I got to see both sides of Willie Mays, the ebullient and the bitter, the generous and the forbidding, when I interviewed him before a Giants game in early June. He’d said no the first time I’d asked to speak with him, and then I pulled every string I had, asking Peter Magowan, Dusty Baker and Giants broadcaster Lon Simmons to intervene for me. It worked; he said OK — and then stood me up, with no explanation, the first time we were scheduled to talk. But the next time he was there as promised.
There’s an extra excitement in the Giants clubhouse when Mays is there. Visitors, Giants staff and even some of the players seem to get a kick out of it. I ran into Dusty Baker’s 74-year-old father, Johnnie B. Baker Sr., outside the clubhouse, and he got excited when I told him I was there to see Mays. “Willie Mays is here? Where is he? I’ve got to say hello.” The two men greeted one another warmly, but with a touching formality, as “Mr. Mays” and “Mr. Baker,” the one awed by the star’s celebrity, the other respectful of the older patriarch’s seniority. They compared aches and pains, and the 68-year-old Mays shook his head, “Well, I have longevity. My daddy’s still alive.”
Mays signed some autographs for kids who happened to be hanging out, and then walked me into clubhouse manager Mike Murphy’s tiny office, where I sat, tape recorder in my outstretched hand, and we talked when we weren’t being interrupted by visitors. I asked how he felt about the title “greatest living baseball player,” which Joe DiMaggio had reportedly demanded be used whenever he was introduced for public appearances.
“I don’t know what Joe wanted, but I don’t have a problem, if he wanted to do that. He was my hero. Joe was the best all-around player. Joe was the best. I only played against him once, in the ’51 Series.”
I ask what current players he would put in the same league as himself and DiMaggio, and he answers quickly: “There’s only two guys you could put there: Griffey and Barry” — Ken Griffey Jr. and Mays’ godson, Barry Bonds — “for all-around. A lot of guys put numbers on the board, but only those two do it all.” He’s equally unequivocal on the question of his best play ever: “The catch off Bobby Morgan in Brooklyn was the best catch I ever made. Jackie Robinson and Leo Durocher were the first people I saw when I opened my eyes. Jackie came out to see if I caught the ball. He was a very good competitor.”
But he thinks it’s silly to try to pick a best season. “I didn’t think like that, about best seasons. What if you thought ’97 was your best year — what would you do now? I never looked back. I couldn’t dwell on last year’s season. I always looked forward. I never worried about what other people were doing — except the guy I was playing against.”
Then Giants broadcaster (and ESPN celebrity) Jon Miller popped his head in, mock-introducing himself to his old friend Mays, who deadpanned, “Hi, I’m Jim Brown.”
While they bantered, I saw Mays’ humor, and his legendary profanity, which he kept in check the rest of the time with a female reporter. Miller confided that he was known for his “Willie Mays stance” when he played Little League, and Mays, not believing that the portly broadcaster had ever picked up a bat, demanded the names of his teammates.
“I said I played Little League,” Miller averred.
“I heard what the fuck you said,” Mays came back. “I wanna know who played with you.”
“Nobody,” Miller confessed. “Nobody who was any good.”
Miller relates that when he was in New York recently, he saw somebody filming a TV commercial with Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter playing stickball. Mays explodes in laughter: “Jeter don’t know about no stickball, he never played in his whole life. He’s a good ballplayer, but where’s he from? Michigan? Maybe he plays hockey, but he don’t know stickball.”
I ask about his stickball-playing days as a rookie. “We played with a mop handle, cut the top off. The stick was small; the ball was small, too. We played it in Birmingham, we called it something else altogether, ragball or something. It was different, we threw the ball in the air. We’d steal mops, we’d cut them off. We’d play on 155th Street in Harlem, we’d play in between the cars. And if you hit it over the roof you were out.” I ask why, and he cackles. “Because you’d lose the ball! You got to hit the ball for location.
“I played stickball in the morning, around 10, for about an hour. There was a bunch of kids. They’d come and knock on my window, ’cause my window was on the ground level. I could walk from where I lived down the street to the Polo Grounds. So I’d buy the kids ice cream, then go to the ballpark. I did that all year in ’51, and in ’52 till May, when I went into the military.” I mention that manager Leo Durocher had problems with his stickball, and he smiles.
