Category Archives: Random Blogging

Doubling Down

The Chair of the National Republican Party pooh-poohs the notion that his party is waging a war on women–next, he says, the Democrats will accuse the GOP of a war on caterpillars. How silly, how over-the-top! Just another one of those politically-motivated charges that are thrown around during a campaign season.

At virtually the same time Priebus (or whatever his name is) was comparing women to caterpillars (okay–maybe that wasn’t his intent), Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (yes, that Scott Walker) was signing a new law –passed on a straight party-line vote–repealing his state’s 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act.

The Equal Pay Enforcement Act  made it easier for victims of wage discrimination to have their day in court, by allowing plaintiffs to bring suit in state courts. Without it, federal courts are the only proper venue for such complaints. State courts, as lawyers all know, are less costly and more accessible, and typically resolve cases more quickly.

This little skirmish is typical of the tactics being used to circumscribe women’s rights. There was no outright reversal of a right–just a measure making it much more difficult to assert that right. This is the same approach being used by most of the anti-abortion measures that have sprouted like dandelions since the 2010 elections swept Republicans into office: the Supreme Court may say they can’t impose an outright ban, but they can bury clinics in a blizzard of medically unnecessary regulations that make it impossible to operate. They can “protect” poor women who clearly don’t know what they want by enacting “informed consent” provisions more burdensome than those required for major, life-threatening surgeries.

Contraception? Well, God’s Own Party has tried to permit your employer to decide whether your insurance should cover birth control, and the party has made it very clear that given the power, it would get rid of Planned Parenthood.

No war?

The troops are marching down the Trans-vaginal Highway as we speak…..

Why Voting for the Man, Not the Party, Doesn’t Work

A few years ago, after choosing between two particularly uninspiring candidates on election day, I told my husband that I would no longer vote for the lesser of two evils. Instead, I would vote for the candidate who was pandering to the least dangerous constituency.

It sounds snarky, but I would argue that it isn’t a bad rule to follow.

Take Mitt Romney, the likely GOP Presidential nominee. My guess is that beneath that wooden exterior, he’s probably a capable enough manager–and not nearly as asinine as he sounds on the campaign trail. The problem is, if he were to be elected, he would still be beholden to the Tea Party crazies and Good Ole Boy racists he is frantically trying to woo during the primaries. Etch-A-Sketch or no, the systemic realities of our political system would operate to prevent moderation or compromise or evidence-based decision-making.

Here in Indiana, we have two major-party candidates for Governor, both of whom are well to the right of center. Pence, of course, is entirely a creature of the extremist Christian Right–if he’s ever had a truly independent idea, he’s hidden it well. Gregg is a conservative Democrat from Southern Indiana. If Pence wins, he won’t skip a beat: his policies will be tailored to his base, which is fundamentalist Christian, exploitative capitalist, and allergic-to-taxes Tea Party. If Gregg wins, however, he will have to moderate his positions in order to satisfy the Democratic base, which is far more diverse and progressive than he is. (As my youngest son likes to say, your vote for Governor will depend upon whether you want to return to the 1960s or the 1690s.)

Of course, if Rupert the Libertarian wins, all bets are off.

Candidates are captured by their political parties in a number of ways; they are not unembedded political actors no matter how much they’d like us to think they are. In some ways, that’s comforting; we rarely know what we need to know about the candidates themselves, so there is some logic in casting your vote for the person who belongs to the party with the philosophy closest to your own. Party affiliation is one among many “markers” that allow us to shortcut the decision-making process.

On the other hand, when one party goes “off the rails”–when the only people who can get nominated are those prepared to grovel to the basest of the base–average voters are deprived of the benefit of sound policy debates between serious candidates.

When elections devolve into battles between the bumper stickers, when candidates endlessly parrot  focus-group tested pieties, it isn’t possible to vote for the “best candidate.” It isn’t even possible to figure out who that is.

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Our Fictional President

Saturday, I opened my IBJ to read a truly paranoid rant from Greg Morris, the publisher, who has a weekly opinion column. Mr. Morris is clearly one of those Second Amendment folks who views his right to bear arms with religious fervor, and his embrace of “one nation, armed to the teeth” was unsettling enough. But what really set the warning bells off was his full-throated embrace of one of the many conspiracy theories that have persisted since the election of Barack Obama: “they’re coming for our guns!”

Mr. Morris was unable to point to a single fact supporting this fantasy. It was the usual “everyone knows” and “someone said” rant–the Obama administration is “just waiting for the second term” and then they’ll confiscate your weapons!

