Bryce Covert

There’s a lot of talk about the enthusiasm gap for the midterms between those fired up to vote Republican and those disappointed in the Democrats. And for good reason. If you look around, it would seem that a lot of “the base” is thinking of withholding their vote for the Democratic party. For example: a new ad in Nevada from conservative Hispanic group Latinos for Reform recently sparked some controversy. It lists grievances with the Obama administration and Democrats in general – mostly that they made promises for immigration reform that haven’t been kept – and ends with the simple imperative: “Don’t vote.”

But they’re not the only ones who might abstain from heading to the polls. At The American Prospect, Jamelle Bouie sees few policy iniatives to help black people and worries, “the longer Democrats don’t have to worry about losing African American voters, the longer Democratic representatives can take advantage of their black support.” Lt. Dan Choi, a US service member who was discharged for being openly gay under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Tweeted today that he won’t vote for Obama. Why? Because a Court Of Appeals temporarily stayed an injunction against the DADT policy after the government had tried to get a stay itself. Much concern has been raised about a low level of enthusiasm among women voters — and rightly so. A commenter who weighed in on a post I wrote urging women to vote shared this feeling: “Democrats aren’t doing what we put them there to do. They aren’t listening to the concerns of women and other marginalized folks who voted them into office.” Many women feel this way.

Blacks, Latinos, gays, women. Even issues groups like environmentalists are wondering if they need to reconsider support for our Commander in Chief. No one feels they got what they wanted these past two years. The question for these groups is whether they lose power by being a shoe-in voting bloc for their party. The conclusion many are drawing: don’t give Democrats your vote on November 2nd.

So what does this mean for the Democratic Party? Basically everyone has prophesied that the midterms will be a bloodbath. The enthusiasm gap will be all over the news on November 3rd and then fade into the background. But this is a long-term problem, and one the party will eventually have to face up to.

And we’re going to have to grapple with it, too. It’s clear we can’t find a friendlier ear in the GOP. As women, minorities, progressives, are we willing to keep voting the lesser of two evils? Do we lose our voice if we refuse to vote? We’ll have find some answers.

I’ve seen this before. Elizabeth Warren, the sharp-witted, tough-as-nails advocate for the brand new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has been appointed a “special advisor” to the creation of the new agency. She was long expected to be named head of the agency, which would have meant a confirmation battle in the Senate. So President Obama avoided that mess by potentially sidelining her from the something that wouldn’t exist without her.

In a happy coincidence, I just finished reading The Woman Behind the New Deal, Kirsten Downey’s biography of Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under FDR. She was a pioneering person and the first woman to serve in a president’s Cabinet. This, of course, came with much grumbling from the boy’s club and many unfounded personal attacks, including an attempt to impeach her. She was also a bargaining chip for FDR, a president who didn’t hesitate to play the political game, as publicly slighting her was an easy way to gain support for his initiatives from conservative Southern Democrats.

While FDR is known as the president who signed our Social Security program into law, it was really the brainchild of Frances Perkins. It was on her task list that she brought to the President before she was willing to accept the Secretary post, and without her pushing, pulling, and cajoling all those involved, it would likely never have come to pass. In order to meet a deadline on the proposal, she even brought committee leaders to her residence, put a bottle of whiskey on the table, and told them no one would leave until the task was finished.

So she would have made a logical candidate to head the new agency. But the politics didn’t match up. Senate approval of the bill looked risky until an amendment was added, saying that the Secretary of Labor should play no role in hiring its personnel. It ultimately meant Perkins had no control over the program she had championed. In the end, she named many of the agency’s top officials to be appointed by FDR and was asked to keep a close eye on the agency (something he would often ask her to do after he had deprived her of official oversight). But the greatest accomplishment of her life came with a personal blow in the form of a political compromise. Even years later, after she left Washington when Truman became president, she asked to be named the head of the agency and was declined. Someone else, who Truman needed to get favors from, wanted the job and got it.

