Apt. 11D

One week off, guys!

Weekend Journal

As part of Ian's constellation of neurological quirks, he has a slight case of OCD. It's not huge, but it's there in the background.

South Carolina

My husband and I went to Nyack for Indian food this evening. Before dinner came, Steve pulled out his blackberry to check results in South Carolina. Then I called my mom for more information. Life of the political junkie.

Our waiter overheard our conversation and asked for information. He was overjoyed. He said he couldn't wait to see what the talking heads had to say tomorrow. And the bloggers.

After dinner, we strolled down the street and spotted a TV in a pizzeria. Obama was giving his speech. All the pizza guys in their white shirts had come out from behind the counter and from the kitchen and were watching the speech. We went in and watched the speech with those guys. It was one of those rare bonding moments that you have with strangers. We talked about the upcoming primary and warmly wished each other a good evening.

Matt Yglesias wondered how many ordinary people watched Obama's speech tonight. More than anyone expected.

Democratic Confessions

Hillary is bugging the crap out of me.

I want to like her. I like the idea of woman president. I think we should evaluate candidates based on their policy issues and leadership skills, and not whether or not we could envision tossing back a brewsky with them.

So, okay. Let's be adults. Let's line up the three Democratic candidates and compare their policy proposals. Frankly, the differences between them are shades of grey. Very, very subtle differences. If you care about national health care, each has a plan. There isn't a huge, huge difference between any of the plans. Any of the three options would be better than the status quo.

And, still, Hillary bugs me.

Maybe the fact that she bugs me comes from some hidden sexism programmed in me as a youth. Maybe the part of her that bugs me comes from society teaching me that women leaders are shrill. So, I've given her second, third, fourth chances.

Everybody hates her inner smug-smartypants-humorless-girl-from-third-grade. At the risk of morphing into David Brooks and reducing all politics to a high school lunchroom, let me just say that in the third grade, I was the space-cadet-girl-who-read-Little-House-In-the-Prairie-under-my-math-textbook. Hillary wins the prize for Least Fun to Party With.

She and Bill have been dreadful for the past few weeks. Their accusations of Obama being a Reagan-lover were stupid and juvenile. Bill has been too visible and aggressive in South Carolina. This isn't a woman hating thing. It's a Clinton hating thing.

I'm actually dismayed that Hillary is ahead in the Florida polls.

The New York Times endorsed Hillary today. But their opinion writers have been pounding her for weeks. Collins tells Bill to go home. Dowd writes, "Bill’s transition from elder statesman, leader of his party and bipartisan ambassador to ward heeler and hatchet man has been seamless — and seamy." Kristof mocks Hillary's experience. This endorsement from the Times must be their way of limiting damage to the likely Democratic candidate. As Democrats, this Hillary hatred is bad for business. It could push moderates into the McCain camp in November.

But we need to be honest that her low likability scores are a liability for us. Likability is a factor in elections. It shouldn't be dismissed as an irrelevant factor that only people with low policy knowledge use to make decisions. It will affect how she operates in Washington and abroad. The return of Bill into DC politics is something that few are looking forward to. If Obama loses, he's going to be Al Gore II - the martyred candidate that we wished had won.

Hillary better clean up her act now. Tell Bill to go back to his cushy charity job. Stop the low blows against Obama. Reduce the arrogance and attitude. But in the meantime, I'm a Obama girl.

47 Million People Don't Want Health Insurance

For the second time this week, I've learned some remarkable news. I've learned that the 47 million uninsured Americans don't really want health insurance. They are young, healthy, and Republican.

Steve Green writes,

Let’s be honest about something here. The biggest reason to mandate health insurance is to force young, healthy people (millions of whom neither want nor need insurance) to pay in, thus lowering rates (and thus transferring wealth) to millions of old people who have a lot more money than young people. But old people also vote a lot more than young people. And by and large they vote for Democrats.

This news has been picked up elsewhere. Someone on Fox News must have been mumbling some of this nonsense, since my mom started lecturing me about this over the weekend. Let's get our facts correct.

First of all, old people aren't all Democrats. 42% of Americans aged 65 to 74 identify as Republican.

