AJC.com > Opinion > Woman to Woman > Archives > 2008 > March
March 2008
Could Obama’s multiracial heritage become a political disadvantage?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
Barack Obama’s thoughtful speech on race proved once and for all that he’s ready for the big leagues of politics.
Obama could have disavowed his pastor, Reverend Wright, who had been a father to the essentially fatherless candidate for twenty years. He didn’t. Obama could have ignored white anger in his defense of black anger. He didn’t. He understands this about working and middle-class white Americans: “When they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed….resentment builds over time.” After a speech that even conservatives like Peggy Noonan are praising, it’s not surprising to find Obama’s polling numbers back on the rise, following the initial shock of the Wright hubbub.
Yet should Obama win his party’s nomination, he’s hardly out of the woods. His disadvantage stems not from a multicultural background and imperfect loved ones — so many of us share that heritage, those relationships — but from battling Republican operatives who happily torpedo opponents with a swift boat of distortion. In a recent FOX News poll, 57 percent of Americans said that they don’t think Obama shares his former pastor’s more controversial views. Will they remember that come fall when the Reverend’s rants echo through endless attack ads?
This election could be decided on sound bites and whims, but I’m hoping we’re smarter than that. We all remember when it seemed important that George Bush was “the kind of guy we’d like to meet for a beer.” Well, look what happened. We’re not having a beer with him. We’re having a war.
Can Barack Obama hit it out of the park with this whole honesty shtick? Yes he can, provided he continues to prove that it’s not just shtick. For as much as we trade clips and barbs on the candidates, acting like this is all just so much Government Gone Wild fun, we’re actually starved for true leadership.
As the primary season marches into its umpteenth, ugly inning, Obama’s grace under pressure looks like the real deal. I say, enough already with the minor-leagues. Let’s send him up to the show.
Should the U.S. open a dialogue with Raoul Castro?
Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Commentary
Recently, a bipartisan committee of over 100 House members sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, practically begging her and the Bush administration to take advantage of a change in leadership in Cuba to reopen a dialogue. They reminded her that “Our policy leaves us without influence at this critical moment….After fifty years; it is time for us to think and act anew.”
This is a critical moment, indeed. With cheap oil from Venezuelan Dictator Hugo Chavez and opportunistic friendship from China, our silence gives Cuba no reason to align itself with Western democracy. Given Cuba’s strategic location, it could be an important security and trade partner, particularly given its abundance of sugar. Furthermore, the resources put toward monitoring Cuba are troubling when far more dangerous places under US sanction—like Iran—could use our full attention.
Nobody is suggesting that Raoul Castro offers a massive change from his brother, or that a dinner dance at the White House is suddenly in order. Yet even Cuban-Americans themselves, notorious hard-liners and influential Florida voters, are softening their stance. A study by Bendixen and Associates showed that over 70 percent of Cuban-Americans want our government to deal with a post-Fidel Cuba, provided we get some cooperation. Not withstanding a fervent vocal minority, this is a far cry from the “there is no talking to a Castro under any circumstances” position that has reigned for years.
“Right now, we have a failed policy” explains Dr. Jennifer McCoy over a cup of coffee near the Carter Center, where she is Director of the Americas Program. “Castro left on his own accord, not because of U.S. policy. That’s all the proof you need that our strategy isn’t working.”
For Dr. McCoy, taking the first step doesn’t undermine our credibility, it signals a willingness to try something new, in the face of overwhelming evidence that something new is desperately needed. Imposing preconditions, such as the release of political prisoners, before any dialogue has an emotional appeal but ultimately makes no sense. “To change the relationship, we have to talk.” McCoy advises. “The whole idea of preconditions is illogical. You have to talk to get movement going for the change that you want.”
Rebuttal
I must admit Andy almost had me sold by her compelling argument. But then I snapped back into reality to remember that Cuba is a communist, totalitarian state with neither Castro interested in easing his strangle-hold on the Cuban people.
If this was a real transition, it might be different. But Raul “Clone” Castro has shown no willingness to change on any issue we have raised. Without willingness, it is utterly foolish to expect dialogue to magically “get movement going for the change we want.” Remember: Cuban leaders are totally corrupt, they allow absolutely no ownership of private property, thousands of people are jailed and tortured for sharing unpopular opinions, and the nation’s economy has been so mismanaged the island can’t even provide basic services.
Let’s also have no illusions about what Andy really means by “talking.” This isn’t trying to build a bridge by comparing notes on how the grandkids are doing. U.S. and Cuban representatives can talk that way at the U.N. every day. No, “talking” is usually shorthand for “concessions” - in other words, “breaking our embargo and allowing trade.”
