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David Brooks raises an excellent question in his column today about demographics and the Democrats: I understand why affluent, college educated voters are drawn to Barack Obama, but how did Hillary Clinton become the candidate of the working class voter? She went to Wellesley and Yale Law School. People in Arkansas found her snooty and bizarre. She didn't shop at Wal-Mart, she served on the board. There was the "cookie baking" flap. In the years since the White House she and her husband have taken in more than $100 million and their best friends are billionaires. Brooks offers only, "Clinton's talk of fighting and resilience plays well down market", but is that it? Whatever it is, Hillary has wrought an absolutely extraordinary political transformation.
And what is everyone thinking about Obama's tepid response to Jeremiah Wright's "throw Obama under the bus" tour? Is Obama right to simply say, "He does not speak for me He does not speak for the campaign. He may make statements in the future that don't reflect my values or concerns. I think certainly what the last three days indicate is that we're not coordinating with him, right?" and just hope Wright burns himself out. Or does he have to make a stronger, more specific statement saying that while he still has love for the Rev. Wright and appreciation for the role he has played in his life, he is filled with sorrow over the ugly, damning, just plain wrong things he has been saying, etc.—which runs the risk of looking like he is getting into an under-the-bus throwing contest with his pastor and which might offend some black voters?
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Depressing findings from the Chronicle of Higher Education: Even though well-off colleges say they're trying hard to recruit low-income students, the numbers are going in the wrong direction. At the 75 schools with endowments over $500 million, the share of students who received Pell grants, which means they come from families that make less than $40,000 a year, dipped from 14.3 percent in 2004-05 to 13.1 percent in 2006-07. The trend is the same at the 39 tippy-top richest schools: 19.6 percent of students there were low-income in 2004-05, compared with 18 percent two years later.
The time frame under study is short, to be sure. But it also matches a period in which colleges have been talking up class diversity, and in which the idea has been floated as an alternative to race-based affirmative action. The falling numbers show that well-qualified poor applicants don't submit applications in droves to the well-endowed schools, and that the schools haven't really figured out yet how to find them. A few campuses have shown that it's possible to improve at that task. The Chronicle noted schools that are exceptions to the rule because they have posted small gains: Amherst, Holy Cross, Williams, Princeton, and the Universities of Richmond and Texas at Austin. At Smith, 25 percent-plus students are low-income; at UCLA, 35 percent. What are those schools doing differently?
That's the big question, I think. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts, but my own sense is that the answer is not the big feel-good initiative that Harvard and Yale announced this winter: expanding financial aid so that it covers families that earn up to $180,000 or $200,000 a year. As this persuasive NYT op-ed points out, most schools don't have the money to give aid to upper-middle-class families (I hope that $200,000 a year still gets you into that category) as well as truly needy ones. And so, as the op-ed by former Columbia Dean Roger Lehecka points out, the Harvard and Yale move "sets an example that is likely to make it even harder for low-income students to attend the best college for which they are qualified." So forget Harvard and Yale—among the private colleges, what's Smith doing? Or Princeton or Williams or Holy Cross or Amherst?
(Cross-posted at Convictions.)
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I sympathize with Hanna's request that Miley Cyrus put on a robe, but I have lower expectations for magic in the Magic Kingdom. With no children or grandchildren in the Miley Cyrus target demographic, I nearly missed the Hannah Montana phenomenon except for the unavoidable Disney juggernaut marketing of former country singer Billy Ray Cyrus’ offspring. (I am reminded that "Achy Breaky Heart" was a hit in 1992.) To me the come-hither Miley VF shots seem relatively tame and designed to widen the teenager’s fan base. (The pictures of Miley with her boyfriend don’t look any more provocative than photos any 15-year-old with a boyfriend might post on MySpace.) I was more annoyed to see the spin obliquely blames the 15-year-old's semi-nude Vanity Fair exposure on photographer Annie Leibovitz, a professional who has been coaxing photography subjects since Mick Jagger was a boy. The story reminded me of the February Lindsay Lohan photo spread in New York magazine where the Disney Parent Trap star (and more recently rehab darling) replicated Marilyn Monroe's famous 1962 “boozy nudes.” When she was criticized, Lohan publicists hinted photographer Bert Stern, who shot both the original Monroe and Lohan re-creation sessions, was to blame.
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I am about to enter into the realm I never imagined I'd find myself, the parental equivalent of the liberal being mugged. In this case, the mugger is Miley Cyrus, or maybe Disney, or Vanity Fair—whoever is most responsible for that photo of a topless 15-year old Cyrus barely holding the bedsheets up. Which is actually less off-putting than the recently leaked photo of her slithering around with her boyfriend. Or BBF, or FWB, or whatever.
