Michelle Cottle at The New York Times writes—Are Americans Ready to Elect a Woman President? They say they are. They’re not so sure about their neighbors, though:
Countless hours have been devoted to examining the often unconscious gender bias that female candidates still contend with. Among other troubling disparities: Women who deviate from traditional gender roles face a risk of backlash from men (and women) who value those roles; women in positions of power tend to be considered less legitimate than their male counterparts; and ambitious women are viewed more negatively, by men and women alike, than ambitious men.
Such biases can provoke a visceral response, noted Peter Beinart, a professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York, in a 2016 piece for The Atlantic. Among other studies, he cited a 2010 paper by two Yale researchers who found that “people’s views of a fictional male state senator did not change when they were told he was ambitious. When told that a fictional female state senator was ambitious, however, men and women alike ‘experienced feelings of moral outrage,’ such as contempt, anger, and disgust.”
Contempt. Anger. Disgust. That’s hardly the basis for a level playing field.
Polling doesn’t much clarify the matter. While most Americans claim they are ready for a woman president, far fewer see other people as quite so open to the possibility. A September poll by Lean In, a women’s advocacy group, found that while 53 percent of voters considered themselves “extremely” or “very ready” for a woman president, only 16 percent thought most Americans felt the same.
Mindy Isser at In These Times writes—Joe Biden Thinks Coal Miners Should Learn to Code. A Real Just Transition Demands Far More:
As of 2016, there were only 50,000 coal miners in the United States, and yet they occupy so much of our political imagination and conversation around jobs, unions and climate change. During the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump ran on bringing coal jobs back to the United States, and Joe Biden said on December 30 that miners should learn to code, as those are the “jobs of the future.” His comments, made to a crowd in Derry, New Hampshire, were reportedly met with silence.
While coal miners aren’t the only workers in our society, coal miners’ voices do matter, and we can’t leave anyone behind. And it’s clear that they are hurting, a point illustrated by the coal miners currently blocking a train carrying coal in eastern Kentucky, demanding back pay from Quest Energy.
The coal industry is in decline, and mining jobs are disappearing. And the science shows that the vast majority of coal needs to stay in the ground if we want to have a shot at stemming climate change. But does that mean miners need to learn to code in order to earn a living? Coding isn’t necessarily bad or unimportant, and it could potentially be one of many retraining opportunities. But coal miners are skilled workers who do much more than just hit rocks all day: Many of them are trained electricians, engineers and builders. There’s no reason they necessarily need to learn new skills when their skills are easily transferable to other industries.
Luke Savage at Jacobin writes—Joe Biden Is Still Lying About His Role in Invading Iraq:
In the former vice president’s new telling of events, he and other Democratic politicians who preferred a multilateral, diplomatic solution were misled by a Bush administration hell-bent on taking America into a war he then promptly set out to oppose.
The facts say something very different. Biden was one of the Iraq invasion’s most zealous boosters — supporting it vocally and publicly throughout 2003 and 2004 — and it was not until a debate with Dick Cheney the following year that he would finally deem his vote to authorize it a “mistake.” In July 2003, some four months into the invasion, Biden could still be heard saying: “It was the right vote then and would be a correct vote today.”
During the debate, no less, the Huffington Post reported on an exchange between then-president George W. Bush and a “leading Democratic senator who later voted to authorize the use of force,” as per a 2005 account written by former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer:
“I will be with you on condition we level with the American people ― we’ll have to say [in Iraq] awhile.”
“You’re right,” Bush said.
“If you can get it done without staying, we’ll give you the Nobel Peace Prize,” the senator said. “I’ll support you for President,” he added.
That senator’s name was Joe Biden.
Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect writes—The Shots Not Taken:
The artful performance on the debate stage was Warren’s. It’s clear that she planned to use the controversy over whether Bernie had told her a woman couldn’t win to position herself, as she hadn’t until Tuesday night, as the Women’s Candidate. She needs that positioning, because when it comes to politics, policy, and program, the effective differences between Bernie and herself are minimal. Each speaks to a different constituency, but each offers fundamentally the same critique of American capitalism and the governmental corruption that has enabled its systemic abuses, and each offers fundamentally the same policies to diminish its clout. That splits the party’s progressives, leaving neither with enough support to claim the nomination. On Tuesday night, in her response to what Bernie either said or didn’t say, Warren took on a new identity without relinquishing any of her old one. She played the Woman Card to a party that is majority-female. Whether or not it ultimately wins her the nomination, it certainly won her the night.
Jon Allsop at The Guardian writes—The media's obsession with Iowa deepens the Democrats' whiteness problem:
Monday’s Booker coverage also re-upped conversations about the structure of the Democratic primary, and its effect on voters and candidates of color. In recent weeks, Booker complained repeatedly that their perspectives have been excluded by the party’s current debate-qualification rules, which prioritize polling and fundraising. Yesterday, pundits reiterated that critique, and there was renewed discussion, too, of Iowa’s place at the top of the primary calendar, which earns the state disproportionate attention every four years. “The whiteness of [the] donor class and early states really matters,” Astead W Herndon, a politics reporter for the New York Times, tweeted. “Their vision of electability impacts viability.”
These might look like conversations for the Democratic party, but they’re important for the media, too. We could do much more to mitigate the distorting effects of imperfect democratic structures, and yet, too often, we reinforce and amplify them. Our preoccupation with “electability” is one such distortion. The concept is a hydra of conventional wisdom and internalized biases, and its predictive value is flimsy. (See: Trump, Donald.) And yet so many of our discussions about politics rest on it. If you’ve listened to campaign reporters this cycle, you’ll have heard ample evidence – albeit anecdotal, for the most part – that many Democratic electors intend to vote not for their favored candidate, but for the one they think stands the best chance of beating Trump.
The press is integral in molding such judgments. And yet, as Sawyer Hackett, a staffer on Julián Castro’s shuttered presidential campaign, told the Washington Post’s David Weigel last week, voters of color are underweighted in its calculus. “I have to believe that if newsrooms were more diverse we wouldn’t be stuck with this narrative that’s made voters think they’re choosing between their minds and hearts,” Hackett said.
I rarely include conservative pundits in the APR, but I this one seemed worth adding to today’s collection.
Jake Novak at CNBC writes—Bloomberg is wasting millions of dollars on a doomed campaign:
Mike Bloomberg’s campaign has already spent more than $200 million on his presidential bid.
Somebody call the cops, I want to report a robbery. Because whoever is taking Bloomberg’s money is committing the heist of the century.
Let’s start with where most of that money has gone: TV ads. I know I’ve seen at least a dozen of Bloomberg’s TV ads so far, but don’t ask me to tell you what they say exactly. It’s amazing that someone who follows campaign messages as closely as I have for years can’t really remember any key details of any of these expensive ads. I think I remember a nurse talking in one of them, but that’s about it. There have been no memorable slogans, no real energy. They’re like wallpaper. [...]
Given what we know so far, it’s extremely hard not to write the Bloomberg campaign off as a vanity project -- perhaps the most extreme political vanity project in American history -- but a vanity project all the same. One has to wonder if Bloomberg is spending so much money so ineffectively now, what kind of president would he make anyway?
Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation and a professor of Australian literature at the University of Melbourne. At The New York Times, she writes—Want to Stop Australia’s Fires? Listen to Aboriginal People:
Aboriginal people in this country firmly believe that we are the longest-surviving culture in the world. We were raised with the knowledge that our ancestors have adapted to changing climatic conditions here for millenniums.
And yet our knowledge of caring for the land is questioned or largely ignored. In the face of catastrophic fires, Australia’s leaders need to recognize the depth and value of Aboriginal knowledge and incorporate our skills in hazard management.
