Obama Can Reboot the Federal Government

Barack Obama apparently resents it when he’s accused of being vague about the policies he’ll pursue as president, seeing such questions as a political trap.  He’s not unjustified in this fear, but since he doesn’t have a record of doing anything in particular in the public sphere — if he had a signature issue, it was ethics and campaign reform, and he just jettisoned that with his decision to raise unlimited private funds in his general election bid — he does have to be more specific than another candidate with a record and a reputation might have needed to be.

I think the promise of Obama is that he will bring to the US government of the new opportunities for collaboration and network formation that creative people have developed in the past five years, using the Internet’s capabilities as their primary tool.  Social media is why my son’s life is going to be very different from mine.

Social media could also be why Obama’s presidency could be very different from any of his predecessors.  Who knows, maybe the state of the art is such that McCain would also embrace these techniques, but if you had to pick between them as to who would usher in that future first, it wouldn’t be a contest. It’s Obama.

There’s a tension, however, between the futuristic orientation of Obama’s young supporters and the essential stodginess of the Democratic Party — a condition Obama’s acolytes haven’t really experienced yet.  The Democratic Party gives life to, and is the death of, idealism in youth.  The situation was nicely captured in today’s Sunday New York Times Magazine, in a short piece by NYU sociology professor Dalton Conley.  Here are some of the key grafs:

The chatter these days is that the Republicans are a party that has run out of ideas. The Soviet Union is long gone; welfare has been reformed; market logics have permeated almost every aspect of our lives (eBay, anyone?). The truth is that the triumph of conservative ideas may present a political problem for the ailing Republicans, but the party that’s truly lacking in new ideas is my own, the resurgent Democrats.

There is lots of talk in progressive policy circles that we need a “New New Deal” or some other sort of postindustrial revision to the social contract. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, after all, were forged in a society in which, for the most part, social organization was concentric. By way of analogy, think of Russian nesting dolls: children were nested in families; each family had one breadwinner; that breadwinner worked for a single employer; those employers were firmly rooted in the United States; and, to top it all off, the vast majority of people living in the country were citizens. This form of social organization made the social contract possible. There were clear parties to cut the deal, so to speak.

(snip)

Today, by contrast, the most common model of social organization is crosscutting social groups.

(snip)

These more complex social arrangements create many problems for the old social contract.

(snip)

So perhaps we need to reimagine these nesting dolls and instead think of the social contract along the lines of a computer network or the hub-and-spoke airline network in the U.S. In such “scale free” networks, distance has been collapsed by long links that allow you to skip between any two points in a couple steps. The government’s role is less as a backup provider — in case one link of the nested chain breaks down — and more as honest broker and resource hub across groups.

In health care, for example, the government could act as a pooler, forming health-insurance-purchasing cooperatives, randomly assigning unaffiliated individuals to groups that would then contract with private insurers. Likewise, the state could set up universal investment accounts for retirement savings, college savings and health expenditures. In education, the feds could mandate that any institutions of higher education that receive government dollars must make their research and course materials available online in an open-source format free of charge.

Private companies and nonprofits are already stepping in to fill this role. The Freelancers Union allows self-employed individuals to purchase health insurance at less expensive group rates. And M.I.T. and iTunes U have already inaugurated the open-courseware movement. But government has an important role to play. After all, the state can absorb a lot more risk than smaller entities can. Think how well government-backed V.A. and F.H.A. mortgages worked after World War II as compared with how the private market has fared lately.

(snip)It’s not surprising that the private-sector, new-economy companies are ahead of government in adapting to the networked society, but if progressives want a victory in the world of ideas and policy — and not just a couple of good election cycles — they are going to have to stop talking F.D.R, J.F.K. and L.B.J. and start thinking eBay, Google and Wiki.

On my other blog, From 50,000 Feet, I wrote about Obama as viewed similarly in a Wired story.

These aren’t the ideas that will get Obama elected, surely.  He already gets mocked as the “egghead” in the race.  He’s compared in an uncomplimentary fashion to such famous Democratic intellectuals as Adlai Stevenson and Michael Dukakis.

But someday, somehow, one of our presidents is going to rescue the federal government from its sclerotic ways and figure out how to treat us like valued customers.  I think it will have to be a Democrat, because only a Democrat will be trusted to reconfigure social safety-net programs, and only a Democrat can butt heads with the public-employee unions that exist to kill efficiency reforms and expert to emerge with anything to show for it.

Obama can grow in the areas where he is now weak.  McCain is what he is. He’s the Pope Benedict XVI of this election, the safe, stall-for-time choice for president who will hold the office honorably while both parties figure out what their new directions will be.  Obama might not be ready (see my last post), but modernizing the colossus that is the US government is a task no one will ever be ready for.  You have to start somewhere, and Obama brings more of the kinds of tools we’ll need than anyone else with a credible chance to become president in 2012.

Is Obama Ready? (*updated)

Okay, Barack Obama, you’ve survived the Hillary gauntlet.  She “threw the kitchen sink” at you, and you hung onto your delegate lead until finally you inched over the top.  You also survived the revelation that Rev. Jeremiah Wright, your pastor, mentor, spiritual advisor and the guy you bring your children to listen to every Sunday is a racist extremist.  Kudos on both.  It couldn’t have been easy.

But you were also lucky. Hillary Clinton is the emblem of a despicable political machine, to which there was a post-traumatic response among some Democrats, particularly the intellectual types who sleep-walked through their skanky reign, recited the talking points on TV when asked, and cheered Bill as if he was Stagger Lee giving a commencement address at Harvard.  You gave them a wake-up call, and you offer an opportunity for cleansing.

Obama, you might get lucky again.  John McCain isn’t as despised as Hillary, but he’s not a beloved figure among his own party, and he’s undeniable tied to George W. Bush on enough policies that the public’s rejection of what’s now being called “the GOP brand” might get him to the White House.

At that point Obama, I hope you can take a few weeks to figure out what it means to be the Leader of the Free World and the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military in the known history of the planet.

You need to take a class or something.  You’re making some appalling errors right now.

———–

On NAFTA:  During a Democratic debate, Obama quite clearly threatened to unilaterally withdraw the US from the treaty if Canada and Mexico weren’t willing to renegotiate.  It came out that his economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee met with Canadian officials as an Obama representative to tell them to take Obama’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric as “political posturing.”  When a memo regarding this meeting was publicized, Obama’s campaign tried to issue a carefully parsed denial, but eventually had to acknowledge the meeting did happen and comments about the politics of NAFTA were made.  Obama and his campaign reaffirmed, however, their anti-NAFTA bonafides. The story hurt Obama, and he lost the Ohio primary.

