Jerry Brown Winning Hearts And Minds By Playing Into Republican Fear Tactics

Just days after forming an exploratory committee to enter the race for Governor, Jerry Brown has decided to follow the likes of Andrew Breitbart and Arnold Schwarzenegger by opening an investigation into ACORN:

In a letter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger dated Sept. 25, Chief Deputy Attorney General James M. Humes said the office has "opened an investigation of both ACORN and the circumstances under which ACORN employees were videotaped." The governor had asked Brown two weeks ago to look into the incidents.

The probe was sparked by a series of hidden-camera videos in which a couple posing as a pimp and a prostitute are advised on how to set up a prostitution business by people identified as workers for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. The videos were taken in Washington D.C., San Diego, San Bernardino and cities in several other states.

There's at least a nod to the possibility that the videotapes were obtained illegally, although I'm not sure California law mirrors the state of Maryland, where the filmmakers clearly violated the law. But the tendency for Brown to follow Governor Headline and chase the popular story is pretty lame. Remember that the Governor specifically called on Brown to investigate ACORN because of the San Bernardino tape, which is full of holes:

Most critically, it is clear that Fox News has made virtually no attempt to verify the authenticity of the tapes before broadcasting them -- something no self-respecting journalistic organization would dare do. Consider the case of the San Bernardino ACORN office, which was featured in the most recent video to be released. The words of ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke appear to be damning. Not only does she offer assistance to Giles and O'Keefe, but she claims that she murdered her former husband following a period of domestic abuse [...]

The problem, of course, is that Kaelke was deliberately lying. The San Bernardino Police Department itself has now confirmed that her claim regarding her husband was untrue. A department statement released on September 15 reads: "The San Bernardino Police Department is investigating the claims made regarding the homicide. From the initial investigation conducted, the claims do not appear to be factual. Investigators have been in contact with the involved party's known former husbands, who are alive and well."

Furthermore, Kaelke has claimed that when she made the statement, she was seeking to mislead the undercover videographers, whom she was suspicious of. "They were not believable," Kaelke is quoted as saying in an ACORN press release. "Somewhat entertaining, but they weren't even good actors. I didn't know what to make of them. They were clearly playing with me. I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me."

But none of these simple facts stopped anyone at Fox from running with the story. Any cub reporter would have thought to actually call the San Bernardino police before effectively alleging that ACORN was staffed by murderers. But such an act never occurred to people like Beck, Hannity, or Carlson. (In her defense, Carlson later added that the husband was still alive, "according to ACORN," but ignored the police report.)

Let's be honest. Fearmongering about ACORN is a cover for a racially tinged agenda by ideological extremists. If the actions of a couple employees provokes a state Attorney General investigation of entire companies, I eagerly await the investigations into every company in California. But we don't have that. Instead, Jerry Brown has decided to follow the fearmongering, and legitimize it. Sad.

Dissecting The Lizard Brain

Two researchers have run the data on Jimmy Carter's contention that race is playing a role in the anger over health care. It's bookmark-worthy:

Our research favors Carter's interpretation and adds some hard data to the debate. In fact, the partisan divide today is even more troubling than if it was driven by race alone.

Americans' views of political issues and their partisan attachments are being increasingly shaped by gut-level worldviews. On one side of many issues are those who see the world in terms of hierarchy, think about problems in black and white terms, and struggle to tolerate difference. On the other are those who favor independence over hierarchy, shades of gray over black-white distinctions, and diversity over sameness.

We call this dividing line an authoritarian one, and we find that what side of the line people fall on explains their positions on a wide ranging set of issues, including race, immigration, gay rights, civil liberties, and terrorism. This is because what lies behind these preferences is a larger difference in worldview, where people understand reality in starkly different ways. This, in turn, leads to rancorous and irreconcilable-seeming political conflicts.

As evidence of the link between health care and racial attitudes, we analyzed survey data gathered in late 2008. The survey asked people whether they favored a government run health insurance plan, a system like we have now, or something in between. It also asked four questions about how people feel about blacks.

Taken together the four items form a measure of what scholars call racial resentment. We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.

Among whites with above average racial resentment, only 19 percent favored fundamental health care reforms and 57 percent favored the present system. Among those who have below average racial resentment, more than twice as many (45 percent) favored government run health care and less than half as many (25 percent) favored the status quo.

No such relationship between racial attitudes and opinions on health care existed in the mid-1990s during the Clinton effort.

I would say that in general, opposition to any social insurance program for the less fortunate meets head-on with racial animus. Whether the presumed leader of this policy shift is white or black, a substantial portion of those with racial resentment pictures that leader as delivering their tax dollars to the undeserving other, which can be pictured in their minds as a black family, a Hispanic immigrant family, or really anyone who doesn't share the same features. It's no accident that opposition to Obama is clustered in the South, given such a reading.

What these professors are really probing is the lizard brain, the tribal identifiers that often bubble to the surface, in unguarded moments, as racism. It's almost too neat and simple to simply call it racial in intent. It goes much deeper to a visceral resentment, a put-upon persecution complex, this constant paranoia that someone else is getting a better deal, and that such inequity can form the basis of all the nation's problems. It's purely an emotional release to explain whatever personal failings or lack of compassion already exists. That this frequently codes racially is a symptom of the relationship between race and class, as well as the other longtime signifiers of identity that have been hard-wired into our brains for centuries.

I found this via DougJ last week, and it really summed up a lot of what I think animates modern conservatism, and it's not particularly or singularly racial:

“Those who have known him [Cheney] over the years remain astounded by what they describe as his almost autistic indifference to the thoughts and feelings of others. ‘He has the least interest in human beings of anyone I have ever met,’ says John Perry Barlow, his former supporter. Cheney’s freshman-year roommate, Steve Billings, agrees: ‘If I could ask Dick one question, I’d ask him how he could be so unempathetic.’”

