Cable TV and newspaper Op-Ed pages are full of pundits and campaign strategists using the latest election polls to opine glibly on the mood of America. Bored with this kind of bloviating, Salon decided to do the exact opposite -- and use the mood of America as a way to generalize about the election. We assembled three leading demographers and trend analysts to talk about which major nonpolitical factors are shaping the electoral environment -- from population shifts to major changes in public attitudes. We asked them about the state of America on the eve of one of the most epochal elections in modern history.
Demographer Cheryl Russell is the former editor in chief of American Demographics magazine, the editorial director of New Strategist Publications and the author of the just-published "Bet You Didn't Know: Hundreds of Intriguing Facts About Living in the USA."
Consumer-behavior guru Ann Clurman is the executive vice president for trends and futures consulting at the Futures Company, the firm produced by the merger of two other forecasting firms, Henley Centre HeadlightVision and Yankelovich. She is the coauthor of the 2007 book "Generation Ageless: How Baby Boomers Are Changing the Way We Live Today ... and They're Just Getting Started."
Peter Francese, who founded American Demographics magazine, is an expert on demographics and consumer marketing. He serves as demographic trends analyst for the advertising agency Oglivy & Mather.
I spoke with Francese, Clurman and Russell by phone. The following transcript of the conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
-- Walter Shapiro
Salon: Welcome to you all. The whole idea of this conversation is, instead of generalizing about the country from the election, we have brought together three demographics experts and trend analysts to talk about how to generalize about the election from what they know about the country.
So where to start? Leaving the Wall Street meltdown aside for a few minutes, how would each of you say the country was different than it was four years ago?
Peter Francese: My feeling is what's different than four years ago, and it's only a little bit different, is the continuing concentration of income at the top of the income scale. Before the financial meltdown, there was enormous concentration of income in the top 20 percent, top 10 percent, top 5 percent of the income scale. And that distorted the picture of really what America is when the top 20 percent of households in America take home half of all the income earned. And I think there's been an increasing bitterness and anger about that, but I do think that the top 20 percent has suffered rather mightily over the last several weeks.
Salon: I want to come back to that in a second because I want to talk about how life has changed in the last four to six weeks because of the financial meltdown. But I was just curious, Ann and Cheryl, what leaps out at you about how the country has been changing in the last four years?
Ann Clurman: There has been a very well-known shift in power from marketers to consumers. Consumers have been really good at celebrating how smart they are, how empowered they are. We've been picking that up for at least a decade. What I think is really significant is what we're calling "personal authenticity." And what that was, that kind of reached a critical mass in 2004, it was a coming together of a number of values and trends that we described as consumers really working on internal clarity of their values. Not only were they kind of trying to understand what was really important to them, they began to develop the courage to act on [those things]. And part of that meant moving out of your comfort zone -- and I think that is very important to what's happening today. But also, this desire to get life right became a passion. What we're seeing today is a massive shift beginning to surface and that shift is not just being caused the last four or five weeks.
Salon: I'm curious what Cheryl has to say to the same question.
Cheryl Russell: I want to put a word in here for the demographics. There is this slow, inexorable change in our country toward much greater diversity. You might not be able to bank on the stock market, but you can bank on demographic change. And that change means that the United States is going to be a minority majority country according to the Census Bureau by 2042. And what's happening is that every year we become more and more diverse and the voices of blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other minorities are becoming more powerful. And in this election I think this is playing out big time.
Francese: That is an absolute fact.
Salon: I'm going to put the financial crisis on hold for a minute and ask, Could the America of 2000 or 2004 embrace a Barack Obama for president? Was America ready four or eight years ago for a mixed-race presidential candidate or was it just that Obama happened to come along in 2008? Is he a lagging indicator that America is changing or is this the first year where it's possible to imagine someone like Barack Obama being elected?
Clurman: Let me take the first crack at that. I know that demographics are critical and I'm going to leave that to the other experts. I've been thinking long and hard about this and my answer would be no, it wouldn't have happened in 2000 and 2004. First of all, critically, the changing demographics. Secondly, we have to look at the last eight years. I don't know what word you want to use for it -- I was going to say "heinous." Thirdly, the youth vote. That's a huge demographic shift, the coming of age of the millennials or the Gen Ys, or whatever you want to call them, and their feelings about all of this. I also want to go back to what I said earlier, which is, people are much more willing to move outside their comfort zone. And while I do believe unfortunately a lot of people are still uncomfortable with Sen. Obama's candidacy, they're going to go for him because they understand it's time to change the discussion.
One of the things we are telling our marketing clients, and one of the things I think Obama's people understand really well, is stop talking about what doesn't work, stop yearning for a time that was, stop talking about, "Gee, I wish we could still do this." With the new realities, we can't. That's old language. The language we need to use is changing the discussion entirely and to ask new questions. We tell everyone, "Think outside the box," and my argument would be, "Change the box in general." Apropos of this, I just got one of those breaking news e-mails, and apparently Advertising Age has named Obama the marketer of the year.
