Heidi Li's Potpourri

The trouble with appointing tax evaders to high positions in government: its a rule of law thing

I wish people would stop telling me to be relieved that President Obama is not President Bush. I detested President Bush, and I detested him from the moment he arrived on the national scene, from the way he ran his campaign which led us to the debacle of an election stolen in Florida (decided by 547 votes in the state George's brother was then Governor; and a long-time Bush supporter designed a confusing ballot and refused to go through the sort of recount that Al Franken is now having to endure); a campaign filled with bait and switch promises (viz: local control over schools, only to be followed by the No Child Left Behind Act: one of the greatest federal government takeovers of local affairs in recent memory.) But these bad-faith measures were just the prelude to an administration that pursued an agenda of putting the President and the executive branch above the law: George W. Bush personally committed war crimes, had his administration engage in illegal surveillance of American citizens, directed his Justice department to come up with justifications for U.S. violations of international law, tolerated or encouraged a host of troubling cronyistic contacts and relationships between his vice-president and members of the energy industries, tolerated or encouraged his justice department to go after government lawyers for their political positions, encouraged the expansion of executive privilege to cover the the office of the vice-president in unprecedented ways, and used various suspect methods (e.g. substituting executive regulation for legislation) to flout the separation of powers and checks and balances built in to the structure of the U.S. Constitution. George W. Bush was shady and underhanded, rivaled in recent times only by Richard M. Nixon, who was literally a crook.

I have no idea whether Barack H. Obama will turn out to be more or less unscrupulous than George W. Bush, more or less interested in the rule of law, and the place of the executive branch in American constitutional democracy. But less than a month into the new administration and, sure, I'm relieved that Obama isn't Bush, but I am not at all persuaded that he is going to be qualitatively more honest, in better faith, and more sensitive to the ideal of a government of laws rather than persons.

Coming into his presidency, Barack H. Obama showed a willingness to bend rules to gain office, and not just when he accepted 20 delegates from a state in which he never even ran, but going all the way back to Chicago. ("As a community organizer, he had helped register thousands of voters. But when it came time to run for office, he employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers." (source)) So far, his vetting failed to catch problems with at least three high level appointments (Bill Richardson, Tim Geithner, Tom Daschle) and even when ethical concerns have arisen about others (Jon Favreau) he's done nothing.

Obama's treatment of Geithner and Daschle particularly distresses me. Both are sophisticated, well-educated people, people who know when to get tax advice, people who understand the distinction between legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion and presumably how to work with an accountant to make sure that they are erring, if err they must, on the side of an abundance of law-abidingness. Both have had held fiscal policy-making positions. Each was found to have broken the tax laws. The Geithner strategy  - apologize, act contrite, claim embarrassment, apologize some more - is now being used by Daschle (go here for a round-up  of media reaction), who we are assured has not only the solid backing of Senate Democrats but enjoys President Obama's absolute support, as of today, Monday, February 2.

Now, I am happy to remark that the Obama administration has taken steps to bring the U.S. more in line with international law. But President Obama's consistent support for would-be office-holders who engage in inappropriate, unethical, illegal conduct does not bode well for those of us who really did want a different kind of politics in this country. I simply do not believe that there is nobody else who could head the Department of Health and Human Services other than somebody who evaded paying over $100,000 in taxes.

Oh, and yes, I do think there is a double standard at work here. Secretary of State Clinton was incredibly wise and politically adept to start early in working out disclosure arrangements regarding President Clinton's Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. But note: she anticipated the problems and questions and dealt with them beforehand, knowing that the boys' club was unlikely to close ranks around her had she not handled the issues forthrightly and adroitly. Meanwhile, for Daschle and Geithner the treatment is like that of small boys caught with their hand in the cookie jar: the men of Washington - and note the it is the men of the Senate, especially Harry Reid, and the man who is President, Barack Obama - who are quick to say of Geithner and Daschle the equivalent of "boys will be boys":  these guys are good guys. Yes, tax evasion is bad (Reid and Obama cannot seem to quite bring themselves to say "illegal") but as long as Geithner and Daschle know how to act contrite and express embarrassment, they really ought to get the jobs they want. But this is no way to create a sense of respect for the rule of law, that respect that George W. Bush never displayed. To restore respect is a tough task and it requires demonstrating little tolerance for those who break laws directly relevant to the responsibilities of the offices they seek.

