Yes, We’re More Than “Oregon Trail”

The original 1970s “Oregon Trail” computer game (image via mediabistro.com)

I’ve always thought it must be slightly strange to live in a state like Massachusetts, where a two-percent increase in insurance premiums makes the national news, or California, which garners headlines every time a member of its House delegation (Nancy Pelosi, Darrell Issa) opens its mouth. Oregon doesn’t typically get as much love; if it pops up in the media at all, it’s usually in a wire story about the Pacific coast (“Dock From Japanese Tsunami Washes Up on Oregon Beach”) or sports coverage of the University of Oregon’s Duck football team. The scant political press earned by the Beaver State tends to be negative: Senator Ron Wyden sells out the Democrats again by teaming up with Paul Ryan to reduce Medicare to a voucher system, or Representative Peter DeFazio takes time off from undermining the president to prove his jerk credentials, demanding of a Republican Congressman (and former U.S. Marine), “Why do you hate this country so much?”

Occasionally, however, living in Oregon illuminates a national issue, perhaps proving that there’s more to the state than Phil Knight, Tonya Harding or the pretentious hippies of Portlandia.

Oregon held its primary election on May 15, and like usual, the official voting guides only featured candidates who had chosen to submit information. Uncontested or obscure races received little attention; incumbents without opponents have scant incentive to send in a write-up, while openings on school boards and utility commissions tend to be low-profile affairs. So unless you’re a fan of endorsing seemingly predetermined outcomes by rubber-stamping the only name on the ballot, being an informed voter means spending some on the Internet, clicking through old newspaper editorials and skimming amateurish candidate websites. I suspect most people don’t bother. Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore, who lives in California, weighs in on his own state’s voter guides:

California is the fifth state in which I have been registered to vote since I turned 18, but the first to offer anything like the Voter Guides. With the radical shrinkage in state and local political coverage available through any sort of media, I honestly don’t know what I’d do without them, and I’m obviously in a position to be better informed than the average voter since I spend most of my time reading and writing about politics.

All this makes me realize how lucky I am to live in one of the only two states that votes exclusively by mail. I’ve never actually been to “the polls”; my vision of a voting booth is the stereotypical curtained cubicle. The idea that voting requires skipping lunch or standing in line after work is foreign to me, and I only dimly remember the pre-vote-by-mail years of my childhood, when the cafeteria at my elementary school would be roped off on November 6 and lines of adults would stretch out the door. It’s not only easier to fill out a ballot in the comfort of your own kitchen but infinitely more practical as well. Kilgore is thankful for California’s voter guides, but a paper guide is only useful if you happen to have it on hand. Even if I had showed up at the voting booth with Oregon’s guide, I still would have been surprised by several of the races on the ballot. Scribbled crib sheets, which voters have have brought to the polls for decades, can’t help you make a decision in a contest too obscure to have attracted your attention. Perhaps smartphones will change this dynamic, but presently there’s no substitute for the ability to sit down at the computer with your ballot and Google unfamiliar names. Many states have relaxed their rules for absentee voting, but in my mind nothing holds a candle to Oregon’s vote-by-mail.

*****

Governor John Kitzhaber, whom Oregonians returned to the statehouse for another chance after his first stint in Salem from 1995 to 2003, earned a long write-up in the May issue of Governing Magazine. Kitzhaber is perhaps best remembered for calling Oregon “ungovernable” after protracted second-term clashes with the GOP-dominated legislature; for this reason, the Governing piece is a nice reminder of how much times — and Kitzhaber himself — have changed. The state House is evenly divided, meaning a Republican and a Democrat split the duties of Speaker, and the most recent session produced a prodigious number of bipartisan initiatives. Though other states have been roiled by contentious debates over health care and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, Oregon managed to win $500 million in federal money to reform Medicaid via coordinated-care organizations. The magazine profile describes the reaction of Republican co-speaker Bruce Hanna:

“He’s been open, honest and straightforward,” says Hanna. “He comes to you and says, ‘Here is what I would like to do. Can we work on it together?’” The answer isn’t always yes, adds Hanna, and what happens next is equally revealing: “We talk about how we manage the process so that we are not killing each other doing it.”

Because Oregon — Or-e-gahn, as the rest of the country pronounces it — is so often overlooked in the national media, it’s nice to see our governor getting some credit.

*****

Believe it or not, I don’t march in lockstep with the far left on every issue. However, the Republican Party of 2012 is so extreme that it manages to push me away from even the conservative positions that I originally agreed with. The latest case in point is the kerfuffle — played out recently at the local level but common in other states as well — over Native American team names and sports mascots. The most prominent dispute was resolved yesterday by North Dakotans, who voted two-to-one yesterday to replace the University of North Dakota’s “Fighting Sioux” nickname. In Oregon, the Board of Education ruled last month that even high schools would have to find new team names, “giving the state some of the nation’s toughest restrictions on such mascots, nicknames and logos.” Some teams, like the Mohawk Indians, will have to find new names altogether, while others can remain “Warriors” as long as they retire mascots depicting Native Americans. Banning Native American team names — especially in the absence of such offensive stereotypes as tomahawk-wielding, headdress-bedecked mascots doing war dances on the football field — has always struck me as overly P.C. Few people rail against the Irish (Notre Dame), Gaels (New York’s Iona College) or Spartans (my own high school), mainly because Anglo Europeans and ancient civilizations lack politically active constituencies.

