"Biden’s plan aims to expand child care and services for the elderly and the disabled, and elevate the status and pay of caregivers as well. But those goals will remain aspirational without a Democratic majority in the Senate, which is why [Schanchline] Nanje and a dozen other Family Friendly Action canvassers have been knocking on a hundred doors a day in the suburbs north of Atlanta. Their work is financed by the Women Effect Action Fund, a group that promotes economic gender equality and women’s rights. Lisa Guide, the fund’s co-founder, told me that the organization was targeting the Georgia races to show both voters and elected officials the enormous impact that access to child care, as well as services for the elderly and disabled, have on women’s personal and professional lives. 'We’re in Georgia to make sure Georgia voters know which Senate candidates are going to help them through our national care crisis—and who aren’t,' Guide said. 'And we want elected officials and policymakers to understand that voters really care about these issues so they end up rising up the ladder for both Democrats and Republicans.'"
Here's a fascinating passage from Ron Suskind's new book "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" (pp. 18-19)(boldface added). Obama and his advisers are plotting campaign strategy in August 2007 and the subject turned to the problem of jobs for 10 million low- to moderately skilled male workers. What "sunrise" could the government subsize and stimulate. The advisers hit on health care:
That was where the jobs would be: nurse’s aides, companions to infirm seniors, hospital orderlies. The group bandied about ideas for how to channel job-seeking men into this growth industry. A need in one area filling a need in another. Interlocking problems, interlocking solutions. The Holy Grail of systemic change.
But Obama shook his head.
“Look, these are guys,” he said. “A lot of them see health care, being nurse’s aides, as women’s work. They need to do something that fits with how they define themselves as men.” ...
Wait, so Trump not only rejects stimulus funds that would probably have helped his re-election chances, but *also* does so in a way to make sure that he personally will take blame for it?
Paul Krugman asks, musing on Trump's stress on bringing back coal mining and manufacturing jobs.
In an ever-changing economy, jobs are always being lost: 75,000 Americans are fired or laid off every working day. And sometimes whole sectors go away as tastes or technology change....
While we can’t stop job losses from happening, however, we can limit the human damage when they do happen. We can guarantee health care and adequate retirement income for all....
I don’t want to sound unsympathetic to miners and industrial workers. Yes, their jobs matter. But all jobs matter.
Is there something different about coal mining and manufacturing jobs? Is it just politically useful (because conservatives can blame liberals and foreigners for the job losses? because these are jobs for, mostly, white men?)?
I'm a little surprised to see Krugman adopting the rhetorical format so recently seen in the much criticized "all lives matter" response to "black lives matter." Trump is essentially saying "mining and manufacturing jobs matter," and Krugman is responding "all jobs matter." The first speaker says there's a special problem here, and the second speaker — with the "all Xs matter" response — cancels out all the work of the first speaker. I'm not saying the second speaker is always wrong, just that the "black lives matter"/"all lives matter" sequence is so freshly critiqued that I'd choose different words if I wanted to enlarge the frame around a problem that someone else has taken pains to identify and get other people to care about.
“Look, these are guys,” [Obama] said. “A lot of them see health care, being nurse’s aides, as women’s work. They need to do something that fits with how they define themselves as men.” ...
As the room chewed over the non-PC phrase “women’s work,” trying to square the senator’s point with their analytical models, [Alan] Krueger — who was chief economist at the Department of Labor in the mid-1990s at the tender age of thirty-four — sat there silently, thinking that in all his years of studying men and muscle, he had never used that term. But Obama was right. Krueger wondered how his latest research on happiness and well-being might take into account what Obama had put his finger on: that work is identity, that men like to build, to have something to show for their sweat and toil.
"If it were one single mass of granite, it would be easy to drill through and provide structural support," said [Caltech geologist Leon] Silver, who trained the Apollo astronauts in lunar geology and pioneered the dating of the San Gabriel Mountains. "But everything in the arc has been bent, shoved, stretched, compressed and metamorphosed."
