0 Romney's Neglected 47% and the Hypocrisy of the Votes

My high school English teacher (and, effectively, my life coach), Mr. Wright, started writing his own blog that is largely political last year.  He had a post back in January, in the wake of Alabama's anti-immigration policies, that offered the question of, "What if [the North] had let the South go?"  That question can be weighed and debated over on Wright and Left but toward the end of the piece, Mr. Wright began running through some numbers that are pertinent to Mitt Romney's comments about the 47% of America that, allegedly, does not contribute and that will not vote against President Obama no matter what.

The Romney, Ryan, and Republican (I guess we can say, "RRR") narrative has been that President Obama placates to those who are living off of the government -- welfare queens, if you will, and much worse.  The picture overtly describes an entire class of people who lack any motivation to work and earn their own treasure or success; of a demographic that expects government to feed their kids, to pay for their food, and to make sure they wear a scarf when it snows outside; of a strata of society whose purpose is to exist as parasites out to feed from the wealthy and to relentlessly strangle the middle-class of what little prosperity it has achieved.  These tales, delivered to a Republican base -- comprised of many middle- and working-class whites, implicates people of color, implicates women, and implicates immigrants as the loose threads that are bleeding America's prosperity and denying this Republican base employment and opportunity.

The problematic component of this is that the numbers just don't add up.  Mr. Wright pointed out in his post that, "there isn't a single state from the Confederacy that makes the list for ten states with the lowest unemployment rates, but they have five of the highest."  If Republicans, or Americans more generally, believe that states have deserved the right to craft their own policy for the sake of their own constituents within their borders then states need to be held accountable.  To have such an affinity for local and state government, it seems as if Republicans are simply unwilling to hold their officials in these positions accountable.

When you examine per capita income, based on 2000 Census data, you will see that the top ten states for per capita income are: Delaware, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, New Hampshire, New York, Maryland, and Minnesota.  The bottom ten are: Idaho, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, New Mexico, Montana, Louisiana, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Mississipi.

Of those states in the top ten, eight have Democrats for governors and the other two have Republicans.  For the bottom ten, four of the states' governors are Democrats while six are Republican.  Looking at how these states voted in 2000, 2004, and 2008, the Democrat versus Republican voting pattern holds and demonstrates that the vast majority of states in the bottom ten voted Bush and/or McCain whereas the majority of top ten states voted for Gore, Kerry, and/or Obama.

Chart showing top and bottom ten states by per-capita income (2000 Census) and the party of their governor in 2011 alongside electoral votes for 2000, 2004, and 2008.

Then, using even more relevant data to hold-up against the Republican Party Platform, we can examine ratio of federal dollars spent on each state versus the number of tax dollars contributed to the federal government by each state.  What might one expect if they read the Republican position and read pay attention to their ads?  Why, that blue states are brimming with entitlements for the entitled, a bunch of socialists following Greece to the gates of financial ruin through their wild tax-and-spend policies.  Certainly, such a study would demonstrate devout adherence to the tenants of fiscal conservatism by those who crusade on its behalf against those aforementioned welfare queens.

Well, believe it or not, that isn't actually the case.  As Mr. Wright pointed out using data provided by CNN and verified by PolitiFact, 

Seventeen states give more money in taxes than they receive from the federal government, yet only two of these more generous states come from the former Confederacy--Texas and Florida--and their contributions just barely earn them a spot on that list.  The other states all accept more money from the government than they contribute.  Mississippi does so at more than double the rate they give.  These are the states that claim to oppose the idea of a national debt and that rail against welfare recipients as if they are the scourge of the nation.  Still, they somehow fail to see their role in propagating such a system because the conversation always focuses on the national debt as an equally-shared-and-caused problem.

This puts Republicans, and Mitt Romney, in a tight spot, no?  If there are forty-seven per cent who, "are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims," then who is that forty-seven per cent really loyal to and going to vote for no matter what?  The statistics just don't back-up Romney's assertions and, even worse, the narrative being advanced is leading folks (read: working-class whites) to [continue] voting against their own interests.

I don't think this is the death of the Romney campaign and anti-fact-checker politics by the Republican Party -- as much as I wish it was.  But it is, or should be, reason enough for Romney to sweat a little bit, if only for the fact that he was caught on camera for being such a jackass.  I'm glad to see that he looked a little frazzled at his press conference last night, standing before voters and trying to evade the press' questions as he has done since he entered the primary.  As the New Yorker wrote,

"Mitt Romney looked a mess Monday night. Standing in front of a group of reporters and cameras gathered on a few minutes’ notice, he was flustered. He spoke quickly, without his usual composure. He looked sad, frustrated—even seemed, once or twice, to be holding back flashes of anger. And worst of all, perhaps, his hair: so famously perfectly coiffed at all times, on Monday night it was, like its owner, out of sorts."