Not all Native Americans, it’s important to note, are offended by the use of tribal names for sports teams. Yet I can understand the argument, made by the editorial board of my local newspaper, that the practice “shows insensitivity at best, and constitutes racial stereotyping at worst.” It contends that “the mascots are disrespectful, hurtful, degrading and humiliating caricatures,” viewed as acceptable by a white majority despite being comparable to “the black-face “minstrel” entertainers who were popular until the mid-20th century.” Even if the mascots are not intended to offend, they are indeed caricatures, presenting a version of reality no less archaic and retrograde than the cheerleaders who prance on the sidelines in miniskirts and midriff tops. It strikes me as a stretch to classify the practice as “a form of oppression,” as the University of Oregon’s assistant vice president of equity and diversity claims, or to blame it for such social ills as “high rates of suicide, incarceration and dropping out of school.” But I can buy the argument that it’s past time for schools to move beyond historically discriminatory references. Daniel Luzer of the Washington Monthly objects to what he sees as misplaced political correctness, writing that “the irony here is that NCAA’s prohibition against all American Indian nicknames ostensibly exists to avoid offending American Indians. But the policy seemed not to consider the attitudes of actual people who might be offended. What’s the point of avoiding the controversial American Indian name if you’re not going to listen to the American Indians?”

The point is that the nicknames poison the national conversation, much in the way the use of the n-word is poisonous no matter how many black rappers try to reappropriate the term “nigga.” Some women don’t feel porn or strip shows are degrading because the women involved are making their own choices and are thus empowered to “own” their sexuality, but that doesn’t mean that everyone wants to join in the “Slutwalk” protests. Women jokingly call each other “bitch,” but I don’t find that OK either. The conservative reaction to the ginned-up controversy in Massachusetts over Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s racial background has only reinforced my belief that certain epithets, regardless of how inoffensive they may seem to some people, shouldn’t be preserved. Though I knew that conservatives opposed affirmative action in general, the degree of hostility toward what the right regards as a manufacturing of “victims” has surprised me. Particularly notable has been the way in which the malicious rhetoric of Warren’s detractors have undermined their own arguments against racial preferences. Whatever one thinks of the merits of affirmative action, it’s hard to take seriously the claim that minorities are no longer disadvantaged by discrimination and prejudice, especially when the very people who regard discrimination as a myth regularly toss around racial epithets and slurs. Why is it permissible to refer to Warren as “Fauxcahontas” when newspapers won’t even spell out the “n-word” in their pages? Are these names any less offensive than using beyond-the-pale terms for Asians like “gook” or “kike,” or any less damaging and stereotypical than jokes likening African Americans to monkeys or punning headlines about “chinks” in Jeremy Lin’s armor? (Of course, when dealing with the folks who thought “Barack the Magic Negro” was an amusing Internet meme in 2008, perhaps “offensive” is a relative term.)

The nonchalance with which conservatives have deployed slurs like “Fauxcahontas” has convinced me that even casual nods to racism, including the implication that Native Americans and cartoon ducks and pirates are equally suitable for sports mascots, are indeed damaging to minorities. Formerly appropriate slang — “injuns,” “squaws,” “redskins” — is a small step away from “Sitting Bull-shit.” National Review, which pretended to take the moral high ground by firing John Derbyshire after he wrote a screed warning whites to, “if accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving,” nevertheless embraces the odious Jay Nordlinger, who calls on readers to submit their own nicknames for Warren. “I myself have thought of Warren as the Dishonest Injun, or Lying Sac(agawea),” he writes, then returns a few days later to add “Spreading Bull” and “Little White Dove” to the crowd-sourced list. Michelle Malkin calls Warren “Pinocchio-hontas,” “Running Joke” and “Sacaja-whiner,” then goes to write:

Once again, the left’s incurable love affair with oppression chic is on naked display. It’s an Olympic competition of the haves to show their have-not cred.

(Derbyshire, it should be noted, also baldly expressed the conservative view of affirmative action: The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites . . . . There is a magnifying effect here, too, caused by affirmative action. In a pure meritocracy there would be very low proportions of blacks in cognitively demanding jobs. Because of affirmative action, the proportions are higher.)

Progressive writer (and token liberal commentator for Fox News, making her the right’s own example of affirmative action) notes the irony in Malkin “bemoaning racist smears against her own Filipino heritage while labeling Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren ‘Fauxcahontas.'” The New York Post refers to Warren’s alleged dishonesty as “smoke signals,” and the Weekly Standard is giddy at the cleverness of a May 8 headline announcing Warren’s absence from a school event: “Chief Mass. Dem Skips Harvard Powwow.” Ethnic references continue to be tossed around with surprising blase at National Review, where Neal Freedman inserts one into a column about Maine’s Independent candidate for Senate, Angus King:

A recent poll measured King’s “favorables” at a remarkable 62–24, which puts him in a regional league with David Ortiz of the Red Sox and Tom Brady of the Patriots, not to mention Elizabeth Warren of the Indians.

Such casual bigotry has nudged me into the camp of those opposed to Native American sports mascots. Congratulations, conservatives, on taking an issue on which I actually agreed with you and moving me firmly and decisively to the left. Keep it up, and by this time next year I’ll be pushing to legalize pot and label genetically-modified foods.