Now that he’s the nominee, he’s doing the usual things, including giving reassurances to Wall Street of his intentions.  His method was a sit-down with Fortune magazine, during which he was asked about NAFTA.  Not too surprisingly, Obama took a more moderate position on the treaty.  The position shift isn’t what made him look bad.  It was the clumsy way he did it:

“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake,” despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? “Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don’t exempt myself,” he answered.

(snip)

Now, however, Obama says he doesn’t believe in unilaterally reopening NAFTA. On the afternoon that I sat down with him to discuss the economy, Obama said he had just spoken with Harper, who had called to congratulate him on winning the nomination.

“I’m not a big believer in doing things unilaterally,” Obama said. “I’m a big believer in opening up a dialogue and figuring out how we can make this work for all people.”

This isn’t a shift in tone or emphasis.  This is Obama talking about himself as if he doesn’t recognize that “politician” who was running around Ohio, getting all overheated and talking about unilateral moves that Obama doesn’t believe in.  As if he was just seized by a passionate hatred of NAFTA, and not making calculated statements to draw votes from NAFTA-hating Ohio unionists, statements that these Ohioans would be justified in now calling lies.

In the big leagues, Obama, politicians shift around all the time, depending on the audience and the temper of the times. The moderate uniter-not-a-divider George W. Bush of 2000 would hardly recognize the Onward Christian Soldiers Bush of 2004.  But you don’t make the shift by casting yourself as an unreliable source of your own beliefs. “Yeah, I said that, but I must have been crazy,” is a fair paraphrase of what Obama told Fortune.

He did it again on an even more sensitive subject: The status of Jerusalem in a hypothetical Israeli-Palestinian accord.  From a Reuters story Tuesday that was headlined: Adviser denies Obama showed naivete on Jerusalem:

Democrat Barack Obama misused a “code word” in Middle East politics when he said Jerusalem should be Israel’s “undivided” capital but that does not mean he is naive on foreign policy, a top adviser said on Tuesday.

Addressing a pro-Israel lobby group this month, the Democratic White House hopeful said: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

The comment angered Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as the capital of a future state. “He has closed all doors to peace,” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said after the June 4 speech.

Obama later said Palestinians and Israelis had to negotiate the status of the city, in line with long-held U.S. presidential policy.

Daniel Kurtzer, who advises Obama on the Middle East, said Tuesday at the Israel Policy Forum that Obama’s comment stemmed from “a picture in his mind of Jerusalem before 1967 with barbed wires and minefields and demilitarized zones.”

“So he used a word to represent what he did not want to see again, and then realized afterwards that that word is a code word in the Middle East,” Kurtzer said.

The U.S. Congress passed a law in 1995 describing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and saying it should not be divided, but successive presidents have used their foreign policy powers to maintain the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and to back talks between Israel and Palestinians on the status of Jerusalem.

I am not running for president, and I don’t consider myself an expert on the Palestinian issue, but even I know that Palestinians take offense when US politicians promise U.S. Jewish leaders that Jerusalem will be Israel’s.  This time it was Kurtzer uttering the “yeah, he said that but he must have been crazy” formulation, describing the misleading and confusing images in Obama’s mind that led him astray.

It’s also bound to be noted by conservatives and McCain’s campaign that Obama seems intimately aware of what Jerusalem looked like when he was all of six years old, but had no clue what his Weather Underground friend Bill Ayers was up to, blowing up buildings two years later.  But more to the point, the claim that Obama is “not naive” doesn’t alter the inherent naivete in a presidential finalist talking off the top of his head on the most touchy international topic imaginable.   Jennifer Rubin, an Obama critic who blogs for Commentary Magazine, spreads the responsibility to Obama’s campaign:

Even more so, if the advisor says Obama didn’t understand what he was saying. But wait a minute. Didn’t Obama have advisors on Israel assisting him with the speech? Where were they? Once again, this suggests that there is too little adult supervision of a candidate unaccustomed to speaking on the world stage about issues in which there are lots of code words, indeed in which every word (e.g. “preconditons,” “immediate withdrawal”) has meaning to Americans’ foes and friends.

The link on the words “adult supervision” will take you to another embarrassment, but this one implicating his “likely National Security adviser” Richard Danzig, who compared foreign affairs to Winnie-the-Pooh.  He was probably kidding, Rubin suggests hopefully.  But I’ve seen so many Democratic candidates destroyed by seeming unequipped to defend the country.  You know, the Dems are supposed to be “the Mommy party.”  To make the same point, I would have picked any book in the world but Winnie-the-Pooh.

Obama has had a meteoric rise to power, to the threshold of the presidency, which I believe he should be favored to win almost no matter what he does.  But please, Obama, don’t scare the grownups, or else a lot of us might take our secret ballots and secretly pick someone else.

*Update, 6/20/08:  The NY Times columnist David Brooks disagrees with any hint that Obama is naive.  It’s all strategery, Brooks says:

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.

Campaign Finance Reform’s Descent into Farce

I’ve been a total skeptic of campaign finance reform for years, and I think history bears me out.  The original premise of reform was to permit a candidate to gain access to public attention strictly on the merits of their candidacy, and for elected officials to enter office owing nothing to any special interests.  Freed of those obligations, the theory goes, elected officials will be free to vote their conscience and in keeping with the wishes of their constituents, rather than the fat cats.

Now into the third decade of campaign finance reform lawmaking, with endless revisions designed to address the unintended consequences of previous iterations, the concept has finally reached its nadir in the City of New York, whose city council has just decided to pass a campaign finance reform law that nakedly tilts the game in favor of the most powerful special interest in that city’s politics.  From the New York Times:

The new law would crack down on donations from lobbyists, strictly limit contributions from contractors who do business with the city, and allow developers to give only a fraction of what they once could.

But there is one group that would be untouched by the major overhaul of the campaign finance law approved by the City Council yesterday: the city’s powerful labor unions.

The unions, which have given millions to city candidates and provide critical backing in Council races, were excluded from the bill, which is expected to be signed into law by the mayor. The bill would go into effect over staggered periods as the city builds the needed databases to track people doing business with the city.

