Obama, Wright and Building a Progressive Majority

Even though I am a stalwart Obama supporter, I believe that the Reverend Wright issue does in fact represent a fundamental threat to his campaign. Yes, it's a "distraction" from the "issues," but let's be real here folks; the American people do not elect Presidents based on issues. If that were the case we would have had nothing but Democratic Presidents from FDR until the present. They vote based on personality, or to put it in a better light -- leadership, character and integrity.

If we remind ourselves of the Rovian school of politics, you take your opponents greatest strengths, and by hook or by crook, you turn them into weaknesses. Thus, the textbook example would be the "Swift-boating" of John Kerry, who I think we can all agree won the Democratic nomination because of his record of military service and was then turned into a traitor.

If we can summarize Obama's greatest strengths, it has to be his unique ability to bring people together across racial, political and other divides, his "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" sort of image as a non-politician politician who has not yet sold his soul to the ways of politics, and his judgment. Reverend Wright is a living, breathing fundamental threat to all of those claims . . .

We are, of course, well acquainted with the first aspect of Reverend Wright's challenge to Obama's candidacy -- his status as a racial conciliator. Obama responded with his "race" speech, which seemed to quell things. For myself, I must admit that I thought that speech was his first major mistake of the campaign in that he racialized the issue with Wright, i.e. made it into an issue between white America and black America, whereas it should've just been an issue with a cranky old preacher who sometimes says things that make no sense and our way outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse, something that many religious leaders, white and black, tend to do. Here the things that Obama said instead that I find problemmatic:

Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

. . .

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

. . .

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted.

. . .

For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

Not to overly simplify matters, but Barack essentially said that we should give Reverend Wright a pass on the statements in question because of his race. For a minute it seemed to work, and everyone congratulated Obama on having made an amazingly adult and poignant speech about our nation's "original sin" -- the problem of race that has never been adequately addressed, and it was true. It was an amazing speech on race, probably the best given by a major public figure since the 1960's. The only problem was that it did not address the issue at hand: Jeremiah Wright's statements were outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse in America, no matter the race of who said them.

I don't know the inside story of course, but based on the succeeding events, I gather that Reverend Wright did not take kindly to Obama's characterization of him as some old, out of touch black man still caught up in the resentments of the past, while at the same time white working class voters in Pennsylvania didn't buy that Reverend Wright's comments were nothing more than a good starting point for a long-neglected national conversation about race.

Now, believe me, I do not blame Barack for his approach. The truth of the matter is that there is a lot of truth in Reverend Wright's words, both as a matter of factual history, and in so far as he is expressing the frustration and bitterness that is part of the black experience in America. But unfortunately, that has nothing to do with politics, particularly politics of the variety in which Barack is currently engaged. Barack is looking to build a new progressive majority of Americans of all kinds that can bring about fundamental changes in our government. Reverend Wright's rhetoric does not help in that cause, because that is not the cause to which Reverend Wright owes his allegiance.

Which brings us to the second and potentially even more damaging aspect of Reverend Wright's threat when he told the National Press Club that Barack's disassociation with him was just based on politics:

Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever's doing the polls. Preachers say what they say because they're pastors. They have a different person to whom they're accountable.

Not only was Reverend Wright casting doubt on Obama's identity as a racial conciliator, but he was now basically calling him a typical lying politician to boot. The mythic quality of this situation is almost too much to believe. It's a very old story, the mentor father figure who becomes jealous as his mentee far exceeds him in fame and power and undercuts him at his most vulnerable moment. It finally became clear to Barack that Jeremiah Wright may be a part of this country, but his rhetoric and his views were plainly antithetical to everything that Obama was seeking to accomplish:

His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church.

They certainly don’t portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Reverend Wright thinks that that’s political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn’t know me very well. And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought either.

Now, I’ve already denounced the comments that had appeared in these previous sermons. As I said, I had not heard them before. And I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia, explaining that he has done enormous good in the church. He has built a wonderful congregation. The people of Trinity are wonderful people, and what attracted me has always been their ministries reach beyond the church walls.

But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS, when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st centuries, when he equates the United States wartime efforts with terrorism, then there are no excuses.

They offend me. The rightly offend all Americans. And they should be denounced. And that’s what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally here today.

I consider this a potentially seminal moment in the history of the progressive movement in America. The trap that Barack fell into with Reverend Wright is a trap that has ensnared many of us. Where do we draw the line between speaking out about the injustices and wrongs of our nation and our government and engaging in divisive, unproductive and unnecessarily inflammatory rhetoric that gets us no closer to our goals? Even more complex is how do we draw those lines in a way that works for people on all sides of our racial divides?