Russell: I agree with Ann. The times create a candidate. What we see playing out in the election today, it's really a long-simmering battle between the generations. It's the battle between the way things used to be and the way things will be. And everybody thought for a long time that the boomers would be the warriors in this battle. But in fact, boomers are actually, or many boomers are, conservative, so that battle never really played out fully. But now, it is their children, the millennial generation, that is on the front line of this battle.
Salon: What do you mean precisely by the millennial generation?
Russell: The millennial generation is basically young adults, technically anyone under the age of 32 this year. But basically it's the young-adult population. When you're talking about voters, you're talking about the "18 to 29" voters, the 18-to-31-year-old vote. So the older generations in 2000 and 2004 still had the upper hand numerically. But this year maybe the younger generations and the new voters will have the numerical upper hand. The financial crisis has driven many of the older people more in alignment in their attitudes with the younger generation. We may see it play out on Nov. 4 that the new way has the upper hand. But that remains to be seen because there are a lot of issues involved with the youth vote and the minority vote.
Salon: I want to come back to the youth vote in particular in a minute.
Francese: Let's never forget that Barack Obama would never have had a chance to become president of the United States were it not for the Internet. And that four years or eight years ago, the power of the Internet wasn't where it is today. He has raised most of his money off the Internet. He has energized the youth vote using the Internet.
Salon: But so did Howard Dean four years ago.
Francese: Not to the extent that Obama is doing it. Obama is an expert at marketing, if you want to call it that. And I think that his use of it to raise money and to energize his proponents has really put him head and shoulders above John McCain, who does not know how to do that. And so I think that it's that power, but there's a second item too. Through the appointment of several high-level Cabinet members in the Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice for example, and Colin Powell, the ascendancy of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice has made Americans comfortable with black Americans in positions of high, high responsibility and of power. Seeing Condoleezza Rice negotiating around the world with world leaders has made many Americans comfortable with the idea of black people in leadership positions. None of that was possible eight years ago.
Salon: Everyone keeps raising good points I want to come back to. But the thing I don't want to get lost is the question I was going to ask at the outset. Peter talked about income inequality as being one of the big changes in America in this decade. Ann talked about American consumers, particularly baby boomers, wanting to get their lives right. Now we have a situation where no one thinks we've gotten the economy right -- something like 9 percent of the American people think we're on the right track. How has this changed attitudes and just your sense, even demographically, of what are going to be both the short- and the long-term effects of this current crisis?
Francese: I will just jump in here quickly and say that one of the things I think is going to happen is it will lower the rate at which people are able to buy homes. And so the percentage of homeownership among millennials for a while, at least until the recession is over and credit is easier, is going to [drop]. We will see more young adults living at home with their parents than we might have. Because that happens in almost every recession that I've ever tracked. I think it will have a measurable effect on the structure of American households and how they live.
Russell: I really agree with what Peter is saying. This financial crisis and the feeling that things are going in the wrong direction have been a long, long time in coming. If you look at men's incomes, men's earnings, among men who work full time, their earnings peaked in 1986. That's more than 20 years ago. So for the past 20 years, why have household incomes been increasing? For one reason only: the working woman. And now, virtually every woman who is going to go to work is at work. That boost to household incomes is over. The only other remaining boost to household incomes is that we have the baby boom generation right now in peak earning years and that has kept the numbers from falling. For example, when the Census Bureau released its 2007 income statistics, household income increased slightly. The only reason for that increase was the baby boom generation in their peak earning years. People are realizing they are not getting ahead, and they don't see any improvement in the future, and that is one of the reasons they want change.
Salon: So the political slogan should be: Are you better off than you were 20 years ago?
Russell: People think they're better off because their wives have gone to work. So they've said, "My household income is higher than my parents' was back then." That's true, but it's only true because you have more earners and more workers. Every household has more workers than it used to.
Francese: And four years ago they thought they were wealthier because their houses were worth so much money. Not anymore.
Clurman: We've been tracking what we call our economic anxiety scale since last January. And of course there's hardly anybody who says they don't have any anymore ... [As early as] January 2008, people were beginning to take some stock of what was going on. And I also want to make the point that one of the major, major shifts that we see coming right now -- and it's just beginning to surface -- is a shift toward owning some of these problems that we face.
I think what's happening is, as the economic ground is shifting under consumers' feet, they're kind of waking up to all the other stuff they've been blocking. Like we don't really save any money; our kids don't really do well on an international basis when it comes to adding and subtracting. We've got two gas guzzlers in our garage and we may only need one. People are beginning to wake up, and in some very recent data we have, we found that 73 percent of people say that our society gives a pass too easily. People are going to stop pointing fingers at everybody else and starting pointing them at themselves.
