Heidi Li's Potpourri

The payoffs - and obstacles - to attending to women's work in the current economy

From a must-read column by Professor Mimi Abramovitz:

Contrary to popular wisdom, spending on services like health care and education produces a bigger bang for the economic-stimulus buck than billions of dollars devoted to roads and bridges. .... For years service jobs have been "reserved" for women. Could this be why mostly male economists have pushed for "shovel ready" jobs held mostly by men as the way to dig us out of the economic quagmire? Could it be that sustaining the male-breadwinner and female-homemaker division of labor trumped economic good sense?

From Professor Susan Feiner learn about W.E.A.V.E and its position on the current stimulus package:

No. 1: Revive and enforce Labor Department regulations requiring affirmative action for all federal contractors.

No. 2: Set aside apprenticeship and training programs in infrastructure projects for women and people of color. Both groups are seriously underrepresented in the construction trades.

No. 3: Spend recovery money on projects in health, child care, education and social services.

Before going into detail on these three targets, let's also look at two over-arching problems with the current plan: Too meager, too male.

Women make up a huge proportion of the workforce, they own homes in ever greater numbers, they have consumer clout - but economically, women are systemically disadvantaged in ways that make put them at greater financial risk then  men. Whether it be for reasons of justice or reasons of prudence, our country cannot afford economic measures that do not address this disparity in risk. We must design economic programs that put women forward.

(Cross posted at Heidi Li on Equality at 51 Percent)

Tim Geithner; Herbert Hoover - Depression revisited (bumped and updated)

I am not an economist, and do not purport to have expertise in the field. I offer this post based on the claims of Paul Krugman and Barack Obama that the fiscal crisis facing the United States and its citizens today is more comparable to the conditions of the Great Depression than any other crisis faced since then. If that is true, no wonder I find the details of whiz-kid tax evader Tim Geithner's newly renamed Financial Stability Act personally depressing. So, by the way, does Wall Street.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner announced a vast new rescue plan for the financial sector. Stocks plunged following the unveiling of the program to use $1.5 trillion or more in public and private funds to bail out banks and financial institutions and thaw frozen credit markets. The plan would create a $500 billion fund to buy up toxic bank assets such as bad real estate loans and commit up to $1 trillion to reopen lending markets for consumer, student, small business, auto and commercial loans.

The Dow Jones industrial average was down 383 points in afternoon trading. The tech-heavy Nasdaq plummeted 63 points, and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index dropped 43 points.

(source)

Here are the highlights of the Geithner plan, according to The New York Times:

Now, read these excerpts from an overview of the Hoover administration's approach to the Great Depression, which set in 6 to 8 years before Franklin Delano Roosevelt was first elected.

A) "The slump in automobile sales was paralleled by the decline in the construction of new housing, causing unemployment in the building trades. Fewer suburban houses meant fewer markets for appliances, wall coverings, and other activities related to home building."

B) "The economy was in trouble but people, dazzled by a surging stock market, ignored it.
The consumer economy was slowing as incomes skewed to the rich. In 1929, the richest 10% of families received 39% of disposal personal income while the bottom 10% only got 2%."

C) "People seemed to be forgetting that capitalism needs to expand, that demand for housing, clothes, automobiles, stoves, and many other consumer goods generates demand in other sectors of the economy. But mass production necessitates mass consumption. Mass consumption necessitates an income distribution that allows consumers to buy. Without the appropriate income distribution, warehouses will burst at their seams and production lines will clog."

D) "Many of the wealthy, as well as others, joined the speculative stock market sending stock prices to greater and greater without regard to company performance; In October, 1929, the bubble burst. The crash meant the tremendous loss of capital as prices declined $74 billion from 1929 to 1932 and the repatriation of much of US investment abroad."

E) "As historians Peter N. Carroll and David W. Noble note, Hoover feared that the collapse of the large corporations would bring down the entire US capitalist system. After all, one percent of the banks held 50% of banking assets. Three corporations—Ford, Chrysler, General Motors—manufactured 85% of the automobiles sold in the US. Chain stores dominated retail sales and their difficulties had national repercussions.

Business and industry met the crisis as they had always done—they cut production, lowered wages, reduced working hours, and fired workers. Unemployment rose from 1.5 million in 1929 to 13 million in 1933, a figure which represented 25% of the labor force. Even such a high percentage hid the dimensions of the problem because it did not what percentage had been forced the part-time work. Industrial wages fell from $425 a week to $17 a week, a decline of 32%."

F) "To help the situation, the Hoover administration sept close to a billion dollars in public works programs but he would not go further. Nor would he argue for direct relief to the unemployed and starving because he feared that doing so would corrupt them."

G) "Hoover and the Republicans saw aid to corporations as being different. Whereas they believed that helping the individual citizen weather the Depression would corrupt him or her, aiding corporations and other business was different. To many, it appeared that the Republicans were only interested in the rich. The newly-created Reconstruction Finance Corporation aided only the large corporations.

Hoover broke precedent because the national government assumed some responsibility for what happens during an economic depression but he was not willing to go far enough. He believed that the depression was part of the normal business cycle and had been caused by international factors and not US ones. to him, 'prosperity was just around the corner.' The best thing for the country to do would be to wait the crisis out."

