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Now this is interesting; I see where a focus group of Republican women has declared Mike Huckabee the winner of last night's debate. These undecided, right-leaning women thought Mitt Romney came off as phony, arrogant and "a snake''—and one woman who described herself as a strong Republican wondered if a guy that rich would really look out for the little guy. (Do you want to break it to her, or should I?) Others expressed discomfort with his Mormon faith and bridled at his lack of support for Sandra Day O'Connor, whom he suggested he would never have appointed to the Supreme Court.
John McCain also got a big thumbs-down from the group, which included 11 California women of various ages, races, and wings of the GOP: He's so snide, they said, as if that were a bad thing. But Huckabee they found caring, real, and in touch with their concerns. So much so that seven of the 11 declared him the winner, and four who'd been leaning toward other candidates decided to support him as a result. Maybe they liked how he patted Nancy Reagan's hand?
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On the legal front this week, we have Michael Mukasey's can't-pin-me-down testimony of yesterday, as Dahlia reported. And also this dismaying report, via his lawyer and the LA Weekly's blog, that a Guantanamo prisoner has contracted AIDS in the camp. If this is true, it's an awful example of the individual harms the Bush administration has caused with its grim insistence that the rule of law and the war on terror shall not mix.
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C'mon, John, there was one great moment in last night's GOP debate: When Mitt Romney sneered that John McCain couldn't be too darn conservative or else the New York Times wouldn't have endorsed him, hehhehheh, and McCain flipped him his riposte—something about then how come both of Romney's own hometown papers, including the superconservative Boston Herald, had endorsed McCain, too, huh? The killing part was not what McCain said, but how he returned Romney's phony laugh, hehhehheh, soooo sarcastically, and right up in Romney's face. So that for a couple of seconds, as they were nose-to-nose doing this and wagging their heads back and forth, I was actually hopeful that the whole thing might end in a head-butt. Alas, that was not to be. But Romney still looks shocked anew every time McCain answers him, so maybe that's why he failed to move in for the kill. And wouldn't you have loved to have seen the thought bubble over Nancy Reagan's head when Mike Huckabee took her arm—thank goodness someone did, because I was afraid she was going to fall—and then spent ages patting her hand?
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Thanks, Dahlia, for your response to my post the other day, and for raising the good question about whether women, especially young women, are more "politically checked out" than their male counterparts. Such questions are one reason I get so amped about overly simplistic feminist rants—they just get tempers flaring and obscure the problems that we can actually work on.
Looking back at the two columns you referenced—a piece wondering if feminism was out of style and the ombudsman's (ombudswoman's?) column in the Washington Post—I have to say that, once I get past the hand-wringing in von Hahn's column, I can relate to her concern more. She seems to be worried that women are paying more attention to low-brow pop culture than concerning themselves with big issues, while Deborah Howell of the Post thinks that we gals would read the paper more if only it had nice stories about parenting and relationships. (Apparently, she missed our discussion of that Page One piece about yuppie parents a while back.)
If men are generally staying better abreast of the political news, I'd bet they're also more politically active, and as such, more likely to have their voices heard. And the squeaky wheel gets the grease, yadda yadda. So therein lies a concern for women. As for what to do about it, it's hard to say. We can't go all Clockwork Orange and strap women into chairs with their eyes peeled open to make them read the A-section. Could we make the hard news more anecdotal, with more personal stories about how the war or congressional legislation or Supreme Court decisions affect everyday people? There's already plenty of that out there, and politicians have bogarted that technique (let us not forget the S-CHIP brouhaha) to such a degree that it's now a tired cliché. I can't offer any solutions myself, but I'd love to hear ideas.
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Did Elizabeth Edwards damage her husband's chances in the election he's dropping out of today? She did not hurt her husband, no; she'd literally rather die than do so, I swear, and still did him more good than harm.
But while people love Elizabeth, they do not love her ?&%! cancer, and the disease did limit her ability to help him. Not because either her illness or its treatment kept her from campaigning—she was out there anyway, forcefully questioning Hillary Clinton's effectiveness as an advocate for women and warning that conservative hatred of the Clintons would energize the Republican base if Hillary were the Democratic nominee. But uncertainty about her health and her future did neutralize her positives to some degree.
