Michelle Obama and Sonia Sotomayor: the lasting legacy of insecurity

The New Neo Posted on by

In a recent post, I wrote of affirmative action:

We all have subsequently paid dearly, including those whom affirmative action was supposed to benefit, because their achievements have forever after been tainted by the suspicion (correct or incorrect) that they might not have been able to earn them if the playing field had not been recently slanted in their favor.

This is one of the most insidious effects of affirmative action, and Michelle Obama—despite all her achievements and her current position as First Lady—may herself still suffer from it. In a recent commencement speech she gave to the graduating class of Washington Mathematics Science Technology Public Charter School, she had the following to say about Sonia Sontomayor and herself (unfortunately, embedding is disabled for the You Tube video; you’ll have to go here to view it) [emphasis mine]:

…And [Sotomayor] went to Princeton, and in the story she said that when she arrived (and this was nine years before I would even think about going) she said when she stepped on that campus she said that she flet like a visitor landing in an alien country. She said that she never raised her hand that first year because…she was too embarrassed and too intimidated to ask questions…So despite all her success at Princeton—and then she went on to Yale Law School where she was at the top of her cass…and despite all of her professional accomplishments, Judge Sontomayor says she still looks over her shoulder and wonders if she measures up. And when I read her story I understood exactly how she feels.

Note that Michelle Obama does not say “how she felt.” She uses the present tense: “how she feels.”

Now, perhaps it’s not really affirmative action that’s at fault. I know that imposter syndrome (which is exactly what Ms. Obama is describing) is more likely to be felt by women (even, or perhaps especially, high-achieving ones) than by men. But it seems odd that these particular women might feel it so sharply even at this late date that they find it necessary to talk about it.

In addition, if you watch the video, you may notice that Michelle Obama speaks with a bitterness that appears to haunt her even today. I find it very sad; she seems to have not been able to put the insecurities of her past behind her no matter what heights she has scaled since.

The disconnect: Obama’s polls and the economy

The New Neo Posted on by

Dick Morris (yeah, Dick Morris; can’t stand the guy but every now and then he writes something interesting) points out that Obama’s continuing popularity seems to rest on the fact that the majority of Americans still blame Bush for the bad economy. Morris believes that, as time goes on and the negative consequences of Obama’s own policies take root, his popularity will plummet.

I don’t know. That would require a connection between cause and effect, and a knowledge of financial matters, that may at this point be beyond the powers of the majority of Americans. It also would mean that quite a few people would have to admit that they were wrong in voting for the man.

These are two very formidable barriers.

More from a recovering liberal

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s more from former liberal (and present Berkeley therapist) “Robin” at American Thinker. She discusses all you ever wanted to know about her transformation and were unafraid to ask.

And I was amused by the following from a commenter, as well:

Aren’t most conservatives former liberals to some extent? All children are liberals. They are naive, selfish, and believe the world works the way they want it to work. They throw tantrums and blame everything on someone else. They think being a kid is cool and adults are uncool.

Carter on the rails vs. Obama on the skids: failing industries and deregulation

The New Neo Posted on by

An article headlined “If Obama Had Carter’s Courage…” is bound to get my attention.

Just the other day I compared Carter favorably to Obama in the arena of hypocrisy about promises not to live high on the public’s dime. Now Holman W. Jenkins offers another shining moment from the Carter past (one of which I was not previously aware): when our system of freight railroads was threatened with multiple bankruptcies and faced the grim prospect of nationalization, Carter showed courage in resisting that call, as well as in confronting the special interest groups to which politicians are ordinarily beholden:

Rail executives and economists had been arguing since the 1920s, when competition from trucks and planes began to emerge, that comprehensive federal regulation had only distorted the industry’s pricing, driven away investment, and made competitive adaptation impossible…it still took some doing on Mr. Carter’s part. When the bill stalled, a hundred phone calls went from the White House to congressmen, including 10 by Mr. Carter in a single evening. The bill essentially no longer required railroads to provide services at a loss to please certain constituencies. It meant going up against farmers, labor, utilities, mining interests, and even some railroads—whereas Mr. Obama’s auto bailout tries to appease key lobbies like labor and greens, which is why it can’t work…

In 1980 [during the Carter administration], Congress passed the Staggers Act, ending a century of federal regulation and leading to the railroad industry’s renaissance. Leo Mullin, then a young Conrail veep, would later look back and praise all involved for having the fortitude to recognize that salvaging the taxpayer’s investment in Conrail meant more than fixing a single broken company—it meant fixing a defective regulatory environment.

