The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

May I Never Hear the Phrase "Democratic Primary" Again

Following up on Anne A. and Melinda H.'s posts earlier in the week: Let me confess here that I have entirely stopped reading primary coverage. Wake me when it's over. I am more than a little outraged (OK, so I'm cranky today) that so much of each day's NYT front page is devoted to the primary horse race and to the psychological profiling of the candidates, the voters, the pollsters. ... Isn't there any *real* news worth covering? *Must* we keep eating these rewarmed meals? I even turn off NPR and switch to music whenever I can smell primary punditry coming.

And yes, there's a limit to that shrinking news hole. My organization (shameless promotion here: Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism) has been told outright that there's no room for "soft" news on the issues we've been researching (say, family policy or sexual harassment case law) because the election coverage is eating up so much space. Is it that the reality show of primary coverage is just cheaper to produce than original reporting?

I hope that will be my last word on the primary. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
 

Reversal of Fortune

Try to imagine the Obama-Clinton race reversed at this point: She is the clear nominee, but he just won’t get out of the race and starts trying on different personas and makes increasingly incendiary racial comments. Actually, it’s impossible to imagine because if the situation were reversed, Obama, as with all the other candidates who knew it was time to get out, would have gotten out, his dignity and reputation intact. A while ago, the first time it looked as if Clinton was not going to make it, Emily B. observed that even if she lost, Clinton was the first woman candidate to have run a serious campaign for the presidency, and the skill, intelligence, and strength she brought to the race would well serve future female candidates. It doesn’t look that way now, however. The horrid, grasping way she is finishing this contest is harming the party and turning her into a reviled, even comical figure. Is she so devoid of an inner life that the prospect of returning to being a high-profile, multimillionaire senator fills her with dread because it means accepting she will never achieve the ultimate fulfillment of her ambition? I suppose she can stay through next week to rack up the votes of her beloved “white Americans” in West Virginia and Kentucky and then still manage to graciously bow out. But as Peggy Noonan wonders, is there anyone who can get her to accept reality?

The Evil of Banality

I am just sick to my stomach today from reading about the ongoing trouble with relief efforts in Burma. The details keep changing, but the United Nations had to at least temporarily suspend its relief effort because the ruling junta has seized food and other relief supplies to "distribute on its own." More like a "shakedown," as blogger Spencer Ackerman calls it. The end result? One U.N. official says he "has never seen such delays" in a relief effort, and the New York Times is pointing out that it took only 48 hours to set up an "air bridge" of flights to Indonesia after the devastating tsunami in 2004 while only a handful of flights have been allowed into Burma in the six days since the cyclone.

It seems like a cover for either nefarious purposes or utter incompetence, but the junta is claiming the delays are being caused at least in part because of complications in issuing visas. Are you telling me that paperwork is holding up the efforts to save tens, if not hundreds of thousands of lives? No one can work on the weekend to issue some visas? Or, even better, can't a military dictatorship issue a decree putting a temporary moratorium on the need for visas?

Welcoming EJ Graff to XX Factor

Just a quick note to welcome EJ Graff to our midst!  EJ, thanks for the great post. I just finished reading a terrific law review article by Judith Kaye—the chief judge of New York's Court of Appeals—and Anne C. Reddy, looking at why women haven't caught up to men at law firms. Well worth the read.  

No Nightmare Ticket

Happy Mother's Day

Hey y'all,

I am delighted to be joining this brilliant assembly. For my first post here, I'd like to point out that Mother's Day is coming up. A year ago I wrote a great deal about how the news media gets working mothers' issues all wrong—talking about these issues as personal problems for individual women, rather than shared economic and public policy questions for a 21st century economy. I was asked to give a short talk on this today... and for my debutante moment, I am posting the talk below. At the bottom I'll give some links to my articles last year, and to research sources for some of the facts here. It's long for a blog post, I admit. Sorry! I didn't have time to be brief ...

Mothers work: Get used to it. Too often, issues faced by working families are treated as personal problems for individual women, private questions of how to balance irreconcilable duties, work and family, things that don’t go together by nature. The consequence: We live in the most family-unfriendly of the developed nations.

