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However Obama's speech plays out, Hillary Clinton's No. 1 surrogate, Bill, has weighed in again on race. He said the idea that he has said anything racially insensitive during the campaign (particularly comparing Obama's win in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson's) is "a myth" (what, not a "fairy tale"?) and a "mugging" by Obama's campaign. (Does this mean Bill Clinton is suggesting he has been mugged by a black candidate?—not to play the race card or anything.) He further went on to say, in that self-pitying style he is so very good at reminding us of, that he never played the race card against Obama, but that Obama's campaign played the race card against him. I hope Hillary will be asked to respond to this.
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Thank you, Ellen. I remember sitting in front of the television in 1998, during the first few days of the Lewinsky scandal, listening to television commentators all but demand Clinton's resignation, and shivering, and saying to my husband, "Wait a minute! This is a coup d'état!" I wasn't the only one. Press critics ranging from the shrill (Michael Moore) to the reasonably steady (Todd Gitlin) were obviously thinking the same thing, because they soon published articles saying it, or saying that it had been a near-coup-d'état Back then it was easy to see who was behind the circulation of the information and innuendo that wound up fueling an impeachment. The Lewinsky scandal was straightforwardly partisan. It was the extreme right that dug up the dirt and the Republicans who used it for political ends.
This time around, it all happened so fast we still don't understand what led to Spitzer's downfall, other than his own hypocrisy and the salacious detail included in the criminal complaint. (One federal prosecutor I know—who dismisses all conspiracy theories out of hand—nonetheless says that the level of detail in the complaint went far beyond what was strictly necessary or germane to bringing the case, and speculates that its authors were at the very least looking for some serious publicity, even before Client 9 was identified.) But I found myself in front of the television anyway, saying the same thing. Yes, Spitzer committed a crime, but personally, I still don't understand why it's a crime. (Read my post about Martha Nussbaum if you want to know why I think that. Better yet, read
her article and the longer law-review article on prostitiution linked to it.) And what about the shocking invasion of Spitzer's privacy? Isn't there anything wrong with that? Does being a political figure automatically strip you of the obvious civil protections? Once it became clear that he wasn't moving money around for nefarious political purposes, oughtn't some form of restraint kicked in? Did his purported crime deserve the aggressive prosecuting it received? And as Martha Nussbaum asked, don't his estimable efforts over the years get him any credit? Or do his sexual pecadillos mean we should just kick this dedicated public servant aside like so much trash?
And how about the fuss the media are making about Paterson's affairs? Check out today's
Times: The story is spiralling way out of Paterson's control. Are we going to throw him out of office, too? If this raging fire isn't what Philip Roth once called "sexual McCarthyism," I don't know what is.
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Truly. I was all set to write that we had given Obama a free pass, that we had allowed him to slip away from something the we'd pin on anyone else. Every one-word slip in this campaign—bitch and monster and Jesse Jackson—has been endlessly scrutinized. I myself have hung many an evangelical politician on the words of their pastor. Reading Obama's book, it's impossible to conclude that he has some vicious strain he's hiding from us. Still, I thought we should acknowledge that it means something to choose as your place of worship a Farrakhan-tinged church where the pastor spits out some white-hating, Jew-hating, America-hating poison.
But then you listen to that speech and it makes you want to weep. Everything I thought was lost in American politics—raw honesty, depth, a natural style, biography un-packaged, un-Disneyfied, and seamlessly matched to meaning, beautiful, unpretentious rhetoric, and whatever is the opposite of pandering to your public—was there in that speech. Amen to that.
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I watched Ben Stein’s commentary on CBS News Sunday Morning this past weekend, and I’m troubled.
Have I been blinded by the salacious nature of the Spitzer story and am I not focusing on the important issues here? Have I been too seduced by the sex and the prostitute?
Stein says, “Something sinister is happening here and it scares me.” He says, “Men hire prostitutes by the thousands, maybe tens of thousands every day.” What is he suggesting? If everybody is doing it, that makes it OK? Men also rape, beat, and kill children and women and other men every day. Should we just look the other way because “everybody’s doing it!”?
