On April 7, former Vice President Mike Pence launched his new organization, deceptively named “Advancing American Freedom.” The organization claims to “expand freedom for all Americans” and “defends the successful policies” of the Trump administration. Still, a quick look at its advisory board reveals an alliance with known hate groups, anti-choice extremists, and organizations who have pumped millions of dollars into suppressing the vote.

Chief among these bad actors is Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-choice organization Susan B. Anthony (SBA) List. In a new partnership with American Principles Project, SBA List is waging a $5 million campaign to attack voting rights in the states. Part of SBA List’s strategy to end legal abortion is to limit access to the polls by peddling dangerous and racist disinformation about the 2020 election—the same disturbing tactic that led to the January 6 insurrection.

How did we get to this point, where one of our political parties is deploying a long-term strategy to use disinformation and inflammatory rhetoric to hold onto power in the face of popular disapproval of its policy positions?

In our book The Lie That Binds, we offer an analysis of the wide-reaching political machinery that conservative leaders activated to push us to this point. The genesis of this decades-long saga can be traced back to the original right-wing movement architects betting that they could rely on a silent majority of Americans who were unsettled by the cultural and social changes around them. In the 1970s, as the nascent Religious Right was going to war against a modern and diverse society, its political operatives needed an issue to put forward as the public face for their cause. Abortion became that face.

Antiquated social mores about sex, sex outside of marriage, and women who have sex when they don’t want a family combined to create a stigma around the entire issue of abortion and reproductive healthcare. That stigma resulted in silence, even among supporters of reproductive freedom, that the right has exploited successfully for many years. Whether because politicians believe the issues are risky to engage on or that they can find common ground on other priorities if they give on this one, attempts among Democrats to change the subject or de-prioritize reproductive rights have only emboldened the Right and allowed the GOP to move a raft of repressive and oppressive policies—often by attaching or threatening to attach abortion provisions to completely unrelated issues, to gain the upper hand in negotiations.

The Stupak-Pitts amendment to the Affordable Care Act was, at least in large part, designed to scuttle President Obama’s signature piece of legislation and divide the progressive coalition through infighting. The strategy failed and the ACA became law, albeit with language to prohibit the use of federal funds “to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion” except in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the life of the pregnant person.

In the Congressional negotiations over the CARES Act, the COVID relief bill passed at the height of the pandemic, the GOP attached an abortion coverage ban (often referred to as the Hyde Amendment) to state coronavirus relief funds. It was a typical anti-choice ploy: Republican lawmakers dared Democrats to vote against the modicum of relief they were offering a panicked and hard-hit public while holding people of color and those with lower incomes who might need access to abortion care hostage in the process. The final legislation ultimately included these restrictions on state relief funds. Anti-choice lawmakers in at least 13 states also attempted to restrict access to abortion care during the pandemic, demonstrating that their efforts are not tied to concern about coronavirus but rather a longstanding political agenda to control women and their families.

When Republicans use abortion as a political football, some on our side are tempted to concede, reasoning that it’s better not to take the bait—and not to fight back on abortion. Others have an internal aversion to discussing these issues for personal reasons. Whatever the reason, the reticence to attack the GOP head-on has allowed the right to own the narrative and keep Democrats rocked back on their heels.  

But, in its own way, the current GOP strategy is also a recognition of defeat. They know that in order to maintain the upper hand, they have to keep escalating. As they got more extreme, pushing laws that chipped away at abortion access and directly challenged Roe v. Wade, a growing reproductive freedom and justice movement started to erase cultural shame around abortion and work with Democrats to capitalize on the broad public support on these issues. Increasingly, elected Democrats, reproductive justice activists, and ordinary people were speaking up and out against the GOP machinations.

So Republicans again ratcheted up the rhetoric. In the 2016 and 2020 elections, Donald Trump accused Democrats of sanctioning “infanticide,” and the party spent hundreds of thousands of dollars spreading the false and incendiary claim. Many Democratic officials understandably held back in their response, believing the notion was so absurd that it was not worth responding to it. Meanwhile, others directly challenged their claims, and NARAL supported some of these candidates through ads, such as Virginia State Delegates Hala Ayala and Elizabeth Guzman.

Those Democrats who held back were misunderstanding how people are processing incendiary information in today’s environment. Our ability to rationally judge the accuracy of an idea we are presented with most often has to get past our visceral emotional reaction first. The right was smartly placing their bets on the fact that a majority of the public would be so reviled by the charges that they would turn off from the conversation entirely.  

SBA List, which has stated outright that “Every abortion is infanticide,” told the New York Times that it had poll-tested the talking point for mass distribution in 2020: “The group says surveys it has conducted in swing states like Arizona and North Carolina show that portraying Democrats as supporters of infanticide—an allegation the left says is patently false—can win neutral voters to their side.”  While SBA List’s claims of persuading voters to their side are almost certainly overblown (Biden ultimately won Arizona), they successfully sowed confusion and forced Democrats to expend resources, time and energy to combat their claims. The right couldn’t win the argument on facts, but they could capitalize on uncertainty and emotional fear-mongering to shore up their base and pick off some conflicted voters. 

It’s time to take charge of the conversation. Since we began writing The Lie That Binds in 2019, the implications of allowing right-wing extremists to silence the majority have become even clearer and more dangerous. We can win on the merits of the argument, as Virginia State Delegates Ayala and Guzman did, and expose the right’s toxic lies about reproductive freedom that bind this movement together in the first place.

This is a moment in our country where so much hangs in the balance: reproductive rights, civil rights, human rights, and indeed even our belief in the promise that democracy holds. It’s time to speak up, call the radical right’s bluff, know our history, and use it to hold accountable those who have used racism and misogyny to wield privilege as a weapon rather than a responsibility. That is our charge, and the truth is our tool.

In Los Angeles in early May, I woke up at 5:30 am to a barrage of texts and phone calls. The day before, the Alabama Legislature had passed a law banning abortion completely. This move came on the heels of the Georgia General Assembly criminalizing abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy. I was in LA with former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to talk to film industry leaders about how they could challenge that law, given their extensive investments in her state. The Alabama ban was a tipping point, and women across the country were rising in anger, frustration, and disgust over the attacks on our reproductive freedoms.

Among the calls were several from presidential contenders who wanted to put together plans to address the erosion of reproductive rights by the Trump administration and the state-level attacks that started years ago in the form of 20-week bans, mandatory waiting periods, forced ultrasounds, and much more. In all, 20 presidential candidates spoke out that day.

It hadn’t always been so. In 2016, when reproductive freedom and justice groups pushed debate moderators to ask then–presidential primary candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders about the threats to reproductive rights as a part of the #AskAboutAbortion campaign, we were mostly dismissed by the media and the political elite. Despite the attacks on reproductive freedom that were well underway, many in the Democratic Party and the progressive movement didn’t understand the toll of these escalating assaults on the ability of women to access abortion, birth control, and prenatal care—not coincidentally, assaults that are primarily felt by poor women, rural women, immigrant women, and women of color. Given the complacency of many at the top, including in the media, only one question was asked about abortion rights during the primary debates—the very last one.

Clinton and Sanders were both pro-choice, so people scoffed, “Why should we waste our time on that?” Having our concerns minimized came as no surprise to those of us who do the work. We explained again and again that pro-choice values are great, but we expect plans.

To their credit, Clinton and Sanders didn’t shy away from the issue. When asked, they were aggressive in response, and as the nominee, Clinton led the charge to insert in the Democratic Party platform a call to repeal the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortion services. Still, the conversation existed on the margins for most pundits and observers.

That brings us to today. Through fiat in the federal agencies and an unapologetic takeover of the judicial system, President Donald Trump has thrust the question of access to abortion—and all it represents about control and freedom—to the center of the 2020 presidential election.

So far, the Democratic field has risen to the occasion. Candidates have advanced explicit positions on abortion rights, and all the major ones support the repeal of the Hyde Amendment and the decades-long discrimination it embodies. That commitment was tested this year when Joe Biden reversed his stance on the issue—vowing to lift the ban on abortion funding for low-income women after quick and severe public criticism.

This progress is due to the painstaking work of those raising the alarm year after year, even when too few listened. In 2014, All Above All, a leader in the reproductive justice movement, began educating people on the evils of the Hyde Amendment and calling for its repeal. Six years ago Wendy Davis, then a state legislator, mounted her famous filibuster against Texas’s 20-week abortion ban. The backlash against that law was enormous, and it planted seeds of resistance against today’s bans. Legislators in the anti-choice movement knew their agenda was unpopular and that they were living on borrowed time. So they moved quickly and quietly to introduce bills designed to outlaw certain kinds of abortions, shame women out of choosing the procedure, and shut down clinics. These lawmakers used every trick available to jam these bills through, convening special legislative sessions and hijacking unrelated legislative efforts. In North Carolina, a bill to impose restrictions on abortion clinics was even attached to a motorcycle safety bill.

Trump’s victory heralded the end of this stealth approach. But as state-level bans sweep the nation, so does an awareness of what’s at stake. The vast majority of American adults—77 percent, according to a 2019 NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll—support legal access to abortion, an increase even from last year. Support is overwhelming among Democratic voters, who have had it with the reproductive oppression enabled by misogyny. It’s undeniable that left and liberal candidates must take these issues seriously if they are to be competitive. People who understand that the freedom to access abortion is inextricably part of our fight for gender equity are marching and resisting in record numbers.

This is an inflection point, and it’s crucial to treat Roe v. Wade as the floor of what we need and not the ceiling. The next president will have massive challenges in digging our nation out of the hole we find ourselves in. Fortunately, the contenders for the Democratic nomination have some ideas. The crisis requires dedicated resources and attention, which would be part of Cory Booker’s call for a White House Office of Reproductive Freedom. The crisis requires nominating judges to all levels of the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, who would protect reproductive freedom, as promised by former candidates Kirsten Gillibrand and Beto O’Rourke and current contenders Pete Buttigieg and Julián Castro, among others. The crisis requires innovative thinking about the relationship between state and federal government, like the proposal put forward by Kamala Harris, whose plan models the preclearance process in the Voting Rights Act, stipulating that the most regressive states get permission from the Justice Department before a new abortion law takes effect. The crisis requires a health care plan that includes coverage of comprehensive reproductive care, like the one proposed by Bernie Sanders. And the crisis requires us to address the increased threats to and violence against abortion clinics, as proposed in Elizabeth Warren’s plan. And of course, the next president must push to codify Roe into statute; repeal the Hyde Amendment permanently; remove the global gag rule, which bars giving federal funds to any foreign health organization that provides abortion or even discusses it as an option; and reinstate Title X funding for Planned Parenthood and other full-service reproductive health care providers.

These plans—and the fact that several presidential candidates vowed during the Democratic debates to restore reproductive rights, even when they weren’t asked about them—are a good start. Still, all of that should be the minimum. To adequately confront this moment, we have to elect pro-choice champions. Congress will be instrumental in safeguarding our reproductive rights, and perhaps more than anything, we need a national leader who can convey with moral clarity and conviction what’s at stake. The Trump administration is a manifestation of a radical anti-choice movement’s deep misogyny and racism. Extremists in the White House have used this opportunity to move an anti-​science agenda and force their narrow moral code on all Americans. We need the exact opposite in our next president.

In a dystopian move, the Trump administration has tracked the periods and pregnancies of migrant women being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement centers to prevent them from having abortions—a move that implicitly acknowledges the sexual violence experienced by these women on their travels and in detention. This White House has put people in charge of our family planning programs who do not believe in contraception and have pursued a strict abstinence-only, sex-shaming agenda. This administration moved funds away from Planned Parenthood and other comprehensive health care providers to fake clinics that lie about everything from abortion to contraception.

Of course, the crowning achievement of this administration is to install justices on the Supreme Court dedicated to gutting Roe and criminalizing abortion. The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, who has been accused of multiple sexual assaults, to the nation’s highest court by a president who is an alleged serial sexual predator himself sent a clear message: We will have no rights to, no ability to feel safe in our own bodies. This president and the anti-choice movement that put him over the top in 2016 see our personal agency as something to gleefully extinguish.

This spring, emboldened by a president who said women should be punished for seeking abortion, Texas held a hearing on a law that would allow prosecutors to impose the death penalty on women who terminate their pregnancies. And in many states, women are fodder for test cases to establish the statutory rights of a fertilized egg over those of the person carrying it. In Alabama, Marshae Jones was charged with manslaughter after being shot in the stomach and losing her pregnancy. Although the charges were dropped, the message was clear: Our ability to reproduce can and will be wielded as a weapon to keep us in our place. Left unchecked, this is the future for all women, just as it is the present for the less powerful voices among them.

So therein lies the challenge. The mantle of leadership is not in seeking a return to a pre-Trump status quo that was already victimizing so many. It’s certainly not in treating the anti-choice movement as a benign force that we have a mild disagreement with. The leader we need will realize that he or she has a mandate to move policy that recognizes reproductive rights for what they are: the nucleus of gender equity and a fundamental guarantee without which women will never be free.

I love my home state of Texas. I am proud to have been born and raised in a diverse environment where I was taught to respect my neighbor’s individual beliefs and expect respect in return. It’s no secret that my home state has been taken over by an extreme wing of the Republican Party, and I am not proud of the results. Last night, the Supreme Court issued a short-term reprieve that allows abortion clinics to remain open while they decide whether or not take up the case of the draconian law HB2, intended to shut them down. But this temporary victory feels fragile in a state where so much damage has already been done. A 2011 study that predates the current law shuttering clinics showed that already 7 percent of women who need abortion care in the state have already tried to self-abort. Even without these remaining clinics being threatened with closure, it’s fair to say that my beloved home state is in the throes of an all-out public health crisis. As we work to rectify that devastating situation, we are faced with a new threat—what happens on November 4 could put all of America on the same path as Texas.

With Election Day bearing down on us, pundits and prognosticators are working overtime debating the question of the day: will the Democrats hold the Senate or will anti-choice Republicans get a majority in both chambers? Predictions vary by the day, but there are two things that most people agree on: this election will be a nail-biter, and women voters can make the difference in all of the key races.

One important fact is flying under the political radar: even if Democrats hold the Senate, we could still see the attacks on reproductive rights so prevalent in Texas and other states go national. Already in the Senate, we have a razor-thin margin when it comes to reliably defending access to abortion services in our country, and unlike years past, those votes are entirely on the Democratic side of the aisle. With pro-choice stalwarts like Iowa’s Tom Harkin and Michigan’s Carl Levin retiring, the chance that the clinic closures sweeping the South and more restrictions on abortion could become the norm in our country.

A national Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found that seven in ten Americans support the constitutional rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade. Recently, my organization, NARAL Pro-Choice America, conducted another national poll and found that yet again, seven in ten Americans believe that women should have the legal right to access abortion. But this majority is startlingly underrepresented in Congress, where only four in ten elected officials share Americans’ pro-choice values. The Republicans who control the House have amply demonstrated that restricting a woman’s right to decide when and how she has a family is a top priority. Their counterparts in the Senate share these goals.

Decades ago, trusting women to make our personal decisions about family planning was a shared value that crossed party lines. After all, Republican Governor John Love was the first to sign legislation liberalizing abortion in Colorado several years before Roe v. Wade, followed shortly thereafter by Republican Governor Rockefeller in New York. Recognizing that reproductive freedom is central to individual autonomy and equality, the mainstream in both parties recognized access to abortion as a fundamental human right.

It’s certainly not news that, like Texas, the House has been taken over by an extreme wing of the Republican Party. What might be news to many is their introduction—and even passage—of bills that are the mirror image of attacks on women’s fundamental freedoms that we have seen at the state level. House leaders passed a bill that would ban all private insurance companies in state exchanges from covering abortion care. They voted more than fifty times to change or repeal or weaken Obamacare, which provides for comprehensive family-planning coverage—including prenatal, birth and maternity care for healthy families. They passed a bill that would ban abortion after twenty weeks of pregnancy, despite overwhelming evidence that this small fraction of cases are the most complicated and the most important to leave between a woman, her family and her doctors. And after the disastrous Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case, they flat-out refused to bring the “Not My Bosses’ Business” bill to the floor for a vote. Apparently for House Republicans, women should have to ask for our boss’ permission to spend our hard-earned insurance dollars on the birth control of our choice.

These bills haven’t become law, but only because the Senate firewall worked exactly as it should—reflecting the will of mainstream Americans by refusing to allow the ideology of a few to be imposed on the many. But if anti-choice Republicans win enough seats on November 4 to take control of the Senate, women will face the possibility of very different treatment under the law. After all, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, who would become majority leader of the Republican-run Senate, has already made it clear that passing the twenty-week ban would be one of his top priorities. But even if we only lose a couple of critical pro-choice champion—and there are several in tight races—we could begin to see incremental dismantling of hard-won reproductive rights.

Many people have told me they strain to find credibility in the idea that America could become like Texas—and I get that. We Texans are our own breed in so many ways. (And hopefully a change of leadership there will move Texas in a new direction.) But what about Pennsylvania, where last month a mother was sentenced to eighteen months in prison after she resorted to buying her daughter abortion pills over the Internet because she couldn’t afford to travel overnight to the nearest clinic, a 150-mile round trip? Or Indiana, where Governor Mitch Daniels signed a law that cuts all federal funding for family planning, increasing the out-of-pocket expense for birth control by hundreds of dollars for low-income women? Or Wisconsin, where under Governor Scott Walker women are now forced to undergo mandatory but medically unnecessary ultrasounds before accessing abortion care? Or Ohio, where the law mandates that doctors must read scripts to patients that have nothing to do with the medical concerns of terminating a pregnancy? The list goes on and on and on.

Far too many women and families in our country have already lost any meaningful right to abortion care. Even more have been subjected to punitive and humiliating lectures and procedures—with no medical purpose—mandated by politicians, not doctors. Losing the Senate would do more than restrict abortion access everywhere in our country. It would put into power individuals whose very ideology is grounded in an idea of women as less than equal citizens, who must be controlled through laws that not only deny us our right to the medical care of our choosing, but also the knowledge that allows us to make informed decisions.

That’s why women not only can—but must—make the difference at polls this year, along with our male allies who believe in full equality of all Americans. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, her well-being, and her dignity.”

When we go to the polls on November 4, we can choose the vision of Ruth Bader Ginsburg for our beloved country—or we can go the way of Texas.

At this moment in a Fort Worth hospital, Marlise Munoz’s body is hooked up to machines that are keeping her body alive. Her brain function, her ability to communicate, or hold her child, or kiss her husband—all of those are tragically and irreversibly lost as the result of a pulmonary embolism she suffered the week after Thanksgiving. Marlise had expressed to her husband Erick—both of them were paramedics—that she never wanted to be kept alive this way. So why, despite her own clear wishes and those of her husband and her parents, is she still on life support?

Because Marlise was fourteen weeks pregnant when she passed.

According to The New York Times, more than thirty states place restrictions on when a hospital can remove life support from a pregnant woman, and a dozen, including Texas, have laws on the books that require hospitals to keep a woman’s body alive if she’s pregnant. The hospital must override the doctor’s judgment that she will not recover, the family’s wishes and even the expressed will of the individual herself. In the most tragic way possible, Marlise’s case is forcing us to confront the reality that in far too many places, women are literally seen in the eyes of the law as vessels whose primary function is to produce more offspring. Sound dehumanizing? That’s exactly what it is.

While some have compared Marlise Munoz’s case to that of Terri Schiavo, the woman whose case ignited a national firestorm in 2005 when her husband and parents fought over whether to remove her life support, this case is quite different. Her husband and her parents agree that Marlise’s wishes should be honored. No one with standing wants politicians to interfere in what should be a private family matter.

The other clear difference in this case is that it wouldn’t exist if Munoz weren’t fourteen weeks pregnant when she was pronounced brain dead. Her pregnancy trumped her right to make end-of-life decisions for herself with her family and have them enforced. This ranking of rights by the state is chillingly familiar to women and families around the country who have faced similar—albeit not so stark—situations.

I’m reminded of the case of Bei Bei Shuai, who faced prosecution in Indiana for feticide after she attempted suicide in 2011 when she was pregnant. She survived the attempt, but her fetus died in the process. So the state has chose to criminalize her pregnancy, declaring her a murderer for attempting to take her own life. Or Alicia Beltran, a pregnant Wisconsin woman who disclosed to her doctor that she had previously been addicted to pills. Although she proudly stated that she had been clean for a year, and confirmed it with a subsequent urine test, her doctor insisted that she go on anti-addiction medication. When she refused, she was arrested and taken to court, where she did not have a lawyer. However, one was appointed to represent her fetus.

Individually, the cases of Shuai, Beltran and Munoz are troubling. Together, they add up to a clear picture of how many politicians think it’s not only acceptable, but preferable, for women to lose rights once they become pregnant. And increasingly, state laws reflect that outdated paradigm.

Forcing women against their will to sit through medically unnecessary ultrasounds or state-mandated lectures full of misinformation in order to dissuade them from terminating an unintended pregnancy is common. And initiatives granting fertilized eggs constitutional rights will once again be on the ballot in Colorado, despite resounding defeats in prior elections. The way the state of Texas is treating Marlise Munoz is typical of the way the anti-choice movement treats women who become pregnant. Every restriction they push reinforces the idea that the state now has a substantial interest in preventing a woman from deciding what is best for herself and her family. Every obstacle, every ban, sends a powerful message to women that they are not in charge of their own bodies.

Lynn Paltrow at National Advocates for Pregnant Women has been tracking these laws for years and advocating for women to be full citizens in the eyes of the law. In 2010, she wrote a piece for The Huffington Post exposing the move towards “personhood” as part of this sinister agenda. She points out that recognizing the humanity of others has never before come at a cost to an entire class of people. When women were recognized as equal citizens under the Constitution, this did not come at a cost to men. She states that “efforts to legally disconnect fetuses and to grant them entirely independent constitutional status would not merely add a new group to the constitutional population: it would effectively denaturalize pregnant women, removing from them their status as constitutional persons.”

Marlise Munoz knew exactly what she wanted to happen to her if a tragedy like the one she suffered befell her, and she had the wisdom to share that information with those closest to her. All her family wants is to honor her wishes. We are fortunate enough to live in a country that values freedom and privacy—it is part of who we are as Americans. But a law that forces complete strangers to desecrate the dying wish of our loved ones shows us how far we have strayed from those very cherished values.

Note: An earlier version of this article indicated that the case of Bei Bei Shuai remained open. In fact, she pled guilty to a lesser charge and was sentenced to time served.  

Nelson Mandela’s passing has elicited a flood of personal memories and tributes from people he touched across the world. I am one of those people. In elementary school in Dallas in the early 1980s, I was fascinated by the televised images of mock shanty-towns on US college campuses. Questions about the South African divestment campaign started me down a path that opened up a world of social justice and politically inspired change.

In 2003, I visited South Africa during the World Summit on Sustainable Development and spent weeks working alongside local organizers in townships around Johannesburg and learning about the strategies they used to thrive even under the oppressive apartheid regime. Everywhere I went, I was blown away by how powerful the women were. Vocal and forthright, they were often their communities’ spokespeople and leaders.

That experience of strong female leadership owed more than a little to the Constitution of 1996, put in place largely by Mandela. In its new Bill of Rights it listed not only race as impermissible grounds for discrimination, but “gender,” and then “sex” and then, uniquely, it also added “pregnancy.” And in case the meaning of that was not clear, the Bill of Rights went on (emphasis added):

Everyone has the right to bodily and psychological integrity, which includes the right

a.  to make decisions concerning reproduction 
b.  to security in and control over their body; and
c.  not to be subjected to medical or scientific experiments without their informed consent.

This official recognition that gender equality requires embracing reproductive freedom remains a high-water mark of international law. This important commitment was foreshadowed by a bill passed months before the constitution went into effect. The Choice on Termination of Pregnancy law—which replaced one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world with one of the most liberal and humane—allows South African women full autonomy to decide when to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester, complete with financial assistance if required. (Abortion is also allowed within widely defined exceptions in the second trimester.) With this act, President Nelson Mandela transformed the lives of millions of South African women.

In the Jewish tradition we have a saying we repeat at every Passover Seder: “dayenu,” or “it would have been enough.” It would have been enough for Nelson Mandela to put his life on the line in 1964 in the struggle for racial equality. It would have been enough for Mandela to inspire us through his twenty-seven years in prison. It would have been enough for him to lead successful negotiations with then-President de Klerk to abolish apartheid. But once he had become his country’s first black president, instead of resting on his laurels—or resting, period—he tackled the issue of abortion, which was considered even more controversial in South Africa at the time than it was here. Why would he do this?

In his famous April 20, 1964, “Speech from the Dock,” given just before he was sentenced to life imprisonment, he offered a clue:

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

The simple answer, then, is that he had more left to do. Mandela acted, as he always had, not out of political calculation but with laser-like moral focus. He knew that for women to have full freedom and equality, we must have autonomy over all issues pertaining to our lives, especially our reproductive destiny.

Mandela’s intimate experience with poverty and oppression showed him that reproductive freedom was intrinsically tied to economic security. Thus, this Nobel Peace Prize winner known worldwide for his pursuit of human equality chose as one of his first acts of elected leadership to cement that fundamental cornerstone of women’s equality into law.

Although a solid, consistent majority of Americans support the protections outlined in Roe v. Wade, well-funded attacks on reproductive freedom are consuming an enormous amount of time and attention in our country. So I was fascinated to see in all the press coverage of Mandela’s death how little was said about his legacy of advancing abortion rights.

It’s been mentioned primarily on women-defined blogs and press, which is important, but not enough. Major network tributes and even mainstream progressive outlets have not seen fit to mention it.

