Convictions : Clinton

Clinging to Guns and Religion—No Apology Needed

Doug Kmiec — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 12:46:00 GMT

As Melinda Henneberger notes, Sen. Obama is being accused of displaying a profound misunderstanding of so-called Midwestern or small-town values based on a recent comment. The senator explained how voters—angry and demoralized by their economic circumstance and the inability of politicians to improve rather than worsen their plight—"cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them."

With due respect to the good people in Melinda's hometown of Mount Carmel and with fond remembrance of my two decades in South Bend, Ind., I doubt anyone in those places is offended until Clinton and McCain ride into town and rile them up with falsehood and fear.

This is merely the inverse formulation of Obama's positive message to not fall prey to politicians of either party who seek support by dividing us. Instead of seeking peace, we have a president and his first cousin barely removed perpetuating an unnecessary war. Instead of addressing the poverty or immaturity or insufficient learning that can lead a young woman to terminate a pregnancy, partisans on both sides mystify us into thinking the next Supreme Court justice (so long as she is "our" nominee) will make it all better. Instead of working to limit crimes of violence by strengthening families, the polemicists of old politics construct the myth that when Madison penned "well-regulated militia," he meant ample home arsenal. Instead of honoring people of faith whose gospel motivates them to teach or ladle in soup kitchens or staff hospitals and nursing homes, candidates gratuitously stoke racial and religious hatred by constant replay of a minister's overheated rhetoric.

Now, having stirred up intense hate and suspicion toward each other, the message of Sen. McCain is: Cling to those hates, my friends. Woe be to anyone who would have the hopeful audacity to tell you to stop. Why, says Mrs. Clinton, you should have known all along that anyone who tells you, "Yes, you can" is a fraud. You know you can't. Insist on your right to see yourself as a victim. Don't vote your freedom—vote for me!

No, Sen. Obama, no apologies needed. When you call upon us to set aside divisions based on faith, you do not dishonor religion but rebuild its immunity from political manipulation. Like Pascal, you are reminding us that faith is "of another order which surpasses all the rest in depth and height."

It's a good reminder even if it did prompt Mrs. Clinton to reminisce about how her father taught her to shoot when she was a young girl in the Chicago suburbs. "Incoming!"

Home Rule in the Breach

Richard Ford — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:32:00 GMT

David, your point about home rule is well taken, but even in cities with broad home rule, local authority is often quite limited.

Two examples from the city that knows how (but still can’t, as it happens).

California cities have very broad home-rule powers—among the most generous in the nation. But the courts often interpret ambiguous state laws as implicitly preempting local ordinances. San Francisco voters passed a handgun ban by initiative in 2005. Unlike Washington, D.C., which is at least getting the chance to test its ban against the Second Amendment, San Francisco just has its ban invalidated in state court as preempted by a state firearms regulation. The state laws the court relied on are actually silent as to local regulation—they’re laws that establish statewide regulation of firearms. The courts found that these laws occupied the field and implicitly prohibited the local regulation.

Another example of aggressive preemption hobbling local government: San Francisco’s attempt to provide for universal health care for local residents has run into federal preemption problems in court. The city wants to extend its existing coverage provided through SF General Hospital and a network of local clinics to all residents who don’t already have coverage. But it also wants to be sure employers don’t just drop health insurance and dump their employees on the city in response. So it’s added a mandate that most employers either offer coverage or pay a fee to contribute to the city health-care plan. This is not a regulation of employee benefits—the city isn’t making anyone provide health-care benefits. It’s just making those who don’t offer coverage to pay the fee (or better put, it’s making every business pay a fee for local health care and exempting those business that provide coverage for their employees) in order to ward off the free-rider problem. But this initiative is being challenged as preempted by ERISA, which regulates employee benefits and preempts almost any state of local law in the field. Is San Francisco’s ordinance even within the field of employee benefits, or is it just a fee levied on local businesses (which the city is otherwise entitled to levy) coupled with a city-provided service? A broad interpretation of field preemption will kill the city’s health-care initiative.

Now you might think the city has no business trying to mandate universal health care—it’s not really a local issue, right? But consider this: The city already operates a large health-care system because, as a consolidated city and county, it’s responsible for public health care for the indigent. The city discovered that it spent a fortune treating poor people in the ER of SF General for conditions that really should be treated cheaply in routine doctor's-office visits. So it set up a network of free neighborhood clinics to provide preventative and routine care in order to keep those people out of the ER. At this point, the city already has a health-care network in place. But what about people who have jobs and aren’t indigent but who still don’t have health care? When they get really sick, they wind up at SF General, too. So the city wants to cover them in the clinics. This led to the push for universal health care and to the contested employer fees.

