Something’s Rotten in the Land of Swanson

Do you have a bad feeling about attorney general Lori Swanson? I never much cared for her patron Mike Hatch, and her election to the office was solely due to her association with him, a tough lawyer with Spitzerian tendencies (professional).

Swanson has presided over a wholesale exodus of experienced and capable attorneys from the AG’s office. I’m seeing names of respected lawyers I have dealt with in journalistic endeavors all leaving due to questions about Swanson’s management style, politicization of priorities, and an obsessive and hypocritical vendetta against attempts to unionize her office.

Don’t these accusations (except union busting) seem strangely similar to all the hubbub Bush-appointed US Attorney Rachel Paulose created? She was hung out to dry by the columnists and pundits, probably with good cause. The Bush administration has de-professionalized and politicized the federal law enforcement effort, and Paulose was the local embodiment.

Is Lori Swanson on the same track, or is she simply a megalomaniac with bad people skills? There seems to be disagreement in the union halls about the appropriateness of organizing the AG’s office, but when Swanson goes out and makes a political appearance at a union protest the same week (the MPR story is a showpiece of reporter as dupe and is entirely without any journalistic purpose), she’s clearly engaged in damage control. And if you read the coverage, local DFLers and union honchos seem reluctant to criticize her for political reasons and out of fear of losing her support.

The basic question has to be what has gone wrong in the AG’s office that a bunch of white-collar professionals feel they need a union to protect them? Swanson’s inability to respond coherently and directly to the question is even more troubling. The fact that the AG is making staged, pro-union, image-management appearances while she tries to keep a union out of her office is zany.

Something’s rotten in the land of Swanson, and it’s a good thing the legislative auditor is investigating. Did you think you’d be pining for Matt Entenza this soon?

Panic Mode

There’s a really interesting analytical article in the current Rolling Stone by political writer Matt Taibbi (articulating better than anything I’ve read or heard) about how the media, with its preoccupation with manufactured controversies, distorts the political process, particularly in the current Democratic race for president.

(Taibbi also appears regularly on Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, which is must-viewing for its candor and willingness to hold pols and the media to account.) His prose and commentary is rife with juvenile profanities, which will turn some people off, but look past it because this is, in a nutshell, the story of our culture right now.

“Through scandal after idiotic scandal, the election process has become a painfully prolonged, deeply irritating exercise in policing conventional wisdom . . . keeping the public in a state of heightened, dumb animal panic, and ultimately turning the election itself into a Darwinian contest. . . .

“What we’re getting with all of these scandals isn’t a sober exchange of ideas but more of an ongoing attempt to instill in the public a sort of permanent fear of uncomfortable ideas, and to reduce public discourse to a kind of primitive biological mechanism, like the nervous system of a squid or a shellfish, one that recoils reflexively from any stimuli.”

Taibbi seems to be in Obama’s camp, but this is not merely about Rev. Wright and “God Damn America.” Taibbi also has no patience for the Geraldine Ferarro contretemps and the uproar over John McCain’s end-of-days preacher. And that’s the point—it’s a game all the campaigns play to because they know the media can’t resist.

Taibbi is appropriately critical of the public and the campaigns, but this is a media-driven trend, uniquely exacerbated by talk radio and cable TV networks with hours of “news programming” to fill and no budget to do any real journalism.

Ultimately, our plethora of choices has degraded the discourse, not improved it.

Sarah Jane’s Lockup

I will not defend or minimize Sarah Jane Olson’s self-indulgent protest crimes, legitimize the ridiculous Symbionese Liberation Army, nor attempt to discern if Olson actually feels remorse for building bombs and robbing a bank where someone was murdered.

And I can’t argue with them hauling her back in last week after releasing her from prison; the sentence is the sentence.

But I question the imprisonment to begin with, especially a sentence well beyond what her co-conspirators received. I know, she conspired to build bombs and participated in a robbery in which an innocent person, a mom such as her, died.

But after you’ve evaded apprehension for nearly three decades, lived a subsequent life of magnanimous rectitude, and become a parent . . . I don’t know what was gained except to satisfy the victim’s family’s sense of vengeance, not what we should be concerned with when crafting justice.

Olson had teenage and pre-teen children in her home at the time of her arrest. It’s a given that the absence of these kids’ mom for a decade will have an irreparable effect on their adult lives. Maybe it will be garden-variety dysfunction; maybe they will become criminals themselves; maybe they will abuse or abandon their children, either physically or emotionally, as they were abandoned.

If a person is a danger to society, we must incarcerate them. If a person is not a danger to society but functions without any benefit to society except to commit crimes, I accept imprisonment as well.

But if they are not dangerous and living otherwise productive, relevant lives, what do we gain when we send parents to prison? A domino effect of troubled adults rearing troubled children that the broader society suffers and pays for.

