The Redstar Perspective

I’m not blogging here again, I just figured if I was still in folks’ rss feeds, they might want to check this out.

I’d been wanting to write about LA’s Gov. Bobby Jindal, who’s been popping up around the intertubes lately as a possible VP candidate for McCain, a former biology major who’s performed exorcisms, and the leader of the state that just passed by a landslide the teaching of intelligent design in local schools. But honestly, you should just read this post at Firedoglake. It’s got all details of the horrendous, humorless, dangerous irony of Jindal’s Reaganesque conservative rise against the backdrop of Katrina.

My contribution? A dear friend’s work-in-progress photo essay of the “recovery” of the Lower 9th Ward, captured from January 2006 through August 2007 (and the second anniversary of the storm). It will be updated next month.

I guess LA school children will be learning how God leveled New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina to punish those homosexuals after all.

From McCain/Jindal ‘08, may G-d save us all.

x-posted at NYC Weboy

UPDATE (10:55 p.m.): Apparently I’m not the only one quitting. HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson is expected to resign tomorrow. Wahoo!!! Ok, now I’m done. Read on.

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It’s with some sadness and some relief that I write this post: I will not be blogging anymore at The Redstar Perspective. This has been a difficult decision, and I’m still unsure what it means. I may retire this site entirely, or I may resurrect it at an unknown point in the future. I’m still sorting out the details.

Here’s what led to this decision, somewhat in order of importance:

a) It’s time to write my dissertation. After meeting with two of my advisors recently, it’s clear I can finish this thing in the next 12 to 15 months and GRADUATE!!! Especially since the New Year, but generally speaking, blogging has become my primary activity, and an enormous time suck for me. Yes, my stats are SLOWLY growing, and, according to readers, my writing is improving. But, in addition to feeling like I’m losing my way re: the content of this blog (more on that in a minute), I also feel like I’m investing so much time and energy in this blog and not generating the returns I want to get. It’s not ok with me that my readership grows when I discuss the general election, because that’s not my preferred content focus. The hours I’ve been spending on posts about Obama v. Clinton, etc., is distracting me from really focusing on the writing I need to be doing NOW - that is, on issues of social justice, urban recovery and contentious politics in post-Katrina New Orleans. In other words, my dissertation.

b) I no longer feel comfortable blogging without anonymity in the ’sphere. Given where I’m at in my still-emerging career, I’m not ok with folks’ ability to track down my thoughts and opinions on-line.  I regret not blogging anonymously, and any blogging I do in the future will strive for greater anonymity. For someone with deeply personal intellectual interests, the current context of the Democratic primary and the empassioned and often heated on-line discussions of race, racism, gender, sexism and misogyny, privilege and prejudice have left me feeling that the web is an even less safe space to really grapple with these issues. In our splicing and dicing interpretative world, I know my thoughts and perspectives on the primary, on poverty, on my family, etc. are up for grabs for appropriation and re-interpretation. Nonetheless, I plan to remove some of the content from this site, but will leave the rest up for the history books.
c) The RP has run its course. This blog began in part because of my work in New Orleans, because my buddy Jake urged me to blog rather than send long e-mails to everyone I knew about what I was experiencing in the city beginning in January 2006. With this dissertation, my work in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is coming to a close. This blog has grown from that original reporting, to cover topics of development, poverty, housing, inequality, activism, cities, and politics more broadly, but all of this has been mixed up with odes to my boyfriend, Grey’s Anatomy, and random (hopefully amusing) stories about my childhood and roots. Frankly, I’m not interested in writing a general interest blog that’s a mix of analysis and journaling. I need the latter for my mental health, but I’ll find another outlet. My priority is to examine urban inequality, especially as it impacts low-income women, households, and neighborhoods. This is what I want to be blogging about (and working on in my lifetime), and I know there’s a niche audience who wants more of this. I’ve got all kinds of ideas for blogging, but I need a new and fresh venue. That will come in time.

So there you have it. Just in time for what would have been the second annual RP History Month. I’m still figuring out how to keep my original New Orleans posts and select others on-line and available. I’ll probably make an announcement about that in the future.

If you’d like to stay in touch, please leave a note in comments. That will give me an e-mail address for you (remember, others can’t see it) if/when I launch another blog.

Thanks to all my readers and champions over the last two years, especially NYC Weboy, and other blogging allies such as Professor Zero, DonnaDarko, Pizza Diavola and Pocochina. It’s been fun, instructive, exhausting and mostly my pleasure. I have become a blogger. Look at me.

Until we meet again, I leave you with some highly recommended reading:

Please read this disturbing, enraging and graphic coverage of the brutal rape and assault of a woman and her kids in Dunbar Village in W. Palm Beach, FL, and how you can let the NAACP know where their legal, PR and activist resources really belong.

A pregnant man challenges people’s ideas about gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights. And shakes up the healthcare profession. (H/t Echidne.) Meanwhile, pregnancy discrimination complaints from women reach record levels.

A refreshing comments thread that asks bloggers to cool it re: their election coverage. Instead of all the collective hyperventilating, let’s all check out Insurgent American’s 35-Point Practical Guide for Action. (H/t Corrente.)