Here's my problem with the phenomenon. Yes, teenage starlets burn this way. But don't they usually do it in stages? In my memory, the Olsen twins were innocent child stars and then they slowly morphed into tabloid fodder. This seems the natural sexual-awareness trajectory of anyone their age, only somewhat exaggerated. Now there are shows we all consider clean: Hannah Montana and High School Musical, for example. And by any watchdog's standards they are: no sex, no exposed flesh, no cursing. This ensures that children as young as 6 or 7(such as my daughter) will know all about them and love them. She doesn't see anything bad. She just listens to lots of teenagers sing and dance and go on and on about who's dating whom and who's in love and who broke up, etc. They are innocent and knowing at the same time. I can't easily say to her: Don't watch that, you don't want to be like that underage sexpot, do you? Because the actors look as cute and innocent as the Teletubbies. But something about all this sanitized high school chatter leaves me uneasy. Why does a 6-year old need to know so much about dating and breaking up?
I can anticipate the objections to this argument: Americans are always fetishizing childhood innocence. They need to imagine their children as clean and gossamer-white in order to protect them. And there is an element of truth in this. I read that popular Lin Burress blog on this subject which was quoted in the New York Times and it made me cringe. (She complains about 5-year olds trying on make-up. Who could read anything dirty in that?)
So I guess, as a parent, I'm just begging for less confusion. When I was a pre-teen in the '70s, the culture was probably more sexed up. I was a little younger than Miley Cyrus when I saw Fame. That was probably about as much bare flesh as I could handle. But it seemed distant and dangerous to me. The actors who played high school kids back then looked practically as old as my parents, or at least my uncle. There was no confusing them with my (relatively) squeaky clean schoolmates.
Late breaking news. Cyrus has now apologized for the photos, calling them "inappropriate" and "silly," See, there she goes again: "Silly?" What 15-year-old uses the word "silly?" That's a 6-year-old pander for sure.
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OK, I'm going to wade into the hornet's nest on the equal-pay bill. Before I begin, let me say that I actually tried to read the Senate bill and have now decided to give up my dream of running for legislative office someday, because it's hard to decipher the gibberish without reading 20 other pieces of legislation.
The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act does does seem "mild," as Richard Ford puts it so well (and this post explains it quite well, for the nonlawyers among us), though I do think it would probably lead to more lawsuits, not fewer. But I think there are multiple and complex reasons besides plain old discrimination that women make less than men, and not only does this bill not address these, but they aren't necessarily problems that can be fixed by any legislation. For example, how many of us take jobs that might be less financially rewarding but allow for flexibility so that we can be home when our kids need us or so that we can dash out for the 3 p.m. piano recital? How many women choose to take a few years off to spend time with their kids while they are young? That inevitably leads to situations in which 40-year-old men are making more money than 40-year-old women doing the same job, because they have more experience. Clearly, if the situation is reversed, and a man has taken a few years off to stay at home, his female co-worker who hired a nanny and slogged through 50-hour work weeks should be making the bigger salary.
I look at how the business world has changed since I was a kid watching my parents hard at work, and I think one of the great improvements that women (with the help of technology) have brought to the workforce is a better grasp of work-life balance. Would men have figured out the benefits of telecommuting on their own? Or flexible scheduling or job sharing? Maybe, maybe not. We have a long, long way to go, and pay equity is an enormous part of that. But I think the solutions are more likely to come from within—more women executives, more women running businesses—than to come from on high by government decree.
Lastly, I don't want to get to a place in our society where the government is deciding what jobs are worthy of what wages (and, yes, I know this bill doesn't do that), because I think one of the costs would be that employers would respond to that infringement on their rights by becoming less accommodating of their employees. And that would be giving up a whole lot of what we've worked for.
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Over on "Convictions," Richard Ford elaborates on our objections to McCain's opposition to the Equal Pay Bill. Here's the full post. He concludes:
I have to say it’s hard for me to believe that anyone who is really committed to equal pay would oppose this mild and sensible piece of legislation—it doesn't open us up to lawsuits for "all kinds of problems"—only for the problem of discriminatory pay. Opposition suggests that McCain is most concerned with reducing the absolute number of cases filed—whether or not they have merit.
