Happy Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving a record 44 million of our fellow citizens require supplemental food aid, Food Stamps. The average allotment is $133 per month per person, which breaks out to about $1.47 per meal. MSNBC reports the average Thanksgiving meal with all the trimmings will cost about $50 per person, nearly a twelve day allocation of Food Stamps.

CBS reports that the economic slowdown has caused a spike in the sales of canned Spam. The average price for a can of Spam is $2.62, which equates to about two meals worth of food stamp support.

By way of comparison, The US will spend nearly $700 Billion this year on defense, including the continuing costs for Afghanistan and Iraq. The record spending for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (the SNAP program, informally known as the food stamp program) will be about $78 billion. For those that say that spending at those levels is immoral, I say that America has failed every one of her neighbors when he or she goes to bed hungry on any night. When a a student goes to school with less than adequate nutrition on which to study we fail them and in so doing jeopardize our own future.

Could you live on $1.47 a meal? What would you eat?

Please keep that in mind when you hear that elections are purchased from the gifts of Governement programs. You might also ask what President Obama is doing to help raise those truly in need to a better station in life. When you do, please eliminate any mention of Republicans from the statement you might make and then ask again.

The first step in seeing a better, more honest, and economically vibrant country is to expect it from political leaders in both parties.

Peace, Happy Thanksgiving.

The Immorality of Poverty

I spent considerable time last weekend with the people I wrote about here. I know they want their story told, particularly my friend, CL. Nonetheless, the names have been abbreviated in some cases or avoided in others to at least partially protect their privacy while attempting to tell as much of this story as possible.

This is for CL, who showed more courage and strength to overcome the battles he faced than I might have ever dreamed possible from any person. I love him like my own children, even as I know that our history shapes us in ways that I am only now beginning to understand.

 Juanita was the mother of my friend, CL. She died at the age of 63 on Oct-28, a day before the superstorm Sandy devastated the area.  She was taken to Bellevue Hospital, and there owing to the power outages and more pressing emergency concerns here body decomposed to a point that the funeral required a closed casket.  This it seems to me was the last indignity visited upon Juanita who tried so hard to live a dignified life. Her children, all gathered to say goodbye with dozens of family and friends, longed to see her one last time, but were denied. They say to those whom much is given much is expected.  Juanita was given so little, and yet she gave the full measure of what she had, more I think than many of us could imagine. She adopted a daughter, dropped on her doorstep by a young woman who just decided one day that she could not raise her. Juanita was well known in the area for being vigilant of bad influences that seemed to seep in through every street and from every avenue. CL told me that the women that rose at the funeral to speak about this part of Juanita’s personality was herself duplicitous, one of those people knew provided crack in the projects. Sitting at her funeral Saturday I was reminded of my own mother who also gave without being asked and without expectation of the notice of others. They are both the salt of this fine Earth. I hope they are laughing together now, resting in some quiet place, exchanging stories about the children they loved so much. 

There are many statistics about poverty, and I will consider some of them here, but Juanita and her family are much more than that to me. I struggled much of this past weekend to understand after a history which runs to some 35 years what she and her family are and what they mean to me, but one thing I know for certain, they are not statistics.

Juanita moved to New York sometime in 1966 or 1967. This was a little more than a decade before I arrived in New York. Bobby Kennedy had yet to declare his run for the Presidency, when he would tell America that he believed “as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.” Around this time Martin Luther King was already considering the transformation of the Civil Rights crusade into a movement that would increasingly focus on economic inequality. King was killed by a poor white man, the kind of person that threatened him since Montgomery, but who nonetheless might have benefited from King’s plans. The most profound menace King may have ever presented was the Poor People’s Campaign, meant to address the concerns of poor whites, poor blacks, really the poor of all races, in a single coalition. King was organizing this campaign, participating in a garbage strike in Memphis, when he was assassinated. There is some irony that King’s assassin, a man of modest means once convicted for a grocery store hold-up which netted $120, might have been the kind of poor white that King hoped to lift up in the last campaign of his life. He wanted to confront the economic status quo, but the threat did not go unanswered. In the years since, which essentially parallel Juanita’s time in New York, the safety net in some ways has been strengthened even as the conditions which require its existence still demand redress.

In January, 1965, at his inaugural address, a few years before Juanita arrived in New York, Lyndon Johnson had declared a “War on Poverty”.  In 1964 poverty rates in the US were 19%. By the end of 1973 the rate had dropped to 11%. Johnson made dramatic progress during his administration. Despite his Southern Strategy which sought to demonize minorities and the poor in a cynical attempt to unite whites against the liberal establishment, Federal spending increased during Nixon’s term and poverty continued to drop.

Around the time of the low water mark for poverty, 11% in 1973, things were changing. Somewhere around that time too many Americans just seems to have given up in the effort to promote broad levels of equality across our multi-colored society.  When the Civil Rights movement started to address the problems of the urban North, what seemed a noble effort to desegregate busing in Montgomery, or to attack the entire racist structure in Birmingham, became a pitched battle, especially around the issue of busing. In 1973, almost twenty years after the Brown decision to desegregate schools, more than 60% of African American children went to schools which were predominately black. Today, racial segregation is no longer a requirement of control for the elite power structure. Today almost the same proportion, about 60%, attend schools made up primarily of children from the same Socio-Economic background. In America today, the issue of poverty obscures the legacy of race.

Progress in lowering the rates of poverty was made during the Clinton Administrations and sporadically at other times. But the bottom line is this: Since Johnson made his address there have been 20 years of Democratic control of the White House and 28 years of Republican control. Each party has adequate time to formulate redress for the immorality of poverty. Neither Party has done so. In recent years the Political Parties have at best played lip service to the issue of Poverty in America. The Middle Class suffers, so the poor can be safely ignored.

During these 48 years the country has failed one of its supreme moral tests. In the richest country the world has ever known we have been unable to eliminate or really even reduce the blight of poverty in our communities. When Johnson spoke at his inaugural one in five Americans lived below the poverty line. Today one in seven live in poverty. That is improvement, but one with a catastrophic edge. Children make up a disproportionate amount of the total: Nearly one in five American children live in Poverty. 

Even during the Reagan administration when the country created 20 million jobs, and conservative rhetoric aside government spending ballooned from 20.6% of GDP to 22.4% of GDP, the levels of those living in poverty ended essentially unchanged at 13% of all Americans. Though there are those that will argue about Obamas culpability for it, the four years of his presidency have seen tragic growth in the number of poor Americans to a rate of roughly 15%, quickly approaching 16%. Unchecked the tragedy of increasing and unanswered need will be Obama’s legacy too. Though we could hope otherwise is there reason to expect different? Based on the just concluded campaign which did not address the poor or poverty at all, I think not.

 In 2011 the poverty line was established as income of $23,000 per year for a family of four. The USDA reported in 2007 that a family of four would spend a minimum of 25% of that amount on food. For the horrible circumstances the poverty numbers represent there is good reason that many government programs pay benefits for those who earn as much as 150% of the poverty level standard. In America, especially in her urban centers, it is nearly impossible to properly feed, cloth, and educate children in families living on $23,000 per year or less. More than 60% of those living below the poverty line have someone in the family who works, hence the phrase “working poor”. That phrase starts to explain the scope of the challenge. Despite the ugly polemics, the vast majority of the poor among us either work, or are seniors. Neither employment nor the social safety net prevents poverty. To put it more clearly neither employment nor the social safety net guarantees a life which is not constrained in poverty. 