*****

Art Robinson

Sometimes when the national media tunes in to Oregon, all it sees is nuttiness. Art Robinson, the Republican who challenged Rep. Peter DeFazio in 2010 and is running again this year, is hailed by the Washington Times as a “model of unity” between the Tea Party and Ron Paul wings of the GOP. Robinson, a scientist whose beliefs are on the fringe even for a libertarian radical, hawks conspiracy theories on the conservative website WorldNet Daily and peddles a homeschooling curriculum designed to save children from the liberal brainwashing of public schools. He made a splash in 2010 by accusing Oregon State University, where his two children are graduate students, of “retaliating” against his son and daughter for their father’s activism. This produced the bizarre spectacle of a political candidate threatening lawsuits over the academic careers of his 20- and 30-something children, four of which attend public universities despite Robinson’s conviction that government-funded education represents a “decaying monopoly” in which “home schooled children cannot attend college and graduate school without exposure to the same evils in American colleges and universities that were a primary reason for taking the children out of the public schools in the first place.” The most priceless part of the Washington Times article:

Mr. Robinson sees himself as a “show-me-the-evidence” skeptic about things such as the honesty of career politicians and the reliability of scientists who depend on government or industry grants to make a living. Mr. Robinson said he thinks the findings of taxpayer-subsidized experiments too often reflect the prevailing government-liberal-environmental prejudices rather than scientific objectivity.

“I don’t believe in doing scientific research with government money,” he said.

Except, of course, if that research involves Robinson’s kids — or Robinson himself, for that matter, as he spent years on the payroll at Caltech and UC San Diego.

To some extent, I’m surprised Robinson hasn’t attracted more national attention, given the bizarre family dynamics at work in this year’s rematch with DeFazio. Robinson’s son Matthew switched parties to run as a Democrat against DeFazio in the May primary, winning about 11 percent of the vote — a fact trumpeted by the Washington Times, despite the fact that it was, well, 11 percent of the vote. Matthew claimed to be independent from his father, yet declined to speak to the media and referred all press inquiries to the elder Robinson, with whom he just happened to share a campaign headquarters and a Cave Junction phone number. If anything, you’d think the nepotism factor of the story would satisfy the AP’s quirky-news addiction.

The Washington Post’s Fix blog did pick up on an announcement from the Republican National Congressional Committee that it considers Robinson a “serious threat” for DeFazio in November. The RNCC certified Robinson as an “On the Radar” candidate, a step above his previous “Young Gun” designation. (The Young Guns program includes a collection of Eric Cantor’s hand-picked doctrinaire conservatives.) It’s odd enough to call a 70-year-old a “Young Gun,” and a dispatch from the Oregonian emphasizes the all-around weirdness of the situation, noting that the announcement “raises questions about how ‘rigorous’ the standards and review process are. Some of Robinson’s statements and writings are outside Republican thinking.” An example:

For example, in his self-published book, “Common Sense in 2012,” which Robinson is selling to finance his campaign, he criticizes government bureaucracy for stifling all manner of life, including adoption and abortion.

“Every child born in America should have a home immediately, and no child should be killed before birth,” he writes on page 114.

“Not all of these homes are of the type that you or I might prefer,” he continues. “But any home and a chance at life is far better than no life at all.”

That same concept applies even if the mother is raped. “Yes, the woman has been seriously injured, and carrying a child to term is an additional burden,” he writes. “She should be compensated very generously for this injury and for this burden. The mother and child are both innocent.”

The Oregonian also reports:

Robinson, who last year called Oregon State [University] a “liberal socialist Democrat stronghold” and in 2009 suggested that pubic schools be abolished, also advocates militarizing space.

“It is obvious that the interplanetary space around the earth is a potential battlefield,” he writes on page 232. “An aggressor with unrivaled control of outer space would have great advantages.”

Oregon already has a reputation for being a granola-crunching, Birkenstock-wearing progressive oasis. Now it seems as if it’s competing for the tourist dollars of the other nutty extreme as well.

*****

BuzzFeed jumped feet-first into politics when it hired wunderkind blogger Ben Smith away from Politico, but the ultimate trending now! website still relies on sensationalist stories and cute-kitten slide shows. Its Politics vertical tends toward overhyped media inventions — “Bill Clinton Undermines Obama Again!” and “Romney Can’t Identify Doughnut!” seem to be two of the most popular — and has been particularly keen lately on letting everyone know that the Obama campaign is in Big Trouble. To wit: “As Mitt Romney’s campaign fundraising gathers steam, boosted by huge contributions to allied groups, President Barack Obama is unexpectedly struggling to keep pace . . . . 88% of donors who gave $200 or more to Obama in 2008 have yet to give that amount to his campaign this cycle.”

Donors from the western states are especially AWOL this year. Oregonians are by far the stingiest, making 91% fewer $200-plus donations in 2012 than 2008, though Colorado, Nevada and Idaho are “close behind.” Easterners are more loyal, with Vermont, Maine and Michigan experiencing the lowest rate of defection. BuzzFeed offers a variety of talking-head analyses for the phenomenon, though it ignores the most obvious explanation: There is no competitive Democratic primary this year, no Hillary Clinton breathing down Obama’s neck to inspire donations. Is it really a surprise that an unchallenged sitting president is raking in less cash than an exciting insurgent whose very candidacy is breaking down racial and generational barriers?