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I want to say amen to your excellent post about McCain and equal pay, Emily. The only thing I'd add is this: I found McCain's comments about the bill particularly dismaying because he invoked an old canard—that women are less qualified than their male peers, and that (by implication) is mainly what keeps their pay low—instead of dealing with the possiblity that discrimination exists. While campaigning in Kentucky, the AP reported, McCain expressed his oppposition to the equal pay bill by noting that what women need is more training:
"They need the education and training, particularly since more and more women are heads of their households, as much or more than anybody else," McCain said. "And it's hard for them to leave their families when they don't have somebody to take care of them.
"It's a vicious cycle that's affecting women, particularly in a part of the country like this, where mining is the mainstay; traditionally, women have not gone into that line of work, to say the least," he said.
Now, to be fair, this quote is taken out of context and I don't know what he said before it. But as a sentiment, this simply doesn't deal with the reality of gender discrimination in our country. Nor will more training help any woman who is being paid less than she should be because of it. McCain's proposal is not a viable alternative, in other words; it's a form of putting one's head in the sand and redirecting voters away from the real, if vexed, issue: that sexism still exists, and we need to find a thoughtful legal way of dealing with it.
Read the rest of the equal-pay conversation on XX Factor.
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I've got more to complain about: Last night, Senate Republicans killed the Equal Pay Bill, which would have undone the Supreme Court's bad deed in a case last term called Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. Lily Ledbetter sued Goodyear for sex discrimination because she earned less than men in similar positions—a fact she proved in court. But on appeal, the Supreme Court found that Ledbetter's suit was too late, by setting the clock according to Ledbetter's first unfairly low pay check, rather than the ongoing low salary she continued to receive years later. It didn't matter when she found out she was being shortchanged—only when Goodyear started doing so.
John McCain said Wednesday that he supports "pay equity for women" but opposes the fix for Ledbetter's plight in the Equal Pay Bill because it "opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems." That has a nice anti-litigation ring, but does it make sense? As Rich Ford pointed out in Slate after the Supreme Court's decision, the clear lesson the case holds for employees is, "Sue early and often. If you suspect your boss might be discriminating with regard to your pay, you can't afford to wait around until you're sure." The Equal Pay Bill might give rise to more meritorious law suits. But couldn't it also stave off some losers? And what does it mean to be for pay equity for women while opposing what's on offer to actually help achieve it?
(Cross-posted on Slate's legal blog, "Convictions.")
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A couple of years ago, my son remarked that President Bush seemed to think every day was Opposites Day, which would explain how he always wound up listening to the wrong people and giving the best ideas the boot. That's how I feel now, listening to Hillary's down-is-up take on why Obama can't win in November. And I am so invigorated by—which on Opposites Day means weary of—hearing her describe his greatest strength as his biggest liability.
No question he's made mistakes. But his fatal flaw, according to her, is that he is not as skilled as she in answering Republican attacks (with more of the same). Watch her gleefully practice on her fellow Democrat, with Republican-style ads evoking such GOP golden oldies as the red phone, Pearl Harbor, and, OMG, Khrushchev? I never expected her to be leading the proverbial Million Mom March, but doesn't it bother any of these old-school feminists to see her painting her rival as the girl in this race—yes, as if that were a bad thing—just as every Republican since Richard Nixon has done to every Democrat since Adlai Stevenson? No doubt the former Goldwater Girl will never be outdone on the mushroom-cloud front. But at what point does one turn into what one fears? If I wanted Karl Rove for president, I would have voted for him the first time.
To me, Obama's appeal is rooted in his view that we have more in common than we might realize—and can't afford to go on tearing each other to shreds in this polarized, cartoon world where if your views are two degrees north or south of mine, then U R evil and must die. It was his refusal to play the same old zero-sum game that got him where he is today—ahead by every measure and, barring the kind of collapse that won't happen unless he betrays his own best instincts, on his way to becoming the nominee.
So, why can't Obama close the deal? In a way, it's his strength in November that is his highest hurdle now. I always thought he would have a harder time winning the nomination than the general, because the Clintons have defined and dominated the Democratic Party for a long, long time. And it's the very same "Let's stand on common ground, together'' appeal—which will win him the support of independents and Republicans in the fall—that makes him so suspect to Democrats who don't want to stand anywhere with those people; they want payback for the Bush years. And while that's understandable, it's not a way to win. Even Bill Clinton, with all his superior political skills and peekaboo triangulating and solemn vows not to act like a real Democrat, would not have won without Ross Perot in the mix. We can't get there on our own —which, again, is Obama's message.
Another reason he can't close the deal: We are never satisfied! Republicans settle for the good-enough candidate, go on about their lives, and show up on Election Day, but not us. I took my children to an Obama rally where people were screaming and swooning and speaking in tongues they were so excited—and on the way home, my daughter sniffs and says she wonders if he's focused enough on global warming. And what can I do but swell with pride? My baby really is a Democrat.
