Robert David Sullivan

Too many dicks on the airwaves

If I wrote that the president (or, worse, the Republican speaker of the House) was a "dick," it would be evidence of the lack of standards among bloggers. But Mark Halperin's use of the term to describe Barack Obama on live TV is being treated as only a smidgen over the line of acceptability — even though its sentiment is typical of broadcast punditry.   

I can understand why Halperin did it. It's got to be tough coming up with new political analysis every day when you're not allowed to talk about policy (too boring) and the horse race dynamics change so little. Other than flipping back and forth between saying that the president is a genius and that he's a stumblebum, you have to talk about "boomlets" for people who are never, ever going to occupy the White House. (Sorry, Tim Murphy of Mother Jones, but Rick Perry is not going to win the GOP nomination after sponsoring a Christians-only prayerfest that implicitly kisses off Catholics as well as Jews and secular libertarians.)

James Fallows has it right:

The real problem is the dickishness of our mainstream political analysis, especially from the "savviest" practitioners. Back during my days as media critic, I argued in Breaking the News and a related Atlantic cover story that the laziest and ultimately most destructive form of political coverage came when journalists seemed to imagine that they were theater critics or figure-skating judges. The what of public affairs didn't interest them. All they cared about was the how.

I may be Massachusetts-centric, but my sense is there was a tipping point with the Bush-Dukakis presidential race of 1988 (and the demise of Gary Hart earlier that year). After that, I noticed a heightened contempt among political journalists for "losers." It came to be an article of faith that any candidate who couldn't master the atmospherics of a campaign — e.g., using flags as effectively as Bush did or answering "What would you do if your wife was raped and murdered?" in a dramatically satisfying way — couldn't possibly be effective at governing. So why bother to even mention his or her policy views?

Note: I do not endorse the sentiment below when it comes to actual dance floors, but it's highly appropriate for the male-dominated field of political journalism.

 

Republicans, taxes, and defense-attorney politics

I suppose I should be paying more attention to stories about how Washington is going to deal with the federal deficit and debt ceiling, but it's all such a predictable pantomime. (No, "kabuki theater" is not a more apt term.)

Is there anything newsworthy about a Republican leader saying that "tax hikes are off the table"? Why would I read a story past that point when it's just going to regurgitate talking points from the Reagan era?

The modern Republican Party is like a criminal-defense attorney with one client: rich people who want lower taxes. Most GOP candidates and office holders are paid to make the case for tax cuts, and their professional ethics prevent them from ever arguing otherwise.

To a Republican, there is no such thing as an ideal tax rate, any more than there is an ideal prison sentence for a defense attorney's client. The client is always innocent and taxes are always too high.

Sorry, Bruins fans, but the MBTA really can't plan for once-in-a-lifetime crowds

One of the most frustrating dilemmas for mass transit advocates is that many (most?) people are exposed to subways and buses only during the worst conditions imaginable.

So there was plenty of bitching about MBTA service on Saturday, when hundreds of thousands of people came to downtown Boston for the Bruins victory parade. The T told the Boston Globe that a record 120,000 people took the commuter rail on Saturday, or almost double the ridership on a typical weekday. And there were plenty of horror stories about crowds stranded on station platforms while packed trains zipped by without stopping on their way into the city.

Is this really a surprise? I imagine a lot of suburbanites are asking, "How do people put up with this every day?", just as they do after New Year's Eve, the Fourth of July, and blizzards that force "drill, baby, drill" SUV owners onto noisy, smelly buses and trains. Some of them may be angry enough to demand cuts in public transit funding on the grounds that there's no point in throwing good money after bad.

Well, we true urbanites don't put up with this every day, and we stay the hell away from the T (or Boston altogether) when the bridge-and-tunnel crowds invade the Hub for a few hours. We know that it's impossible for any public transit system to double its capacity for one day. We also know that no public transit system can or should maintain staff and equipment levels to meet once-in-a-lifetime crowds. Indeed, if a subway system doesn't have crowded trains during rush hour — so packed that lots of people have to let a train or two go by before they can fit on one — it's surely wasting money.

