NYCweboy

Til The Clouds Roll By

In the end, as I think about it, the thing about a hurricane is not what you can anticipate, but what you can't: what makes a hurricane disastrous are things you either couldn't figure out in advance, or knew about, but couldn't prevent.

If you can figure out, for instance, that a hurricane hitting New York City and its coastal surroundings would be an enormous human disaster, you can move a lot of people out of the way. You can't move a lot of houses out of the way, but depending on how bad the storm is, that might not matter.

People will, no doubt, debate a lot of silliness about whether all the evacuations were necessary, whether public transportation should have been halted, if it all seems, in retrospect, like overkill. Have at it, I suppose. It seems to me, though, that, what will remain, after all the shouting dies down, is the reality that we dealt pretty well with things we could anticipate. 

The problem with Hurricane Irene, are things we couldn't.

it seems obvious, now, that a 500-mile wide tropical storm is still a big mess after it hits the coast... but no one, really, quite predicted what a disaster the storm would be once it traveled north of the New York coast. This is a storm that, most likely, will be recalled - as these storms are - most by the places that were most devastated worst. Upstate New York, Vermont, a great deal of Connecticut... Irene is probably destined to be their memory, more than for those of us who waited, with varying anxiety, for a deluge that didn't quite deliver. 

It could have been worse, it could have strengthened the way some forecasts predicted... but this doesn't have to be a story of What Might Have Been. The good thing, the amazing thing is that, for what it actually was, people took it seriously. And some serious people showed their seriousness. 

As much as Michael Bloomberg gets a terrible reputation for his imperiousness and  his occasional high-handedness (none more than his own faith that he, alone, is best suited to be Mayor), he does have a Chief Executive knack for making a plan. His decisions to evacuate low lying areas, to shut down the nation's largest public transportation system, were big choices and he owned them and clearly, they worked. Similarly, Chris Christie bluntly laid out a plan to evacuate New Jersey's shore points and said so in a clear, forthright way: take this seriously. Don't wait for the storm, don't be an idiot, and don't waste the time of people whose job it is to respond to disasters. Bev Perdue in North Carolina came off similarly forceful, practical, and determined.

It's easy to say "non one wanted to be the next Katrina", but it's more than that; the question, ultimately, is whether one thinks its alarmist or simply prudent to prepare for the worst. All over the East coast were officials who hedged that choice, who lagged on forcing evacuations, who seemed to follow the lead of others, rather than take it. On Long Island, the sense of just how bad things might get seemed to unravel in a fog. Connecticut officials seemed very concerned, but not quite ahead of the possibilities.

Sure, as Sunday unfolded, it was easy to feel kind of had; yes, it rained wherer we were for just about 24 straight hours... but we had no real flooding, no downed trees on our street, no power outage of any kind. The search for batteries and flashlights, the sight of a grocery stores cleaned out of bread and bottled water (how... prison), it all felt a little absurd. Sunday afternoon, we went out for a newspaper. 

But one reality of Irene, I think, is how oddly capricious the results were: just blocks from places which had little more tha a long rainstorm were places full of downed trees, flooding, massive power outages. My little Westchester town came through mostly intact. The town where my Starbucks is saw massive flooding. The towns next to it are littered with tree debris. It was still hard, this afternoon, to find a passable road from that town to my hometown. Our commuter rail - the one that everyone questioned stopping - is probably going to need a week to resume full, normal service. Had trains tried to run through the storm, I guarantee you the mess would be longer to recover from, and worse.

So New York City came through less scathed; and the Jersey shore dodged some of the worst of ocean surges and less rain. Even Long Island took less direct damage than anyone expected. Even so, what probably matters most is preparation. And seriousness.

And what can be anticipated.

For me, what really pushed me to prepare for this storm was my Mother's memory of the Hurricane of 1938, called the Long Island Express, the one storm from history where a hurricane traveled up the East Coast, never hitting land until it crossed Long Island and slammed into the Connecticut and Rhode Island coasts. My mom's childhood hometown in New Jersey took a glancing blow, one she never forgot. About six months ago, she found this PBS special about the hurricane. The stories in it have stuck with me ever since.

