Heartache With Hard Work

I Don’t Feel Young – Wye Oak

Here’s an awkward article. E.J. Graff is uncomfortable with the relationship between Kevin Clash (the voice of Elmo) and a young man. Here’s why:

But the Elmo puppeteer story does bother me. In case you missed it, Kevin Clash is a six-foot-tall African-American man, now 52, who does the voice of the Sesame Street icon. Earlier this week, word came out that a young man, now 23, accused Clash of getting involved with him when the accuser was 16 years old—under the age of consent. Sesame Street put Clash on a leave of absence while it investigated. The accuser has since recanted, saying he was an adult and that the entire relationship was consensual.

But it still makes me queasy. Why is a 45-ish-year-old man having sex with a teenager? If the 18- or 19-year-old were female, I would be appalled at the probable power imbalance, assuming that a creepy middle-aged man was manipulating a youngster’s immaturity to use her sexually, to soak up the admiration of youth, promising (implicitly or explicitly) things that a more mature adult would know were lies. Why should my attitude be different if the youngster is male?

A couple things here.

First, why on earth is it important that Clash is “a six-foot-tall African-American man”? Is there any way to read this other than a squeamishness over scary big black guys?

Second, the categorical refusal to accept the validity of such relationships seems pretty dogmatic to me. Obviously there are potential power issues. But there are potential power issues in a lot of places. That’s not usually a reason to completely reject the principle of a relationship but rather to make sure those imbalances are taken seriously.

I’ll reference Dan Savage and his ‘campsite rule’ on this question. That is, the older partner should leave the younger “in better condition than they found them.”

Sure, someone who is 18 most likely is not emotionally mature yet. But a caring and considerate older partner can certainly contribute to their emotional growth. And an emotionally manipulative jerk can do serious damage regardless of his/her age.

Look, I’m not unaware of the significance of probabilities. And sure, if you know nothing else about a 45 year old man except that he is dating someone barely over 18, that should trigger a warning for you. But at the same time, I’m aware of the fact that the vast majority of outrage in our society about this sort of thing comes at the expense of older gay men. Which feeds into the narrative that being gay is equivalent to pedophilia. And that does a tremendous disservice to those who quite legitimately participate in caring age-divergent relationships.

If you’re old enough to drive, old enough to vote, old enough to work, you’re old enough to be given some level of trust in your relationships.  ‘Trust’ doesn’t mean categorical approval, but it does mean starting from the assumption that these people are subjects who deserve the dignity of their own choices.

The Corpses Of Our Motivations– The Lawrence Arms

Up through the election, we heard paeans to Silver, hilarious jokes about the fools who tried to ‘unskew’ the polls, and the general triumph of reality-based analysis.

Then Silver returned to his old stomping grounds and wrote a pretty straightforward post explaining why Mike Trout is (rather obviously) the correct choice for MVP. And out came the crazy. The comments section on the article reads like a greatest hits of all the stupid things people on the right said about Silver in regards to the election.

But, the Tigers made the playoffs (despite winning less games than the Angels, and playing in a terrible division). And, your analysis didn’t account for the fact that Cabrera volunteered to move to third (in fact, it does account for that – because the replacement level for third base is higher than first base. Cabrera struck out less than Trout (totally irrelevant information). Cabrera led in total base, slugging percentage, homeruns, and OPS (all of which measure much the same thing – and no one is contesting that Cabrera had a narrowly better offensive season). RBIs (which are a function of opportunity, and Trout scored more Runs). It’s pretty much impossible to measure defense (it is difficult, but it’s difficult in the same way that single polls are never perfectly accurate. But they sure do provide some information).

The point here is that people were absolutely willing to walk through fire to defend Silver’s secret sauce, his commitment to objectivity, etc. But once his opinion began to differ from the preconceived value of his fans, he became just another media fool incapable of correctly assessing the situation.

The attitude of ‘I’ve been watching baseball for decades; you’re not going to convince me that the Triple Crown doesn’t = MVP with some supposed facts’ is strikingly similar to ‘I’ve been watching political campaigns for a long time and it feels like Romney has momentum.’

Suddenly everyone is an expert and Nate Silver is just a rube.

Motivated reasoning is a powerful thing.

