Half Changed World

It really was a day to remember.

I'm assuming that anyone reading this has already read news coverage, so I'm only going to post about my personal experience:

The transportation logistics were convoluted, but not terrible given the huge number of people they were transporting.  The 16S bus we had been promised didn't exist, but that didn't really matter.  Bypassing L'Enfant Plaza and getting dumped at Judiciary Square instead probably cost us an hour of walking around, but gained us the experience of getting to walk through the 3rd street tunnel.  On the way home, we didn't even try to get on the metro near the Mall, but walked across the 14th street bridge to the Pentagon.  We passed a woman who suggested that it would be grand to have no cars and pedestrians walking down the middle of Independence Ave all the time.

The lines for the ticketed areas were a total mess.  The silver line literally looped back onto itself at one point.  We lucked into being right nearby when they opened up a new gate, but I'm not at all surprised that some ticket holders never got in.  There was no one managing the lines or providing information that I could find.

The Mall was a madhouse
(we were jam packed so tightly that I literally couldn't move my arms
for most of the time, and I could only see small pieces of the Jumbotron, let alone
the actual events) but it was still a glorious day.  Everyone was just
so happy and excited and buzzing.  I've never been in that tightly packed a crowd other than for short periods on the subway, but it was ok.

I really wasn't that cold, except on the way home.  I guess we were packed in so tightly we kept each other warm, like penguins.

That said, I'm glad that D turned down my offer to come.  He would have been tired and uncomfortable and unable to see, and I would have had him on my shoulders for hours, and we both would have been cranky.  It was a day for going with the flow, and I'm particularly bad at going with the flow when I feel responsible for other people's happiness.

The crowd was more integrated than any event I've attended that I can think of.  The woman in front of me (white) was 6 months pregnant and part of a group that was 4 adults and 16 children. She's a lot braver than I am.  The woman next to her (black) said she was only there because her 91 year old mother wanted to be there.

I'm not generally a fan of Rick
Warren, but it was moving to hear so many people around me saying the
Lord's Prayer under their breath around me.
 

The crowd was a lot more rowdy than you could tell from the TV
broadcasts — there was lots of cheering for Ted Kennedy and Jimmy
Carter as well as Bill Clinton and all of the Obamas, and there were
pretty loud boos for Bush, Lieberman, and Clarence Thomas.  (Some for
McCain, but not as many as for the other three.)   And there was lots
of singing of hey nah, good bye.  Chants of Yes We Can and Obama while the dignitaries were arriving.

I don't think the people around us
knew that Aretha was going to sing, so there were whooops when she was
announced. 

I couldn't really hear most of the speeches — the audio wasn't very
loud, and there was also an echo effect from the multiple jumbotrons —
so I watched the whole thing over again once we finally made it home.

Here's a photo I took during Obama's speech — by holding my camera over my head and snapping in the general direction of the screen.  The view from my eye level was much worse.

Forgot to mention: Everyone in my section was amused by a squirrel who was clearly freaked out that there were so many people under ITS TREE.  At one point it got up the nerve to jump from one tree to another, and there was an audible cheer in our area. 

I spent much of the day immersed in the details of the recovery legislation that's being introduced in the House.  And all I can say is, wow, we're really in a whole new world.

I know, there's still a long way to go between this preliminary bill being introduced and something being signed into law.  (I watched my schoolhouse rock, you know.)  But, for someone who has spent much of my life fighting for incredibly modest incremental improvements, it's just mindboggling to read a bill that in one stroke would do so much.

Just to give one example: you might remember that last fall, I was excited that the Senate tax bill would lower the threshold at which families begin to qualify for the child tax credit to $8,500.  Well, this bill would lower the threshold all the way to $0.  If a family with a child earns $1, they would get a $0.15 tax credit.

This is just totally outside of my zone of experience.  The only time in my life when Democrats have controlled both the Presidency and both houses of Congress was 1993-1994.  And Clinton was so convinced that he needed to bring the budget deficit under control that he famously complained that they had become "Eisenhower Republicans." 

So, wow.

I was thrilled to read earlier this week that Tom Geoghegan is running for Congress, for the seat that Rahm Emmanuel is vacating.  It's a special election, which usually means really low turnout, and there's about 10 people running for it, so goodness knows whether he's got a shot, but I'm excited enough about him that I squeezed out a contribution for him.  Thomas Frank called him an "unrepentant New Dealer" and that's probably fair enough.  He's a lifelong labor lawyer, a supporter of single payer health insurance.

But the main reason that I'm supporting him is that he wrote a book that changed my life.  It's called Which Side Are You On?  Trying To Be For Labor When It's Flat on Its Back.  It begins:

The book is sad, funny, and poetic.  And it convinced me that tilting at windmills is a perfectly reasonable way to spend your life.  The next thing I knew, I was taking  David Montgomery's classes and a few years later I was in public policy grad school. 

My copy of the book is still on my shelf, and I just picked it up.  I had forgotten that Geoghegan had signed it for me.  It's dated November 1994, a few weeks after the election that brought us Newt Gingrich and the Contract with (or on) America, and I must have been pretty discouraged when I talked to him, because what he wrote is "For some good it may do — Read Coles!  Then just put it all aside, and do it all with as much style as you can."

Anyway, I'm not the only person who Geoghegan has impressed.  Here's Kathy G writing about canvassing for him, and Katha Pollitt and David Sirota and James Fallows and Rick Perlstein (author of Nixonland) even Mickey Kaus

Oh, and if you're having trouble spelling his name, you can also find his website at www.tom09.com

It still takes my breath away to think that in just over a week, this man is going to be sworn is as President of the United States.  I'm sure he'll piss me off sometimes, but I really can't think of anyone else I'd rather have as President right now, even if there are people whose list of policies look closer to mine.