A friend of mine, Lynn Hunter, who lives in Ames, Iowa—and has had breast cancer, too, as I have, said, "Even I was stunned when the word that he was staying in the race anyway first came out,'' after the couple announced that Elizabeth's cancer had returned last spring. "At first, it seemed to indicate a level of ambition I wasn't comfortable with. It took a few days for me to figure out that it's like a bad country song or that bucket movie''—if your time is limited, then all the more reason to spend it well.
But men in particular seemed unable to come to grips with Edwards' decision, she thought: "My brother and I were talking about the candidates and the first thing he said about Edwards was he didn't understand how anybody whose wife was sick with cancer would make that decision. I'm in a faith-sharing group and it came up more than once in the group, too. And the men, interestingly, were always the ones saying they didn't get it.'' Lynn, who is a therapist, sees the fact that it was breast cancer as adding another layer of discomfort: "Psychologically, that's part of it. It's like my husband went to Borders and got two books on the husband's role in my recovery from breast cancer. Would he have done that if I'd had leukemia? No, there's a sexual overlay to this; he wanted to be the best breast cancer husband he could be.''
Yet the real deal-killer, of course, was not Elizabeth or John or even his $400 haircuts, but the newer, more inspiring alternative to Clinton, Barack Obama. Because Obama so completely embodies the change that this election is about, no amount of spousal support or sunny uplift would have been sufficient. As Elizabeth herself said of her husband months ago, "We can't make him black, we can't make him a woman.'' Just this once, it wasn't the white guy who best matched the message, or the moment.
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No gender gap, no respect. That's the story for Republican women voters in the primaries so far. Tonight, according to exit polls, they broke for John McCain 32 percent over 30 percent for Mitt Romney. Which means they voted along the same lines as GOP men more or less (35 percent McCain, 32 percent Romney). Ho-hum. As in Iowa and South Carolina and New Hampshire—if the lack of coverage in my last hour of searching is any measure—no one is much keeping track. Gender has mattered a great deal in the Democratic race, with women tilting between Hillary (New Hampshire and Nevada) and Obama (Iowa and South Carolina), and voting in larger numbers and by different margins than men. But they haven't been the key to any Republican victories. In Florida, tonight, they accounted for 44 percent of the vote in their party, compared to 60 percent among Democrats.
So the main interest in GOP women has been speculation about how many might vote for Hillary in a general election. (Mark Penn: as many as 24 percent. Republican response: no way. October poll: Eighty percent said definitely not, more than ruled out Obama or Edwards.) Given their political views, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that they're up for Hillary to grab. On the other hand, if McCain or Romney or someone doesn't start tailoring his pitch to them and only them, they could get miffed. The virtue of a party without a gender gap is that it's not dodging the potholes of identity politics. The downside is that it's muddling along without thinking much about what its women want. Listening to Romney's and McCain's speeches tonight, I don't hear anyone wooing the ladies. Not even in a throwaway sentence or two.
Why is there no female angle to the Republican race? Are the security moms completely gone? Has the Hillary candidacy simply erased gender as an issue for Republicans because they don't have a first woman to support and history to make? What do Republican women want, anyway? They support the Iraq war in far greater numbers than their Democratic counterparts. But they're just as worried about the economy. Beyond that, and the obligatory pro-life nod, no one seems to ask them. Maybe the Republican candidate who went a-courting would find himself with his dance card more than full. When you've spent months as a wallflower, you're ready to dance with the guy who asks you.
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Rachael I don’t think you’re going to find anyone on this blog racing to second Karen Von Hahn’s simplistic take on feminism, any more than we swallowed the NOW tantrum last night or the Steinem logic earlier this month. The split you’re sketching isn’t really between feminists and traditionalists but between feminists and what Von Hanh seems to want to characterize as overgrown tweens. I think that she's mixed up her criticism of apathetic women with a critique of a new generation of (for lack of a better word) post-feminists. Like you, I am infuriated by representatives of the women’s movement who demand I vote for whichever candidate wears the Spanx. And like you—and Rich Ford, whose wonderful book we just excerpted—I agree that if all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail (in this case pervasive sexism). And that this is a lazy way to view the world. Right or wrong, this generation of feminists can’t be made to see everything through a gender prism, and that’s not because we’re all spoiled, stupid, or too wrapped up with the Spice Girls to see what’s really happening under our noses—or just above the glass ceilings.