Yesterday, by the end of the day, the clouds rolled on. The winds whipped by, and even the tail end of the hurricane, the tropical storm, pretty much blew away without incident here at home. Much as we anticipated. It wasn't that bad. This time. And maybe, if we keep taking them seriously, and we prepare for the worst, we can at least know how to meet the disasters we can anticipate.

Friday Evening Floralude

 
jinb

Here's To Good Friends

Today is a day off and I've been catching up with good friends, all of us linked in strange, nearly magical ways. This one's for you guys, and all we talked about today:

 

 

Libya, Liberated

Conservatives said it wouldn't work; for months they've made "leading from behind" into a right side slogan to define all this wrong with the Obama Administration.

Liberals complained that we were opening a front in yet another mideast war, an obvious prelude to the day when our tropps would have to go in, yet again, against an Arab dictator.

Say what you want about the unraveling of Libya in the past 24 hours - and admittedly, the fall of Tripoli is in its early stages, still, with much yet to play out - but can we just step back, for a minute, and acknowledge that part of what we're seeing is actually another example of the President and his foreign policy teamn getting the right thing done in pretty much the right way?

There wer never a lot of good choices when looking at Libya, because of Qaddafi's level of control, the lay of the land, and the uneven power between his Army and a ragtag collection of rebels. As North Africa dissolved in uprisings (this is less an "Arab Spring" then a North African story, given that the real changes have happened in Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya), it seemed impossible for the world to just stand by. But the question of how to get involved loomed large.

It helped, of course, that leaders in Tunisia and Egypt saw that trying to hold on to power, to kill large numbers of their own people, was madness. That was never going to happen with Qaddafi (nor, as we're seeing, is it likely to move Bashar al-Assad in Syria), and that left few good alternatives.

While the Obama Administration did a lousy job of explaining the role of the coalition it joined, the general idea of it made sense: use foreign forces to limit Qaddafi's army in a massacre of its own people, and allow rebel forces to keep fighting to overthrow the government. It was, most obviously now, a strategy for taking sides in a Civil War in the name of civilian defense. But the alternative of leaving Qaddafi in power was and is simply untenable. It was long past time for him to go.

And so, we now have yet another remarkable moment. Even as late as last week, it was hard to see how the rebel forces would ever move into Tripoli, challenging Qaddafi on his home turf. And then... they did. A war no one could see ending, is nearing its end. Without US or European troops on the ground. 

None of this is to suggest that what happens next is easy, or even peaceful; as we're seeing in Egypt, simply eliminating one oligarch does not solve every problem. But the last 24 hours are a reminder that change can happen, that it can happen in the right ways, particularly when people work together. And, in terms of American policy and politics, we have yet another reminder that, for all their flaws, this Administration is part of the process of making progress. It's not that I think he's a great President...  but on Libya, he got it right. And that, too, does matter.

Friday Afternoon Folding Chairs

 
jinb

Nothing From Nothing Leaves Nothing

My last post about the President being merely mediocre as opposed to a total failure elicited familiar comments about the threat posed by President Obama as the Democrats who will eviscerate Social Security and Medicare. I tend to think it's a testament to his mediocrity that something the President hasn't even done continues to be the biggest concern about his Presidency - as bad as he is... most likely he'll get worse.

In a remarkably scandal-free August, the President has spent the past week or so touring the Midwest on a bus run of three states, largely unsuccessfully trying to reverse generally negative assessments of his recent handling of the economy. His latest threat is to offer some sort of "jobs proposal" next month, a near perfect encapsulation of all that is wrong with his Presidency: more speeches, less doing, no real attempt to offer practical solutions to problems real people face, and doing next month what arguably should have been done yesterday, or months ago.

Is it any wonder then that even the President's most ardent supporters are reduced to making the weak argument that the President deserves reelection because the Presidency is ineffectual?

I've been a big fan of "VastLeft" over at Corrente and his(?) darkly funny cartoon dialogue between Obama supporters and Obama skeptics. Recently, this cartoon has become part of a duel between Glenn Greenwald and Scott Lemieux over just how ineffectual Obama has been and whether it's a function of the person, or the nature of the Presidency.

At the risk of shocking some regular readers, and in an attempt to reclaim some "true left" cred, I'd just like to say I'm pretty much with Greenwald (and Armando over at TalkLeft) on this one: it's Obama who's ineffective, not the Presidency. The bigger problem - and why the cartoon is so depressingly prescient - is that in a choice between Mr. Ineffective and some rabid right wing Republican... I'll still pick the ineffective Obama.

