Rick Perlstein | The Nation
Reading Bob Woodward
Bob Woodward discusses the White House “threat” with Sean Hannity on Fox News.
This business with Bob Woodward—the White House’s Gene Sperling told him he might “regret” making a certain claim blaming Obama for the sequester debacle; Woodward told Politico he heard that as a veiled threat; conservatives crowed that all this proved Obama has lapped even Richard Nixon as a political thug; then the actual full exchange with Sperling, when it came forth, made it painfully obvious that the offending words were about as threatening as a light misting rain on a warm summer night—reveal most of what you need to know about Bob Woodward’s usefulness these days as a guide to how Washington works. That is to say, he is utterly useless in explaining how Washington works. But he is almost uniquely useful as an object lesson in displaying how Washington works—especially its elite punditry division.
All credit to David Folkenflik of NPR for having the presence of mind to invite us to turn to page 105 of All the President’s Men to remind Woodward what a real White House threat sounds like: John Mitchell in September 1972 telling his partner Carl Bernstein that if The Washington Post published what it knew about Mitchell personally approving the payment of political spies, Post publisher Katherine Graham was “gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer.”
They ran it anyway, of course. They ran it even though Richard Nixon’s re-election juggernaut was proving impermeable to Woodward and Bernstein’s ongoing Watergate full-court press, and many among Georgetown’s cocktail set had begun to consider the Post’s ongoing indulgence of the story a bit of an embarrassing obsession, kind of the way a blogger like Glenn Greenwald is looked upon now. Because back then, Woodward had guts. He’s something different now: a barometer of Washington conventional wisdom, who more appears to say what he chooses to say based upon his continually evolving sense of who is up and who is down among precisely that same Georgetown cocktail set.
Think that claim is harsh? Here’s an almost scientific case study to prove it. Consider Woodward’s three-volume series of books about George W. Bush’s foreign policy. I reviewed the series in 2006. The first, published in 2002, called Bush At War, was composed back in those heady days when his president’s approval ratings were up above seventy percent. “The George W. Bush who strides across the pages of Bush at War,” I wrote, “was a superhero…. And while the picture of the commander in chief in Plan of Attack (2004)”—modestly subtitled “The Definitive Account of the Decision to Invade Iraq”—“was rounder, the White House found if flattering enough to put it on the recommended reading list as they prepared for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign.”
Call it the middle volume in a Goldilocks series: not too fulsome, not too mean, just something a little bit in between—just right: after all, his presidential approval ratings were hovering all that year right around 50 percent.
Then came 2006, the collapse of the Iraq adventure, and a president down below 40 percent in the ratings, roundly derided in all the right circles as a miserable failure. The book Woodward published that year—subtitle: “Bush at War, Part III”—was called State of Denial, and depicted a dangerous idiot. So I did some A/B/C comparisons: Woodward in 2002, 2004 and 2006, characterizing the same subject in completely different ways, correlated in every instance with his declining muscle in Washington.
Descriptions that were deferentially polite in 2002—“Bush, 55, has a quick, joshing manner”—became downright rude by 2006. (“Bush and Rove in particular dwelled on ‘flatulence’—passing gas—and they shared an array of fart jokes.”) In 2002 Woodward’s Bush was a careful empiricist: “I want to know what the options are. A President cannot decide and make rational decisions unless I understand the feasibility of that which may have to happen…. I wanted him to understand some of the nuances…” In 2006? He’s an ignoramous. Here he is in an informal pre-presidential foreign policy seminar with the Bush family pal who also happened to be Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan: “Bandar, I guess you’re the best asshole who knows about the world. Explain to me one thing.”
“Governor, what is it?”
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“Why should I care about North Korea?… I get these briefings on all parts of the world, and everybody is talking to me about North Korea.”
Bandar patiently explains that, well, America had 38,000 troops deployed on its border, and a single aggressive act could spur a world war. Woodward depicts Bush responding, “Hmmm, I wish those assholes would put things just point-blank to me. I get half a book telling me about the history of North Korea.”
Then, to put it in appropriately Watergate language, I found what I consider smoking-gun proof that all this is power worship far more than it is journalism. As I wrote, “The two most recent books end with the same interview: Mr. Woodward’s several hours with the President on Dec. 10 and 11, 2003. Both books contain the same exchange: Mr. Woodward says, ‘But we have not found any weapons of mass destruction,’ and Mr. Bush replies, ‘We have found weapons programs that could be reconstituted.’ ” The two books continue in almost identical wording, Woodward describing himself telling the president he’d been “travel[ing] around the country,” discovering Americans found him (note the diplomatic construction) “less the voice of realism” than previously for not acknowledging the non-presence of WMD.
But the 2004 and 2006 versions end with him characterizing the same interview entirely differently. “True, true, true,” the president is quoted as saying in Plan of Attack. Mr. Woodward then offers this paraphrase of what Bush said next: “He contended that they had found enough.” That line, in 2004, “He contended that they had found enough,” comes off as Woodwardian self-criticism: the last word belongs to the president, turning the reporter into a quisling who would happily leave a dictator in power because he only had a little bit of weapons of mass destruction.
In 2006, however, gives himself the last word, as an internal dialogue: “It had taken five minutes and 18 seconds for Bush simply to acknowledge the fact that we hadn’t found weapons of mass destruction.” It completely changes the meaning of the very same discussion: the man who came off as a steely protector of the nation when he was up above 50 percent in the approval ratings has suddenly become feckless now that he was below 40.
Woodward claimed in an interview he had just been following the facts as they were revealed to him: “It took me over two years to find out what happened, and quite frankly, as I say as directly as can be said in English, they have not been telling the truth about what Iraq has become.” But as I wrote in 2006, doesn’t precisely that shifting perspective indict itself? “If Part III is the better book because it’s a more accurate portrayal of the Bush administration’s abject failures and inadequacies, doesn’t that make the author look worse? What was he withholding?” For instance the word “Bandar,” a central figure in Part III—or “Bandar Bush,” ran the nickname with which GWB tagged him in tribute to the intimacy of their relationship—doesn’t appear in Volume I. That intimacy apparently wasn’t something Washington polite opinion cared that you knew about in 2002. A state of denial, you might say.
Continue reading Bob Woodward. But not the prose. You won’t learn much from that. Read the man instead. That way you’ll learn what the people in power think about what you’re supposed to think.
Right-wing TV had a field day with Woodward and his White House “threat,” even though it may all just be a ploy by Woodward to sell more books, Leslie Savan writes.
Nothing New Under the Wingnut Sun: Reckless Spending Cuts
A traffic sign is seen near the US Capitol in Washington March 1, 2013. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst
So: the “sequester.” That too-clever-by-half notion, born of last year’s debt ceiling negotiations out of the White House’s presumption that, when faced with the horror of heedless, profligate, across-the-board budget cuts to all manner of popular government programs, the Republicans’ “fever would break”—remember that?—and the Loyal Opposition would somehow come to agree to a reasonable, “balanced” deficit reduction package. It all seemed so cut and dried in those palmy days, just a few months ago: who could possibly imagine a major American political party could possibly let such madness actually go into effect?
Um, me? I wonder how many folks within the White House, gaming out whether Republicans might not just call the bluff, bothered to consider the fact that an embrace of heedless, profligate, across-the-board budget cuts to all manner of popular government programs is a key component of hardcore conservative ideology. That, when Barry Goldwater proclaimed in his 1960 manifesto Conscience of a Conservative, “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size …. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them …. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ ‘interests,’ I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty,” that Barry Goldwater—and the future millions for whom his sentiments became an ideological touchstone—meant what he said.
