The best piece on the Biden choice--

--by far, is Al Giordano's.

Yet the words in that 1988 speech were essentially true, if not original. He was the first Biden to go to college. He did descend from coal miner country. This was a man with the class resentment that comes naturally to being born from below. And as the national media vetting process will disclose in the coming days, after 36 years in the US Senate, he's still one of the poorest US Senators: he never availed himself of the back-door personal enrichment techniques that most of his colleagues - Democrat and Republican - have utilized. Beyond class resentment, he retains a sense of class solidarity. His wife since 1977 never went into Washington lobbying: she remained a public schoolteacher.

Biden has also lived personal tragedies that would have splat most people like watermelons tossed from the sixth floor of a Wilmington tenement: between his first US Senate election in 1972 and being sworn in, his first wife and three small children were in a gruesome car accident. Mrs. Biden and his daughter died, his two boys were wounded, and he became a single father. Biden never quite entered the Washington DC culture so seductive to his peers: commuting from Delaware to DC, always coming home at night.

...I think [Obama and McCain] are going to get along splendidly, and have a lot of infectious fun using John McCain as a punching bag. Apollo Creed has now signed on as coach and sparring partner with Rocky Balboa. Multi-racial class warfare - there's a place for us, somewhere a place for us - now becomes the wedge against the millionaire McCain. ...

Yes, I would have preferred the "three point shot" - that Obama pick a running mate from outside of Washington - but as DC insiders go, it's interesting that Biden chose all these years to refuse to live inside it, or meet with its lobbyists. ... The 2008 election now has its very own "Comeback Kid," and his name ain't Clinton. Oh, yes, I can live with that.

Go read.

On William Deresiewicz's article & Ivy League entitlement

There's been a lengthy debate on Mather-Open, and maybe other email lists too, about this article from The American Scholar, in which Yale English professor William Deresiewicz decries how life in the Ivy League fosters classism and intellectual laziness among those who go there. Now, I'm sympathetic to this argument -- my regular readers will know that I've always believed Harvard is a sickening manifestation of the worst American elitism -- and most of Deresiewicz's article is a helpful reality check for those of us who live inside it. You should read it.

BUT, I submit, Deresiewicz has got his causation mixed up. This paragraph is the giveaway:

...it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.

Okay, that is not a function of your education. That is a function of you being a douchebag. I'm sorry, but throwing up your hands and saying "The Ivy League MADE me an elitist! I couldn't help it!" is no excuse. There are plenty of us at Harvard who, for various reasons, manage to maintain an identity that's quite separate from the ruling-class Harvard Club sensibility, and the worst we suffer is a little bit of cognitive dissonance and a desire not to give any money to this place after we graduate. To be sure, arrogant, privileged douches who think in Deriesiewicz's terms are the overwhelming majority at places like Harvard, but that's not a reflection on the insitution itself, it's a reflection on its admissions policy.

So while Deriesiewicz is much more comfortable than most critics with the magic word that actually explains this problem -- class -- he still winds up overlaying it with a bunch of bunkum about how Ivy League schools somehow produce intellectual torpor in their students by the nefarious means of grade inflation and, wait for it, imposing architecture. (You must read this to believe it.) The argument is transparently ridiculous. Harvard, an institution where most of us barely go to class, would be well served if it produced ANYTHING intellectual in its students.

The problem is that a large, and socially dominant, proportion of our student body (and I am extrapolating here from Harvard to the rest of the Ivy League) was elitist and privileged well before it ever came here. They grew up in places like Westchester, went to school at places like Exeter, and spent high school summers driving one of their father's BMWs around places like Cape Cod. Of course a person with a background like that will wind up thinking and acting entitled. It'd happen to them at any college: the only difference at the Ivy League is, they reach critical mass here thanks to their built-in admissions advantages and subsume the rest of the student body. The subsequent failure of Harvard classrooms to produce a real liberal education is solely because Harvard has filled them with people who are incurious.*

Deriesiewicz has identified the right phenomenon -- his description of it as "entitled mediocrity" is absolutely perfect, and I'm going to start using that phrase -- but it's not, as he argues, an intellectual or institutional problem. It's a social problem. And you cannot sensibly analyze an Ivy League school until you recognize that fact.

Now, to lighten the mood, here is a dancing walrus.

*I should add, by way of a disclaimer, that I personally am also enormously intellectually lazy. My Harvard education is wasted on me; as far as I can discern, I'm here because the admissions office finds rural Canadians an amusing novelty. If I could restructure Harvard admissions to my own standards, I would not have accepted myself.

