Author: mhasegawa

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Nan Robertson

I’m sure there will be many words written about Nan Robertson and her personal struggles with toxic shock and alcoholism, but I read today about her death with a tinge of sadness.  Nan Robertson is responsible for what may be my only appearance (other than as a comentator on blogs) in the New York Times.

It was Miami 1972.  I a proud McGovern delegate to the Democratic National Convention.  She stopped me as I was making my way onto the floor and asked if she could interview me for a story about what women were wearing at the convention.  Mind you, I’ve never been a fashionista, but I was young and flattered.   I don’t have the link to that old article, but I have a copy. (Page 48, July 12, 1972)

Maya Hasegawa, a 25-year-old, tiny delegate from Richmond, Va, had suited up in a tank top and pants, with sunglasses perched atop her glossy locks.  “I’ve been marching since I was 13 years old,” she said proudly, “I’ve been very active in the peace and civil rights movements.”

And there is a picture of me, too – a head shot.  Everyone I know was excited.  And she spelled my name correctly which made my family happy.

She didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize for writing that paragraph about me, she won for her New York Times Magazine article about toxic shock which she suffer in 1981 .

The article unsparingly described the author’s swift, brutal encounter with the illness, which resulted in the partial amputation of eight fingers:
I went dancing the night before in a black velvet Paris gown, on one of those evenings that was the glamour of New York epitomized. I was blissfully asleep at 3 A.M.

“Twenty-four hours later, I lay dying, my fingers and legs darkening with gangrene.”

But I admired her book The Girls in the Balcony most of all. 

Ms. Robertson, who after a grueling rehabilitation was able to resume her career, wrote two books. The first, “Getting Better: Inside Alcoholics Anonymous” (Morrow, 1988), was both a history of the organization and a narrative of the author’s recovery from alcoholism. The second, “The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and The New York Times” (Random House, 1992), was in part about the suit brought by female employees against the newspaper in 1974.

Reviewing “The Girls in the Balcony” in The New York Times Book Review, Arlie Russell Hochschild called it a “warm, salty, wisecracking book.”

…

In 1963, Ms. Robertson began a decade as a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Times, where, as she said in an interview many years later, her de facto job description was to cover the “first lady, her children and their dogs.” Her years in Washington would furnish her with the title of “The Girls in the Balcony,” a reference to the cramped, second-story space in the National Press Club to which female journalists were then relegated.

“The Girls in the Balcony” was an account of the events surrounding Elizabeth Boylan et al. v. The New York Times, a federal class-action suit filed on behalf of 550 women at The Times over inequities including pay, assignments and advancement. (Ms. Robertson was not among the seven named plaintiffs in the suit.) In 1978, the suit was settled out of court for $350,000, with The Times agreeing to an affirmative-action plan.

(Nan Robertson in 1982 at the Times.)

Nan Roberton may have been sent to cover fashion at the 1972 Convention and give me a monment of fame, but she will be remembered by me  for very much more than that.

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The “Recovery”

It is just before 6 am and I logged on to the New York Times.  Two headlines say it all:

“Federal Pay Czar Tries Again to Trim A.I.G. Bonuses”  and  “Still on the Job, But Making Only Half as Much”

The first story is about the difficulties in getting A.I.G to reduce or not pay $198 million to employees of the trading unit.  The same unit that is part of the cause of this recession.

But the Treasury’s special master for compensation, Kenneth Feinberg, is running into legal hurdles because those bonuses fall outside new rules against bonus payments at companies receiving government assistance. The bonus agreements at issue were struck before last year’s emergency rescues by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, and thus are not directly covered by the new rules.

The problem is a recurring one. A.I.G. payments early this year to the same employees elicited public outrage, though government officials said then that they had little legal authority to rescind pre-existing contracts.

The second story is about people who still have jobs, but have taken deep pay cuts and/or demotions in pay grade to keep their jobs.

In recent decades, layoffs were the standard procedure for shrinking labor costs. Reducing the wages of those who remained on the job was considered demoralizing and risky: the best workers would jump to another employer. But now pay cuts, sometimes the result of downgrades in rank or shortened workweeks, are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression.