There's an almost studied uncaring. And of course, Randian teaching gave those predisposed to uncaring a way to order their lack of compassion intellectually, to create virtue in selfishness and convince themselves that the less privileged are better off receiving no help from them. This anecdote from Rand (nee Alissa Rosenbaum)'s early life is fascinating and instructive:

Anne C. Heller, in her skillful life of Rand, traces the roots of Rand's philosophy to an even earlier age. (Heller paints a more detailed and engaging portrait of Rand's interior life, while Burns more thoroughly analyzes her ideas.) Around the age of five, Alissa Rosenbaum's mother instructed her to put away some of her toys for a year. She offered up her favorite possessions, thinking of the joy that she would feel when she got them back after a long wait. When the year had passed, she asked her mother for the toys, only to be told she had given them away to an orphanage. Heller remarks that "this may have been Rand's first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call ‘altruism.’ " (The anti-government activist Grover Norquist has told a similar story from childhood, in which his father would steal bites of his ice cream cone, labelling each bite "sales tax" or "income tax." The psychological link between a certain form of childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism awaits serious study.)

These children grew up to want to maintain that state of retarded adolescence, of a belief only in their own self-interest and greed, and Rand built a philosophy around it so they could justify their inhumanity and relieve the burden of their own consciences. They flipped morality on its head and built statues to the virtuous capitalist, and a drive for permanent growth that benefits only himself which is seen in this inverted pyramid as a glory to all mankind. In short, they have no compassion because they are told they have no need for it. It is a philosophy that served masters. And if taken to extremes, it can become profoundly sociopathic, as the desires of the individual trump social norms or conventions.

Is that racial in nature? It's certainly an argument that benefits the super-wealthy by relieving their guilt, makes it moral to hoard wealth and provides an element of superiority for anyone in the ruling class. That's definitely tribal. And class and race have become profoundly mixed in this culture. The teabaggers eat up Randian thought because they can easily justify their selfishness and identify a group with which they can hold some level of superiority. There's a comfort in a common enemy, in a tribal clustering against the other, armed with a philosophy that you can wield as armor to protect yourself from feeling any human emotion about that other's suffering. They may be the dreaded "populists" who Rand and her ilk would bar the door to the mansion to keep out in the rain; but they can internalize both halves of this at once, especially when they share the same enemies.

These thoughts have taken decades if not hundreds of years to wind through the American lizard brain. It will take perhaps as much time to wind them out. If race is what makes wingers uncomfortable with their own beliefs, then perhaps that's the proper line of attack. But it's much deeper than that.

They Used To Call This Dowdification

Politico's Glenn Thrush murders a quote from Tom Perriello to make it seem like he's saying that opposition to Obama's agenda is rooted in racism. Now, forget about the truth of that statement. In order for Thrush to meet the evidence promised in his headline and get eyeballs and make sure everyone passes around his link, he has to bury the context in an ellipse.

What Thrush provides:

Perriello: “Well, you know, making the comment or not making the comment doesn’t change the reality that clearly this is part of what’s going on…I conducted over a hundred hours of town hall meetings in central and southern Virginia…and there were…cases where very racist remarks were made. Sometimes they were called out by neighbors in the audience, sometimes they weren’t. Clearly, race remains a factor in America…there’s also a lot of disagreement here that is genuine here and not based on race, so I think we have to have both conversations.”

What Perriello actually said:

Well, you know, making the comment or not making the comment doesn’t change the reality that clearly this is part of what’s going on, but not all of what's going on. I conducted over a hundred hours of town hall meetings in central and southern Virginia…and there were the rare cases where very racist remarks were made.

he put "the rare" in an ellipse. That is just journalistic malpractice, deliberately sensationalizing a quote to elicit a response that puts a Democratic lawmaker into a flashpoint debate for no reason.

After getting some heat for it, Thrush returned the full context of the quote he took out of context without noting what he did.

He is a blogger, so you can't use the ever-ready phrase "Call a blogger ethics panel" with the requisite irony. Just suffice to say that this is what Politico calls "journalism."

...Here's the Google cache of that page, showing Thrush's ellipses burying the context of Perriello's remarks.

The Fakest Outrage

This is pretty funny. Michael Steele, who just got off accusing every Democrat in America of playing the race card for a week, goes ahead and... plays the race card:

Michael Steele said it was “curious” on why the White House would ask New York Gov. David Paterson (D) not to run for reelection in 2010.

“I found that to be stunning, that the White House would send word to one of only two black governors in the country not to run for reelection,” Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), said on CBS’s Face The Nation.

Indeed it is stunning, letting someone with a 20% approval rating know that he can't win.

I don't really want the President meddling in any of these state elections, at least not publicly. But these are obvious political decisions to set up the party well for an election year. Paterson isn't just polling badly, he's done 50 and 60 points to opponents. He's micro-polling.

And despite this supposed iron fist from the White House, Paterson is still running for Governor. And I'm sure he appreciates Michael Steele's endorsement. Will Steele apologize to Rudy Giuliani or whoever is running for Governor in New York State for breaking with the party and endorsing the black man for purely racial reasons?

Carter And Race

In some respects, the former President is the perfect person to make this argument. He's done with politics and has nothing to lose. Anyway he's already hated by the right, so what more can they do to him?

"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American," Carter told "NBC Nightly News." "I live in the South, and I've seen the South come a long way, and I've seen the rest of the country that shares the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African-Americans."

"That racism inclination still exists, and I think it's bubbled up to the surface because of belief among many white people -- not just in the South but around the country -- that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It's an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply," Carter said.