The fundamental lesson that I think Barack and the rest of us should take from this episode is that the answer to the question of whether Jeremiah Wright gets a pass on his rhetoric of anger and frustration because he's black is a resounding, "No!" If we are going to build a true progressive majority for social change in America, there has to be established boundaries of discourse, and those boundaries have to apply to everyone, regardless of race, religion, class, etc. Now reasonable minds can of course disagree about what those boundaries are, and that's completely fine. But the larger point is that the transgressions of those boundaries cannot be excused by reference to the racial background of the speaker in question.

Of course there's always free speech and freedom of religion, etc. People are free to say whatever they want, but not if they want to be a part of the movement to build a progressive majority for change. And if you don't want to be a part of that, then please don't pretend to be. You are marginal (by your own choice) to this political cause. If you can gather enough people behind your version of the world, more power to you.

What does this mean for Barack going forward? In the end, this will come down to the third aspect of Jeremiah Wright's threat to Obama's candidacy: the question of judgment, i.e. why did he join this church and stay there for twenty years? Personally, I don't blame Barack for falling into this trap, which was set long before he came upon the scene. He met Jeremiah Wright when he was 27 years old, and living for the first time in his life in a black community. For a young politically-motivated, religious skeptic like Barack, Jeremiah Wright's brand of socially and politically conscious faith understandably must've have been a powerful attraction. As the years went by after that, I'm sure Barack may have had increasing second thoughts about his choice of religious institution, but how do you just leave the church where you were baptised, married, and where your kids were baptised because of something your pastor said?

Hopefully, however, Barack's final rejection of and disassociation from Jeremiah Wright will prove to be his "Sista Souljah" moment, the point in time when he conclusively demonstrated to America that he will be a President for all of Americans, not just black people. I think many Americans are well aware that we have far more to gain by helping Barack build a progressive majority for change than by reverting to the kind of unproductive rhetoric that Reverend Wright seems intent on bringing us back to. Barack has only to lead the way and we will follow. Barack has been making lemonade out of lemons throughout this whole campaign, and this is certainly the ultimate lemon. I, for one, am very thirsty.

Why We’re Screwed on Global Warming: Reason No. 5726

An anecdote from the trenches…

In my day job, I work as an environmental and transportation advocate for low-income people in Los Angeles. Recently, I was fairly stunned by a meeting I attended organized by local environmental groups to discuss the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) Long Range Transportation Plan (LRTP). The “bottom line” in the LTRP can be found at page 53, wherein it is stated that if all goes as planned, L.A. will spend tens of billions of dollars on transportation improvements over the next twenty-plus years, only to see surface transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions in L.A. County will rise from 72,670 metric tons per day as of 2004 to 98,900 metric tons per day in 2030. According to the MTA's own numbers, that total represents a less than 1% reduction as against what would would happen if we did absolutely nothing.

What you might find even more amazing is that this plan will likely enjoy the support of the so-called “environmental” community here in Los Angeles, because it includes a plethora of long-sought after multi-billion-dollar rail projects. See, an unholy alliance between MTA planners, rail advocates and housing developers (hereinafter collectively referred to as “rail fetishists”) have framed the debate about public transit in LA as exclusively about whether or not we could find the funds to build this or that billion-or multi-billion dollar rail project, while any further expansion or improvement of bus services are quickly dismissed as not financially feasible, even though improving basic bus service has shown itself to be the most cost-effective way to improve public transit ridership in Los Angeles and other similarly laid out cities around the country and the world. Many of these same groups supported, or at least failed to oppose, a draconian fare increase proposal last spring.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love riding trains. I happen to own a home within walking distance of new rail line currently under construction. I went to planning school at Berkeley and recognize that every mode of transportation has a place within a well-functioning transportation system. But at the same time, there are few things in life that I find more disturbing than watching a “snow job,” i.e. a presentation of opinion masquerading as fact. And that’s exactly what happened at this meeting. The fact that rail fetishists such as MTA and the Transit Coalition would present the debate on transit in LA in such a fashion is not particularly newsworthy. What I find particularly disturbing was the presentation of such as the perspective of the environmental community.

