Class of ’08 | The Snare of Privilege


Brian Stauffer

By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: May 25, 2008

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Wellesley ’69, Yale Law ’73 and the first lady of the land for eight years, is suddenly a working-class heroine of guns and whiskey shots. Barack Obama, Columbia ’83 and Harvard Law ’91, visits bowling alleys and beer halls and talks about his single mother who lived on food stamps.


REGULAR GAL Wellesley and Yale credentials aside, Hillary Rodham Clinton has pretty much avoided the “elitist” label.

John S. McCain III, United States Naval Academy ’58, the son and grandson of admirals and the husband of one of the richer women in Arizona, chases after the conservative, anti-elite religious base of the Republican Party, and prefers to talk about the “cabin” at his Sedona weekend retreat rather than the Phoenix home lushly featured in the pages of Architectural Digest in 2005.

In an increasingly populist country, it’s not surprising that all three presidential contenders have been sprinting away from the elitist label for much of this primary season. But do they really expect to get away with it?

More to the point, should they? Don’t voters want the best and brightest, and best-credentialed, rising to the top?

Not exactly. Americans have been ambivalent about elites since the nation was founded by revolutionaries who were also, in many cases, landed gentry. And status and wealth still play an outsize role in our supposedly classless society.

Our presidential history is a case in point. Although there has long been an anti-aristocratic bent to American politics, voters have put some famous aristocrats (including two Roosevelts, one Kennedy, all Harvard men) into the White House, and have all but idolized them as well. Over the last 20 years, every president has been a graduate of Yale. In 2004, two members of the university’s rarefied secret society, Skull and Bones, ran against each other, and the more elite candidate, George W. Bush (Andover, Yale, Harvard Business School, son of a president), won.

But it’s not always easy to say exactly who, or what, constitutes the elite — especially in recent decades. In his book “The Power Elite,” published in 1956, the leftist thinker C. Wright Mills identified a class “composed of political, economic, and military men,” who harnessed “the major means of production” along with “the newly enlarged means of violence” created in the nuclear age. In 1975, the neoconservative Irving Kristol described the elite, or “the new class,” as he termed it, as a confederacy of like-minded liberals in a range of professions — from journalism to law — who were “suspicious of, and hostile to, the market precisely because the market is so vulgarly democratic.”

Mr. Mills and Mr. Kristol shared the belief that “the elite,” however they were defined, wielded disproportionate influence. This year, these competing views remain in place. Republicans sneer at Democrats for being cultural elitists, and Democrats deride Republicans as economic elitists. But the old labels have been turned inside out.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain have both derided Mr. Obama as “elitist” for his remarks about bitter rural voters who “cling” to guns and religion, even as Mr. Obama, in a counterpunch, mocked her courtship of gun owners, depicting her as a kind of ersatz Annie Oakley “packing a six-shooter” in a duck blind. And Mr. McCain, throwing a haymaker of his own, pointed out in a recent speech to members of the National Rifle Association that “someone should tell Senator Obama that ducks are usually hunted with shotguns.”

Amid all this, some have noted that we have reached a curious moment in American history: an African-American candidate, born seven years after the Supreme Court repudiated segregation in public schools and four years before the Voting Rights Act was passed, finds himself struggling to overcome an aura of privilege.

“It really is a delicious irony that the first serious black candidate for president should suddenly be described as elite,” said Tom Wolfe, the author of “Bonfire of the Vanities” and a longtime chronicler of the nation’s fixation on status.

One reason is that Mr. Obama holds two Ivy League degrees at a time when not all Americans accept the notion of an Ivy League education as a triumph of American opportunity. As elite campuses have become more culturally diverse, but not necessarily more accessible to many in the middle class, the perception persists that high-powered connections still matter.

“Most people in America just don’t buy into the idea of a meritocracy as defined by Ivy League meritocrats,” said Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the author of “The Big Test,” a history of the SAT and the rise of the American meritocracy. “That’s one reason why the average American buys the person who doesn’t have fancy college credentials but who built a business from scratch, like the guy who owns a Toyota dealership in Marietta, Ga., and who grew up poor.”

In a nation without a titled aristocracy, an elite education may well be the most important membership card. “American elites have a problem that the Europeans don’t, which is how to assure that their children and their children’s children retain their elevated social position,” said Jason Kaufman, a Harvard sociologist who has written on elites and American culture. “Americans do this through cultural institutions and exclusion — art museums, classical music and tremendously elitist universities.”

There may be another reason Americans are skeptical about the idea that the best rise to the top: those at the top haven’t performed too well lately. Christopher Buckley, Yale ’75, the novelist and humorist, notes that recent Iraq books contain echoes of “The Best and the Brightest,” David Halberstam’s classic account of the huge failures of the Ivy League brain trust in the Kennedy White House who propelled the nation into Vietnam. “If you loved Vietnam, brought to you by Harvard and Yale, you’ll love Iraq,” Mr. Buckley said.

Consider some crucial players in the Iraq war: former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Princeton ’54; Vice President Dick Cheney, Yale dropout; I. Lewis Libby, Yale ’72; and L. Paul Bremer III, the former top American civilian administrator in Baghdad, Yale ’63, Harvard Business ’66. Mr. Bush, Mr. Bremer and Mr. Libby also graduated from Andover.

Mr. Buckley recalled a famous line uttered by his father, William F. Buckley Jr., Yale ’50, who observed in the 1960s that he’d rather “be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book than by the 2,000 members of the Harvard faculty.”

Ivy League credentials aside, what matters in the end to most voters, when it comes to choosing a president, is not academic pedigree, but rather the candidates’ ability to make an emotional connection and to win trust and confidence. The most famous aristocrat-presidents of the 20th century, John F. Kennedy and Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all had that gift, and it outweighed the advantages — and drawbacks — of education, wealth and privilege.

This year’s focus on the crucial swing states, and their large working-class populations, has made inspiring those voters and playing down elitist credentials a political necessity. At the very least, Mrs. Clinton’s lopsided primary victories in West Virginia and Kentucky show how much more work Mr. Obama, the likely Democratic nominee, must do with this critical slice of the electorate.

