Cheer up girl! It could’ve been worse… you might’ve won.

Could it really be just two interminable years since this humble blog [declared] with such ballsy confidence that Hillary Rodham Clinton didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being president? My… how times have (not) changed. Well, now that the rest of the world knows it, the only remaining question is: what does she get as a consolation prize? The slackjawed political punditocracy — who have managed to be wrong about almost every aspect of this election — are boosting the Hillary as Veep meme. Looks like they will continue their perfect losing streak at prediction. Obama is unlikely to select her as his running mate for the simple reason that he seems to want to win and he well knows that, outside of the Democratic Party (and thesedays even inside it…), she is radioactive. The Republicans are playing all innocent, scuffing the floor with their Buster Browns and whistling nonchalantly during this discussion, hoping not to give away their absolute need for Obama to select her — it’s the only thing that would get disgruntled Republican donors to open the money spigot for McCain. No, she won’t be vice-president. But what will she be?

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Victims of police brutality: Michael Stewart, Eleanor Bumpers, Antoine Reid, Abner Louima, Patrick Dorismond, Amadou Diallo, Ousmane Zongo, Timothy Stansbury, Sean Bell

“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
– Robert Kennedy, quoting Aeschylus, following the assassination of Martin Luther King.

This week, 3 New York City police officers were acquitted of the wrongful death of Sean Bell, who was gunned down in a hail of 50 bullets after leaving a bachelor party the night before he was to be married. The details of the case can be recovered from the [New York Times] site and I won’t recount them here. I’ll just comment on the fact that when I heard the judgment, which I was dreading, I felt sick. I dreaded it because I feared that it would play out as so many similar cases in this city had over the years: police officers in a tense situation overreact and apply deadly force in a situation that did not warrant it. The police would be acquitted because in an ambiguous situation the onus is on the victim — especially if they are black — to avoid death. This case, as those that preceded it, reminds us in the starkest way that black people in New York City live in a state of siege. Sequestered in ghettos still, disproportionately vulnerable to the ravages of crime and too often assumed to be dangerous by those who are charged with their protection.

The first night I lived in this city as an adult, in 1983, I was wakened from sleep on a blisteringly hot September night by the sounds of a man screaming for his life. I got out of bed and looked down into Union Square to see a group of police officers crowding a crumpled figure lying before them on the ground. “Good,” I thought, “they got him,” thinking that the figure on the ground must have been the one attacking the unseen victim. The next day we learned that the crumpled body had been Michael Stewart, a young black graffiti artist who had been beaten to death by the police following his arrest for spray painting a subway car. The officers involved were all acquitted.

Cases like Stewart’s and those represented in the photo focus our attention, but you can’t live in this city without being made to face, everyday, the commonplace soul-destroying injustices that are perpetrated against black people and that become the perverse representation of normalcy. Every time I see a cab driver pass by a black woman with children because he’s afraid she will bring him into a black neighborhood, or a group of young black men given wide berth on the street because of what they are wearing I can’t imagine how so many people can endure so many hurts for so long. Living a life where just leaving your house in the morning becomes a test of courage.

It’s just like the SATs all over again! Eli is to Tom as Barack is to Hillary.

Hillary Clinton spent part of Sunday night watching the Super Bowl at a bar called Dixie’s in St. Paul MN. Of course, her enthusiasm for the Giants was about as authentic as the tears she’s been known to shed on cue (do you think she even knows who Eli Manning is?) and she whooped and hollered with the best of them when Manning’s already legendary drive defeated the sure-bet Patriots in one of the biggest upsets in NFL history. But I wonder if the irony of the situation was lost on her? Her putative hometown team aren’t the only guys making late drives at formidable opponents: CNN [released a poll today] showing that Barack Obama has not just caught up to Clinton in nationwide polls going into Super Tuesday, he may have surpassed her. The storied game plan from the Clinton camp has been that the rush of contests on Tuesday, coming so soon after Obama’s big win in South Carolina, will benefit her because her established name and reputation will trump his nascent momentum. But they may have underestimated the depth of Obama’s appeal and the dissatisfaction level toward Clinton’s candidacy within the party.

If Obama pulls off an upset the contest will drag on to the convention. That’s a long time for allegiances to settle into stony loyalties that will not easily switch come general election time. Some people are muttering about an eventual “dream ticket” of Clinton-Obama, or vice-versa. That’ll never happen — whoever wins the nomination will have to start running to the center to beat McCain and will need to pick a centrist running mate. Someone like Evan Bayh.

