A Goldwater Liberal

At a talk she gave last week, Gloria Steinem referred to Barry Goldwater as a moderate Republican. I almost fell out of my chair.

But consider this. Goldwater:

• Accused Pat Robertson of trying to turn the Republican Party into a religious organization (“If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye”).
• Supported gays in the military ("You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight").
• Endorsed medical marijuana, defended Roe v. Wade, and believed in the separation of church and state.
• Delivered the word to Richard Nixon that he must resign.
• And lamented that a “bunch of kooks” had taken over the GOP, telling Bob Dole in 1996, "We're the new liberals of the Republican Party. Can you imagine that?"

Before we get too carried away, Goldwater also opposed the Civil Right Act (as, by the way, did Al Gore Sr.), was one of eight senators to vote against the Equal Rights Amendment,declined to censure Joe McCarthy, discussed nuclear defoliation of Vietcong supply routes, and suggested the United Nations move to Moscow or Beijing.

Still, while we think of America as a more conservative society in the 1950s and 1960s than it is today, in some ways its politics were not. When he ran for president in 1964, Goldwater’s views on religion, gay rights and abortion were simply not issues, and the Republican party paid little attention to the cultural conservatives in its ranks. Now they have taken over the party, and they are gunning not just for Barack Obama but for Mitt Romney . . . who is standing there in his new blue jeans desperately hoping to get picked by their team.

Stay tuned. I’m trying to figure this out myself.

The Wars Within

It has become an axiom in today’s politics that Washington is increasingly, intolerably and perhaps permanently polarized, that the two major parties are moving toward their ideological extremes, and that the result is legislative paralysis and really ugly politics. There is a lot of truth in that sentence.

But it misses a critical internal debate in which dissenting groups in each party are challenging that party’s economic orthodoxy. I’ll outline those changes in this post, and look more closely at each in the days ahead. I welcome your thoughts.

On the Republican side, the tendency to lump together Tea Partiers and cultural conservatives – while dismissing Ron Paul as a libertarian outlier – has shed insufficient light on what is driving bitter rivals to pummel Mitt Romney as much for his persona as his politics. One clue lies in the success of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” which attracted to the GOP millions of disaffected Democrats, They were not simply nostalgic for the Jim Crow south or fed up with the 1960s. They were also heirs to an agrarian, and often angry, economic populism, which meshed with similar beliefs held by generations of western and midwestern Republicans. One result was to vastly expand the wing of the party that detested “Wall Street” and its bankers, financiers and internationalist worldview.

Meanwhile, the reigning Democratic ideology equates social justice with economic growth, a position that resonates with the party’s dominant interests – labor unions, entitlement recipients and minorities seeking opportunity. Environmentalists, however, are increasingly raising fundamental questions about both the possibility and the desirability of unlimited growth.

Blunt Instrument

Several organizations are reported to be moving quickly to take advantage of the Blunt Amendment, which is not to be confused with Virginia’s blunt instrument (Feb 27^th post). Its aim is to amend current health care law to enable those with “religious or moral objections to specific items or services to decline providing them.” In a way that makes sense only in Washington, Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri has attached his legislation to Senate Bill 1813, whose purpose is to reauthorize Federal aid to highway construction programs.

The amendment, which has attracted 23 co-signers, could redefine health-care delivery:

• The First Church of Christ, Scientist could open a chain of hospitals across the country that, to comply with its religious beliefs, will offer no medical services whatsoever. They will, however, accept Medicare and Medicaid.
• To expedite its program of posthumous baptisms (Feb. 24^th post), the Mormon Church could install baptismal pools adjacent to wards for the terminally ill.
• While the Archdiocese of Philadelphia will provide no contraceptives in its pedophilia treatment centers, it could install large shredders to ensure confidentiality (http://articles.philly.com/2012-02-25/news/31098596_1_church-lawyers-abuse-complaints-priests).
• The Shriners, however, would seem to have an issue. Although the organization has operated outstanding children’s hospitals for decades, some believe that any group whose members wear a red fez and worship in a temple must be Muslims – the one religion to which the Blunt Amendment probably does not extend. I mean, look at the logo.

And the organization’s name change from the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine to Shriners International will probably not fool the senators – who know that international is just another word for un-American.