But women with children have always worked. Centuries ago, in the Wwestern European and American traditions, for instance, married women with children—at least in the classes of butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers that most of us descend from—would have been the business partners who took goods to market, kept the shop’s accounts, and oversaw the adolescent labor (once called housemaids and dairymaids, now called nannies and daycare workers). Early in the 20th century, they might have done piecework, gone out into domestic service, taken in laundry, or fed the boarders. But with industrial and consumer capitalism, work left home. Married men got shoved out of the house to work for salaries and wages. And in white, middle- or upper-middle class families, married women got shut in.

That brings us to the part of feminist history that many of us already know: for the college-educated classes, women’s entrance into the waged work force has been moving in fits and starts over the past century. By the 1970s, feminists had knocked down the barriers to women entering the professions in large numbers. But the workplace still isn’t fixed. A good chunk of discrimination now tends to kick in once a woman gets pregnant or takes a maternity leave.

Researching the book I collaborated on for author Evelyn Murphy in 2005, Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men—And What To Do About It, I was startled by how many lawsuits were won because managers openly and publicly told women that they couldn’t be hired because they were pregnant; or that having a child would hurt them; or that it was simply impossible for women to both work and raise kids. Many other women we talked with had the same experience, but chose not to ruin their lives by suing. One lawyer who’d been on the partner track told us that, once she had her second child, her colleagues refused to give her work in her specialty, saying that she now had other priorities—even though she kept meeting her deadlines, albeit after the kids were asleep. She was denied partnership. A high-tech project manager told me that, when she was pregnant in 2002, she was asked: "Do you feel stupider?" Her colleague wasn’t being mean; he genuinely wanted to know if pregnancy’s hormones had dumbed her down.

These aren’t just anecdotes. Consider the work being done by Shelley Correll, a Cornell sociology professor. In one experiment, Correll and her colleagues asked participants to rate a management consultant. Everyone got a profile of an equally qualified consultant—except that the consultant was variously portrayed as a woman with children, a woman without children, a man with children, and a man without children. When the consultant was a “mother,” she was rated as less competent, less committed, less suitable for hiring, promotion, or training, and was offered a lower starting salary than the other three. In an associated experiment, if she was late or had absences, she was fired sooner than any of the other three. Researchers have found that women with children who work full time have a significantly larger wage gap compared to men than do women without children who work full time. Last I checked it was 70 cents compared to 77 cents. Meanwhile, men with children get paid more than men without children. Fathers earn more—mothers earn less. There’s a mommy penalty—and a daddy bonus. We call this discrimination. 

This exists not because women with children "choose" lower-paying work in lower-paying job tracks. (We can talk about job segregation another day.) Rather, it exists in part because the American idea of mothering is left over from the 1950s, that odd moment in history when America’s unrivaled economic power enabled a single breadwinner to support an entire family. Fifty years later we still have the idea that a mother, and not a father, should be available to her child at every moment, to kiss any boo-boo. But if being a mom is a 24-hour-a-day job, and so is being a professional worker—can you say ‘crackberry’?—then the two roles are mutually exclusive. “Working mother” is treated as the social equivalent of “deadbeat dad”: someone who is failing their God-given responsibilities to their children. 

But the United States cannot and will not go back to a time in which women with children do not work in the waged workforce. Over the past century, the U.S. has seen steady upticks in the numbers and percentages of women, including mothers, who work for wages. Since 2000, the percentage of working mothers with infants has held steady at 53.5 percent. When they can afford it, married women with infants take maternity leaves of a year or so, but then head steadily back to work: 75 percent of women with school-age children are on the job. That’s because the vast majority of contemporary families cannot get by without women’s income.

Now, let’s flip this and think from the point of view of the best interests of the children: 70 percent of American children are growing up in families with all adults in the workforce. That means most American families need flexibility to care for their kids. And yet, on a variety of basic policies—including parental leave, family sick leave, early childhood education, national childcare standards, after-school programs, and health care that’s not tied to a single all-consuming job—the U.S. lags behind almost every developed nation. How far behind? Out of 168 countries surveyed by Harvard School of Public Health researcher Jody Heymann, the U.S. is one of only four without mandatory paid maternity leave—along with Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland. And any parent could tell you that it makes no sense to keep running schools on 19th century agricultural schedules, taking kids in at 7 a.m. and letting them out at 3 p.m. to milk the cows, when their parents now work until 5 or 6 p.m. Why can’t 21ss century school schedules match the 21st century workday?

