Make 'Em Disprove It


On Mitt Romney's website, geared to elicit donations, we learn he wants to "make permanent, across the board 20 percent cut in marginal rates," "eliminate the Death Tax," and "cut the corporate tax rate to 20 percent."   As a share of the economy, income taxes are lower than they have been at any time since 1950:  the estate tax already applies only to estates worth over $1million; on balance, the effective GDP tax weighted average is slightly lower in the U.S.A. than in the other nations of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation (OECD)

No matter, because in the debate Wednesday night Etch-A-Sketch was freed to connect with independent voters.    He thus somersaulted into  "First of all, I don't have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don't have a tax cut of a scale that you're talking about. My view is that we ought to provide tax relief to people in the middle class. But I'm not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high- income people."

Having already denied that he is for cutting the taxes he tells conservative audiences everywhere he wants to slash, the born-again for-now liberal claimed "I want to bring down the rates down (sic), at the same time lower deductions and exemptions and credits and so forth so we keep getting the revenue we need."  At least twice he returned to the theme, claiming "what I do is I bring down the tax rates, lower deductions and exemptions... getting us to a balanced budget" and "my plan is to bring down rates but also bring down deductions and exemptions and credits at the same time so the revenue stays in."

Sure, sure it is.   E.J. Dionne notes "Obama did return repeatedly to a central point: Romney's vagueness in his proposals on taxes and health care.  He charged that Romney was hiding the details of those plans because they would prove unpopular with and harmful to the middle class."   President Obama hinted at the deductions Romney is thinking of when the President pointed out (emphasis mine)

Well, for 18 months he's been running on this tax plan. And now, five weeks before the election, he's saying that his big, bold idea is "never mind." And the fact is that if you are lowering the rates the way you describe, Governor, then it is not possible to come up with enough deductions and loopholes that only affect high-income individuals to avoid either raising the deficit or burdening the middle class. It's — it's math. It's arithmetic.

The President went in a slightly different direction when in the same response he argued

The only way to pay for it without either burdening the middle class or blowing up our deficit is to make drastic cuts in things like education, making sure that we are continuing to invest in basic science and research, all the things that are helping America grow. And I think that would be a mistake.

Getting revenue out of eliminating loopholes sufficient to lower deficits significantly can come only by goring the ox of the middle class, as Romney won't admit.   And if he maintains the deductions/exemptions, either the deficit will balloon or spending for popular items, such as research, education, and law enforcement will be dropped.

Most likely a Republican presidency will do what all Republican presidencies do- lower rates and avoid closing loopholes.   There will be fewer revenues, deficits will expand exponentially, and that president will leave the mess to the next Democratic president to clean up. But we don't know that- and, according to Romney's own testimony, preferences in the tax code will be reduced.

Why not take Mitt Romney at his own word?    The strategy ought to be:  no more Obama hinting-around.  No more Mr. Responsibility.  Or as one Republican performer once put it, No More Mr. Nice Guy.   Start asserting:  we've run the numbers and discovered that Mitt Romney plans to eliminate the home mortgage interest deduction.  When the media stars start squealing, tell them our experts are better than your experts.  If history is any guide, they will write it off as "he said, she said."

When fact-checkers come a knockin', tell them, as Romney told the Des Moines Register, "Fact-checkers on both sides of the aisle will look in the way they think is most consistent with their own views."   When Romney denies he wants to eliminate the popular break for homeowners, respond  "see, we told you he'll change his story back-and-forth so he doesn't have to tell the truth."

It won't happen that way, of course.    The corporate wing of the Democratic Party, currently led by Obama-Clinton (but including Ed Rendell, Mark Warner, and others), is loathe to offend the media, notwithstanding the lust of the GOP for the task.  (Romney's confrontation with Jim Lehrer was passive compared to Newt Gingrich's tactics in the primary debates.)  Additionally, the President wants to be seen as the responsible and congenial deficit-reducing moderate soaring above partisan bickering, all the better (he believes) to gain media support and Republican acquiescence in the bold, transformative center-right policies he plans for a second term.



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Letting Romney Off



Debate host Jim Lehrer asked President Obama and former Governor Romney last night "do you believe there's a fundamental difference between the two of you as to how you view the mission of the federal government?"  The President responded (and ask someone to awaken you midway through):

The first role of the federal government is to keep the American people safe. That's its most basic function. And as commander in chief, that is something that I've worked on and thought about every single day that I've been in the Oval Office.