Let’s agree that life is too complicated to hammer away at problems—or at Kennedys—for imagined acts of sexism. But can we also agree that Von Hahn, for all that her evidence is dopey, points to the same trend Deborah Howell poked at in this week’s Washington Post (Disclosure: Slate is owned by the Post). It was a strange effort at explaining the massive disparity between young fathers and young mothers who read the paper, but it touched on some of the same themes as Von Hahn (including the observation that “women read magazines avidly, and as one young woman told me, magazine ink doesn't rub off on her hands.”) I don’t know who depressed me more, Howell or Von Hahn, but I do wonder if their claims are true and a generation of young women are more politically checked out than their male counterparts.
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So, some folks are worried that "feminism is out of style." Gee, could it have anything to do with stuff like this? Apologies if I seem too flippant. But I do sense a common thread between Karen von Hahn's column in the Globe and Mail (go read it if you haven't) and that noxious letter from the New York chapter of NOW: It's as if feminism is an either/or proposition. If you like pink ... if you are anti-abortion ... if you don't quiver with joy at the possibility of a President Hillary Clinton, then you are NOT a feminist.
Is there no room for nuance? A woman should be able to think that it's rotten that there aren't more female CEOs and that we still wipe more bottoms and mop more floors than our husbands without also feeling compelled to believe that The Man is still keeping us down because the abortion clinic gives Juno "the creeps."
Von Hahn bemoans the fact that "girls of this generation ... consider it ‘lame' to align themselves with a woman candidate on the sole ground of sisterhood." I think that represents a rousing success of the feminist movement. It tells me that women believe that it's so possible for a woman to become president that they're willing to wait for the female candidate who best represents their views.
If "sisterhood" means that I have to choose Ms. over InStyle, Hillary over John McCain, and If These Walls Could Talk over Knocked Up, then count me out.
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I see that the blogosphere is aflame - oh, it must be Tuesday - with a debate about whether Obama snubbed Hillary at last night's State of the Union. I didn't catch this moment, or lack of one, myself. Which is a shame, because after Kennedy endorsed Obama yesterday, I truthfully was a lot more curious about what the Kennedy-Clinton-Obama body language would be than about whether Bush would make it all the way through his last SOTU without ever once correctly pronouncing the word nuclear. (Si, se puede!)
But here is the play-by-lay from Frank James, on the Chicago Tribune's The Swamp: "As Clinton approached, Kennedy made sure to make eye contact and indicated he wanted to shake her hand. Clinton leaned towards Kennedy over a row of seats and Kennedy leaned in towards her. They shook hands. Obama stood icily staring at Clinton during this, then turned his back and stepped a few feet away. Kennedy may've wanted to make peace with Clinton but Obama clearly wanted no part of that. "
On MSNBC this morning, Obama adviser David Axelrod denied said snub: "First of all, they acknowledged each other as they entered the chamber. But I think he knew that Senator Kennedy and Senator Clinton were friends. This was obviously an awkward day from that standpoint, and I don't think he wanted to stand there while Senator Kennedy was greeting Senator Clinton. And I think that was an appropriate sentiment. Unfortunately, the camera caught it in a different way, and so it got interpreted that way. And that's the kind of environment we're in right now. It's a very competitive race, so every little thing is going to be interpreted in that way. But it was really a matter of letting Senator Kennedy have his own conversation, his own greeting with Senator Clinton without him hovering over them...I think it's understandable that he would not want to stand there with Senator Kennedy as if he were lording it over her."
Today, some Obama backers are arguing that he might not have even seen her, though this seems unlikely, given that one thing we can definitely conclude about last night is that she should wear red more often. Others in the Obama camp say good for him, refusing to shake the hand of someone so willing to whip out the race card. And of course, Hillary backers are outraged that Mr. Nice Guy, who is supposed to bring us all together, refused to reach out to her on his campaign's best day.