But the news media and public policy makers still don’t see working families’ issues as economic or public policy questions. Consider: If fathers get pushed off the job, that’s discussed under the heading of labor, business, globalization, world trade, all public issues. But if mothers get pushed off the job—because jobs disappear or are redefined during her maternity leave, or because bosses stop promoting a woman with children on the assumption that she will soon refuse to travel or cut back or go part-time—if mothers get pushed off the job, that’s discussed as women making private emotional choices. How natural: She just wanted to stay home with her baby.

In other words, women are seen as having personal lives even in the same arenas in which men are seen as having public lives. And that has consequences. When the demands facing working families are posited as personal issues for individual mothers rather than as a major public policy issue for a 21st century economy, each family must tackle these issues alone. This focus makes as much sense, according to media critic Caryl Rivers, as saying, “Okay, let’s build a superhighway; everybody bring one paving stone. That’s how we approach family policy. We don’t look at systems, just at individuals. And that’s ridiculous.”

For more info:

The Opt-Out Myth, E.J. Graff, Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2007. (This includes footnotes and links to the supporting research.)

The Mommy War Machine, E.J. Graff, Washington Post Outlook section, April 29, 2007.

Thank You, Toni Morrison

Who's the Most Happy Fella, Obama or McCain?

According to this report and this new book, conservatives are generally happier than liberals, "because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light." Which is a nice old liberal way of saying whee, no -isms to worry about, plus no drowning polar bears or reason to get all glum about Iraq. There are a few holes in this theory: Anything related to the '60s can still kill the glee, as can government regulations and gay people. (Washington is not supposed to tell us what to do; for that we have a much-married addict who issues instructions on the radio.) The ability to rationalize does seem to have kept our tap-dancing president from losing any shut-eye; in fact, he thinks our troops are having such a "romantic'' time in Afghanistan that he envies them, sometimes. And since the sunnier presidential candidate usually wins, this might even explain the Republican hold on the White House; "Morning in America'' trumps malaise every time. Or as Jeff Greenfield explained it, Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck. Only, who's the Bugsiest in this scenario, McCain or Obama?

I have to say that evidence of the famous McCain temper as served up by the Washington Post  was a little on the disappointing side—if one petty, score-settling phone call and some righteous rage at Arizonans who didn't want MLK to have a holiday is the worst they can say of him, where's the threat to the republic? Sometimes, he does say "my friends" like he could gladly strangle somebody, but I've also seen him shrug off bad press in a way that not many officials are able to. (Yes, I did see him go off on Elisabeth Bumiller, but in the main, there is a reason he gets favorable coverage.) And the more I read about him not voting for Bush in 2000, wanting us out of Iraq (before he started the whole 100-year thing), and even suggesting that we went in over oil, the more reasonable he seems. (Could he secretly be a liberal sourpuss?) Until Tuesday, Obama hadn't had a lot to laugh about in a while. But his cool-customer demeanor and ability to pull off a little physical comedy—as when getting the dirt off his shoulders—took our (way more antic, but apparently just hilarious) current president a long, long way. Too far; this contest is not a joke, which is why I find the whole Operation Chaos nonsense so demeaning to the process. But to win it, you do have to be able to laugh at yourself, as "I'm older than dirt. More scars than Frankenstein'' McCain can, and make that smile matter when you give it up, as Obama does. Could one of their debates please be on Comedy Central?

Bill's Heart

For whatever it’s worth, I shared Melinda’s sense that Bill had just sort of left his face in his other pants last night. (Now forcibly restraining myself from making the joke about where he might have left his other pants.)

Emily, you are right that the Clinton family tableaux at each of these speeches has proven a sort of still life in public social anguish—but given that it’s historically been the task of the presidential wife to look like a medicated groupie in a good suit, maybe it’s fair to say that Bill was doing a decent male impression of just that last night.