I am in no position to know just how deeply or robustly FDR's New Deal reforms have insulated us from a new Great Depression. But with a Nobel Laureate and the President of the United States telling me that we are in a state of disaster, I find it depressing that the Treasury Secretary's plan sounds much more Hooverian than FDR-like.

I know the economy is not going to do an about face on a dime. I do not need Secretary Geithner or President Obama to tell me that. But with trillions of dollars going to banking corporations and relatively little aid going to those who are rapidly falling into more dire straits than they imagined possible, I cannot help but feel as so many of us did when George W. Bush whisked us into war in Iraq. In the words of author Anne Lamott: "I don't know who on the left can lead us away from the craziness and the barbarity: I've very confused now."

Lamott wrote those words when she was criticizing George W. Bush for deceiving the American people. Sauce for Bush should be sauce for Obama. One problem with the Geithner plan is "lack of transparency". Deception: a post-partisan kind of thing.

Wanted: domestic Cabinet Secretaries for Obama's executive branch

It turns out to to be tough for the executive branch to get much accomplished when the cabinet is riddled with vacancies.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt entered office in 1933, the country was in the midst of the Great Depression, which is generally dated as lasting from 1929 through the early 1940s. One commentator dates 1933, the year of Roosevelt's first Inauguration, as "the worst point in the depression, more than 15 million Americans—one-quarter of the nation’s workforce—were unemployed." Neither Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt's presidential predecessor nor the 1920s-earlier 1930s U.S. Congress had had any success in blunting the effects of the economic catastrophe, let alone getting at its causes.

Given this background, it is practically boring that the moment Roosevelt hit Washington, DC he arrived with domestic cabinet positions filled, and backups for at the ready for those who had to depart unexpectedly. Quite possibly because of his extensive experience in government, federal and state, Roosevelt realized that the executive is a branch of government, not a one-man operation - a multi-faceted wing of the government each part of which requires personpower and leadership. This all sounds obvious, I know.  Obvious, that is, until one realizes that as of February 7, 2009, the President who has taken office under economic circumstances that have been compared to those under which Roosevelt took office has still not filled three major domestic/economic cabinet positions: Labor, Commerce, and Health and Human Services. Furthermore, that President, Barack Obama, apparently had no backups in two cases, Bill Richardson and Tom Daschle where the nominees' problems were on the much vaunted transition team's radar, although apparently not high enough to attract the notice one might have expected.

FDR's first 100 days (which actually date from the time Congress convened after his inauguration) gained momentum from the very quick passage of a bill he had ready to send to Congress immediately,

When Congress met on March 9, F.D.R.’s Emergency Banking Act was introduced in the House with the ink still wet. There were no committee hearings, no debate, no amendments. The measure was whooped through with bipartisan support and no roll call. Most members had not read the bill, and took on faith what the leadership presented. Three hours later the bill passed the Senate (73-7), and an hour later Roosevelt added his signature. The entire legislative process, from the bill’s introduction in the House to the president’s signature, took less than six hours. (source)

The Emergency Banking Act of 1933 tackled one discrete part of the bleak economic situation, in two steps:

• Legalized President Roosevelt's decision to declare a national banking holiday.
• Permitted the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to appoint a conservator with powers of receivership over all national banks threatened with suspension.

It was not an omnibus  attempted cure-all. Perhaps this is why leadership from both parties could digest it  and rally their legislative troops around. When Roosevelt called Congress into Session, passing this Act was his only immediate objective. It was only because this Act passed so swiftly that Roosevelt was able to get more New Deal banking and finance legislation underway. Within the first 100 days, Roosevelt was able to act on the momentum garnered from the quick passage of the Banking Act. He sent numerous stimulus sand relief bills to Congress, going one category or problem at a time, which diminished opportunities for time-consuming logrolling and bickering.

But none of this could have been accomplished so quickly or effectively if Roosevelt had to do all the work of the executive branch alone. Although the number of cabinet positions in 1933 were fewer than today, Roosevelt had all his filled, by people who knew him well. Here is the starting line-up of those who filled domestic positions and were responsible for drafting and implementing the legislation of the first 100 days:

Secretary of the Interior
Harold L. Ickes (1933 - 1945)

Secretary of Commerce
Daniel C. Roper (1933 - 1938)

Secretary of the Treasury
William H. Woodin (1933 - 1933 [resigned due to illness]) • Henry Morgenthau Jr. (1934 - 1945)

Attorney General
Homer S. Cummings (1933 - 1939)

Secretary of Agriculture
Henry A. Wallace (1933 - 1940)

Secretary of Labor
Frances Perkins (1933 - 1945)

In 100 days, this group, working with Congress, accomplished more to restore Americans' confidence in the economy and the government than Herbert Hoover's administration had in the previous 4 years. Not that Hoover made NO effort. He put forth and signed into law one of the original trickle-down (to write anachronistically) pieces of economic fix-it legislation:

Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) Act of 1932

• Provided loans to banks, savings banks, building and loan associations, credit banks, industrial banks, mutual savings banks, and life insurance companies.
• Made loans to railroads, many of which could not meet their bonded indebtedness payments.