The wingnuts are EXTREMELY sensitive to this. Because Carter's coming close to cracking the code here. It's really as much about class as race - corporate-dominated Republicans want the lower classes to fight amongst themselves while they steal the Treasury. But because of our particular history, that manifests itself as a racial issue, because of the disproportionate amount of minorities at the low end of the income scale. And this goes double for undocumented immigrants, which manifests itself as anyone of Hispanic origin.

Digby has more on this. Our lack of what she calls "social insurance" does lead to this animosity toward racial minorities who get "something for nothing." The fact that we're seeing similar animosity play itself out in Europe with regard to animosity toward Muslim immigrants, even while they've had well-designed social safety nets, tells me that this is something of a universal, tribal concept ingrained in our lizard brains, and unwinding it is nearly impossible, at least for some section of the population.

The Other

All of the health care bills offer their subsidies to those who need help affording coverage through tax credits. This is seen as completely normal and a cost-effective way to provide such subsidies, since it only requires a new line item on the tax form instead of some new structure for paying out credits. But it actually hurts people who have to lay out money for health insurance and then wait all year until April to get their money back. In addition, some groups, like nonprofits, don't pay taxes. But they also provide health care for their workers, which means they cannot benefit from any tax credits for small businesses to help with affordability in the plan.

The main bill in the House would award a tax credit to small businesses that provide their employees with health insurance — but nonprofits do not pay income taxes and thus would not benefit.

“Why should employees of nonprofits be treated worse than employees of for-profit businesses?” said Jonathan A. Small, government affairs consultant at the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York.

Nonprofit groups were hoping that the president would include them in his speech to Congress on Wednesday, but instead he mentioned only “families, businesses and government.”

“There was nothing in that much-repeated trilogy of those needing help that spoke to nonprofits,” said Lester M. Salamon, director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

This sounds like a nitpicky point, except that nonprofits are collectively the fourth-largest employer in America.

And there are dozens of little inequities like this. We've heard about the canceling of all individual health insurance, essentially, for undocumented immigrants, even when they have the ability to pay with their own money. Then there's the issue of nurse home care for the children of the poor, a proven crime reduction strategy that has run aground amid shouts of "billions for babysitters" and the like.

It's part and parcel of a long-running strategy by the right to cry martyrdom for their tax dollars being given to the undefined "other." It doesn't matter if a government program reduces crime or saves money or just makes moral sense. This boils down to a largely homogenous Republican Party not wanting their money to go to people who don't look like them or don't act like them or don't work like them. "Illegals" or the undeserving poor or "do-gooders" in the nonprofit sector need not apply. It's been a time-tested tactic going back to Richard Nixon's Southern strategy.

This is the paradox of the tea-party movement and other right-wing protests fueled by genuine citizen anger and fear. It is true that the federal government embraces redistributive policies and that middle-class income is seized in order that "someone else benefits." But so obviously, that "someone else" who is benefiting is not the poor and lower classes -- who continue to get poorer as the numbers living below the poverty line expand and the rich-poor gap grows in the U.S. to unprecedented proportions. The "someone else" that is benefiting from Washington policies are -- as usual -- the super-rich, the tiny number of huge corporations which literally own and control the Government. The premise of these citizen protests is not wrong: Washington politicians are in thrall to special interests and are, in essence, corruptly stealing the country's economic security in order to provide increasing benefits to a small and undeserving minority. But the "minority" here isn't what Fox News means by that term, but is the tiny sliver of corporate power which literally writes our laws and, in every case, ends up benefiting [...]

What's really happening with these protests is that the genuine rage and not unreasonable economic insecurity of these citizens is being stoked, exploited, distorted and manipulated by movement leaders for entirely different ends. The people who are leading them -- Rush Limbaugh, the Murdoch-owned Fox News, Glenn Beck, business-dominated organizations of the type led by Dick Armey -- are cultural warriors above everything else. They're all in a far different socioeconomic position than the "middle-income Americans" whose anger they're ostensibly representing. Their principal preoccupation is their cultural contempt for various groups (illegal immigrants, the "undeserving" poor, liberals) and their desire to preserve the status quo whereby the prime beneficiaries of government policies remain themselves: the super rich and the interests that control Washington. It's certainly true that many of these protesters are driven by the standard right-wing cultural issues which have long shaped that movement -- social issues, religious fears, cultural and racial divisions, and hatred for "liberals" as Communist-Muslim-Terrorist-lovers. For many, all of that is intensified by the humiliation of being completely thrown out of power, at the hands of the first black President. But much of it is fueled by the pillaging of the corporations and Wall St. interests which own their government.

Matt Taibbi called it the peasant mentality. The powers that be get the lower classes to fight amongst themselves and split along ideological or tribal or other identifying lines, leaving room for them to prosper. For Republicans, that means painting their opponents, who are less homogenous and are made up of so-called "outsiders" of society - the poor, the disenfranchised, African-Americans, Hispanics, gays and lesbians, etc. - as undeserving of really anything; and painting the leaders of that party - whether it be a Governor from Arkansas or a war hero from Massachusetts or South Dakota or a multicultural community organizer from Illinois - as the head of a movement to destroy American culture. That's really basically it. And sadly, considering that Democrats have over the last several decades abandoned their role as protectors of the weak, the poor and the voiceless, you can almost sympathize with the misled in the teabagging protests, who finds nobody standing up for them.

Except, their susceptibility to what is essentially a racial argument leaves me little room to share sympathy for their concerns.

The Revolt Of The Septuagenarians

Ezra Klein had a column in the Washington Post over the weekend explaining why senior citizens, who favor Medicare, oppose a government-run health insurance program for people other than them. They think Medicare will be diluted by expansion and reform. That's a fairly simple "I got mine" theory of why seniors don't support health care reform. I don't necessarily think of Grandma as a selfish bastard, however. They are as caring and compassionate as anyone else on this rock we call home. They may fear the rug being pulled out from their coverage - and on this, Democrats haven't made the sell about how seniors stand to gain big from reform, particularly through lower prescription drug spending - but I think a simple campaign showing how the grandkids won't have any hope of getting medical care under the status quo would theoretically undermine the selfishness argument. And AARP has been making their own sell to seniors. I think Klein's secondary point hits the mark a little more:

Seniors are also the most conservative segment of the population and are getting more so. They constitute not only the sole age group that Obama lost in last year's election, but also the sole age group in which his results were worse than those of John Kerry in 2004. And both Obama and Kerry underperformed Al Gore's 2000 results.