That fortitude is exactly what’s missing today, as it was missing from Mr. Obama’s statement on Monday, which attributed GM’s failure to sins by everyone but Washington.

I’m extremely unfamiliar with the history of the railroads (passenger or freight) in this country—except for the usual random facts every child used to be forced to learn in school, such as the golden spike at Promontory Point; as well as a trip to Chicago I took when very young on the Twentieth Century Limited, which included sleeping berths a few inches from the ceiling for my brother and me as the old train rattled along on through the night; and then later the obligatory jokes about Amtrak coupled with several rather frustrating trips between Boston and New York on said line.

Alas, it would take me far more time than I have available at the moment to catch up on all I don’t know (which is almost everything) about the history of the US railroad system. But a very quick skimming of the Wiki entry on Amtrak and one on Conrail (the freight system Jenkins is referring to, the one with which Carter dealt) indicates it’s an intriguing story as well as a relevant one.

For example, I always thought the cause of the decline in the passenger rail system was obvious. Whoever would prefer a train ride to a car ride given the choice, except for commuters in cities with traffic so bad that driving has become an exercise in hair-tearing frustration and futility? And it’s certainly true that passenger railroads probably would have declined when faced with stiff auto competition no matter what they’d tried to do to compete.

But they never really had a chance; even before autos represented especially keen competition, the hands of the passenger rail industry were tied—by the federal government:

The first interruption in passenger rail’s vibrancy coincided with government intervention. From approximately 1910 to 1921, the Federal government introduced a populist rate-setting scheme, followed by nationalization of the rail industry for World War I. Ample railroad profits were erased, growth of the rail system was reversed, and railroads massively underinvested in passenger rail facilities during this time. Meanwhile, labor costs advanced, and with them passenger fares, which discouraged passenger traffic just as automobiles gained a foothold.

Compare and contrast to Conrail (I’ve excerpted only a small portion of its lengthy history, in which Carter was only one player of many) [emphasis mine]:

In the years leading to 1973, the freight railroad system of the U.S. was collapsing…

Conrail was incorporated in Pennsylvania on October 25, 1974, and operations began April 1, 1976. The theory was that if the service was improved through increased capital investment, the economic basis of the railroad would be improved. During its first seven years, Conrail proved to be highly unprofitable, despite receiving billions of dollars of assistance from Congress. The corporation declared enormous losses on its federal income tax returns from 1976 through 1982…Congress once again reacted with support by passing the Northeast Rail Service Act of 1981 (45 U.S. Sec. 1101 et seq.), which amended portions of the Regional Rail Reorganization Act by exempting Conrail from liability for any state taxes (45 U.S.C. 727(c)) and requiring the Secretary of Transportation to make arrangements for the sale of the government’s interest in Conrail (45 U.S.C. 761). After NERSA was implemented, Conrail began to improve and reported taxable income between $2 million and $314 million each year from 1983 through 1986.

Although Conrail’s government-funded rebuilding of the heavily run-down railroad infrastructure and rolling stock it inherited from its six bankrupt predecessors succeeded by the end of the 1970s in improving the physical condition of tracks, locomotives, and freight cars, the fundamental economic regulatory issues remained, and Conrail continued to post losses of as much as $1 million a day. Conrail management, recognizing the need for more regulatory freedoms to address the economic issues, were among the parties lobbying for what became the Staggers Act of 1980 [this is the act passed when Carter was president], which significantly loosened the Interstate Commerce Commission’s rigid economic control of the rail industry. This allowed Conrail and other carriers the opportunity to become profitable and strengthen their finances.