Francese: That's why Barack Obama did so well in that last debate where the last thing he said [was], we're all going to have to make sacrifices. I think that resonated incredibly well with an awful lot of Americans.
Clurman: It really does. I think one of the reasons people are not quite as hysterical about what is going on is that they realize a lot of other people are in the same boat. Everybody is getting hit hard here. It's very interesting. We call it the "new responsibility marketplace," but it's kind of not here yet. It's coming, and slowly but surely we're going to see this rolling out. People are realizing on some level that it's time to pay their proverbial piper.
Salon: Just to clarify, you think that people understand the magnitude of the problem?
Clurman: They understand on some level. Some people who are up there intellectually understand this problem, but I think on some gut level, people understand that we have got a lot of really serious problems and what's happening is the economy has acted as a lightning rod for some serious thought about where are we going. Global warming, I forgot to mention that one. What's happening to the planet, what's happening to our lives.
Salon: But I don't see people going to find scapegoats.
Clurman: That's why there's an accountability and responsibility happening. What we saw in '91, during that recessionary period, we saw the baby boomers looking at the world collapsing around them and pointing fingers and whining and saying, "This isn't my fault." And now what we're seeing, because the times are different and the demographics are different, what we're seeing is people looking around and saying, "We've got some serious issues here and we've all got to take some modicum of responsibility." It's not enough to just change your light bulbs [from incandescent to fluorescent]. We've got to do something more about what's fundamentally wrong here.
Salon: So maybe the headline is "The baby boomers have grown up"?
Francese: Don't count on it.
Salon: What I want to do is come back to the other end of the group who hasn't really grown up. Is there a demographic reason why 18-to-29-year-old voters seem more vocal, seem more involved, seem to be turning out in greater levels in any election that I can remember since the 1970s?
Russell: We'll see if they turn out. They consistently disappoint. Hopefully this time they will turn out and boost their voting rate above, I think in 2004 it was about 42 percent.
Salon: I am someone who has always thought that one of the truths about American politics is the youth vote always disappoints. I find myself slowly moving to the other camp, but I will quickly go back to my heritage of being a skeptic if it doesn't materialize. I'd be interested in what the history has shown.
Russell: The youth vote has been declining. It did increase in 2004 over 2000. There was a big leap from 32 to 42 percent in the 18-to-24-year-olds. We could see another increase again. But more important, the thing that's happened in that youth market is the increase in the number of those voters. Since 2000, the number of 18-to-29-year-olds has grown by 4 million people, because that large millennial generation has filled the age group. So you have this greater number of people; you have a much more diverse population there than among the older generation. Only 60 percent of the 18-to-29-year-olds are non-Hispanic white. So you have a lot of people identifying with Sen. Obama and encouraged to take part, participate more because they see someone who is running for president who is more like themselves. I think a third factor in the youth vote is the Internet. The Internet makes a network out of young adults.
Francese: Like Facebook.
Russell: Everything that a young adult does, everything that happens to them today, is immediately communicated to the entire network of young adults, and that kind of communication power has amplified their voice.
Francese: There's a fourth item that I want to add to that. That is the vast number of young women who are going to college. The best-educated man in America is 55 years old. But the best-educated woman is only 35. So women are going to college at significantly higher rates than men, and there are many, many more young college-educated women than there ever were before in American history. And so that higher education translates into higher Internet usage, higher awareness of what the political scene is. I think that we are all going to be pleasantly surprised, including the three reasons Cheryl just gave, that the youth vote will surprise us pleasantly this time and not stay true to form and stay away.
Clurman: You've talked about youth being more interested and more galvanized since any point since the '70s, but we also need to understand that there's a fundamental difference here. In the '60s and '70s, a lot of it was all about idealism. I think what we have today, in addition to all those wonderful demographics we heard about, these kids are very practical. Very pragmatic. This isn't about, be all good and all be altruistic and if we all make sacrifices, everything in the world will be fine in two weeks. This is a very practical, pragmatic group that understands, it's hopeful pragmatism, if you will, and that requires taking some action.
Salon: Is it that women were just going to college at a disproportionately low rate and that they've just caught up with men? Or is there something else going on with gender roles?
Francese: No. There are a couple of reasons, in my view. One, we've obviously over the last 30 years made the switch from a manufacturing, construction-based economy which favors men who are not college graduates to an office-based employment category in which most people now work in offices and that favors women. Women can work in offices equally as well as men. And they are actually a majority of the professional managerial workers according to the Census Bureau data. They're 51 or 52 percent. Women are just as capable of taking managerial and professional jobs and doing them just as well as men but those jobs usually require college degrees. So women, who mature earlier in life than men, do go to college in greater numbers, significantly greater numbers. That's a fairly recent development.
