Tuesday, November 06, 2007 - Posts
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The Times' Sewell Chan wrote a good blog post yesterday on Lauren Bush, a fashion model and niece of the president who's promoting the FEED bag: "[A] reusable cloth bag that costs $60 and enables the food program to feed a child for one full school year." News of Lauren Bush's do-gooding got me wondering how the younger female members of our two dynastic families—the Bushes and the Clintons—match up.
I'm a loyal Democrat, but I must admit that the Bushes are racking up all the karma points. Besides promoting the FEED bag, Lauren Bush has served as an honorary spokeswoman for the U.N. World Food Program. And Jenna Bush just published a book called Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope, which chronicles her experiences working with U.N.-sponsored charities in Latin America. Chelsea Clinton, on the other hand, has joined the corporate ranks. She left McKinsey not too long ago to work at a hedge fund.
I find it interesting that the daughter of two Democrats chases cash while the Bush girls advance liberal causes. Is Chelsea acting out? Are the Bush girls rebelling against their conservative forebear? Or am I being too cynical? Maybe Chelsea figures the private sector is the only way she can get any, um, privacy. Maybe Lauren and Jenna really care about the United Nations.
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Emily, I’m so glad you offered Paula Radcliffe as a model by which to understand Hillary Clinton, because after years of struggling to comprehend why such a lot of people seem to dislike Hillary so, I finally get it. (She strikes me as more likable than most politicians, though that’s a bit like saying she smells more like dog poop than elephant feces.)
Why? Because I cannot stand Paula Radcliffe. My anti-Paula animus is completely irrational. We’ve never met, and I’m sure we never will. She’s made no statements that offend me and taken no positions that infuriate me. I admire her talent and her single-mindedness. And as someone who loves athletics and who still has a British passport somewhere at the back of a drawer, I’m extra-appreciative of her success. But there’s something about her that drives me up the wall. It’s probably not even her fault. I was in Britain during the 2004 Olympics, and judging from the media coverage, the entire Olympiad was mere background to the women’s marathon, which "our Paula" was favored to win. In the event, as the BBC put it, she ended up “slumped on an Athens pavement, crying bitter tears of pain and frustration.” If I’d had to look at one more image of her “agony,” I’d be crying bitter tears myself.
By the way, your mention of Radcliffe resuming her training schedule just 12 days after giving birth reminded me of a story about Margaret Thatcher taking the bar exam the afternoon after she had twins. It’s one of those anecdotes that’s too good to fact-check, but I just looked it up. According to an interview she gave in 1985, four months passed between giving birth and taking the final exam to become a barrister, but it was seeing the new babies that left her determined to really pursue the law: “I wrote off to Lincoln's Inn for my Finals papers for my Bar Exam which was to take place in December, and I knew that once I had done that and entered pride would make me work hard for it to get them.” (Incidentally, the interview is fascinating and reminded me what an outsider Thatcher was—she was famously a “shopkeeper’s daughter,” but she also grew up in a home without an indoor toilet and was the first person in her family to go to university.)
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How inopportune for the Democrats that the face of their fund-raising efforts in the Senate is New York's Chuck Schumer, of Michael Mukasey fame. "Slightly better on water-boarding,'' is not much of a rallying cry, and liberal activists are urging those who hoped that a Democratic-controlled Congress might toe the line on torture to withhold their contributions to the party.
Specifically, contributions to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which Schumer chairs, as a reprimand for his judiciary committee swing vote today, in favor of Bush's nominee for attorney general. Of course, Mukasey already seemed as much Schumer's guy as the president's, since Mr. DSCC kept bragging that the nomination was all his idea—right up until Mukasey refused to call waterboarding torture.
In their intensity, those who want to see Schumer punished—as a deterrent—remind me of my family of Midwestern conservatives, nocturnal Republicans who'd stay up all night decrying the Trilateral Commission. When my Aunt Ginny stopped by our place one day to report that the Commies were coming, a schoolmate who didn't know this happened all the time in my house burst into tears. And oh, Gin took fund-raising letters from her party personally; Ronald Reagan was counting on her, she'd say.
So I thought of her, not only with fondness but fresh kinship, as I tore into the message in my inbox this morning, from Schumer's Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "Dear MELINDA,'' it began; see, they know me! Surely, CHUCK was writing to explain himself. Which was great, because I had a hard time following that part in his New York Times op-ed about how we know for sure Mukasey would be better than whatever caretaker AG we would otherwise get. Skip the advice and consent now, in other words, so as to maybe be able to offer it later—when something really important is at stake?
Let's see here, hmm, the letter offers a "little Senate update, a 10-second strategy session,'' but mentions nothing about the matter at hand. It does say that "2008 is the Halley's Comet of elections.'' Oh, and that "we can nail the trifecta next year if we start filling our war chests now.'' But through some oversight, shy Schumer's name is not even on the thing, which is signed by James Carville.
As a result, I'm stuck parsing the op-ed, in which Schumer explains that "Judge Mukasey's refusal to state that waterboarding is illegal was unsatisfactory to me.'' But, no worries, he goes on to say, because Congress is considering a law that would explicitly ban the practice. Like I'm considering the conclusion that fund-raising is the only reason we even have two parties.
Last week, Schumer argued that Mukasey is "the best we can get'' from President Bush: "From this administration, we will never get somebody who agrees with us on issues like torture and wiretapping.'' But who is this ‘we' again? Count me out, along with those online warriors who find today's plea for money so resistible.
"For the Senate to make a bold declaration about torture and waterboarding by rejecting him is appealing,'' Schumer says in his op-ed. Only, not appealing enough; it is just so embarrassing getting all worked up over the fate of the Republic, like my out-there Aunt Ginny and the whole of the blogosphere. Yet if not over the notion that the United States does not stoop to torture, then when?
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I've been thinking about Hillary's dilemma, if that's what it is, through the prism of Paula Radcliffe. Radcliffe won the New York City Marathon last weekend after running up to the day before she gave birth to her 10-month-old daughter, and then taking exactly 12 days off after the birth to recover. I confess that I kind of hate her. Shouldn't pregnancy and birth be one time when women give themselves a break and, yes, accept the attendant biological limitations?
At the same time, Radcliffe's feat is cause for celebration, I suppose, precisely because she exceeded those limitations. Isn't she the ultimate liberated woman, having figured out how to be a mother and a running rock star? Somewhere in here lies an imperfect Hillary parallel. She is also the woman who is breaking the country's biggest gender barriers, and in that sense, she has won my admiration and the support of a lot of women. And yet to do that, she has to be utterly singleminded, and try to mask her female identity in certain key ways. That's key to proving she can be commander in chief. So then when she says she's being ganged up on by a bunch of men, just that claim is enough for a dust up, even if she didn't explicitly play the gender card. But she doesn't take a hit from women in the polls, because a lot of them do see the dilemma.
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