The mountain range lies in a giant crescent between two major faults, the San Gabriel and the San Andreas, which separates the Mojave Desert on the North American tectonic plate from the Los Angeles Basin on the Pacific plate. Between the two major faults are many secondary faults. Some are vertical strike-slip faults that move laterally, and some are thrust faults that move vertically. Some are horizontal, traveling through the ground at various depths....
The longest possible tunnel, described as one alternative in state documents, would stretch 13.8 miles under the Angeles National Forest. Assuming TBMs started at both ends and advanced at 20 feet a day for 261 days a year, the tunnel would take seven years to complete — finishing in 2026. At an advance rate of 10 feet a day, the time would double to 14 years....
"Nobody can sit here and tell you what something like this is going to cost over a 20-year period," [said Jeff Morales, the rail authority chief executive]. "Any big program like this is loaded with challenges. The day you hear me say I am comfortable is the day I am not telling you the truth or the day I have deluded myself."
That's at the L.A. Times, where the top-rated comments are: "Why is it that when we predicted this, we were callled [sic] flat Earth declinists, when were the right the whole time?" and "No one with a single brain cell ever thought this was rational. It is and has been a political boondoggle from day one. It's stunning to think environmentalists in CA would allow such a dangerous construction project."
Flashback to April 2009: "Obama unveils high-speed passenger rail plan... The president's plan identifies 10 potential high-speed intercity corridors for federal funding, including California, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the Southeast, the Gulf Coast, Pennsylvania, Florida, New York and New England.... His plan would be funded in part through the recently passed $787 billion stimulus plan, which includes a total of $8 billion for improvements in rail service.... The city of Chicago, Illinois, would be the hub of the proposed Midwest Regional Rail System, which would stretch to Madison, Wisconsin, in the Northwest; St. Louis, Missouri, in the South; and Detroit, Michigan, in the East."
Wisconsin said no to that money. It was the single issue that caused me to vote for Scott Walker in 2010. Local media whined that we lost $810 million, while California was "the big winner, with up to $624 million." California is now in the process of giving up hope that it can meet a $68 billion budget. The rail authority chief executive says it would be delusional even to believe you can project the ultimate cost.
"The six-year, $478 billion infrastructure plan would provide a 33 percent increase in funding for big, new public works projects," the NYT reports.
Quite aside from the problem of new taxes on business, what bothers me here is that Obama's old and extremely expensive "stimulus" package — back in '09 — was presented as a transformation of the "infrastructure" — with lots of talk of roads and bridges — but where are all those improvements we were gulled into thinking we were getting for our money?
Klain is highly regarded at the White House as a good manager with excellent relationships both in the administration and on Capitol Hill. His supervision of the allocation of funds in the stimulus act -- at the time and incredible and complicated government undertaking -- is respected in Washington. He does not have any extensive background in health care but the job is regarded as a managerial challenge...
A former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden and also to then-Vice President Al Gore, Klain is currently President of Case Holdings and General Counsel of Revolution, an investment group. He has clerked for the U.S. Supreme Court and headed up Gore's effort during the 2000 Florida recount and was portrayed in the HBO movie Recount by Kevin Spacey.
Oh, well, then, that makes perfect sense. Which Supreme Court Justice did he clerk for? And why not hire Kevin Spacey? I'm sure he'd do a convincing job of assuring us that everything is under control. He was excellent delivering lines like "The plural of 'chad' is 'chad'?" and Chad — coincidence?! — is a country in Africa.
And by the way, I thought we'd stopped using the job title "czar." We're back to the retrograde messaging implicit in the title of a long-ago Russian autocrat?
ADDED: It seems that Klain is called a "czar" because Republicans were calling out for a "czar." From The Daily Kos a few days ago:
Thus McCain, as usual, follows in the footsteps of the House crazy person caucus, but now the Republicans demand that Obama institute an "Ebola czar" even after those selfsame Republicans were muttering about abuse of power and tyranny and impeachment over the "czars" the gubbermint already had has been catapulted into the Sunday show orbits of Serious Debate, by mere virtue of Sunday John saying it. We don't have enough czars. We demand more czars! Why isn't Obama leading by appointing czars?
