Year: 2013

He’s one of those slimy, oily, back-slapping, money-grubbing pols that creep me out. He doesn’t even have the Clinton charm. And yet he’s ahead:

Republican Ken Cuccinelli goes into today’s gubernatorial election in Virginia expected to lose to Democrat Terry McAullife, a man who almost missed the birth of a child to attend a fundraiser and once downed shots of Puerto Rican rum on morning television. The Most Quoted Man in Washington, University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato, has summed up the election as two people “running against the only people they could beat”—and Cuccinelli, well, couldn’t.

Why?

His answer:

[Cuccinelli] chose the campaign path that offered the most resistance from 21st-century constituencies. For instance, already vulnerable to suggestions he was overly involved in people’s bedroom activities (he’d sent an volunteer to monitor a George Mason University sex fair and said the state should regulate gay sex), he opted to set up a website to advocate for the restoration of the state’s sodomy law, which was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003. And critically, given the extension of the franchise to women just 93 years ago, McAuliffe was able to target Cuccinelli for supporting transvaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions because Cuccinelli supports transvaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions.

Cuccinelli is a reactionary theocon of the Catholic variety, a type gently reprimanded by the current Pope. Par exemple:

My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that. … They don’t comport with natural law. I happen to think that it represents (to put it politely; I need my thesaurus to be polite) behavior that is not healthy to an individual and in aggregate is not healthy to society.

Myra Adams notes the huge gender divide in the Virginia race:

Women are McAuliffe’s key to victory. According to a recent Washington Post poll, there is not just a gender gap but a gender canyon, with McAuliffe trumping Cuccinelli 58 to 34 percent with women voters. Cuccinelli is opposed to abortion and holds traditional views on gay marriage and contraception. The McAuliffe campaign has successfully labeled him as an extremist.

Enten’s analysis of the race:

McAuliffe’s success has largely depended on Republican candidate Ken Cuccinelli being even more disliked. Sound familiar? It should, because a very similar battle is going on for the 2014 midterms. Democrats are trying to break a stretch of the White House party losing or winning fewer than 10 seats in the House of Representatives – a stretch that dates back to the civil war. They need to take 17 seats to win back the House.

Right now, Democrats are ahead on the national House ballot by about four points among likely 2014 voters. As in Virginia, it’s all about being less ugly. President Obama’s approval rating is bad, but Republican approval ratings are worse. The fact that voters in Virginia are disobeying the longer term election after the presidential race trend should have national Republicans at least somewhat worried.

Update from a reader:

Here are two things that are very interesting about the VA governor race. The first is that it is very focused. McAuliffe is using his DNC knowledge about microtargetting to his maximum advantage. With me being an immigrant, my wife is the only voter in our household. The only gubernatorial stuff we’ve got in the mail is stuff on women’s rights. Nothing on jobs, nothing on health care – only women’s rights. Cuccinelli has sent us nothing, even though we got plenty of mail from our Republican Delegate. He even showed up at her polling station this morning.

Second, and perhaps more important, McAuliffe has masterfully succeeded to stay focused on the issues, not on his personality – which is a loser for him. And even more interesting, McAuliffe has come out swinging as a true Democrat. Pro-Obamacare. Pro-choice. Pro-gay. Pro-transit. And: pro-compromising – he will likely face a Republican House of Delegates, while the separately-elected lieutenant-governor will break the tie in the Senate.

Normally, Democrats who want to win in Virginia pose as centrists – see Warner and Kaine – to get elected. McAuliffe will entirely win on Obamacare and women’s issues – and sheer disgust of Cuccinelli.

(Photo: Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe passes a campaign flyer to three-year-old Ozzie Springer of Centerville, Virginia, as he greets commuters on Election Day at Vienna/Fairfax-GMU Metro Station in Fairfax, Virginia. By Alex Wong/Getty Images.)

Let’s go to Kentucky, a deep red state which has nonetheless set up one of the best systems for getting health insurance for the poor. We have heard an awful lot of gripes from those with insurance on the individual market, and those with Cadillac-style plans who have been forced to adjust. But the people we haven’t yet truly seen or heard are those getting affordable insurance for the first time in their lives. Maybe I’m a squish, but this report from the NYT helped put some of the political cock-fighting into perspective:

The woman, a thin 61-year-old who refused to give her name, citing privacy concerns, had come to the public library here to sign up for health insurance through Kentucky’s new online exchange. She had a painful lump on the back of her hand and other health problems that worried her deeply, she said, but had been unable to afford insurance as a home health care worker who earns $9 an hour.