Secondly, most of the uninsured are from working families. "Over 8 in 10 uninsured people came from working families – almost 70 percent from families with one or more full-time workers and 11 percent from families with part-time workers." More real facts about the uninsured here.

Weekend Journal

Last summer, we sent Jonah to Fancy Camp for four weeks to give him a chance to muck around in the woods and sing songs and have watermelon pit fights. He had a marvelous time, and we're planning on sending him again next summer. I'm not sure if Fancy Camp is any different from Boy Scout camp, and we'll have to do some research for lower cost places when we get some spare minutes.

I'll Say Sorry, But I'm Not Taking Off My Glasses

Is Divorce Good For Women?

In a column for Slate, Tim Hartford explains why divorce is good for women using nice, neat, bloodless rational choice theory. I like rational choice theory. It can be a useful way of analyzing why individuals behave in certain ways. It assumes that people rationally look at option A and option B, weigh the alternatives, and then choose the option that benefits them the most.

In this column, Hartford explains how the greater ease of a “no fault” divorce has lead to happier women.

...once divorce started to become conceivable, women knew they could no longer think of themselves as one part of an economic unit. Rationality, you will recall, is about thinking ahead and responding to incentives. Realizing that the economic unit might break up, at which point a woman who simply specialized in having children was in serious trouble, it became rational for a woman to maintain career options as divorce insurance. In the division-of-labor world of the 1950s, unhappily married women would rationally stick it out: they had few alternatives. But as more older women were finding jobs, managing their housework more quickly with the aid of washing machines and electric irons, women started to realize that there was an alternative to an unhappy marriage. Divorce was still financially tough but it was no longer economic suicide. And then the contraceptive pill came along, making women—as we have seen—more highly educated, career-minded and employer-friendly...

That started a second reinforcing loop—some people regard it as a vicious circle. Because divorce was conceivable, women preserved career options. But because women had career options, divorce became conceivable. It became less and less likely that a woman would become trapped in a miserable marriage out of pure economic necessity...

The serious entry of married women into the workforce has meant that they spend a little less time baking cookies, and perhaps also that their husbands spend a little more time with the children. It has empowered them to leave marriages that are not working, making them happier and safer from abuse. It has truly been a revolution, and the price of that revolution is more divorce and less marriage. That price is very real—but it is almost certainly a price worth paying.

Really interesting and I agree with much of what Hartford said. But I can’t resist poking holes in his argument. Hartford makes the same mistake that all rational choice economists make. They assume that people’s preferences are all the same.

So, the looming spectre of poverty from divorce has pushed women to enter the workforce in droves. They need the insurance of a paycheck. That sounds about right. However, is full time employment good for all women? Hartford assumes that full time employment makes people happy. Writing legal briefs is better than baking cookies.

Full time employment is great for people who do cool jobs, like writers, pundits, and economic professors. Full time employment sucks for the person doing data entry in a direct mail company or the person who fills up coffee cups at a diner or the person renting cars at an airport. How many daycare workers would rather be watching their own children, instead of spending most of their paycheck to have other people watch their children? My father-in-law is marking off the number of weeks until retirement on his desk blotter.

And even some people with enough education and privilege to have access to cool jobs, still would prefer to be home watching their kids. They would rather change diapers, than prepare legal briefs. All those women are forced into the workforce, because they need that insurance, but they aren’t really happy about it. Being a stay at home mom is now a high risk sport.

Then there is the whole problem with the double shift. Many working women return from a full day at work to put in another shift at home. They are still making dinner, minding the kids, doing the laundry. Divisions of labor from the 60s still apply in many households, even though women are now doing the bread winning, too.

The availability of divorce has been great for some women – those who have access to great jobs, those that need the threat of a divorce to keep their men in line, those who are in genuinely abusive situations. But it hasn’t been great for the women who have been pushing unwillingly into the workforce and now face a double shift at home.

Experience

Yes, I know it's terribly uncool to read AOL news and to even still have an AOL e-mail account. But I kinda like hanging out in the Octogenarian Knitters and Swingers chatroom, so shut up.