Read Brownfemipower’s WAM conference speech about centering feminist activism around questions of citizenship and the problems this creates for advocating for immigrant women. (How I missed this conference - held at MIT, the irony! - is beyond me.)

Be well, have fun, and stay safe.

After 7+ years of Bush, our economy is in the worst shape since the Depression.  Tent cities are even in the public consciousness.  These developments point to the consistent, callous pattern of government neglect and abdication of responsibility under the Bush Administration, who, along with a GOP-led Congress, put into overdrive the worst trends of three decades of government devolution. 

Take my favorite example of New Orleans, where a flourishing Tent City should come as no surprise to anyone following post-Katrina recovery trends.  One of the worst travesties of the destruction of public housing in New Orleans is the grossly inadequate replacement of subsidized housing units in the proposed mixed-income developments.  Only one proposal - Lafitte - includes one-for-one replacement, in part because one of the development partners, Enterprise Community Partners, knows first hand the success of this model from past public housing renovation in Seattle.

A significant number of developer/do-gooder transplants to New Orleans hail from affluent cities like Boston, New York, San Francisco and Seattle, which tend to have highly competitive, sophisticate and activist affordable housing development sectors.*  They bring these high-capacity models of affordable housing development with them to New Orleans.  Yet, several fundamental problems in New Orleans impede their replication. 

Obviously, all cities have unique socio-political cultures and different demographics.  That New Orleans is a distinctive place in the nation cannot be overstated.  Second, the political economy of New Orleans was weak prior to the storm, and is in tatters now.  Most of the non-profit and civil society actors in the city are trying to fill a serious void left by the financially eviscerated city government.  Third, and most problematically, the massive displacement of the poorest and most vulnerable, the overall whitening of the population, and a corresponding shift to a more conservative, middle-class urban politics, makes alive and well the spirit of Rep. Baker’s (R-Baton Rouge, LA) comment

“We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

This spirit is driving local and national decision-making behind affordable housing development in post-Katrina New Orleans. 

At the conference I was at in NOLA two weeks ago, in a panel on affordable housing development tenant activists routinely questioned the featured scholars, researchers and developers on the issue of displacement.  It came up over and over again, no matter how strenuously the panelists tried to frame market-based housing solutions as an overall positive for cities and low-income residents.  Cities like Boston et al. are not acting out of any unique urban altruism to retain low-income households, but out of political necessity (votes) and reality (suburban political power and NIMBY-esque zoning + federal funding for cities for low-income populations).  When one of the poorest cities in the country like New Orleans sees a silver lining in Katrina displacing a significant percentage of its neediest tenants all at once - versus the slow trickle generated in other cities in the last twenty years - you can be damn sure the political elites will do everything in their power to keep those folks out. 

They owe a big thanks to the GOP-dominated government we had until 2007, who denied the HUD and Medicaid funds that could have flowed to properly shelter, care for and bring home these families after Katrina.  Actions like this reflect the same spirit behind the massive funding cuts to HUD and HHS Programs and the complete absence of regulation of the housing and homeownership boom that contribute now to rising rates of foreclosures and homelessness nationwide. 

A national pollster at the NOLA conference talked about widespread Katrina fatigue, accompanied by a sense of “we’ve got our own problems now.”  No doubt.  I just hope that as we turn inward to deal with local economic insecurity and crisis, we all remember that post-Katrina New Orleans was never the exception, but the harshest of realities for our country. 

Because election fever has overtaken my brain, I’ve been neglecting the issues I usually talk about here: poverty, urban development, housing, inequality, and post-Katrina New Orleans. (That my blog readership is way up reinforces the notion that no one likes to talk about poor people.  Sigh.)  So I pass the mike to Prof. Peter Dreier from Occidental College, who I recently saw speak at a conference where he urged those college kids who could afford it to drop out of school this fall and organize voters for the election.

Dreier sums up a great deal of what I’ve been studying these last four years - in the context of class, power and voting patterns. His point of departure is Obama’s re-hashing of the meme about working-class white (WCW) resentment - one I picked up happily as it gave me an opening to embrace the good and bad about my roots. Dreier points out that although WCW racism and prejudices held by all middle- and lower-income social groups exist, it is the institutional power of wealthy whites that perpetuates structural racism and inequality - a system upheld in the voting booth year after year. He writes:

…let’s be clear about the class nature of racial prejudice, stereotypes, discrimination, and disparities. Wealthy whites are more likely than working-class whites to use the race card in the voting booth. Voting statistics reveal that most upper-income whites consistently vote in Republican, not Democratic, primaries, which means they don’t have to vote for black or Latino candidates. And in partisan run-off elections, wealthy whites overwhelmingly vote for Republican over Democratic contenders. [He goes on to sample supply voting data by income categories.]

…

…in an Obama-McCain face-off fewer wealthy whites will vote for Obama than working-class whites whom affluent pundits are so quick to label as racist. Indeed, we’ve already seen a significant number of blue-collar white voters show their support for Obama in Iowa, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and other states. Yes, white working-class Democrats in economically troubled Ohio favored Clinton over Obama. But in November, most of the blue-collar Democrats, working-class independents, and union members who voted for Clinton — in Ohio and elsewhere — are likely to switch to Obama, not McCain.