Did anyone in the White House notice how many conservatives, including ones in positions of governmental power, after Mitt Romney’s recorded back-room admission that he couldn’t get elected because 47 percent of the electorate is addicted to suckling on the federal teat, responded that what he said was absolutely correct? (Even if they admitted it was unfortunate a public unready to handle it had to hear it.) That conservatives, as an article of faith, see breaking the link between citizens and their government benefits as the only sure way to break the link between voters and the Democratic Party? And that severing that same link is also the best way way to restore the broken moral fabric of the nation? (Which is one explanation Republican governors use to defend their determination not to accept free federal money to qualify more of their poor citizens for Medicaid under Obamacare: They are saving their citizens from wicked dependency. Their other explanation is that Obama must necessarily be lying to them—but that will have to be the subject for another post).
And what could the White House have predicted conservatives would say to those who point out that pulling the rug out from under huge chunks of federal spending will spur a recession? They could have predicted that many would say exactly what they have said: that since it’s excessive federal spending that causes recessions, what’s wrong with cutting excessive federal spending?
Bottom line: didn’t anyone whose job it is to think about such things consider that at least some powerful Republicans—not all, it is true—would relish sequestration as a marvelous thing, a historic opportunity, a gift from Obama to help further the cause they’d been proclaiming as sacred for generations: to shrink the federal government small enough so they could someday drown it in Grover Norquist’s proverbial bathtub? “Once these cuts take effect, thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off and tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find childcare for their kids,” said Obama. Did he ever consider that to a lot of Republicans, that would sound like a wish list?
Here, note, was Rudolph Giuliani eleven days ago: “The federal government is highly inefficient. It could use a 5 or 10 percent cut.”
And that utterance, with its lust after cuts, jogged my weird historian’s memory.
When Ronald Reagan became governor of California in 1967, in part because of his vague but florid promise to cure the state’s budget deficit, his harried and incompetent budget director announced a magical solution: a budget that consisted of little more than last year’s document with the added notation for each deparment, “less 10 percent reduction.”
Saner heads pointed out that, well, this was not exactly how budgeting worked. That some spending was federally mandated, some other spending mandated by state statute; that administrative departments have fixed expenses and were not chunks of cheese that maintain their structural integrity if you carve a tenth of the bulk from any random portion, as if one corner being as important to the structural integrity of the whole as any other; and that—duh—some departments themselves are more integral to the health of a complex polity than others. Other observers made it clear to Reagan that his course would be a political disaster. (On one campus the governor was burned in effigy with placard reading “REDUCE REAGAN BY 10%.”) Indeed just such ineluctable facts of budgetary life were supposed to be sufficiently obvious to today’s Republican negotiators that they would never let the sequester’s slice-off-any-old-chunk-of-the-cheese madness take place. But why should we presume today’s Republicans show themselves any more sensible, any less susceptible to magic thinking, on such matters than their hero Ronald Wilson Reagan?
In 1967, it happened, inconvenient political reality spiked his administration’s hope to decimate (literally!) the entire state budget. He did, however, decimate where he could. For instance, in the the state’s Department of Mental Hygiene, which seemed a practical notion at the time because, as Lou Cannon noted in his book on Reagan’s governorship, “the population of the mental hospitals was declining, thanks to tranquilizing drugs and new medical procedures.” Although, oops: “the numbers were deceptive. The patients leaving the hospitals were the ones who responded best to tranquilizers; those who remained were more apt to need intensive care. And the state’s mental hospitals had never been adequately staffed.”
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The indiscriminate—sequester-style, you might say—layoffs went forth nonetheless; and, in 1972, they were intensified. The results are infamous. The psychiatrist and novelist Irvin Yalom has written about what it was like to witness that calamity from within: “Reagan with one bold, brilliant stroke abolished mental illness in California,” he recalled. “As a result hospital staffs were forced, day after day, to go through the charade of treating patients and discharging them back into the same noxious setting that had necessitated their hospitalization. It was like suturing up wounded soldiers and sending them back into the fray. Imagine breaking your ass taking care of patients—initial workup interviews, daily rounds, presentations to the attending psychiatrists, staff planning sessions, medical student workers, writing orders in the hospital charts, daily therapy sessions—knowing all the while that in a couple of days there would be no option but to return them to the same malignant environment that had disgorged them. Back to angry spouses who had long ago run out of love and patience. Back to rag-filled grocery carts. Back to sleeping in moldering cars. Back to the community of cocaine-friends and pitiless dealers awaiting them outside the hospital gates.”
Heartbreaking. Reagan, meanwhile, denied the problem existed. In 1967, when a visiting expert from Sweden called a ward in Sonoma County the worst he had seen in several countries, the governor accused the staff there of having “rigged” the poor conditions to sabotage his cutback program. Another time Reagan just said, “We lead the nation in the quality of our mental patient care, and we will keep that lead.” In 1973 he called his “new approach to the treatment of the mentally ill that has reduced the number of patients sentenced to a hopeless life in our asylums from 16,500 to 7,000” a “model for the rest of the nation.”
What modern day horror stories will attend our own unanticipated chunk-of-cheese approach to federal budgetary decimation? That’s been a subject of much debate. One thing, however, is certain. The conservatives who’ve spent the last few weeks labeling Obama “President Panic” just for making the obvious argument that indiscriminate cutting has consequences will also figure out some species of magic thinking to deny their recklessness has had any negative effects at all—in fact, Reagan-like, they’ll surely devise cherry-picked and distorted nonsense in order to maintain that sequestration has yielded up loaves-and-fishes policy miracles.
Another prediction: sequestration will cause greater budget deficits down the road—because of the simple fact that there are certain things government has to do, and making it harder to do those things at any given moment makes it more inefficient and expensive for government to make up the ground down the road. This conservative retreat from a simple understanding of government spending as investment that pays off down the road is one of the reasons—there are others—Republican administrations end up creating bigger deficits than Democratic ones. Reagan’s gubernatorial administrations, for example: inheriting a $4.6 billion state budget in 1967, he left behind a one in 1975 that cost $10.2 billion. The average individual Californian’s tax burden when he took office was $426. When he left it was almost double that, at $728.
But there is a difference, this time. Back then, Democrats instinctively and successfully fought what Reagan was up to. This season’s budget decimation, on the other hand, has been underwritten by Democrats—by Democratic naïveté. By a simple refusal to absorb and accept the lesson of history: that some conservative Republicans will always be constitutionally incapable of acknowledging that a cut in government capacity can ever be a bad thing. The fact that they now can claim, even if disingenuously, that the cuts were Barack Obama’s idea in the first place may make their triumph politically only the sweeter.
Voting is not a right, but a privilege in this country, Rick Perlstein discovers.
(Son of) Constitutional Roadblock to Efforts to Fix Federal Elections
Voters in California. States could legally take back the power to appoint electors without a popular vote at any time. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes.)
Three weeks ago I held forth in thunder on the subject of voting: “The President and Congress have little or no constitutional authority upon which” to fix America’s broken voting system, I wrote. “It is one of the best kept secrets in our political life: There is no federal right to vote…I’d be glad to be corrected, but as best I can tell, that means that technically, in almost every case, a state can make it as hard as it wants for its citizens to vote, and there’s practically nothing DC can do about it.”
Soon after, with my gratitude, I was corrected. But that doesn’t mean that I was all wrong. Today, with the question of fair elections back in the news, what with the oral arguments this week on the Supreme Court challenge to the Voting Rights Act, let’s dig a little deeper.
Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution grants a federal right to vote for Congressmen—who shall be “chosen…by the people of the several states, and the electors in each state shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature.” And while the states are granted an uncomfortable amount of power to set voter qualifications (no small thing: that’s the source of so many of the historic abuses so eloquently set forth in the classic text that inspired my post, Alex Keyssar’s The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in America), Article 1, Section 4 also grants Congress authority to alter voting procedures, at least in congressional elections: “The time, places and manner of holding elections shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.”
