The gay-rights cause Obama can actually do something about
On Wednesday, President Obama declared his evolution complete. In an interview with ABC News he said: “At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”
Gay-rights groups rejoiced; conservative groups scolded. But what the president thinks about gay marriage is, ultimately, symbolic. There is a different issue on which Obama could achieve real, tangible results for gays and lesbians, and gain electoral advantage over Mitt Romney: employment discrimination.
Obama has already done everything he can on gay marriage. His administration has declared the federal law banning gay marriage, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), to be discriminatory and declined to defend it in court. He has extended spousal benefits to the domestic partners of federal employees. Marriage laws, on the other hand, are written at the state level. Even a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman, which Romney supports and Obama already opposed, is not actually signed by the president.
Meanwhile, it is still legal in 29 states to discriminate against gays and lesbians in hiring and firing employees, and in an additional five it is legal to discriminate against transgender people. There has been a Democratic bill floating around Congress called the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would extend the federal protections of the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Thus far Obama has said he supports the legislation, but has not called much attention to it.
Instead he’s spoken out on gay marriage, which may come with some political costs in November. It is preposterous to assert, as many political pundits do, that black voters will be receptive to attacks on Obama over gay marriage. Polling shows blacks have become roughly equal to whites in their acceptance of gay marriage. Obama enjoys high approval ratings among black voters, and they agree with him more than with Romney on every other issue. They are also accustomed to voting for more socially liberal politicians, just as wealthy pro-choice Republicans have accepted that they must vote for anti-abortion-rights candidates.
But perhaps it could hurt Obama at the margins among certain key demographics that lean against gay marriage, such as working-class white voters in the Midwest or Mexican-Americans in the Southwest. Meanwhile Democrats in socially conservative states who face a tough re-election fight, such as Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), are surely seething at the attack ad Obama just handed their opponents.
Romney’s second shot at healthcare reform
Americans believe in second chances. The oral arguments before the Supreme Court last week were a rare opportunity to dispassionately re-examine the divisive healthcare debate of two years ago. What happens if, after the smoke clears, we get a second chance at healthcare reform?
We’ve long known that healthcare will be a central theme in the 2012 presidential contest. The High Court’s deliberations and June decision only reinforce that reality for President Obama and Governor Romney.
Unlike with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the constitutionality of Governor Romney’s Massachusetts law has never been seriously questioned. States, not the federal government, have police powers, allowing them to require purchases (car insurance, taxes and licensure) and to pass wide-ranging public health laws and public safety laws. The Bay State law enjoys broad popular support.
In contrast, the case before the Supreme Court was brought by the majority of states. Regardless of what the Court decides, the PPACA will continue to polarize the country.
President Obama may cite Romney’s Massachusetts reform as inspiring his efforts, but there are profound differences in the size, reach and financing of the two laws. Elected just six months after the law’s passage, Romney’s successor, Democratic Governor Deval Patrick, has obscured some of those differences by taking a big government approach to implementation.
Where Romney sought an open marketplace for individuals to purchase benefit plans ranging from catastrophic to generous, Patrick has drastically limited choices and mandated minimum coverage levels beyond private-market norms.
Even with poor implementation, the Massachusetts law has yielded some positive results, including broadening insurance coverage, especially for minorities, and decreasing premiums for individual purchasers of insurance.
DCTech -
I hope you’re not implying that medicine should be regulated. (Except by the VA.)
America’s path to alternative energy runs through Brazil
Mitt Romney alone can no longer be saddled with the label of most obvious flip-flopper among this year’s presidential candidates. That honor instead belongs to Barack Obama, whose 180 on the Keystone XL pipeline construction last week was sufficient to induce whiplash among oil industry executives and green advocates alike.
In an effort to actually make good on his “all of the above” energy policy, promoting both fossil fuel and renewable energy, President Obama had no choice but to pull off a neck-twisting reversal. Five months ago he postponed a decision on whether to build a controversial $7 billion pipeline to bring Canadian oil sands fuel down to Texas refineries. But it turns out that was only a temporary sop to the activists who see the structure as both an environmental threat as well as the embodiment of reckless Big Oil greed.
Now, with his opponents falsely equating current high oil prices with Obama’s perceived inaction on domestic energy development, Obama is acting differently. He’s scrambling to counter them by not only reconsidering the earlier postponement but actually accelerating the pipeline’s build as a national priority.
