Equality Deferred: What Happened in the Proposition 8 Vote
ON MAY 16, 2008 the California Supreme Court struck down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. The ink hadn’t yet dried on the landmark decision when opponents filed an initiative, Proposition 8, to appear on the November 2008 ballot that would amend the state’s constitution to read: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”
But it didn’t dim the celebration because no one seriously thought it would pass. Not here in California; not now in 2008; not our neighbors, our friends, our allies in a hund... More
Beauty and Justice: Van Gogh at the MoMA
2008 has been a year of blockbuster art shows at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the New York show that promises to be the most memorable of 2008 is no blockbuster. It is the Museum of Modern Art’s “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night.” With just 23 paintings and nine drawings hung in six small galleries, the van Gogh show is so small that MoMA uses special tickets to limit the number of people allowed in at one time.
Fifty years before van Gogh began doing his night paintings, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in the opening chapter of Nature: “If the stars should ap... More
Bull Session with Rahm Emanuel
WHEN I was a senior at Sarah Lawrence College in 1978, I kept hearing things about this new kid named Rahm Emanuel. People were talking about him as some sort of big man on campus.
I met him just once, during a late-night bull session about politics at the Pub, a campus student center. The drinking age back then was eighteen, and the Pub served beer, so it was probably a beer-fueled bull session.
We had a gifted group of students at the time and the conversations tended to be pretty interesting. Among the people I was pallin’ around with were Ira Kaplan, who went on to... More
The Day After: Obama and China
OBAMA-MANIA IS gripping much of the world, and there are high hopes that an Obama presidency will restore faith in the American dream. In China, that dream was crushed by tanks in Tiananmen Square nearly two decades ago. Can Obama bring it back?
What we can say here in Beijing is that Obama’s victory hasn’t killed off the dream. As one graduate student in my department put it shortly before the election, “If Obama loses this game, I don’t know what I will say about democracy.” He was thrilled with Obama’s victory, drawing the implication that the change of guard shows “the importan... More
The Day After: It's Been a Long Time Coming
IN DOROTHY B. Hughes’s 1963 suspense novel The Expendable Man, a young doctor drives from Los Angeles to Phoenix for his niece’s wedding. Along the way he picks up a teenage hitchhiker. Though he never makes an untoward gesture, he quickly becomes anxious to be free of her and eventually stakes her bus ticket and meal and drops her at a Greyhound station. She turns up murdered and the police come to question him, but the paranoia that we think is troubling him—that of an adult man giving a ride to a teenage girl—turns out to be rooted in something very different.
... More
The Day After: Beginning Again
NOW WE need to know what kind of a president he will be. Watching returns with my wife, younger daughter and grandchildren in a Greenwich Village apartment, I wept with relief when it became clear that Obama had won—because of the high hopes riding on his candidacy and the sense of desolation and demoralization that would have followed on his defeat. Though the community-organizing style of his campaign suggested to many people that we were watching the birth of a social movement, I suspect that what we have seen is very different: a charismatic candidacy whose charisma would not have survi... More
The Day After: 1964
IN THE television coverage of Barack Obama’s electoral victory, pollsters and strategists kept invoking an unexpected year: 1964. This was the pier that number-crunchers threw a line to in an effort to anchor Obama’s election to the recent American past. In coming days, they promised, a thorough breakdown of voting numbers would reveal what had really happened, how voting patterns had gone, and whether a historic realignment had occurred. But in the midst of qualifications and presentiments a kind of intuitive connection seemed available to these specialists that the rest of us ... More
The Day After: Overwhelming
WHO WOULD pretend not to be overwhelmed? In the world of ordinary politics, of actions planned and executed in the normal system, there is nothing to compare it to.
Since 1968, the Republican Party has believed that the White House belongs by right to a Republican. The presidencies of Carter and Clinton were marred not just by the usual efforts of opposition, but by efforts of delegitimation of a peculiar virulence. It will take all of Barack Obama’s wit and resourcefulness to command the fair hearing that is owed to the side that has won its innings.
Yet it seems poss... More
The Day After: Yes We Can!
FIREWORKS CRACK in the distance and silent tears stream down my cheeks and those of my electrified group of friends in Asheville, North Carolina, who have gathered to mark this extraordinary moment in American history. Barack Obama is the 44th president of the United States.
North Carolina, the last state in the southeast to declare a winner, has transformed its political identity by endorsing a Democrat for the first time since 1976. In this year’s election season, North Carolina teetered from red to blue, leaving its precious delegates in the balance in a brutal race ... More
The Day After: Caveats First
THE DUTIFUL caveats first. Let’s get them out of the way: Yes, Senator Joe Biden helped craft and pass one of the most loathsome pieces of class legislation since Walpole’s Black Act of 1724 and is the darling of the extraordinarily predatory credit card industry. Wall Street has given Obama’s campaign three times as many contributions greater than $25,000 than it has given McCain’s. It seems safe to assume that a candidate whose chief economic advisers hail from either the University of Chicago or Goldman Sachs is not going to be the most radical economic reformer we have ever ... More
The Day After: Relief
NOT UNTIL 9:30 p.m., when NBC declared that Barack Obama had taken Ohio, did I allow myself to feel that he was going to win the election. But it was not joy that I felt, so much as relief, when at 11:00 p.m. the networks announced that Barack Obama had gotten the electoral majority he needed. The what-if-he-loses scenarios that had been running in my head since summer (and led me to avoid friends’ election parties) made joy seem frivolous—too close to cheering in church.