State workers in Georgia are taking home smaller paychecks. So are the tens of thousands of employees in California’s public university system. The steel company Nucor and the technology giant Hewlett-Packard have embraced the practice. So have several airlines and many small businesses.

Let’s face it.  AIG is not solely responsible for the economic crisis.  Many of the rest of us were also riding high and spending beyond our means. The couple in the paycut story is an example.  Both seem to have their self esteem tied up in the amount of money they make. 

But most of the rest of the world must now scale back while a company which played a large role in the collapse still gives out bonuses.  Makes you wonder.  Hope the bonus recipients save the money for their rainy day.

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Back with some random observations

I haven’t posted for a while for a number of reasons.  The two major reasons are first, I have been spending a lot of time on the computer at work and didn’t want to come home and do the same (rather watch the Red Sox) and, second, because the health care debate was beginning to depress me.  I’ve been kicked into starting to post again by what happened over the weekend  on the golf course in Lakeville, MA.

In case you haven’t heard the news, a swastika and Obama were carved into the 18th green.  This picture is from the Boston Globe.

lakeville_swastika_101309.jpg

President Obama is coming to Boston in a couple of weeks to support Deval Patrick.  The FBI, Secret Service, and Lakeville police are investigating.  The Globe reports

Lou Mincone, the public club’s assistant manager, said he was stunned by the vandals’ gall, and baffled by the senseless, hateful act.

“What would motivate anyone to do such a thing?” he asked incredulously. “To use the president’s name like that? It’s crazy.”

Mincone, who discovered the damage, said the vandals dug the message more than an inch into the turf, likely using a tool or sports cleats. He said the message, which was about 10 feet by 15 feet wide, was written sometime Sunday night or Monday morning

It took a while to do,” he said. “It wasn’t a five-minute deal.”

This is what the climate surrounding the election of a black man to be President has brought.  The tea baggers with the posters of the President as Hitler, the Rush Limbaugh’s, the Glenn Becks, and the Michelle Bachman’s.  I have been jolted out of my hiatus.

The Red Sox are all done.  And likely done is Jason Veritek.  We need to sign Jason Bay, figure out what ails Josh Beckett, hope Matsuzaka stays thin and strong over the winter, and that Papi finds his mojo.  Go Phillies!

The Senate Finance Committee compromised away real health care reform to court the insurance companies and the Republicans.  So the night before the vote the insurance companies issue a report that they will have to raise rates anyway and only Olympia Snowe voted for the bill.  To show what an Alice in Wonderland world this this, the President thought this was progress.  At this point he probably thinks, well, let’s pass something and fix it later which is the point I am rapidly reaching.

The insurance company report was issued by a group called America’s Health Insurance Plans.  According to the story in the New York Times

“The overall impact will be to increase the cost of private insurance coverage for individuals, families and businesses above what these costs would be in the absence of reform,” said Karen M. Ignagni, president of the trade association.

…

The report says that the cost of the average family coverage, now $12,300, will rise to $18,400 in 2016 under current law and to $21,300 if the Senate bill is adopted. Likewise, it said, the cost of individual coverage, now $4,600, will average $6,900 in 2016 under current law and $7,900 under the bill.

The study provides ammunition to Republicans attacking the legislation and might intensify the concerns of some Democrats who worry that the bill does not provide enough help to low- and middle-income people to enable them to buy insurance.

Scott Mulhauser, a spokesman for Democrats on the Finance Committee, said: “This report is untrue, disingenuous and bought and paid for by the same health insurance companies that have been gouging consumers for too long. Now that health care reform grows ever closer, these health insurers are breaking out the same tired playbook of deception. It’s a health insurance company hatchet job.”

I am becoming increasingly convinced that nothing can get done in this country because everyone is too worried about the effect on their profits.  Regulation of the finance industry, health care reform, tort reform.  In every instance those opposed worry about their own bottom line.  What ever happened to the idea of the common good?