As recently as Mar. 8, Senate Democrats echoed Obama’s early wariness on the pipeline by defeating a Republican bill to fast-track Keystone’s construction. The bill fell short by four votes, no doubt due to Obama’s personal outreach to several senators for their “no” vote, prompting Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to remark: “At a moment when millions are out of work, gas prices are sky-rocketing and the Middle East is in turmoil, we’ve got a president who’s up making phone calls trying to block a pipeline here at home. It’s unbelievable.” After two weeks of damaging poll results, Obama hurried to a photo-op in Cushing, Oklahoma to announce his embrace of the pipeline project.
It would be easy to dismiss such quick U-turns as election year politics-as-usual, but perhaps the truth is that Obama and his advisers finally saw the light on the game-changing potential of North America’s energy opportunities. Within the oil and gas sector, the talk of America becoming energy independent has reached fever pitch since Obama nixed his earlier decision on Keystone. Last week’s Wall Street Journal op-ed by renowned Citigroup energy analyst Ed Morse, “Move Over OPEC – Here We Come,” painted a dramatic picture of a Western hemisphere hydrocarbon revolution based on the current glut of Canadian oil sands crude, American shale gas and Mexican offshore drilling, rendering the Americas as “the new Middle East.”
Statements like that reassure defense observers who see the dangers of foreign oil dependency and encourage multinational fuel corporations. But it’s also the renewable energy companies that stand to benefit. Solar, hydropower, wind and green fuel cell need time to become economically viable and plug into a revised and as-yet-undeveloped smart power grid. A domestic fossil fuel awakening can buy that time.
Brasilia is the power it is today because of Lula’s enlightened leadership. Before Lula its currency regularly crashed, and there was zero safety net for the poor. Today, while far from perfect, there is great hope, the poor are getting some help, and the country is in the best financial condition it has ever seen. We need to understand how intervening to help the general populace, while also practicing financial rectitude can transform a country in a few short years, as it did, magnificently, in Brasil. Instead, we seem to try and follow the neo-con models of Chile and Singapore, where you get either quasi-dictatorship or outright repression. The future is Sweden, Germany and Norway–and Brasil, if it continues on the path of social democracy, looks like it will get there, too. They are the countries whose model works and whose people have the best chance at a healthy, dynamic life–and, neo-con propaganda to the contrary, the best chance for a stable financial future.
Trayvon Martin, Obama, and the persistence of bias
By now the facts are well-known: Trayvon Martin was a 17-year-old young black man who, on Feb. 26, 2012, was walking home from a 7-Eleven in Sanford, Florida, with a bag of Skittles and a bottle of iced tea. George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman of white and Latino heritage, though advised by police not to pursue Trayvon himself, got out of his car carrying his 9-millimeter handgun. Allegedly after some confrontation, Zimmerman shot Trayvon dead.
Should we think about this horrendous incident as a random encounter, or does it teach us something about the politics of race and the persistence of racial bias in America today?
When Zimmerman first called the police about Trayvon Martin, he said: “There’s a real suspicious guy. This guy looks like he’s up to no good, on drugs or something. It’s raining, and he’s just walking around looking about.” Writer E.J. Graff termed this “Walking While Black.” In other words, Trayvon was presumed to be guilty of something nefarious simply because of the color of his skin.
Some who’ve listened to the tape of Zimmerman’s 911 call believe they heard him use an obscenity and a racial slur. But whether Zimmerman is an overt racist or not is largely beside the point. Focusing on relatively isolated instances of overt racism tends to obscure and excuse the very pernicious, very persistent reality of implicit racial bias that runs throughout our society — and very much shaped how the world saw Trayvon Martin and how the world sees President Obama still.
Most people don’t throw around racial epithets, let alone admit they do so to researchers. Yet we know that racial stereotypes still exist in America, leading scientists now to focus on implicit bias: unconscious mental shortcuts that we form based on our life experience as well as the stories, culture and history we absorb around us.
In one study, researchers used computers to generate several faces that were exactly the same except for the skin color — half were black and half were white. All respondents (yes, including black people studied for the project) were more likely to rate the black faces as showing greater hostility. In another study, scientists showed a group of subjects a video of one person pushing another person. When the “shover” was black and the “victim” was white, 75 percent of research subjects said the push was aggressive. When the “shover” was white and the victim was “black,” only 17 percent of subjects said the push was aggressive.
Implicit racial bias has also been found in what researchers call a “shooter bias” — in which subjects playing a simulated video game are more likely to mistakenly pull the trigger on unarmed black men than on unarmed white suspects. The phenomenon has been tested and proved with police officers, too.
Seriously? At the bottom of your little column, it says “PHOTO: An undated handout photo released by the Martin family’s public relations representative shows 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.”