Here’s a sad irony: as the economy (fingers crossed) starts to improve significantly in the upcoming years, people will suddenly start to care a whole lot less about the deficit.  And yet, when the economy is booming is precisely when we ought to start paying attention to fixing the long-term deficit risks.  When credit is cheap, we should borrow to stimulate.  Once things start growing faster, the government can step out of the way and let the rising tide of the economy start to balance the budget for us, and devote its energy to reigning in the long-term mess.

It’s a funny thing, that.  Despite it being phrased in terms of ‘handing down these deficits to our children,’ the fever pitch of deficit-mongering always takes place during economic declines and fades away if things are going well.  It’s almost as if the average person doesn’t really understand the complex nature of the global economy and fixates on the deficit as an easy signal of Bad Economic Things.

I’m in a predicting mood, so here’s another one.  Obama is going to put some serious effort into resolving long-term deficit issues in his second term.  And the public, which ostensibly was terrified about the ‘record-breaking’ deficits of his first administration, will be really unhappy about it.  Sub-prediction: the vast majority of media outlets covering this issue will not notice the irony.

At about 8:15 Pacific time on Tuesday night I declared that the Democratic candidate was going to win in 2016.  By at least five points, too.

Here’s the thing: the economy is already recovering and it’s only going to pick up more.  The lost capacity over the past few years doesn’t represent some fundamental collapse of the American economy.  It’s all still latent there.  And once things pick back up for real, they’re likely to really take off.

If Obama was able to keep his approval right around 50% in the current economic climate, you can only imagine what things will look like in a genuine recovery.

All of which points to a big Democratic win.  After all, the demographic advantages possessed by the Democrats right now are substantial.  Which is not to say that they’re eternal.  But for at least the next few years, the Republicans have built a hole for themselves which is going to be very difficult to get out of.

Over the long term, it’s simply impossible to imagine a major political party isolating itself from an increasing-large share of the electorate.  Which means they’re going to have to re-calibrate their relationship with all the non-white, non-male portions of the country.  But for the near future, there’s not really any way to successfully do that.  The base of the Republican party right now is simply not going to accept the kind of changes that it would take to win over those votes.  At least not over the next few years.

Now, there’s always the possibility of strange occurrences which push things out of whack.  But if I were Marco Rubio or some of the other potential up-and-comers in the GOP, I would plan on laying low for the next cycle.

So, the Senate. As I mentioned yesterday, I think this is a really big deal. At the most basic level, it’s important simply that the Democrats held the majority. That seemed pretty unlikely earlier this year. But instead of losing things, they actually GAINED seats. That helps to secure the blue team against potential losses in the next two cycles. And it pushes the median vote in the Senate left.

That is particularly true given the specifics.

Because of the GOP’s incapacity to speak reasonably about abortion and rape, they’ve traded an inconsistent vote (in Richard Lugar) for a reasonably solid Democratic vote (in Joe Donnelly). And they’ve given up an almost certain lock on knocking McCaskill out of Missouri. Instead of taking that seat, they got blown out of the water by a double-digit margin.

Jon Tester in Montana, who was supposed to be a sitting duck, will be serving his second term. He’s a conservative Dem, but not wildly so. Or rather, he appears to primarily be interested in accomplishing specific moderate goals, rather than being a moderate fetishist who tacks to the center by instinct regardless of circumstance.

Speaking of which, it seemed like a disaster when Kent Conrad decided not to run, but he’s now been replaced by Heidi Heitkamp who will likely be less of a pain in the butt for progressives. And then there’s Connecticut, where Crazy Uncle Joe Lieberman is finally gone and has been replaced by a far more solid liberal vote in CHRIS Murphy. Those two are retentions that may end up mattering a lot because although the seats were already blue-ish, they’ve now been given a nice new coat of paint. Tim Kaine is no liberal, but he’s likely to be at least as good as Webb. Heinrich will be a bit more left than Bingaman

We lost the Nebraska seat, but of all the possible seats to lose, that’s probably the least painful. The Benator was a Democrat, sure, but god he was aggravating.