Couldn’t we have sentenced Olson to a decade of community service? Forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, for ten years, plus the first five years in-house arrest outside the service? That sentence benefits society, at little actual cost to taxpayers, and does not wreak damage on the lives and psyches of Olson’s kids, the other innocent victims of her crimes.

Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe her kids, all of whom are now legally adults, have navigated the last decade unscathed and will go on to live lives unaffected by all this. But the fact remains that America has a larger share of its population in prison than any democracy, and the Olson case is another example of the insanity of how we mete out justice in the USA.

The Hard Sell

I have a coupon worth half off at any Starwood hotel property in the world. I would like to use it this summer, but it is rife with exceptions and asterisks, and I was required to call Starwood to find out where I could actually use it. They suggested to me that I put together a short list of destinations since August is a heavy travel time and the coupons are often blacked-out or sold-out at many hotels.

I did just that and called back. I sat on hold for ten minutes and then got transferred to a different department, luckily not in India. I then went through resort after resort, hotel after hotel, hearing “not available, blackout, not available.” Finally, at one of my lesser options, I heard, “that’s available, can I have your credit card number to hold your reservation?”

“Uh, there are a few others I’d like to check.”

“How many?”

“Is there some limit?”

“Uh, I can’t check like ten or anything. But I can hold the reservation for you until Friday without a credit card, if you’d like.”

“Look,” I said, “I sat through a ninety-minute time-share presentation to earn this coupon. I haven’t had a real trip alone with my wife in five years. The dollar is worthless overseas. I sat for ten minutes on hold, spent hours on your website, and you’re trying to talk me into buying the first hotel you can find a room at? Do you work on commission or something?”

Turns out these fine folks are compensated, in measure, by the number of reservations they “close.” Starwood believes that, coupon notwithstanding, if I get off the phone with Bob, I might just call Hyatt (which applies no such pressure tactics) and decide to stay with them. And even if I call back, Bob cares less if I stay with Starwood than that I book with him and not Susie in the cubicle down the corridor.

What an asinine way to run a business.

It reminded me of some window-shopping I was doing for a TV at Ultimate Electronics, flush with my holiday bonus. “Can I ask if you’re planning to take one home tonight?” asked the salesman.

“I’m not, no. I’m doing my research and comparing sets and retailers . . .”

“What if I told you we match all our competitors prices and have all the models they carry? Would you be ready to buy tonight?”

“Pal,” I said, “This is an $1,800 television set, not a $20 pair of headphones. I don’t drop two grand on impulse.” He walked away, not interested in making me a customer of one of his colleagues in a week or two.

It reminded me of the time I was at Carousel Audi test-driving a car a few years ago. It’s an upscale place, trust me. They’re not pulling folks off the street with bratwurst and popcorn.

“Are you planning on purchasing today?” the salesman asked me.

“No, I’m going to drive several different cars and then make a decision.”

“Is there anything I could do or say to you to get you to make a purchase commitment today?” he asked. I told him I didn’t make $35,000 impulse purchases.

Which reminded me of a recent meal I ate at a local steakhouse. I was researching for an article, and we had ordered a lot of food, borderline gross in fact. Salads, sides, main courses, sauces, etc., but no appetizers.

“Could I thrown in an order of calamari for the table, to start?” the server asked.

I looked at him and raised my eyebrow. “We’ve ordered more food than we can possibly eat; you have to know that. I’m sure people do the same thing all the time. Did you really believe we’d order a plate of calamari?”

“You’d be surprised.” He smiled, winked, and walked away.

The left-wing pundits wonder how hundreds of thousands of people took out mortgages they could not afford, without asking how they worked or thinking about various economic scenarios. It had to be fraud on a massive scale, they suggest.

Maybe so.

Or maybe the banker just asked.

Both Sides Now

Anyone who spends any time in any major American city understands that a century-and-a-half post-emancipation and forty years post-civil rights, there remains no group of Americans as deeply troubled as black Americans. The endemic poverty, lack of upward mobility, criminality, lack of schooling, and family dissolution are phenomena of such stunning complexity that they are not discussed in the political sphere anymore. Until this week.

Barack Obama’s surprisingly candid speech about race in America perhaps portends an opening. Could it be that this mixed-race American has the courage and insight to move the nation as a whole to accept some collective responsibility while engaging the black community to look in the mirror?

I realize in an election season gripped by a failed war and foreign policy, the detritus of one of the worst presidencies in American history, and a desperate bubble economy, not many of us would rank making real headway in bringing black America back into mainstream America as a top priority.

But it’s clear from his speech in Philadelphia that Barack Obama sees it from both sides. He understands the perspective of the angry African American who sees his community as the victim of centuries of mistreatment, and he sees the perspective of the frustrated white American, tired of being repeatedly asked to help a community that seems incapable of self-renewal.