It is hard for an empty suit to take a stand - or perhaps even to understand what it means to take a stand

Richard Cohen's sister is canceling her inauguration party because of President-elect Obama's choice of Rick Warren to bless Mr. Obama's taking the office of the Presidency of the United State. According to her brother's column in the Washington Post, what made her do this is the way in which Mr. Obama's choice to pick this pastor for this occasion serves as a special sort of condoning of Mr. Warren's views about gays and lesbians. I agree with Richard Cohen, and apparently his sister, that these views should be regarded as totally unacceptable by anybody who has any sense of the importance of civil rights and indeed of human rights. I also agree with Richard Cohen's view that as a somebody running for the office of President and who was at the time a U.S. Senator, Mr. Obama had a particular responsibility for denouncing his then-pastor's church, Trinity United Church of Christ, for giving the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan a special award during the primary season. I find it troubling that neither Mr. Cohen nor apparently his sister have not been, as far as I can tell, overly concerned by President-Elect Obama's equally eloquent silence and inaction regarding the sexism and misogyny directed at Senator Clinton and her supporters, particularly the sophomoric expression of these attitudes by Jon Favreau, the man writing President-elect Obama's inaugural address. (I shudder to think what the reaction of the Cohen family would have been if Favreau had been found on YouTube horsing around calling somebody a "homo" - maybe then Richard Cohen's sister would join us in our demand that the President-Elect fire this sophomoric bigot as his chief speech-writer. Whether a bigot is slick (Warren) or juvenile (Favreau), he is still a bigot.)

It is tempting to forget in this sort of dynamic who the real problem is. As is clear from what I have written so far, I wish Richard Cohen and his sister would be, respectively, writing about and canceling inauguration parties as much over Mr. Obama's inaction in the face of sexism and misogyny as they are in the face of anti-Semitism and gay-bashing. And yes, I wish that Richard Cohen's sister had paid attention to and given greater weight to the fact that she had the option to work to elect somebody who, both as a Senator and as a Presidential candidate, repeatedly marched in Pride parades and met with editors of gay newspapers across the country rather than working for somebody who would not even have his photograph taken with Gavin Newsome.

But I am not falling into the trap that lies that way. Just because people got it wrong before does not mean they cannot help matters now. People can learn. So despite the bit of complaining above, I am not going to point a finger at Richard Cohen's sister (or, for that matter, at Katha Pollitt for decrying the misogyny involved in the Warren choice when Pollitt, like Richard Cohen's sister, opted to support Mr. Obama for the presidency when it was already obvious that he was complacent, to say the least, about sexism and misogyny). I am just pleased that they are starting to pay attention now and apparently coming to understand better who they voted for. To quote Richard Cohen: "The real problem has nothing to do with ministers and everything to do with Obama's inability or unwillingness to be a moral leader. Sooner or later, he just might have to stand for something."

Aye, there's the rub. During the primary season and the general election a friend of mine who spent some considerable amount of time listening to me lament the Democratic Party's poor judgment in making then-Senator Obama their poster-child, kept saying to me that the real problem with Mr. Obama is that he is an "empty suit".

That term seemed to me too tepid back then. But I have come to see it as the essential problem behind the problem of Mr. Obama's inability or unwillingness to be a moral leader, and possibly any kind of leader. To be a moral leader, to stand for something means that you have to fill out your suit, your office, your position. To be an "empty suit" is to be a person who cannot draw a line in the sand, precisely because you do not have an arm and hand within that suit to use to reach out and draw that line. To be an "empty suit" is to be devoid of the weightiness that real leadership requires, including the gravitas to admit to a mistake and change one's position (drop the bigoted minister and lose the bigoted speechwriter; say you have been wrong to dig in your heels rather than listen to the concerns of so many of the people who worked so hard to elect you). To be an "empty suit" is to be a moral vacuum.