But the really important news is the addition of some genuine progressive voices. The new slate of Democratic Senators includes a number of folks who could be very big names for a very long time. The campaign against Scott Brown is likely the toughest one that Elizabeth Warren is going to have face for a long time. And Warren immediately becomes one of the most progressive voices in the chamber. A role she’ll share with Sherrod Brown, who ended up winning re-election fairly easily.

Angus King is an Independent, but will likely be in the most left-leaning quartile of the Senate. And he’s replacing the perpetually aggravating Snowe who was the most liberal of the Republicans but was still a Republican. And, importantly, King has highlighted filibuster reform a major issue.

Tammy Baldwin is going to do great in the Senate, and is a real improvement over Kohl. She’s not quite Feingold, but is much closer to that mold.

This sort of thing is really important. Building a back bench of strong liberal voices helps to promote the overall agenda, it raises the profile of the issues they care about, and it provides a range of future options to draw from for Cabinet positions or even the presidency.

For people that are disillusioned with the relatively centrist policy positions taken in the first Obama administration, one of the best possible antidotes is a more progressive Senate, which can drag him (and those that will follow him) leftward.

The Book of Love– The Magnetic Fields

2004 was devastating.  It wasn’t enough that Kerry lost.  It’s that he lost in part because a series of anti-gay amendments helped turn out the far right vote.  It really shook my faith in things. I was still sure that equality would win in the long run, but ‘long’ suddenly felt desperately far away.

So now it’s 2012.

– The Democratic president, who officially endorsed gay marriage earlier this year, just won a fairly conclusive victory. During his first term, he finally made it possible for gays to serve openly in the military and refused to support DOMA in Court. Not only did his pro-gay stance not hurt him, it actually probably helped.  The Republican candidate desperately tried to avoid social issues at all, because he knew it would make him and his party look crazy.

– Tammy Baldwin was just elected as the first openly gay Senator.  It wasn’t even an issue in her campaign.  The House will have six queer members.

– Three states just voted to permit same-sex marriage.  Another state shot down a marriage equality ban.  After 32 consecutive losses trying to secure basic rights at the ballot box, we swept the tables last night.  And while there will surely be other losses down the road, the firewall has been broken.  And it will only be easier to vote in favor of equality the next time.

– Gay marriage was already legal in Iowa, but the results last night ensured that right won’t be rescinded.

– The Supreme Court is set to hear a case about DOMA soon, and I’m not completely terrified of what they might say.

– The Republican Party is facing the looming reality that they are not just on the wrong side of history, but are on the wrong side of an ever-growing electoral reality.  Even they aren’t dumb enough to keep this up forever.  And, if you’ll forgive the pun, once some prominent GOP leaders remove their fingers from the dike, the whole thing is going to burst.

A personal anecdote:

I grew up in a pretty conservative place: Island County, Washington.  It’s the home of the Whidbey Naval Base, with all the politics that you’d expect from that.  I did not know a single openly gay person the whole time I lived there.  In elementary school, kids played ‘Smear the Queer’ for fun.  And last night, Island County voted to affirm marriage equality.

It may be the proudest I’ve ever been of my hometown.

Well, that was quite a night.  Being a vaguely competent human adult, and a statistical nerd, I had very little doubt about the general outcome.  And still, there’s always some nervousness.  Add in a great deal of doubt about some really important state-level initiatives, and I had a lot to stress about.

And, at the end of the day, basically everything broke right.  The polls were spot-on for the presidential and Senate races.  Marijuana was legalized in two states.  California managed to pass a tax to prevent itself from collapsing AND finally gave the Democrats a super-majority.  Which means they could actually have just passed the tax anyways.  But still, having clear popular commitment to it is a big deal.

And gay marriage.  On November 5th, it had never been approved in a statewide vote of any kind.  That’s an 0-32 record.  But last night three states affirmed marriage equality, and Minnesota rejected a ban on it.  More thoughts coming about this later tonight, but suffice to say, this is a Big F-ing Deal.

The Democrats grabbed a couple extra Senate seats, and held onto some that looked DOA six months ago.  Thanks to a Republican Party that decided to pose the question: ‘rape…is it really that bad?’  But also thanks to Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and Jon Tester in Montana.  Heitkamp in particular kind of blew me away.  I gave up on that one as soon as Conrad announced he was leaving and never really thought about it again.