The Pappy State

This is not about abortion. It’s about arrogance, paternalism and the abuse of power. But let’s begin with abortion – which I am hesitant to do because it is, in almost every instance I can imagine, none of my business. And it is certainly not the business of the state legislature, the U.S. Congress or presidential candidates. But Friday’s post on Virginia Senate Bill 484, requiring “transvaginal ultrasounds” for pregnant women, elicited some strong responses, one of which included a news story about Pennsylvania’s House Bill 1077. Incongruously known as “the Women’s Right to Know Act,” HB 1077 mandates ultrasounds for pregnant women contemplating abortion. The bill’s name plays off the real right-to-know law, whose purpose is to assure transparency in state government. Until a concerted effort, led by the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, pushed through an improved law in 2008, Pennsylvania had the worst right-to-know law in the United States. (Full disclosure: the PNA hired me to write a blog in support of that campaign.)

A disturbing pattern emerges in the Virginia and Pennsylvania bills:

• Both were introduced by women who seemed sort of clueless – Pa. Rep. Kathy Rapp said she had “never heard of” a transvaginal ultrasound, while Va. Sen. Jill Vogel said she would withdraw her bill . . . after it had already passed.
• Then the paternalists took over – “It's really just to help women make a good and informed decision.” Anything I can do that would help better educate a woman.” Blah, blah, blah.
• The bills humiliate women – the Pennsylvania bill, for example, stipulates where the screen must be placed in front of the woman and even the typeface of the statement she must sign (bold).

Both bills are off the table at the moment . . . but remember that the Virginia bill did pass the Senate, while the Pennsylvania bill had 112 co-sponsors in a legislature that currently has 197 members.

For more:

http://www.publicopiniononline.com/ci_20033700?source=most_viewed

http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/billinfo/billinfo.cfm?syear=2011&sind=0&body=H&type=B&BN=1077

http://www2.wsls.com/news/2012/feb/01/va-senate-approves-abortion-ultrasound-requirement-ar-1656051

What is happening to us?

Sometimes, if I take the news seriously, I wonder if we will bomb ourselves back to the 12^th century or just elect a president from the 12^th century. I take the news seriously

I have no particular light to shed on the escalating saber rattling by all sides over Iran, except to think that a proxy attack by Israel does not seem like the lesson we should have taken from Iraq and Afghanistan – and that a political campaign already filled with vitriol is not a good venue for conducting foreign policy.

The Crusades mentality has penetrated to the core of the presidential debate, as religion has become its latest – and perhaps most dangerous – flashpoint.  In the last few days, Newt Gingrich has blasted the Obama administration’s “war against religion;” Rick Santorum has railed against Obama’s “phony theology” (although he said he was talking about the president’s environmental policies, not his personal faith); and Mitt Romney has accused the president’s team of having “fought against religion.”

Some of you wrote to compare Martin Luther King’s praise of extremism in the last post with the extremism we are witnessing today. It is worth noting that King went on to write: “Will we be extremists for hate or for love . . . for the preservation of injustice or the extension of justice?” And then he invoked the same god that has been turned into a political battering ram: “Jesus Christ,” he wrote, “was an extremist for love, truth, and goodness.”

“My feets is tired . . .

. . . but my soul is rested.' So said Mother Pollard, a 72-year-old elder in Martin Luther King Jr.’s church, after several weeks of participating in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. King quotes her in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which I reread in honor of Black History month. Written in 1963, the letter is addressed to white clergymen who were supporters of civil rights but put off by King’s tactics of non-violent direct action, civil disobedience and willingness to break what he believed “unjust laws” – for which he was fully prepared to go to jail.

It is interesting to read the letter now, in light of current upheavals around the world, particularly the uprisings in the Middle East almost all of which began as peaceful protests and ended with horrendous violence precipitated by the state. Many of us have forgotten the repressive violence from threatened governments that confronted our own civil rights movement two generations ago. The demands for freedom and justice seem little different in Libya than they were in Little Rock; and the worries about whether long-repressed Arab peoples are ready for self-government seem a lot like those voiced by the well-meaning white moderates who prefer, wrote King, “a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.”

And in a time when the word extremist is hurled about willy-nilly, it is worth remembering King’s response: “the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.”

Millennial Righteousness

RESOLVED, That the House of Representatives declare 2012 as the "Year of the Bible" in Pennsylvania in recognition of both the formative influence of the Bible on our Commonwealth and nation and our national need to study and apply the teachings of the holy scriptures. Adopted by the Pennsylvania House, January 24th by a vote of 193-0. 2012

• Rep. and former Speaker DeWeese (D) is convicted of conspiracy, conflict of interest and theft.
• Former Rep. Freese (R) gets 4 to 12 years for corruption.