“We believe in the best and the brightest, but you’ve also got to relate to ordinary people,” said Ed Rollins, the longtime Republican strategist who was the national chairman this year of the unsuccessful presidential campaign of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas. “I think one of the problems that Obama has is that he gives a magnificent speech, he can inspire massive crowds, but he seems aloof up close.”

The lesson has not been lost on Mr. McCain, whose third-generation Annapolis lineage makes him perhaps the most elite of the three candidates and is married to a woman whose money financed his political career. In a speech last month in Inez, Ky., the Appalachian coal-mining hollow where in 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson declared his war on poverty, Mr. McCain tried to bridge the difference.

“I cannot claim that the circumstances of our lives are similar in every respect,” Mr. McCain told a friendly crowd at the Martin County Courthouse. “I’m not the son of a coal miner. I wasn’t raised by a family that made its living from the land or toiled in a mill or worked in the local schools or health clinic. I was raised in the United States Navy, and after my own naval career, I became a politician. My work isn’t as hard as yours.”

Nonetheless, Mr. McCain assured the crowd that “you are my compatriots,” and “that means more to me than almost any other association.”

It was a peculiarly American sentiment — hopeful, political, perhaps naïve. But it was as old as the nation itself.

“I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has,” Lincoln told Union troops assembled at the White House in August 1864, as recounted in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, “Team of Rivals.” He promised them all “equal privileges in the race of life.”

The Emotional Appeal of Presidential Candidates Who Are Not Too Intelligent: Why Republican Candidate John McCain’s Poor Academic Record May Be One of His Strongest Political Assets

By JOHN W. DEAN
----
Friday, May. 30, 2008

I ended my last column by raising the question of why, for decades, Americans have consistently elected the less intelligent of the two presidential candidates between whom they have been asked to choose, and by asking how the Democrats might deal with the fact that they have two highly intelligent potential candidates in this year’s presidential race. Since then, the New York Times has also addressed this issue. With the headline “The Snare of Privilege: ‘Elitist’ is the label they all run from. But why, exactly, are Americans so allergic to it?”, the Times noted, ironically, that the least privileged of the contenders in the 2008 presidential race, Barack Obama, will still have to fight being tagged as privileged, and so ensnared.

In this column, I’ll consider why this is the case, and suggest that the label of privilege far better fits McCain than Obama.

In Fairness, McCain Should Be Considered More Privileged Than Obama

According to the Times, Obama’s problem stems from the fact that he “holds two Ivy League degrees at a time when not all Americans accept the notion of an Ivy League education as a triumph of American opportunity.” Based on information from the Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Nicholas Lemann, it is reported that average Americans are more likely to respect “the guy who owns a Toyota dealership in Marietta, Ga., and who grew up poor” than to respect an Ivy Leaguer. For presidential election purposes in recent years, those who attend Ivy League schools have been considered to be “privileged,” and meritocracy, according to most Americans, is not to be found in the Ivy League.

If truth be told, however, Obama earned his Ivy League degrees the hard way, while the child of privilege in this year’s presidential contest is John McCain. McCain obtained his appointment to the U.S. Navy Academy because his father and grandfather had been there, and McCain’s path to the Senate was made easy because his predecessor, Barry Goldwater, liked his father, Admiral Jack McCain.

Yet McCain always passes over his privileged history, while making much of the fact that he finished at the bottom of his class at Annapolis to establish his bona fides as a regular guy. In addition, McCain invokes his laudable Vietnam POW experience as evidence of his physical toughness and stamina, qualities to which regular guys can easily aspire.

Identifying with Obama is more difficult for some voters. One reason may be that, as Ed Rollins, the longtime GOP strategist who has a keen eye for political reality, further explained to the Times, not only are Obama’s Ivy League degrees a potential problem, but so is the training those degrees gave him. As Ed put it, “one of the problems that Obama has is that he gives a magnificent speech, he can inspire massive crowds, but he seems aloof up close.”

Overall, the Times’ report suggests that to get elected president today the candidate must “make an emotional connection [with average American voters]” which helps to win their “trust and confidence” – which are essential. Trust and confidence are not won by academic pedigree or prestigious educational success. To the contrary, for (too) many voters, it is necessary to shed such accomplishments to win this kind of loyalty. Ivy League degrees are considered by many as indicia of arrogance and privilege (whether such qualities belong to the degreeholder or not).

It is a shame that this is the situation, but I must agree with the assessment set forth by the Times that Hillary Clinton and John McCain have worked hard to convey that they are “regular” people, and that it is necessary for all our candidates to do so, because emotions, not reason, rule our electoral decisions.

Emotions, Not Reason, Will Elect the Next President

Dr. Drew Westen, a clinical and political psychologist who teaches at Emery University, has literally looked inside the mind of partisan voters with MRI scanning equipment, and confirmed that emotions dominate our voting decisions. Westen writes about our emotionally-driven democracy in his recent book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotions In Deciding the Fate of the Nation (Public Affairs, 2007), and his findings are not good news for Democrats, unless they change their ways.

Westen focuses on, among other matters, the ability of the Republicans to successfully portray John Kerry during the 2004 presidential race as a liberal elitist – an image that Kerry helped foster with his faux hunting trip and topped off with his windsurfing photographs. Yet, importantly, much of the Westen material is also directly applicable to the Obama campaign. For instance, Westen reports that Republicans have figured out how to play upon the emotions of the voters – selecting winning emotional strategies such as running regular-guy candidates who are not exceptionally bright, and to whom voters can more easily relate emotionally. In addition, Republicans have mastered the craft of painting Democrats – and their issues – as emotionally out of touch with contemporary voters.

Westen and his colleagues found “[t]he political brain is an emotional brain. It is not a dispassionate calculating machine, objectively searching for the right facts, figures, and policies to make a reasoned decision.” Democrats, however, like to appeal to reason. While this resonates with many key elements of the Democratic Party, it simply does not work across the board with all voters.

