the toughest job in america

The Obama transition team has a lot of difficult decisions on the table, to say the very least. There are plans to enact, positions to fill . . . but in its fine tradition of reporting, the New York Times has unveiled (and the BBC has picked up on) yet another decision tormenting top Obama aides: should he continue to use email?

I must confess it’s mind-boggling to me (and probably to 99% of my age cohort) that a person could get by without instantaneous electronic communication, although I suppose the President has plenty of staffers at his beck and call. But I get the sense that this is a little mind-boggling to Obama, too, who has relied heavily on his BlackBerry throughout the campaign (and will for that matter be the first president to have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office). Now that he’s headed for the White House, though, there are concerns both over the security of email communications and over transparency laws that might require his correspondence to be opened to public view.

One option aides are considering: letting Obama receive but not send emails. During the campaign, most memos, briefing books, and drafts of speeches went directly to Obama’s email, eliminating the tediousness (and, one must suppose, massive waste of paper) involved in printing out and delivering each and every document.

on modern feminism in america and beyond

According to a report on the global gender gap released earlier this week by the World Economic Forum, women and men in the US are 72% equal — a bit of a weird-sounding statement, but it’s based on a quantitative index incorporating measures of economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, and health and survival. In the US (and in most of the world) men and women are essentially equal in terms of health and education (in fact, in the majority of the world’s countries, women outnumber men at institutes of higher education). Economically and politically, though, women lag far behind men no matter where you look. Even in Norway, the country with the smallest gender gap (the report quantifies gender equality there at 82%), women only enjoy 78% economic equality and 53% political equality. (For a detailed breakdown of how these values are attained, check out the full report.)

The US ranks 27th on a global scale of gender equality; it is somewhat above average in economic equality (75%, compared to a global average of 59%), roughly on par in health and education, and slightly below average in political equality, with a score of only 14% (the global average is 16%). None of these values are exactly inspiring, but it’s the political inequality that interests me most.— the question of what it takes to be a woman and be elected to high office, because the political viability of female candidates speaks directly to national cultural attitudes toward women, which are, predictably, heavily sexualized. A friend of mine recently declared that we needed not to treat women less like sex objects but to treat men like sex objects more; after all, we all ARE sex objects when it comes down to it. This is true, I suppose, but speaking with the authority of bisexuality, it is a LOT easier to sexualize Sarah Palin’s candidacy than John McCain’s, and I don’t think that’s just happenstance.

As a self-identifying feminist, I’m offended by the fact that sex appeal seems, if not vital, enormously important to most female politicians’ success; at the same time, I’m disgusted with those who attribute the accomplishments of a smart, savvy, and sexy woman in government entirely to the last of those qualities. (I’m even more disgusted when I feel they may have a point.) But these barriers are nothing in comparison to the aptly named global gender gap. Women the world over are still in a state of subjugation, from Afghanistan to Eritrea, and to ignore their economic, social, cultural, and, yes, political plight is far more heinous a crime than to make a few lewd remarks about Sarah Palin’s boobs.

and I think my job applications are bad

You may have heard tell of the Plum Book, a comprehensive list of jobs that are filled by presidential appointment that is published every four years, shortly after the election. Begun in 1952, when the Presidency changed hands to a Republican for the first time in 22 years, the Plum Book lists 7,996 job openings this year.

Of course, everyone knows that by being hired by a politician, you automatically pose a liability to them; anything shady about your character can and will reflect on them. If you want that point really driven home, though, take a look at the Obama Transition Team’s job application, a seven-page behemoth listing 63 different topics to be addressed, from financial disclosures to recent cohabitants to a thorough listing of every public communication you have ever made. As a member of the internet generation, I find this last to be particularly mind-boggling, and am starting to wonder if any subversive tendencies might be revealed by my eight-year-old publications on neopets.com.

august 28, 1963: a dual legacy

Barack Obama delivers his acceptance speech tonight to the Democratic National Convention, on the anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. The legacy of August 28, 1963 is not so simple as that, though; the march was the centerpiece of a time of delicate (and often incendiary) political negotiation, and Obama’s nomination evokes not only Dr. King’s legacy but that of the other parties involved.

The purpose of the March on Washington was heavily disputed within the leadership of the Civil Rights Movement. Various groups considered it a gesture of support for John F. Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill, a wider-reaching statement on the political, social, and economic inequality between races, or, conversely, a demonstration against the same Civil Rights Bill, which some considered to be a textbook example of too little, too late. The African American community has always faced internal divisions over varying degrees of radicalism and attitudes toward their historical oppressors, and Obama has already spoken eloquently and intelligently on the subject of race and racism in America.