Feminists do not horse-trade women's rights to care for their bodies for Republican votes

A week or so into our new Presidential administration, and the strange sensation of living in a universe that only partially intersects that of many people I would formerly have have considered obvious political allies continues. Starting yesterday and on through today I began receiving messages from blogger friends and then from NOW-NY and then Planned Parenthood, that something very strange seemed to be happening with the economic stimulus bill. Apparently President Obama (who neither NOW nor Planned Parenthood can bring themselves to name as part of the problem, although Planned Parenthood does suggest calling the White House) and Congressional Democrats are willing to curry votes from Republicans on the Hill by cutting the Medicaid Family Planning State Option from the stimulus package the Congress is hoping to have ready for presidential signing by mid-Februrary. The Medicaid Family Planning State option is a provision that would provide health care coverage for 2.3 million low-income women, according to Planned Parenthood, by "allow[ing] states to expand their Medicaid family planning services, including cancer screenings and other preventive care, to more women in need, without having to go through the burdensome Medicaid waiver process." Or as the National Women's Law Center puts it, "In a disappointing move, the economic recovery package will not include a provision to make it easier for states to make family planning services more accessible and affordable to the millions of women and families who depend on them. The Medicaid Family Planning State Option would have allowed states to expand Medicaid eligibility for family planning services without having to obtain a federal waiver."  Meanwhile, when I went to look at the January 28 New York Times print edition to for details, I found no mention of this ditching of the Family Planning option until deep into one of the three stories on the stimulus package, mentioned in passing in a vague paragraph on page A16 of the Washington print edition of the Times:

As the House version of the legislation came to the floor on Tuesday, Democrats stripped from it a provision that Republicans had ridiculed as having nothing to do with economic stimulus, one expanding federal Medicaid coverage of family planning services. (The Congressional Budget Officehad estimated that the provision would actually save the government $200 million over five years by reducing pregnancy and postnatal-care expenses.)

Then, as I sat down to compose my thoughts about this latest bit of chicanery over women's bodies, things turned a bit more surreal. Apparently, despite its reported spike in subscriptions, Ms. Magazine has enough leftover editions of its inaugural issue - you know, the one with this patently ridiculous cover, to just today be offering me more "one more chance" to own the cover in poster size.

Please note: no way in hell does a feminist look like a person who is willing to horse-trade funds for family planning benefits under Medicaid to placate Republicans, who will do anything to beat back money for family planning which they are trying as quickly as possible to turn into an epithet. Family planning is a good idea. So is birth control in most people's lives. So, in some cases, is access to safe and legal abortion. Family planning, birth control, access to safe and legal abortions: these are not dirty words. They are real world, practical options - options needed, at least as options, by all women if they are to be truly autonomous actors in our society; and therefore options that must be as available to those whose health insurance is provided by the government as to those whose insurance is provided by private insurers.

Here's a little trick used by many who teach property law across the country. Most first year law students arrive in their Property Law courses with two visions of what property is: either the stuff they just put away in their dorm rooms or a field in the country somewhere. So we law professors often start by telling them that no,that isn't property at all. What property really is, is the set of entitlements and rights any particular person or the state has to control or use the stuff they just put their dorm rooms or the field in the country. In other words, property is a bundle of say-so's over what happens to the bits and pieces in the world. Who gets to say what about what happens to what what bits and pieces makes up the law of property. Today's casebooks tend to leave out the statutes and cases that blatantly assumed that women and black men were bits and pieces that were just as much the objects of debates about particular say-so's - cases about the details of chattel marriage (e.g. since a husband controlled all of his wife's legal rights, could she ever charge him with rape?) and chattel slavery (e.g., since a slave owner controlled absolutely the working conditions of slaves, could a slave owner be charged with murder for  willfully and knowingly depriving slaves of adequate rest or water thereby leading to their deaths?). Property casebooks tend to leave out these cases because it is rightly considered unacceptable to conceive of women and black men as the equivalent of the stuff in the dorm room or the field in the countryside. So, especially when it comes to chattel slavery, current law school curricula focus on the law that removed blacks from the status of chattel and recognized them as persons, not property.

Because there has never been a legal seismic shift in the status of women in this country - nothing comparable to a Civil War leading to an Emancipation Proclamation or the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution or the myriad of statutes and regulations passed to make the guarantees of these Amendments a reality - there is no natural place in law school curricula to address the halting transition our society is making toward giving women full say-so over their own bodies and the opportunity and means to give that say-so tangible effect.  Some family law courses consider the question; some specialized courses in feminist legal studies do. But even the most aspirational of law school curricula still must work from the law as it is, not as we would have it be. And the fact remains that women have not been liberated from the shackles legally imposed on them.

If President Obama and the Democratic Congress were to horse-trade away men's rights to control their health care, I am confident that there would be hue and cry. But this is because the baseline assumption in our society is that men are entitled to control their own bodies.  No man of any color is the property of the state, nor may the state dole out its aid starting from the presumption that the state has more say so over men's bodies then men themselves do.

But since President Obama has decreed "there's not a minute to spare" before he gets the stimulus package he is willing to settle for, apparently he has not a minute to spare to fight for the women's rights and resources to control and care for their bodies.

