NYCweboy

You've Got A Fast Car...

...and in today's weird celebrity news: Robert Novak hits a pedestrian in downtown Washington... and then tries to drive away.

(Insert comment about heartless conservatism here.)

Notes on New Orleans

I just got home from six nights in New Orleans - a mix of business and pleasure (the city would have it no other way), traveling with the man and meeting with non-profit folks and public housing resident-activists.  On my first morning there I joined several residents and activists in solidarity at another's hearing at NO's Criminal Court.  Some thoughts on that are here.

My relationship with New Orleans is a tense one - the intensity of the inequity is something this uptight, machine-politick-reared New Englander cannot abide.  My work there takes me through a morning at the Criminal Court, and I pass another listening to another former resident weep over the loss of her home and sitting with her through one family crisis after another.  In an effort to escape from the despair, I trundle over to Magazine Street and spend hours wandering the boutiques full of relatively inexpensive, funky and fun dresses (I marvel at the affordable and independent designs they have down there - I'm not aware of any equivalents up here in MA).  But it's difficult to overcome the cognitive dissonance of watching families cope with trauma and injustice and then pay an excessive amount for two sandwiches and glasses of wine with the man at an overpriced (if delicious) bakery shop decked out in fantastic pinks and blues.  Surreal is often a word folks use to describe their experiences in post-Katrina New Orleans, and they're not wrong. 

I finally verbalized that one of the things I can't stomach about the city is its lack of government - I live in a city with a strong mayor and a city and state with a long history of liberal patronage and paternalism (we have our own public housing up here, for example).  This sentiment, of course, made me feel both like a loser and a teeny bit fascist - but at every turn it seems like there's a new outrage - and the civil and non-profit sectors can only do so much.  I hope Pelosi et al. are listening slightly more carefully than they've been during this whole FISA nonsense.

But despite my links o' grief above, with each passing day I relax a little bit there.  Drinks with friends help.  As does excellent food.  And hot, humid weather (I may be alone on this one) and lush parks and foliage.  And the endless little new stores opening up here and there.  And the sheer breadth of experience I have there, in a way that my rather cloistered world here in MA cannot match - for better and worse.  It's a rarefied city, and writing about it off and on for three years now (I know, I'll never be from or of there!!) - well, I'm starting to feel a little cliched.

August 29, 2008 is the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  The city is slowly returning, but unevenly and precariously.  The Democratic Convention ends on August 28. Gulf Coast organizations and their national allies are pressing Sens. Obama and McCain and the Democratic and Republican Parties to prioritize Gulf Coast recovery in the upcoming administration.  Because while the scale of Katrina's devastation is exceptional, its physical and social aftermath is strikingly less so.

I leave you with an excerpt from a Times-Picayune piece on New Orleans volunteers helping out after the Iowa floods:

Unlike the brackish water that surged over the New Orleans area, the Cedar River's fresh water spared the green grass and flowers. Except for the vegetation, though, the vacant neighborhoods could be Gentilly or Old Metairie or Meraux after Katrina.

In the Cedar Rapids neighborhood of Time Check, named for merchants' 19th century practice of honoring the postdated paychecks of railroad workers, references to the 2005 hurricane are ever-present.

"I sat at home. I watched TV. I saw the pictures of Katrina. But you just don't get it until you're actually living it," said Janette Schorg, who drove last week from Davenport, Iowa, near the Illinois border, to help her parents muck out their two-story home of 40 years.

It just angers me every time I drive into Cedar Rapids that it goes from beautiful to a war zone," Schorg said.

Some residents admit the recent flooding has forced them to reconsider their notions of New Orleans.

"We all watched during Katrina and said, 'Why would people live in a bowl?' " said Bill Polton, whose 85-year-old father lives just three blocks from the levee that runs along First Street Northwest, on the Cedar River's west bank.

"Well, here we are sitting in almost the same scenario," Polton said. "Nobody realized how far the flood plain would go."

- Redstar

One... And That's Not Funny. (Or, Are You Ready For The New Seriousness?)

Time and others are taking her (as usual) to task for her snarkiness, but I have to say I think Maureen Dowd is onto something... though not something that's as bad as she thinks.

Flash forward to the kerfuffle — and Obama’s icy reaction — over this week’s New Yorker cover parodying fears about the Obamas.

“We’ve already scratched thrift, candor and brevity off the list of virtues in this presidential cycle, so why not eliminate humor, too?” wrote James Rainey in The Los Angeles Times, suggesting “an irony deficiency” in Obama and his fans.

Many of the late-night comics and their writers — nearly all white — now admit to The New York Times’s Bill Carter that because of race and because there is nothing “buffoonish” about Obama — and because many in their audiences are intoxicated by him and resistant to seeing him skewered — he has not been flayed by the sort of ridicule that diminished Dukakis, Gore and Kerry.