And yet, I find myself wondering how exactly, aside from the illegal nature of it, paying for the services of a prostitute is different from paying for the services of a hairstylist or a massage therapist (the kind without the “happy ending”)? I think there is a difference, though I’m not sure how to articulate what that difference is. To hire a prostitute is to reduce a woman to her anatomy, I think, to reduce her to her sexual function in the same way that calling a woman a c-word is to reduce her to her anatomy or calling a man a d-word. To not want to deal with the whole person is to do violence to this person. Then again, when I go for a haircut, am I not just reducing my hairstylist to his haircutting function? I’m not sure how to answer this. It feels like there is some sense of violation and domination about going to a prostitute that does not exist when going for a haircut or a massage.
Stein says, “Spitzer was elected by an immense majority in New York.” This is true. And “Now he’s out of a job, and a man the voters didn’t vote for as governor is going to be governor.” An acquaintance this weekend reiterated this sentiment: “Paterson may be the best governor in the world, but he’s not the guy I voted for.” I don’t know if I agree with this. When you vote for a governor, are you not voting for the lieutenant governor too, in the case that the governor cannot perform his duties? I think it is the “cannot perform his duties” that is the issue here. Can the governor not perform his duties because he hired prostitutes?
While Stein acknowledges that what Spitzer did is a crime, he says, it’s “not a political crime, not treason, not terrorism.” He says, “Having elected officials kicked out of office by appointed officials is a very dicey proposition.” He suggests that because men are usually not punished at all for hiring prostitutes, or not severely punished, that Spitzer’s punishment did not fit the crime.
Last week, I felt that it would be hard for the people that Spitzer has to meet with and work with to look him in the eye knowing the details of his sex life. And this to me was enough reason for him to step down. How could he be an effective governor now that we’ve seen the man behind the curtain? In the last weekend, my feelings about that have softened some. We seem to have gotten over the details of Bill Clinton’s sex life being on display. And I sense that with the passage of time, feelings about the Spitzer scandal will lessen, too.
Was Spitzer’s departure too hasty? Or is his crime enough of a crime?
My acquaintance also expressed disgust that while the Bush administration commits crime after crime, this is what we are focused on. That I completely agree with.
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Do three saps make a trend? What I like best about Obama is that he does not play dumb and keep moving, or shout, Hey, look over there! So that instead of either rushing by this outcry over his preacher's remarks, or attempting to minimize what's happened, he's taken the far harder tack of doing just the opposite, of slowing down and broadening the focus of what Wright's frustration and the public's reaction to it are all about. It would have been so easy for him to get out there and tell us the 34 ways in which Wright is contemptible—but instead, he's actually tried to put the man in context. (Wright's been compared to Hitler on Fox and you think this is without risk?) And I'm asking seriously: When was the last time a politician, any politician, paid us the compliment of asking us to take a deep breath and get beyond our first reaction? Which is why I think he's not only been able to address the immediate campaign concern, but has managed to turn this into a chance for us to learn something. Don't we need someone in public life who can look at a problem and say, No, I reject that premise; let's go at this a different way. He has that capability, and the whole notion that his only real gift is a way with pretty words drives me mad: Lovely words are the product of clear thought. Always.
I heard Obama's speech today as an announcement that we should call off the purity tests, all of them, because we are all flawed, sure, but are also more than the sum of our three worst YouTube moments. We don't have the luxury of continuing to play this gotcha game, because we can every one of us be got—and why would we spend our time that way, when there is so much work to be done?
"As imperfect as he may be,'' Obama said today, Wright "has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years. I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.''
Isn't there a little Jeremiah Wright—and a little Toot, as he calls his Kansas-born grandma—in all of us? But what I heard him say today is that that's just the starting point.
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That was the flat-out best political speech I have heard in my lifetime. No, nothing messianic about Obama: It's just that he's the rare politician who doesn't insult the American public by pretending that our complicated world is simple. And, damn it, the man can write a speech. The sheer poverty of the Democratic Party's rhetoric over the past few years has often made me want to cry in frustration. Obama manages the near-impossible: He turns a tricky and potentially damaging story into a teachable moment, and he does it with eloquence, too.