My head says no but my heart says yes

Okay. I realize that this, from Machinists Union president Tom Buffenbarger, is a completely unfair, mean-spirited, borderline-bigoted ad hominem attack on Obama's supporters, and it has no place whatsoever in civil democratic discourse. I also understand, per Atrios and Kagro X among others, that this argument reinforces right-wing framing and does violence to the Democratic coalition. I also understand that Obama's support is not at all limited to bicoastal elites, and that he's gaining making gains every day among the working class. By NO means am I endorsing this shoddy, reprehensible line of argument. That being said:

“Give me a break! I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine. He's a poet, not a fighter.”

Doesn't some part of you just want to add "Harvard students" in there and run around the Square with a goddamn megaphone?

...UPDATE: Chris Bowers has a good commentary on this issue.

The triumphant return of the Sunday Screening

Ha ha! You thought I'd given up, didn't you? Just because the last Sunday Screening was all the way back in November -- well, seven thousand pages of academic writing later, I'm back and ready again to subject you all to mind-numbingly obscure bits of YouTube irrelevancy. Like the above -- do you realize what an enormous selection of TV signon/signoff clips YouTube has? Unbelievable. Every era, every location. I considered devoting an entire post to them, but then I decided I should at least make an effort to retain my tiny, precious audience... if you're interested, though, start at these nuggets of pure gold and work your way out from there. Nothing captures the aesthetic of a given time and place quite so perfectly, I contend, as its incidental TV graphics.

But what I've been fixated on lately is this fascinating footage of Mitt Romney arguing with a reporter. Look:

Now, leaving aside the factual content here (and the press secretary's incredibly douchey reprimand at the end), my question is: WHY would Romney's people put him in front of a rack of office supplies? My God are they trying to make him look like a bland corporate automaton? BALLPOINT PENS, for crying out loud. Not even an aisle of cool office supplies, like printers. No. PENS. You could not ask for anything more banal. The obvious allegory here is The Office--

--which perfectly captures just those mindless, soulless Ward-Cleaver-with-a-low-IQ tendencies that Romney's working so hard to hide. (I wish there was video somewhere of the scene from Season 3 where Michael confronts Dwight in an actual Staples; the aesthetic is just perfect.)

Speaking of The Office, I want to promote this video made last year by the Harvard undergrad Government Department. I'm late to this party (h/t: Dani Rodrik back in December), but it's well worth your time; who knew that Gov had so much deeply rooted anxiety?

...Really that's what The Office, and its derivatives, are about: anxiety. These are programs about people who are unsure of their places in the world, lacking confidence in the structures that are supposed to support them. In the Scranton, Pa., that The Office shows us, life is basically meaningless; Jim Halpert, the "beta male" hero, always gives that Kafkaesque look to the camera that asks -- both hilariously and heartbreakingly -- "What am I doing here?" We haven't seen this kind of ennui creeping into the popular culture since the paranoia films of the 1970s. It's an indicator of a nation, and particularly an economy, in serious trouble.

Mitt Romney's campaign, it seems, does not recognize this. They certainly are not playing the symbological game very well (as vs., for instance, Obama); he's running a nice conventional GOP campaign that will win him a nice conventional 40%. And meanwhile they've got Mike Huckabee, who I'll leave you with, nipping at their heels making just this argument -- don't let anybody tell you America's not a class-conscious society...

Elitism is Everywhere These Days

Three examples.

1. Libertarians: "See, the public at large is stupid, because it rejects the ideas of economists and economists are always right. Democracy sucks."

2. Conservatives: "You know who deserves more credit for their dedication and hard work? People who inherit boatloads of money."

3. TIME Magazine: "Look! A rich guy and a celebrity! I wish they ran our government." (swoon)

I don't know about you, but I'm getting a little tired of this. Money is not the arbiter of intelligence, capability, or merit, nor does it necessarily flow towards people who display those qualities -- yet we see the above kinds of arguments in our public discourse all the time. I'm not sure whether they come out of a misguided faith in market capitalism or a fetish for money (if there's a difference); but it's damn time we stopped listening to people who consistently glorify the most powerful at the expense of everyone else.

--
(big h/t to Sadly, No!, which is always good at pouncing on this stuff)

Roundup -- Now With Exclamation Points! (!)

Boy oh boy has it been a rolling start here on campus -- Spring Break was all well and good, but there's nothing to get that blood pumping like good old-fashioned grey Cambridge drizzle for fucking days on end! Woo-eee! I'm so excited I'm mixing up my ironic exclamations!