The changes have received broad support from government watchdog groups, who say the new campaign finance law will be among the most stringent in the country, sharply limiting influence and the appearance of influence of special-interest money on government policy.

Excluding labor groups from the restrictions illustrates the considerable strength unions retain in New York City politics, at a time when union power is waning elsewhere in the country. The new restrictions, political analysts say, will only magnify their power.

I’m curious.  Who are these “government watchdog groups” who think this law is fair? (None of them are named in the story.)  Aren’t they a little embarassed?  No matter how you feel about the relative merits of unions, business, city contractors or developers, you can’t call it “fair” to restrict only some of these interests. 

City residents, the constituents whose interests are supposedly at issue here, can be affected negatively by “pay to play” contracting, over-development, or special interest pro-business legislation.  While the principle of campaign finance reform may be defective, it is not irrational to want to control those interests.  But the public can also be affected negatively by overly generous pay and benefit packages to the city’s huge corps of employees, and by restrictive hiring and firing rules that keep incompetent people in vital positions. 

Cities all over America have faced bankruptcy owing to excessive pension and pay obligations.  Those contracts are not agreed to in a vacuum; they are a direct result of labor’s political power.  Just ask Roy Romer, or anyone else who has been forced to run the LA Unified School District, where labor is given license to insert itself into every important decision.

Here is the City Council’s rationalization:

The City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, the daughter of a retired union electrician who was first elected in 1999, has received a total of nearly $70,000 in union contributions. One of her top aides, Maura Keaney, is the former political director for Unite Here, which represents hotel, restaurant and apparel workers.

Ms. Quinn has repeatedly drawn a distinction between a union negotiating with the city for better pay and benefits, and developers and corporations vying for lucrative land deals or government contracts.

“The situation here is to require that everyone gets treated the same way,” she said yesterday. “A union or a PAC can give one contribution, whatever the maximum is for the office in question. Someone who did business with the City of New York prior to this could have every person in the business give a contribution of the maximum level allowed to that office. So I think this in fact much more levels the playing field.”

Well, it’s a sound bite anyway.  Coming to a city hall near you!

Road Rage in New Jersey

Crackberry addicts, even if this story is “dogpile,” it’s worth contemplating next time you pick up your PDA while driving to see if you’ve got a new message:

New Jersey State Police are investigating an allegation that the trooper who was driving Gov. Corzine’s SUV two weeks ago when it crashed going 91 m.p.h. may have been distracted by e-mails sent to his mobile phone or BlackBerry.

A Berkeley Heights police sergeant was quoted in the Star-Ledger of Newark yesterday saying he sent an e-mail shortly before the crash to Trooper Robert Rasinski, confronting him over having a two-year affair with his wife, Susan. He said he enclosed a family photo as an attachment.

Detective Sgt. Michael Mathis said he hoped the angry messages he sent to Rasinski did not cause the April 12 crash on the Garden State Parkway.

“We are confirming that there is this allegation and that it is under investigation,” State Police Lt. Gerald Lewis said yesterday. He declined to comment further.

Police are trying to determine whether Rasinski saw the messages just before the crash and whether they had an effect on his state of mind. The governor’s Chevrolet Suburban, speeding and with lights flashing, was struck by a pickup truck that had swerved to avoid another vehicle. The SUV then spun around and crashed into a guardrail.

Can you imagine the situation, if this is true?  Or, to be fair to Trooper Rasinski, let’s imagine it generically.  You’re driving a VIP to an important meeting (in Gov. Corzine’s case, it happened to be with Don Imus and the Rutgers women’s basketball team).  You notice the signal that a new e-mail has arrived.  You read it and the news is…existentially upsetting. Someone you care about has died.  They found a lump somewhere and they want to biopsy it.  Your pet has disappeared. You’re dumped. You’re fired.  Another 9/11 has occured. 

Okay, not too long ago, it would be considered uncool and uncouth to send such news on an e-mail.  But apparently not anymore, because there is no dispute that Sgt. Mathis did use e-mail to confront Trooper Rasinski with his allegation.  And certainly, Trooper Rasinski would not be the first driver on an American highway to read an e-mail while behind the wheel, traveling at high speed.

The problem of electronic communication devices and driving has been framed up til now as one of distracting the eye and diverting the hand.  But what about the soul?  Should you be driving at 80 or 90 miles per hour simultaneously with getting news that will change your life forever?

Obviously, no.  But how do we stop the news from coming in?

Trooper Rasinski’s union brothers are, of course, standing by him:

Davy Jones, president of the State Troopers Fraternal Association, blasted Mathis’ allegations yesterday and called them “dogpile.”

“My people are out there doing the right thing,” he said yesterday.

Jones told the Star-Ledger the investigators asked Rasinski “all these questions in a taped interview. That’s part of the standard protocols. . . . There’s nothing here other than an understandably aggrieved, soon-to-be ex-husband putting something forward that is totally without merit, and it’s a sin.”

The new twist in the crash investigation came as doctors reported that Corzine is breathing on his own and began taking food yesterday.

Mathis, 40, had posted messages on the Star-Ledger’s Web forum, saying he had sent Rasinski the e-mail with the photo just minutes before the accident. “I hope it didn’t cause the crash,” Mathis wrote in the forum, “but no man in his right mind could have been thinking clearly with the affair exposed.”

Mathis confirmed to the newspaper that he had posted the comments.

Mathis also wrote in the forum that he first contacted Rasinski on April 10 in a phone call and, over the next two days, exchanged text messages with the trooper. He told the newspaper he learned a month ago his wife was having an affair.

So this wasn’t the first Trooper Rasinski would have learned that his affair had been discovered.  But still, he was being harassed by his lover’s husband, and it must have stirred his blood each time he was confronted with the fallout.  And then, over his shoulder, here’s the governor saying Get me through this traffic, Trooper.

Ever since the Clinton/Lewinsky scenario, it’s assumed that everyone can compartmentalize.  They can do anything and everything in their private lives; their jobs won’t be affected.  That’s the position the fraternal association takes on the case now before us.  The issues are completely separate, and only a half-mad jealous husband is capable of the “sin” of thinking Trooper Rasinski’s driving was affected.

So, then why do we want to ban cells phones in moving vehicles? Is it logical to say drivers can compartmentalize themselves from a life-altering event, but not from a trivial phone call?