Unsurprisingly, his legacy championing women’s basic freedoms is not lost on extremists in this country hell-bent on taking them away. With their typical tone-deafness, they opine:

“Nelson Mandela has the blood of preborn children on his hands … lots of them,” wrote anti-choice blogger Jill Stanek on Saturday.

“[I]t makes no sense for pro-life Christians to praise Mandela’s example considering what he did with that power once he became president,” wrote Paul Tuns, editor of the Canadian pro-life publication The Interim.

“The organization Keep Life Legal asked the question: “What about apartheid in the womb?”

One of the first things I noticed when I joined NARAL Pro-Choice America as president was how much these extremists depend on their aggressive public vitriol to stigmatize the medical procedure of abortion and silence the majority in this country who understand that reproductive rights are vital to the freedom and self-determination that makes us Americans. The anti-choice lobby trades in hatred and fear to frighten people into avoiding the issue so they can they win by forfeit.

In attacking the moral leadership of one of the world’s most beloved freedom fighters, these zealots have once again gone too far. But their slander is not the only reason we must talk about Mandela’s contributions to women’s freedom. We must go there, because he went there. If we want to honor Nelson Mandela’s commitment to a society “in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities,” we only do it justice when we loudly recognize that his vision of human dignity included women’s freedom to make their own decisions about when we have children.

Tribute after tribute has unfolded with this chapter deleted, leaving all the successes and gains for South African women invisible. I am not going to bow to that pressure to hold my tongue. I will praise Mandela loudly and proudly for refusing to leave women behind. And if enough of us do so, maybe someday soon all women can be assured the respect and freedom that Mandela fought to bring to the women of South Africa.

Jessica Valenti reports on the latest legal battles over birth control. 

(AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

Barring an unexpected last-minute jolt of sanity, at midnight tonight the federal government will shut down all but its most essential services. Despite the Senate passing a clean bill last week to continue funding the government, the Republican-led House early Sunday morning chose to forsake their basic responsibility to keep our country functioning, and instead used the impending shutdown as a last-ditch opportunity to delay the Affordable Care Act—the president’s signature bill that would insure millions of Americans unable to afford healthcare on the open market.

But if the Republicans’ single-minded obsession with delaying or repealing Obamacare isn’t enough partisan politics, an amendment they rammed through in the dark of night added language that would give bosses the power to decide whether women who work for them should have access to birth control through their healthcare coverage. (They had help from two anti-choice Democrats: Jim Matheson of Utah and Mike McIntyre of North Carolina.) The combination of the two measures puts the budget bill back in the hands of the Democrat-controlled Senate, which will almost certainly strip out these outrageous provisions and send the bill back to the House, which has until midnight tonight to approve the measure or shut down the federal government.

Americans may be familiar with the Tea Party Republican’s obsession with crippling Obamacare before the insurance exchanges open tomorrow, October 1. What’s less known is their backward position that women’s birth control coverage—whether used for family planning or for medical necessity—should be decided by employers. Given that 99 percent of all women in this country use birth control at some point in their lives, this position puts anti-choice lawmakers not only outside the mainstream but in a different galaxy from the mainstream.

This is not new. In 2012, Senator Roy Blunt tried to pass similar language as part of a highway funding bill. The so-called “Blunt amendment” was stripped out by Senate Democrats then, but now it’s back as Republicans have decided that the budget fight is the perfect chance to renew their very real war on women.

Remember Republicans’ soul-searching after they lost big in 2012 thanks to the largest election gender gap in modern history? Apparently that search turned up empty, since the resolution they approved this weekend forces millions of American adult women to ask permission of their employers before they get their birth control pills covered in their health insurance like all other medications.

What’s more, the so-called “conscience clause” would also give employers control over coverage for pre-natal services. That’s right: these anti-choice legislators who claim to base their ideology on a “respect for life” want to take away from women the coverage that ensures healthy pregnancies. That’s not respecting life. It’s disrespecting women.

I’m not so sure this is a winning strategy for them. Case in point: the race for Virginia’s next governor. In the most widely watched campaign of 2013, Republican Ken Cuccinelli is losing the race to Democrat Terry McAuliffe among women by twenty-four points, according to a recent Washington Post poll. Much of this gap is driven by women aghast at Cuccinelli’s radical positions on choice, including his declaring “personhood” for all fertilized eggs, which would outlaw many forms of contraception and even in-vitro fertilization if taken to its full extreme. If Cuccinelli loses in November, it will be entirely because his radical positions are driving women to the polls to vote against him. Choice has become the issue in the race, and Cuccinelli has done everything in his power to hide his record.

Likewise, Republicans in Congress had better expect to pay a huge price in 2014 and beyond if they continue to pursue a radical agenda that attacks women. Yes, a huge part of the GOP caucus is elected from gerrymandered districts that reward extreme conservatism. But women—and in fact all Americans—are seeing more and more exactly what their party stands for. The more they pursue policies like the one that puts women’s family planning decisions in the hands of their employers, the more they drive themselves into the far fringe, a place they can expect to occupy for years to come if they don’t change tactics quickly. Americans want their elected officials to do their job and help our economy thrive, not play Daddy to grown women who are more than capable of making our own decisions.

But in the near term—the very near term—it’s the rest of Americans who will suffer the consequences of this anti-choice extremism and intransigence. The Republicans’s decision to pass a last-minute radical attack on women virtually guarantees a government shutdown tomorrow. That means troops see their paychecks delayed. It means national parks shut down. It means critical services come to an immediate halt.

Americans are not willing to live with this tradeoff. It’s time for anti-choice members of Congress to put extremism aside and do the job we sent them to Washington to do. As for the women whose lives they want to control, they’ll just have to let us make our own decisions. Hopefully they can learn to live with that.

John Nichols explains why the government shutdown is a powerful reminder of why DC should be a state.

(Courtesy of Flickr)

“A girl walks into a fake pregnancy clinic…” This sounds like the beginning of a joke, and what comes next is so outrageous that it might be laughable if it weren’t dangerous.

When Caitlin, a volunteer for NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia, entered a “crisis pregnancy center” (CPC), as these fake clinics are called, posing as a scared woman in need of help, she got just the opposite. The video below highlights the lies:

Caitlin was told in this facility that birth control pills are a form of “enslavement,” that they would give her cancer and that condoms don’t work because they’re “naturally porous.” But Caitlin didn’t get her lies straight up; they also came with a side of shame. The counselor also told her, “I don’t think you should be having sex because you’re not married.” And, worst of all, when this young woman tested the counselor’s response to an assault victim by telling a hypothetical story about being raped while intoxicated, she was told, “OK, well just don’t do it again.”

Taking a page from the junk science that fuels climate change denial and “reparative” anti-gay therapy, CPCs claim to be medical facilities but are nothing more than outposts of an extreme movement whose agenda is to—by any means necessary—frighten women out of having premarital sex and out of exercising their constitutional rights to terminate an unintended pregnancy. Caitlin’s experience was not an anomaly. NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia conducted an investigation of fifty-six crisis pregnancy centers in the state, and a full 71 percent of them shared bad information with women seeking their services, posing extreme danger, both physical and emotional, to the women who seek their services.

The obvious question is how these places stay open. In Virginia, part of the answer is Ken Cuccinelli, the current attorney general and Republican candidate for governor. He has said he was “proud” to help establish a “Choose Life” license plate as a state senator, the proceeds of which go directly to CPCs. (Similar plates fund CPCs all over the country, from Mississippi to Massachusetts.)

License plates aren’t the only way states divert money to CPCs. In June, Ohio Governor John Kasich signed a budget that diverts money away from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and sends it to crisis pregnancy centers. That’s money meant to help the most vulnerable families pay for things like food or clothing or rent, now paying for facilities to harass and misinform some of those very same women who might need that assistance. And North Carolina’s budget moved $250,000 out of the Women’s Health Fund, which provides care for the poor and uninsured, and sent it to the state’s largest group of CPCs.

I’ve written before about the extreme lengths these politicians go to in order to pass unpopular mandates that rob women of our constitutional rights. Knowing that these measures are out of line with modern American family values, anti-choice politicians bury them in budgets, call endless special sessions and attach them to completely unrelated bills. In North Carolina, anti-choice restrictions were plugged into a motorcycle safety bill, spawning a glut of “motorcycle vagina” jokes that had women around the country laughing for days—we have to laugh not to cry.

Colorlines exposed the disturbing campaign to target women of color and poor communities by crisis pregnancy centers. The in-depth report looks at how CPCs use deceptive tactics to lure women into their facilities and then, with no regard for the issues they face, shame them into thinking they have only one choice:

Fueled by a race-baiting, national marketing campaign and the missionary-like evangelism of its affiliates, Care Net has turned the complex reality behind black abortion rates into a single, fictional story.

We can and must educate women about their full range of choices before and after they are pregnant. We must support policies that reduce unintended pregnancies and increase access to abortion for all women. We must fight the efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and other high-quality health centers and fight to keep clinics that offer genuine medical services to women (and men!) when they need them.

While CPCs are the vehicle trying to rob women of our rights and our autonomy, the drivers are the politicians like Ken Cuccinelli who support them with special protections and taxpayer funds. Accountability starts at the ballot box. No politician who supports crisis pregnancy centers should see another term. That starts with making sure Cuccinelli loses his race for governor come November. This would be a victory not just for Virginia, but for women around the country.

How did the “opt-out revolution” affect men?

(Flickr/Robin Siesto)

Every time an American woman walks into her polling place, she ought to give thanks to Susan B. Anthony, who wrote the constitutional amendment that allows her to vote. Anthony herself was arrested and convicted for the right we take for granted—that women are entitled to participate in our democratic process. Her advocacy for women extended to our education and even our right to own property. (She was also an early supporter of the temperance movement. No one’s perfect.)

I’m certain Susan B. Anthony would be aghast if she knew that her name was being used by a group of anti-abortion extremists to drive an anti-women agenda and roll back the rights she fought so hard for. Anthony knew that caring for women’s health was an important part of protecting their rights, which is why she opposed the criminalization of abortion. Since abortion was illegal in the nineteenth century, she knew the stakes. Women still sought abortions back then, but it was like playing Russian roulette with your life. There were horrible complications, infections, and many women ended up sterile. The unlucky ones died of botched abortions.

The Susan B. Anthony List (SBA) bears no resemblance to the legacy of the hero whose legacy has made all of our lives better. A new report from NARAL Pro-Choice America and American Bridge details the insidious goals of this so-called women’s organization. They make no bones about their plans: their president, Marjorie Dannenfelser says, “When we started about 20 years ago, you would not put the pro-life movement and the NRA in the same category…. That’s been my goal—to make this issue, which is so fundamental, have the strongest political arm they could possibly have. That’s the direction I see this heading in.”

They’ve got a big agenda: use the upcoming Virginia governor’s race as a “proving ground” to drive their anti-choice fundamentalism in a dozen states and in the thirty-three Senate races in 2014. We’ve seen how they support the most radical candidates running the most out of touch campaigns. When the rest of America—including the vast majority of Republicans—was denouncing Todd Akin for his mystifying comments that a woman couldn’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape,” the SBA List stood by him. Dannefelser called him “an excellent partner” and reaffirmed her organization’s support for his candidacy.

Richard Mourdock didn’t deny that rape could result in pregnancy, but he did say those pregnancies were “something God intended to happen,” and again SBA List stood by their man. They ran ads attacking his opponent, who now sits in the US Senate. Akin, of course, also lost.

They don’t stop with candidates. When the Virginia legislature proposed a bill in 2012 that would require women who need an abortion to get an unnecessary, invasive transvaginal ultrasound, Dannefelser took to the airwaves to praise the measure. “Really, this is a matter of giving a woman more information that she needs to make a decision that’s fully informed,” Dannefelser told Chris Matthews about the procedure, which involves penetrating a woman with a wand to give her an ultrasound that only confirms what she already knows. (The law eventually passed without the transvaginal ultrasound requirement, although it still forces women to undergo a noninvasive ultrasound that is just as unnecessary.)

While SBA List is a fan of unnecessary ultrasounds, the organization does not like it when women have access to the healthcare they need. The organization asked Republican presidential candidates to sign a pledge to defund Planned Parenthood, which would deny women access to cancer screenings, prenatal care and even regular check-ups.

SBA List styles itself a feminist organization that works to elect more pro-life women to office. (In fact, they supported some of the most radically anti-choice male candidates in 2012.) But their real agenda is as fiercely anti-woman as Anthony herself was pro-woman.

See thier work in this year’s Virginia governor’s race. They’ve committed a minimum of $1.5 million to help elect Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, an anti-abortion extremist in the mold of Akin and Mourdock. Six years ago, then–state legislator Cuccinelli sponsored the most extreme kind of personhood amendment, one that would ban many forms of birth control (not to mention miscarriages).

The Virginia governor race is a chance for SBA List to test strategies and messaging they can deploy nationwide in 2014, 2016 and beyond. Like most pro-life activists, they have focused their efforts on hiding the most extreme parts of their agenda and pursuing attacks on a woman’s right to safe and legal abortion care piecemeal. They conceal their radical agenda as concern for women’s health and safety. That’s why our report on the record and activities of SBA List is so important; we need to expose them now for who they are, before they help elect more candidates that threaten our rights and our lives.

Defending guys who question rape? Pushing invasive and unnecessary medical procedures on women? Thinking they know better then we do about what works best for our lives? It is difficult to imagine a more insulting attack on Anthony’s proud legacy.

The first couple is peddling black college graduates some seriously worn-out stereotypes on race and opportunity. Read Aura Bogado’s take.

Editor's Note: The following is the text of the speech given by Nation contributor Ilyse Hogue in her first public appearance as the new president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, at its fortieth anniversary dinner, in Washington, DC, on February 5.

Thank you all for coming out tonight to show your support for NARAL Pro Choice-America, for Nancy, and for this cause that is so central to building a country worthy of our ideals.

How many of you are at a NARAL event for the first time? Stand up! That's amazing! Round of applause. Welcome!

Now, how many of you in this room have been working with NARAL and the pro-choice movement for twenty years or more, stand up. Wow! Incredible.

Such rich history in this room—and so much new energy. With that combo, how can we not accomplish great things together?

One of the reasons we have gathered here tonight is to honor the great leadership of Nancy Keenan.

For the last eight years, Nancy has steered this organization with a steady hand and a clear vision through some very challenging times for our movement. We are all indebted to her for that.

And, on a personal note, Nancy, I cannot thank you enough for the grace and love you have shown in passing this charge to me.

Transitions like these are natural moments for us to take stock, to ask ourselves—how far have we come? where are we headed? …as individuals, as a movement, and as a country. Tonight we mark the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. Forty years ago, the basic freedom for women to decide if, when, how and with whom we have a family was enshrined into law.

It is unthinkable to many people today how fundamentally that changed women's lives. Before Roe, the lives of millions of bright and passionate young women were irreversibly altered because of choices they were not trusted to make. Before Roe, the leading cause of death for women of child bearing years in the United States of America was illegal abortion.

It is sobering to think how many people in this room carry memories in their hearts of lives lost too young… simply because the law didn't recognize what we know to be true—that women know best when we're ready to have a family.

I do not regret that my generation didn't experience the days of back-alley abortions. But I do regret that we don't all know the brave leaders who have fought for decades to put those days behind us. So many women have worked so hard to safeguard choice under the law. Because of them, our generations can write our own destiny like never before. We owe them all—you all—an enormous debt.

It is hard to start naming names, because I might never stop. But I do want to call out one more person: Before we had Nancy Keenan and before we had Kate Michelman, we had Karen Mulhauser to lead NARAL. Karen is here tonight and we thank you so much.

And so as we look forward from today, it's so important to recognize that we stand on the shoulders of giants. And our very first job is not to fall off—not to fall back into those dark days our opponents would wish on American women.

So, forty years later, how are we doing from up here on these shoulders?

Not so bad. As of two weeks ago in a Wall Street Journal poll, seven out of ten Americans support Roe. Seven out of ten. If this decision were on the ballot, they'd call that a landslide. It is so important to recognize when we are winning.

That's not to say we don't still have a political fight on our hands. We do, because on choice, as in so many areas, our politics lag way behind our culture. It often takes a while for some politicians to catch up with the realities of people's lives.

As Stephanie Cutter noted earlier, this election cycle both surfaced the true colors of our opponents—it's not just abortion anymore folks, now it's whether we can have contraception (or healthcare) or if we even know if we were raped—and we seized the opportunity to go on offense. In race after race, the anti-woman, anti-choice candidate was defeated, bringing us a record number of women in Congress. And a woman's right to choose was central to many of those contests.

Still, for too many women, these victories feel like an illusion. Those same opponents are scoring policy wins at the state level that have devastating impact on women and girls. In my home state of Texas, the defunding of Planned Parenthood means almost half of poor women in that state are going without basic healthcare, much less being able to decide for themselves how to handle an unwanted pregnancy. In Arkansas, just yesterday, the House voted to ban abortion after twenty weeks of pregnancy with no exemptions for rape or incest.

So the basic fight, for our basic freedom, is still with us. Women's work is never done.

Yet, as we stand here on the shoulders of giants, we also must look out over the horizon and anticipate the world yet to come. To ask how we build a movement that supports an evolving set of women's choices, some that exist today but were unheard of forty years ago. Some that we can hardly imagine even tonight.

The world is changing—fast. Women are attending college in record numbers. Women in the United States are choosing to have fewer children and are starting families later in life. Demand for fertility treatment is up—modern technologies now not only help us avoid having families at the wrong time, but help us to have families at the right time. Two thousand twelve was not only a milestone for women in government; it was also a milestone for women in business. Two thousand twelve brought what was once unthinkable when we witnessed the appointment of the first pregnant CEO to run a Fortune 500 company.

And still our politics lag behind our possibilities. Paid sick days, equal pay, family leave—these are the kinds of things women need to make the choices that let us thrive and to thrive in the choices we make. And what we know is that when women thrive, communities thrive, marketplaces thrive and our country thrives.

In 1995, at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, Hillary Rodham Clinton proclaimed to the world that “women's rights are human rights.”

She went on to say, “We need to understand that there is no formula for how women should lead their lives. That is why we must respect the choices that each woman makes for herself and her family. Every woman deserves the chance to realize her God-given potential.”

Secretary Clinton's words are as applicable today as they were almost twenty years ago. Choices are expanding in an ever-changing world. Our challenge in the coming decades is not just to beat back those who would restrict those choices but to marshal the millions of women who want to define what these new choices mean for us.

Women are thinking bigger thoughts and dreaming bigger dreams for our families and for our futures than ever before. But we cannot do that unless our foundational rights are secured. And those foundational rights will not be secure until we challenge our political leaders to match policy to the real lives of real women today.

This is our charge as a new generation of women leaders, standing up here on these giant shoulders to think hard about how we can be giants too. I really hope you'll join me.

Young activists also attended the dinner, including one College Democrats president who was herself an "accident baby," Anna Simonton reported from the event.

Michael “Heckuva-job” Brownie has been making headlines the past couple days with his “expert” assessment that President Obama may have jumped the gun with his pre-emptive warnings about Hurricane Sandy. We’ll never know how many lives were saved because officials across the Eastern seaboard sounded the alarm early and got people out of harm’s way. But I’m gonna guess that a Romney campaign that has gone to great lengths to keep any memory of the Bush administration in a dim corridor far from voters’ consciousness is not pleased with Brown’s uninvited intrusion into the political discourse in the final days of a close election.

Michael Brown is best known as the hapless FEMA director that George W. Bush made famous when he commended the guy for doing a “heckuva job” during Katrina as the Lower Ninth Ward sank on national television. His re-emergence during Sandy would be laughable, except for one thing: it reminds us that the outrage we experience in moments of tragedy are too often nowhere to be found in the cold calculations that lead to election messaging.

In 2005, for a moment in time, a stunned nation peered at itself in the mirror after Hurricane Katrina. We began to have an honest conversation about the intersection of poverty, racism and callousness that allowed an entire population to languish in misery while a president flew over in his plane and claimed to understand their plight. While the legacy of Katrina played a role in diminishing confidence in Bush’s leadership, the 2008 election was litigated more over the plight of Iraqis and not over how to prevent another Katrina.

Similarly, in 2011, Troy Davis was put to death for a murder that it seems dubious at best that he committed. Amidst nationwide vigils and protests about the racial inequity of the US criminal justice system, the Supreme Court denied the last appeal from Davis and his lawyers to stay the execution. He was killed by lethal injection on Wednesday, September 21. “I Am Troy Davis” became the anguished rallying cry of a public paralyzed by injustice.

And for months early this year, the murder of Trayvon Martin catalyzed a national conversation about American’s obscene gun laws and the tolerance we have for the epidemic of murder of young black men. Hoodies, skittles and iced tea became the macabre symbols for a life that was lost way too early. While vigilantes like George Zimmerman remain free, gun control has meritted only the slightest mention in the presidential race, despite the best efforts of groups like Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

On his show last Sunday, Chris Hayes did a must-watch riff on what the election would be like if the South Bronx was the “swing state” upon which the election hinged. Instead of an auto bailout, we might be having a national conversation about homelessness, or stop-and-frisk or racial disparities in our prison system.

Instead, these critical issues are relegated to the sidelines in our nation’s most watched election spectacle because hard political calculation demands a more expedient route to winning a majority in the Electoral College. Given the importance of Ohio in winning the 2012 contest, we’ve spent far more time in these final weeks understanding the fine points of a relatively modest—albeit important—government investment in a key part of our manufacturing base than on the life-and-death issues that affect millions of people in this country.

Along with long-standing groups like League of Young Voters and Color of Change, a new loose-knit group of courageous and committed activists has decided that this is the year to take action. Threading the pragmatic task of building visible political power with the passion of pursuing a deeply moral cause, Hoodie Vote was formed a few months ago to give young people of color an organizing structure that allows them to participate in the election while showing their allegiance to correcting racial inequity in our culture.

Hoodie Vote Co-Founder and National Coordinator Trell Thomas tells me:

I wanted to start the Hoodie Vote movement because I saw a huge need for young people—particularly young people of color—to be involved in the political process. I saw the correlation between young people and fashion/culture and the need make a difference in what they viewed as a “real” way. I also was very touched by what happened to Trayvon Martin so much so that I got in a van full of strangers for a twenty-one-hour ride to Sanford, Florida, to be a part of the march because the cause was one that I believed deeply in. 

I swore that I would not let Trayvon be forgotten. The thing about the situation with Trayvon, the hoodies, this movement and the political process is that people voted on the “stand your ground” law that ultimately ended in the death of an innocent young man, and if we forfeit our right to vote who’s to say that there won’t be another Trayvon? I wanted young people to make that correlation. I wanted them to know that it is much bigger than a presidential seat, there are issues that affect you locally in a real way.

So why not send a message on this election day in our hoodies? Why not show people that we matter, that we care, that we are involved. We aren’t robbing, killing or looking suspicious in our hoodies. We are making a difference, changing the world in our hoodies! I see this as a way to continue to turn tragedy into triumph and to bring more positive out of such a negative situation.

Hoodie Vote has taken off, with groups on fifty campuses around the country and a handful of celebrity endorsements. Even Russell Simmons has gotten in his hoodie to support the emerging movement.

These committed activists are playing the long game. We’ve got miles to travel before we see national leadership embrace the embedded racism and poverty that plagues our inner cities. But as Hoodie Vote’s Trell noted to me in his comments, “We will not be bitter because of this, we will be better!” We would all do well to learn from this spirit.

I spent a half-hour yesterday cutting and pasting the presidential debate transcript into Word and then using the search function to look for the term “women.” When the ABC transcript came up empty, I tried the CNN one. When that also returned no results, I decided to change my search parameters to “woman”—i.e., singular. Booyah! I got four, count ’em, four hits! All four were in anecdotes about a “woman I met…”

Perplexed, I went to recheck the debate schedule. Maybe there wasn’t any mention because a future debate was dedicating time to the topic? Nope. Economics and foreign policy are where these debates are headed.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who noticed. My e-mail inbox is full of outreaches from women’s groups who note that Romney’s extreme positions were neither defended or challenged. From stalwart NARAL to new on-line group UltraViolet, women’s groups are once again left to point out that women were left out of the debate.

To be honest, I am annoyed as I write. Women are 52 percent of the population, so dedicating one section of one debate to “women’s issues” would be absurd. But the complete absence of discussion about the enhanced barriers women face in a bad economy is staggering. The economic and social well-being of women is integral to that of the country, and highlighting this, and forcing Romney to defend his regressive policies on everything from choice to the economic fairness for women is not only good political strategy, it would start to open up a real conversation about closing the gap on gender-based inequality. How hard is it to go from anecdote to analysis?

Here are these four women the candidates met along the campaign trail that merited mention in Wednesday’s debate:

The Unemployed Woman—Mitt Romney spoke of an Ohio woman who had been out of work for six months. Accordingly to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national average time of unemployment is almost eleven months, so this woman was faring OK among her peers. But she’s right to be concerned. Women continue to recover from the recession more slowly than men, largely due to the loss of public sector jobs. The private sector has added 3.5 million jobs since the recovery started, but only 28.8 percent of those have gone to women, and they are likely to be paid seventy-seven cents per the dollar for their male counterparts. The Romney/Ryan “jobs” plan would result in millions more jobs lost, the bulk in the public sector. Even if Unemployed Woman was able to buck the trend and get a private sector job, she shouldn’t expect to be paid like the boys in the office, since Romney refuses to confirm his support for equal pay.

