Joe Conason

Why was it OK to write about George H.W. Bush's alleged affairs in 1992, while bashing Drudge's scandal-mongering today? Because the right still uses sex rumors to smear Democrats while protecting its own adulterers.

With the so-called Kerry intern story dead, now that the woman with whom the Massachusetts senator supposedly had an affair has convincingly denied it, all that remains of this evanescent “scandal” is the old debate over when, if ever, the press should delve into the private lives of political candidates. In an election year, that is always a pertinent and complicated question. But a few eager promoters of the Kerry story, no doubt disappointed by now, are deflecting their frustration onto those who wondered publicly whether Kerry’s personal affairs merit such scrutiny.

On Sunday, as his scoop began to disintegrate, Matt Drudge sniped at his critics. He noted archly that while certain “main press players” had criticized him for “revealing details of a behind-the-scenes campaign drama surrounding candidate Kerry and the nature of his relationship with a mystery woman,” those same journalists had once “peppered” the first President Bush with “questions surrounding an infidelity rumor.” Drudge included me in that list — along with Helen Thomas, Jonathan Alter and several television correspondents. And at first glance, he had a point.

In my column last week examining the Kerry flurry, I urged reporters to consider whether “the rumor of a private peccadillo deserves their attention and resources in the 2004 campaign.” Yet 12 years ago, during the 1992 presidential campaign, I wrote a cover story for Spy magazine about rumors and allegations swirling around the first President Bush’s personal affairs.

Drudge perceived a contradiction — and now an Internet blogger and a newspaper gossip have arraigned me for hypocrisy.

Flattering as it is to be insulted by the likes of Mickey Kaus, I believe readers deserve a better account of that episode than he offered. He actually didn’t bother to read the Spy article, which I would have faxed to him if he had only asked. (Neither did Drudge, I suspect.) Instead, adhering to his usual rigorous approach, Kaus relied on a brief Nexis clip from USA Today that described my article somewhat inaccurately. Although his continuing obsession with the sexual prowess and physical appearance of politicians he dislikes is worthy of clinical analysis, I’m not going there. (Following this recent column by the incomparable Daily Howler, further comment on Mickey and his style may be forever superfluous anyway.)

Daily News gossip Lloyd Grove, who publicizes the Kaus kvetch today, at least asked me for the Spy article (although it is hard to say how closely he read it). In an e-mail to me, Grove says I ought to have disclosed the old Bush story when I wrote about Drudge and Kerry, and explained the difference. Fair enough, although it didnt occur to me at the time. I think its quite obvious why 2004 is very different from 1992. So does Boston Phoenix media critic Dan Kennedy, who also obtained and read a copy of the Spy article.

For anyone unfamiliar with the late and lamented Spy, it was a glossy, sassy, frequently daring monthly that stalked the unoccupied journalistic territory between satire and investigation. While Spy’s usual targets tended to be obnoxious public figures such as Donald Trump and Larry Tisch, it also ran longer, deeply reported stories on nasty K Street lobbyists, crooked officeholders and other political topics. In 1992, its editors asked me to look into the whispers of adultery that had haunted George Herbert Walker Bush since his 1980 presidential campaign — and why the national press corps had never published a story on the topic.

I spent months chasing down rumors about Bush, most of which I debunked. As I noted in the introduction to the Spy article, most of what the politicians, consultants, businessmen and other sources told me about his affairs amounted to “no more than unconfirmable gossip.” I also found one story that my editors Kurt Andersen and Susan Morrison, their counsel and I believed likely to be true.

But so what? Why did we think the Bush story was worth our “attention and resources” in 1992?

The answer, of course, was the enduring double standard that pillories Democratic peccadilloes while ignoring or excusing the same misbehavior among Republicans: “What American journalists seem uncomfortable investigating is screwing around — by a Republican president or candidate, at least — especially if the investigation might require more than a supercilious glance at a ‘supermarket tabloid.’ This year, while a parachute press corps has scoured Little Rock for any hint of Democratic scandal, the issue that remains too hot to handle is whether Poppy has been faithful to Bar … If stories about womanizing could ruin Gary Hart and cripple Clinton,” I asked, “then why isn’t anybody looking into the stories about George Bush?”

Moreover, the Republicans were clearly preparing to exploit an unfairly tilted playing field: “In public, the president warns his own campaign against delving into ‘the sleaze.’ In private, his political aides snicker about the so-called independent committees that will do the dirty work, just as they did in 1988 with the Willie Horton ad. In fact, the same operatives behind the notorious Horton spot have already set up a new, pseudo-autonomous Presidential Victory Committee, aiming to spend $10 million for media attacks on Clinton’s character.”

The other germane aspect of the Bush story was how widely the belief that the president had strayed was held by the reporters who covered him. R.W. Apple, then the chief Washington reporter of the New York Times, openly discussed the issue. He even uttered the name of Jennifer Fitzgerald, a former Bush aide and alleged paramour, at an academic seminar broadcast on C-SPAN. But as numerous top Washington journalists told me, almost nobody had made a serious attempt to learn the truth.

So I examined the rumors and allegations — and knocked down most of them. Yes, I quoted many anonymous sources on the subject. But I also quoted Washington journalists Jack Germond, Fred Barnes and the great Walter Pincus — along with the president’s son George W. — denying any substance to such allegations.

