Half Changed World

Surprising absolutely no one, John Edwards announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President today.  I think he’s a good candidate, and I’m just thrilled that he’s talking about poverty and inequality as major issues in America today. 

It’s somewhat bizarre to realize that the guy who was the party’s nominee for Vice President the last time around is considered an underdog this time, and is positioning himself as the outsider.  But Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are so hogging the political spotlight that everyone else is left on the outside. That said, there’s over a year to go until the first primary, so a lot can happen between now and then.  (The NY Times pointed out earlier this week how early the announcements are happening this cycle; I think one of the effects of this is that it makes Bush seem like even more of a lame duck than he would otherwise.)

The conventional wisdom in recent years seems to be against competitive primary seasons, arguing that candidates do better when they don’t have to move away from the center, and can keep their money for the general election.  I’m not convinced by that.  It’s certainly true that the media will pay a lot more attention to a competitive race than to one that seems to be locked up. And I think a candidate gains stature by defeating people of stature and that passion reinforces itself rather than being a limited resource.

I’m honestly not sure who I’d vote for if the primary were today.  And for once it’s because there’s multiple (potential) candidates who I’d like to see President, not because I’m so depressed about the choices.  That’s a nice feeling.

I’ll be interested to see how all the candidates interact with the blogosphere over the next few years.  I think Edwards gets it, or at least has hired someone who does.  His website has a special section for bloggers with the lure for those who sign up of being featured on their blogroll.  And John and Elizabeth both made appearances on Kos today.

Nearly two years ago, I wrote here about rumors that the Department of Labor was going to try to roll back the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA)  There was some good discussion about the importance of FMLA, but DOL didn’t do anything.  It looked like the we might have nipped the attempt in the bud.

Well, on Friday DOL published a "request for comments" on FMLA.  DOL "invites interested parties having knowledge of, or experience with, the FMLA to submit comments and welcomes any pertinent information that will provide a basis for ascertaining the effectiveness of the current implementing regulations and the Department’s administration of the Act."

"Interested parties having knowledge of, or experience with, the FMLA…."  That means me.  And probably you.  So let’s do it.   Comments are due by February 2, 2007. Email them to: whdcomments@dol.gov (the notice also lists a US mail address, as well as a fax number.)

DOL lists a range of topics on which they are particularly soliciting feedback, including the definitions of an eligible employee, a "serious health condition" and a "day," the interaction between paid leave and unpaid FMLA leave, the medical certification procedures, and the impact of FMLA on productivity, morale, and retention.

Based on my reading of the notice, I think they’re trying to make a case against allowing workers to use "intermittent, unscheduled" FMLA.  It’s clear that employers have complained about it, arguing that workers who are late or just don’t want to come in are claiming that it’s due to depression or other hard-to-disprove ailments and covered under FMLA.  I hear that, and I’m sure there are cases of employees who abuse the law.  But there’s plenty of legitimate reasons why one might need to take intermittent, unscheduled leave to deal with personal or family illness.   I would guess that there are far more people with medical conditions where the need for care is unpredictable — like asthma or lupus — than those where people have regularly scheduled appointments, like chemotherapy or dialysis.

The Federal Register notice is fairly dense and technical, but don’t get intimidated by it.  What they’re asking for is personal experience — your stories.  Tell them about how you needed leave when your or your child, spouse or parent was sick.  Tell them about your coworkers who took leave, and how you managed to cover for them.  If you’re an employer, tell them how the FMLA has affected you.

Also let them know when FMLA hasn’t worked for you.  Tell them if you had to go back to work 6 weeks after you had your baby instead of 12 because you couldn’t afford to do without your salary any more.  Tell them about the problems you had because your kids passed the same damn cold back and forth all month, but the FMLA regulations say that "a cold or flu" doesn’t count as a serious illness.  Tell them if you’re a doctor and find the documentation requirements a burden.

Let’s spread the word.  MomsRising already picked the story up, but I haven’t seen much else about it. 

Additional resource: National Partnership for Women and Families

Alison asked me what political blogs I like.  That’s a harder question to answer than it seems.

A short answer is provided by my bloglines subscriptions.  As you’ll see, there’s a lot of blogs there, and no, I don’t read all of them every day — nowhere near that.  But these were all ones that I liked enough to think that I’d want to find them again, and the easiest way to do that is to add them to my subscriptions.