Whether Obama was being ungracious, authentic or tactful in a way that did not serve his political interests, I don't know. But I can't help thinking of how big a deal it was when Claytie Williams, who was running for Texas governor against Ann Richards in 1990, refused to shake her hand at a debate; it really was a turning point. Of course, last night's missing handclasp was nothing like that blatant. And Barack Obama is certainly no Claytie Williams, who handed what was left of his support from women to Richards when he observed that bad weather is like rape - "as long as it's inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.'' Still, for future reference: When in doubt, shake it.
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I saw HBO's therapy series In Treatment last night, and felt it could be helped by adding a long-married couple to the lineup of patients:
Therapist: Why don't we start by--
Hillary: Have you seen his finger? It's out of control. He's wagging it at everyone. Every time his finger comes out I lose 5 percent of voters.
Bill: I should be in the presidential suite at Davos getting a massage from those Swedish gals they have there. But because I agreed to help my wife, I have to listen to lectures on behavior from Ted Kennedy!
Therapist: How do you feel when --
Hillary: Could you tell him to try to remember to mention my name occasionally when he gives one of his "I'm the greatest" speeches?
Bill: You wanted me to rough up Obama for you!
Hillary: I didn't say you should sound like the ghost of Lester Maddox!
Therapist: Could we --
[cut to: lamp being thrown at Bill's head]
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Oh my dear Emily, I just read that NOW letter about how Ted Kennedy has supposedly betrayed all women everywhere by endorsing Barack Obama—and I have not seen that many exclamation marks since I read Donna Hanover's book about how great it is being the ex-Mrs. Rudy Guiliani. (In brief, it is great!) Even though Politico's Ben Smith double-checked with NOW to make sure this missile was for real, it's still hard to believe it isn't a prank, of the sort pulled by those guys who yelled, "Iron my shirts!'' at Hillary a couple of weeks ago. (Seems like longer, though, doesn't it?)
This is such an old-fashioned hissy fit, I would not be surprised to wake up tomorrow and read that the sender had gotten up off her fainting couch and apologized: "Silly moi, lost my head there for a minute, on account of PMS. Or not.'' Because it only underscores Kennedy's point about how important it is to "close the book on the old politics of race against race, gender against gender, ethnic group against ethnic group, and straight against gay.'' And Obama's point that the old politics -- interest-group politics -- will not go quietly. Obama's position on abortion rights is identical to Clinton's, so is the fact that Kennedy has endorsed a man really the outrage here? Or is it that somebody thinks their power base in the Democratic Party is being threatened?
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"Whoa," says Ben Smith of Politico about the New York chapter of NOW's blast against Ted Kennedy for endorsing Barack Obama. Whoa is right. Also woe. Also wow. NOW NY calls the endorsement "the ultimate betrayal," lays into Kennedy for his apparent past legislative sins, which the group previously "hushed," and writes, “And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment! He’s picked the new guy over us." Lots more fury follows—enough to prompt John Dickerson to wonder if the name Mary Jo Kopechne was in the original draft of NOW's press release.
So, that's it—an endorsement of any candidate but Hillary is a betrayal of the feminist cause? I suppose the more sophisticated version is that interest groups expect the politicians they support to support them blindly in their time of need. This is their time of need, the NY NOW chapter argues, ergo, Kennedy should be with them. But that assumes that the feminist time of need equates with electing Hillary. Would most women, or even most feminists, agree with that? I just can't. And what does this narrow-cast way of evaluating a candidate really have to recommend it? I can't think of anything on that score, either. Can some other women's group please speak up to say that if Kennedy has good reason to think that Obama would be the best president for the country, and a damn fine president for women, then supporting him is A-OK with them?
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I am also ready for Bill Clinton to sit down. But it's worth pointing out that among white women in South Carolina, Bill disaffection—or whatever turned women away from Hillary—seemed to produced a boost for Edwards rather than for Obama. You're right, Dahlia, that Obama won 53 percent of women over all, which is the first time he has cracked 50 percent. But that was because he won 79 percent of black women (who made up one-third of the total electorate). Hillary won 44 percent of white women—a lower number than her overall support among women in Iowa or New Hampshire—Edwards won 34 percent (higher than Iowa and New Hampshire), and Obama won only 22 percent (lower).