The Staggers Act allowed the setting of rates that would recover capital and operating cost (fully allocated cost recovery) by each and every route mile the railroad operated. There would be no more cross-subsidization of costs between route-miles (i.e., rates on profitable route segments were not set higher to subsidize routes where rates were set at intermodal parity, yet still did recover fully allocated costs). Finally where current and/or future traffic projections showed that profitable volumes of traffic would not return, the railroads were allowed to abandon those routes, shippers and passengers to other modes of transportation. With the Staggers Act, the railroads, including Conrail, were freed from the requirement to operate services with open ended losses for the public convenience and necessity of those who simply chose rail services as their mode of transportation.

Seems to me there are a number of lessons here, the first of which is that government bailouts without significant government deregulation of unreasonable mandates and taxes hampering a failing industry are doomed to fail themselves, and all such bailouts will therefore be a waste of taxpayer money. In addition, keeping an industry in private hands is better at turning a profit than nationalization—as long as the government doesn’t tie those hands unreasonably in order to favor other special interest groups.

Obama seems to be on a course to disobey all those lessons. Carter, to his credit, was not.

The disappearance of Air France 447: those in peril in air and sea

The New Neo Posted on by

It was a juxtaposition of two romantic and wonderful cities: Rio and Paris. Who wouldn’t want to take a flight from one to another? Spirits must have been very high indeed on Air France 447 when it departed.

The airbus left Rio just fine. But it never made it to Paris. All aboard are presumed dead somewhere over—and then in—the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

All disasters strike fear and grief into our hearts. But this one has a special horror: the catastrophic event occurred while the plane was out of radar contact and without the pilots being able to send any message at all. And since it happened over deep ocean, the recovery efforts will be particularly difficult and the black box that could tell the story may never be found. It is a disappearance and a mystery.

This tragedy, already almost unbearable for the loved ones of those who died, contains the added painful possibility that the bodies of the lost may never be recovered. And all of this happened in an instant; families and friends were waiting at the Paris airport for an ordinary happy arrival, and then they received the dreadful news that will change their lives forever.

Now we learn that some debris has been sighted near the spot where the plane is suspected to have gone down: the mute and terrible testimony of an airplane seat, an orange buoy, and some other debris. The material will need to be investigated further to see if it is indeed from the downed flight, but it’s a good bet that the answer will be yes.

Searching for the black box will be much harder, and it’s a race against time: the mechanism only emits signals for thirty days. Right now the cause of the crash is a complete mystery; despite turbulence and lightning, neither would explain the large and sudden systems failure that seems to have occurred, evidenced by an automatic signal emitted by the plane indicating loss of electrical power and cabin pressure.

I have always loved the Navy Hymn, from the very first time I ever heard it as a young child. Although it is connected with the military, there is no reason it cannot apply to civilians as well—or any of “those in peril” on the sea or in the air. Since the passengers and crew of Flight 447 were in danger in both sea and air, I think it fitting to offer this beautiful hymn in their memory, in hopes that their souls are at rest and their families and friends find comfort, and that we find some answers to the mystery of what happened:

There are many versions of the hymn, which originally was written in 1860 for sea travel but has since been updated to include air and even space (see this for examples of many of these variations, and more). Here is the version in the video:

Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidst the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
O, hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea!

O Trinity of love and power!
Our brethren shield in danger’s hour;
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them whereso’er they go.
Thus ever let there rise to Thee,
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea!

Lord, guard and guide the men who fly
Through the great spaces of the sky.
Be with them traversing the air,
In darkening storms or sunlight fair;
Oh, hear us when we lift our prayer,
For those in peril in the air!

The illogic of affirmative action

The New Neo Posted on by

The Sotomayor debate has brought the controversy about what is known as “reverse racism” to the fore. I don’t much like that term—I’m of the opinion that racism is racism is racism. But the term “reverse racism” does acknowledge the fact that racism in the name of redressing previous discrimination practiced towards a minority by a dominant majority does have a different flavor and purpose than the original. That doesn’t make it right, however.