Mo Rocca does a blog for AOL, and he has been amusing lately. Check out: "Experience Matters" and "Experience v. Change."

If you are looking for other kinds of interesting experiences, check out this blog, True Porn Clerk Stories. You must read the post on why she uses so much handsanitizer. (via the unfogged commenters, of course).

Katie's Error

Every morning, my husband rushes around the house locating his blackberry and his turkey sandwich before running out of the house for the 6:50 bus to Manhattan, To avoid bodily harm, I wisely decide to stay out of his way. Instead, I pour myself a cup of coffee and watch 15 minutes of the morning news shows.

I'll flip back and forth between CBS and NBC. The shows are interchangeable. Perky people who will just as happily tell you about an up-coming storm, the latest in shoe fashion, and results of the Michigan primary. What happened when I slept?

At 7:05, I'll reluctantly turn off the news and start toasting the waffles and fishing damp jeans out of the dryer.

That 15 minutes is only time that I'll digest TV news. As a blogger and a political scientist, I'll be getting news all day, but I'll be mainlining headlines through the Times website and bloglines. By the time that 6:30 rolls around, I'll be cooking, tutoring, chauffeuring. I'll be yelling at kids to quit their computer programs and making them fold up their Taekwondo pajamas.

I never watch the 6:30 news. And neither do my students.

When I teach Politics and Media, I assign the most widely used textbook, but the students don't know what to make out of it. The author writes as if the world still looked up to news anchors. She talks familiarly and respectfully of Brian Williams and Katie Couric. She assumes that the students also worship them. No. The students worship Jon Stewart. They have never watched the 6:30 news, not even once. They have never watched the local 5:00 news shows either. I have to actually assign a project to get the students to watch those shows, so they will care more about the text. I might as well have asked them to go to a museum.

Finally, Flanagan has written an article for Atlantic that most bloggers will agree with. She writes about Katie Couric's dumb move from the morning show to the evening news.

That Katie has bombed at CBS is a testament, not to the existence of a glass ceiling, but to the fact that real revolutions are so thoroughgoing that they don’t just provide a new answer, they change the very questions being asked. Katie’s mandate to lure women and young people to the nightly news was in itself ridiculous and doomed to fail—and a goal beneath her talent and ambitions. No woman needs to storm the Bastille of nightly news, because the form has become irrelevant: Oprah has immeasurably more cultural, commercial, and political clout than Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, and no young person is ever going to make appointment TV out of a sober-minded 6:30 wrap-up of stories he or she already read online in the afternoon. Because Katie remembered the old world, the one in which the most-respected news was broadcast at the end of the day, she thought that she was taking a more powerful job. But the Today show—broadcast for four hours a day, a forum for interviews with many of the top newsmakers of the day, as well as for the kind of lifestyle-trend stories it pioneered and that have come to play such a big part in the nightly news—is a far more culturally significant program. One reason that this huge star didn’t have a tell-all biography written about her until now is that while she was at Today, no publisher wanted to antagonize her; a booking on the show was every new author’s dream. The release of Klein’s splashy book, then, is evidence not of Katie’s elevation, but of its opposite. She made the kind of mistake that women a generation younger than hers probably wouldn’t have. She spent her time gunning for a position that had been drained of its status and importance long before she got there. And what she has learned, the hard way, is that her climb to the top has been not a triumph but the act of someone who slept through a revolution.

Couric's likability has also been questioned lately. There have always been rumors that Couric doesn't play well with others, and Matt Lauer still has the fresh honeymoon glow from Meredith Vieira. I didn't bond with her like Flanagan did, but I never hated her. She seemed always seemed more approachable than Matt Lauer, who I imagine washing his hands after shaking hands with people. (I once sat one table over from Lauer, Bryant Gumbel, and their wives at a restaurant. Chilly city. They never spoke to each other through the meal.)

While I feel bad for Couric for making such a dumb move, I don't mourn the end of network news. It was always staged and superficial. I love that news production and commentary is so decentralized and open. The last viewers of the network news are one shuffleboard game away from extinction. Couric better start a blog.