But, of all those blogs, which ones are political?  That’s hard to answer.  Majikthise and Pandagon were both finalists for Koufax awards last year.  But what about Bitch, PhD?  Does the fact that she sometimes tells cute kid stories make her less of a political blogger?  For that matter, what about me?  I don’t generally think of myself as a political blogger, because I write about a lot of things, but I’ve been interviewed by two different academics studying political bloggers, and was invited to participate on Gather’s election 2006 group. 

I tend to prefer bloggers who mix the personal and the political to those who are all politics all the time.  For one thing, I think it dramatically reduces the level of flaming — when you think of the words on the screen as coming from a real person who gets frustrated with their kids and likes to watch trashy tv, you’re less likely to tell them they’re a moron.  For another, the volume of postings tends to be more managable.

I may lose my blogger credential for saying this, but I think that for most national political issues, the much maligned mainstream media generally does a better job of covering things than bloggers do.  Where blogs shine are the issues and races that get overlooked by the mainstream media.  So I love reading Not Larry Sabato who covers Virginia politics down to the delegate and state senate level.  The now defunct Democracy for Virginia used to highlight specific bills.  Nathan Newman writes about labor issues.

For the high volume political blogs, I mostly depend on others to point out the most interesting posts.  I usually only read Kevin Drum or Matthew Yglesias when Laura at 11d sends me over to them, but then I almost always find something else there that’s interesting.  TAPPED and inclusionist are other blogs that often point me to interesting content elsewhere. 

It’s worth noting that the biggest "political blogs" aren’t exactly blogs.  They’re community sites, like DailyKos and MyDD.  I generally don’t read these unless someone points me to a specific post, because I haven’t figured out how to handle the huge volume on them.  I do check out TPMCafe every week or so. 

A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to view the Motherhood Manifesto documentary.  (I work for one of the Moms Rising aligned organizations, so we set it up in the conference room during lunch and brought popcorn.)

It’s very well done.  For each of the letters in the MOTHER agenda, they have a funny pseudo-fifties animated clip, a feature about someone affected by the issue, and brief interviews with experts who are working on the issue with aligned organizations.  It’s a nice mixture of wrenching personal stories with just a touch of policy wonkery and, unlike many discussions of work-family issues, they leave viewers with hope that progress is being made rather than with handwringing over the current state of the world.

When the movie was done, we sat around and discussed it.  Some in my organization (which focuses on low-income individuals and families) were concerned that there weren’t more low-income mothers featured in it, but I’m pretty sure that was a deliberate choice.  I think it’s almost certainly true that the way to get more affordable child care, health care, etc. for poor families is to get middle- and upper-income families to fight for changes in the system, out of self-interest as well as altruism.  But I think it’s also important to make sure that the solutions then work for everyone.  (Recently, there was a discussion on one of my parenting email lists about the high cost of child care in the DC area, and the solution that someone suggested was to increase the amount that could be put aside tax free for child care in Flexible Spending Accounts.  I tried to be polite in pointing out that FSAs don’t help people who don’t make enough to owe federal income taxes.)

The more interesting question that was raised was whether it’s limiting to frame this as a mothers’ organization rather than as a caregivers organization, since many of the proposals are needed by people caring for the elderly or sick as well as by parents.  And someone — not me — did ask my favorite question of Where Are The Dads?  I’m really ambivalent about this one.  On the one hand, I do think that always talking of these issues as mothers’ issues lets fathers and others off the hook.  But I do think that being a mother is a very salient part of lots of mothers’ identities, and so it’s a good way to mobilize them.  In particular, there are a lot of people who don’t think of themselves as activists, but if you convince them that being politically engaged is an important part of being a mother, they might do it.  And I’m not sure that a broad "caregivers movement" would engage people in the same way.  What do you think?

In any case, the documentary is worth watching.  If you’re in the DC area, and want to see the movie, the Women’s Information Network is having a screening and discussion tonight at AFSCME.  (Sorry, I won’t be there — I’ll be at D’s soccer team dinner.)  If that doesn’t work for you, let me know if you’d like me to arrange a kid-friendly viewing at my house some time.  (Probably not until January.)

Wheeeeeeee!  It’s really looking like the Dems have taken both the House and the Senate.  Given that Virginia uses overwhelmingly electronic voting machines, it’s hard to imagine the circumstances under which a recount would find another 7,000 votes for Allen.  It’s not like Florida, where you can argue about chads and voter intent.  I think Webb has pulled it off.

There’s an odd little debate that’s floating around the blogosphere about how progressive the new Democratic representatives and Senators are.  This is both a question of who should get credit for the victory (e.g Emanuel vs. The Netroots) and a question about the upcoming legislative agenda.