Taken in tandem, Medicare and Social Security protect senior citizens somewhat from the indignity of poverty. Nearly nine in ten seniors live with incomes above the poverty threshold, the highest of any age group, though as in almost every measure minorities fare worse. A 2008 study from the Center for American Progress (CAP) reported that, “Blacks make up only about 9 percent of the elderly population in the United States, yet represent 21 percent of the elderly population living below the poverty line.” Moreover, poverty rates do not consider the increased costs of medical care for the elderly.  The CAP report also states that reporting on poverty levels for seniors fails to take “into account how much money people have left to meet basic needs after paying for their medical costs. Under this measure, the elderly poverty rate in New York City would have been 32 percent in 2006, compared to 18 percent under the official measure.”

There is a fair argument that Americans are perhaps the most charitable on earth. And yet, America is a country with unprecedented resources which willfully tolerates the extremes of hunger and deprivation in her midst. It is hard to square those two traits of the American personality. Yet it is only with great peril to our society that we ignore those differences or cease striving to close the gap.  For all the talk about gun violence in Chicago, the vast majority of it is blacks killing blacks, or Latinos killing Latinos. Other than the moral burden of the violence the white community is largely untouched. But what society anywhere can call itself enlightened or just and live with such immoral and senseless destruction in its midst.  In Chicago a city with a perennially liberal, supposedly progressive politics, gun violence is at epidemic proportions.  There are those that will say this shows the deep moral the inadequacy of liberalism, if not its complete failure. Yet conservative fixes such as rigid criminal justice structures and incarceration have had their day too. When it pertains to poverty, and its cruel aftermath, both conservative and liberal solutions have come to abject failure. If the case can be made the War on Poverty despite making some progress as in many ways come to failure, can’t the case also be made that the War on Drugs is failure of even a more colossal level. We have incarcerated two generations of blacks, Hispanics and poor whites. What do we have to show for it?

At Juanita’s funeral over the weekend I learned that before coming to New York during the decade of hope and change, the 1960’s, she picked cotton in South Carolina for $2 a day, $10 a week. She moved to New York, in hopes of providing a better life for herself and her family. After arriving in New York, she moved into a two-bedroom, third-floor, apartment in the publicly subsidized Amsterdam Houses, on West 62^nd Street behind the glorious Lincoln Center Performing Arts Center in Manhattan. Rent runs, I think, around $500 per month. Construction on the Amsterdam Houses was started during the great depression, delayed due to WW II, and completed in 1947/48. From the beginning the majority of its inhabitants were African American, many of those descendants of Southern Negroes who lived in the area since the time of the Civil War. Juanita too was a refugee of sorts from that legacy.

http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~history/amsterdamwebexhibit/buildingamsterdamhouses/building1.html

Across the street at Lincoln Center, Marc Chagall’s majestic “The Triumph of Music” faces east on the plaza, a joyous ode to a city of immeasurable wealth and incomparable art. Juanita, her four children, her numerous foster children and her adopted daughter, lived to the west of Lincoln Center, across the street behind the masterpiece. For years the projects, though prison like on the inside with dim hard fluorescent lighting, caged windows, and slow, pre-war elevators which often malfunctioned, had a lovely view across the Hudson to New Jersey. The terrace right outside and to the right of the door to the 62^nd Street building had a grand view. Now that Western border is boxed in completely by the towering monstrosity of Trump Apartments, which run for blocks along West End Avenue. Any illusion that the place would be a safe haven of protection from the cruelty of the mean streets is now replaced by the certainty of confinement. The mask, now removed (or perhaps more accurately secured in place), exposes the Houses for what they were intended to be from that start and what in fact they are: An effort to hide something, to keep something in, rather than to protect by keeping something out. In the shadow of “The Triumph of Music” poverty and want are kept contained and well hidden from public view. America cannot fix what she cannot see.

For eight years or so, I visited the Amsterdam Houses as part of the Big Brothers/ Big Sisters mentoring program. When I started my involvement in the Big Brother’s  program, I was just 21, new to the city and with a lot of time on my hands. I was determined to drink in all that the city could offer. My involvement there was a part of that. I did not realize it would become such a part of my life. Each week, I rode the PATH train from Hoboken, and then caught the 1 train to the 66^th Street station which disgorged its passengers right below Lincoln Center. If I had time, I would head out of the East Exit, sometimes grabbing breakfast at the Greek diner a couple blocks south on Broadway. Walking back to pick up CL, I often spotted New York’s other Statue of Liberty, a 43 foot replica of the green girl which peers down from atop a building on 64^th Street.  Even knowing what I know, and having seen what I have seen, to this day the neighborhood is one of my most favorite in the city.

Together my “Little”, CL, and I went to movies, museums, the beach, and my apartment in Hoboken. Almost all of my friends in New York and New Jersey became surrogate big brothers/ sisters. My roommate Ben and my brother Mark welcomed CL to our place on Washington Street dozens of times. Ben let CL noodle around on his electric base. My boss, Ray, took CL out on his fishing boat, then moored in Staten Island, and let him drive. Eddie and his brother let CL go out on their Catamaran off the beach in Long Branch, a thrill even I missed. Another friend, Jeanette, had CL and I down for many Rumson, New Jersey weekends, some of which were filled with parties of Jay Gatsby proportions. To all mentioned here and those that are not know this: CL remembers all of you with fondness and great gratitude.

CL and I walked all over the city together and spent long hours in the ever changing jewel which is Central Park. Another “Big”, Bob, and I organized several camping trips to an outdoor site, Camp Koinonia, a couple hours away where dozens of “Bigs” and “Littles” stayed in rustic cabins, hiked, cut wood, and enjoyed the open fresh air. Tough boys that had seen horrible stuff, more than most of us might ever imagine, screamed like girls at the sound of a deer in the woods on pitch black knights. In return for what we showed our little brothers, the “Bigs” were exposed to the vibrant, black culture of New York.  Phrases like “Oh, Snap” or “That’s whack” became familiar. I still recall it all so vividly when I drive down the FDR on the East Side of Manhattan and see Keith Haring’s  pop-art “Crack is Wack” playground murals. The boys let their little nappy hair down in the rolling woods at Koinonia. I remember, one of my favorites, Eric, singing Diana Ross’ gay anthem, “I’m Coming Out” as we chopped wood one day with his big brother, Ralph. I love that kid’s smile. Today, god willing, he would be in his 40’s, but all I have of him is the memory of the chipped toothed smile of a 14 year old.

I know I cannot be alone in feeling a certain relief in taking both the boys and ourselves from the harshness of the city and the places they lived on those trips upstate. The projects were hard, unforgiving places. The man who lived with Juanita when I first started to see CL was a tall, lanky frightening looking guy, who I would come to learn beat CL and his sisters until one day Juanita had enough and told him to get out. A heavy fragrance of wasted alcohol, urine, and intermingled violence, pervaded those brick towers in the Amsterdam Houses. I personally never saw a gun or a knife, but I heard so many stories.  I remember visiting one of CL’s friend’s apartments and even midday on a Saturday alcoholic decay could be smelled the moment one crossed the threshold of the entryway.