This piece by Victor Davis Hanson is an excellent exploration of how muddled and illogical “reverse racism” and its proponents have become. I have a few things to add, as well:

Reverse racism is not about fairness to the individual. It’s about the perception of fairness to categories of people in order to even out statistics that indicate differences of outcome between groups.

It’s about collective guilt and collective innocence, and the hope that, by doing penance for the former, advocates can finally claim the latter.

It’s about taking individuals off the hook for their own achievements or lack thereof.

It’s about blaming all differences between groups on the effects of prejudice. The underlying belief is that if there are any disparities between the achievements of races/ethnic groups, this cannot possibly reflect real differences (not even ones that are culturally perpetuated within such groups).

The criteria for inclusion in the favored racial or ethnic group are quite irrational and simplistic, sometimes allowing those with only a tangential connection to the group to claim the coveted status. And in a terrible irony, these criteria reduce people’s complexity to a simple matter of race in exactly the same manner that discriminatory racism does. And it almost goes without saying (although I’ll say it again) that the rules penalize other probably deserving categories of people—impoverished whites from Appalachia, for example—because of their race, and their race alone.

The policies are open-ended in time. There is no consideration of what criteria could be used to decide some day that it is time to end the policy.

Groups that have been discriminated against in the past but who have transcended it through their own achievements, without any special help (East Indians, Chinese, and Jews, to name a few) are exempt from being assisted now, despite the discrimination from which they have suffered in the past. Their subsequent achievements are considered to remove the need for affirmative action, and of course they do; I’m not arguing that favored status should be extended to such groups. But, what achievements by black people (or for that matter, native Americans or Hispanics or other favored groups) would be enough to finally end affirmative action? For example, is Obama’s election as president sufficient to remove the need for affirmative action for African Americans? And if not, whatever would be? Do the outcome statistics (jobs, income, admission to schools) have to be exactly equal between groups before affirmative action can be ended? And would even that be enough?

Hanson’s essay is so good that I’ll conclude by quoting the last section of it at length:

Indeed, creating, recreating, and emphasizing racial identity, especially among elites, currently involves so many contortions that it has descended from the absurd to the outright pernicious-and is becoming a sort of racism itself. One gets the uncomfortable feeling that the perpetuators of the present system—mostly elite whites—find some sort of psychological absolution in such a system that allows them to alleviate guilt without living among poorer people of color, or sending their own children to the “diverse” public schools—two concrete steps that might quickly indeed ensure better neighborhoods and better education for the “other.”…

Unfortunately, unlike a Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, or Alberto Gonzales, President Obama has embraced identity politics in unprecedented fashion-and we are reaping what he has sown…

But then only in these race-conscious times could a Barack Obama have entered the racial labyrinth as a well-educated youth of mixed and foreign ancestry, and middle-class prep school lineage, and exited as a representative totem of the African-American underclass.

By virtue of that metamorphosis it matters not at all that he once subsidized the racial hatred of Rev. Wright’s Church, carelessly tossed out the epithet ”˜typical white person’, stereotyped the white working class as ”˜clingers,’ had his privileged Attorney General call Americans “cowards” on matters of race, and nominated a candidate for the Supreme Court who, despite all the tortured exegeses of exculpation, declared that white males could not possess the judicial wisdom and temperament of someone of her own race and gender.

You see, in matters of racial politics, we deal now only in fantasies rather than reality.

The Tiller murder

The New Neo Posted on by

Controversial abortion doctor George Tiller was shot and killed in church yesterday, and a firestorm of argument has erupted in response.

Some on the pro-choice side blame the entire pro-life movement, especially people such as TV talk show personality Bill O’Reilly, who referred to the doctor over the years as “Tiller the Killer,” as well as groups that publish names and addresses of abortion doctors in order to intimidate them and facilitate protests and reprisals against them.

My opinion? I hold each person responsible for his or her actions, and ultimately the Tiller murderer is fully responsible for what he did. The rest are examples of freedom of speech, which is (and should be) protected.