In a Chicago Tribune feature about Spy, James Warren, then the daily’s media columnist (and now its deputy managing editor), described my Bush story as “an unusually low-key, even caution-ridden effort that dispenses with the magazine’s characteristically biting rhetoric and even verges on the mildly pedantic … But the story is intriguing as it makes a case that the press is tougher on Democrats when it comes to alleged ‘character’ issues than on a sitting Republican president.”

While focusing on the myriad Bush rumors and how they had been handled by the press, I came across a case that was considerably stronger than most of the gossipy tales floating around him. Out of respect for the woman’s privacy, the Spy editors and I agreed to refer to her only as “Ms. X.” In 1980, after working for a news agency covering the Republican presidential primaries, Ms. X told several friends in New York about her romantic involvement with Bush. The following year, after Bush was elected vice president, she moved to Washington. There she confided in another close friend.

Without knowing or speaking with each other, her Washington and New York friends separately confirmed to me what Ms. X had told them. They unanimously vouched for her credibility. I also managed to speak with Ms. X, who acknowledged knowing Bush but called the affair allegation “absolutely and 100 percent a lie.” She also threatened to sue Spy for libel. But when reminded that a story must be untrue to be libelous, she replied, “Maybe libel wouldn’t be how we’ll pursue … What you’re doing is destroying my privacy.”

If I have any qualms about the Bush story, they’re the same ones that I felt at the time. The headline — “He cheats on his wife” — oversold what we were publishing, as I told Andersen and Morrison. They disagreed. And the Spy style tended to preface allegations with the word “alleged” less diligently than other publications.

Unfortunately, the July/August 1992 edition of Spy isn’t available on the Internet so that readers can reach their own judgments. Rereading it now, I think the reporting holds up well. And the conclusion is certainly still pertinent. Indeed, considering the lopsided media coverage of Clinton’s sins and those of his adversaries on Capitol Hill, most notably Newt Gingrich, it’s almost prophetic:

“Does it matter whether [Bush] had an affair with [his former aide] Jennifer Fitzgerald, or with any of the several other women whose names have been linked to his? … Perhaps not. If George Bush had entered the White House a virgin and remained pure for the past four years and the next four, he would still suffer by comparison to several presidents who were known philanderers: Jefferson, FDR, even LBJ and Eisenhower … Certainly it’s past time for American politics to grow up and reach a point where stories about our leaders’ sex lives are treated as the titillating, perhaps largely irrelevant trivia they usually are. But that maturity will never be achieved as long as the public is permitted to see the messy human truth only about Democrats, while Republicans are displayed inside a bubble of happy, wholesome illusion.”

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Trench warfare rages over Keystone pipeline

The GOP tries every which way to undo the green's modest victory

By Alyssa Battistoni

Protestors outside the White House demand a stop to the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline. (Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)

Topics:Keystone XL pipeline, Editor's Picks, Environment, U.S. Congress

When the Obama administration announced last month that the Keystone pipeline project would be delayed pending a more thorough environmental review of its impacts, Keystone’s opponents celebrated—but warned that the fight was far from over. Sure enough, pipeline politics remain front-and-center as those in favor of the pipeline seek to circumvent the longer review process while its opponents struggle to fend off attacks on their tenuous victory, and the past few weeks have seen a burst of legislative maneuvering as Republicans seek a way to rubber-stamp the pipeline without the president’s approval.

The maneuvering is intense because the struggle over the 1,600 mile proposed pipeline has become a proxy battle in a larger war over climate change, corporate influence, and the legacy of the Obama administration. Both sides agree that the fate of Keystone XL will influence more than just whether oil is transported from the tar sands central Canada to the United States. It will signal whether the U.S. is moving away from the carbon-fueled economy or embracing it anew.

The Republicans are attacking from several directions. A House bill introduced by Representative Lee Terry (R-Neb.) in December would require the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to issue a permit within thirty days of receiving an application, essentially removing the Interior Department and Army Corps of Engineers from the oversight process, exempting the pipeline from several state and federal environmental regulations, and eliminating any discretionary review process.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the bill on February 7, while killing Democratic amendments to prevent Keystone oil from being exported after processing, to block TransCanada from using eminent domain to seize private land, and to certify TransCanada’s claims that most of the steel used in building the pipeline would be manufactured in the United States. Republican leaders have also indicated that they’re considering inserting the bill’s language into other legislation in a replay of December’s payroll-tax-bill shenanigans.

Another bill, sponsored by Rep. Connie Mack (R-Florida), would allow Congress to approve the pipeline without presidential review by invoking Congress’s constitutional authority to regulate international commerce; Sens. David Vitter (R-La.), Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), and John Hoeven (R-N.D.) co-sponsored a companion bill in the Senate. And today, Republican leaders added a provision to the same effect to a transportation funding bill that may go up for a vote as soon as Tuesday. In response, anti-Keystone activists are seeking to imitate the success of last month’s anti-SOPA online activism, aiming to inundate senators with a stated goal of half a million emails within 24 hours to demonstrate that opposition to the pipeline remains strong.

The Keystone provision is unlikely to pass the Senate, let alone get a signature from President Obama. But if the past few weeks are any indication, we haven’t seen the last of the pro-pipeline legislation by a long shot. Mitch McConnell gave the game away in a statement to the conservative publication Human Events, saying “the only way we’re going to get the Keystone pipeline started is to defeat Barack Obama.”