This goes back to a point I've been trying to make about the problem with reelecting Obama; as it stands, it seems entirely likely to me that Democrats, and some independents, will turn out strongly to reelect the President, despite the fact that a significant portion of the President's base of support is less than thrilled with him. Grimly reelecting a mediocre, ineffective President may be enough for the President's team (they already seem curiously detached from the very real frustrations of many true lefties), but it's going to make for a dismal few years of the President most likely pleasing no one. And then we face the prospect of trying to reconstitute left wing politics in time for 2016.

It's not that I'm worried, as so many still are, about how "dangerous" President Obama is to Social Security and Medicare; as I said last time, I don't think the angry left is giving enough credit to the President's actual successes in staving off the very worst of what the right has to offer (including especially lousy ideas like privatization of entitlement programs). But this President's mediocrity is dangerous because he's been so ineffectual on the crucial issues that probably matter most in solving our economic woes: sorting out the mortgage mess, reasserting some control over the banking and finance industries, dealing with health care costs rather than providing health insurance, and on and on.  

If President Obama is no President Bush - forcing through damaging, dreadful policies until the country simply can't take anymore - that's probably been more a saving grace than an absolute disaster. Yes, it's dismal to watch things like last December, where the President negotiated with himself on some "middle ground" position on the Bush tax cuts, rather than simply letting all of them expire. It's not the Presidency that's ineffective, it's this President. 

Even so, the problem of this President not being the liberal anyone seems to want him to be isn't all his fault; it's the confluence of how Obama was sold to the public in 2007 and 8, along with considerable disarray within the left, and the lack of a clear sense of purpose and direction as to what we're trying to accomplish. The coming election is shaping up to be a depressing rehash of the same old arguments in part because there's no real organized effort from the left to challenge the incumbent President. That's not something that can entirely be blamed on the President. If he's giving the left nothing to believe in... there's no real search for the "something" that would be better than nothing. 

And that's the thing: as bad as he is, Barack Obama is a preferable alternative to anything Republicans are likely to offer up - surely better than the prospects offered by Mitt Romney, Michelle Bachmann, and now Rick Perry or even Paul Ryan. It's that grim choice, and those lousy alternatives that define the shape of the coming election, how bad it will be, how dismal we will feel after all is said and done. He's the mediocre option we're apparently stuck with. And next to nothing... is about as good as it gets.

The Curious Failure Of The Obama Presidency

Much of the backdrop of this week's bad news - the S&P downgrade, the stock market gyrations, the Republican Presidential candidate dance card - took place against the backdrop that's just about become an absolute given: the idea that Barack Obama's presidency has somehow failed.

The sense of disappointment in the Obama Presidency has broadened and deepened in the past few months, especially as the debt ceiling and default drama played itself out. Since conservatives nd Republicans have already committed themselves fully to hating Obama, and a significant swath of the left was already disappointed, what probably happened, really, was that a real sense of doubt and disappointment crept into the Obama diehards - the educated, professional elite.

Having maintained for nearly 3 years that the prospect of a President Obama was never going to be as good as the hopes and dreams of his most fervent supporters, I'll continue to maintain that they have no one to blame but themselves. The Obama Presidency was oversold, its promise was never as bright as the true believers suggested, and a lot of what didn't happen has to do with the President himself. 

Still, given all the negativity, and contrarian that I am, I have to wonder... is the Obama Presidency really the disaster its being made out to be, just now? (Dear God... I am turning into Carrie Bradshaw on politics.)

As bad as things are, I think the idea of the Obama Presidency as absolute failure, however appealing it seems, is itself a mistake of trying too hard to condemn the man and his leadership. Despite a variety of mistakes - especially on economic issues - to say that this is a Presidency of few or no accomplishments, or disastrous choices that have ruined us, is to toss out some real signs of progress... and a way to miss the reasons that, come next November, the route to Obama's reelction is nowhere near as bad as it may seem just now.

The Iceman Melteth

One of the disasters that befell us during my brief hiatus, here at home, was that we lost our refrigerator. I don't mean it ran away... I mean it just up and stopped working.

