Call us when you're ready

We admit to small faults only to persuade others that we have no great ones.
--Maximes, Francois de la Rochefoucauld (1613-80)

And so it is with Chris Matthews' lame apology for his outrageously sexist comments concerning Hillary Clinton and other women involved in politics. Since I'm not a regular viewer of his program (which I've briefly endured only once or twice), I've left it to others to establish that his toxic emissions were not an isolated incident or two. In a letter to Steve Capus, President of NBC News, for example, activist Gloria Steinem and Kim Gandy, President of the National Organization of Women, described the following:

During an appearance on the January 9 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe, Matthews said of Senator Hillary Clinton, “the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around” and that “[s]he didn't win there [New York] on her merits.” Matthews has referred to Clinton as a “she devil,” compared her to a “strip-teaser” and called her “witchy.” He has referred to men who support her as “castratos in the eunuch chorus.” He has suggested Clinton is not “a convincing mom” and said “modern women” like Clinton are unacceptable to “Midwest guys.”

Matthews’ sexism is hardly limited to his comments about Clinton; such rhetoric is just the latest in a string of sexist attacks he has made against prominent female political figures.

[...]

In November 2006, shortly after the Democrats took the majority in Congress, Matthews asked a guest if then-presumptive Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was “going to castrate Steny Hoyer” if Hoyer (D-MD) were elected House Majority Leader.

During coverage of a presidential debate last spring, NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell was compelled to remind Matthews that Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) wife, Michelle, is a Harvard-educated lawyer after he focused obsessively on her physical appearance.

Repetition of epithets like "she devil" and "witchy" tend to have an overwhelming cumulative effect, creating the perception that the "devisive" Clinton is "unelectable" due to the extreme hostility and high negatives that she generates in certain quarters. There's a self-fulfilling quality to these attacks, and deliberately so. Clinton ends of battling against a presumption that at least some of the hysterical response she generates is grounded in real character and political flaws. She is truly the velcro candidate, which makes it all the more improbable that she's in such a strong position after the first round of primaries.

The tricky question is: if Clinton gets an early lock on the nomination, will the Democrats face the same dilemma as they did in 2004? Namely, a problematic candidate who's acceptable to the mainstream of the party but too deeply flawed to win a national election.

Those who claim that Clinton is doomed as a nominee point to her high negatives, including the alleged 40% of voters who say they would never, ever, categorically and under any circumstances, vote for her. But the practical question is always: what's the alternative? Hillary does well in matchups with all GOP candidates, with McCain presenting the greatest threat to her and Obama:

A Jan. 10 national poll by CNN shows Barack Obama has a 55 percent favorability rating, John McCain 54 percent, Hillary Clinton 53 percent, Rudy Giuliani 46 percent, Mike Huckabee 38 percent and Mitt Romney 31 percent...

Somewhat surprisingly, Clinton and Obama would not only win if the election were held today but would win handily against Giuliani, Huckabee or Romney. This same trend is seen when respondents were asked whom they definitely would not vote for in November. While 38 percent gave thumbs down to Obama and 43 percent to Clinton, 52 percent outright rejected Huckabee, 55 percent Giuliani and 62 percent Romney. The one person who wouldn't be overrun by Obama and Clinton is McCain. McCain's "no" votes [sic] the same as Clinton's, and in hypothetical national matchups, he's in a statistical dead heat with both of them.

Voter perceptions of Hillary Clinton are not engraved in bronze, and a serious of dismissive articles and vicious attacks in the mainstream media have had the paradoxical effect of generating sympathy and raising her public stature. And, maybe, producing a narrow victory in New Hampshire.

The folks at Pollster.com, an excellent resource for current polling, have launched their own online survey that, among many other things, asks: "Do you think that America is ready for a female president?" They also ask whether "America is ready for an African American president."

What, exactly, does it mean to be "ready?" It's quite absurd, really, that such questions have to even be asked. The other day, someone asked me whether voters are willing to cast their ballots for a woman or an African American—making it clear that she was quite prepared to do so, but doubted that the majority of her fellow voters could stomach the thought.