The Foreclosed Woman—Romney met a woman in Nevada facing foreclosure after her husband lost his job. Foreclosed Woman is probably not alone, but she’s going to have a challenge organizing a meet-up. Gender-based foreclosure stats are extremely hard to come by, as I learned after asking several organizations leading on this issue for a breakdown. What we do know is that predatory lenders pushed subprime mortgages on women at a much higher rate than on men, despite women’s having a generally higher foreclosure rate. African-American women fared the worst; they were 236 percent more likely to receive a subprime mortgage than white men. Neither candidate have a serious plan to deal with the human and economic impact of the record foreclosures, but given Romney’s stance on regulation and allegiance to trickle-down economics, it’s safe to assume he would let the banks run amok and certainly principal reduction would become a distant dream.

The Uninsured Woman—Romney also encountered an uninsured woman along the course of his travels. This is not shocking given the 19 million adult women nationally who were uninsured in 2011. Some of this is because of cost; some women have lost their jobs; some are unable to get coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Women of color make up half that number, despite their making up roughly a third of the population. Repealing the Affordable Care Act as Romney has said he would do his first day in office would be disastrous for Uninsured Woman, who will benefit from Medicaid expansion and from access to traditional insurance through the elimination of surcharges based exclusively on gender.

The Back-to-School Woman—President Obama told one story of a North Carolina woman who went back to school at the age of 55 and was able to get a better job as a result of it. Women are more likely to enroll in and graduate from college than their male counterparts. This is true across all ethnicities. We know that more adults went back to school as the recession hit. Adults and regular-aged students alike depend on Pell Grants for their college education, a program far more likely to be preserved under an Obama presidency than a Romney one. Romney has also been an advocate for profit-driven universities, which by some estimates are funded up to 90 percent  with taxpayer dollars while proving disastrous in terms of graduation rates and employment stats post-graduation.

Apparently, none of the women on the campaign trail approached the candidates with a question about reproductive choice. So allow me to assert that all aspects of our lives get categorically more difficult when we lose control over decisions about family planning and reproduction.

We’re less six weeks from two party conventions that spent the better part of their allotted time paying homage to the critical role women play in American families, in the American workforce and certainly in deciding American elections. President Obama is clearly the leader on issues as they relate to women, and the Democrats have made hay with the Republican War on Women. As the election moves into the final stretch, we need to be more visible in the conversation, not less.

Be sure to also check out Bryce Covert’s take on the “invisible women.”

Twelve years ago, as a different presidential election approached, I was frustrated. I graduated from college and grad school in the mid-’90s and entered a robust job market, even in my chosen field of nonprofit advocacy. I faced few challenges paying off the loans I had taken to cover the portion of my tuition that my parents couldn’t pick up. Still, the world looked—and was—unjust. The wave of unchecked free trade sweeping the globe was wreaking havoc on the manufacturing base here at home and human rights abroad. Privatization of natural resources was the buzzword of the day, and the ecological projections felt downright apocalyptic. I wondered whether there was anything besides cosmetic differences between candidates Bush and Gore.

Twelve years, two wars, one financial crisis, 15 million underwater homes, trillions in tax cuts for the wealthy, and a social safety net hanging by a thread have disabused me of that notion: what’s cosmetic to one relatively privileged white girl is life-changing for the tens of millions living in poverty.

Deepak Bhargava lays out the imperative to lean into this election and keep an eye on post-election movement building. His basic premise is inarguable: things will get a whole lot worse if there’s a Republican takeover. But it is also worth considering how, in addition to the devastating material impact of a Romney presidency, a GOP victory robs us of the oxygen required to grow deeper and broader roots for the progressive movement.

This may seem counterintuitive, since surges in participation are often most visible in times of opposition, but the strength and numbers required to elect majorities are different from those needed to rewire policies and priorities. The latter requires us to innovate, to invest in multi-tiered organizing, and to shift our culture to embrace power—all of which would become virtually impossible under a Romney presidency.

An emphasis on innovation is our best bet to secure the necessary breakthroughs in organizing. Experimental online organizing drove the electoral wins of the last decade. Maybe the next breakthrough will come from merging advocacy and service to help people in distress and strengthen incentives for participation. Or maybe from programs that prioritize horizontal relationships and the elevation of community leaders. Or maybe from putting pressure on less visible actors like ALEC. Whatever that next breakthrough is, we won’t find it if our imagination is tied up in defense.

Victory feeds progressive momentum and participation. Strategically picking and winning offensive fights will not only help the folks who need it most; it will set the stage for continued progress. From the Dream Act to marriage equality, early success came in the states. Opportunities at the state level are looming—including a real chance for clean elections in New York—and acting on them requires the breathing room a Democratic presidency offers.

For the long game, progressives have to learn to embrace power. Winning deep concessions requires not only outside pressure but deep ideological connections with officeholders. Progressives, long wary of the way power corrupts, are often reluctant candidates. But those connections are far more assured when we elect our own. Our candidates will be more viable if we have time and money to invest in training them and strengthening their campaigns.

We still have our work cut out for us if Obama wins a second term. What we’re fighting for now is the opportunity to do that work.

Other Replies to Deepak Bhargava’s “Why Obama?”

Dorian T. Warren: “Go for the Jugular”
Frances Fox Piven and Lorraine C. Minnite: “Movements Need Politicians—and Vice Versa”
Saket Soni: “We Need More than a New President”
Bill Fletcher Jr.: “Defeat the Reactionary White Elite”
Tom Hayden: “Obama’s Legacy is Our Leverage”
Ai-Jen Poo: “A Politics of Love”
Robert L. Borosage: “Re-elect Obama—But Reject His Austerity”

And this web-only article:
Michael Brune: “For the Climate, Obama Needs Another Four Years”

Image: Steve Brodner

The news of Mitt Romney’s remarks at a closed-door fundraiser that were leaked by Mother Jones has been dominating since it broke yesterday. The scandalous content appears plentiful enough to keep pundits and political junkies glued to Twitter for the remainder of the cycle. And let’s be clear: between Romney’s callous “wait-and see” approach to the Middle East peace process, his instrumental view of Latino voters and his parasitic characterization of those who are too poor to pay income tax, he painted a devastating picture of himself as a leader and a person.

The line from the video that is the source of the most fascination is when Romney claims that he cares not at all for the 47 percent of Americans who pay no income taxes and freeload off the government, since they are sure to be Obama voters anyway. The statement is a window into the cynical and meanspirited worldview that would guide this candidate’s policies and priorities were he to win in November. This alone should give every voter pause, regardless of partisan affiliation.

But there’s a reason right-wing blogger and CNN contributor Erick Erickson’s first tweet after seeing the leaked tapes expressed joy:

Dammit!I’m just now seeing these Romney secret videos. We need that guy on the campaign trail!

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) September 17, 2012

 

A year ago this week, a small band of committed activists achieved a goal that had eluded the established political organizations and the progressive nonprofit sector: they successfully shifted the national conversation away from one about cuts and austerity to one about our nation’s yawning economic inequality. “The 99 percent versus the 1 percent” became the rallying cry for an reinvigorated movement, and Occupy Wall Street ushered in a new era where political fantasy gave way to economic reality in shaping the public discourse.

While the glory days of Occupy faded with winter, the movement left an indelible imprint on our collective consciousness: despite partisan claims to the contrary, most residents in this country have far more in common than we have that drives us apart.

(A big shout out to those committed activists who retook Zuccotti Park for the anniversary of Occupy. For more on this, see Nation reporting here.)

Panicked by the need to respond to the growing sense of outrage about a rigged system built by some of their architects, right-wing leaders cast about for a way to change the conversation back to their own advantage. It was this desire that drove Erick Erickson to start the “53 percent movement.” In launching his campaign, Erickson called the protesters “whiners,” and sought a new social division—one that pitted the 53 percent of Americans who pay federal income taxes against those he claimed were “free-loading” activists. Despite his entreaties and the cheerleading of the right-wing echo chamber, their manufactured meme could not compete with the much more resonant, organic and accurate 99 percent rallying cry.

Still, the mathematical and rhetorical trick has remained in the back pocket of a GOP desperate to change the subject back to their hobbyhorse of the deficit. They see their opportunity in the resurrection of the 47 percent argument, despite how the moment presented itself.

There is now, as there was then, much to take issue with in the 47 percent statistic. Those 47 percent of Americans live below the poverty or are unemployed or are elderly, many of whom have paid taxes their entire life. Those 47 percent also almost certainly pay some form of taxes: be it payroll taxes, income taxes, state taxes, property tax or sales tax. And there is emerging an even more in-the-weeds debate about whether or not these 47 percent are actually more likely to vote for Romney or Obama, an answer we’ll never find because it’s different depending on how you count. It is tempting to jump on these arguments—passionate as we all are for getting the ever-dwindling facts out to our fellow Americans.

But doing so will cede the home field advantage to the GOP. This certainty accounts for Stuart Varney’s crowing that it’s about time we get back to talking about how “half of the population is living off of the other half” during Fox and Friends’s morning coverage of the tapes. It is the same reason that Brian Kilmeade on the same network stated unequivocally that Romney should be stumping on this issue all the time. If we’re spending time talking about what half the population does or does not get or do, we inevitably draw attention away from the fact that the GOP is running a candidate whose entire life experience and political vision is shaped by being part of the top tiny fraction of this country’s wealth at a time where most Americans are struggling to get by.

So, while the campaign can’t be happy about the GOP-patented guerrilla tactics now coming back to bite one of their own, early pronouncements that the election was won last night are premature and irresponsible. If Romney’s camp can weather this storm and find themselves washed up on the beaches of the 47 percent versus the 99 percent, they might have chance of not getting voted off the Island. This election—and more important, the fight for economic opportunity—remains about the genuine struggles and solutions that benefit all but the most privileged in this country. Romney’s dismissal of half of those folks doesn’t change that fact.

A full timeline of the right’s campaign to move the 47 percent meme is provided here by Media Matters for America.

For more on Romney and the 47 percent, read John Nichols on how the presidential candidate himself belongs in that number.

Eva Longoria strode on stage at the Democratic National Convention tonight looking every bit the international star that she is. She didn’t have an empty chair, but she carried a sharp analysis and a disarming sass. She spoke of her modest upbringing in Texas and how, while college was not optional in her family, the money was sparse. Eva took what jobs she could—fast food, mechanics, aerobics—to pay for college and then pay back her loans. Her family believed that the opportunity America would offer if she got her degree was a worthy investment. Pivoting from the personal to the political, Eva drew a sharp line between the candidates with the thunderous applause line: “The Eva Longoria who worked at Wendy’s flipping burgers—she needed a tax break. But the Eva Longoria who works on movie sets does not.”

In the theater of modern conventions, party platforms are pro forma, but party pizzaz is paramount. This is the reason the Republicans were so thrilled to have a star like Clint Eastwood that they didn’t bother to vet his bizarre performance last week in Tampa. The Democratic National Convention is the final dress rehearsal for the last two months of the campaign, where they take the narrative for a spin and the audience response is like real-time market-testing. And Longoria was there to appeal directly to key target demographics and leave them feeling better about an administration that’s lost some luster in the long slog of the last four years.

Young people voted in record numbers in 2008. Even more, this is the group that gave the long-shot candidate a rock-star status that helped propel him from a long-shot candidate to the White House. But with their economic prospects dim because of the recession and payments due on college loans, their participation this cycle is far from assured.

Just under 60 percent of young voters say that they will definitely vote this fall, a twenty-point drop from this time four years ago. The president is leading Mitt Romney by a secure margin among the under-30 set, but still a significantly lower number than 2008. Being outspent three-to-one by outside groups, the Democrats need a high turnout election to secure the margin of victory. While there’s time for that to change, the campaign can’t afford to take any chances.

Hence, the final night of #DNC2012 was star-studded. Set between a national anthem by Marc Anthony and a set by the Foo Fighters, Mary J. Blige brought down the house with her cover of Bono’s “One Love.” In between, Eva was joined by actress Kerry Washington, who built on the story John Lewis told earlier in the evening.

“So many struggled so that all of us could have a voice in this great democracy and live up to the first three words of our constitution: We the people. I love that phrase so much. Throughout our country’s history, we’ve expanded the meaning of that phrase to include more and more of us.

Today there are people trying take away rights that our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers fought for: our right to vote, our right to choose, affordable quality education, equal pay, access to healthcare. We the people can’t let that happen.”

Next up, Scarlett Johansson conjured an image of the magic of her first trip to the voting booth, reminiscing, “When I was a little girl, my mother—a registered Democrat—would take me into the polling booth, and tell me which buttons to press and when to pull the lever. Is that even legal? I remember the excitement I felt in that secret box, and feeling like my mom’s vote wasn’t just about the candidate, it was about our family—and all the families just like ours.” Scarlett seemed familiar with studies showing that a firm commitment to vote increases the likelihood of actually following through. She implored, “You know who I’m voting for. I’m not going to tell you who to vote for. I’m here to ask you to commit to vote.”

It wasn’t just the movie stars on parade tonight in Charlotte. Internet sensation and son of two lesbians, Zach Wahls spoke to the crowd about how much it meant to him to have a president who recognizes his family as equal. Dreamers and young vets told their stories and implored their peers to step up and engage.

The Republicans don’t need angry white men, but they squandered their opportunity anyway with Clint Eastwood’s performance last week. The Democrats knew they needed to gin back up the enthusiasm that drove the youth vote in 2008, and the star power out tonight took their responsibility seriously and delivered a sober message. And Eva did it without the chair.

Michelle Obama’s singular mission last night was to convince Americans that she and the president deeply understand the real challenges facing Americans today, and she aced it. With a relaxed grace that wowed the convention hall, she spoke in personal terms of a common American experience and voiced a deep belief that a shared connection allows her husband to fight for all of us, but especially the women. Against a backdrop of the GOP assault on women’s rights and an economic recession disproportionately affecting women, her words offered a handhold for the slipping hope that ran rampant just four years ago.

While she never mentioned either Romney by name, the obvious juxtaposition of the couples’ lives and core beliefs was woven silently into anecdotes and stated principles throughout the speech. The emotion in her voice was audible as Michelle recounted watching her father struggle to dress himself every morning for his physically demanding job at the water plant. The family needed the money despite his progressive multiple sclerosis. The painted image automatically conjured up a comparison with Ann Romney’s idyllic upbringing as the privileged daughter of a small town mayor.

When Michelle relayed the constant worry of her parents as they scraped and sacrified to afford the small portion of college tuition not covered by federal grants and loans, we were remided of Ann Romney’s description of how tough it was to live off of Mitt’s stock portfolio while they were newleyweds in college. Working moms around the country chuckled with camaraderie when Michelle said date night for her and Barack as parents was dinner or a movie because “as an exhausted mom, I couldn’t stay awake for both.” Ann Romney’s full-time mothering was no doubt exhausting, they must have been silently musing, but since she didn’t have to juggle a job as well, she might have gotten both dinner and a movie. And in a final blow, Michelle deftly but gently cut the heart out of of the GOP narrative and Mitt Romney’s top selling point when she said softly that for Barack “success isn’t about how much money you make, it’s about the difference you make in people’s lives.”

While Michelle was the main event, the entire evening was a veritable paean to the women voters this campaign needs to win. If the convention stage was the floor of the House, what are commonly referred to as “women’s issues” would be front and center in a Democratic offensive to rebuild the middle class and own the principles of equality and justice.

With female leaders of labor, government and health advocacy speaking all night long, the crowd was primed as the evening wore on. The men also paid homage to the women who got them to the stage, and pledged to fight for a better future for everyone’s daughters. Julian Castro, the young mayor from San Antonio, delivered a standout performance based largely on his life story of being raised by his mother and grandmother. It was a moving nod to the immigrant experience being made possible by strong women.

By the time Lilly Ledbetter took the stage, the crowd erupted in a frenzy something like teenage fans at a Jonas Brothers concert. The notorious blond grandmother from Alabama sued all the way to the Supreme Court after discovering male counterparts at her tire factory earned more than she did. Smart and sassy, Ledbetter summed up the real-life impact of a twenty-three cent pay gap: the ability to take the family to the occasional movie and still have pennies left over for the college savings account. Ledbetter scored one of the best responses of the night when she mused: “Maybe twenty-three cents doesn’t sound like much for someone with a Swiss Bank account….”

Women across the board say that economic concerns are top of list to get their vote, but nine out of ten say it is critical a candidate understand women. “Understanding women,” I heard consistently as I wandered the hall, means not making abortion and jobs separate issues. With two income households a necessity and reproductive health central to economic security, convention promises will remain just those until—in the words of one older male delegate from New Hampshire—“we stop talking about these as women’s issues. They are economic issues and family issues.”

The women at the convention are fiercely defensive of their president. One Virginia delegate told me with an evangelical zeal that “people forget the patient was bleeding. Our country was on the ER table and losing life fast. Now, the bleeding has stopped and the healing can begin.” Women effortlessly list Obama’s accomplishments on healthcare, on choice, on financial reform. They sing his praises as a father and a husband. And they organize like people with the threat of a Romney/Ryan presidency hanging over their heads.

But even on this night of homage to women, the wage gap wasn’t the only one on display. The women’s Congressional delegation lined up behind Nancy Peolsi as she spoke from the stage appeared appallingly sparse. Though not every member was meant to be accounted for, the image is a graphic reminder that women still only make up 17 percent of federal elected positions. Those numbers qualifies the United States for a spot at seventy-third place in the world for female representation in government, tied with Turkmenistan. A delegate from Colorado told me conspiratorially that there’s always a fight with local party leaders to get money to women candidates in enough time to make a difference in viability.

While the Ledbetter Act has become the president’s signature legislation with women, there is widespread frustration that the Paycheck Fairness Act still languishes in Congress, even if most of that rancor is reserved for the GOP. And one African-American delegate from Nevada fervently wished aloud that the president and Democrats would just speak up about the fact that the wage gap is far higher for women of color than white women. “Painting over the race part of inequality doesn’t help,” she said of her work to get other women of color involved in the campaign.

Kathleen Sebelius’s concise summation of the real time impact on women’s lives from Obamacare was impressive in content and delivery. But no speech provided a genuine analysis of why we are losing substantial ground on reproductive choice, most of them instead settling for the easy win against the GOP villain. Governor Deval Patrick’s rousing line about Democrats’ much-needed pivot to offense requiring more spine met with genuine, if surprised, appreciation. But with no stated solutions on how to stop the war on women other than to re-elect Obama, that offensive still looks daunting. Women haven’t forgotten that the Stupak amendment restricting federal funds from going towards abortion happened on the Democrats’ watch. “It’s not a matter of blame,” one woman from Illinois explained, “it’s a matter of strategy.”

But none of that was top of mind tonight as Michelle took the stage. She connected beautifully with almost every woman in the room while she spoke of her daughters, her concern for their future and her primary role as Mom-in-Chief. The distance yet to travel was most evident in what she didn’t say. Her own success as a lawyer, a dean at the University of Chicago and a hospital administrator was notable in its absence. Her impressive professional biography would have to wait another cycle for the political culture to catch up with reality. Meanwhile, she more than fulfilled her core job as first lady, which is to remind us of her husband’s humanity, his dedication and her abiding belief in his ability to continue to lead this country forward. And we believe her. Because while Ann Romney shouted out last week in Tampa, “I love you women,” Michelle Obama is one of us women.

As anyone knows who’s ever tried to make an idea or a piece of content go viral, it’s almost impossible to manufacture the conditions for the perfect cultural storm. There’s a special magic required for the organized chaos that erupts when a single moment gives voice to a gathering undercurrent of social consensus. And last night at the RNC, Clint Eastwood had that special magic. Just probably not in the way that the Romney campaign had anticipated.

Surprise guest Eastwood was reportedly given three minutes to speak, but spent the better part of fifteen minutes of prime-time coverage ranting at an empty chair that was supposed to be an invisible President Obama. Pain was visible on the faces of candidate and campaign operatives alike as it became clear that these confused ravings of the famous octogenarian were going to be the stand-out performance from an otherwise carefully orchestrated week.

And that it is. Within moments of Eastwood’s start, @InvisibleObama had a Twitter account with a picture of an empty chair. By the end of the speech, the chair had almost 17,000 followers. It now has 48,000.

#Eastwooding is obviously headed for a new definition in the urban dictionary: taking out frustration on in animate objects.

Celebs and commoners alike have been posting pictures of empty chairs from all over the country claiming to have had encounters with the Invisible President.

Even the president got in the fun when his Twitter account posted a picture of the back of the president sitting in his chair, with the tag line “This seat’s taken.”

Given fruitless attempts to beat back the unchecked lies of the Romney camp, it’s easy to see how last night’s antics served as a pressure valve for release.

But why this moment? Why not one of the other surreal and enraging examples that daily flood our airwaves and inboxes?

In my opinion, the most succinct and spot-on insight came from a Jamelle Bouie tweet, “”This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama.” 

In an electoral climate where candidate can lie without conscience and fact checkers are neutralized by the campaign’s ability to buy the airwaves, having an honest conversation about the state of play has come to feel like having an economic symposium in the memory ward of an assisted living facility.

Though there’s nothing mentally deficient about most Romney supporters, there is a demonstrable stream of lies and deceits combined with a strategic effort to make the president fit some archetypal mold of a villain that confuses the debate to the point of futility.

While that feeling has been lurking for the last four years, Eastwood’s performance gave it physical manifestation.

Below are a sampling of the best #Eastwooding tweets out there, including one from yours truly.

Now all my chairs want to be interviewed too.

— Ilyse Hogue (@ilyseh) August 31, 2012

Now all my chairs want to be interviewed too.

— Zach Braff (@zachbraff) August 31, 2012

Breakfast w #emptychair. We were a little rude to invisible guest #eastwooding

— mia farrow (@MiaFarrow) August 31, 2012

Eastwood/Chair 2012 Twitter.com/zdroberts/stat…

— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) August 31, 2012

#Eastwooding Give Clint Eastwood a break… The RNC asked him to speak about ObamaCare and he thought they said ObamaChair…

— FastLaugh (@FastLaugh) August 31, 2012

Our dog, #eastwooding. Twitter.com/colindickey/st…

— Colin Dickey (@colindickey) August 31, 2012

I look forward to how the season 3 of Newsroom will treat #eastwooding.

— Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) August 31, 2012

I heard that Clint Eastwood was channeling me at the RNC. My lawyers and I are drafting our lawsuit… #RNC #ClintEastwood #rnc2012 #GOP2012

— Bob Newhart (@BobNewhart) August 31, 2012

Note: An earlier version of this piece wrongly attributed Jamelle Bouie’s tweet to Andrew Sullivan. 

US Representative Todd Akin, R-MO (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

The Twittersphere went nuts yesterday after a video was posted of Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin expressing some jaw-dropping views on rape and abortion in an interview with local news:

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

The short-term consequences of such an incendiary remark are predictable: Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill will trumpet the remark to her own political advantage, donations will spike to her campaign and the party committees will offer the remark as one more proof point of the GOP’s war on women. But the impact of Akin’s effort to redefine the terms of this debate reaches beyond this one race. In the multidimensional chess that shapes public opinion, the game is less about individual elections and more about a sustained effort to mainstream radical ideas. In the case of denying women control over their lives, there’s evidence that the bad guys may be winning the long-game.

Akin was Paul Ryan’s co-sponsor on a House bill just last year banning the use of federal funds for abortion except in cases of “forcible rape.” This term seemed laughably redundant since all rape, by definition, is forced. But this redefinition of rape was deceptively sinister. Statutory rapists often use coercion but not physical force. If the measure had passed, a 13-year-old emotionally manipulated into having sex with an older friend or relative would no longer be able to use Medicaid to terminate a resulting pregnancy. Nor would her parents be able to use their tax-exempt health savings fund.

While the measure was defeated, conversation around it introduced skepticism about whether all rape is created equal and what distinctions should be recognized by law. Instead of making him politically toxic, Ryan’s support of the pioneering forcible rape measure likely made him a more attractive vice presidential candidate to a Romney campaign needing to energize the right-wing base.

And whether or not Akin loses this cycle, his comments have already escalated the stakes. In his world view, the rape victim’s body will be the ultimate judge of whether a crime has taken place. If she gets pregnant, by Akin’s standard, her reproductive organs consented to the pregnancy, so she must have consented to the sex. This bizarre standard of innocence is reminiscent of medieval Europe, where the men in authority held the similarly scientific view that women guilty of witchcraft floated in water while innocent women would drown. Being cleared of witchcraft was of course not much consolation to the drowned women, though they at least got to skip being burned at the stake.

Akin’s comments appear an awful lot like step one in the GOP’s favorite two-step tactic to redefine the world around us: first, more extreme figures voice opinions that would never fly from more politically palatable ones. The right-wing echo chamber picks up those opinions in the guise of news coverage. Then, the more politically acceptable candidates shift their rhetoric to acknowledge the newly accepted opinion as reality.

Consider our seemingly uncontrollable slide towards climate catastrophe: in 2006 and 2007, the link between human activity and climate change was almost incontestable. Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth was a breakout hit; and the former VP was rewarded for his leadership on the global issue with a Nobel Prize in 2007. In 2008, both McCain and Obama openly acknowledged the existence of the threat and the need for action. Scientists breathed a collective sigh of relief that the US might finally exert some leadership on this existential issue.

But when the Obama victory made the idea of a clean-energy economy a potential reality, the climate deniers kicked into high gear. Cash from the Koch brothers poured into bogus organizations to promote climate skepticism and cast doubt on the scientific consensus. Senator Inhofe called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” A 2009 Chamber of Commerce ad buy brutalized House Democrats who voted for the climate legislation. In the lead up to the climate summit of 2009, someone even hacked into a University server and published highly edited e-mails from climate scientists to make them appear to be fabricating their results. While the scientists were exonerated, the damage was done.

