Category Archives: Random Blogging

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 Other than the hated “Obamacare” (which very few people who want it repealed seem to understand) and pious hand-wringing over the national debt (inconveniently created by George W. Bush), most of the accusations seem to be the products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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Be Careful Who You Piss Off

The Huffington Post reports that several officers of the Susan B. Komen Foundation have resigned in the wake of what can only be described as the debacle of that organization’s effort to defund Planned Parenthood.

When the Foundation decided to play abortion politics at the expense of poor women who depend upon Planned Parenthood for their annual breast exams, it set off a reaction of epic proportions–not to mention a level of scrutiny that the organization had formerly escaped. Questions were raised about the outsized executive salaries, the organization’s habit of suing other nonprofits that had the temerity to use the color pink or the term “cure” in their own efforts, and the percentage of overall funding that found its way to actual breast cancer research. According to the Huffington story, fundraising is down, morale is low, and management is in disarray.

There are a number of lessons to be learned from this exercise in self-destruction, but I think the most hopeful sign has little to do with the Komen Foundation and a lot to do with Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood has been the object of unremitting attack by the Right for many years now. Those of us who are older can remember when Planned Parenthood boards drew their members from civic leaders of both political parties; indeed, George H.W. Bush served on the national board until he decided to accept the nomination for Vice-President. The organization was not particularly controversial, because it was understood to be in the business of providing health care and family planning to women who needed those services but lacked the resources to access them.

The abortion wars and the rise of an extremist Right Wing willing to play dirty undermined the formerly widespread recognition of the importance of Planned Parenthood.

Despite the fact that abortion never exceeded 3% of Planned Parenthood’s services, despite the fact that no tax dollars were used for abortion services, and despite the fact that economic pressures made the organization’s provision of women’s health services more critically important than ever, Planned Parenthood’s reputation took a real hit–the result of unremitting attacks and dishonest characterizations.

The response to Komen’s clumsy effort to further de-legitimize Planned Parenthood may have marked a turning point.

When the “abortion wars” were seen as genuinely limited to the question of abortion, most women–even the most pro-choice among us–could recognize and respect the deep moral ambivalence many people feel about the issue. But recent political assaults have torn the mask off of much of the “pro-life” movement, displaying a profoundly anti-woman agenda. It is one thing to oppose abortion; it is quite another to attack women’s right to contraception and reproductive health as a violation of the religious prerogatives of those whose theologies subordinate women.

Women are waking up to the very real threat to our hard-won equal rights. In the process, we are recognizing the attacks on Planned Parenthood for what they really are–attacks on us.

Let’s hope that the people perpetrating those attacks–the Rick Santorum’s and the Eric Miller’s and their ilk–learn what the Komen Foundation has learned: be careful who you piss off. Because–as the saying goes–if Mama ain’t happy, ain’t NOBODY happy.

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Love It or Leave It

When I was growing up in the 1950s (yes, I’m THAT old), anti-communist crusaders had a handy phrase with which they shouted down any criticism of American government: “Love it or leave it.” There was, in their view, no room for middle ground–if you weren’t a patriot, defined as someone who defended 100% of what America was and did, then you needed to move elsewhere.

Apparently, the love it or leave it folks are back–albeit in slightly different philosophical garb–and they are enthusiastically supporting Rick Santorum for President. This time, it is those of us who are unwilling to identify America as a “Christian Nation” –and behave accordingly–who are being invited to leave.  

Despite the efforts of all of the GOP candidates to pander to the religious fringe of the party, the Santorum campaign has been the most explicitly tied to religious doctrine, and Santorum himself is quite obviously the most sincere in his beliefs. It should come as no surprise that he has attracted those elements of the electorate who feel aggrieved by the respect for diversity that characterizes modernity.

In fact, Santorum’s campaign has operated to shine a light on a campaign element that political operatives usually manage to obscure–judging (accurately, one hopes) that too much attention to it will repel more voters than it will attract. Most campaigns that have chosen to court the Christian Nation folks have done so through carefully targeted appeals and the use of “dog whistle” terminology in campaign speeches. (George W. Bush was a master at this–he would sprinkle phrases through his speeches to signal the faithful that he was one of them–knowing that the majority of Americans were unfamiliar with the phrases and their context and would fail to “get” their significance.)

Santorum, however, has chosen to run as a theocrat. He makes no bones about his desire that American law should reflect his religious beliefs.

Santorum and the people he has attracted cling ever-more tightly to a revisionist history that justifies the past privileging of white, heterosexual Christian (formerly only Protestant) males. The more society changes, the more they reject the generators and markers of that change–science, globalization, diversity.

It is hard to believe that in the 21st Century we are watching a credible candidate for a major political party’s nomination reject evolution, deny the existence of global climate change, criticize women who work outside the home, oppose the use of contraceptives and advocate second-class citizenship for gays–a candidate who rejects the principle of separation of church and state, and welcomes the support of pastors who tell non-Christians they should leave the country if they disagree.

In the (thankfully highly unlikely) event that Santorum becomes President, I think many of us would seriously consider that invitation.

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