I think I've decided against taking the boys downtown, although it kills me a little to be so close and not to be there.  But we wouldn't be able to see a thing, and it's going to be cold, and they just don't have that much patience.  I took them to see him at the town meeting in Alexandria during the primaries, so they can tell their kids someday that they saw him.  (I'm told that my great-great grandmother Betsy Segal saw Mr. Lincoln when he came to New York to give his speech at Cooper Union and she was a little girl.)  One of my friends is having a kid-friendly party, so I think we'll go there, and watch on TV and wave flags, and read stories from Our White House.

I'm not going to any of the inaugural balls, but there are a couple of parties that I'm considering.  My boss is having a get together on the evening of the 20th, if I can figure out how to get to her house in Maryland from Virginia.

What are you doing?

I'm not a fan of Rick Warren, and I'm not thrilled with Obama's choice to invite him to give the invocation at his inauguration.  But, you want to know what my main response is? 

Obama really meant it when he said he wasn't going to be president of the red states, or blue states, but of the United States of America.

These images from Minnesota Public Radio make me grateful that I'm not an election judge.  There are some examples — on both sides where the campaigns are grabbing at straws.  But there are also some where it's really hard to tell what the voter had in mind.  And there's also the issue of having someone who can't decide whether they're voting for Al Franken or the Lizard People determine the control of the U.S. Senate.

I have to say, these ballots make the Georgia idea of having a runoff when neither candidate gets 50 percent seem more reasonable.  Although I have a sneaking suspicion that the policy just might may have been instituted to make sure that a black candidate couldn't win if two white candidates split the vote.  Does anyone know which actually costs the state more (per capita), holding a runoff or manually reviewing all the ballots?

Of course, the efficient way to deal with multiple candidates is the preferential or instant runoff ballot where voters rank the candidates and then when someone is eliminated, his or her votes are redistributed to the voter's second choice.  It means that you can vote for a "minor party" candidate without feeling like your vote is wasted — and when my 5th grade class used it for our presidential vote in 1980, John Anderson did in fact win.

Australia actually uses this system in their parliamentary elections, and it seems to work for them.  Cambridge MA uses a version of it for city council elections where first they reallocate the "extra" ballots  of candidates who got more votes than needed.  That link indicates that they have moved to using scan cards for these elections — when I lived nearby, they did it all on paper, and you could hang out and watch them move the ballots from one pile to another.  I wonder what fraction of ballots are spoiled there — it's pretty confusing if you're not used to it.

It appears that the $700 billion bailout fund isn’t going to be used to buy "toxic assets" from the banks after all.  I’m not sure how I feel about that. 

On the one hand, the folks at Planet Money have been telling me since before the bailout bill passed that most economists think a stock injection plan makes more sense than buying assets of unknown value.  On the other hand, Congress certainly thought they were giving Treasury authority to buy lousy assets, not all this other stuff.   Neel Kashkari, who is running the bailout office, may be doing the right things.  But no one elected him anything, and no one confirmed his appointment.  And I’m enough of a believer in checks and balances to think that
maybe the Treasury ought to be going to back to Congress and saying
"this is what we want to do and why."

I also think the fact that Kashkari is literally a rocket scientist* (well, technically an aerospace engineer) is a symptom of what’s been wrong with the American economy.  There’s just been so much money sloshing around the financial sector that it’s been sucking smart people away from jobs where they actually do something productive.  Being an engineer is on average a good-paying job, but it’s not a winner take all job — very few engineers make more than $200,000 a year. 

*For what it’s worth, David Kestenbaum at Planet Money has a PhD in Physics.  I haven’t been able to find anyone working in finance who is literally a brain surgeon by training.

I don’t usually cry with happiness, but I’ve been tearing up all day.  Because for 22 months, Obama has been telling us that the United States can live up to its highest aspirations, can make real the story that this is a place of unparalleled opportunity, and last night we did it.  So many people feel like they own a piece of this victory, because they volunteered or gave money to the campaign, and that’s something wondrous too.  I keep looking at the pictures of people dancing in the street, or the tears running down Jesse Jackson’s face, and then I well up again.  By 9am today, you couldn’t buy a copy of the Washington Post anywhere downtown because people wanted them as souvenirs.

All day long I’ve been humming Ella’s Song to myself — it’s the Sweet Honey in the Rock song that begins "We who believe in freedom shall not rest until it’s come…." 

Obama’s got a tough job ahead of him, and yes, there’s no way he’s going to make everyone happy who supported him.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be celebrating today.  As Marge Piercy writes:

This is the blessing for a political victory:

Although I shall not forget that things

work in increments and epicycles and sometime

leaps that half the time fall back down,

let’s not relinquish dancing while the music

fits into our hips and bounces our heels.

We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melach haolem, sheheckianu, v’kiemanu, v’higianu lazman hazeh.

Blessed are you, Adonai our God, Ruler of the Universe, who gave us life, who sustained us, and who enabled us to reach this day.

That’s a neat widget, but so far, I’ve been mostly checking out the results at the New York Times, which lets you drill down by county.
Not much to say yet.

Update: 10:16 pm.  It sure looks like Obama’s won, but the reality of it hasn’t really hit me.  Both boys are asleep on the living room couch.

Virginia’s Presidential race is still too close to call.  It looks like this may be the state where the polls are going to be furthest off.  I’ll be really interested to hear what they think happened.

Wolf appears to be beating Feder by large margins.  Connally appears to be beating Fimian.  Chris Shays has lost, so there are no longer any Republican Representatives from New England.

I should be going to bed, but I found this via Brad DeLong and couldn’t resist.

By the way, DeLong is a wonky economist, and I’ve never seen him post a video before.