"The Roosevelt seniors are being replaced by the Reagan seniors," says Paul Begala, who helped run Clinton's 1992 campaign. A May poll by the Pew Research Center found that for the first time in 20 years, the GOP is now an older party than the Democrats.

The June Post-ABC poll asked whether respondents would prefer a smaller government with fewer services or a larger government with more services. Seventy percent of seniors -- the segment of the population with government-run health care and a government pension, also known as Social Security -- preferred a smaller government, compared with 37 percent of people 18 to 29. Seniors are the age group most solidly opposed to the public option. In fact, in the August Post-ABC poll, they were the only age group in which a majority opposed it. "Seniors are like the American West," says Julian Zelizer, a Princeton historian. "They depend on government and then say they hate it."

The age divide has animated most of the anger in town hall meetings and tea parties, which is not about health care reform but about Obama. He had a similar problem attracting senior support during the Democratic primary. Seniors as a demographic are simply more easily targeted by smear campaigns from the right, and more receptive to them. Nobody wants to talk about the role of race in all this, but I don't think it's hard to figure it out. Fear of a black President still runs deep over a generation that's more conservative in their thinking. I think Matt Bai is correct to look on the bright side:

The good news for Obama and his party, of course, is that they still enjoy an enviable level of support among voters just breaking into the work force and among those now drifting into middle age. And that means that if reigning Democrats can manage to get health care policy right this time, and maybe even add some fundamental energy reforms, they might still be able to cement more hopeful attitudes about government for generations to come, much as Roosevelt did in his day. Today’s younger voters might never be as party-affiliated as their grandparents were, but neither may they turn out to be as cynical about their leaders as their parents often seem to be. If the president has his way (which is to say, if the worst nightmares of Republicans come to pass), those voters may someday live out their retirements in Arizona or Nevada, spinning stories for their grandchildren of the days when Barack Obama was twice elected president, when government managed once again to make things better instead of worse and when politicians still bothered with these things called town halls.

But it's going to be a hard slog, because of the people who most commonly vote in elections, particularly midterm elections, today.

Must Have Been Some Meeting Coming Up With That Backpedal

Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-KS) last night mused about finding a "Great White Hope" for the Republican Party.

"Republicans are struggling right now to find the great white hope," said Jenkins. "I suggest to any of you who are concerned about that, who are Republican, there are some great young Republican minds in Washington." As examples, Jenkins mentioned Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI).

Now, given the history of that phrase, used in the American lexicon to describe the turn-of-the-century search for a white opponent to defeat the first African-American heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson during a time of racial polarization, I think it's pretty clear what Jenkins meant, or at least what she wanted to dog-whistle. But the whistle apparently was loud enough for humans to hear, so Jenkins and her staff had to have a late-night strategy session to come up with an excuse. Here's the best she could do:

U.S. Rep. Lynn Jenkins on Thursday in Lawrence denied that she was speaking in racial terms when she invoked the term “great white hope” at a recent town hall forum.

Jenkins, a Topeka Republican serving her first term in the House, told a recent gathering in northeast Kansas that the Republican Party is looking for a “great white hope” to help stop the agenda of a Democratic-controlled Congress and President Barack Obama.

“Obviously I was discussing the future of the Republican Party in response to a question about is there any hope for Republicans,” she said while touring Kansas University. “I was explaining that there are some bright lights in the House, and I was unaware of any negative connotation. If I offended somebody, obviously I apologize.”

Swing and a miss!

"I was just talking about a bright light, you know, a bright Caucasian light with white skin that can help the white Party - did I say white, I meant Republican Party, I don't know how white got in there - to return us to the white power where we should belong. White people."

If Jenkins were any more transparent, she'd be the Great White Hope.

The Demographic Futility Of The Birther Argument

It's true that Republicans have circled the wagons on the Birthers, and have begun to smack down on those questioning the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate and the whereabouts of his birth. But that doesn't really matter by now. It's "out there" and it's a powerful tool to designate the President as alien, the other, somehow unfit for the office of the Presidency, without the credentials to serve. That's the undercurrent to this, and I can quote The Poor Man Institute on this:

Lee Atwater on the crushing weight of political correctness and how it put a crimp in Republican Party messaging efforts:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

As always, necessity is the mother of invention. And hate springs eternal. And so on.

So in 2009, you say stuff like “where’s your birth certificate”? to the black guy with the funny name – no surprise that Andrew “Bell Curve” Sullivan and Lou “Dirty Meckscuns” Dobbs* are all over it. Pure coincidence, I’m sure. Though to be fair to Andy, he usually shows the same zeal if there’s misogyny* to partake in.

That's really it. And it is really done to reinforce this notion that the alien and the other are taking your money and using it for themselves. Conservatives think this is the way they can win the day, through tribal identification. And it works in the short-term. But the long-term demographic trends cut hard against their success in this matter. Right now we have an economic problem which will determine the course for Democrats in the near term. In the long-term, tribal appeals to racial solidarity will fall flat on their face.

...for those who want to believe that the fact we elected a biracial man to the Presidency means that racism has ended as a concern in the United States, I submit:

IT MAY BE the ultimate indignity.

Lawrence "Lonnie" Powell, 58, a semiskilled laborer at the city's Northwest Transfer Station, in Roxborough, said that since he began working at the trash-handling plant in 2003 he has had to seek the superintendent's permission to go to the bathroom — then descend five flights of stairs to use it.

