Post Blago Blog Post

Not that I didn't enjoy the Rod Blagojevich Untergang media circus, but I've yet to find a piece addressing the really interesting question here, namely: how did this guy manage to function as Governor of a major state?

I mean, I understand that Illinois expects corruption from her politicians, no problem there. But this guy is nutty -- delusional, narcissistic, histrionic, incapable of normal self-presentation. So what are the expectations of a United States Governor, such that Rod Blagojevich was able to (more or less) meet them for almost five years? And what's next? Are we going to find out that Arnie Schwarzenegger never bothered learning to read or write? That David Paterson is exactly like that Peter Sellers character? That Janet Napolitano is just some kind of Internet hoax? How did the quality controls manage to totally vanish all at once?

Wall St. welfare

What Paul Krugman said. 

Some of Krugman's commentators are pretty good too. Most resonant with me, I fear, was the one who began (roughly): 'This is why I didn't vote for Obama in the primaries...'. Obama is a transformative figure symbolically and stylistically, and his being good rather than evil is a pretty radical change in context. But none of that entails that he's even going to attempt to change the culture of kleptocracy which has now sunk the American economy. My hope is that his current deference to the right and the rich (hiring Summers et al., not really trying to fix TARP) is an elaborate Plan A which he will be able to ditch in a year or so when everyone's been given enough rope and things have only gotten much worse. My fear is that he's a hardcore Rubinomics man himself, and just doesn't grasp how broken the system is or see what's fundamentally wrong with taxpayer-funded robber baronry. 

And actually, I have an even deeper fear. This is that Obama does understand the problem, but seriously believes he can change the self-interested behaviour of bad agents through the magical power of his personal moral authority, whether that means being generous and responsive to House Republicans or speaking mighty Words of Chastisement to bonus-taking bankers. In which case he's delusional, and there may be no Plan B at all. 

UPDATE: Joseph Stiglitz says it too.

Obamaflections

I'm the least qualified person to try to speak to this, but I wish someone would do it, so here goes.

Amid all the joy over Obama's inauguration, I've seen no mention of how remarkable it is that black America fully embraces Obama as theirs, sees his cause as theirs, fully owns this moment of triumph. That wasn't a foregone conclusion. Obama is not descended from any slaves, or people who suffered under Jim Crow, or civil rights marchers. He's really African-American, whereas the phrase is normally used as a weird euphemism for practically the most longstanding indigenous group in the country (except for aboriginal groups, I guess). And in many well-known ways Obama's story is more like that of an immigrants' kid than of the average black American (to the admittedly minimal extent that there is such a thing). At the start of the primaries, when Hillary was still leading among black voters in South Carolina, there were some muffled rumblings and grumblings about whether Obama was 'black enough', and it took a while for those to die away. He could easily have come to be identified as mixed-race first and foremost, and not really representative of anything but his urban elitist self.

So why didn't it play out that way? This is where it gets interesting, because there are two diametrically opposed answers:

1. It's all about race. Obama might not share the family history of most American blacks, but he shares the pigmentation, and that's what matters to them because it's still what matters for your life chances. It's what gets you excluded and stereotyped and stopped by the cops. Obama could have grown up Brazilian and his triumph would still be black America's triumph, because what it's a triumph over is just the centuries-long history of white racism in the U.S.

2. It's all about culture. Obama counts as fully American-black because black America is his adopted cultural home: he married into it, he goes to church in it, he lives in Kenwood, he listens to hip hop. (He even likes sweet potato pie, which I fear would be the dealbreaker for me.) He lives as an African-American, in short, and if that's what matters then the phrase isn't so stupid after all: all these cultural markers are just like the markers that we casually use to place some family as Italian-American or whatever.

Now I try to imagine a white man who had made all of Obama's choices, and assimilated as fully as possible to the black South Side. (I wonder if there are any....) How would black voters respond to that guy as a political candidate? I think there would be some feeling of solidarity, but obviously nothing like the reaction to Obama. So (1) can't be dismissed; and maybe it's really the heart of the matter. But I'm pretty sure (2) counted for a lot too. And that points to a future where pigmentation means less for identity than culture and culture is understood to be something freely adopted, as a mode of personal expression and self-development, open to all and none the less authentic for it. Bring it on, I say.

Your e-z post-inauguration round-up:

1. Bush getting booed and jeered, as the commentariat falls into awkward silence. That's change I can believe in! (If it needs defending, see here.)

2. A nice first-person account of the big day (and another one here)... which was actually an organizational fiasco in some respects. Here's hoping a head or two rolls.

3. The Obama family defined: very cool.

4. And of course Pete Seeger.

Heh, so someone at the Globe does read this blog

Thanks to Spirit of the West for pointing out our first unacknowledged contribution to the host organism, from one of the endless rather dull articles today on Obama:

But Mr. Obama is a man as well as a symbol. His personal qualities appeal at least as powerfully as his race to all sorts of Americans.

His Ivy League law background excites educated voters. His stance of "ironic cool" in interviews wows the young. His gentlemanly manners and lithe elegance - he is closer in style to Fred Astaire than to any U.S. politician - charm suburban whites generally and white women in particular.