Congratulations, Kirsten Gillibrand

Note to readers: I have been ill - nothing serious but not well enough to write and even now will have to be brief - thank you for your patience during the lull.

In early December, I stated my own preference for Kirsten Gillibrand for appointment to the New York State Senate seat opened by Secretary of State Clinton's decision to move to the Executive branch. As I wrote recently, Gillibrand was neither the only woman suitable for a gubernatorial appointment nor the only suitable person. But kudos to Governor Paterson, who is taking all sorts of heat for the appointment (not surprising in the snakes nest of New York state politics), for sticking to his word and his principles about a) filling the seat with a woman, especially so that the 2010 ticket of state-wide office runners in New York would definitely include a woman incumbent (that's the 51 Percent spirit) and b) using his own judgment and not being jockeyed by New York state dynastic politicians (whether the dynasty be Kennedy or Cuomo).

I cannot know all the reasons Governor Paterson chose Gillibrand, and surely many were "political" - e.g. related to his belief that selecting her would be good for his chances for reelection; or for New York State Democrats in general. Even if one went into 2008 with a less jaded view of politics (which I did not) nobody could come out of it with such a naive one as to think that such factors played no roll in his choice.

Indeed, this is part of why I applaud the choice of Gillibrand. A Democrat who has twice won in a majority Republican congressional district, this is no untested politician (note to those complaining about her "lack of experience" - see e.g. our just-elected President; were you raising that complaint about him, either when he ran for Senate or for President?)

Gillibrand is more conservative than I am on a number of issues: her take on the Second Amendment, in particular, commits her to a view about individual rights to own guns with which I disagree, although on the relevant vote in Congress in which she has participated she voted for improved background checks on gun purchasers with a history of mental illness. But on other issues, including reproductive rights, her voting record makes me smile at the prospect of eliminating the domestic versions of the gag rule that President Obama has eliminated in the international context. On still other issues, I am, as is so often the cases in democratic politics (small "d", please note) in partial agreement or partial disagreement, but can easily comprehend the reasonableness of Gillibrand's view. For example, in the absence of an extension of the precedent of Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that recognized the unconstitutionality of laws prohibiting interracial marriage to to same sex couples, Gillibrand is for a federal law permitting same-sex civil union and leaving the issue to states as to what to term this union. What I like about Gillibrand is that she takes her own position seriously: while I might prefer a champion of legislation for same sex-sex marriage, a liberal committed to federalism, can, in the absence of a Supreme Court decision mandating the extension of the institution of marriage, coherently maintain a preference for the a federal law permitting civil unions, while leaving to the states the question of what to call these unions.

Kirsten Gillibrand is a nuanced politician. And she's a young woman by political standards, at 42 the youngest member of the Senate. As we have seen, youth favors rising politicians, especially those who would be President. Kirsten Gillibrand may or may not develop politically in ways that would make enough of her positions strongly appealing to me to get behind her as a rising contender for the Presidency. But the idea is not far-fetched. So, for the first time in many weeks my heart is unequivocally warmed by a development on the national political scene.

Read this news article to get a wellrounded characterization of Kirsten Gillibrand.

Sometimes you give back to the community in ways you never thought you would

I am not often deliberately autobiographical here at Heidi Li's Potpourri. But sometimes an ally asks you to join in a project and ...

Petunia Politik tagged me.

Apparently, some in the Pumasphere are playing the following game: if tagged we are asked to write six things about ourselves AND tag six other bloggers to do the same, as part of a way of supplying some diversion for those who will be sauntering the web with care over this weekend.  So, in name of community building and camaraderie:

1. Yes, I am 5 feet, 9 inches tall. If you have seen me in person, and you are insightful you know this and will not get bogged down in discussions of whether height is relative and what my height means for you. Recently, I attended an event where a very insightful person questioned my height, and when I asked whether he really did indeed want to get into a conversation about the nature of reality, he quickly replied that given his full head of dark brown hair, completely ungreyed, he saw no point in going there.

2. According to my mother, I never asked for a brother or a sister (after me, my mom went through some pregnancies that the babies didn't survive) but when I was about three or four I requested a cat, so I would have "somebody to talk to" when she and my father were talking to each other. I named the cat that arrived Mischief Funnyface Feldman, and no better black and white alley cat has ever been a better companion. Mischief was also an excellent conversationalist which was fortunate since my parents were plenty able to spend time in good conversation with each other.

3. I love to nap.

4. I love to laugh, and probably the reason I am still with my husband and always will be is that he is uniquely able to crack me up.

5. I was raised in a fiercely anti-racist home, really one that was unusually like that for its time and place. My mother, in particular, instilled in me the attitude that skin color simply is not relevant to evaluating a person. She and my father established the authenticity of their own view by not batting an eye when the first person I ever lived with - and the person who became the aforementioned husband - turned out to be brown with a name that most Americans find to be quite the tongue-twister. They met the young man and the first thing they said to me when we spoke in private was that THIS was a person who showed the sort of kindness and intelligence that they thought would make me happy.