I spoke about the destructiveness of the recent fires with my countryman Murrandoo Yanner, a Gangalidda leader and the director of the Carpentaria Land Council Aboriginal Corporation. Mr. Yanner is a man made for these times; he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the world that he has assimilated into Gangalidda laws and philosophy. [...]
Since the 1990s, Mr. Yanner has led Aboriginal people in the Gulf of Carpentaria toward sustainable economic development. He guided the Waanyi nation through Aboriginal rights campaigns, including opposition to the development of Century Mine, an open pit zinc mine that began production in 1999 and operated for 16 years.
Today, he leads the Jigija Indigenous Fire Training Program, which educates pastoralists, volunteer firefighters, Indigenous rangers and the mining industry on how to fight fire with fire — as our ancestors did.
Caroline Frederickson is former president of the American Constitution Society and author of “The Democracy Fix: How to Win the Fight for Fair Rules, Fair Courts, and Fair Elections.” At The Washington Post, she writes—It’s up to John Roberts to make sure senators stay true to their oath:
As he presides over the impeachment trial of President Trump, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. does not need to act like a potted plant — nor should he. In fact, Roberts as presiding officer has the ability to force senators to be true to their oath to “do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws.”
Under the Senate’s standing rules, the presiding officer has the power to issue “orders, mandates, writs, and precepts,” to “direct all the forms of proceedings while the Senate is sitting for the purpose of trying and impeachment” and to “rule on all questions of evidence including, but not limited to, questions of relevancy, materiality, and redundancy of evidence.” To emphasize the limits of Roberts’s role, some commentators argue that these seemingly broad powers are actually quite constrained, because the Senate majority retains the power to overrule Roberts.
But that does not make the chief justice’s role a nullity. Certainly, were Roberts to rule to admit evidence at the request of the House managers, a Republican senator could object and request a vote. With their majority in the Senate, the Republicans could easily prevail and have evidence excluded. Because the Senate has the final word in impeachment, the House managers have no ability to appeal — at least not to a higher court. But imagine how such a move would influence the proceeding. Would Republican senators really want to demonstrate such unprecedented partisanship, overruling the conservative, Republican-appointed chief justice and lending credence to assertions that they are running a rigged trial and burying relevant evidence?
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Debating in the shadow of impeachment:
Typical of our politics, many meaningless salvos were exchanged in politics and in punditry over whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was wise or unwise to hold off on sending the articles and impeachment managers over to the other side of the Capitol.
At the least, the delay pressured some Republican senators to admit that, yes, a trial with no witnesses is not a trial at all. “Time has been our friend in all of this,” Pelosi said at a news conference Wednesday during which she named seven impeachment managers. With new information emerging about Rudy Giuliani’s unseemly efforts to undermine our own country’s ambassador to Ukraine, it was hard to deny her claim.
But a nation that made Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server front-page news for years is so numb to Trump’s extravagant abuses of power that everything he does just rolls by as if we were watching a movie about another country with a dysfunctional political system and a corrupt, madcap leader. In a rambling campaign speech Tuesday night in Milwaukee, Trump elevated our discourse by describing Pelosi’s district in San Francisco as “filthy, dirty.”
Dana Milbank at The Washington Post writes—Impeachment descends into darkness:
Under the glare of 61 floodlights, the House voted Wednesday to appoint managers to transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate. Projectors beamed each lawmaker’s name and vote onto a wall for all to see.
And now comes the darkness.
As the long-delayed transfer of the impeachment articles finally got underway, President Trump’s allies in the Senate announced extraordinary new restrictions on press coverage of the upcoming trial, shielding senators in unprecedented ways from the prying eyes of the American public.
When House managers arrived with the impeachment articles in a ceremonial procession Tuesday evening, Senate Republican leadership had already decreed that their arrival would be filmed only by a single, shared TV camera (partially obstructed, it turned out) at the doors of the chamber in which the mostly empty desks of Republican senators also could not be seen.