But I also believe that government has the capacity — the federal government has the capacity to help open up opportunity and create ladders of opportunity and to create frameworks where the American people can succeed. Look, the genius of America is the free enterprise system, and freedom, and the fact that people can go out there and start a business, work on an idea, make their own decisions.

But as Abraham Lincoln understood, there are also some things we do better together.

So in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln said, let's help to finance the Transcontinental Railroad. Let's start the National Academy of Sciences. Let's start land grant colleges, because we want to give these gateways of opportunity for all Americans, because if all Americans are getting opportunity, we're all going to be better off. That doesn't restrict people's freedom; that enhances it.
And so what I've tried to do as president is to apply those same principles. And when it comes to education, what I've said is we've got to reform schools that are not working. We use something called Race to the Top. Wasn't a top-down approach, Governor. What we've said is to states, we'll give you more money if you initiate reforms. And as a consequence, you had 46 states around the country who have made a real difference.

But what I've also said is let's hire another hundred thousand math and science teachers to make sure we maintain our technological lead and our people are skilled and able to succeed. And hard-pressed states right now can't all do that. In fact, we've seen layoffs of hundreds of thousands of teachers over the last several years, and Governor Romney doesn't think we need more teachers. I do, because I think that that is the kind of investment where the federal government can help. It can't do it all, but it can make a difference, and as a consequence, we'll have a better-trained workforce, and that will create jobs, because companies want to locate in places where we've got a skilled workforce.

It was, of course, a question in the wheelhouse of almost any GOP candidate, a vague, general question designed to elicit vague, general answers, the kind Republicans specialize in.   Still, a blogger at DailyKos notes that Obama's response could have included the explanation that

Private actors are looking out for themselves, not for you.  Government agencies are run in the public interest, or at least they have a duty to be (regulatory capture is a big problem, but the solution is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater).  Competitive markets work great in many cases, but many essential services are difficult for the private sector to efficiently provide--without either wasteful duplication or monopolistic rent seeking.

All completely true and important, but every bit as boring as Obama's response.  As long as Barack Obama  chose his debate theme as the need to impose austerity to tackle the deficit, he might have reminded voters- or better yet, his opponent- of Mitt Romney's debt-ridden role at Bain Capital.  He should have used Matt Taibbi's description in Rolling Stone five weeks ago of Mitt Romney as

fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth...

A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself.

This "gambit," Taibbi explains

stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.

Taibbi identifies Romney as cozy with Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, and the other "hucksters" who have been conducting

decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let's-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let's-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of "creative destruction," and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America's rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt. 

Cut out some of the invective (which Taibbi is fond of), such as referring (albeit accurately) to Romney and Ryan as "pompous and self-righteous," Wall Street executives as "shifty-eyed huckster" or "jerkwad," and billions of dollars as "assloads of money," and you have two-thirds of Americans jumping off their sofa and cheering.    As a bonus, Mitt Romney would have gone ballistic and self-destructed.  (True, Jim Lehrer might have had a heart attack and Bill Clinton, Cory Booker, and Ed Rendell would have put out a contract on Obama, but the President does have Secret Service protection.)

Of course, this didn't happen, and won't happen, for Obama is loathe to incur any more enmity from the finance, insurance, or real estate sector.  He was anxious to avoid the issue of Bain Capital, as Mitt Romney generally does, probably because it enhances his image as rapacious and greedy.

The President was presented a golden opportunity to sharpen his differences with Romney when Lehrer opened a new topic by stating "All right? All right, this is this is segment three, the economy, entitlements.  First answer goes to you. It's two minutes. Mr. President, do you see a major difference between the two of you on Social Security?"

A few moments into a boring response, Obama half-heartedly remarked " that's the perspective I bring when I think about what's called entitlements. You know, the name itself implies some sense of dependency on the part of these folks."    His response should have been more direct and decisive by correcting the host on the term "entitlements," noting they instead are "earned benefits," and lashing out at Mitt Romney for targeting the elderly surviving on Social Security benefits.

But Barack Obama did not seize the opportunity, which was, hopefully, merely bad strategy rather than an indication that a re-elected President will go all in for a grand bargain.