The party’s aim is to make the pipeline’s rejection a symbol of Obama’s alleged failure to stimulate the economy, and more generally, to paint a portrait of the president as a weak leader more concerned with appeasing “special interest groups” than with taking decisive action. Said Mack at a recent press conference, “The president has decided he’s not going to lead on this issue…so we need to get him out of the way,” while Lugar declared “The president has failed to lead.”

But pipeline protesters counter that Obama’s decision on Keystone represented a courageous refusal to give into pressure from fossil fuel lobbyists: MoveOn.org called it a “bold stand against the power of the oil industry” while Bill McKibben said he “did the brave thing” in standing up to the American Petroleum Institute. While the issue is frequently portrayed as one that could divide key factions of Obama’s base, with labor unions in favor of the pipeline and environmentalists against, several major unions have come out in support of the administration’s decision to delay the pipeline, calling efforts to speed up the review the “cynical move” of a “do-nothing Republican Congress” and stating “President Obama has acted wisely.”

A report released by the State Department Investigator General last week also raised concerns about several aspects of the original environmental review. The report found that the original review failed to consider conflicts of interest—one of TransCanada’s lobbyists, Paul Elliott, is a former aide to Secretary of State Clinton, and the third-party contractor selected to conduct the review had prior financial relationships with TransCanada.

Moreover, the State Department neglected to address several regulations and had insufficient expertise to adequately consider issues like the pipeline’s potential impact on endangered species. The findings bolster environmental groups’ claims that the pipeline serves the interests of the oil industry, which is among the Republican party’s top donors, and TransCanada, whose spending on lobbying has tripled in the past year to $1.73 million, $1.33 million of which went to Elliott for pipeline-related expenditures.

And it’s not just American politics that have been shaken up by the controversy over Keystone. After the delay was announced, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper said he would begin looking into alternative markets for the country’s natural resources, and during a recent visit to Beijing, “pledged closer trade ties with China.” That, in turn, has sparked a wave of concern about the specter of “foreign oil” back in the US—although most of the oil transported by the pipeline would ultimately be exported rather than used to supply the country’s energy needs. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) argues that Keystone would make the U.S. into “a middleman between Alberta and Asia” while doing nothing to reduce the country’s reliance on foreign oil.

: Alyssa Battistoni writes about the environment and politics from Seattle. More Alyssa Battistoni

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An offensive advocate for LGBT rights

By choosing Goldman CEO Blankfein as a spokesman, HRC signals that corporate malfeasance is perfectly acceptable

By David Sirota

Lloyd Blankfein (Credit: AP/Alessandro della Valle)

Topics:Wall Street, LGBT

Last week, the Human Rights Campaign, the organization that advocates for equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, announced that Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein will be its first “national corporate spokesman for same-sex marriage.” HRC’s move was almost universally portrayed in the media as a laudable one for the cause of equality: a supposed Nixon-goes-to-China-esque coup that aligned a politically conservative icon with a liberal cause. As one HRC executive told the New York Times: “Lloyd Blankfein is not someone average Americans would think is going to support marriage equality.”

In all the ovation and self-congratulation, however, two big problems were left unmentioned.

First and foremost is the simple fact that this is not some brilliant P.R. move in the Nixon-to-China vein. On the contrary, many (though certainly not all) Wall Street financiers have long professed their support for gay rights, culminating in their pivotal role helping legalize gay marriage in New York state. That’s, in part, because it’s an effective strategy to divert attention from their economic agenda.

Taking a page out of corporate greenwashing strategies, many of the most offensively greedy, right-wing thieves in the business world have long touted their personally progressive position on select social issues like gay rights as a means of publicly presenting themselves as Good and Decent People. Not surprisingly, the particular progressive causes they choose tend to be those that do not impact their businesses or personal economic situations. In some cases, in fact, these thugs seem as if they are leveraging their stands on such progressive issues as a quid pro quo bargaining chip for their personal financial interests. As just one example of where that kind of dynamic may have played out, recall that almost immediately after Wall Streeters underwrote Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s campaign to legalize gay marriage, Cuomo launched a public (though ultimately unsuccessful) campaign to halt the extension of a so-called millionaires tax on those same Wall Streeters.

This isn’t to say that Wall Streeters’ support for marriage equality isn’t a good thing; it most certainly is. (As a strong supporter of marriage equality, for instance, I’m glad those Wall Streeters helped New York State legalize gay marriage.) It’s only to say that Blankfein’s support of gay marriage isn’t some hard-to-believe coup; it’s probably exactly what many “average Americans” would expect from a Manhattan investment banker.

That gets to the second, even bigger problem: What, then, is the movement for equal rights really saying to “average Americans” when that movement promotes someone like Blankfein as its chief public spokesman? And what is the muted reaction to the HRC announcement saying about what is acceptable in America?

To answer that question, consider who Blankfein is — and recall specifically that he is not some quiet, buttoned-up executive in a staid manufacturing industry, nor is he known as a new Lee Iacoca or Steve Jobs — aka a person widely revered (rightly or wrongly) for how his innovation and business savvy (supposedly) helped the world. On the contrary, Blankfein is the singular — and rightly detested — poster boy for the lies, crimes and avaricious schemes that destroyed the economy, impoverished millions of Americans and ripped off taxpayers.