It may not be the reason, in and of itself, to vote Obama. But the Illinois senator might be the first American leader in two generations to portend real action and engagement on America’s racial malaise.

Political Blog of the Season

If you’re actively following the Clinton/Obama race, you need to be reading The Field. It’s a thinly financed, shoestring, one-man operation helmed by veteran political reporter Al Giordano that has become a must-read by all the big-name pundits—it is housed under the banner of an organization called RuralVotes, which is working to revitalize and make sure the needs of rural America aren’t ignored this political season.

Giordano has done a tremendous job handicapping the race, analyzing and predicting delegate math, and separating spin from reality. He is evidently backing Obama, but it hasn’t affected the soberness of his number crunching or the general salience of the effort.

His lengthy piece this week, explaining why Hillary is a lock to decisively win Pennsylvania and why Obama will lose by raising expectations, tells you everything you needed to know with six weeks to go. If you love the game, but have a limited amount of time to play, play The Field.

Earth to Pundits: Men Like Sex

The punditry is not covering itself in glory this week, it’s covering itself in delusion. A couple notable examples, ripped from the headlines:

Our Internet friend Jason DeRusha asked on WCCO-TV: “Why do men do that?” Meaning go all Spitzer.

His package failed to quote Chris Rock, whose message on men and sex remains the only one of any value or insight: Men cheat because they can. All men want to cheat. They do it in direct proportion to their opportunity and desirability.

Our culture has become so feminized, and feminine values so dominate today’s relationship norms (probably a good thing, on balance) that men understand female sexuality better than women (and some men) understand male sexuality.

Some politically correct men won’t even own up to theirs. (Was Spitzer one of those guys who frowned at dirty jokes and billboards for Hooters?) It’s one area where the Christian right and the over-educated left come together.

The male sex drive is like a mind-altering drug. It compels us to take risks and clouds our judgment about the magnitude of those risks. The biological imperative at the root of the sex drive also compels men to seek variety in sex partners. Spread the seed and multiply.

Or, as the saying goes, “show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you a guy who’s tired of ------- her.” Not because she isn’t beautiful anymore. But because his sex drive has moved on as it’s programmed to. That’s why AIDS spread so fast in the gay community—monogamy is much harder to sustain without a woman in the mix.

If women could see a running display of men’s thoughts, they would be horrified. They’d lock the door and not come out of their house. And it’s not just the cads on construction crews, trust me. It’s the IT guys at your office. It’s the lay pastor at your church. But on balance, most men are pretty good at keeping it in their head and their pants.

Which is why what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

When I turned eighteen, the guy I worked for that summer bought me a hooker for the afternoon. It was a sprung on me a la “here’s the motel key, she’s waiting in room 104 across the street.”

I was insecure and overwhelmed and turned the gift down to the girl’s face. My boss said I’d regret it in about an hour. (It was more like two.) I tell this story to women, and they think my boss was sleazy. I tell this story to men, and they want my ex-boss to teach seminars across America on management.

I’m not endorsing prostitution; I’m not claiming most men don’t love their spouses. (I’m not sure they’re mutually exclusive. Women would inevitably disagree.) What I am saying is that male sexuality is in an ongoing battle with monogamy and intimacy and will be until they make us take a pill to stop it. All these ridiculous “why?” discussions just deepen the culture’s denial.

Eliot Spitzer cheated not because he was power mad, not because he is low down and no good, and not because he has a psychological disorder. He cheated because his brain was telling him what all men’s brains tell them and he, like many men, gave in to it because he thought he could pull it off without consequence.

The genuinely interesting question is not why do men cheat? It’s why didn’t Spitzer realize he was more vulnerable than most guys, and who brought him down?

****

Earth to Pundits: Mississippi is not America

Last night, during the Mississippi primary coverage, it was interesting watching the press unable to maintain its impulse control. I had MSNBC on. The pundits were atwitter over Clinton apparatchik and ex-Rep. Geraldine Ferraro’s unapologetic remarks that Barack Obama would not be in position to win the Dem nomination for president with so little time in government if he weren’t black. And she was being pilloried for having the nerve to say it.

The pundits were incredulous that a Democratic pol would dare to imply that some black people get a free pass in our culture.

Ferraro’s right in broad strokes but wrong in specifics. There are amazing opportunities for black Americans to jump the queue in our society. They can go very far, very fast, in many professions. And they don’t have to be as good as the non-minorities they are competing against in many of those situations.

Admitting that does not distort the reality of life in black America today or minimize the challenges black Americans face. Why would anyone imply that it does? I don’t know why that isn’t obvious to Keith Olbermann.

But that’s not why Barack Obama is leading Hillary Clinton. It’s because he is an inspirational, transformational figure while she is a lunch-bucket politician and a fairly ruthless one, we are discovering. Americans are looking for leadership, and he seems like a leader.