Powell, who is black, said that white employees have been permitted to use a bathroom just 25 feet from his work station.

"On several occasions I've actually defecated on myself, trying to get down to the bathroom," said Powell, who operates a machine that packs trash into tractor-trailers to be taken to landfills.

Powell is one of five current and former employees, all in their 50s, who allege, in legal documents and interviews with the Daily News, that the station's white superintendent has discriminated against them because they are black.

This is in the same city where black children were asked to leave a white country club swimming pool a few weeks back.

The Gates 911 Call

I've listened to the Henry Louis Gates 911 call, and it does not look particularly good for Sgt. Crowley. The woman who called doesn't really have any opinion on whether a burglary took place or not, she raises the possibility of the people living there, she notes the presence of suitcases, and she really only made the call because an acquaintance asked her to do so.

The dispatcher relays most of the information to Sgt. Crowley, and Crowley apparently didn't check with the 911 caller at all:

“She didn’t speak to Sergeant Crowley at the scene except to say, ‘I’m the one who called,’ ” said the lawyer, Wendy J. Murphy. “And he said, 'Wait right there,' and walked into the house. She never used the word black and never said the word backpacks to anyone.” [...]

After Sergeant Crowley arrived at the home, according to the tape, he radioed that he was with a man who “says he resides here,” but he described him as “uncooperative” and asked for backup, saying, “Keep the cars coming.” He also asked the dispatcher to “send the Harvard University police this way.”

You can read plenty of your own biases into this, but stripping it down to the bare facts, you have a 911 call saying that two men maybe broke into a house but they could live there, the cop arrives and confirms that the man lives there, but then he calls him "uncooperative," brings out other cops, and arrests him.

This question divides a lot of people, but the moment that Crowley confirms that Gates is in his own home, he has no reason to be there.

Anyway, I'm sure it'll all be settled by beers at the White House, anyway.

The Facts Of The Gates Case

The Henry Louis Gates situation is mainly a distraction. But there's also a serious policy component. Policemen should not be allowed to arrest someone for being an asshole in their own home. If that was the case, right-wing bloggers would all be doing 10-20. It appears clear, and I guess there may be audio tape to this effect, that the cop came to Gates' house, figured out that he was not a burglar, words were exchanged, and then the cop arrested him for disorderly conduct. That's really over the line of what cops should be allowed to do, regardless of the motivations, racial or otherwise.

The crime of disorderly conduct, beloved by cops who get into arguments with citizens, requires that the public be involved. Here's the relevant law from the Massachusetts Appeals Court, with citations and quotations omitted:

The statute authorizing prosecutions for disorderly conduct, G.L. c. 272, § 53, has been saved from constitutional infirmity by incorporating the definition of "disorderly" contained in § 250.2(1)(a) and (c) of the Model Penal Code. The resulting definition of "disorderly" includes only those individuals who, "with purpose to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof ... (a) engage in fighting or threatening, or in violent or tumultuous behavior; or ... (c) create a hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which serves no legitimate purpose of the actor.' "Public" is defined as affecting or likely to affect persons in a place to which the public or a substantial group has access.

The lesson most cops understand (apart from the importance of using the word "tumultuous," which features prominently in Crowley's report) is that a person cannot violate 272/53 by yelling in his own home.

Read Crowley's report and stop on page two when he admits seeing Gates's Harvard photo ID. I don't care what Gates had said to him up until then, Crowley was obligated to leave. He had identified Gates. Any further investigation of Gates' right to be present in the house could have been done elsewhere. His decision to call HUPD seems disproportionate, but we could give him points for thoroughness if he had made that call from his car while keeping an eye on the house. Had a citizen refused to leave Gates' home after being told to, the cops could have made an arrest for trespass.

But for the sake of education, let's watch while Crowley makes it worse. Read on. He's staying put in Gates' home, having been asked to leave, and Gates is demanding his identification. What does Crowley do? He suggests that if Gates wants his name and badge number, he'll have to come outside to get it. What? Crowley may be forgiven for the initial approach and questioning, but surely he should understand that a citizen will be miffed at being questioned about his right to be in his own home. Perhaps Crowley could commit the following sentences to memory: "I'm sorry for disturbing you," and "I'm glad you're all right."

Spoiling for a fight, Crowley refuses to repeat his name and badge number. Most of us would hand over a business card or write the information on a scrap of paper. No, Crowley is upset and he's mad at Gates. He's been accused of racism. Nobody likes that, but if a cop can't take an insult without retaliating, he's in the wrong job. When a person is given a gun and a badge, we better make sure he's got a firm grasp on his temper. If Crowley had called Gates a name, I'd be disappointed in him, but Crowley did something much worse. He set Gates up for a criminal charge to punish Gates for his own embarrassment.

By telling Gates to come outside, Crowley establishes that he has lost all semblance of professionalism. It has now become personal and he wants to create a violation of 272/53. He gets Gates out onto the porch because a crowd has gathered providing onlookers who could experience alarm. Note his careful recitation (tumultuous behavior outside the residence in view of the public). And please do not overlook Crowley's final act of provocation. He tells an angry citizen to calm down while producing handcuffs. The only plausible question for the chief to ask about that little detail is: "Are you stupid, or do you think I'm stupid?" Crowley produced those handcuffs to provoke Gates and then arrested him. The decision to arrest is telling. If Crowley believed the charge was valid, he could have issued a summons. An arrest under these circumstances shows his true intent: to humiliate Gates.

The cop baited the guy into leaving the house so he could arrest him for making a cop feel bad.