Russell: I totally agree with what you're saying, and actually the percentage of women who go to college out of high school has been significantly higher than men for the last 10 or 15 years as women poured onto college campuses. It's totally true that women are much more educated than men. And if you look at married couples today, in 2007 for the first time among married couples, the percentage in which the husband is more educated than the wife is lower than the percentage in which the wife is more educated than the husband. There's been a real change in family life.
Francese: That changes the power structure within the household in terms of who makes the decision about one thing or another. If anything is going to allow household income to rise, it's the increasing educational attainment of the women breadwinners in that household.
Salon: I'm sitting here in Indianapolis, and one of the things that fascinates me is that the normally conservative suburbs of a city like this are trending a bit more Democratic, a bit more toward Barack Obama, because the standard 35-year-old college graduate who might be working for Eli Lilly here is more liberal on social issues than the Republican Party has been for the last 25 years. Are there demographic trends to buttress this?
Francese: Certainly I agree with that statement, but those people are also working in offices with black, Hispanic, Asian professional individuals and if it's Eli Lilly, if it's a large corporation, they have diversity programs, so they're more comfortable around minorities than someone who is 65 who may have never worked in an office or for a corporation where there were professional black, Hispanic, Asian individuals.
Clurman: I think the biggest dividing line is the age issue rather than the education. And the older generation holds the more traditional attitudes. The younger generations, for them race is not as big a factor. If you look at the age breakdown for the support for Obama, the older generation was first heavily toward McCain, and then the financial crisis moved it more toward Obama.
Russell: Ann, when you say older can you define what you're talking about?
Clurman: At this moment I'm talking about 65-plus. That generation is the one that was raised in a different time with different attitudes.
Salon: Is there anything -- in terms of trend analysis or demographics -- that either campaign is doing in not an individual ad or one comment but as a consistent theme that makes you think, "What country do they think we're living in?"
Francese: Sarah Palin is the classic example of that. What country does she think we're living in? If you listen to what she says at various rallies, she's talking to a very small segment of American voters who really are going to vote for someone that they think is like them. But in fact her anti-intellectualism does not play well in most suburban and other areas. Her constant play to people who she thinks are sort of put upon by the more intelligent, the more well-educated part of the society, and her constant talk about the fact that Obama is an elitist of some sort, is really misguided in the sense that it may appeal to a small group of people who feel aggrieved because they don't have the education to get ahead in this information-based society. But it is politically foolish in my view.
Russell: I think it has real tones of Spiro Agnew. It seems to me very, very dated. That whole anti-intellectual --
Francese: Anti-media --
Russell: Exactly.
Salon: The nattering nabobs of negativism.
Russell: Sarah Palin is playing on the rural versus urban battle in the United States. Americans have a love affair with the rural, but in fact most Americans are urban or suburban today. Unfortunately, our political system is set up so that the rural areas have a great deal of political power, in the Senate. I think that trying to play up this rural vote can be effective because so many Americans relate to it. But ultimately, the suburban and urban voter should numerically take precedent.
Francese: Only 20 percent of Americans live in rural areas.
Russell: Still, playing to the rural roots of America has worked well in politics over the years, and she's just continuing that line.
Francese: Except that she's pandering, because she's doing it in a negative way. She's saying the rest of the world is somehow bad. If you live on the coast, you're somehow an effete snob, that kind of negativism. It's one thing to glorify the rural roots, as Joe Biden has championed his rural roots --
Salon: His rural roots were in Scranton, Pa., which were basically more hardscrabble small-city roots.
Russell: Every presidential campaign in recent history has played up this rural connection.
Francese: But they've played it up in a positive way. They don't play it up by bashing people who are not rural; they merely say this is a fine way of life.
Russell: I think one of the criticisms of Obama being from Chicago is the rural versus urban fight.
Salon: Is there anything else that strikes you, non-Sarah Palin related, as awry in terms of what the candidates are talking about? Cheryl, in your book, I saw based on poll analysis that 65 percent of the American people consider themselves moderates. That certainly isn't the tone in politics or on cable television.
Russell: Right, most Americans are in the middle of the road. But there's been such a partisan split in the media that's taken place, with the different cable channels focusing on different camps and talk radio, that it's driven a wedge between Americans when in fact there's very little difference between most of them.
Clurman: One thing, and I haven't been following this judiciously, but I do remember in the beginning there was a little bit more boomer bashing.
Salon: Done by Barack Obama.
Clurman: Exactly, and I thought that was a huge, huge boo-boo. And it seems to me they have walked away from that, which I think was smart to do.
Salon: Our generation may be slightly fading but it is politically risky to put us in the crosshairs.
Clurman: There are 70 million-plus boomers, and boomers vote in high numbers, and technically Obama is a boomer. I was just stunned when I saw that in the beginning, because these people who are running this are so smart. What are they thinking? And I guess that a lot of their polling told them to walk away from that.