And now, here comes Obama, leading by following, appointing a czar. Or a guy to do whatever it is Ron Klain is good at doing who will be titled "czar." What the hell does a czar do? We'll find out when we see what Klain does. He's certainly good for something, like the way he allocated the funds of the stimulus act. We'll find out how that kind of expertise and orientation plays out in the ebola context.
AND: The (unlinkable) OED defines "czar" only as: 1. "The title of the autocrat or emperor of Russia; historically, borne also by Serbian rulers of the 14th c." and 2. "transf. A person having great authority or absolute power; a tyrant, 'boss.'’" But there is a "Draft addition," lingering in "draft" status since 2001: "orig. U.S. A person appointed by a government to recommend and coordinate policy in a particular area and to oversee its implementation." The oldest use is, interestingly enough, beer czar:
1933 S. Walker Night Club Era 167 There are several versions of why Mulrooney quit the job to become the state beer 'Czar.'
The most prominent use of "czar" — where the term really took off — was "Drug Czar," applied to Bill Bennett in early 1989, as George H.W. Bush was about to take over the presidency. But it wasn't Bush the Elder who created the position. Congress did that, over the objections of President Reagan. As for the choice of Bennett, the biggest critic, amusingly enough, was Joe Biden:
''What concerns me most is his total lack of background in law enforcement,'' said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Delaware Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
IN THE COMMENTS: Ignorance is Bliss says the Kevin we need to assure us that everything is under control, that all is well, is not Kevin Spacey but Kevin Bacon:
We drove 1,000 miles yesterday. Hence the late start today.
I need to adjust to the new time zone and altitude. I'll have something for you to read soon...
Here's a photo from Boulder. I like the curved building, the glass bricks, and the colors next to the deep blue sky, but I took this picture for the sign in the window, "Obama Stimulus Pizza" (what's on it?!):
Racism isn't the only thing he accuses the GOP of in his effort at originality. He also says there's an effort to "nullify" the American system of government, the presidency, and the results of the last 2 elections:
Except this time, of course, we cannot deny that race too is an added factor to the fathomless sense of entitlement felt among the GOP far right.
Cannot deny... fathomless... I find it hard to consume these overstated certainties. I would be amenable to a discussion of the idea that the emotional process of human thought inevitably includes a racial element. But by saying "this time" and pinning the racial "factor" only on Republicans, Sullivan shows that he doesn't want any subtle understanding of race. He's doing polemic. So I'm only going to shine a light on his accusation that the Republicans are racist:
On that point about the Obama administration's focus on women's jobs, remember that Obama's original idea was to have a stimulus that would produce jobs for men — who "need to do something that fits with how they define themselves as men":
As the room chewed over the non-PC phrase “women’s work,” trying to square the senator’s point with their analytical models, [Alan] Krueger—who was chief economist at the Department of Labor in the mid-1990s at the tender age of thirty-four—sat there silently, thinking that in all his years of studying men and muscle, he had never used that term. But Obama was right. Krueger wondered how his latest research on happiness and well-being might take into account what Obama had put his finger on: that work is identity, that men like to build, to have something to show for their sweat and toil.
“Infrastructure,” he blurted out. “Rebuilding infrastructure.”
And then what happened? How was Obama — with his concern about manhood — swallowed up and enfolded within the Party of Women?
Interesting to see his desire to build masculine pride by giving men things to build, because men like to build... and now, in 2012, to find him bumbling and mumbling things like "You didn't build that."
Well, we — or they, the men — didn't build that if that is the infrastructure, the roads and bridges you were talking about. (Remember the big roads-and-bridges theme of September 2011?) And — I wish I had a searchable text of everything said from the stage last week — did anyone even mention roads and bridges at the Democratic Convention?
The windfall for the industry over the last three years raises questions of whether the Obama administration and state governments went too far in their support of solar and wind power projects, some of which would have been built anyway, according to the companies involved....