Is that really a good idea when every penny goes straight into the pockets of a corrupt regime? As Dr. Jaime Suchlicki, Director of the University of Miami’s Institute of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies said in a phone interview, “Any trade from us will put money into the military and government, which owns everything in the country. The money won’t go to Cubans.”
Its not that the United States is unwilling to talk. What we are unwilling to do is to provide direct support to corrupt, harsh, totalitarian dictators who oppress their people. We’ve been quietly providing the Cuban people “back door” humanitarian help for years, totaling $270 million in private aid last year alone.
Many people point to our easing of restrictions on Vietnam as an example of communist dialogue. But as Ray Wasler of the Heritage Foundation pointed out, we did that only after Vietnam’s leaders took some baby steps, like developing international trade rules.
Baby steps aren’t a huge hurdle; if Raul isn’t willing to take even those, we’re kidding ourselves to think that ‘talking’ would be anything more than our one-sided concessions for a dictator to continue business as usual.
Should people invest time and money in local, organic food?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Commentary
The organic-food industry reminds me of Starbucks coffee. It costs more, it doesn’t necessarily taste any better and yet somehow buying it makes people feel better. Organic foods have their place, but the moral-high-ground hype of the modern organic movement drives me crazy. Organics come with trade-offs they don’t seem to recognize.
In theory, always buying locally-grown organic food is a wonderful idea. My parents retired to the mountains, where they grow their vegetables, get eggs from the farm down the road, and know which farmers have the best hormone-free meat.
But modern suburbanites don’t know the local farmer. And once that local link is gone, it is very difficult to know what you’re getting for those higher-priced “organic” foods. Today, that label assures a higher price, but not that the product is more natural, healthier or even that it tastes better.
Not to mention that the research is mixed on which organic products and processes are actually healthier. British studies, for example, have found that organic milk contains more anti-oxidants, but lower levels of vitamins A and E.
Organic types condemn pesticides; but most studies sanction the miniscule amounts consumers ingest. More importantly, without pesticides to ward off insects and fungi, crop yields would plummet. And chemical fertilizers horrify organic types, but are one of the single most important advances in feeding hundreds of millions of people who would otherwise be starving.
With those trade-offs, I appreciate the common sense approach of Cindy Burke, author of To Buy or Not To Buy Organic. She started a book on going totally organic, but her research changed her mind. By phone, she explained that understanding where your food comes from is more important than, for example, paying a premium for supermarket organic milk, when those cows are probably stuck on a giant factory farm instead of grazing on grass. She said, “Organic started as a sustainable way of growing healthy food in a bio-diverse environment, but big business has turned it into a high end niche. That’s why I did all the research on when it matters to buy organic and when it doesn’t. It doesn’t make sense to buy everything organic, especially if it has a small exposure to pesticides; you can get better value and food almost as good.”
Rebuttal
My colleague Shaunti clearly appreciates the wholesome goodness of local organic food. Yet her affectionate description of the hormone and pesticide-free meals served up at her parent’s mountain home begs the question: Should putting fresh, healthy food in our bodies really be a vacation-only splurge?
We forget that until the 1940’s all agriculture was organic. Now, it’s another story. “If our food had to be labeled with the variety of pesticides and herbicides used, then you better believe organic would be more prevalent” declares Alice Rolls, Executive Director of Georgia Organics.
Rolls easily concedes that we needn’t go organic on everything. Yet when it comes to many foods it’s hard to buy that pesticides aren’t a problem. It doesn’t explain why some pesticide-using farmers maintain an alarming double-standard in their own lives: Rolls has heard plenty of accounts of “conventional farmers who won’t eat their own crop but have an organic garden by the house for personal consumption.”
Despite this troubling hypocrisy if “hundreds of millions of people would starve” without their pesticide-laden food, I’d spray the fields myself. Fortunately, that’s just not true. Researchers from the University of Michigan found that yields were almost equal on organic and conventional farms. Moreover, organic farming gives underdeveloped countries some unique survival advantages. Farmers in remote communities gain true self-sufficiency, rather than dependence on costly pesticides and the genetically modified seeds required to tolerate them.
Local and organically grown food is harder to find and often a bit more expensive than the piles of “big ag” bounty available at the local supermarket. Yet if you buy organic or local food where it counts, cutting out some of the other garbage you mindlessly throw in the cart, you’ll probably break even financially— and come out way ahead, health-wise.
So don’t think of frequent trips to your local farmer’s market as a chore. Think of it as giving yourself vacation food without the staggering hotel and airline bills.
Far from an organic purist, I’ve nonetheless found that I’m never sorry when I put a little time and effort into finding the freshest food my town has to offer. I figure that my hard-working body deserves it. Doesn’t yours?