Russell: The youngest boomer today is 44, so he's definitely a boomer, and boomers are the largest voting bloc still. In this election, 38 percent of votes are going to be cast by baby boomers in November. And that is larger than any of the other generations that will be voting.
Salon: Is that partially because boomers are now at the age where they vote very heavily, or is that all population based?
Russell: Both factors are involved. The number of boomers, and that voting increases with age. Interestingly, the millennial generation we've been talking about is 19 percent of the vote this year. And that's up from 13 percent in 2004. Generation X is 20 percent, and the older generation, which is people older than boomers, 63-plus, is 23 percent. The millennial generation, in terms of the size of its vote, is almost as large as the older generation.
Francese: That's new. That's one of the reasons Barack Obama has a chance.
Salon: And that is as good a place to end as any. Thank you all for providing us with a different way to look at the election.
The staff and readers of Salon had a big debate over choosing Glenn Beck our "Crazy Person of the Year." As we stated in the introduction to "The Year in Crazy," we disqualified certain media stars -- Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly -- and some GOP leaders -- Sarah Palin and Liz Cheney -- whose crazy behavior was purely opportunistic. We rejected prominent people who had a crazy belief or two -- Whoopi Goldberg casting doubt on the moon landing -- but didn't seem driven by crazy.
Only one man was crazy enough to possibly trick us. Only one man stood on a media platform comparable to O'Reilly's and Limbaugh's, and delivered a crazy shtick that was so over the top that sometimes you'd say: He doesn't believe any of this, right? The tears, the shaking, the hysteria -- it's all an act, right? And sometimes you'd say, "Get the nets, Fox News!"
Yes, that man is Glenn Beck, and we come down on the side of "Get the nets!" An overview of Beck's career shows that his success is equal parts talent, timing, cruelty and crazy.
The man who would be King of the Crazies emerged when nut-job America really needed a leader. Since he started his career as a prank-and-smear shock jock with a bad perm, one who once called a rival DJ's wife on the air live to ask her about her miscarriage, it's clear Beck will do anything for attention. But, somehow, the anything always involves a big helping of crazy.
The kinds of statements and behaviors that got folks on our crazy list -- they're Beck's daily bread. On one recent Monday alone (thanks, Media Matters!) he claimed that on climate change, "America is now an Axis country ... on the wrong side of history" (for the young folks: Nazi Germany was an Axis power); that Democrats will "retain power ... in a way that Americans" won't "recognize" after their policies fail; that he was readying a healthcare exposé for his Monday Fox News show that would be a Van Jones-size coup. (It turned out to be that the husband of a congresswoman who supports healthcare reform went to jail for fraud -- and Beck claims he wrote the Democrats' healthcare reform from jail.) Of course, the Democrats actually don't have a healthcare reform bill (and they should probably collectively go to jail for their failure to produce one by now).
Of course, the mention of Van Jones, the White House green jobs czar toppled by Beck's combination of sensationalistic reporting and bullying (Jones signed a 9/11 Truth petition and flirted with extreme leftism in his youth), is a reminder that crazy has consequences. Beck's crazy has intersected with a broader social paranoia on the right, and it's clearly something to worry about, not merely mock. We also don't want to make light of mental illness, and given Beck's own confessions about his drug addictions and his mother's suicide, it's clear he deserves some sympathy.
But not much. There are great therapists, therapies and even some legal drugs out there that could help Beck, but instead he's chosen to funnel his crazy into stirring dangerous hatreds. Glenn, if you decide you need psychological help, we'll help you get it, but until then all we have for you is this ignoble award, the craziest person in this crazy year of 2009. Congratulations!
There's no way to talk about all the crazy that was 2009 without talking about Orly Taitz. The sad part is, by the end of the year, her Birther movement (the hodgepodge of crazy glued to the idea that somehow Barack Obama isn't eligible to be president) wasn't even all that far out on the fringe.
A majority of Republicans now think in some way like Taitz, saying either that they're sure that President Obama isn't a citizen, or that they have doubts about his citizenship. (Twenty-eight percent say Obama's not a citizen, 30 percent aren't sure.) By December, even former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was saying that she thinks the Birthers have a "fair question" about Obama and his birth certificate. (Although Palin later walked her assertion back on her Facebook page, the maintenance of which seems to be her new full-time job.)
It's sad that so many people have come to believe this because, of course, the evidence is indisputable: Obama was born in Hawaii. And no matter how hard the Birthers might try, no matter how many lawsuits Taitz and others bring, the courts are going to leave the man in his rightful place as president.