Let Me Tell You a Story About A Little Town Called Los Angeles…*

Harold Meyerson’s Los Angeles magazine column is not on its website yet, so you’ll just have to believe me that it’s pathetic.   Called “Topsy Turvy,” it is the kickoff to a series of features under the umbrella “The Power Issue.”  I’d call Meyerson’s piece propaganda — and Meyerson more pamphleteer than journalist — except I think he believes every word of it himself.  

In the spirit of Christmas I suppose, the story Meyerson wants to tell is like the Gospel verses that purport to show the birth of Christ and his divinity were foreshadowed by the Old Testament prophets.  In Meyerson’s cathechism, the whole history of Los Angeles has been leading up to this magical moment — the ascension of Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor.  The story’s John the Baptist is the late Miguel Contreras, the man who had the vision of a “labor-Latino-liberal alliance,” and then brought it into the world — dressed I suppose in swaddling clothes.

Do I dispute the fact that Latinos, labor and liberals today dominate City Hall?  Of course not.  But how new is it?  Not very.  The trend lines bringing each of these factions into power weren’t the vision of anyone in particular, and they were clearly visible long before Contreras became head of the LA County Labor Federation in 1996.  And for all the benefits empowerment accrues to these groups, it has not shown itself to be a coalition that’s strong enough to overcome Los Angeles’ profound problems.

Meyerson has to tweak history to make it fit his mythology.  His tale includes, but minimizes and misinterprets the 20-year mayoralty of Tom Bradley, attributing his rise solely to a coalition of Jews, African-Americans and liberals.  As I understand the history, those factions got Bradley into a runoff in 1969, where he was defeated by a racist reactionary assault by incumbent Mayor Sam Yorty.  It took additional help from labor and some of the business community to get Bradley elected in 1973. 

Labor played an enormous role throughout Bradley’s reign — as strong or stronger than it does today.  Bradley’s mightiest achievement, the rebuilding of downtown, came about because of labor leaders like Bill Robertson and Jim Wood, who saw the potential for thousands of good jobs in the construction of office towers and, later, the Metro Rail.

In comparison with Los Angeles’ reputation before World War II as an anti-labor city, Meyerson makes it seem like a phenomenon of the Villaraigosa era that unions play a dominant role in choosing who sits on “more than half the seats” on the City Council.  In fact, that level of influence took hold in the 1970s.  Bill Robertson was about as big a power broker as this city has seen in the past 50 years.  The carpenters, machinists, transportation workers and several others were serious power players that at least half the council and all other elected officials had to take seriously.  The players today are different and the agendas are different, but the labor movement’s decisive strength goes back decades.

It goes almost without saying that liberals have dominated Los Angeles politics at least since Bradley’s emergence in the late 60s — back when liberals didn’t hide their philosophy behind anodyne words like “progressive,” back when liberals were much more left-wing than today’s breed.  Three of the four mayors who have served since 1973 were liberal Democrats, and the fourth, Republican Richard Riordan, was only electable in 1993 because Los Angeles was in both a deep recession and a social malaise in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots. 

Riordan, however, was the embodiment of the RINO, the Republican In Name Only — a liberal in GOP drag, who only adopts a handful of conservative ideas to maintain his party identity.  A former Bradley appointee himself, Riordan’s staff was populated by Democrats. In fact Riordan and Villaraigosa had the same chief of staff.  Riordan posed no threat to the liberal achievements of Bradley’s era.  His conservatism on law enforcement and the economy mirrored the shift in many liberals’ thinking on those subjects at the time of his election.

True, Riordan took on the unions sometimes — but so did Bradley, and so has Villaraigosa.  If you want to see a mayor who was truly obedient to labor, the only example in my lifetime was Villaraigosa’s predecessor, Jim Hahn, whose defeat was celebrated by Meyerson.

Latinos are also not new to political power in Los Angeles.  Meyerson neglects a significant success of the Latino-labor coalition:  The uphill fight to elect Edward Roybal to the City Council in 1949, a seat he held until 1962.  True, after Roybal left City Hall, Latinos couldn’t win another seat on the council until Richard Alatorre in 1985, but that was more due to the devious political genius of a Spanish-speaking Irishman, Art Snyder, whose pork-barrel politics kept him popular in East LA for two decades.  But Latinos were a part of Bradley’s grand coalition. Throughout his tenure, Bradley never had more than two deputy mayors at a time.  One of the two was always a Latino.  

What really boosted Latino political fortunes in LA was the U.S. Justice Department. In the early 90s, the department sued to force the city to redraw its council district boundaries to maximize the potential for Latinos to win two more seats, for a total of three.  There are still three Latino council members today.  There probably should be four, but for the consensus desire to avoid conflict between the fast-growing Latino population and the shrinking black population.  The 2010 census will likely cost one African-American seat, and perhaps bring about two more Latino seats.  But this is demographic destiny combined with federal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act — not anyone’s grand strategy. 

In Meyerson’s mythology, Los Angeles was dominated by business leaders for most of its history until very recently.  In fact, at least since I was old enough to vote, business has had to form or join coalitions in order to have much political influence at all.   Even developers have to adopt the protective coloration of others’ agendas to win votes for their projects.  During Bradley’s era, business joined with labor and with the African-American and Latino communities on pro-growth policies that eventually led to a backlash among affluent suburbanites pining for preservation of Brady Bunch-style neighborhoods.  The homeowner groups — who Meyerson pretty much ignores in his fable — continue to exert strong influence on councilmembers representing parts of the San Fernando Valley and the Westside.

Meyerson is correct in observing that, beginning in the 1980s, “slowly but inexorably, all of the city’s signature big businesses–its banks, oil companies, aerospace conglomerates and department stores…were sold to or enveloped by new owners who moved their headquarters out of town.”  But why did things move in that direction — out of town?  Why weren’t LA-based corporations strong enough to be the nucleus of many corporate mergers?  

That saga is where the real story is, but it’s not one Meyerson wants to tell.  The fact is, Los Angeles has an extremely hostile business climate.  It’s heavily regulated, it’s expensive, and its public services are in tatters.  The young, eager and talented coming out of the nation’s colleges don’t think of LA as a cool place to start their careers.  Married employees with kids don’t want to deal with the bad schools, the traffic or the smog. Los Angeles is also afflicted with California’s poor business climate — a double whammy. 