Below, by the way, is a Langston Hughes poem Obama seems to be channeling—listen carefully to his speech and you'll hear echoes. A great and moving poem. (And there's an ironic back story here, too, which I wrote about a couple of years ago: For a short moment in the summer of 2004, Democratic nominee John Kerry briefly hit upon a decent campaign slogan, "Let America be America again," a phrase inspired by the Hughes poem of the same name. But the right quickly attacked, using Hughes' 1930s flirtation with communism to discredit the poet, the poem and any phrases or sentiments inspired by it. Does that sound like a familiar strategy? Cf. "Jeremiah Wright." Kerry—who's no Barack Obama—disowned the slogan in about 10 seconds flat.
I'm glad we finally have someone who can reclaim the sentiments, if not the slogan. Anyway—here's an excerpt from the poem (with a link to the whole thing):
Let America be America Again - (Langston Hughes, 1938)
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me).
(Read the rest of the poem here.)
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Meghan, I am also a sap, but I don't think you needed to be one to be moved by this speech. Obama has often tried to transcend race. Wright's remarks reminded us all that sometimes you just can't. And so Obama got out there and owned the specific injustices black Americans experience while also marrying them to incarnations of disadvantage that can be just as burdensome. The worst moments in this endless primary season, for me, have been the ones in which we have to listen to a chorus about who has it worse, women or black people, or whose -ism is more worthy, feminism or anti-racism. Obama takes us away from that false choice, and that's where I want to be.
And then, for good measure, he singled out reading to your children as one of the most important things parents can do. Which made me think of him as a dad—and a good dad. A welcome image.
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I've been more and more impressed with Obama's speeches—especially since I saw him at a rally in San Antonio. But I still wasn't entirely prepared for today's speech—inspired by the criticism of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. In it, Obama tackled racism head on, and did so—amazingly—in a rather forgiving if rigorous way. He talked first about the anger certain African-Americans feel at finding themselves shut out of the American dream. Then he went on to acknowledge how easy it might be to feel a similar anger if you're a working-class white American who doesn't feel particularly enfranchised either—an immigrant, or someone who lost his or job as the economy globalized. He showed a kind of empathy (at least at first) for those folks in this position who might resent African-Americans for the opportunities afforded them by affirmative action. And he talked about this "unacknowledged resentment" like it was something less dirty that "racism," something not just to be bundled up and hid under the bed where no one could see it, but a fact of national life that deserved voicing. Of course, the last thrust of his speech was about why that resentment is ultimately divisive and needs to be overcome. But he didn't act censorious or threatened by this race resentment. On the contrary, he acted almost like a pastor—someone gently prodding and guiding a flock to acknowledge latent sins that seem too shameful to voice. I usually feel that Obama kinda stumbles when he gets anecdotal and folksy—it's a bad John Edwards or Bill Clinton imitation, I think—but the story about Ashley, a white girl who volunteers for his campaign, was incredibly moving. Maybe I'm just a sap.
I don't think so, though: The other thing that was powerful about the speech, because it's still unexpected, is how directly and uncagily he acknowledges his own role in these scandals. Sure, he said, he knew about Wright's inflammatory remarks. He doesn't try to shield himself from them; instead, he invites Americans into his thought process. This is a kind of political performance too. But it's one that's closer to what I've always thought our politicians should strive to do: appear as if they're speaking naturally to us, their constituents.
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What I liked about the Times article about the Patersons' affairs was this censorious observation by reporter Danny Hakim: "The admission is likely to be a distraction for the new governor at a difficult time." It's a classic instance of what I call the dissociative mood, a grammatical tone that is struck when something that should have been stated in the first person with an active verb ("I or we did something") is uttered in the third person with a passive verb ("something was done to someone, mistakes were made, the whole thing is a mystery to us"). This inflection, characterized by bat-your-eyelashes disingenuousness, is found largely in government statements, for obvious reasons, and in the media, especially when we in the media report the effects of our own reporting but leave ourselves out of the account.
So: Why is admitting to consensual extramarital affairs that have long since ended likely to distract from Paterson's gubernatorial agenda? Why, because we, the media-or perhaps I, Danny Hakim-mean to make it an issue! Who else gives a damn?