It is understandable that most wealthy whites would consistently vote for Republicans, who like low taxes and hate strong unions. But in recent decades, a significant number of working-class whites — the so-called “Reagan Democrats” — have voted for GOP candidates who have done so little to address their bread-and-butter concerns. As Thomas Frank argued in his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the Republicans have successfully used “wedge” issues — abortion, religion, gun control, gay rights, affirmative action, and, of course, the war on terrorism — to persuade some working-class whites to vote against their economic interests.

But the tide seems to be changing.

…

By focusing on voting behavior and attitudes, however, political pundits deflect focus away from other fundamental concerns. America’s corporate and political rulers have long used racism, ethnic stereotypes, and immigrant bashing to divide working people and weaken their collective power. Manufacturers recruited Southern blacks to act as strikebreakers in Northern cities, and employers warned “No Irish need apply” and resorted to anti-Semitism to pit workers against each other. In hard economic times, scapegoating against blacks and Hispanic immigrants diverts white workers’ attention away from the failure of business and political elites to create enough decent jobs.

Although working-class white Americans may harbor racist sentiments, they do not control the major institutions that are responsible for America’s racial divide, including the economic forces that sometimes pit white, black, and Hispanic working families against each other for jobs, housing, and decent schools.

…

in every sphere of American life — income, hiring, promotion, housing, the quality of public schools, college attendance, treatment by the criminal justice system, media portrayals, and others — race remains a divisive issue. While upper-middle class pundits may get some smug pleasure out of pointing to racial prejudice among America’s white working-class voters, they would be more accurate if they looked up, rather than down, the economic ladder to identify who really has the power to prop up, or fix, the institutions that turn bigotry into discrimination.

It’s worth reading the whole thing. This is where my worries flare up that current Clinton supporters - should she not get the nomination - will fall for the “Maverick McCain” meme rather than supporting Obama/the Democratic nominee. We cannot let that happen.

(This post has been updated.  3/18/08.  10:11 p.m.)

Obama’s Speech is here. Here’s my first reaction (and here are others).  I want to respond now to the truth he raises about loving those who make us who we are, warts and all, and using that unconditional love of our deeply flawed, contradictory pasts and selves to bring about positive social change.  Obama says (my emphases throughout):

[Rev. Wright] contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

I spent the weekend with dear friends, two of whom have a similar upbringing to mine in being raised within lower-income networks of a single mother and her kin and friends.  The three of us now have advanced degrees from high status private schools, relationships with white men from middle-class families, and are hopefully on track to do better than our parents (although in my case, it would now be to keep up with them). Over the weekend we laughingly compared the different elements of our pasts that we’re trying to leave behind versus still embrace, and the middle-class proclivities we’ve developed: our own personal journeys from the beer track to the wine track, if you will. 

Yet, I left the weekend feeling a little like a stereotypical resentful, angry working-class white, namely due to the carping of another friend who kept talking about how elite we all were and how we didn’t live in “the real world,” and a late night dinner ode to immigrant paragons versus ignorant, uneducated, unskilled native-born Americans.  Sigh.  I don’t need to remind RP readers that the world’s a little more complicated than that.

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Obama’s Philly speech is here.  My initial thoughts on the audacity of his campaign are here. 

Initial reactions from around the web are coming in.  I agree with Melissa at Shakesville about the absence of reaction to Wright’s comments about Clinton.  She links it to complaints (like mine) about elitism, and I’d only add that sexism is infused in this elitism, as the worlds of politics, academia, and other high status professions are often the worst arenas for gender inequity and (white) male privilege.  Feministing commenters continue the debate about the absence of addressing sexism in Obama’s speech.

I also agree with Jeralyn at Talk Left that this speech will ameliorate unsettled Obama supporters and not work with those already disinclined to support him.

Finally, I don’t have the same reaction to his speech as Riverdaughter, but she raises a good point about his passive references to the use of race during the campaign.  Obama’s use of vague and passive language like she points out has bugged me to no end this campaign, as his phrases like “the forces of division” remind me of Bush’s framing of geopolitical conflict as the war between good vs. evil.  The rest of the speech was strong and direct, so let’s knock off the insinuations, Obama. 

The full transcript of Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race this morning is here. 

Throughout this campaign, I - a Clinton supporter - have found myself relating more personally to the foibles of the Obamas.  I’m supporting Clinton for a number of reasons I’ve elaborated on previously, but I’ve often felt it was a real shame she and Obama were running at the same time, because I’d have enjoyed vigorously campaigning for him.  My personal resistance to Obama has to do with a) an elitism and arrogance I associate with the highly educated worlds in which we both orbit, b) the disingenuous notion that he is not like other politicians, and c) the problematic conflation in his campaign of movement building with electoral politics.  But there is a great deal more to the man and his candidacy that attracts me than these three strong negatives.  His speech this morning on “the contradictions” inherent in “the people that are a part of [him]” illustrates perfectly that he, more than some of his most vociferous supporters and surrogates, understands (or at least acknowledges) the messy work involved in fighting for social inclusion and positive social change. 

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UPDATE, 3/13/08: NAGIN WON’T SIGN DEMOLITION PERMIT FOR LAFITTE.  GOOD FOR HIM.  I’M MOVING THIS 3/10/08 POST ABOUT MY RECENT TRIP TO NOLA BACK UP TO THE TOP. 

