Author Archives: Sheila

A Dismal Legacy

If conversations at my office and family gatherings are any indication, Americans are intensely focused on the upcoming presidential election. Traditional print and broadcast media and internet blogs alike are filled with arguments over the respective merits of the candidates, and detailed analyses of who is voting for whom and why.

Whatever their other differences, voters clearly can’t wait to be rid of George W. Bush. However, before we rush to bid a not-so-fond farewell to the Bush Administration, it may be instructive to examine the legacy of the past seven years.

Bush took office in 2001. During the previous eight years, Gross Domestic Product had grown an average of 4.09%  annually. Over the past seven years, GDP growth has averaged 2.65% per year.

The national debt was $5.7 trillion in 2001. It is $9.2 trillion now. Over the three years preceding 2001, the government had actually managed to amass a $431 billion surplus; during these last three years, we’ve had a $734 billion deficit.

The Clinton Administration created an average of 1.76 million private sector jobs each year during its eight years in office;  the Bush Administration has averaged 369,000 per year.

In 2001, there were 31.6 million Americans living in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Today, the Bureau reports there are 36.5 million.

When Bush took office, there were 38 million Americans without health insurance; today there are an estimated 47 million, and the average annual family health insurance premium has increased from $6,230 to $12,106.

Median household income was $49,163 in 2001; it is $48,023 today. Meanwhile, gas prices have increased from 1.39 a gallon to 3.07, and the cost of college tuition has gone from $3,164 to $5,192. Consumer debt has nearly doubled, from $7.65 trillion to $12.8 trillion.

When we turn from domestic matters to international ones, we see an equally dismal landscape: our trade deficit has soared from $380 billion to $759 billion, and the value of the dollar has declined precipitously. In 2001, a dollar would buy you 1.07 Euros; today, it will get you .68. We are more dependent on foreign oil. Our armed forces are stretched dangerously thin. And don’t even ask about our international reputation: a recent Pew poll of ten nations charted dramatic declines in the percentage of people in those countries holding a favorable view of America.

What these statistics from government agencies—the Treasury Department, Bureau of Labor Statistics and the like—can’t and don’t take into account is the damage done to America’s governing institutions by this Administration’s unremitting assaults on the rule of law. How does an accountant quantify cynicism? How do we measure distrust, or value lost accountability?

It is hard to imagine that anyone running for President in 2008, on either ticket, could do a worse job. But whoever wins will face daunting challenges.  The next President must restore fiscal sanity, address our multiple problems, repair our international reputation, and—most important of all—make us believe in America again.

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Same-Sex Marriage–Again

The Indiana Senate has demonstrated that it will spend its limited time during this short session on those matters most important to—who, exactly?

 

At a time when public passions are at a boiling point over our dysfunctional tax system, when citizens are demanding that we streamline Indiana’s wasteful, overlapping government structures, the Senate has decided to take decisive action—to ban same-sex marriage.

 

By this point, the arguments against SJ7 are well-known. It “solves” a problem that doesn’t exit, by denying still-theoretical gay couples access to hundreds of legal rights that heterosexual citizens enjoy. Those include the right to be appointed as a guardian of an ailing or injured partner, the right to take family leave, and the right to half of the partnership’s accumulated property if the relationship dissolves. Same sex partners pay more taxes because they aren’t entitled to spousal gift and estate tax exemptions and deductions. They can’t seek damages for a partner’s wrongful death. There are hundreds more—rights enjoyed by heterosexuals married two days, but denied to gays who have been partners for 30 years.

 

Worse, as constitutional expert Aviva Orenstein testified, part B of this poorly-drafted Amendment is likely to hurt all unmarried couples, not just gay ones, and is an invitation to the “judicial activism” that proponents claim to detest. No one has a clue what “legal incidents of marriage” are.

 

SJR 7 is opposed by Indiana’s largest employers, by many clergymen and religious organizations, by university professors, by dozens of professional organizations, and in recent polls, by a majority of Indiana citizens. So what compelling justifications are offered for cluttering the Indiana constitution with this confusing and discriminatory language?

 

Basically, proponents say gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry because some religions teach that homosexuality is immoral. (Of course, all religions teach that rape and murder are immoral—but Indiana allows rapists and murderers to marry. Go figure.) They say marriage and sex are for procreation (although we allow sterile folks to marry). Most of all, they insist that recognizing gay unions will undermine families and the institution of marriage. (Similar claims were made about interracial marriage, and about allowing women to own property and vote.)

 

Let’s at least be honest. This isn’t an effort to protect families—it is an effort to privilege some families at the expense of others. SJ7 is not about religion or morality—it is about whose religion, whose morality.

 

This is also not about our Senators responding to some groundswell of public opinion. This is an issue rapidly losing its salience with most voters, who are understandably a lot more concerned about taxes, crime, access to health care and other bread-and-butter and quality of life issues. To the extent the Senate is responding to public pressure, it is pressure coming from a small but highly vocal constituency.  