On one level, it's a legitimate question: are U.S. voters capable of overcoming their presumed sexist and racist legacies, or will it be another generation or so before the country is mature enough to elect a woman or minority president? Also, do polls accurately reflect voter opinion on such matters? After all, polls suggested that the 2006 Tennessee senate race—in which African American Harold Ford, Jr., was the Democratic candidate—would be a lot closer than it turned out to be. Polls can't adjust for those who are too embarrassed to admit their racist or sexist motivations.

The fundamental problem for Democrats might be their candidate's gender, or race, and not the specific flaws of Clinton or Obama (both of whom are too reflexively centrist for my taste). The Republican attack machine could, and certainly will, make every effort next fall to transform the favorable ratings that Clinton or Obama currently enjoy. We can expect an absolutely vicious assault based on the kind of racial and sexist slurs and innuendo that have only been hinted at so far in national campaigns. Attacks on Clinton will suffer from the law of diminishing returns, since she is already such a known commodity, but we can only imagine what would be inflicted on Obama.

John Edwards is vulnerable on other grounds, of course, including his long career as a trial lawyer and the media's caricature of his compelling grassroots populism. Unfortunately, he seems to have dropped off the radar screen of viable candidates [1], as determined by ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, Fox, The New York Times, The Washington Post and all the other usual suspects. Call it another self-fulfilling prophecy.

Are we "ready" for a president who's not a white male? There's every reason to fear the answer to that question.

NOTES

[1] Full disclosure: As an Oregon resident, I won't be able to vote in a primary until May 20th, when the nominations will probably be locked up. More than forty states vote before then. As a registered Democrat, I would be happy to vote in the general election for any of the declared candidates—including Obama, Edwards and Clinton (and not necessarily in that order). If I had to vote in a primary tomorrow, it would be a very tough choice indeed.

42nd and counting

The latest comparative study on world life expectancy received a lot of attention this week:

"The U.S. has been slipping for decades in international rankings of life expectancies as other countries are improving health care, nutrition and lifestyles, according to the AP/Daily Star. Countries that rank above the U.S. include Japan, most of Europe, Jordan and the Cayman Islands. A U.S. resident born in 2004 has a life expectancy of 77.9 years, placing the U.S. in 42nd place, down from 11th place two decades ago.

"Researchers say the lower U.S. ranking is attributed to the high uninsured rate among the population, in addition to rising obesity rates and racial disparities in life expectancy. Black U.S. residents have a shorter life span, at 73.3 years, than whites. The U.S. also has a high infant mortality rate compared with other industrialized nations, with 40 countries [including Cuba] having lower infant mortality rates than the U.S. in 2004."

In a long editorial on the subject, the New York Times surveyed the life expectancy study and various findings from other recent comparative analyses:

• "The United States ranks dead last on almost all measures of equity because we have the greatest disparity in the quality of care given to richer and poorer citizens. Americans with below-average incomes are much less likely than their counterparts in other industrialized nations to see a doctor when sick, to fill prescriptions or to get needed tests and follow-up care."
• "All other major industrialized nations provide universal health coverage, and most of them have comprehensive benefit packages with no cost-sharing by the patients. The United States, to its shame, has some 45 million people without health insurance and many more millions who have poor coverage. Although the president has blithely said that these people can always get treatment in an emergency room, many studies have shown that people without insurance postpone treatment until a minor illness becomes worse, harming their own health and imposing greater costs."
• "The real barriers here are the costs facing low-income people without insurance or with skimpy coverage. But even Americans with above-average incomes find it more difficult than their counterparts abroad to get care on nights or weekends without going to an emergency room, and many report having to wait six days or more for an appointment with their own doctors."
• "We have known for years that America has a high infant mortality rate, so it is no surprise that we rank last among 23 nations by that yardstick. But the problem is much broader. We rank near the bottom in healthy life expectancy at age 60, and 15th among 19 countries in deaths from a wide range of illnesses that would not have been fatal if treated with timely and effective care. The good news is that we have done a better job than other industrialized nations in reducing smoking. The bad news is that our obesity epidemic is the worst in the world."
• The U.S. performs "poorly in coordinating the care of chronically ill patients, in protecting the safety of patients and in meeting their needs and preferences";
• The U.S. "scored poorly in coordinating the care of chronically ill patients, in protecting the safety of patients, and in meeting their needs and preferences, which drove our overall quality rating down to last place. American doctors and hospitals kill patients through surgical and medical mistakes more often than their counterparts in other industrialized nations."
• "In an eight-country comparison, the United States ranked last in years of potential life lost to circulatory diseases, respiratory diseases and diabetes and had the second highest death rate from bronchitis, asthma and emphysema. Although several factors can affect these results, it seems likely that the quality of care delivered was a significant contributor."
• "Despite the declarations of their political leaders, many Americans hold surprisingly negative views of their health care system. Polls in Europe and North America seven to nine years ago found that only 40 percent of Americans were satisfied with the nation’s health care system, placing us 14th out of 17 countries. In recent Commonwealth Fund surveys of five countries, American attitudes stand out as the most negative, with a third of the adults surveyed calling for rebuilding the entire system, compared with only 13 percent who feel that way in Britain and 14 percent in Canada."
• The widespread negative views "may be because Americans face higher out-of-pocket costs than citizens elsewhere, are less apt to have a long-term doctor, less able to see a doctor on the same day when sick, and less apt to get their questions answered or receive clear instructions from a doctor."
• "Shockingly, despite our vaunted prowess in computers, software and the Internet, much of our health care system is still operating in the dark ages of paper records and handwritten scrawls. American primary care doctors lag years behind doctors in other advanced nations in adopting electronic medical records or prescribing medications electronically. This makes it harder to coordinate care, spot errors and adhere to standard clinical guidelines."