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Ann, a question triggered by your great post this morning: What is the opposite of hope and civility? Is it honesty and candor about the toughness of this race, as you suggest? Is it being “mean and irrational” as Gail Collins argues? Or is it specificity and detail as Joan Walsh implies? From the outset, Obama critics have always conflated his tone with his politics—arguing that all this optimism and coalition-fostering was either empty rhetoric that masked a lack of substance, or that his only end game is to repair politics as it is practiced.
I think that mistake sometimes leads commentators to confuse Clinton’s substance with Obama’s style. When she wins on substance, the problem must be his style. And it leads them to conclude that he has to drop all the sunny optimism and civility in order to be substantial or rigorous or detailed or honest. Substance, rigor, detail, and honesty are not the opposite of civility. Obama can crank up the former without sacrificing the latter. Or at least he can try before hauling out the chainsaw and the flaming torches.
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Ann, your smart post tees me up to protest one particular pander: the candidates' unwillingess to speak the scientific truth that there is no evidence of a link between mercury in vaccines and autism. McCain is the worst on this. From the Washington Post, quoting McCain at a February town hall meeting: "It's indisputable that (autism) is on the rise among children, the question is what's causing it. And we go back and forth and there's strong evidence that indicates it's got to do with a preservative in vaccines."
Obama isn't much better. His quote from a Pennsylvania rally this week, also in the Post: "We've seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it's connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it." The Post has video showing that Obama pointed to someone in the crowd when he said "this person included," so he wasn't talking about himself. Still, there is nothing inconclusive about the science on the autism-vaccines link.
Hillary doesn't slam the door shut on the myth-makers, either. Asked what she would do to protect against "exposure to mercury through vaccines," she said, "I will ensure that all vaccines are as safe as possible for our children by working to ensure that Thimerosal and mercury are removed from vaccines." This is nonsensical, since the government took thimerosal out of vaccines in 1999 (because of other concerns about mercury, though not the kind of mercury in thimerosal, and not related to autism).
As Slate's health editor, I've run so many pieces that patiently debunk the claim that vaccines cause autism that the last time the controversy cropped up, I couldn't bear to assign a new one. Here's how the CDC puts it, "there's no convincing scientific evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines." Here's the latest study knocking down this ever-persistent claim. Here's a good explanation about why the myth won't die. Why, then, are the candidates blithely skipping down this pander path? I haven't heard back from the McCain camp. When I asked the Obama campaign, I got no direct answer but rather a pointed mention of the many many e-mails that parents devoted to this myth send. Which of course is the answer: On one side of this dispute is an extremely impassioned and devoted band of adherents who are deserving of sympathy: parents of autistic children. On the other side is scientific truth—cold, abstract, and apparently not a vote getter. But as our colleague Will Saletan points out, how can Democrats complain about the fake denials of global warming and evolution while practicing the exact same pandering over autism? Gross.
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Here's my two-days-after two-cents. Obama may be feeling weary, but it seems to me he should be feeling he's been remarkably successful at changing the standards of conduct for campaigning, if not yet for governing. But won't it be ironic if the norm-shift to niceness ends up serving neither him, nor the Democratic Party, very well in the end? Our threshold for sustained competition, with any level of conflict in it, seems to have become very low, thanks not least to Obama's invocation of a more harmonious ethos—with the result that his candidacy risks looking hamstrung and a little hapless: The nice-guy stuff would have looked great if he'd won quickly. Since he hasn't, the above-the-fray mentality itself tends to get the blame, fueling fears that its limitations may be more glaring when it comes to real governing. Meanwhile, Clinton looks more like a down-in-the-mud caricature than she would otherwise, and Democratic behavior in general looks dysfunctionally divisive—and inspires gloom-and-doom about November.
But by pre-Obama standards, it seems to me Democrats might be battling on without feeling so bitter and disappointed in each other. Should we be feeling so chagrined that he's facing up to how tough it is to forge broad coalitions, and that she's getting whacked daily for her win-at-all-costs approach? Should we be so panicked they'll tear each other to pieces? And not to be too cynical, but as Gail Collins suggests in her column today, there's a downside to the purportedly high road of just talking positively and peacefully about the issues: It's an invitation to start pandering shamelessly (and all but identically) to the voters. After lots of talk about hope and experience, it surely doesn't hurt either candidates or voters to get some lessons in patience and resilience.