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Misstep In Colorado


At Fox News, Charles Krauthammer said that polls should tighten a bit with Mitt Romney's solid debate (transcript, here) performance in Denver.  The Republican demonstrated to voters bombarded by ads attacking him that he "does not have horns"  while, Krauthammer observed, Barack Obama unwisely sat on a lead.

Sat on a lead, indeed.   There were at least ten instances in which President Obama stated or strongly implied agreement with his opponent, including

When it comes to our tax code, Governor Romney and I both agree that our corporate tax rate is too high.

On energy, Governor Romney and I, we both agree that we've got to boost American energy production.

Now, Governor Romney and I do share a deep interest in encouraging small-business growth.

When it comes to corporate taxes, Governor Romney has said he wants to, in a revenue-neutral way, close loopholes, deductions — he hasn't identified which ones they are — but thereby bring down the corporate rate. Well, I want to do the same thing, but I've actually identified how we can do that.

You know, I suspect that on Social Security, we've got a somewhat similar position. 

Now, in fairness, what Governor Romney has now said is he'll maintain traditional Medicare alongside it.

Now, Governor Romney has said he wants to repeal Dodd-Frank, and, you know, I appreciate, and it appears we've got some agreement that a marketplace to work has to have some regulation, but in the past...

And it happens we've got some agreement that a marketplace to work has to have some regulation.

...the irony is that we've seen this model work really well in Massachusetts, because Governor Romney did a good thing, working with Democrats in the state to set up what is essentially the identical model. And as a consequence, people are covered there. It hasn't destroyed jobs.

There's a reason why Governor Romney set up the plan that he did in Massachusetts. It wasn't a government takeover of health care. It was the largest expansion of private insurance. But what it does say is that insurers, you've got to take everybody. Now, that also means that you've got more customers.

At MSNBC, Ed Schultz noted that Obama said nothing about Bain Capital, the 47%, offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands or elsewhere.   Schultz noted that Romney was animated, yet not angry, and appeared to want the job, whereas the incumbent appeared almost indifferent to remaining president.   Mitt Romney, Chris Matthews recognized, "seemed to endure the evening while Romney seemed to relish it."    Chris Hayes, who also realized that Romney helped himself in the debate,  asserted that the President's people believe that Obama's biggest asset is his personality and feared that a more aggressive approach would have undercut that.     Left unsaid: Team Obama worries constantly about the President appearing to be an angry black man.

Reverend Al Sharpton argued that, despite initial impressions of the debate, Romney in the next couple of weeks will have to answer for "his lies."   At Salon, Joan Walsh notices a few of Romney's conflicts with objective reality: the candidate denied proposing a $5 trillion tax cut, contended he is "not going to cut education funding," claimed the Affordable Care Act had raised taxes by a trillion dollars, and, describing inaccurately the Independent Payment Advisory Board, maintained Obama has established "a board that will tell people what kind of treatment they're going to get,"   Whether fact checkers will have much of an impact on the public's perception of the veracity or integrity of the challenger remains to be seen.

Still, there is a major opening for the Obama campaign in Romney's declaration "But you make a very good point, which is that the — the place you put your money makes a pretty clear indication of where your heart is."  That would make for a delightful campaign ad given, as Walsh's Salon  colleague, Alex Seitz-Wald, notes, "The obvious rejoinder, ready-made for a DNC attack, is that Romney’s heart must be in the Cayman Island, Bermuda or Switzerland, where Romney has put his money.

It's on to the vice-presidential debate and the following two presidential debates.   Before this encounter, many pundits had argued that the first debate between Obama and Romney would be the most important of the three, and few if any maintained that either of the last two would be more important.   Fortunately for the incumbent, that will prove false.  Voters will tune in to Obama-Romney II and III to determine if their first impressions were correct.  If so, that bodes ill for the President; if not, his election will be almost assured.  In either case, the first debate, despite an almost unanimous decision for the challenger, thankfully will not prove pivotal.




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On Further Review, Pierce's Criticism Stands



The Washington Post uses the headline "Can Romney Turn This Thing Around?"Meanwhile, Investors Business Daily goes with the more accurate "Why Americans Might Tolerate This Failed President" to describe the misguided essay against Barack Obama by George Will.The columnist, long syndicated by The Washington Post's Writer's Group, contends

A significant date in the nation’s civil rights progress involved an African American baseball player named Robinson, but not Jackie. The date was Oct. 3, 1974, when Frank Robinson, one the greatest players in history, was hired by the Cleveland Indians as the major leagues’ first black manager. But an even more important milestone of progress occurred June 19, 1977, when the Indians fired him. That was colorblind equality.