At any rate, one political scientist suggests that the northwest is acting out its disappointment with Obama’s tack toward the center: “[T]he Pacific Northwest has traditionally been a stronghold of the progressive movement, many of whose adherents hoped for a far more combative, liberal Obama embrace of policies like single-payer health care.” And then there’s this:

In the case of Oregon, one of the issues that inspired voters to put money behind Obama in 2008 was getting American troops away from combat. That urgency has now faded. “Oregon was the most virulently anti-war states during the Iraq war,” said Jake Weigler, director of Oregon Communications at Strategies 360, a strategic communications firm. “That was a powerful motivator during the 2008 election. It may not be as powerful a one now.”

Perhaps that’s true, but I don’t remember Iraq being the overarching issue of 2008. At this point in the last election cycle, I was still sending money to Hillary. The county-by-county breakdown — after all, it’s not a BuzzFeed story without a graphic — of the state is most telling.

Percentage decrease in Oregon and Colorado Obama donors by county. The darker the county, the higher the percentage of drop off donors.

The shaded counties also happen to be the state’s reddest counties. The correspondence is straightforward and exact, with the rural areas in eastern Oregon showing the biggest decrease in donations. Eastern Oregon reliably elects Republicans; the second district, which encompasses most of the eastern portion of the state, has been represented by Republican Greg Walden since 1999, while all four of the other House districts have voted for Democrats. Here’s the county-by-county breakdown by voter registration:

Voter registration in Oregon (image via DailyKos)

Looks pretty similar to BuzzFeed’s version, huh? It can’t be a huge surprise that the independents and Republicans who might have been attracted to Obama’s ground-breaking 2008 candidacy have been the first to defect in 2012. Suddenly, the big donor drop-off story doesn’t seem quite so big. It doesn’t take an encyclopedic knowledge of the state to realize the most conservative areas are also least likely to donate to a Democratic president, but it does take more than the iota of awareness exhibited by the dancing baby/swimming Corgi writers at BuzzFeed.

How Not to Sell a Candidate

Elizabeth Warren (image via nytimes.com)

Amid all the hubbub over Elizabeth Warren’s purported Native American heritage, it’s easy to forget that the race will probably still come down to which candidate – Warren or incumbent senator Scott Brown – voters like better. I’d wager that the “Fauxcahontas” kerfuffle matters more to national media and conservative pundits, whose bitter hostility toward affirmative action and the “victims” it creates has been somehow surprising, than to the average Massachusetts voter. Brown has largely relied on surrogates to go after Warren’s record on her heritage, while his own campaign maintained its laser focus on the issues of class and wealth that have defined the race thus far. The spectacle of two millionaires attempting to out-Average Joe each other is nothing short of humorous, as Warren tries to backpedal from statements about “leaving teeth on the floor” and Brown stumps around the state in a pickup truck and accuses Warren of hypocrisy for not contributing more than her tax bill to government coffers. (No one seemed to wonder why, if Brown is so concerned about the national debt, he doesn’t chip in some extra cash of his own to pay it down.)

Because Brown benefits from two years as Massachusett’s junior senator, the campaign has largely been about defining Elizabeth Warren. Is she the ivory-tower, Obama-anointed socialist intent on taking down Wall Street, or is she a defender of the middle class who worked her way out of poverty to Harvard?  Her image in the media is more than a split personality; it’s practically a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde phenomenon. Right-wing publications have turned her into an “Occupy” parody, denouncing her in biting language that mocks her as a “politically foaming zealot” and “a guileless, fevered Marxist.” The left, including a recent Doonesbury star turn, paints her as a liberal savior. To both sides, she is a figure to be ridiculed or lauded on a national level, while Brown – perhaps to his advantage – remains a more parochial personality. The candidates compete over who draws more donations from out of state; 64 percent of Warren’s first-quarter contributions came from beyond Massachusetts, and Brown relies on outside donors for 71 percent. Warren is not exactly working overtime to combat her reputation as a carpetbagger – a glossy mailer from her campaign recently arrived in my mailbox in Oregon – and frankly, she is reaching the point of media oversaturation. The tipping point may have been the Doonesbury appearance; even a staunch Democrat like myself, who supported Warren at the CFPB before she “made it big,” is feeling jaded by her sudden star power. Ironically, her status as a liberal icon may be doing more harm than good, as a recent profile in The Nation demonstrated.

You can’t get much further left the Nation without running into Marx and Engels. Six months after the protesters were cleared from Zuccotti Park, it still regularly updates a blog on the Occupy movement. Yet for all its full-throated defense of the working class, the Nation’s target audience is not the blue-collar factory worker but the Prius-driving, latte-sipping urban liberal that Scott Brown likes to mock. Though it claims to represent the 99 percent, its writers and readers are, if not the 1 percent, at least in the upper quartile – and sometimes it shows. The piece on Warren, as an argument for populist support, is an utter failure. Author E.J. Graff preaches to the choir, and is seemingly oblivious to how her words might come off to someone without a college degree or an Energy Star washing machine. Perhaps this is just fine, as most Nation readers have both. But if the magazine is genuinely concerned with respecting the average worker and dispelling its reputation as the organ of left-coast liberals out of touch with middle America, it should watch its mouth.