Walking across the marble plaza of Lincoln Center after leaving the desperation of the Amsterdam Houses I recall more than once ruminating, the famous Springsteen lyric at the end of Jungleland: “The Poets down here don’t write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be” playing on endless loop in my brain.  When we were together this past weekend, CL told me how he had taken money from me to feed his family. “My belly was full” he said, but they had to eat too. He said when I found out I told him just to ask, and from then on he did. I don’t recall that, but maybe he did.  He also reminded me of when I bailed him out after he was arrested tooling around in a stolen car. It was just a dumb stunt, but drugs were already part of the equation then. It has been so long I have forgotten, but CL tells me that I told him that was it. He needed to straighten himself out, but it was already too late.

Whatever was before, Crack wrecked the place. Sometime in the middle eighties, probably 1984 or 1985, Crack rolled onto the neighborhood, destroying nearly everything in its path. I am quite sure I did not recognize the effect it was having on the community immediately, but there were signs. Those loitering on the fringes of the playground had an air of danger to them that I had not felt before. Initially CL was spared, but within a year or two, he too entered the vortex. I knew he was trapped there for a while, but only this past weekend I found out that he spent ten years, trapped by addiction. For years before Crack, I had a casual attitude about casual drug use. I did not dream what we were exposing our friend too. When I first picked up the thread of the story a couple years ago, I was filled with dread and guilt. CL assures me that he made his own decisions, but I will forever wonder over some of the choices I made.

Crack exposed the destruction brought on by the a failure of the mis-named and mis-directed War On Drugs, which led to the highest incarceration rates in the US of any industrialized nation. Six million Americans are in prison or under the supervision of the criminal justice system in America. Of that number more than one million are actually housed in a prison or jail. It is estimated that over ¾ of those now in the criminal justice system have a history of some level of drug abuse. Re-incarceration rates are much higher for those with drug problems.

In the criminal justice system, race’s pernicious role in the problems of poverty in America are exposed. Only now are states starting to address the incredible variance in sentences between those handed out for cocaine convictions (largely white) and those handed out for crack (largely black and Hispanic). But today 39% of the prison population is black men, and incarceration rates are six times that for white men. In New York, the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws initiated in 1973 were only moderately revised in 2009. Crack still carries stiffer penalties than Cocaine, but judges at least have more flexibility to order treatment, which is difficult, and often unsuccessful the first time tried. Pulling oneself up by the boot straps is not a policy. It is a slogan of deaf blindness and moral avoidance. 

It is estimated that even though the vast majority, something more than 75%, of those in the criminal justice system, would benefit from drug treatment, perhaps as little as 10% actually get it. To be sure the reasons for this is some cases can be traced to the addicts unwillingness to seek treatment, but the overwhelming reason is one of limited resources devoted to treatment, and in many cases the lack of state laws set up to direct treatment as a first option. A for-profit system of jails and the political muscle it can harness is a major contributing factor to the slow progress in reform. Penal institutions in the US now “employ” over 300,000 inmates at wages of less than $1.00 per hour contributing to an intense economic motivation to house poor whites, Hispanics and African Americans in penal institutions. There things can and do go bad quickly. Stories of jail being worse than the streets are not cliché. CL told me of one friend of his that went up for a relatively short stay that was extended into a relatively lengthy stay after a fight to “survive” (his word, not mine) turned ugly.

Nonetheless, incarceration can cost the states $30,000 or more per year per inmate. These exceed by a factor of between four and ten times that of treatment. Only a society that values Old Testament retribution and unencumbered capitalism over reform of the human beings in their charge would authorize such obscene expenditures. This is especially true when one considers that $30,000 per year would pay for an extraordinary college experience for the children of the Amsterdam houses and elsewhere across America’s poor urban and decrepit rural landscapes.

Last weekend I asked CL how he paid for his addiction during those ten years, and he told me he sold to others. Though sheer providence CL avoided prison. Both of his sisters were not as lucky.  Both spent time in prison, one through multiple trips. Treatment never caught up to her and it is just in the past year, perhaps because of Juanita’s declining health she finally kicked the habit. I will pray for her now, as she makes plans to move into her mother’s old Amsterdam Houses Apartment, a place of great temptation and too easy access to drugs even today.  It was shocking to hear CL speak with some authority on why Crack addiction was so much more difficult than heroin, which at least can offer the promise of methadone for withdrawal. Crack is cold turkey, crawling skin, sweats etc. Still he did it, and after ten lost years, he moved away from New York and for the past 15 years he has lived and worked in North Carolina.  He has had some martial ups and downs, but he has three kids, and he provides for them, has been working steadily, and lives a quiet sedentary life, perhaps too much so as recently health problems have become a concern.

CL’s only brother is still caught in addiction. Brother “J” told me three times last Saturday that I had “saved his life”. While it is true that I helped to bail him from jail for a minor offense that a suburban kid would have escaped with a perp walk back to Mom and Dad’s, I did not save him from anything. Nonetheless, each time he uttered his words of gratitude I told him plainly I did not “save you for this”.  He is a shell of the man I knew 25 years ago. He might not make it.

While my friends and I were recreationally experimenting, in the urban milieu of poor New York, if there was experimentation it could be dangerously short lived. A few days of fun, could and often did lead to a decade or more of addiction, prison, and in many cases death. That lanky guy that beat CL, became addicted to heroin and succumbed to AIDS, the other epidemic then sweeping New York.  To this day Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign rings as a liberal mantra devoid of humanity, and disconnected from action or results. This is solving the drug problem the way protected, isolated whites would like to see it solved. It bears no resemblance to the world, certainly none to the world of Juanita’s four children, all of whom succumbed at one time or the other. Just Say No required little engagement on the part of the sloganeers. Real issues of poverty, deprivation, as well as cycles of violence, fear, and isolation need not even be addressed. Just Say No. As a moniker for a solution it enrages me.

Throughout this weekend I kept thinking about victims and villains. We can easily see Mr. Lanky as the villain he was, but dead as he is, is he also a victim? When he was 10, might he also been running the length of the playground, trying furiously to burn his adolescent energy. Liberals like me, often parade around their good works, but here in New York the most liberal of big liberal cities we house the poor in decrepit, life draining prisons, with pleasant names like the Amsterdam Houses. Who really gives a crap about Mr. Lanky, gone to where he belongs many would say?  Those propagating empty solutions like Just Say No retain great pride for the rallies they attended and the chants of the children, but their willful ignorance camouflages the urgency for real solutions. Concern like that might actually cost them something. Who are the heroes and who are the villains?

I told CL over the weekend when we visited that I could not believe Juanita lived in that poorly lit apartment, with the mis-matched floor tiles, for 40-plus years.  What should be transitional housing has become a come as you please prison for the urban underclass. Locks are not required to retain the inmates. Most feel they cannot escape and few try.

