Category: The Dish

Dale Carpenter looks at the state of marriage equality suits across the country. They’re not that encouraging for those who want marriage rights enforced by courts. Happily, in the first state, Massachusetts, marriage equality is here to stay – and we have a fascinating experiment in its impact. And in the biggest state, California, the legislature has now passed marriage equality twice – only to be vetoed by the governor. If the courts and governor allow the California legislature to rule, this debate will enter a new and decisive phase.

Marc Ambinder remembers something from the early 1990s Rudy tries to forget:

"They can send me a signal and vote for me on the liberal line."

Ryan Sager pours a bucket of cold water over the senator’s polling bump.

Heartburn for Hewitt: the candidacy of principle is gaining while the candidacy of whatever-the-Christianists-want is fading. Nationally, Ron Paul has doubled support to 4 percent of Republicans (tied with Huckabee), while Romney has drifted down to 7 percent. Now think of the money differential and how much cash Romney has poured into this campaign this early, while Paul has relied on far skimpier funding. Bonus Hewitt squirm: McCain has now reversed places with Romney and is at 18 percent – up from 11 percent only a few weeks ago.

Paris, France, 10 am.

Despite the protestations of some readers, I still think of myself as a conservative. So I took the interesting YourMorals test, invented by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and covered in the NYT yesterday. His theory is that our evolution gives us instincts toward both camps – but that the conservative instincts are deeper, older and more inchoate. Money quote:

Of the moral systems that protect individuals, one is concerned with preventing harm to the person and the other with reciprocity and fairness. Less familiar are the three systems that promote behaviors developed for strengthening the group. These are loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority and hierarchy, and a sense of purity or sanctity… They found that people who identified themselves as liberals attached great weight to the two moral systems protective of individuals — those of not harming others and of doing as you would be done by. But liberals assigned much less importance to the three moral systems that protect the group, those of loyalty, respect for authority and purity…

Extreme liberals, Dr. Haidt argues, attach almost no importance to the moral systems that protect the group. Because conservatives do give some weight to individual protections, they often have a better understanding of liberal views than liberals do of conservative attitudes, in his view.

Ron Bailey had a crack at the test here. You can test yourself here. My results were as follows:

That’s a high score on the liberal counts – of harm to others and fairness – higher than my conservative scores on loyalty, authority and purity. But it turns out I’m also more conservative than most of those "conservatives" who took the test. The combined scores are below:

I imagine many conservatives haven’t taken the test – they number only a fifth of the liberals – so maybe the study is skewed a little toward the libs. But if you wonder why I haven’t formally left the Church or gave Bush the benefit of the doubt for a long time or revere the military, check out my authority score. Of course, my purity level is lower than most conservatives. But I bet it’s in the same range as most libertarians. And where do they fit on this paradigm anyway?

Yesterday, after sitting through a tedious speech by Barack Obama on tax policy, I noted:

If Obama gets no further than his current rut (I suspect he’ll surpass it later in the fall), he will nonetheless have achieved something remarkable. Here is a credible, serious African-American candidate for president boring an audience on tax reform. The days of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton dominating African-American politics and visibility are gone.

I guess Jesse Jackson agrees. Jackson’s "acting white" remark is a sign of desperation – of failure, of the bankruptcy of pure victim politics. It’s racist; and it’s offensive. But it’s also an extremely encouraging sign. It could help illustrate one of the game-changing features of the Obama candidacy and open more eyes to the potential in the Illinois senator; and it could jump-start up a real debate among African-Americans about what their future politics should look like and express. Both are very healthy developments.

Obama, after all, is not only running against Clinton and her well-oiled machine. He’s also running against the failed past in racial politics. But part of his candidacy is about not explicitly returning to these tired and divisive racial themes, while articulating policies that he believes benefits whites and blacks in an interconnected America. Yhe Obama campaign should thank Jesse Jackson for making the newness of Obama’s racial message clear in a way that leaves the race-consciousness to others. It’s the first lucky break Obama’s had in a while.

Obama in the end didn’t need a Sistah Souljah moment. He needed a Jesse Jackson moment. And he just got one.

(Photo: Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty.)

Just because he’s a partisan fanatic doesn’t mean he doesn’t have some good ideas. An intelligence academy is one of them.

The fashion industry tries again to protect its own copyrights.

He’ll get the government to do your taxes for you! From the AP:

The IRS would send prefilled tax forms to 40 million workers who take the standard deduction and have a bank account. They would simply have to sign and return it, which Obama estimates would save more than $2 billion in tax preparer fees, 200 million hours of work and "an incalculable amount of headache and heartburn."