Seriously, great roundup for you tonight. First a note -- to your left is the Peace Dollar, issued in the 1920s and 30s. I got one from my late grandfather last week; it's the most remarkable piece of currency I've come across (and I say this coming from a country that routinely puts beavers on its money). There's something comforting in the knowledge that, at one point, our government had no qualms about printing such hippie-ish designs; hopefully, in the next few years, we'll be able to use this wonderful image less wistfully. (And I'm sure President Kucinich would be up for a reissue.)

Meanwhile though -- to arms!

--Josh Marshall thinks that photo of John McCain in Baghdad is a latter-day Dukakis tank moment -- except way more substantial and significant. As usual Marshall's quite right. (Here's a sentence we never thought we'd find ourselves saying about John McCain: "if only they'd nominated him first...")

--In case you still need convincing that the electability argument is bullshit, Sifu Tweety of Poor Man has your back. Read it all. Then for dessert read the next post down, The Editors' hilarious demolition of Jonah Goldberg:

...in my head, I have a brain. Using this “brain”, I am able to determine that the conservative movement - meaning the people who control the White House, who until recently controlled the Congress, their political operatives, seamlessly integrated with the media apparatchiks who “work” at places like National Review - is a lot more important than what some dude I never heard of said this one time, particularly when the only reason I know this dude exists is because you douchebags won’t shut the fuck up about him. Hence my lack of interest.

--Speaking of The Corner: I guess when conservatives say "support our troops," they mean "support our troops, not the British troops, those pansies." I wish I were making this up. And I still haven't quite parsed Derbyshire's whopping statement that "whether or not I could stand up well to torture, I expect Marines to."

--Of course perhaps I'm just expecting too much from these people. We are talking about men whose reaction to the Iran crisis is -- quoting verbatim from Fred Barnes -- "Hey, they could use American ships!" (Kondracke later added that we should "put the whammy on them." Honestly, FOX News could just replace all its commentators with eight-year-old Hulk Hogan fans, it'd be a lot cheaper.)

--I was struck by this graph, posted by Jerome a Paris in an excellent Kos diary. Note that the last time the top few had such a large share of national income was the late 1920s, roughly 1928. History concentrators: what happened to our economy right after that? Hmm...

--Speaking of crashes, Chris Matthews has gone off the deep end. (Well... *further* off the deep end.)

--I should have known it existed: grammar blogging. Sample quote: "the understood verb phrase inside the though-clause has to mean something that does not correspond to a syntactic constituent in the antecedent main clause." I barely understand 1/3 of this blog and yet I can't stop reading it. For instance -- and here's another sentence I never expected to write -- this discussion of gerunds is hilarious.

--Over at Slate, hidden behind a sensationalistic title about Grand Theft Auto, is a thought-provoking article about liberal activist culture and the need for individual empowerment. This one will require some digesting.

--Fred Thompson's campaign is over; if he even hints at running, executives from Bravo will have to personally assassinate him. This is America, TV comes first.

--Did you know that Lee Atwater destroyed funk and invented gansta rap? Me neither! (Apparently MC Rove is just part of a long Republican tradition.)

--OK, one more shameless link to mockery of conservative bloggers -- Michelle Malkin has been reduced to delusional fantasies about Frank Capra, and it's really just too easy. HuffPo's Chris Kelly does a great job though ("Stirring words. It's like Pat Benatar wrote Braveheart").

--Apparently our generation is called "millenials," and there's a whole group of people dedicated to getting us more involved in politics. This introduction to the issues involved is worth a read, particularly in the way it (correctly) characterizes our understanding of community and and the public. More detailed writing is at Future Majority, a blog dedicated to youth-voter issues. Look forward to more from these people.

AND that's all I got. Let me close with a wonderful quote from Richard Nixon, as revealed in Henry Kissinger's secret transcripts; his wisdom still rings true today.

"Goddamn newspapers—they're a bunch of sluts," Nixon said. In another taped conversation, two weeks later, he said, "I don't give a goddamn about repression, do you?" "No," Kissinger replied.

Our President, ladies and gentlemen! (Slow clap.)

This is an open thread.

"The Bourgeois Revolt"

I want to draw everyone's attention to Chris Hayes, a guy I've never heard of, writing at TPMCafe. Emphasis mine:

Much of the post 1970s decline in organizing (and indeed the fate of the Democratic party and progressives) can be tied, I think, to the unraveling of much of the social capital our constituencies used to have. This process has been documented quite famously by Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol. So can the internet reverse the trend? I used to be aggressively skeptical on this score, but the innovations of the last few years have made me more optimistic. MoveOn, for example, has been finding ways to use the internet to actually, physically bring people together and build organization and capacity. The potential of this is just beginning to be tapped.