Admittedly, there are liberals who are ultra-besotted with Obama because he’s black, and his election portends a transformation of white attitudes. But for most of us, it’s because he inspires and portends a reordering of American politics . . . maybe.

The punditry was equally useless in analyzing Obama’s win in Mississippi. Obama’s white support was less than in Wisconsin and Virginia. It was a “disturbing trend for the Obama campaign.” So was exit poll data that, for the first time, showed Clinton’s supporters more unwilling to accept Obama as the nominee than vice-versa.

Uh, it’s MISSISSIPPI. Look at the demographics. Obama underperforms in states where the bulk of the white population is undereducated. But we can’t admit the truth about Mississippi on TV, so we just cite “disturbing trends.”

Why can’t the pundits accept that the fundamental dynamic of this campaign has not changed in weeks and will not change until the end? As in all campaigns, Clinton and Obama have disparate bases with divergent makeups, and each has difficulties attracting the other’s base. The question for the superdelegates (and it’s why they’re there) in August will be which one will be better at cobbling together 270 electoral votes against John McCain?

But every Tuesday the pundits seek to label the natural state of electoral politics as a “disturbing trend” portending some revised end game. It’s nonsense. (And why end it so fast boys? Aren’t MSNBC’s ratings higher than in years? That’s not due to Lockup: Raw, trust me.)

Last week Clinton was ascendant. Obama couldn’t close the deal. This week we’re back to where we were two weeks ago: the numbers just don’t add up for Clinton. Dontcha feel a little used?

And now we’ve got six weeks to Pennsylvania. It’s not going to get any clearer. It’s just going to get more stupid.

Watching the Women

I am puzzled by the apparent interest in women’s basketball and hockey. Not the interest in playing but in viewing it. I don’t think anyone out there would claim the quality of play is equal to the men’s sport at the same level, whether it’s preps, college, or the pros.

The Star Tribune covers Gopher women’s ball as a sort of Affirmative Action project. It’s so equal to the men’s coverage that you often have to read into the story to figure out which team they’re talking about. Obnoxious.

And we’ve made big local heroes of Lindsay Whalen and Janel McCarville (I could not bring myself to even skim the profile of McCarville we ran in our magazine, not that I’d react any differently to one about Spencer Tollackson, who I’d imagine can outplay Janel.). They now are in the WNBA, I believe. The WNBA is a joke.

Now, this isn’t some sort of misogynist rant. I fully support most of the Title IX stuff and have no objection to men’s athletics profits funding women’s at the U, for example. I just don’t understand why any of the rest of us are supposed to care about the games. For the same reason I don’t understand why people claim to care about the St. Paul Saints.

The Saints are a yuppie social club, by and large. And that’s fine, and no one who goes to their games claims otherwise. Throughout the years, media coverage of them has eroded as it has become clear that’s the case. But that’s not the situation with women’s athletics.

If I am going to spend my dollars and time watching athletic competition, I want to watch the best. College sports makes my cut because they play a more exciting, less predictable brand of football and basketball than the pros. But watching the Gopher men’s b-ballers collapse to Indiana this week reinforced how hard it is to watch and care about demonstrably inferior talent week in, week out.

I’ve listened to WCCO’s Don Shelby go on and on about women’s ball. I know he has daughters and did some coaching. I will go watch my daughter play prep or college sports, if that’s her thing. And I understand why other people do the same. I have friends who insist the standard of play in women’s volleyball is equal to men’s, and they have season tickets to see the UC Berkeley team play.

But I am wondering if the increasing media attention and interest in women’s ball is a function of the vast stretches of time cable TV has to fill and the great liberal, egalitarian underpinnings of the print media and academia. Cause it ain’t about the ball.

A friend of mine took his kids and mine to a Gopher women’s hockey game. “Why?” I asked him. “It wasn’t bad,” he replied. My point exactly.

Stuff White People Like

I’m taking a couple days away from the assembly line, so I’d thought I’d amuse or offend you today with a link to a site my colleague Sarah Howard brought to my attention.

It’s called Stuff White People Like, but it’s really focused on a certain kind of white people—earnest, educated, socially aware, consumerist. It’s funny at first, but I’d stick to the headers and photos and not delve into the text, because you soon stop laughing. See, Stuff White People Like is written by a holier-than-thou person who doesn’t have a lot of subtlety.

The kind of self-righteous person who might suggest (near end of article; a very useful piece by the way) that it was wrong to pay Indonesia and Brazil to stop the cutting of their rain forest so as not to release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere because the act makes Westerners feel better about drinking bottled water and traveling by plane.

Yes, white people are annoying. But usually not as annoying as the scolds and tedious intellectual moralists who think they know better.