The resulting shift in public opinion was almost immediate. Between 2008 and 2010, the number of Americans who believed media accounts of climate change were exaggerated jumped from 35 percent to 48 percent. Among self-identified Republicans, it went to 66 percent. By last year’s Republican presidential primary, right-wing contenders made seemingly inane statements that flew in the face of scientific consensus, and even the ones like Romney who had previously acknowledged the threat were forced to recant to maintain their viability.

While the political dynamics around these two issues are different, there are striking similarities in the right-wing strategy of capitalizing on extreme statements to shift the spectrum of what’s possible. And the wary will take heed: in the span of four short years, we went from having two presidential candidates who openly advocated action to stop climate change to having no GOP candidates in 2012 who could or would affirm its existence and a Democratic president who seems to wish the issue would magically disappear. The consequences of inaction are already being felt.

The same process is underway to undermine women’s voices in our own destiny. Mitt Romney has already flip-flopped from a pro-choice Senate candidate and a governor who promised to be “a good voice” among Republicans on reproductive health to his new incarnation as Paul Ryan’s running mate and an anti-choice leader. While Ryan allows lesser candidates like Akin to carry the water on extreme views held by the right-wing patriarchy, his equally radical views become mainstreamed as his anti-woman credentials are embraced by the party leadership. If we don’t stop laughing and start drawing hard lines around scientific reality, how many Akin’s will it take before we see a President Romney ordering rape victims thrown into the water to see if they float?

For a take on how to fight back against rape culture, read Jessica Valenti’s “How to Out a Rapist.”

First American woman in space Sally Ride passed away Monday, and her death has become a question of adjectives. Specifically, which ones are used in the plethora of tributes. Used: iconic, pioneer, brilliant, author, passionate, advocate, and role model. All true. Not used: lesbian. Also evidently true.

Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan accused the New York Times of either active or passive homophobia by omitting this core part of Ms. Ride’s identity in her extensive obituary. Ultimately, though, Sullivan saves his harshest criticism for Ms. Ride herself, calling her an “absent heroine” for her trademark discretion and bemoaning her missed opportunity to serve as a role model for young gay people.

My neck hair bristled reading that, empathizing with Sally and far too familiar with the universal curse of professional women painfully managing the delicate balance between fruitful camaraderie and destructive vulnerability in male-dominated and often sexually charged workplaces. Still, it seems that towards the end of her life, Ride was quite open about her relationship with her partner of twenty-seven years, Tam O’ Shaughnessy, who was noted as surviving family in the statement released by Sally Ride Science to announce her death.

But the jury’s out on the cause for the omission. Commenters chimed in to point out that the New York Times never leads with a “heterosexual” headline when one dies. Others point to Anderson Cooper, who came out this month to an anticlimactic chorus of “duhs!” If equality is counterintuitively defined by the choice to exercise privacy, to many this is one battle that seems to be drawing to a close.

Such is the view from elite media and pop culture. The view down below isn’t so rosy. The same day as the Sally Ride obituary was printed, the Contra Costa Times carried a report of a Pleasanton, California, comedy club that turned from humorous to hostile when the drunk performer noticed a lesbian couple in his midst. According to the women’s lawyer, the comedian approached the table violently thrusting his pelvis and yelling:

"You’re a LESBIAN. All you need is a GOOD-MAN!! I’ll volunteer my services to get in between the two of you to show you a ­good time you won’t be needing any strap-on’s or vibrators with me.”

Get it? Because nothing makes a lesbian joke better than throwing some rape allusions on top. After the threatened woman threw a drink at her thruster, he retaliated by hurling drinks and bottles from other patrons’ tables at the fleeing couple. Rather than help the women to safety, many in the audience joined in.

When news of the incident led to bad press, the performer in question, Eddie Griffin, fell back on the “can’t you take a joke?” defense, long the kryptonite of anyone trying to highlight cultural oppression. The production company screamed censorship, and Eddie himself posted a screed on his Facebook page calling out the negative publicity “all over a joke about dyke bitches!”

These twin tales are emblematic of a culture increasingly embroiled in a fractured relationship with itself on issues of tolerance. The president endorsed gay marriage in an election year and mogul Russell Simmons can heap public accolades on hip-hop star Frank Ocean for coming out. Progress. A young gay couple faces a hostile crowd in a club in suburban California, and teen suicide remains 300 percent higher in the gay population than the straight. Miles to go.

Kermit gets massive social media love for his public divorce from Chick-fil-A after the fast food chain’s CEO retrenched his company’s commitment to only support the ­“biblical definition of marriage.” But it’s a mistake to lose sight of the fact that the Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day started by Governor Mike Huckabee in response had 80,000 people signed up in the first forty-eight hours. Those metrics are the envy of any organizer who’s ever planned an online event.

A new initiative between Courage Campaign and American Bridge understands this all too well, which is why they’ve joined forces to launch Mitt Gets Worse. These groups are trying to head off the insidious complacency of an embattled electorate who thinks that in comparison to a Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney might be a kinder gentler alternative on social issues. The effort is aimed at those tempted by a change in course on the economy, and serves to remind them that falling for a charlatan carries a heavy price.

Concerns about the economy may divide us into the 1 percent versus the 99 percent, but the numbers get a whole lot scarier when we look at other critical progressive values like justice and civil rights. Until this dynamic changes, the adjectives that define Sally Ride’s life and death are going to be have to remain more than a personal choice.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Sally Ride as the first woman in space. This has been corrected to accurately represent her as the first American woman in space. 

A couple nights ago, insomnia led to channel-flipping, which led to an obscure B-movie called Ready to Rumble. The utterly forgettable wrestling flick had almost induced slumber when I heard one of the characters utter wisdom from an ancient martial arts master: “Always attack the man’s strength…. No one expects you to attack you at their strongest point, that’s where you can defeat them.” That phrase came roaring back to me in daylight hours yesterday when Mitt Romney surrogate John Sununu wished aloud that the president would “learn to be an American.” This offensive statement is the latest feint in the Romney campaign’s feeble attempt to execute the patented Rovian strategy reflected in the wrestling movie. Only Romney’s version is less ancient wisdom and more grade school taunt, “I am rubber, you are glue…”

Sununu’s attempted attack, steeped in birtherism and barely concealed racism, comes straight from Karl Rove’s playbook. Famous for aggressively going after his opponents’ strengths, Rove undercut John McCain’s unimpeachable status as a war hero by engaging in a whisper campaign asserting that McCain betrayed his country under torture and was unfit to lead as a result. Four years later, a paralyzed Democratic base watched in shock and awe when the Swift Boat Veterans launched a similar attack on John Kerry. No one anticipated a brutal blow on a decorated vet by a draft dodger.

But the Romney campaign’s attacks look less like the carefully crafted, strategic offensives that Rove is known for and more like the spastic flailing of a candidate desperate to deflect incoming blows to his own credibility. Already under scrutiny for the very charges he’s trying to glue to President Obama, Romney’s major achievement has been to drive home the belief that his attacks only hold up a mirror to his own weaknesses.

Weeks of unrelenting examination of Romney’s record at Bain Capital are taking a toll, according to analysts of both political persuasions. Newt Gingrich backers first aired first-person accounts by American workers who found their jobs axed and their communities decimated after acquisition by Bain. The Obama campaign takes up the drumbeat, and there seems to be an endless supply of folks who can trace their personal misfortune back to the robber-baron tactics of Romney-led Bain. Since not too many voters’ bucket lists include placing trust during a fragile economic recovery in a guy who made a fortune at the expense of Americans workers, Romney’s response was to lob a lame moniker at the president, calling him an outsourcer-in-chief. He didn’t even sound like he believed it would work as he was saying it.

That feeble attempt to undercut the president pales in comparison to John Sununu’s calling this president un-American. While such theatrics may satisfy the teeny percentage of birthers among the GOP ranks, most people read this attack in context of the vast disparity between the life stories of the two candidates. Romney’s privileged upbringing, which he parlayed into lucrative positions in management and private equity, catapulted him to wealth that makes him worth more than the last eight presidents combined. While a good “rags to riches” story is a mainstay of American cultural mythology, Romney’s story is noticeably absent of rags but is rife with whitewash to cover transgressions against the country he seeks to lead.

Americans—fatigued from far-right calls to release a much-examined birth certificate—are far more interested in why Romney steadfastly refuses to release his tax returns, despite even conservative outlets’ nearly begging him to do so. Speculation that Romney paid no taxes in 2009 feeds concerns of an electorate that this candidate has not shared the pain of this economic crisis. To make matters worse, Romney also spent the last week telling media outlets that Bain filings with the SEC placing him at the company in crucial outsourcing years are false. So either he lied to the SEC or he’s responsible for even more jobs being shipped overseas than previously believed.

Avoiding taxes, concealing documents, lying, destroying American jobs—these may be hallmarks of the 1 percent who place personal gain ahead of duty to country, but these are not elements of the American dream that most of us still aspire to. Those are found in President Obama’s story: born to a (mostly) single mom, raised by his grandparents, struggling to put himself through college. Despite the adversity, he managed to attend the best schools, gave back to his community and excelled at every undertaking. Those who want to believe in bootstraps need look no further.

None of this is to exalt a president who—while having achieved many things of significance—has also made strategic and substantive mistakes and struggles with some challenges of the office. But elections are ultimately about trust, and in such a scenario disappointment and human error will trump deeply flawed character every time.

Romney’s failure to grasp this critical difference has led him to make dizzying campaign errors. Far from executing on the Sun Tzu axiom “kill with a borrowed knife,” a k a use the enemy’s strength against him, his attempts to deflect have only magnified his own weakness. And in doing so, he’s inadvertently personified a different Sun Tzu axiom, “cornered prey mount desperate attacks.”

Mitt Romney escaped the record heat this weekend by attending several parties in his honor in the Hamptons. Early predictions were that one afternoon in this elite enclave would net the candidate more than $3 million for his campaign.

Less than 200 miles away in Philadelphia, where the median income hovers at $36,000 and a quarter of the city lives below the poverty line, there were no beach parties, but some disturbing news. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that state election officials upped the number of statewide voters potentially affected by the new voter ID laws from the 90,000 that Governor Corbett claimed to 758,000. A full 9.2 percent of the state’s eligible voters could be turned away from the polls in November, despite being eligible. In Philadelphia, where over half of the city’s residents are people of color, 18 percent of registered voters lack proper ID under the state’s new laws—laws that Pennsylvania House leader Mike Turzai claimed will deliver the state to Romney in November.

These twin anecdotes seem to perfectly capture the GOP 2012 plan for victory: “voters out, money in.” Despite the massive capital advantage the Republicans have accrued, they’re still driving a strategy of disenfranchisement and destruction that imperils our democracy and seeds distrust among a populace already experiencing record lows of confidence in their elected leadership.

Next week, pundits will be hyperventilating over the political fundraising totals from the last quarter. The cover of the Sunday NY Times Magazine breathlessly asks the rhetorical question, “Can Democrats Catch Up in the Super-PAC game?” Let’s get it clear: no, they can’t and no one ever claimed they could. But they also don’t need to—what they need is to raise some money, spend it smarter than their counterparts, and provide millions of people the legal means and the emotional desire to exercise their constitutional right to vote. The right understands this key to Democratic victory, which is why outraising is not enough. Victory requires dominating the system at both ends.

More than two dozen states have passed voter ID laws, with eleven passing in the last two years. Republicans, sensing the opportunity, have continually hyped the negligible threat of voter fraud in order to make voting tougher and tougher for the elderly, the poor, Latinos and African-Americans—all of whom tend to lean Democratic. Meanwhile, back in April, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson gave $10 million on one day to Romney Super PAC, Restore Our Future. Combined with $20 million to Newt Gingrich’s failed bid plus millions more to Rove and Koch brothers front groups, Adelson has given close to $60 million all told, and has stated publicly that he’ll spend up to $100 million to defeat Barack Obama.

What’s driving these actions at both ends of the spectrum is a mix of personal entitlement, business efficiency and good old-fashioned elitism, with a healthy dose of racism. Take Adelson: he’s in for high stakes because his personal stakes are high. He’s under investigation by both the Department of Justice and the Security and Exchange Commission for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) by paying off local officials and working with organized crime to further his gambling empire in Macau, China. The Obama administration has been diligent about prosecuting FCPA cases, while Adelson presumes the heat would be off under a Romney presidency. When you have $25 billion, what’s $100 million to secure your freedom?

Adelson also makes 90 percent of his earnings from his casinos in Macau and Singapore, a high number, but not unheard of for US companies operating abroad. Obama has promised to close the loopholes that allow these corporations to shelter earnings overseas, robbing US treasuries of billions in tax dollars. Preserving offshore tax havens is not the only place where donating big bucks to GOP Super PACs is a highly efficient business model. Mega-donors David and Charles Koch’s company, Koch Industries, spent a whopping $40 million on disclosed lobbying expenditures between 2008 and 2010. The price of a fundraiser in the Hamptons is peanuts compared to that tab. Between the tax plan and the estate tax, high-net-worth folks stand to save millions annually under Romney. The candidate himself would save almost $5 million per year under his own plan.

Apparently, when the stakes are this high, you don’t take chances. Hence, the full court press on disenfranchisement. In Florida, the GOP governor has been so intent on purging voter rolls of Latino-sounding names that the Justice Department filed an injunction and sixty-seven election supervisors courageously refused to implement the program until he proves his claims in each case.

Self-serving economics is a repugnant driver, but the psychology that allows lawmakers to deny fundamental rights to their constituents while their rank and file stand by is even more insidious. In a rare moment of honesty, a GOP donor that shelled out $25,000 to attend one of the Romney events yesterday had this to say to a LA Times reporter:

“I don’t think the common person is getting it,” she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. “Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them… But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies—everybody who’s got the right to vote—they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income—one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”

While it’s the money they flaunt, it’s the people they fear, a fact that would serve us well to remember as limited resources are spent in 2012 and beyond. As progressives work to protect the vote for every American citizen in the short term and to blunt the impact of big money on our democratic process, let’s not lose focus on long-term investments in our own not-so-secret weapon: the people—of all colors and ages, all incomes levels, in the cities and on the farms—that make this country great. When they all have a voice, we all win.

In perhaps the most highly anticipated decision of the Obama administration, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 today to uphold the individual mandate as constitutional. Justice Roberts, who sided with the liberals to tip the balance, voted to uphold the measure not under the Commerce Clause, as the Solicitor General had argued before the Court, but under the power of Congress to “lay and collect taxes.” The ruling surmises that the individual mandate amounts to nothing more than a tax charge levied on those free-riders who choose not to buy insurance and might otherwise end up sticking the rest of us with the bill.

How easy was that? No more arguments about the limits of Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause or the merits of forcing broccoli on Americans. So why didn’t the Obama Administration make the free-rider tax argument all along? Because to do that would be to admit that the President had proposed a new tax on Americans, even if only on the most irresponsible scofflaws among its ranks.     

In a desperate attempt to salvage their political win, the minority argued in their dissenting opinion that even though the effect of the mandate is that of taxation, it cannot be upheld under that jurisdiction because the framers of the law used the “wrong label.” Just when you thought that conservative logic couldn’t get more twisted, these judges “reasoned” that if the concerted anti-tax campaign was successful enough to force legislators to swap the word tax in order to sell a proposal, then they can’t then have the protections associated with taxes. It’s almost the legal equivalent to "you snooze, you lose!"

Confused? You’re not alone, since confusion is an intended effect of the linguistic gymnastics key to the right-wing’s win-at-all-costs game plan. But at least we can thank Chief Justice Roberts and the other four justices for striking a blow today for cognitive coherence. The Court affirmed by a razor-thin margin that a rose by any other name remains, constitutionally, a rose.

This comes as a blow to conservatives who, for years, have understood the power of language to shape reality. A nostalgic walk down memory lane of the healthcare reform fight is littered with catchy opposition phrases completely devoid of truth. Who can forget the summer of 2009 when town halls were filled with citizens terrified that Obama-appointed death panels would be administering their care if the bill passed? Anyone still have their “Obama lies, Granny dies” bumper sticker? Someone might want to tell Granny that it’s safe to come out of the basement now.

And how about that mandate that’s at the center of the frothing Tea Party rage? This “radical” initiative was introduced in 1993 by Republican Senator John Chaffey of Rhode Island as a means to undercut the employer mandate central to Hillary Clinton’s infamous health care proposal. Shifting the burden of responsibility from business to individuals proved to be such a popular conservative position that Mitt Romney made it the centerpiece of his Massachusetts healthcare reform bill. Rationally, Democrats assumed that Republicans would never attack their own idea. However, ever attuned to the power of language, Republicans made the "mandate" sound even scarier than a small tax applied to a few bad seeds. 

Now that that the Court has ruled that mandate is the semantic equivalent to tax, the questions seem endless. Can we expect “no-tax Norquist” to withdraw support from the Republican presidential candidate who effectively raised taxes on Massachusetts residents when he signed RomenyCare into law? And was Romney lying to his constituents then, as Sarah Palin claimed that Obama is now in her tweeted response to the ruling?

@SarahPalinUSA: Obama lied to the American people. Again. He said it wasn’t a tax. Obama lies; freedom dies.

It’s worth noting here that what their side lacks in originality, they make up for in brevity, lyricism and consistency. Truth comes in a distant fourth in the Republican message hierarchy.

But this whole linguistic rabbit hole we find ourselves at the bottom of raises the question: why not just call the whole thing what it is? Given how much Americans tend to love tax breaks and how relatively few “free-riders” there are who would incur unsubsidized new taxes under Obamacare, what political cost calculation led to all the talk of a mandate and a commerce clause in the first place?

The answer lies in a decades-long war on taxes that has left Democrats paralyzed when faced with an advantageous opportunity to reclaim the term. Conservatives, well aware of their victory in this strategic front of the language war, use the weaponized word prodigiously. In 2009, a Democratic-backed (but really quite conservative) market mechanism to put a price on carbon and begin the slow process of mitigating the disastrous impacts of climate change was killed in Congress after being labelled “cap-and-tax.” Never mind that even more taxpayer dollars are going to fight unprecedented forest fires in Colorado or biblical-scale floods in Minnesota, both obvious effects of record heat and shifting weather patterns.

The full frontal assault on taxes was birthed by conservatives with an agenda to squeeze the life out of popular social spending initiatives in the latter part of the last century. Given how normative taxes were in American culture, the intellectual architects of the “Starve the Beast” strategy saw no way to force spending cuts without a high-profile campaign to destroy the funding mechanism. The fact that the Federal Treasury would be collateral damage was of no concern to these men, and any political consequence for an incoming Democratic administration was icing on the cake. George W. Bush’s deficit spending and casino style regulatory approach drove the American economy straight off a cliff after systematically dismantling the rescue squads. The subsequent mess is one that Republicans have delighted in watching Obama try to clean up, a task made even more impossible by Republicans who would rather see the economy destroyed than vote for an increase in tax revenue, even—or especially—on the country’s wealthy.

But the impacts of this scorched-earth campaign are ominously visible not only in a policy agenda skewed towards the 1 percent but also in newly embedded cultural norms. When fire services were rendered optional in rural Tennessee as a way to curb spending in 2011, many residents opted out. After all, who ever believes that their house will burn until the sparks start flying? But in at least two heart-breaking instances, firefighters were forced to sit by and watch as peoples’ homes burned to the ground because of unpaid fees. The parallels are strikingly similar to the conservative outcry against the healthcare mandate, without which we would be forced to sit idly by while people suffer. As I wrote last week here, Justice Scalia’s endorsement of the “let them die” faction of the tea party in the healthcare hearings gave judicial credibility to a fundamentally anti-American posture of indifference—a position reinforced by his dissenting opinion this morning. Do we really want to embrace an America where we watch our neighbors’ lives go up in flames?

Given all of this, the irony of this much-reviled three letter word offering a parachute for a plummeting healthcare initiative is not lost on this progressive. As millions sleep easier tonight as a result of this ruling, it’s important to remember a few lessons as we forge ahead: Obama didn’t kill your granny, freedom is not actually dead and constitutionally protected taxes can—and often do— create a stronger America. That may be language actually worth fighting for.

The Supreme Court’s highly anticipated ruling on Obama’s healthcare reforms could come any day now. Whatever the verdict, expect much ado about the hotly debated role of broccoli in healthcare and arcane explanations of the Commerce Clause that is at the center of the legal case against the individual mandate. But buried deep in hearings filled with legalese and judicial sparring was a short exchange that illuminates an American ideal that truly hangs in the balance with this decision—the idea that in a civilized society, we do not sit idly by and watch our neighbors die.

The specific back-and-forth in question occurred on the third day of the hearings between Justice Antonin Scalia and Solicitor General Donald Verilli, the administration official charged with defending the law in court. It went like this:

GENERAL VERRILLI: No. It’s because you’re going—in the health care market, you’re going into the market without the ability to pay for what you get, getting the health care service anyway as a result of the social norms that allow—that—to which we’ve obligated ourselves so that people get health care.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, don’t obligate yourself to that. Why—you know?

GENERAL VERRILLI: Well, I can’t imagine that that—that the Commerce Clause would —would forbid Congress from taking into account this deeply embedded social norm.

JUSTICE SCALIA: You—you could do it. 

If you are not a frequent watcher of the Court and therefore not fluent in the cadences of judicial banter, this short, seemingly banal interchange in an exhaustive debate may not have even registered. The “deeply embedded social norm” that Verilli refers to—in fact seems confused that he has to explain to Justice Scalia—is the norm that dictates that people will step in to aid others who are ailing or in danger of death.

Scalia’s statement that “you could do it [defy these norms]” eerily evoked the appalling moment at the September 2011 Republican presidential debate when the audience wildly applauded Wolf Blitzer’s stunned probing of whether candidate Ron Paul would allow a 30-year-old uninsured man in a healthcare emergency to die. “Yes!” shouted unashamed audience members, turning a presidential debate into something reminiscent of the Roman Colosseum. When Justice Scalia argued against the social norms that Verilli was presuming sacrosanct, he was essentially saying, “Let him die!”

While we’ve grown to expect this kind of mob mentality from a radical right wing whipped up in a Tea Party frenzy, this bizarre display of indifference from a Supreme Court Justice breaks new ground in an evolving culture that seems to prize resistance to any and all government over the compassion that is the essence of civilized society. The right screams often and loudly that President Obama has declared war on the Judeo-Christian underpinnings they hold as American as apple pie. But in fact, it is Justice Scalia, from his exalted perch, who appears intent on vacating the Golden Rule and undermining the parable of the Good Samaritan, both core to Christian theology.

Dahlia Lithwick hit the proverbial nail on the head in her description of Justice Scalia when she wrote in Slate in 2003:

Scalia doesn’t come into oral argument all secretive and sphinxlike, feigning indecision on the nuances of the case before him. He comes in like a medieval knight, girded for battle. He knows what the law is. He knows what the opinion should say. And he uses the hour allocated for argument to bludgeon his brethren into agreement.

Scalia, ever the showman, joked during the March hearings that having to read the entire healthcare law in order to rule on it would amount to cruel and unusual punishment, prohibited by the Constitution. At the same time, he displayed an egregious ignorance regarding which provisions in the bill actually passed. And on the final morning of arguments, Scalia laid his cards on the table when he argued that stripping out the individual mandate would cause the whole law to topple.

The mandate, more descriptively titled the “free-rider clause,” fines uninsured individuals who expect taxpayer-supported emergency services to cover calamities that befall them. It is also the component of the reform that allows insurance companies to affordably cover those with pre-existing conditions. Cutting the mandate, Scalia mused, cuts the heart out of the entire reform and would almost certainly kick the whole matter back to a gridlocked Congress, while millions of lives hang in the balance.

A recent Pew poll shows that approximately 83 percent of Americans are affiliated with an organized faith, be it a form of Christianity, Judaism, Muslim, Hinduism or Buddhism. A whopping 78.4 percent of us fall somewhere in the Christian camp. Yet, it is core Christian values that are currently on trial at the Supreme Court.

Perhaps this emotional dissonance is what drives a new poll from the New York Times that shows that only 44 percent of Americans approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing. Once a venerated institution that seemed immune to the partisan squabbles of the other branches of government, the Court has consistently displayed its corporate and right-wing allegiances in decisions that span from 2000’s Bush v Gore when it picked our president and irrevocably altered the course of history (Scalia later told Americans to “get over it!” when asked about the decision) to the 2009 Citizens United decision, the impact of which is being felt acutely this election season. Now, 75 percent of Americans say that the Justices’ political preferences motivate their decision making on the bench.

When healthcare reform passed in 2010, the United States ranked dead last among similar countries in a study comparing cost and quality of healthcare. America consistently spends twice as much for lesser care than its industrialized allies. While the Affordable Care Act left some of the best solutions on the table, it offers real hope to the one in four American adults that go without healthcare each year due to job transitions or other circumstances. So many of our neighbors live in terror that a single unexpected calamity will drive their family into bankruptcy spurred by emergency medical bills. Now, when the verdict comes in, those fellow Americans can add a new fear to their list: that a Conservative Catholic Supreme Court Justice will lead the charge to let them die.