“Leo didn’t want me to play there — he didn’t want me to get tired. But it was good for me, playing with the kids was good. That’s how I learned to hit the breaking ball. Guys would bounce the ball to you, and you’d have to hit it, and sometimes it would bounce this way, that way. That’s a breaking ball. I could hit anything that moved — the change-up, breaking ball, curveball.”
Mays is happiest reminiscing about great plays and games and players of years gone by. His hearing’s going, but his memory for baseball detail is incredible. Miller tells a funny anecdote about a hit Mays got off Mets pitcher Jon Matlack, and Mays volunteers, “I remember that game! They beat us 7-1. It was a change-up; I could always hit the change-up.” He recalls a legendary extra-inning doubleheader against the Mets and volunteers, “Galen Cisco pitched eight shutout innings, and then in the ninth gave up two runs,” remembering like it was last year, instead of more than 30 years ago.
At that point manager Dusty Baker dropped in, apologized for interrupting, and told Mays that someone from the players’ union had phoned to ask if Mays would host an awards ceremony that had in the past been graced by Hank Aaron and Joe DiMaggio.
“Why didn’t they call me?” Mays demands.
Baker smiles. “He was afraid to call you.”
“Tell him to pick up the damn phone,” Mays retorts, then asks for the number.
And about a minute later, in walks Giants star Barry Bonds, (Mays played with Bonds’ father, Bobby, in the Giants’ outfield in the late 1960s and early ’70s). They have a cryptic exchange; it seemed Mays was trying to put Bonds in touch with someone who’d pay him for an appearance. “Guy didn’t call you?” Mays asks. “OK, I’ll call him. I don’t wanna hold you up. I’ll let you know.” The $10 million-a-year-superstar leaves, and his godfather shakes his head: “He’s gotta earn some money? He needs money like he needs a hole in the head. Give me the money. Why’m I tryin’ to get him fuckin’ money?”
Then Miller says goodbye, mentions he’s going to England for vacation when the season’s over and jokingly invites Mays to come along. Mays says a quick no. “I ain’t never been to Europe. I like it over here. What am I goin’ over there for? What am I gonna do over there? It’s cold in England.” He notices Miller isn’t wearing a jacket (you need one at Candlestick, even in June) and insists, “Where’s your jacket? The Giants didn’t give you a jacket? I’ma bring you a heavy jacket, Bally’s is always givin’ me jackets. You need a jacket.”
When we get back to our conversation, I ask if he would like to have managed. He says no. “I didn’t think I would be a good manager. Maybe I had too much expectations, I just felt I wouldn’t be good at it, and I don’t like to do anything I’m not good at. I know the game, but I don’t think I could sit there day in and day out and watch baseball. Even when I was playing the game, I used to get up, come in the clubhouse, walk around. I couldn’t watch it all. Maybe I was nervous.”
Periodically Mays would lapse back and forth from past to present tense when talking about his playing days, which ended 26 years ago. Asked about his favorite manager, he insists, “I never had a favorite manager. I never had a manager that bothered me. As long as they leave me alone.” I mention reading he’d feuded with Clyde King, the Giants manager in the late ’60s who tried to make him bat leadoff, and he shrugs. “Clyde didn’t bother me, he just was the type of guy who didn’t tell me the truth. We just had problems, that’s all.
“I got along with all of them. As long as they leave me alone out on the field. I could do things on the field a manager couldn’t tell me to do, because a manager doesn’t know what I can do — sometimes I don’t even know myself. Bill Rigney and I had a problem the first year. When a new manager comes in they have new ideas. When I talked to him I said, Bill, just leave me alone, and after four or five months, he did. And we would become very, very good friends.”
But the conversation took a bad turn when I asked about the years he was banned from baseball, and it never righted itself.
“I wasn’t out of baseball long. It was two years. Two years. It was short.”
I acknowledge it was a brief period.
“Well, say it, then. Say what it was: Two years. I was only out a year and a half, really.”
And the interview went south from there. When I tried to change the subject to happier times — last year, when the Giants announced they would name the plaza outside their new ballpark “Willie Mays Plaza,” and build a statue there in his honor — Mays got even more ornery.
“Wouldn’t it be moving for you if you had a statue put up of you? You wouldn’t appreciate that? Anybody who’d have a statue put up about him, and don’t appreciate it, then there’s something wrong with the person. I’m kind of curious why you’d ask me a question like that. I’m having a statue built while I’m alive to see it, and I think it’s tremendous.”
It was a bad moment; in 20 years I’ve never had an interview turn so sour. I apologized to Mays for upsetting him, and wrapped up the interview.