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Melinda, your observations last night seem to have foreshadowed much of today’s postmorteming: Everyone now agrees it’s all about the bitterness. The only point of contention is whether all this spluttering rage indeed motivates voters—as you suggest—or pisses them off—as this Times op-ed insists. (Tuesday’s result was “even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it. Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work.”)
More and more I see this as liberals foreshadowing their own November defeat. Everyone is so damn terrified of the inevitable, invincible, candidate-crushing Republican Attack Machine that the only metric left to us is which candidate can survive it. If that’s all we care about, we should probably just nominate Karl Rove to run against McCain in November. And here’s the kicker: It feeds on itself. Your angry Clinton supporters read this morning’s Times op-ed about bitterness, and it makes them even more bitter. (“She can’t catch a break. Everyone in the media is in the tank for Obama. Even when she wins, she loses. ...”) Whereas the pacifist Obama-cats like myself read that their guy is poised to take the gloves off, and it mostly just makes us want to stay home.
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The most important split among Democratic voters this year may not be based on race, gender, age, or even whether or not you think bitter is a bad word; I look at the exit polling tonight and wonder if the defining difference isn't one of temperament, with angrier voters not only favoring the angrier candidate but guaranteeing that this race isn't going to be over anytime soon.
I say that because according to the exit polls, Clinton voters are significantly more likely to vote Republican or stay home on Election Day if they don't get their way in the primary. (Sixty-two percent would be dissatisfied with Obama as the nominee, and maybe that's no big whoop; dissatisfaction is a vague word, and a mewling little feeling that fades. But only about half of Hillary's supporters in Pennsylvania would vote for Obama in the fall? Now you have my attention. Fully a quarter of them would rather see John McCain in the White House than the Brand X Democrat—and nearly 1 out of 5 say they'd take their toys and stay home.) It makes sense that Clinton's angrier backers like that their candidate is that way, too; they seem to think it is a good thing that she is mad at the competition and the activists and the press -- and good that she won't quit no matter what. For her supporters, this shows the backbone that's been lacking in some other Democrats we could name—and she has named them. To them, it means she'd be harder to swift-boat. It means she wouldn't wimp out and put the country's interests first in a recount -- how weak is that? -- or work with the opposition once elected.
Obama supporters, on the other hand, are the dreaded Kumbaya types who will not go home mad if their guy is not the guy—and that's to their clear disadvantage. (Only 52 percent of them could whip up even dissatisfaction if they don't get their way; 16 percent say they'd go for McCain and 13 percent would stay home.) The obvious problem for Obama is that his chilled-out supporters like him that way, too; his ability to make good on Bush's broken promise to be a uniter, not a divider, is so central to his appeal that if he followed the advice of all those people who want him to "close the deal'' the old-fashioned way, he would lose what sets him apart.
Angry doesn't win general elections. It doesn't entice new voters into the process or beguile independents or heaven knows, invite Republican defections. But by definition, it has enormous negative power. And in the next couple of weeks, we're going to see how angry Hillary and her supporters really are.
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Here’s a thoughtful piece from Courtney E. Martin at the American Prospect responding to Linda Linda Hirshman’s Slate piece from last Friday about the ways in which young feminists resent Hillary Clinton out of a semi-Freudian need to destroy their mothers. For those scoring along at home, Debra Dickerson fires off a round for Hirshman’s team here at Mother Jones.
Anyone but me find it hilarious that every feminist writer of every generation evidently comes to this battle with claims that they are interested in pursuing a deeper, more nuanced conversation about gender, just before they let loose with the scattershot accusations about the other side? Martin accuses some “older women” of dismissing women’s body issues, for instance, as “frivolous.” While Dickerson takes aim at “young women who inherited what we mothers fought for and now want us to disappear so our girls can go wild and pole dance without feeling all guilty.” I get it that Martin’s criticism is couched in a larger discussing about the need to learn from one another and that Dickerson’s going for comedic effect. But their continued talking past each other raises the question about what a “nuanced” conversation about our differences can possibly look like, if every assertion about those differences—be it from Hirshman, Martin, or your mamma—is instantly disparaged as peddling in reductive stereotypes.
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After we toast Danica, let's raise a glass (of milk, in case anyone's watching) to welcome Cynthia Sommer home from jail. As far as I can tell, Sommer spent 2½ years in lockup for getting breast implants and hanging out in bars. A San Diego jury heard a lot about what a tramp she supposedly was; Sommer even started dating again after her husband died! Then, they found her guilty of murdering him. According to the Los Angeles Times, prosecutors presented 34-year-old Sommer as an older woman (OK, it's Southern California, but still) who offed the 23-year-old Marine "to collect on his $250,000 life insurance policy and begin a new, fun-filled life'' in Florida, with new boobs and multiple boyfriends. Only—their bad—it turns out Sommer "was jailed 876 days for an arsenic-poisoning murder that prosecutors now say didn't occur.''