Within a minute, the system checked her information and flashed its conclusion on Ms. Cauley’s laptop: eligible for Medicaid. The woman began to weep with relief. Without insurance, she said as she left, “it’s cheaper to die.”

What price can you put on that? Or on this:

So far, [insurance agent Donald Mucci] has enrolled just a few longtime customers in exchange plans. They include Mrs. Shields, 49, a widow who had been rejected by insurance companies because she has diabetes. She is paying $745 a month for coverage through a program for people with pre-existing conditions, but the program will end in January.

Mrs. Shields, who has an annual income of about $17,000, qualified for a monthly premium subsidy of $232 a month. With Mr. Mucci’s help, she chose a silver-tier plan offered by Anthem that has a $2,450 deductible and a $4,500 out-of-pocket maximum. She will pay a monthly premium of $151 after the subsidy.Mr. Mucci said he would get a commission of $18 from the transaction. Before the health care law, he said, he would typically receive a lot more.

“Is it a win?” he said. “For Judy, it sure is.”

At the core of this technocratic edifice is something quite simple: the lifting of intense anxiety, the restoration of personal dignity, the chance to live better and longer, the opportunity to be free of physical pain. In the end, though I remain skeptical about whether the ACA is the best possible solution to the plight of those in such need, it is the only solution at hand. I want it to work. And I find the brutal attacks on it to be devoid of any true sense of what it feels to be alone and sick and terrified.

(Photo: Affordable Care Act navigator Adrian Madriz (R) speaks with Lourdes Duenas, who is looking for health insurance, during a navigation session put on by the Epilepsy Foundation Florida to help people sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act on October 8, 2013 in Miami, Florida. By Joe Raedle/AFP/Getty.)

Yesterday, Congressman Mike Michaud, the frontrunner for governor of Maine, came out:

I wasn’t surprised to learn about the whisper campaigns, insinuations and push-polls some of the people opposed to my candidacy have been using to raise questions about my personal life. They want people to question whether I am gay.

Allow me to save them the trouble with a simple, honest answer: “Yes I am. But why should it matter?”

That may seem like a big announcement to some people. For me, it’s just a part of who I am, as much as being a third-generation mill worker or a lifelong Mainer. One thing I do know is that it has nothing to do with my ability to lead the state of Maine.

Mark Joseph Stern thinks that “Michaud’s announcement isn’t likely to sink him—or boost him”:

In 2012, Maine voters approved same-sex marriage, with 53 percent of voters on board, in a historic statewide referendum. (Mainers still support marriage equality by that same margin.) Most of the “no” votes on the referendum came from Michaud’sconservative-leaning congressional district, the second most rural in America, while the “yes” votes sprang mostly from the urban, coastal pockets in the state’s 1st Congressional District. That shouldn’t be a problem for Michaud: In the governor’s race, the congressman will be vying for these urban votes in addition to his home district’s votes. These pro-gay votes are likely to outweigh any anti-gay votes from Maine’s rural interior.

If Michaud’s sexuality won’t be a problem for him, it almost certainly will be for Maine’s current Tea Party-backed Gov. Paul LePage. LePage, a social conservative, is known for his churlish ad libs, including a possible anal rape joke about a Democratic state senator.

Keith Wagstaff adds:

[R]oughly one third of America still wouldn’t vote for a candidate who was openly gay. The trend, however, is clear: Americans are more willing to accept LGBT politicians now than they ever have been before. Michaud is betting that those changing attitudes will send him to the governor’s mansion in Maine. Other potential Senate and gubernatorial candidates in the LGBT community will be watching closely.

A reader writes:

While Stanley Milgram may have misled us, in science, the question is whether the results can be replicated. So isn’t the real question whether Milgram’s thesis was replicated in later studies? Like this one, for instance. Or this one. Of course, there have been attempts to replicate Milgram that challenged the results, but narratives like the one posted seem to perpetuate the notion that one experiment gives us a scientific conclusion, just as the notion that finding errors in an experiment debunks the conclusion. The results come in the process of replication or failure to replicate results. The deeper flaw was that we took one experiment to be the authoritative word on a question, instead of seeing it as one piece of a puzzle.

