NYCweboy

By All Means, Let's Make The Election About Domesticated Fags And Loose Living Tramps (Thanks, Newt!)

I have to admit I pretty much figured this year's Presidential election was foreordained as a Romney vs. Obama slugfest over the economy, with a predictable, if dismal, win for President Obama. And that's probably what we're still going to get. But how we get there, apparently, still matters.

If Romney has failed to exactly inspire the Republican base, the last couple of weeks haven't been entirely about him. What's changed, I thnk, is that Rconservatives have decided that they can't win on economic issues... and so they unpacked their favorite old trunk, the thing we often call "social issues."

Maybe it's age, maybe it's the sense that I've heard this song before, but my patience for euphemisms is pretty much gone. And so, I am tired of hearing about "social issues" when what people mean is "let's say awful things about blacks, gays and other minorities and see if Americans will give in to their worst instincts."

"Social Issues" is supposed to be about abortion, gay marriage, "family values" and the like, but really, it's about dressing up age-old prejudices and judgements about others without saying the ugly words. What's wrong with gay marriage? Something about men, women, tradition and procreation... since marriage equality opponents insist, all the time, that they don't hate gays. And what's behind the spate of new restrictive abortion laws and the brouhaha over Catholic charities and insurance coverage for contraception? Concern for life and religious freedom, not hatred of women or opposition to contraception, since that's what they keep telling us.

If there's a reason American conservatism has utterly failed to broaden its appeal, certainly in the past thirty years, it has a lot to do with just how negatve and unappealing their pitch has been. There's been virtually nothing positive that conservatives have had to offer, nothing but anti-this and opposition to that. Immigration, in fact, is a perfectly sensible issue that really does need reform, but it's become a "social issue" about the Mexican border and a specific group of undocumented immigrants because... well, "anti-Hispanic" isn't attractive, either. 

It's not surprising, really, that conservatives have drifted back into this corner; an actual election about economic injustice and issues like health care would have been an interesting discussion, especially if the right had something to offer groups of people - especially in the working class - who have really been shafted, left and right, over time. But of course, Republicans have nothing to offer on jobs, housing, financial reform, or health care. All they have is an intense dislike for President Obama and anything he's done on those issues. 

I'm not sure Mitt Romney really does have anything to offer, but to his credit, he's studiously avoided reverting to the social issues morass unless heavily pushed; it's not really the Mormon way (Orrin Hatch is a good example of this), and it's not Romney's style to appeal to people's worse instincts. So perhaps it's understandable that the "not-Romneys" of the primary season have found themselves forced to resort to the basest appeals to the base.

Of all of them, though, I suspect the real turning point  was South Carolina and Newt Gingrich's win; Gingrich really had nothing to offer except boilerplate rhetoric built on right wing talk radio bromides, the familiar litany of how things are terrible and liberals are to blame for it.  It's Gingrich who, rather skillfully, re-introduced the sham issue of insurance coverage for contraception. And Gingrich offered the kind of rhetorical cover that conservatives need to revert to "social issues" as their driving force - we're not clased-minded bigots... we're decent people looking out for America, and the Constitution.

Of course, Gingrich himself is a twice divorced Catholic convert who would, literally, say just about anything to win an election, and the dissonance between who he is and what he says just got more pronounced as his prominence grew. Rick Santorum, on the other hand, doesn't have quite that problem. Unlike almost any of the other conservatives who got big and flamed out, Santorum doesn't have to go to some of the ugliest places to sell his fealty to "social issues"; he's already been there (remember "man on dog"?). And so Santorum pitches himself as the populist voice of the unheard working (white) man (and we do mean men), and all of the "social" issues are covered as well.

I don't know if Santorum can actually ride this wave all the way to the Republican nopmination; it would be frankly hilarious if he pulls it off, but we (and he) can't possibly be that lucky. It's telling, though, that Romney and his team are, yet again, flummoxed by Santorum's success. He's the one thing they don't quite have an argument against: a true believer who thinks moderation is for wimps.

Either way, an election that revolves around the angry right renewing its worst calls against gays, pushing familiar virgin/whore/mommy lines about women's roles in society, selling familiar prejudices about blacks and hispanics... is an election held on familiar ground that they really can't win. There's too many of us, too few of them, and too many like me who are tired of listening to carefully chosen words meant to mask really hateful ideas and prejudices. None of it makes President Obama a better President, but it certainly makes clear the starkness of the choice. Which is a much easier election than the one about those pesky problems with jobs and housing and health care and such. 

The Song Remains The Same

So… President Obama has given another speech this week on immigration; it appears to be very similar to the last speech he gave, not just in tone and content, but also in timing. That is, he gives a speech on immigration well before the primary elections of the next election cycle. In it, he bemoans the failure of Republicans to do little more than posture on border security, insists that he does not favor anything like amnesty for millions of undocumented workers, and then adds some blather about how we need better policies to train the best and brightest and encourage them to stay in our economy, rather than going back to their home countries after their student visas expire.

