The second point is that Americans in general are not very ideological, at least about the size and scope of government.  The popularity or lack thereof of government programs is dictated by whether they are seen as effective and, more importantly, whether they benefit whoever you’re asking.  Even the Tea Party, which in general presents itself as opposed to big government as a matter of principle, is willing to fight for big government when self-interest so demands.  As Potts points out, Southern concerns about the size and role of government have always been tied up with race, going back to slavery.  Potts also could have pointed to the South’s continuing support for the Democratic Party through the New Deal, which dramatically increased the size and role of government.  Put another way, Southerners were fine with the federal government providing electricity, jobs, and income security, but not saying who gets to drink at which water fountain.  Conservative politicians and commentators like Rand Paul, Barry Goldwater, and William F. Buckley may be sincere in opposing/having opposed the Civil Rights Act on “role of government” rather than racist grounds (which of course doesn’t excuse how callous and misguided their position was/is), but it simply isn’t accurate to ascribe that sincerity to white Southerners in general.

-AR

- AS

Apple is apparently harping back to that time in advertising with their new, headless iPad ads that only feature white people. They’ve eschewed the cool, sometimes race-ambiguous iPod silhouette ads of old, and are instead making ads that look like they are set in a Pottery Barn catalog.

I screen captured these images from ads and tutorials on the Apple website. Check out how white and upper class all these iPad users are!

Oh hello Long-sleeve T-shirt man. Is that an Old Navy tee? As if! Try Eddie Bauer. Compliments on the home – what is that, a granite counter top? Love the white-framed painting of abstract whiteness on your white walls there, too. I bet when the sky isn’t totally white you get beautiful views out of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

This has to be a joke. So T-shirt man just plops the ol’ iPad down on his thousand-dollar blue jeans, kicks up his suede (or whatever) shoes and starts to read the New York Times? With a latte, no doubt. But does he read the story about Obama critiquing Wall Street excesses? Oh no, he’s like, What’s this about kayaking in paradise now?

Look! There’s the latte! What is this fancy-jeans person reading, you ask? Oh, only True Compass: A Memoir by Edward Kennedy. This is starting to feel like an ad put together by the people at Stuff White People Like.

Here is my favorite transition. You think, why is this Ann Taylor dress/J Crew flats woman looking at a picture of this little foreign child? Does she want to adopt him or something? (And how does she keep her white table so white when she keeps putting her feet on it like that?)

Nope – she doesn’t care about that kid at all – she was just thinking about going to Paris, like all rich white people! Such as this gentleman, of the dress shirt and the immaculate wood floors.

This family budget was calculated before the family bought a bunch of iPads and had to add a little 1% pie sliver for “unnecessary shit.” As a side note, look how much this family spends on insurance! I know it’s hard to see, but ‘insurance’ is that massive blue portion. Hence their fascination with Edward Kennedy and health care reform, no doubt.

Oh no! Somebody forgot to put arugula on the grocery list. Although maybe fresh spinach and flat-leaf parsley (is that what it says?) are adequate substitutes. And who buys things like toothpaste and fabric softener at the grocery store? Rich people. In fact, who buys fabric softener? Someone who doesn’t have to lug all their detergents and such two blocks to the laundromat, that’s who.

I guess it’s no surprise that an expensive product that has no real purpose except as a lap accessory would be marketed to wealthy white people. But do they have to be so obnoxious about it?

-AS

One annoying species of meritless hypocrisy charges are those that involve neutral categories being treated as something you either favor or oppose.  For instance, both left and right have been hurling charges of hypocrisy at each other for taking different stances on the anti-war protests of the Bush years and the Tea Parties of the past year.  “Whatever happened to dissent being patriotic?”  But nobody is claiming that the Tea Partiers have no right to protest.  Rather, the Tea Partiers are criticized because they are 1) wrong on the merits, 2) using violent, racist, and homophobic rhetoric, and 3) displaying a level of hysteria and fear of the president so detached from reality as to suggest that it is at least in part motivated by a certain characteristic that makes our current president unique from all of his predecessors.  (And in case anyone got lost in the run-on end to that sentence, yes, I’m calling them racist.)  By criticizing the Tea Parties for these reasons, I am not preventing myself from taking to the streets and denouncing the president next time someone takes us to war for illegitimate reasons.