Almost all of the pro-life groups have condemned Tiller’s murder, although some on the other side claim that this is mere sanctimonious hypocrisy for public consumption, and that all those who criticized Tiller have his blood on their hands. But although anti-abortion forces are passionate about their cause, very few are killers or would promote such killing; among devout Christians, especially, it is antithetical to their pro-life stance. They believe that the proper avenue is to change public opinion through peaceful means, protests, and education.

Any and every group in which members feel strongly about their cause (including, for example, environmentalists) runs the risk of encouraging the extremists and killers in its midst. In this respect, the pro-life forces are hardly unique. Abortion is an issue that raises such powerful feelings that I’m surprised that more killings of this sort don’t occur, although every single one is a crime to be condemned.

Tiller became a lightning rod for the controversy because he was no ordinary abortionist. He operated one of only three clinics in America that perform late-term abortions on fetuses deemed to be viable, or probably viable, or possibly viable. These abortions were performed even on healthy fetuses, allegedly to preserve the mother’s health when other abortion procedures that could have preserved the life of the fetus were rejected as more likely to compromise the mother’s well-being.

This is by far the most controversial type of abortion procedure, one that even many pro-choice advocates condemn (in these situations the term “unborn child” instead of “fetus” seems especially apropos). It is certainly a practice that I consider very very troubling (you can read about some of the complex legal and medical issues involved here). So those who called Tiller a killer had a fairly strong case.

I unequivocally reiterate that this does not in any way excuse his murder. But it certainly does explain why he might have been a focus for criticism. To supress such criticism would be to suppress freedom of speech in an important arena.

Tiller himself certainly knew that he was a target; he’d been shot in both arms by an anti-abortion assailant in 1993. He maintained recently in a successfully-defended lawsuit that all of his abortions, even the late-term ones on healthy fetuses, were in compliance with Kansas law that:

…allows abortions after a fetus can survive outside the womb only if two independent doctors agree that it is necessary to save a women’s life or prevent “substantial and irreversible” harm to “a major bodily function,” a phrase that has been interpreted to include mental health.

That’s the law. The court ruled that Tiller was innocent of charges that he had not followed it, and acquitted him. The killer wrongly took the law into his own hands, and that is murder. And those who would use this murder for political ends are guilty of something, although I’m not sure what to call it.

Mr. President goes to New York…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to take in dinner and a Broadway play.

The Democrats counter the resultant criticism by saying that all presidents take vacations, especially Mr. Obama’s predecessor George Bush, so what’s the big brouhaha about?

It is certainly true that most presidents vacation quite a bit. They need to. They also need to relax, enjoy themselves, and get out on the town now and then in more short-term ways—take in a play or a movie (or play golf, as Eisenhower was often criticized for doing).

Obama is no different. But most vacations are longer trips, working vacations where the president has a change of scenery and keeps working in a more relaxed and rural setting than the White House. Camp David, for example, exists for that purpose. Or if presidents prefer, they either go home (the ranch for Bush and Reagan, the peanut farm for Carter) or, if they don’t own that sort of convenient retreat, they go to estates kindly offered by friends and supporters (the Clintons on the Vineyard, for example).

I have no problem with this at all, and I’ve always assumed that, be they Republican or be they Democrat, Presidents mostly work very hard while at these “vacation” places. Getting there involves flying and expense and all that. But this sort of getting away from it all and yet continuing to work seems necessary for presidents’ mental and physical health, and not wasteful because they usually are away for quite a while.

But for a president to fly from DC to New York for an evening of pleasure seems to have no precedent (at least none I can recall) on either side of the political spectrum. It somehow seems excessive for a short-term treat that is available right in Washington with much less bother and expense. But instead of going to the Kennedy Center, the Obamas flew to New York complete with entourage and press for a single night’s activity that could be more or less duplicated at home in DC. And for the Obamas to do this now, with the economy as it is, seems especially tone deaf and narcissistic. It’s an indication that Obama has learned he can do whatever he wants; he is nearly immune from criticism in the mainstream media, so why not indulge whatever whim he and Michelle might have?