I enjoy luxurious subway service, with short waits and plenty of seats, because I generally travel outside of rush hour. (There are occasional glitches with disabled trains and "signal problems," but they occur most often when unusually large crowds tax the system.) Same thing with popular restaurants: I tend to go on weeknights, when the service is better than on Friday and Saturday nights. Thanks, people who come into the city on weekends, for subsidizing the other nights when these restaurants are bearable!

As for the people injured on an escalator at Back Bay Station: That was terrible and shouldn't have happened. But next time you might consider not getting on an escalator that's overloaded with people who just swarmed off a crowded train. You could take the stairs or even hang back for a minute or two to let the crowd disperse before trying to get out of the station. Believe it or not, those of us who use the T every day are not trampled on a regular basis.

Weiner resigning from office is a slap to democracy

Anthony Weiner is quitting Congress after pushing pics of his manhood through the Internet tubes. It's understandable, given that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats, dropped him like a hot potato (or hot something else). But it's still undemocratic.

It's an insult to voters when politicians walk away from their seats midterm, whether because they landed better jobs, got embarrassed by scandal, or just got tired of not getting their way. In many cases, they're replaced by someone who did not earn the office but can use the advantages of incumbency to win "re-election." There's often a special election to fill the vacancy, and it's almost always won by an insider who can raise cash quickly; newcomers who need a normal election cycle to make themselves known to voters are out of luck.

In Weiner's case, we have a guy who became unpopular with his House colleagues (looking smart will do that) and then the party leadership, so there were plenty of people eager to push him out. I'm not going to get into his particular actions here, but a midterm resignation (as opposed to retirement at the end of his term) only emboldens people looking to overturn election results they don't like. Those who wonder why prostitute client Sen. David Vitter is still in office while Weiner is gone miss the point that scandals are a convenient way to get rid of politicians that their peers never liked anyway. Consistency is never the issue.

I think political vacancies should simply remain vacant until the next regular election, with possible exceptions for (certified) death, jail sentences, and offices with direct control of military forces. I don't see why Weiner's constituents should be saddled with some political hack just because he got too big for his britches.

 

Save Downtown Crossing by turning it into a tourism district with a Fedora Trail

Borders Books is closing its downtown Boston branch (where I've done almost all my Christmas shopping over the past decade), which means more debate over why a growing, prosperous city has such a crummy central shopping district. The Filene's Pit debacle is one reason, of course, but there must be ways to improve the neighborhood around that giant hole on Washington Street, just as Boston should be able to fix up the Government Center area instead of being distracted by the unlikely prospect of tearing down City Hall. (Both places were in my "10 Worst Things About Boston" post.)

Tuesday's Boston Herald has some suggestions from its business writers for turning things around. But I can't imagine a casino being a good thng, despite Frank Quaratiello's argument that it would bring "foot traffic" and fill in storefronts. Don't gambling establishments offer cheap food and drink and do all they can to stop people from leaving? Are people really going to play the slots and then drop $80 for a meal at BIna Osteria or Petit Robert?

Besides, a lack of foot traffic isn't really the problem. There are plenty of pedestrians at all hours of the day, thanks in part to all the workers in the area. Nighttime is a different story, and other Herald writers are correct to urge more housing and round-the-clock activities, though I think the city has already been aiming for that.

My suggestion is cut back on the glitz (which is proliferating nicely in other parts of the city) and turn Downtown Crossing into an historic district.

Libertarian group says Mass. doesn't have big government (but cut it anyway)

The libertarian Mercatus Center says that Massachusetts ranks 46th in "freedom," thanks to such oppressive measures as motorcycle helmet laws and high cigarette taxes, but it doesn't exactly buy into the "Taxachusetts" slur: "Tax rates remain about average, and the government payroll is remarkably small."