The similarities between these two women were apparent even before Warren’s appointment. Both were direct speakers; both fought single-mindedly to protect the American people; both did so without thinking of personal gain or fame. And now we can add one more similarity: both were short-shifted out of positions of leadership in their own creations for political efficacy.

Much has changed for women since Frances Perkins served FDR, but they are still often political outsiders. This means they are good at spotting areas where we need new rules, but it also means that they can lose out to those closer to the political epicenter. A Wall Street insider like Tim Geithner still gets Obama’s ear over a watchdog like Warren. Let’s hope that Obama can cut through the political games to see her for what she is: just the woman we need fighting for us.

For people who know me personally, you will probably agree with two things: 1. I’m a vegetarian, and 2. I’ve never been interested in telling other people how to eat or using my vegetarianism to feel holier than thou. Unlike some, I recognize the multiple factors that keep people from being vegetarians: lack of access to vegetables, high prices for good produce, culture and traditions that surround cooking, really liking a juicy burger. Vegetarianism has always been a very personal choice for me (and an easy one, since I’m not a big fan of meat), and I’ve never felt telling people how to eat is a useful cause.

But I read one little fact that struck me in the new book Eaarth by Bill McKibben, which describes a planet that we’ve changed so entirely that it no longer resembles the Earth that we’ve known. This fact is that, “It takes eleven times as much fossil fuel to raise a pound of animal protein as a pound of plant protein.” McKibben suggests that this means we should either turn to vegetarianism or Chinese cooking practices, which “use meat almost as a condiment.”

The BP oil spill has been the most glaring, physical evidence in recent history of just how destructive our reliance on fossil fuels is. Our use of them is complex; as I’ve pointed out before, electrical generation is the highest producer of pollution, yet uses a negligible amount of oil. The fossil fuel it relies on most is natural gas, which is usually extracted onshore. But even so, we clearly use a whole lot of oil as a country, as our thirst for it has driven rigs deeper and deeper into the ocean and is drying up the assets in the Middle East.

One of McKibben’s points in Eaarth is that the large scale must become smaller in our new world. Rather than corporate farms, we need community gardens; rather than national roads projects, we need local governments to upgrade infrastructure that can handle a shifting climate. Personal choices are also becoming more and more important in the fight against global warming. Conservation, the least glamorous and most personal solution, could be one of the most important tools: “The energy analyst Amory Lovins recently calculated that Americans could, relatively cheaply, save half the oil and three-fourths of the electricity they use” through actions such as insulating water heaters and turning off videogame consoles.

So personal choices really matter. And perhaps more vegetarians could make a really big difference, if it takes so much fossil fuel to raise meat. If you were flirting with the idea of becoming a vegetarian, now is a great time to consider a serious relationship with it.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham pulled his support yesterday from the climate bill he was crafting with Democrat John Kerry and Independent Joe Lieberman, and I can’t say that I’m surprised. President Obama made the concession in late March of opening up new areas to offshore drilling, a move designed to bring Senate Republicans on board with a clean energy bill. But if anything is to be learned from the battle over health care reform, giving Republicans what they want doesn’t bring any votes on board; they are ready to oppose any bill that coincides with the administration’s agenda, even if it includes things the party originally stood for. And while Obama’s move to open up offshore drilling forgets the lessons learned from health care reform, its assumption that it will bring energy independence is wrong to begin with.

John McCain has already sworn off Republican cooperation with Democrats on any legislation after the passage of health care reform, a drumbeat that seems to be in line with the entire party. Graham originally called the move on offshore drilling a “good first step,” but with his recent desertion has now delayed the unveiling of the legislation, scheduled for tomorrow, and has made the future of the entire bill uncertain.

The original reaction to Obama’s offshore drilling move in the Senate was also mixed among Democrats. Bill Nelson of Florida and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey warned that drilling near their states’ coasts would endanger their beaches and coastal economies. Kerry put out a statement saying that “in the difficult work of putting together a 60 vote coalition to price carbon,” he would “put aside his own long-time policy objections” over offshore drilling, all the while not specifically endorsing the plan. It remains unclear if other Democrats will be as willing to also put their objections aside, not to mention withstand the almost guaranteed backlash from environmental groups.