In short, voters are going to react to McCain and Obama in the general election this fall with their hearts, not their heads. The Times makes the point that if Obama is currently perceived as arrogant, elitist, and a liberal Ivy Leaguer to boot, then he will be in trouble. This is why Hillary Clinton is winning the white, working-class voters in states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky; she is the one who has managed to emotionally connect with them.

I am not sure that Obama can make this emotional leap he must make to win the presidency. My concern comes from Obama’s writings, particularly in Dreams of My Father, and also from reports I have received from people who have encountered Obama in offstage moments.

For example, a friend of mine ran into Obama while he was with a couple of his aides, at a non-campaign event at a small-town YMCA. Obama was going to play basketball. Rather than invite the locals to join – or even let them watch his traveling pickup game – the Secret Service asked six guys (including the fellow who gave me the report) to end their regular Wednesday evening half-court game, so Obama could have the court. While the request was polite, the players did not feel that they had any choice in the matter. All the while, Obama ignored these guys and gave the impression that he was something of a big shot, taking a break from his campaign, and did not want to be bothered talking to them, being watched by them, or even being nice when not campaigning.

This bit of arrogance did not play well. My friend – a Democrat – was left feeling that Obama is not a natural politician, but rather is still learning. (But few learn in a race for the presidency.) His Republican fellow players, meanwhile, had harsher words for Obama, and surely won’t be crossing party lines in his support. Granted, this incident occurred fairly early in the campaign, but it is very difficult to act as if you enjoy people, if in fact you don’t. This, I suspect, is going to be a problem for Obama with many voters.

The Emotions of the “Race Issue”

Dr. Westen also addressed the emotionally-loaded question of race in passing in The Political Brain. He explains that Obama, like every African-American candidate for Senate or President in the near future, needs to study the effectively-orchestrated Republican campaign run against Congressman Harold Ford (also an African-American), when he sought to win a Senate seat in Tennessee in 2006. It was a “psychologically sophisticated” undertaking built on racism. It worked. And Republicans got away with it, paying no price for their underhanded tactics, but rather winning a Senate seat.

The Democrats were fearful of talking about race in the Ford campaign, Westen observes. This was a mistake. They failed to call attention to the racist campaign being waged against them, and they did not call the GOP on its morally reprehensive decision to play to people’s prejudice. The same kid of racist campaign has already started with Obama, and if the Obama campaign and his supporters do not call attention to it, John McCain will gain an easy victory, only to bring us the third term of the Bush/Cheney Administration.

Westen has loaded his 426-page book with not only insightful analysis of the dominate role emotions play in electing our presidents (and other officials), but also sharp suggestions for how Democrats can start playing catch-up before they are once again shut out of the White House. Only one Democratic candidate for president has effectively used emotions against the Republicans: Bill Clinton, and he did it twice. He also recommends this book. As I read this book, and thought about the Obama campaign, I realized that the indispensable asset that Hillary Clinton might bring to a Democratic ticket this year is emotion.
Granted, no one offends the hardcore Republicans more than the Clintons. But Democrats are not going to regain the White House by trying to convert Republicans, and thus, the emotion Hillary evokes could actually help Obama win, by spurring Democrats to turn out and vote. Indeed, the only people who should worry about Hillary’s addition to the ticket are Republicans – who know that she, better than most, can stir the emotions needed to win in November.

======================================================
JOHN DEAN | Before becoming Counsel to the President of the United States in July 1970 at age thirty-one, John Dean was Chief Minority Counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives, the Associate Director of a law reform commission, and Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States. He served as Richard Nixon's White House lawyer for a thousand days.

He did his undergraduate studies at Colgate University and the College of Wooster, with majors in English Literature and Political Science. He received a graduate fellowship from American University to study government and the presidency, before entering Georgetown University Law Center, where he received his JD in 1965.

John has long written on the subjects of law, government, and politics, and he recounted his days in the Nixon White House and Watergate in two books, Blind Ambition (1976) and Lost Honor (1982). He lives in Beverly Hills, California with his wife Maureen, and now devotes full time to writing and lecturing, having retired from his career as a private investment banker.

In 2001 he published The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment that Redefined the Supreme Court; in early 2004, Warren G. Harding, followed by Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. In 2006, John publihsed Conservatives Without Conscience.

His newest book is Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches.

Foreclosure Phil



NEWS: Years before Phil Gramm was a McCain campaign adviser and a lobbyist for a Swiss bank at the center of the housing credit crisis, he pulled a sly maneuver in the Senate that helped create today's subprime meltdown.

By David Corn

May 28, 2008

Who's to blame for the biggest financial catastrophe of our time? There are plenty of culprits, but one candidate for lead perp is former Sen. Phil Gramm. Eight years ago, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown. Yet has Gramm been banished from the corridors of power? Reviled as the villain who bankrupted Middle America? Hardly. Now a well-paid executive at a Swiss bank, Gramm cochairs Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and advises the Republican candidate on economic matters. He's been mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary should McCain win. That's right: A guy who helped screw up the global financial system could end up in charge of US economic policy. Talk about a market failure.

Gramm's long been a handmaiden to Big Finance. In the 1990s, as chairman of the Senate banking committee, he routinely turned down Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt's requests for more money to police Wall Street; during this period, the sec's workload shot up 80 percent, but its staff grew only 20 percent. Gramm also opposed an sec rule that would have prohibited accounting firms from getting too close to the companies they audited—at one point, according to Levitt's memoir, he warned the sec chairman that if the commission adopted the rule, its funding would be cut. And in 1999, Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms—setting off a wave of merger mania.

But Gramm's most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry—friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career—came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead—even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. "Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it," says a congressional aide familiar with the bill's history.

It's not exactly like Gramm hid his handiwork—far from it. The balding and bespectacled Texan strode onto the Senate floor to hail the act's inclusion into the must-pass budget package. But only an expert, or a lobbyist, could have followed what Gramm was saying. The act, he declared, would ensure that neither the sec nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (cftc) got into the business of regulating newfangled financial products called swaps—and would thus "protect financial institutions from overregulation" and "position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century."