Graff describes the voters who will decide between Warren and Brown in November as if they are animals in a zoo, exotic yet primitive, perhaps prone to recklessly overturning their food dishes when agitated:

Most of the electorate is not really paying attention yet. And when they do, they are not deciding the way you and I do. Ideology and policy are not how these independents select a candidate. They’re not watching The Rachel Maddow Show or The O’Reilly Factor; they’re not reading The Nation or National Review. They’re getting dinner on the table, racing from work to pick up kids after school and following the Sox, Bruins and Pats. They pick candidates the way they pick friends: which one is honest, straightforward and sincere? Which one understands their lives?

They are not deciding the way you and I do. No, these people are far too grounded to take an interest in politics; they are the salt of the earth, putting homespun values and everyday wisdom above ideology or lofty policy speeches. They’re simpletons.

Graff is not any less condescending toward Massachusetts conservatives, whom she paints with an equally broad brush, making sure to quote one man who “looked well off” and who delivers a line — “Elizabeth Warren is a communist” — that conveniently turns him into the stereotype of the misinformed Fox News viewer. Of the crowd at a rally for Scott Brown, Graff writes:

The men were perfectly shaved and shorn in suits or barn jackets, or they were scraggly older union white guys in work boots. The women, outnumbered by about three to one, wore pearl earrings and had Coach bags and perfectly combed hair.

These true conservatives know why they support Brown. They believe that any resentment toward the 1 percent is class warfare and whining, an attack on normal families.

Graff meets a couple whose house is in foreclosure, who speak disparagingly of powerful banks and their manipulative tactics. They live in Potterville, an area in which, according to Graff, “the banks are screwing people.” Still, they waver between the two candidates. “These two lived smack in the middle of Potterville, but they didn’t yet know they should be voting for Warren,” Graff laments. “Will they by November?” Not they didn’t know whether they would vote for Warren, but they didn’t yet know they should be voting for Warren, as if Graff is intimately familiar with the couple’s priorities. To Graff, economics should dictate the voting patterns of “these people.” It’s as if she can’t imagine why the couple would opt for Brown, why other concerns — possibly what Republicans call “moral values” — might matter.

The article ends with another grating characterization of the regular Americans that Graff regards as so different from herself and her presumed audience of well-read elites:

The ordinary Massachusetts voter—the kind who doesn’t tune in until the last minute—will have to choose between two story lines. They will talk about it this way: he’s a small-town Wrentham boy who solves problems based on facts, while she’s a leftist ideologue from Harvard. Or they will talk about it this way: he’s a lightweight with a pretty face and a truck; she’s a real person who will fight off the banks and others trying to ruin the middle class. They will assess which one is more likable and sincere.

The word “sincere” appears multiple times in Graff’s narrative; it is apparently the trait which she believes Massachusetts voters prize most greatly. Is it really so bizarre to think that the people in Massachusetts might be perfectly fine with electing someone who isn’t just like them? Why does she assume that the people she meets can’t look beyond likability and personal history? Surely these are important characteristics, but they are characteristics important to every voter. If the regular folks in Graff’s story can be stereotyped as non-political rubes, we could just as easily stereotype Nation readers as left-wing robots who would vote for anyone, from Elizabeth Warren to Warren Buffett, with a “D” after his or her name.

At times, Graff seems aware of her prejudice, and her writing leans toward the tongue-in-cheek. Describing Warren’s visit to a job training center, she at least acknowledges the piece’s gauzy, soft-lens tone:

Cue the movie music. The shining candidate stepped forth, tall and thin, with her no-fuss bob and warm blue eyes. Her kind voice and earnest enthusiasm lit up the room. She told her humble story as if it simultaneously meant nothing and everything.

Unfortunately, the hagiographic language doesn’t stop there. In fact, it continues through the entire story, until the reader has no choice but to conclude that Graff is actually, to some degree, serious. The fairy tale rolls on, punching up the repetition and short, dramatic sentences. “This was inspiration they understood,” she writes of the Jobs Corps members. Then:

She was running for Senate, she said, so that she could see that all of them, the people in that room and the rest of the American middle class, get a fair shake. So that she could keep an eye on the banks and credit card companies that try to trip folks up with “tricks and traps” and rigged mortgages. So she could bring jobs to people who were ready to work hard.

We could go further: So she could right the world’s wrongs. So she could bring justice to the downtrodden. Like Robin Hood, Elizabeth Warren would take from the rich and give to the middle-class, to the poor.

I don’t doubt that Warren is — dare I say it — sincere about her consumer advocacy. She would probably make a good senator, certainly a better one than Scott Brown, who is a reliable Republican vote despite all his talk of bipartisanship. But the Nation profile only cements in the minds of its readers the stereotype of the unwashed masses too dim-witted to vote in favor of their own interests. The magazine pretends to be the voice of the working class, but its words and attitude are elitist and off-putting. On the chance that an issue does find its way into the hands of someone wavering between Brown and Warren, I find it hard to believe that Graff, who consistently looks down her nose at anyone outside the enlightened liberal bubble, would win Warren many converts.

Super Failure

As the Congressional supercommittee grinds toward failure, the Times published an article on Saturday contending that the panel is “stymied by a deep rift over whether affluent Americans should help reduce the deficit by paying more taxes.” True, and it goes straight to the heart of the issue: Democrats think the solution to our budget problems must include higher taxes, while Republicans would rather close the deficit by cutting spending. To truly plug the hole in the budget, bumping up rates for the wealthiest Americans won’t be enough, but even Democrats aren’t stupid enough to admit that the middle class will also need to chip in. When the GOP won’t even contemplate allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for households making over $250,000, why mention the inconvenient truth that confiscating 100% of millionaires’ income won’t fix the national debt?