I am sitting at Sound Cafe in the Marigny in New Orleans.  I have a full disposable digital camera in my free conference bag that contains two very depressing photos of the partially demolished St. Bernard housing projects in Gentilly.  I am drinking iced tea and enjoying the 60-ish degree breeze coming through the open door on my last evening in NOLA.

This post is dedicated to Professor Zero, who recently meme’d me for my “excellent coverage of New Orleans.”  After being gone for six months, I have been out of the loop here, and her shout out and this recent trip are signals of my renewed involvement in recovery through ‘08.

This visit I was in the Marriott on Canal on the edge of the French Quarter.  I have stayed in the Quarter once before, but at a smaller Holiday Inn on the northern (?) / upriver edge of the neighborhood, not quite in the heart of things.  Until I rented a car today, I did not leave the FQ/Central Business District/Warehouse District areas, taking dinner the last two nights in upscale spots like Luke and Herbsaint, and spending yesterday afternoon walking around the Quarter, dropping in and out of clothing boutiques. 

As you might imagine, the trip started to feel like a vacation, not only because of my own activities, but because the streets and Jackson Square and restaurants and my hotel lobby were crowded with tourists.  On this trip I particularly feel the loss of never having visited the city before the storm, because these neighborhoods’ weekend vibrance left me wondering if this was what this area was like prior to Katrina.  I’ll never know.  All I know is that wandering around yesterday, I felt better about my post-professional relationship with the city, meaning that I could see myself returning here just for pleasure after my work here ends.  Disaster recovery work is so emotionally draining that I was not sure I’d ever find peace with the city.  Yesterday I found myself thinking how fortunate I was that I knew well many of New Orleans’s neighborhoods, so that if I did come back for a vacation, I would not be confined to the charming yet touristy FQ.

This morning a colleague picked me up and took me out to the airport to pick up my rental car.  3 minutes up river from my FQ hotel is a multi-block tent city of homeless folks living beneath the highway.  And I was back in the New Orleans I’ve come to know through my work.  My 24 hour vacation was over.

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First, let’s thank NY Gov. Spitzer for reminding us of Vitter’s sexual indiscretions.  Both men rule on platforms of fighting vice. I say, if we’re going to oust Spitzer, let’s make sure Vitter’s sitting beside him in the back of the Lincoln Town Car as they both get the hell out of town.

(As an aside, check out this pro-legalization of sex work piece from Cara at The Curvature.  Brings up some great points re: women’s rights and gender equity.)

I hear MS has a primary today?  But let’s not overlook this little nugget from The American Prospect (registration), summed up at Racewire:

Mississippi’s Black labor groups are organizing alongside the state’s growing immigrant population to fight for driver’s licenses for all residents.

Throughout the 1990s more immigrants arrived looking for work. Some guest workers overstayed their visas, while husbands brought wives, cousins, and friends from home. Mexicans and Central Americans joined South and Southeast Asians and began traveling north through the state, finding jobs in rural poultry plants. There they met African Americans, many of whom had fought hard campaigns to organize unions for chicken and catfish workers over the preceding decade.

It was not easy for newcomers to fit in. Their union representatives didn’t speak their languages. When workers got pulled over by state troopers they were not only cited for lacking driver’s licenses but also often handed over to the U.S. Border Patrol. Sometimes their children weren’t even allowed to enroll in school.

As someone who’s had the honor to work occasionally with activists for Latino immigrants and African-Americans in the Gulf Coast since Katrina, it’s thrilling to read news like this.  The AFL-CIO unions are named specifically in the Prospect piece.  From what I’ve seen of their work the international and some of the locals are really making an effort to bridge long-standing divides and build strong coalitions in the post-Katrina Gulf Coast.  

This is great news. 

Finally, here’s a round-up of links to the UN’s comdemnation of human rights abuses via the racially and economically discriminatory plans to demolish much needed public housing in New Orleans.  The UN treats post-Katrina government failures as the ultimate example of enduring racial discrimination and inequity in the U.S.:

The UN Committee calls for adequate, affordable housing in Katrina-affected areas, and also for the remedying of housing conditions in racially segregated areas across the country.

Right on. 

Yesterday, after my conference ended, I called the M.A.S. and railed against the infantile on-line fighting about the Democratic primary.  More and more bloggers are equally fed up: Parachutec at Firedoglake takes us all to task for our blind idolatry, points out the obvious reality that neither Clinton nor Obama are especially progressive, and concludes with asking us what the issues are on which we’ll hold the incoming President accountable.  Much to his/her and my dismay, virtually no commenter answers the question, whether because they are unable to or uninterested in doing so. 

I can think of several issues, which I had the pleasure of discussing and learning more about in the company of 1,500+ conference attendees here in New Orleans this week.  We were at PolicyLink’s third Regional Equity summit, where major topics included poverty alleviation, affordable housing, racial equity, and social and economic justice.  One of the plenaries was a discussion of keeping race and equity on the political agenda in the ‘08 elections (though the question came up if they were even on the agenda in any meaningful way).  Comprised of Jim Wallis, Maria Echaveste, Patrick Gaspard (EVP of SEIU1199), Antonio Gonzalez, and Dr. Robert K. Ross, and moderated by Tavis Smiley, the panel was fascinating mainly in the candidates’ varying degrees of optimism or pessimism about the possibilities for a progressive agenda, and increasing the political power of ethnic/racial minorities. (With only one woman on the panel, it was the least gender balanced of the 6 I attended, indicative of the gender bias in our political sphere, including who is considered an authority.) 

