Month: November 2011

Wait for it:

Frank Pasquale itemizes the many reasons he thinks it is:

Must a conservative suspect all government, or merely the ossified and corrupt Washington of today? Perhaps the former view is a hallmark of actually existing conservatism. But to consign government programs like Medicare, Social Security, and the EPA to the scrapheap of history would itself be more the province of radicalism than conservatism. Thus one final sense of the conservatism of OWS is the protesters' insistence on the endurance of a social contract that emerged in the New Deal. If conservatism is to be more than a categorical rejection of collective action, it has to articulate something worth conserving. OWS, at its best, does that.

Indeed it does. Of course the left is, currently, in part a conservative force. They are resisting radical change: the privatization of social security, de-regulation of the financial sector, globalization of finance and labor, the explosion of lobbying and crony capitalism since the last real tax reform in 1986. They are hippies for the era of Eisenhower! Which is a little mind-blowing when put so starkly.

The words GOP voters used to describe Herman Cain's latest ad:

Reality TV stars:

While Kim and Kris may now be without love, they won't be without money. The two-part, four-hour television event and subsequent sale of wedding photos earned them an estimated $18 million — or $250,000 per day from the wedding to the divorce filing.

To put the 72-day marriage in perspective, Buzzfeed made a list of things that lasted longer than Kim Kardashian's marriage to Kris Humphries.

His positions are what you would expect from someone whose political identity has been formed in the fever swamps of Fox and talk radio. I.e.: the Palestinians do not exist as a people; the US should support any Israeli government in any circumstance because the two divinely exceptionalist countries are indistinguishable; the West Bank settlements, far from being frozen or dismantled, should be aggressively expanded on Biblical principles. The combination of neocon fanaticism with evangelical literalism means that Israel does not just have a special relationship – it is the United States, as far as the GOP is now concerned.

And what on earth is an American candidate doing giving an interview to a foreign newspaper, deriding his own president as "weak" and backing the foreign government over his own? (A foreign newspaper owned, I might add, by an American). This has now become so routine for the Likudnik GOP we don't notice how offensive this, how, if a Democratic candidate addressed a foreign country in order to foil his own president's foreign policy, we'd never hear the end of it.

But then, increasingly, Israel-Palestine is no longer a foreign policy question for the GOP. It's a domestic question, related primarily to how to channel religious devotion, and to demonstrate one's own theological cred. Like running for office in Tunisia.

There's one other facet of George Will's eruption of dyspepsia at Mitt Romney on Sunday that's worth noting. Conor is right that it was a nihilist column, with no real endorsement of anyone else. But what I also notice was the initial credentializing Obama attack:

Obama, a floundering naif who thinks ATMs aggravate unemployment, is bewildered by a national tragedy of shattered dreams, decaying workforce skills and forgone wealth creation.

Let's first note what this "floundering naif" has handled since arriving in the Oval Office: the worst recession since the 1930s, a mass revolt in the Arab world, a nuclear threat from Iran, two wars we had lost or were losing, a debt that, even if he had done nothing, would have been record-breaking, a global and domestic economy in the midst of tectonic changes. Let's assume the worst: that the stimulus only stopped the bleeding; that our influence in the Arab world had been decimated and he has not been able to turn it around, that healthcare and financial reform were too compromised by Congressional cooptation of them, that he has dropped the ball on tax reform.

I think you can make all sorts of legitimate criticisms, but none of them make Obama a "floundering naif". Compared with Bush on 9/11? Compared with Clinton's first chaotic two years? A man with Clinton, Gates, Panetta and Petraeus on his team? And note Will's only evidence for this is that Obama "thinks ATMs aggravate unemployment". But when you look up the source of that, you find Obama was only using an example of how technology and automation is indeed wiping out whole sectors of employment with dizzying speed. Does Will think that automatic banking at ATMs or online has created employment? Does he have a proposal for tackling mass unemployment at a time of technological acceleration that is wiping out job after job?

I'm still waiting for a truly interesting or cogent critique of what Obama has done wrong from the right. A critique that intelligently cites the historical context in which this poor fucker is working. Here is the "floundering naif"'s Inaugural address:

Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land — a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time…

With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come.

Naif? Really? He never saw this coming?

A reader quotes me:

He really had no idea that his own organization had arranged compensation in the five figures to two women claiming harassment? So who did authorize this? And how did it get by Cain himself? Was he that off-hand a manager?

Do you realize the conflict of interest involved in directing a company to make settlement on case in which you are personally a plaintiff?  Wouldn't happen in the real world. And I don't know the specifics of this case, so I can't tell if his lack of knowledge in terms of the amount is credible or not, but such a scenario is not unheard of.