Managers get fired all the time. The fact that the Indians felt free to fire Robinson — who went on to have a distinguished career managing four other teams — showed that another racial barrier had fallen: Henceforth, African Americans, too, could enjoy the God-given right to be scapegoats for impatient team owners or incompetent team executives.

Perhaps a pleasant paradox defines this political season: That Obama is African American may be important, but in a way quite unlike that darkly suggested by, for example, MSNBC’s excitable boys and girls who, with their (at most) one-track minds and exquisitely sensitive olfactory receptors, sniff racism in any criticism of their pin-up. Instead, the nation, which is generally reluctant to declare a president a failure — thereby admitting that it made a mistake in choosing him — seems especially reluctant to give up on the first African American president. If so, the 2012 election speaks well of the nation’s heart, if not its head.

In "George Will Is Not Making Any Human Sense, Continued" Charles Pierce writes

First, in my capacity as the Don King of Punditland, I will make the match right now: George Effing Will vs. the Kindly Doc Rachel Maddow. Fifteen rounds. The parking lot at Caesar's. Who ya got?

Second, if Will believes that the reason the president seems to be prospering right now is because the good heart of America is giving the black fella a break, he's climbed so far up his own ass that he could sneeze and break his collarbone.

Will, who  claims "Obama's administration is in shambles," is annoyingly prone to conflating baseball with life, or anything in it.   But I'll play that game, and you can play that at home.   When Jackie Robinson was signed as a player by Branch Rickey  

Fellow players were slow to accept Robinson as a member of their team. Some were openly hostile; others refused to speak to him or even sit near him. It didn't help that Robinson began his season in a slump, unable to make a hit in the first five games.

His teammates finally rallied to Robinson's defense after witnessing several incidents in which opponents verbally and physically assaulted Robinson. One player from the St. Louis Cardinals intentionally spiked Robinson's thigh so badly, he left a large gash, prompting outrage from Robinson's teammates. In another instance, players on the Philadelphia Phillies, knowing that Robinson had received death threats, held their bats up as if they were guns and pointed them at him.

Maybe- just maybe, of course- Obama as president has faced similar obstacles.   Apparently, Will did not notice a politically slick politician from Georgia recently say, however misleadingly

You have to wonder what he’s doing.  I’m assuming that there’s some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don’t understand. Whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to go play basketball for a while or watch ESPN, I mean, I don’t quite know what his rhythm is, but this is a guy that is a brilliant performer as an orator, who may very well get reelected at the present date, and who, frankly, he happens to be a partial, part-time president.

Yes, we (but not some columnists) get it, Newt.   The black fellow plays basketball (don't they all?) and has "some rhythm," though it is hard to determine "what his rhythm is."   Gingrich forgot to say he "dances around issues," though he remembered in January to call Obama "the most effective food stamp president in history."    He has labeled as "a partial, part-time president" (shiftless and lazy?) a chief executive who vacations far less than his immediate predecessor and whom The New York Times in May reported

insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.

“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”

George Will gets to have it both ways.    Without any evidence, he infers that Obama's hopes hinge on white guilt because voters are "especially reluctant to give up on the first African American president" and won't want to admit "it made a mistake in choosing him."   He calls on voters to reject his candidacy, like the Indians who "felt free to fire (Frank) Robinson," which "showed that another racial barrier had fallen."

Yet, October 3, 1974 also had been "a significant date in the nation's civil rights progress" because a black man was hired as a manager.   In the same manner, according to Will, America demonstrated it was not racist (though unwise, disregarding "its head") when it "hired" Barack Obama; it will prove "an even more important milestone of progress" when it fires him.   Convenient.

Will believes (or pretends to believe) that the U.S.A. struck a note for racial progress when a black was chosen as President.   Voters in Democratic caucuses and primaries arguably (full disclosure: I voted for Clinton) did so when it made a one-term Democratic Senator the nominee of the party over a heavily-favored spouse of an ex-President popular with the party's voters and establishment.  In the general election, however, the nominee faced a bad presidential, and even worse vice-presidential, candidate in an atmosphere in which Charles Manson, if released from prison, could have run a strong race against a Republican.   The GOP label was toxic at the time because any connection with the incumbent, George W. Bush, was deadly.  (Four years later, it took Mr. Bush's brother even to mention his name at the party's convention, and that was done somewhat defensively.)