Indeed, an election lawyer reminded me of two counter-examples in which Congress passed laws aiming at improving voting administration federally, neither of which faced constitutional challenges I’m aware of: the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (MOVE), and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
But that’s hardly the end of the issue.
HAVA (whose goals were to replace the failed punchcard and antiquated lever-based voting systems, to create an Election Assistance Commission to help administer federal elections and to establish minimum election administration standards), passed overwhelmingly (357-48 in the House, 92-2 in the Senate) and was signed by President Bush in 2002. But it’s one of those diabolically labyrinthine “kludges” within which America so excels in entangling its social policies: not really a congressional mandate, it instead only provides a pool of federal funding states can collect if they lay out an acceptable plan to carry out the law’s goals.
No states ended up turning down that money —but these, alas, are more ideological times than even back in 2002. Republican governors are more lunatic than they used to be—as attested by all the ones so eager to turn down free federal money to qualify more of their poor citizens for Medicaid under Obamacare. Meanwhile, some states have taken the money only to hoard it. And what was politically possible in 2002 may be inconceivable in 2013. Could something like HAVA pass now, given that Republicans all but brag of sabotaging efficient election procedures in order to hold down the Democratic vote? The question, I’d wager, answers itself.
Meanwhile, according to Wikipedia, MOVE, intended to help military folks vote, is a paper tiger: “implementation of the act has been spotty, with only fifteen states having fully implemented it…90 percent of absentee ballots sent to American civilians living abroad are returned and counted, compared to two-thirds of absentee ballots mailed by overseas military personnel. In a report by the Overseas Vote Foundation released in January 2013, 21.6 percent of military voters did not receive their ballots and 13.8 percent of military voters tried to vote but couldn’t.”
I asked Professor Keyssar to clarify his thoughts about whether there can truly be said to be a federal right to vote or not. He pointed out—as Digby also reiterated in an e-mail to me—that the Constitution refers only to a right to vote for members of Congress. Which would sound academic—if Antonin Scalia hadn’t, in his five-to-four decision in Bush v. Gore, triumphantly proclaimed, “The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as a means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College.” He continued, “the State legislature’s power to select the manner for appointing electors is plenary; it may, if it so chooses, select the electors itself…. History has now favored the voter, and in each of the several States the citizens themselves vote,” but the “State, of course, after granting the franchise in the special context of Article II, can take back the power to appoint electors.”
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And what does that mean? Well, according to the good folks at Fairvote.org, who support just the sort of right-to-vote constitutional amendment I endorsed in my previous post on this subject, that means “Florida’s legislature has the power to take that power away from the people at any time, regardless of the popular vote tally.”
Still feel safe in your constitutional right to vote?
And don’t forget: this is the same constitutional provision that allows the outrage that American citizens living in territories—Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Guam—don’t get to vote for president. And that the only reason residents of Washington, DC, get to was a constitutional amendment, passed in 1961.
Given that context, reread what Obama said in his State of the Union address about fixing elections: “Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.”
Narrow, narrow, narrow. Maybe some nice law can be proposed, say, providing a pool of federal funds, HAVA-style, to give to governors to increase the number of polling places or some such. And then, in the unlikely event that it passes, Republican governors could gladly turn that money down. Laws introduced by House and Senate Democrats to require states to provide online registration and allow at least fifteen days of early voting will likely go nowhere—because conservative Republicans don’t want to make it easier to vote. (In one of those 1975 Ronald Reagan radio broadcasts I’ve been discussing recently, the future president wrote of the horror he shared with other conservatives at a proposal to allow people to register to vote more easily by sending in a postcard: “In recent years, and without our paying attention,” he darkly intimated—a liberal conspiracy!—“it’s become easier and easier to become a registered voter. And whether we know it or not, we’ve been making it easier and easier for voting blocs to swing elections even though the bloc doesn’t represent a majority…. Look at the potential for cheating!”)
And note what Obama did not throw the weight of presidential rhetoric behind while the whole world was watching his inaugural address: the restrictive voter identification requirements that are as much an insult to democracy as those long lines (even as, admirably, Attorney General Holder has called them the equivalent of a poll tax, illegal under the Twenty-Fourth Amendment).
So it is that, still, a genuine federal right to vote—what poor old soon-to-be-incarcerated Jesse Jackson, Jr. prescribed in his proposed, now-orphaned, constitutional amendment as “regulations narrowly tailored to produce efficient and honest elections,” reviewed regularly by Congress “to determine if higher standards should be established to reflect improvements in methods and practices regarding the administration of elections,” and a requirement for every state to “provide any eligible voter the opportunity to register and vote on the day of any public election”—goes begging. And will go begging, in the end, until that bold day when America finally decides to become a grown-up democracy.
Maybe it's not too late for liberals to get over their love affair with Rahm Emanuel and see his missteps for what they are, Rick Perlstein writes.
Rahm on the Ropes
Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel at a press conference in December to voice support for stricter gun laws. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast.)
Back last year when I was columnizing for the Rolling Stone website, I started explaining to the rest of the country what Rahm Emanuel’s tenure as mayor of Chicago felt like on the ground here in my hometown—and not, say, from the rarified altitude of national mainstream publications who treated the half-baked, potentially self-dealing ideas he rammed through a Kremlin-like City Council as if emanations from some sort of public policy Nirvana; unquestioningly took the mayor at his word even in his most pie-in-the-sky, pot-of-gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow pronouncements; and fawned over him as some sort of new-breed reformer because, well—he tells them he is some sort of new-breed reformer. I called that “Rahmpraganda.” Its most sublime practitioner proved to be Jonathan Alter, who gushed in The Atlantic: “Sitting in his cavernous office on the fifth floor of City Hall, Rahm lowers his outstretched empty palms, then raises them above his waist. ‘If you have your hands above the table you can’t deal from the bottom of the deck.’ ”
Now, it wasn’t hard for me to document the various ways Emanuel dealt from the bottom of the deck all the damned time: all I had to do was compile links of the local coverage. On how his administration all but bribed teachers to support his dubious education initiatives. Or rammed through shock-doctrine anti-protest maneuvers. Or embarrassingly manipulated statistics. Or hid his pay-for-access scheduling practices from public view. Or pleaded poverty in a laughably transparent way in order to cut services for things like libraries, while passing equivalent amounts from the city treasury to favored corporate interests. Or practiced simple old-school Chicago-style cronyism.
The responses I got from this humble act of second-hand journalistic aggregation proved the most extraordinary part of the exercise: reporters whose job it was to cover City Hall on a day to day basis, in an atmosphere of sickening intimidation, reached out to me with an almost absurd amount of gratitude that someone, anyone, was bringing this news to the rest of the country.
Still and all, I had to report, “the approval rating of a man some say wants to be the first Jewish president is 52 percent after his first year in office”—not great, but not bad.
But stick around to the end. This story may yet have a happy political ending—if the rest of the country manages to pay attention to what’s actually happening in the city.
Since I wrote those articles last year, Emanuel’s municipal missteps have only compounded. Jonathan Alter said of his response to Occupy, “His policy has been to treat demonstrators as gingerly as possible.” A local judge disagreed: on First Amendment grounds, he ruled that the arrests of hundreds of people in Grant Park two nights in a row for violating curfew (but none of the 500,000 who stayed past curfew there on Election Night in 2008) proves “the city intended to discriminates against defendants based on their views.”
