Dana Goldstein

In Defense of Shouting at the President

Interrupting the head of state during a prepared speech to call him a liar -- when he isn't even lying -- would be against the rules of decorum in most democratic nations. But in general, I'm all for more frequent, rowdier confrontations between the president and Congress, in part because it gives each party a chance to clarify its agenda while subjecting it to the critiques of the other. At Newsweek, John Barry writes:

The debacles of the past decade surely show how damaging is this inability to require America’s head of government to explain and defend his actions, at the time, to the legislature. Suppose President Bush had been forced to answer tough questions back in spring 2003 about his arguments for invading Iraq? Or his decision to set up Guantanamo and fill it with detainees scarfed up from faraway battlefields? Or his decision to allow the methods of interrogation that he did? The questions he never had seriously to address quickly mount up. ...

The debate over President Obama’s desire to change America’s health-care system would surely have been less beset by angry fantasies, less in thrall to paranoid conspiracy-theories about ‘death panels’, if the head of government had been required, over these past months, to face Congress at intervals and answer questions about what he had in mind ?

Indeed. I'd only add that it's no accident that American presidents are treated with such deference. In post-Revolutionary America, a sizable contingent of the political elite wanted to crown George Washington king. He demurred, but there remained a conscious effort to aggrandize the president, through his clothes, seal of office, security retinue, and even the luxury of the chariot that carried him to and from events. In the eighteenth century, this was crucial for a new country embarking upon what looked like a naive experiment in popular democracy. But surely in 2009, as the most powerful nation on Earth, we can afford a bit more rough and tumble.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Beyond the Public Option

For the past two years, New York City has been running an experimental pilot program called OpportunityNYC, in which poor people -- mostly black and Latina single moms and their kids -- are paid for "good behaivor." In the Prospect's current print issue, I report on how that program is faring. While the jury is out on whether cash incentives can improve academic performance or encourage single moms to find part-time work, it seems that monetary rewards work quite well when it comes to encouraging good health: Forty-five percent of all Opportunity NYC payments were for health-related activities, compared to just 18 percent for work-related activities. Families enrolled in the program can earn $600 per adult for maintaining private health insurance, or $40 per month for enrolling in Medicaid. Each child or parent can earn $200 for an annual medical check-up, $100 for a recommended follow-up exam, and $100 for a visit to a dentist.

Opportunity NYC is an interesting lens through which to view the health reform debate. The goal of these health rewards is to incentivize preventive care -- the kind that's cheaper to provide and keeps people from developing more unpleasant health problems later on. This is important for drastically poor children, of course, and for their moms -- the people who are enrolled in Opportunity NYC and who already qualify for public assistance.

But it's also important for young women who might become pregnant, and whose health at conception affects their baby's birth weight and neurological development. It's important for urban gay men of color, the nation's highest risk group for HIV infection. And it's important for immigrant construction workers, who do dangerous jobs that jeopardize their health, but who often don't have employer-provided health insurance.

All these people are costing our health care system a lot of money, because they don't qualify for Medicaid and can't afford to purchase their own private insurance coverage. That's why -- as we feverishly debate the public option -- we can't lose sight of the other elements of health reform. The health reform legislation in front of Congress would expand Medicaid coverage to poor single adults of both genders. It would likely guarantee prenatal and maternity care. It would provide subsidies that help poor people afford decent medical care.

The lesson of Opportunity NYC is that given government support, health care is one of the first things people access. It's important to them, especially if they are parents.The payoff to society is that when we maintain good health through preventive care, we don't have to pay for drastic interventions later on. The long-term savings of a more humane health care system are impossible for the Congressional Budget Office to conclusively score. But in our quest to "bend the cost curve," let's not leave common sense at the door. This isn't really all that difficult to understand.

cross-posted at TAPPED

History and Crisis

It has long been Barack Obama's habit, here at home, to compare our current economic crisis to the Great Depression. Back in October, during a debate with John McCain, Obama said, "We are in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression." Speaking at Columbia University last month, Paul Volcker, chair of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, went further, saying, "I don't remember any time, maybe even the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast."