Dowd, of course, is worried about being out of a job... or at least, as Joe Klein suggests, forced to be serious.. but as I said, I think she's on to something, something I've been noting for a couple of posts and counting: the New Yorker flap, the discussion of humorlessness... there's something of a sea-change coming in political comedy, I think.

The GOP Continues to Starve Cities

This article is chock full of infuriating bullsh*t about GOP machinations to stall a much overdue housing relief bill. Congress expected to have it on Bush's desk by now, but now the GOP wants to investigate Dodd's mortgage from Countrywide and the White House has threatened a veto based on $4M in grants to cities to deal with neighborhoods with high foreclosure rates.

Seriously, it's like Bush doesn't even live in this country, or have a basic understanding of our political economy. He claims that banks will benefit and not homeowners, forgetting that many of these neighborhoods have struggling homeowners living alongside - effectively trapped - foreclosed and abandoned properties that can trigger a downward spiral in (often, already struggling) communities. Aid to cities and towns to provide upkeep and oversight of these neighborhoods is a terrific component of these housing bill, and something some municipalities have undertaken already. (Yep, that link is 15 months old, and Bush wants to veto this bill over a paltry, desperately needed $4M. WHAT. AN. ASSHOLE.  Sigh.  Par for the course.)

I hope Barney Frank, MA's righteously awesome, out-and-proud (and Clinton supporting) Representative forces the GOP's hand on this and gets this thing moving, but frankly, I've got little reason to feel optimistic.  How about you?

- Redstar

But You Can't Stay Here

I don't really talk about my actual paying job much; I'm one who thinks its best to separate the blog from the rest of a personal life.

That got a little harder last week, when Starbucks announced it was closing 500 more stores, bringing planned closings to 600.

I found out the night before it hit the papers, because we got the press release posted to the in-house web page, and I was working.  That night and the next morning were all about answering the "is it you guys" questions from friends, family, and, most touchingly, customers.

It's not us. It may not even be any store in my district. We are all performing pretty well (though the "underperforming" criteria was left rather vague, so no one's actually sure what the criteria is), and all of that has to be viewed in the context of a weak economy.

It's the broader economic implications that are really worth writing about. I don't think I've ever worked for a company that held the place of "stand-in for the larger economy" before, even at other retailers. It's an interesting place to be. It's why, I think, you get pieces like last Friday's in the New York Times, which blamed poor real estate choices for what realy is a story about broader economic trends.  It's also I think why David Margolick's profile of Howard Schultz (yes, we all just call him Howard) seems so sour and less than flattering. Howard is supposed to solve everything for everyone... or he's failed. That seems like an outsize level of expectation, if you ask me.

A World Without Jesse Helms

It was easy, really, to let Jesse Helms stand in for everything one despised about Republicans. In the Reagan ears, the first Bush Years, the Clinton years... Helms was the archetypal embodiment of the Southern Strategy in all its conservatism, bigotry and hatreds. Jerry Falwell may have been more direct, but he was in no position to actually do harm the way Helms was.

As a rad fag who came of age in the era of ACT UP, we needed Jesse Helms as much as he needed us: what's a world without enemies, when fighting the enemy is all you know?

So now he's dead, and one searches to find something polite to say... without much luck. Helms made the world a little meaner, a little more divided, a little less accepting. I'm not one to let those stand as good things. The charitable view of, say, his awful campaigns against Harvey Gantt is that he exploited our nation's racial divisions for personal gain. Calling that "standing up for what you believe in"... not so much.

Still, there's no escaping that "Jesse Helms" was a necessary part of those angry, rad years. If he hadn't existed, we'd have had to invent him - something to oppose, to be angry at, to hate as you were hated. I'm older now, and I don't hate Jesse Helms. I won't miss him, but in the end, he was kind of sad, and a little pathetic. And the righteous outrage I had then is why I can't muster so much of it now: compared to Jesse Helms, folks like George W. Buch and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are simply incompetent amateurs.

And maybe that's the nice thing to say of Jesse Helms: at least he was good at it. 

It's A Rich Man's Game, No Matter What They Call It

I'll be the first to say it: sometimes David Brooks gets it right. Along with the good column on debt a while back, and this past week's endorsement of that interesting book about "Sam's Club" conservatives, Brooks dives into the numbers and reminds us that donations to the Obama campaign come mostly from wealthyu professionals:

When he is swept up in rhetorical fervor, Obama occasionally says that his campaign is 90 percent funded by small donors. He has indeed had great success with small donors, but only about 45 percent of his money comes from donations of $200 or less.

The real core of his financial support is something else, the rising class of information age analysts. Once, the wealthy were solidly Republican. But the information age rewards education with money. There are many smart high achievers who grew up in liberal suburbs around San Francisco, L.A. and New York, went to left-leaning universities like Harvard and Berkeley and took their values with them when they became investment bankers, doctors and litigators.