If only she'd been thinking ahead, she would have saved her pennies for a better attorney, because the first knucklehead she hired opened the door to a description of her "lifestyle'' that was so inflammatory the judge ruled she'd been deprived of a fair trial. He overturned her conviction for murder with special circumstances, which carries a mandatory life sentence. "The evidence about her breasts, drinking and sexual activity 'became like an overwhelming cloud that covered everything,' " her new defense attorney, Allen Bloom, told the Times. Yet Sommer was kept in jail—and separated from her four children, ages 8, 12, 13, and 16—while waiting for a retrial. Until last week, when new tests showed no evidence of arsenic in her husband's tissue samples. Bloom had already lined up experts who were going to testify that Todd Sommer's death could have been caused by the diet pills he'd been taking. And prosecutors were still interviewing the neighbors, hoping to find some additional dirt on Sommer. Maybe, while she's deciding whether to sue them, each prosecutor should be made to wear a big A pinned to his or her chest, like Hester Prynne in the Scarlet Letter. Except in that case, of course, the A stood for adulterer.
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Emily, your exegesis of Obama as Joshua to MLK's Moses, leading the people to the promised land, was inspiring, but it would have been laughed off the table at a Seder I attended this past weekend—also in the Philadelphia area—where three separate attendees announced their decision to change their vote in tomorrow's primary from Obama to either Hillary or (in the case of one intractable Hillary-hater) not to vote at all. Their decision was based entirely on the Jeremiah Wright dustup. In their eyes, voting for Obama would now constitute an irredeemably anti-Semitic act, presumably because of Wright's ties to Farrakhan (all the recent combing of his sermons for offensive material didn't turn up any anti-Semitic rants, did it?). Mind you, these were not hardcore Zionists whose only voting issue is Israel's security—they were middle-class, center-left Jews who agreed with Obama on the war and most social issues and who would have placed themselves firmly, if not passionately, in his camp six weeks ago. Of course, this is just one anecdotal example, but it made me wonder how many Jewish votes Obama lost in that whole Wright flap, and whether, if he does become the candidate in the general, those lost votes will wander across the desert to McCain.
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Speaking of Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary, at our family seder in Philadelphia over the weekend, my mother pointed out that just as 40 years elapsed before the Israelites made it to the Promised Land, so 40 years have passed since the assassination of MLK in April 1968 and this contest, with Barack Obama's candidacy. He may be down in the polls statewide, but in my parents' corner of northwest Philadelphia, Obama signs bloomed in many a yard (even on streets near the home of Gov. Ed Rendell, a Clinton diehard). If MLK plays the role of Moses in this analogy, then Obama is Joshua—of a generation one step removed from the past (civil rights-era leaders like Jeremiah Wright come to mind). It's the Joshua-vintage leader who gets to lead his people into the new land. All very biblical and sweeping and moving—even if you're right, Hanna, and tomorrow Obama doesn't yet pull it off.
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I've been to only a handful of car races in my life, all on a two-bit track in Manasses, so I shouldn't have much of a stake in the triumph of Danica Patrick. This weekend, the 26-year-old became the first woman to win an Indy car race, defeating a two-time Indy 500 champion by six seconds. But here is why I find this victory so sweet. For as long as man has known how to inflate rubber, there have been men (and particularly middle-aged men) who brag that they could beat any female college pro in a one-on-one. In his book about sports stunts, Todd Gallagher has a chapter called, "How Big Is the Gap Between Male and Female Athletes." The chapter begins with the anecdote of a 39-year-old overweight alcoholic who came within one basket of beating a professional women's basketball player in a one-on-one. Gallagher's conclusion is that the gap between male and female professional athletes is "much wider than the general public understands," and he has all sorts of graphs and charts to prove that. My husband, who plays on both a soccer and basketball team, keeps this book in our bathroom. You are beginning to see where my resentment comes in. Whether or not Gallagher is right, men are permitted to keep this fantasy alive becaue it's hardly ever tested. In professional sports, in the Olympics, there are few co-ed sports.* Even in non-team sports (gymnastics, weight-lifting) men and women usually compete separately. Car racing is a rare exception, probably because there aren't enough women interested. And Danica took advantage of that. What makes it sweeter is, Danica is no tomboy, playing by the men's rules. Before winning this weekend, she was most famous for posing in various Paris Hilton-like poses in her bikini. So before we lapse into our postfeminist sulk tomorrow night (when Hillary wins Pennsylvania), let us all toast Danica and her fabulous legs.