How should government respond on home foreclosures?
Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Commentary
“There’s plenty of blame to go around” is how my friend Jack, a loan officer at a local bank, neatly sums up the foreclosure crisis. From oblivious lenders to deceptive mortgage brokers, from overly optimistic borrowers to overly ambitious investors, many bear responsibility for our current subprime-related quagmire.
No homeowner deserves a free pass, even if caught up in the one-two punch of a bad loan and sinking house prices. Yet the capitalist maxim, buyer beware, feels especially callous when directed at hard-working folks who were manipulated into bad loans when they qualified for decent ones. Moreover, no matter how we got here, a neighborhood filled with vacancies and rotating tenants is bad for everyone.
Voluntary initiatives like Fed Chair Ben Bernanke’s recent appeal to lenders can be helpful, but more aggressive government intervention is needed to stem the tide of foreclosures. A reasonable solution backed by Senate Democrats would temporarily change the bankruptcy code, allowing qualifying families to file for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, then work with judges to modify their mortgages. Under current laws, vacation homes, ranches and farms can be restructured but not primary residences
Is this a total bailout for naive borrowers? Hardly. “They’re not going to get a free ride” explains Dan Immergluck, a Georgia Tech professor and expert on mortgage lending. Indeed, homeowners would have to prove that they’re residents, not speculative investors, who were deceived as to the terms of their loan, and that they can work out a payment plan.
Under these stringent rules only 200,000 families would qualify, yet there still remains nearly insurmountable opposition. The Mortgage Bankers Association complains that these negotiations would drive up interest rates. Not so-a study by Georgetown Law Center disputes the MBA’s claims, asserting that there would be little to no change in rates if legislation allows modifications in bankruptcy proceedings.
Many agree on changing the lending laws so that fewer people can be taken advantage of in the future. Yet for those who scrimped and saved for a down payment on a dream and honestly represented themselves in the borrowing process, buying a house should never have turned into such a nightmare. It benefits us all to keep those families in their homes.
Rebuttal
Where borrowers were truly defrauded, the government should prosecute corrupt brokers or lenders and put them in jail.
The problem is that lender fraud accounts for only a fraction of home foreclosures, and most of the broader proposals out there are compassionate but foolish. Foreclosure estimates range between 600,000 to one million this year, and most are due to standard economic shifts- or because someone gambled and lost.
If homeowners lost jobs because companies moved from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt, that’s a fluid economy in action. Should the government really punish areas that are gaining by bailing out those that are losing steam? Or suppose one borrower prudently saved for five years for a downpayment on a reasonably-sized house, while his neighbor took a no-doc, no-downpayment, high-interest loan for a bigger house than he really needed: is it right to bail out Guy #2 now that he’s underwater? One reason our free market works is that consequences help make more-informed decisions next time.
I used to work for the Senate Banking Committee, so I contacted several conservative staff members off-the-record. They pointed out that only two-thirds of homeowners even have mortgages, and that 95% of them are paying on time! As one aide said, “What about all those people out there who made the right decision and who will profit from downturn? And why should congress try to prop-up an already inflated housing market, anyway? We need to accept the good and bad from the market.”
The government should encourage what lenders are already doing: voluntary actions like writing down underwater loans. But mandatory measures would mean the government suspending a contract between two private parties: the lender and the borrower. And as the Cato Institute’s Alan Reynolds told me, “Without secure contracts there is no security of property rights. Most of the proposed solutions are far worse than the problem, because they would restrict mortgage lending for many years while the highly-localized problem of too many overpriced houses will be largely fixed within a year or so.”
The loss of a home is a personal crisis. But we can’t afford to create a worse problem by involuntary government actions that would turn these personal crises into a national economic one.
Are liberals not supportive enough of our military?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Commentary
In February, the Berkeley, California, City Council passed a measure saying Marine recruiters were “not welcome in our city.” The measure emphasized, “If recruiters choose to stay, they do so as uninvited and unwelcome intruders,” and asked residents to “impede…the work of any military recruiting office.”
Shock and outrage swept the country. It’s one thing for private citizens to exercise their freedom of speech; quite another for the government itself to undercut national security and military morale. Even many liberals decried the Berkeley action as extreme, saying their fellows should oppose the war, not the military.
The Berkeley action may be extreme — but it’s also a natural and almost inevitable outgrowth of what I believe is a systemic flaw in liberal thinking. Liberals tend to believe that people are inherently good, so problems can almost always be solved by working harder at understanding, education and dialogue. Under this reasoning, the use of force (e.g. the military) becomes not only counterproductive but often shameful and wrong.