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What Emanuel had planned as his marquee accomplishment—corporate-style “school reform”—has been cracking like a pane of glass. His attempt to game state law to make it virtually impossible for Chicago public school teachers to strike backfired last year when they not only struck the hell out of him but ended up undermining the core rhetorical underpinning of the “reform movement”—that teachers unions are the enemies—when Chicago Public School parents sided overwhelmingly with the strikers. That hardly held back Phase Two of Emanuel’s scheme, set to roll out this year: planned massive school closings, based on dubious and opaque statistical arguments about “underutilized” buildings. Activists point out that the rationale for school closings shift from year to year, and never seem to accomplish the policy aims that supposedly justify them; so threadbare have the city’s explanations become by now, in fact, that the actual reason for hollowing out the system has become transparent to just about everyone: to turn the most prominent operator of charter schools, the United Neighborhood Association, or UNO, into a wheelhouse of a new-model political machine. Here’s an editorial from last Friday in the Chicago Tribune, a right-leaning publication that would love to sign off on City Hall’s corporate “school reform” agenda, if only it didn’t obviously stink so very, very bad:
The Chicago Sun-Times recently reported that much of a $98 million state grant given to UNO to build schools was funneled to companies that have deep connections to the organization’s political allies and a top UNO executive, Miguel d’Escoto. Shortly after the story broke, d’Escoto resigned.
D’Escoto Inc., a company owned by Miguel d’Escoto’s brother Federico, reaped more than $1.5 million for work as the “owner’s representative” in the construction of several schools.
Reflection Window Co., owned by another d’Escoto brother, Rodrigo, stands to earn nearly $10 million for work on several schools.
Plumbing contracts went to a company owned by the sister of Victor Reyes, the clout-heavy lawyer and lobbyist who helped UNO snag the state grant.
UNO hired Aguila Security, a firm run by two brothers of state Rep. Edward Acevedo, a longtime UNO ally who voted to approve the UNO grant in 2009.
And all this is not to mention Emanuel’s most nationally prominent policy failure—his inability to accomplish a reduction in the city’s heartbreaking epidemic of youth gun violence, horrifyingly symbolized this winter by the slaying of local 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton about a week after she returned from performing at Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Now that promised happy political ending. Voters are waking up. Crain’s Chicago Business polled 600 voting-age Illinois voters last September. Thirty-four percent approved of Emanuel’s performance and 33 percent disapproved. It just ran the poll again. This time, 19 percent approve and 50 percent disapprove. And in Chicago proper? Thirteen percent “strongly disapprove” of his performance, 9 percent “somewhat disapprove,” and 13 percent “lean toward disapproval”—down sixteen points in net approval since September.
Who loves you, Rahm? Around one of every fifty Chicagoans, it turns out. Says Crain’s, “just 2 percent of Chicagoans surveyed said they strongly approve of the mayor’s job performance.”
Once more, though, the celebrity-besotted national political media hasn’t quite received the news. Last week, The Washington Post’s conventional wisdom maestro Chris Cilizza reviewed the chances of Emanuel making a respectable presidential run. He kind of liked them. He quoted Democratic pollster Mark Mellman: “I’ve known Rahm for almost 30 years and if I’ve learned anything it’s that Rahm can achieve whatever Rahm sets out to achieve.” Maybe Mellman should start reading the Chicago press—who’ve been proving that Rahm’s achieving just about nothing he’s set out to achieve.
Rick Perlstein last wrote on the Oscars and why this year’s ceremony was hardly political.
Politics and Oscar Night
Ben Affleck presents the Oscar for best documentary to Malik Bendjoullel for Searching for Sugar Man. (Reuters/Mario Anzuoni.)
Some people had been predicting a political Oscar night. “This year’s Oscar race has been politicized to an unusual degree,” The Washington Post said the day before the ceremony, citing Kathryn Bigelow’s being denied, or snubbed, for a Best Director nomination following Senators McCain, Feinstein and Levin’s angry protestations that Zero Dark Thirty falsified the role of torture in catching Osama bin Laden; and all that silly talk of Lincoln as a useful parable for the imperative of bipartisan compromise, and also the fact that the Washington debut of Argo was held at the Canadian embassy—a bit of a reach, really, to call that political. The Post didn’t mention the real potential for political fireworks last night came in the documentary feature category. Two films, The Gatekeepers and 5 Broken Cameras, held up Israel’s policies in occupied Palestine to critique. Last week, the Palestinian co-director of Cameras was detained with his family at LAX and threatened with deportation even as he waved his Oscar invitation in front of border agents to prove his right to be in the country. That story was publicized by Michael Moore—and it was hard not to imagine that should one of these pictures win, a moment might materialize like the one in 2003, when Moore used the occasion of his victory for Bowling for Columbine to light into George W. Bush’s hide. “We live in the time where we have ficticious election results that elect a fictitious president,” he said. “We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons.”
But neither of those films did win—nor the brilliant account of the AIDS activism of ACT UP, How To Survive a Plague, which might have spiced things up, too. Searching for Sugar Man (which I don’t know anything about) won; The New York Times has called it “a hugely appealing documentary about fans, faith and an enigmatic Age of Aquarius musician who burned bright and hopeful before disappearing.” Nice, I suppose, but not too political. The most political salient American documentary of the year—Queen of Verseilles, that subtly searing indictment of our culture of greed that should be put in time capsules so future Americans can precisely understand just how mad the America of 2012 had become—wasn’t nominated at all. The only thing political about last night’s ceremony, in fact, turned out to be the feminist offense you had to have taken at Seth McFarland’s charming jokes about boob shots and domestic abuse.
It used to be different, of course. Before Michael Moore, there was Marlon Brando, who in solidarity with the showdown of armed activists of the American Indian Movement with federal marshals after they seized the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, sent a Native American woman named Sasheen Littlefeather to accept the best actor award on his behalf.
And then there was 1975, the most bizarrely political Oscar night of all.
Late in 1974 a director named Peter Davis showed a documentary called Hearts and Minds briefly in a Los Angeles theater to qualify it for Academy Award consideration (watch the whole stunning thing here). It opened with images of a 1973 homecoming parade for POW George Thomas Coker, who told a crowd on the steps of the Linden, New Jersey, city hall about Vietnam, “If it wasn’t for the people, it was very pretty. The people there are very backwards and primitive, and they make a mess out of everything.” General William Westmoreland, former commander of US forces, in a comment the director explained had not been spontaneous but had come on a third take, was shown explaining, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.” (Thereupon, the film cut to a sobbing Vietnamese mother being restrained from climbing into the grave atop the coffin of her son.) Daniel Ellsberg was quoted: “We aren’t on the wrong side. We are the wrong side.” The movie concluded with an interview with an activist from Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “We’ve all tried very hard to escape what we have learned in Vietnam,” he said. “I think Americans have worked extremely hard not to see the criminalities that their officials and their policy-makers exhibited.”
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A massive thunderstorm raged outside at the Oscar ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion on Oscar Night, April 8, twenty days before the final fall of Saigon to North Vietnam’s Communist forces—where after Sammy Davis Jr.’s musical tribute to Fred Astaire, and Ingrid Bergman’s acceptance of the best supporting actress award for Murder on the Orient Express, and Francis Ford Coppola’s award for best director (one of six Oscars for The Godfather Part II: “I’m wearing a tuxedo with a bulletproof cumberbund,” cohost Bob Hope cracked. “Who knows what will happen if Al Pacino doesn’t win”), Lauren Hutton and Danny Thomas opened the envelope and announced that Hearts and Minds had won as the year’s best documentary.
Producer Bert Schneider took the microphone and said, “It’s ironic that we’re here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated.” Then he read a telegram from the head of the North Vietnamese delegation to the Paris peace talks. It thanked the antiwar movement “for all they have done on behalf of peace…. Greetings of friendship to all American people.”