I could – and have, repeatedly – give chapter and verse on why virtually all of this is wrong-headed and about the exact opposite of a useful, usable approach to immigration reform… but as with so many political stories these days, this is not new and doesn’t add much to an existing debate.

Instead, I just offer these few observations: It’s amazing how minority voters fall for this speech, repeatedly, as some indication that the President is “doing something” when in fact he’s done nothing at all (except, as many note, continued arrests and deportations much the way his predecessor did). Second, nothing about immigration is going to change until someone focuses on the reform of actual immigration process and USCIS. And third, nothing about this kind of cheap political posturing is going to change until Democrats who care about actual immigration reform actually replace a lot of senior Democratic Party leaders.

 

Don’t say no one told you.

The Crying Game... And Chasing The "Progressive Presidency" Unicorn

The break from political writing that I took to do a play was helped in no small part by the stagnant realities of national politics. A month of generally keeping up with the news made clear to me, anyway, that nothing really has been changing, or making much progress.

Yet, the constant drip of stories and polls suggests considerable dissatisfaction with how things are, especialy politically. There's a lot of theorizing about why this is so, much of it centered on dissatisfaction with the President, or his Administration, or policies they've attempted or achieved.

As someone who's been sitting on the sidelines watching, I tend to share the general dissatisfaction... and the vagueness which surrounds it. Something's wrong... but just what it might be isn't exactly clear.

I've asked friends and listened to starngers, and what I've come down to is that much of the "dissatisfaction with Obama" isn't really about him or his Presidency so much as the general state of affairs (especially the economy) in the country and a question of leadership which is larger than Obama himself. And with that, I think, is also the continuing struggle to better define the politics of both left and right as demographics shift and parties are redefined.

And none of that, really, can be resolved anytime soon.

Um... What Were We Talking About Again?

In the wake of Tuesday's primary results, and a slew of political developments in the past few days (I do, as well, plan to talk about, um, ...Rand Paul? Is that his name?... in a separate post), I've been struck by the resumption of a familiar aspect of the recent deep partisan divides: that there are multiple conversations happening, each largely ignoring the others.

As a lefty, I notice it especially in the right's determined silence, and fleeing from, most discussions of Rand Paul, and more specifically, refusing to touch the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I mean - Christ - even Jeff Sessions (that's Jefferson Beauregard Sessions) came out to say the Civil Rights Act was basically a good thing and Paul was wrong about the regulation of private business. And that's more than most people on the right did.

The relative silence on Paul and his fairly pure approach to libertarian ideals (I even slogged my way through multiple pages of the usually nutty Redstate bloggers to be sure), seems to be a tacit admission that initial cheering for Paul's solidifying Tea Party power was premature. Cooler heads that long predicted Paul was a disaster waiting to happen turned out - sooner than I think anyone expected - to be more than a little accurate.

Bigotry, Elitism, and Gordo's Big Gaffe

For more than a day I heard about a "big gaffe" in the upcoming election race in the UK, without knowing what the big deal was. Mostly... I didn't really care enough to investigate; I've never entirely understood the level of political junkie that requires a constant fix of an election somewhere, at all times, and I don't buy - as those heavily invested argue - that the British elections actually tell us all that much about US approaches to politics. I prefer a land where RuPaul is the Queen, thank you very much.

Still, Gordon Brown's gaffe - after doing a "walkabout" in a neighborhood outside London, he complained to his staff about a difficult conversation with one voter, who he termed "bigoted" for bringing up immigration issues in England (most everyone knows, I guess, that the British are struggling with an influx of East Asians, many of them Muslim). Brown, already in trouble as unpopular (he replaced Tony Blair after having served as Blair's Chancellor of the Exchequer, or their Treasury head, right before the Big Meltdown), has apparently done himself in, laying the groundwork for the Tories to take a small majority, or putting the country's third party, the Liberal Democrats, in a position to play Kingmaker in Parliament in a coalition.

Again, I'm not riveted by any of this, so you don't have to be, either.

What did strike me interesting, as it did for many - aside from Brown being yet another dope who doesn't make sure his mike is off before speaking - was Brown's striking use of "bigoted" to describe the concerns of a white, working class woman. Brown's been nailed, basically, for being the Labour Party leader who's out of touch with, well, Labour. And that, really, does seem to parallel of lot of what's happening, and not happening, on the American left as well.