Every Time She Says Goodbye

Emily and Melinda: I thought the ruddy and spaced-out Bill looked like his heart was under strain last night for a different reason: because he was witnessing the first chapter of his wife's valedictory speech. The whole proceedings seemed logy, so fence-mending, so puzzlingly bile-free ... and then I realized, this was her way of saying goodbye. Granted, it'll be a long, Clinton-style leave-taking, with lots of popping back through the front door for wallet and keys and an extra hug and hey, just for old times' sake, can we talk one more time about seating those mathematically meaningless Florida and Michigan delegates? But really, isn't she just marking time so she can win Kentucky and West Virginia, let Obama reach an uncontestable majority of superdelegates, and leave the race on a less ignominious note (all the while, as Trailhead suggested last night, hoping against hope for a late-breaking video on YouTube to expose her opponent as a Boy Scout-molesting flag-burner)?

Has Bill Clinton Checked In With His Heart Doc Lately?

Loving and the Campaign

We surely haven't heard the last of the Rev. Wright problem, but after the Obama campaign has been focused on fighting off the notion that Obama is part of this country's deep racial divide, it did feel good to hear him talk again of it being time to transcend categories (though surely it was no coincidence that the backdrop of faces behind him were mostly white women, some old enough to be his mother). Speaking of his mother (I wasn't bothered, Emily, by his shorthand description of her), I couldn't help but think of the obituaries that appeared Tuesday of Mildred Loving, the black woman who was arrested with her white husband in Virginia for the crime of being married to each other. The Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws in 1967; if Barack Obama's parents had traveled with him in Virginia when he was a baby, their mere existence as a family would have put them in legal jeopardy. And now a man who's the product of a marriage that would have been illegal in the majority of states is poised to be the Democratic nominee for president. I hope Mrs. Loving got satisfaction from this.

I also enjoyed watching the backdrop behind Hillary—the shifting facial expressions of Bill Clinton. I'm always intrigued by the semiotics of what she does with Bill. At the last few election nights she's had him in camera range as she spoke; whenever she has him close it seems to signal she feels she's in trouble. At first Bill watched her with that lip-biting look of enchantment we know so well, but as the speech wore on the mask seemed to drop and you could almost read his thoughts: "Hill, you haven't got it. I've got it, and you haven't, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Hill, guess what, all those years you sacrificed for my career—well, it turns out I wasn't holding you back. You're only on this stage because of me, and even so, now that it's your turn and you had everything in your favor—Hill, you just haven't got it. And let's face it, Obama, he's got it."

Obama Hits the Reset Button

Obama's Mom Line

I'm feeling better this morning: I agree with you, Dahlia, about the virtues of Obama's speech, and now that we've woken up to the slim margin of Clinton's victory in Indiana, the superdelegates should have an excuse to break for him and help Democrats bring this loooonnngg contest to a close. Which, for the good of the party and the nominee, they should start moving on. What's everyone else thinking about last night and where we are?

The line that jumped out at me in Obama's speech was this one: "This is the country that made it possible for my mother—a single parent who had to go on food stamps at one point—to send my sister and me to the best schools in the country on scholarships." The facts are true; the sentiment resonates. It's a good line for a candidate to utter when he's trying to shake the impression that he thinks about regular people as abstractions. And yet what an odd essence to reduce Obama's mother to. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro was a college student in Honolulu when she married his father and had her son. She was in graduate school there—after marrying again and living in Indonesia—when he and his half-sister went to prep school on a scholarship. In this illuminating profile by Janny Scott, she never seems at the mercy of circumstance. She may not have had much money at various points of her life, but that seems like a chosen path, and a bit beside the point. Even in his hardscrabble food stamp moment, Barack Obama is entirely unordinary. He doesn't pretend otherwise, really, but it was odd to see his mother reduced to her one-sentence politically useful self.

Hope on a Rope

Emily you’re right: It would have been bad enough if this Democratic primary had seen voters tearing the party in half over the war or immigration or health insurance. But it’s dispiriting as hell to see them ever more hardened along race, class, age, and gender lines. These very angry, very personal fissures in the party make Obama’s insistence tonight that “we may not look the same or come from the same place, but we want to move in the same direction” more dubious than ever. Many people who desperately wanted to believe that of themselves last January spent the better part of April torching their neighbors’ lawn signs.

Still, if tonight’s speeches were any indication, Clinton may be going down fighting, but she is going down. Without the fire of her Pennsylvania speech or scoring a knockout by any definition, she actually gave about the same speech as Obama—health care, gas prices, mistreated veterans, icky McCain, economy, fond nod to the grandparents—but somehow hers was all about Hillary, while his was all about us.