This is a man who refused to tell Congress the truth about the basic facts of how the firm he led bet against — and profited off — the destruction of the American economy. As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi documented, in 2010 Blankfein “went to Washington and testified under oath that Goldman Sachs didn’t make a massive short bet and didn’t bet against its clients” — even though the Senate’s “Levin report proves that Goldman spent the whole summer of 2007 riding a ‘big short’ and took a multibillion-dollar bet against its clients, a bet that incidentally made them enormous profits.” Blankfein’s lying was so egregious, the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations has recommended that the Justice Department consider perjury charges against him.

Blankfein is also the CEO who oversaw Goldman at the very moment that the firm engineered the infamous Abacus deal, a deal that was so insidious, that it ultimately drew a record $550 million fine from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Lately, he’s made headlines personally lawyering himself up in preparation for possible criminal prosecution, which is probably a smart move because he’s already being formally deposed in a civil lawsuit related to the SEC settlement. And, of course, this says nothing about Blankfein and Goldman’s central role in the deceptive mortgage securitization schemes that, ya know, cratered the entire global economy.

Considering all of this through the prism of HRC’s decision to promote him and the political/media world’s supportive reaction to that decision, we see a disturbing message: namely, that in America, if you commit the most odious economic crimes against humanity, you can not only get taxpayers to bail you out, you can not only keep your job atop the most powerful corporations, but you get to keep your social status as well. In this case, you get to be promoted as the cheery spokesman of a progressive social cause.

This gets us back to what HRC calls morally questionable: for most mainstream organizations (and certainly all progressive organizations) to willfully align themselves with bigotry and prejudice (yes, there are of course still groups like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council that align themselves with that kind of hate, but at least as they do so it’s considered controversial and cause for widespread criticism). Yet, when a group pushing the progressive cause of civil rights and social equality promotes one of the avatars of economic injustice as a spokesman, there’s either no criticism at all — or widespread applause.

To be sure, when it comes to divisive political issues, there are no perfect high-profile spokespeople for public awareness campaigns. Everyone has a flaw, nobody is pure, and almost nobody is universally liked. But there’s a clear and obvious difference between imperfect and villainous. When a progressive group refuses to find the former and instead willfully aligns itself with the latter, it may help the specific and worthy cause at hand in the short term (in this case, marriage equality). But over the long haul, it sanitizes that villain and, worse, helps legitimize all he represents — including all the terrible things he represents.

That’s why Blankfein probably jumped at the chance to be HRC’s spokesperson — it’s a great deal for him, even as it gives the big middle finger to the millions of Americans he harmed in this recession.

: David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota

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Why Ron Paul is still relevant

Those of us who hate him need to understand those who love him.

By Gary Weiss

He's wacky. He's wise. (Credit: AP/Robert F. Bukaty)

Topics:2012 Elections, Ron Paul, Editor's Picks

These are depressing days if, as I do, you don’t care much for Ron Paul.

His strong showing against Mitt Romney in Maine is further proof that the libertarian Texas Congressman l is not going away. So this is as good a time as any for those of us who view him as an off-the-charts extremist to come to grips with two larger questions presented by his candidacy: Why do so many people like this guy?

And even: Do Paul’s followers have a point?

My credentials in the anti-Paul camp are unassailable, and I have the hate mail to prove it. I haven’t changed my mind about his views. I still think that he’s a phony populist, because his positions would favor the 1% more than any other Republican candidate. I haven’t changed my mind his “end the Fed” campaign is diversionary, and that his advocacy of the gold standard would put us in another Great Depression were it ever implemented. I’m concerned by the cult-like fervor of so many of his followers. I don’t buy his excuses for the racism that appears in newsletters that were published under his name.

But that doesn’t mean that those of us who aren’t won over by Paul should just dismiss the guy as a nut, which seems to be a popular practice in news organizations.. I don’t think he’s been terribly forthcoming, especially on those newsletters, but you can’t deny that Paul has a number of positive qualities that moderates and liberals needs to understand and appreciate, in order to effectively counter his views:

1. He has integrity. I grimace as I write this, but it’s true. Perhaps not compared to Mother Teresa, but certainly he does when stacked up against pretty much any other politician I know, including more than a few Democrats. (He obviously has more integrity than Mitt Romney, but that’s not saying much.) His consistent dedication to the same ideals, the same causes—obsessions, actually—cannor be seriously disputed. A perusal of his books, House of Representatives floor speeches and miscellaneous bloviating over the years shows that the man has been hammering away at the same isolationist/monetary/no-government/”Constitution” themes for decades. He has opposed the war on drugs for decades, just as for years he has opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Mind you, he’s not always internally consistent, in the sense that he takes positions that stray from the libertarian ideal—taking earmarks for his district and stridently opposing abortion. But on most issues you can expect that his rigidity on matters of ideology will shine through, no matter how politically inexpedient.

2. He’s likeable. Paul doesn’t give off mean-S.O.B. vibes like Newt Gingrich. He’s rumpled, and walks with the head-forward bad posture of a slightly distracted junior college professor, shuffling along, late for his next class. He doesn’t make a big show of bullying debate moderators as Gingrich has been doing (though he has walked out on an interview). Though his positions are even more uncompassionately conservative than Romney, he comes across with considerably more warmth (again, not saying much). His delivery on the stump is folksy, not fanatical. He talks about cutting $1 trillion out of the federal budget like your family doctor telling you he’s got to take out a gallstone. It’s good for you. It won’t hurt for long. Paul is often compared to the old man in the neighborhood who shoos the kids off his lawn, but he reminds me a lot more of Senator Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar Democrat of the 1968 campaign. He doesn’t have McCarthy’s urbane wit, but that’s asking a bit much.