“It don’t matter. You’ll write what you want to write. I’m just me, I’ll be me from day one till the day that I’m gone. That’s just me.”
Yesterday it was funny: Mitt Romney announced he was having a fundraising contest to let supporters win a dinner with the farce that is Donald Trump. President Obama has raffled off dinners with George Clooney and former President Bill Clinton; Mitt’s got Trump. Any questions? Do you see a stature gap between the two campaigns? Do you want to have dinner with two guys who like to be able to fire people? Whatever floats Mitt’s boat.
Today it’s appalling: puffed up by Romney’s flattery, the preening, orange-haired narcissist doubled down on his idiotic birther claims against the president, telling the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove: “Look, it’s very simple. A book publisher came out three days ago and said that in his written synopsis of his book, he said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia. His mother never spent a day in the hospital.”
If you haven’t been following the story, and I tried not to, the addled spawn of Andrew Breitbart found a dusty 20-year-old catalog from Obama’s former literary agency that said he was born in Kenya. An assistant quickly said that she wrote down incorrect information. Trump doesn’t believe her.
“That’s what he told the literary agent,” Trump told Grove. “That’s the way life works … He didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth. The literary agent wrote down what he said … He said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia … Now they’re saying it was a mistake. Just like his Kenyan grandmother said he was born in Kenya, and she pointed down the road to the hospital, and after people started screaming at her she said, ‘Oh, I mean Hawaii.’ Give me a break.”
Give us a break, Mitt. It was already embarrassing that you were using Trump as a fundraising lure – why not raffle off a dinner with Dick Cheney, who’s hosting a fundraiser for you in July? At least Darth Vader has gravitas; Trump is a joke. Pretending to run for president, Trump made birtherism his big issue, and ultimately Obama responded by prevailing on the state of Hawaii to release his long-form birth certificate – a truly sad moment for this country, when the overwhelmingly elected president, a black man, has to show a nasty rich white guy his papers.
If you ever want an example of the vicious political double standard that helps Republicans in this country, here it is: Democrat Hilary Rosen said something inartful about Ann Romney being a stay-at-home mom, and the entire Democratic Party had to denounce her; Obama campaign leaders tripped over themselves to be the first to push her under the bus; Rosen immediately apologized. But Romney has been able to keep his ties to Trump as well as misogynist Rush Limbaugh without political penalty — so far.
This is a moment for the presumptive Republican nominee to stand up for sanity and distance himself from the crackpot birther fringe, and tell Trump he’s going to have to cancel their dinner date. Maybe he’s got to wash his hair that night. Or one of Ann Romney’s cars.
Does Romney have the integrity and courage to do that? I don’t think so, but I’d love to be surprised.
U.S. President Barack Obama speaks at a campaign fund raising event in Denver, Colorado May 23, 2012. (Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)
I count myself as a supporter of President Obama who reserves the right to criticize him when I disagree. And I disagreed with his reluctance to come out in support of gay marriage for a long time. I’m also on record wishing he’d taken a stronger public stance behind several big progressive priorities — a larger stimulus, tougher Wall Street reform, a public option for health insurance, a big jobs bill – whether or not he had the congressional support to make it happen.
Throughout the president’s first term, his most ardent supporters have reacted to those of us pushing him to do – and say – more on such issues with frustration and anger, some of it nasty and personal, some of it thoughtful and well-argued. They rightly blame Congress for blocking action on key progressive priorities, but strangely downplay the power of presidential leadership. Late last year, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait twice attacked liberal Obama critics for being “unreasonable” about what the president alone could accomplish, because “liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president.”
Chait took particular aim at lefty image guru Drew Westen, a one-time Obama admirer who criticized the president in the New York Times not merely for what he hadn’t accomplished, but for failing to tell a compelling story. Chait accused Westen and other progressives of embracing:
…a model of American politics in which the president in not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen’s telling, every known impediment to legislative progress — special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion — are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama’s failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.
Chait caricatured Westen’s argument (and the beliefs of those who agreed with it), but he got lots of love for both pieces in the pro-Obama blogosphere, where folks finally felt they had a real diagnosis for the illness of those they dismissed as “emoprogs.” But now that we see the changes wrought by Obama’s politically risky embrace of gay marriage, maybe it will be easier for folks to understand that it’s the job of political advocates not merely to praise, but to push their leaders forward.