Another reader:

I’m a social psychologist, so I have some background in the substance of Milgram studies. I’ve not read Gina Perry’s book, but I’ve heard her talk about it and I’ve been extremely unimpressed by her take on the meaning of the research. One example of a thoughtful response to Perry’s book is this review by Carol Tavris:

“Deep down, something about Milgram makes us uneasy,” Ms. Perry writes. There is indeed something that makes everyone uneasy: the evidence that situations have power over our behavior. This is a difficult message, and most Americans have trouble accepting it. “I would never have pulled those levers!” we cry. “I would have told that experimenter where to go!” Ms. Perry insists that people’s personalities and histories influence their actions. But Milgram never disputed that fact; his own research found that many participants resisted. “There is a tendency to think that everything a person does is due to the feelings or ideas within the person,” Milgram wrote. “However, scientists know that actions depend equally on the situation in which a man finds himself.” Notice the “equally” in that sentence; Ms. Perry doesn’t.

“Milgram’s definition of obedience,” she writes, “despite his arguments about the power of the situation, seemed like a life sentence, as if people were frozen forever that way—fixed, stuck, like butterflies on a pin.” By the end of her investigation, she is transformed: “I had traded my admiration of Milgram for a better view of people.” These remarks would be naive coming from a nonprofessional; from a psychologist, they are perplexing. Milgram’s message, which has stood the test of time and replications, is precisely that people aren’t fixed and stuck like butterflies on a pin. People aren’t cruel by nature. To accept the findings of the experiments doesn’t require us to abandon a “better view of people”—it requires us to understand that ordinary people are capable of both obedience and rebellion, conformity and heroism. Forget Nazis; think of workers who bend to the will of employers when told to ignore evidence that their product is unsafe.

Update from a reader:

Radiolab did a really great episode (at around 9 minutes) on an alternative interpretation of Milgrim’s experiments.  They consider some of the discarded evidence and actually have a somewhat different explanation: that although the subjects were administering deadly shocks, they weren’t motivated by obedience per se, but hoped their participation furthered science.  I thought this was a rather compelling interpretation, because it addresses why anyone would trust the authority of someone in a lab coat in the first place.  In other words, that it wasn’t blind obedience.

Stephanie Simon reports on a fierce fight in a Douglas County, Colorado, “which has gone further than any district in the nation to reshape public education into a competitive, free-market enterprise”:

The conservatives who control the board have neutered the teachers union, prodded neighborhood elementary schools to compete with one another for market share, directed tax money to pay for religious education and imposed a novel pay scale that values teachers by their subjects, so a young man teaching algebra to eighth graders can make $20,000 a year more than a colleague teaching world history down the hall. Conservatives across the US see Douglas County as a model for transforming public schools everywhere.

Kris Nielsen has more on the implications of today’s election:

Douglas County schools are not urban and they’re not failing — not a usual target for privatizers — and we’re seeing a different strategy at play.

The drive from the current board is to create “niche” schools, where students are tested, matched to a future career based on the scores, and then eventually placed into a niche school where they fit best, based on those criteria.  Parents aren’t okay with that.  And neither are most community members, since it is probably the least democratic way to run a school system that we’ve seen so far in this country. So, we have four challengers running for school board, and the grassroots movement to get them elected has been very active.  Hundreds of volunteers spend every hour of free time canvassing, picketing, attending meetings and forums, and speaking to anyone who will listen. Apparently, it’s working, because the “other side” is getting nervous.  So nervous, in fact, that they’ve decided to call in the cavalry.

Ravitch counts the biggest elephants:

The Koch brothers have contributed $350,000 to the free-market campaigners. They would, if they could, privatize all of what we now know as public education. The current board, fighting to maintain control, hired conservative icon Bill Bennett for $50,000 to be a consultant. It also hired Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute to write a paper praising the district’s initiatives, for $35,000.