*Correction, April 22: The post originally said that there are no co-ed professional or Olympic sports. However, men and women do compete against one another in Olympic equestrian and sailing events.
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Well, I probably should have known that something was fishy when the Yale Daily News reported that “[f]ew people outside of Yale's undergraduate art department have heard about Shvarts' exhibition.” Yale’s not a big campus: When I was there, we all knew that some girl was keeping live crabs from a Chinatown grocery store in her bathtub; I’m sure that, if someone was regularly “making art” in hers, people would be talking about it.
Dana, you asked if the artwork was successful or not, given what we know now. I think that, based on the criteria I mentioned in my last post, the answer is no. I still don’t get the sense that Shvarts had a compelling—or coherent—message to impart. What does it mean to “draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body”? That’s like a horrible parody of art school speak. What does it even mean? OK, “function” I sort of get: She’s giving a big middle finger to the patriarchal-hegemonic-essentialist-traditionalist view of women as vessels for childbearing. Very Handmaid’s Tale. But where does “form” come in? What—or whose—“ambiguity” is she referring to? Maybe we’ll get a clearer thesis when Shvarts formally presents the work next week.
NB: According to the official Yale statement, the project includes “visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials.” (Emphasis added.)
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Just after my post below speculating that the abortion-as-performance-art story was a hoax, a fellow Slatester sent around this press release from the Yale public relations office, stating that Aliza Shvarts never really impregnated herself or induced any home abortions, and that the entire thing was "a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body." The only ambiguity it brought up for me was the question of whether Shvarts was a liar or a lunatic. But it's not clear who at the university knew about this "creative fiction," and for how long—from the wording of the release, it appears that just today Shvarts was called upon to confirm to university officials that her project was a stunt. I'm interested to know what other XXers think: Was Shvarts' point simply to trick people into being horrified that a young woman might really have done this to herself (and, depending on your point of view about abortion, ended the lives of several incipient human beings in the process). And if so, was her piece a success?
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OK, I’m both resolutely pro-choice and a known oversharer on this topic, but that abortion-as-Yale-art-project item strikes me as genuinely repellent. It also strikes me as a scam. Though auto-insemination doesn’t always have to be high-tech and expensive (just ask any lesbian with a turkey-baster baby), it seems highly unlikely that nine months' worth of the most assiduous basting would result in four separate pregnancies and miscarriages. (Though the artist declines to specify how many times she knocked herself up, the description of the installation implies that that four separate filmed miscarriages will be projected onto that plastic-wrapped bloody cube suspended from the ceiling. Up for a jaunt to New Haven, anyone?)
And as long as we're getting technical, what's this wonderfully effective "herbal" abortifacient, apparently available without a doctor's prescription, with which the budding Duchamp supposedly induced her multiple miscarriages? And since an early-stage induced abortion can be indistinguishable from a menstrual period, who's to say the filmed miscarriages weren’t fake? The whole story rings false, particularly the notion that Aliza Shvarts’ adviser would sign off on a project that could endanger her student’s health and would almost certainly endanger her own job. Hoax or not, I guess Shvarts’ installation is an accomplishment by some negative measure: In a single attention-getting move, she’s managed to make the pro-choice movement, feminism, performance art, and Yale all look bad at the same time.
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Bloggers are expressing shock, disgust, and outrage at this Yale Daily News article, which describes one Aliza Shvarts’ senior art project: “a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself ‘as often as possible’ while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages.” The exhibition itself consists of video recordings of her “experiencing miscarriages in her bathroom tub” and a large cube featuring samples of her uterine blood pressed between layers of plastic sheeting.
Weird and gross, granted. (Go walk it off if you need to.) But as a piece of agitprop shock art, it treads some familiar Karen Finley, Robert Mapplethorpe-esque ground, which as we all know is candy for the undergrad art crowd.
When I was at Yale, I heard about a student who had sex with her boyfriend while menstruating, then hung up the bloody sheet as part of an art-department exhibition. And one year, I participated in a friend’s performance art project about “the seven stages of women”—I was lucky (I got “sickness”), but the girl who got cast as “puberty” had to spend three hours in a huge box of tampons while fake blood made from baby shampoo dripped all over her. Now, this is why Yale is actually a great place for young artists, particularly young female artists: They’re encouraged to take themselves, and their work, very, very seriously. Of course, that means you get a lot of juvenile stunts (though that performance art piece, as a whole, was pretty moving), but if you’re not going to take your work seriously, why even bother doing it? I’m glad Yale inculcates that kind of earnestness, and I believe Shvarts when she says that she wanted to “inspire some kind of discourse.” But I don’t think she gave much thought to what, exactly, the “message” of her piece was supposed to be—though she claims that it does, in fact, have one. Is that cube a shrine? A cautionary tale? A memento mori? I don’t know, and I’d be surprised if Shvarts knew, either. Muddled thinking usually leads to boring art.