Still, the disagreement over taxing the rich is the highest-profile and most emotional issue the supercommittee faces. One line from the Times article illuminates what I see as the fundamental flaw in the conservative argument against using the tax code to “redistribute” wealth. Reporter Annie Lowrey writes that Democrats are wary of the GOP’s proposal to lower tax rates and curb exemptions, “fearing tax cuts would require cutting even more from government programs that primarily aid the poor.” It’s true that the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — to say nothing of the smaller programs like food stamps and housing assistance — disproportionately benefit those with lower incomes. But it’s disingenuous to claim that “the poor” are the only beneficiaries of these programs. Elizabeth Warren, despite being terribly overhyped by the media (New York magazine calls her “a saint with sharp elbows,” while the Times magazine blares that “heaven is a place called Elizabeth Warren”), drew criticism from Republicans for articulating the truth about government spending. Video of her speech went viral in liberal circles. She said:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for . . . .

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

So, though Medicare and Medicaid may matter more to people with little savings and low incomes, even the rich benefit from programs ostensibly aimed at the poor. Unless the wealthy are content to live in a country where they’re accosted on the street by beggars or where consumers are too poor to purchase the goods they produce, indiscriminately cutting government spending benefits no one. Hedge fund managers and CEOs don’t reap the rewards of the social safety net as directly as the average person, but that doesn’t mean they are unaffected.

Republicans argue that the wealthy already pay more than their “fair share” of taxes — nearly 40 percent. Tea Party favorite Senator Rand Paul said today that “The vast majority of millionaires and billionaires are paying all of the taxes. That’s who pays the income tax.” Well, no kidding: When you earn most of the income, of course you’re going to pay most of the income tax. The richest 1 percent of households contribute an increasing percentage of tax revenues because their income has also increased. The Washington Post has some fantastic graphs to illustrate this point. Between 1986 and 2008, their share of the tax burden jumped 54%. But over the same period, their incomes increased by 119%. Far from paying more than their fair share, the most affluent now pay only 23% of their income to the government — down from 33% in 1986. And yet, that proportionately smaller contribution still entitles the wealthy to the same benefits — roads, an educated workforce — that it did nearly thirty years ago.

I’m going to go out a limb here and predict that the supercommittee won’t have a sudden breakthrough in the next four days. This might be just fine, considering that the cuts mandated under sequestration don’t touch Social Security or Medicaid, and only take a small swipe at Medicare. The defense budget would take the biggest hit, an outcome that wouldn’t be unwelcome. But the likelihood of those defense cuts taking place is nil. John McCain, Lindsey Graham and other hawkish Republicans are already exploring ways to weasel out of cuts to Pentagon spending. The whole point of sequestration was to make failure by the supercommittee unpalatable, but changing the rules halfway through the game makes bitter medicine go down a lot easier. With the panel deadlocked and Republicans offering only token tax increases (which are only on the table if all the Bush tax cuts are extended), you have to wonder if failure wasn’t their game plan all along.

The War on Elizabeth Warren

Whom Are You Calling a Grandmother? (Photo via cnn.com)

UPDATE – 7/15/11: President Obama’s Grow-a-Spine miracle tablets have apparently not worked. Bloomberg News reports that he “has chosen a candidate other than Elizabeth Warren as director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a person briefed on the matter.” Maybe it just fit with the “Let’s Cave to the GOP” theme of the recent debt ceiling negotiations. Or maybe, as Stephen Colbert suggested the other day, the Republicans have taken America hostage and are holding a gun to its head . . . . Keep it there long enough and perhaps the country will get Stockholm Syndrome.

“Elizabeth Warren, Champion of Consumer Financial Protection” (Businessweek, 7/7/11)

“An Agency Builder, but Not Yet Its Leader” (NYT, 7/4/11)

“Director or No, Wall Street’s Newest Cop Is Ready for Duty” (NYT, 6/20/11)

“The Bank Lobby Steps Up Its Attack on Elizabeth Warren” (The Nation, 6/20/11)

“Blocking Elizabeth Warren” (NYT, 6/10/11)

With July 21, the official debut date of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, just around the corner, Elizabeth Warren is getting a lot of press. The bureau is Warren’s brainchild, but though she has dedicated the past year to getting the agency up and running, President Obama has not nominated her as its director. Opposition by Senate Republicans would likely make her confirmation impossible, and the Times reports that “it is conventional wisdom in this town that the first director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be anyone but Elizabeth Warren.”

Whether or not Warren is actually named head of the bureau, her part in its creation has ensured her legacy will be indelible. Businessweek devoted its July 7 cover story to the woman it calls the “Champion of Consumer Financial Protection.” The title is unwieldy, but the article makes the case that, regardless of Warren’s political future, she has already been the midwife of lasting change to the banking world.

Media coverage of Warren traffics in cliché, and Drake Bennett’s sharply-written Businessweek profile goes out of its way to puncture such stereotypes. “Warren is a grandma from Oklahoma in roughly the same way Ralph Nader is a pensioner with a thing about cars,” he notes. Indeed, The Times repeatedly makes the grayhair characterization, referring to Warren as “a driven, sometimes blunt 62-year-old grandmother” in much the same way that the cache of bin Laden documents is always a “trove” and the latest dismal job numbers are always a “speed bump” on the road to economic recovery. Bennett is not taken in by the passionate-yet-controlled hand gestures or the intent gravity that reporters typically observe in a Warren interview. He writes that she is prone to expressions like “Holy guacamole!” but adds that “it’s difficult to tell whether these are spontaneous or deliberately deployed to soften her imposing professorial mien.”