I was just talking to someone in Phoenix today — the growth there is phenomenal.  Las Vegas, Reno, Portland, and other cities from Boise to Dallas are growing at LA’s expense, because they offer business lower costs, lower taxes, better services and a better lifestyle for the workforce.  Businesses want to ship their good through LAX and the Ports of LA and Long Beach.  They want to sell to the region’s huge population.  But they don’t want to have their headquarters here, and they want as little of their operations here as they can get away with. It’s just too costly and too much of a hassle.

Much of the blame for LA’s anti-business image, and California’s, falls at the feet of the portion of organized labor representing public employees.  To whatever extent labor’s political clout grew in the 90s and 00s, it was due to public sector workers taking over the labor movement.  The labor leaders in Bradley’s time, like Bill Robertson, were pro-business, because business meant jobs.  The labor leaders of the Contreras era are pro-high taxes, because high taxes pay for public sector jobs and perks.

Far from being the fulfillment of an historic evolution, the current political dynamic is in fact quite volatile and unsustainable.  Eventually, high taxes depress business activity so much that raising them brings in little additional funds.  Public services suffer as more and more of the public revenues go toward salaries and extremely generous pensions — and eventually, even the most liberal voters who give government the most benefit of the doubt will notice that despite massive resources going into the government, services aren’t improving.  Those who can afford to leave, leave.  Those who can’t leave are also those who don’t have much to give the taxman — or who can hire accountants to keep the taxman at bay. 

If there is any manifest destiny in Villaraigosa’s emergence, I think it comes from qualities unique to the man himself — his energy and enthusiasm, his charisma.  He obviously makes some people feel hopeful about Los Angeles.  He also has a great network; and better relationships with the state government, the governor and the legislature, than Bradley, Riordan or Hahn had.  That helps.

But the diminishing presence of business in Los Angeles is not a good sign, and it is not good news for liberals, labor leaders or Latinos.  In the first half of the 20th century, as Meyerson points out, business had too much power, and they abused that power to suppress organized labor and minorities.  After Bradley was elected, there was a balancing of influence between business and labor, leading to a period of growth from which all communities and factions saw benefit through working together.  The equilibrium was lost in the early 1990s, and since then, Los Angeles has been in decline.  Meyerson’s pseudo-socialist ideology blinds him to the fact that his beloved labor-liberal-Latino coalition is primarily in charge of handing out ever-smaller pieces of a shrinking pie.  It’s not clear if they know how to grow it. It’s not clear whether anyone does.

*Edited 12/2/06

Whose “Agenda?” Who’s “Agenda-driven?”*

For the third time in 10 days, I’m going to mention Jill Stewart, having blogged 11 months without mentioning her once! It’s purely coincidental that the first two mentions came only days before she was appointed local news editor of the LA Weekly. I must have sniffed it out in the ether.

Actually, it was David Zahniser’s recent reporting at the Weekly that reminded me of Jill. His piece on the local government’s questionable handling of Miguel Contreras’ death was the kind of story the Weekly used to spike, but that Jill would’ve run with during her years at New Times LA. And then her name came up in Harold Meyerson’s parting blast at the Weekly, inspired by his disgust at Zahniser’s story. To argue that his beloved progressive LA Weekly was dead, Meyerson made connections among the Contreras story, the Weekly’s new ownership (the former publishers of New Times LA, which bought the Weekly’s parent company and appropriated its name, Village Voice Media), and his recollections of Stewart, who was the alternative to the alternative media during the height of the Weekly’s progressive era.

Like some others, I have been struck by the words used in various reports on Jill Stewart’s hiring — words like “ideological” and “agenda-driven,” which Kevin Roderick used in LA Observed. The syntax of these citations makes it unclear whether Roderick was airing his personal opinion, or taking the temperature of the LA journalistic/political world. There’s no question that’s what a lot of people say about her. You might think I’m being disingenuous, but I am baffled by it, in the same way I was baffled by the negative reaction to Zahniser’s journalism.

What has always made Jill Stewart stand out to me — going back to when I first met her as an LA Times reporter — was her lack of an agenda. Yes, Jill Stewart had a distinct temperament — part populist firebrand, part smirking brat — that comes out in her writing. But there is no political movement or philosophy that she’s so attached to that she would shade her reporting to suit it. That’s more than you can say about her critics.

Los Angeles has many “agenda-driven” reporters and publications. Harold Meyerson’s LA Weekly was openly so, as he acknowledged repeatedly in the few weeks’ trip down Memory Lane. The Daily News has a distinct agenda — to demonstrate how the San Fernando Valley is getting screwed over by the “out-of-touch downtown interests.”

The Los Angeles Times is widely accused of having a standard-issue “liberal” agenda — to the right of the Weekly, but still left-of-center.  But its agenda goes deeper than that.  It’s local news coverage is so inconsistent, and the choices of what it decides to cover and what it decides to ignore arouse suspicions of agendas that are more like personal vendettas.  Over the years, readers have detected a kind of poster-boy favoritism toward certain political figures (Tom Bradley in the 70s, Gloria Molina, Antonio Villraigosa, to name a few), and knives out for others (Tom Bradley in the 80s, Richard Alatorre, Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Hahn), based on criteria that seem to mix the political with the personal.

I remember having an argument with a Times reporter about a situation where political rivals Molina and Alatorre both tried some fishy tactics to steer lucrative contracts to their respective allies. The Times was selective in their outrage, deciding that Alatorre’s hardball was news but Molina’s was not.  They had settled on that storyline before the fracas started, and made it clear to me (we represented a client in the Alatorre mix) that no facts that disrupted that storyline would be published–using the airy, dismissive, “We don’t think it’s news.”

On and on it goes. I’m sure people closer to the entertainment industry see agendas in what Variety and the Hollywood Reporter choose to cover. The Times’ sports columnist Bill Plaschke went on an all-out campaign in 2005 to discredit the former Dodgers’ GM Paul DePodesta, leading directly to his unexpected firing. In Los Angeles, agenda-driven reporting is the rule, not the exception.

So why is Jill Stewart called out?

Her most famous journalistic accomplishment was her work in the 1990s focusing on the Los Angeles Unified School District. Alone among reporters in Los Angeles, Stewart refused to buy into the political consensus that the poor scholastic performance of LAUSD’s students was due to factors beyond the school board’s control. For at least a decade as LA’s schools declined, the conventional wisdom was LAUSD problems were all due to overcrowding and low teacher salaries, and that those problems could not be solved unless Proposition 13 was overturned, allowing the necessary taxes to be raised. The political community clearly hoped that at some point, the awfulness of LAUSD would cause an uprising against the tax-limiting measure — so they didn’t do much about it.