A prime example of a surface-level hypocrisy charge that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny is this post from “The Corner,” in which the tragic Jonah Goldberg endorses a reader’s condemnation of liberals for invoking the Constitution in opposing the Patriot Act but dismissing concerns that the health care bill is unconstitutional.  The argument has some superficial appeal:  liberals loved the Constitution when Bush was making laws, but now that it’s Obama they don’t care!  But with any knowledge of history and consideration of context, it’s obvious that the difference between liberal reactions to the Patriot Act and the health care bill (and conservative reactions, for that matter) is not a change in opinion over the importance of the Constitution, but rather a difference of opinion in how the Constitution applies in a given situation.  Liberals have long interpreted the Constitution to give strong protections to civil liberties while giving the government wide discretion to regulate economic matters.  The different reactions to the Patriot Act and the health care bill are perfectly consistent with such an interpretation.

-AR

What does this have to do with anything of actual importance? I feel like the past months of following the health care debate have been a condensed version of my experience as a Pirates fan. Every time a new package or compromise or new procedural avenue is announced, I convince myself that it’s the one that’s going to get the bill through. And every time, thus far, I’ve been disappointed. So with the White House house announcing that “this is the week!” and the House and Senate having a tentative agreement on how to get the bill through, my reaction is both to celebrate “here we go!” and to lament “here we go again. . .”

In one way, the Democrats inability to pass a health care bill is a lot sadder than the Pirates inability to put together a winning season. (OK, in two ways: whereas passing a health care bill involves giving millions of people access to medical care, the Pirates having a winning season involves winning some baseball games.) While the Pirates’ losing records are consistent with the lack of talent, poor management, and low payrolls they’ve had over the past two decades, the Democrats have failed to pass a health care bill despite large majorities in both houses of Congress. Despite the fact that Republicans have used every procedural tool at their disposal to block legislation since they’ve been in the minority, and despite the fact that Republicans used every tool they could to pass legislation when they were in the majority, Democrats have, to this point, been unwilling to push the limits of the rules so that a simple majority vote could pass the bill. So while there’s a lot to be encouraged by in Harry Reid’s recent “get tough” letter to Mitch McConnell, it also has a “what took you so long?!?” quality.

McConnell, for his part, calls Democratic efforts to pass the bill by majority vote “a raw exercise of legislative power.” I’m not sure exactly what work the word “raw” does in that sentence, but passing a piece of legislation is no doubt an exercise of legislative power. Which is, you know, kind of an appropriate thing for the legislative branch to do.

-AR

The action of the Central Falls school board is the most extreme manifestation of the growing trend toward scapegoating teachers generally and teachers’ unions specifically for the problems of failing schools.  It is generally easy to predict from the demographics of a school district how successful it will be on certain measures.  Central Falls is a good example:  according the Associated Press, “More children live in poverty in Central Falls, a city of just 1 square mile, than anywhere else in Rhode Island. Until recently, one of the city’s few growth industries was a quasi-public jail.”  The school also a high percentage of students who speak English as a second language.  Yet it’s an article of faith that the reason schools fail is that unions make it impossible to fire bad teachers.

There seems to be a belief that we can eliminate the flaws in the system supposedly caused by teachers’ unions without getting rid of the benefits the unions provide.  The benefits of good pay and job stability provided by unions are most important in the most difficult and stressful positions.  Put another way, it’s unclear to me, after we fire all the teachers in struggling schools, how we attract people into these high-stress, difficult jobs without the wages and job security teachers’ unions protect.

While my general support for unions no doubt motivates my defense of teachers’ unions, there’s a broader public policy concern at play.  Somewhere along the line, we decided that improving schools was the only anti-poverty measure we are willing to consider.  This decision has led us to reverse the relationship between poverty and education quality:  we believe that improving schools will eliminate poverty, rather than that attacking poverty is the only way to improve failing schools.  Since we have decided, against all evidence, that poverty is not the problem with our failing schools, the problem must be that our lazy, union-protected teachers just aren’t trying hard enough.  Bust the unions, and we don’t have to lift a finger to create jobs in the inner city, improve public housing, or reform our criminal justice system.

There is thus a cruel irony in the rhetoric used against teachers’ unions.  Teachers are assailed for putting their own self-interest ahead of that of students.  But they are the only ones being asked to sacrifice anything in this equation.  Because we unwilling to spend any additional public resources on attacking the root causes of poverty, we demand more from those who have already decided to dedicate their lives to the difficult task of teaching our most disadvantaged children.

-AR

DailyKos recently commissioned a poll to gauge just how of touch rank and file Republicans are with reality.  And the answer is:  very.  Only 42% of Republicans say President Obama was born in the United States, compared to 36% who say he was not and 22% who aren’t sure.  Twenty-three percent of Republicans believe their state should secede from the Union, 39% believe Obama should impeached (which isn’t suprising, since 63% believe he’s a Socialist, 31% believe he’s a racist who hates people, and 24% believe he wants the terrorists to win), and 21% believe ACORN stole the 2008 election.