Come on, I’m on a laptop, wearing out-of-date glasses, and I can tell it’s a damn Photoshop edited picture. There’s no way in hell anyone, regardless of age, would have legs that size, with skinny little arms like that, and, oh yeah, the grass and helmet look like clip art additions. Please start using recent photos of Mr. Martin, instead of these pictures that are obviously aimed at making the victim look like a small, defenseless child. We know he was a kid, no reason to fake his youthfulness to us, show us the real Trayvon Martin photos!
Obama’s first foreign policy blunder
This is an excerpt from The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs, published recently by Penguin Press.
The defining mistake of Obama’s first-term foreign policy was his decision to escalate American military operations in Afghanistan. There were 35,000 American troops in Afghanistan when Obama was inaugurated. By the summer of 2011 there were roughly 100,000. The main national security rationale for their presence was to prevent the Taliban from regaining sufficient strength to invite Al Qaeda back to the Afghan training camps and sanctuaries they had operated from before 9/11. But since early 2002, seven years before Obama became president, Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden himself — until he was tracked down and killed by U.S. commandos in May 2011 — had been based in Pakistan, under the protection of a Pakistani army that continues to receive billions of dollars in American military aid.
Long before his presidential bid, Obama had called for an increased American military effort in Afghanistan. He repeated that position frequently during the 2008 campaign. Obama’s strong opposition to the Iraq War led many supporters to imagine that he rejected the idea of defending America against terrorism by waging conventional military conflicts in distant Islamic lands. Some of the more philosophical passages in Obama’s autobiographical books, writings, and speeches elaborating on his opposition to the Iraq War fed that misimpression.
In a widely noted November 2006 speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, he emphasized his belief that the war had been not just a “failure of implementation” but “also a failure of conception,” going on to argue that “the rationale behind the war,” including an excessive faith that “we can impose democracy on a country through military force,” was “misguided.”
Some thought they heard echoes of the Reverend Martin Luther King’s famous 1967 speech declaring opposition not just to the war in Vietnam but to “a far deeper malady of the American spirit” that, if not confronted then, could lead to other misguided wars in other countries also waged in the name of guaranteeing liberty.
But Obama had long made a clear distinction between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq as an unnecessary war of choice and a diversion from the main battle against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. He supported the war in Afghanistan as a justified response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and necessary to America’s future security. On that basis Obama had harshly criticized the Bush administration for diverting military resources from Afghanistan to Iraq after 2003. And during his presidential campaign Obama had talked about sending three to five more brigades to Afghanistan as he drew down U.S. combat forces in Iraq.
Within a month of taking office, Obama approved a 17,000-troop increase for Afghanistan. That was less than the top U.S. commander there, General David McKiernan, had requested. But it was within the range Obama had called for during the campaign. It amounted to a roughly 50 percent rise in troop strength.
Obama made the same mistake LBJ made in Viet Nam.
He listened to his generals and not his political advisers.
Mr. 1 Percent versus Mr. 1 Percent
Listening to a newly populist President Obama or to Mitt Romney, who touts his CEO past at every turn, it is tempting to imagine a 2012 election that unfolds as textbooks imagine, with Republicans speaking for business and Democrats standing up for the little guy. Don’t be fooled. A more accurate reading of the contest features two elite candidates who represent different wings of the 1 Percent – a group increasingly divided over economics and the role of government.
Look closely at Obama’s rhetoric and you see that he’s not channeling Occupy Wall Street as much as a pragmatic tax-and-invest liberalism. Obama speaks for highly educated, affluent Americans who want government to do more, not less, on a number of fronts – like education, infrastructure, scientific research and clean energy. These folks don’t envy Europe; they envy China, which is deploying a muscular statism to compete economically and dominate the future.
Yes, Obama has made some strong statements lately about inequality and raising taxes on rich people. But most of this goes over just fine in Malibu or Manhattan. Many of the rich are ready to pay higher taxes – with polls showing, for instance, that a majority of millionaires support the Buffett Tax. And many agree that inequality has gone too far, seeing the growing wealth divide as a threat to America’s economic dynamism and social cohesion. The things that liberal rich people don’t like – unions, protectionism, and regulation, etc. – Obama doesn’t like much either.
Romney, meanwhile, speaks for a more familiar kind of 1 Percenter who thinks that business has all the answers and government should claim as little private wealth as possible. These elites embrace what New York Times columnist Ross Douthat last week called the “competitiveness revolution” – a drive for greater efficiencies and higher profits in which private equity firms like Bain Capital are heroes, not villains. Most of these people aren’t concerned about inequality, believing that all boats will rise faster in a laissez-faire economy and the fantastic heights of the yachts will only serve to inspire people. The best thing government can do for the little guy, the logic here goes, is get out of the way of private enterprise.