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The President and Joe Wilson

Another President plagued by another Joe Wilson.  This is not President George W. Bush and the Ambassador Joe Wilson who exposed part of the rational for the Iraq War and then had his undercover CIA operative wife, Valerie Plame, outed.  This is President Barack Obama heckled by a Republican Congressman Joe Wilson during a speech to a joint session of Congress.  And who is Congressman Wilson?  Aldele Stan has posted “14 Things You Need to Know About Obama Hecker, Joe Wilson” on Alternet.  So here are a few.

1. Like his ideological counterpart known as Mr. The Plumber, his real name is not Joe. It’s Addison. His middle name is Graves. That makes him Addison Graves Wilson.

3. Wilson served as an aide to the late segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond, who is credited with conducting the longest filibuster in Senate history — against the 1957 civil rights bill.

5. A large percentage of Wilson’s campaign contributions come from the health sector, according to OpenSecrets.org. Over the course of his eight-year congressional career, Wilson has collected $414,000 from the health sector, topped only by contribution from what OpenSecrets calls the “finance, insurance & real estate” sector, from which he has gleaned $455,000.

7. Wilson is an adamant opponent of health care reform. As reported by The Hill, his last Tweet before his heckling performance at Obama’s speech read, “Happy Labor Day! Wonderful parade at Chapin, many people called out to oppose Obamacare which I assured them would be relayed tomorrow to DC.” (Wilson is currently the top trending topic on Twitter, and has nearly doubled his number of followers since his outburst.)

8. A military veteran whose health-care coverage is set for life, even after he retires from Congress, Wilson has “voted 11 times against health care for veterans in eight years, even as he voted ‘aye’ for the Iraq War…, ” according to Adam Weinstein, an uninsured Iraq-war veteran, writing at Newsweek’s The Gaggle. “He voted to cut veterans’ benefits─not his own─to make room for President George W. Bush’s tax cuts,” Weinstein says. “He repeatedly voted for budgets that slashed funding to the Veterans Administration and TRICARE. And perhaps most bizarrely, he refused — repeatedly — to approve Democratic-led initiatives that would have extended TRICARE coverage to all reservists and National Guard members, even though a disproportionate number of them have served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan — and many lost access to their civilian work benefits when they did so.”

10. Wilson served in the Reagan administration as deputy counsel in the energy department.

Unfortunately, South Carolinians seem to like him and agree with him.  The New York Times reports

“Yeah, it was rude, but somebody needed to say it,” said Susan Wahl, 41, a homemaker in this town of 800 outside Columbia. “Ordinary people can’t just get up and tell Obama he lied. He said something we all wanted to say.”

Maybe Ms. Wahl wanted to say it.  I wanted to say rude things as I watched Representative Eric Cantor pay attention to nothing but his Blackberry or iPhone or what ever he was playing with.  And I did cheer when President Obama called out opponents of health care reform asking them to talk rationally about ideas and not spread myths about the contents of the legislation.  But, Ms. Wahl and I were watching at home and Representative Wilson was on the floor of the Congress where, I believe, calling anyone a liar is outside the bounds of established decorum.  Here is more from the Times

Some Republicans noted that President George W. Bush drew derisive hoots from Democrats when he made his case for Social Security changes during his 2005 State of the Union address. But Mr. Wilson’s Republican colleagues overwhelmingly took the position that he had exceeded the bounds of Congressional decorum and that he took the right step by quickly admitting it.

“His behavior was inappropriate,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader.

Other Republicans said the outburst was also counterproductive, providing a political bonanza for Democrats, feeding the party’s story line that the August uproar over the health proposals was fed by boorish Republicans and orchestrated attacks.

It is difficult to see how this will play out in the long run.  Those of us outside of South Carolina can contribute to Rob Miller, the Democrat who is running against Mr. Wilson – and people can contribute to Wilson.  Miller has a tough road to victory.  As for the fate of health care reform, that is a wait and see also.

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The President Speaks at Wakefield High

Updated September 9 .  I added this cartoon by Dan Wasserman.