I haven't seen many people make much of the class/elitist angle this story brings up, and I was a little worried tonight when I discovered that Rod Dreher, a conservative writer I admire, but still disagree with often, noticed the same thing. But, true to his questioning, broad thinking nature, Dreher gets it more than most:

For people of my social and cultural class, illegal immigration isn't a problem. It staffs the restaurants we love, it gets our grass cut, and it offers us a chance to preen morally about how open we are to diversity, etc. But for some of the folks I met in Dallas, it was a completely different matter. Yes, there was some racism there, no question. But these were also people whose neighborhoods were changing, and not for the better, because of immigration and crime. These were people who didn't have a choice about sending their kids to private schools, and whose public schools were being overcrowded by children who spoke no English, and who had to be taught somehow. These were people whose economic circumstances forced them to depend on public hospitals for care, and who had trouble getting into those hospitals because the waiting rooms were jammed with illegal immigrants. And so forth.

Generally speaking, we journalists don't really care about those people, except to dismiss them privately, among ourselves, as bigots. Maybe they are bigots to a certain extent. But so are we, and we are bigoted against ... them. (If we define "bigoted" as having malign prejudices unsupported by the facts). But because of our own class and cultural biases, we don't see it. Epistemic closure, again. As Gabriel Winant observes:

Something's not working about the post-industrial economy, either in Britain or in the U.S. With economic growth limited to the rich few, a feeling sets in of being abandoned by haughty elites and their impenetrable institutions , among which are the free labor markets that drive immigration. And then, when they catch a glimpse of this anger, leaders like Brown don't know what to do or say except to condemn.

Exactly. And politicians of the left and the right aren't the only ones at fault.

It's rare to see this kind of candor, and also to get at the layers of issues that surround immigration while avoiding a lot of the hot-button word choices that inflame passions on the issue. And I think it's just the complexity that Dreher draws out on who is affected most by immigration issues that explains why the immigration cuts badly across both political parties here and why sorting out immigration reform is so far off.

Then too, I'm always struck by how the discussion of elitism and class differences plays out - how defensive many educated elite professionals get when you point out that, from a class perspective, they have little, if any connection to the working classes, and often no real feel for the issues others face (check out the feedback Dreher got just as a sample). What follows from that, really, is something that bewilders me all the more: okay, if you don't know... why not go find out? Dreher does, I do... and I know others do as well. We seek out people different form us, take in their perspective without judging it, and try to see the complexities in the issues we care about. That just makes sense to me; it's odd to me that others don't see it.

That's why, for instance, while I think Ta-Nehisi Ciates is trying, in a well meaning way, to look closely at the new Arizona law, he's falling into the notion many East Coast liberals are - seeing all of what's happened with an eye towards racism and prejudice, rather than facing the frustrations of people who live the problems of illegal immigration far more immediately than we do in much of the Northeast (and I don't just mean suburbs and upscale communities - even urban centers where undocumented immigration is an issue are much different here than along the Southwest border). I'm not arguing for some idea that the law is okay or should be accepted; but to deal with the problems the new law raises in an intelligent way, I think, requires facing up to the problems created by an uncontrolled border and a broken system for dealing with immigration. And it doesn't make one a "bigot" to be concerned about immigration, any more than it makes one "racist" to be critical of our black President. What we do about the class divide, though, I can't say - except, maybe, that we're not going to find a solution looking across the pond.
 

Neither Party Is Mine Not The Jackass Or The Elephant

Like clockwork, the Arizona Immigration Mess has "returned immigration reform to the table" with the appearance of a new "framework" for a bill in the Senate. And if anything shows why now is not the time to take this up again - and the Arizona mess is a lousy way to start the discussion - it's the outline of the bill under discussion.

Indeed, the bill arrived, as the last few immigration stabs have, pretty much DOA. It didn't take much more than a day for Harry Reid to say immigration was moving to the "front of the line" (that phrase should be killed, now) in Senate business - after, you know, they "do something" about financial reform - only to have Reid pull that back by Friday, when it became clear that the oil spill made it moere important to do window dressing on the environmental bill instead.

It's just as well, because the new "framework" is pretty much the old bill in a new dress - a lot of money and stuff thrown at enforcement of the southern border, and weak stabs at adding yet more visa classifications to the alphabet soup of existing visas, and no real attempts to reform USCIS in any meaningful way. The right instantly jumped up screaming "amnesty" and the left immediately glommed onto the excessive elements of enforcement. And the merry dance started again.

One reason we desperately need a shakeup of established, tired leadership in both houses, especially among Democrats, is because all of this is so off the shelf - say "healthcare" and they pull out a half dozen old bills and smush them together. Say "environmental issues" and they pull out the same bill as last year and start pushing it again. Say immigration, and we're right back where we were in 2007 - more discussions of the southern border, "path to citizenship" fictions about people already here, and no real movement on what's so deeply broken in the immigration process.