The lessons from passing health care reform seem to have completely disappeared in this next battle. Has the White House forgotten the months of hemming and hawing in the Senate Finance Committee led by Max Baucus, which stalled for months with little to show in bipartisanship? Even after that, in the name of gaining Republican support the bill was allowed to stagnate far after the summer. The longer it sat in limbo the more it became susceptible to false accusations and attacks. The public option was thrown out; restrictive abortion language was inserted; Republican ideas such as extending dependent coverage to age 26 were included in the final bill without a single Republican vote to show for it. The bargaining and delaying didn’t produce Republican support, not because the Democrats didn’t try, but because the GOP will not touch something with Democratic fingerprints on it.

But again we see the desire to have a bipartisan agreement on the climate skew the bill before it is even unveiled. Offshore drilling was offered up without the guarantee of any Republican votes, and the GOP is already backing away. Graham’s objection to the bill has nothing to do with whether or not offshore drilling, a Republican idea, will be included; his objection is the order in which bills are introduced, a lame excuse if ever there was one. His fellow Republicans are likely to find other excuses as to why they can’t back the bill as they create distance from the Obama agenda. This compromise won’t bring forth the Republican votes, and it may threaten the support of some Democrats.

And beyond the misguided political positioning, there is the flawed idea that offshore drilling is a legitimate part of the answer to climate change. Natural gas is now being touted as a “clean energy” because it burns cleaner than coal in generating electricity; thus, if we could only drill into offshore reserves, we would have more clean fuel supply. But onshore natural gas reserves in the US are rising as developing technologies can better extract it from shale formations, where the majority of our natural gas reserves are to be found. The Potential Gas Committee calls the outlook “an exceptionally strong and optimistic gas supply picture for the nation.” It is also likely that the new offshore supply would not hit markets for quite some time, as was pointed out when this issue came up in 2008, and that it is likely to produce a relatively small amount of reserves. (Not to mention the danger of drilling in the middle of the ocean, as witnessed by the sinking BP rig this week.) There is no need to drill offshore while we have a huge supply of natural gas already in development on land.

Add to this a preliminary paper that looks at the total carbon footprint of natural gas extracted from shale formations with the extraction methods taken into consideration. Hydrofracturing, the technique of blasting water and chemicals into rock formations to extract gas from shales, may have its own high emission levels. What our environment needs is not more burning of natural gas, but a clear way to handle carbon emissions so that we can start transitioning to a more carbon-light world.

So Obama has thrown the Republicans a bone, a bone that doesn’t make any climate change sense and one that they are unlikely to catch anyway. Lindsey Graham, the one Republican who seemed willing to consider lending his support to the initiative, is gone before the legislation sees the light of day. The lessons learned so painfully in the health care battle have disappeared, and the future of a climate change bill is already looking dim.

D.C. is stuck. Democrats, even with a huge majority in Congress and a hold on the White House, can’t seem to figure out how to pass health care reform, or even whether they should. Republicans are using their minority to block anything that has a Democrat’s fingerprints on it. The fracture between the two parties seems to have become a gaping canyon that can never be crossed and which opens up in every piece of legislation, often swallowing it whole.

Both a cause and a symptom of our strange political environment is the worship of the sound bite. If a politician dare open his or her mouth, those words will be immediately recorded, taken out of context, packaged, and distributed globally in the 24-hour news cycle. Words are the greatest weapon to be used against an opponent and they are always shortened and sharpened like an arrowhead.

Twitter is the ultimate incarnation of the sound bite world we live in. Don’t misunderstand me — I am a regular user and believe that it has many positive applications, particularly in politics: it is an easy way to spread information, a direct line between leaders and constituents, an enormous discussion board. But Twitter demands that its users speak in 140 character blurbs, mirroring the 30-second sound bite afforded our elected leaders. I find myself listening to interesting speeches or reading well-written op-eds while scanning for that one phrase that I can copy and paste into Twitter. I want to boil the basic point down to something that fits in the 140-character box to pass on to my followers.