This leads to cascading problems in education. Neither liberal nor conservative mantras offer much in the ways of solutions. Charter schools, which offer “choice” are often performing no better than their pure public counterparts in raising test scores. Recent court decisions in some states have led to a reconciliation of financial aid available to poor districts as compared to rich ones, but all the money in the world will not repair the breach of a fatherless home, even worse one with a drug addicted mother. The only thing more infuriating than non-committal liberal platitudes are conservative vows of de-facto abandonment. Conservatives would, if allowed, cut school aid, increase class sizes, reduce Pell grants which help those of poor and working class backgrounds attend college. In their place they propose Charter Schools, weakened teachers’ unions, and up from the boot straps bullshit. I am no expert, but it seems that true as it is in districts that service poor as well as more well off students, at minimum what schools need is a broad mandate to experiment in pursuit of better performance.

Solutions can be found in almost every area of concern, but legitimate news outlets are too busy wasting pixels and ink on a silly CIA sex scandal which will garner more attention in four days than the causes, and possible solutions to deadening chronic poverty have generated in the past four years. Publishers of information, fed by advertisers who desire nothing more or less than eyeballs which may consider the purchase of their products, are only partially to blame. Americans must demand action too. In the 60-plus days since the four Americans were killed in the American embassy in Benghazi upwards of 2,000 were touched by gun violence.

In housing, there is ample evidence that political decisions were made in Chicago by the late Mayor Daley (See The Promised Land, by Nicholas Lehman), and New York by Robert Moses, as well as cities large and small across the country, to carve up the great metropolitan centers. The reasons range from benign paternalism and neglect to overt racism. Either way, neighborhoods of the poor and working poor fell victim to “Urban Renewal”. (This includes my Father’s parents, long gone now, but forced from their home many years ago in Chicago). We can start to revitalize these communities by breaking up the projects. Progressive governments across the Northeast, specifically in several communities in Northern New Jersey, and elsewhere have torn down the easily identified brick prison projects, built during the great depression and for a decade or two after. In their place dispersed low rise, mixed income housing has gone up.  

Then it’s all about jobs, jobs, jobs. The Republicans pilloried Obama for the critically high unemployment rate of 14.3% in the African American community. Fair enough. As the two parties look for ways to reduce the deficit, something all Americans should want, we ought to demand that jobs programs especially for those on the lower end of the economic ladder are built into the short term plan. Long term we ought to expect deficit reduction. Short term we need to put America back to work.

On criminal justice, we should seek to meet a goal of reducing the number of prison inmates, particularly those convicted of non-violent drug crimes, by a minimum of 25% over the next ten years. This is a national problem, but the solution must administered by states. It affects big liberal states like New York and California as well as smaller states with deep red conservative governance. With the massive reduction in expense which smaller prison populations would generate states ought to commit at least one new space in drug treatment for every proposed prison furlough, with the balance going towards education. Every state with an expanding prison population and inadequate drug treatment services which tries to make the case that it must raise College tuition due to budgetary restrictions ought to be challenged to explain their priorities, both in budgetary and human terms. Pressure needs to be brought on state legislators and governors to reduce the warehousing of minority men in prison labor camps.  

Finally, Americans of better economic circumstance need to look at themselves. Liberals need to acknowledge that despite the billions spent on programs to help the poor, profound chronic poverty continues to fester in our communities. Money alone is not an answer. Across the gamut programs which are successful and cost effective ought to be replicated and expanded. Those with poor track records of success ought to be dropped. Johnson unleashed a wave of state and local level experimentation with his Great Society programs. Though more experimentation is warranted, over time some of these programs were institutionalized with limited results at the National level which has opened the entire effort up to charges of cronyism, inefficiency, and ineffectiveness which were often true. Beyond the purely cynical but ultimately effective politics of the Southern Strategy which caused much of the anti-poverty effort to be viewed through a black-white prism, some of the programs that did not work were protected by entrenched interests. Experimentation can be a great thing, but liberals ought to be able to acknowledge the danger of entrenched bureaucracies, especially of the liberal variety, which in their essence are conservative protectors of a miserable status quo. Liberalism looses the argument every time they refuse to acknowledge that. Reflexive liberal reaction to any reductions in any program do not serve the public dialogue we need to have or the citizens we claim to want to serve. Merely making the case that the Government wastes far more in welfare for large corporations or the rich, while true, does not raise one woman or one child from poverty.

For the right in the current political climate of demonization it is difficult to see a way forward for Conservatives. However, we must acknowledge that these problems are so deep and the resolution of them so critical to our nation that no institution, organization or person, can be excluded from the effort. While money cannot be the only solution, for some problems especially chronic unemployment there is no substitute for it. Conservatives uncomfortable with government interaction in the economy ought to propose their own solutions to train and employ the long term unemployed. This can take the form of private partnerships or quasi-governmental Public-Private partnerships. The only minimum requirement ought to be a commitment to action.

When I walked from CL’s apartment for the last time on Saturday a heavy feeling settled on me. Though I had not been on those steps in 20 years, there was still some finality to that departure. Perhaps I thought I would not be back there before, but now some permanence to that idea trailed me through the projects.  As CL told me this weekend, “It was really rough, but it was where we lived so we made the best of it.” On the steps heading out that door there was a younger Mom with two little boys, perhaps six or seven, but so close in age and appearance they could have been twins. Back in the day I would have called them nappy headed. They were beautiful children with bright eyes and scooters of the type favored by my son.  I looked at them for moment, tapped one on the head. I wanted to tell them good days are ahead. Keep your hope up. Work hard. CL made it, you can too. The world is there for whatever you make it. I know CL believes that now. Perhaps he barely got out, but he did make it. His mother pushed a lot, and I tugged a little and one kid made it over the wall. Even 25 years later I cannot express what that means to me and the profound effect that experience as had on my life and shaped in almost all ways who I am. Perhaps there is reason for hope. Perhaps that is what all of us need to start with--conservative, liberals and the poor themselves—even as we can agree that poverty especially at the levels currently seen in the United States is immoral, there is still reason for hope.  There is always reason for hope. Anger is good. Hope is better.

They Call it Democracy

Let's not let the fact that Mitt was a horrific candidate mask what really happened on Election Day and is happening in America. I was relieved and somewhat surprised that Americans found it within them to rise above their racial ambivalence to re-elect a black man for President. Now having had the chance to see the details about the electorate, particularly the demographic breakouts, there is reason to be even happier. Moreover, the results give us some perspective as to why for the last four years there has been such deep, sometimes nearly hysterical, animosity towards the President.

The good news is that the electorate, at least during Presidential races, has shown itself to be younger, more racially diverse, and more socially liberal than I even imagined. I’m not sure this extends to matters of the economy and fiscal issues. This election process has shown that Americans in many ways are fiscally conservative. Obama and the Dems will take a pasting the next time around if they do not get the debt under control, and they ought to. The Republicans new found concerns regarding deficit spending are a canard, but I still felt one of their most effective attack lines was the $16 trillion debt.