I hate to carp on these divisions, but they're too big to ignore. There's a divide among men, too, and it's almost as wide, just with positions one and two reversed: Edwards got 43 percent of white men, Clinton 29 percent, and Obama 27 percent. Meanwhile, Obama got 82 percent of black men. What, if anything, could alter all the individual calculuses that's causing this heavy identity politics? Or does it all not matter, because all these groups of Democrats will support the eventual nominee in adequate numbers, and it's naive to think that in a primary in which the candidates agree on most of the big issues, people won't be inclined to vote for the one who looks like they do?
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It’s not going to be about gender when the pundits turn Barack Obama’s thrashing of Hillary Clinton in South Carolina into a referendum on her husband. The truth is that long before Bill turned himself into the Tasmanian Devil on the campaign trail, we were wondering how Hillary was going to fit in the space around him.
Long before his extra-credit sessions with his female staffers, Hillary suffered the comparison between his megawatt charisma and effortless authenticity -- even when he was lying, he was genuine. Long before he re-emerged, larger than life, in South Carolina, he was always larger than her.
As women, we always knew Hillary would have a rough time getting beyond being the missus, and we hardly telegraphed clear messages about what we’d have liked to see from her. We blamed her for staying with him, and we loved her for it. We blamed her for skidding along on his coattails, but we understood that sometimes that's the only way to get in the game. A friend once suggested that women who hate Hillary mostly just wanted to get in Bill’s Wranglers. Any way you look at it, the man casts an enormous shadow; and any way you look at it, we knew too much about the balance of power in their relationship to be comfortable.
Perhaps as a result of Bill’s giant shadow, Hillary wants it both ways. She wants to be on his team and to make it on her own. She wants credit for her successes and credit for his. She wanted him on the sidelines in this campaign until she needed a soccer hooligan. And as soon as he began to co-opt her presidential bid in earnest this week, our first serious female contender for president started to look like Bill’s wife again.
One of the qualities in Hillary Clinton that scares me most is her lack of a fixed sense of self. She has invented and re-invented her public persona dozens of times over the years -- often to contrast with Bill's -- and you can’t really blame her for that. She’s had to figure out what this country wants from its women as she goes along, and if this campaign has revealed anything it’s that we no more agree on what we want in our women than we agree on how to get out of Iraq.
But it hasn’t helped that this Clinton campaign has also reinvented itself almost weekly since January: We’ve had Falling to Pieces Week; Finding Our Voice Week; Unloading a Carton of Whupass Week; and then Heh, Heh, That Bill Is a Maniac Week. Is it just me, or is it true that when it comes to issues of character, you don’t necessarily want a candidate who seems to be testing out new ones for each new crisis?
Caroline Kennedy will be endorsing Obama in tomorrow’s New York Times, and you can’t miss the contrast between this daughter of a great president and the wife of one. Feminists may weep that Kennedy speaks from under the shadow of her father to endorse another man, while Hillary can’t seem to wriggle out from the shadow of her husband. But then, it’s not an accident that in South Carolina tonight, Obama beat Clinton among women 53 percent to 30 percent.
It’s not so much that women aren’t ready for a woman president. We are. But there’s something about last week’s spectacle of Bill Clinton crashing through South Carolina like the guy poised to drag her back to his cave by the hair that reminds us that Hillary has some stuff to work out in her marriage before she works it out with the rest of us. Any woman in public life inevitably still struggles to define herself in opposition to men. But Hillary has an even bigger cross to bear: She’s still defining herself in opposition to Bill.
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A guest post from our own Will Saletan about the exit of Dennis Kucinich from the Democratic race:
Why does the man who endured humiliation through the entire 2004 primary season drop out this early in 2008? I blame the wife. He didn't have a wife last time. The wife is the person who tells you, "Honey, it's time to drop out."