In the new book Confidence Men, Ron Suskind reports that President Obama initially wanted the stimulus plan to focus on generating infrastructure jobs so that it would address the economic and psychological needs of males in particular. Now blogger and law professor Ann Althouse argues that Obama was diverted by his female constituency into creating a jobs plan that failed because it wasn't male centered and infrastructure heavy. Here, in a Bloggingheads.tv debate with Amy Sullivan of Time Magazine, Althouse makes her case that the stimulus wasn't manly enough...
The embedded video at the link cuts off the set up, in which I tell you what's in the Suskind book that supports my hypothesis. So I recommend watching the video segment clipped here. And note that I'm suggesting a theory to be contemplated and studied in further depth. I'm not simply making an assertion that Obama was diverted by his female constituency and that the stimulus plan failed because it wasn't male centered. Obviously, I don't know that, and I don't purport to know things I don't know. It's a theory.
Here's a fascinating passage from Ron Suskind's new book "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" (pp. 18-19)(boldface added). Obama and his advisers are plotting campaign strategy in August 2007 and the subject turned to the problem of jobs for 10 million low- to moderately skilled male workers. What "sunrise" could the government subsize and stimulate. The advisers hit on health care:
That was where the jobs would be: nurse’s aides, companions to infirm seniors, hospital orderlies. The group bandied about ideas for how to channel job-seeking men into this growth industry. A need in one area filling a need in another. Interlocking problems, interlocking solutions. The Holy Grail of systemic change.
But Obama shook his head.
“Look, these are guys,” he said. “A lot of them see health care, being nurse’s aides, as women’s work. They need to do something that fits with how they define themselves as men.” ...
As the room chewed over the non-PC phrase “women’s work,” trying to square the senator’s point with their analytical models, [Alan] Krueger—who was chief economist at the Department of Labor in the mid-1990s at the tender age of thirty-four—sat there silently, thinking that in all his years of studying men and muscle, he had never used that term. But Obama was right. Krueger wondered how his latest research on happiness and well-being might take into account what Obama had put his finger on: that work is identity, that men like to build, to have something to show for their sweat and toil.
“Infrastructure,” he blurted out. “Rebuilding infrastructure.”
Obama nodded and smiled, seeing it instantly. “Now we’re talking. . . . Okay, let’s think about how that would work as a real centerpiece.... Don’t even get me started about potholed highways and collapsing bridges,” Obama said....
Isn't it strange that collapsing bridges are exactly what Obama is back to talking about in September 2011?
And just like that, a policy to repair the nation’s infrastructure was born. The federal government, in partnership with the private sector, would call upon the underemployed men of America to rebuild the country, and in doing so restore their pride.
Obama wanted to rebuild masculine pride!
But what happened? Why didn't the original stimulus, in early 2009, rebuild America and America's men? I seem to remember some pushback. There was this NYT op-ed in December 2008, by Linda Hirshman:
Mr. Obama compared his infrastructure plan to the Eisenhower-era construction of the Interstate System of highways. It brings back the Eisenhower era in a less appealing way as well: there are almost no women on this road to recovery....
The bulk of the stimulus program will provide jobs for men, because building projects generate jobs in construction, where women make up only 9 percent of the work force....
Fortunately, jobs for women can be created by concentrating on professions that build the most important infrastructure — human capital. In 2007, women were 83 percent of social workers, 94 percent of child care workers, 74 percent of education, training and library workers (including 98 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers and 92 percent of teachers’ assistants)....
And then what happened? Did Obama ever openly express his enthusiasm for masculine jobs? The terminology became "shovel-ready jobs." He couldn't say "manly jobs" or "men's work." Not only did Obama abandon his dream of lifting up men, we didn't even get the construction work done.
And now here he is, last week, posing by a bridge that's — what? — falling down and getting accused of using the bridge as a "prop."
Asks John M. Logsdon — professor emeritus at the Space Policy Institute, George Washington University, member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board — in the MIT Technology Review:
The selection in 1972 of an ambitious and technologically challenging shuttle design resulted in the most complex machine ever built. Rather than lowering the costs of access to space and making it routine, the space shuttle turned out to be an experimental vehicle with multiple inherent risks, requiring extreme care and high costs to operate safely. Other, simpler designs were considered in 1971 in the run-up to President Nixon's final decision; in retrospect, taking a more evolutionary approach by developing one of them instead would probably have been a better choice....