But there's a problem with the internet as well. Very few poor and working class people are spending their time on progressive blogs or attending MoveOn vigils. There's no single demographic profile of the "netroots" but the closest data we have -- a Pew survey of committed Howard Dean supporters from 2004 -- reveal a constituency that is overwhelming white, educated and upper-middle class. [...]

In short: The netroots phenomenon is a bourgeois revolt. Look at the inequality data for the last six years and you see that the concentration of wealth in the upper-most portion of the distribution has come at the expense, chiefly, of the upper middle class. Like the restless activists in the Third Estate of France, the people driving this new organizing resurgence and participating in it are people that are not generally used to feeling disempowered. This is a tremendous asset since half of what organizers do is teach people to demand things, and the upper middle class is already habituated to do just that.

Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes. Hayes puts his finger right on the button -- blogs and blogliberalism, specifically the kind that is taking over the Democratic Party, did not develop spontaneously in a vacuum. It is an economic class-based reaction. Concerns about the mass disempowerment (even disenfranchisement) of Americans have existed in the working class and minority groups for decades, but it's only now that they have spread so far up the ladder; and it's only now that people with more political and intellectual heft than Michael Moore are talking about them.

(Comparison: this is much the same function as opposition to Vietnam, which metastasized only after the draft began sending middle-class kids off to war -- as opposed to the largely poor groups that had previously made up the bulk of the troops.)

With that in mind, consider Eric Massa, netroots hero who lost his 2006 race (NY-29, upstate) in a squeaker, who today wrote the following on DKos:

Nationally speaking, Alan Blinder, the noted economic expert who is credited with being the architect of the North American Free Trade Agreement and its close cousin the Central American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA and CAFTA, the latter of which my opponent Randy Kuhl cast the deciding vote for. Without Randy Kuhl voting for corporate America there would be no CAFTA.), now believes that between 42 and 56 million jobs are potentially offshorable in the near term future. The Wall Street Journal reported on their front page on 28 March that "Mostly he (Alan Blinder) wants to shock politicians, policy makers and other economists into realizing how big a change is coming and what new sectors it will reach." "This is something factory workers have understood for a generation," he says. It’s now coming down on the heads of highly educated, politically vocal people, and they not going to take it." (Sound familiar? -ed.) The "it" is watching their jobs sent to China, India and Vietnam.

But even though specifics are hard to come by here in NY-29, it is more than obvious that open door burn-down-the-barn Free Trade has destroyed much of what the greatest generation built for the three generations of Americans who have followed in their footsteps. Many of the above-mentioned factory jobs are gone. No longer can the "Made in America" label be found in clothing stores on Market Street in Corning, New York nor in the software development offices in Rochester to the north. As replacement for these lost jobs, my opponent’s vision of economic policy for the 29th Congressional District is focused on near total dependence on addictive Washington handouts, which would make us virtual slaves to professional politicians. I believe that if we are to stand at all it must be on our own two feet and we will not be able to do that as long as corporate interests prevail over the interests of working Americans.

Massa takes the same argument Hayes lays out and puts it in political terms -- very powerful ones at that. (He's already announced his intention for a 2008 rematch, and should be nominated easily.) Did you catch the bit about "software development offices"? This is not a Joe Lunchbucket issue anymore, it is everyone's issue. I have said it before and I'll say it again: economic populism is the most powerful and relevant mode we have as liberals, especially now that it encompasses more than just a few disadvantaged demographics.

Maybe this doesn't fly yet in Cambridge, Mass, or the leafy Westchester suburbs so many of us Harvard kids were plucked from. But you go to the majority of middle-class America -- your generic suburb, land of Reagan Democrats, or even more upscale than that -- and these concerns are palpable. People worry about their debt and their job security. Their kids' tuitions. They worry about out-of-control tax cuts for everybody but them. They worry about not having a stake in their country anymore, and having a government that doesn't give a shit. These are the concerns that Democrats can and must address.

It is deeply sad, and makes me somewhat uncomfortable, to write that these core issues of our time only become politically salient once they apply to privileged white people. In the long term this is obviously something that needs to change, in our culture and/or our political system. But meanwhile, given the cards we've been dealt, it makes sense for Democrats and liberals to voice these concerns wholeheartedly and fullthroatedly: we want our America back.

And returning to Hayes' point, online organizing seems the best way to do it. Daily Kos (and MoveOn, and ActBlue, and yes, to an extent Dem Apples) today are what the union halls were in 1932 -- a bunch of people who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore. So if we're in the business of making historical parallels... well, you can figure out where that one leads. And it bodes very well for the Democratic Party -- so long as we play our cards right.

The Harvard Carnival, Maine Islands, and the Ghost of Eugene V. Debs

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