I appreciate the work of law enforcement. But regardless of race, too many cops have the belief that if they get insulted, they have the right to turn that into an arresting offense. That's not the law whatsoever, nor should it be. It creates a chilling effect among the public not to call out bad behavior in law enforcement or raise your voice in any way. I know we're all supposed to believe that cops are saintly, but I live in LA. Police misconduct happens all the time, and we should be vigilant when it does.

Instead, the media takes the soccer ball and chases it into the corner, without any semblance of factual records or perspective. It becomes an emotional argument instead of a factual record of misconduct. We pay cops with tax money. We should not risk arrest when arguing with them.

Josh Marshall hit this from a different angle last night.

Here We Go With The Hissy

You could see this coming the moment Lynn Sweet asked the question. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the wingers put her up to it:

The right is now mobilizing heavily against President Obama's comments last night about the Henry Louis Gates case.

The NRCC has sent out a press release, challenging individual House Dems about whether they agree with Obama that the police "acted stupidly":

The president was slow to point out any wrongdoing in the wake of the Iranian election and his administration was quick to force through a failed stimulus plan even though they 'misread' the economy. This is certainly a questionable rush to judgment coming from a president who hasn't exactly been quick to call out unconscionable behavior by a merciless foreign dictator or gotten his facts straight before advocating a trillion-dollar mistake to address our ailing economy. Is it really presidential for him to cast harsh judgment of a law enforcement official without all the facts?

Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh is being much more blunt in a racial appeal:

"Last week, we saw white firefighters under assault by agents of Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor," said Limbaugh (emphasis his). He added: "Now, white policemen are under assault from the East Room of the White House, by the President of the United States, after admitting he had no -- he didn't know all the facts, what went on in there."

The facts of the case, just by virtue of the police dropping the charges after a day or so, are pretty clear.

I really don't think this will work. I get the idea - to push a white backlash by foregrounding some war on public safety personnel, who are seen as inviolable. Did you know that they've never made a false arrest? But common sense takes over at some point. This may appeal to those with a racial chip on their shoulder, but I don't think anyone without one would argue that cops arresting a guy in his own home is absurd. Libertarians should really reject this, I would think.

And by the way, can we get over the notion that we're in a post-racial society now?

UPDATE: The President:

"I have to say I am surprised by the controversy surrounding my statement because I think it was a pretty straight forward commentary that you probably don't need to handcuff a guy, a middle-aged man who uses a cane, who's in his own home," Obama said [...]

"I think that I have extraordinary respect for the difficulties of the job that police officers do," the president told Moran. "And my suspicion is that words were exchanged between the police officer and Mr. Gates and that everybody should have just settled down and cooler heads should have prevailed. That's my suspicion."

Tweety is going off about a President venturing opinions about a criminal case, when all the charges were dropped. Oh Lord.

...Oh, and Kitty Seeyle is an idiot. "Americans got a rare glimpse Wednesday night of what it means to have a black president in the Oval Office." Yes, and get ready for the white enslavement camps, my bitches! Because first the President considers arresting a man in his own home a stupid act, and then you're all headed to the camps... Up against the wall, whitey!

Post-Racial Society

We've moved so far beyond race, that even a Harvard professor can be treated like a profiled suspect... oh wait, he was blacktoo?

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation’s pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The incident raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a victim of racial profiling.

Police arrived at Gates’s Ware Street home near Harvard Square at 12:44 p.m. to question him. Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, had trouble unlocking his door after it became jammed.

He was booked for disorderly conduct after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,” according to a police report. Gates accused the investigating officer of being a racist and told him he had “no idea who he was messing with,’’ the report said.

We may have a biracial President, we may have a more enlightened society at the margins, but we have not conquered the problem of race by any stretch of the imagination.

The Bigot In The Room

I saw Pat Buchanan today refer to Frank Ricci as "an American hero" on Hardball. His opponent in the debate, an NAACP lawyer, was measured and calm. But he never brought up what Buchanan wrote just a couple days ago in talking about the GOP's strategy for victory in the future.

In 2008, Hispanics, according to the latest figures, were 7.4 percent of the total vote. White folks were 74 percent, 10 times as large. Adding just 1 percent to the white vote is thus the same as adding 10 percent to the candidate's Hispanic vote.

If John McCain, instead of getting 55 percent of the white vote, got the 58 percent George W. Bush got in 2004, that would have had the same impact as lifting his share of the Hispanic vote from 32 percent to 62 percent. [...]

Had McCain been willing to drape Jeremiah Wright around the neck of Barack Obama, as Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis, the mainstream media might have howled. And McCain might be president.

If only John McCain race-baited more, if only Republicans, who have practically nobody but Southern white men left in their party, made MORE overt moves toward Southern white men, then they would receive electoral glory. As Ta-Nehisi Coates says:

There are a couple problems here, I'd submit. One is that Sotomayor isn't black (except in Baltimore.) She's a Latina. Amping up the race-baiting isn't just going to turn off black people (most of whom are already turned-off) it turns off Latinos also.

The second problem is that it likely turns a significant portion of white people also. The GOP's problem isn't that it needs to shore up Alabama--at least not yet. It's problem is, well, basically everywhere else that isn't Alabama. I don't know how bashing Sotomayor makes you more competitive in, say, Colorado or Oregon. I'd assume the opposite.

Altogether, I think this is awful political advice. But it's about what you'd expect from the guy who, as one of Matt's commenters note, told us that Sarah Palin would steal women from Obama. You don't have to be right to do Buchanan's job. Or even sincere. You just have to be very loud.

Pat Buchanan is a bigot. He provides a bigoted viewpoint for hours per day on a supposedly liberal network called MSNBC. Why is that tolerated, like ol' Pat is just a crazy uncle?

...Rachel Maddow is laying into Buchanan right now, it's pretty lively.

Boy, If Only Life Worked Like This

Josh Marshall gets this right, it was an Alvy Singer bringing out Marshall McLuhan at the cinema moment:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), seeking to discredit Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy, cited her 2001 “wise Latina” speech, and contrasted the view that ethnicity and sex influence judging with that of Judge Miriam Cedarbaum, who “believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices.”