All that being said, plenty of people—including many of the women at Slate—think the whole thing might have been staged. First of all, artificial insemination isn’t that easy—or cheap. And what are these “herbal” drugs Shvarts claims to have taken? But even more damning: How could her adviser have possibly sanctioned this project, much less given Shvarts the green light to go ahead without a doctor’s supervision? Doesn’t that seem like grounds for an immediate dismissal, or at least a tenure reassessment? Call me naive, but I have a little more faith in that professor’s common sense—she must be in on the joke. Right? Right?
Read the rest of the Aliza Shvarts conversation on XX Factor.
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On today's episode of Hey, a Girl Can Dream, my man Benedict decides that as long as he's in the neighborhood, he should stroll on over to the Supreme Court and spend a couple of minutes protesting the death penalty, by lethal injection or otherwise. The high court is a short walk from the White House, where the president told the pope that Americans "need your message that all of life is sacred.'' And what better way to get that message out?
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So of course I plugged my stats into the handy-dandy wage gap calculator that Trailhead mentioned, which the Clinton campaign has posted on its Web site in honor of Equal Pay Day (April 22, in case you haven't pencilled it in yet) and the results were predictable. Some hypothetical man of my age and race would earn about one-third more than I do, at least according to Clinton's software program, whose calculations seem rather vague and ballparky, to put it mildly. I know this disparity should make me angry, and I guess, in a hypothetical kind of way, it does. But what really irritates me is something else; before Equal Pay Day comes today, which is Tax Day, and despite the fact that I mailed out a check just this morning to cover the taxes on the salary that I do get, the government persists in refusing to call me a taxpayer. No. My husband, according to the IRS, is the only "taxpayer" in our household. I am the "spouse." So for that matter is Hillary Clinton: Sccording to their jointly filed 2006 tax return, H.R Clinton, whose occupation is listed as U.S. senator, signs on the line for "spouse," while William J. Clinton, whose occupation is listed as "speaking and writing," is the official household taxpayer.
It's a little thing, I know, but it drives me crazy, once a year, that the IRS does not update its forms to acknowledge that women, though our salaries may or may not still be lower than men's, do in fact work hard for the money we get; do in fact have payroll taxes deducted, Social Security, etc. We feel like taxpayers, look like taxpayers—are, in fact, paying taxes, but are not considered bona fide taxpayers, unless we make a big deal about it and force our husbands to take on the "spouse" designation. (Actually, the reverse happened in our household: For a few years after we were married, and both making about $2 a year, I somehow was the taxpayer and my husband the spouse, which we both thought was fine, but then one tax preparer found this so disconcerting that he actually filled out the paperwork to have the titles reversed.) The thing is, how hard would it be for the government to move into the late 20th century, if not the early 21st, and change the form to have a Taxpayer A and Taxpayer B? I know that there are lots of important things the next administration will have to fix—the economy, the war, the mortgage debacle—but I hope that somebody, someday will get around to updating this throwback to an era when wives' earnings were considered to be little more than pin money.
And if I'm not a taxpayer, could I have back, like, you know, all those taxes I paid?
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A guest post from Barbara Ehrenreich:
I spent an hour yesterday trying to persuade Tom Frank, author of What's the Mater with Kansas? and the apparent intellectual source of Obama's remark on white working class "bitterness," to weigh in with an op-ed somewhere. Unfortunately, he'd already had 20 calls before mine on the same theme, so our conversation moved on quickly to the Disney Princess Cult and its pernicious influence on 3-year-olds. Although all this was off the record, I do not think I am betraying a confidence by revealing that Frank judged Bittergate to be "silly."
Because, of course, a lot of people, and not only in the white working class, are bitter, though "pissed off" might have been a better choice of words. Real wages have been stagnant or falling for years; fuel and now food prices are going through the roof; the repo guy is picking at the locks. Sticking to that most exotic of all demographics—white working-class men—and drawing entirely on my own circle of relatives and friends, I can confirm Obama's observation.
There's my old friend Trice, for example, a flight attendant who's bitter that his company's top executives are about to pamper themselves with fresh bonuses while he's taken a 30 percent pay cut in recent years. There's my nephew Shannon, a