Steve Kornacki runs down the astonishing political changes we’ve seen in the mere two weeks since the president carefully announced his supposed change of heart on gay marriage. The nation’s largest African-American organization, the NAACP, has come out behind it – and maybe most important, recognized it as an important civil rights issue. Maybe most dramatic, in Maryland, African-American voters have now flipped to support the state’s gay marriage ballot measure 55 to 36 percent –almost the exact percentage by which they opposed it in previous polling on the state issue. And in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, African-Americans’ support for gay marriage jumped to 59 percent from 41 percent in the wake of the president’s historic announcement.
Now, I’m not going to argue that Obama’s turnaround alone caused this sea change. The arc of the moral universe has been bending toward justice on gay rights for a long time, and as I wrote last week, the president gave it an additional tug. There have been advocates within the NAACP working to make this happen for a long time, and they deserve a lot of credit. African-American voter opinion had already been trending in this direction, even if black voters had been less receptive to gay marriage than other demographic groups. There is also an emotional and personal component to the president’s stance that makes his moral suasion hard to replicate on behalf of, say, the jobs bill or the public option. (And let’s also remember it’s white voters who are most hostile on some of those economic issues, thanks to the divide and conquer politics of the GOP over the last 40 years.)
Still, it’s hard not to conclude that Obama’s words made a significant difference in the political course of this debate. Ironically, it was once critics of Obama who mocked the power of words, and specifically the candidate’s own oratorical gifts. Obama shot back at them many times.
“Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” he told Wisconsin Democrats in February 2008. “‘I have a dream’ — just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ — just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ – just words. Just speeches.” At many times over the last three years, I’ve been amazed at how Obama’s critics and supporters seemed to change sides on the question of the power of his words.
I give the folks who call themselves “prag progs” – pragmatic progressives, as opposed to “unreasonable” emoprogs – a lot of credit for fixing attention on what the president has accomplished, and reminding others not merely to fixate on what he hasn’t. But I think it’s time that all of us acknowledge that there’s a role for constructive pressure, too. Progressive change has always required impatient agitators – and it will continue to.
Political commentator and author Ann Coulter addresses the American Conservative Union's annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, February 10, 2012. (Credit: Reuters/Jim Bourg)
I was late to the excellent MarketWatch story debunking the notion that President Obama’s been on a spending binge; I spent most of Tuesday traveling. But after my “Hardball” segment on it Wednesday, Ann Coulter tweeted: “Joan Walsh says that Marketwatch chart is ‘unbelievable’! Why yes it is, in the sense of being untrue.” That’s when I saw that there was shrill but lame GOP pushback on Rex Nutting’s excellent story, from both Coulter and the American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis. I don’t normally reply to Coulter’s right-wing delusions — I haven’t written a column about her in five years – but since I think Nutting’s findings are a crucial corrective to GOP lying, I wasted my Wednesday night trying to understand the GOP attempt to discredit him. You’re welcome.
Coulter admits she relies on Pethokoukis, so let’s go directly to the source. To recap, Nutting crunched Office of Management and Budget and Congressional Budget Office numbers to find that under Obama, spending has risen at an annualized rate of 1.4 percent, less than any president since Dwight Eisenhower. It jumped 8.1 percent in the last three years of the George W. Bush presidency, and in fiscal year 2009, for which Bush approved the budget, it jumped 17.9 percent. But Bush isn’t the most profligate Republican: Ronald Reagan increased spending an average of 8.7 percent in his first term.
Pethokoukis quarrels with Nutting’s assigning Bush’s budget to Bush, because “Obama chose not to reverse that elevated level of spending; thus he, along with congressional Democrats, are responsible for it.” Exactly how one president undoes the spending approved by another president under a different Congress goes unexplained. The AEI pundit also argues that we should look at federal spending as a percent of GDP, and he notes that’s gone up under Obama, attempting to prove that Nutting is mistaken – but that’s a useless metric during a recession, which by definition shrinks GDP.
Coulter goes even further (of course). “It turns out Rex Nutting, author of the phony Marketwatch chart, attributes all spending during Obama’s entire first year, up to Oct. 1, to President Bush.” (The italics are in the original; they’re where the good writing is supposed to be.) She continues: “That means, for example, the $825 billion stimulus bill, proposed, lobbied for, signed and spent by Obama, goes in … Bush’s column.”