Wallis, a preacher who is white, mostly focused on the religious commitments to combatting poverty: with church groups returning repeatedly to the Gulf Coast, he described New Orleans as “converting ground” for a generation of “new abolitionists” committed to eradicating global poverty, which they believe is the “new slavery.”  (He also spoke earlier this week to 200 evangelicals in Boston, which I found particularly fascinating.)  The other panelists - Latino/a and African-American - took on the issues of the a) black/brown divide, especially as it concerns economic opportunity and neighborhood violence; b) coalitional possibilities among African-Americans and Latinos, c) tremendous voter participation and mobilization within these two broad ethnic categories; d) rural versus urban poverty; e) economic mobility for immigrants versus native-born minority groups, and f) immigration policy. 

The entire panel urged the audience to continue fostering positive social change at the community level, to continue to build what many consider to be a progressive, grassroots movement for economic and social equity in the 21st century, and to never cease the “forceful agitation” against the fat cats in D.C. in pressing for social change.  Elections, said Gonzalez, are always “opportunities” for change, but nonetheless are “blunt instruments” for making change.  Most of them advocated for small steps versus big solutions, butalso called for, as Dr. Ross put it, a “transformational frame around poverty,” versus our current “transactional frame around services” that incites fear of tax increases and the free riding of the undeserving poor. 

The final session was a feedback forum for attendees to talk about what worked and didn’t at the conference.  A major critique that I also heard during a specific session on reducing poverty was that the topic was effectively framed as a problem exclusive to African-Americans and Latino groups.  An Asian/Pacific Islander (AIPA) immigrant and native born AIPA both publicly called for greater attention to poverty among all racial-ethnic groups, pointing out that between 20-30% of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are AIPA, and that in places like Minnesota, for instance, poor whites are a major target of anti-poverty activism.  There was also a call for greater youth mentorship as Civil Rights activists passed the torch to a new generation of leaders, criticism of the absence of tenants’ voices from panels on housing, and making race, class and poverty more explicit topics of concern for progressive researchers. 

As Mayor Otis Johnson of Savannah, GA put it, anti-poverty and development activists need “specific [analyses] of people and place” in order to develop strategies and initiatives that appropriately respond to geographically diverse “pecking order[s] of social mobility” in the U.S. (Mayor Johnson also described his political philosophyas one of “incremental radicalism,” which I think describes mine too.)

Drinking all of this in against the backdrop of our current election, the frivolity of shouting at each other on-line is stark.  Panelists refrained from primary partisanship, and even took pains to consider our options under a future President McCain, sticking to a general discussion of what our “righteous work” (thanks Tavis) looks like going forward under any of the three major candidates.

Because, as Wallis put it, “Washington [D.C.] is the last place movements hit.”  Folks in D.C. think “history moves through them,” but “history does not bear this out.”  It is the grassroots that matter.

So campaign for your candidate, even preach (to the unconverted!) why you believe in them, but really consider what they can do for us, and how they can facilitate or empower our “righteous work.”  We cannot let our energy and passion die on November 5, 2008.  Hell, it’s just another Wednesday in the never ending struggle for positive social change. 

(Or, some primary season pop psychologizing; this post is a work-in-progress)

In the wake of Clinton’s tremendous wins this week, rising up in the blogosphere are a few voices pushing back on the notion that this happened in part because she went “negative.”  (Personally, I find Obama’s subtle, dismissive vocabulary of “I guess” and “apparently” used to qualify her wins just as offensive as some find her 3am phone call ad.)  Most of these contrarian voices say one or two things: a) that’s scarcely negative compared to what the Dem nominee will and has faced in the general election, and b) Toughen up, for Christ’s sakes.  This is politics.

I can’t really understand the broader appeal of Obama’s unity message.  Some guy in the cocktail line at Clinton’s victory party in TX said to me, “I thought everyone your age was supporting Obama.”  I said, “they are!” and furthered that I thought it was their “idealism.”  As he put it, “that isn’t a bad thing.”  Hell, I wish I were not so jaded.  What I’m thinking of in this post is the lefty consensus that Clinton is too competitive and too aggressive and too mean to the *real* candidate.  Layered on to this is how many media/blog personalities apparently hate what is actually a marvelous competition in the Democratic primary.

Both candidates are improving and benefitting from such a close race.  So are their supporters, who are similarly energized by the competition.  I’ve experienced first hand the amazing passion of Clinton supporters, who allegedly pale in comparison to Obama supporters.  The truth is that Clinton and Obama are running similarly strong, record-breaking campaigns.  Contrary to on-line wisdom, most Dems love the both of them, and the popular vote is incredibly close.  This two candidates are pretty evenly matched, and we should have a grudging respect for both of them. This race is a gift, and we should be so happy to have so many choices. 