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As far as meta-themes go in this presidential campaign, this week’s “Hoppin’ Mad” trope has quickly become tiresome. Yesterday we heard endless reports about an incident in which Barack Obama ostensibly had a “testy” exchange with a reporter that proved testy only in the eyes of someone at ABC trying to bump up their page views. And today’s headlines are all screaming about Bill Clinton who allegedly “lays into” “unloads on” “gets fiery” and otherwise freaks out on a CNN reporter. But if you watch the video–of Clinton responding to a question from Jessica Yellin about reports of vote suppression in Nevada—I just don’t see much laying into or unloading. Wordiness? Yes. Misdirection? Some. But up until the very end when he says “shame on you”—with a big smile on his face, and in much the same way you might if your dog had peed on the bathmat—I just don’t see much rage here.
So, what’s up with the whole media manufactured tantrums thing? Is it just some lame attempt to create a psychodrama where none exists? Is it reporters trying to stand out by putting themselves at the center of the story? Is Clinton right in saying that—like hockey—the press watches campaigns only for the bleeding?
In his great 2007 book A Bee in the Mouth, anthropologist Peter Wood describes an America in love with a “social anger” that is more performance than real. It’s bad enough when we feign anger in public life in to engage voters. But engaging viewers with the suggestion that candidates and their spouses are constantly out-of-control is exponentially more revolting.
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And still on the subject of bias in Supreme Court reporting, longtime Slate contributor and appellate attorney Walter Dellinger writes in the following e-mail:
A former academic colleague of mine once said a very wise thing about "bias": "The worst kind of politics is the politics that doesn't know it's a politics."
It was once suggested that Linda not cover abortion cases because of her "bias" in favor of reproductive rights. She had a "position." The assumption is that she should and could be replaced on those cases by someone without a bias. Without a bias? Who would that be? Oh, right, of course, someone who had shown total indifference to either side of the debate. And that is because not giving a damn either way about whether unborn are being slaughtered or women are being coerced by a totalitarian intervention into their lives is not a "position"—it is something called "objectivity" or "balance" or whatever.
The goal of fair reporting does not depend upon reporters having no "views"—it depends upon a professionalism that gets it right. And here is where the critics utterly fail. In the field that Linda covers, it would be easy to make out a case of unprofessional bias. The materials on which her reporting is based are all public. To take one kind of example: Every predictive statement she has made in assessing oral argument over a long career was either verified or repudiated by the court's subsequent decision. For example, a report by Linda that said "The Court appeared unwilling to accept the government's broad view of executive power" followed a few months later by an opinion of the Court that gave the executive everything it asked for would count as an error. Finding enough errors and finding that the errors are systematically in the direction of the reporter's "bias" should establish a lack of requisite professionalism. Showing bias (on the part of an unprofessionally biased Supreme Court reporter) would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
Why has no critic actually undertaken to demonstrate Linda's bias from readily available public sources? Two weeks' work by a summer intern would do the trick. Doesn't the failure to do this strongly suggest that the critics actually know what they would find—that while she must have made mistakes somewhere in thousands of stories, what is remarkable is how extraordinarily rare such mistakes have been and what is dispositive is the total absence of a pattern of errors in one direction that would be consistent with biased reporting. So the critics must actually know better. Which is why Emily and Dahlia are so right that it is very wrong to dignify these attacks as if they were honest complaints that deserved an answer.
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Dunno, Emily ... I, for one, am glad that Ed Whelan at NRO has outed us as raging drunks.
To me, the remarkable aspect of the assault on Greenhouse is—as you point out—that she warrants such extra-special crazy-ass contempt from the right wing. She’s not just “biased,” in Whelan’s latest. She’s also “sloppy.” It speaks to the impossible high-wire act still attempted by the Supreme Court press corps. They strive to be absolutely factual even while some of the best reporters on the beat have about 30 years’ experience and the political opinions that come with that. Long after the rest of the journalistic world chucked the illusion of objectivity to settle for the hope of accuracy, the folks on the SCOTUS beat still struggle mightily to hide their opinions each day. Some succeed better than others. I succeed not at all. And, of course, all of them slip up once in a while because the line between fact and opinion is murky. But Greenhouse is held to a different standard because the political right thinks she has this magical ability to alter the course of constitutional history with a quirk of her eyebrow toward the bench.
What. Ever.