And if Clinton was going down fighting, Obama looked like he was finally, after months of wheezing and gasping, prying himself off the ropes. Somehow, Clinton is at her best when she’s on offense. Also when she’s on defense. But Obama reminded us tonight that he is at his best insisting that both offense and defense require games of “names and labels” and "distraction" and "exploitation." To that end, both he and Clinton congratulated the other, and each sounded welcome notes of reconciliation and party unity. But while she talked about “winning” and “victory” and “teams” and “tiebreakers,” he’d moved beyond it. Finally. 

And just by stepping back from these increasingly small fights, he maybe reminded us that we, too, are bigger than all that.

Read more XX Factor reactions to the Indiana and North Carolina primaries.

King Solomon Voters

Another night, another split decision, another unrelenting headache. (This according to CBS, which called Indiana early for Clinton, and Obama's clearer win in North Carolina.) Torie is right, we at the Gabfest have looked high and low for the best sports metaphor to describe the Obama-Clinton marathon, and our listeners sent in lots of great entries. But I'm going biblical tonight, and it's not the candidates I'm after. It's the voters. They remind me of King Solomon threatening to split the baby in half—without, necessarily, the wisdom to call off the operation before it's too late. The baby is the party, straining as it's pulled in two directions, a tug of war apparent once again in exit polls that show black people line up behind Obama (92 percent in North Carolina, according to a number that just flashed across my TV screen!) and white women, and to a lesser degree white men, trot to Clinton. The baby is also the eventual nominee, and the heady promise of unity and purpose that this primary season once held. Remember how Democrats used to marvel at their choice between two great candidates, and may the best man or woman win? Now they both look weary and torn asunder and highly unmighty.

King Solomon took out his knife to teach a lesson, and to figure out which of the baby's professed mothers was the true one. I'm not sure what lesson these endless elections could possibly have to teach (other than that too much inclusivity is a bad thing, and that the Republicans' winner-take-all system looks pretty good right now?). Or how these King Solomon voters could possible identify the true candidate. Maybe because there is no such thing, or because the knife has already drawn too much blood. Or maybe because my metaphor falls apart in the end. Fittingly. Superdelegates, save us.

The Limits of the Eight Belles Metaphor

Obvious though it may be, the metaphor didn't strike me until others pointed it out. The first thought I had when I saw the news was, "How awful." I was a horseback rider as a kid and obsessively read any horse-related tale I could find—from Black Beauty to truly awful YA series like Thoroughbred. Thoroughbred starred a young girl named Ashleigh with dreams of being a jockey and her horse, an underdog filly named Wonder. Ashleigh was the only one to see Wonder's spirit and potential (natch) and the only one with the sensitivity to ride Wonder to victory (natch.) Together, they became a winning machine (natch), competing with and regularly defeating the boys, equine and human alike. A wonderful, schlocky story that gave me a completely distorted view of the horseracing world—and gender relations.

That sort of childhood reading material and the "Girls can do anything!" message that was reinforced by my parents, my teachers, and television (the "girl joins and dominates the boys' sports team" was a standard story line in many a Saturday morning TV show, including Saved by the Bell) shaped my early views on gender. One of the hardest life lessons for me to learn is that females, both in the animal and human worlds, can't do everything males can. Eight Belles' name is now up there with Ruffian, a great female horse who ran herself to death in a race against the boys. There are limits to the usefulness of this new angle to the old politics-as-horse-race metaphor, though. Humans don't have to be put down when their legs break. They can race again.

All Politics Are Relational

Not only is it OK to admit being so over this endless campaign, it's all but required. Privately, even Stephen L. Carter must be fed up at least some of the time, with revulsion and rage and—where did that come from?—passion taking turns. I've started viewing it like any long-term relationship, in which just when you think you will never laugh at that stupid joke ever again—well, you do. And just when you're sure that if one more person says superdelegate you will run screaming into the traffic, you suddenly find that embarrassing as it is, you do care about Guam. Or so I can imagine.

You know who else seems sick of this Democratic primary? Barack Obama. Not that he’s phoning it in or anything, but a certain weariness seems to have set in. Which I take as yet another sign that not only is he not too elite, he might be too normal: He still thinks he can go off script sometimes, and he lets it show when he’s had it with trying to insist on a new kind of politics if all we really want to carry on about is flag pins. When Hillary Clinton says she would never have chosen Jeremiah Wright as her pastor, she isn’t kidding; you wouldn’t stick with that guy for five minutes if your every human impulse was run through the purifying filter of, “but how would that play in Scioto County?"

