I posted a piece on CNN’s blog today which starts:
Over President’s Day weekend I traveled from the halls of Harvard to my childhood home in Baltimore, a city far better known for The Wire than its education system. On Saturday night, I heard my mother coach a parent by phone on ways to ensure her child was focused and ready to study. My mother retired as a Baltimore City school teacher several years ago, but she still puts in the time to tutor kids through a program run by a local church. She cared about students then, and she cares now. And, although you would not know it from statements like Rick Santorum’s attack decrying the “factories called public schools,” dedicated teachers like my mother are not an exception. Not all teachers are great; nor all public schools. But the reason I have been at Harvard, twice – once for my undergraduate education, and now again as a teaching fellow at the Institute of Politics – is based on my parents’ efforts and the excellence that was present in public schools.
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.
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.
It’ll become quite apparent what this latest racial political controversy is about when you watch two pieces of video below: a campaign ad by Pete Hoekstra, who is running for Senate, plus his defense of the ad.
This thirty-second nugget of campaign nonsense was originally, in its HTML code, called “Yellow Girl.” Yes, she is wearing yellow, but one might be prone to looking for double entendre considering that this ad is A) blatantly race baiting in the guise of talking China economic policy and B) hypocritical (since Hoekstra voted for the Bush tax cuts and TARP bailout while his opponent did not).
And besides all that: I’m curious where this woman is from. More likely Chicago or Long Beach than China, judging by the fake accent.
On a race-baiting scale, this uses ridiculously unsubtle racial code that is more at the level of the Willie Horton ad than anything that’s been done about African-Americans recently. Oh well: there’s still time for more foolishness in the campaign season. I hope we don’t go there.
In this weekend’s Nevada caucus, the first primary contest with a large percent of Mormon voters (26% of participants), Mitt Romney won handily by 50 percent of the total. But he strikingly won 90 percent of the Mormon vote.
During the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, African-Americans were criticized for blindly following Obama because of race. Similar charges are not being leveled, at least not to the same extent, against Mormon voters for Romney.
Humans are social animals and we all have reasons for hewing to identity and affinity groups, as well as calculations about whether and how supporting a particular candidate will affect us and our communities.
There is no question that anti-Mormon bias is going to be a factor among some Republican voters when it comes to Romney. But I’m also interested in whether and how the close hewing of Mormon voters to Romney as a candidate will be explored with the same persistence than the black vote for Obama did.
tracks the life of Sophie "Sky" Lee, a thirtysomething black rock musician making a comeback in New York City in 2000. There are a few hitches to her plans: Sky's guitarist is her mercurial, drug-abusing ex-husband; her manager is also her boyfriend; and Sky herself is frightened of the cost she'll pay to reach the pinnacle of fame.