Now I knew that this color-blindness was quite uncommon. Still is, I imagine. I was not, and am not, naive about the lack of color-blindness in this world. And until this election year I felt my life was nothing but the better for having had instilled into it both anti-racism and color-blindness - for never thinking that color of a person's skin was relevant to his or her value. But here is a paradox: while I understand intellectually that the election of a non-white to the Presidency of the United States of America is historically remarkable, I cannot become interested in President-elect Obama's imminent inauguration simply because of the color of his skin. And that's because I have never really paid attention to the color of his skin. So, in a slightly perverse way I am alienated from the obviously authentic joy other people take in the fact that we are about to have our first non-white President. Again, I stress that I get it on an intellectual level. I do not even think that it is per se racist to be moved simply by color of the our incoming President's skin. The paradox arises for me because skin color has simply mattered so little to me throughout my life, I cannot suddenly make it matter to me now.

6. In a way, I wish I could make it matter, because I admit I feel a loss at not being swept up in pure joy that many people of good will are genuinely feeling as they see the upcoming inauguration like Rev. Jesse Jackson does: “It is a huge civil rights moment,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson. “Barack Obama has run the last lap of a 54-year race for civil rights."

The last lap: from where I sit, with no ERA, with 51 Percent's goals far from realized, with misogynist, homophobic Rick Warren about to bless the new president's term we have laps and laps and laps still to run. But I do hope the inauguration of Barack Obama is at least part of the tortuous path in the quest for a truly liberal society, one where accidental features of individuals - their skin color, their gender, their sexual orientation, their nation of origin - have nothing to do with how we measure one another's worth. Only time will tell.

I will be extending invitations to the following blogs' authors to join in the game of tag. (Note, given the evolving nature of how people use the term "Puma" I am taking the liberty of identifying blogs I find interesting and in keeping with the self-governing independence of thought that to me characterizes the emerging core of Puma political thinking).

Katalusis ~~ DoublejointedFingers ~~ Bud White's World ~~ Donna Darko ~~ Stray Yellar Dawg ~~ American Indy in Italy

CNN interview: Amy Siskind attempts to educate; Ms. Mag editor uses airtime as commercial

Watch the video here. Listen to The New Agenda's executive director Amy Siskind succeed as she raises pertinent, relatively mild objections, to the Ms. Magazine cover for its special inauguration issue.  Then listen to Ms. Magazine's executive editor Katherine Spillar as she first a) dodges the issue, which is not whether men can be feminists, but whether there is any basis for referring to this man, President-elect Obama, as "what a feminist looks like" and then b) tells people to read the magazine so as to understand the cover (read = buy the magazine) and then c) evidently indicated to the CNN anchors that subscriptions to the magazine are up because of the inauguration cover, and thus the cover was a good idea.

Successful covers do not require a magazine to explain or justify their meaning. For example, most thoughtful criticisms of The New Yorker's satirical cover of the Obamas faulted the cover for being failed satire: for its failure to broadcast its satire and thus its potential to be taken too seriously. In other words, that cover, in many people's opinion, failed on its own terms. Similarly the Ms. Magazine cover fails on it own terms. The intention was not to satirize the claim that Barack Obama, who has not one achievement in public life that can be considered as his own contribution to advancing feminism, is the paradigm of a feminist. No, the intention was tell us just what the cover said: that Barack Obama is a feminist, indeed a heroic - if closeted - one (note it is only his undershirt that reveals the truth of his feminism). If the intention was to say that men can be feminists, they should have put Bill Clinton, who put his career on hold to assist his wife achieve greatness in hers, on the cover. Or they could have put Terry McAuliffe on the cover, for his unwavering devotion to a candidate who happened to be female but who also had a record of standing by the once-core Democratic Party principles that have, in the past, made many of us proud to be Democrats. No way was Ms. Magazine's intent  to suggest that men can be feminists, a point that anybody who has given two thoughts to feminism gets.

Apart from an intent to laud and fuss over President-elect Obama, the intent of the Ms. Magazine cover is the intent of most magazines: to sell the merchandise.  Fair enough, some will say. What's wrong with trying to sell the merch? Generally, in the case of magazines not much. But Ms. Magazine was founded to lead a cause. If it simply wants to bump up subscriptions - assuming there's enough data in yet to support the claim that the current cover does that - then Ms. Magazine should, straightaway, start with centerfolds labeling whoever is trendy at the moment as a stealth feminist. For those with more salable physiques, have them pull the over-clothes apart a little more widely; or maybe pose them with the slogan on the back of their panties, briefs or boxers, and wearing nothing else. They can shyly peek over their shoulder, indicating that they themselves are as surprised as the rest of us that Ms. Magazine has singled them out as archetypical feminists.

In the CNN interview, Ms. Spillar says "some people" have "overreacted" to the cover. This sounds an awful lot like the sexist tropes used by the cover subject's language during the primary season, such as his imagery about Senator Clinton's "claws" and "fangs" coming out. Just who is Ms. Spillar calling "some people"? Women. You know, the people whose claws and fangs come out when they get periodically down.

Ms. Spillar, you are completely correct that a man can be feminist. And in your interview today you demonstrated the corollary, that a woman can be a misogynist, belittling the concerns of those who once depended on publications like Ms. Magazine to give voice - and the front cover - to matters central to equalizing opportunities for 51 percent of this country's population.