Perhaps even more importantly, the Senate became a LOT more progressive. Again, I’ll have a full post about that up soon.  But, the short version is that Elizabeth Warren is in the chamber, and Joe Lieberman is not.

Of course, the House remains in Republican hands (despite the Dems actually getting more net-votes – yay gerrymandering! yay federalism!), which is a bummer.  And the initiative to eliminate the death penalty failed in California, but I wasn’t really expecting that to pass anyways.

Anyways, this wasn’t a ‘transformational’ election and the blue team didn’t win a ‘mandate.’  But even just preserving all the gains from Obama’s first term is a HUGE win for progressive values and human dignity.  Most prominently, universal health care is now safe, probably forever.

There’s a lot of reasons to be cynical about the current state of American liberalism.  But yesterday was a really good day.

Paul Ryan should dump $10 million bucks into the Allegheny River tonight. It will save him the effort of doing it 1450 days from now.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ll be live-tweeting the election results tonight.

@olneyce

See you on the other side!

A Minutes Decision – Hutch and Kathy

My initial response to this commentary about undecided voters was intense frustration.

These people are more articulate than the ones in the SNL skit. But honestly, not that much. They all give reasons for their undecided status. And yet, it’s hard to discern what actual reasoning process is going on.

The basic theme is that these voters don’t much like Romney, but are so concerned about the economy that they’re considering voting for him.

But one thing that you will not see anywhere in that article is what precisely they think Romney will do to improve things. Even more, there really isn’t any coherent articulation of what the problem even is. Yes, ‘the economy’ isn’t doing well. But what does that actually mean? I don’t get the sense that anyone really knows.

Now, that’s not necessarily bad. I don’t expect people to have complicated theories about aggregate demand or QE3 and so forth. But it still drives me crazy to consistently hear people engage in this sort of self-analysis without any clear signal that they even grasp just how much they’re putting on faith.

If you’re going to vote on the economy, don’t you think it would be important to lay out precisely what the guy who is supposed to be better on the economy will do?  My sense is that this does not even occur to most as being a problem.  In their minds, the president has far more power than in reality.  So failure at the macro-level must therefore be evidence of some individual failing.  Starting from that premise, the decision process mostly involves grabbing ahold of whatever campaign narratives bolster your position.

Weirdly, I actually have a lot more sympathy for the people who give reasons that (in my opinion) are clearly incorrect or crazy. For instance, Melinda in Iowa says: “a lot of handouts to people that take advantage of the system. I am concerned Obamacare will just take my money so I can pay for others. Now, I do believe many people deserve assistance, but I wish that there would be more investigation into who actually is getting assistance and I feel that Obama has not done enough in regards to this.” Now that’s just silly (again, in my opinion). But at least it’s a demonstration of a broad ideology. The kind of person who would say something like that is the kind of person who is just not going to be on board with the Democratic economic agenda – and there’s no real need to articulate specific objections. The reason she is undecided is that she values cultural issues a lot. That makes sense. If economic times are good, that sort of person is going to prioritize the other stuff, but when things are bad and the person in charge has a different attitude toward economics, then you’re going to start doling out the blame.

Another theme is that they want to focus on the individual person over the party dynamics of that person.  Many of these people seem like folks who prefer Democrats to Republicans, but are contemplating holding their nose in hopes that Romney will be more moderate.   This isn’t a crazy idea, but it does often stem from a misunderstanding of just how party-dominated our system has become.  You aren’t voting for the individual; you’re voting for the party and there’s an individual who gets dragged along with it.

All that said, there’s something strangely wonderful about these undecided voters, and the intense work they do to communicate the reasons for their undecidedness. After all, there are a lot of ‘undecided’ voters who are undecided in the sense that they simply don’t care enough to make a decision. The undecideds that we’re talking about are the ones who believe it’s a significant civic duty to vote. And they take the obligation seriously.

As political scientists, we can tear our hair out about unreasonable expectations of these voters.  But we need to also remember that elections work perfectly well even if the only thing they do is reward/punish candidates for the general conditions under their watch.  And we can also diagnose what’s ‘really’ going on underneath the reasoning.  But that doesn’t make the perception of responsibility and care any less real.  These people are committed to American democracy and are putting a lot of work into fulfilling their role.

And you have to respect that.