So what's so bad about the Bay State? "The biggest fiscal problem for Massachusetts is debt, which equals more than a quarter of personal income."

Hmm. If the state's debt is our biggest problem and our tax rates aren't unusually high, why not raise taxes (perhaps on gasoline) to help retire our debt? That's unthinkable for a libertarian, so Mercatus has an alternative solution: "Reduce state grants to local school districts to encourage better use of funds. Use savings to retire state debt."

Of course, state aid to local school districts is targeted to poorer cities that don't have much of a tax base, so Mercatus is essentially saying we should reduce the state debt by firing teachers in Lawrence and Springfield.

Why not say that any school district that depends on money from the state must lower its legal dropout age to 12? Think of all the savings — and freedom! — to be gained!

The Chinese laugh at New York and Chicago but tremble in fear of Des Moines

Today in alleged news: The New York Times reports that Iowa and New Hampshire have disproportionate power* in determining who will lead the United States. And their bigfoot status is of a piece with the anti-urban bias (the US Senate is an even more glaring example) of American politics:

Above all, Iowa and New Hampshire lack a single big city, at a time when large metropolitan areas are crucial to lifting economic growth. Big metro areas are where big ideas most often take shape and great new companies are most often born. The country’s 25 largest areas are responsible for 52 percent of the country’s economic output, according to the Brookings Institution, and are home to 42 percent of the population.

Yet metro areas are also struggling with major problems. The quality of schools is spotty. Commutes last longer than ever. Roads, bridges, tunnels and transit systems are aging.

You don’t hear much about these issues in the first year of a presidential campaign, though.

The big picture quote in the piece is from the Brooking Institute's Bruce Katz, who says, “The United States stands apart as an anti-urban nation in an urbanizing world." He unfavorably compares us to China, where urban planning is at the core of economic strategy.

*Update: Jonathan Bernstein makes a valid point, that Iowa and New Hampshire have become less important than non-state-specific "support from party actors." That may have something to do with how many potential 2012 GOP candidates have dropped out long before Iowa. But I disagree with Bernstein (see his comments section) that the the dynamics of the general election give more weight to urban issues.

Not coincidentally, the Phoenix's David Bernstein today gives a big "CAUCUS PANDER WIN" to long-shot Republican presidential candidate Buddy Roemer, who promises to hold his inaugural balls in Iowa rather than in Washington, DC. Presumably, this would show the world how little we care about our job-generating, immigrant-attracting big cities. We could show China that our political elites are keeping a laser-like focus on the aging, population-losing, obsolete-industries backbone of our great nation!

Matt Yglesias suggests moving the first primary from New Hampshire to Massachusetts so that "we’d probably see candidates saying something about traffic jams, mass transit, regional planning, etc. instead of all farms all the time," but this has to be mostly for the joke of forcing GOP candidates to compete in the most educated state in the US. Yglesias says that he doesn't want to get too far from the small size of New Hampshire that supposedly helps little-known candidates. By that logic, we could move the first primary to Washington, DC, except that it has far too many... federal employees for the Republican Party's liking.

So why not shrink the New Hampshire primary to just Nashua, whose size (86,000) is reasonably close to the population median? (That is, a bit more than half of all Americans live in cities bigger than Nashua and almost half live in places that are smaller.) Or Portland, Maine, which is a bit smaller but slightly more diverse and, frankly, a lot more interesting?

It won't happen, of course, because of our national romance with little bitty towns where nothing happens. Speaking of which, I've been asked to post more Andy Griffith Show clips, so below is what is probably the best episode of the series, a Twilight Zone-ish tale of a "Man in a Hurry" to the big city of Charlotte who is trapped in Mayberry on a Sunday afternoon. (I think Mayberry is actually the afterlife here and he'll never escape.) Seriously, it's a beautifully written and produced episode, but I'd love to find an urban equivalent.