Mr. Obama, why not change your mind? It is your party, disinvite Rick Warren.

Frank Rich, an entrenched New York Times columnist, finally decided to publish a wee bit of criticism directed a President Elect Obama just today, December 28. Just a tad of critique because, according to Rich, "for the first time a faint tinge of Bush crept into my Obama reveries this month." As one  who has not been laboring under Obama reveries and who began trying to figure out whether he reminded me more of Richard Nixon or George W. Bush as far back as the fall of 2007, the this late faint awakening from a journalist of many year's experience seems peculiar, to say the least. I know that coming out of a pleasant reverie must be difficult, but Rich is barely awake and certainly not likable enough given the narrow basis for his creeping concerns about Mr. Obama. Rich's main beef is that Mr. Obama has displayed "his own brand of hubris and arrogance" by expending an amount of "political capital" that Rich considers "small change" because, according to Rich, most Americans who know about  Rick Warren like him.

Indeed, Rich himself kind of likes Rick Warren because: "His good deeds are plentiful on issues like human suffering in Africa, poverty and climate change." Sure, Warren "is opposed to same-sex marriage, but so is almost every top-tier national politician, including Obama." (Note to Mr Rich: there is some scary circularity in the logic here.  It is no sign of acceptability of any kind that "almost every top-tier national politician" and Rich Warren are on the same side of any given issue.) With regard to Warren's hatred of gays, Rich cannot even be bothered by anything other than Warren's "defamation" of gays. So he apparently is not bothered by Warren's comparison of women who exercise their right to abortion to Nazis or his assertion of the propriety of wifely submission.

(What is it with these men who comment on Warren? They object to his treatment of group that includes men (gays) but they cannot even note Warren's misogynistic worldview, one in which all wives are second-class to all husbands and women exercising their constitutional rights to bodily self-determination are put on the same moral plane as Nazis. (If you are bothered by this consistent blindspot, you may be interested in 51 Percent.)

Rich confidently writes of Obama "he’s not about to rescind the invitation." I assume that Rich is confident of that because he does note Obama's "cockiness" - which Rich ultimately excuses, writing "By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama’s disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It’s no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history."

I wholeheartedly agree that the decision to have Rick Warren bless his inauguration is no Bay of Pigs. But Frank Rich just can't quite pull himself out of his reverie if he calls the Warren invitation and Warren's role in the event an "asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black President." Having a bigoted, homophophic, misogynistic cleric headline your inaugural is likely to render the event anything but joyous for millions of Americans. What Rich regards as an asterisk, they recognize as the sharp elbow to the ribs.

Why doesn't Mr. Obama simply rescind the invitation? It was a bad idea to extend it and the incoming President of the United States does not have to stick with bad ideas, just like he does not have to retain staff members who engage in boorish bigoted conduct (vide Jon Favreau). Mr Rich urges "humility and equanimity everywhere in America, starting at the top." Mr. Obama has a wonderful opportunity to display both qualities immediately. Instead of hiding from the press in Hawaii, he could set up a microphone and say:

"I made a poor decision when I invited Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation.  It is difficult to withdraw the invitation now without embarrassing Mr. Warren, but I must take full responsibility for my own mistake in extending the invitation in the first place. I apologize wholeheartedly for having created this awkward situation which does, I realize embarrass Mr. Warren. But Mr. Warren's pride is not most important thing at stake here. My own insensitivity to the concerns of gays and women led me to make a poor decision, one that is ruining the inauguration for many people who voted for me in the first place. I want to be the first to show that I can, calmly and with equanimity, change my mind when I know I have made a poor choice."

In the alternative, if Mr. Obama cannot bear to embarrass Rick Warren by disinviting him, he can have invite a second cleric or other leader with rather different views than Mr. Warren's regarding gays and women to stand right beside Mr. Warren and give a co-invocation.

Precisely because this is no Bay of Pigs, Mr. Obama can do something about the situation before he goes through with a bad choice. The inauguration has not happened yet. Nobody's life depends on Mr. Obama sticking with a plan that once made might be risky to change. But a lot of people's opinion of Mr. Obama rides on what he does about the current situation; could be that much more than "small change" is at stake. Finally, setting aside political calculus, it might be nice to have the incoming President distinguish himself from the outgoing one by demonstrating that he has the guts to recognize his own mistakes and to ameliorate or correct them for himself when he has the opportunity.

What Rick Warren has to say for himself and what it says about President-Elect Obama's grip on women's interests and advancement

Candidate Barak Obama had no problem throwing people under the proverbial bus (vide his own pastor of 20 years, Reverend Jeremiah Wright). President-Elect Obama seems eager to take on board as many men who millions of women object to - even if they voted for Mr. Obama in the general election. President Obama's ongoing refusal to even discuss why Jon Favreau should have no place in an Obama administration gives the lie to his claims about the importance of including those who disagree with him in conversation with the President-Elect.