At first, we thought it was repairable, and so did the repairman. He carefully cleaned and dusted and tinkered, and in the end we got back a wheezy, grumbly thing that sort of made ice and sort of kept things cold... but it had "last legs" written across it.And about 5 days later, the whole thing just gave out. 

It probably didn't help that the refrigerator was built in 1968. After we found that out, it was hard not to admit that 40+ years of work for a fridge is pretty damn good. 

These moments - power outages, the death of an appliance - are a reminder and a wake up call to just how for granted we take some of the most basic technologies. My mom and I both quickly realized that the miracle of refrigeration is something you miss most when you need... ice cubes. Without ice for beverages, everything just seemed that much worse. I was reduced to filling up a large cup with ice to bring home after work, just in case.

(And, if you don't know, Starbucks is a place where one can get, on request, a cup of ice or water or both for no charge. Yes, we think a lot of people take too much advantage of it... but after this month's experience, I'm a lot less judgmental of the requests. I've been there... and sometimes, people just need ice and some water.)

Living without a refrigerator can be done, we found, for a little over a week without going completely mad. Towards the end, the constant dining out (it sounds fun but gets old, fast), the lack of ice (not to mention ice cream), the limited options when one is desperate for food... all became a bit much to bear. And when the nice lady at Sears said the refrigerator we wanted was unavailable for 3 weeks, we both blanched... and picked a more expensive one that could be delivered in 4 days.

Our new refrigerator, then, is something of a wonder.  I've realized that, because of where I've lived (the three houses of my parents, the last purchased in 1978; as well as a string of apartments until I moved here with mom), I have never lived before with a refrigerator made after 1980. They've clearly made some advancements. The thing is amazingly quiet. It's incredibly brightly lit. There's a lot of storage space and its inventively laid out.

But, even more scandalous... we now have ice and water in the door.

I don't know about you... but ice in the door was for other people. Fancy people. Decadent people. People who couldn't be bothered to run the tap and break an ice tray. We are not those people. We don't even have a dishwasher. Even my sister, who has a pretty high end kitchen, doesn't have ice in the door (they do have freezer drawer on the bottom, and its stainless steel, so its pretty glamorous. And don't get me started on her Viking stove).

So here we are, a couple of weeks later, living in glorious decadence with the refrigerator of some other, far more fabulous home. I really expect someone (maybe from thjose government panels conservatives fear so much) to show up and tell us that are fridge is simply not appropriate, and cart it away, and return us to the slightly smaller, freezer on the top (did I mention we got a side by side? I know! So bourgeois!) days  we used to know and love.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to put my fancy Irish butter into our specially cooled butter holder. :)

Friday Evening Floralude

 
jinb

Seriously, Does Anybody Know How To Madison?

I tried - in vain - not to get my hopes up, but election junkie that I am, I found myself following the Wisconsin recvall elections in minute by minute detail last night, When I went to bed, the possibility was a 2 or 3 seat pickup for Democrats. When I got up this morning, it turned out to be only 2.

There's no reason for a Democrat to get too down about this; doing all these recalls was seriously uncharted territory, and perhaps the most heartening thing for democracy (small d) is that so many Wisconsinites took the recalls seriously and turned out to vote. That's a good reminder to elected officials to remember that voters do, in fact, care about voting. And Americans care about elections.

Still, it's reasonable to wonder just what went wrong and to wonder how Democrats, who can't seem to muster enough energy or support to reverse a wildly unpopular set of actions in Wisconsin can make any progress elsewhere or nationally in 2012. Recall elections in one upper Midwest state shouldn't be a national barometer, but these will be, and what they tell us, I think, is that the prospects were oversold, anger alone is not a strategy, and that equating unions with the working class is a mistake of the liberal establishment that should be let go of, and soon. Whether we learn these lessons, the right way, and how we apply them, I think, will  be the gauge of whether 2012 is a reversal of tea party strength or merely water treading (there's no way, I think, for a tea party based surge except in conservative wet dreams).