2011

• Former Speaker Perzel (R) pleads guilty to conflict of interest, theft and conspiracy.

2010

• Rep. Veon (D) is convicted of illegal fundraising.

2009   

• Sen. Fumo (D) is convicted on 137 counts of corruption.

2007

• Rep. Habay (R) is convicted of harassment, perjury solicitation and intimidation.

2005

• Legislators vote themselves a pay raise at 2 a.m. without public knowledge – and with an authorization to receive the money as "unvouchered expenses,” thereby evading the Constitutional prohibition against taking salary increases in the term they are passed. Gov. Rendell (D) signs the bill. Public outrage forces repeal of the raise – and 17 legislators and a Supreme Court justice are tossed out in the next election.

2000

• Sen. Loeper (R) pleads guilty to hiding $330,000 in income from consulting firm.
• Rep. Gigliotti (D) is convicted of extortion, mail fraud and tax evasion.
• Sen. Slocum (R) pleads guilty to discharging 3.5 million gallons of raw sewage into Brokenstraw Creek as plant manager in Youngsville.
• Rep. Druce (R) is convicted of hit-and-run death.
• Rep. Bebko-Jones (D) pleads guilty to forging nominating petition signatures.
• Rep. LaGrotta (D) pleads guilty to ghost employment of family members.

Tea Party

• Last week, at a program I moderated on environmental justice, I had my first direct encounter with a follower of the Tea Party movement. While it’s unfair to generalize from a sample of one, this guy lived up to the stereotype – intransigent, belligerent, misinformed (no, Henry Waxman is not a senator from Wisconsin), and completely uninterested in dialogue. He was also oddly likable.

• I also read an article about Tea Party activists showing up at local planning meetings across the country to protest environmental – and even cost-saving – proposals, ranging from bike lanes to high-speed rail lines, from smart meters on home appliances to smart growth to limit sprawl. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/us/activists-fight-green-projects-seeing-un-plot.html?scp=1&sq=Activists%20Fight%20Green%20Projects,%20Seeing%20U.N.%20Plot&st=cse

• On Saturday a note from an old friend raised concerns about a movement that seemed increasingly able to impose its views on local governments. “I think this is as battle worth fighting,” he wrote, and suggested a counter-offensive as a focus of this blog.

The public object of the protesters’ anger is something called Agenda 21, a non-binding resolution from the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio that called on all nations to practice sustainable development and conserve natural resources. The apparently Orwellian name, the UN imprimatur and the link to the “global warming hoax” have made Agenda 21 a bull’s eye for Tea Partiers and talk show hosts. The Republican National Committee recently condemned its “destructive and insidious nature”– although it didn’t explain how it had overlooked this “dangerous” threat for 20 years.

The dangerous threat is from zealots seeking to impose their know-nothing views on the country – and working harder than the rest of us to do so. This is a battle worth fighting.

Komen Out

An idiosyncratic guide to Mitt Romney’s recent primary woes: July 20, 2010. Karen Handel finishes first in the Republican primary for governor of Georgia, defeating Congressman Nathan Deal by more than 10 percentage points. In her campaign she calls for abolishing government funding to Planned Parenthood.

Aug. 10, 2010. Despite endorsements from Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney, Handel is narrowly beaten by Deal in a run-off, during which Deal had accused Handel of being a card-carrying member of the Log Cabin Republicans, the ever-shrinking GOP organization that supports gay rights. Handel responded to this McCarthy-like tactic by . . . denying membership in the organization. Unfortunately, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found evidence not only of her membership, but of her support for domestic partnership benefits.

April 2011. The Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation hires Ms. Handel as senior vice president for policy.

Nov. 29, 2011. The Komen board adopts a policy that would effectively defund Planned Parenthood.

Jan. 24, 2012. The Pennsylvania House of Representatives unanimously passes H.R. 535, a non-binding resolution declaring 2012 the "Year of the Bible."

Jan. 31, 2012. Komen ends its annual $700,000 contribution to Planned Parenthood.

Feb. 3, 2012. Komen reverses itself.

Feb. 7, 2012. Handel resigns.

Feb. 7, 2012. The US Court of Appeals strikes down California’s Proposition 8 and affirms gay marriage . . . at least for now.