But Taitz doesn't just believe Obama is ineligible to serve as president, no: She also believes that he's hired goons to try to kill her, that he has killed others, that he's gotten Google in on his plot against her, that he's overseeing a plan to put untold numbers into camps run by FEMA, that he and others have conspired to use the swine flu vaccine for god knows what sorts of malicious mischief. In August, Taitz claimed she'd found Obama's "real" Kenyan birth certificate, which was easily proved to be fake. Next, the guy she claimed found it for her charged that Taitz had put him up to the forgery, and the ensuing tangle of lurid charges and countercharges is even too crazy for this post.
Taitz is indefatigable. No matter how many losses she suffers (and she's racked up more than her share), she presses on. Maybe it has to do with growing up behind the Iron Curtain; she came to the U.S. by way of Israel, but is originally from Moldavia. Or maybe it's the same sort of spirit that has propelled her to a unique but impressive array of professional titles: lawyer, dentist and real estate agent.
Come 2010, though, Taitz is likely to be a leader without any followers. Other Birthers have been slowly but steadily abandoning her, some for personal reasons, some because they've realized just how little knowledge of law and legal procedure is at Taitz's command. By the end of one case, which also saw the Birther attorney slapped with a $20,000 sanction, Taitz's own client had abandoned her.
None of that matters to Taitz. The judge is just acting under orders from the Department of Justice, the letter in which her former client disavows her could be a forgery, the Birthers with whom she's feuding are all just Obama plants who've been working to destroy the movement from the inside. In Taitz's world, the setbacks simply prove the global conspiracy behind Obama.
If 2009 goes down in history as the year when ideology finally pinned fact-based politics to the floor and dribbled a loogie over its face, then the people of Minnesota's 6th Congressional District will have proven themselves ahead of the curve. After all, they first elected Michele Bachmann to Congress back in 2006. And get this: They reelected her in 2008. Take that, evolution.
Evidence that Michele Bachmann stepped in a bucket of crazy? Take your pick. Calling Barack Obama un-American? Check. Death panels? Check. Encouraging armed revolt? Check. Calls for mass self-mutilation and/or suicide to protest the Obama regime? Check.
Forget truth. Hell, forget truthiness. The era of the Birthers is Bachmann's epoch, because the bar is so low. Indeed, there is no bar. Just as Glenn Beck can portray President Obama as a follower of Mao Zedong simply by connecting the two on a blackboard with chalk, Bachmann can go onto the House floor, spout out any odd claptrap that comes to mind, and still get reelected.
Bachmann thinks more carbon dioxide is a good thing, since it is a "natural byproduct of nature," just like syphilis, I suppose. She has warned that AmeriCorps could lead to "re-education camps" for young people; she suggested armed revolt to stop climate change legislation (urging her supporters to be sure they're "armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back"). She keeps hinting that there is some creepy, sinister plot behind the 2010 Census.
Bachmann isn't just crazy, she's crazy's frothy-mouthed cheerleader. Take her speech on healthcare reform last August in Colorado, at a time when some Americans had lost perspective, composure and in some cases all grip on the facts during town hall-style meetings across the country. Bachmann happily stirred the big pot of lunacy. "This cannot pass!" she shouted at her Colorado audience. "What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn't pass."
Bachmann, of course, came to national attention just before the 2008 presidential election, when she declared on MSNBC's "Hardball" that she was "very concerned that [Obama] may have anti-American views." She went on to encourage a media and congressional investigation into the anti-American views of all of her enemies. Although her opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, began to surge in the polls, that November she clung to her seat. The people of Minnesota's 6th District will get to have a third referendum on crazy in 2010, when Bachmann will face one of two Democrats: physician Maureen Reed or state Sen. Tarryl Clark. Unbelievably to the rest of the world, Bachmann's two-year jag of crazy seems to have strengthened her hold on her seat, but it's still possible she'll step beyond the realm of orthodox, increasingly acceptable right-wing crazy into a new crazy frontier that could cost her politically.
Possible, but not likely.
The tough report released this week (PDF) by Scott Harshbarger, the former Massachusetts attorney general asked to prepare an independent assessment of ACORN by that organization's leaders, could scarcely compete with the infamous videotapes that sparked cable drama and congressional outrage last summer.
Prepared by Harshbarger with his colleagues at the Proskauer Rose law firm, the 47-page report neither absolves nor indicts the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, as ACORN is formally known, which has provided advocacy, voter registration and other services in poor and working-class communities across the country for decades. Having presided over Common Cause, the nation's leading political reform advocacy group, as well as overseen numerous investigations at the local and state level during his long career in public service, Harshbarger was highly qualified to examine the tangled affairs of ACORN.
Although Harshbarger found that the ACORN employees who were taped surreptitiously by video producers James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles had committed no illegal acts, he sharply criticizes the group's present and former leadership for the negligence and stupidity that led to the embarrassing incidents recorded in the group's offices in several cities, including New York, Washington and San Diego. He excoriates ACORN founder Wade Rathke and other former leaders of the group, whose drive for growth and power, Harshbarger writes, led them to abandon basic standards of governance, accountability and fiscal probity.