Speaking of which, did any of you who read Rick Hertzberg's comment in The New Yorker go and look up the Martha Nussbaum article he quotes, the one written from Belgium, in which she declares that Spitzer was hounded out of office by "quintessentially American" Puritanism and mean-spiritedness? If so, I'd love to hear what you think, especially about the part where she compared being a prostitute with being an opera singer (apparently, not so long ago, they weren't perceived as being very different). Being fairly Euro-trashy myself, I kinda agreed with her and her podium-bashing conclusion:
What should really trouble us about sex work? That it is sex that these women do, with many customers, should not in and of itself trouble us, from the point of view of legality, even if we personally don't share the woman's values. ... What should trouble us are things like this: The working conditions for most women in sex work are extremely unhealthy. They are exploited by pimps, and they enjoy little control over which clients they will accept. Police harass them and extort sexual favors from them. Some of these bad features (unhealthiness, little control) sex work shares with other job options for low-income women, such as factory work of many kinds. Other bad features (police extortion) are the natural result of illegality itself.
In general we should be worried about poverty and lack of education. We should be worried that women have too few decent employment options and too little health and safety regulation in those that they do have. And we should be worried if men force women to do things sexually that they do not want to do. All these things are worth worrying about, and it is these things that sensible nations do worry about. But the idea that we ought to penalize women with few choices by removing one of the ones they do have is grotesque, the unmistakable fruit of the all-too-American thought that women who choose to have sex with many men are tainted vile things who must be punished.
Eliot Spitzer's offense was an offense against his family. It was not an offense against the public. If he broke any laws, these are laws that never should have existed and that have been repudiated by sensible nations. The hue and cry that has ruined one of the nation's most committed political careers shows our country to itself in a very ugly light.
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This morning is a flashback to 1998, toward the end of Lewinsky hell, when Bob Livingston decided not to run for speaker because someone had figured out he'd had an affair. And then came all sorts of rumors about who else Larry Flynt was going to out. And then it turned out Newt Gingrich was also getting some. (Newt Gingrich! Who would ever get steamy with him???) Back then, I had the same thoughts I am having now: Am I a conservative? Am I socially conservative? Am I the last person in America without an open marriage? Or who hasn't had an affair? What got to me today was not the McGreevey driver threesome story (which seems to fit right in with this Ashley Dupré moment) or the more-than-I-needed-to- know details about the Patterson marriage and the Days Inn. It was the blasé comments, by both Paterson and the anonymous New York city officials. "Like most marriages," Paterson began his confession. Most marriages go through periods where both spouses are having open affairs with other people? And then: It's "commonplace" for Albany officials to keep mistresses or have second families in the capital, said NY officials. Really? Second families in the capital are commonplace? Where else is that commonplace, that I don't know about? At the DoE? The IMF? On K street? In Kansas?
These last couple of weeks have been a real end of innocence for me. First Client 9. Then in Sunday's NYT, call girls who drink mint tea, carry NPR bags, and read Junot Díaz. Today, the driver threesome, and the Days Inn. What will I learn tomorrow? That Nancy Pelosi's a madame?
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And a new record, isn't it, for time elapsed between the swearing in and the swearing at? That's quick work, when right under the New York Times headline "New Governor for New York, Pledging Unity" is this second offering: "Patersons Acknowledge Extramarital Affairs.'' Only as these his-and-hers relationships were over years ago, this is relevant how? No laws were broken that I can see, except for the one about taking your wife and your girlfriend to the very same hotel. And I've stayed in worse, but the Days Inn? I see here where you can't have more than two guests in a room with only one bed, though—which might or might not have ruled out a stay by the McGreeveys. (Whatever happened, it's sure odd that New Jersey's former first lady sees the allegations that she and the ex-governor had threesomes with his young driver as an attempt to upstage her. "He cannot stand it,'' Dina McGreevey said of her ex, "when I am receiving attention in the media rather than him.'' Could anybody be that starved for attention? OK, yes. But wouldn't these revelations be problematic in his new line of work as an aspiring Episcopal priest?) Now that John and Abigail Adams, there was a lovely couple.