3. He’s smart, and in a nice way, unlike Gingrich or Romney. He doesn’t lecture; he doesn’t talk down to people. I think this explains a great deal of his appeal to the young. He’s this generation’s Mr. Wizard, the affable TV science teacher who taught baby boomers how refrigerators operate and how to get electricity out of a spool of wire and a magnet. Ron Paul’s Mr. Wizard character similarly reduces complex issues that people don’t understand into simple concepts amenable to simple solutions, such as abolishing a good part of the federal government and getting rid of the income tax. Yet he is able to embrace these off-the-charts positions in a manner that doesn’t make them seem extreme. It takes a genius to do that, and I don’t mean that in a nice way.

4. He knows the American people are fed up. He’s struck a chord with a lot of people I respect. His talk about American “empire” makes many a progressive feel warm and fuzzy. More than any other candidate—including President Obama—he understands how tired Americans are of being underemployed, exploited by the big banks and sent to engage in nation-building overseas. Sure, his policies would entirely wipe out regulation of banks, but he gets away with it from sheer force of personality. (And yes, I can already see the comments—the hedge fund managers and bankers support Romney. Sure they do: because he’s going to get the nomination.

Paul’s views on foreign policy hearken back to the Republican isolationists of the 1930s, the Robert Tafts and Gerald Nyes, and he similarly taps into the latent Heartland “fortress America” mentality. He cannily exploits the paranoia that has long characterized American politics, and the deep-rooted dislike of foreign entanglements that has been dormant for decades. There’s an aroma of the old America First movement to much of what he says about foreign policy, and that’s scary to people who’ve read a lot about the 1930s, and know that we’d all be speaking German today if the Firsters had gained power. But they didn’t. Most people don’t give a hoot about what happened five years ago, much less seventy.

5. He talks some sense. That’s what Paul haters have had a lot of trouble digesting: he’s an extremist on most issues who makes a lot of sense on foreign policy. He’s the only anti-war candidate in 2012. Even people who don’t agree with him totally on foreign policy have to admit that his opposition to the U.S. getting involved in Libya is looking smarter as every day passes, as do his views on staying out of the maelstrom in Syria. Sure, it’s insane for progressives to support a candidate who wants to turn back the clock on the New Deal and Great Society, as I pointed out a few weeks ago. But Paul has outsmarted us. He knows that dismay about Iraq and Afghanistan is strong enough to overcome any lingering doubts about his foreign policy views among a staggering number of people who’d otherwise find him repugnant.

The solution, I think, is the same one that applies to the spreading influence of another extremist who has gone mainstream, Ayn Rand. What’s needed is not shunning but debate, and an understanding that his positions need to be viewed as part of an organic whole. Anyone who reads “Atlas Shrugged” knows that laissez-faire capitalism is just part of the Randian package. So is atheism and a lot of other concepts that people in the Tea Party don’t always recognize when they brandish those “Who is John Galt?” posters.

It’s the same with Ron Paul. If you swallow his foreign policy, you guzzle down laissez-faire capitalism as well, whether you like it or not. So sure, he makes sense on Syria, but he has one of the worst records on the environment and global warming of any member of Congress. That’s just one part of the price tag. It’s a long list.

Politics is compromise, and so do the choices that voters have to make. Those of us who oppose Ron Paul believe that his positions are too extreme to warrant compromise. But we need to understand why so many reasonable people feel differently.

: Gary Weiss is a journalist and the author of "Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America's Soul," to be published by St. Martin's Press on February 28, 2012. Follow him on Twitter @gary_weiss. More Gary Weiss

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The deep roots of the war on contraception

The uproar over Obama's decision stems from tensions between Democrats and Catholics that date back to FDR and LBJ

By Ellen Chesler, New Deal 2.0

(Credit: Library of Congress/The White House)

Topics:New Deal 2.0, Birth Control, Planned Parenthood

This piece originally appeared on New Deal 2.0.

Republicans for Planned Parenthood last week issued a call for nominations for the 2012 Barry Goldwater award, an annual prize awarded to a Republican legislator who has acted to protect women’s health and rights. Past recipients include Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, who this week endorsed President Obama’s solution for insuring full coverage of the cost of contraception without exceptions, even for employees of religiously affiliated institutions. And that may tell us all we need to know about why President Obama has the upper hand in a debate over insurance that congressional Tea Partiers have now widened to include anyone who seeks an exemption.

It’s a long time ago, but it is worth remembering that conservative avatar Goldwater was in his day an outspoken supporter of women’s reproductive freedom — a freethinker who voted his conscience over the protests of Catholic bishops and all others who tried to claim these matters as questions of conscientious liberty and not sensible social policy. With Goldwater on his side, Obama sees a clear opening for skeptics wary of the extremism that has captured Republican hopefuls in thrall to the fundamentalist base that controls the GOP presidential primary today. Holding firm on family planning — even if it means taking on the Catholic hierarchy and other naysayers by offering a technical fix that would have insurers cover costs instead of the churches themselves — is a calculated political strategy by the Obama campaign, not a blunder as it has been characterized by many high powered pundits, including progressives like Mark Shields of PBS and E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post.