It didn't quite work out that way. For starters, the legislation contained a provision—lobbied for by Enron, a generous contributor to Gramm—that exempted energy trading from regulatory oversight, allowing Enron to run rampant, wreck the California electricity market, and cost consumers billions before it collapsed. (For Gramm, Enron was a family affair. Eight years earlier, his wife, Wendy Gramm, as cftc chairwoman, had pushed through a rule excluding Enron's energy futures contracts from government oversight. Wendy later joined the Houston-based company's board, and in the following years her Enron salary and stock income brought between $915,000 and $1.8 million into the Gramm household.)

But the Enron loophole was small potatoes compared to the devastation that unregulated swaps would unleash. Credit default swaps are essentially insurance policies covering the losses on securities in the event of a default. Financial institutions buy them to protect themselves if an investment they hold goes south. It's like bookies trading bets, with banks and hedge funds gambling on whether an investment (say, a pile of subprime mortgages bundled into a security) will succeed or fail. Because of the swap-related provisions of Gramm's bill—which were supported by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury secretary Larry Summers—a $62 trillion market (nearly four times the size of the entire US stock market) remained utterly unregulated, meaning no one made sure the banks and hedge funds had the assets to cover the losses they guaranteed.

In essence, Wall Street's biggest players (which, thanks to Gramm's earlier banking deregulation efforts, now incorporated everything from your checking account to your pension fund) ran a secret casino. "Tens of trillions of dollars of transactions were done in the dark," says University of San Diego law professor Frank Partnoy, an expert on financial markets and derivatives. "No one had a picture of where the risks were flowing." Betting on the risk of any given transaction became more important—and more lucrative—than the transactions themselves, Partnoy notes: "So there was more betting on the riskiest subprime mortgages than there were actual mortgages." Banks and hedge funds, notes Michael Greenberger, who directed the cftc's division of trading and markets in the late 1990s, "were betting the subprimes would pay off and they would not need the capital to support their bets."

These unregulated swaps have been at "the heart of the subprime meltdown," says Greenberger. "I happen to think Gramm did not know what he was doing. I don't think a member in Congress had read the 262-page bill or had thought of the cataclysm it would cause." In 1998, Greenberger's division at the cftc proposed applying regulations to the burgeoning derivatives market. But, he says, "all hell broke loose. The lobbyists for major commercial banks and investment banks and hedge funds went wild. They all wanted to be trading without the government looking over their shoulder."

Now, belatedly, the feds are swooping in—but not to regulate the industry, only to bail it out, as they did in engineering the March takeover of investment banking giant Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase, fearing the firm's collapse could trigger a dominoes-like crash of the entire credit derivatives market.

No one in Washington apologizes for anything, so it's no surprise that Gramm has failed to issue any mea culpa. Post-Enron, says Greenberger, the senator even called him to say, "You're going around saying this was my fault—and it's not my fault. I didn't intend this."

Whether or not Gramm had bothered to ponder the potential downsides of his commodities legislation, having helped set off an industry free-for-all, he reaped the rewards. In 2003, he left the Senate to take a highly lucrative job at ubs, Switzerland's largest bank, which had been able to acquire investment house PaineWebber due to his banking deregulation bill. He would soon be lobbying Congress, the Fed, and the Treasury Department for ubs on banking and mortgage matters. There was a moment of poetic justice when ubs became one of the subprime crisis' top losers, writing down $37 billion as of this spring—an amount equal to its previous four years of profits combined. In a report explaining how it had managed to mess up so grandly, ubs noted that two-thirds of its losses were the fault of collateralized debt obligations—securities backed largely by subprime instruments—and that credit default swaps had been "key to the growth" of its out-of-control cdo business. (Gramm declined to comment for this article.)

Gramm's record as a reckless deregulator has not affected his rating as a Republican economic expert. Sen. John McCain has relied on him for policy advice, especially, according to the campaign, on housing matters. The two have been buddies ever since they served together in the House in the 1980s; in 1996, McCain chaired Gramm's flop of a presidential campaign. (Gramm spent $21 million and earned only 10 delegates during the gop primaries.) In 2005, McCain told a Wall Street Journal columnist that Gramm was his economic guru. Two years later, Gramm wrote a piece for the Journal extolling McCain as a modern-day Abraham Lincoln, and he's hailed McCain's love of tax cuts and free trade. Media accounts have identified Gramm as a contender for the top slot at the Treasury Department if McCain reaches the White House. "If McCain gets in," frets Lynn Turner, a former chief sec accountant, "we'll have more of the same deregulatory mess. I like John McCain, but given what I know about Phil Gramm, I wouldn't vote for McCain."

As a thriving bank exec and presidential adviser, Gramm has defied a prime economic principle: Bad products are driven out of the market. In John McCain, he has gained an important customer, so his stock has gone up in value. And there's no telling when the Gramm bubble will burst.

David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington, D.C. bureau chief.

Free Press Action Fund: Action Alert


Don't let Corporate Media continue to enable government propaganda.

Take Action Now: Investigate the Propaganda
http://free.convio.net/site/R?i=yh_LiZON7S2j_Kbj8WDLjQ..

The country is buzzing today over a tell-all book by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. In his explosive memoir, McClellan reveals that the Bush administration ran a "political propaganda campaign" to mislead the American public on the war in Iraq.

But he takes it one step further, implicating the mainstream media for its role in "enabling" this propaganda: "The national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House" in spreading the president's case for the war, McClellan writes. The mainstream media didn't live up to its watchdog reputation. "If it had, the country would have been better served."

This should be a shock to everyone. The president's own spokesman lays a large share of the blame for Bush's pro-war propaganda on the media's "deferential" treatment of White House spin.