The shuttle was much more expensive than anyone anticipated at its inception.... The shuttle's cost has been an obstacle to NASA starting other major projects.
But replacing the shuttle turned out to be difficult because of its intimate link to the construction of the space station....
Today we are in danger of repeating that mistake, given Congressional and industry pressure to move rapidly to the development of a heavy lift launch vehicle without a clear sense of how that vehicle will be used. Important factors in the decision to move forward with the shuttle were the desire to preserve Apollo-era NASA and contractor jobs, and the political impact of program approval on the 1972 presidential election. Similar pressures are influential today. If we learn anything from the space shuttle experience, it should be that making choices with multidecade consequences on such short-term considerations is poor public policy.
ADDED: Was the shuttle program too expensive? It cost $209.1 billion. Think of it as a jobs program and compare it to the Obama stimulus, which is said to have cost $278,000 per job. The stimulus was $666 billion, more than 3 times the cost of the shuttle program, which went on for many years and which went way over budget.
Says Rush Limbaugh, about this NPR segment, which I tried to listen to. Man, NPR is slow. Unless you're driving in traffic trying to create the illusion that you are going quickly, I don't see how you can listen to that. But there's a transcript at the link, and you can read it so much faster than the 5 minutes it takes for Geoffrey Nunberg to perform the text on the audio. When he finally gets to the point that the word of the year is "no," he says:
That word usually gets a bad rap in public life; it's never a compliment to call somebody a naysayer. So Democrats obviously meant to put Republicans on the defensive when they began to call them "the party of no" for opposing the stimulus bill in early 2009. As The New York Times' Ben Zimmer pointed out, that phrase has often been used by the party in power to label the opposition as obstructionist. Ronald Reagan branded Democrats as the "party of no" in 1988, Bill Clinton did the same thing to Republicans in 1994, and Tom Delay turned the phrase back on Democrats in 2005.
Here's the part Rush played:
What was different this time is that after some early defensiveness, a lot of Republicans embraced the label and even ratcheted it up a notch. "We're not just the party of no," Rush Limbaugh said, "We're the party of hell, no!" — and Republican leaders quickly adopted the line. That extra word shifted the meaning of the phrase — it no longer suggested just opposition to particular bills and programs but unapologetic and resolute defiance.
That stance clearly resonated with a lot of voters.
Rush stopped his playing of the clip there, but it continued like this:
"No" has a great power to bring people together, precisely because it doesn't have to be pinned down. A child has a much harder time mastering "yes," which is always the response to a specific prospect — "Do you need to go potty?" Whereas the child's first "no" comes earlier, as a pure eruption of willful refusal. And the word retains that capacity, even as we learn to intone it to convey despair, anger, defiance, fear, astonishment, disappointment or resignation.
And that's how NPR sees you voters: You're children. You're resisting potty training. Your Tea Potty Party is mindless emotionalism. You're — as Andrew Sullivan would put it — intellectually inert brats.
That's what makes these choruses of negativity so hard to read, whether they're coming from unhappy voters or tired preschoolers in full shutdown. Everybody is sounding the same plaintive note, but it isn't as if there's any single juice flavor that will make them all happy again.
Hard to read?! Is conservatism a foreign language to Nunberg and the NPR slow-listeners stuck in traffic? Juice flavor? It would be a punch line for me to call that a punch line — juice ≈ punch — but why is that a punch line? Maybe Nunberg plied his intellectually inert brats with juice — I'll get grape, because grape is a little more favorite — but what does that mean about what he (and NPR) think government is supposed to do? It's supposed to give us yummy things to make us feel good (and compliant). No wonder he can't read these choruses of negativity.
Milwaukee County executive Scott Walker, the Republican candidate for governor, has denounced the train as a Big Government boondoggle, and has vowed to send the money [$810 million] back to Washington if he's elected. He has even launched a website, www.notrain.com, attacking Obama and his opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, for supporting the new line. Walker and Barrett don't agree on much, but they agree that high-speed rail is a defining issue in their campaign.
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