Backstage, Bob Hope was so livid he tried to push his way past the broadcast’s producer to issue a rebuttal onstage. Shirley MacLaine, who had already mocked Sammy Davis from the stage for having endorsed Richard Nixon, shouted, “Don’t you dare!” Anguished telegrams from viewers began piling up backstage. One, from a retired Army colonel, read, “WITH 55,000 DEAD YOUNG AMERICANS IN DEFENSE OF FREEDOM AND MILLIONS OF VIETNAMESE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM…DEMAND WITHDRAWAL OF AWARD.” On its back, Hope madly scribbled a disclaimer for his cohost Frank Sinatra to read onstage. Sinatra read it to a mix of boos and applause: “The academy is saying we are not responsible for any political utterances on this program and we are sorry that had to take place.” Upon which, backstage, the broadcast’s third cohost, Shirley MacLaine berated Sinatra: “You said you were speaking for the academy. Well, I’m a member of the academy and you didn’t ask me!” Her brother, Warren Beatty, snarled at Sinatra on camera: “Thank you, Frank, you old Republican.”
Take that, Washington Post. Now that’s a political Oscar night.
Greg Mitchell argues that despite popular consensus, Searching for Sugar Man is indeed a political film.
Moderate Republican Mugged By Reality
Sam Kleiner was disillusioned fellow campus Republicans refused to support GOP moderate Mark Kirk, above. (Reuters/Frank Polich.)
Last month I introduced you to Alex, a young University of Chicago grad, a certain sort of modern-day social type: libertarian-until-graduation. A “LUG,” if you will. One possessed of an impassioned trust that free markets are always real, and always right; that government intervention was always an imposition by illegitimate force, and always wrong; and someone who believed that if workers didn’t like what the market was telling them at one job, well, they could always quit and find another. He was drenched in an ivory-tower college conservatism that dissolved at the first touch of real-world employment.
This month, meet another victim of the ivory-tower right: Sam Kleiner, Moderate Republican Until Graduation—a MRUG. Now a law student at Yale, Sam has become an impressive liberal-leaning journalist, for publications including the present one. When I met him four years ago during his undergraduate years at Northwestern University (he helped organize this debate between me and Ramesh Ponnuru early in Obama’s first term), however, he was a moderate Republican flirting a bit with neoconservatism, specifically that tendency’s oft-professed claim to an extra-super-special “moral” conception of America’s role in the world. But by the next time I met him, several years later, the Republican Party had lost him for good—in fact, talking to him recently by Google Chat, it’s hard to imagine him ever having thought anything nice about the Republicans at all. What happened? Something he says is part of a pattern. “I’m certainly not the only one of my friends who worked for moderate Republicans who left the party,” he told me. “I think the Republican Party mugged a lot of moderates.”
It was an interesting conversation to have in this season of reflections on how to broaden the Republican coalition in the interests of its future survival. For from his vantage point in the trenches of the College Republicans, Sam just saw how “the party wasn’t interested in having these voices around anymore.”
Sam grew up in Tucson, Arizona. And though it’s easy to exaggerate how early and suffusingly the blanket of right-wing orthodoxy suffocated the moderation out of the party altogether (I’ve done it myself), Sam found the congressman he grew up with, Jim Kolbe, “a fantastic moderate.” So it was with pleasure and pride that he joined with the College Republicans when he matriculated at Northwestern in 2005. He soon spied disillusionment over the horizon. In 2007 tried to get his colleagues to volunteer for the congressional campaign of now-Senator Mark Kirk, “a very moderate Republican.” No luck: “Many within the group were uncomfortable with his views on social issues.”
The following winter, William F. Buckley Jr. died. “The College Republicans had a kind of tribute night to him,” Sam remembers. “I showed up, but was really disturbed that people watched the video of him calling Gore Vidal a queer and were cheering him on.”
Meanwhile, there was foreign policy. Sam wrote his senior thesis on Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the maverick Democrat often dismissed on the left as a knee-jerk hawk—a epithet Kleiner found unfair: “Scoop was interested in pursuing a foreign policy that was founded on a moral vision of the US in the world, but he didn’t want to take us to war to get there,” he says, noting his signature accomplishment, the Jackson-Vanek amendment, which tied trade concessions with the USSR to their willingness to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate.
Others might disagree that Jackson’s legacy was quite so benevolent, noting that he was so committed to bulking up America’s armaments he was known as the “Senator from Boeing”—and noting, too, his protégés and associates, which included Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, the cream of the neocon crop, the architects of Iraq. Kleiner found them, though, more apostates than acolytes: “I think the neoconservatives completely misrepresented his legacy,” he says, citing the research on what Jackson actually thought and believed for his senior thesis. “Iraq was huge mistake.” That “there are still neocons [who] can’t admit that is a moral outrage.”
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Be that as it may: Scoop or not, unapologetic warmongers are pretty much all the Republican Party defense establishment has left. So: the would-be moderate Republican was homeless on that front, too.
With a student to his left with whom he enjoyed debating ideology, he started the Northwestern Political Union, in part to sponsor debates like the one in which I participated. Pretty anodyne stuff, you’d think—but not to his soon-to-be-erstwhile comrades among campus Republicans. “I tried to get Republicans to get involved and pretty much everyone refused. ‘We don’t fraternize with the enemy’—[that] was a kind of line you heard a lot.”
Still, he tried to persevere. “My ‘youthful idealism’ was that the party was going to change—that the fever would break. Boy, was I wrong. I think back now on the craziness that freaked me out in the party in 2007 and 2008 and it looks like child’s play.” Now, in between his work in law school, he’s started documenting some of that in journalism on how Republicans in his home state “went off the deep end,” turning Arizona into “a national laughing stock”—an apostate’s and native’s testimony. One of his articles describes bills “cloaked in the language of the Constitution” but which are actually “trying to challenge the very premise that we can have a Constitution of the United States.” One would require the federal government employees to register with local sheriffs when carrying out government business in their counties. Another would criminalize the regulation of harmful (or “harmless,” as the bill puts it) emissions; a third would require the state attorney general to seize federal assests if it “increases the ability of this state to generate revenue.” (“What the hell does that mean, as a practical matter?” I asked. He answered, “That’s the point. This isn’t practical. It would mean trying to seize any federal land, including military bases, if the state thought they could make better use of it.”)
From Evanston to Arizona, the loss of sane Republicans has been Democrats gain. Arizona has sent a majority Democratic delegation to Congress (“because Republicans have nominated candidates so far out of the mainstream”); “We have great Democratic mayors in Tucson and Phoenix who are doing incredible things to make those world-class cities.” And Kleiner? Last year he served as issues director for a 2012 congressional primary race fought by the young Democratic writer Andrei Cherny. He is just the kind of super-smart, motivated, talented up-and-comer that any political party would want in its bullpen. Now the Republicans have lost him for good. How many more?
Do Republicans have an ambivalent relationship with the truth? Ronald Reagan certainly did, Rick Perlstein writes.
Happy Birthday, Mr. Fortieth President!
Ronald Reagan at a rally in 1984. (Photo courtesy of the Everett Collection.)
I missed a friend’s birthday a couple of weeks ago. February 6 was the 102nd anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth. I’ve been spending a lot of time with the old fellow, as some of you know, working on a book, and I really should make amends. Because he astonishes me. A man as myopic as what you’ll be seeing below really deserves some sort of recognition. He really, really does.
As I noted in a recent post on Reagan’s contribution to the ideology of NRA vigilantism, I spent a goodly amount of time this previous summer at the Hoover Institution at Stanford listening to the daily radio broadcasts broadcasts by which he reintroduced himself politically to the nation, beginning in 1975, following his second term as governor of California. Listening to Reagan with Google by my side was an astonishment, even knowing how much he habitually stretched the truth. There was the time I heard him make an impassioned brief against the Ahab-like maritime bureaucrats insisting that a steamship that plied its trade up and down the Mississippi for tourists, the Delta Queen, be fireproofed according to law, which her owners said would put her out of business. Even though she “has never had a fire…. No matter, said the bureaucrats in Washington. The Delta Queen could not be made an exception.”