That inclusiveness extends now to Rick Warren, a virulent opponent of women's reproductive rights and a notorious homophobe. During the primary season, I was among those who noted that then-Senator Obama's commitment to women's reproductive rights appeared less than stalwart; I  have also noted that by any definition of progressivism  GBLT issues, Mr. Obama was no progressive.

Many writers more eloquent than I are now focused on Rick Warren's views on gays and lesbians. So, here I though I would just share some clips from interviews or dialogues in which Rick Warren  participated. They reflect, upon other matters, Mr. Warren's views on women, their reproductive rights, women who exercise those writes, and his own understanding of his relationship with President-Elect Obama. In some cases, the President-Elect has explicitly disagreed with Warren's views, in others not.

From the transcript of the Saddleback Presidential Forum, Aired August 16, 2008 - 20:00   ET THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. (Transcript from CNN, Anchor John King’s opening cut) (emphases added)

PASTOR RICK WARREN, SADDLEBACK CHURCH: Welcome to the Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency. I guess you got my invitation. We’re here in Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. Tonight, we’re going to use the interview format with these two candidates. We believe in the separation of church and state, but we do not believe in the separation of faith and politics, because faith is just a world view, and everybody has some kind of world view. It’s important to know what they are.

[...]

OBAMA: I love the ministries that are taking place here at Saddleback. This is the second time I have been here. The first time we had a wonderful time. Excluding you of course –

WARREN: And your wife.

OBAMA: I was going to say — you know, there are so many people that are constantly helping to shape my views and my opinions. You mentioned one person I’d be listening to, and that’s Michelle, my wife, who is not only wise, but she’s honest. And one of the things you need, I think, any leader needs is somebody who can get up in your face and say boy, you really screwed that one up. You really blew that.

WARREN: Your wife’s like that, too?

WARREN: Everybody’s got a world view, a Buddhist, a Baptist, a secularist, an atheist, everybody’s got a world view. ...

The first one is Christianity. Now, you’ve made no doubts about your faith in Jesus Christ. What does that mean to you? What does it mean to you to trust in Christ? And what does that mean to you on a daily basis? What does that really look like?

[...]

WARREN: Yes. Let’s go through the tough ones. Now, the most –

OBAMA: I thought that was pretty tough. [referring to the question about about what Obama's faith in Jesus Christ means to him, particularly on a daily basis]

WARREN: That was a freebie. That was a gimme. That was a gimme, OK? Now, let’s deal with abortion; 40 million abortions since Roe v. Wade. As a pastor, I have to deal with this all of the time, all of the pain and all of the conflicts. I know this is a very complex issue. Forty million abortions, at what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?

From The Christian Post, December 17, 2008 (emphases added)

Attempting only to make abortions “rare” is not much different than saving some of the Jews during the Holocaust when all could be saved, according to megachurch pastor Rick Warren.

“Of course I want to reduce the number of abortions,” Warren told Beliefnet Editor-in-Chief Steven Waldman when asked if he was going to work with the Obama administration to achieve an abortion reduction agenda or if he thinks that the effort is a charade.

“But to me it is kind of a charade in that people say ‘We believe abortions should be safe and rare,’” he added.

 Rick Warren on His Saddleback Summit with McCain and Obama
The Purpose-Driven pastor assesses the nominees' performances, knocks Democratic faith outreach, and denies McCain had a leg up.

[Warren} “Don’t tell me it [abortion] should be rare. That’s like saying on the Holocaust, ‘Well, maybe we could save 20 percent of the Jewish people in Poland and Germany and get them out and we should be satisfied with that,’” Warren said. “I’m not satisfied with that. I want the Holocaust ended.

[Interviewer] The Democrats recently added language to their party platform that they say is aimed at reducing demand for abortion. Does it represent a significant step toward a pro-life position?
 
[Warren} It is a step, there's no doubt about that. I've been getting a lot of feedback on it. I was out of the country, and people starting writing me about it. The general perception was: too little too late--window dressing. I'm not saying I would say this, because I haven't even read it, but what I was hearing form people was that [Democrats] were saying "It's OK to be pro-life and be a Democrat now." In other words, "You can join us. We're not changing our firm commitment to Roe v. Wade, but you can now join us." Well, for a person who thinks that abortion is taking a life, I'm sure that's not going to be very satisfactory to most of those people. And to put it in right at the last minute at the end of a campaign, there was some question about that: Why are they doing this?
 
[Interviewer] When you asked Obama about when life begins, he punted, saying "It’s above my pay grade." Should someone running for the highest office in the land have a clear answer to that, or is that kind of ambivalence acceptable?
 
[Warren} No. I think he needed to be more specific on that. I happen to disagree with Barack on that. Like I said, he's a friend. But to me, I would not want to die and get before God one day and go, "Oh, sorry, I didn't take the time to figure out" because if I was wrong, then it had severe implications for my leadership if I had the ability to do something about it. He should either say, "No, scientifically, I do not believe it's a human being until X" or whatever it is or say, "Yes, I believe it is a human being at X point," whether it's conception or anything else. But to just say "I don't know" on the most divisive issue in America is not a clear enough answer for me.
 