So it's been interesting this week to hear how Obama's historical references change as he reaches out to Europeans at the London G-20 meeting. At his press conference with Gordon Brown yesterday, Obama compared the recession not to the 1930s but to the late 1940s. "All of us here in London have a responsibility to act with a sense of urgency," he said. "Make no mistake: We are facing the most severe economic crisis since World War II."

The comparison to World War II is both sensitive and strategic. It is sensitive because it acknowledges a key difference in the American and European experiences of the 20th century; Europe was left completely devastated, physically and emotionally, by the ravages of Nazism, while the United States soared to the height of its power. And strategic because the World War II example hearkens back to a time of internationally recognized American moral leadership, when the Marshall Plan and Berlin air lift demonstrated to the world the United States' commitment to human rights.

Could George W. Bush have pulled this off? It never would have occurred to him.

cross-posted at TAPPED

R.I.P. John Hope Franklin

The trailblazing African American historian John Hope Franklin has died at the age of 94. Chair of President Bill Clinton's Presidential Initiative on Race and a winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Franklin was best known for his research on the lives of free blacks living in the pre-Civil War South. I was lucky to meet Franklin four years ago and write a profile of him for my college paper. Here is an excerpt of that piece:

Another piece of accepted history Franklin questions is the notion that there are uniquely white and black "cultures" within the United States, as opposed to uniquely white and black experiences. Because Franklin maintains that Americans of different races have more in common than they realize, he is skeptical of attempts to tackle the issue of race in homogenous settings.

"I don't believe you can get anywhere doing it separately - you've got to have communication," he said.

Franklin continued, "I have a feeling that this difference in cultures is overdrawn, overblown sometimes. How different is my culture from yours? Well, there's food. Black food is Southern food. ... Or dress? What is dress? Most people wear clothes like I wear, like you wear, like we all wear. And when they're not wearing that, they're wearing a costume. An African dashiki is a costume in this country. Religion. What's religion? Blacks didn't have any Christianity - they got it from whites."

More controversially, Franklin argued that American blacks might be willing to give up some of their group cultural identity in exchange for complete tolerance. "Blacks have been lonely and have tried to create a culture," he said. "Kwanzaa - that was just created whole cloth. It's so contrived. ... There's more of a culture in common that blacks and whites have. Unless there's a deliberate effort to create a separate culture."

cross-posted at TAPPED

Re: Michelle Obama, Race, Gender, and the Sixties

If you've been following our recent discussion of Michelle Obama's image, you should check out Ta-Nehisi Coates' Atlantic profile of the woman he calls, simply, an "American girl." Yesterday I wrote that in her increasingly policy-driven role as first lady, Michelle has been distancing herself from the Jackie O image she seemed to cultivate during the general election, after she got into trouble for her "first time in my adult life" comment. But Coates, whose reporting dates back to the later part of the campaign season, has a different interpretation of Michelle. Early 1960s nostalgia is something she deeply feels, he writes, as it brings Michelle back to her stable, middle-class childhood on the segregated South Side of Chicago -- a place where, unlike the elite institutions in which she would spend her young adulthood, being both black and high achieving felt completely "normal." The first lady truly laments, Coates posits, "our collective fall from motherhood, Chevrolet, and a chicken in every pot." Michelle tells Coates:

My mom and maybe a few others were some of the few who were able to stay at home. A lot of my friends, they weren't called latchkey kids, they were just kids whose parents worked. ... We went to the public school right around the corner and we had lunch, and you could go home for lunch, and we had recess and there weren't closed campuses then. ... They'd bring their bag lunch, they'd sit on the kitchen floor and talk to my mom.

The power of this reminiscence from Michelle isn't just that it hearkens back, comfortingly, to a time of traditional gender roles and single-income prosperity. It is that memories like this one are treasured by just as many white baby boomers as black ones. Indeed, the Obamas are quite adept at using "family values" to cut across racial divides; think of Barack's focus on responsible fatherhood, for example, or Michelle's vow to have her daughters make their beds each day, as if the family didn't have a small army of servants at their disposal.