I don't, really, care about the right and the crazy conservative xenophobia - it's not who we are as Americans, and while it appeals to a certain kind of cruel streak we have, it can't really win in the end. What depresses me is that, yet again, I'm stuck with these people I'd like to be supporting in my own party, who keep messing it up. It's embarrassing to call what was trotted out this week anything like a serious attempt to think harder about reforming our immigration system, make a better process, and fix what's broken. That's the party I signed on for, and by the time I get to Arizona... I don't recognize them at all. And I have no idea, none, about what to do about it.

The Paper Chase

I'm not going to claim some special expertise when it comes to Arizona... but it's weird to have been there so recently and to watch the immigration debate unfolding around their new law - a law, I have to mention, that seemed to be on no one's mind while we were there.

It's easy to write the angry, left side "how could they do this" screed - as Linda Greenhouse shows, it practically writes itself - but I think the whole unease about "show us your papers" and the intrusive, ugly aspects of the new law are readily apparent, and we've yet to see the worst case scenarios play out. Very likely, we never will. And these exercises in high dudgeon, while necessary, don't necessarily deal with the hard issues around immigration that many - especially the educated, northeastern professional class who can live largely above and beyond the practical effects of immigration issues - don't want to look at in depth.

Indeed, I think the immigration debates of the second Bush term tended to end with "do we really have to do this now", and that feeling, I suspect, is coloring the return of the issue now. As much as there is real fear and real loathing of the new Arizona law, I think the main tone of dismissal is exasperation, a "not here and not now" admonition to a misbehaving child at the mall, where everyone can see. That certainly seems to drive the latest Obama Administration reaction, as they've done so often, of "if we make the appropriate clucking noises and promise to do something real soon, maybe this will just go away."

In terms of doing something, this year, on immigration, I'm betting this will go away, somehow, and soon; there's no real appetite to argue this (again) on the national stage, no one has a good solution, and the politics of immigration cut badly across both parties, something lefties don't like to discuss (because it's about working class resentments about illegal immigrants and the lack of low level jobs) and Republicans like to wish away (because reasonable, thinking conservatives are as disdainful of the ugly xenophobia being sold to the masses as are the actual conservative immigrants who want some immigration reform... just not extremes like this).

But mostly, I think, there's this fantasy, both right and left, that the Arizona law, somehow, just happened out of the right wing, racist, primordial ooze, and that's not the case. I saw enough of Arizona to get that, even though it seemed out of the blue, this turn of events isn't necessarily surprising, and it is borne of a frustration that we can't, for much longer, not talk, and not do something about the immigration mess we have on our hands.

Midday Morsels - Captain Obvious And All The Sad Young Men

Because I can't write another post about another shooting...

• What happened in Binghamton was awful... the question is, was it preventable? We won't know that until someone, yet again, wakes up to the real common thread here: episodes of mass violence stem, usually, from a failure to deal with mental illness. If we could start there... and do something about it... we might finally make a dent in stopping them.
• And yeah, I don't think angry conservative populists are helping... but neither are the lefty ones, either.
• Guess what else - higher unemployment means more people without health insurance.
• Iowa judges say it's wrong to discriminate against gay people. As if we didn't know.
• Wil Wilkinson smokes pot, enjoys it... and thinks you will too. And that may be why you really haven't heard of Wil Wilkinson up to now.
• And one sad old man in the Hollywood Minute: Jay Leno's already causing an affiliate revolt... and he's just getting started.

One Way To Fix Immigration... The Painful One

I haven't indulged, much, in wondering how this or that pet issue of mine will change in the coming months. I know there will be changes... but a lot of it is hard to predict.  And while a lot of the notions of positive change come from the hopefulness associated with Obama, one can't ignore that our new economic realities are quite possibly the far more relevant change agent.

Well... okay, actually one can try to ignore the new economic realities. And therein lies our new set of problems.

One of the ways the economy has changed our debates can be seen, most clearly, in the immigration debate we've been avoiding since the Great Immigration Compromise of 2007 went down in flames.  Up until the end of last year, especially with construction of homes and commercial property humming along merrily, the demand for cheap labor drove a lot of our issues with border crossings and people seeking opportunities while getting around legal limits on immigration.

As you might guess... that's kind of a dead issue, these days.

Gone Fishin'...

As previously announced, the NYC Weboy will be on a hiatus from blogging here for the rest of August. Please scroll down, as it's likely that J in Baltimore and RedStar may fill in the gaps with musings, links and photos of their own. You may also find me blogging some critical things over at newcritics. I will not be checking this blog on any kind of a regular basis, but I can be reached via e-mail (nycweboy at nycweboy dot com)... and I do welcome correspondence. I will resume blogging the Tuesday after Labor Day. Yes, that means I will not blog about the Democratic Convention... but just assume I liked Hillary's speech, that the VP selection is not my favorite choice, and I wasn't all that impressed with Obama's speech.

Have a great summer. Enjoy.