Rick Santorum was robbed… or so I thought. Mitt Romney was declared the winner of the Iowa Caucuses by a mere eight votes. It might have been symbolic, but it supported the widespread opinion that Romney was the front runner and perhaps unbeatable. Then, a second count of the ballots showed that 1) Rick Santorum seemed to be the winner but 2) some ballots were lost, so the outcome was named a “virtual tie.”

Okay, that’s old history but worth recapping for just a moment. Because now, after a week of social issues wrangling — particularly between the Obama administration and the Catholic Church over contraceptive coverage — Rick Santorum appears to be the GOP frontrunner.

Here’s a bit from the New York Times:

A survey conducted Wednesday through Sunday by the Pew Research Center shows Mr. Santorum with 30 percent of the vote among Republican and Republican-leaning voters, virtually tied with Mr. Romney, who has 28 percent. A month ago in the survey, Mr. Romney held a commanding lead over Mr. Santorum, 31 percent to 14 percent.

A separate national poll by Gallup also conducted Wednesday through Sunday shows a similar surge for Mr. Santorum. The Gallup poll also has both men essentially tied, with Mr. Romney at 32 percent and Mr. Santorum at 30 percent. A Gallup poll released a week ago, on Feb. 5, showed Mr. Santorum at 16 percent, well behind Mr. Romney at 37 percent.

He did win three (non-delegate-granting) contests, but could the momentum relate more to how starkly social issues have taken the fore?

She seemed carefree, fashion-forward without being extravagant, lighthearted, and of course impossibly talented. This is the Whitney Houston I first came to see as she took over the early music video airwaves, and before that, the cover of Seventeen magazine.

That's an 18 year-old Whitney on the right, on a 1981 cover of Seventeen.

Whitney Houston died at the age of 48, the day before the Grammy Awards. She was found in the afternoon at a hotel where, later that night, her long time manager and supporter Clive Davis would host an awards pre-party that became a tribute. During the red carpet to Davis’s party, celebrities offered simple tributes or, in the case of actor Peter Fonda — whose best-known role in Easy Rider included him and his costars using real drugs on set for the script — ascerbic commentaries. Regarding Houston, Fonda said:

We’re all very shocked by it and saddened by it, but it’s not a surprise. It should be a lesson for every musician, but all of the people who have abused drugs over the years still haven’t been a lesson to the rest of the people who followed that same pattern, that same role. I think she was a very addictive character, and if you’re that addictive and you can’t be helped in rehab, then there’s only one person who can help, that’s yourself. She lost track of that person I think quite some time ago.

The cause of Houston’s death isn’t known yet, but regardless of the immediate cause, the public narrative of her life centers around talent, instability, and addiction. Here she is as as a pop princess in her 1985 video for
“How Will I Know”:

(A compilation by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer includes links not only to her videos, but the 2002 interview with Diane Sawyer that focused on whether Houston was battling addiction. The star hedged her answers carefully.)

There’s a scene from the movie Precious where the obese, abused black title character looks in the mirror and sees a preppie white face peering back. It speaks to a kind of self-loathing that Toni Morrison explored in The Bluest Eye, as well as the fantasy all teens engage in. My family always taught me to love my race and hair and skin, but I was an overweight nerdy girl who aspired to be one of the beautiful cool kids. When I looked in the mirror, I did not see Whitney Houston staring back, but as I fluffed my hair and put on my makeup (quite poorly!), she was who I wanted to be. She, in my eyes, was perfection. Now, with her later life and death, she is perfection undone. No one is perfect in the way the media presents celebrities (often later to tear them down); but no matter what life Houston led her talent will go down in history. Her daughter is the same age that Houston was when she did that cover of Seventeen. For her daughter, mother, and all her family friends and fans — rest in peace, Whitney. Rest in Peace.

I’ve long maintained that class in America is a tricky thing, in part because the American Dream not only precludes but excludes class. In many societies, from the United Kingdom to Nigeria to India, there are class dynamics based on ethnicity, bloodlines, and education as well as on how much money you earn. (How many plotlines can we find in British fiction about down-on-their –luck bluebloods?)

From the Washington Post

America has its own royalty, but less of it with a less robust history and a shorter timeline. We measure our royalty, such as it is, in hundreds of years; Europeans and Asians in thousands.
I bring all this up to frame Mitt Romney’s statements that have gotten him in very hot water. He recently stated: “ I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich. They’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.” Romney made those statements on Wednesday after what must have been a satisfying victory Tuesday against Newt Gingrich in the Florida Primary.

Let’s parse these figures a bit. First of all, it’s doubtful that 90-95 percent of Americans are struggling, unless they measure their personal wealth against Romney’s or other titans of industry. The official poverty rate in our nation is 15 percent. Many more people are genuinely struggling to pay their bills. Yet “struggling” is as much a psychological measure as a financial one. There are people who earn a good living who feel overextended; and people who earn nearly nothing who feel, if not secure, at least at peace.

I met one of the latter recently while giving a speech about trends in the job market. He’d been laid off from a job he’d had for three decades, shortly before retirement age. Although he hadn’t been able to find another job, he told me he was thrifty and had savings that would sustain him. I remember how clearly and proudly he said to me, “I’m a free man.”

On the other hand, there are people who earn incomes at or near the “one percent” – i.e., roughly half a million dollars a year in income – and still feel like they’re struggling. In some cases, it’s not all a case of income envy. Our relative sense of wealth is based in part on regionalized and circumstantial expenses. If you earn a half a million dollars a year; have three kids in college who don’t qualify for financial aid; and are also supporting aging parents then perhaps you might feel a sense of anxiety. That’s not government cheese-level stress, but it’s stress nonetheless.

All that said, it’s hard to believe that 90+ percent of Americans perceive themselves as struggling, let alone actually show economic signs of struggling despite their incomes and savings. Anyone who watches television sees endless ads urging the spending of discretionary income on everything from diamond rings to Florida vacations to food at Olive Garden or Red Lobster. That implies that some people, and not just 5 to 10 percent of people, have discretionary incomes or lines of credit they use for non-essentials.

The United States is fundamentally a consumer economy (i.e., roughly 70 percent of GDP, though that number is contested by various economists for various reasons). To crib from artist Barbara Kruger, we shop therefore we are.

There will likely be entire dissertations written on Mitt Romney’s attempts to appeal to a populist voter base. While we consider that proposition, we also have to check in with ourselves, and decide what role we play in our constructions of prosperity, poverty, and class identity.