What's important to remember though, is that the reality of the Obamas' lives haven't always comported to their PR push around traditional family values. When the couple met, Michelle was Barack's boss. They delayed parenting until their mid-thirties. Michelle didn't stop working full-time until her husband's presidential campaign was underway. As much as Michelle treasures her own stay-at-home mom, you can't really understand this woman unless you realize she has never, herself, been a stay-at-home mom. At The Root, Dayo Olopade wonders whether Michelle is a "secret working girl." The truth is, there is no secret at all. Michelle has always worked. And she still is working, every single day.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Living History

These are the fields of Monticello, once tilled by Thomas Jefferson's slaves. I visited there last Memorial Day weekend. Today, via Matt Yglesias, I see Ben Smith is reporting that Paula Abeles -- a white Jefferson descendant who's been active in keeping black descendants out of Monticello family reunions -- has become a John McCain volunteer after initially support Hillary Clinton. I've long been fascinated by Jefferson and his family history, and it's worth expanding, I think, upon how deeply racist and out-of-the-mainstream folks like Abeles are.

Conclusive DNA evidence linking Jefferson or one of his brothers to the black Hemings line has existed since 1998. In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation concluded it was likely that Jefferson himself fathered all six of his slave Sally Hemings' children. The dates of their births correspond quite neatly to nine months after the rare times Jefferson and Hemings were simultaneously at the estate. And historical documents indicate, the foundation found, that "several people close to Thomas Jefferson or the Monticello community believed that he was the father of Sally Hemings' children."

If you visit Monticello today, you'll hear chilling, wrenching stories about the lives of the hundreds of enslaved people who lived there. Jefferson, although thought of in his own time and today as a "benevolent" slave-owner, did instruct his overseer to beat his slaves. Jefferson sold husbands away from wives and teenagers away from their parents. Jefferson publicly tortured and humiliated runaways.

Those Jefferson descendants who continue to reject their black brethren are facing off against both science and history, choosing to embrace an outdated and, quite literally, white-washed image of their scion. Hearing that Abeles supports McCain will only push more Clinton supporters -- the vast majority of whom are committed Democrats and fairly progressive -- into Obama's camp.

cross-posted at TAPPED

A Voice of Conscience in Moscow

Amidst the news that Vladimir Putin fired his premier today, leading to increased doubts about who he will crown his successor, I stumbled upon this profile of Tatyana Zaslavskaya, the Russian sociologist responsible for coining the terms perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (opening), the ideological cornerstones of Mikhail Gorbachev's reform program for the USSR between 1985 and 1989. Zaslavskaya's research into the Soviet Union's struggling agricultural sector led her to posit that the Soviet government's economic planning had hamstrung development and led to massive poverty. The solution, she suggested, was political, social, and economic liberalization.

Though she didn't consider herself an anti-Communist radical, Zaslavskaya endured censorship and persecution from the Communist regime until Gorbachev came to power. At age 80, she brashly told an interviewer in July, "Russia is not a kingdom. We do not need any crown princes or successors who can win power only with the blessing of their predecessor."

How interesting that an academic -- and a woman at that -- was the brains behind such an important shift in world history. Yet outside of Russia, Zaslavskaya's name is virtually unknown.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Thoughts After a Month in Europe

View of the gold-domed Neue Synagogue from Tacheles artist studios, Berlin.

After a month traveling in Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, and Croatia, I'm back in D.C. refreshed, though still fighting jet lag. What did I miss most? Free tap water in restaurants, sharp cheddar cheese, my laptop, and good old American friendliness. It's funny how accustomed we are to social lubricants like how are you and enjoy your day.

What did I love most about my travels?  Europe's linguistic diversity, the political and cultural curiosity of its people, and the out-of-body sense of walking through the ravages of twentieth century history -- not to mention the ancient, medieval, and early modern pasts -- with each step one takes. Here are some quick hits:

Most vibrant city: Berlin. I stayed in East Berlin's Mitte district for 8 days, where a stroll of a few blocks took me past a bar featuring live ska/klezmer bands, a dozen art galleries, used clothing shops, restaurants representing every international cuisine, remains of the Berlin Wall, the rebuilt central synagogue of Berlin, packed beer gardens, and quiet cafes. Berlin is a city that, more than any other I've spent time in, feels like the playground of creative young people. You can feel how Berliners have re-engineered their city for tolerance and diversity even as they continue --  earnestly and thoroughly -- to dig through Germany's history of genocide and war.