Though Obama’s share of the white vote was down a little, his support there did not vary far from what other Democrats had been pulling in recent elections. That’s an encouraging sign and suggests a level of maturity in the electorate that the recent campaign might suggest wouldn’t be there. Even more satisfying is the fact that we now know that the electorate is made up of increasing numbers of politically engaged African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and young people. Republicans took a shellacking among young voters and women. As Andy Borowitz said, “I guess rape wasn’t the sure fire campaign issue the Republicans thought it would be.” It’ll be interesting to see if the coalition can hold together after the transcendent Barack Obama leaves the stage. At the moment there are reasons to be both hopeful and pessimistic about that.

Obama took 75% of the votes generated by an increasingly vibrant and engaged Latino electorate. Based on current birth rates, Latinos add 50,000 voting age individuals to the electorate every month. That’s 600,000 freshly minted voters per year. Thanks to self-deportation and other heinous rhetoric, and a few well timed initiatives by the President, Latinos  voted overwhelmingly Democratic. I heard someone say, a Republican in fact, that it’s hard to rally someone to your side when they think you hate them. There is much talk now among Republicans about the need for a change in rhetoric. It makes you wonder if their policies will adjust to the new reality, or whether softer language alone will be enough to change votes?

America is becoming a truly interracial society at a breathtaking rate. Republicans will either adapt to that new reality or perish. I suspect they will adapt, but I have to laugh when I see Tea Party androids having their post-election press conference blaming it all on the weakness of their moderate candidate. In general I heard very few Republican voices that really seemed to get what happened.

The President won a close election in a complex and difficult environment with still near desperate economic circumstances meshing with hyper-partisan and mean spirited political environment. Though there are encouraging signs, this is no guarantee or harbinger of the future. Much has been made of the Romney lies, and there were many, but Republicans will long remember the Obama ad which accused Romney of killing that man’s wife. With systematic voter suppression inspired by Republicans who sensed the demographics were against them it was ugly. It’s ironic to me that the same political leaders that set out to suppress votes in poor, and minority communities, now having lost can’t seem to understand that what they tried to address with their suppression actually came to pass. African American and Latino voters turned out in droves for the president, sometimes waiting an obscene six, seven or eight hours to vote. #Stayinline was all over twitter.

Obama’s opponent was a politically tone deaf, clumsy oaf who‘s comments on the 47% could not be explained away. It’s funny now to think of all those who mocked Nate Silver’s 538, prediction of 90.7 certainty, or a Florida vote which would go 49.797 Obama and 49.775 Romney (Florida remains  unresolved) who did not see the 47% calculation with the same level of derision for the way it was: A number plucked from the air. Silver shocked and shamed the punditry class with a spreadsheet. When you create multi-level arithmetic formula you get results like 49.797. It wasn’t romantic, but it was real, and it turned out to be more fact based than the rising tide of emotion that the Republicans claimed. What a surprise. Romney pulled 47% from his ass, just like that little lizard Dick Morris’ who projected a Romney landslide (325 electoral votes). The fuzzy and foolish math splattered all over the right wing media machine was a perfect metaphor for a Republican Party that denies climate science and wants to replace Evolution teaching in the schools with Creationism. I believe what I believe, the facts will not interfere with that. How fitting for a campaign that vowed they would not be restrained in any way by fact checkers that in the end their own pollsters clearly didn’t check the facts about the changing nature of the electorate.  To a person the Republican establishment was shocked. The look of utter shock on Sarah Palin’s  face on Tuesday was priceless.

As the campaign went on I was really amazed that even though Romney made it clear that he would be willing to abandon the conservatives he had courted with severity, none of them balked. Until he lost. Both Hannity and Limbaugh took the high road yesterday. Neither went after the candidate, for which they harbored such doubts, with full fire. Both called him a good and decent man, perhaps too decent for the likes of Obama, bla, bla, bla. But across the country other conservatives are coming forward with harsher words. Neither the grass roots organizers nor the high profile talking heads seem inclined at the moment to reconsider the wisdom of their policy proposals.

Ironically, the conservative rank and file does seem to sense something in the bigger picture though, something troubling and worrisome for them and their world view. Though it cannot be discussed in proper company or the media I’m convinced that it’s from this reality that so much of the Anti-Obama rhetoric has been so overblown and at times hateful. White men are getting the idea that they are losing whatever grip they ever had or thought they had on power and they are not happy. Perhaps they do NOT hate Obama as a black man. Even the most bilious and spiteful conservatives I have spoken to deny it. Perhaps what they really despise is what the President represents.

Obama is the living breathing emblem of America headed to a new day of cross racial coalitions, tolerance, and ambition, one where whites on their own will no longer control the agenda unless they are engaged in coalitions with others. That’s creating a lot of anger, from which Limbaugh, Hannity, and the others feed, pulling in big ratings and whopping big salaries far beyond the comprehension of most of their listeners. There is some irony in working class whites complaining at the altar of these rich commentators to assuage their anxieties about what they perceive to be their increasing lack of power in the society. Perhaps this is power they never really had, but don’t tell them that. Limbaugh and Hannity will sell far more soap, and get far more people to invest at Goldline International if they can somehow convince their fearful audiences that the return of their power is right around the corner, if only…

White Southerners, about half of whom consider themselves evangelicals, are feeding at the government teat at astounding levels. Simultaneously they are pissed off that Government is giving all their tax money to the socially irresponsible, people, I guess, who might look a lot like them. Mississippi, a state where more than one in four people relies on the government health program for the poor, Medicaid, gave about 55% of their vote to Romney. The Ryan budget plan called for a 30% reduction in Medicaid. In Alabama, a state where about one in four of its citizens is reliant on Supplemental Nutritional Assistance (Food Stamps) to sustain themselves and their families, 61% voted for Romney. The Ryan plan called for a 17% cut in Supplemental Food Aid. This would require the elimination of close to 300,000 Alabamans from the plan.

There is ample evidence that the conservative voter is angrier than they are informed. Fox News is at the forefront of that, but by far not the only cause. Mississippi, Alabaman and Louisiana lead the nation when counting the number of its citizens with a High School education or less. A cursory review of levels of government assistance across the deeply conservative south suggests that any ire regarding the appropriation of government funds could easily be pointed inward rather at Washington. The anger though often directed at what they perceive as wasteful government spending, could also be attributed to chronic crushing poverty throughout the region which weighs on both whites and blacks, though disproportionately on blacks, with bitter force.  

Across the South, the heart of the Republican Party’s base, unprecedented demographic shifts are taking place. These changes leave Southern white males, already well behind their northern counterparts in economic terms, holding on to a shrinking majority of political power in their home states. Latinos, which passed the 10% threshold in the nationwide vote for the first time, now make up 8% of the population in Georgia. Though they are only 4% of the total, the Hispanic population in Alabama has risen 150% in the last decade. African Americans make up an additional 27% of Alabama’s population. Despite the growth of the Latino population there, or maybe because of it, the Alabama Legislature still passed extremely hostile anti-immigrant legislation in 2011. This is now being met with loud complaints from the business and agricultural communities for the negative effect it is having on business across the state and the labor shortages it has created in certain areas of the economy.  A little further west, there is talk that a generation from now Texas could be a blue state, which will shock the hell out of the power structure there.