I now understand that. A lawyer backs that up:

Under Title VII, the federal law that governs sexual harassment claims, any individual alleging harassment can only sue her or his employer – not the individual that allegedly committed the action. The individual harasser has no role in process except as a "witness."

A claims coordinator lends her expertise:

Most employers buy insurance for harassment claims. Once the insurance company gets the claim they will interview the parties involved and start an investigation. At that point the employee that has been charged with harassment will likely be out of loop. The insurance company and their lawyers will deal directly with the claimants and their attorney. Any settlement would be up to the insurance company. As a reader pointed out, a lot of claims are settled with little or no evidence of wrong doing. This is due to the fact that it costs a lot of money to go to trial, so insurance companies settle whether than go to court.

So, Cain should know if allegations were made against him. But he may not know what if any outcomes of those allegations as the insurance company makes all settlement decisions as per policy language.

Another lawyer:

It is certainly true, as the management-side lawyer asserts, that the simple fact of payment to settle the charges against Mr. Cain do not establish that he did whatever he was accused of doing – or, if he did do it, that his conduct amounted to sexual harassment as defined by law (and I say all that as a lawyer, a liberal, and a strong feminist).  It's also normal for there to be a confidentiality provision as part of such the settlement. 

But a key point was missed in the discussion: the Politico piece reported that the National Restaurant Association "gave [the women] payouts to leave the association."  If the story is accurate, this strikes me as an acknowledgement that something more was going on here than "baseless" claims that the association decided, for business reasons, should be settled for a smallish sum in order to avoid the costs of litigation.  That is, instead of changing the women's job duties such that they didn't have to come into contact with Cain - a prudent and common response by employers in these situations, even where the claims are baseless - or settling the claims for cash and allowing the women to continue in their positions, the parties decided that the best option was for the women *to give up their jobs*. 

Absent some information that the women were troublemakers before bringing these charges such that the association would want to push them out before causing even more headaches, it seems to me that the benefit of the doubt should be given to the women's claims at this point.  If the Politico story is wrong and the women left of their own volition, the implication is no better (and probably worse), as it means that two women independently determined that what they experienced was serious enough that they needed to leave their chosen jobs, because it was clear the boss wasn't going anywhere.

Of course, the drip-drip-drip nature of Cain's changing positions only adds more support to the Politico story.  In less than 24 hours, Cain moved from a flat denial that any sexual harassment charges were lodged against him, to having a "vague" recollection of some charges against him, to a specific memory of a specific gesture he made towards one of the women that he claims was determined to be baseless - implying that the woman's remaining claims had some plausible basis in fact. (And it seems to me that if Cain is now talking about some of the charges against him, he has opened the door to the women coming forward to discuss the charges.)

I don't know what happened, but one thing is certain: while Cain will not get the nomination for many good reasons independent of this story, he and his followers now have the perfect excuse for his inevitable failure in the primaries. It won't be because the lack of any campaign organization shows that he had no plans of running a serious presidential campaign, or that his tax plan made no sense financially or politically, or because he used campaign funds to buy his own books and put the profits in his own pockets, or that his abortion position is both inconsistent and incoherent (not to mention cruel), or, as we are just learning, that funds may have been illegally spent for his benefit before his campaign began. 

No, it will be because he is the victim of a liberal media (Politico??) on a "witch hunt" to dredge up that old liberal saw of sexual harassment charges, which, as we know, are always unfounded. Sigh.

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com

Update: Readers offer their book recommendations on our Facebook page.

You'd think she'd be needed at a moment like this. But Gloria Cain, thus far absent from her husband's campaign, will soon meet the press "in an exclusive interview that we are currently planning and anticipating." Alex Pappas tried to profile her last spring:

It’s hard to find much of anything about Gloria Cain on the Internet. Her only mention on Herman Cain’s campaign website is in his biography, where he says, "the paramount joys in my life are my wife, Gloria, our children and our grandchildren." "She’s very private and classy,” said Martha Zoller, a Georgia-based talk radio host who often talks about Cain, but admitted she’s only met his wife once.

Cain said his wife is a native of Atlanta who graduated from Morris Brown College in 1968. He graduated from Morehouse College in 1967. "One month after she graduated from college, I swept her off her feet — we knew each other — and we got married a month later," he said. They have a 39-year-old daughter and 33-year-old son. They also have three grandchildren. Though she has worked as a teacher and a librarian, Cain says his wife — who sings in the choir at Antioch Baptist Church North in Atlanta — has been a homemaker for most of their marriage.

GOP consultant Anthony Del Pellegrino underscores the need for Gloria's presence right now:

[P]olitics is much like a courtroom. A prosecutor may reveal a point that can plant a seed of doubt in the mind of those in the jury but the Judge may ask the juror to disregard those remarks. Does anyone believe that those remarks are erased from the jurors minds? If you do, you are not very realistic. The same thing applies in politics.