“So I would just say to you, I believe in Judge Cedarbaum’s formulation,” Sessions told Sotomayor.

“My friend Judge Cedarbaum is here,” Sotomayor riposted, to Sessions’ apparent surprise. “We are good friends, and I believe that we both approach judging in the same way, which is looking at the facts of each individual case and applying the law to those facts.”

Cedarbaum agreed.

“I don’t believe for a minute that there are any differences in our approach to judging, and her personal predilections have no effect on her approach to judging,” she told Washington Wire. “We’d both like to see more women on the courts,” she added.

Sessions was clearly flustered by this, causing his lobster bib to flap full into his face and almost tip over his ten-gallon hat.

Perhaps the best part of this is that Judge Cedarbarum and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III were nominated by Ronald Reagan for the federal bench in the same year, 1986, but Sessions didn't make it as far as Cedarbaum, because of "a controversy surrounding comments he made involving the Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP."

This won't stop the silliness, but it was an amusing moment to distract us from, for example, Lindsey Graham comparing the "wise Latina" comment to sectarian violence and repression in Iraq.

Voting Rights Act Gets A Reprieve

Seems to me that the Supreme Court nodded to legislative intent by not completely eviscerating Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in a ruling handed down today by an 8-1 margin.

The case involved Section 5 of the Act, which requires voting districts that have historically engaged in discrimination to “preclear” any new voting rules changes they make with a federal court or the Department of Justice. Under today’s decision, Section 5 will remain in effect, but voting districts are allowed to “bail out” of its requirements if they can show that they have not recently engaged in race discrimination and are not likely to do so in the future.

Of course, this depends on the test that states have to pass to bail out of the requirements - if they can opt out of the provision easily, then the SCOTUS did the conservatives' bidding. Hopefully judges will impose a more strict standard.

"I am not a racialist, but, und this is a big but..."

(Title from an obscure Monty Python sketch)

The Sotomayor debate continues to reveal the absolute worst of human nature, driven by conservative white men with serious issues over race. Tom Tancredo and Pat Buchanan, two of the biggest loudmouths in this debate, share an aide who plead guilty to karate chopping a pedestrian and calling her the N word. For his part, Buchanan called the Supreme Court nominee a quota queen who practices "race-based justice," basing this on a quote and none of the facts of her record (in Ricci she was bound by the law and precedent, and quotas had nothing to do with it, as Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out to him today). Does everyone remember when Pat Buchanan was radioactive to the party and brought down George W. Bush's hopes in 1992? Now he's on the "liberal" MSNBC more than the peacock.

And now there's a new player in this debate, Manuel Miranda, who you may remember from stealing Democratic files when he was working for Bill Frist. Within the space of a few hours today, he basically called Mitch McConnell gay for resisting a filibuster for Sotomayor, and then he slandered all African-Americans.

Today, Miranda did a conference call with conservative bloggers organized by the Heritage foundation, where he discussed Sotomayor. Asked how Republicans could oppose her while avoiding charges of racism, Miranda said they had to wage substantive attacks. Then he segued into a discussion of the views of Hispanics on issues, saying:

“By the way, Hispanic polls, Hispanic surveys, indicate that Hispanics think just like everyone else. We’re not like African Americans. We think just like everybody else.”

The audio is here; the key bit starts at around the 42 minute mark.

To be clear, Miranda didn’t appear to be saying that African Americans are unlike everyone else in that they don’t think. He seemed to be saying that everyone, including Hispanics, thinks one way on issues, and African Americans think another way. Perhaps Miranda meant otherwise, but this seems clumsy or wacky at best and seems to crudely isolate African Americans as a political group.

Not like those dirty African-Americans, you see.

This is just a disaster for the GOP, and it gets worse and worse.

A White Christian Party

Howard Dean got in some trouble for characterizing Republicans that way in 2005. He was merely citing the numbers:

PRINCETON, NJ -- More than 6 in 10 Republicans today are white conservatives, while most of the rest are whites with other ideological leanings; only 11% of Republicans are Hispanics, or are blacks or members of other races. By contrast, only 12% of Democrats are white conservatives, while about half are white moderates or liberals and a third are nonwhite.

Blogger is bloggered and won't display images, but the rundown of the poll is here.

This really informs the Sotomayor debate. With conservatives retreating to their ideological corners, it's not hard to expect a certain paranoia to creep in. White conservatives see the world changing and cannot get a handle on it. They believe that this diversity and multiculturalism targets them and their homogenous group, and they imagine that the nonwhite have an unfair advantage over them. It's perverse, but in context I get it.

And the world is only getting more diverse and more tolerant. Hard to see where conservatives go from here.

Not Your Father's Supreme Court

Without the Internet, this level of detail almost certainly wouldn't exist, but we can now paint a pretty full picture of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's decisions on the 2nd Circuit Court, a body of evidence that can be used to form an opinion about what kind of Supreme Court Justice she will make. And it's a mixed bag. There are some hopeful signs, like her ruling in Hayden v. Pataki, where she argued that felon disenfranchisement laws do fall under the purview of the Voting Rights Act, suggesting an inclusive treatment of the franchise for all citizens. She based this on the plain reading of the statutory text of the Voting Rights Act. She dissented in the case of Pappas v. Giuliani, arguing that an anti-Semitic rant sent by the plaintiff was not enough to have him fired by the NYPD, and that he deserved a jury trial to determine if his First Amendment rights were violated. This is a powerful endorsement of the First Amendment, even in a case where the speech is distasteful. Her dissent in a strip-search case shows her defense of civil rights and the unreasonable search and seizure clause of the Fourth Amendment.