Feb. 7, 2012. Rick Santorum wins the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses and the non-binding primary in Missouri.

The Luxury of Candidates

China is reportedly teaching the Iranians how to build intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach the U.S., while Iran is simultaneously expanding the uranium enrichment activity that Israel is threatening to bomb. Meanwhile, the United States has recalled its ambassador and all diplomatic personnel from Syria, whose government has escalated the killing of its people, and Egypt has announced it will put on trial 19 Americans who work for non-governmental organizations in the country. Russians are protesting Vladimir Putin in the freezing temperatures that have killed hundreds in Europe, and Greece, on the edge of economic collapse, is building a wall topped with razor wire to keep out illegal immigrants from Turkey. The list goes on. No, it is not just the economy, stupid.

And yet presidential candidates of all persuasions stick to the poll-driven narrative that the upcoming elections are about jobs, jobs and only jobs. A lot of people are still hurting badly in America, domestic economic issues continue to be a source of enormous concern, and this country’s social and economic divisions must be addressed. But America does not exist in a bubble cushioned from the rest of the world. Candidates, whether incumbents or not, get to define the issues in short-term insular ways that allow them to stay on message and play to their audiences.  Those responsible for making actual decisions must contend with a much more complex and uncertain world.

Safety Net

Several of you reminded me that some people sleep on the subway because that is the only place they can sleep. Last evening a man on a packed uptown train emitted a stench that literally cleared the back third of the car.

And Mitt Romney said, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”

I know there is a connection here.

But I don’t think it’s the obvious one that everybody pounced on. Mitt Romney doesn’t seem any more out of touch with the world of struggling people than any of the other candidates who ride around in big buses, insulated by aides, and speak in platitudes to hand-picked crowds. Maybe they would have developed more empathy for the dispossessed if they had done a stint as community organizers.

Still, no amount of backpedaling, clarifications and “you-took-me-out-of-contexts” can justify Romney’s remark because:

1. The “safety net” is the essence of the welfare state that is under assault by all the GOP candidates. To use its current existence to dismiss the plight of the very poor is hypocrisy.
2. The idea that the safety net is adequate (in fairness, Romney said he’d fix it) seems a little callous. As the stinking man made clear, the subway provides sleeping places, not bathing facilities . . . which may explain why the reaction to him was startlingly sympathetic.
3. Polls show that most Americans are incensed at the rich and the poor. But the notion that politicians should divide the country into those they care about and those they don’t – whether it’s Romney’s 90-95% or Rove’s 50% +1 – contradicts the duty of a president to bring us all together.

Back to the Future?

While I know little about China, the press it has received over the last few weeks has fascinated me. There seem to be three Chinas:

• China, the model to emulate
• China, the competitor to fear
• China, the human and environmental tragedy

Clearly, the three Chinas are interconnected, since they are all the same country. The question for me is: how dependent are the first two on the foundation of the third?

Document3

Photos by Lu Guang

The descriptions of China remind me of 19^th-century America, when the nation underwent enormous growth based on technological and financial innovation, the exploitation of natural resources and the abuse of human labor. It was a time characterized by the creation of massive wealth, with unprecedented chasms between rich and poor, and with almost no regulatory protection for workers, consumers, children or the environment. The period experienced harsh labor violence from Homestead to Cripple Creek. In 1886 the U.S. Supreme Court implicitly recognized the personhood of corporations in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, and a decade later in Plessy v Ferguson, the court endorsed the Jim Crow South. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in Manhattan burned 146 young seamstresses to death.

Our economic prosperity is also built on the foundation of that era, but it is hard to imagine returning to such unregulated times – as some of our aspiring leaders are urging us to do.

Anger and Hope

In the fall of 2008 I, and a lot of other people, volunteered for the Obama campaign. I spent many evenings in Philadelphia going door to door in both white neighborhoods and black (for in Philadelphia, as in every city in America, those distinctions still define most neighborhoods). In the latter, some of which I would have feared to enter in other times, I was welcomed with jubilation; in the former, there was less joy but the work seemed more important – for after seven years of a needless and failed war, the collapse of the housing and financial markets, and the worst recession in 70 years, what was driving this campaign was hope – people joining together across racial, ethnic, economic and political boundaries to rebuild America. But there remains a lot of anger in this country – much of it legitimate – and the politics of anger has too often proved stronger than the politics of hope. It enabled the Know Nothing party to take every state office in Massachusetts in 1854; it was the foundation of Nixon’s southern strategy in 1972; and it delivered South Carolina to Newt Gingrich last week. There is a great deal of pressure on Barack Obama to play to that anger, but to do so would betray those he brought together four years ago. Hope is not a sign of weakness, nor anger a sign of strength, and no one can play the anger card like the current group in Congress. If this election is about anger, they win. If it is about hope, we do.