Most interesting to me about Whelan’s latest crusade—er, noble truth-seeking enterprise—is that it does highlight the impossibility of what most SCOTUS reporters are trying to do: Perfect objectivity in Supreme Court reporting is a laudable goal. But unless we just reprint the transcript, we are all of us offering interpretations and impressions. That’s the expertise we get paid for. Interesting, also, is the fact that the convention is eroding on its own. Both Jeff Toobin and Jan Crawford Greenburg produced excellent books about the court last year that sidestepped objectivity for opinion and point of view. Yet nobody is calling for their scalps. In fact, most of us found their candor pretty refreshing. I am not sure whether anyone would contend that Jan’s book is objective while Jeff''s is not, or vice versa. I certainly didn’t hear rants about deliberate bias and dishonesty. Most of us simply recognized in those books the truth that different legal reporters hold different opinions, that it may be impossible to conceal them anymore, and that this may be a good thing.
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Ed Whelan at NRO didn't like the piece Dahlia and I wrote yesterday defending Linda Greenhouse. We're not eager for a tit for tat. But it seems worth repeating that our basic point, which Whelan ignores, is that critics on the right go after Greenhouse with an overwrought vigor not visited upon any other Supreme Court reporter (and few other reporters in general). The point seems to be to discredit her and the paper, and what we were objecting to is the Times feeding the whole thing. (Though we did appreciate that Whelan didn't like what Hoyt had to say about him.)
Whelan can attack whomever he wants. What's odd, though, is that he seems so reluctant to own up to being a hatchet man. He seems surprised that we feel like he has gone after us, too. I dunno, phrases like "strikingly dishonest and incompetent--or both" (about my writing) and "dishonest and baseless" (Dahlia's) seem pretty clear. (Isn't this great--now he's got me doing his research and reprinting his nastygrams.) Whelan used that language during the Alito and Roberts hearings, a perfect time for confusing the conversation about the nominees with overheated zingers about anyone who dared to criticize them.
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I'm not sure Obama can walk away—as he said on NPR this morning, if you don't respond to charges that you think are factually inaccurate, they tend to stick (Swift Boat). Obama also talked about how Bill is playing the campaigning role that the vice presidential nominee often plays—he's the spewer, as you say, D. In a general election race, Obama would have his own VP, but at this stage, he doesn't. And Hillary's response that Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Edwards also support their spouses doesn't ring true here. They're not ex-presidents, they're not Bill Clinton, etc.
That said, is what Bill is doing really so bad? This is a campaign. Campaigns are slugfests. He's out therre slugging. I don't much like watching it myself, but I feel like it's worth asking the question. Is it more objectionable because Hillary is a female candidate and he undermines her authority? Or is this simply evidence of their smart (if unappealing) teamwork?
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Emily, I’m not sure the Clinton campaign can’t control Bill or simply doesn’t want to. As you point out, it’s apparently working. And certainly it’s to Hillary’s advantage that she gets to appear all calm and superego while her husband spews id all over the sidewalk. (How's that for gender-role reversal? He's playing Lovey to her Mr. Howell!)
But Obama seems to forget that the most basic rule of tantrum-management is walk away ...
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Newsweek's Jon Alter has a piece about Bill Clinton's recent hostile and aggressive campaign behavior. Alter quotes former Clinton lawyer, now Obama supporter, Greg Craig wondering "if Hillary's campaign can't control Bill, whether Hillary's White House could." I think we probably have all the evidence we need (see the former No. 1 best seller known as "The Starr Report") that no, Hillary Clinton cannot control her husband. Even if she became the most powerful person in the world, if he started embarrassing her, probably the best she could do would be to declare him an enemy combatant and ship him off to Guantanamo.
I guess Bill's attacks have been working -- Hillary won the last two contests. But in the long run, won't his self-righteous rants hurt her? Every time he gets riled he seems like someone who, for the past seven years, has only had to deal with questions from lesser mortals such as, "Would you like one pillow or two in your sedan chair, my liege?" In last night's debate Obama criticized Bill's attacks on him, and Hillary responded that she was the one running for president. Obama replied that sometimes it was hard to tell. Isn't that truth terribly undermining of her claim to the presidency?