The Times concluded:

"With health care emerging as a major issue in the presidential campaign and in Congress, it will be important to get beyond empty boasts that this country has “the best health care system in the world” and turn instead to fixing its very real defects. The main goal should be to reduce the huge number of uninsured, who are a major reason for our poor standing globally. But there is also plenty of room to improve our coordination of care, our use of computerized records, communications between doctors and patients, and dozens of other factors that impair the quality of care. The world’s most powerful economy should be able to provide a health care system that really is the best."

Another recent study by the Partnership for Prevention reinforces the notion that lack of access to preventive care for the uninsured is a major factor in life expectancy:

Utilization rates remain low for preventive services that are very cost effective and have been recommended for years. Increasing the use of just 5 preventive services would save more than 100,000 lives each year in the United States.

• 45,000 additional lives would be saved each year if we increased to 90 percent the portion of adults who take aspirin daily to prevent heart disease... [Note: Consultation with a doctor is strongly recommended before anyone starts taking maintenance doses of aspirin.]
  
• 42,000 additional lives would be saved each year if we increased to 90 percent the portion of smokers who are advised by a health professional to quit and are offered medication or other assistance. Today, only 28 percent of smokers receive such services.
• 14,000 additional lives would be saved each year if we increased to 90 percent the portion of adults age 50 and older who are up to date with any recommended screening for colorectal cancer. Today, fewer than 50 percent of adults are up to date with screening.
• 12,000 additional lives would be saved each year if we increased to 90 percent the portion of adults age 50 and older immunized against flu annually. Today, 37 percent of adults have had an annual flu vaccination.
• 3,700 additional lives would be saved each year if we increased to 90 percent the portion of women age 40 and older who have been screened for breast cancer in the past 2 years. Today, 67 percent of women have been screened in the past 2 years.

• Breast and cervical cancer screening rates were lower in 2005 compared to five years earlier for every major racial and ethnic group: White, Hispanic, African American and Asian women all experienced declines.

• 30,000 cases of pelvic inflammatory disease would be prevented annually if we increased to 90 percent the portion of sexually active young women who have been screened in the past year for chlamydial infection. Today, 40 percent of young women are being screened annually.

The Partnership for Prevention study found that race and ethnicity are critical variables in access to health care:

In several important areas, use of preventive care among racial and ethnic groups lags behind that of non-Hispanic whites.

Hispanic Americans have lower utilization compared to non-Hispanic whites and African Americans for 10 preventive services.

Hispanic smokers are 55 percent less likely to get assistance to quit smoking from a health professional than white smokers.

Hispanic adults age 50 and older are 39 percent less likely to be up to date on colorectal cancer screening than white adults.

Hispanic adults age 65 and older are 55 percent less likely to have been vaccinated against pneumococcal disease than white adults.