09.09%20OBAMA%20SCHOOLKIDS%20copy

 

President Obama gave a “first day of school” speech today that was broadcast to schools across the country – and available on the internet to anyone who wants to watch.  (there is a link in the New York Times story below) The conservatives, actually, the far right Limbaugh and Beck followers were convinced that the President was going to indoctrinate the the nation’s school population.  It has been compared with speeches given in North Korea and the former Soviet Union.

So what did he actually say?  According to the New York Times

President Obama exhorted America’s students on Tuesday to study hard, set goals, accept personal responsibility, and “get serious this year’’ in a back-to-school address that became a lightning rod for conservative parents who accused the White House of trying to indoctrinate their children with a political message.“The future of America depends on you,’’ the president declared, in one of the few departures from his script.

 

President Barack Obama spoke to students at Wakefield High School

This was a speech worthy of Bill Cosby.

“At the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude,’’ the president said. “That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. There is no excuse for not trying.’’

The President tried to explain that you won’t like everything you study and that some things will be hard but you had to set a plan for yourself and stick to it.  I think this is my favorite part of the speech.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it. 
I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things. 
But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.
That’s OK.  Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” 
These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying. 

E. J. Dionne comments in the Washington Post

We have just gone through one of the most shameful episodes of the young Obama presidency — shameful because of the behavior of the right wing, shameful because the media played into an extremist agenda, shameful because we proved that our political system has become so dysfunctional that a president gets punished for doing the right thing.

Upon Barack Obama’s election, even my most conservative friends who supported John McCain said Obama could do a world of good for poor children in the country by stressing the importance of education, hard work, staying in school and taking responsibility. Yes, those are often thought of as conservative values.

But when Obama proposed to do just that on the first day of school, the far right — without asking any questions or seeking any information — decided to pounce, on the theory that everything Obama did should be attacked relentlessly as part of some secret and dangerous ideological agenda.

Out popped Jim Greer, the Florida Republican chairman, who accused the president of trying to “indoctrinate America’s children to his socialist agenda.”

In a normal world, the media would have asked Greer for proof of such a wild charge and, since he didn’t have any, his press release would have gone into the circular file.

But, no, the media is so petrified of being criticized for being “liberal” that it chose to take a lunatic charge seriously and helped gin up this phony controversy.

…

And, of course, Obama’s speech was not at all “political” in any conventional definition of that word. It was about highlighting the importance of individual achievement. Here is an example of the president’s “socialist” propaganda, from the text of his speech:

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world — and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

If that’s “socialist,” then Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and just about every parent in America are “socialists.”

So have the Limbaughs, Beck’s and Greers apologized?  Of course not.  There had to be a hidden or coded message in the speech somewhere.  Greer did concede it was a good speech but seems to continue to insist that it must have been rewritten.  Asked on CNN for proof, he had none.

It was a good speech.  Newt Gingrich, Laura Bush and Karl Rove said so.

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Facts for the Health Care Debate

Anyone who reads this blog regularly already knows that I am in favor of reform all the way to single payer.  However, with single payer not an option, I have been sending email and writing everyone , including President Obama, that we need to keep the public option.  I don’t believe anything will really change without it.  But the debate has really degeneated.  Things are being presented as “fact” that are not true, but once said take on a life of their own.

This week Newsweek presented a two-page spread by Sharon Begley titled “The Five Biggest Lies in the Health Care Debate”.  But I think there are actually 6.  The quotes are from Begley; the comments are mine.

1) There will be electric funds transfers out of your bank account that you will not control.

 Take the claim in one chain e-mail that the government will have electronic access to everyone’s bank account, implying that the Feds will rob you blind. The 1,017-page bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee does call for electronic fund transfers—but from insurers to doctors and other providers. There is zero provision to include patients in any such system.

2) You’ll have no choice in what health benefits you receive.

In fact, the House bill sets up a health-care exchange—essentially a list of private insurers and one government plan—where people who do not have health insurance through their employer or some other source (including small businesses) can shop for a plan, much as seniors shop for a drug plan under Medicare part D. The government will indeed require that participating plans not refuse people with preexisting conditions and offer at least minimum coverage, just as it does now with employer-provided insurance plans and part D. The requirements will be floors, not ceilings, however, in that the feds will have no say in how generous private insurance can be.