Hopefully the Obama team takes this as an opportunity to score some real points, the way Bill did at the DNC -- with facts.  If you think poor people, black people, Latinos, women, the elderly, and so forth, are all sitting around expecting entitlements and feeding off of the system rather than supporting it, then perhaps it is time to modify your thinking.  Not only are these entitled socialist parasites not the ones freeloading off the system, they're the ones holding it up.  It's blue states bankrolling red state insolvency and the red states biting the (invisible) hand that feeds.

0 What We're Reading Today (9-18-12)

Kanye West's Prosperity Gospel - The Atlantic
Spencer Kornhaber

Fighting Irrelevance with Fire: The Chicago Teachers' Strike - The Economist
The Economist

Scott Brown's Feminist Fight with Elizabeth Warren - The Daily Beast
Michelle Cottle

Will Obama's Campaign-Trail Bar Crawl Leave Romney Staggering? - The Daily Beast
David Freedlander

We are all Welfare Queens Now - The Atlantic
Ta-Nehisi Coates

0 Patriot Game by The New York Times

The New York Times did a fun mash-up of Romney and Obama clips from their respective speeches to  produce this fun video.  Need to kill 2 minutes and 30 seconds?  Here it is.

0 Wall Street's Fear of Elizabeth Warren

Full disclosure, I'm an intern for the Elizabeth Warren for Senate campaign so, as you can imagine, I'm thrilled with this headline.  I should also say, for legal reasons, that these thoughts are entirely my own and, in no way, reflect the views and opinions of Elizabeth Warren and her campaign staff.

The more I get involved with the Warren/Brown race in Massachusetts the more I am intrigued by it.  I haven't followed Scott Brown's voting record as a Senator especially closely but I know his stance on enough major issues and know that I prefer Warren's perspectives to his enough so to feel confident on her campaign team.  However, as a Republican Senator, Scott Brown is very tame -- all things considered.

I just finished reading this piece in Bloomberg & Businessweek by Sheelah Kohlhatkar that talks about the image Scott Brown has presented to voters and why he is so important to Wall Street. The piece, appropriately titled, Scott Brown, Wall Street's Hope to Stop Elizabeth Warren, looks at Brown's political history and how he has conducted himself within this Senate race.  For Wall Street people, it seems as if Scott Brown is not only the fiscally conservative, low regulation, "pro-business" candidate that they would naturally like.  Scott Brown is the only thing standing between their business practices and someone with the expertise, clout, and cojones to really work to limit Wall Street's freedom to trade as they used to trade (read: to conduct business at the expense of the common man).

I have seen a fair number of Elizabeth Warren interviews by now and also had a brief breakfast with her and six other Tufts students to discuss student debt at Danish Pastry House right by Tufts and I've noticed that she is hammering home this message of financial responsibility on the part of banks that puts middle-, lower-, and working-class citizens in harm's way.  She talked about it at Danish Pastry House in the context of student debt.  She talked about it on The Daily Show back in January.  She made it a large component of her most prominent speaking spot of this whole campaign season -- at the DNC last week.  Painting Mitt Romney and his fellow Republicans as the party of people whose loyalties lie with the upper crust of society has become a standard weapon in the Democrats arsenal this campaign season.  Everyone has made reference to Romney's and Ryan's opinions on taxes when they were not lambasting Republicans for their stances on social issues.

The thing that sets Elizabeth Warren apart from other Democrats who are also charging against Wall Street and corporate exceptionalism is that she has the knowledge base and vocabulary to actually put some consumer protections in place that will reign-in the wild, wild, Wall Street.

A couple weeks ago I would have said that didn't matter all too much.  The polls I was reading showed a Brown advantage or a negligible difference between the two candidates.  Brown, a somewhat centrist-Republican and true Son of Massachusetts, was connecting with voters in a way Warren wasn't.  It was, as an article I read put it, as if Elizabeth Warren had opted for the Aaron Sorkin approach -- that approach being similar to Sorkin's argument for how news should be on The Newsroom: intelligent, direct, and answering to a higher calling for integrity (read: holier than thou at times but, boy, that would be helpful news).  Warren was telling it how it is and banking on the power of the truth to bring voters to her team; for a while, though, it seemed as if Warren was viewed as smart and nice by voters but they cared about someone they connected with and who they liked.  No number of Ph. Ds will replace the value of knowing why the Red Sox made a great move in dealing Gonzalez, Beckett, and Crawford to the Dodgers and also why the Celtics are always contenders for the NBA Championship (even when they're not).  You don't have to be right but you damn well better be able to make a defense of the Celtics because those LA assholes are gonna let you have it no matter what.