In particular, I think it’s a question about how much Pelosi should use her power as Majority Leader to promote her vision of the Democratic party and keep more conservative members from making common cause with the few moderate Republicans who are left.  Over the past couple of years, she’s really pushed Democrats to maintain party discipline — to vote strict party lines, so the Republicans couldn’t claim that they were acting in a bipartisan manner.  And that’s made sense, since the Republican leadership has been using their power over the rules to prevent any amendments from being voted on that they didn’t like, even when those amendments could have won the support of a majority of Representatives.  But now that the Democrats are in power, it will be interesting to see whether she tries to maintain that sort of strict discipline.

On the Senate side, because of the possibility of a fillibuster, most legislation requires 60 votes.  In recent years, the Democrats have gotten very leary of providing the needed votes to move any legislation forward, because even if the Senate-passed bill was reasonable, they knew that they’d get screwed in conference committee.  So it will be interesting to see how things play out.

Finally, everyone should pay attention to what Congress does over the next six weeks, as they return for a lame duck session.  The continuing resolution that provides funding for most of the government only runs through November 17, so they have to come back and finish up the budget process.  This gives the Republicans one last chance to try to ram through some of their priorities before they lose control.  It could get ugly very fast.

Please vote.  Please please please.

I’ve got a little bubble of hope that’s been trying to come out, and I keep pushing it down because I don’t want to be too disappointed.  I can still feel what it tasted like in 2000 when the initial Gore lead disappeared somewhere around midnight, and the sick feeling in my stomach in 1994 as the size of the Republican win became clear.  I’ve been obsessively checking the Post website and Not Larry Sabato, even though neither has anything particularly interesting to say at this point.  While individual polls point in different directions, they’re all within the margin of error.

I’m going to head to bed soon, because I’m getting up early to volunteer at one of the local polling places.  I’m actually volunteering for the Commonwealth Coalition, rather than Webb, because I really don’t think that anyone is going to show up at the polls not knowing who they’re voting for in the Senate race, but I actually think that handing people the full text of Ballot Question 1 might sway some votes.  And then I’m going to vote myself, and then head into work, and then come home and obsess.  If you’re in the area and want to come obsess with me, you’re invited.

I think it’s going to be a long night.  If the Dems lose most of the close Senate races in the East, it could be over early, but otherwise we’re all going to be waiting for the Montana results to come in.  And I wouldn’t be surprised if one or more races were close enought to require a recount.  (The Post suggests that Missouri is the most likely state to have problems.)  So we may not know Wednesday morning who is in control of the Senate.

Hey, Bill Clinton just called me.  Well, sort of.

How about everyone posting tomorrow after they’ve voted and saying what the lines were like, etc?

I figure that this week, instead of blogging, my free time can be better spent making political phone calls.  And I’d like to encourage all of you (at least those in the US) to spend the time you would have spent reading it doing likewise.

MoveOn has made it incredibly easy to do this from your own home.  Go to www.callforchange.com and sign up, and they’ll tell you exactly what to do — who to call, what to say.  You need to be able to get online and call at the same time.  I’ve been using my cell phone so I don’t have to pay for long-distance calls.  Right now, they’re trying to ID people who are likely to vote for Democratic candidates in targeted races, but who have a history of not always making it out to vote.

The tool is very elegant — you click on different buttons to tell them if you get an answering machine or a bad number (or got hung up on), as well as to provide the responses you get if you reach a real live person.  If you get a bunch of no answers in a row, they give you a little pep talk.  And they track how many calls you’ve made, and how many responses you’ve gotten, so you can feel like you’re making real progress. 

A big thanks to This Mom for pointing this website out to me.  I got overwhelmed by the email, and so got off of the MoveOn list.  I’ve been meaning to volunteer on some of the local campaigns, but only made it out one afternoon.  After working all day, it’s just hard to give up my time with the boys in the evenings or weekends.  And they’re not quite old enough for me to drag them with me when I knock on doors.  But this I can do from home, after the boys are in bed. And if I only have time to do it for 10 minutes, I can do it for 10 minutes.   (They ask you to sign up for specific shifts, but that’s just a way of making you feel committed — you can actually hop on any time you have a few free minutes.)

So Obama is officially considering running for President.  He says he’ll decide after the election.   As those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know, I’m really hoping he runs. (Even though my dad thinks that it’s the kiss of death for David Brooks to be encouraging him to run.)  It would be great to have a candidate that I was really excited about for a change.  Maybe, as Rebecca Traister argued in Salon last week, it’s not fair that I can’t get enthusiastic about Hillary, but I can’t.