Another top donor, Jeb Bush, makes his case in National Review:

The new board decided that striving to be the best in Colorado no longer was sufficient. Instead, it set a goal of competing “against students across the nation and the world for the most sought-after careers.” Now, Douglas County is taking on Massachusetts and Maryland, Finland and Singapore. … The lesson here is a valuable one. Our students are falling behind students from other nations in an academic race that will determine our place in the 21st-century global economy. Our children are, at best, mediocre performers on international assessments in science, math, and literacy. We have become complacent, and complacency is the bridge to stagnation and mediocrity. It can no longer be an option for kids at any academic level. Reform is often associated with turning around failing schools. But in Douglas County, it is being used to turn good schools into great schools. …

[T]he Denver Post recently endorsed all four [conservative] reformers in an editorial titled “Retain innovation in Douglas County schools.” The paper called the district’s market-based reforms “an innovative plan that respects teachers and is sure to be imitated.” You can appreciate how threatening such enlightenment is to union bosses. And the Post is hardly a conservative outlet, having twice endorsed President Barack Obama.

Update from a reader:

We lived in Douglas County until our youngest graduated from high school in 2012. Both of our sons got a damn good education. Our sons both had freshman college classes that were not as difficult as their high school classes. Over the 12 years we were there we ran into a few teachers that were not so hot, but I defy anyone to find a profession that does not have a few members who are not peak performers. On the whole, those teachers were putting their hearts, souls and knowledge to work to help my kids.

I watched this new school board come in and they made it very clear that they are against public schools. They started an experimental program to provide vouchers, assuring one and all that the schools getting the money would comply with the standards and testing required of the public schools. That went by the wayside as soon as the first religious school said “uh, no. We’re not going to comply with those standards.” The school board paid out the money nonetheless.

The school board brought in a new superintendent a couple of years ago. The only thing that they said about her qualifications was that she cut $40 million from the Tucson AZ school system budget – but she did that the year she was hired by Douglas County, so there was no opportunity to see how those cuts affected the students. It was enough that she had shown she could cut the budget. Nothing was said about quality during the announcement of her hiring (believe me: I was scoping out everything I could find from the school board).

This school board has taken a great school district, with great teachers and decimated the teaching force. When we returned for a visit this year, teachers were openly talking about getting out and how awful things were generally in the district. As my husband said “it’s not surprising they would be that open with you because you volunteered all the time and they know you. But me? They don’t know me well enough to be saying things like this.” And teachers I didn’t know well were saying the same thing.

In the end, I am so glad that my sons made it out and to college before the board went even crazier. It makes me sick to see a board that so hates public education in charge of public schools. And they are destroying what was a great school system.

And that bit about the Denver Post recommending Obama? Hey, look at who Obama was running against. It wasn’t a reach for a conservative paper to endorse Obama over Palin and Romney.

Malcolm Forbes observes that in Berlin, “the powers-that-be have ensured that the dead live on”:

We can make a distinction here between celebration and commemoration: Berlin celebrates the dead through its plentiful street-names and statues but commemorates them in the form of plaques and memorials. And due to the horrors of the 20th century, Berlin is, unquestionably, a city of memorials.

Malcolm praises Zerstörte Vielfalt (“Diversity Destroyed”), the 2013 Berlin initiative that “highlights the social and cultural diversity that was dismantled and destroyed in Berlin by the Nazis”:

Especially hard-hitting are the open-air portrait exhibitions or urban memorials. There are 11 in total, dotted over the city in specific areas. Each is comprised of a cluster of striking advertising columns — so-called Litfaßsäule, actually invented by a German printer — which give accounts of Nazi-era episodes relevant to that locality, together with photographs and potted biographies of the many that suffered under the regime. Of the 200-plus portraits, some are famous figures like Einstein, Brecht, and Hannah Arendt, who were persecuted but became exiled survivors. Most of the portraits, however, are those of victims, their lives prematurely snuffed out.

[T]hese exhibitions have two vital new things to say. Firstly, and more directly, they provide histories of lesser known victims, restoring existences that the Nazis tried to permanently expunge from collective memory. Secondly, and more indirectly, they reveal a new German mindset, perhaps a generational shift, one that is now — for want of a better word — more comfortable at tapping into its calamitous past, as willing to commemorate untold dead in the street as to name that street after a renowned 19th-century philosopher.

Previous Dish on German notions of “memorial” here, here, and here.

(Photo of Zerstörte Vielfalt memorial by Allan Grey)