Most stunning city: Vienna. Everywhere you turn, there's another breathtaking Hapsburg palace or perfectly manicured public park. Beautiful classical music wafts out of rehearsal halls, the croissants are the best we'd ever tasted (chocolate icing on the outside, vanilla custard within), and the Secessionist art is transporting. The mystery is why so many Viennese teenagers are completely Gothed out. Dyed black hair, combat boots, and wallet chains were as ubiquitous as jeans and polo shirts among the high schoolers we saw lounging in every park.

Strangest superimposition of Eastern Bloc architecture on a medieval walled city: Bratislava, Slovakia.  We didn't think much of Slovakian food, but from the fortress above this city, we took in an old Jewish ghetto, the uniformity of the Communist housing state, and looked over the border into the Austrian countryside, where dozens of giant windmills turned in unison.

Best place to learn about post-war European history: Budapest. Hungary's fascist Arrow Cross party never ascended to the majority pre-war, but was later installed by Hitler and helped to carry out the ghettoization, deportation, and genocide of the nation's vibrant Jewish community, which accounted for 5 percent of the Hungarian population (that's a larger percentange of Jews than in the United States today). After the war, the Soviets ignored the results of two free elections and installed a Communist regime that brutalized the population for over four decades and violently quashed a democratic uprising in 1956. The average Budapest apartment building still bears bullet holes from the 1956 street fighting. At the Terror Museum, we walked through the Communist Party's underground prison and execution site. Budapest is a breathtakingly gorgeous city that has withstood a terrible burden of history.

Best place to meet international travelers: Croatia. The craggy, magnificent Adriatic coastline really encouraged conversation on the beach, on ferries, and while hiking. We met two of the few liberal Democrats from Alabama (they wholeheartedly endorsed Tom Schaller-ism), several American expats, tons of Australians, and some friendly French jeunes femmes who gifted us with soft pads for lying on the rocky beaches. Everybody wanted to hear about the presidential elections. But when I told an Aussie investment banker that Hillary was in the lead, he informed me she can't win. I guess you don't have to live inside the Beltway to keep up to date with CW.

I'll be posting more photos and reflections soon! I've been thinking a lot about the Jewish history I witnessed in every country we visited. Let me know in comments if there are particular places you'd like to see pictures of or hear more about.

Roe, Privacy, & the Constitution

One aspect of the Planned Parenthood speeches that didn't make it into my TAPPED coverage was discussion of Roe''s place in constitutional law. Of course, the major critique of Roe heard from abortion rights supporters is that because the ruling is based on an individual's right to privacy--her ability to make medical decisions without intervention from the state--it will always be under attack, since privacy is not an explicitly guaranteed right in the Constitution.

But the Constitution does allow citizens to refuse to quarter soliders. That's an implicit right to privacy, isn't it? The Supreme Court has also overturned sodomy bans based on the right to privacy.

Without being asked about this last night, Hillary said, "Privacy is assumed in everything that the constitution stands for. How can you have freedom of speech and freedom of conscience if you don’t have a right to privacy?”

Obama mentioned that when he taught con law at the University of Chicago, he discussed Roe not in the context of abortion politics or privacy law, but as a key ruling on civil rights.

I'm no law expert, but I liked the legal justifications both candidates relied upon.

The Geography of Conquest

Garance Franke-Ruta responds to my post on the United States' fetishization of Native American culture by remembering that in New Mexico where she grew up, it wasn't quite as much of a trend to name streets and mascots after Native tribes, perhaps because so many Native people still live in the Southwest.

This makes sense to me, and also confirms my unease with the kind of "Indians are neat" rhetoric I grew up around. It would be odd, for example, if all the Lubavitchers were deported from Brooklyn and then Williamsburg was renamed "Chasid Village." Don't you think?