Jim Hightower at Other Words writes—How do billionaires make money? By having money already:
While the workaday majority of Americans continue to be mired in our low-wage economy, the precious few at the tippy-top soared out of sight in 2019. They started the year already wallowing in wealth. By year’s end, the 500 richest people saw their total haul increase by an average of $2.4-billion each.
Indeed, some needed bulldozers to bank their increased wealth.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, for example, piled up an extra $27-billion last year. Bill Gates of Microsoft added $22 billion to his stash. And even though Amazon czar Jeff Bezos dropped $9 billion in a divorce settlement, his fortune multiplied so much that he’s still the world’s richest person.
Bear in mind that none of these moneyed elites did anything extra to earn these extraordinary bonanzas. They didn’t work any harder, didn’t get smarter, didn’t add anything of value to society. They simply reclined in luxury and let their money make money.
That’s a dirty little secret of our rigged economic system — unfettered inequality begets ever-expanding inequality.
Mary Retta at The Guardian writes—From the Oscars to the Democratic party: why are US culture and politics still so white?
To say that Harris and Booker withdrawing from the race was disappointing is an understatement. It felt personal: though I was never entirely on the same page with either candidate politically, the comfort and validation that comes from seeing a candidate who looks like you, who vows to protect you and your community, is undeniable. But my sadness stems from something much deeper than a desire for representation; it’s my sense that the increasingly white Democratic slate confirms people of color’s worst fears about the trajectory of this country’s political landscape.
In the devastating aftermath of Trump’s 2016 win, we were consoled only by the conviction that this was fated to happen, that we needed a candidate to win on a platform of hate so that we could wake up to the immediate necessity of electing a leader who prioritized the values of unity, justice and, of course, love. As such, seeing promising candidates of color fail is even more devastating because it questions that logic and makes Trump’s win feel like less of a fluke and more of a prediction of our future.
This same is true of our disappointment with this year’s Oscar nominations. Like the 2020 Democratic ballot, this year’s Oscar nominations are oppressively (if unsurprisingly) white. In the wake of the nomination announcements, viewers and critics alike have been quick to point out the large number of creatives who were snubbed, many of whom were people of color. Lupita Nyong’o did not get an Oscar nomination for her spellbinding lead performance in Us, and it seems strange that more attention was not given to the actors in films such as Hustlers and Parasite. The black British actor Cynthia Erivo was the only person of color nominated across 20 acting categories, and out of five directing nominations, all nominees were male.
Ultimately, what’s most upsetting is not the number of white candidates or the number of white nominations, it’s what this whitewashing represents: a grand invalidation of the lived experiences of people of color.
Emily Alford at Jezebel writes—Could Rebellious Teens Please Just Go Back to Worshipping the Devil?
It’s really no surprise that some teenage boys love Trump. From what I can recall, they are burdened with all the baggage that comes from being taught that normal human feelings are wrong and bad along while being offered limited outlets for expressing any emotion that isn’t rage. So with all the performative masculinity bullshit they’re wading through, it’s not exactly a shocker that boys have fallen for one of the worst performances of masculinity of all time—that of charlatan-in-chief Donald Trump.
According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, the teenage boys in a working-class Pennsylvania town are using Trump memes to bully (primarily female) classmates, a practice that would surely delight the president:
“The girls mostly roll their eyes, but sometimes the jabs cross a line. Last year, when Alabama passed an anti-abortion bill, some of the boys shared a series of Instagram posts from women outraged by the ban, with the song “Hoes Mad” playing in the background. ‘The boys mostly like Trump. There’s an attention side of it,’ [one student] said. ‘It’s just like a way to get people upset, to rile up the girls, the whole masculine group loves Trump.’
Asked about their support for Trump, one male student attributed the Trump presidency to the success of his parents’ construction business, while another student, who is coincidentally student body president, put his support down to gender: “Just historically, when you think Republican, you think males, and when you think liberals, you think more female.”