The videos, he writes, "represent the byproduct of ACORN's long-standing management weaknesses, including a lack of training, a lack of procedures and a lack of onsite supervision."
He notes that the "hidden camera controversy is perceived by many as a third strike against ACORN on the heels of the disclosure in June 2008 of an embezzlement cover-up, which triggered the firing of ACORN's founder, and the allegations of voter registration fraud during the 2008 election, done in collaboration with Project Vote," although he goes on to note that several U.S. attorneys found no basis to prosecute ACORN in the registration cases.
So rather than the "whitewash" reflexively denounced on right-wing Web sites, Harshbarger's report forthrightly reprimands the ACORN leadership for failing to "meet the expectations and requirements of the stakeholders who supported and benefited from its advocacy and service work." The report sets forth nine detailed recommendations for improved performance that Harshbarger says the organization must implement immediately.
Yet while the Harshbarger report focuses chiefly on the structural and managerial shortcomings of ACORN itself, its findings strongly suggest that the coverage of the "scandal" was overblown and mishandled by the media outlets that played those videotapes over and over again.
Amateurish as those recordings were, with their grainy images and muddy sound, they presented the bizarre tableau of prostitution and fraud as right-wing cinema vérité. The tapes' raw appearance was, however, highly misleading, according to Harshbarger, because the broadcast versions were edited and voiced over in ways that distorted the actual encounters between Giles and O'Keefe and the duped ACORN personnel.
To assess the meaning and accuracy of the videotapes, Harshbarger and his colleagues did the job that journalists ought to have done from the beginning. They interviewed ACORN employees. Later, they reviewed both the tapes and the transcripts made available on BigGovernment, a Web site owned by Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing impresario behind Giles and O'Keefe.
What Harshbarger discovered, as his report's Appendix D reveals, is that much of what appeared on Fox News Channel and in other media outlets, let alone on right-wing Web sites, was not what had actually occurred in the ACORN offices -- and that exculpatory material was edited out of the tapes.
In San Diego, for example, the ACORN employee shown on the tapes is someone whose primary language is Spanish, not English. The report notes that "in the released video, his participation amounts mostly to nodding or saying 'OK.' It is difficult to determine what this employee is responding to because the videographers' statements are obscured by a voiceover inserted later."
After O'Keefe and Giles left the San Diego office, that same employee called a cousin who worked in a local police department "to ask him general advice regarding information he had received about possible human smuggling" -- a reference to O'Keefe's claim that he was bringing in young girls from El Salvador to work as prostitutes. The police report concerning that call shows that officers followed up later, only to be informed by the ACORN employee that the incident was a "ruse."
In Philadelphia, O'Keefe's suspicious behavior likewise alerted the ACORN staff that something was amiss, and the police were informed there as well. No video of the visit to the Philly office was ever released by O'Keefe and Breitbart, although Harshbarger notes that "some of the released videos contain scenes of the sign of the Philadelphia ACORN office and shots of Philadelphia's head organizer with no audio."
Contrary to the claims of right-wing critics, who complain that Harshbarger failed to interview any of ACORN's adversaries, the lawyer and his colleagues were rebuffed when they tried to speak with O'Keefe and Giles. Amy Crafts, a Proskauer associate who co-authored the report, told me that she made several efforts to contact the video producers both in person and through their attorneys.
On Oct. 21, Crafts said, she was barred from the press conference held by O'Keefe and Giles at the National Press Club in Washington, even though she promised not to ask any questions. Then in November, she wrote to O'Keefe and Giles requesting interviews through their Washington attorneys. O'Keefe's lawyer replied that his client would not participate, while Giles' lawyer didn't bother to answer at all.
None of this should be surprising to anyone familiar with the backgrounds of O'Keefe, Giles and Breitbart -- a former employee of the Drudge Report. But it is now clear that the ACORN videotapes were an exercise in propaganda, not journalism.
What's worse is that the mistakes committed by most news outlets in the early coverage of this incident continue. Reporting on Harshbarger's findings, the Associated Press story published in the Washington Post on Tuesday doesn't mention his questions about the videotapes, his rebuffed attempt to interview the video producers, or the producers' staunch refusal to permit him to review the unedited tapes for comparison with the versions that were released.
Nearly six months ago, Al Franken was sworn in as the junior senator from Minnesota. For his defeated opponent, former Sen. Norm Coleman, it was the end of a long, hard road -- a road full of legal challenges, ballot challenges, financial challenges and, one can only assume, profound personal challenges.
That’s not enough to stop Coleman, though. The current rumor, reported by Politico, is that he’s thinking of making a run for governor. This is an office he’s always wanted: Dick Cheney had to talk him into running for Senate instead in 2002. And with incumbent Gov. Tim Pawlenty leaving, apparently to run for president, it’s Coleman’s chance.