But with these most recent polls coming out I'm eager to see if money pours toward Scott Brown and if the attacks get nastier.  Kohlhatkar pointed out at the end of her piece in Bloomberg/Businessweek that it seemed as if Scott Brown was beginning to sincerely dislike Warren.  Perhaps that is the case, perhaps it isn't.  More relevant to me, though, is that I think voters are beginning to demand more concrete facts and information from politicians.  General affinity is nice but President Clinton reminded everyone what the jobs score is between Republicans and Democrats and he reminded the country of how it was accomplished.  With so many university students registering to vote (en masse) in Mass and Republicans being blasted for lack of specifics in their platform that make good "arithmetic", I would not be surprised to see this shift in the polls as the beginning of a push for Warren.

If I had to predict, I would say that between the efforts to make sure young people are voting and a general fatigue with empty shouts and complaints, people are eager to have a solution and Elizabeth Warren is offering that.  Consumer protection sounds like a really nice concept when you begin to think about it -- and especially when you're tired of the namecalling between the two parties.  I know Scott Brown has been trying to paint Warren as an elitist tool from Harvard who doesn't understand the common person's life but, perhaps there is a certain merit that Massachusetts has begun to recognize that having an uppity, elitist, Harvard professor might not be the worst thing in the world.  Who knows, maybe more independent and middle-class voters are beginning to recognize that the survivability of the middle-class might depend much less on the handsome, athletic, Pats fan, with perfect hair and more upon the seemingly docile, softspoken, frame of a Harvard bookworm.

0 Preliminary Thoughts on Yeezy's, "Mitt Romney don't pay no tax"

(Via Politico)

Yeezy is getting ready to drop his newest album, Cruel Summer.  After My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Watch the Throne (with Jay-Z), fans are undoubtedly excited to see the next project to come from the mind of Chicago's tortured-douchebag-rapper-producer-musician-artist-"voice of a generation".

In a refreshing turn toward politics for Yeezy, he drops a line in his second verse that calls-out Republican candidate, Mitt Romney:

These niggas tryna hold me back.  I'm just trying to protect my stacks.
Mitt Romney don't pay no tax, Mitt Romney don't pay no tax.

A few weeks ago,  Kiese Laymon published a story on Gawker called Kanye West is Better at his Job than I am at Mine (But I am way Better at Being a Fake-Ass Feminist), which was more so an examination of the author's own relationship with women in his life and his commitment, or lack thereof, to be the feminist he fashions himself to be.  However, Laymon uses Kanye West as a focal point because Kanye West has never been afraid to demand more, call bullshit, or amplify his voice and his experience.  Laymon writes:

Poor black folks from New Orleans deserved more so Kanye said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." 

Beyonce deserved more so Kanye said, "Taylor, I'ma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the greatest videos of all time." 

Queer brothers deserved more so Kanye said, "I been discriminating against gays … and I wanna come on TV and tell my rappers, just tell my friends, Yo, stop it, fam ..." 

Black kids in Chicago deserved more so Kanye said, "Man, killing's some wack shit." 

Listeners of American popular music deserved more than formulaic noise so Kanye West offered us eight years of GOOD music. In those eight years, Kanye managed to collapse, carve and distort disparate sounds rooted in the black musical traditions into newly shaped inescapable musical experiences. His work did more than challenge conventional composition. Whether it'sCollege Dropout, Late Registration, 808s and Heartbreak or Watch the Throne, Kanye's work literally dared us to revise our expectations of sound.

But Kanye West, for many reasons, is exceptional -- and I mean that with the positive and negative implications in tact.  I think he is one of the most talented musicians and producers that my generation will have to offer -- especially in the realm of hip-hop or pop music.   He is also exceptional in the sense that he stands among a select few musicians, athletes, and celebrities who are willing to offer their voice and their experience to the political discourse and our national conversation about what values our country should stand for.

Don't mistake me.  I don't believe that T-Pain needs to stand behind Dennis Kucinich or that Kevin Durant needs to wear a hoodie to every game in honor of Trayvon Martin (though imagine how powerful it would be if he did).  I just feel like Kanye shouldn't be an exceptional figure because he speaks out against what he thinks is unfair treatment of blacks, of poor folks, of people, in essence.

I'm trying to rack my brain for the musicians who dedicate real estate in their verses to causes that matter to normal people -- to the people buying their music and funding their lifestyles.  Some of us sip Ciroc with the copious number of women we have sex with but, I would wager, there are even more folks out there who don't.  And maybe that isn't even really the point.  I think the point is that had Lil Wayne or Ke$ha laryngitis around the time they were "discovered" their lives would readily be as marginalized and subject to misappropriation of resources and structural abuses as any other poor person-of-color or woman.