I went on Google Newspapers, typed in “Delta Queen” and “fire.” And learned…she had caught on fire little more than two years earlier.
Fact-checking Ronald Reagan has been, sometimes, almost comical. But it sometimes makes you want to punch through a window, too. In July of 1975 he made an especially aggressive broadcast attacking “the innuendos and the accusations that the CIA and our government had a hand in bringing about the downfall of the government of Chile.” (It wasn’t innuendo, as a Church Committee report published in 1976 definitively proved, and which Reagan, as a member of the blue ribbon Rockefeller Commission investigating the CIA that year had to have known when he uttered the words.)
He went on to flay congressmen who “act as if fascism had been imposed on the Chileans, to their great distress and unhappiness.”
He then cited a recent unprecedented Gallup poll undertaken in the South American nation. It recorded that 83 percent “agree with the new government’s statement of principles,” over 90 percent said “the government has either completed, or nearly completed, these principles, which include that freedom of thought will be respected,”; that 64 percent thought they were “living better”; 75 percent liked their medical care; 73 percent thought conditions would improve (only 11 percent disagreed). As for the new government which had brought their nation to this happy pass, “60 percent gave it the highest rating possible and only 3 percent feel it was bad. This is quite a contrast to much of what we’ve heard in the news about a reign of terror, political prisoners, torture and a depressed and frightened populace!”
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The paradox will give you a headache, right? Polling only works in a country without a depressed, frightened populace. Where the public trusts authorities enough to tell them the truth without fear of retribution. Chileans, since September 11, 1973, had lived under an official “state of siege,” renewed every month by military decree and not lifted until 1978—at which point General Pinochet revised the state of siege to a mere “state of emergency.” The new rules, he magnanimously explained, meant “I cannot banish anyone for more than six months and there will be no more trials of a military nature” (through the nightly curfew would remain in force). “This is not a threat but I am testing how people will behave,” he said. “The reality is that we are living in a tranquil period and there is support for the government. I believe that this backing permits me to lift the state of siege and maintain only a state of emergency.”
And what did he offer as his evidence, in 1978, that these “relaxed” measures were acceptable? Ironically enough, a Gallup Poll citing 80.6 percent support for his government.
Back in 1975, meanwhile, the first time Gallup came calling in Santiago, by public law the military junta could banish anyone they wanted, and keep them “in detention in locations other than regular prisons”—such as, infamously, the national soccer stadium, where some 40,000 political enemies had been held. By private law, thousands of regime enemies were simply “disappeared,” including an Air Force official, Alberto Bachelet, who was tortured to death in 1974 (the papers reported he died from cardiac arrest in a basketball game). His daughter and mother were picked up for detention and torture six months before this Reagan broadcast. Would you speak truthfully to a stranger bearing a clipboard in a country like that?
Apparently Ronald Reagan never thought of that. Gallup said Chileans loved their ruler, and that was good enough for him. Put simply, there were good guys and bad guys. Augusto Pinochet, vociferously anti-Communist, was one of the good ones.
Call it a preview of what was to come, ten years later, when he called the proprietors of another set of death squads, the Nicaraguan Contras, “our brothers,” “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French resistance.” Happy birthday, Mr. President!
Even expanding preschool education, which is shown to boost later academic performance, will be a tough sell for Barack Obama with this Congress, Rick Perlstein writes.
Nothing New Under the Wingnut Sun: A Coming Preschool Backlash?
Barack Obama poses for a photo with second graders in 2009. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais.)
It was one of the most cheering propositions in the president’s State of the Union Address: “Tonight, I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America.”
The formulation, it’s true, is redolent of the ideological timidity of the “liberalism” of our age: instead of the federal government just doing something that’s good, it sets up unwieldy, confusing funding streams to have someone else do it instead. (Political scientist Steven Teles defines this as American federalism’s “kludegocracy”: “For any particular problem we [arrive] at the most gerry-rigged [sic], opaque, and complicated response.”) But all the same it’s a great goal for a president to get behind. As Obama went on to explain, “Every dollar we invest in high-quality early childhood education can solve more than seven dollars later on, by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime.”
The problem is, the White House might just be naïve enough to believe this is a relatively easy political sell. The breakthrough research on the payoffs to investment in “universal pre-K” was done by a Nobel Prize–winning economist named James Heckman, of the University of Chicago—and Heckman is, fundamentally, a prototypical University of Chicago economist, a neoclassicist. So it’s a “conservative,” market-based idea, right? Like cap-and-trade. Like the “individual mandate” in health insurance. So how could conservative Republicans object?
Right. You see where I’m going with this.
The president signaled that part of the sale when he noted two states that “make it a priority to educate our youngest children”: Georgia and Oklahoma. Said The New York Times, “Oklahoma and Georgia have Republican governors and were won by Mitt Romney in last year’s election. Both states have expanded their preschool programs in recent years.” So it is that Obama traveled to Georgia today to promote the plan.
The Times then quotes an earnest liberal with one of those what-conservative-could-object observations: “‘If you look at how pre-K has grown, you can see a range of different governors supporting it,’ said Helen Blank, the director of childcare and early learning for the National Women’s Law Center. ‘We should be able to come together on something that we have clear research on.’” You know, the kind of observations that have become so familiar to us, eight seconds before the conservatives refuse to come together with Obama in any way, shape or form.
And on cue, here’s John Boehner, dismissing the notion out of hand: he says getting the federal government involved in pre-k is “a good way to screw it up.”
Obamaism in action. The hand of fellowship extended, there to be smacked away with extreme prejudice by Republicans for whom fellowship is inconceivable, whatever the Nobel Prize–winning “research” might say. (Oh, and then there’s this: research? What research? Said the Cato Institute’s director of the “Center for Educational Freedom,” “Why would you want to very expensively expand the programs like this is the evidence of effectiveness is not really sound?”)
But the politics of this won’t be about the research. Like I’ve been saying: “liberals get in the biggest political trouble…when they presume a reform is an inevitable concomitant of progress. It is then they are the most likely to establish their reforms by top-down bureaucratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues.”
The worst backlashes of these sorts are always the ones that come from perceived federal government interference with the prerogatives of the nuclear family. This is what that phrase “family values,” whose fetishization by the right is so inscrutable to us on the left (for what could better preserve family values, we say, than living wages, paid family leave and all that other stuff the “family values” right could never dream of supporting?) means to them: the prerogative of the patriarch to control his family as he wishes, absent state interference—which, even if the kludgy Obama preschool plan in actual fact will not threaten at all, it will be perceived as doing anyway, “death panel” style.
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The preschool backlash is one of the oldest stories in the history of “New Right” organizing. A bill proposing a national system of nursery schools, under the authorship of Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale, was on a glide-path to passage in 1971. “Backed by Democrats, Republicans, and a highly mobilized set of interest organizations,” historian Kimberly J. Morgan has written, “the bill’s middle-class appeal made it seem like a political sure bet in the months preceding the the 1972 election season.”
The experts agreed: What could go wrong?
Then came a visitation from a new political planet: the nascent “family values” right.
A young University of South Carolina graduate named Connie Marshner accepted a job in 1971 on Capitol Hill as a secretary for Young Americans for Freedom. Quietly, on her off hours, according to historian Leo Ribuffo, she transformed herself into an expert on a bill she decided was the quintessential example of the “therapeutic state invading the home.” Wrote Ribuffo, “Marshner established a letterhead organization and sent out mailings denouncing Mondale’s bill to local church women. To her own surprise this small effort prompted hundreds of thousands of letters to the White House.” Nixon vetoed the bill—with a speech that precisely tracked the nascent religious right rhetoric on the family: its good intentions, he said, were “overshadowed by the fiscal irresponsibility, administrative unworkability, and family-weakening implications of the system it envisions…our response to this challenge must be…consciously designed to cement the family in its rightful position as the keystone of our civilization.”