 

We can only hope that when SJR7 arrives in the Indiana House, our Representatives give it the priority it deserves—and bury this bad bill whose time has thankfully passed.

 

 

 

   

 

 

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A Post-Culture-War America?

Word Column                                                              Sheila Suess Kennedy

January 29, 2008                                                          811 words

 

A Post-Culture-War America?                                                                        

Okay, let me begin with an admission—I’m obsessed with the Presidential campaign. Totally, hopelessly obsessed. I spend really embarrassing amounts of time emailing back and forth with two of my sons who are equally obsessed, and equally enamored of “my” candidate.

By the time this column appears in print, the primary may well be decided. Worse, on those rare occasions when I force myself to be realistic, I have to admit that the odds are against my guy; the smart money says he isn’t going to be the candidate. The thing is, it has been so long since there has been a national candidate I could wholeheartedly support; it’s sort of like falling in love, even when you know—as my husband keeps warning me—you are likely to get your heart broken. Again.

When I sat down to write this column, I wasn’t going to write about the primary. But then I thought about why it is that I am so enthusiastic about Barack Obama, why his emergence has made me feel almost hopeful for the future of the country I love, and it seemed a phenomenon worth exploring, because his candidacy has a particular message for America’s minority communities, including the gay community.

The past seven years have been a disaster for America, and if polls are to be believed, a significant majority of Americans recognize the dimensions of that disaster. We are a sour, dispirited electorate. (My husband says I’ve been in a really bad mood since 2000.) In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, there was a rush of national solidarity and the best kind of patriotism, but it didn’t take long for this Administration to slam that window shut, and to turn us against each other. “Good Christian Amuricans” were under attack by “Islamofascists,” “homosexual deviates,” “secular humanists” and other assorted heathens—and they weren’t going to let us forget to be very, very afraid.

Fair is fair; this Administration didn’t invent the culture wars. They just used culture war issues to gain and retain power. I don’t have to remind readers of The Word how Karl Rove and his political disciples sliced and diced the electorate in order to win elections; anyone who voted in a swing state in 2004 knows just how well the cynical use of state constitutional marriage amendments worked—bringing out the haters to vote against the “queers” and not coincidentally to pull a lever for George W. Bush.

Bush and his crowd will be gone in November, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief. (Hell, we can have a party! I certainly intend to.) It is certainly true that almost anyone who takes the oath of office next January will be an improvement. But we have a chance to do more than trade a sleazy, incompetent Commander in Chief for a sleazy, competent one. We have a chance to elect a post-culture-war President, and begin to put the nastiness and intolerance behind us.

When the campaign began, I’d have gladly taken any of the Democratic front-runners. (Someday, perhaps, if the sane people retake control of the GOP, I can feel that way about Republicans again…). But after watching the Clintons’ willingness to say and do anything in South Carolina—their willingness to distort, smear and shamelessly use the race card a la Karl Rove—I no longer feel that way.

The Clintons have been allies of the African-American community for decades—but they were clearly willing to throw blacks under the bus when they thought it served their purposes. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” gave the gay community a taste of how lasting their commitment to gay rights was. Hillary is running well among Hispanics, but she was quick to retreat from her statement at an early debate that undocumented workers should be able to obtain drivers’ licenses—an issue very important to that community. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Clintons’ alliances are strategic—and disposable—rather than principled and enduring.

As Ted Kennedy said when he endorsed Obama, we have a chance to make this a transformational election. We can put a new kind of candidate in office; multi-ethnic, multi-racial and post-culture-war. As Obama himself said in his South Carolina victory speech, this is not an election about gender or race or ethnicity—it is about the old politics versus a new politics. It is about the past versus the future.

I am so ready for that future.

It may be that by the time you read this column, the primary is effectively over. It may well be the case that the “old politics” has won. (There’s an old saying that goes, “age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time,” and for all I know, that’s true.) But for right now, for the first time in a very long time, I’m in a good mood.

 

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A Post-Culture-War America

Word Column                                                              Sheila Suess Kennedy

January 29, 2008                                                          811 words

 

A Post-Culture-War America?                                                                        

Okay, let me begin with an admission—I’m obsessed with the Presidential campaign. Totally, hopelessly obsessed. I spend really embarrassing amounts of time emailing back and forth with two of my sons who are equally obsessed, and equally enamored of “my” candidate.

By the time this column appears in print, the primary may well be decided. Worse, on those rare occasions when I force myself to be realistic, I have to admit that the odds are against my guy; the smart money says he isn’t going to be the candidate. The thing is, it has been so long since there has been a national candidate I could wholeheartedly support; it’s sort of like falling in love, even when you know—as my husband keeps warning me—you are likely to get your heart broken. Again.

When I sat down to write this column, I wasn’t going to write about the primary. But then I thought about why it is that I am so enthusiastic about Barack Obama, why his emergence has made me feel almost hopeful for the future of the country I love, and it seemed a phenomenon worth exploring, because his candidacy has a particular message for America’s minority communities, including the gay community.