You're welcome, Mister O'Sullivan! (Truly.)

Now ship them to the Hague

I may yet get cathartically verklempt later on, but this morning I didn't really hear the big cartoon sun singing Beatles songs as angels frolicked, though I would have liked to. (Did you?) Perhaps it's because I was multitasking and as usual it ended in a botch-up all round: ended up with an unwritten lecture, an ominously hockey-puck-like pie, and having missed all the fun bits of the inaugural ceremony, if indeed there were any. (I gather that at any rate Cheney's transformation into Dr. Strangelove is now complete; that there was a groovily weird benediction; and that Barry O's speech was basically depressing.) For whatever reason I'm more in a mood for retrospective bile today, and in that spirit will link to the most telling comment I've found on the interwebs today: a summary of the Bush years according to America's Finest News Source, at Making Light. Lest we forget, eh.

UPDATE: For anyone else still working the schadenfraude, nothing (as you might expect) can touch Wonkette and commentators on the Old Testament satisfactions of seeing Dick Cheney in a wheelchair. Setting aside the now-standard Dracula and Hannibal Lecter riffs, opinion is evidently divided on the important question of whether the right cultural touchstone is now (a) Mister Potter in It's a Wonderful Life; (b) Doctor Strangelove (seemed like the obvious call to me); (c) Burgess Meredith as a Batman villain (this I don't get); and (d) a Dalek in Doctor Who. But who or what is a Dalek, and just how sordidly evil is it?

Rubinomics strikes again

The bad news is that the new soon-to-be-confirmed Secretary of the Treasury didn't pay his taxes until he was audited and forced to do so.

But hey, the good news is that it was all just an honest mistake! That IMF payroll system was just too darn tricky and complicated for him.

Umm, wait a minute....

Geithner's only claim to fame is being a protege of Rubin and Summers, the soi-disant geniuses and Wall St. apologists whose ideological opposition to all regulation of financial industries brought us the whole fucking securities-industry meltdown and with it the total crash of the American economy. It would be really, really nice if Obama started throwing these boys overboard. But I don't see it happening. Because not paying your taxes and having an illegal housekeeper can only make Geithner seem all the more reassuringly One of Us to Wall St. and the Republican Party. And of course appeasing those two groups is universally understood to be the sole legitimate aim of Democratic administration economic policy.

Even more than Her Hillaryship, this is the nomination that made me decide I just don't believe in all that hoohah about 'Change'. Or rather, I'll believe it when I see it, and with this shower I'd be crazy to expect to.

It's now official

I have directed my computer -- with pangs of regret and in a tone of chagrin that it probably didn't fully register -- to regard everything from the Obama family as spam.

Oh Chicago, I miss you sometimes

Courtesy of Eschaton, some hi-lites from today's indictment of Governor Blagojevich:

A 76-page FBI affidavit alleges that Blagojevich was intercepted on court-authorized wiretaps during the last month conspiring to sell or trade Illinois’ U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama for financial and other personal benefits for himself and his wife. At various times, in exchange for the Senate appointment, Blagojevich discussed obtaining:
< a substantial salary for himself at a either a non-profit foundation or an organization affiliated with labor unions;
< placing his wife on paid corporate boards where he speculated she might garner as much as $150,000 a year;
< promises of campaign funds – including cash up front; and
< a cabinet post or ambassadorship for himself.
Just last week, on December 4, Blagojevich allegedly told an advisor that he might “get some (money) up front, maybe” from Senate Candidate 5, if he named Senate Candidate 5 to the Senate seat, to insure that Senate Candidate 5 kept a promise about raising money for Blagojevich if he ran for re-election. In a recorded conversation on October 31, Blagojevich claimed he was approached by an associate of Senate Candidate 5 as follows: “We were approached ‘pay to play.’ That, you know, he’d raise 500 grand. An emissary came. Then the other guy would raise a million, if I made him (Senate Candidate 5) a Senator.”

The full press release is here, including some almost Nixon-quality bathos:

Throughout the intercepted conversations, Blagojevich also allegedly spent significant time weighing the option of appointing himself to the open Senate seat and expressed a variety of reasons for doing so, including: frustration at being “stuck” as governor; a belief that he will be able to obtain greater resources if he is indicted as a sitting Senator as opposed to a sitting governor; a desire to remake his image in consideration of a possible run for President in 2016; avoiding impeachment by the Illinois legislature; making corporate contacts that would be of value to him after leaving public office; facilitating his wife’s employment as a lobbyist; and generating speaking fees should he decide to leave public office.

... In a conversation with Harris on November 4, Blagojevich analogized his situation to that of a sports agent shopping a potential free agent to the highest bidder. The day after the election, Harris allegedly suggested to Blagojevich that the President-elect could make him the head of a private foundation.

...Also during that call, Blagojevich agreed it was unlikely that the President-elect would name him Secretary of Health and Human Services or give him an ambassadorship because of all of the negative publicity surrounding him.

Meanwhile the Nixon tapes just keep on giving.