State of the Union

As an army veteran (European front), I get nervous when someone uses the military as the beacon for us to follow. So when the president said last night that “this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world,” I thought, he needs to get out more. Leading off his speech with military and foreign affairs, however, was a brilliant tactical maneuver, for it caught the “it’s-the-economy-stupid” people by off guard and went virtually unnoticed by the pundits. And it allowed Obama to frame the state of the union around his most spectacular moment – the killing of Bin Laden – and to play to the country’s infatuation with the military. Other institutions have let us down, he said, let’s follow the military’s example. Not, I hope, of paying $640 for a toilet seat or urinating on dead Afghans. With his paean to the Hoover Dam, praise of fracking, and insistence that “we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy,” Obama stepped firmly into the past at a time when we desperately need a new vision of environmental justice. And his efforts for social justice brought tepid applause for tax fairness and none for a millionaire’s tax.

Then came Mitch Daniels. Aside from making Bobby Jindal’s 2011 performance look animated, his pedestrian rebuttal contained startling Republican praise for “these proud programs” of social security and Medicare, the usual Europe bashing, and such soaring rhetoric as: “the problems are simply mathematical, and the answers purely practical.”

Good enough for William Kristol, who is leading the “Draft Daniels” movement with an enthusiasm he hasn’t shown since the invasion of Iraq.

President Palin

One thing seems clear from Saturday’s South Carolina primary: Republican voters don’t like any of their candidates very much. It’s hard to disagree. In the last few months, not one of the current candidates has offered a new idea or an original thought. Oh, some have shifted position slightly to pick up ever-angrier and more conservative voters, but mostly they have shouted louder, spent more, and double-downed on meanness. This is now all about them, not us. But don’t we know enough about them already? Rick Santorum has staked out his turf as the most rigid social conservative since Torquemada. But since he also lost his Pennsylvania senate seat by a 2-1 margin, electability would seem to be an issue. For months Mitt Romney has moved painfully to the right on social issues – only to get beaten up for being a successful businessman with an aversion to paying taxes. Isn’t that the very model of a modern-day Republican? Newt Gingrich is just shameless. Battered by Romney’s superPAC in Iowa, he came back with one of his own in South Carolina and headed straight for the gutter . . . where he thrived. Ron Paul, it seems to me, has been the most thoughtful candidate, his positions the most interesting. They are also nutty.

The process itself has become repellent. It has stripped people who are vying to become our next president of every shred of their dignity. How low can we go? Enter Sarah Palin.

The Populists

I once ran for Congress, and I know how easy it is to get sucked into twisting something your opponent says to suit your needs. Like Newt Gingrich did when he, of all people, hammered Mitt Romney as a vulture capitalist who “likes to fire people.” It didn’t work, probably because we already knew that, and so Romney rolled to his second straight primary victory with 39% of the vote. Ironically, I got 39% in 1996 . . . and lost by a landslide. But Romney is claiming yesterday’s margin – plus his eight-vote Iowa victory – as a presidential mandate. In second place was Ron Paul who, despite running in a state whose motto (“Live Free or Die”) could be taken from his campaign literature, finished 40,000 votes behind. He was, though, the only candidate to defend Romney’s firing quote, saying that his critics “are either just demagoguing or they don’t have the vaguest idea how the market works.” Your choice.

Gingrich and Rick Santorum finished in a dead heat, with 9% apiece, which together just edged out John Huntsman’s total. Finally, Rick Perry barely beat newcomer Buddy Roemer, who finished third in his last campaign for re-election as governor of Louisiana – behind David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Edwin Edwards, who later served almost 10 years in the federal penitentiary for racketeering.

But the quote of the campaign was Rick Santorum’s response to Obama’s stated desire to have every child go to college: “what elitist snobbery out of this man.”

These Black presidents are so out of touch.