Last weekend, the annual Netroots Nation conference in Providence, Rhode Island, drew 2,700 progressives to discuss the state of the movement. Since the event fell two days after Governor Scott Walker won his recall election in Wisconsin, I expected a collective mood approximating either a massive group therapy session or a giant wake. I found neither. The political challenges were apparent, sure. The “Bold Progressive 99% Candidates” panel was supposed to feature two bold progressives, Lori Saldana and Eric Griego, who lost their primaries to more centrist candidates. And while some respected elected officials were in the proverbial house—Senator Sheldon Whitehouse held court in the bar after speaking about the perils of Citizens United, while earlier Elizabeth Warren wowed from the main stage—there was none of the craziness of the 2007 Netroots Nation when all eight Democratic candidates for president made almost-mandatory pilgrimages to Chicago to court the powerful base of bloggers and activists and get an edge in the long race ahead. Instead, there were multiple panels on Occupy, art in every hallway, an amazing TED-style Ignite session from participants. Netroots Nation 2012 seemed to reflect a growing progressive sentiment that favors sass over suits and an emphasis on power building over power wielding.

In the hallways and in the twittersphere, a handful of folks bemoaned the absence of administration heavyweights as evidence of disrespect for the base, and some of the press used the conference to drive that now familiar storyline. Digging deeper though, the back-to-basics energy that pervaded the conference felt refreshing to most attendees. Rather than racing between keynotes dominated by political rockstars, participants lingered over panels doing deep dives into policy or skill shares on social media. Less Democratic Party participation left room to elevate emerging movement leaders, like Ai-Jen Poo from National Domestic Workers Alliance and Becky Bond from CREDO Action. The thousands of conversations elicited some common themes on lessons learned and moving forward. Here are five of my top points; I’d love to hear yours in the comment section below:

1. A powerful movement is defined by values, not tactics. Occupy. Consumer Boycotts. Shareholder Activists. Netroots Progressivism. While some argue these are independent movements; I see them as different tactics in a singular movement committed to economic opportunity, social and political equity, and environmental sanity. Despite having experienced a growth decade in the progressive political power due to the emergence of online communities, the national political sector is often the lagging indicator in social change. Does that mean we abandon the electoral playing field? Absolutely not. Groups have been and will continue to be active in primaries and general elections this year. But it does mean it’s time to put resources into other sectors that build power towards our ultimate goals. The Stop Rush campaign has alerted political activists to the power of the pocketbook to stop hate speech and ChangeToWin has invoked the wrath of the Wall Street Journal for its effective shareholder organizing. Trayvon Martin’s murder united progressives around the need for racial justice and The Advancement Project is organizing that energy to fight voter suppression campaigns that keep people of color out of politics. Embracing a values-based definition of the progressive movement and resourcing strategies accordingly will allow us to control more levers and win more victories.

2. Impact is impact: embracing progressive entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurship is exploding. From energy efficiency giant O-Power to peer-to-peer car-sharing platform Relay Rides, private ventures with a social mission are having great impact on everything from consumption to community-building and often outpace their non-profit brethren in measurable gains. And while these folks are everywhere from the Young Global Leaders table at the World Economic Forum to the pages of Fast Company, they are often nowhere to be found at progressive political gatherings. It’s time to stop divining whether the motivation of profit-driven ventures are pure and to start evaluating these folks on their impact. An effective progressive movement needs like-minded business to stand with us against corporate co-option of our government.

3. Winners practice multidimensional chess. The right sees a win as a win as a win. A state win or a local win is as good as a national one; a partial win may not be good enough, but heralding it shows the momentum and power of the movement. Progressives are notoriously short on elevating local and state candidates, even though those actors may be able to maintain a progressive posture better than the national ones. There exists good infrastructure to identify and support candidates to build our bench, including Progressive Majority and the New Organizing Institute, but until we learn to use national bully pulpits to herald these up-and-comers, we unnecessarily limit the narrative of our own victories and the power-building that comes with it.

4. Claim victory early and often. The right, amazingly, even sometimes counts losses as wins. While the personhood amendment in Mississippi failed late last year, its backers helped succeed in moving the conversation from access to abortion to access to contraception, something they clearly consider a victory. As progressives, we are slow to claim victory—even when it is real—for fear it might communicate to those in power that we are wholly satisfied and to those on the sidelines that we don’t need their help. But momentum generates more energy, not less and more energy can create greater change.

5. Microtargeting is for voters, not movements. It is high time that we stop using the words “online” and “off-line” in front of organizing. Organizing is organizing. Netroots are grassroots. Many organizers and funders who share the analysis that we are losing have an inclination to go back to what they know best — funding direct service and traditional Alinsky-style organizing. I fear this future. While service providers are absolutely critical in addressing immediate need, they alone will never be able to alleviate the inequality that plagues our nation. And no one refutes that traditional community organizing will always have lessons to teach us about building power. Still, there’s no going back to the 1990s. Community organizers are wired now and mobile platforms represent the best hope of engaging anyone under thirty. Only when we lose the artificial distinctions will we fully embrace our power and the possibilities of a united cohesive movement.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker. (AP Photo/Charles Sykes)

There is a disease spreading across our political punditry, and the beloved mayor of Newark, Cory Booker, seems to have contracted it. On Sunday’s Meet The Press, Booker disavowed the new ad campaign attacking Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, and in doing so, compared the Obama team’s decision to air the ads to the right-wing invocation of Reverend Wright to take down the president. Booker released a retraction video hours later, but the incident indicates just how advanced the sickness of false equivalence is in our national dialogue. The plague has now infected a normally sharp public official unlikely to confuse a thinly veiled racist play against the first African-American president with an examination of the economic track record of his challenger.

I’m as much a Cory Booker fan as the next populist progressive. I’ve watched with bemusement as his social media presence has made him a superhero, able to plow driveways in biblical snow storms and tweeting as he goes door to door during hurricanes to protect his constituents. His larger-than-life persona went stratospheric last month when he rushed into a burning building to save a woman trapped by the flames. But Cory, while you had me at your first hashtag, you lost me yesterday when you uttered these words:

“This kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides,” [Booker] said on Meet the Press. “It’s nauseating to the American public. Enough is enough. Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright. This stuff has got to stop.”

In an effort to appear objective in a political climate anything but, talking heads now feel the need to utter a Democratic offense in the same breath as a Republican offense. But I’ve got news for them: when the offenses don’t line up—as they often don’t these days—these folks don’t sound objective, they sound like lunatics.

Mitt Romney is running as CEO-in-chief of a country starved for jobs. His economic record is central to his candidacy by his own design. The ads in question feature workers from factories destroyed by Bain Capital challenging Romney’s model for job creation. In an election where the economy and jobs lead voters’ concerns by double digits, a candidate’s history as an industrial titan is not only germane but crucial to decision-making. Obama’s team are hardly the first people to think so; Winning Our Future, the Sheldon Adelson–backed Super PAC, launched the mini-documentary King of Bain, widely credited with helping win the South Carolina primary for Gingrich.

This line of inquisition simply does not equate to using a preacher’s old inflammatory statements as an attack on the president’s patriotism. Even the previous Republican challenger understood the immorality of stoking racism as a path to the Oval Office.

But unchallenged false equivalence in our media and from our politicians is at epidemic proportions. A few cases in point:

In March, after the release of Game Change—the movie depicting the train wreck that Sarah Palin made of the McCain campaign in 2008—McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt defended himself on Morning Joe by claiming that both parties choose unqualified candidates for vice president. He compared John Kerry’s choice of John Edwards as vice president in 2004 to McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin, saying both were ill-suited to run the country. Schmidt is a Republican operative with self-interest in playing down the Palin decision, so we might forgive him the transgression. But NBC Chief Correspondent Andrea Mitchell—guest on the same show and the epitome of establishment media—was quick to affirm Schmidt’s assessments of the two candidates. Not a single guest made the obvious point that Edwards was a respected senator with thoroughly vetted policy positions whose character flaws would not be revealed until years later. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, was virtually unknown and her lack of knowledge on even basic policy issues would have become clear in the most basic interview of a rigorous vetting process.

Earlier this month, one of Politico’s premiere political reporters, Manu Raju, stated in an article about Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s frustration over gridlock in the Senate that the filibuster is a tool that has been employed with growing frequency by both parties over the years. Raju’s history book seems to begin in 2009 when the threat of filibusters by the Republicans shot up to more than double that of their Democratic counterparts in previous years.

More insidious is the February column by Washington Post analyst Ezra Klein that claimed that “politically motivated” shifts on issues by both parties undercut any ideological meaning of “left” and “right.” By making this sweeping conclusion, Klein ignores the body of evidence that shows distinctly different motivations for the examples he uses. Democrats have consistently shifted position in an effort to compromise with Republicans—being lambasted by their base for doing so—and move legislation forward. Republicans have shifted position to stake out increasingly extreme positions that will drive government out of business. In conflating the two, Klein misinforms readers about the nature of the political dysfunction in our country and makes it that much harder to fix it.

The problem of false equivalence is so rife in our country that the president dedicated a chunk of his speech at the Associated Press luncheon in April to the issue. While it doesn’t rank explicitly on the list of voter concerns, this habit contributes to the high rates of American distrust in the news media. The American people are smart enough to know when a commentator or anchor holds an opinion and forgiving when this is made apparent. Attempts to cover up personal bias with false equivalence does not make one objective, but it does make one complicit in obscuring the dynamics of that lead to political gridlock and an unresponsive democracy. I’d expect Cory Booker, who’s built his entire political career on being responsive, to be immune to such an affliction.

A flag announcing the IPO of Facebook flies next to the American flag outside the offices of J.P. Morgan in New York City, New York, May 4, 2012. REUTERS/Lee Celano

When it was revealed last week that Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin renounced his US citizenship, even notorious bad-boy billionaire Mark Cuban took to Twitter to express his disgust. The move allows the 30-year old Saverin to avoid paying a significant chunk of the taxes he will owe on the windfall coming his way with the impending Facebook IPO. In making this decision, the Brazilian native did more than expose his blind disregard for all that his adopted country has done for him. He has made himself the poster child for the callous class of 1 percenters who are all too happy to use national resources to enrich themselves, and then skate, or cry foul, when asked to pay their fair share. The story evokes the image of the marauding aliens from the movie Independence Day, who come to Earth to take what they can get before moving on to another planet.

Saverin, who stands to make billions from his 4 percent share in Facebook, hastily moved here at the age of 13 when his name turned up on a list of potential kidnap victims targeted by criminal gangs in Brazil. His father was a wealthy businessman, with a high profile in their home country, and so his family relocated to Miami to protect the youngster. Eduardo thrived in his new country, eventually attending Harvard University, where he had a stroke of life-changing luck when he was assigned future Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a roommate. Their subsequent struggle over the company has been immortalized in the blockbuster Academy Award–winning film, The Social Network, which portrayed Eduardo as an outsider within the close-knit circle of friends, who eventually only won his stake in the company through a lawsuit based on an early investment in the company.

Writer Farhad Manjoo does an excellent job at pandodaily identifying all the ways that young Eduardo’s years in the United States played a role in the financial bonanza he’s about to experience. Starting with the obvious protection from kidnapping that wealthy people generally enjoy here in the United States all the way through the reasonably functional US court system that awarded him the shares that are about to make him a billionarie, this country played a critical role in this young man’s life. In return, Saverin has decided to relocate to Singapore, where he’ll pay no capital gains taxes on any Facebook shares he sells in the future. In fact, he’ll only pay an “exit tax,” which will be determined by his own team’s estimated value of his net worth at the time he renounced his citizenship. This little move could cost the US Treasury as much as $600 million dollars. That’s a novel way to thank your adopted country.

Saverin exemplifies the spoiled 1 percenter who erodes the fabric of the country that afforded such opportunity by not paying back the investment America made in him. His decisions are a slap in the face of every person who recognizes that, to be a place that can facilitate the birth of new innovations like Facebook, the United States needs resources. Doubt that? Remember what government funded the research that created the Internet and the web? Harvard University, where the Facebook plot was hatched, took in almost $700 million in federal grant support for tuition and research last year alone. But Saverin’s decision is even more insulting to the millions of his less wealthy fellow immigrants who work hard to gain the privilege of giving back to the country that affords them opportunity to pursue their dreams in relative safety. Not to mention the DREAMers who offer to fight and possibly die for the country that they yearn to make their own.

Saverin aside, immigrants add an enormous amount to our economy every year. Despite right-wing rhetoric, even undocumented workers pay plenty of taxes too, including not only sales taxes but often payroll taxes. A study from the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy showed that undocumented immigrants paid over $11.2 billion in taxes in 2010, including income, property and sales taxes. Immigrants are also disproportionately entrepreneurial. A long-term study in 2008 showed that immigrants are almost 30 percent more likely to launch a small business than their non-immigrant counter parts. Their aggregate total contribution to the business income of the US economy is over 10 percent. In some places like Long Island, they account for upwards of 16 percent of small-business profits. Most of these immigrants see paying taxes and generating income as an opportunity to reinvest in the country that extended a hand to them and their families. Not so Saverin.

This week we’re going to be overrun with stories about the Facebook IPO and the instant billionaires that it creates. It is the kind of economic fairy tale we love to pore over, with the enigmatic Zuckerberg ready to pay over $1 billion in taxes while asking the board to slash his salary to $1 annually. In the midst of this, Saverin’s craven selfishness will help us rethink not only enforcement of our tax code but also how we recognize and define loyalty and patriotism for all of us, immigrant and native-born, who call America home.

“We must reconnect the people to the political process and their government.… Let’s pass campaign finance reform and let’s do it this year.”

These words, uttered by Governor Andrew Cuomo at his State of the State address in January, could have been discounted as a rhetorical nod to a base issue by a Democratic governor a year into his four-year term. That’s the risk of a system where money in politics feels as pervasive as sand on the beach: its ubiquity creates a dangerous inertia that prevents citizens from seizing real opportunities for change. But thanks to a coalition of New Yorkers dedicated to elevating and actualizing Governor Cuomo’s pledge, this year could not only rewrite the rules in New York but also change the risk calculation on engagement for the entire country.

As the Supreme Court has chipped away at the protections in McCain-Feingold (a k a the Bi-Partisan Campaign Reform Act) and Citizens United has opened the flood gates to corporate money in the political system, the collective frustration has risen to an astonishing 83 percent of Americans who believe that there’s too much money in politics. But despite the rare across-the-board consensus, federal policy solutions have been at a standstill. The vicious cycle that gives rise to big-money candidates has produced overwhelmingly negative incentives to stepping out on government accountability. That gives wealthy and corporate interests a virtual lock on the status quo.

New York’s public finance legislation, if it comes to a vote in June, could be the beginning of the end of that dynamic, which is why it’s worth exploring the key elements that make this issue viable again.

First off, the people: grassroots groups in New York have joined with two key constituencies to force a new equation on legislators—high donors and business interests. On the forefront is the New York Leadership for Accountable Government (NY LEAD), a coalition of philanthropic luminaries and high-dollar contributors. With marquee names like media-mogul Barry Diller and Facebook founder Chris Hughes as the face of the effort, this is the first credible wedge of political donors on the issue of campaign finance reform. NY LEAD brings much-needed resources to the fight, but its real value is in breaking the psychological paralysis of politicians convinced that action equals electoral death. Real money backing reform candidates forces a new position on the issue.

Similarly, the early endorsement of the Committee on Economic Development (CED) was a key win for the fledgling campaign. The CED is a policy think tank backed by senior executives at a number of Fortune 500 companies. The group is actively encouraging business leaders to join the coalition, proactively blunting the hollow cries of the right that an accountable government is anathema to business interests.

The ground troops include MoveOn.org, Public Campaign, New York Citizen Action and some of the state labor unions. An organizer I spoke with said that’s been the key to getting traction on the ground—an unprecedented partnership between good-government groups and constituency-backed organizations. Together, they are singularly focused on getting their elected officials on the needs of New Yorkers over the needs of their campaign coffers. Theirs is a high-risk, high-reward strategy: double down on the systemic overhaul and getting other vital issues addressed will be vastly easier.

One of our best hopes to nationalize this effort is the presence of progressive hero and reform champion Senator Russ Feingold, who is engaged individually and through his new group Progressives United. Senator Feingold’s strict adherence to his principles in 2010 by not allowing outside money in his race may have cost him an election, but it won him the undying gratitude of a movement starved for leaders. He laid out the opportunity at hand in New York Daily News op-ed last week.

If played well, the New York campaign offers three huge advantages to the 83 percent of Americans desiring more democratic elections.

Modeling of solutions. A successful campaign needs a proof of concept to garner resources and interest. If the public funding legislation passes in New York, we’ll have a legislative blueprint in place for the rest of the country. A victory in New York also begins dismantling psychological and cultural obstacles to action nationwide. New York ranks among the loosest states in the nation when it comes to campaign finance laws. Individual donors can give more than $60,000 to candidates in state-wide races. That’s more than twelve times the median cap of $5,000 by other states with limits! In 2011, just 127 individuals gave more than a third of all money collected by in state candidates and political parties. New York is awash in money, and Albany has sometimes made Washington look like a paragon of virtue. Successfully implementing a democratic election program in New York would effectively topple the excuse for not doing so anywhere else in the country.

State strategies. The effort in New York is part of a growing trend of savvy progressives treating state and local fights as part of our overall battlefield. With the federal Congress at a virtual standstill and confidence in their ability to move legislation at an all-time low, litigating this issue at the state level is not only a smart way to move towards a more democratic system, it may be the only way for now. The right wing has been adept at exploiting this tactic: look at how the Mississippi personhood initiative or the Alabama hate laws have catapulted fringe positions to the national spotlight. Because the desire to end pay-to-play politics is as mainstream as those are marginal, advances in New York could spread virally to other states and force federal movement more quickly.

National momentum. One of the toughest challenges to mounting a real campaign around money in politics is a common sense of futility about the closed-loop relationship between large donors and elected officials. Inertia is the enemy of reform, but a visible campaign in New York will provide new hope and opportunities for engagement. The campaign builds on the fall success of Occupy Wall Street that both revved up a dispirited electorate and irretrievably linked economic inequality to political inequality. Citizens United made the corporate co-option of our democracy impossible to ignore, and frustration and discontent are a tinderbox waiting to explode. When asked by e-mail why Americans should tune into what’s happening in the Liberty State, Senator Feingold said this: “New York can ignite a movement. A victory there will set a nationwide example for how public financing can combat the corrupting influence of corporate money.” In other words, the next couple months in one state could determine whether there’s sufficient momentum to keep this issue in the spotlight through 2012 and lay the groundwork for a concerted push towards federal reform in 2013.

The stakes are high. In that very same State of the State address, Governor Cuomo noted that New York’s voter turnout in the 2010 midterms was the lowest in the nation. It is possible that as the chief executive of his state, he has realized that his government is on the brink of crisis due to collapse of participation. Or maybe he thinks like many Democratic leaders that the system is so out of whack, he doesn’t stand a chance at re-election without substantial reform. Either way, Cuomo is poised to step into the leadership vacuum and provide a rare glimpse of hope on a mission-critical progressive priority. Let’s all pay attention.

As someone lucky enough not to have an underwater home, I have had the luxury of not needing to learn the all the gory details of our broken housing finance system—full of undecipherable acronyms and the minutiae of regulation and arcane policy. So, I admit that I have only loosely been following the situation since the $25 billion fraud settlement between the big banks and the state attorney generals was announced.

But my curiosity was piqued again this week when I got an e-mail from CREDO Action protesting new information that the task force established to investigate what went wrong never received the staff that it was promised. And while the source of the hold up is unclear as is exactly how many staffers have been assigned, what is becoming clear is that even the promised fifty-five investigators would be ill-equipped to achieve its goals. That news got me wondering where things stand more generally with task force, lauded by progressives and homeowners alike when it was announced back in January.

In a recent NPR interview, William Black—the former litigation director for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board—pointed out that a hundred investigators were employed to get to the bottom of the Enron scandal ten years ago. That was a single company, and now we’re talking about delving into multiple business sectors to determine accountability and criminal wrongdoing in this crisis. For a more apples-to-apples comparison, the thousand-strong force investigating the Savings and Loans crisis in the 1980s returned a thousand felony convictions. The economic impact of the mortgage crisis is estimated to be forty times worse than the S&L debacle, and yet this under-staffed investigation has only been able to uncover enough evidence for ten convictions.

CREDO’s petition asking President Obama to staff up the task force well beyond the original promise has already yielded over 100,000 signers and over 1,100 calls to Obama For America headquarters, and I’m told CREDO has not even contacted all their members yet. This level of engagement is an indication that others like me who tune back in to find expectations unmet will have a strong response. Notably, a response that has the potential to trump queasiness progressives have about criticizing a Democratic president in an election year. But also a responding audience that clearly wants to use the instruments at hand to create a win for all involved.

One unintended consequence of the establishment of the task force is that many Americans felt like they could rest easy that justice was underway. Part of this feeling stemmed from the clear engagement of President Obama in his State of the Union address and part stemmed from the reputation of strength and integrity of the chair of the body, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. Given the massive entrenched interests of the banks and the hyper-partisan political landscape, though, it appears that allies in government will need a strong outside consituency to make progress on this issue. Not doing so would be a huge missed opportunity for our economy and millions of Americans still waiting for relief.

The Campaign for Fair Settlement, of which CREDO is a part, was formed to do just that—keep pressure on the various enforcement mechanisms for resolution and to make sure this issue doesn’t fade from view. The loose coalition is showing signs of ramping up activities in the coming weeks, including planned direct actions at bank shareholder meetings. It appears that the CREDO petition was just a shot across the bow.

The reasons for acting with speed and strength are clear and compelling:

1. The Moral Imperative: Americans are sick of seeing bankers go free while they foot the bill. The underwater mortgage holders are the living example of a values system out of whack. They live in limbo, or worse, while the banks that partnered with them on these mortgages and then forged documents to illegally foreclose get bailed out with homeowners’ tax money and let off with a small fine. And justice is an hourglass with the sand running out. The statute of limitations on most of these cases is up soon, so swift action is required if criminal penalties are forthcoming. Claims that the taskforce is itself running out the clock will certainly have more resonance as time goes on.

2. The Economic Imperative: Unresolved mortgages are a huge drag on economic recovery. The International Monetary Fund, hardly a bastion of progressive economic policy, just released a report demonstrating the positive economic benefits of mortgage write-downs. Simply put, when American homeowners are not trapped in debt, they buy more things from American businesses, who then hire more American workers. In the 1930’s the Roosevelt Administration faced a similar crisis. It formed the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) to buy distressed mortgages from banks and then worked with homeowners to prevent default and eviction. The report cites this move as contributing to getting the economy back on track, not to mention keeping people in their homes. In the end, the HOLC even turned a profit. We still have time to learn from the successful models of history. If even just Fannie and Freddie committed to real principal reduction, some experts say this would be enough to tip the entire housing market towards recovery and have a positive domino effect on the economy at large.

3. The Political Imperative: If none of those reasons are enough, a glance at the politics of the situation should motivate even the most hard-hearted political operative to action. As Mike Lux put it in his excellent Daily Kos piece last week, there are 11 million underwater homeowners. This is an important constituency in a close election. Many of these folks were already among the swing voters hungrily pursued by each campaign, and if they were not before, they are now mad as hell and looking for some answers from their elected officials. If the situation remains stagnant, some of these homeowners will certainly vote for the other guy, desperately hoping for anything but the status quo. Some disillusioned Democrats may just not vote. Add to this the clear signs that the base is deeply invested this issue, and you can see how effective action could be a political game changer.

It’s not accurate to say that nothing has happened. Right after the task force was formed, Eric Schneidermann unleashed a flurry of subpoenas, and shortly thereafter, the small initial settlement was announced. Last month, I attended a press conference on the Hill as a representative for Rebuild The Dream, on whose board I serve. The event brought together advocacy groups and members of Congress to ask that Ed DeMarco be removed as head of FHFA, where he continues to block settlements and write downs for mortgages held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The administration has not moved to replace him, but has shown signs of pressuring DeMarco to take action. This is good and should be lauded.

Actions to date still fall short of the huge opportunity to do right by homeowners, help the economy and win the hearts and minds of a depressed electorate in a critical year. Many Americans felt like the formation of the task force was a genuine beginning of a new era of much-needed accountability in this country, not a one-off gesture to quell frustration. I believe that there are people inside the administration and the task force that really want to fight this fight. Let’s hope that the Campaign for a Fair Settlement gives them the fire they need to make the task force’s investigation, and principal reduction, the priority it should be. The political and economic alternative is unacceptable.

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The Occupy Wall Street movement, revered for refocusing the world’s attention on rising economic and political inequality, died peacefully in its sleep after a long winter hibernation. Born September 17, 2011, Occupy grew steadily and spread like wildfire from city to city and country to country before reaching its peak—inhabiting ninety-five cities in eighty-two countries and 600 communities in the United States. Initiated by Canadian magazine Adbusters, Occupy Wall Street was famous for its “human microphone,” its dedication to democratic process and its persevering slogan, “We are the 99 percent.” Whether by fear, anger, worship or respect, there’s not a leader in the NGO or political world who has not been moved or changed by Occupy. Occupy Wall Street is survived by many offspring, including Occupy Our Homes, Occupy the SEC, Occupy Colleges and The 99% Spring.

When asked to write about what the future holds for Occupy Wall Street, I found myself pondering what a future looks like without it. Or at least without the Occupy enshrined in our minds: the one defined by a tactical commitment to seizing and holding public space, an adherence to universal direct democracy and a resolve to clear all decisions through the General Assembly. At first, the exercise felt illicit, as though I might lose my progressive credentials for even giving the thought voice in my head. But as I allowed myself to go there, the act of sedition felt important and empowering. The whispered anxiety I hear about whether Occupy will re-emerge this spring with sufficient force seems misplaced. What’s paramount is to ask: If Occupy died tomorrow, would it have left behind a fundamentally transformed landscape with new players, new methods and new values? The answer to that is an exciting and liberating yes.