Shockingly, Coulter is … wrong. First of all, only about $120 billion of the stimulus was spent in fiscal year 2009 – and Nutting counted it in Obama’s column. He also included new funds appropriated under Obama and the Democratic congressional majority for the child health insurance program and other projects. And it says so quite clearly on the nifty chart Coulter finds fault with: $140 billion spent in the 2009 budget year is plainly attributed to Obama. It also says so in the text of the story, for people who don’t read charts.
“I attributed all the new spending I could find to Obama,” Nutting told me in an email. “I looked at the CBO’s budget outlook from Jan. 2009, and spending for ’09 was actually lower than CBO projected. And spending has been flat since then.”
Coulter also claims that Nutting’s piece has been ignored by the New York Times, but in fact David Firestone weighed in today, and made a point I should have made: It’s actually sad that a Democratic president is kvelling about cutting the rate of federal spending growth to its lowest level since Dwight Eisenhower (actually, I made that point last August). Firestone notes that various budget deals aim to cut discretionary spending by $800 billion over a decade, by trimming education, food, housing, transportation and job training programs. “This category of spending, which used to be 5 percent of the gross domestic product in Nixon’s days, is heading down to less than 2 percent,” Firestone notes. Pethokoukis and Coulter ought to be applauding.
I’ve hailed Nutting’s piece not because I’m happy that Obama has presided over such stingy budgets (largely forced to by congressional Republicans), but because I’m glad to see a reporter telling the truth. If Pethokoukis and Coulter are the best the GOP can do to tear his work down, maybe more reporters will join him.
With so many Republican lies about President Obama, it’s pretty hard to pick out the worst one. The most vicious stuff, of course, comes from the crazy birthers, who won’t go away. (Way to spend Arizona’s tax dollars, Sheriff Joe Arpaio!) Then there are the more mainstream slurs – Newt Gingrich calling him “the food stamp president,” or Obama’s “friend” Sen. Tom Coburn saying he favors government programs because “as an African American male,” he received “tremendous advantage from a lot of these programs.”
But if you measure the power of a lie by its utter truthlessness combined with the breadth of its reach, the notion that Obama has presided over a wild federal spending spree is probably the biggest whopper spread by the GOP, with the help of the right-wing noise machine and lazy mainstream media. Mitt Romney regularly rails against the “debt and spending inferno” the president supposedly ignited. Last month on Fox, Charles Krauthammer called Obama’s spending “radical, unprecedented,” and CBS Radio’s Mark Knoller reported that the “National debt has increased more under Obama than under Bush.”
On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal’s Marketwatch debunked all of those claims: “Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s,” writes Rex Nutting. “Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.” In his first term, Obama will have increased spending by 1.4 percent; in his last three years, George W. Bush increased annual spending by an average of 8.1 percent – and in Bush’s last fiscal year, 2009, spending jumped 17.9 percent. Republican deity Ronald Reagan increased spending an average of 8.7 percent in his first term. Nutting continues:
After adjusting for inflation, spending under Obama is falling at a 1.4 percent annual pace — the first decline in real spending since the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon was retreating from the quagmire in Vietnam.
In per capita terms, real spending will drop by nearly 5 percent from $11,450 per person in 2009 to $10,900 in 2013 (measured in 2009 dollars).
Strangely, Marketwatch frames Nutting’s article as “commentary,” I guess because he’s an opinion columnist, but his facts and figures come straight from the non-partisan Office of Management and Budget and Congressional Budget Office. The charts he uses are vivid and leave no room for doubt: When the president says he’s dropped spending to its lowest levels since the Eisenhower presidency – back before the Civil Rights Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Clean Water Act, the Economic Opportunity Act, or the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency or Department of Education — he’s telling the truth.
Mild-mannered White House press secretary Jay Carney was nearly moved to swearing on Wednesday, pointing to the facts outlined by Nutting and telling reporters “don’t buy into GOP B.S.” (That became a leading Politico headline later in the day.) But will the media heed Carney’s warning?
We’ll see. Somehow I doubt it. I discussed where the “big spender” lie fits into the pantheon of GOP falsehoods on MSNBC’s “Hardball” with David Corn:
Mitt Romney put out an ad Monday using Newark Mayor Cory Booker, along with former Tennessee politician Harold Ford Jr. and former auto czar Steve Rattner, to attack the Obama campaign for its criticism of Romney’s work with Bain Capital. “Have you had enough of President Obama’s attacks on free enterprise?” the ad asks. “His own supporters have.”