I hear anecdotally around the web all the time that fellow bloggers and writers share some of my qualities, such as introversion or a preference for the written over the spoken word.  I have always lived on the edge of the crowd: whether it was reading on a couch in the middle of countless relatives as a kid or being the only non-Jew in a tight-knit group of Jewish college roommates.  This doesn’t make me any less a part of either of these groups; what it does indicate is that I require a little distance, whether spatially or culturally, so I can retreat into my head for periods of time.  I don’t consider myself shy, but other bloggers have described themselves as such.

The other thing about blogging for me is that narcissism is involved.  While part of it is certainly a release, a need to write as an emotional and cognitive process, it’s also the case that I think people should be reading what I have to say.  That my opinions matter, and should be instructive for others.  Why else would I make it public?

It seems to me that this whining over negativity and a corresponding fear of competition is coming from a group of people that should be analyzed for their tendencies toward opting out of mainstream social interaction and group experience, because we didn’t fit in for one internal or external reason or another.  If other bloggers possess a similar mix out there of my introversion and narcissism, then it is little wonder we’re all tearing each other to pieces on a regular basis over our preferred candidate.  Add to this that bloggers are not beholden to external codes of impartiality, distance or objectivity; we think we know what we’re talking about, that what that is is valuable (despite only few having been rewarded our rightful financial desserts! heh), and so the rest of y’all might as well F-off.  (Unless you agree with me, of course.) 

“Going negative,” contrary to utopian notions of rising above the fracas, are a reality of winning. (Hell, it’s a little hypocritical on all our parts to castigate Clinton for unseemly behavior when that’s all we can seem to dish out on-line.)  It’s incredibly difficult to opt out of the battle alone; to some, Obama’s attempt to be above it all comes across as arrogant and removed.  (While there is a racial insinuation here of the uppity Negro, there’s also the blatant anti-elitism we have in this nation.  One reason I avoid pro-Clinton sites like the nutty, security-oriented No Quarter blog is because of it’s pro-working-class anti-elitism, which leaves MIT-educated working-class-born me feeling like I should be ashamed of my education.)  So although Sen. Obama trying to run a different campaign is commendable, it’s more likely to succeed if all the Dem candidates had gotten together prior to map out the agreed upon rules of the game.  I know, such a lofty notion!  FWIW, I don’t think either campaign has gotten particularly ghastly, and I also think this tit-for-tat we’re engaging in on-line of which candidate is the bigger a**hole is ridiculous.  For every shot Clinton allegedly fires, there’s a camp who believes Obama also holds a smoking gun.  

Reality tv and welfare retrenchment and free market sloganeering all indicated to me that as a nation we dig competition, particularly unfair fights.  Now, I know that my blogosphere is decidedly to the left on at least social and economic policy (if not tv programming), but I’m surprised that our allegedly communal zeal for regulation, big government and fair trade somehow means that Obama is the clear heir to nomination.  One thing that has Clinton supporters fired up is the not-so-tacit suggestion that we are somehow illegitimate.  Given that generally women, Latinos, the elderly and the lower-middle- and working-class voters favor her, whereas younger people and African-Americans favor Obama, this election bickering is a shallow yet dangerous play on very real divisions across different groups who have been marginalized, oppressed or disenfranchised in one way or another in society.  It’s kinda all fun-and-games on the web, but after being at a conference on equity and justice for the last 2 days, and doing this kind of work for a living, and campaigning for Clinton with a very diverse group earlier this week, I’m both more dismissive and more frustrated by the hating than ever. 

As I’ve made clear here, I’m speaking to a mainly Internet phenomenon among people who may prefer the anonymity and arms-length communication mode available on-line versus in real life.  But, again, if they’re as introspective as I am, and as much of a frustrated, misunderstood genius as Napoleon Dynomite and me, then I fear we’re all carrying an unreasonable degree of resentment and hostility around when we should be working together to win elections and push forward our socio-political agendas.  Or at least respecting one another’s different paths. 

I’ve said it before, in different ways: Quit badgering me and let Sens. Clinton and Obama know how you feel about their political behavior, beliefs and plans.  I happen to like my candidate, as well as yours, and the majority of their different supporters that I know.

I’m at a conference in New Orleans covering these themes, though the words “regional,” “social” and “smart” come before them, respectively.  (Me, I’m skeptical of regionalism and smart growth.)

It’s an interesting conference in that these themes don’t necessarily go hand in hand, and it’s effectively a community development conference that’s rather glitzy: held at the Sheraton on Canal St, with talks by Danny Glover and a panel beginning in a minute hosted by Tavis Smiley.  Last night the Mayor said a few words at the evening reception.

But it’s been interesting so far, as I hear from scholars, practitioners and wonks about trends in federal policy, the rising salience of poverty among voters, and municipal strategies for combatting poverty. I’ve been surprised at how much I enjoy it, given I usually can’t sit still during conf. presentations for more than 5 minutes.

I’ll be back over the weekend when this is all said and done with some longer, more interesting updates.  For now, I have to complain about one thing: WHY DOES THE MARRIOTT NOT ONLY CHARGE IT’S GUESTS A DAY RATE FOR INTERNET, BUT ALSO REQUIRE US TO USE A WIRE ATTACHED TO A MODEM?  I THOUGHT IT WAS 2008. 