Please become part of a growing people-powered campaign to investigate this scandal and make media more accountable to the public:

Make Mainstream Media Answer for Spreading Pro-War Propaganda
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Click on the link above and sign a letter that urges House Committee Chairs Ike Skelton, John Tierney and Henry Waxman to convene full congressional hearings about propaganda in the news.

The media's complicity in promoting this war was confirmed Wednesday night by CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin who said that network executives had pushed her not to do hard-hitting pieces on the Bush administration as the nation readied for war.

"The press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation," Yellin told CNN's Anderson Cooper. (Watch the video). http://free.convio.net/site/R?i=W69zq7_j9DD74ca-QbhlKw..

More than 100,000 Free Press activists and allies have already urged their members of Congress to launch an investigation into the media's role in spreading pro-war propaganda. By joining their call, you will be part of a massive coalition of citizens, bloggers and independent media who refuse to let Big Media off the hook:

Expose the Propaganda 'Enablers' and End Fake News
http://free.convio.net/site/R?i=m_oggQJszSMoFTyFh6j8Zg..

McClellan's memoir comes on the heels of an April 20 New York Times exposé, which revealed an extensive -- and likely illegal -- Pentagon program to recruit and place pro-war military pundits on nearly every major news outlet in America. Congress has promised to investigate the Pentagon’s role in the scandal, but it shouldn't end there.

Our democracy is in peril when mainstream media fail to question the official view and put the interests of ordinary Americans first. This watchdog role is especially critical during a time of war.

Sign the letter and then tell your friends to help send a loud message to Congress: We're not backing down until the truth comes out.

Gratefully,

Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
Free Press Action Fund
www.freepress.net

P.S. Thanks to you, Free Press is leading the charge to hold media accountable for spreading propaganda. Our next step is to run a powerful ad to put Congress on notice to act. Contribute now and send the message: We're not backing down.


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While the Senate is debating climate change, we need you to make sure that they’re not leaving poor people behind.

Unfortunately, climate change is a reality that is already affecting the world’s most impoverished people. The severe impacts poor communities include droughts, floods, and increased disease—which poor people are least equipped to deal with.

Right now, the Senate is debating a bill that could make a big difference for these people. We need your voice today.

Tell the Senate to help poor people impacted by our changing climate.
http://act.oxfamamerica.org/campaign/LW/wbwsw864ain6w3d?

Oxfam staff and partners are reporting the disastrous consequences of extended droughts across Africa and flooding in South Asia. As the largest emitter of pollutants in the world, the US has a responsibility not only to cut our own pollution but also to help poor people survive the consequences of climate change.

Currently, the Senate is debating a bill that would require companies to buy permits in order to continue emitting the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. The revenue from the sale of those permits could be used to assist poor people who are already facing the consequences of climate change.

It's a simple way to begin solving two problems at once – requiring polluters to pay and helping vulnerable communities. But the opposition will be fierce – so it’s up to us to take a stand. Ask your senators to ensure that the Lieberman-Warner bill requires a higher level of emission permits to be sold—rather than given away to polluting companies—and uses the money raised to help the poor adapt to the impacts of climate change.

http://act.oxfamamerica.org/campaign/LW/wbwsw864ain6w3d?

This is a key opportunity to shape comprehensive climate legislation that could help millions of poor people – we don't want to miss it.

Thank you for all that you do to help end poverty and injustice.

Sincerely,


Tim Fullerton
Oxfam America Advocacy Fund

May 29, 2008

by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Ali Frick, and Benjamin Armbruster

ADMINISTRATION | Bush's Former Mouthpiece Tells All

In his "scathing" new memoir, which will be released next week, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan accuses his former colleagues in the Bush administration of not being "open and forthright on Iraq," arguing that they engaged in a "political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people." President Bush "signed off on a strategy for selling the war that was less than candid and honest," writes McClellan, "not employing out-and-out deception but by shading the truth." McClellan, who is "the first longtime Bush aide to put such harsh criticism between hard covers," also claims in his book that former Bush adviser Karl Rove and former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney Scooter Libby "allowed" and even "encouraged" him to "repeat a lie" about their involvement in the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity. In one shocking revelation, McClellan "suggests that Libby and Rove secretly colluded to get their stories straight at a time when federal investigators were hot on the Plame case." The White House reacted with indignation yesterday, calling McClellan "disgruntled about his experience at the White House." Though current White House Press Secretary Dana Perino initially said Bush was not likely to comment on the book, she later told CNN that Bush "didn't recognize the same Scott McClellan that he hired and worked with for so many years." On background, White House aides were even more blunt, telling MSNBC's Kevin Corke that McClellan is a "traitor."

LOYAL BUSHIES STRIKE BACK: Bush was only one voice in a "chorus" of current and former Bush administration officials pushing back against McClellan's explosive allegations, often in very personal terms. "This now strikes me as self-serving, disingenuous and unprofessional," former Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend said on CNN. Rove, whom McClellan describes in the book as willing "to push the envelope to the limit of what's permissible ethically or legally," responded on Fox News by calling McClellan "irresponsible," adding that he "sounds like a left-wing blogger." Former White House Counselor Dan Bartlett called allegations in the book "total crap," saying that in hearing McClellan's criticisms, "it's almost like we're witnessing an out-of-body experience." McClellan's predecessor, Ari Fleischer, told NPR that he was "heartbroken" by the harsh tone of the book. Interviewing Fleischer for the CBS Evening News last night, Katie Couric noted that the former Bush administration officials now criticizing McClellan all sound like they "are operating out of the same playbook" by claiming "this doesn't sound like the Scott McClellan they knew."