I’m not sure how this is all going to shake out, but from my perspective, the MTA’s LRTP by its own terms does almost nothing to address the environmental challenges that we face here in Los Angeles. They are projecting that twenty years from now, the mode share between private automobiles and alternative modes will be exactly the same as it is now and that emissions will be reduced by less than 1% not from where they are now, but from the increase that they project to occur were we to do nothing. These numbers utterly fail to fulfill LA County’s responsibilities in terms of global climate change pursuant to a landmark anti-global warming law (AB 32) signed by Governor Schwartzenegger last year.

When pressed on this point, the MTA called on the environmental community to help them to magically bring about some kind of “behavior modification” whereby people would become so guilt-ridden about their emissions-spewing ways that they would just stop driving so much.

I asked a question during the meeting about why an expansion of the very popular and cost-effective “Rapid Bus” program was not in the plans. FYI, “Rapid Bus” is a program of introducing greatly improved service on heavily used transit lines in Los Angeles that has lured thousands of new riders with very modest investments (essentially the cost of additional buses at approximately $500,000 each), while simultaneously vastly improving mobility for the transit-dependent. The answer was very revealing, I thought: in the bizarro world of MTA, the Rapid Bus lines are a problem because they tend to stimulate ridership. Yes, you read that correctly. The MTA had hoped that the Rapid Buses would be revenue-neutral because the faster service would require fewer buses to move the same number of people. In fact, however, because the reduced travel times led to increased ridership, they have not seen the cost savings they were hoping for.

So, here we have MTA planning to spend tens of billions on wonderful new rail lines that are not projected to result in a shift in mode share or significant reduction in pollution, while leaving it up to divine intervention to somehow get people out of their cars. At the same time, simple and inexpensive improvements in bus service with proven effectiveness at luring people onto transit are casually dismissed as infeasible due to the financial effects of that increased ridership. And this is something that the environmental community appears ready to get behind? My head was spinning, indeed.

Thankfully, the LA Times published an article on Thursday morning that reassured me that I am not bat-shit crazy. The Column One article for that day’s paper entitled “London’s levy for sins of emission,” detailed the measures being taken by that city to effect the kind of “behavior modification” that we can apparently do nothing more than pray for here in Los Angeles. The solution there is exceeding simple: charge people who drive (upwards of $50 a day under the latest proposal) and apply the proceeds toward improved bus service: “Much of the $252 million a year raised under the existing congestion management charge has been poured into the city’s bus system, which has undergone a remarkable transformation and now offers citizens clean, reliable and frequent transit alternatives.”

So there you have it, all ye rail fetishists! Even a city that boasts one of the world’s best rail systems, when pressed to actually reduce pollution and congestion, has devoted the lion’s share of new transit resources to building a better bus system! No longer must we gaze in envy at Europe or the East Coast, or even our lovely City by the Bay to the north, wishing that if only we had a decent rail system, then maybe we could do something about getting people out of their cars. No, we can do something right now, and it’s very simple: adequately fund the damn buses!

I suppose, maybe my personal perspective grows out of my own personal experience with Metro Line 212/312. The “212” is essentially the La Brea Avenue bus. I live near the corner of Rodeo and La Brea, so I take it a lot. It’s a pretty great bus line actually, in terms of where you can go. It connects Hollywood and Inglewood, and travels through quite a few densely-populated and very walkable communities along the way. It also crosses paths with a lot of the major East-West bus lines in the city and it even connects with the Red Line, the Green Line, and soon, the Expo Line as well. You can take care of business in downtown Inglewood’s civic center, party in Hollywood, shop in the Fairfax district, recreate at Rancho La Cienega, and so much more, all within mere steps of Line 212 bus steps.

I’m not the only person enamored with the 212 -- it’s very popular. The 212, however, is a local bus and thus stops at every other corner. The 312 is supposedly a “limited” but I’ve seen a 212 beat a 312 plenty of times, so I have no idea what the limited designation really stands for. One could say that it’s limited in the sense that it won’t stop for you if it’s already full, but that is the case with the 212 as well. And this is what happens all day every day on this line: the bus gets even fuller than it’s usual sardine can-like state, and the bus driver has no choice but to drive right past stops crowded with riders.

All day every day there is a battle between the bus driver and the passengers, with the bus driver urging the passengers to “move back,” and the passengers trying to not get crammed too deep into the rear of the bus. My natural inclination to give up my seat to elderly passengers or those with young children in tow is rendered quite meaningless when at any given time there are twenty such passengers standing on the bus.