At the same time, in Jocks v. Tavernier, she strongly upheld, and convinced her Republican colleagues, police power and broad grounds for arrest in a case where a man who needed help with his truck in an emergency ended up being arrested and losing his job. And her general temperament is of a judge who hews extremely close to the law, never mind the bleatings of the right. Far from being a conquistador or leading with her race, she actually favored the law over blanket claims of discrimination the majority of the time.

Other than Ricci, Judge Sotomayor has decided 96 race-related cases while on the court of appeals.

Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous. (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had occurred.) Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge. In the one divided panel opinion, the dissent’s point dealt only with the technical question of whether the criminal defendant in that case had forfeited his challenge to the jury selection in his case. So Judge Sotomayor rejected discrimination-related claims by a margin of roughly 8 to 1 [...]

In sum, in an eleven-year career on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has participated in roughly 100 panel decisions involving questions of race and has disagreed with her colleagues in those cases (a fair measure of whether she is an outlier) a total of 4 times. Only one case (Gant) in that entire eleven years actually involved the question whether race discrimination may have occurred. (In another case (Pappas) she dissented to favor a white bigot.) She participated in two other panels rejecting district court rulings agreeing with race-based jury-selection claims. Given that record, it seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking.

I truly value this variety of treatment of the Sotomayor record, all of which came from blogs and not the traditional media. And I think you can get a full picture of Sotomayor from this treatment. What come sup for me is the overwhelming feeling that this is a highly qualified, competent, brilliant judge whose opinion sits pretty much in the middle of mainstream legal thought. Maybe in past years, that would be enough to put her as the swing vote on the Court. In the current makeup, it puts her on the far left - because this Court has moved sharply to the right over the past 30 years, particularly on corporate issues.

Here's a simple way to expose the Myth of Balance. In 1980, when I clerked at the Court, the justices were, roughly from left to right, Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, Byron White, John Paul Stevens, Lewis Powell, Potter Stewart, Warren Burger, and William Rehnquist. Believe it or not, this Court was widely thought to be conservative. But think, just for a moment, about how much would have to change in order for the Court of 2007 to look like the supposedly conservative Court of 1980.

First we would have to chop off the Court's right wing, removing Scalia and Thomas and replacing them with Marshall and Brennan. Far to the left of anyone on the Court today, Marshall and Brennan believed that the Constitution banned the death penalty in all circumstances, created a right to education, and required the government not merely to protect the right to choose but actually to fund abortions for poor women.

Next we would have to replace Kennedy with Blackmun. Blackmun was also to the left of anyone on the current Court. Fiercely protective of the right to privacy and opposed to the death penalty on constitutional grounds, Blackmun believed that the social-services agencies were constitutionally obliged to protect vulnerable children from domestic violence and that affirmative-action requirements were broadly acceptable.

Then we would have to leave Breyer, Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg essentially as they are. All of a sudden, the four would be perceived as the Court's moderates rather than its liberals, operating as a group much like White, Stevens, Powell, and Stewart. (The parallel between White-Stevens-Powell and Breyer-Stevens-Souter is very close; true, Ginsburg is somewhat to the left of Stewart in many domains, but their voting patterns and general approaches are pretty close.)

Finally we would have to assume that Roberts would vote more or less like Rehnquist (which is to say, definitely to the left of Scalia and Thomas) and that Alito would vote more or less like Burger (definitely to the left of Rehnquist).

To say the least, all this would represent a radical change in the Court's composition -- so radical that liberals cannot even fantasize about it. But this radically changed Court would be essentially identical to the supposedly conservative Court of 1980! [...]

The upshot of all these shifts is that what was once on the extreme right is now merely conservative. What was once conservative is now centrist. What was centrist is now left wing. What was once on the left no longer exists.

Cass Sunstein, who works in the Obama Administration, wrote that, and he's absolutely right. And Sotomayor does nothing to rebalance this debate. And I don't know that the President could have gone further than he did. She was generally a good pick. But that's a failure to stand up to conservative messaging. The end result for the country is that the Court shifts to the right, and nobody blinks an eye.

The Media Treatment Of Sotomayor

I didn't address the New York Times' Sotomayor temperament story yesterday. I think you could probably talk your way into believing that this was a perfectly legitimate area of concern, as Adam Liptak did. And I generally like Liptak as a reporter. But I also sympathize with Christy Hardin Smith's take.

You want to know why those opposing Sotomayor keep raising this issue of "she's a bitch on the bench?" (And how often have you seen this tack with a man. Honestly.)

It's because they know that a Heathers campaign is media catnip.

The titillating nature of junior high anonymous gossip mongering is so much more amusing and more easily understood by political reporters who don't bother trying to comprehend legal intricacies.

I think Liptak can get away with saying that Sotomayor's demeanor and style of questioning might be of legitimate interest if he didn't allow a bunch of anonymous sources to characterize it as "difficult" and "nasty" off the top. He did give voice to perhaps the best rebuttal of this line of argument, however:

Judge Guido Calabresi, a former dean of Yale Law School who taught Ms. Sotomayor there and now sits with her on the Second Circuit, said complaints that she had been unduly caustic had no basis. For a time, Judge Calabresi said, he kept track of the questions posed by Judge Sotomayor and other members of the 12-member court. “Her behavior was identical,” he said.

“Some lawyers just don’t like to be questioned by a woman,” Judge Calabresi added. “It was sexist, plain and simple.”

He said Judge Sotomayor’s forceful and lucid arguments had persuaded him to reconsider his position in a number of instances. “And I’m a tough act,” he said.

Actually, I think Sharon Theimer's AP article, accusing Sotomayor of hypocrisy because she grew up in poverty but now accepts her salary as a federal judge instead of living in a Bronx tenement, would warrant much more criticism.

There's no doubt that the media is treating this pick differently because Sotomayor is a woman, so driven are they by conservative frames and narratives.