THE USUAL AUTOMATIC SMEAR RESPONSE: McClellan is experiencing the same automatic smear response the White House deploys against former allies who dare to criticize the administration, including former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former head of faith-based initiatives John DiIulio. In 2004, when Bush's first Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said publicly that "the Bush administration began planning to use U.S. troops to invade Iraq within days" after Bush took office, White House aides pushed back hard with personal attacks. One senior official told CNN that "we didn't listen to [O'Neill's] wacky ideas when he was in the White House, why should we start listening to him now." Last year, Bush's former chief campaign strategist Matthew Dowd publicly broke with the President by claiming that Bush had "become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in." Bartlett dismissed Dowd's criticisms by saying Dowd had been "going through a lot of personal turmoil." Ironically, before he published his own criticisms, McClellan was often the one responding to critical books as the White House's top spokesperson. In 2004, when former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke wrote a book charging that President Bush had "ignored terrorism for months" before 9/11, McClellan led the White House counter-charge, claiming that Clarke was a bitter ex-employee who "wanted to be the deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department."

MCCLELLAN'S CREDIBILITY CHALLENGE: As ABC News's Jake Tapper pointed out yesterday, "some of the same language now being used to trash McClellan he himself used to trash previous administration authors." For instance, when Clarke published his tell-all book, McClellan claimed he was doing it for money because "he has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book." But McClellan's credibility challenge goes beyond the fact that he once attacked people in his current position. McClellan charges the White House with not being "open and forthright on Iraq," which is a drastic shift from his past rhetoric regarding the war. As a White House spokesperson, McClellan repeatedly defended the conduct of the war, justified the case that was made to launch it, and defended Bush's handling of the war. "There were irresponsible and unfounded accusations being made against the administration, suggesting that we had manipulated or misused that intelligence. That was flat-out false," said McClellan in a 2006 press briefing. "We've been very straightforward about where we are, in terms of the theater in Iraq," he claimed in another. In 2004, he insisted, "This President is someone I think the American people recognize as a straight shooter."

Last night, significant news broke that directly impacts our push for Impeachment Hearings and a possible Inherent Contempt charge for Bush Administration officials such as Karl Rove:

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has revealed in his upcoming book that:

• Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and Vice President Cheney lied about their role in revealing the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson – actions easily amounting to obstruction of Justice.

McClellan also admitted that:

• There was a coordinated effort within the Bush Administration to use propaganda to pump up the case for the Iraq war and hide the projected costs of the war from the public.

Scott McClellan must be called to testify under oath before the House Judiciary Committee to tell Congress and the American people everything he knows about this massive effort by the White House to deceive this nation into war.

Last week, a subpoena was issued for Karl Rove to testify before the Judiciary Committee. It appears he will take every legal action to block this subpoena. The truth is that Congress has the right – and obligation – to hold him accountable now - not months or years from now. It is long past time to pass Inherent Contempt and bring Rove, Libby and others before Congress.

We simply cannot ignore these recent developments, nor should we postpone serious inquiry until after the next election.

Your commitment to accountability for the Bush/Cheney Administration, and the support of 230,000 other Americans who signed up at wexlerwantshearings.com, has inspired and motivated me in my effort to hold impeachment hearings for Vice President Dick Cheney and Inherent Contempt for Rove and others. During the past months I have been a tireless and dogged advocate of this vitally important cause.

Many of you have written me, asking for an update on where we stand with regards to impeachment hearings. I know most of you believe - as I do - that impeachment hearings for Vice President Cheney – are not only justified, but that it is our constitutional obligation to look into the serious allegations of wrongdoing that have been raised. This is especially true based on the newest revelations from Scott McClellan.

I believe that it is the duty of Congress to pursue impeachment whenever there's significant evidence of wrongdoing, be it by Republicans or Democrats, regardless of the timing of elections or the current political environment.

Some of you have written me demanding that I deliver hearings or impeachment. As hard as I have been fighting for this cause, I cannot make impeachment happen by myself. What I can do, and what I have been doing at every turn, is trying to communicate two simple messages to my colleagues:

• the serious allegations of wrongdoing and the clear-cut rationale for impeachment hearings;and
• the fact that the public will support our efforts when Congress boldly acts on the side of justice and accountability.

Unfortunately, to date, these arguments have not been enough to convince even a majority of the liberal and progressive Members of Congress to support impeachment hearings. In addition, the leadership of the Democratic Party in Congress genuinely feels that pursuing impeachment will jeopardize our congressional agenda and threaten gains in the November elections. Although I genuinely disagree with this view, to date I have been unable to convince them to change this policy.

I understand the challenges that we are up against, and I recognize the odds that we face. Nevertheless, I remain unfazed and unyielding.

This new evidence from Scott McClellan could be the tipping point – but we must move quickly. I will use the McClellan admissions to help convince my colleagues that we must hold impeachment hearings.

Regardless, I will continue to fight for progressive values and our Constitution. I will do everything I can to pursue accountability for criminal actions taken by this Administration and this Vice President. I will be a furious opponent to any expansion of this misguided war, and I will fight against the use of torture by our government and to protect our civil liberties here at home.

Most of all, I will continue my efforts to convince my fellow members of Congress and voters, that we should not be a party of passivity - but that we succeed when we present the public with stark choices that are based on the guarantees in our Constitution, and not on the politics of the moment.

I will continue - at every pass - to call for impeachment and accountability. While I wish more of my colleagues supported our movement, we must not let our discouragement lead to apathy and distraction in this important election year when we must break free from eight long years of illegalities, corporate handouts, and a tragic and devastating war.

We should not end the calls for impeachment. I will push against the crimes of the Bush Administration whenever I am provided the opportunity. I will use my role on the Judiciary Committee to take on Administration officials – like I have done with Condoleezza Rice, Attorney Generals Gonzalez and Mukasey, and FBI Director Mueller.

I have not given up our fight to hold this Administration accountable and neither can you. I am grateful for your patriotism and your support. I'll continue to keep you informed and part of the conversation.

Sincerely,

Congressman Robert Wexler


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The Hillary Mystique by Michelle Cottle and Amanda Fortini

Discussing the Clinton campaign's effect on sexism, feminism, and the possibility of a female president.

Post Date Wednesday, May 28, 2008

As Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign approaches its end, what are the implications for feminism of the first major presidential campaign by a woman? We asked New Republic senior editor Michelle Cottle, who has been covering the Clinton campaign, and Amanda Fortini, a New Republic contributor who recently wrote about Clinton and feminism for New York magazine, to discuss her historic run.