Meanwhile, just across the aisle, McCain looks to put a lock on his nomination on Tuesday, giving him plenty of time to shore up his right flank and prepare his assault on the eventual Democratic nominee. Alas, no Giants-like come from behind upset for Mitt Romney. He’s done.

Meet your new President.

It has become a cliché among the political punditry that the only thing standing between the Democrats and the White House are… Democrats themselves. With the notable exception of Bill Clinton, Democratic candidates and their party faithful seem congenitally incapable of putting together a candidacy that can win the support not just of Independents and the scant Republican crossover voter but of their own motley base. Barack Obama’s resounding victory in the South Carolina primary pretty much rings the death knell on the chances for a Democratic victory in the fall and, I would say, guarantees that our next president will be John McCain.

It would appear that Democrats learned nothing from the debacle of the 2000 election. That election showed the profound impact that a fracture in their base could have — had Ralph Nader not shaved just a few percentage points off the totals for Al Gore, there would have been no need for a Supreme Court coronation of George Bush. This time it’s worse. As has been noted [many times], outside of the Democratic party Hillary Clinton is not a very popular character. Her chances in a general election were dicey to begin with unless she faced a particularly weak Republican and, as McCain ascends, that looks unlikely. A full-on challenge to her from within her own party is evidence that even Democrats are not satisfied with their choices. And the nature of the dissatisfaction — as evidenced in the South Carolina vote — must encourage the Republicans. Obama won South Carolina with overwhelming support from blacks (78%) and women (54%), but fewer than one out of four white Democrats voted for him. And these are white Democrats. A Democrat cannot win the general election without picking up Southern states and they cannot win Southern states without white votes.

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Just like clockwork, the 1968 anniversary articles have begun. For creatively-challenged journalists across the country — but especially here in the East — 2008 should prove to be an irresistible “perfect storm” of then-and-now comparisons that filter current events through the dusty lens of that fateful year. Unpopular president executing an unpopular war? Check. An election year suffused with issues of race and class warfare? Check. Columbia University planning to expand into Harlem amid protests from long-time residents? Check. The New York Times kicks off the trend with a couple of articles in their Education section that describe resurgent activism on local campuses. A red diaper baby of 60’s radical parentage, Thai Jones (now a grad student at Columbia, natch), [writes] with unrestrained sympathy about recent protests on campus that show an abiding heritage of lefty commitment at the Ivy League school, while [another article] by (surprise!) a Columbia faculty member describes the recent reanimation of the Students for a Democratic Society at the tiny New School in Greenwich Village.

What both articles evidence more than anything else is a poignant nostalgia for a radical time that passed with the demographic blip that created it. Pace Dylan, the times changed. Jones reluctantly acknowledges in his piece that the modern Columbia protests (which included a short-lived hunger strike over a perceived lack of multicultural studies) failed when a far larger number of counter-protesters who were offended by the strikers’ tactics mobilized on Facebook, and the New School kids are clearly oblivious to the ill-fated history of the group they espouse. Perhaps a field trip is in order — all they have to do is go out the back door of their college on 11th Street and walk down to the house at 18 W 11th, where the Weather Underground, the radical group that succeeded the S.D.S., blew themselves to smithereens while making bombs on a cold day in March 1970.

Last prayer, or fat chance?

Al Gore, having won an Emmy, an Oscar and now the Nobel Peace Prize, is on a roll. There’s just one prize left that many would like to see him claim that has eluded him — one that he came within a hanging chad’s breadth of receiving in 2000. It’s a sign not only of his popularity but also of the rising sense of panic among Democrats that they seem destined for a ticket headed by Hillary Clinton. The [grumblings] in the lefty media about how to stop our gal from Illinois Arkansas New York began about the time that wunderkind Barack Obama started showing [signs of flagging] in his media-fueled race for the nomination. Suddenly [stories] about the nascent Draft Gore movement increased in frequency and, now with the Nobel win, have reached a fevered pace. CNN [reports] on the pressure on him to join the race (including a hilarious quote from Jimmy Carter, who has been badgering him for so long on the issue that Gore finally had to ask Carter to stop calling his house), while the Washington Post [raises questions] about whether he could successfully raise enough money this late in the primary run-up. That would certainly be a significant obstacle to overcome were he to decide to join the race, but I think there’s an even bigger factor weighing against him, so to speak: he’s too fat to be president.

The Presidential Body Mass Index (PBMI)

[Click to view] chart of US presidents ranked according to their Body Mass Index

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I was very proud to be a Columbian today.