Occupy Wall Street has already transformed beyond recognition from its original state. Very few Occupies still hold public space, and the ones that do have lost members through attrition, arrests and extreme weather. The core players are focused on protesting the police repression that many sites experienced in the fall. There’s nothing wrong with self-defense, and police repression is certainly more pronounced in communities experiencing economic and political crisis. Still, this focus relegates the debate squarely within a familiar police versus protesters trope—a tough one for protesters to win, especially at a time when the country yearns to keep economic inequality front and center.

Meanwhile, campaigns have emerged outside the constraint of the trademark Occupy tactics. These campaigns often have an independent infrastructure, targeted goals and a nimbleness that prevents bringing every decision to a General Assembly. Not content for process to be the extent of their contribution, these campaigns have specific demands for justice: Occupy Our Homes demands that banks adjust or forgive loans so people can stay in their houses; Occupy the SEC pressures government for enforcement of the Volcker Rule; Occupy Our Colleges insists that governors refuse to cut one more dime from school budgets so that our youth can be educated without mortgaging their future.

The rallying cry of the Occupy movement—“We are the 99 percent”—has also taken on a life of its own. With a spirit of inclusiveness that mimics the slogan, established institutions from MoveOn to National People’s Action to the United Auto Workers are investing collective resources into The 99% Spring, a massive training project that aims to train 100,000 people in nonviolent civil disobedience and economic literacy.

It would be easy to dismiss some of these efforts as unworthy heirs to the Occupy mantle. Or to try to retake surrendered and seized Occupied public space when the weather warms. I hope we don’t. Social change is much like ecology: every once in a great while, we experience a massive breakthrough, an evolutionary leap, in how the world around us is defined. Occupy did that. The rest of the time, change is the unglamorous, slow plodding of organizers trying to adapt and push forward in an ever challenging environment. These evolutionary leaps reignite movements with imagination and energy, but sustaining that pitch is an often impossible task. The challenge is to use the fertile ground left by the transformed earth to foster a multitude of new growth.

It’s human to mourn the death of the early days of the cohesive and compelling communities in the town squares, which gripped the world’s attention. Let’s honor the past, note what has changed and make way for the new. Occupy is dead! Long live Occupy!

ALSO IN THIS FORUM

Richard Kim: “The Occupy Spring?”
Michael Moore: “The Purpose of Occupy Wall Street Is to Occupy Wall Street”
Bill Fletcher Jr.: “Occupy the Imagination”
Marina Sitrin: “Occupy: This Is What Democracy Looks Like”
Todd Gitlin: “More Than a Protest Movement”
Frances Fox Piven: “Occupy! and Make Them Do It”
Stephen Lerner: “Horizontal Meets Vertical; Occupy Meets Establishment”
Jeremy Brecher: “Occupy Climate Change”
Jonathan Schell: “If Vaclav Havel Met Occupy’s Human Mic…”
Arun Gupta and Michelle Fawcett: “Occupying the Unexpected”

Bill Maher spent a significant portion of last Friday’s Real Time defending Rush Limbaugh. Well, not defending the man, whom he calls repulsive. And not defending Rush’s statements over the last few weeks, which he vehemently objected to on both political and rhetorical grounds. But Maher defended Rush’s right to say those things, invoking free speech and the ACLU, and in the process missed the point completely.

Maher proclaimed that efforts to pressure Rush Limbaugh’s sponsors amounted to an illegitimate attack on his freedom of speech, and that the advertiser campaign is an example of “the system being manipulated.”

Unsurprisingly, the right-wing press wasted no time in broadcasting triumphantly that even lefty pundits recognized that the real victim here was Rush.

Let’s get this clear: Rush is not a martyr for the cause of free speech. Nor have his First Amendment rights been violated in any way since the day he chose to call a Georgetown law student a “slut” for arguing that contraception should be covered by health insurance. For starters, violating Rush’s First Amendment rights would require state action. Rush has not been jailed for his views, nor has anyone even whispered a suggestion to that effect. There have been no calls for his radio transmitter to be jammed. No one is even demanding he be fined, which might be possible under the FCC’s arcane and arbitrary decency laws.

Instead, what his critics are doing is exercising one of their own fundamental American rights, their right as consumers to frequent the businesses they choose. This is not actually a constitutional right, but for Americans who may feel their right to vote doesn’t amount to much, our right to spend our money as we see fit affords us some additional measure of self-determination.

In the modern world of consumer defined identity, we use this power of the pocketbook for far more than satisfying visceral needs. Our shopping preferences have become clear signifiers of our values and our character. Any Branding 101 class teaches that values alignment is a key driver of consumer loyalty. Many companies have spent millions of dollars winning and retaining customers through value-based brand strategies. Shop at Whole Foods? Might as well scream “I care about the Earth!” (Or just carry your recycled Whole Foods shopping bag to scream it for you.) Apple user? Obviously hip, tech-savvy and cutting edge. Munching on some Newman’s Own cereal? Clearly someone who cares about philanthropy and your health. It’s a perfectly reasonable way to build a customer base. But it makes these companies responsible for upholding their end of the bargain.

In response to Rush’s ranting, no one has called for our government censorship. People have merely vocalized their desire not to be associated with companies that associate with Rush. Those associations risk reflecting on our values, which—in this case—so drastically diverge from his that we care enough to change our choices over it. There are no issues of law or free speech here. This is simply the marketplace doing its thing, shaping both our commerce and our culture by reflecting shared agreement on conduct and conscience.

By conflating this economic feedback loop with Rush’s right to free speech, Bill Maher played into a right-wing canard, misinterpreted the protections guaranteed by the First Amendment, and did himself and his viewers a disservice. In order to uphold the First Amendment, which is very important, it helps to know what it means. It does mean that Rush should not be censored for his views by the government apparatus. His opinions should not be criminalized, nor should his business be shut down by an arbitrary panel of judges empowered by the State. But nowhere in the Constitution is Rush, or anyone else, guaranteed the right to be shielded from popular outrage if he chooses to engage in hate speech, misogyny or slander. Advertisers who exercise their preference to support Rush do not have a right to retain customers angered by this decision. Above all, Rush is not guaranteed an enshrined right for the private sector to pay him for his outrageous behavior even if it costs them customers. His hate cannot and should not be forcibly subsidized.

Advertiser campaigns are hard to run and hard to win. I wrote about this when Lowe’s dropped the show All American Muslim. Companies weigh vocal customer concern against the backlash of a decision that could be perceived as political. At the end of the day, successfully attracting the attention of a business and changing their position on an ad buy carries a high threshold for action. Rush Limbaugh’s three-day tirade against an innocent woman expressing her own political views met and surpassed that threshold. His language made business leaders uncomfortable and supporting him risked their market share. That’s why the show has lost forty-six advertisers.

These kinds of consumer campaigns have become the embodiment of democratic principles in a country where consumer choices matter and the government is more and more influenced by corporations, rather than the other way around. The power of the pocketbook has the wonderful potential to crowd-source our cultural norms. The last two weeks have shown just how far outside of our cultural norms Rush resides.

That does not mean he should shut up. He should keep on speaking his beliefs. The First Amendment guarantees him the right to say whatever he likes. It does not guarantee him the right to be paid to say it. And the sooner Bill Maher and others get this right, the stronger our democracy will be.

Representative Pingree,

Your announcement yesterday that you will not seek the open Senate seat in Maine made my heart sink. My emotional reaction to your well-reasoned decision surprised me. After all, as someone who has operated in the political arena for quite a while now, I’m accustomed to the pragmatic decisions and political calculations that are the bread and butter of incremental progress. Still, there are moments where outrageous circumstances should trump reasonable decision making, and recent events in the world of US women have been outrageous enough to warrant one of those moments.

The reasons for your decision are apparent and undeniable: early polling shows a nearly impossible pathway to victory in a three-way race; former governor and independent candidate Angus King has established himself as the presumed front-runner and your constituencies overlap; absent one of you dropping out, the race will likely be won by the Republican candidate. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee lauded your decision as the right one for the people of Maine and progressive causes, since neither will benefit from adding another Conservative Republican to the Senate. I am quite certain that party operatives and others are lining up to thank you for “taking one for the team.” But, me? I just wonder when it will be someone else’s turn to step aside for our team.

The number of women representing Americans fell in 112th Congress for the first time in thirty years. In the November 2010 elections, women went from ninety-three seats in the House and the Senate to ninety combined, making the overall percentage of women leadership at the federal level just under 17 percent. That numbers qualifies the United States for a spot at seventy-third place in the world for female representation in government leadership. We are tied with Turkmenistan.

Your announcement comes on the heels of a week dominated by Rush Limbaugh’s series of tirades against Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke. Rush has lost close to forty-six advertisers for his rant calling Ms. Fluke a slut for testifying about the need for contraception to be included in healthcare. Yet, the comments from Republican leadership have been milquetoast at best, with majority leader John Boehner seeming to blame both sides equally. Representative Darrell Issa blamed the Democrats for the tone of the contraception debate.

Just before “slut week,” the Senate debated a measure introduced by Missouri Senator Roy Blunt, who believes decisions about contraception coverage should be left to a woman’s employer. In fact, Blunt’s amendment would have allowed employers to withhold payment for other types of health service if the treatment conflicts with their conscience. In the world of the GOP, healthcare should not be between a woman and her doctor but between a woman and her employer, with her employer having final say. The amendment was barely defeated, with three Democrats breaking party to lines to narrow the margin.

This is the same body that in November of 2010 voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have ensured fair pay for women. According to the US Bureau of Labor 2011 Statistics, women earned almost 18 percent less than men last year for a week of full time work. This wage gap has proven disastrous for women on the economic edge in America. Despite the economy showing marginal signs of improvement, more and more women are living in poverty. According to the 2010 Census, four million more women than men face poverty in the United States. Mothers get special punishment in this economy. 34 percent of families with a single mother as head of household are poor and 17 percent live in deep poverty. The same is only true of 17.3 percent of families headed by a single father, with only 8 percent living in deep poverty.

This disparity isn’t only present at the bottom end of the economic spectrum either. In a culture that places a premium on innovation, male-founded startups receive venture capital funding by a margin of four to one over women-founded startups. Women-led companies are twice as likely to get debt capital versus equity capital, requiring that women shoulder more of the risk on their own. These facts are true in spite of research that shows that gender diversity within senior ranks of organizations translates into financial value, especially where innovation is part of the equation.

The issues outlined above have been marginalized as “women’s issues,” despite the fact that they are issues of family, issues of economic competitiveness and issues of national public health. But as Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted after the Blunt Amendment vote: "If the Senate was 83 women and 17 men instead of the other way around, #BluntAmendment would never have made it to the Senate floor."

I hope you understand, Representative Pingree, I respect your choice. It is you who must bear the burden of running—and potentially losing—on your professional future, on your family life, and on your personal health and psyche. You have earned, and will get, my support no matter what path you choose.

But I could not let your decision become a footnote of history without registering protest. As a champion of all of the issues above and of equality for all Americans, you should not have to step aside in this critical year. Since women’s destinies are inextricably tied to the nation’s destiny, we cannot move into a new era of peace and prosperity without addressing them. Yet, forcing these issues out of the women’s ghetto into the light of priority evidently requires more female leadership, which means that maybe it is someone else’s turn to step aside. 

IMAGE COURTESY: © 2011 DREAMWORKS II DISTRIBUTION CO, LLC

Standing at the center of a circle of women, a housekeeper tells of finally fixing herself a meal after working seven straight hours, only to have the mistress of the house storm into the kitchen and throw the pan of food into the sink, banning “that ethnic food” from her home. Next up, a nanny recounts the most recent day when after working eleven hours straight, her employers requested that she stay late into the night to care for the children. Unable to jeopardize her job, she stayed, going one more night without seeing her own children. The other women in the circle nod in weary recognition and, in turn, tell their own stories.

These are not scenes from the popular and controversial movie, The Help. These are twenty-first-century experiences being shared at the Los Angeles gathering of the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance (NDWA) this past weekend. The women present call themselves “the real-life help,” and the meeting was held in conjunction with the Oscars to remind Americans enamored with the Hollywood vision of civil rights era maids asserting their dignity that things have not changed as much as we might think.

Linking their campaign to the Oscar buzz of The Help is a savvy move for one of the only organizations dedicated to protecting the rights of our country’s 2.5 million domestic workers. In doing so, NDWA is trying to jump start a conversation about an insidious and largely invisible problem in our culture. They are having some success. NDWA co-founder and director Ai-Jen Poo recently spoke on a widely reviewed panel at USC on the power of film to create social change with writer and director of The Help, Tate Taylor. Students, professors, and press were introduced to the idea that this work of fiction has disturbingly real life parallels we have yet to confront as a society. In her acceptance of the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress, The Help star Octavia Spencer praised the work of real life domestic workers. And the campaign twitter hashtag #BeTheHelp that launched during the Golden Globe Awards gained traction during last night’s airing of the Oscars.

On the USC panel, Poo explained, “Change has to happen on many levels: on the level of policy, on the level of behavior, but also very importantly on the level of hearts and minds. And what this film did was open up the space and the hearts and minds of this country to actually imagine a day when this work would be respected and valued and protected and that’s just meant so much to the workforce especially as we continue to fight for recognition and protections.”

After spending the weekend with thirty domestic workers, I find it undeniable that the power of the movie runs far deeper than the tactical campaign connection. The Help offers validation to millions of unseen workers and a way in to the national conversation for women who are struggling to change their working conditions. In facilitated sessions over the two-day gathering, the domestic workers without fail used the movie as a narrative springboard, comparing and contrasting their experiences with those of Minny and Aibileen, who have come to feel like personal friends to these domestic workers.

One of the workers explained to me that she had never seen stories like theirs told before The Help. The simple fact that they now have an acknowledged presence in popular culture has given power and momentum to their organizing for basic legal protections. In response to an NDWA call, thousands of domestic workers turned out to see the movie together on opening night. Afterwards, leaders were able to organize discussions about how to push their own fight forward. First-time attendees, fired up by what they saw in the movie, responded enthusiastically.

Prominent thinkers and writers have blasted the movie for its failure to adhere accurately to the comprehensive experience of domestic workers in the civil rights era. The Nation contributor and MSNBC host Melissa Harris Perry called the movie a Disney-fication of the civil rights struggle. And there is undeniably irony in the fact that the movie’s African-American stars were nominated for Oscars for playing roles so similar to Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy in Gone with the Wind, for which she won 1939’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar. All of these points are critical and worthy of consideration and debate. The more things change, the more they stay the same as my grandfather used to say.

Getting a critical mass of domestic workers together is still no small feat. These women are largely invisible precisely because they are isolated in their own workplaces; there’s no lunchroom to pass out union cards, no company picnic where people can speak to each other in a relaxed setting. Many of these workers are undocumented and all are lacking economic security. This combination leaves them almost completely at the mercy of their employers, setting up the perfect conditions for abuse or neglect.

New York became the first state in 2010 to formally recognize the rights of these women when it passed the first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. A similar bill is now working its way through the state house in Sacramento. That’s 2.5 million workers in America, and so far only one and a half states offering them any protection. While such advances seem tiny, The Help has provided invaluable assistance to organizing workers and getting momentum for this breakthrough legislation.

Hollywood may have sanitized the past, but it has also given a voice to the present. When Octavia Spencer was awarded the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress last night, our room erupted in cheers and tears. Each domestic worker felt like the victory was their own. In this puzzling cultural conundrum, we find opportunities for change.

As the party was winding down and The Help had lost out both for Best Actress and Best Movie, New York domestic worker Barbara Young put it this way: “This movie put us in the public domain. Many millions of people know about domestic workers right now. Viola may not have won, but she was very positive in telling her story and telling our story. We came here to celebrate this movie, and we did.”

Karen Handel in a Tuesday, August 10, 2010 file photo. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)

This morning, Karen Handel resigned as the vice president of public policy of the Susan G. Komen foundation. Handel had spent the last week at the epicenter of the controversy around Komen’s decision to withdraw support for Planned Parenthood and several progressive groups were circulating petitions to call for her dismissal. Handel’s very public resignation letter shows a political acumen and sophisticated grasp of cultural narrative that seems to have eluded Komen generally and their CEO, Nancy Brinker, through this entire debacle.

Here’s an excerpt from the beautifully crafted letter:

What was a thoughtful and thoroughly reviewed decision—one that would have indeed enabled Komen to deliver even greater community impact—has unfortunately been turned into something about politics.This is entirely untrue. This development should sadden us all greatly.

Handel, with an expert turn of word, moves to recast the characters in this ongoing saga that is helping to set the stage for a showdown over women’s choice in the 2012 election.

Handel is well-documented as a leader in pushing for Komen defunding of Planned Parenthood. According to internal e-mails obtained by the Huffington Post, Handel was constantly hyping the threat of a right-wing backlash against the breast cancer foundation for their grant to Planned Parenthood, even though—at best—those threats were sporadic and low level. The Komen funding to Planned Parenthood was restricted and could be used only for breast cancer screening in the clinics. Since most women who can afford to do that screening at their private doctor’s office do, this policy by definition disproportionately affects low-income and young women.

Handel won her crusade to score political points and impose her radical ideology on the organization, and certainly Nancy Brinker deserves blame both for allowing this to happen and for lying about it later on Andrea Mitchell’s show on MSNBC, when she claimed that Handel had no part in the decision. What Handel failed to do, despite her obvious PR prowess, was prepare her sponsoring organization to withstand the ensuing maelstrom. Her letter today—both in the content and her choice to release it—shows that helping Komen through this tough time might not have been her first priority.

Handel has a long-established political trajectory. She was the deputy chief of staff for Marilyn Quayle when her husband, Dan, served as vice president under George H.W. Bush, and she became the deputy chief of staff for Georgia Governor Sonny Purdue, after she opportunistically switched parties to run as a Republican in 1998. Handel went on to hold political office herself as Georgia’s secretary of state, where she enacted regressive voter ID laws that inspired lawsuits from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF). She resigned from this post to run for governor of Georgia in 2010 in a bitterly fought contest that earned her endorsements from choice flip-flopper Mitt Romney and the staunchly anti-choice Sarah Palin. She lost to Congressman Nathan Deal, who used her earlier affiliation with the Log Cabin Republicans against her. When he did, she denied ever being a member, a claim that caused PolitiFact to give her a “pants on fire” rating. She then went to Komen, presumably to regroup and plan next steps.

The last paragraph of her letter includes the following line:

While I appreciate your raising a possible severance package, I respectfully decline.

Severance packages routinely come with gag orders—stipulations on what the person leaving the organization can and cannot say about the conditions under which they left. While no one outside of Komen, Handel and their lawyers are privy to the conditions under which this offer was made, if the norm prevails, accepting it would prevent Handel from leveraging her new role as the darling of the culture war crowd. This entire subtext of the letter screams that Handel feels sacrificed at the altar of political correctness, but that she refused to sacrifice her own integrity in the process. In an election year already about bishops and birth control, being a spokesperson for the radical anti-woman, anti-choice, anti-equality movement probably plays more to her political nature than going quietly into the night.

The way that this entire saga unfolded points to the work of a political master. While I have no love lost for the Susan G. Komen foundation, if I were their board, I would be angry and sheepish about having my organization used as a political stepping stone and then left as collateral damage for an ambitious self-serving culture crusader. Make no mistake: we’ve not heard the last of Karen Handel. And when she surfaces to tell her story, people should remember: she’s not the victim, she’s a sophisticated political operator who may have gotten exactly what she wants.

After a long, dark period of stagnation and pay-to-play politics, we’ve just seen a flurry of progressive victories that could upset the conventional wisdom about a post–Citizens United world.
 
Citizens United has reshaped the landscape, paving the way for the proliferation of political ads in early primary states, many of which would formerly have been illegal. There is no denying the decision’s impact on nearly every issue: spending legalized by Citizens United was partly responsible for Scott Walker’s victory in Wisconsin in 2010, and, moving forward, Citizens United–enabled ads will be full of messages about President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone pipeline. But another, albeit indirect, result of Citizens United is actually a positive one: a realization by progressive groups that financial competition is futile—prompting altered strategies that play to progressives’ strengths.

Consider the events leading up to the Senate’s January 20 decision to postpone the Protect Intellectual Property Act vote, which would have been almost unimaginable just one week before, when PIPA and its House counterpart, SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act), were considered done deals. Only an awkward alliance of political geeks and new-media companies stood in the way of an entertainment industry power grab. But the bills’ promoters failed to anticipate the power of “Blackout Wednesday” to popularize the outrage. Suddenly, Congress started fielding calls from people unable to sell couches on Craigslist and harried parents of students desperate to consult Wikipedia for school papers. Thus sounded the death knell for the bills.

The tactical decision to pull down popular websites was tailored to these bills, but two other recent victories—the rejection of the massive Keystone oil pipeline and the submission of more than a million signatures for the recall of unionbusting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker—were also made possible by fusing old-school community organizing with innovative netroots strategies.

The Keystone pipeline deal was all but signed when a small band of climate activists mounted a week of direct action at the White House this past summer. As the civil disobedience peaked, groups quickly followed up with sustained organizing of Obama volunteers and donors who publicly committed themselves to withhold re-election support if the pipeline was approved. In the final tally, there were more than 1,000 arrests and more than 1 million petition signatures. Public statements flooded the White House, and Washington received close to 40,000 calls opposing the pipeline in one day.

The Wisconsin recall effort, netting more than 1 million signatures, is a similar story of block-by-block organizing coordinated with savvy online work [see John Nichols, page 6].

None of this is to say that money doesn’t matter and political ads are on their way out. After all, $13 million was spent on ads in the lead-up to the South Carolina primary, and
$12 million is now pouring into Florida. The result of Citizens United has been more ads, by less identifiable players, with a much uglier tone. The decision should be overturned.

At the same time, though, this onslaught of ads has made Americans crave limits on election spending. A new CBS poll shows that a majority of Republicans, Democrats and independents favor limits both on how much individuals can give to candidates and how much outside groups can spend on ads. A total of 67 percent of respondents said outside spending should be limited, and less than a third favored the current system. A different poll shows that two-thirds of small business owners believe that Citizens United hurts their interests.

The influx of such huge sums of money has also forced smaller groups to re-evaluate their reliance on a saturated media market to deliver a message, and has catalyzed new investment in breakthrough organizing. The popular momentum behind such campaigns may well be evidence that instead of disengaging in a post–Citizens United world, voters jump at concrete opportunities to show their power.

Still from a Newt Gingrich campaign ad attacking Mitt Romney.

After a long, dark period of stagnant progressive momentum and pay-to-play politics, this week saw a flurry of progressive victories that could upset the conventional wisdom about a post–Citizens United world.

This morning’s announcement by Harry Reid that the Senate is postponing the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) vote would have been almost unimaginable as recently as a week ago, when PIPA and its House counterpart, SOPA (the Stop On-line Piracy Act), were considered done deals. Only a handful of disgruntled geeks stood in the way of an industry power grab that would have blessed online censorship and stifled innovation. But the bills’ promoters failed to anticipate the power of “Blackout Wednesday” to popularize the outrage. Suddenly, it wasn’t just geeks. Congress started fielding calls from people unable to sell couches on Craigslist and harried parents of students desperate to consult Wikipedia for school papers. Thus sounded the death knell for the bills.

While the tactical decision to pull down popular sites in protest of these bills were tailored to the Internet blackout bills, the other two major victories this week—the rejection of the massive Keystone oil pipeline and the submission of 1.9 million signatures to recall union-busting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker—were also made possible by fusing old-school community organizing with innovative netroots strategies.

Going into the week, news was dominated by the proliferation of political ads in early primary states, many of which would have been illegal prior to Citizens United. There is no denying that decision’s impact, on almost every issue: spending legalized by the Citizens United decision was partly responsible for the Walker victory in 2010, and moving forward Citizens United–enabled ads will be full of messages about Obama’s rejection of Keystone. Progressives have continually highlighted the ruling as a low point in a campaign world that comes with a multimillion-dollar entry fee. It’s true that experts warn that the proliferation of ads could result in voter disengagement.

But what if the net result of Citizens United is a realization by progressive groups that financial competition is futile, one that prompts altered strategies that play to progressive strengths? In the two years after the Citizens United decision, we’ve seen a renewed commitment to deep organizing and innovative rapid response that is threatening corporate-backed electeds and industry-promoted legislation alike.

Take the Internet censorship bills: the smug overreach of these industry-backed bills united both poles of the political spectrum and new media companies in an unprecedented wave of online activism that turned the tide and left both bills gasping for life on the eve of their vote. Google, a leading industry opponent, launched its first ever online petition, a move that netted it a staggering 7 million signatures. Websites as far-ranging as Wikipedia and I Can Haz Cheezburger? went dark on Wednesday to protest the infringement on their rights. Users expecting to laugh at cats instead learned of the imminent threat, and these collective actions popularized the outrage.

The same day, the president announced his decision to comply with a State Department recommendation to reject the Keystone Pipeline. The pipeline—replete with catastrophic climate impacts and powerless to deliver the jobs its promoters promised—was all but signed when a small band of committed climate activists mounted a week of direct action at the White House last summer. As the civil disobedience peaked, groups quickly followed up with sustained organizing of Obama volunteers and donors, who publicly committed to withhold re-election support if the pipeline was approved. In the final tally, there were over 1000 arrests, more than one million petition signatures and public statements flooded the White House, and close to 40,000 calls were made to Congress opposing the pipeline in one day.