Blaming LAUSD’s problems on Proposition 13 was, at best, an incomplete diagnosis. Stewart shined the light on other factors that were more responsible — like the strict, inpenetrable labor rules that made it almost impossible to fire teachers and principals who weren’t merely incompetent, but who refused to do their jobs. She took on a major sacred cow, bilingual education, and shared with readers the objective studies that demonstrated the failure of this once idealistic concept — as well as the heartbreaking and often absurd anecdotal experiences of parents that made one’s blood boil.

Going just from memory, I recall reading Jill Stewart stories about Hispanic parents who were begging to have their children released from bilingual classes, to no avail. She — alone — reported that the larger the bilingual population, the more money went into LAUSD coffers and individual teachers’ paychecks. This conflict of interest, and the tragic consequences for thousands of students whose parents wanted them to learn in English, was never reported by the LA Times, the LA Weekly or the Daily News until long after Stewart had established the facts — if then.   To “progressives,” any information that undermined bilingual education was racist, and any information that made the education unions look bad was “anti-worker.”  LA’s press corps was afraid to cross these invisible lines — except for Stewart.

Which strikes you as more “agenda-driven?”  Reporting the facts about these things, or suppressing the facts? Would you rather have an education reporter who starts from the premise that the mission of the schools is to provide the best possible education for its students, and focuses on stories of how the system fails to meet this goal? Or a press corps that pretends to do that while sweeping problems under the rug because of the possible political fallout?

I don’t think Jill Stewart’s education reporting was driven by any particular ideology. Her stuff was refreshing because it was simply about what’s working and what’s not working, and if it’s not working, why not … and then to follow the story wherever it took her. She ended up on the wrong side of the education unions and the political defenders of bilingual ed — that was how the cookie crumbled. She didn’t start out from an anti-union position. But the rest of the press corps, and especially the Weekly, started every story from a pro-union, or a leave-the-unions-out-of-this, stance.

The mindset on education in Los Angeles has changed in the past 15 years. The city’s power elite used to be shockingly complacent about the decline in education. After all, they could afford to send their kids to private school, or could afford to live in San Marino, Palos Verdes or Beverly Hills — while working “productively” with the labor leaders who benefited from the status quo.

Stewart’s reporting contributed to a dramatic change in that mindset. Reformers from Dick Riordan to Eli Broad to Antonio Villaraigosa have been inspired — perhaps without even knowing it or wanting to admit it — by what Stewart uncovered. The education unions, while still incredibly powerful, are viewed by the press corps more skeptically. Mayor Villaraigosa’s efforts to assert city control over the school system were portrayed in the media as a “battle” with the education unions — and the unions were not portrayed in these stories favorably. That narrative would have been unimaginable without Stewart’s reporting in the 90s.

They say that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Los Angeles frequently rewrites that cliche: It is the land of the willfully blind. And the one-eyed man is “agenda-driven.”

I don’t envy Jill. When you’re in her position, if you make any mistakes, foes will pounce. I respect Parke Skelton. In one of the letters to LA Observed, he accuses her of sloppy reporting on a story that involved him directly. Naturally, I’m not in a position to know what happened, but he’s generally credible. As it happens, his campaign firm almost exclusively represents progressive candidates. It is understandable he would draw the inference that her alleged mistake was ideological. Just as it is understandable that every time the New York Times or CBS News makes a mistake, conservatives think it’s ideological.

But no one’s perfect, least of all reporters. They take snippets of reality and (sometimes) disguised spin and try to tell a story that will enlighten and divert their readers. If they make a career out of reporting or commenting, they write tens of thousands of words and dozens of stories every year — and will sometimes get things wrong. Jill and her reporters now are on the firing line more than most. They will produce stories that make highly regarded, powerful people unhappy. In retaliation or in an effort to exonerate themselves, the targets will look for errors and occasionally find them.

You might be tempted to join the outraged brigade. It will feel … so right-on … to be in line with the cool people who can hand out jobs, contracts and other emoluments.

If that ever describes you, just stop for a second and think. Where would LAUSD be now, if not for Jill’s daring break with the conventional wisdom? You’ll never get the establishment in Los Angeles to admit it, but she is one of their most valued sources of information. She deserves the benefit of the doubt. And she deserves to be read.

*(Copy-edited, 11/5/06)

On the LA Weekly, David Zahniser and the Progressive Movement

Over on LA Observed, you have probably been following a dramatic series of developments involving the LA Weekly: Harold Myerson’s departure as political columnist and cheerleader for the local labor organizations, David Zahniser’s cover story this week about the circumstances surrounding the untimely 2005 death of LA labor chief Miguel Contreras, and the way in which LA’s progressive community, including Myerson himself, views both events through the lens of how the Weekly’s new ownership has betrayed the paper’s past role in progressive movements.

Well, in all your clicking, don’t miss the series of posts in the LA Observed “We Get Email” section concerning this matter. The last note, from Larry Kaplan, makes the most crucial point about Zahniser’s scoop that all the “whither the Weekly” eulogies ignore:

…I think the crux of the story is the way Contreras’ death was handled by the coroner, the cops and the bigwigs who showed up at the hospital that day.

The story should NOT be where Contreras was and what he was doing when he died, and perhaps the critique of the Weekly story is that it did not make that clear enough.

Exactly.

David Zahniser is what this city hasn’t had for a long time: A government watchdog. His City Hall coverage at the Daily Breeze always had two things most of his competitors’ coverage did not — depth and style. In the face of generations of local news editors who alternately viewed LA’s municipal government as a morality play or a boring backwater, Zahniser actually found things out, and could turn them into interesting stories.  He writes stories that serve nobody’s interests but the readers’.

Zahniser’s accomplishments merited attention because, unlike the Times and to a lesser extent the Daily News, nobody in their right mind would strategically leak a story to any reporter for the almost unread Breeze. When I read an exclusive story in the LA Times, I can almost always guess who served it up it to them. That’s the advantage of being a reporter for the biggest daily in town. You don’t have to dig for stories, the stories dig for you. A Times reporter can be very lazy, and still look good to their editors.

Zahniser’s brought his talent to the Weekly, and now has a bigger stage on which to perform. The stakes are higher. As Kaplan points out, he or his editors might have erred in emphasizing the first half of the story, the tawdry death scene, rather than the second half of the story, the fervent efforts by high officials allegedly to cover it up by blocking an autopsy.