I guess the point is this, and let me apologize now for moving hastily through this because my computer is near dead and I am nowhere near a power outlet.
It isn't just strange to me that so few musicians, hip-hop artists in particular, engage the political discourse, at least tangentially; it's irresponsible.  Their music both supports and exploits the lived experiences of marginalized and oppressed groups in society.  Their success was due, in large part, in people legitimizing their retelling of those experiences and the willingness of their communities and similar communities to endorse them.  But when these rappers finally have the opportunity to amplify the struggle and plight of their neighbors and friends back home -- their often saluted, "homies" -- they don't take the chance.

I'm going to try to put this into a longer piece -- perhaps in the style of Kiese Laymon and use Kanye West as a focal point.  Until then, though, props to you: Common, Kanye, Lupe, Jay-Z, Nas, Game, Beyonce, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, et. al. who have used the hip-hop microphone to speak at one time or another in the defense of yourself, your communities, and your friends.

To the rest of you, you're part of the reason why Mitt Romney may still never pay no taxes.

0 Rednecks 4 Obama

I don't really dig the use of the old Confederate Flag but the sentiment is still nice.

0 "Obama's Way" in Vanity Fair by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis spent 6 months profiling President Obama for Vanity Fair.  His piece is endearing, insightful, and a pleasure to read.  Everyone knows President Obama plays a lot of basketball but did you know that he wears the same red-white-and-blue UnderArmour high tops every time he straps up on the court?  Check it our here.  It's a long piece but well worth the read.*

Basketball hadn’t appeared on the president’s official schedule, and so we traveled the streets of Washington unofficially, almost normally. A single police car rode in front of us, but there were no motorcycles or sirens or whirring lights: we even stopped at red lights. It still took only five minutes to get to the court inside the F.B.I. The president’s game rotates around several federal courts, but he prefers the F.B.I.’s because it is a bit smaller than a regulation court, which reduces also the advantages of youth. A dozen players were warming up. I recognized Arne Duncan, the former captain of the Harvard basketball team and current secretary of education. Apart from him and a couple of disturbingly large and athletic guys in their 40s, everyone appeared to be roughly 28 years old, roughly six and a half feet tall, and the possessor of a 30-inch vertical leap. It was not a normal pickup basketball game; it was a group of serious basketball players who come together three or four times each week. Obama joins when he can. “How many of you played in college?” I asked the only player even close to my height. “All of us,” he replied cheerfully and said he’d played point guard at Florida State. “Most everyone played pro too—except for the president.” Not in the N.B.A., he added, but in Europe and Asia. 

Overhearing the conversation, another player tossed me a jersey and said, “That’s my dad on your shirt. He’s the head coach at Miami.” Having highly developed fight-or-flight instincts, I realized in only about 4 seconds that I was in an uncomfortable situation, and it took only another 10 to figure out just how deeply I did not belong. Oh well, I thought, at least I can guard the president. Obama played in high school, on a team that won the Hawaii state championship. But he hadn’t played in college, and even in high school he hadn’t started. Plus, he hadn’t played in several months, and he was days away from his 51st birthday: how good could he be?

*I have to say that I haven't finished the piece yet, just one of nine pages.

0 What We're Reading Today (9-12-12)

On Obama's 'Disappointing' DNC Speech - The Atlantic
James Fallows

Florida, a True Must-Win for Romney - FiveThirtyEight
Nate Silver

Is Bin Laden Winning - The Atlantic
Robert Wright

Against Foodie Diplomacy - The New Republic
Noreen Malone

Hologram Steve Jobs Returns as Rapper to Introduce iPhone 5 - HighSnobiety
David Fischer

Clinton, Obama, and the Triumph of Substance - The New Republic
Jonathan Cohn

0 Bill Clinton: What He Said vs What was Written

(Via The Atlantic Wire)

Bill Clinton is a phenomenal public speaker.  His rhetorical flourishes and charisma work wonders every time he delivers another speech.  If you missed him at the DNC a few nights ago you truly are missing out.  President Clinton was polished, professional, friendly, and interesting.  His speech had substance; it had pop; it had grit and honesty and a folksy trueness to it that most political speeches lack.

The most interesting thing is that Bill Clinton didn't write most of the speech.  As it turns out, there were huge swaths of his 49-minute talk that were delivered off the cuff and totally on-the-spot.  The Atlantic Wire shows the comparison between the prepared remarks versus the words he used while on stage in Charlotte.  Have a read and you'll see that some of the most memorable parts of the speech were, in fact, ad libbed.  Have a look here.