So the former senator is giving it some thought. However, one of his top operatives, Jeff Larson, is throwing some cold water on the rumor, saying, "I don’t think it’s something he really needs to do or really wants to do. I think he’d make a spectacular governor. I really do. I just don’t think he’s going to run." Another advisor, though, says that Coleman sees a gubernatorial race as a chance to "to put aside some of the partisan rancor."
And the almost-two-term senator himself? "It’s really nice waking up in the morning and reading the paper and realizing that nobody is trying to kill you politically today. I’m a public servant at heart, but I haven’t made a final decision on whether being the governor is the best way to do that,” he said.
A few people in my letters thread today claim to see "sour grapes" and "I told you so" in my post saying progressives have only themselves to blame for feeling betrayed by President Obama. Ain't no sour grapes -- I voted for him, of course -- but there is a helping of "I told you so," I admit, left over from the 2008 primary battle. And Tom Hayden's bleat of betrayal in the Nation today – Alex Koppelman writes about it here -- forces me to confess it.
Hayden's delusional Obama endorsement in March 2008 made such an impression on me, I can quote whole sentences from memory. Well, one whole sentence, the first: "All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama." Oh, and I remember that he said Obama's "very biography" and his campaign's "very existence" would cure cancer, make my hair silky smooth, and cause pretty, pretty unicorns to dance in my backyard, too.
OK, that last part isn't true.
But I felt like I was in some kind of Maoist reeducation camp, being urged to struggle mightily and cheerfully for Chairman Obama.
So yeah, that old "I told you so" demon drove me back to reread Hayden's Nation piece -- co-signed by Danny Glover, Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr. (but redolent of Hayden's manifesto-writing style) -- and boy, it's even worse than I remember. For those of you saying it's not fair to blame progressives for deluding themselves about Obama, please read this, and then try to make the same argument. Some of my favorite lines below:
"All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama. We descend from the proud tradition of independent social movements that have made America a more just and democratic country. We believe that the movement today supporting Barack Obama continues this great tradition of grassroots participation, drawing millions of people out of apathy and into participation in the decisions that affect all our lives. We believe that Barack Obama's very biography reflects the positive potential of the globalization process that also contains such grave threats to our democracy when shaped only by the narrow interests of private corporations in an unregulated global marketplace. We should instead be globalizing the values of equality, a living wage and environmental sustainability in the new world order, not hoping our deepest concerns will be protected by trickle-down economics or charitable billionaires. By its very existence, the Obama campaign will stimulate a vision of globalization from below….
"We intend to join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama's unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined…. We have the proven online capacity to reach millions of swing voters in the primary and general election. We can and will defend Obama against negative attacks from any quarter….
"We take very seriously the argument that Americans should elect a first woman President, and we abhor the surfacing of sexism in this supposedly post-feminist era. But none of us would vote for Condoleezza Rice as either the first woman or first African-American President. We regret that the choice divides so many progressive friends and allies, but believe that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be a Clinton presidency all over again, not a triumph of feminism but a restoration of the aging, power-driven Wall Street Democratic hawks at a moment when so much more fresh imagination is possible and needed. A Clinton victory could only be achieved by the dashing of hope among millions of young people on whom a better future depends. The style of the Clintons' attacks on Obama, which are likely to escalate as her chances of winning decline, already risks losing too many Democratic and independent voters in November. We believe that the Hillary Clinton of 1968 would be an Obama volunteer today, just as she once marched in the snows of New Hampshire for Eugene McCarthy against the Democratic establishment."
Oh, and I searched the whole thing: Not one word about Afghanistan. Not even the word "Afghanistan."
I want to be clear here. I am not saying, and I never said, that Clinton was more progressive than Obama on any of these issues. But Hayden, Michael Moore and too many progressives claimed, with zero evidence, that Obama would be more progressive than Clinton. He wasn't, and he isn't. There were many reasons to choose Obama over Clinton, but that he was the better progressive was never one of them. Certainly his Cabinet choices -- including Clinton herself -- are no more progressive than hers would be. Claiming a President Clinton would preside over "a restoration of the aging, power-driven Wall Street Democratic hawks at a moment when so much more fresh imagination is possible and needed" seems particularly silly today (and using "aging" as a pejorative was a poor choice from Hayden's particular demographic, but old habits die hard).
Struggle mightily and cheerfully to forgive yourself for your self-delusion, Tom Hayden and friends. OK, my "I told you so" moment is officially over.
Houston's New Mayor: This ain't Texas' 1st Gay Rodeo
Worlds Apart
Giuliani out, and maybe in, in 2010.
The Honeymoon's over.... But not the Marriage
Yabba Dabba, Dont Worry About It.