Normally, if a 52-year-old man dies in a store like the botanica where Contreras died, that would be considered an unusual death. Leaving aside the fact that the locale was later determined by police to house prostitutes, even the ostensible product, herbal remedies, would raise red flags. Whatever you think of the benefits of herbal medicine, some of the remedies in that category are, in fact, powerful chemical agents that are not regulated as drugs. If for no other reason than to protect public health, an autopsy should have been done. Public officials allegedly put pressure on hospital officials to ensure an autopsy was not done, for the sake of Contreras’ reputation and legacy. Folks, that’s a story.  There is a long history in Los Angeles of political interference in the County Coroner’s performance of his duties; of autopsy findings being buried, changed, leaked or otherwise abused by people in power to guard the private interests of the living and the dead.

The progressive community sees Zahniser’s article as a watershed. The old, progressive LA Weekly would not have published Zahniser’s story, Myerson basically asserts. Occidental College professor Peter Drier articulates the left’s rage in an email sent around the progressive community and published by LA Observed:

The article is irresponsible, gutter, tabloid journalism, with no redeeming value. It is difficult to understand why the paper published this crude story — and put in on the cover, no less — except to sell newspapers and/or to lend support to those who wish to harm LA’s progressive labor movement. Miguel and his family, who are still mourning his death, deserve better than this cheap hit. They will survive this crude piece of gutter journalism. They, and his many friends and allies, know that Miguel’s life as a warrior for justice, was his real legacy and his gift to us.

(snip)

The loss of the LA Weekly as a progressive voice is a tragedy. When we organized the Progressive LA conference at Occidental College in October 1998, the Weekly was one of its cosponsors, featured it on its cover, and published several stories in the September 30, 1998 issue about the past, current, and future of progressive politics in LA: link and link. This reflected the Weekly’s view of itself at the time as a watchdog and as an instrument for change. On politics, culture, and other matters, the LA Weekly has helped give voice to those forces who might otherwise be shut out of the public debate. It has reported on the people and organizations — unions, community groups, environmentalists, women’s rights and gay rights groups, immigrant rights activists, school reformers, fair trade advocates, living wage crusaders, and ordinary folks trying to cope with life in this diverse and sprawling city — who’ve been on the front lines of the struggles for social and economic justice.

(snip)

But how do we hold the new LA Weekly accountable? Outraged by this week’s cover story, some folks floated the idea of organizing a boycott against the Weekly. But how can you organize a boycott against a newspaper that is distributed for free? And how can you put pressure on its advertisers when its ad pages are dominated by penis enlargement ads, breast augmentation ads, and dating services?

The fear, which Myerson articulates too, is that the Weekly will become a muckraking journal that splatters muck on progressives, not just their enemies. Myerson cites Jill Stewart, the iconoclastic writer for the defunct New Times LA (whose owners now control the Weekly) as the kind of journalistic example he fears will take over the Weekly. Stewart enraged many at City Hall because her investigations and commentary evinced deep disillusionment with the left’s hypocrisy. She was tough on leaders like Jackie Goldberg, to whom LA’s left is devoted. And her writing was juicy and irresistable, so her scoops got attention. Back then and today, I’ll admit it — I’m a fan of Jill Stewart. And I’m a fan of David Zahniser (which is not to say he’s similar to Stewart — it was Myerson who made that leap).

Far be it from me to challenge Myerson and Drier on what’s good for the progressive movement — they work in it every day, and I don’t. But my opinion is, they’re wrong about the kind of journalism that helps those “who’ve been on the front lines of social and economic justice.” The news should not be ideological. It should not be afraid to hit hard at hypocrisy and double-dealing on the part of progressive icons.

Going back to the 1920s, there is an unfortunate history of socialist journalism, or journalism by socialists, that turned out to be propaganda, concocted to mask failure, corruption, even atrocities. Today’s progressives should want to take pains to disassociate their movement from such unethical and ultimately self-defeating reportage; to demonstrate that unlike the left-wing of the past, they are not afraid of the truth because their ideas have value quite apart from the flawed mortals who advocate them.

And let’s face it: the good-ol’ LA Weekly that Myerson and Drier could depend on as an ally and publicist was also funded by ads for plastic surgery, tanning salons, massage parlors and escort services. What does that suggest? That most Weekly readers, then as now, skipped over the political content to read the movie and nightclub listings, and were more interested in dancing than demonstrations. The Weekly could be edited by William F. Buckley and probably make the same profit if Buckley were willing to accept such advertising.

The left is not entitled to the news columns of the LA Weekly by divine right. But if the left can help scrupulous reporters like Zahniser find powerful stories to illustrate the need for their brand of politics, their presentation in a more balanced setting will give them greater credibility. In this era of nakedly partisan journalism and blogs, it is too often forgotten that most of us read journalism for stories, not political instruction. We can come to political conclusions on our own.

Wal-Mart Day at the LA Times

Two pages of the LA Times, two constrasting views of the Wal-Mart issue that, together, illustrate tremendous confusion in the Democratic Party over an issue where clarity would help them: Health care.

First, the Times’ lead editorial, which chastizes the Democratic Party for its “shameful demonization” of the discount retailer:

Most Americans do not want their politicians ganging up on one company. Wal-Mart may be a behemoth that employs 1.3 million people in this country and earned $11 billion in profit last year, but it still looks like bullying when politicians single out one business to scapegoat for larger societal ills. And when they start passing laws aimed at their scapegoat — as the Maryland Legislature did when it passed legislation forcing Wal-Mart to spend a certain amount on employee healthcare — the judiciary rightly balks. A federal judge struck down the regulation, holding that it violates laws requiring equal treatment of employers.

But there is no stopping the campaign rhetoric. At an anti-Wal-Mart rally last week in Iowa, Biden noted that the retailer pays people $10 an hour, and then asked: “How can you live a middle-class life on that?” It’s clearly the company’s fault, at least from a skewed senatorial perspective, that all Americans cannot live a comfortable middle-class life. How dare it pay prevailing retail wages? Bayh, who appeared at another rally, was quoted as saying that Wal-Mart is “emblematic of the anxiety around the country.” That may be true. But if it’s the emblem he’s worried about, he should stay in Washington and work to make healthcare more affordable for working families.