The events of August 28, 1963 involved another key player, of course, and another figure whose legacy is of vast importance to Barack Obama’s campaign for president: John F. Kennedy, whose civil rights legislation was in question and who initially opposed the march, fearing, the recently published journals of Arthur Schlesinger suggest, that the march would not attract enough demonstrators and that the weak turnout would undermine his efforts to push the bill through Congress. Kennedy was, of course, a leader whose rise to power very much resembled Barack Obama’s thus far; a charismatic, young candidate, he represented hope and change for a stagnant Washington.

In any case, whatever your background and political leanings, I’d watch Barack Obama’s speech tonight. It should be interesting.

responding to zimbabwe

The Nation published an interesting piece yesterday on a resolution Obama propelled through the Senate just over a year ago condemning violence on the part of Zimbabwe’s government, citing said resolution as evidence of Obama’s foreign policy savvy. I certainly agree with them that Obama’s actions were more inspiring than Bush’s or McCain’s at the same time, but I find their praise somewhat excessive. They hail Obama as a leader who sees what others don’t about world affairs and does something about it, as if it took a carefully trained eye to tell that Zimbabwe was in (excuse my French) deep shit. Thing is, it didn’t. I remember reading as a sixteen-year-old about Tsvangirai’s trials at the hands of Mugabe’s government and thinking that someone ought to do something about it. And the Congressional resolution, while certainly praiseworthy in intent, doesn’t seem to have gotten much done.

I’ve heard people saying that there are two people out there who could really make a difference in the Zimbabwean situation: Mandela and Obama. That’s all well and good, but what, exactly, is the difference they could make? Convince Mugabe to hand over power? Not happening. Get the African Union to take a harder line against him, perhaps, but what would that do? Mugabe is firmly entrenched in his position, and he’s not going to depart from it unless forced. Personally (and bear in mind that I have hardly the expertise of a cockroach in this manner), I feel that there are two plausible steps that might improve affairs in Zimbabwe: some kind of a power-sharing deal, which might be brokered with firm support from within Africa, and international pressure on Zimbabwe to open up to foreign aid. Democracy is pretty difficult to manage when the majority of your population is focused on surviving from day to day, and a greater aid presence could help stabilize the lives of Zimbabwe’s people enough for an effective regime change to eventually come to pass. In either case, though, the primary pressure on Zimbabwe canot come from Western nations, as Mugabe plays anti-imperialism as his trump card in nearly every dispute; African leaders must unite to get Mugabe into line. That, I think, is the reason Obama and Mandela both have such potential as players in this crisis. They both have the African credibility and international respect required to get the leaders of a continent rallied around one cause.

[previous zimbabwe posts here]

bob dylan, constitutional law consultant

In a recent dissenting opinion on a rather torpor-inducing Supreme Court case (the subject matter, I believe, was pay phones and long-distance calls), Chief Justice John Roberts, spurning the tradition of citing previous cases as precedent, wrote instead:

The absence of any right to the substantive recovery means that respondents cannot benefit from the judgment they seek and thus lack Article III standing. “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone, on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records 1965).

Dylan tops the list of popular musicians cited in judicial opinions with 26 hits; next is Paul Simon with 8 (or, when combined with Simon & Garfunkel, 12), followed by Bruce Springsteen with 5. William Rehnquist, Roberts’s predecessor, was given to the citation of Gilbert & Sullivan, but Roberts’s citation marks the first use of popular rock lyrics to support a Supreme Court opinion.

See the NY Times piece on the citation here.

scalia’s dissent

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past 48 hours or so, you might not know that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have the legal right to appeal their detention as enemy combatants in U.S. civilian courts. This is a huge deal; it renders the whole point of Gitmo utterly moot. If being somewhere outside of U.S. soil doesn’t exempt detainees from U.S. legal rights, who cares about having a special place outside the U.S. to hold them?

One of the Supreme Court justices, Antonin Scalia, wrote a dissenting opinion that the New York Times characterized as “apocalyptic”, predicting increased American casualties as a direct result of the Court’s ruling. His reasoning is as follows: previous cases have existed in which the military released detainees who were being held at Guantanamo due to lack of evidence that they were enemy combatants, and they have subsequently proven unequivocally that they were, becoming involved in terrorist activities and killing Americans. If the military didn’t have enough evidence to keep enemy combatants under lock, then how on earth can they prove detainees’ enemy combatant status to America’s civilian courts?

I have to say, I find it interesting that Scalia, as a member of the highest court in the land, seems out to stifle the judicial system itself. If the correct and legal processes that exist in America are not capable of handling all of America’s activities, is the solution to simply suspend the correct and legal processes?

The full text of the court’s decision is available here.

a little faith

There’s a lot that goes on in a political campaign. There are ads to be run and speeches to be made and debates to be won (or at least spun). But when it comes down to it, the most important, most massive piece of campaign apparatus is devoted to one very simple task: getting out the vote. Think about that for a moment. The crucial component of every campaign isn’t about glamor and star power, isn’t about rousing speeches or photo-ops, it’s about individual people calling up individual people and saying, hey, mind taking a couple minutes out of your day for the sake of this guy I believe in?