I refused to vote for John McCain for a number of reasons but among them was the fact that while I knew he had the capacity for moral leadership, I did not care for the directions toward which his moral commitments would lead my country. I refused to vote for Barack Obama because I knew he came up empty on the capacity for moral leadership.

In some ways, moral emptiness, especially in a President, is worse than moral wrong-headedness. The morally wrong-headed leader takes a stand, e.g. George W. Bush's legitimization of torture, and one can rally people against the stand she or he takes. The morally empty leader takes no stand. Under these circumstances, her or his silences often allow people to forget that the blank that exists in lieu of a leader is the appropriate target of criticism. After all, it seems easier to go after people who actually do take stands (Rick Warren, for example) rather than the person who silently enables wrong-headed person to gain in stature. But this is sleight of hand. The real problem is the enabler, the person who allows the sophomoric sexist to put words in his mouth, the person who lets bigoted clerics and their churches affiliate with him.

So, to Richard Cohen's sister and to Katha Pollitt, I say welcome to my party - the one that got lost in 2008, the one that expected moral leadership of a certain kind from a Democratic president. Now that you are here, I hope you can help me figure out what we are going to do with the empty suit about to occupy the Oval Office. If that empty suit thinks he can pick up sufficient evangelical money and votes in 2012, he is not going to listen to bloggers and op-ed columnists whose votes and followers he thinks he can replace with the support of the evangelicals, regardless of the detestable content of many of their views and some of their conduct. Personally, I do not think we can give the empty suit the backbone necessary to resist the lure of that support. If we cannot give this empty suit some backbone, we need, as I have written before, to start figuring out how we can have a better candidate on offer in 2012. So to the people who are canceling their celebrations, may I suggest that they use the time and effort saved to start solving that problem. We need to coalesce now around somebody who can fight for a nomination by a major Party - probably the the Party formerly recognizable as the Democratic one - who is what Obama's supporters hoped he would be and what I fear he is not.

If you think images do not matter, would you welcome these into your child's library?

Ferris State University, in Big Rapids, Michigan is a historically black university. It is also home to one of the most interesting museums in the United States of America: The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. One on-line exhibit is devoted to The Picaninny Caricature.

From the museum's website:

The picaninny was the dominant racial caricature of Black children for most of this country's history. They were "child coons," miniature versions of Stepin Fetchit (see the section on the coon caricature). Picaninnies had bulging eyes, unkempt hair, red lips, and wide mouths into which they stuffed huge slices of watermelon. They were themselves tasty morsels for alligators. They were routinely shown on postcards, posters, and other ephemera being chased or eaten. Picaninnies were portrayed as nameless, shiftless natural buffoons running from alligators and toward fried chicken. [footnote omitted]

Some of the images presented as examples of hateful imagery:

 

The museum also has online exhibits dedicated to depictions at the intersection of misogyny and race hatred. Two of these are here and here. From The Mammy Caricature:

• Is this funny?
• Is this cute?

If one of President-elect Obama's staff members had posed in the lap of a cardboard cut out with this mask photoshopped as the head, would that person still have a job?

A slogan from the Museum:

"THESE IMAGES FORCE A PERSON TO TAKE A STAND FOR OR AGAINST THE EQUALITY OF ALL HUMAN BEINGS."

Under no circumstances are death threats acceptable

Whether one agrees with President-elect Obama's positions or not, whether one agrees with his political methods or not, nothing - absolutely nothing - justifies threats on his life. The same goes for any other person in a civilized society. Death threats are unequivocally evil.

These press reports - here, here, and here - must make us mindful that the horrid hatefulness directed against women and gays is the same sort of hatefulness that is being directed against the President-elect. Whatever else we as Americans agree or disagree about, we must categorically condemn and reject these threats.