Less insightful, however, is Bennett’s celebratory tone. He lauds Warren for her contributions, making her out to be the savior of the banking world. (Sheila Bair, whose serious face graces the cover of this week’s Times Magazine and whose op-ed manifesto was recently published by the Washington Post, might have a thing or two to say about that.) He describes the broad powers the CFPB will assume on July 21: “It will supervise not only banks and credit unions but credit-card companies, mortgage servicers, credit bureaus, debt collectors, payday lenders and check-cashing shops. Dozens of researchers will track trends in the lending market and keep an eye on new products.”

Warren’s accomplishments are myriad; she is “not waiting for permission to do the job she may never get.” In Bennett’s telling, whether Warren receives an official appointment is almost immaterial, as she has already “hired hundreds of people,” including “several top hires from outside the federal government.” When the bureau opens, it will apparently run like clockwork, as “teams of analysts will follow various markets — credit cards, mortgages, student loans — to spot trends and examine new products.” Bennett has a high degree of faith in the agency’s ability to be everything to everyone; his laundry lists of the agency’s many duties support the opinions of Raj Date, Warren’s deputy at the CFPB, whose name has also been floated for the top position. Date’s take on the agency is predictably laudatory. “If the bureau and its market research teams had been in place five years ago,” Bennett paraphrases Date as saying, “they would have spotted evidence of the coming mortgage meltdown and could have coordinated with the bureau’s enforcement division to head it off.” One suspects that such grandiose proclamations were also made at the creation of the SEC and the FDIC (certainly Sheila Bair has laid out similarly lofty goals for her agency), and one only has to consider Lehman Brothers or AIG to see how effective those regulators were in avoiding the crisis of 2008. Granted, the purpose of the CFPB is to step in where the other cops on the block have failed, but anything billed as the be-all-end-all of financial regulation is bound to be oversold.

By burying Warren with praise, Bennett obscures the true challenges facing the CFPB and commits the sin that, just last week, I commended Businessweek for avoiding: He gives the business community a pass. In its examination of Transocean’s complete abrogation of responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf, the magazine painted a picture of a soulless, mean-spirited corporation that didn’t toe the usual Chamber of Commerce political line. This week, however, Bennett performs a delicate two-step. He pretends to slap the wrists of Warren’s Republican detractors while surreptitiously giving big business a pat on the back.

How does Bennett accomplish this? First, he minimizes the threats to the CFPB (and to the Dodd-Frank legislation as a whole) by overstating Warren’s accomplishments. He devotes a massive, thirteen-line paragraph to what the bureau can do, come July 21, then spends only four lines on what the bureau will not be able to do. It’s a caveat worth mentioning; in fact, it’s one that has been the topic of numerous concerned editorials and articles. Without a director, the CFPB is not completely toothless, but neither is it the long-armed rule-making body that Bennett proclaims it to be.  The Times writes that the lack of leadership will leave the bureau’s powers “muted.” Reporter Ben Protess continues:

Absent a director, the bureau doesn’t have the authority to oversee payday lenders, mortgage brokers and other nonbank lenders, according to an interpretation of the statute by Treasury and Fed inspectors general. Ms. Warren is not even allowed to identify the nonbank financial firms she plans to regulate.

An article in The Nation addresses the very real stumbling blocks that the new agency will face. The Republican-led House Financial Services Committee has passed bills aiming to strip the CFBP of a single director altogether, replacing Warren (or, presumably, a more benign alternative) with a five-person commission. For a party that talks so much about eliminating sprawling bureaucracy, the GOP has sure worked hard to hamstring Warren’s agency by . . . adding bureaucrats. The proposed “bipartisan” commission seems to be modeled on the perpetually-deadlocked FEC, where the conflict between Republican and Democratic commissioners has ground the business of election regulation to a halt. Ari Berman, writing for The Nation, notes that “in a rather stunning bit of hostage taking, forty-four Senate Republicans recently announced they would not approve any nominee for the CFBP unless the GOP proposals were implemented.”

The Nation is certainly not an unbiased news source, and the article devotes a mind-numbing amount of space to the money spent by the financial sector to lobby Washington and line the pockets of Republican politicians (mores specifically, the three Republican politicians who just happened to sponsor the anti-CFPB bills). Surely the millions spent by the banks on lobbyists is a problem, but reeling off the dollar amounts hardly helps the reader to understand the specific threats facing Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild. The money is not the issue; what that money buys is, and by listing campaign contributions, The Nation manages to stoke outrage without linking those contributions to particular dangers.

The crucial pieces of information in Berman’s article are less sensational. Undermining Businessweek’s assertion that the CFBP will have the authority to rein in sketchy banking practices, Berman reveals that, “despite claims about its unlimited power, the CFPB is the only banking regulator whose budget will be capped (for now, at 12 percent of the total Fed budget) and whose rules can be overturned (by a two-thirds vote from the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a new group of top federal economic policy-makers).” The power of the CFPB is hardly as unchecked as Republicans like Rep. Jed Hensarling, who calls the agency “one of the greatest assaults on economic liberty in my lifetime,” have claimed.