That he goes on to say... not very much about what this all means, shouldn't obscure the importance of the data. Like so many things from the primaries, this is where the discussion of working class relevance comes into play: one reason the Clinton supporters were easy to overlook, is that the Democrats have become a Party of wealth - it's a different wealth, as Brooks points out, than the wealth of Republicans, but it still matters that their wealth is distorting our politics, and removing the sense of a common set of needs. And while we may be enjoying the fruits of growth industries (for now - given that the financial markets are collapsing as we speak), ultimately playing to the interests of your moneyed donors is a recipe for trouble. And I think we're headed straight for it.

While The Getting's Good

Count me among those who suspect that there's one of two ulterior motives for Joe Bruno's decision to retire: either he's getting indicted (or avoiding indictment), or he knows that the GOP majority in the State Senate is on its last legs. We'll know soon enough if either one is the case... but right now, my thinking is the latter.

There's almost no nice way to put what Bruno's done as Senate Majority Leader - he's the face of crony politics, of pork, of the broken system of favors-for-government politics that's favored in New York State. Only Elliot Spitzer, being more of a jerk and more of a scandal, could have managed to make Bruno look good. Up until the "state helicopter" investigation backfired and Spitzer's hooker habit came to light, it was Bruno who seemed scandal-plagued, ineffective, and on the way out.

Jennifer asked me what I thought about the prospects for change in Albany and i have to say... not much. David Paterson - already shaping up to be a thoroughly lackluster Governor replacement - is clearly part of Albany's politics as usual approach to business and Shelly Silver isn't going anywhere (especially now), so the best prospect appears to be that Bruno's leaving pulls the last leg out of the slender GOP majority (they've lost a seat or two in each of the last few elections, trimming the GOP Senate majority to two right now... not like they need more than one). In which case we get some lifelong machine Democrat... and the whole process resumes under one party control (hint: look how well that's worked in Massachusetts).

Of course the idea of an indictment is sexier, and would, maybe, up-end the political world in Albany... but I doubt it. For one thing, I think a clear case of corruption would have been made by now if it was going to be, but even so, I don't think Bruno's fall will be any more meaningful than Spitzer's in the long run.  The machine tramples the ones who get caught (oh, have I failed to mention Vito Fossella? Shame on me!), and rolls merrily on along.

Call me a cynic if you wish (it's not my worst quality), but I've been watching NY state politics for more than 20 years and nothing really ever changes. Any hint of hopefulness - mine started with Mario Cuomo (who may, singlehandedly, explain my disdain for Obama's style of uplift politics)... and got its ultimate ass-kicking from Spitzer - dies long ago. I'm not getting fooled again, and unlike Paterson... I'm not blind. Much. So farewell to Joe Bruno, a true New Yorker. Much as we hate to see it in him... that's just what we are: Get out while the getting's good.

Bootstraps

On Father's Day, Obama spoke to a church crowd about fatherhood and personal responsibility.  While he was at his rhetorical finest, I've got endless problems with his tired lecturing about behavior, culture and helping the "deserving" poor - here, "fathers doing their part."

My first PhD general exam draft was a personal essay about how my white urban family epitomizes William  Julius Wilson's "underclass" - an extended family living in Dorchester and South Boston public housing that lacked the education, assets and connections to get out of the city when jobs and wealthier whites were doing just that.  20 years after the book's publication, the problems of inner-city joblessness are worse than ever, matched by an unprecedented incarceration rate (the "schools-to-prison pipeline").  Marriage rates are falling nationwide across all ethnic groups, we face a severe shortage of affordable housing, and poverty and inequality have steadily risen under Bush's watch.  Low-income communities of color shoulder a grossly unjust share of this societal burden, yet my white ethnic family endures the same challenges of joblessness or low-wage work, addiction, mental illness, domestic violence, homelessness, etc. 

I've got no patience for political pandering about poverty and social welfare.  With Obama our presumptive nominee, my ire is now directed his way.  Click here for my rant. 

- Redstar

Tim Russert

It's only in the last six months or so - since I moved back home - that I've been tuning in regularly to Meet The Press. Within the last 3 years, I'd pretty much stopped watching; partly out of convenience (I would DVR it and never watch those either), and partly because I really found it utterly unsatisfying.

It's these things that come to mind when I think about the sudden, stunning loss of Tim Russert.

In his way, by the time he died, Russert was legendary. Partly that was due to ratings - Russert was the number one Sunday talk show anchor almost without interruption (I think ABC was on top for a while there, but I can't confirm that). Partly it was due to a reputation as the "serious" interviewer, the litmus test of any major political figure, certainly any American one (and really... what's the alternative... Charlie Rose?).

Neither of those, I think, really speak to what made Russert so successful, which was really about personality. Russert was a prime example of news reader celebrity, and almost everything - his role as political commentator, his hosting duties, his role as "Washington Bureau Chief," was subsumed to his star quality. Buoyant, gregarious, full of that manly bonhomie that people seem to like so much, Russert filled up the space - literally - and the room. I may not have loved Meet The Press... but I always liked the guy. How could anyone not?