3) Older patients and the very sick will not get treatment.  This is related to the Stephen Hawking myth.  The one that he would be dead now if he were getting benefits under the British health care system.  Only he is under the British National Health and as of this morning is alive and still doing his work.

The House bill does not use the word “ration.” Nor does it call for cost-effectiveness research, much less implementation—the idea that “it isn’t cost-effective to give a 90-year-old a hip replacement.”The general claim that care will be rationed under health-care reform is less a lie and more of a non-disprovable projection (as is Howard Dean’s assertion that health-care reform will not lead to rationing, ever). What we can say is that there is de facto rationing under the current system, by both Medicare and private insurance. No plan covers everything, but coverage decisions “are now made in opaque ways by insurance companies,” says Dr. Donald Berwick of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

What I don’t understand is why wouldn’t we want to know what is most effective so we can all be treated in the best, most cost effective and beneficial way.

4) Illegal Immigrants will get free health care.  I think they already do when they go to emergency rooms and our insurance premiums reflect that cost.

Will they be eligible for subsidies to buy health insurance? The House bill says that “individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States” will not be allowed to receive subsidies.

…

Can we say that none of the estimated 11.9 million illegal immigrants will ever wangle insurance subsidies through identity fraud, pretending to be a citizen? You can’t prove a negative, but experts say that Medicare—the closest thing to the proposals in the House bill—has no such problem.

5) There will be death panels making decisions about who gets treatment.   Related to #)3, this has been debunked all over but still lives particularly in the minds of Betsey McCaughy and Sarah Palin.

This lie springs from a provision in the House bill to have Medicare cover optional counseling on end-of-life care for any senior who requests it. This means that any patient, terminally ill or not, can request a special consultation with his or her physician about ventilators, feeding tubes, and other measures. Thus the House bill expands Medicare coverage, but without forcing anyone into end-of-life counseling.

I’ve had a lot of older relatives who have had end of life discussions with their doctors to decide on the level of treatment desired.  Everyone found them comforting and helpful to have decisions made.

6)  The government will set doctor’s wages.  I believe that one way to control costs is to put doctor’s on salary rather than fee for service which often ends up in many extra tests as the doctor and his or her practice tries to pay for equipment and up the billing.  However the proposed bills do not do this.

This, too, seems to have originated on the Flecksoflife blog on July 19. But while page 127 of the House bill says that physicians who choose to accept patients in the public insurance plan would receive 5 percent more than Medicare pays for a given service, doctors can refuse to accept such patients, and, even if they participate in a public plan, they are not salaried employees of it any more than your doctor today is an employee of, say, Aetna. “Nobody is saying we want the doctors working for the government; that’s completely false,” says Amitabh Chandra, professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

I close with the picture Newsweek chose to accompany this story.

Town Hall Face:   An unsightly condition caused by unsanitary health-care politics

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Cameron Todd Willingham and the Death Penalty

I haven’t had the chance to read the article in the New Yorker Magazine by David Grann but Bob Herbert has written a powerful op-ed in today’s New York Times about Cameron Willingham’s execution by the State of Texas.

There is a long and remarkable article in the current New Yorker about a man who was executed in Texas in 2004 for deliberately setting a fire that killed his three small children. Rigorous scientific analysis has since shown that there was no evidence that the fire in a one-story, wood frame house in Corsicana was the result of arson, as the authorities had alleged.

In other words, it was an accident. No crime had occurred.

Cameron Todd Willingham, who refused to accept a guilty plea that would have spared his life, and who insisted until his last painful breath that he was innocent, had in fact been telling the truth all along.

…

The fire broke out on the morning of Dec. 23, 1991. Willingham was awakened by the cries of his 2-year-old daughter, Amber. Also in the house were his year-old twin girls, Karmon and Kameron. The family was poor, and Willingham’s wife, Stacy, had gone out to pick up a Christmas present for the children from the Salvation Army.