But according to the current MTA LTRP, when I walk out of my house in 2025, I can expect to be dealing with the exact same bus service, local or “limited” only, except that I can also expect that the car traffic with which the bus must compete for road space will have gotten progressively worse, and thus my ride will likely be even slower and more crowded than it is now. There are no plans in the medium- or long-distance for a Rapid Bus on La Brea. If I’m “lucky”, I might get an articulated bus, running at decreased intervals. What a lovely vision of the future indeed!

So it kind of rubs me the wrong way when I hear mainstream environmentalists and MTA staffers baying on about what kinds of magic words need be spoken in order to finally guilt people into leaving their cars at home. That’s not the problem right now on Line 212, nor is it the problem on hundreds of other bus lines across LA County. Nor is it the problem, by the MTA’s own admission, on those bus lines that have gone “Rapid.”

There’s no magic to getting people out of their cars in Los Angeles, or lots of other places for that matter. The solution has already been proven. Better bus service equals more ridership. In a sane world, increased ridership would lead to more frequency. More frequency leads to a further increase in ridership and so on and so forth. And this is not even to get into the proven effect that radical fare reductions have also had on ridership in Los Angeles (see the 1980’s three-year experiment with 50 cent fares that was used to sell one of the half-cent sales tax that we’re now so thankful for).

I do understand the environmental concern about emissions from our naturally gas-fueled buses, which, while significantly better than diesel, are not perfect. To this I would say two things. First, it seems clear that the technology for zero-emission buses is close at hand. Hydrogen fuel buses are on the roads today, as are all-electric ones. With the automobile industry seemingly on the brink of a major shift toward hybrids, this technology can only get even better, cheaper, and more effective within the 20-year planning horizon of the LTRP. Secondly, rail has its own significant environmental costs as well. Aside from the fact that we’re still getting 80-90% of our electricity from non-renewable sources, there’s also the environmental destruction that comes with the construction process itself. Trees and vegetation must be cleared, houses and businesses too at times. Millions of tons of concrete are poured and even more steel is riveted into place, all of which in the long-term will end up as pollution somewhere.

There’s also the growth-stimulating effect of the lines themselves, which actually goes to the central point around which this whole global warming debate really revolves: growth vs. sustainability. I see this all over the place in my work – planners treat growth as an inevitability, and they then work to accommodate it. This then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, however, as we in fact not only accommodate growth, but also enable it. Rail seems at first glance to be an environmentally friendly alternative, and compared to new or expanded highways, it is (though there’s plenty of those in the MTA plan as well). But in actually, rail grows out of the same paradigm of accommodating growth, only with recognition that as the city urbanizes, there is just not enough space to accommodate growth by building highways.

There is an immediately poignancy to all of this long-range planning because transit advocates in Los Angeles are right now organizing to place an initiative on the November ballot for a new tax or fee for transit, the money from which would dedicated to implementing the LTRP. As things now stand, I’m not sure that I would support such a tax. The fact is that Los Angeles County has been collecting similar taxes for the past twenty-plus years, and yet, year after year, the situation gets worse. The roads are more congestion, the buses more crowded, the air smoggier (with any improvements in air quality coming not from reduced traffic flow, but instead for better technology) and the trains are just never going to do a particularly great job of covering our 400 square mile wide metropolitan area.

The MTA’s main objection to expanded bus service seems to be that it’s too operationally expensive, and that most new money (federal and state) is for capital projects, not operations. If the problem in our transit system is that we don’t have enough money to operate more buses, then why not dedicate the new money to that? If the new money is going to do nothing other than implement the MTA LTRP, as currently constituted, what are we really offering to the voters of Los Angeles? Doing our part to combat global warming? No, not when the plan contemplates a huge increase in emissions in the County, even given full implementation. Reducing congestion? Not in the cards under the current plan either.

My alternative would be to come up with something that, if it goes as planned, will actually solve the problem by providing an inexpensive, efficient, clean-air transit system that can take riders anywhere they want to go in the County in a reasonable amount of time? I believe that such a system could be implemented for a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time of the proposed expansions of the rail network. With the same money, we could reduce fares, bring top-level Rapid bus service to every major street in LA County, and phase in a new clean fleet of buses running purely on electricity or hydrogen. Add in some additional freeway express buses and local circulators, along with a greatly improved pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure and I think we’d be in business. If a radically progressive federal government ever comes into being, maybe they would allocate the tens of billions that it would take to build out our rail network.

For those of you who are in the LA area and want to comment on the draft LRTP, go here.