Considering the tortured history of race relations, across the region, and the economic scarcity that still pervades, it is not hard to see or understand a rising tide of anger. While much is made of the extreme allegiance African Americans show towards the Democratic Party which has not always reciprocated with respect, the same should be said for Southern Whites and the Republican Party. There is nothing in recent history, let’s call that 30 years, which indicates the Republican Party has any proposals to truly lift the economic circumstances in the States of the old Confederacy, the rock solid though hemorrhaging base of the Party. Ironically the last politician who made any overt effort in that direction was Bobby Kennedy, a Democrat, in 1968. Yet it may take another decade or two, if not longer, until we see that race based allegiance to the Republican Party is mitigated.

I have often felt that there was a racial element to the extreme hostility we have seen in some quarters directed at the President. What the election’s results did though was expose the much larger issue: White male political power is shrinking at a rate so fast that in some quarters it cannot even be acknowledged. So the candidate was weak. Self-deportation, and a whole stage of candidates for the nomination jockeying to see who could appear most hostile to immigrants had nothing to do with the loss. Senator Lindsey Graham, R-SC, had the best response to this which he presented even before the defeat: “We’re not losing 95% of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics and voters under 30 because we’re not being hard-ass enough.”

Cross racial coalitions, which would dramatically increase the political power of the South, are not on anyone’s radar, except of course that of David Plouffe, David Axelrod, and Jim Messina, the President’s political team who exploited the lack of understanding to the new demographic reality held by the other side to great effect. While liberals like me fretted over the polls, going to Silver’s blog for reassurance with some regularity, Obama’s political team were executing a plan built on spreadsheets, math, practicality, and a clear understanding of the cross-racial, coalition they needed to build. They were certain all along they would win and they did. In one state The Romney team crowed about knocking on 75,000 doors. In that same state The Obama team knocked on 350,000. Jim Messina said that over the weekend before the election they knocked on five million doors. Considering that that only nine states were truly fought over, and the vote totals will be around 110 million people, that’s an impressive and focused effort. Among other challenges to the Republican Party add this: The Democrats outworked them.

In the end though this election is about more than spreadsheets and graphs or how many women, gays, or people of what color voted for which candidate. Elections matter, and for almost everyone on either side it seemed this one mattered more than most. All the demographic analysis, the targeted door to door canvasing and phone calls we heard about, these were just the tools of victory. In the end this election was about whether or not any attempts would be made to slow the onslaught of global warming or whether drill, baby, drill will become the mantra of our own destruction. It’s about whether Americans have any social contract with each other, or whether it’s literally every man for himself. It’s about how Americans will define fair. Will there will be regulation at all of the powerful financial interests that nearly brought America to its knees through their greed and corruption only to climb out quickly with the help of billions in TARP money. EDven then they still left the poor Joe’s and Jane’s of the US with  underwater mortgages, and quick trigger foreclosure procedures. Many of those by the way proved to be illegal and have been prosecuted, something we can be sure would not have happened under Romney.

We can be glad that the Koch brothers, Shelly Adelson, and about a 1,000 other Americans of endless wealth blew hundreds of millions, actually nearly a billion, on an election from which they achieved very little except an intransigent, Tea Party dominated, House of Representatives. Though heartened by the voting public’s rejection of all that advertising, we should remain concerned about the deep corruption of money that has been unleashed. Excepting Bernie Sanders, there are no signs that anything will be done to drain the pond of that poison. We can take a deep breath of gratitude that the rights of women will not be reset to something more closely approximating Mad Men than the enlightened 21^st century we thought we were in. Even so we sit stunned and shocked with what we have heard about women from well-educated but ideologically blind men over these past months. On a more positive note the fight for gay rights marches on, with clear indications this election cycle that the public in many cases favors a more expansive view of what those rights are.

“I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.

America, I believe we can build on the progress we've made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunity and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try.

I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We're not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America.

And together with your help and God's grace we will continue our journey forward and remind the world just why it is that we live in the greatest nation on Earth.

Thank you, America. God bless you. God bless these United States.” Barack Obama, Nov-06, 2012

An Election About Something

Well, Election Day is here and the conventional wisdom about the campaign seems to have shifted. Even liberals like me are pondering dramatic moves to the center as we consider the alternatives of gridlock,  compromise, and problem solving. For all of the fire generated by the most committed liberals and the most committed conservatives, the truth is the vast middle wants nothing more than to see progress.

Lest we forget in the midst of all the ad hominem declarations that this race was about nothing, let us recall that, notwithstanding some of the incredibly petty arguments, at moments this race was about something, something quite large.

Including the largely unregulated outside PAC’s that supported them, each candidate raised and spent about $1 Billion. The Center for Responsive Politics reports $858 million was raised by outside groups brought into existence by the Citizen’s United decision. Of that amount CRP reports that 69% went to fund Romney's effort. This is not surprising, considering the super wealth that was the source of the vast majority of this money. Consider this: 900 individuals contributed 60% of the $858 million, over $500 million to the Super PAC’s and other deregulated groups. Just 149 individuals, 149, contributed over 1/3 of the total of $858 million.

When you hear all the plaudits and false claims of only in America Democracy today remember that out of a country of 315 million people, less than 1,000 citizens made a concerted effort to buy this election, the overwhelming majority of them for a conservative candidate that promised to lower their taxes. As America seems to work to sell its highest office to the highest bidder, let us remember that around the world, in Egypt, in Burma, in Tunisia and in Libya, and in dozens of other countries around the world elections are also taking place. America has a unique claim to unencumbered, non-military, handovers of the levers of Government, but increasingly we are not alone. Increasingly the unique dynamic in our elections, as compared to much of the rest of the world, is the influence of those on the extreme fringes of wealth and privilege on our electoral process.

At the moment, the country seems on the precipice of making a decision which flies in the face of the avalanche of advertising which attempted to bury the President. But, and this is a rather large BUT, that will not settle the argument over what has become an undemocratic process to unprecedented extremes. That is something, a pretty big deal.

On Healthcare there can be little argument that this election is a referendum on the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare. Going back to 2010 when the Republicans swept into control of the House largely on their commitment to repeal the ACA, how one side or the other, one candidate or another, positioned themselves on this issue was largely a litmus test as to the true commitment to Party. On the Republican side this forced even the Stepfather of ObamaCare, the Republican candidate Mitt Romney, to abandon his own authorship and promise to repeal.  Every single Republican candidate promised to do the same during the nomination process.

For many Republicans repeal is not adequate. The larger goal has become to separate Government from any Healthcare Guarantee for America. To that end the Ryan Budget proposed draconian cuts to Medicaid, the Healthcare program for the poor. The nearly 1/3 cut over the next ten years would sever a basic safety-net cord for millions of our fellow citizens. By contrast Obama’s healthcare plan would increase by 17 million the number of Americans on Medicaid, with the Federal government picking up the cost for the working poor who can neither pay for their insurance, or the penalties for lack of coverage. One can argue the merits of that one way or the other, but for those of us informed on these issues and making our decisions accordingly, it cannot be said that this is nothing.