That's why to say that evangelicals are a monolith is a myth, but the other thing is that you've been hearing a lot of the press talk about "Well, evangelicals are changing, they're now interested in poverty and disease and illiteracy, and all the stuff I've been talking about for five years now." And I have been seeding that into the evangelical movement and it's getting picked up, and a lot of people are talking about doing humanitarian efforts.
 
But I really think it's wishful thinking by a lot of people who think [evangelicals] are going to drop the other issues. They're not leaving pro-life, I'm just trying to expand the agenda. And I've moved from pro-life to whole life, which means I don't just care about that baby girl before she's born, I care about it after she's born. I care about whether she's born into poverty. I care about whether she's born with AIDS because her mother had it. I care about whether she's a crack baby. I care about whether she's going to have an education.
 
If an evangelical really believes that the Bible is literal—in other word in Psalm 139 God says "I formed you in your mother's womb and before you were born I planned every day of your life," if they believe that's literally true, then they can't just walk away from that. They can add other issues, but they can't walk away from the belief that at conception God planned that child and to abort it would be to short circuit the purpose.
 
[Interviewer] It sounds like it would be unconscionable for an evangelical to vote for a pro-choice candidate like Obama.
 
[Warren} All I can say is you’ll see what happens. This is why there's a difference between simply talking the lingo….After the 2004 election the Democratic pundits were saying, "The Democrats lost in '04 because they didn't talk the language of faith." And actually that's kind of, not paternalistic, but it's talking down. It's basically saying, "If you just get the right words, then they'll think you’ve got the lingo." And just because a person can say God and Jesus and salvation and whatever doesn't mean they have a worldview. And people want to know what do they believe, not just their personal faith. It's just like how many different beliefs do Jews and Christians have and still call themselves Christians or Jews? It's all over the spectrum.

Being President means coping with distractions

In 1972, here are just some of the items that were on President Nixon's plate that anybody - Nixon-hater, Democrat, liberal; Nixon-fan, Republican, conservative - who cared about welfare of the country would have thought the President should well have been concentrating on:

• U.S.- Sino relations
• War in Indo-China and Vietnam
• U.S. - Soviet Union detente
• Multi-lateral disarmament movements and treaties
• The U.S. Senate's ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment

Then, there were these "distractions":

• Congresswoman Bella Abzug's (D. N.Y.)  resolution calling for the impeachment of President Nixon following his decision to mine North Vietnamese harbors. [Note: This was back in the day when impeachment was not taken off the table when war crimes were at issue.]
• The Watergate break-in occurs [Nixon's reaction caught on tape on June 23 when Nixon meets  his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman and says, "The only way to solve this, and we're set up beautifully to do it, is for us to have [Deputy CIA Director Vernon] Walters call [FBI Director Pat] Gray and say, 'Stay the hell out of this . . . [The CIA] should call the FBI and say that, 'We wish, for the good of the country, [that you] don't [look] any further into this case.' Period"]

The distractions spilled over into 1973:

• The Watergate break-in builds into a scandal. President Nixon names Plainfield, N.J.-born Harvard law professor Archibald Cox, 60, special Watergate prosecutor and tries to have CIA director Richard Helms prevent an FBI investigation into the Watergate break-in. Helms refuses and Nixon relocates him, making him ambassador to Iran.
• Vice President Agnew resigns under pressure October 10, pleading no contest to charges of income tax evasion in connection with money received during his tenure as governor of Maryland.

Of course, in 1973, there are matters that anybody would think deserved Presidential attention, including:

• A cease-fire in Vietnam January 28 ending direct involvement of U.S. ground troops in Indochinese hostilities.
• The Yom Kippur War occurs. It is the fourth and fiercest Arab-Israeli war since 1948.
• Britain joins the European Economic Community. Denmark and Ireland also join, bringing members to nine in the Common Market created by the Treaty of Rome in 1958.

The point: being President in complex times - and the early 1970s were complex times - means coping with a variety of events. Some make the President's job easier, some make it harder. But just because the ones that make it harder do that, does not mean they should not be examined.

I hope that the matters that the pundits are dismissively trivializing as distractions do not in fact lead to the same sort of demise for President-elect Obama  that the distraction of  the early 1970s brought to Richard Nixon. The revelation that Richard Nixon was possibly more corrupt than his greatest detractors ever thought he was was not good for the country. But that does not mean it would have been better for the country if press and public just went ostrich-like and refused to consider the "distractions" because of the very real difficulties facing the U.S. and the country at large. Ridding the country of a thieving vice-president and a president who regarded the U.S. Consitution as an inconvenient constraint on his own power was good thing.

True, how troubling distractions are is a matter of degree. A plagiarizing Vice-President is not as troubling as one who is an income-tax evader. A Presdent whose staff may be involved in high level state corruption is less bothersome than a President who is personally directing violations of national and international law. A President who retains a misogynistic speech writer, keeping him out of sight, presumably in the hope that all will be forgotten is terribly bothersome.

But whatever the final truths we learn aout the current "distractions" facing President-elect Obama, we need to know the truth. After we get some information we can decide whether it disqualifies Mr. Obama from the presidency. But for now, we need to the press to take the heat and find out some truth for us.

It would also be helpful if the Obama administration's transition team would ditch the bunker mentality. Somebody has to begin the process of political disarmament in Washington D.C.