But there’s one number in the poll that’s been getting a lot of attention that strikes me as being surprisingly low.  Fifty-three percent of Republicans believe that Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama.  Obviously, I disagree with these people on the relative qualifications of Obama and Palin.  But my disagreement is more with the simple fact that they’re Republicans and not how they judge qualifications for elected office.  On the latter issue, I’m probably more in line with the Republicans who answered Palin than the Republicans who answered Obama.   While there are many seemingly objective factors by which one could say President Obama is more qualified than Sarah Palin–intelligence, temperment, worldliness, etc.–none of these matter as much to me as the fact he’s right and she’s wrong on the major issues a president has to deal with.  If I were a Republican who conceded the objective grounds for Obama’s superior qualification but agreed entirely with Palin on matters of policy, I would no doubt be among the 53% of my party saying she is more qualified than Obama.

To give an extreme example, even after the absurd revelations of the past few weeks, if a pollster were to ask me who I considered more qualified to be president, John Edwards or a generic but respectable Republican like, say, Orrin Hatch, I’d have to go with Edwards.  From my perspective, thinking about issues in the right way, starting with the correct baseline assumptions and principles and reaching the correct results, is the single most important qualification for an elected official.

-AR

With those skeptical expectations in mind, I was pleased with the President’s address.  On policy, there wasn’t much in the way of new announcements, good or bad.  While the spending freeze is a political stunt with disastrous policy consequences (as people far smarter than myself and some guy named Barack Obama have pointed out), we knew it was coming for a few days.  And aside from that, there wasn’t the kind of movement to the right that I had feared.  President Obama seemed to be relaunching, rather than abandoning, the major goals he set for himself when he took office.

The best parts of the speech were those when the President called out the irresponsibility and obtructionism of Republicans.   My favorite passage was:

And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town — a supermajority — then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well.  Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership.  We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions.   So let’s show the American people that we can do it together.

For the past year, the Administration and the Democratic leadership has been trying pass major initiatives by playing along with the arcane rules of the Senate and the disgraceful manipulation of those by the Republican leadership.  They have dutifully tried to cobble together 60 votes on every bill and waited patiently as important posts remain unfilled due to anonymous holds and demands for cloture.  Last night, the President finally called out this non-sense in the highest profile forum available to him.

I’m not sure anything will change after last night’s speech.  I certainly don’t expect Mitch McConnell to be shamed by the President’s words and actually allow the country to be governed.  But it was a smart and necessary move by the President, and probably the best speech he could have given under the circumstances.  The country and progressives needed to be reassured that the President remains committed to real change on big issues, while Republicans need to be forced to at least publicly defend their scorched earth approach to legislating.

-AR

But last week was a good week for ACORN.  First, the results of an independent investigation, commissioned by ACORN and conducted by a former Attorney General of Massachusetts and the esteemed law firm Proskauer Rose, revealed no pattern of illegal activity by ACORN and cast doubt on the most damning piece of evidence touted by the Right.  Then, on Thursday, a federal judge ruled that the bill passed by Congress to strip ACORN of any federal funding it receives is unconstitutional.

What the investigation revealed is what anyone who has actually dealt ACORN already knew:  that the problem with the organization isn’t corruption but rather disorganization and lack of oversight.  And rather than serving some great liberal conspiracy to steal elections and install communist dictators, ACORN’s flaws undermine, rather than further, its true and noble mission of organizing low-income people, providing them services and getting them to be more active in their communities.

With the prostitution video discredited, the only evidence ACORN’s critics really have is stories of organizers turning in fraudulent voter registration cards.  But like ACORN’s disorganization more generally, this specific charge doesn’t indicate some great conspiracy to steal elections, but rather reveals a waste of resources that undermines ACORN’s true mission of empowering low-income communities.  It doesn’t help low-income communities or ACORN-backed candidates if some unscrupulous canvasser registers Mickey Mouse to vote; he ain’t showing up on Election Day.  As someone who has worked in community organizing, I can say from experience that there’s nothing more frustrating than realizing that you’ve wasted your organization’s resources to pay someone to go sit in a park and write made-up names on a piece of paper.

The best news for ACORN is that neither the Right’s crackerjack gumshoes nor their own investigators have yet uncovered ACORN’s true scheme:  to buy up cheap property in the California desert, then have their crony Barack Obama detonate a nuclear weapon in the San Andreas fault so that Southern California crumbles into the ocean and ACORNburg becomes expensive beachfront property.

-AR

-AR