The past seven years have been a disaster for America, and if polls are to be believed, a significant majority of Americans recognize the dimensions of that disaster. We are a sour, dispirited electorate. (My husband says I’ve been in a really bad mood since 2000.) In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, there was a rush of national solidarity and the best kind of patriotism, but it didn’t take long for this Administration to slam that window shut, and to turn us against each other. “Good Christian Amuricans” were under attack by “Islamofascists,” “homosexual deviates,” “secular humanists” and other assorted heathens—and they weren’t going to let us forget to be very, very afraid.

Fair is fair; this Administration didn’t invent the culture wars. They just used culture war issues to gain and retain power. I don’t have to remind readers of The Word how Karl Rove and his political disciples sliced and diced the electorate in order to win elections; anyone who voted in a swing state in 2004 knows just how well the cynical use of state constitutional marriage amendments worked—bringing out the haters to vote against the “queers” and not coincidentally to pull a lever for George W. Bush.

Bush and his crowd will be gone in November, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief. (Hell, we can have a party! I certainly intend to.) It is certainly true that almost anyone who takes the oath of office next January will be an improvement. But we have a chance to do more than trade a sleazy, incompetent Commander in Chief for a sleazy, competent one. We have a chance to elect a post-culture-war President, and begin to put the nastiness and intolerance behind us.

When the campaign began, I’d have gladly taken any of the Democratic front-runners. (Someday, perhaps, if the sane people retake control of the GOP, I can feel that way about Republicans again…). But after watching the Clintons’ willingness to say and do anything in South Carolina—their willingness to distort, smear and shamelessly use the race card a la Karl Rove—I no longer feel that way.

The Clintons have been allies of the African-American community for decades—but they were clearly willing to throw blacks under the bus when they thought it served their purposes. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” gave the gay community a taste of how lasting their commitment to gay rights was. Hillary is running well among Hispanics, but she was quick to retreat from her statement at an early debate that undocumented workers should be able to obtain drivers’ licenses—an issue very important to that community. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Clintons’ alliances are strategic—and disposable—rather than principled and enduring.

As Ted Kennedy said when he endorsed Obama, we have a chance to make this a transformational election. We can put a new kind of candidate in office; multi-ethnic, multi-racial and post-culture-war. As Obama himself said in his South Carolina victory speech, this is not an election about gender or race or ethnicity—it is about the old politics versus a new politics. It is about the past versus the future.

I am so ready for that future.

It may be that by the time you read this column, the primary is effectively over. It may well be the case that the “old politics” has won. (There’s an old saying that goes, “age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time,” and for all I know, that’s true.) But for right now, for the first time in a very long time, I’m in a good mood.

 

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Don’t Stereotype Me!

I’ve had it. And the 2008 election system has just started.

According to the pollsters, I am one of those “older female voters” who can be counted on to support Hillary Clinton because, after all, we’re so much alike. We share a gender.

This may come as a big shock to the so-called “analysts” who like to slice and dice the electorate into “interest groups” and “market niches” based upon some wonky version of identity politics, but women—even those of a “certain age”—are not a monolithic voting bloc. Not long ago, I wrote about my irritation with negative gender stereotypes: the South Carolina (female) Republican who employed a sexist term for Clinton, and the patronizing (male) commentators who applied a gender lens to every tactic employed by her campaign. I think many women feel the same impatience with that sort of one-dimensional approach to her candidacy.

But guess what? Many of us are equally impatient with a candidate who seems to feel entitled to our votes simply by virtue of a common gender, and with pundits who give that entitlement legitimacy. When Barack Obama was asked whether he anticipated getting a major share of the African-American vote, he sensibly replied that he expected he’d need to earn every vote. He clearly recognized what the “chattering classes” seem unable to grasp, that women, blacks, Latinos, young people and all the other groups into which voters get lumped consist of individuals who are more—and more complicated—than those labels reflect.      

In both the Republican and Democratic primaries, we have seen strong signals that voters are tired to death of the poll-centered politics of the last few election cycles. Both Huckabee and McCain have based their appeals to GOP voters on straight talk; Mitt Romney, vastly better financed and clearly more acceptable to the business wing of the party, has dutifully designed (or changed) his positions on the basis of his polling. Conventional wisdom favored Romney, but so far, actual voters haven’t.  

Among Democrats, as Frank Rich observed in the New York Times, it is the Clinton campaign, led by pollster Mark Penn, that is following the older script. “In Mrs. Clinton’s down-to-earth micropolitics, polls often seem to play the leadership role. That leaves her indecisive when one potential market is pitched against another.” If those polls also tell her she can count on women’s votes, she’s in for a surprise. This election won’t be decided on the basis of gender or race. They won’t be irrelevant, but they won’t be decisive, either.

This is an election about the future, about where we are going as a nation. It is about who can best bring a sour, fractured, dispirited citizenry together again, about who can best heal the deep divisions created by wedge issues and culture wars and pandering to political bases. It’s about vision and hope—and yes, change.

It isn’t about identity politics. Candidates who think it is are part of the past we so desperately need to change.

 

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