Being a baseball aficionado, Will might do well to acknowledge while the opposing club is not strong and his own clean-up hitter is mediocre, his team is lousy, and most people realize it.



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The Hippie President


"Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term," Jo Becker and Scott Shane write in The New York Times,  "has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record."   Current and former Obama advisers have told them of a "paradoxical leader" who

has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”

Yet the administration’s very success at killing terrorism suspects has been shadowed by a suspicion: that Mr. Obama has avoided the complications of detention by deciding, in effect, to take no prisoners alive. While scores of suspects have been killed under Mr. Obama, only one has been taken into American custody, and the president has balked at adding new prisoners to Guantánamo.

“Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the intelligence committee. “They are not going to advertise that, but that’s what they are doing.”

Administration officials deny such a policy exists and

The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take in choosing targets, and their reliance on a precision weapon, the drone, reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to reject what he called the Bush administration’s “false choice between our safety and our ideals.”

But he has found that war is a messy business, and his actions show that pursuing an enemy unbound by rules has required moral, legal and practical trade-offs that his speeches did not envision.

Becker and Shane note additionally of the President's policy "No one would have imagined four years ago that his counterterrorism policies would come under far more fierce attack from the American Civil Liberties Union than from Mr. Romney."

But there is one Republican who apparently believes all this qualifies President Obama as a modern-day, misguided Gandhi.  Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh stated (video, from Media Matters, below)

Well, let me tell you something.  There is no question that the hands of our military are tied. We've heard of about these rules of engagement many previous occasions in Afghanistan. It's what happens when you got a pacifist as president, when you have somebody who believes that the United States is to blame and in fact deserves some of this stuff and that we can't display superpower status. We can't project power.





Rendition, military commissions, and indefinite detention all have been retained by Barack Obama.  But the real problem, according to the nation's top radio talk show host, is that he just hasn't killed enough Muslims.




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Garbage In, Garbage Out



I do not come to bury Ruth Marcus.  I come to praise her.

Somewhat.  A few of the questions the Washington Post syndicated columnist recommends be posed to the two major presidential candidates tomorrow night are well-informed, probing, and worthy of answers for the American people.   Two others, however, reflect disturbing ignorance.

She critically prefaces one of her questions by stating

President Obama, you have been criticized for not supporting the recommendations of your own fiscal commission. Why didn't you? Do you regret that choice?

You have offered what you describe as $4 trillion in debt reduction over 10 years. Yet your $4 trillion is $2.3 trillion short of what the Simpson-Bowles commission said was essential.

It's not entirely, or even primarily, her fault, of course.   Dean Baker noticed that even the august, paper-of-record New York Times has referred to "the proposal by President Obama’s fiscal commission led by Erskine B. Bowles, the Clinton White House chief of staff, and former Senator Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, a Republican."   It is common throughout the media to refer to the "Simpson-Bowles report" or, in shortened form, "Simpson-Bowles," as if the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform actually had issued a report.   The Commission by-laws, as Baker notes, read

The Commission shall vote on the approval of a final report containing a set of recommendations to achieve the objectives set forth in the Charter no later than December 1, 2010. The issuance of a final report of the Commission shall require the approval of not less than 14 of the 18 members of the Commission.

Baker notes, however, "there was no vote on anything by December 1, 2010 and there was never a report that received the approval of 14 of the 18 commission members. Therefore, there was no report of the commission. That's pretty simple, isn't it?"

Marcus unknowingly propagates another faulty premise when she asks

you promised in Charlotte to take “responsible steps” to strengthen Social Security. Yet in your acceptance speech four years ago you said that “now is the time ... to protect Social Security for future generations,” and then did nothing on Social Security during your first term. What do you plan to do if re-elected? Would you support Gov. Romney’s proposal to raise the retirement age to reflect increases in longevity? To lower the rate at which benefits grow for higher-income seniors?

Paul Krugman, recognizing that the increase in longevity cited by Marcus and so many others is well overstated, explains

Consider, in particular, the proposal to raise the Social Security retirement age, supposedly to reflect rising life expectancy. This is an idea Washington loves — but it’s also totally at odds with the reality of an America in which rising inequality is reflected not just in the quality of life but in its duration. For while average life expectancy has indeed risen, that increase is confined to the relatively well-off and well-educated — the very people who need Social Security least. Meanwhile, life expectancy is actually falling for a substantial part of the nation.