I was shocked to see this garbage in the staid IBJ, a publication focused on the business community, and one of the few media outlets that still fact-checks and reports.But it reminded me of an observation someone made about the Republican primary–that the GOP candidates are running against a fictional President.

The criticisms of Obama from the left–and there have been plenty of them–tend to fault him for specific policy decisions. He has failed to dismantle Bush’s security apparatus; his administration defended the killing of an American citizen working with the terrorists, without a trial or other due process. Agree or not with those criticisms (and I do), they are specific and tangible.

The criticisms from the Right, however, rarely focus on something the President actually did. Other than the hated “Obamacare” (which very few people who want it repealed seem to understand) and pious hand-wringing over the national debt (inconveniently created by George W. Bush), most of the accusations seem to be the products of fevered imaginations: Obama is a “socialist” who wants to make the U.S. into Europe; Obama hates white people; Obama is a Kenyan Muslim fascist; Obama wants to confiscate our guns….

I read “The Audacity of Hope” during the 2008 campaign. I agreed with almost everything in it–because the positions outlined were very much the same positions I held (and continue to hold) when I ran for Congress in 1980 as a moderate Republican. If there is one mistake today’s Left and Right hold in common, its the belief that Obama ran as some sort of raging liberal. He didn’t, he wasn’t, and he isn’t.

The absolute hysteria on the Right can’t be explained by Obama’s actual policies. Unlike the situation with George W. Bush, who didn’t arouse intense animosity until he’d actually done things, the irrational hatred of Obama began the day he was elected.

We seem to have two Presidents, the actual man we elected, and a fictional “boogeyman.” And while race doesn’t explain all of that, it explains a hell of a lot.

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Counterintuitive…and Interesting

The most recent issue of The New Yorker has an interesting article about retail establishments and staffing levels.

The conventional wisdom is that in order to profit, retailers must keep costs low, and the most effective way to do that is to have as few employees as possible. As the article points out, however, “Although leanness is generally a good thing in business, too much cost-cutting turns out to be a bad strategy, not only for workers and customers, but for businesses themselves.”

The author quotes from a recent Harvard Business Review study of four large low-price retailers with much higher employee costs than their competitors. These are stores, like Costco, that pay their employees more, provide benefits, and provide more training. They also employ a lot more people.

And–counterintuitively–they make more money. They have higher sales per square foot than similar businesses with thinner staffs, and they experience much less (costly) turnover.

The article doesn’t just look at the successful retailers with larger sales staffs; it also notes examples of the reverse. When Home Depot and Circuit City slashed employees to cut costs, sales plummeted.

I’m sure there are other business practices that contribute to both the positive and negative results. But assuming the Harvard folks are right, assuming they have controlled for other factors and that they have produced sound, compelling evidence that hiring more employees (to a point, obviously) translates into greater profits, I wonder if that evidence would be enough to overcome the conventional wisdom that favors “lean and mean.”

Somehow, I doubt it.

After all, we have years and years of compelling evidence that tax cuts don’t create jobs–but politicians continue to insist otherwise.

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Etch-A-Sketch and Old White Guys

There’s been a lot of talk–gleeful and rueful–about the “Etch-a-Sketch” comment by one of Mitt Romney’s advisors. (For those who missed it, the advisor was asked by a CNN reporter whether he worried that Mitt had been pushed so far right during the primary process that he would be unable to attract moderates during the general election; he responded that he wasn’t concerned, because the general election was like an Etch-A-Sketch–you shake everything up and start over.)

The remark underscored one of Romney’s biggest problems: the widespread perception that there is no “there” there–that he is Mr. Inauthentic. But I think it displayed an even more fundamental disconnect.

Today’s GOP has become a party of old white men who don’t understand how people communicate in the world of twitter and Facebook. We saw this during the last campaign–John McCain was often (aptly) described as “an analog candidate for a digital age.”

Romney’s advisor wasn’t wrong, exactly, about the nature of the primary and general campaigns–he was simply behind the times. It used to be that candidates could target voting blocks and special interests with direct mail appeals that flew under the radar of the electorate at large. It used to be that primaries could be conducted as largely “in house” contests–and it was usually only political junkies who would read the traditional media’s reporting on those primaries.

We don’t live in that world anymore. Facebook, Twitter and You Tube, among others, have altered the political landscape; people see a ridiculous remark, or are angered by a political position, and post it. Posts go viral. Literally millions of people are drawn into arguments that would have been “inside baseball” in days gone by.

And speaking of days gone by–nothing says old-fashioned and out of touch like a reference to Etch-A-Sketch.

Romney’s problem isn’t just that he’s willing to say anything to anyone. It’s that he and his team of old white guys don’t understand the world they now live in.

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