Recent public opinion polling on the subject is worth reconsidering. For years, it has been perfectly clear that a substantial majority of Americans see the value of expanding access to contraception and reliable sex education as essential tools to prevent unwanted pregnancy and abortion and to help women balance the competing demands of work and family. But unlike a zealous minority on the other side, these moderates have not necessarily privileged these social concerns over important questions of economics or national security that mattered more to them at election time.

That’s what seems to be changing. With his now-famous “nope, zero” response last spring, President Obama simply shut down Republicans in Congress who wanted to defund family planning as part of a deal to reduce the federal deficit. The action elicited a sudden surge in his popularity, especially in the highly contested demographic of women voters between the ages of 30 and 49 who voted for him in 2008 but wound up frustrated by failed promises and disappointing economic policies. Campaign polling has since uncovered a big opening for Obama with this group because they are furious over Republican social extremism. An astonishing 80 percent of them disapproved of congressional efforts to defund Planned Parenthood last spring. Polling among Catholics in response to last week’s controversy shows identical patterns, with 57 percent overall supporting the Obama “compromise” to ensure full coverage of contraception, according to reporting by Joe Conason in The National Memo, and cross-tabs demonstrating much higher margins of support from Catholic women, Latinos, and independent Catholic voters — all prime Obama election targets.

If the numbers are so persuasive, why then have Republican conservatives strayed so far from the greater tolerance of the Goldwater age? Why have they allowed the family planning issue to tie their candidates up in knots in 2012? The answer is in just how outsized the influence of a minority viewpoint can be on a political party, so long as it represents the base of that party’s support.

A bit of history going all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal is instructive. Back then, birth control was still illegal in this country, still defined as obscene under federal statutes that remained as a legacy of the Victorian era, even though many states had reformed local laws and were allowing physicians to prescribe contraception to married women with broadly defined “medical” reasons to plan and space their childbearing.

The movement’s pioneer, Margaret Sanger, went to Washington during the Great Depression, anticipating that Franklin Roosevelt, whose wife Eleanor was her friend and neighbor in New York, would address the problem and incorporate a public subsidy of contraception for poor women into the safety net the New Deal was constructing. What Sanger failed to anticipate, however, was the force of the opposition this idea would continue to generate from the coalition of religious conservatives, including urban Catholics and rural fundamentalist Protestants who held Roosevelt Democrats captive, much as they have today captured the GOP. It was Catholic priests, and not the still slightly scandalous friend of the First Lady, who wound up having tea at the Roosevelt White House.

The U.S. government would not overcome moral and religious objections until the Supreme Court protected contraceptive use under the privacy doctrine created in 1965 under Griswold v. Connecticut. That freed President Lyndon Johnson to incorporate family planning programs into the country’s international development programs and into anti-poverty efforts at home. As a Democrat still especially dependent on Catholic votes, however, Johnson only agreed to act once he had the strong bipartisan support of his arch rival Barry Goldwater’s endorsement and also the intense loyalty and deft maneuvering of Republican moderates like Robert Packwood of Oregon in the Senate. Packwood, in turn, worked alongside Ohio’s Robert Taft, Jr. in the House and a newcomer from Texas by the name of George H. W. Bush. Bush would remain a staunch advocate of reproductive freedom for women until political considerations during the 1980 presidential elections, when he was on the ticket with Ronald Reagan, accounted for one of the most dramatic and cynical public policy reversals in modern American politics.

Reagan had supported California’s liberal policies on contraception and abortion as governor, and Bush as Richard Nixon’s Ambassador to the United Nations had helped shape the UN’s population programs. But Republican operatives in 1980 saw a potential fissure in the traditional New Deal coalition among Catholics uncomfortable with the new legitimacy given to abortion after Roe v. Wade and white southern Christians being lured away from the Democrats around the issue of affirmative action and other racial preferences. Opposition to abortion instantly became a GOP litmus test, and both presidential hopefuls officially changed stripes.

Fast forward to 1992 and the election of Bill Clinton as America’s first pro-choice president, coupled with the Supreme Court’s crafting of a compromise decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey that put some limits on access to abortion but essentially preserved the core privacy doctrine of Roe v. Wade. The perceived double threat of these political and judicial developments unleashed a new and even more powerful conservative backlash that took aim not only at abortion, but at contraception and sex education as well.

Exploiting inevitable tensions in the wake of profound social and economic changes occurring across the country as the result of altered gender roles and expectations — changes symbolized and made all the more palpable by Hillary Clinton’s activist role as First Lady — conservatives, with the support of powerful right-wing foundations and think tanks, poured millions of dollars into research and propaganda promoting family values and demonizing reproductive freedom, including emotional television ads that ran for years on major media outlets. A relentless stigmatizing of abortion, along with campaigns of intimidation and outright violence against Planned Parenthood and other providers, had a chilling effect on politicians generally shy of social controversy. And Bill Clinton’s vulnerability to charges of sexual misconduct left his administration and his party all the more defensive.

Since the welfare reform legislation of 1996, aptly labeled a “Personal Responsibility Act,” not only has access to abortion been curtailed, but funds for family planning programs at home and abroad have been capped. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been allocated to the teaching of sexual abstinence, rather than more comprehensive approaches to sex education. Just as tragically, U.S. programs addressing the crisis of HIV/AIDS — admirably expanded during the presidency of George W. Bush — were nonetheless made to counsel abstinence and oppose the use of condoms and other safe sex strategies, leaving women and young people all the more vulnerable to the ravages of the epidemic.