The threats to the CFBP are real, and they are vastly larger than Businessweek gives them credit for. On top of the bills passed in the House, Republicans have “tried unsuccessfully to cut the CFPB’s budget earlier this year and succeeded in mandating two audits of the bureau per year.” Berman writes that Warren’s “associates” quote her as describing Republican efforts as an attempt to “pull the arms and the legs off the agency.” And though Bennett asserts that “few Cabinet secretaries can claim to have left as indelible a mark on the departments they lead as Elizabeth Warren has already left on the one she doesn’t,” it is not enough that “Warren has built the CFPB largely to her specs.” It doesn’t matter how the CFPB is constructed or how talented its employees if its budget is eviscerated and its enforcement powers are curtailed. It wasn’t a lack of regulatory agencies that enabled the financial crisis but the toothlessness of the agencies that did exist.

Bennett’s claim that Warren’s development of the CFPB has been “almost entirely free of interference from Congress and the Administration” is patently false. The creation of the CFPB is not finished until it goes live on July 21, and possibly not until it assumes its full powers under a permanent director. The efforts by Republicans, on behalf of the banking industry, constitute nothing if not interference. In The Nation, Berman points out that the lobbying push has been partly successful. So far, the CFPB is “focusing on low-hanging fruit, such as clearer mortgage disclosure forms, that can draw consensus among consumer advocates and industry groups. Everyone agrees the real fights are yet to come, once the CFPB goes live and begins tackling difficult issues like policing scams in the credit and mortgage markets, and cracking down on overdraft lending fees and shady prepaid credit cards.”

This is a sharp contrast from the Businessweek paradigm, in which the CFPB is prepared to spring forth fully formed, Athena-style, from the head of Elizabeth Warren. Businessweek’s willful ignorance of the challenges facing the CFPB is dangerous because it suggests that the battle to police Wall Street has already been won. For the magazine’s wealthy, business-class audience, this is good news. Bennett allows his reader to feel warm and fuzzy about Warren’s success without challenging the status quo. A hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners approach to the topic would surely have alienated a portion of Bennett’s audience, but it would be more honest than the article he produced. He goes beyond simply not demonizing the Republican opposition to the CFPB; in fact, conservatives come off as just another thorn in Warren’s side: irritating, but not life-threatening. Instead of holding the business community’s feet to the fire, pushing Businessweek’s corner-office readers to question their complicity in the anti-CFPB lobbying efforts, Bennett gives them a pass. He doesn’t mention that the Chamber of Commerce, which The Nation reports has “a dozen lobbyists focused on the CFPB alone,” spent $17 million on federal lobbying in the first quarter of 2011. He doesn’t point out that the Chamber’s senior director has admitted that “we’re fundamentally trying to kill this.” He also neglects to list the numerous industry groups, from the American Bankers Association to the National Association of Federal Credit Unions, that have lined up to fight the establishment of Warren’s agency.

Businesspeople are, as the term suggests, people too – and it is not impossible that a few, after learning the true extent of the threats to an agency designed to protect consumers, would emerge dissatisfied with the business community’s unholy alliance with the GOP. But Bennett is only tossing softballs. Both Businessweek and The Nation quote Senator Richard Shelby, who, as the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, will be instrumental in confirming (or not confirming) the eventual nominee to head the CFPB. However, while Ari Berman writes that “Shelby has said that a Warren recess appointment would be ‘dangerous to the American economy,’” the nastiest remark Bennett includes is tame to the point of ridiculousness: “She’s a professor and all this,” he quotes Shelby as saying, “in a tone that makes it clear he is not paying her a compliment.”  In case even that is too harsh,  Shelby is also given the chance to opine, “She’s probably a nice person, as far as I know.”

As if he is looking for a cherry to top of his deliberate misunderstanding of the existential threats the CFPB faces, Benett concludes with another sop to Warren’s dogged, straight-shooting personality. Her future is bright, he implies, writing that “Warren gives the distinct impression that she will not suffer long if the President passes her over . . . . Whether the story ends with her confirmation or being driven from town, it’s almost certain that the character of Elizabeth Warren will come out looking just fine.” The statement is offensive in more ways than one; for starters, it’s not Warren that will suffer if President Obama caves to conservative pressure and opts for a less experienced, and perhaps less passionate, nominee. No – it’s the consumers, whom the bureau is charged with protecting, that will suffer. No one, not even Obama, is particularly concerned with Elizabeth Warren’s bruised feelings. Warren was not pushing for herself when she wrote, in her oft-quoted 2007 article in the journal Democracy, that “It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street – and the mortgage won’t even carry a disclosure of that fact to the homeowner.”

Unaddressed in Bennett’s article is what happens if the push to neuter the CFBP succeeds. If Warren is indeed “driven from town,” does that mean the banking industry and their GOP mouthpieces will have turned the CFBP into just another toothless bureaucracy? Joe Nocera, in an op-ed column for The New York Times, writes that, though Warren may not be able to win confirmation, it is a fight worth having, and not one that Obama should shrink from. Nocera concludes:

In politics, there are certainly times when compromise is the right approach. But this is not one of those times. The agency needs to begin its life unafraid to do its job, which won’t happen if the White House backs down now. By contrast, nominating Elizabeth Warren, who is nothing if not unafraid, would send exactly the right signal.