Credit | Getty Images

Amanda Fortini: You know, Michelle, we've heard a lot about how there's a stark divide between pre- and post-boomer women voters, but when I was researching my piece for New York, I actually didn't find that to be true. The real divide seems to be between women who had and had not been in the workforce for some period of time, between women who had worked at a job where prestige and money were at stake, and those who had not. If women had experienced, to a greater or lesser degree, a kind of institutional sexism, they could relate to what they were seeing with Clinton. And they said, "We've seen instances of sexism in our lives, but it really hasn't hindered us. But if we're going to ascend even higher, to our own version of what Clinton herself has called the highest glass ceiling in the country, we're going to hit it too." And it's made them think about feminism in a way they hadn't before.

Michelle Cottle: I've definitely seen those concerns from the coterie of women around Hillary, the Hillarylanders, who tend to be forty-something women who originally gravitated toward her in part because of their feminist ideals, and because she represented a new kind of First Lady. A lot of these women are kind of crushed that people never grasped or got excited about the historic nature of a woman president in the way that clearly they have about the possibility of a black president.

Fortini: Women in that demographic are definitely very upset. I was surprised to read in a recent New York Times article that some of them have formed a group, "Clinton Supporters Count Too," and that they plan to campaign against Barack Obama in November, which seemed very surprising to me and certainly counterproductive in terms of women's rights. If you compare McCain and Obama on the issue of reproductive rights, you have to consider that McCain will very likely appoint two pro-life Supreme Court justices. He also hasn't supported the Fair Pay Act because he believes it would create frivolous lawsuits against big business. In his view, pay inequities should be dealt with through education and training. But that doesn't address the fact that in the workplace gender-based pay discrimination remains a problem, nor does it leave women legal recourse if they experience such discrimination on the job.

Cottle: I think that when she drops out, there's going to be a core of Hillaryites who won't be able to get over it. I have friends who may feel that way. They're very disappointed, and they're kind of offended, by media bias against the idea of a female president, and by the lack of excitement about the historic nature of her run. It's not as if they'll go vote for McCain, but if they're busy the day of the vote they might not feel compelled to get out and vote for Obama. They might stay home. But there's a huge group of supporters--including Hillary herself--who will get out there and try to make the point that in terms of policy interests, there's a huge difference between the parties.

My guess is that the Clintons don't want their legacy to be dividing the party and giving us another term of Republicans, especially if Hillary has any kind of future plans, whether they're in the Senate or the Governor's office of New York. And when her supporters are no longer hearing this rhetoric about how people are trying to push Hillary around, everything will soften and people will start thinking about what will be best going forward.

Fortini: You said something that was really interesting to me--that women have felt upset about what they perceive to be a lack of excitement over Clinton's historic candidacy. Is it that younger women didn't get behind Clinton as a female candidate early on, before the media bias started to reveal itself? Is it that Clinton herself really didn't address gender in the way Obama addressed race with his speech in Philadelphia?

Cottle: The best way I've found to explain it is through a contrast with the media's reaction to Barack Obama's candidacy. You have pundits like Andrew Sullivan waxing rhapsodic about how fantabulous it would be for America's image, how great and glorious a morning it will be, when we have an African American taking the oath. You would never hear someone say that about a woman. Even if they're talking about the historic nature of it, they don't talk about it in such grand and soul-cleansing terms. And I think part of it is that in the history of this country, slavery, Jim Crow, and racism have been much uglier, more overt, nasty phenomena than sexism.

Sexism is here, sexism is present, but it's been more paternalistic, and presented in soft, warm and fuzzy terms: "We want to protect the women! It's not that we don't like them." Even when talking about being in battle, it's, "We don't want women to get hurt." Women weren't persecuted for burning their bras. Feminism is a different cause than civil rights. Slavery is kind of a moral scar for America, so we can be poetic about how great it's going to be when we, at last, elect an African American. And we just can't talk that way about electing a woman. Plus, people seem to be embarrassed--women in particular--to talk about sexism, as though the very notion is kind of retro: "Aren't we past that?" I think Gloria Steinem's New York Times Op-Ed was, to some degree, pretty dead-on, and it's something that younger women aren't willing to admit to even if they have experienced it.

Fortini: Yes, I found that. They didn't want to talk about it, saying, "Why are we still dealing with these issues?" or, "We don't want to whine, we don't want to complain." And yet they also felt a little bit chagrined about not having paid attention to these issues earlier. And many of them said that the Gloria Steinem article really spoke to them. And some of them mentioned that Robin Morgan e-mail that was forwarded around, saying, "Look, we don't like the way that Morgan says it, but we agree that these are issues that people don't want to talk about, and that we do feel are real and important."

A lot of women expressed to me that when talking with men, the men brought up exactly what you said--the toxic nature of this country's history of slavery, and that it would be so much more historic and restorative to see an African American president, whereas there just wouldn't be the same kind of symbolic significance with a female president. A lot of women were angry at this tit-for-tat kind of comparison. Many of them who had been women's studies majors pointed out that women in this country were historically the property of their husbands and fathers--while you can't compare it to slavery, women were currency, women were chattel. People don't often think about that.

Cottle: Sexism tends to be vastly more subtle. It's not as though people look at you and say "I'm not going to promote you because you're a woman and all women are X," they'll say, "You're too pushy," or, "You're too abrasive," or, "You're not tough enough." I've come across so many studies where they've done a series of blind comparisons saying "these characteristics belong to candidate X, and he's a man, and the same characteristics belong to candidate Y, and she's a woman," and in case after case you do find a bias against women as leaders. I think this is particularly difficult when you're talking about the presidency because people vote for such inchoate "I want to have a beer with him" reasons. Even more so than when they vote for senator or congressman, they're not voting on policy issues. They say they are, but they're not. They're voting on those weird intangibles about who has good character and leadership ability, and time after time, there's a bias in favor of men, and it's really hard to overcome that. I think that the bind that Hillary's gotten into is that she's had to show that she's strong enough and tough enough and experienced enough, but in the process, her campaign missed the other part of the equation: She isn't "human" enough. And that's a very common Catch-22 among women.