This often leaves us little room for “nuance, flexibility, pragmatism — even a full range of human emotions,” as put by Richard W. Stevenson in a recent New York Times article about President Obama’s State of the Union address. It’s hard to explain a complex stance on a complicated issue when your words are only repeated in 140 characters or 30-second doses. Stevenson’s question is a fair one: “Is it possible to embrace complexity in a political and media culture that demands simple themes and promotes conflict?”

Obama recently took this question on by venturing into the dangerous territory of the House Republican retreat and taking direct questions from his opponents, all on-camera. It was a brilliant move, because it gave him the time and space to have a debate and elaborate on what he thinks and why. In reaction to this unscripted, lengthy and riveting conversation, a group of bipartisan political figures and bloggers have begun calling for “Question Time”. What they envision is the President regularly taking questions from Congress in the way that the British Prime Minister appears before the House of Commons for open question forums. Nate Silver, on his blog FiveThirtyEight, explained his reason for joining the Question Time movement: “[I]t seems to me that there is a need for conversations that are not staged, that are not reduced to 30-second soundbytes, and that are not filtered through the lens of the media.”

But what they miss is that no event goes unfiltered. It is a bit ironic that this movement is seeking to escape the sound bite world by spreading its message on Twitter — by using the trending hashtag #questiontime, for example. Their sentiment is worthy, but can Question Time really escape the Twitterization, sound bite machine that is our news consumption? Obama’s GOP retreat debate was, after all, live-tweeted by many, with the juicy morsels pulled out and posted in that limited box. Indeed, in response to the calls for Question Time, White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton told reporters, “[P]art of the reason Friday [the House retreat Q&A] was so successful with the GOP conference was the spontaneity that occurred there. And it is going to be hard to recreate the spontaneity that happened.” It seems clear that even something as seemingly pure as a regular open forum will eventually be whittled down to digestible pieces, not just by the 24-hour news. Even these bloggers and Twitterers themselves now partake in the sound bite system.

Perhaps, then, the answer can’t lie in escaping the sound bite, the 140-character Twitter post, and the 24-hour news cycle that will record it and repeat it over and over again. Democrats have to get savvy about being sound bite friendly. Republicans have to partake in the political process even while they create their sound bites. And they should all probably look into creating Twitter accounts.

Even with the central role corporations play in today’s key political issues, few people seem to comprehend the way they act and why. Populist outrage erupts at every excessive dime spent on bonuses. Conservatives on the bench recently decided that corporations deserve constitutional protection. Politicians are still wooing their support on health care reform, financial reform and clean energy policy—a courtship that is sure to end in rejection. But corporate viewpoints on politics should, almost without exception, be ignored, because corporations have one motive, and one motive only: higher returns for the shareholders.

Corporations answer to a select group of people, and those are, in descending order of importance (except in the case of financially unstable companies, which answer almost entirely to their lenders): shareholders, board members, executives, and, lastly, their employees. This is important because shareholders’ single biggest demand is ever increasing profits. Flat revenues will not do, and God help you if you dip into negative numbers. Pulling in higher numbers than the previous year, previous quarter, and all the predictions is the only measure of success for any corporation. Yes, even in a recession.

The focus on profits is the only lens through which they look at today’s issues. Health care and financial reform, green legislation—executives see these as damaging to revenue (not to mention brand new and therefore terrifying). Much of health care reform is aimed at chopping down the flourishing income of the large health care companies. Financial reform puts constraints on the hyperbolic profits posted before the crash. Green technologies threaten to take market share away from traditional sources of energy (coal, oil, and natural gas), and cap and trade will put a “tax” on big carbon consumers, such as electric utilities, for what they use to make money—burning coal to generate electricity that they can sell cheaply to their rate payers.

This is why it is so disastrous to give a corporation the same freedom of speech as a human being. A corporation is not a human being in a very key way: its only concern is with making money. It does not have opinions except what is dictated by the market and its shareholders. The only thing it desires is the ability to make more money. If that happens to coincide with doing some good for the world—there are in fact listed companies that create solar power, for example—then it is a but a happy coincidence. They do not feel altruism unless it is a nice PR stunt; they do not support political candidates unless those candidates will help them make more money.