Empirically grounded studies over and over again undermined the efficacy of these approaches, which also flew in the face of mainstream American viewpoints and basic common sense. With Barack Obama’s election they have largely been revoked, enflaming the conservative base that put them in place and has lived off the salaries supported by government funding for faith-based social policy.

Even more disheartening to conservative true believers is the promise that the Affordable Care Act will vastly expand access to contraception by providing insurance coverage for oral contraceptives. This guarantee, endorsed by all mainstream health advocates, also includes emergency contraception, popularly known as the morning-after pill, that holds the promise of further reducing unwanted pregnancy and abortion and was meant to offer common ground in an abortion debate long defined by a clash of absolutes. The strong dose of ordinary hormones in emergency contraception act primarily by preventing fertilization, just like daily contraceptive pills, but in rare instances may also disable a fertilized egg from implanting by weakening the uterine lining that it needs for sustenance, causing opponents to vilify it as an abortifacient.

Supporting the Obama policy changes, on the other hand, is a new generation of progressive activists in reproductive health and rights organizations, energized by the intensity of the assaults against them, and now well-armed to educate and activate their own supporters by using traditional grassroots strategies and more sophisticated social networking. No institution has been more important in this effort than Planned Parenthood, with its vast networks of affiliates and supporters in every state, millions more supporters online, and a powerful national political and advocacy operation based in Washington D.C. that has been put to use to great effect in recent months.

The strength of the Planned Parenthood brand, coupled with the organization’s demonstrated ability to rally hundreds of thousands of supporters when it is attacked, has helped overcome traditional political reticence on reproductive justice issues. The Planned Parenthood Action Fund is already out with a strong new appeal warning politicians that women are watching. “Enough is enough. Back off on birth control,” is the new advocacy mantra.

Mindful of the numbers — and with the added ballast of what now amounts to a daily drumbeat of progressive television talk and comedy that delights in pillorying Republican prudery — Democrats are intensifying their resolve to take on this fight. Two things we can be sure of: Whoever emerges from the bloodbath of the GOP contest will try and backtrack from the birth control extremism of the primary. And Obama supporters, backed up by the advocacy community, will in turn stand ready to pounce on this inevitable flip-flopping.

Both sides may well summon the spirit and words of Barry Goldwater, who cautioned against allowing faith-based extremism to gain control of the Republican Party. “Politics and governing demand compromise,” he told John Dean, who reports on the conversation in his 2006 book, “Conservatives Without Conscience.” “But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know. I’ve tried to deal with them.”

: Ellen Chesler is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and author of "Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America." More Ellen Chesler

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Our stubborn faith in aphrodisiacs

Scientists scoff at the idea, so why do we cling to age-old superstitions about sex and food?

By Felisa Rogers

(Credit: Salon)

Topics:Eatymology, Food, Valentines Day

From the Garden of Eden to the oyster cellar bordellos of old New York, food and sex are entwined. Although every food under the sun has been touted as an aphrodisiac at some point in time, humans tend to get turned on by three categories of food: extremely expensive food, food that is risky to acquire, and food that resembles genitalia.

Rare and exotic foods have favored positions in the canon of culinary aphrodisiacs. Consider the truffle, the piranha and the labor of harvesting a plate full of sparrow tongues. Foods from far-off lands have the spicy whisper of perilous adventure, and there’s nothing quite like a hint of mystery to stimulate the imagination. For example, Aztec concubines taught the conquistadors to drink hot chocolate; when the Spaniards carried the exotic substance across the sea to Europe, they brought with it the rumor that the drink was an aphrodisiac. And during the reign of Charles I, when rice was still a luxury in Europe, noble Casanovas swore by the improbable aphrodisiac of rice boiled in milk and flavored with cinnamon.

As an ingredient becomes common, and thus cheaper, it loses its magic. Case in point: the potato. Your modern Brit is unlikely to find a plate of mashed potatoes sexually stimulating, but potatoes and sweet potatoes were hailed as aphrodisiacs when they were first introduced to the European palate; in Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Falstaff reels off a list of the era’s aphrodisiacs: kissing comfits, snow eryngoes (the candied roots of sea holly), and potatoes. Once rare ingredients such as cinnamon, cloves, marmalade, rice and pepper have likewise lost their sexy status.

The second largest umbrella group of chewable aphrodisiacs is based on the crude logic that if something looks like your nasty bits, it’ll undoubtedly put your prospective partner in the mood. Thus, scheming Lotharios and temptresses have long relied on the amorous offering of edible flowers and roots. In the British Isles, wake robin (Arum maculatum) was once valued as a thickener for puddings, a starch for Elizabethan neck ruffs, and for its phallic bloom, which earned the plant a reputation as an aphrodisiac and spawned over 20 suggestive folk names, including Adam and Eve, lords and ladies, devils and angels, stallions and mares, and dog’s dick. On a similar note, the word “orchid” is derived from the ancient Greek word for testicle. Pliny the Elder recommended bulbous orchid tubers as an aphrodisiac, and the Romans called orchids “satyrion” because legend had it that the phallic roots grew from the spilled semen of a satyr.

The tribes of Mexico preferred not the root but the flower. The Totonoc Indians believed that the orchid Vanilla planifolia sprang from the blood of a goddess, and the Aztecs named it tlilxochitl, or black flower. Vanilla planifolia is an inherently romantic plant: its small blossoms open in the morning and are exclusively pollinated by hummingbirds and melipone bees. The dirty-minded Conquistadors noted the pod’s resemblance to female genitalia, and gave the plant the name vanilla, which derived from the Latin for sheath. Europeans soon prized vanilla as an aphrodisiac; wild stories circulated that vanilla could transform the ordinary man into an astonishing lover. Elizabeth I is said to have been especially fond of vanilla pudding.