Willingham said he tried to rescue the kids but was driven back by smoke and flames. At one point his hair caught fire. As the heat intensified, the windows of the children’s room exploded and flames leapt out. Willingham, who was 23 at the time, had to be restrained and eventually handcuffed as he tried again to get into the room.

According to Grann and Herbert,  an incompetent arson investigator decided the fire was arson, witnesses decided that Willingham had not tried to rescue his children and there was a jailhouse snitch.   Herbert continues

Willingham was arrested and charged with capital murder.

When official suspicion fell on Willingham, eyewitness testimony began to change. Whereas initially he was described by neighbors as screaming and hysterical — “My babies are burning up!” — and desperate to have the children saved, he now was described as behaving oddly, and not having made enough of an effort to get to the girls.

And you could almost have guaranteed that a jailhouse snitch would emerge. They almost always do. This time his name was Johnny Webb, a jumpy individual with a lengthy arrest record who would later admit to being “mentally impaired” and on medication, and who had started taking illegal drugs at the age of 9.

The jury took barely an hour to return a guilty verdict, and Willingham was sentenced to death.

He remained on death row for 12 years, but it was only in the weeks leading up to his execution that convincing scientific evidence of his innocence began to emerge. A renowned scientist and arson investigator, Gerald Hurst, educated at Cambridge and widely recognized as a brilliant chemist, reviewed the evidence in the Willingham case and began systematically knocking down every indication of arson.

The authorities were unmoved. Willingham was executed by lethal injection on Feb. 17, 2004.

The fundamental problem with the death penalty is that you can’t take it back. 

Now comes a report on the case from another noted scientist, Craig Beyler, who was hired by a special commission, established by the state of Texas to investigate errors and misconduct in the handling of forensic evidence.

The report is devastating, the kind of disclosure that should send a tremor through one’s conscience. There was absolutely no scientific basis for determining that the fire was arson, said Beyler. No basis at all. He added that the state fire marshal who investigated the case and testified against Willingham “seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires.” He said the marshal’s approach seemed to lack “rational reasoning” and he likened it to the practices “of mystics or psychics.”

Cameron Todd Willingham was executed by the State of Texas on no evidence.  Who will pay for his death?

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What I did on my vacation

If I were President Obama, I would have to write something like this “I was going on vacation but there was a hurricane so I was late.  Then my advisors said I had to make an announcement about reappointing the Fed Chairman.  Then one of my best friends died and I had to write his eulogy and attend the funeral.  All I really wanted to do was to spend a week more or less out of the public eye and hang out with the family and the dog, maybe some friends.  Oh, well.”

Obamas on Vacation

I think we should actually be concerned that the President didn’t really have a vacation.    Here the First Family is arriving, full of hope for a fun time. 

Barack Obama goes biking with his daughters.

Then one of the few times he did something fun in public, he got criticized for not wearing a helmut. 

We need to lighten up.  There is a happy medium between the, to my mind, excessive vacationing done by George W. Bush and Obama’s measly, not quite a week.  There is also a medium between Bill Clinton many public times when he was on the Vineyard and W. hiding on his ranch.

As Susan Jacoby wrotes in the introduction to her discussion blog in the Washington Post

Why would a president, having just had the delightful experience of speaking at town hall meetings to which some upstanding citizens saw fit to carry loaded guns, need a vacation with his wife and daughters? Incredibly, President Obama is being criticized by the political right for his decision to spend a few more days on vacation with his family at Camp David next week. Of course, no president is ever really on vacation; his day always begins with a lengthy national security briefing and he is always out of touch with advisers on important issues. In this case, the family’s five days on Martha’s Vineyard have already been shortened by the inevitable political and personal duties associated with the death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. It seems to me that there is an ethical blindness about this country’s obsession with working—or appearing to work—24/7.

I, for one, an suspicious of anyone who never takes a vacation.  Everyone needs some time away from the world in which they reside most of the time – a different location, a different rhythm to the day, a new experience.  I just do not understand those who think that President Obama should not vacation while there is a deficit or whatever the person’s issue is. 

I hope the President enjoys his few days a Camp David this week despite his daily briefings.  Come back and we will tackle health care, Mr. President.  With a public option.