Ever since it was announced that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would speak at Columbia there has been almost universal condemnation of the university and its president Lee Bollinger for “giving a platform” to the dwarvish miscreant. Even people like Andrew Sullivan, who has been calling for aggressive political confrontation with Islamo-fascism since 9/11, [dismisses] the event as another lefty sop to anti-Americanism:

I take a very broad view of free speech rights in America, but I would never have invited a dictator and religious extremist like Ahmadinejad. So far, it seems his usual blend of glibness, guile and gall is exposing him to ridicule as it should. If there are no gays in his country, why is he hanging so many of them? But I wonder: would Columbia ever invite a right-wing extremist with the same views as Ahmadinejad on women, gays, Israel and the Holocaust? Or do you have to be a brown-skinned, terrorist-enabling, nuclear-proliferating, certifiable nut-job to get the invite?

Incredibly lazy thinking. I wonder if the forceful challenge that Lee Bollinger presented his hapless guest with this afternoon causes any of those who forgot that we live in a liberal democracy to recognize how important it is to confront civilly and directly such reactionary evil? Would that such an invitation had been extended to Hitler back in 1933 and his reception been as publicly eviscerating. If nothing else, Ahmadinejad’s public humiliation on a world stage he had sought out precisely to gain political stature surely means that Columbia and its administrators are now considered enemies by the Islamo-fascists and in our “war on terror” that has to count for something.

More pictures I shot around campus after the jump…

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Just like Santa’s workshop! Except these elves work 15 hours a day, 7 days a week and earn 30 cents an hour.

This post is a follow up to [The New Gilded Age].

The Guardian has [a chilling article], written by the author of [The Real Toy Story] — an exposé of the Chinese toy manufacturing industry — that details just how sordid are the conditions that give rise to the kinds of product recalls that American toy companies have experienced recently. The article’s author, Eric Clark, details the advantages of moving toy production to China for American companies, like Mattel, that have their eyes forever focused on the bottom line: plentiful cheap labor, elimination of plant overhead and ability to negotiate lowered production costs on new products, which reduces further their competitive risks. But his description of conditions for Chinese workers reads like something out of our own dark industrial past:

The workers, mostly young women, shuffle from building to building. They could be on their way to school – if they did not appear so exhausted from working most of their waking hours. They have traveled in by bus from rural areas up to three days journey away – part of the biggest movement of people in human history. Shifts can last 15 hours a day or more, seven days a week – unlawful, but not uncommon in the peak toymaking season. Inside the fetid dormitories, their only living space, and often packed illegally with as many as 22 to a room, they collapse into curtained-off bunks. At lunch breaks, thousands of them in uniform, ID cards dangling on ribbons, pour onto the streets.

Compare that with this [excerpt from a letter] I found from a young woman who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, writing about her working conditions in early 20th century New York:

The day’s work was supposed to end at six in the afternoon. But, during most of the year we youngsters worked overtime until 9 p.m. every night except Fridays and Saturdays. No, we did not get additional pay for overtime. At this point it is worth recording the generocity (sic) of the Triangle Waist Co. by giving us a piece of apple pie for supper instead of additional pay! Working men and women of today who receive time and one half and at times double time for overtime will find it difficult to understand and to believe that the workers of those days were evidently willing to accept such conditions of labor without protest. However, the answer is quite simple — we were not organized and we knew that individual protest amounted to the loss of one’s job. No one in those days could afford the luxory (sic) of changing jobs — there was no unemployment insurance, there was nothing better than to look for another job which will not be better than the one we had. Therefore, we were, due to our ignorance and poverty, helpless against the power of the exploiters… As you will note, the days were long and the wages low — my starting wage was just one dollar and a half a week — a long week — consisting more often than not, of seven days. Especially was this true during the season, which in those days were longer than they are now. I will never forget the sign which on Saturday afternoons was posted on the wall near the elevator stating — “if you don’t come in on Sunday you need not come in on Monday”!

Truly, the sins of the past are upon us again. Instead of providing incentives to Chinese manufacturers to improve the lot of the young women who produce our toys (which might require returning more profits to the producers), or moving production back home (which would entail even further reduction in profit) American companies are more than willing to exploit conditions that would be illegal in their own country in order to maintain their margins. According to Clark, of the $10 retail cost of a Barbie doll produced in China, only 35 cents goes back to the people who produced it. Eager to cut their own costs and improve productivity, is it any wonder that Chinese subcontractors cut corners?

This opens up a dilemma for American consumers: the toys under the Christmas tree are tainted — if not literally with lead paint, than figuratively with support of an unjust labor market. How much would consumers be willing to spend — in the form of higher-priced domestically-produced goods, for example — to put pressure on the toy industry to change its ways?