Happy Friday.

PS: Life’s a lot more peaceful without the incessant virtual shouting of the blogosphere.

I am really sunburnt.  Even my fingers are sunburnt.  But not my eyes; I look like a raccoon from wearing shades all day in the hot San Antonio sun.  (Special thanks to the Obama supporter who lent me some sunblock, which I re-applied far too late in the day.)

But it was DAMN WORTH IT - Viva Clinton, who won Ohio, RI, and TEXAS tonight!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:)

I am quoting Rep”>Rep. Delia Garcia (D-KS) in the title of this post, the first  Latina and youngest woman ever elected to the KS legislature.  She spoke briefly at Clinton’s victory party tonight in San Antonio - she’d traveled to the state to stump for HRC - to our crowd of majority Latino/a volunteers.  I’ve probably said this before, but I really think being a Red Sox fan (through ‘04 anyway) offers special training for the kind of close victory we experienced tonight in TX.  The enormous camraderie with fellow underdogs, the absolute elation in pulling ahead and coming to the brink, and the inability to truly relax until that ball is in Manciewixzcjghz’s glove and Foulke is in his arms.  D’oh!  Wrong image.

I have 2 pictures left on my disposable digital camera with me here in San Antonio, and I can’t wait to finish the roll and get the photos up on-line.  What an amazing 48 hours, and what a tremendous outcome.  At the heavily Latino precinct where I volunteered until 8:00 tonight, folks waited hours to participate in the evening caucuses, in part because the line to vote in the primary was so long.  A Latino dad drove up to the polling station in the late afternoon in his mini-van covered in Clinton signs, with his 2 daughters and wife.  He and his young teen girls sported similar Dallas Cowboys regalia, and the daughters held signs and cheered for Clinton while he shouted in English and Spanish into a bullhorn why passing drivers should support the Senator.  Eventually a cop came and told him to relocate - the bullhorn, unlike signs, requires further distance from the polling station - but it was a trip while it lasted.

When my fellow local volunteers finally arrived at Clinton’s victory party tonight, around 11 pm, they reported that the 3 precincts caucusing at our polling station awarded Clinton 21 delegates to Obama’s 2.  I heard multiple stories from other local caucuses where Obama didn’t even meet the threshold to receive any delegates, and Clinton took them all.  The crowd at the victory party erupted over and over and over tonight - when CNN exit polls showed 62% of TX Latinos supported Clinton, when Clinton first pulled ahead of Obama, when Ohio was called, when Clinton spoke in Ohio, whenever CNN showed that map of Texas and all the areas in the South that supported her (especially San Antonio), on and on and on and on.  So many reasons to celebrate.

Local and out-of-state volunteers alike kept talking about meeting up again in Pennsylvania.  I think it’s a must.  (Here’s hoping some of you all will join us!)  The nun I keep mentioning in these field posts told me she works with Mexican immigrants in Omaha, many of whom are undocumented and at risk for deportation.  She told us a particularly painful anecdote of a young mother getting deported and leaving 3 young American-born children behind, one not even a toddler.  This mom had come illegally to the country at age 2, and was now being sent back to Mexico, where she knew no one.  Sr. Ana really believes in Clinton because she thinks Clinton will deal humanely with the problems and complexities of immigration in this country.  I heard several times from others how much they similarly believe in Clinton.

Me, I trust no politicians, nor do I feel personally connected to any of them, as others over the last 48 hours have described feeling to Sen. Clinton, Pres. Clinton, and JFK, Jr. (of all people).  But damn! I was completely moved by the image of a woman on the big screen in that ballroom tonight, celebrating her win in Ohio and promising to keep fighting her way through this race.  Later in the bathroom a reporter who first apologized for not being impartial quoted her grandmother in saying to never count out a woman who is down, and the rest of us agreed enthusiastically. 

In the last 48 hours I’ve had the new pleasure to campaign in a Latino region, to work with straight women and men; lesbians, gay men and transgendered supporters; white, black, Latino and Asian volunteers; and campaign participants of all ages and abilities.  Honestly, it was f***ing awesome.  AND WE WON.

Cross-posted at The Hillary 1000.

I loathe this man.  Read on.

With 8 days until the March 4 primaries, this is how I feel. Exhausted of the he said/she said. Tired of sifting through the various charges leveled at candidates, campaigns, their supporters, the media, bloggers, at me. A week ago I was fired up - This is participatory democracy! - and NYC Weboy and I laughed about how the blogs need a mediator to keep the place civilized. I was spending all day on the web, and at one point exchanged emails with a dear friend of mine about the rise of social isolation in contemporary society and how I am one of those people who have *traded* face-to-face interaction for virtual socializing.This dear friend, a young black woman married and raising an interracial child, has so far been a voice of reason for me in this campaign. While the clunky media-driven debate over “Race v. gender” has raged for months, searching greedily for The Biggest Loser between our two Dem candidates, she said to me in an email that this has been her “dream” primary - she’s supporting Obama, but would have happily supported Clinton. With Obama she gained a role model for her daughter and theoretical future sons, but she got teary at both Obama’s “Yes We Can” and Clinton’s “This One’s for the Girls” videos. This friend is who I think of when I see The Obamas grace three magazine covers in one week (he on The Economist and US News, and Michelle on Newsweek) and am struck by how cool and overdue that is for this nation. It is her that I think of when I feel pride watching these two candidates share the debate stage and make the Democratic Party look great. And it is this friend who I am now pulling into the blogosphere, at her own peril.