Asian Americans have the lowest utilization of any group for aspirin use as well as breast, cervical and colorectal cancer screening...

Despite higher screening rates among African Americans for colorectal and breast cancer compared to Hispanic and Asian Americans, increasing screening in African Americans would have a bigger impact on their health because they have higher mortality for those conditions.

If the 42 percent of African Americans age 50 and older up-to-date with any recommended screening for colorectal cancer increased to 90 percent, 1,100 additional lives would be saved annually...

The Partnership for Prevention study concludes:

"Low utilization rates for cost-effective preventive services reflect the emphasis that our health care system currently gives to providing acute care. Among the 12 preventive services examined in this report, 7 are being used by about half or less of the people who should be using them. Racial and ethnic minorities are getting even less preventive care than the general U.S. population.

"Expanding the delivery of preventive services of proven value would enable millions of Americans to live longer, healthier, and more fulfilling lives. There is the potential to save 100,000 lives annually by increasing use of just 5 preventive services. It would also lead to more effective use of the nation's resources because the United States would get more value--in terms of premature death and illness avoided--for the dollars it spends on health care services."

Patients often receive "acute care" in hospital emergency rooms because they have no access to preventive care, which is vastly less expensive. A system of effective preventive care would, more importantly, also be more humane.

The Chair of the commission that conducted the Partnership for Prevention study notes that:

"A lot of Americans are not getting live-saving preventive services, particularly racial and ethnic minorities. As a result, too many people are dying prematurely or living with diseases that could have been prevented," said Eduardo Sanchez, MD, MPH, Chair of the National Commission on Prevention Priorities, a blue-ribbon panel convened by Partnership for Prevention to guide the study. "We could get much better value for our health care dollar by focusing upstream on prevention."

Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, added:

"This report illustrates that the health benefits would be great if more people took preventive actions... More illnesses would be avoided, fewer lives would be lost, and there would be more efficient use of our limited health care resources. It's important that all of us make a concerted attempt to focus our energies and efforts on preventing disease, not just treating it."

One of the most common objections to proposals for a national health system is that the U.S. "can't afford" it. Yet quite the opposite is true: the U.S. can no longer afford to support a massive insurance bureaucracy whose primary function is to find reasons for denying coverage to patients for medical treatment.

But access to health care is fundamentally a moral issue (as previously discussed here). Failure to address it results in thousands of avoidable deaths each year and suffering on a scale that would be difficult to document.

Maybe the news isn't all bad: the latest findings on life expectancy actually place the U.S. in a slightly higher position than the CIA's earlier estimate for 2007. On their list, the U.S. had dropped to 47th out of 222 countries.

PHOTO: "Health Care Voter" Dave Peter talks to candidate Dennis Kucinich in Nevada (Flickr).

Geaghan: A homegrown surge

Barack Obama's strengthening candidacy has incited hordes of white racists to discard their inhibitions—if they have any at all—in what Dave Niewert at Orcinus* calls the "new racism." He describes this phenomenon in the following terms:

Today CBSNews.com informed its staff via email that they should no longer enable comments on stories about presidential candidate Barack Obama. The reason for the new policy, according to the email, is that stories about Obama have been attracting too many racist comments.

So far, we have been regaled with the oft-repeated "Hussein" note, the Fox smear of Obama's Muslim background, followed by Limbaugh's astonishing riff on "Barack the Magic Negro". That these reflect a barely concealed racial animus mixed with general white xenophobia should be obvious, and notably, these are all occurring on a national scale, within ostensibly mainstream media sources.

For right-wing audiences, cues like this signal just how far they can take things themselves. So on the public level, the result of this kind of talk is a regular outpouring of old-fashioned racist bile, permission having been granted by leading right-wing voices.

Niewert continues:

This resurgent racism likes to cloak itself in the pretense of rebellious individualism standing up to the oppression of overbearing "political correctness," or else in academic-sounding terms that fling about misinformation regarding the sciences and sociology to construct a pseudo-rationale for what they euphemistically like to call "race realism."

But pull the cloak aside, and the same old, decrepit racism of a century ago is there, festering like a decaying zombie who refuses to die.