Even as the October polls showed Obama pulling ahead, I was apprehensive ab... More
The Day After: Don't Gloat, Organize
BLACK AMERICANS’ struggle to share fully in the American republic’s promises and challenges is the most powerful epic of unrequited love in the history of the world. Barack Obama’s election last night didn’t bring that epic to a close, but it did signal something very new—new not only about Obama, but new also in what’s around him.
That was evident in his magisterial dignity in reaching out not just to those who rejoiced and wept but also to those who were disoriented and in despair over his color or his politics—or both. Can we who supporte... More
The Day After: A Renewed Sense of Vision
“LIBERALISM,” Lionel Trilling wrote, “is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” Sadly, much has changed since Trilling wrote this in his 1950 The Liberal Imagination. The past half century has not only seen a decline in liberalism—as both a political and intellectual force—but also the rise of a potent and influential conservative movement that helped launch and sustain the presidencies of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush. We are not living in a l... More
The Day After: A Liberal Movement, If We Can Keep It
AMONG MY memories of this remarkable campaign, what stands out most is the day I spent canvassing for Barack Obama with two teenaged African-American sisters from South Indianapolis. I met them in early May just before the Indiana primary in the sprawling townships of Decatur and Perry, named for once-famous admirals in the War of 1812.
The young women and their mother were the only black residents I saw anywhere in the area. The townships were a bastion of Hillary Clinton voters and of Christian conservatives. In one week there, I spent more time debating about abortion than I have... More
The Day After: Keep Obama Accountable
ON ELECTION Day 2004, I worked on a get-out-the-vote drive for John Kerry in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. After a long day, the polls had closed, and I started my drive home to Brooklyn, listening to electoral returns on the car radio. Early signs were good. Passing through New Jersey, when the announcer declared Pennsylvania a win for Kerry, I felt satisfied with having contributed in a small way to a victory. But by the time I was crossing Staten Island, the electoral count had started to sour. I began listening to the best of the 80s and 90s, only periodically flipping back to the news fo... More
The Day After: I Was There
IN THE early evening opposite Grant Park, the mood was light and happy, no exuberant throngs yet, but gaggles of bumptious teenagers, women pushing strollers, families and couples strolling along Michigan Avenue. In the last few unseasonably benign days, Barack Obama’s incredible luck stretched to the weather.
Chicago is not a theatrical city; so there were none of the street perorations, or miming of strong feelings, or extravagantly ironic banter you’d get in a New York crowd on the edge of something momentous. Midwesterners tend to see politics as a private preference, not ... More
The Day After: Nothing's the Matter With Kansas
IN THE 24 hours since the networks declared Barack Obama the 44th president of the United States, one storyline has washed away all others: our joy, individual and collective, in the historic election of our first black president.
Gone, suddenly, were all those campaign-trail arguments and analyses
about which we spent untold hours typing out tortured email messages,
half-baked blog posts, and bickering rejoinders. The swiftness with which this grand symbolic victory over race prejudice displaced once-consuming controversies was bracing because it underscored how ready m... More
The Day After: Signs of a More Perfect Union
MY FAMILY and friends were eager to see me go. They were starting to call me Scrooge. The more I heard of a landslide in the election, the more I wanted evidence. The more smiles, pats on the back, and thumbs up I got at the pick-up gatherings outside my children’s school or from neighbors in our elevator, the more I snarled for proof, some tangible sign that this election would be different.
Projections and good cheer weren’t working for me. New York, where I live and work, wasn’t working for me either. So I hit the road at four in the morning on Election Day, bound for Wynnefield,... More
The Day After: Obama and the Middle East
IN THE past six months, the Gallup World Poll found voters in 71 of 73 countries preferring Barack Obama to John McCain. But recently Obama’s support has been at its lowest in Arab- and Muslim-dominated countries, where most respondents indicated they expected U.S. relations with the world to remain unchanged. Conventional wisdom among many Arab and Muslim commentators suggests that they believe that Obama’s foreign policy will represent a continuation of the last eight years.
This skepticism is unwarranted—seriously unwarranted—I believe. The historic election of Obama as Ame... More
Why Rising Test Scores May Not Equal Increased Student Learning
When state test scores go up, teachers and administrators often breathe a sigh of relief that their schools will not be declared failing under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Others feel the satisfaction that funding for their public schools, which is such a large part of their states’ budget, appears to be well spent and there is an increased likelihood of having an educated work force to meet their community’s future economic needs. The positive feelings associated with rising test scores are based on our interpretation about what that increase in scores means. A rise in state, distr... More