 

 

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Another reflection on Senator Kennedy

Now that I, like much of Massachusetts, have spent several days glued to the television or, in the case of my husband, participating in the memorial, but before we turn to the speculation about his successor, I want to post a few thoughts from Patricia Williams writing in the Sunday Guardian.

There isn’t anyone who grew up in Massachusetts who doesn’t feel personally touched by the life of Kennedy. There’s the family legacy. His maternal grandfather was the amiably colourful mayor of Boston, John Francis Fitzgerald, the child of immigrants and the first Irish Catholic to achieve such power in the then-English – or “Boston Brahmin” – dominated-political landscape of New England.

The election of “Honey Fitz”, as he was known, was significant because this was the Boston of Henry James and the Irish were very much looked down upon. I remember my grandmother describing signs in the windows of certain establishments that read: “No Irish, no coloured, no dogs.”

…

The particular struggles of the Irish in Boston is largely forgotten today; indeed, the Kennedys are often characterised as part of “the north east liberal elite”. But the origins of their family success are rooted in a fight that spans all aspects of a broader civil rights movement that stretches back to the 1800s and included not merely African Americans but Irish and Italian immigrants, the descendants of indentured servants, the poor, the labouring classes.

…

It is true that the senator’s life history was one of great human complexity. And just as the healthcare debates have been disrupted by an astonishing amount of hateful speech, so the national blogosphere is filled with bitter, ungenerous commentary about the time he cheated on an exam at Harvard; or how he called his political advisers before he called paramedics when his car plunged off a bridge on Martha’s Vineyard, leaving the body of Mary Jo Kopechne, a young campaign aide, submerged for nearly nine hours; or whetherhe drank to excess.

But here in Massachusetts, it is the political commitment that counts. It is his public service that means the most and the regional allegiance to this man crosses all partisan boundaries. The Boston Herald, a local tabloid that spilled oceans of ink denouncing him in life, remembered him with uncharacteristic mistiness.

…

As I write, President Obama is giving the eulogy at Senator Kennedy’s funeral. To African Americans, Obama is “our Kennedy”. I wept when I discovered that the funeral was to be held at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Although many in the national press cite the church as one close to the hospital where his daughter Kara was treated for lung cancer, or one that is in a neighbourhood once inhabited by Irish immigrants, it is also in the neighbourhood where I grew up. It is in what most Bostonians know as a black neighbourhood, a “dangerous” neighbourhood, a neighbourhood “in transition”.

(This is Tremont Street near Mission Church.  Photograph from the New York Times.)

These days, it reflects the demographic that both Kennedy and Obama represent: a new generation of the American dream. It is a neighbourhood filled with hopeful immigrants from the Caribbean and West Africa and Bosnia and the Middle East. It is on the cusp of gentrification – a neighbourhood of college students and the underemployed, of medical technicians and starving artists.

There’s a black barbershop next door to the church, and a pizza joint and restaurant that serves Jamaican food. If some reporters were surprised when they set up the satellite feeds, those who knew anything about Ted Kennedy and the tradition from which he came were not.

There was a quote from Tennyson’s Ulysses that Senator Kennedy loved, a quote that he read at his brother Robert’s funeral, and one that is now being read as he is laid to rest: ” I am a part of all that I have met… ” begins the stanza. Senator Edward Kennedy lived his life precisely at the crossroads of all that he encountered – at the intersection of statesmanship, of history, of moral purpose, of tragedy, of compromise.

There are many who think that his passing means the end of an era. When I look at the unparalleled outpouring of those he met, whose world he touched, I am confident that the work he began lives on not only in the politics and presidency of Barack Obama, but in the dreams he ignited in so many, many others.

Some people will question the sanity of women, people of color, the poor, the disabled and the gays and lesbians wondering how we can mourn a man who in the words of one of the commentators who posted about this piece “left a woman to die in his car”.   I don’t think they will ever (or perhaps can’t) understand what he did for people who were not born with his priviledges.  This is why so many of us stood and watched the motorcade and were glued to the television.  This is why Governor Deval Patrick could quote his mother “I love me some Kennedy.”  This is what we will miss.