And as the summer goes on, and the presidential campaign picks up steam, and Obama solidifies his already formidable position as a front runner ... well, expect to see a lot more of those zombies crawling the streets of our public discourse.

Or, as I wrote last month in reference to the Imus controversy:

Imus is part of a nauseating (and apparently growing) cultural phenomenon founded on an in-your-face racism, sexism and homophobia that proudly flaunt what they call their "political incorrectness." In reality, "politically incorrect" is nothing more a euphemism for language and symbols that are meant to hurt other people, especially minorities and women. When someone objects, they're accused of being "hypersensitive" and urged to get over it.

And we still have eighteen months until the election. If either Clinton or Obama emerges as a nominee, it's hard to imagine how deep the effluent will get between now and then.

Meanwhile, Harvard has put together an online test (the Implicit Association Test) intended to evaluate whether a person has an automatic preference for one race over another. It's free and takes about 10 minutes. While I have some questions for the assumptions and utility of the test as designed, here are the results for the "European American - African American IAT:"


The most important result: 70% of the respondents had a preference for whites that ranged from "slight" to "strong." 54% had a "moderate" or "strong" preference for whites. About 12% showed a "slight" to "strong" preference for blacks, or about the same percentage as African Americans in the U.S. population. Less than one out of five people had "no preference."

The results could be significant, since 732,881 people took the IAT between 2000 and 2006. But who chooses to take these tests, and why? I suspect that overt racists would be less likely to take it, but the data still reflects a 70% preference for whites.

It's not too surprising that people would have a "preference" for those of their own "race" (whatever that is). Still, it's hard to believe that this is a healthy condition in a very diverse society.

NOTES

*Thanks to Digby at Hullabaloo for the link to Orcinus.

NOTE: There are many other types of IAT's available at Harvard's site.


PHOTO: Sens. Barack Obama and Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) tour a Russian base where mobile missiles were being destroyed as part of the Nunn-Lugar program.

Geaghan: Sunday Snippets from the paper of record

Since she began writing a regular column for the New York Times in 1995, Maureen Dowd's career has been distinguished by an almost indiscriminate series of personal hit pieces on everyone from the Clintons to Al Gore to the Bush dynasty and, this week, Paul Wolfowitz. Her name has even become a verb in some quarters, as in "to dowdify." If she has ever written a kind word about anyone in politics, I must have missed it. (I readily admit, however, that there may be few reasons to write anything positive about our political classes.)

Wolfowitz, the neocon who played a central role in selling and quickly botching the Iraq war, is now embroiled in a scandal involving nepotism, among other things, in his new gig as president of the World Bank. As with Iraq, he seems incapable of recognizing his mistakes. Dowd, as she often does, skewers her target nicely:

Like W., Wolfie is dangerous precisely because he’s so persuaded of his own virtue.

Not surprisingly, people who are so convinced of their own infallibility can do no wrong and are not bound by the same limitations (including the law) that constrain the rest of us. Or so they believe.

Meanwhile, Frank Rich's columns can be equally (and appropriately) devastating for his subjects, except he frequently transcends personal vilification and shifts his focus to the culture at large. In today's column, for example, he explores the fallout from last week's firing of Don Imus by CBS:

The biggest cliché of the debate so far is the constant reiteration that this will be a moment for a national “conversation” about race and sex and culture. Do people really want to have this conversation, or just talk about having it? If they really want to, it means we have to ask ourselves why this debacle has given permission to talking heads on television to repeat Imus’s offensive words so insistently that cable news could hardly take time out to note the shocking bombing in the Baghdad Green Zone...

If we really want to have this conversation, it also means we have to have a nonposturing talk about hip-hop lyrics, “Borat,” “South Park” and maybe Larry David, too.

Though we've been hearing rumors about a national "conversation" on racism for decades, it's not happening now and won't even begin unless our political, cultural or religious leaders are willing to confront some very difficult questions about both our history and current social realities.

Instead, we're seeing a sustained reaction against "political correctness" and "victimology" that's analogous to, and part of, the opposition to feminism documented by Susan Faludi in 1991 in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1).

That reaction is based on a simple premise: women, blacks and other minorities may have had some legitimate complaints about systematic discrimination in the past, but American society has evolved towards greater equality. So their litany of complaints is entirely out of proportion to current realities and, thanks to programs like affirmative action, serves only to victimize the white majority (and especially white males). As long as that all-too-convenient perception exists, any "conversation" will be impossible or, at best, unproductive.