The gusto with which even moderate Democrats are bashing Wal-Mart is bound to backfire. Not only does it take the party back to the pre-Clinton era, when Democrats were perceived as reflexively anti-business, it manages to make Democrats seem like out-of-touch elitists to the millions of Americans who work and shop at Wal-Mart.

But then, on the facing page, columnist Erin Aubry Kaplan performs a rather difficult pirouette: Defending former UN Ambassador Andrew Young’s racially insensitive comments to the LA Sentinel, made on behalf of Wal-Mart, while condemning him for making those comments…on behalf of Wal-Mart. Get it?

After sapping the local economies of rural and semirural America, Wal-Mart set its sights on the urban market — corporate-speak for big, diverse cities like Chicago and Los Angeles that are densely populated with middle- to low-income black and Latino consumers. It swooped into Inglewood two years ago and put an initiative on the ballot that would have allowed one of the first Wal-Mart Supercenters in the state to be built — and would have allowed Wal-Mart to do it with virtually no city oversight. Inglewood voters rightly rebuffed the measure, rejecting Wal-Mart’s pitch that $5 T-shirts and $7-an-hour jobs would be the most transformative thing to happen to downtrodden black folk since the civil rights movement.

In such a context, bringing in former civil rights hero Young to do damage control, to belatedly lend some black credibility to the “urban” effort, seemed like a bad joke. Wal-Mart obviously missed the irony. The famously suave Young didn’t blink an eye.

Then he found himself face to face with the Sentinel crowd, which tends to be deferential to any black dignitary but which also includes a few skeptics, especially on the Wal-Mart issue. Undoubtedly thinking he could speak frankly to his own — that he could keep it real, as it were — Young repeated what blacks have said for generations: that members of other ethnic groups account for a disproportionate share of the merchant class in their own community.

He said it badly, and in painting all those merchants as uncaring and unethical, he said it too broadly. But he had a point. The chronic lack of business ownership among blacks in black communities is a real problem, and it was a major factor in civil unrest in 1965 and in 1992.

Young’s comments were called racist, and I don’t entirely agree. Certainly it’s despicable to exploit racial and economic anxiety in order to convince the black media that Wal-Mart is a solution. Being racially or ethnically specific, however, is not the same as being racist.

In ’92, people talked openly about the friction between Korean shopkeepers and their black customers in South L.A. because, well, it was there. It had consequences. That window of public discussion has closed; now, discussing racial or ethnic groups in any forum less dry than academia is considered almost vulgar. In condemning Young as racist, we also killed the messenger.

Don’t get me wrong: Young paid the appropriate price. But the real vulgarity is the dire economic picture in black and brown neighborhoods represented all too well by the overabundance of “stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables” that Young cited. Loaf for loaf, a Wal-Mart Supercenter might have better food. But it — and Young — hardly have the right stuff.

Kaplan’s circular reasoning unintentionally supports the Times’ editorial position. Young was fired for making a reasonable point in an unreasonable way, using unacceptable ethnic stereotypes to illustrate a larger truth: The “Mom and Pop” stores in lower-income communities–the stores that Wal-Mart critics say they are worried will be run out of business–don’t deserve special protection if they aren’t serving their communities.

More broadly, Young was blowing the whistle on the sham aspects of the campaign against Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart Watch and WakeUpWalMart.Com are components of a “corporate campaign,” which is a term used by both labor and management to describe a labor-funded PR campaign to denigrate a company in order to force that company to agree to labor demands that can’t be won via collective bargaining or traditional organizing of workers.

In most cases, corporate campaigns are dishonest and border on blackmail. About a decade ago, I represented a health care firm that was targeted for a corporate campaign. The union running the campaign wanted the firm to waive its rights and make it extremely easy for the union to represent the firm’s workers. These workers had rejected the union up to now, but the union wasn’t willing to take no for an answer. So they started a corporate campaign against my client.

The corporate campaign never mentioned the plan to organize the workers. Instead, it accused my client of killing its patients. Since my client ran a chain of nursing homes for the elderly, it was not hard to find dead former patients to talk about. But the union figured that if it said “patients die” enough times, business would suffer, and this prospect would cause the company to change its position. The corporate campaign was damaging, but unsuccessful.

Labor has good reasons to be concerned about Wal-Mart. I don’t begrudge the labor movement getting into a fight with the retail giant. Wal-Mart poses a direct threat to union-won high wages and good benefits for workers at grocery chains like Ralph’s and Vons, as we saw with the grocery strike of a few years ago.

Wal-Mart can cut prices because they don’t pay their workers as much, and don’t lavish benefits on them. Over time, to stay in business, other retailers will have to match Wal-Mart’s wage and benefit structure — and they will find workers who are willing to take jobs that pay less. Unions want to forestall that trend because it will put yet more private sector workers out of their reach.

Wal-Mart’s policies are hastening a day of reckoning that has been looming for decades. The idea that employers should be responsible for our nation’s health care is a historical oddity; a byproduct of World War II-era wage and price controls, and political decisions that benefits should not be taxed as income in order to allow unions to win increases employee compensation without increasing their take-home pay.

Now that most Americans don’t work for big companies or belong to labor unions, this jury-rigged, inefficient and unfair model for providing health care is getting exposed — ironically, by Wal-Mart, which takes the position that consumers shouldn’t be forced to pay a premium price for a product in order to subsidize the health care of the workers who sold it to you.

So, who should?

The LA Times apparently thinks liberals have gotten off track with their attacks on Wal-Mart. They’re saying: Stop trying to force Wal-Mart to subsidize health care — and start working on a plan to get the federal government to do it. Democratic politicians fighting Wal-Mart are defending a status quo that doesn’t exist anymore. Organized labor is sending its political supporters in the Democratic Party down a primrose path to serve its own, narrower ends.

If Wal-Mart disappeared tomorrow–or if Wal-Mart suddenly decided to give all its workers health care coverage–that would still leave tens of millions of American families without anyone to subsidize their health care coverage. The Times, I think rightly, is chiding Democratic politicians for taking cheap shots at Wal-Mart as a substitute for doing anything to correct that basic injustice.

Perhaps, as Evan Bayh suggested, Wal-Mart is a symbol. But if your children get sick, symbolism can’t cure them. Developing a universal health care plan won’t be an easy thing, but if Democrats want to win in 2006 and 2008, they’d better start. Attacking Wal-Mart is a distracting indulgence in demagoguery.