Well-intentioned people on the left, therefore, frequently have an inherent tension and discomfort with the military, and a deep lack of understanding for its importance. And that translates into policies and actions that look non-supportive or even hostile.
Some of those actions may be merely frustrating, like Toledo’s Democrat mayor recently refusing to let Marines into his town for a pre-approved training exercise. But others are far more demoralizing, such as when congressman John Murtha read an early and very inaccurate news release of a battle in Iraq and called a press conference to say Marines had “killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” And still others are deadly serious, like President Clinton’s enormous shrinking of our military forces; 30 percent in the Air Force alone. He promised to shrink defense by $60 billion, then struck $120 billion from the defense budget. Yet, he sent more troops abroad on operations than in the previous thirty years. By 1999, more than half of those enlisted planned to leave the service at the earliest allowed time.
Unfortunately, perhaps influenced by ideological discomfort with military action, both another Clinton and Obama are refusing to recognize that we are now winning in Iraq, and threaten to return lower morale to our military when we can least afford it.
Rebuttal
I’m not really a wear-your-heart-on-your-car kind of gal, but right about now I want to slap a big bumper sticker on the back of my van that says, “You can support the troops AND be concerned about this war. I think we all know that. Now, stop tailgating me.”
If troop morale is in danger, I doubt it’s due to antics in The Peoples Republic of Berkeley or the justifiable disappointment of decorated marine colonel John Murtha, (who magically transformed into a liberal the second he parted ways with the official stance on Iraq.)
We could guess how the troops feel — but why not just ask them? The Military Times did, finding in a recent poll of active-duty service members that a third of respondents do not feel that their own commander-in-chief has their best interests at heart. Perhaps that’s why active service troops are increasingly less inclined to align with the Grand Old Party. Sixty percent of respondents identified themselves as Republican in 2004.Three years later, only 48.9 percent claimed the GOP as their party of choice. I wonder what “systemic flaw” in troop-think is causing this abandonment?
The troops do need our support, now more than ever, but with our advocacy for their protection, not with bumper sticker platitudes that solve nothing, help no one. To call such advocacy liberal might startle moderates and conservatives; all Americans are more than capable of recognizing that our brave men and women face an uphill battle, for not even an encouraging surge can insure permanent stability in Iraq.
Black and white stereotypes simply don’t hold up in this gray-area war on terror. For any of us, supporting the troops should mean acknowledging that in a front-less war where enemies and allies change in an instant, giving our soldiers tools for diplomacy and education is just as vital as decent helmets and body armor.
If there’s a “systemic flaw” to be found here, it’s in my colleague’s temptation to consider an entire group of people naively immune from reason, yet expect them to work with her towards democracy. That doesn’t play any better here than it does in Iraq — and it certainly doesn’t support the troops.
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Commentary
By Shaunti Feldhahn
Barack Obama’s multiracial and international heritage provides him an amazing empathetic advantage. And to say the man can speak is an understatement. Unfortunately, we have seen how easy it is for his cultural heritage to also become a political disadvantage.
Unless you’ve recently been on a wilderness trek without television, you know that Obama has long attended a church pastored by a “fiery” figure in the black liberation theology movement - a movement that can be seen as uncomfortably racist by whites.
To be fair, the church’s mission statement emphasizes a desire to “eradicate” the “color line.” But before being altered, their website also included this Reverend Wright comment: “The vision statement of Trinity United Church of Christ is based upon the systematized liberation theology that started in 1969 with the publication of . Black Power and Black Theology.” This worldview explains why he would call our nation the “U.S. of K.K.K.A.” or say “G_ d_ America.”
The problem now confounding even Obama supporters is that he apparently didn’t find that worldview repugnant. Fiery rhetoric isn’t uncommon in African American churches - but it’s usually about the gospel, not “The United States of White America.” Thankfully, Obama disavows Wright’s controversial messages - but was also so saturated by the culture that he apparently didn’t realize how strange it would seem that he could tolerate even one minute of it. A Franklin and Marshall Pennsylvania poll found Obama’s “favorability” rating dropped 10 points in March.
I too grew up in an international, multi-racial environment, find racism of any sort offensive, and want the same for my kids. My 2nd-grader is the only white child in her class, and is totally color-blind. I’m grateful Obama calls for unity, and says “There is not a Black America and a White America . there’s the United States of America.” But, many now wonder, since color-blindness should be our goal, how he could surround himself with hyper-color-awareness?
While racism undoubtedly still exists, Obama has proven more than capable of overcoming it. His disadvantage isn’t arising because he’s half black, but because he has spent years being comfortable in a non-mainstream, race-based cultural community that doesn’t appear to see reverse racism for what it is. And, ironically, any kind of racism is something that most Americans find very uncomfortable.