The right has added its own variation on this theme: the inequality of African Americans is the result of years of paternalistic federal programs created by Democratic administrations and congresses. These programs have created an unhealthy dependency that has prevented blacks from taking initiatives that might allow them to enter and thrive in the free-market system. As the inflammatory Dinesh D'Souza once wrote, "the American obsession with race is fueled by a civil rights establishment that has a vested interest in perpetuating black dependency" (4).

The reasons for the backlash? Faludi's comments in a 1999 interview still seem valid today:

Look, it's hardly a time of great jubilation for anyone. But it's much harder for men in many respects because they have this feeling that women are rising just as men are falling. The truth is, of course, that women are moving from the subbasement to the basement. By any objective measure -- pay, representation in boardrooms, status -- men are still ahead. But psychologically it's much harder to fall than to climb, even if you land at a higher point than those who are just beginning to rise.

By most measures, of course, African Americans haven't experienced even the limited social and economic mobility that Faludi describes for women (2). Until we have our national "conversation," that reality seems unlikely to change.

NOTES

(1) Followed by Faludi's Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man in 1999.

(2) The scope of the problem, contrary to popular perceptions about minority preferences in hiring, was revealed by a 2003 study conducted by researchers from MIT and the University of Chicago. They submitted a large number of job applications that were substantially the same in terms of education and prior experience, but they differed in one respect: half the "applicants" had names that "sounded" African American. Those applicants were 50% less likely to be invited in for interviews, and the percentage was even lower for better paying, more responsible positions. [See also this article by Tim Wise and our posting on the U.S. "Punishment Culture."]

(3) In a January posting, we attempted to apply the academic construct known, awkwardly, as "cultural pseudosubspeciation" to Iraq. That concept has equal application to racial, ethnic and gender relations in the U.S. and elsewhere. Our friend Ellis at Disambiguation (which has been far too quiet of late) has privately expressed some disagreement with our use of that notion. Maybe we can elicit a comment from him, or our hordes of readers, on this subject.

(4) In his lengthy analysis of race relations in The End of Racism (1996), D'Souza also wrote: "Activists recommend federal jobs programs and recruitment into the private sector. Yet it seems unrealistic, bordering on the surreal, to imagine underclass blacks with their gold chains, limping walk, obscene language, and arsenal of weapons doing nine-to-five jobs at Procter and Gamble or the State Department."

PHOTO: The gleaming new headquarters of the New York Times, designed by Renzo Piano, on 8th Avenue in Manhattan.

Geaghan: Empty heads at MSNBC

Don Imus has outdone himself, yet again one more time ad nauseum, as you can readily see from Wednesday's entry on the indispensible Media Matters site. He referred to Rutgers' women's basketball team, with its eight African American and two white players, as "some nappy-headed hos." I was tempted to embed the YouTube footage of Imus' blather in this post, but for some reason my hand trembled uncontrollably each time I tried to do it. (You can see it at Media Matters, along with a revealing account of recent similar statements by Imus and others on his show.) Imus has apologized for his "stupid" comment, predictably, after receiving a flood of free publicity for his disturbingly popular show.

Imus is part of a nauseating (and apparently growing) cultural phenomenon founded on an in-your-face racism, sexism and homophobia that proudly flaunt what they call their "political incorrectness." In reality, "politically incorrect" is nothing more a euphemism for language and symbols that are meant to hurt other people, especially minorities and women. When someone objects, they're accused of being "hypersensitive" and urged to get over it.

PHOTO: Tennessee's Candance Parker claims the net after her team beat Rutgers for the NCAA women's title by a score of 59-46 on April 3rd.

UPDATE (4/9/07): Digby at Hullabaloo hosts an interesting discussion on this question: is it better to ignore the Imuses and Limbaughs of the media world? My view: confront them, ideally without too many histrionics, which can damage credibility. Ignoring them won't work, as Kerry proved with the Swift Boat slanders. I like the variation on Voltaire that goes: "I may disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death my right to ridicule you."

Not responding would only encourage them and, even worse, likely be considered an admission that they're right.