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Senator Ted Kennedy and the Dream

Today I stood out on Court Street in Boston and watched the motorcade with Senator Kennedy’s hearse pass by.  It was an extraordinary moment as first the hearse and then cars with family members passed by to the waves and applause of those of us lining the street.

This from the editorial in the Nation

Senator Edward Kennedy, who died on August 25 after a battle with brain cancer, was one of the giants of American political life. For five decades, virtually every major piece of legislation to advance civil rights, healthcare and the economic well-being of Americans bore his name and resulted from his tenacious, passionate and effective efforts. His commitment to public service was driven by an exuberant engagement with politics, a deep sense of compassion and a belief that every American is entitled to dignity as well as equal justice under the law.

Yes, I know he was a flawed man.  A womanizer and partier well past the age when one should give up such activities.  And there was always Chappaquiddick.  But in some way those flaws made him more of a common man. 

I worked for his short lived Presidential campaign in 1980 and will never forget his speech to that convention.  Again from the Nation.

That was not to be. So on the second night of the Democratic National Convention in New York City that summer, Kennedy addressed the delegates. His speech, the most inspired in a career of inspired oratory, was not a concession. It was a call to arms. Kennedy’s was a plea to the party to stay true to “the cause of the common man and the common woman”–a call that, unfortunately, would not be heeded by too many Democratic nominees who would campaign for lesser purposes. “I’m asking you–I am asking you to renew the commitment of the Democratic Party to economic justice,” Kennedy proclaimed, as he outlined the jobs-with-justice pledges he and his delegates had nailed to the party platform. “Simply put, they are the heart of our tradition, and they have been the soul of our party across the generations. It is the glory and the greatness of our tradition to speak for those who have no voice, to remember those who are forgotten, to respond to the frustrations and fulfill the aspirations of all Americans seeking a better life in a better land. We dare not forsake that tradition. We cannot let the great purposes of the Democratic Party become the bygone passages of history.”

Kennedy ended that speech by declaring, “For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

The question in my mind is who will replace him as the leader of what has often been called the liberal wing of the Democratic party.  Senator Kennedy was really “The Fighting Liberal.”

Kennedy’s early support for Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, eloquently outlined in his final address to the Democratic convention in Denver last year, was never naïve. Kennedy knew the younger man would stumble and struggle, make mistakes, disappoint the faithful. Kennedy himself had done all these things. But he believed that Obama was made of stronger stuff, the same mettle that led a defeated presidential candidate to deliver a fight-on address to the 1980 Democratic National Convention and then to do just that across the next three decades. It is this understanding that “the cause endures” that made Kennedy so inspiring, and so essential to the political and policy struggles of his time. If he was right to place his faith in Obama, as we now must hope more fervently than ever, the loss of the liberal lion will be a cause of sadness but not a setback. And we will know that on that hot summer night in New York City twenty-nine years ago, Ted Kennedy was right: “the dream shall never die.”

I end with some words from the Boston Globe’s Derrick Jackson.

As one African-American woman, a former educator, said to me yesterday , “I’m not so sure that the other Kennedy brothers ‘got it’ right here’’ – she pointed to her heart – “about civil rights. Ted Kennedy did. I cannot think of a single vote on a single issue that I disagreed with.’’

Nor can I, come to think of it. Like no other senator, Kennedy sought to weave the legal gains of the 1960s into the working fabric of American life. He helped make a reality not just of civil rights and voting rights for African-Americans, but also of rights for women, the poor, people with disabilities, and people who need health care.

He was an overdog for the underdog. Without him, how much more would the Democrats have teetered in the face of Ronald Reagan’s anti-welfare campaign of the 1980s? Without him, how much more of an identity crisis would the party have had when President Clinton steered the Democrats to the center, finishing off Reagan’s anti-welfare work?

His work could not close the  still-growing chasm between rich and poor, between CEOs and grunt workers. But he was a leader in recognizing the gaps. In law after law, he converted the heat from the torch of the 1960s into a warmer embrace by America of all its people.