Civilization having been preserved—for the time being—Marshner claimed credit, began making the mobilization of “little clusters of mainly…evangelical, fundamentalist Mom’s groups” her life’s work, then got a job as head the new Heritage Foundation’s education department, and was soon in Kanawha County, helping organize the textbook wars there.
Mondale’s plans and Obama’s are as different as night and day: the 1971 law really did establish federal daycare centers; the Obama legislation will surely push some byzantine scheme to distance the federal money from the local implementation as much as humanly possible, insulating it from any conceivable charge he has in mind Maoist-style mind-control camps for 3-year-olds. So, home free, right? Well, if you believe that, I’ve got an Obama death panel to sell you right here. And a contraption exemption for religious employers.
I dearly, dearly hope the White House has anticipated that backlash this time, and has figured it into their political plans. If not, that’s political malpractice from them.
The battle over education rages at all levels: Rick Perlstein last wrote about the long history of book-banning in this country.
Nothing New Under the Wingnut Sun: 'Textbook Wars'
Toni Morrison’s book Beloved recently sparked a curriculum controversy in Virgina. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens.)
Last week The Washington Post reported on a school board vote in Fairfax County, Virginia, over whether to consider removing a book from the curriculum. A mother named Laura Murphy told of how her son encountered Beloved, by Toni Morrison, in his senior high school English class. “It was disgusting and gross,” he said. “It was hard for me to handle. I gave up on it.” It was only one mother complaining, but that was enough: Soon, a vote was slated to consider whether to review the book’s inclusion in the curriculum. Complaints were fielded about plots points involving bestiality and gang rape—and the novel’s dramatic apex, when the escaped slave murders her 2-year-old daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured. Uncomfortable, yes, but the director of the American Library Association said discomfort was the whole point: “It’s a painful part of the African-American history in parts of this country. A lot of parents understandable want to protect their children from that…. However, we strongly advise people to read the book as a whole before they make their judgment.” The English department at the boy’s school chimed in with an eloquent public letter (“reading and studying books that expose us, imaginatively and safely, to that trouble steels our souls to pull us through out own hard time and leads us to a greater empathy for the plight of our fellow human beings”). The mom, meanwhile, assured the world she was “not some crazy book burner,” just someone concerned that “new policies be adopted to give parents more control over what their children read in the classrooms.”
It was all so very familiar to me, given the research I’ve been doing on conservatism in the 1970s, when these controversies were a constant. They unspooled themselves again and again into the 1980s and ‚90s, and, obviously, beyond. Sometimes I really do feel like actors in history—hell, why else do we call them “actors”?—read their lines from a script.
The classic 1970s textbook fight unfolded in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1974. It was long, intense, riveting, and violent, and I won’t summarize it here (listen to this outstanding West Virginia Public Radio special to learn more) other than to note some common, structuring tropes.
There is the lone mother innocently going about her business, never dreaming her children’s innocence might be being despoiled by education bureaucrats, until a single, shocking discovery forces the scales from her eyes. In Kanawha the protagonist was one Alice Moore, who a couple of years after arriving in town reported herself startled to discover that the district’s comprehensive sexual education course developed with the help of a grant from the US Office of Education “wasn’t just a sexual education course. It dealt with every aspect of a child’s life…how to think, how to feel, and to act…their relationship with their parents.” The supposedly ordinary housewife transformed herself into a fierce, formidable political advocate (in the Post this week that trope was suggested by photographs that depict Laura Murphy looking steely, intense, concerned—and pretty). She ran for school board (slogan: “Put a mother on the school board”), which was how she discovered a suite of language arts textbooks being fast-tracked for approval by her liberal colleagues to introduce “multi-ethnic, multicultural balance” into the curriculum included outrages like Eldridge Cleaver celebrating the rape of white women in Soul on Ice, and texts encouraging, nay demanding, thatchildren question the revealed religion they learned at their parents knee—“compelling their children, by law, to be in that classroom, and then undermining everything they believe in…. I’m talking about ignoring Christianity, I’m talking about attacking Christianity.”
In Kanawha the fight was eventually pursued by fundamentalist preachers who dynamited the school board building. Nothing like that these days in bucolic Fairfax County, Virginia; these fights have become far too domestic and routinized for that. (This fight, from exactly a year ago in Michigan over the same book, seems to have more dangerously approached Kanawha-style furies.) The reason I raise Kanawha is to help flush out the common arguments. Giving “parents more control over what their children read in the classrooms”—populism—was always the bottom-line one.
Another is the core claim for what makes textbooks unacceptable: that they are disturbing. The Texas organizers who guided Alice Moore’s local work (though she dishonestly claimed her movement to be spontaneously local), Mel and Norma Gabler (who insisted on being called the “Mel Gablers”), advised her what to look out not just for books that derided religion (that was a given), but one with a “morbid,” “negative,” or “depressing” tone. For instance, the Gablers flagged Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” for its “gruesome, murderous, bizarre content.” In this, they tapped a deep American discomfort with unpleasantness as such. (Remember young Mr. Murphy, the high school senior, on Beloved: “It was disgusting and gross.”)
You saw that all the time in textbook war stories in the 1970s. In Richlands, Virginia, a hundred miles to Kanawha’s south, the target was John Steinbeck’s “pornographic, filthy and dirty” The Grapes of Wrath. In the upscale bedroom community of Ridgefield, Connecticut, it was Mike Royko’s lacerating biography of Richard J. Daley, Boss, because it “portrays politics in an un-American way and we don’t want our kids to know about such things as corrupt politics.” Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s satire on the firebombing of Dresden, a particular Gabler bête noire, was being kicked out all over the place. In a North Dakota town it was publicly incinerated. The English teacher who had assigned it was thrown in jail.
It’s important to note, though, that there’s discomfort, and then there’s discomfort. It is surely no coincidence that the “disgusting” books that seem to most raise conservatives’ hackles usually involve plots that involve the powerless challenging the powerful. The Bible, after all, is at points rather disgusting and unpleasant, too.
Eighties movie buffs will remember the scene in Footloose (1984). A parent approaches the right-wing minister played by Jon Lithgow: “Reverend, we have a little problem. I heard the English teacher is planning to teach that book.”
“Slaughterhouse Five. Isn’t that an awful name?”
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Kevin Bacon, playing the out-of-town cosmopolitan kid who liberates the town from reactionary ways, taken aback, assures them it’s “a classic”—another familiar trope in these scripts: the smarter-than-thou sanctimony of the liberals. A father says, “Maybe in another town it’s a classic.” A mother insists, “Tom Sawyer is a classic!” (A clever little fillip, for as the screenwriter was surely getting at, Tom Sawyer’s sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with its unflinching portrayal of racial wickedness and use of the “N” word—better to shelter kids from such unpleasantness, the logic went—has been a familiar a banning target, too, including, the Post reported last week, in Fairfax County.)
The mocking of the stupid philistines by the Kevin Bacon character, whom the audience is meant to identify with, against parents who wants to ban a book without even reading it, is both understandable and problematic. It feels really good to lord one’s intellectual superiority and sophistication over another. It’s problematic to pass judgeent on a book you haven’t read. But in these fights intellectual arrogance might also be a temptation to be avoided. I wrote this in Nixonland about the 1960s, but it also applies to the 1970s—and our own time as well: “liberals get in the biggest political trouble…when they presume a reform is an inevitable concomitant of progress. It is then they are the most likely to establish their reforms by top-down bureaucratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues.”