In the same vein, The Romney/Ryan plan envisions eliminating Medicare as a guaranteed program for seniors. Romney did say this would only affect those who have yet to reach the age of 55. There is substantial disagreement as to the wisdom of this approach which is once again an ideologically driven crusade to separate Government from any role in Healthcare for Americans. Arguments can be made that on a voluntary basis those of us with no faith in the future of these programs ability to pay their promised benefits ought to be able to opt out. But it cannot be denied that this would leave a poorer, perhaps sicker and more desperate, group who cannot afford to leave Medicare, with diminished benefits and lesser guarantees of medical services. Whether government ought to provide a minimum standard of Healthcare for all, or just turn the whole shebang, at current levels 17% of GDP, over the private sector is a pretty big deal.  

On matters of war and peace, despite Candidate Romney’s 11^th hour conversion, there is every reason to believe he would have pursued a more aggressive, militarist policy around the world, and especially in Iran. Many, if not most, of his foreign policy advisers served in the Bush administration and were the architects of the disastrous foray into Iraq.

How many of us noticed the stories in the last week regarding the deep divisions in the Israeli political establishment on Iranian policy? In a story published in Haaretz, and picked up the NY Times, two years ago Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Barak ordered the heads of the Israeli Defense Force as well as Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, to prepare for a strike on Iran. In an extraordinary step, the military leaders refused the civilian orders for fear it would lead to war. Despite the rhetoric, both the Israeli and American public, while greatly concerned about the nuclear program in Iran, are deeply uncertain about any rush to war. It bears remembering, that last February and March when Netanyahu was in the US pounding the drumbeat of war, candidate Romney was suggesting the provactive step of having the US send additional carrier groups to the Middle East. Meanwhile,  President Obama was strengthening sanctions and arguing for time to allow the impact of the sanctions to affect the Iranian public. The Iranian currency, the Rial, has gone from 11,000 to the dollar in 2011 to over 36,000 to one today meaning the currency has about 1/3 of its purchasing power from just a year and a half ago. Various factions of the Iranian power structure are now arguing among themselves as to whether the government is taking appropriate steps, and responding adequately to the crisis the sanctions have created within the Iranian economy.  For Americans impatient with the pace of change in Iran, let us not forget the claims of a quick and easy transition in Iraq. Let us recall the 4,300 American soldiers lost, the eight year battle to leave. The Iranian military is substantially more powerful than what the Iraqis had, and the population of Iran is nearly double that of Iraq. Most all Americans harbor deep anxiety about the potential of Iran to join the group of countries in possession of nuclear weapons. The question is how does America handle that threat, and how to we work with our allies to prevent it. Matters of War and Peace, of calm reason or hot-headed reactionary militarism are pretty big deals, pretty big somethings.  

In  the final analysis, in many cases-- whether the environment or energy policy-- it’s hard to tell what the real differences between these two candidates would be. Both have offered stealth policy platforms designed to achieve election, even at the cost of a clear mandate to govern. Romney has talked of a tax cut plan which will reduce everyone’s rates, not eliminate favored deductions, and increase revenue for the purpose of balancing the budget. This is impossible, especially when tied to increases in military spending which even the Pentagon does not feel are warranted.  Obama has called for a Grand Bargain of Tax Cuts, and “Entitlement Reforms” without spelling out exactly what they will be. Will he propose raising the retirement age? Will he agree to means test Social Security and Medicare, and in so doing require people that have paid into these programs for their entire working lives be forced to give up some or all of their benefits. Conservatives could go batshit if that happens, and the 2014 election in this age of demagoguery could easily turn BOTH the Senate and the House Republican. Would the middle, which claims to want compromise, hold?  

The perspective of the leader who would lead us into these dialogues is a pretty big something. While the President has been non-committal, his opponent has stood by in silence during some  ugly incidents in the primaries. His coalition, if we are to believe it, is still fighting battles through a nearly Neanderthal lense on abortion, contraception, and even the role of women in the workplace and the society at large. Rather than honor the service of gay men and woman fighting for our country around the world, parts of the Republican coalition includes those who would boo even at the mere conversation about the integrity of their rights as American citizens. The Republican candidate stood mute, when during one of the debates hooligans shouted that we should “let him die” in reference to someone without health insurance who contracts a crippling disease. When Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a whore, candidate Romney said that was not language he would have used. Comments on the irresponsible moochers, the 47%, notwithstanding, the Republican candidate's terror with offending anyone on his right flank, makes one wonder how he would govern our large and diverse nation.  Can someone who sides with Joe Arpaio be counted on to protect the rights of All Americans? Can someone who calls for the harshness of self-deportation as a statement of his policy on immigration be counted on to govern with any compassion for the most vulnerable among us?    

American can be quite proud that we elected our first African American President, but this election is all about two separate and distinct candidates, and the content of their character. That is really something, a pretty big deal.

The Ideological Divide

My family’s power came on yesterday afternoon around 3:30. We were rescued from our island of cold darkness by dozens of electrical workers from Ohio who made their way through our neighborhood like a swarm of bees, finding every malfunctioning part—some of which I was not even aware of—until every last pole was fixed and every last wire was mended and reattached. Though you might not have known it from my endless complaint we actually had better than almost everyone us else who is truly suffering from the storm around the tri state region. While thousands of our fellow New Yorkers lost everything, we just lost power. There is no damage to our home and other than a few down branches no real damage to our property. Even our lack of power was mitigated greatly by a good Samaritan, a man my wife knows at her job, who stopped by after just a day and a half of darkness with a generator and gas to run it.  We could only draw power to heat a room at a time, and run a few lights and a space heater or the fridge, but as I told my wife even though it was maybe a 10% improvement in the quality of our circumstances it felt like 90%.

Next weekend and for maybe several weekends we intend to pay back that tribute by heading to the real disaster zones and offering whatever help we can. 

Media junkie that I am I was glad to have my smart phone which in absence of almost everything else was my primary source of information. I followed Cory Booker in Newark (inspiring and endlessly caring), The City Of Hoboken (overwhelmed), Governor Christie (fiercely determined), and half a dozen news sites on Twitter. This allowed access to the full range of news sources which I consume daily, and other than Morning Joe and AC 360, I didn’t miss much. I posted on Facebook several times a day and received  encouraging words from childhood and FB friends throughout which meant a lot, even as their kind words reinforced an image I have of myself which is unappealingly narcissistic and needy. Yes we were uncomfortable and inconvenienced, but we were hardly suffering. People in Breezy Point, Queens  Staten Island, and along the Jersey shore and the southern coast of Long Island are suffering in ways we can barely grasp.

Beyond the disaster coverage I caught glimpses of the political undertow pulling both right on left. More than one FB “friend” on the left posted the widely published photo of the President and Governor Christie and noted with contempt that Christie sure seemed to change his tune about the President now that he needed Federal action. Then yesterday after the power came up I noticed that a guy I knew 25 years ago, someone who is now fiercely conservative commenting on the picture with even more disgusted bile, ranting about why there were no similar pictures of the President embracing the families of those who died in Libya.  It has been widely reported that conservatives have gone batsh** over the New Jersey Governor’s positive and actually supportive interaction with the President. For those taking political shots from either side of the ideological divide we can be sure of one thing: No individual on either extreme really cares about those people who are really suffering right now. While there are thousands, tens of thousands, whose only possession is the clothes on their backs, these ideologues on both left and right have been the most exposed, their ideology just a mask for their contempt, their naked hatred exposed as having no connection to humanity or the common good.