I’m not at all certain this is good policy. It’s possible that, as the small-business owners and restaurant owners argue, the mandate will put people out of business and make everyone worse off. Restaurants have gotten together and decided to tack a fee onto every bill to cover the costs of the new health coverage. They want the consumer to know why they’re paying extra for their five-course tasting menu and wine flight. Maybe the extra costs will drive away consumers and put the marginal restaurant out of business. Maybe it will even destroy the foodie culture here and consign us all to have to eat at Red Lobster and Outback. But isn’t this just the kind of local effect we should expect a city to be sensitive to and adjust to? And mightn’t it be a good idea to let a local government experiment with universal health care to give Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama some actual information to work with when they argue about it?

These aren’t home-rule issues, but they are examples of how we hobble our cities from doing what cities ought to do—experiment with new policy ideas that might not occur to legislators or bureaucrats at the state or national level—or might not get past the special interests there.

Why Bush Is Our Most Shakespearean President

Kenji Yoshino — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 04:09:00 GMT

"Removing Saddam Hussein was the right decision early in my presidency, it is the right decision now, and it will be the right decision ever." —President George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., March 12, 2008

"Let me live here ever / So rare a wondered father and a wise / Makes this place Paradise."—William Shakespeare, London, England, circa 1610.

Our presidents have always loved Shakespeare. In April 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson visited Shakespeare's birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon. "They shew us an old Wooden Chair in the Chimney corner, where He sat," Adams wrote in his diary. "We cutt off a Chip according to Custom." Adams lamented that "[t]here is nothing preserved this great Genius," with no apparent recognition that more might have been preserved if tourists had not taken away chips of the fixtures.

Lincoln could recite hundreds of lines from the plays by heart. Along with the Bible and U.S. Statutes, a volume of Shakespeare graced his White House desk. While steaming up the Potomac in April 1865, Lincoln read aloud lines from Macbeth describing the peaceful postmortem sleep of the good King Duncan. After Lincoln was assassinated five days later (by an actor who had played some Shakespearean roles), Lincoln further cemented the reputation of Macbeth as an unlucky play.

Passing to more recent times, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt writes about attending a 1998 White House event in which Clinton mentioned being forced to memorize passages from Macbeth in junior high. It was not, Clinton said wryly, the most propitious beginning for a political career. When Greenblatt shook his hand afterward, he asked the president: "Don't you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?" Still holding his hand, Clinton replied: "I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object."

It might be hard to see George W. Bush's place in this great presidential tradition. Internet searches reveal no evidence that Bush has ever quoted or referred to Shakespeare. But while others only parrot Shakespeare, Bush emulates him.

Shakespeare is famous for having introduced more words into the English language than any other individual. Those words have become so much a part of our vernacular that we no longer associate them with the Swan of Avon. Words used above—like birthplace, fixture, and assassination—originate with him. Perhaps Shakespeare's most enduring legacy lies in his unseen mark on our semantic stock.

Along this metric, Bush stands alone among the 43 presidents. His coinages are the stuff of legend, including terms such as misunderestimate, mential, and embetterment. Many critics lament how busybody editors "corrected" Shakespeare's Quartos because they did not conform to their pedestrian notions of proper usage. For the same reason, we should not let stenographers "correct" Bush's contributions to our literary heritage. Bush's words do not belong to us. We hold them in trust—for our childrens, and for our childrens's childrens.

Not Just Women's Work

Doug Kmiec — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:05:00 GMT

A new study says women with children are less "productive" at work. Maybe it's time law firms and corporations -- and men -- restructure employment relationships to recognize that many women want to be both parent and professional, and the culture would be better off if we made that easier to do. ...(read more)

Which Is Worse? Racism, or Sexism, or Asking Which Is Worse?

Richard Ford — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:01:00 GMT

Plenty of wags have compared Hillary Clinton to a zombie or the Terminator—she claws her way back to her feet and limps on when any mere mortal would be long dead. But the real reanimated corpse of this election is the contemptible question of whether sexism is worse than racism. This crude and divisive inquiry will not die, no matter how many times it is doused with the holy water of common decency and no matter how many times the wooden stake of good sense is driven through its heart. So I’m under no illusions that my attempt here will prove to be a magic bullet.