Booker, of course, has become infamous for telling David Gregory on “Meet the Press” Sunday that Obama ads criticizing Romney’s Bain work are “nauseating” and “crap.” Then Harold Ford Jr., who laughably tried to become the senator from Wall Street in 2010 after failing to become the senator from Tennessee in 2006, couldn’t stand seeing Booker getting all the centrist Wall Street love, and jumped in behind him: ”I would not have backed off the comments, if I were Mayor Booker,” Ford told his friends on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Monday. “Private equity is not a bad thing. Private equity is a good thing in many instances.” For good measure the Romney ad also scooped up Rattner’s criticism – also on “Morning Joe” – from a few weeks ago: “I don’t think there’s anything Bain Capital did that they need to feel bad about,” Rattner told the crew.
Democrats are wringing their hands over the latest circular firing squad, but I think all the self-promotion and betrayal is a good thing. It should remind Democrats why many working- and middle-class people either sit out elections or don’t think there’s a big difference between the parties. For the last 20 years, folks like Rattner, Booker and Ford have tried to make sure their party courted Wall Street more slavishly than the GOP – and they often succeeded. We ought to remember that history before we get carried away with our populist high-fiving in the 2012 campaign, convinced that Obama deserves to win the fealty of the unemployed, underemployed and Occupy Wall Street, too.
I’ve always kind of liked Cory Booker, even while knowing he was a privileged Ivy Leaguer in love with his own capacity to reconcile conflict and also to convince rich people and Republicans that Democrats don’t hate them – kind of like Barack Obama, before he got sandbagged by the modern GOP. I still don’t think Booker has gotten nearly enough grief for his multilayered betrayal of Obama on “Meet the Press.” For one thing, he stepped on the president’s message, which is a terrible move for a trusted surrogate. He also played the despicable false-equivalence game – and he did it again in the video he made to try to walk back some of the damage he’d done. Booker keeps claiming what he really finds “nauseating” are the negative super PAC ads “from both sides” – but the Bain attack is coming directly from the Obama campaign (although the pro-Obama Priorities USA contributed one ad to the mix). Besides, it’s outrageous to equate the Bain attacks with the Fred Davis-Joe Ricketts plan to morph the president into Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I expect Republicans to try to make that lame argument, not Democrats.
Maybe most unfair, Booker and Ford endorsed the GOP lie that Obama has it in for private equity generally, not merely the excesses of firms like Bain. They’re only egging on the Wall Street wusses who act like the president has nationalized the banks just because he signed on to the flawed Dodd-Frank bill and once called a few of them “fat cats.” Booker and Ford are clearly only out for themselves, anxious to prove there are some Democrats who still love Wall Street. Of course, this shouldn’t surprise us: Booker has teamed up with hedge fund moguls and other super-rich private equity folks (as well as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates) in the course of reforming Newark’s schools as well as generally advancing his career. (He’s also ignored public records laws to keep those big donors from scrutiny.)
I wrote about Rattner’s comments earlier. By all accounts he did a decent job as auto czar, helping the president restructure the big three automakers and save the industry. But the big Democratic Party donor is clearly trying to pull the party back from those who are coming to understand that its fealty to Wall Street has hurt it with working- and middle-class voters – and much more important, has hurt the country. It’s Democrats who have for years protected the carried interest rule, keeping tax rates low for investors and private equity principals like Mitt Romney. Booker, Ford and Rattner are firing a warning shot at Democrats who are wandering away from their Wall Street. To its credit, the Obama team is doubling down on its Bain campaign, and let’s hope that continues.
Joan Walsh joined Salon in 1998 to become the first full-time news editor and became editor in chief in February 2005. At the end of 2010, she became editor at large, to write full time. In the last couple of years she's had the privilege of debating conservative zealots on
TV, from Bill O' Reilly to Dick Armey to Pat Buchanan.
As a columnist for San Francisco Magazine, she won Western Magazine Awards in 2004 and 2005 for writing about local politics. She's written for everyone from the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post to Vogue and the Nation.
Before she joined Salon, Joan spent many years as a freelancer. She also ran her own business, consulting to national foundations and nonprofits on education, community development and urban poverty issues. She's a crazy San Francisco Giants fan and co-wrote a book about the ballpark back in 2001.
U.S. President Barack Obama speaks at a campaign fund raising event in Denver, Colorado May 23, 2012. (Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque) 
Political commentator and author Ann Coulter addresses the American Conservative Union's annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, February 10, 2012. (Credit: Reuters/Jim Bourg) 
(Credit: AP) 