What do all of you think?  Has anyone read his new book?

(Sorry for the light posting lately — I’ve been busy and am just back from a business trip, where I didn’t have internet connection.)

Today’s book is The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement And How You Can Fight Back, by Jacob Hacker.  Can I just say that I wish I had written this book?  It answers the question that a bunch of us wrestled with in the spring — how can we be so affluent, and yet feel like a "middle-class" life is out of our reach?  Hacker’s answer is that we’re facing more risk than ever before, so even if we’re doing well today, we worry that it could slip out of our grasp tomorrow.

Specifically, Hacker shows how a range of economic and political forces have combined to increase risk in almost every aspect of our lives:

• Income volatility has increased significantly, and has increased more among the middle- and upper-class than the poor.  (The poor still have higher levels of income volatility.)
• Job loss is more likely to lead to long-term unemployment, and re-employment at significantly lower wages and/or in a different industry.
• Marriages are more likely to end in divorce.
• Education is an excellent investment, but also a risky one — students are borrowing more than ever, and going to college doesn’t guarantee a high income.
• Defined benefit pensions are rapidly disappearing, replaced by 401ks.
• More people are uninsured than ever before, and even people with insurance have a higher probability of being hit by large uncovered bills than in the past.

Hacker’s not the first one to say any of this, but he does a really nice job of pulling it together in one package.  (One of my few complaints about the book is that when Hacker incorporates true-life stories that illustrate his points, the stories are oddly familiar, because he picked most of them them up from the same newspaper articles that I’ve read.)

The most immediately politically salient part of this book is where Hacker takes on the proposals to privatize Social Security and to shift people from standard health insurance into Health Savings Accounts.  Hacker argues that these are part of an ideologically driven "Personal Responsibility Crusade" that is designed to increase risk, even though most people feel like they have too much risk in their lives, thank you very much. 

Hacker also makes some proposals for how to reduce risk from its current levels.  The simplest is probably his proposal for universal 401ks, that could be portable across jobs, and that workers would be automatically enrolled in unless they opted out.  He also proposes that the government would annuitize these accounts when people reach retirement.  He also proposes to open up Medicare for people under 65 and to create a system of Universal Insurance that would cover people against sharp drops in income.  (Neither of these proposals are described in any detail in the book, which attempts to reach a general audience and so tries not to scare people off with too many formulas.)

Like Warren and Tyagi, Hacker also offers some practical advice — build up some savings, sign up for a 401k if you can, buy life insurance, don’t buy a house that you can only afford with a variable rate mortgage, don’t enroll in a college that you can’t afford to stay in until you finish.  He also points out the significance of "loss aversion" — that it’s more painful to give up something that you have than to never have had it in the first place.

If all this isn’t familiar to you, read the book.  And if it is, send it to your Congressman.

I’m saddened to hear of the passing of Ann Richards, who was a bright light among politicians, full of good spirits as well as what Anna Quindlin called "a sense of fun, irreverence and general cussedness."  I hadn’t known until I read her obituary that she got her political start working for Sarah Weddington, of Roe v. Wade fame.

I see the President managed to say nice things about her, even though they were rival candidates for Governor of Texas, and Barbara Bush never forgave her for her the "born with a silver foot in his mouth" line*.  (In retrospect, it’s hard to believe that people complained about Bush Sr’s lack of articulateness — his son makes him look like an orator and a statesman.)

I had the chance to talk to Ann Richards on the phone once.  I had been helping interview candidates for a job at my old office, and I noticed that Richards was listed as a reference for one of them, a young woman who had worked in her law office while attending the LBJ school.  So I immediately volunteered to call her.  I left a message explaining why I was calling, and later that day Richards herself called me back.  Her first words about the applicant were "isn’t she just the cutest little thing?"  I thought this was hysterical, even though I’m sure the applicant would have cringed if she had known.

***

In writing this entry, I wondered whether Richards had said the line about Bush "being born on third and thinking he hit a triple" as well as the silver foot line.  It looks like credit for that one goes to Jim Hightower.  The best discussion of this appears to be a digression in the comments to this old post of Brad DeLong’s.  Google also taught me that the silver foot line was used as far back as 1966, and Heather Booth applied it to Bush a few weeks before Richards did.  But Richards did it on television.

***
Molly Ivins on Richards.

I can’t find the blog I read earlier today that had some great photos of Richards, so here’s an assortment via google images.