Fortini: I was surprised by the poll findings that have been cited a lot, where people said they would be more likely to vote for a man, black or white, than a woman.

Cottle: The rule of thumb I always use is that people lie to pollsters. Pollsters will tell you that you have to ask, "Are your neighbors ready for a black president," or, "Is America ready for a black president?" There's this hesitance to discuss this. It makes people uncomfortable. Men in particular, who don't really consider themselves 1950s retro kind of guys, get really offended at the idea that such widespread sexism exists. My favorite example was the guy in New Hampshire who yelled, "Iron my shirt!" at Hillary, and USA Today called it a "seemingly" sexist comment. And I was like, what do you mean "seemingly"? This is obviously a sexist comment!

Fortini: I think that's why men who consider themselves enlightened and progressive do get so offended at charges of sexism, because in so many cases sexism is so subtle and so insidious that they--we--don't even realize it's occurring. And most women don't want to be the one finger-pointing and calling it out. And then it snowballs, and builds on itself. I think that's what's been happening over the years, and now we have this situation where latent sexism has really been brought to the fore and people are surprised. It seems like we're in the early '70s, especially over at MSNBC where they're calling her the "grieving widow of absurdity."

Cottle: I think Chris Matthews did more to help her campaign in New Hampshire than possibly anyone else in the country. I know so many women who think he's the devil at this point. And from his perspective, he doesn't see it as remotely a sexist kind of thing. He sees it that he doesn't like the Clintons, and Hillary is a bad candidate, and it has nothing to do with what quite obviously is a weird, sexist strain going through his commentary.

Fortini: This is another case where it gets muddy. People say the enmity is not anti-women, it's anti-Clinton. But the dislike of her has been expressed in decidedly misogynistic forms. Male candidates don't have people putting pictures of them on a urinal ...

Cottle: ... or making nutcrackers out of them.

Fortini: Right, we know all the examples.

Cottle: That said, though, I don't think that's why her campaign failed. I think the interesting thing that will come out of this, when they do the endless autopsies, is that they ran a terrible campaign. A lot of her problem was that they had to do two conflicting jobs, as we talked about. They had to make her seem tough enough and also show the human side of her. Most of the country still thinks of her as an "iron maiden." Aside from that broad messaging problem, which failed to overcome certain stereotypes, they just technically fell apart. That will be what people will focus on. Feminist seminars will talk about the handicaps and benefits of gender in all of this, but I think the hardcore politicos and analysts will talk about the failures in planning.

Fortini: I agree. But one of the things I thought was interesting was The New York Times asking if the media bias was so bad that it would deter future candidates from even running. I disagree with that. Not that coverage wasn't biased--it was--but anyone who's ambitious enough to want to run for a high political office isn't going to be deterred by the fact that they might meet some kind of sexism along the way.

Cottle: The thing that I worry about is that Clinton had certain advantages because of her celebrity that helped her to overcome certain other things--the charisma issue in particular. There are charismatic women, but when you're talking about "presidential charisma," or projecting both strength and warmth, overwhelmingly the people who tend to possess this are men. And Clinton didn't have this, but she made up for it by the fact that she was kind of a rock star in the party, if for no other reason than because of her husband.

Fortini: I worry about that as well. Even if we had a female candidate who had this ineffable, intangible charisma, I think it would be perceived very differently than it would be in a man. When you think about the kind of ease with which Barack Obama conducts himself, I don't know if it would be received as well if he were a woman. The "I want to have a beer with him" factor that we look for in our male candidates--I don't think we necessarily want that from a woman. I don't think we know what we want from our female candidates, frankly.

Cottle: Right. Nancy Pelosi got to be speaker of the House not because she had to work over the entire country--she had to work a specific group of colleagues to get elected, and that requires a different kind of skill set than pitching yourself to millions of Americans. She did not have to win a popular election. It's the same thing with Margaret Thatcher--it was a parliamentary system. Margaret Thatcher didn't have to be broadly appealing in order to get her first shot as Prime Minister. It's not the same system, and it's not the same skill set. That's what's disappointing and disheartening for me. It's not that there aren't women out there on the farm team--people talk about Kathleen Sebelius and Janet Napolitano--but just because you're qualified doesn't mean you can make that next jump. You have to have all those weird intangibles that put you above the rest, and it remains to be seen what we expect that to be in a woman. With so much of this being about personality, it's much harder to see who's going to be the next in line.

Fortini: I think that's what's disappointing for so many women, especially older women. There are a lot of qualified people on the horizon, but who'll really be able to step up? It's going to be a really long time before we see another viable female presidential candidate, though who knows? Maybe Hillary will be back herself.

Michelle Cottle is a senior editor of The New Republic. Amanda Fortini is a writer in Los Angeles.

How Bush’s Allies Support Our Troops

Last week, 22 Senate Republicans voted against the 21st Century GI Bill, legislation that gives four-year college scholarships to veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The House recently passed a similar amendment as part of the Iraq funding bill, despite President Bush's veto threats.

We're airing TV ads in districts across the country whose members of Congress voted against the troops. Take a look at the ad featuring Rep. Michele Bachmann and then forward them to your friends.



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Subject: How Bush's Allies Support our Troops
Message: "Support our troops." For years, President Bush and his allies in Congress have used those words to justify their war in Iraq. But last week, when faced with a simple choice of voting for our troops or against 'em - they voted against 'em. Last week, 22 Senate Republicans voted against the 21st Century GI Bill, legislation that gives four-year college scholarships to veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The House recently passed a similar amendment as part of the Iraq funding bill, despite President Bush's veto threats. The American people need to know that when conservatives say they support the troops, they really only mean they support the war. That's why Americans United for Change is airing TV ads in districts across the country whose members of Congress voted against the troops. Take a look at their new ads: http://www.americansunitedforchange.org/gibill Thanks!

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