Yesterday, I talked to Christine Jennings, whose ’06 Congressional race for Katherine Harris’ old seat is, in effect, still going on. Jennings has been on the campaign trail almost every day since thousands of voters in Sarasota County reported having trouble casting their ballots on electronic voting machines in that one race—a race that according to the tally she challenged, she lost by 369 votes. In ’08, she still has the same old opponent, only he’s an incumbent now. And if that weren’t jolly enough, two weeks ago her ’06 primary opponent decided to get back in the race, too, as an independent. So as you can imagine, Jennings isn’t all that sympathetic when voters tell her how worn out they are with both Hillary and Barack. “I tell them, 'Don’t fall for that. That’s how all those Republicans on TV saying this race is dragging on too long want you to feel.’ (It was also the Republican-controlled legislature in her state, she points out, that cannily voted to switch the date of the Florida primary, and tucked that change into the wildly popular bill outlawing the impossible-to-audit voting machines that Jennings believes cost her the '06 race: “They knew exactly what they were doing.") “Democrats love to focus on the issues, and that’s good, but we need to focus on winning." And be willing to endure even the sight of Sidney Blumenthal trying to paint Obama as an old-fashioned '60s radical—yes, though that decade ended when the candidate was 8. Because if Christine can hang in there, so can we.

With Apologies to the Good People of Guam ...

A question for all of you: At what point does it become socially acceptable to admit that one is no longer interested in the Democratic primary? And at what point will newspapers stop treating the subject as if it should still be the focus of national attention? I rather thought we had passed this juncture a month ago when Nora Ephron, speaking for millions, described the primary as an "unending last episode of Survivor. They're eating rats and they're frying bugs and they're frying rats and they're eating buts; no one is ever going to get off the island and I can't take it anymore."

And yet it goes on: We've now had the Rev. Wright scandal not once, but twice. We've now had major newspaper and political blog coverage of the Guam primary, where the Hillary campaign declared that their candidate had "historic ties" to the island, Obama won by seven votes, and an apparently astonishing 4,500 people turned out for the election. The same observations about both candidates get recycled in different ways, to the point at which it's not worth reading the newspaper anymore.

The truth is that there wasn't—let's face it—that much new that we were ever going to learn about Hillary Clinton during this campaign: We already know more intimate details about her life than most of us know about most of our best friends. The excitement of the early part of the primary was learning about Obama and watching him draw even with Hillary. But that moment has passed, and we aren't going to learn anything else about him until we see him debate John McCain. Nevertheless, I have the feeling that one still isn't quite allowed to say any of this in public, as a degree of earnest political involvement is expected, at least from "Slate's women," and other community-spirited folk. Or am I wrong?

Down With the Gas-Tax Vacation

Well Emily Y., you sure were right that Obama had to fend off Wright more decisively. Now he has, and it's not clear whether we should thank the good reverend for behaving so badly that he pushed Obama to denunciation or just wish he'd kept his big mouth shut this week. I veer toward the latter. If we look back and this turns out to have killed Obama's candidacy, or wounded him too badly for him to win the general election, it will be one very sad tale. I don't buy the father-son explanation, either. Wright is not Obama's father. He's just a big baby.

Ann, I think you are on to something. This down-with-the-people moment for Hillary is like a cannier and more broadly appealing version of her earlier impersonation of Reese Witherspoon's character in Election. When she lost in the early rounds, she seemed like the brainy girl who always loses out to the cool guy. Now she's the old gal who's been around a few times and knows how to talk hunting in Scranton, Pa. It's amazing to me how such symbolism matters more than all the money the Clintons raked in last year and their general bubble existence. There should be a new word for how elite they are! And yet, no matter. All of this would be pretty unobjectionable, I suppose, if not for this insane gas-tax vacation that Hillary is advocating. It's the ultimate pander: The campaign can't name a single economist who supports it as good policy, according to John Dickerson in Slate today. So this is where proving you are one of the people gets you? Can't she just take her eggs scrambled and drink more beer?