The fact of the matter is that curricula are just about by definition top-down, bureaucratic things. This is why the “freedom to read” rhetoric associated with an admirable movement like the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week disturbs me sometimes; kids in school really aren’t free to read, are they? They follow curricula. And as such, inevitably there will sometimes be pressure, from the bottom up, from parents offended by elements of a curriculum. This is a perennial tension of public education in an ideologically diverse society that can never go away.
It seems to have been handled well in Fairfax. School board members decided not to make any decisions before actually reading the book. The responses divided among those familiar lines I sketched above. Conservative discomfort: “Board member Elizabeth Schulz (Springfield) said parts of the book made her so uncomfortable that she skipped over them.” She voted to consider the disgruntled parent’s challenge: “‘That graphic, violent, disturbing sexual material,” she said, “doesn’t have to be in the classroom.’ ”
Another board member, Ryan McElveen, perfectly encapsulated the liberal pole in these disputes, a contradictory double-headed argument that taking a book out of a curriculum is censorship (“Personally, I would never seek to ban a book”), and that we should surrender to bureaucratic expertise (“I trust our educators to use sound judgment for determining what’s appropriate in the classroom.”)
In the end, the “liberal” side prevailed, the sixteen-member board voting six-to-two (with eight members who apparently hadn’t the time to pore through the tome abstaining from the vote) not to review Laura Murphy’s challenge. Pronouncing herself “disappointed but not surprised,” she promised an appeal to the Virginia Board of Education. The Post doesn’t seem to have investigated further, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Laura Murphy is at least by now working concert with conservative organizations; groups like the Heritage Foundation (which in 1974, in the second year of its existence, aggressively descended on Kanawha as an organizing opportunity) have long made recruiting the disgruntled as their figureheads into an art. I predict a school board run in her future, but only tentatively. Even more tentatively, I can conceive textbooks fights re-inflating to 1970s size.
But what I can say with absolute confidence is that they won’t go way. The questions these fights raise cut to the heart of the meaning of liberal arts education: it is, well and truly, liberal—inviting students to think and question, to blow apart settled ways of looking at the world, and, yes, force them into mental worlds that disturb. And as long as there are conservatives, that cannot but be a controversial proposition.
Rick Perlstein writes about the memorial for Internet activist Aaron Swartz, which was at times bizarre, at times touching.
Aaron Swartz's DC Memorial: Radical Brings Bipartisanship to Washington
Aaron Swartz. (Creative Commons.)
This past Monday saw an extraordinary gathering of the progressive and not-so-progressive tribes: the Washington, DC, memorial service for Aaron Swartz (whose passing I recognized here)—“somber in tone,” a friend, Noland Chambliss, who was there reported back to me, “and despite the political bent, and the focus on laws and policies, still very much a memorial, full of grieving.” Noland began his account with a caveat: “I didn’t know Aaron well. We had mutual friends and I would occasionally see him at a party or a conference. Our only real conversation was in a shared cab. He had seen Van Jones’s presentation calling for more powerful, emotional communicators making the progressive argument”—Noland was involved in conceptualizing Jones’s group Rebuild the Dream—“and Aaron hoped that his friend Ben Wikler would step into that role. We talked about what it would take to talk about the issues we cared about in a more compelling way.”
Wikler, reports Noland, was the memorial’s MC:
speaking in short bursts between the others, alternately funny and grave. It was a strange gathering all around, the crowd a mix of progressive activists and internet freedom folks, Hill staffers for various Representatives present (from both sides of the aisle), and friends and family of Aaron’s. Ben was probably the only person who could have pulled it off, helping to weave together remembrances about Aaron’s personal life, reflections on how society treats our brightest minds, and scathing critiques of our criminal justice system.
One of the curious things about the service was the presence of Darrell Issa, the California congressman whose scabrous helming of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee—Ground Zero for opportunistic attempts to delegitimate the Obama White House and liberal governance generally—reminds some, including me, of a latter-day Joseph McCarthy. But Issa worked on the same side with Aaron in defeating SOPA, the “Stop Internet Piracy Act,” and has been at the forefront of calling for accountability in the runaway prosecution against him. Cynically? Sincerely? Here’s Noland:
When Issa spoke he pushed it a bit. He opened with a bit about how he and Aaron both knew that it was “In God We Trust” not “In the Government We Trust.” [Note: Aaron was an atheist.] It was tense for a moment, like… if this guy decides to use this as an opportunity to tell us about how the government is overbearing and awful someone might stand up and start swinging. But he didn’t, he waved at the line but didn’t cross it, didn’t even get too close in my opinion.
He said everything he was supposed to, I suspect. He said the prosecutor was wrong, that harmless crimes should be treated as such, he even said something progressive about over-criminalization, and how we fill our jails with people that need treatment, not punishment. It was really well done and I think people were very thankful for the tone he struck.
Then things got weird:
A guy from a right-wing tech policy group called Tech Freedom spoke towards the end and pretty badly misjudged the room. I don’t know why he thought it might be a good moment, in that room on that night, to explain that he thought what Aaron did was illegal and should have been punished, but he did and it didn’t land well.
I think it was by way of trying to make a point about people from different perspectives finding common ground on this issue. But he fumbled it and once people started muttering at him he just decided to keep digging a hole. He got really defensive and pedantic started in on this lecture to the effect of “people like you are just mad and don’t understand policy nuance and how to get things done” and it was pretty much a nightmare. People started yelling at him and Taren [Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron’s girfriend] had to stand up and and ask everyone to listen to the guy.
Then came Congress’s most outspoken liberal:
Alan Grayson was great. He slipped into a pastor-type role, and talked about how society marginalizes forward-thinking people and ultimately treats them like human sacrifices. They challenge us and move us forward and we reward them for this gift by marginalizing them and persecuting them and prosecuting them, sometimes to death. I would love to be a fly on the wall in a conversation between him and Issa about how we serially punish curiosity. It was a theme in both their remarks and it was what Grayson identified as what made Aaron unique. Grayson said what we called intelligence was really just intense curiosity.
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The last speaker was Stinebrickner-Kauffman, who has written powerfully of how calling Swartz’s suicide as result of “depression” miscasts what actually happened. Noland found her remarks “just fucking heartbreaking”:
She was very personal and very vulnerable. I cried my way through most of it and don’t remember all of the specifics but one line stuck out; it captured perfectly the madness of what happened here. She said the first time Aaron told her about the case he said, “I downloaded too many journal articles and I’m being indicted for it.” She said, “That doesn’t sound like that big of a deal,” and he responded, “Well, they want to make an example out of me. But it’s not like anyone has cancer.”
Her capacity to do this thing, at this moment, has left me completely in awe. I cannot imagine what it is like to be her right now and I desperately hope I never come to know. She is a hero, period.
Noland’s final thoughts:
Two hours contemplating a system that incentivizes the merciless pursuit of maximum punishment for someone like Aaron is a pretty devastating experience. But the chance to grieve and be with friends and recommit to trying to make this country a better place for everyone but especially people like Aaron was wonderful. Between Taren reminding us so powerfully about the real human cost of this kind of excessive prosecution, and Darrell Issa and Alan Grayson agreeing that we, as a country, need to find a way to cultivate our most brilliant and curious minds, maybe something good will come of this in the end.
Genuine bipartisanship in Washington. And it took a radical to achieve it. Does that just beat all? Like everything else Aaron achieved, it was hard to imagine anyone else possibly getting it done. Noland asks that you consider lending your name to organizing efforts to honor Aaron’s legacy here, and consider helping Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman here. So do I. Let’s get it done.
Rick Perlstein wrote a eulogy for Aaron Swartz after his unexpected death.
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