Dinner with Stephanie Coontz

Stephanie Coontz came to speak at the Yale Political Union, and I had the pleasure of having dinner with her at Mory's. Professor Coontz is a well known researcher of family history. She takes an opposing view to family values advocate Maggie Gallagher who I had dinner with earlier this year. Highlights from the dinner: - She criticized Maggie Gallagher as not being a serious, academically trained social scientist. Coontz has formed a group of social scientists who aim to provide information to the media about family issues based on the latest research. She critized Gallagher as picking out the statistics that bolstered the conservative cause, while ignoring all other evidence. - She believed that the bad outcomes of children with single parents could be avoided with proper training. For instance, a single parent is more likely to have a more friendly relation with their children. While the child is young, the parent will say things such as, "How about you go to bed now?" The child will generally obey. But when the child reaches the age of adolecent rebellion, the parent will start making a curfew, and the child will say, "I didn't used to have a curfew! Why are you restricting me now?" In a two parent family, there is usually an alliance of adults against kids and more of a definite generation boundry. It is a house rule that a child must go to bed by a certain time. Thus when the child becomes an adolescent there is already a history of having rules, and the child finds it more acceptable.

Chris Suellentrop has an article in Slate about Congressional corruption. He briefly relates how back in 1994 Washington state residents voted out then Speaker Tom Foley because he brought home too much pork:

Examining the campaigns of the two "giant-killers" of 1994 and 2004, George Nethercutt and John Thune, illustrates the Republican transformation. Nethercutt beat Tom Foley, then the Speaker of the House, by running as a citizen-outsider, and Eastern Washington voters were embarrassed about being on the receiving end of so many government contracts. "It's basically pork. Even though we live here, it just isn't right," one voter told Time magazine. Ross Perot campaigned against Foley before the election and asked voters at a rally, "Are you for sale?"

I found this fascinating, and now I really want to learn more about that election. After I interned in Congress I decided that I could never be a legislator because too much of the job is bring home pork for your district. At best this is an amoral process of deciding who gets the most benefit of money the government is going to spend anyway. At worst it is a battle to grab as much money as possible from the public treasury regardless of if it is well spent. Every district wants to elect a Congressman who is good at this bringing home the money because every other district is too. The case of Foley is one of the only times I have heard of a district acting against its own interests for the interests of the country as a whole. Are there any lessons we can learn from this? Would there be any way of changing the way that Congressional elections are framed to encourage this result to happen more often? People are generally good, and will do the right thing if they know what it is, so perhaps we need to better articulate what the costs of pork are. At times, I have also thought about if there would be anyway of devising a system to replace pork barrel politics. For instance, if each Congressman got a number of "credits" that they could apply towards preference in receiving a government project. There are a gazillion problems with this, but maybe I'll write about it more in the future.

The tragedy of American healthcare

Some months ago, a man I know through my work at National Student Partnerships threw himself off of a 300-foot cliff. Amazingly, he survived and is now recovering. The man has a history of bi-polar disorder and he was attempting to commit suicide. I just found out that he was on medication, but he was unemployed and could no longer afford healthcare. Without healthcare, he could no long afford the medication.

In our healthcare system, it is almost impossible to buy insurance alone. If you are not in some sort of pool, such as one you get if you an employer, the prices are astronomical. The problem is especially bad if you have a pre-existing medical condition. Because of the way our system is set up Paul Hammer almost lost his life and society has had to pay far more in medical costs. This is a tragic and insane way to run a healthcare system, and it needs to be fixed.

Dana Millbank on the media.

Yesterday I attended a master's tea with Washingpost correspondent Dana Millbank. Here are the highlights from his talk:

• Millbank believes that though most journalists are liberals, they try very hard to balanced. I told him that I thought part of the problem with journalism was that journalists usually do either one of two things a) They try to be completely even-handed and make no judgements. However, this leads them to report without any sense of context. As Millbank said, this leads to reports such as, "Tom Delay claimed that the Moon is made out of green cheese. However, Senate minority leader Tom Daschale countered that this is completely false." Politicians can easily learn to abuse journalists who do not make judgements. b) Journalists do try to interpret events in their reports, and their liberal bias shows through. Millbank agreed with this analysis and said that perhaps what we really need is affirmative action for convservative journalists. I agree with this. There is no such thing as pure objective reporting. There are so many events in the world and so much to report on that all reporting requires interpretation. Without conservative reporters, it is inevitable that the liberalism of the journalists will show through. When that happens, conservative viewers will be turned off and switch to the O'Reilly Factor and Rush Limbaugh, who both have no sense of journalistic standards whatsoever.
• Millbank does believe that their is an "elite bias" among the media. This leads a number of biases while reporting, such as being very pro-free trade.
• He criticized journalism schools as being useless.
• He thought one of the biggest problems in the news media was the profit motive. Stories are selected that will sell. The news that has the best pictures and videos will end up on the news, regardless of its importance.

Howard Dean on the Democratic Party

At Dean's talk yesterday, he emphasized that the Democratic Party needed to start focusing on local elections. This means racing hard for city councils, state legislatures, and governorships. He noted that the majority of governors are Republican and that the Democrats need to fight hard for these seats in 2006. I think that this is terrific advice. First, the biggest problem the Democrats had in this past election was the lack of great candidates. In the past one hundred years, only two presidents have been elected directly from the Senate, and none have in the past forty years. Four out of our last five presidents were elected after last serving as governor. This is for good reason, the skills needed to be a successful Senator do not overlap nearly as well with becoming a successful President. The American people want someone who has a clear record of accomplishment. Also, governors can be far more moderate while still being principled, since if they are too far out their state will soon be in very bad shape. This is also terrific advice because it will help Democrats rebuild a vision for the future. The Democrats can point out a lot of problems but they are short on realistic solutions. By focusing on local matters perhaps they can get out of the rut of expecting the federal government to do everything. I thought a Dean presidency would have been a disaster for the country, but after hearing him speak I was impressed. With his views on what the Democratic party needs to do to succeed, I think he could make an excellent DNC Chairman.