We have seen photo op charity which chills, especially when compared to genuine charity which heals and unites. Thousands are either already engaged or are mobilizing right now to help those in need and to alleviate suffering. The political affiliation of the needy or the Samaritans matters little now.  While noting the curiosity of the  electrical workers being from Ohio, I was disinterested when I came upon them yesterday as to their party affiliation or even-- if the truth be told-- whether their rescue mission would keep them from voting in the most critical state in this most critical election. I wanted heat and I was and I am ever so grateful for their service.

I have also heard the absurd argument made by conservatives that challenges like this show the lie of the Federal paternalism. Charity they say is what really matters now. I heard one ask “When a tree falls on your house, do you call the Fire Department or your neighbor?” While this particular commentator allowed that both calls would be made, he really wanted to emphasize the importance of the neighbor, which is actually and truly fine, so far as that goes.  But when you, your neighbor, and really every family in your community has seen everything demolished, has lost everything there is NO substitute for coordinated Federal, State, and Local action.  Charity might get you some temporary power, or get you some warm food and blankets. Charity can mobilize more quickly and perhaps with more precision to get to those in need than all branches of government combined, but it has neither the resources nor the muscle to put things back together. Anyone who has seen the vast images of utter devastation knows that. Those making an argument otherwise are so far on the ideological extreme they are lost in nostalgia for a country that no longer exists if it ever did. I find this nostalgia ironic in that it masquerades as empathy for others, while only exhibiting ideological detachment from humanity.

In the end everyone knows that funding legislation will need to pass Congress in order to allow communities to put themselves back together and to make people whole again. Conservatives will argue, and have already done so, that any new spending should be offset with spending decreases elsewhere. Liberals will argue that that wasn’t the case after Katrina and ought not to be now. There will be a tug of war across the divide. Let us hope that it does not crush hope, delay help, or prolong suffering as we saw with the Zadroga Act, the healthcare bill for 9-11 first responders, which did not pass until 2010, nine years after the terrorist attack.  

Let us hope too, that the events of this past week help all Americans to focus on our communities, the need for united action and less on the issues that divide us. America must unite to rebuild and heal the communities devastated by Sandy. The hurricane has generated an uptick in those that believe that climate change is real, about 60%. But the power of the energy companies to stifle this sentiment and postpone government action is manifest and profound.  Without mentioning candidates both big oil and big coal have run thousands of ads highlighting seemingly middle class, just like you and me, “energy voters”. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence big energy has created seeds of doubt about the reality of climate change. One has to wonder what will it take for Americans to see that the storming is breaking?

Back in Washington liberals are already lining up on their side of the divide to protect any movement on entitlements. They will argue that nothing ought be done until the rich are once and truly made to pay their fair share. I have sympathy for this argument as an intellectual exercise, even as a moral one, but politically that deal is not out there. This is the reason Obama was so vague on his plans. A more left-leaning fiscal argument on the President’s part would have made liberals feel good, but would cost Obama the election. On the other side of the divide, a more right leaning argument from Romney that not only provided the carrot, tax cuts across the board, but also the stick, massive reductions in clearly defined spending and deductions to pay for it, would drop Romney from a near tie, to a ten point deficit. Ideologues on both sides of the divide making the argument that the other guy is being vague are ignoring completely the vagueness of their own candidate’s proposals. As a liberal I think that Obama has been more forthright than Romney, but only by degrees. 

Fiscally, a program that contains tax increases, probably even on those making less than $250K per year, along with increases in the retirement age to slow the rates of growth in Social Security and Medicare, are a necessity. Liberals will howl. I won’t.  On spending I would hope that the grand bargain contains more short-term stimulus targeted to create jobs, especially among the long term and unskilled unemployed. The working poor became the villains in so many ways during this election cycle. They have been largely ignored, but any real solution must address the urgency of their plight.  

At the same time providing long term spending reductions is absolutely essential. Neither party can continue to accept the status quo muddied by dishonest rhetoric where one party talks about lifting all boats, which only happens at the margins if at all, or getting control of the debt, which the other party does not at all. While we can and will disagree with the causes of the debt, whether Republican, Democratic, or both, we can and must make the sacrifices to get it under control. The job picture remains dismal, especially for segments of the population with less skills and/ or education, and the Republican criticism of the President’s priorities, jobs vs. healthcare, or not without merit. Considering that the conservatives have stymied jobs programs over disagreements about spending they are also somewhat disingenuous. But here again Americans on both sides of the divide have to understand and accept what is politically possible.

There will be no moral victories for Obama, if he is reelected for a second term. He will have to show a level of political dexterity that has not been in evidence up until now. I am among those who feel that the President has missed chance after chance to govern. He has done many great things, but he has governed over a malfunctioning government for which he bears direct and personal responsibility. 

On the other side of the divide Republicans need to understand that the world of the Beev’, Ward and June Cleever is no more. For millions of Americans, especially people of color, memories of those days are not sepia colored and tinged with nostalgia. Seldom are recollections of fire hoses or attack dogs set upon peaceful demonstrators marching for the right to vote or sit at lunch counters considered nostalgic.  The day is fast approaching when white majorities will no longer control national elections. If Obama does win it will be because he cobbled together a collation of blacks, Hispanics and just enough white votes, although not close to a plurality.  Republicans and conservatives can be angry about that, they can demonstrate against it which only exposes vile race hatred from which a small but real fraction of their vote is drawn, or they can accommodate to it.  The Darth Vader of the right, Karl Rove, knows that Republicans will have to increase the size of their tent in order to maintain relevance. If the GOP does not make the adjustments they will see themselves consigned in history alongside the Whig Party  and their righteous  message of fiscal discipline will go with them. Romney may carry this election with majority white support, but if he dies it will likely be the last that can be won that way.

The reality is that this is a deeply conservative country. I mean this not in terms of social activism where Americans have shown a tremendous ability to adapt and expand rights. Nor do I mean this in terms of fiscal policy. Americans are mostly conservative in their unwillingness to change quickly. There are vast forces arrayed on both sides of almost every argument now. While it is true that as Rachel Maddow said that almost all of these forces have an economic power structure behind them which means real, true, progressive change nearly impossible to achieve, Citizens United is the new reality.  While fair minded people of both parties are organizing to overturn it, people who want to see action from their government better learn how to govern with it. Liberals who believe they can accomplish anything critically important without accommodating at least some segments of Republicans are dooming themselves to four more years of gridlock.

Americans of all political stripes want the things that government provides without the responsibility of paying for it. Romney has played to this in the most craven manner, promising tax cuts, increases in defense spending, and protection of treasured middle class tax deductions such as charitable giving on interest of home mortgages. Something has to give, and even a cursory understanding of the debt we are piling up now would indicate the ridiculous nature of his proposals. Obama has been less absurdist in his proposals, but a fair minded person would acknowledge that they don’t add up either.

So the movement forward in the next four years under either candidate will be small and incremental. Americans that truly want it all will see to that.  Any hope for something better, whether progressive or disciplined, or my choice some combination of both lies in the middle, the place occupied by those who have abandoned their decrepit home on one side or other of the ideological divide.