And finally, on Tuesday of this week, a Wisconsin effort announced it had submitted over 1 million signatures to recall corporate darling Governor Scott Walker—almost twice times the number required to get the recall on the ballot. The Wisconsin recall effort is a similar story of block-by-block organizing coordinated with savvy online work that solidified new alliances and resulted in close to half of eligible Wisconsin voters asking for the chance to recall the Walker administration. Walker won just over a year ago with 52.3 percent of the vote in the most expensive race in the state’s history. A whopping $37.4 million dollars were spent in that election on television advertising. And yet a committed grassroots operation not only could reverse that decision but has a nervous state government so committed to accountability in the recall proceedings, they are using a webcam to give voters access to every move they make in counting the signatures.

Now, no one is arguing money doesn’t matter and political ads are on their way out. Already, $12 million have been spent on ads in the lead up to the South Carolina primary. That’s an estimated 25,000 ads in the span of a few weeks for a state with a total population of 4.5 million. This mirrors the Iowa caucus, where people complained of being hit from every angle with political ads. These primaries follow a 2010 election cycle that tested the new Citizens United ruling allowing unlimited spending by outside parties on behalf of a candidate in political races. The undeniable result of Citizens United has been more ads, by less identifiable players, with a much uglier tone. It should be overturned.

What we do know, though, is that the ads make most Americans crave more limits on election spending. A new CBS poll out yesterday showed majority of Republicans, Democrats and Independents favor limits on how much both how much individuals can give to candidates and how much outside groups can spend on ads. A total of 67 percent of respondents said outside spending should be limited, while less than a third favored the current system. A different poll shows that two-thirds of small-business owners believe the Citizens United decision hurts their interests.

What’s now also coming into focus is that the influx of such huge sums of money has forced smaller groups to re-evaluate their own reliance on a saturated media market to deliver a message, and catalyzed new investment in breakthrough organizing. The popular momentum we saw this week behind such campaigns may well be evidence that instead of disengaging in a post–Citizens United world, voters jump at concrete opportunities to flex their power. While I won’t claim a triumph for people-powered movements quite yet, the last week has been a great indicator that frustration is turning to action in ways that could yet prove game-changing.

Author’s note: A previous version of this column erroneously stated that the Walker recall effort had 1.9 million signatures to recall the government. This is the total number of signatures collected to recall the Governor, Lt. Governor, and four state senators. The number of signatures to recall Governor Walker was over one million. The above version has been corrected. 

You can access all of The Nation‘s coverage of Citizens United by clicking here.

Nothing speaks more to our country’s tortured views on gender, marriage and power than the reception of the recently released book The Obamas. Jodi Kantor’s biography of the first couple has set off a firestorm of complaints about the accuracy of events described in the book and a debate about the author’s claim of insight into her primary characters. At the source of these controversies lies the unresolved tension of a culture that expects women to achieve as highly as men but first ladies to take a back seat to their presidents.

Sales of political books rise and fall on the same sensational rhythms as our political media, so it’s not surprising that the marketing buzz leads with dramatic stories about friction between the first couple—especially Michelle—and their staff. The most repeated one tells of an alleged blowup by former press secretary Robert Gibbs after being admonished by senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, who was reportedly displeased with his response to a story about claims by French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy that Michelle said living in the White House was “hell.” In response to media noise about this incident, the White House press shop aggressively dismissed any hint of tension in the administration.

Voters don’t expect calm to prevail in the pressure cooker of politics, and it’s not news to anyone that West Wing staffers sometimes lose their tempers or use foul language. Many first ladies have been accused of overstepping acceptable boundaries in finding a comfortable position in the White House. So the fact that a defense of Michelle Obama’s character feels necessary in the face of such minor skirmishes is testament to cultural contradictions and collective anxieties about recent trends in professional identities, in marriage and in limits we place on women in power. In all these areas, our accomplished first lady—with her Ivy League degrees and professional achievements—is caught between nostalgia and how we
actually live today.

Despite some reports, The Obamas paints a portrait of a sophisticated woman whose educated opinions inform her aspirations and her family’s new role. So Michelle’s need to reject the “angry black woman” mantle on CBS This Morning made women everywhere wince with frustrated familiarity. African-American women bear a unique burden, but strong professional women of all races are at risk of being classified as angry, humorless or just plain bitchy. Studies have shown that men who get angry are often rewarded in their career, while women who express anger tend to be penalized. Add in a slew of stories claiming that women have benefited from the economic downturn at the expense of men, and the result is exacerbated gender tensions in a time of job scarcity. Combined with statistics about greater attendance and graduation rates for women in higher education, a story is emerging of a decline in men’s pre-eminent position in society. Although
reality does not bear out this picture, there’s a growing backlash against real and perceived female empowerment that finds easy expression in criticism of our first lady.

At the same time, everything about marriage is being questioned. Marriage equality appears increasingly inevitable, while straight marriage is on the decline. A recent Pew poll showed that 43 percent of Gen Xers believe marriage is becoming
obsolete. New emphasis on professional achievement for women means that when straight people marry, reasons for coupling and roles within marriage are changing. Yet, because marriage is a beacon of familiarity in a chaotic world, it remains core to how we evaluate our leaders. The Republican primary has been full of stories about Herman Cain’s infidelities, Newt Gingrich’s string of divorces and Michele Bachmann’s admitted submission to her enigmatic husband, Marcus. In this tempest, Kantor portrays the Obamas’ marriage as filled with mutual respect and joy, but one that has had to transform from a partnership of equals to one that satisfies a media-imposed ideal. Men are now lauded for choosing partners who are their intellectual match. But powerful first ladies are still portrayed as intrusive and their husbands as henpecked.

In an effort to fit Michelle’s role into a traditional profile, the media constantly remind us that her work is on presumably soft subjects, primarily her hallmark cause to end childhood obesity. Attacks from the right against the first lady’s pursuit of that goal have been downright misogynistic. Rush Limbaugh claimed she is a poor messenger for healthy eating because she could not be a swimsuit model, and Representative Jim Sensenbrenner said the first lady has no business lecturing on healthy eating with her own “large posterior.” Slurs aside, what critics miss is that this campaign is not aimed at soft targets. The food and beverage industry is a powerful lobbying force, spending nearly
$16.3 million in the 2008 cycle to defeat initiatives—like a “soda tax” and limits on aggressive advertising aimed at kids—that would encourage a healthier diet and thus cut into its massive profits. To tackle childhood obesity, we’ll have to confront complicated issues of race, class, entrenched corporate power and access to healthy food. In a move that illustrates her shrewd political mind and her commitment and compassion, this first lady found an unimpeachable signature issue that could be fundamentally transformative and yet is still considered within bounds for her position.

The Obamas paints a hopeful portrait of a modern marriage that has withstood the adversity that comes with the most powerful office in the world. Michelle Obama is depicted as a woman initially reluctant to enter public life but who, as Kantor’s narrative progresses, uses her intellect and moral compass to become both a savvy politician and an adept advocate for her causes. The result is more than an insightful biography of one of the most important couples of our time; it is a parable for where we stand as a country in our expectation of gender roles and partnership in a changing world.

New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor released a new book yesterday about the Obamas titled, appropriately, The Obamas. It’s clear from promotional materials and Kantor’s own interviews that what’s different about this book is its positioning of first lady Michelle Obama as the pivotal character in the unfolding drama of this presidency. In doing so, The Obamas takes a hard look at the adaptations and transitions required when a partnership of equals suddenly becomes a scrutinized hierarchy. Kantor also offers a glimpse into the tensions of a culture that expects our women to achieve as highly as our men but our first ladies to take a back seat to their presidents. The result is a sympathetic portrait of both Obamas that could help to humanize an administration criticized as being aloof and inaccessible.

Political book sales rise and fall on the same sensational rhythms as our political media, so it’s not surprising that the marketing buzz leads with a handful of dramatic anecdotes about friction between the new first couple—especially Michelle—and their staff. Even Kantor’s own chosen excerpt in the Times hypes the most incendiary and oft-repeated story: one where press secretary Robert Gibbs blows up after being admonished by Valerie Jarrett for being slow to respond to a leaked conversation in the French press in which Michelle Obama confides to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy that living in the White House is “hell.”

The result is preliminary reporting full of predictable media Sturm und Drang about unrest and hurt feelings in the East and West wings. In reaction mode, the White House press shop sent Politico’s Mike Allen the requisite push-back memo listing nit-picky inaccuracies in an attempt to undermine the core charge. The list includes quibbles about a particular outfit choice by Michelle Obama and the nationality of a family visiting the White House. (If you enjoy media one-upmanship, here’s Ben Smith from his new perch at Buzzfeed finding the inaccuracies in the White House list of inaccuracies.)

Still, by centralizing the marriage as core to the narrative of the Obama presidency, Kantor is on to something important. Alongside policy concerns, people are hungry to understand the character of the people in charge of our country. Voters don’t expect calmness to prevail in the pressure cooker of politics, and it’s not news to anyone that staffers sometimes lose their tempers or use foul language in the West Wing. But in voters’ never-ending quest to discern the substance and values in a political world littered with gossip and posturing, insight into family relationships provides a critical indicator of integrity, of authenticity, of that intangible quality of character that matters to three of four voters.

The way a candidate approaches marriage serves as one window into the equation of shared values. It’s no accident that GOP opponents have focused as much time attacking Newt Gingrich for his string of divorces and for his decision to leave his second wife while she was hospitalized for cancer as they have on his toxic political record as Speaker of the House. Most Americans cannot picture themselves doing anything similar. Nor is it surprising that Americans have been fascinated by the union between Michele Bachmann and her enigmatic husband, Marcus. From her pronouncement of her own submissiveness in their marriage to his decision to spend the day before the Iowa caucus shopping for dog glasses, the bizarre story of their marriage added to a series of stumbles that ultimately sank her.

In contrast, Kantor portrays the Obamas’ marriage as not only filled with mutual respect and joy but also as reflective of the modern complications and challenges that many Americans face juggling two careers and family concerns. Covering the 2008 election made Kantor aware of how hungry voters—especially coveted women voters—were for this kind of story.

“I was inspired in part to write this book when talking to women voters on the trail in 2008," she told me in a phone conversation. "I would try to ask them questions about candidates, and they would want to talk about the media. They felt Hillary Clinton was being treated in a very sexist way, and I wasn’t sure that I agreed with that. There’s a kind of nastiness to politics and they were seeing a woman subjected to it for the first time. Still, I could tell there was not enough out there to speak to them and their needs and lives. There was a huge underserved market of readers out there who were perhaps looking for different kind of story [about our leaders].” 

Kantor answered these concerns with The Obamas, an honest portrayal of people who are put under unprecedented scrutiny with unusual rapidity. Neither of them had the experience of being from political and wealthy families, like the Kennedys who shared their youth as first couple. Nor had they the practice of presenting their modern marriage to the public like the Clintons had from living in the Arkansas governor’s mansion. The added strain of being the groundbreaking African-American first family would take most people—and marriages—to the breaking point. Instead, Kantor’s story is one of balance and grace, a couple who navigates an almost impossible situation with not only their relationship but their noble aspirations intact.

For a president who has been criticized for holding the public at arm’s length, the portrayal of him in the book can add texture to his humanity at a time voters are looking to reconnect to the incumbent. And while pundits speak of a potential enthusiasm gap among women voters, the story of the First Lady’s influence over her devoted husband’s agenda can help give confidence to a coveted demographic that can secure margins of victory in tight races.

Ms. Kantor writes in the book, “Every day, he met with advisers who emphasized the practical realities of Washington, who reminded him of poll numbers; he spent his nights with Michelle, who talked about moral imperatives, aides said, who reminded him again and again that they were there to do good, to avoid being distracted by political noise, to be bold.”

Rather than protesting, the White House should embrace the book as one that admirably depicts the first couple as thriving partners, even as they struggle against the constraints of antiquated roles in leading the country into a new millennium.

I was recently asked whether I’m optimistic or pessimistic about the coming year, and my mind drifted to a talk I heard just before the new year by the author Deborah Tannen. An expert in cross-gender and family communication, Tannen focuses on “conversation rituals—automatic ways of speaking that affect the responses we get when we talk to others:" basically, how individual perceptions of joint interactions silently give shape to collective reality. Husband and wife fight because she thinks he wants genuine feedback on work, rather than the positive reinforcement he’s craving. Guy at work is perceived as a bully by his team, when really, as one of six siblings, he learned young to yell loud if he wanted to be heard. Tannen argues that differences in these rituals are often at the center of most dysfunction in relationships, professional or personal. Changing up the conversational rituals breaks up the pattern and catalyzes progress.

Listening to her got me thinking about broader conversational rituals, and the way our politics, culture and economy have long been defined by a predictable equation of who says what when. Elected officials posture largely for the political elite, pundits have focused on small insider-y details that feel irrelevant to the masses, corporate titans repeat economic myths with little review and people increasingly gravitate towards media outlets that reinforce their own existing belief system.

But 2011 showed evidence of a complete rewire of the conversational rituals that got us in our current stagnant state. People spoke out of turn, people spoke who didn’t have proper credentials, people spoke unmediated to each other, people spoke. Period. The net effect was a leap forward a system reboot in how we experience, and thus shape, our worlds. Consider:

Cultural: #IranElection—OK, I know the Green Revolution was in 2009, but those days in June broke ground for new patterns of information sharing and solidarity tactics that were pervasive through the Arab Spring and forever changed our conversational rituals around global events. Within hours, it was clear that traditional systems used to interpret and compartmentalize events within our dominant foreign policy lens were dissolving in the face of the individual accounts endlessly streaming on Twitter. Primary accounts and unfiltered images passed from virtual hand to virtual hand in seconds, and they not only expanded the content that defined our opinions, but they forced us to reconsider our own role in the unfolding events. In the face of immediate heroism and graphic brutality, the divisions between actor and witness became blurred. In our simple choices of whom to follow, what to re-tweet and whether to color our avatars green, we immediately and publicly defined our own relationship to events unfolding across the globe. The ripple effects quickly reached unprepared pundits and statesmen who were no longer asked to explain events to a passive audience but were forced to respond to active participants in a vibrant global experience.  

Economic: #Sharable—Despite being in its infancy, the rise of the sharable economy and what its aficionados call “collaborative consumption” is already changing our conversational rituals around consumerism and ownership. Why go to a hotel when you can get a more intimate and less expensive experience from booking a room in someone’s house on airbnb? Why go to a bank if you can have a more direct a personal relationship with your investor on Prosper.com? Direct lending even extended to #OWS when MoveOn.org set up Occupy Wish List which allowed different encampments around the country to post needs and individuals to provide for them. Taking a centralized middleman out of economic exchange changes the equation on everything from employment to profit models. But it gets really interesting when we realize that the byproduct of peer-to-peer models is the inherent shift from the central organizing principle for consumers from “ownership” to “access.” If I only use my power drill two hours a week, why am I paying for it full time, when I can have one for a fraction of the cost at SwapTool.com? There are very few bad actors on these sites, because the networked community outs them quickly and they are marginalized by the group. The result is a level of confidence among members that allows goods and services to flow freely with promise of payment. In addition to fundamentally changing the conversational rituals around consumerism, the peer-to-peer service platforms—with their horizontal trust-based relationships—should serve as a beacon for every political organizer who could never seem to crack the coveted “Organizing 2.0” code.

Political: #OWS—From the moment it became a story, Occupy Wall Street scuttled entrenched political conversation rituals and has continued to do so with remarkable durability. Elected officials bobbed and swayed before questions about the protests, trying to decide which side was the most politically rewarding. Pundits rushed, and failed, to compartmentalize the flocks of occupiers within an existing familiar context. The notoriously silent 1 percent have gone public in an unprecedented defense of their right to be rich. The December 17 protests did not merit much air time in traditional outlets, but the Ustream feed had tens of thousands of viewers consistently throughout the day. Even when the media finally settled on a familiar theme of “police versus protesters,” occupiers spoke directly to one another and a sympathetic public to invert the normal stereotyped roles. The most searing and lasting image of the protests came not from a cable news crew or a New York Times photographer. The cell phone video of protesters being tear-gassed at point-blank range passed like wildfire via every medium possible and spawned a generation of pepper-spray art.

The unfamiliarity of the brand, the contagious nature of the tactic and the lack of recognizable figures speaking for the movement created the perfect storm to shatter the political conversational rituals. While others lament the lack of #OWS demands, organizational infrastructure or political plan, I applaud their most significant contribution of disrupting that conversational norms and throwing entrenched power off their talking points.

In 1994, when the concept of conversational ritual was new, Tannen wrote an OpEd for USAToday titled, “You Can Talk Your Way Through The Glass Ceiling.” The piece explains her focus by stating, “I want to give everyone more control through awareness of how ways of speaking affect getting credit, getting heard and getting promoted—right up through the glass ceiling.” I’m not sure that the democratic glass ceiling will be shattered in 2012, but the conversations in all the areas that matter this past year make me hopeful we’re getting closer.

Congress officially adjourned for the year yesterday when Representative Michael Fitzpatrick (R-PA) brought down the gavel and declared class dismissed until January 2012. When Democrats protested that the majority had not allowed a vote on the bipartisan Senate deal to avoid raising the payroll tax on 160 million American workers, the GOP cut the microphones and cameras so Americans could not hear their protestations. This remarkable move prompted C-SPAN—responsible for filming the sessions so Americans can keep tabs on their lawmakers—to publicly exonerate themselves, tweeting, “C-SPAN has no control over the U.S. House TV cameras—the Speaker of the House does.”

It’s as if Speaker Boehner thinks that by shutting down the cameras, turning off the lights and going home, the movie is over. Only—to state what’s obvious to anyone who is not in the DC fog—this “movie” is a real-life nightmare for too many Americans. If this were a screenplay, this move would be a perfect way to wrap up the year defined by hyper-partisan gridlock. Cutting the C-SPAN feed that offers at least some transparency to Congress’s machinations puts an exclamation point on the ruthless serial political brinkmanship that now stands in for the business of governing the country.

Pundits and Democratic party officials have been quick to point out that Republicans bear the brunt of responsibility for this one. Representative Fitzpatrick closed the session as Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD) was trying to bring up the Senate deal, and he literally walked out of the chamber with his Republican colleagues, leaving Hoyer to narrate their exit:

“You’re walking out, you’re walking away, just as so many Republicans have walked away from middle class taxpayers, the unemployed, and… those who will be seeking medical assistance from their doctors.”

See it for yourself here:

To add insult to injury, as this scene was playing out in the House chamber, Republican leaders were posing for a photo in Speaker Boehner’s office, mugging with pride at their “leadership” in refusing to bend.

By attaching poison-pill provisions to the original House bill and then refusing to take up the stop-gap Senate version, these “leaders” have sealed Americans’ fate. They will head into the New Year expecting somewhere between $900 to $1200 less money in their pockets in 2012. In real life, that’s a lot of money and a huge hit to many families already on the edge. This move will force people to choose among basic necessities: heat or food? Medical care or gas in the car to get to work?

Democrats are correct to loudly blame Republicans for this debacle. If there ever was a time for finger-pointing, this is it. Republicans are gambling that if they sink this bill, voters will take out their frustration at the tax hikes and hard times on the Dems, costing them at the ballot box in November. The scary thing is, they might be right. Even if the Dems win the blame game in the battle over tax hikes, it’s not the same as finding ways to provide relief for hurting people. And the GOP taking short-term hits in the polls should not be mistaken for Dems winning back the hearts and minds of the American people.

A brand new Gallup poll shows that Congressional approval ratings are at 11 percent—the lowest since Gallup started keeping track in 1974. Though the poll was taken prior to the recent antics on the payroll tax, the reasons are still obvious enough. The list of trust violations perpetrated by Congress on the American people in 2011 alone runs long: the budget showdown, the theatrics about the debt ceiling, the fight to renew unemployment insurance, the formation of the so-called supercommittee spawned by their refusal to agree on the debt ceiling… all of these impasses have served to reinforce in the American people a belief that Congresspeople are more interested in winning their next election than mending the fraying national economy—that they are keen on keeping their jobs, but can’t be bothered to do them.

I’m thrilled to see the Democrats calling out the Republicans for holding regular Americans’ needs hostage to their 1 percenter priorities. It’s a good first step, but alone, it’s not sufficient to stop Dems in Congress from being tarred with the same distrust and disgust as their ideological opponents. That’s what the Gallup poll shows, and Republicans are counting on it: in a change election, they don’t think they have to maintain high favorability to win. They simply have to make sure that the Dems can be accused of the same wrongdoing and demand their chance to do better.

Obviously, this would have dire and long-term consequences for the Democratic party, which remains our country’s best hope for genuine legislative reform on everything from jobs to the creeping climate catastrophe. But the stakes are so much higher than the next election. The willingness of Americans to believe in our democracy hinges not only on how economic issues are litigated in Congress but on how much we cab trust the forces litigating.

And to win on that score, Democrats need to do much more than point fingers at the primary offenders. Blame is not change; establishing fault is not progress. Americans need to see Democrats fight unyieldingly, with everything they’ve got, on the critical issues. Wherever possible, executive orders should be given that will relieve the pain of ordinary Americans. When that’s not possible, votes should be extracted from recalcitrant Republicans by whatever means possible, and those who continue to grandstand should be made to pay at home in their districts and be made national examples of all that is wrong with our government. This means naming names, not defaulting to generic labels. It means making people uncomfortable and not playing nice. It means talking to Americans like they are fellow travelers in the fight to restore sanity to our politics and not just voters in the next election. Above all, we need to stop pretending like if we can only get the rules right, the other team will play nice. Far from looking for ways to use the power of government to alleviate pain and build a strong nation, the Republican goal remains undermining the structures that allow government to function, or to “drown it in the bathtub,” in the infamous words of Grover Norquist, the party’s ideological godfather.

Unless there’s a blueprint for finally and fully breaking the Republican strategy of hostage-taking, they will continue to be perceived as the more powerful party, and Dems will be left trumpeting their own weakness to avoid blame. As Americans become more and more desperate for any kind of move out of the current predicament, we risk increasing numbers being drawn to power over principle.

The Occupy movement has made the need to recognize this difference far more acute. The movement has proven that there’s a critical mandate to move the needle; our political system is currently stretched to the breaking point. The goal of the Republicans is to edge it past the breaking point; Democrats have to make people believe that government can be a force for good and is worth bringing back from the brink. That’s a happy ending in the political movie of our lives that we can all get behind.

Under pressure form a small right-wing group, Lowe’s—the world’s second-largest home improvement retailer—pulled ads this week from TLC’s new television show, All-American Muslim. The show follows five Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan, as they go about their business—marrying, having children, running businesses and generally being human and Muslim in post 9/11 America. The company’s decision came after a group called the Florida Family Association asked its members to e-mail Lowe’s and voice their outrage, claiming All-American Muslim is “propaganda” that is “clearly designed to counter legitimate and present-day concerns about many Muslims who are advancing Islamic fundamentalism and Sharia law.”

The Lowe’s decision has prompted some pushback—a boycott threat from Russell Simmons, statements of displeasure from Congressmen Keith Ellison and John Conyers and protest petitions from MoveOn.org and CREDO. But regardless of the company’s next move (currently, it is holding firm), the speed of its surrender to an extreme group peddling outright bigotry should give us pause and force a closer look at how the landscape has shifted in a country that claims religious tolerance as a founding principle. Simply put, the bigots won way too easily. 

Having run similar campaigns targeting companies who advertise on objectionable shows, I know how formidable a challenge it is to get a profit-focused company to take a stand on anything perceived as remotely politically controversial. Businesses have an inherent and driving incentive to appeal to as many potential customers as possible, and any move they make in this space risks making news that alienates customers on one side of the issue or the other. Successful campaigns generally either spend months painstakingly establishing a clear pattern of abhorrent behavior on a show, or successfully capitalize on specific indefensible remarks by one individual. The campaign against Glenn Beck for instance, did both, and eventually resulted in a demonstrable loss of hundreds of advertisers and hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue. But this kind of action required almost two years and the mobilization of multiple organizations with millions of members to document and publicize dozens of instances of Glen Beck’s making racist, anti-Semitic and even violent statements.

Neither the content of All-American Muslim or the strength of the campaign against it rise anywhere close to the levels of other successful advertiser campaigns. In place of Glenn Beck’s claim that the president is a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people,” last week’s sixty-minute episode of AAM depicted a newlywed adjusting to her non-Muslim spouse’s dog and new parents grappling with having an infant in the house. In place of many prominent African-American and Jewish groups and leaders calling Beck out for his race-baiting, we have the Florida Family Association and its modest list of members—hardly a political powerhouse—to be reckoned with. That equation just doesn’t seem to add up.

Unless, that is, we take a hard look at the cultural context we’re dealing with. To understand the shifts in our country that create the toxic foundation for the Lowe’s decision, consider this disturbing report issued in September by the Brookings Institute and the Public Religion Research Institute on American attitudes towards Muslims. Among the top-line findings:

§ nearly half of Americans would be made uncomfortable by a woman wearing a burqa in their presence, a mosque being built in their neighborhood or Muslim men praying at an airport;  

§ 41 percent would be uncomfortable if a teacher at the elementary school in their community were Muslim;

§ 47 percent said the values of Islam are at odds with American values.

This shows a clear, if passive, bias against public displays of Muslim identification in American society. While these numbers do not represent a clear majority of opinion, the number of people openly expressing discomfort with Muslims is enough to create fertile ground for the growth of a more potent strain of bigotry.

There was good news in the survey too:

§ 88 percent agreed that “America was founded on the idea of religious freedom for everyone, including religious groups that are unpopular”;

§ 95 percent said all religious books should be treated with respect;

§ two-thirds said there should be strict separation between church and state.

This shows a near-universal commitment to generic religious tolerance. But in a matchup between acute and targeted hatred and generic tolerance with passive bias, hatred will prevail.