This is also why the voices of corporations need to stay out of discussions about reforming their own industries. A large health care company will only get on board with health care legislation if it thinks it will positively impact the bottom line; a prominent investment bank will only back financial reform that stays out of its way; a multi-billion dollar electric utility will only take up the cause of renewable energy if doing otherwise will hurt them. Accepting their point of view as valid in these discussions is blind, and hoping that they will be supportive of real reform is naive. Any proposal that excites the executives of a particular industry is to be viewed with the utmost skepticism.

The idea that good could come from the Stupak Amendment, an amendment introduced by Representative Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) that was passed and put into the House health care bill, would likely infuriate any self-respecting pro-choicer. The amendment purports to continue the “status quo” in separating federal dollars from funding abortion. But in reality, as many pro-choice and neutral groups have proven, this amendment threatens to take women many steps backward in their access to abortion coverage. By making sure that no individual who receives a government subsidy—a bounty of new customers for insurance companies—can buy into any plan that offers abortion coverage, insurance companies are incentivized to stop offering it in order to tap into this new market.

Glimmers of a silver lining are beginning to show through the anti-choice storm clouds, however: the pro-choice movement has galvanized in a campaign against this amendment in a manner not witnessed in this country for quite some time.

For many women, the label “feminist” has become a dirty word. Even liberal-leaning news outlets such as The New York Times, NPR and MSNBC have taken to calling the pro-choice movement “pro-abortion”—and what woman wants to label herself pro-abortion? A large percentage of young women are passively supportive of the pro-choice cause at best, and at worst are apathetic or even adverse to becoming involved.

Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized a women’s right to choose an abortion, happened nearly 37 years ago. We now have a divide between those who remember life with illegal abortions, their memories branded with a sense of urgency and danger, and those who have only known safe and legal ones. As The New York Times said in a recent article, “The 30- to 40-somethings…are more concerned with educating their children about sex, and generally too busy to be bothered with political causes. The 25-and-under crowd, animated by activism, sees a deeper threat in climate change or banning gay marriage or the Darfur genocide than in any rollback of reproductive rights.” Young people of our generation have yet to come out in forces anything like those from the 60’s and 70’s women’s rights movement.

The pro-choice movement witnessed many concessions and setbacks in recent times: the push for mandatory sonograms, counseling and waiting periods; “conscience” clauses allowing physicians and pharmacists to deny women birth control access; the brutal assassination of Doctor George Tiller, among others. And there have always been a core group of pro-choice women fighting these setbacks, mourning losses and celebrating victories.

But the Stupak Amendment has captured the attention of those 25-40 somethings that aren’t interested in political causes or feel other causes are more important. Since the House vote, pro-choice groups have seen an inundation of funding and support—Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, recently told the Times, “The reaction [to Stupak] has been phenomenal, like a match dropped on dry kindling.” A consortium of pro-choice groups, including Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and NARAL Pro-choice, organized a lobbying day on December 2^nd that had such a high turnout that the overflow room was reported to hold 200 people.

The pro-choice fight is not only seeing a huge revitalization, but it is moving into the mainstream. Even Cosmo has gotten into the action, running a recent piece called Are Your Rights in Jeopardy? that linked to a Planned Parenthood abortion ban petition. Women seem to be comfortable coming out against the amendment and finally standing up for the rights that have been slowing sliding away from us.

The health care fight is now in the Senate, where Stupak-esque language is already being introduced by Senator Ben Nelson (D -Neb.), although has a slim chance of garnering enough votes to pass. If the Senate passes a health reform bill, women will be holding their breath in hopes that the Stupak language will be taken out in conference.

But no matter how the Senate votes and now matter what the final bill looks like, one important thing has happened to the pro-choice movement: its new generation is paying attention. Hopefully that can be the only lasting effect that Bart Stupak has on women’s rights.