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So, Chris Matthews apologized—at length—for his Hillary comments (which XX Factor discussed here and here). Here’s the video. I’m sure that now a chorus of laments will ring out in the world at large about how PC nags forced him into this. But let’s remember that his statements took place in a larger context of ongoing negativity toward Hillary (check out this Media Matters article). And listen to what he says about halfway through: that he wasn’t speaking “blunt truth,” in this case, because the real truth is a lot larger than he made it sound. That sounds about right to me. If he had said sympathy was a factor in getting Hillary where she is today, fine, big whoop. But he implied it was the only factor. That’s not a “tough truth” sensitive women don’t want to hear; it’s just a predictable, small-minded jab.
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Good question, Juliet, about whether the decline in abortions can be attributed to the decline in the number of clinics. You're right about the latter. In her recent book This Common Secret, Susan Wicklund says that ”between 1982 and 2000, the number of abortion providers in the United States declined from 2900 to 1819, a drop of 37 percent, and thetrend has continued since." Wicklund also notes that "in 2004, almost 60 percent of abortion providers were more than fifty years old.”
The Guttmacher Institute, which puts out the abortion stats, discusses barriers to acess in certain parts of the country as a possible explanation for the fall. But the Gutt folks don't think there's a direct cause-and-effect link. They point out that the abortion rate declined much faster (by 9 percent) than the number of providers (2 percent). Also, as Will Saletan notes, the rate is down in some pro-choice states and some states in which there was an increase in providers—California, Georgia, and New York. And there were also three states in which the abortion rate increased despite a decrease in providers—Alaska, Colorado, and Connecticut. So this doesn't look like the most plausible explanation.
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That's funny Ann, the one thing that never occurred to me was that Megan Meier's parents had struck an impossible bargain with her over MySpace. Perhaps because my kids still believe that Dora the Explorer actually lives inside my laptop I haven't yet thought through what a parent should be doing about monitoring social-networking sites. One of the ironies of the Meier story, beyond those we've already mentioned is that all these parents are simultaneously described as over-involved "helicopter" people and tragically checked-out.
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Dahlia, I'd say one of the most poignant lines in the New Yorker article-and there were plenty of them-comes from Mrs. Meier, Megan's mother, maturely drawing stark age distinctions. She feels for the teenagers who posted messages posing as "Josh Evans," the fake boyfriend. "If you don't think that child wishes she could go back and change that . . . It could easily have been Megan doing that." It's the adult involvement that she cannot forgive, not just her neighbor's but, I suspect, her own as well: she gave into her daughter's pleas for an account, imposing a rule she knew she couldn't enforce-that Megan never be on MySpace without a parent present. Part of what is so disturbing about this story, I think, is the image of a world ensnared by social networking technology, making middle schoolers of us all: needy, insecure, anxiously voyeuristic, socially hypervulnerable creatures for whom being alone, ever, is insupportable-is death.
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Emily, I agree with your Clintonian sentiment re abortion (fewer = better), but perhaps only in theory. The new report on the falling abortion rate didn't provide a reason for the decline. Maybe I'm being cynical, but could this have something to do with the dwindling number of clinics?
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Just read Lauren Collins piece on the Megan Meier MySpace/Suicide story. We haven’t really covered this story at Slate, largely because it’s virtually impossible to wrap your head around it all. Collins doesn’t try to make sense of it all either, just sort of lays it out there in a read-it-and-weep piece that paints the kids involved as somehow old beyond their years and the parents as young beyond theirs.
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Per our discussion about Juno and abortion earlier this week, the Guttmacher Institute announced today that the U.S. abortion rate has declined to its lowest level since 1974—the year after Roe v. Wade was decided. In 2005, the rate was 19.4 abortions per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44. The absolute number has gone down as well, to 1.2 millon abortions in 2005, which is 25 percent fewer than the high of 1.6 million abortions in 1990. This, I think we can agree, is unvarnished good news. I hope that it speaks to the spreading of the birth control, birth control mantra that Melinda was wisely intoning. The Guttmacher Institute notes, however, that more than one in five pregnancies still ended in abortion in 2005, so we've got a ways to go.