This clash of elites is hardly new. It has been taking shape for years now as the economy has diversified, with vast new wealth created by highly educated knowledge workers who live and work in blue states and, by and large, believe in government and elite experts. Barack Obama, so obviously smart and logical, with two Ivy League degrees, is a near-perfect fit for this crowd.
Romney is a less ideal candidate for his pro-business constituency, at least according to his mixed record on taxes and government as Massachusetts governor. But he’s close enough, with his CEO credentials and a set of policy positions that blogger Ezra Klein noted recently put him well to the right of George W. Bush.
While the media often imply that Obama has been abandoned by his affluent supporters and is now banking on populist appeals, campaign finance data supports the notion of a divided 1 Percent. Obama has been raking in big bucks from wealthy supporters – nearly as much as all the Republican candidates combined – and Democrats overall have raised more money in the current election cycle than Republicans (not including outside groups) – despite the attention-grabbing GOP primaries under way. As in the previous few elections, Democrats are doing great with lawyers, tech leaders, entertainment professionals and other educated elites.
Humankind is presented with an incredible and unprecedented situation. We are spectacularly successful at doing something potentially ruinous of all we claim to be protecting and preserving by ever increasing natural resources exploitation and continually increasing food production. Stupidly we hold fast to a wicked delusion that, if we do NOT do these things, a catastrophe will follow. This upside down, delusional thinking is leading us to precipitate a disaster of some unimaginable sort because the continuous exploitation of limited resources, including continually increasing food production to feed a growing population, is precisely what is actually causing humanity to careen toward a colossal global ecological wreckage.
Keystone XL’s organizing principle
In October 2011, National Journal surveyed energy experts about whether Obama was likely to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry Canadian tar-sands oil through the U.S. to the Gulf of Mexico. Ninety-one percent of the “energy and environment insiders” believed he would.
On Wednesday, Obama proved them wrong.
How could the experts have gotten it so wrong? The answer is twofold: Grassroots environmentalists were stronger, and congressional Republicans dumber, than anyone predicted.
Back in August of 2011, when author and activist Bill McKibben staged the first anti-Keystone rallies around the White House, political observers scoffed. These were, after all, the same environmentalists who had been rendered irrelevant by their cap-and-trade defeat and the stress of economic recession. No way they could stop a fossil fuel infrastructure project with big money behind it.
But McKibben kept at it. The movement he seeded grew, forging strategic partnerships with Nebraska farmers, social-justice groups and unions. Activists staged more rallies, hounded the president everywhere he went and uncovered serious questions about the relationship between the tar-sands industry and the State Department. As the crowds grew, big-money Democratic donors started weighing in on the issue. In November, under intense pressure, Obama announced that the final determination would be delayed until after the election. It was an unexpected display of muscle from the green grass roots.
Still, most observers assumed that Obama was just buying time (and the support of his environmental base) and would approve the pipeline in the spring. That’s where the dumb Republicans came in.
CapitalismSays,
Your textbook Economics get punted when OPEC decides to cut supply (i.e. artificially restrict) in the face of an increase in the supply of oil from Canada to keep prices high (as they have demonstrated numerous times in the past).
Like Mike said, oil companies have no interest in reducing the price of oil – whether it be Canadian oil firms, ExxonMobil in the U.S., or an OPEC oil sovereignty.
A shrinking middle class means a shrinking economy
The following is an excerpt from a speech Alan Krueger, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, gave at the Center for American Progress on Thursday. The full text is available here.
Although I have done much research on inequality, I used to have an aversion to using the term. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal ran an article in the mid-1990s that noted that I prefer to use the term “dispersion.” But the rise in income dispersion – along so many dimensions – has gotten to be so high, that I now think that inequality is a more appropriate term.
President Obama summarized the rise of inequality very succinctly in his Osawatomie, Kansas speech, when he said, “over the last few decades, the rungs on the ladder of opportunity have grown farther and farther apart, and the middle class has shrunk.”
These trends are well documented but worth reviewing. My first figure shows the annualized growth rate of real income for families in each fifth of the income distribution over two periods. The figure shows that all quintiles (fifths) of the income distribution grew together from the end of World War II to the late 1970s, but since the 1970s, income has grown more for families at the top of the income distribution than in the middle, and it has shrunk for those at the bottom.