"Bipolar America"

That was the collective title of two reviews of three books in yesterday’s New York Times. All deal with the rightward shift of the Republican party and the destruction of its moderate wing. Michael Kinsley’s review of Thomas Frank’s Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right asks: what causes so many working-class people to vote against their own interests? The same thing that always has, I thought: big money and the race card. But Timothy Noah’s review of Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson’s The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, rattled my self-satisfied mind. Tea Partiers, it seems, want to do away with all entitlements . . . except their own. The reflexively oppose all new taxes . . . except those levied on other people. How unconscionably selfish, I thought, until I realized they weren’t so different from me. I know we need entitlement reform . . . but Medicare is the best health insurance policy I have ever had (of course, I’ve never been in Congress), and social security is a safety net. We need reform . . . but this was a promise. These are not isolated thoughts. As a committed environmentalist, I have reduced my footprint . . . but not quite to the point of inconvenience. I abhor what is happening in our inner cities . . . but I lock my car doors when I drive through them. I am not as self-sufficient as I think I am. I need more inconvenience . . . and to unlock the doors.

Hyprocrisy

It turns out that Rick Santorum, the self-proclaimed paragon of moral values, may have received a sweetheart mortgage from donors to his campaign. I write “may” because after Santorum lost his seat in a landslide to Bob Casey Jr., the Senate Ethics Commission dropped the inquiry. Why does it seem that the virtues our political leaders most loudly proclaim become the ones that take them down? Remember Gary Hart’s 1988 challenge to the press to “put a tail on me” two days before he was caught on a boat called Monkey Business with a model named Donna Rice? Apparently Herman Cain didn’t. Is political success simply another narcotic that alters your reality by surrounding you with people who tell you how great you are? Newt Gingrich’s personal peccadilloes are too well-documented to need rehashing, but his loud complaints about being steamrollered by Mitt Romney’s SuperPAC seem a bit hollow given his enthusiasm for the Citizens United decision that brought them to life. It wasn’t the court decision that did him in, Gingrich told MSNBC. It was Mitt Romney and “a bunch of millionaires getting together to run a negative campaign.” Romney, of course, denied any connection to his own SuperPAC . . . just as Ron Paul, the man of the people, denied any connection to The Ron Paul Political Report whose analysis of the Los Angeles riots concluded that “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks. . . .”

The American Dream

It is harder for Americans to rise from poverty to prosperity than citizens of almost any other nation in the so-called first world, according to an article in today’s New York Times. Actually, scholars have debunked the “rags-to-riches” story for years, beginning with studies showing that Horatio Alger’s heroes rose not to great wealth but to middle-class respectability. The lesson of the stories was more about hewing to the corporate line than accumulating great wealth. Ragged Dick was not the last tycoon so much as the first organization man. And even though upward mobility might mean only a slightly better life for your children, the American Dream was that opportunity was there for all to seek. But now even that fluidity seems to be going in the wrong direction. Because the frailty of America’s safety net condemns the poor, and our current tax policies insulate the rich, we live in a society that looks ever more like a banana republic than the land of opportunity. America’s poor have become not just a separate class, but a distinct caste – especially in the cores of our cities, where crime, poverty and vast and chronic unemployment are both epidemic and ignored. And yet we continue to insist that our politicians demonstrate their reverence for an American Dream that has become a nightmare for so many.

Iowa

Cynicism dies hard after the Iowa caucuses, even though the press certainly seems to take them seriously. And so they become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy – not in the sense that they accurately predict the ultimate Republican nominee (they don’t), but that they give an imprimatur to some candidates while turning the big losers into roadside litter. Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry could come back from their dismal showings, but it seems pretty unlikely. Maybe they just want to be vice president. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is seeking to turn his 8-vote victory over Rick Santorum into an indicator of his inevitability. I don’t think that less than a quarter of the 112,255 votes cast translates into a mandate for anything, but I do think Romney will be the candidate because everyone seems to think he is the one Republican who can beat Obama. But obviously he still doesn’t go down well with the hard right, and they are refusing to go down easily. Rick Santorum, who tells people over and over and over again, that he is the only candidate to have to visited all 99 of Iowa’s counties, moved in a few days from the far end of the debate podium to the new unRomney. He almost won, as he has been predicting for months. Ron Paul did, too, despite new disclosures about his unsettling past and unsavory fellow travelers. Newt Gingrich bore testimony to the power of well-funded, quasi-anonymous negative advertising, as Romney’s supporters spent millions bashing him from front-runner to also-ran. People complain about the coverage of the horse race instead of the issues, but the horse race is the only interesting thing about this primary. On to New Hampshire.