Obama has often been compared to Jimmy Carter. Maybe some of his policies are, but in this respect they could not be more different. Although Carter was an awful president, one good thing I must say about him is that he promised his presidency would be less imperial (he would carry his own bags, for example) and he followed through on much of that. Carter took relatively few vacations compared to other presidents: only 79 days for his four years in office, mostly at his own peanut farm. Say what you will about the man, but in this respect (unlike Obama with his calls for sacrifice only for others), he was no hypocrite.

[ADDENDUM: So much for transparency.]

Leonard Cohen comes to Boston

The New Neo Posted on by

Okay, quick: how many 74-year olds could give a three-plus-hour concert night after night and leave the audience hungry for more? Leonard Cohen, that’s who, and last night it was Boston’s turn to savor the pleasure, and my turn to sit in the audience with over 3500 other lucky Cohen aficionados.

He didn’t disappoint, not for a minute. There were no obscurities from the Cohen oeuvre last night, either—it was Greatest Hits all the way, and in this case “great” is not hyperbole, it’s understatement.

Since I knew nearly every word of every song, I was tempted to sing along as I do at home. But everyone in my proximity was spared that experience by dint of my great forbearance; I limited myself to a lot of swaying and a few happy yelps when I’d hear the opening notes of a particular favorite.

As I’ve written before, Leonard Cohen is not for everyone (although he’s certainly for me). Some find him boring, some find him droning, some find him hard to tell apart from Dustin Hoffman until he opens his mouth (although as they’ve both aged, they look a lot less alike than they used to). But I find him to be one of the most compelling and hypnotic singer-songwriters, poet-musicians—whatever sort of hyphenated descriptive term you prefer—in the world.

Cohen spent a lot of time last night with his hat on and his eyes closed and his legs bent or even in a full kneel (try doing that when you’re seventy-four), facing his backup singers or his musicians and singing to them. It sounds as though this would distance him from the audience, but it didn’t; it’s his way of reaching deep within himself to give the greatest emotional power to each song. The words are neither more nor less important than the music, and although he’s probably sung each composition hundreds or even thousands of times, he never seems to be just going through the motions.

For example, when Cohen sang “Suzanne,” one of his earliest songs, he brought thick layers of memory to those of us who had first heard it back in high school or college in the 60s, from a Leonard Cohen who seemed mature at the time but was only in his mid-thirties. How did he make it seem so fresh now, singing it as an old man? His voice is far deeper (deeper even than I’d heard it sound recently in You Tube videos from the current tour—how deep can a man’s voice get and still be heard by the human ear?) But that’s not the only thing that’s deeper; you can hear all the ache of the intervening years—the hard-won wisdom and the hard-fought pain—in his phrasing and tone, and as you listen you nod and think of all that you’ve been through in those same passing decades.

Cohen’s musicians and backup singers are all extraordinary artists as well. Each one has more than a moment in the spotlight and each one is fully up to the task. This is no small part of what is so satisfying about a Cohen concert. One is carried along not only by Cohen’s sonorous voice, his powerful presence despite his diminutive size, and the force of the songs themselves, but also by the wall of sound that accompanies them. No song ever sounds exactly the way it did on the record, nor does it sound exactly the way it did on the You Tube video of some other concert, but it is a tribute to the extraordinary musicality of Cohen and everyone else on the stage that none of the new variations is ever a disappointment no matter how deeply entrenched in one’s head a beloved original might be. Each new phrasing, each new riff, is a revelation.

I have just used the word “revelation,” and it points to another characteristic of Cohen’s work: there is a religious undercurrent to it, even when he’s singing about sex (or maybe especially when he’s singing about sex). How he manages to combine the worldly and even the world-weary with the ecstatic and the numinous is a mystery, but his music is permeated with this sense.

Towards the end of the evening it became even more apparent, as he closed the night with encore after encore for the ecstatic crowd that didn’t want to let him go, and then gave them a benediction in farewell. One wonders if there will ever be another Leonard Cohen tour. But one can hope. Meanwhile, the cries of “we love you, Leonard!” rang out from the audience as it said its goodbyes.