Judith Shulevitz’s post on "XX Factor" last week was the latest version of this question that I’ve seen (and far from the worst), but this question has become almost obligatory in any race- or gender-conscious discussion of the election. For instance, in her New York Times op ed, Gloria Steinem insists, “I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest,” but a scant four paragraphs earlier she declared a winner, asserting that “gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House.”

I want to convince you that the racism vs. sexism query is one that should never be posed much less dignified with whatever could possibly pass for an answer. It’s conceptualism at its nadir. (It has all of the futility of kids arguing over whether Superman or Spider Man would win in a fight, but with none of the charm.) Worse yet, the question, by its nature, invites the most base form of competition for victim status: Like a bad cultural studies conference where the most subordinated of them all gets to speak first, this question suggests that the people who labor under the more severe type of identity-based oppression somehow, by virtue of their victimization alone, deserve special priority—first question after the keynote, first grab at the coffee and Danish table, maybe even first dibs on our political loyalties.

And while wallowing in the worst of 1990s-style identity politics, it ignores one of the few valuable lessons 1990s identity politics had to teach: namely that social identities are situational and not essential, that how and whether race and gender are important depends on context. Typically when the question has been put, it has evoked some thin one-sided evidence as to why one or the other is worse for Clinton or Obama (Clinton has to put on makeup and worry about the color of her pantsuits/ Obama can’t go on the attack without sounding like a black thug), augmented by a long litany of gender or race grievances that don’t have much to do with the narrow question at hand (slavery, Jim Crow, job discrimination, racial profiling, segregation, the Tuskegee experiment, the Jena 6/ rape, pornography, anti-abortionists, sexual harassment, prostitution, the glass ceiling, lazy and macho husbands, dry cleaners who charge more for blouses than shirts), the sheer tedious length of which is meant to overwhelm all arguments to the contrary, leaving only one conclusion: Sexism (or racism) is worse.

Of course it’s true, as Shulevitz asserts, that “a woman seeking higher office faces obstacles that a man does not face, no matter what the color of her skin.” But this doesn’t suggest that gender is the greater obstacle generally—only that gender poses distinctive obstacles. It’s also true that a black person seeking higher office faces obstacles that a white person doesn’t face, no matter his gender. If (for God knows what reason) we were to take seriously the narrow question—who has it worse, Clinton because of sexism or Obama because of racism?—we’d need to consider all of the racially or gender-specific disadvantages each has experienced and somehow try to compare them.

And there are distinctive advantages to be considered as well: Geraldine Ferraro was right to say that Obama wouldn’t be a front-runner but for his race, but right only in the most banal sense: Candidates for high office are elected, in large part, based on the voter’s perception of their “character,” and that perception is derived in large part from biography; Obama’s includes the fact that he’s black. And of course many people are especially excited about the prospect of a black president. So, too, Hillary Clinton would not be a front-runner but for her gender—plenty of people are excited about her candidacy primarily because of the prospect of a female president. There’s nothing scandalous about this—race and gender are salient in our society, and the symbolism is relevant in a politician. But how could we know “which is worse?” without somehow performing this complex and context-specific cost/benefit analysis? No one has even tried to make such an accounting—and for good reasons—but that’s what one would need to do in order to make any sense of the “which is the greater obstacle” question.

This leads me to suspect that when people ask whether sexism or racism is the greater obstacle in the context of Clinton vs. Obama, what they really care about is whether sexism or racism is the bigger social problem (since the evidence cited so often goes to the latter inquiry and not to the former) and therefore whether it would do more good or be more profound, in some overall cosmic sense of “good” or “profound,” to have a female as opposed to a black president. It’s understandable that someone who has spent her life fighting sexism, like Ms. Steinem or Ms. Ferraro, would find it tempting to pose (and answer) this question. But this is precisely the kind of unresolvable moral question, shot through with self-interest, that epitomizes the worst of late 20th-century identity politics. That kind of question has ruined more potentially successful activist organizations, academic conferences, college seminars, and political movements than all of the agents provocateurs J. Edgar Hoover could have imagined in his soggiest of wet dreams. And it will ruin the Democrats as well if we let it.

One last thing: If it seems that right now the people most insistently posing this unfortunate question are feminists, that’s simply because Hillary Clinton is losing. If Obama were losing, you can be sure you would hear similar carping from racial activists. (Close your eyes, and you can almost hear it now: “The white power structure will always protect its own in the end. …” “Race is still the greatest oppressive force. …” etc., etc.)