These less well-off and lesser-educated individuals are not likely to capture the imagination of most of the news media, generally relatively well-off and more highly educated.  There has been little attention paid, in fact, to the news reported on September 21 by The New York Times:

For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.

Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

Perhaps there would be consideration of this large, though declining, group of Americans if one of those awful cliches stereotyping voters would emerge.  We have had "soccer moms," "NASCAR dads," and "Walmart moms."
 
But unless "diner women" or some other hideous term trivializing this segment of the populace is popularized, it's hardly likely that many journalists will pay attention.   The elites might even find some solace in the statistics, for the racial disparity between relatively uneducated white women and black women has declined or apparently, reversed.  But the drop in life expectancy for white women without a high school diploma reflects yet another instance in which the American economy has left a lot of people behind, even if it's inconvenient to notice.





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And She Doesn't Live In A Teepee, Either


It was full steam ahead for conservative bloggers, writers, and talk show hosts when Boston's other paper, the Boston Herald, reported in late April that Elizabeth Warren, who as a professor at Harvard Law School (from which she now is on leave)  had told the institution that she was in small part of Cherokee heritage.    A blogger at Ace of Spades HQ claimed "When people are willing to lie that easily for little or no reason, they'll lie about anything. Someone should start reviewing her academic papers."   Syndicated columnist Mark Steyn, who periodically substitutes for the host on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, wrote "Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran'ma as Cherokee, but let's cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn't be black. She would if she could, but she couldn't. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind – "people who are like I am," 31/32nds white – and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together."  La Shawn Barber blogs "The point I tried to make in the column was how ridiculous it is for the blond, blue-eyed Elizabeth Warren to list herself as a racial minority, an American Indian, not that the descendants of American Indians cannot be blond and blue-eyed.

Limbaugh himself couldn't be restrained,  commenting "This is the woman Obama wanted to run a consumer fraud division or what have you.  But what reservation did this woman grow up on? When was the last reservation she was at? What's the last pack of cigarettes with no sales tax that she bought?  But this is who they are."

Ever the opportunist, Limbaugh used the flak over Warren's claim as fodder for generally attacking liberals, whom he claimed

categorize people. They make moral judgments on people on the basis of surface matters.  They don't see the humanity of an individual.  They see the skin color; they see the sex, the gender, the orientation -- and from there they make their judgments on people.  And here's proof of it.  She is an Indian, one-thirty-second of an Indian, because her papaw had high cheekbones.  And all Indians have high cheekbones.

Before critiquing racialism, Limbaugh should have checked in with his preferred Massachusetts Senate candidate, incumbent Scott Brown (R-Cosmo), who at his debate with Ms. Warren, unashamedly argued "Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a person of color.  And as you can see, she is not."

Credit Scott Brown for political acumen.  Recognizing he is running in Massachusetts, he has avoided criticizing  Democratic President Barack Obama and has employed the politically correct terms "person of color" and "Native American."

But American ethnicity is a complicated matter, a melting pot or mosaic or at times even a hodgepodge.  It may be hard enough for a member of one Indian tribe to recognize another, and probably more difficult for, say, for a Caucasian, Asian, or black person to make the distinction.   And here comes Scott Brown, native and resident of the State of Massachusetts, with fewer of its residents of such background than 40 other states, to say of Elizabeth Warren, "and as you can see, she is not."   Among the Senator's detractors was Bill John Baker, who asserted "The Cherokee Nation is a modern, productive society, and I am blessed to be their chief. I will not be silent when individuals mock and insult our people and our great nation.”

The perfect term for the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North America and South America and their descendants, formerly referred to as "Indians" and increasingly as "Native Americans," remains elusive.      Julia Good Fox, professor of American Indian Studies at Haskell Indian Nations University, states "I think people still have this perception that all American Indians look like this image of Plains Indians from the 1800s.   We don’t look like how we would have 200 years ago either, so to expect Indians to look the same (as they did then) makes no sense."

Nor does it make any sense to assume, as Brown does, that all such individuals are "persons of color" (whatever the phrase means).   Bill John Baker would know.   He is 1/32 Cherokee, the same as claimed by Elizabeth Warren.  And this "person of color" looks like this:

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