Expressions of outrage, holding Lowe’s to account and calling out the haters by name are all important components of beating back the tide of bigotry already widespread across our country. But without a parallel strategy to combat the more pervasive and insidious passive bias, we risk a whole generation’s becoming “carriers” of bigotry. Once these attitudes are openly accepted as the cultural norm, the groundwork is laid for escalating anti-Muslim fanaticism that could seriously jeopardize the American experience for all citizens.

A second (and even more marginal) group, the American Decency Association, has also weighed in support of FFA’s pressure campaign against Lowe’s. Bill Johnson, its president, stated that the show is designed to make the Muslim community “appear attractive.” “And that’s what makes it so dangerous,” he told the right-wing news site OneNewsNow. “We’ve been watching it over these several weeks that it’s been broadcast, and they stay very conveniently away from [mentioning] jihad or anything of that nature.” It apparently never occurred to him that that might be because these families have no relationship to jihad, or anything of that nature.

What we really need to combat passive anti-Muslim bias is exactly what All-American Muslim is doing—exposing non-Muslim Americans to the utterly normal lives of our Muslim neighbors. Ideally this would not require special shows but would be done in the context of the mainstream shows and media that define “normal” America. For now, that will have to wait. But here’s hoping that this controversy brings All-American Muslim some new viewers. 

With the “occupations” sweeping the country, the failure of the jobs bill and an alleged assassination plot against the Saudi Ambassador, the shocking news out of Alabama in the last few weeks garnered little notice. So if you missed it, Alabama began implementation of a draconian immigration law (HB56), codifying a new era of fear and racism in our country. HB56 turns Alabama into a police state reminiscent of the old Soviet Union, making it a crime to appear in public without your papers in order. It requires proof of citizenship in routine transactions. Schools need to see papers for children and their parents before fulfilling their core duty of educating children. In moves worthy of a dystopian late-night B-movie, law enforcement is now required to stop anyone who “appears” illegal.

One hyper-real image making its way around the Internet shows a sign posted on the door of a utility office demanding a driver’s license to pay your bill. Failure to show proof of citizenship, the sign warned, could result in termination of water services to your home. Punishment will now be meted out not only to people without papers, but also to those who employ, house or assist them in any way. A lawsuit to stop HB56 filed on behalf of Episcopalian, Methodist and Roman Catholic churches notes that “Alabama’s Anti-Immigration Law will make it a crime to follow God’s command to be Good Samaritans.”

On October 14, a circuit court of appeals blocked two sections of the law regarding schools and random checks of citizenship, but left the rest intact. Despite this late reprieve, damage has already been done. Through official reports, whispered stories and calls to a hastily set up support hotline, the human damage is starting to come into sharp focus. Two thousand children didn’t show up for school the day after the law went into effect—worried parents kept them home, fearing arrest or separation. A man told the hotline his full-term pregnant wife was too terrified to go to the hospital to give birth. He said they would stay at home and hope for the best. Yard sales are a common sight, with locals picking through belongings of former neighbors trying to sell what they can before fleeing the state. Many won’t even leave their homes for groceries, and church workers are on overtime delivering as much sustenance as possible. Undocumented parents with children who are citizens face heartbreaking choices—a teenager giving up a hard-won college scholarship to remain with her family; a newly engaged couple choosing between being torn apart or living a life in hiding.

The architects of this mandate claim that if we drive undocumented workers away, there will be more jobs for American citizens. Years of evidence and early reports from Alabama tell a different story. Famers are already reporting a crisis in their workforce that will hobble harvests and drive food prices higher. One farmer reported that he had only eleven citizens apply for the picking jobs after his crew left, only one stayed to take the job after learning what was entailed—and that man quit after one day. Alabama farmer Chad Smith told Forbes, “The tomatoes are rotting in the vine, and there is very little we can do.” “We will be lucky to be in business next year,” he added.

The theory goes that if American citizens won’t subject themselves to the same backbreaking conditions for the same meager pay that immigrants are forced to live with, employers will have to raise wages and pass along the cost to consumers. But with poverty in the state over 17 percent, the disposable income required to absorb these costs just doesn’t exist right now. And with studies showing nearly one-third of Alabama households already not getting enough to eat, letting crops rot in the fields is downright immoral.

The economic impact doesn’t end with the crops; it affects everyone in the state. As Randy Christian, chief deputy in Birmingham’s Jefferson County, points out, his county is already trying to avoid filing the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history; enforcing this law will cost police money they do not have: “I am more concerned on where we will put the ones we detain. We have a jail built for 900 inmates that is already overcrowded and averaging 1,200 inmates a day. It’s another unfunded mandate to a county struggling to keep its head above water.”

So, if the economic calculation is so off, how did we get to this moment when a counterproductive proposal, rooted in racism, becomes the law of at least part of our land? Support for comprehensive federal immigration reform has been steady for almost a decade. In the latest Pew survey, nearly 76 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of independents supported a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants—as did more than 44 percent of Republicans.

Yet, from the Comprehensive Immigration Act of 2006 to the failure of the DREAM Act in 2010, we’ve been completely unable to advance reasonable and humane solutions at the federal level, no matter who is in the White House. The “why” is a messy mix of racism, elite obstructionism and politicians guilty of playing on xenophobia to win races and power. But when a population is denied a rational solution to an identified problem, the ground becomes fertile for extreme measures to take root.

For those—and there are many—who say “Well, that’s just Alabama,” I would point your attention to Arizona, Georgia and other states that have already taken steps in the same direction. History is full of irrefutable evidence that when the economy gets bad, scapegoats are targeted, and the worst instincts of humanity reveal themselves. Alabama has asked its citizens to cross invisible boundaries of humanity—waging political battles on the backs of school children, cutting access to the most basic human needs, like water. The faces fleetingly captured in the media in Alabama before disappearing into the shadows are victims of a political system that encourages grandstanding over proble- solving. This dark response to our country’s need for genuine economic reform stands in stark contrast to the hope so many are experiencing from the thousands of occupiers standing together in parks all over this country demanding change. Fake fixes come in all shapes and sizes, from diverting the conversation from jobs to a debt ceiling, to pointing the long finger of blame at those with the least power in our society. Alabama’s latest experiment shows us that we can’t reclaim our economy by surrendering our humanity.

Most of the endless rehashing of the debt deal has correctly focused on the fact that corporate interests and Tea Party politics have prevailed again, at the expense of the middle class, children in poverty, students and the elderly. But too little attention has been paid to the blow this drawn-out debate has dealt to the foundational principles of our democracy.

A CNN/ORC International poll conducted after the deal shows that a whopping 77 percent of Americans believe that elected officials acted like “spoiled children.” The yawning gap between the mindset of decision-makers in Washington and the daily reality of most Americans is a grave threat to what organizers call “little-d democracy.” This is about neither the Democratic Party nor the procedural machinery by which our nominally democratic government operates. “Little-d democracy” is the basic idea that ordinary Americans, regardless of rank or stature, can have a voice in shaping their destiny.

When all is said and done, the process that created the debt deal may end up being as destructive as the deal’s effects. While the country watched helplessly, each new turn and every talking head in the saga demonstrated that ordinary people had no real part to play. Unless we employed an army of lobbyists or had a key to the Congressional washroom, it seemed, there was no reconciling the debate on the Hill with the needs and desires of those most affected by the final deal.

Some points to consider:

§ For months, poll after poll showed that rank-and-file Americans of all political persuasions believe that revenues (the nice way to say taxes) should be a part of any deal. Seventy-two percent of Americans polled between July 14 and July 17 said taxes should be raised on those making more than $250,000 per year, including 73 percent of independents and a stunning 54 percent of Republicans. Fifty-nine percent wanted taxes raised on oil and gas companies, including 60 percent of independents and 55 percent of Republicans. Yet Republican legislators refused to vote for any deal that included revenues, and the Democratic leadership capitulated, even though the GOP’s position was exactly the opposite of what large majorities wanted.

§ In the week leading up to the vote, more than 600 rallies were held around the country supporting the passage of a clean debt-ceiling bill and protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from cuts. MoveOn.org alone made more than 125,000 calls to Congress to support a clean debt-ceiling raise. Coverage of all of these rallies was minimal at best. There was also one Tea Party rally, which, despite the impressive resources of its corporate backers, was sparsely attended. Yet the talk in Washington almost exclusively centered on what the Tea Party would accept.

§ Respected economists on both sides of the partisan divide agree that cutting spending during a recession is all but certain to make things worse. This consensus was hardly mentioned in the debate and not at all reflected in the outcome.

§ The press skewed coverage away from reporting the facts in favor of presenting both parties’ claims equally, regardless of facts. As a result, most major media reported that both sides were compromising when, in fact, the GOP—the party less representative of the views of most Americans—was winning far more concessions and compromising far less.

§ The president’s simple reminder to the American people that they can and should communicate with those they voted into office set off a firestorm of debate on cable news and other news outlets about whether this was an act designed to anger Republicans and whether it was appropriate for the president to make such an ask. Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC asked Democratic strategist Bill Burton if the president should really be taking his case to the American people and if the crisis would be better solved by leaders meeting behind closed doors.

§ Finally, the construction of a new “Super Congress,” also nicknamed the Gang of Twelve, is yet further separation between the deal-makers and the people whose lives hang in the balance. In 2008 a similar issue arose when it appeared that unelected “superdelegates” might decide the outcome of the Democratic primary. A nationwide frenzy about direct democracy resulted. Contrast that response with the lack of such an outcry over the Super Congress—evidence, perhaps, of a weary citizenry that has given up.

This combination of factors—overlooked citizen action, disregarded public opinion, unheeded expert warnings, uncritical press coverage that ignores the facts and denigrates citizen participation—creates conditions for a broad-scale disengagement from the processes that nominally allow citizens to participate in governance. In fact, when a Washington Post/Pew Research Center poll asked for single-word characterizations of the budget negotiations, “ridiculous” was at the top of the list, along with “disgusting” and “stupid.” Seventy-two percent responded with a negative word, and only 2 percent had positive feelings to offer. This is a far more disturbing trend than what we would have seen if the poll had reflected voter anger and frustration. Anger moves people. Disgust and contempt for government create apathy.

We are coming off a decade of unprecedented organizing opportunity. With the emergence of online engagement and social media, Americans were beginning to feel that they had a way to participate strategically in the conversations in Washington that shape their lives. This president was the first one elected using broad engagement strategies, and his election changed the national psyche by demonstrating to millions of Americans that their participation could pay off and democracy could work. The disappointment about the debt deal is especially acute against the backdrop of the record levels of participation, enthusiasm and hope generated during the 2008 election.

In between, we had the 2010 Citizens United decision, which rebuilt the gates around the Capitol that the online revolution had supposedly crashed. Corporate cash, already omnipresent in lobbying, dominated the airwaves; and thirty-second ads, played over and over again, drowned out the millions of organized voices crying out for change. That led to the 2010 election of radical candidates representing a tiny minority of Americans who were more concerned about the federal deficit than they were about joblessness and the overall economy.

The debt deal’s final resolution of what essentially amounted to a hostage crisis by that minority represents a complete unmooring of official decision-making from the will of the American people. The past few weeks could be the final straw that leads to a collapse of confidence not just in this government but in the American project of self-governance. At a time of so much great need in our country, sending the message that citizen involvement is futile is dangerous not just to the substance of one debate but to the core principles that allow us to call ourselves a democracy. Are we really prepared to risk that?

Most of the endless rehashing of the debt deal has correctly focused on the fact that corporate interests and Tea Party politics have prevailed again, at the expense of the middle class, children in poverty, students and the elderly. But in understanding the long-term impact of this drawn-out debate, too little attention has been paid to the blow it has dealt to the foundational principles of our democracy.

A CNN poll conducted after the deal shows that a whopping 77 percent of Americans believe that elected officials acted like “spoiled children.” The yawning gap between the mindset of decision-makers in Washington and the daily reality of most Americans is a grave threat to what organizers call “little-d democracy.” This is about neither the Democratic Party nor the procedural machinery by which our nominally democratic government operates. “Little-d democracy” is the basic idea that ordinary Americans, regardless of rank or stature, can have a voice in shaping our own destiny.

When all is said and done, the process that created the deal may end up being as destructive as the deal’s effects. While the country watched helplessly, each new turn and every talking head in the seemingly endless saga demonstrated that ordinary people had no real part to play. Unless we employ an army of lobbyists or have a key to the Congressional washroom, it seemed there was no reconciling the debate on the Hill with the needs and desires of those most affected by the final deal.

Some data points to consider:

§ For months, poll after poll has showed that rank-and-file Americans of all political persuasions believe that revenues (the nice way to say taxes) should be a part of any deal to resolve our debt crisis. Seventy-two percent of Americans polled between July 14 and July 17 said taxes should be raised on those making more than $250,000 per year, including 73 percent of independents and a stunning 54 percent of Republicans. Fifty-nine percent wanted taxes raised on oil and gas companies, including 60 percent of independents and 55 percent of Republicans. Yet Republicans refused to vote for a deal that included any revenues at all, and the Democratic leadership capitulated despite the fact that the position was exactly the opposite of what large majorities wanted.

§ In the week leading up to the vote, more than 600 rallies were held around the country supporting the passage of a clean debt-ceiling bill and protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from cuts. MoveOn.org alone made more than 125,000 calls to Congress to support a clean debt-ceiling raise. Coverage of all of these rallies was minimal at best. There was also one Tea Party rally, which, despite the impressive resources of their corporate backers, was sparsely attended. Yet the talk in Washington almost exclusively centered on what the Tea Party would accept.

§ Respected economists on both sides of the partisan divide agreed that cutting spending during a recession is all but certain to make things worse. This consensus was hardly mentioned in the debate and not at all reflected in the outcome.

§ As documented by Ari Melber in The Nation, the press skewed coverage away from reporting the facts in favor of presenting both parties’ claims equally, regardless of facts. As a result, most major media reported that both sides were compromising when, in fact, the GOP—the party least representative of the views of most Americans—was winning far more concessions and compromising far less.

§ The president’s simple reminder to the American people that they can and should communicate with those they voted into office set off a firestorm of debate on cable news and news outlets about whether this was an act designed to anger Republicans and whether it was appropriate for the president to make such an ask. Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC asked Democratic strategist Bill Burton if the president should really be taking his case to the American people and if the crisis would be better solved by leaders meeting behind closed doors.

§ Finally, the construction of a new “Super Congress,” also nicknamed the Gang of Twelve, is yet further separation between the dealmakers and the people whose lives hang in the balance. Contrast the disgusted response of most Americans to this announcement with the reaction to a very similar issue, the role of unelected “superdelegates” in the primary election of 2008. The very idea that superdelegates might be able to decide the outcome of the race lit up a nationwide frenzy about direct democracy. The lack of such an outcry here can be seen as evidence of a weary citizenry giving up.

This combination of factors—overlooked citizen action, disregarded citizen opinion, unheeded expert warnings, uncritical press coverage that ignores the facts and denigrates participation by ordinary citizens to boot—creates conditions for a broad-scale disengagement from the processes that nominally allow them to participate in governance. In fact, when a Washington Post poll last week asked for single-word characterizations of the budget negotiations, “disgusting” was at the top of the list, along with “ridiculous” and “stupid.” Seventy-two percent responded with a negative word, and only 2 percent had positive feelings to offer. This is a far more disturbing trend than one that reflects anger and frustration. Anger moves people. Disgust and a view that government is stupid creates apathy.

Some may say that this is business as usual in Washington and that getting frustrated at party bosses is as old as our democracy, so why am I making so much of this now? Well, for a couple of reasons. We are coming off a decade of unprecedented organizing opportunity. With the emergence of online engagement and social media, Americans were beginning to feel as though they had a way to strategically participate in the conversations in Washington that shape their lives. This president was the first one elected using broad engagement strategies, and his election changed the national psyche by demonstrating to millions of Americans that their political participation could pay off and democracy could work. The disappointment about the debt deal is especially acute against the backdrop of the record levels of political participation, enthusiasm and hope generated during the 2008 election.

In between, we had the 2010 Citizens United decision, which rebuilt those gates around the capitol that the online revolution had supposedly crashed. Corporate cash, already omnipresent in lobbying, dominated the airwaves; and thirty-second ads, played over and over once again, drowned out the millions of organized voices crying for change. That led to the 2010 election of radical candidates representing a tiny minority of Americans who were more concerned about the federal deficit than they were about joblessness and the overall economy.

The debt deal’s final resolution to what essentially amounted to a hostage crisis by that minority represents a complete unmooring of official decision-making from the will of the American people. The last few weeks could be the final straw that leads to a collapse of confidence not just in this government but in the American project of self-governance. When citizens don’t participate, democracy is in peril. At a time of so much great need in our country, sending the message that citizen involvement is futile is dangerous not just to the substance of one debate but to the core principles that allow us to call ourselves a democracy. Are we really prepared to risk that?

In America, we hold some truths to be self-evident: our news should report facts, and our personal communications should be private. Given the scandal rocking Britain over Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid paper News of the World and his huge influence over US media, both of these notions could be in jeopardy.

James Murdoch announced today that amidst a growing furor, News of the World will cease publication on Sunday. Far from resolving the problem, this radical step raises the question of just how deep this scandal goes. The Murdoch-owned paper The Sun has faced similar allegations of phone hacking this year, and no investigation has yet been conducted to see if similar abuses occurred at Murdoch-owned papers here in the United States.

For years now, Murdoch’s News of the World has been trying to tamp down the widening scandal involving its reporters who violated the privacy of celebrities, politicians and members of the royal family by hacking into their voicemails in search of juicy stories. The scandal finally boiled over this week, as the Guardian reported that they had sunk much lower: after 13-year-old Milly Dowler was abducted on her way home from school in 2002, News of the World hacked into her phone, listened to her voicemails and deleted several messages—apparently to free more space for Milly’s friends and family to leave new messages the paper could listen in on. This led both the police and Milly’s family to believe Milly was still alive and clearing her messages, which not only impeded the authorities’ search for her abductor but also gave Milly’s parents false hope that their daughter was still alive and would come home safely. Her remains were found six months later.

These revelations have rocked Britain. Prime Minister David Cameron called them “shocking.” Labour party leader Ed Miliband has called for Rebekah Brooks, former News of the World editor and now one of Murdoch’s top lieutenants, to resign. MP Tom Watson is calling for the suspension of Murdoch’s son and heir apparent James, who has been transferred out of the country to New York amid speculation that the scandal would only continue to grow.

This is anything but an isolated incident. News of the World spent years invading peoples’ privacy: it was how they did business. The younger Murdoch personally approved an enormous settlement related to phone hacking, and alleged abuses are still being uncovered. The most recent of those include the families of the victims of the terrorist bombings of the London Underground, who have come forward to say their phone messages were hacked too. Despite charges that Brooks knew about the hacking, Murdoch has stated unequivocally that she will remain in leadership. Brooks says it is “inconceivable” that she knew of Milly Dowler’s phone hacking, but it strains credibility that executives could be blind to the fact that the paper was invading people’s privacy for years. At best, it’s an inexcusable lack of oversight; at worst, it’s a conspiracy to spy on private citizens to sell papers. Either way, it requires action and accountability from the top, and Murdoch’s continued support of his long-time lieutenant is one more indication that he puts his personal and political agenda above good business and the common good.

Which brings us back to the United States, where Murdoch’s News Corp. owns Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. When asked point-blank this spring whether his company was hacking people’s phone messages here, Murdoch flatly refused to answer. US shareholders are suing News Corp. for nepotism over the purchase of Murdoch’s daughter’s company at a highly inflated price and her subsequent promotion to the News Corp. board.

One of the largest News Corp. holdings, Fox News, routinely peddles misinformation about climate change, uses racially charged rhetoric and openly promotes Republican positions and candidates, all while pretending to present “fair and balanced” news. Fox News’s Washington managing editor Bill Sammon was even found pushing his staff to tie President Obama to socialism on air, even as he admitted the claim was “rather far-fetched.” And advertisers wary of sponsoring dubious content have been fleeing Fox News here just as they are fleeing News of the World in Britain due to indecent, if not illegal, activity.

These are not the problems of a few bad apples but of a whole rotten barrel that threatens news standards and journalistic ethics. For a media icon like Murdoch, who looms large in American culture, scant attention has been paid to the financial and cultural implications of such mismanagement, or to the disregard for public interest from a major media conglomerate. If Murdoch wants to have a positive legacy in journalism, he needs to win back the trust of his millions of consumers who like their businesses clean, their privacy intact and their news to be factual. And if we in America care about the impact of corporate behavior on our lives and our political discourse, we had better start asking some questions.

For the past two weeks, all eyes have been glued on Madison, Wisconsin. The collective and joyful resistance to Governor Scott Walker’s power-grabbing budget bill has inspired the demoralized progressive base and put the corporate-backed assault on working people front and center in the national conversation.

But although it’s obvious that the right- wingers are out to break the back of the progressive movement, it’s easy to miss the strategy that guides their selection of specific targets. Their attacks are all carefully aimed at the same critical juncture: institutions that work for people in their daily lives and in the political arena, those that connect people’s personal struggles around the country to the political struggle in Washington. Once we recognize the crucial role these progressive service organizations play in building progressive politics, the right’s broader strategy in Wisconsin and elsewhere becomes clear. Scott Walker is a soldier in the same army as James O’ Keefe and Lila Rose, the right-wing video pranksters who smeared ACORN and tried to smear Planned Parenthood.

Indeed, the recent attack on Planned Parenthood provoked a sickening sense of déjà vu. Seemingly out of nowhere, undercover activists secretly film an employee of a major progressive institution making embarrassing statements. The resulting video makes news and inflames the debate around federal funding of the organization’s services. It was the ACORN attack all over again.

ACORN was unique as an organization that served our nation’s poor people. Wrangling with life’s common challenges like mortgages and housing forms, ACORN employees built trust by offering help person to person, neighborhood by neighborhood. They then leveraged that trust to lobby for federal legislation to address the root causes of the crises facing these people—predatory lending, lack of community investment and stagnant wages.

Planned Parenthood operates more than 800 health clinics nationwide. These clinics are often the only option for women who need vital services, including contraception, HIV testing and Pap smears to detect and prevent cancer and other life-threatening illness. Every year 3 million Americans go to Planned Parenthood, and one in five women will visit a Planned Parenthood clinic in her lifetime. The personal relationships developed at clinics inform Planned Parenthood’s ongoing advocacy for federal support for reproductive health and freedom. As a trusted name representing women’s interests in Washington, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund has lobbied successfully for greater access to healthcare, better family planning education and the preservation of a woman’s right to choose.

The nexus of service and advocacy is a powerful place to stand: simultaneously addressing direct needs and advocating for systemic redress of those needs is a winning equation for progressives. Yet we have precious few progressive organizations left in that spot at the national level, and the ones we do have are under attack precisely because our opponents understand their power.

The biggest setback in this area is the long-term decline in union power. For more than 100 years, unions have cared for their members, cultivated community and engaged in political advocacy to raise living standards for working people.

But after weathering decades of attacks and public vilification from the right, private-sector unions see their memberships at an all-time low of 6.9 percent. These unions may be facing extinction in the next decade. Meanwhile, too many national institutions on the left have increasingly focused solely on advancing policy positions and winning elections. The result is a huge gap between individual people’s real experiences and the institutions we have designed to protect our rights. Still, more than once I’ve heard progressive elites ask why “the people” don’t get that they should be fighting with us.

This elite sentiment goes to the heart of the tremendous opportunities we have lost in the past two years. With ACORN out of the picture, Planned Parenthood on defense and unions fighting for their lives, the decreasing ability of national progressive institutions to help meet people’s needs in the economic crisis has hurt us badly. Policy prescriptions don’t feed the family dinner tonight, and detailed explanations of who is to blame for the crash won’t put a roof over people’s heads tomorrow no matter how correct the analysis. Of course, exceptions exist—Van Jones’s Green for All is one attempt to bridge the gap—but these innovations are few and often given short shrift by entrenched interests at the national table.

The historic roots of this gap are clear. My generation was raised in the excess of the ’80s, which spawned a loathsome disregard for the plight of poor people. The prevailing notion was that addressing poverty and the slipping state of the working class was the purview of churches and private charities, not government. Government, a whole generation of freshly minted conservatives asserted, was for cutting services and taxes.

Liberals understandably fought back by defiantly focusing on our core tenet that government can and should advocate for all its citizens, including those with the least. We concentrated national resources into legislative and electoral fights, believing that by battling the collusion between corporate special interests and party bosses we could move toward greater economic fairness. Often, a focus on service was denigrated by progressives in the political sphere as playing into the opposition’s hands by implying that private citizens could eradicate the need for government intervention through charitable acts alone.

As a young middle-class adult, I was commended for my work at the local food bank or homeless shelter. However, I was taught this was charity, separate from my political organizing. Each had a place in my life, and each had separate stories, peer groups and institutions associated with it.

Even the word “service” is a damaging vestige that artificially separates providers from those seeking assistance. As progressives, we need to project a conviction that all American destinies are linked and thus need to be addressed systemically as well as in the moment. Otherwise, frustration born of lack of opportunity will continue to be parlayed by the radical right into support for budget cuts and other policies that will add to people’s misery.

The progressive vision of a government of, by and for the people is as relevant as ever, but in light of the past few years, we need to re-examine how we get there. Powerful movements reach deep into culture and society. They compel people to join for work, for play and for mutual aid. Emotional bonds sustain them in times of struggle, and a common vision leads to strategic engagement with the forces shaping their world. Too many progressives still ask why regular folks don’t support their fights in Washington (see Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas?).

A better question might be, How do we better support those regular folks in their struggles at home?