The overselling of Wisconsin is a big part, I think, of how next year's results will be perceived. It was a mistake, I think, to make Scott Walker and some of his more outlandish ideas such a focal point of of liberal activism, absent a clear indication that they could be stopped or reversed. Wisconsin enjoyed a pretty significant turnaround in the last election, and it wasn't just - though this frustrates many lefties - a cosmetic success of "Tea Party" activism. This was a real and pronounced shift, and probably a reflection of demographic shifts that have built over time. Even now, it's unclear how Democrats statewide can retake the big elections. The prospects in the recall elections were always daunting and slim, yet optimism, anger, and hubris took over, a reminder that playing politics on an emotional level never realy works. You need someone who can coldly, and from a distance, evaluate what's possible, and what isn't.

In the end, the failure enshrined in liberals overpromising and under-delivering in Wisconsin will matter, no matter how we try to minimize the loss. Yes, it was an uphill fight; yes, these districts were drawn for Republicans and considered safe. But still. Why create 6 races on a hunch?And if the prospects fo success were as limited as late reports indicated, why didn't someone get in front of that reality sooner? Ratcheting down expectations, admitting that Walker might well retain his stranglehold would both have made the results less dramatic and provided a focus for future angry energy.

But still, anger alone is not enough. Just as "Tea Party Rage" has proven to be no theory for actually governing, liberal activists have little more to sell across a number of states than anger - anger at anti-union policies, anger agt antiwoman efforts on abortion, anger at budget cuts, and on and on. It's not that rage isn't appropriate, or even productive; it's that once you've gotten angry... there needs to be a next step. Get angry and... do something. But the question of what to do, and how to go about doing it is where politics, on all sides, is falling down. 

Which, if you think about it, is why we just seem to get angrier.

Yes, I'm angry about eviscerating union rights; I'm angry about efforts to roll back access to abortion and much of the rest. But I need more than that when I think about voting for people, and I think Wisconsin voters did as well, and I'm not sure that's how this election played out. And ultimately, at the state level, across a lot of states, there are enormous budget problems, more than a little of which stem from promises about state worker pensions that cannot realistically be fulfilled. And however well meaning, liberals have, for years, punted on the hard questions of the bad math of state retiree pensions. That's how you get Scott Walker, and his elimination of bargaining rights. Being angry about that isn't an answer.

Ultimately, Wisconsin wasn't a test for Democrats per se, it was really a test to see if unions could muster the kind of support needed to remain vital players in big time election politics. On that score, the results are probably a wash - not overwhelming enough to scare the right, but strong enough that the left has little choice but to go all in on backing union demands. Republicans play to a theory that working people no longer see unions as vital or necessary, and I think Wisconsin showed that to be a fallacy that doesn't necessarily help the GOP with the less well off.   

In thinking about that, though, it occurred that Democrats believe a dangerous reverse fallacy - that is, that unions see everyone in the working class as their allies, and therefore, to support unions is to support a stand-in for the working class experience. That reality too, is less true than we'd like to admit. While workers like the idea of unions and the protections they've sought, most workers aren't in them. And while unions would like to expand their presence, I'm not sure that's the same thing as identifying fully with every workers current experience in the workplace.

Unions have failed, repeatedly and spectacularly, at unionizing the private service sectors, especially retail. Part of that, naturally, is resistance by employers, and part of it is an adverse regulatory climate. But the fact remains, often, that workers don't pick the union. And I'm not sure unions really understand the dynamic, or appreciate that, to some workers, the prospect of what a union can provide doesn't outweigh other factors.

I don't want to make this too broad, but I think both union leaders and Democratic Party leaders like to substitute "union" for "working class" even though they're not the same. Whatever unions think about non-unionized workers, however much they think of themselves as advocates for all workers, the reality remains, a union is there to represent its members. That's what SEIU does. That's what the NEA does. That's what AFSCME does. And those union interests - for instance, for state and municipal workers - can, at times, conflict with the interests of other, non unionized workers.  It would be counterintuitive, and poor leadership, for unions to pick the interests of others over their members.

The point, really, is that the failure to change Madison, to know how to shake up the Madison of Scott Walker and today, is rooted not in one failing, but in the combination of hubris, anger and substituting union goals for the goals of all working people. Merely lowering expectations, or relying on more than anger will not be enough. The left needs to unwrap the sticky, difficult question of how to separate unions and the important, but merely subset of workers they represent from the needs of other, nonunionized workers as well. That's one tough dance... and I doubt that it's one the left can learn in under a year.