Oysters and clams have had a lewd reputation since history’s dawn. The Roman author Juvenal (a nasty misogynist) uses oysters to complete his portrait of a slut partying away the night: “When she knows not one member from another, eats giant oysters at midnight, pours foaming unguents into her unmixed Falernian, and drinks out of perfume-bowls, while the roof spins dizzily round, the table dances, and every light shows double!” In keeping with the Roman talent for using food to call attention to those ultimate aphrodisiacs — wealth and power — emperors and aristocrats turned their noses up at local oysters and sent away to the British Isles for a superior variety. The association between oysters and strumpets would have staying power: As Rebecca Stott points out in her book “Oyster,” “Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the woman oyster seller was used in poetry as a figure of erotic play, something like the oyster, to be consumed, part of the sensuous fruit of the street for the male urban voyeur.” In 19th century America, underground oyster saloons catered to base instincts — guests could slurp back dozens of oysters while cavorting with good-time girls and prostitutes; some of the seedier joints offered private rooms. A few decades later and a few hundred miles south, scantily clad ladies would shimmy in a popular striptease act called the oyster dance. In the 1940s, Kitty West (a cousin of Elvis Presley) danced on Bourbon street as “Evangeline the Oyster Girl”; to open her act, she stepped with aplomb from a giant half shell.

But food and sex also play an entwined role in more “respectable” culture. If we look at the big picture, we see food at the heart of every human ritual. As Lionel Tiger points out in “The Pursuit of Pleasure”: “The exchange of mates between families was the only process more significant for human evolution than food sharing. But it was also wholly associated with it; the wedding dinner established a circle of implication and meaning.” The Tzteltal Indians of Chiapas, Mexico, take it to the next level: in traditional families, a young married couple lives with the girl’s parents. For the first 15 days of marriage the bride and groom don’t speak to each other or sleep together. Their sole means of communication is through food. Every evening, the wife cooks a meal for her husband. If all is well on the 15th day, the couple will sleep together that night. These people clearly know their foreplay.

Our literary masters have made much of the sensual significance of food. Eve parting her lips for the fruit of knowledge may mark the most infamous sexy food metaphor, but it is by no means the only time food and sex intersect in the Bible. Half the lyric beauty of “Solomon’s Song” stems from food metaphors: “I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste”; “thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits.” Some phrases draw a direct correlation between eating and love: Food is a gift for the beloved, and the space where the lovers meet is made more beautiful by spices and fruit: “He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.” Certain passages hint that food is part of the path to the boudoir: “The mandrakes gives a smell, and at our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee, O my beloved.” Mandrake, a poisonous root from the nightshade family, was a popular aphrodisiac during ancient times. “Solomon’s Song” also references other more tasty aphrodisiacs of the day: cinnamon, saffron, figs and pomegranates.

Food scholars and scientists tend to ignore and/or ridicule the idea of a food that functions like Viagra. The Western world’s most popular edible aphrodisiacs, chocolate and oysters, do actually create a sexy hormone rush, but generally only when they are eaten in gross quantities. As food writer Amy Reiley notes, “You’re more likely to go into a diabetic coma than get that rush because you’d have to eat so much chocolate to get the effect.” Revered food historian Alan Davidson sums it up best in “The Oxford Companion to Food”: “In short, the concept of a truly aphrodisiac food is on par with that of finding a crock of gold at the end of a rainbow.”

So why the proffered carrots and the bowl of sparrow’s tongues? Perhaps because our entwined pair, food and sex, is really a threesome: food, sex and superstition. The human libido is both excitable and fragile, easy to titillate yet just as easy to destroy. So much of sexuality is subject to the vagaries of nature and the whim of another, it’s no wonder humans have sought to control the situation by relying on witch doctors, poisonous roots, dubious elixirs and our old fallback, food, a substance that we viscerally know to be the staff of life.

Or maybe we persist in the belief that specific foods can lead to sex because there’s something to it. According to anthropologist Robin Fox, food leads to sex because a male’s ability to provide food plays into the female’s need to reproduce with a mate who will help nurture their young: “a male’s willingness to provide food becomes an important index of his suitability as a mate. Above all, it suggests his willingness to ‘invest’ in the female’s offspring.” No doubt there’s something to it, but we prefer a less clinical explanation: The act of procuring or preparing a special food can be sexy in itself. We associate food with comfort, and cooking is an act of love. By creating or acquiring a special food or beverage for a potential lover, we are creating at least the illusion of love and security, which is generally conducive to sex. In his excellent book “Heat,” Bill Buford convincingly describes the concept of cooking with love: cooking as a singularly intimate act of love one performs for friends, family and lovers. He also writes of cooking to be loved: “The premise of a romantic meal is that by stimulating and satisfying one appetite another will be analogously stimulated as well.” If you’ve ever factored a date’s restaurant choice or cooking skills into your decision to put out, you’ve experienced the aphrodisiacal qualities of food.

: Felisa Rogers studied history and nonfiction writing at the Evergreen State College and went on to teach writing to kids for five years. She lives in Oregon’s coast range, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. More Felisa Rogers