I should point out that the pattern in the post-1970s period is not monolithic. As this next chart shows, the period from 1992 to 2000 was an exception, when strong economic growth and the policies of the Clinton administration led all quintiles to grow together again. Indeed, all income groups experienced their fastest income growth in years.
moderator, why do my posts get truncated? let me try again:
The middle class is getting smaller because the higher income group is getting larger.
The US Census tracks long term household income (40+ years of data) and if you use this data to create 3 income groups (low under $25k per year, middle $25k to $100k per year, and high over $100k per year) you’ll see a slow but steady drop in the number of low and middle income groups and an increase in the upper income groups. Bottom line, households are becoming more prosperous. See the August 21, 2010 article at http://unrepentantcapitalist.blogspot.co m/
Obama’s Ted talk
The president’s new populism comes from Teddy Roosevelt’s new nationalism.
By Michael A. Cohen
The views expressed are his own.
Has there ever been an American President more regularly compared to his predecessors than Barack Obama? Since arriving on the national stage Obama has been weighed against Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Reagan, Kennedy, Truman, Carter and even George W. Bush. But after his remarkably full-throated populist speech yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas we have to add another one to the list – Theodore Roosevelt.
The choice of Osawatomie for a speech that basically establishes the outlines of Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign was hardly accidental. It was the sight of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous “New Nationalism” speech, a set of remarks that laid the foundation for his 1912 run to recapture the White House and signaled his own ideological break with the conservative wing of his own Republican Party.
In evoking Roosevelt’s century-old rhetoric, his attacks on concentrated wealth, and his call for a more active and engaged federal government, Obama yesterday embraced a grand tradition in American politics — that of the anti-business populist standing with the ordinary American. In doing so, Obama has framed the 2012 election in terms that have been the focus of presidential campaigns since Roosevelt ran for a third term in 1912: what is the proper role of government in the lives of the American people?
When you have a guy like obama, who doesn’t have the experience to run a gas station, must less the country, you have to expect he must look to others for what to say.
Occupy Wall Street has already beaten the Tea Party
By David Callahan
The views expressed are his own.
Occupy Wall Street protestors are pondering their next steps after police raids this week dismantled more Occupy encampments in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. In some ways, though, the movement has already scored its most important victory: It has changed the “narrative” that frames public debate. Polls show that the Tea Party story – about an America being destroyed by big government – has been pushed aside by the Occupy Wall Street story, which stresses rising inequality and corporate greed.
This is good news for President Obama. While there is little that Obama can do between now and next November to jumpstart the economy, he may have a strong chance at reelection anyway if Americans keep gravitating to a progressive worldview.
In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken earlier this month, 76 percent agreed that the “current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country.” In another recent poll, by The Washington Post/ABC News, respondents were asked: “Do you think the federal government should or should not pursue policies that try to reduce the gap between wealthy and less well-off Americans?” A majority – 60 percent – said the government should pursue such policies.
Meanwhile, public concern about the Tea Party’s linchpin issues – taxes and the deficit – has receded. Asked in late October to name the most important issue facing the country, just 5 percent of respondents to a New York Times/CBS News poll named the budget deficit. A majority said jobs and the economy. This same poll included another result that should give Democrats hope: A strong 69 percent of respondents agreed that the policies of Republicans in Congress “favor the rich” while just 12 percent thought the same thing about Obama’s policies.
There’s only one problem with this article: It’s entire premise that OWS has beaten the Tea Party is entirely false. The simple fact is that this is not born out by any current polling comparing support for the organizations head to head. In fact polling shows the opposite. The article also ignores the fact that the Tea Party now has true political power i.e. seats in congress. OWS, arguably, has none.
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2 011/PPP_Release_US_11161023.pdf
Q7 Do you support or oppose the goals of the Tea
Party movement?
Support 42%
Oppose 45%
Not sure13%
Q8 Do you have a higher opinion of the Occupy
Wall Street movement or the Tea Party
movement?
Occupy Wall St. 37%
Tea Party 43%
Not sure 20%
Q6 Do you support or oppose the goals of the
Occupy Wall Street movement?
Support 33%
Oppose 45%
Not sure 22%
@ raylinx: Do you have even a shred of empirical evidence that God is judging anyone? I know you believe what you say but what facts, what data do you have to support your claims? Many studies have shown that True Believers, such as yourself, further entrench themselves in their belief system the more facts to the contrary are presented. True Believers do not present facts because they have none. Yes, it is your absolute right to believe what you want to believe. You do NOT have the right to foist your beliefs on anyone else without hard data to support those beliefs. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” You have no evidence.