Because now this my lovely friend is spending more time than usual on-line, discovering for herself how f***ing obnoxious so many of the blog comment threads are about the candidates. And my experiments in consciousness-raising here at The RP suddenly feel especially unpleasant. I’m taking her down with me! Oh No!

My support for Clinton has origins in her qualifications for the Presidency - she’s the smartest and the realistic best the Dems have to offer, I think, and her gender firmly pushes me into her camp. But I don’t think I’m alone when I say that her candidacy has taken on a whole new level of meaning for me, divorced from the candidate. This has become a fight for me about gender equity, a battle I’ve long waged, whether aggressively or sometimes just silently in my head. I feel like I’m fighting for Clinton in honor of my mother and her peers, in honor of the women’s lives I’ve had the privilege to study for school, and for myself and my and my peers’ future. Watching the attacks on Clinton this primary season has unleashed an anger in me that I’d either been ignoring or resisting until now, one that I’m hoping will last for the rest of my life.

The problem is that Clinton - of course - is not a perfect candidate on which to mount my fight for justice. No single woman would be; the fight to reduce oppression and domination of women is a battle to be waged across campaigns, political and economic and social structures, and on behalf of and with a range of activists committed to social equity.

The meta-narrative of this campaign, and electoral politics more generally, have pretty much prohibited such a coalitional struggle, as the false choice between the “black man and the white woman” exploits and reinforces the already fragile relationships between activists representing different social groups and struggles. As a Clinton supporter, in the time and space available to me in my current on- and off-line life, I’ve sacrified depth of analysis about this race for qualified support of my candidate. I say qualified because most everything I post in her favor is casually vetted and posted at a deliberately partisan site for other Clinton supporters. I’ve characterized this site as a safe space that I think legitimately has its place here in the ’sphere. And I love being a part of it.

But I cannot stress enough that this Clinton support is not my politics as usual. The reason I rarely get fired up about elections or candidates is because I think politicians are pretty much all the same, and the system is set up such that their self-interest always comes first. I believe that to get things done you need to be willing to negotiate with a pretty varied range of people and groups, and that conflict (versus violence) is fundamental and necessary, and difference is to be tolerated and embraced, not suppressed. I think change comes incrementally, due to a variety of intertwined external and internal pressures, including movement politics, protest, behind-the-scenes deal-making, and policymaking.

Clinton and Obama both represent different pieces of the scenario I just described. They comprise different coalitions of voters, different tactics (between them and within their campaigns) to land the nomination, different narratives of how they’ll lead, different leadership styles, yet very similar political positions and stances across a wide range of issues that matter to various voters. Neither of them will really change our power to influence the system, regardless of how much both camps of supporters believe they will (beyond the diffuse and thrilling symbolic empowerment many of us will feel should our preferred candidate take that oath in January). Only we can do that, and once either of them is in office, both become more representative than they are now of all the legislative, regulatory, distributive, and participatory changes we need in our government.

What has been a real loss for me this campaign is how divergent I feel from my usual stances of a) trying to better understand the intersectionality of various forms of oppression that women, people of color, LGBT, and others feel, and b) fighting for greater anti-poverty policy and equity in the U.S. I don’t believe that loss would be vindicated by participating in the Obama campaign either. What I’m hoping is that at the end of this primary, rather than tripping over deepened gendered, ethno-racial, sexist and classist divides, our mutual desire to heal our (re-) opened wounds is stronger than ever.

After Hurricane Katrina, there was a national outcry for an honest conversation about the persistence of racial and economic inquity in the U.S. Some folks actually began that conversation, picking up where they left off before the storm struck, and are still talking and agitating to this day. May the 2008 Presidential elections leave us with a similar mandate, and may more of us engage with it than the many-but-still-too-few who are fighting for justice in the Gulf Coast now.

Because just like Katrina evacuees in TX, all of us matter well beyond March 4, November 4, and January 20, 2009. Pretty soon Clinton or Obama or even McCain will be behind the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’ll still be sitting here at our desks, in our cars, on the bus, or behind the counter. Staring down the same old shit.

Over at The Hillary 1000, Donna Darko offers an (as promised) depressing summary of the sexism rampant in the election.  One culprit she doesn’t address directly is the MSM, though their shenanigans have been documented extensively by fellow bloggers. 

Well, as I posted over in H1K comments, here at the Cinci airport, I just watched a commercial for CNN where they trumpeted their diversity (as in their range of global news coverage and topics).  To demonstrate their depth and breadth in appealing to all corners of humanity with their hard-hitting journalism, they paraded 5 different MALE faces across the screen.

Of course.  This makes sense, you know, because all women hate politics.  We, after all, spend all our time watching Lifetime and HGTV and WE and Oxygen and HSN. 

Though perhaps the commercial is prescient.  After this election cycle, dudes may be the only folks left watching CNN, MSNBC, and their ilk.