Hometown Update

The 60 Minutes piece about my hometown of Wilmington aired two days ago. Video's here. It was certainly emotional for me to watch, though I suppose I'm an easy target. You can see my mother playing bells in the sequence at the church, and if you're fast enough you can catch my girlfriend and I in the back corner of the small audience.

I'd love to label myself a prophet for having predicted the nature of the piece, but there's nothing prophetic about identifying the pain that emanates from certain and impending loss.

That loss, having mostly taken place, will be consummated in three days, when DHL operations in Wilmington cease. Watching the piece viscerally brought home the fact that my reason for coming to Washington has thus far been an abject failure. I've mentioned it before, and I've never said it as bluntly, perhaps even to myself, but I came here because of my hometown. I came here to help in the best way that I knew how. And because I knew what was happening in Wilmington wasn't an isolated incident. 70,000 jobs were lost yesterday. Yesterday. Almost ten times the number that were lost in Wilmington.

I was never so naive as to think that I'd come here and get a job that directly related to helping my hometown. I knew it would take years of hard work, compromise, and smart decision-making before I'd be in a position to do anything substantive.

Politics is an end unto itself, and is only loosely related to governing when it is at all. Politics is the art of winning. I came to Washington because I thought I knew how to win. Nothing in my life has ever made sense to me the way politics does. Like 60 Minutes, I thought I knew what sold, and how to sell it. I thought I'd come here, bust my ass, work twice as hard and learn twice as much as everyone else, and make myself an asset to a Congressional or Executive office. I thought somebody here had read Horatio Alger. I thought my time struggling to decide what I wanted to do with my life, living outside the U.S., traveling the world and accumulating friendships and experiences would be an asset and not a detriment. I thought...

Instead, I'm awash in a sea of Ivy league grads that have planned on working on the Hill since they were in utero. I'm 29 and feel like a dinosaur in an environment that's dominated by people fresh out of college getting the jobs that I'd donate a kidney for. I'm someone with almost no meaningful connections in an environment where who you know is more important than what you know, and what you can do never even comes up. I certainly know some people, but connections aren't really useful unless someone is willing to pull a string for you, and like Wilmington, even if you have heard of me, you sure as hell don't owe me any favors.

I've applied to 41 jobs on the Hill since my internship ended in December, and haven't even received a polite 'no thanks' from a single one. I've gone through 19 different cover letters, searching for the magic words that might land me an interview or chance, wondering all the time if they get read or not, if I should keep applying, keep setting up informational interviews, keep writing emails that rarely get answered.

Like everyone else, dreams or not, I've got to pay the rent, and that necessity has to be measured against why I came here in the first place. The reality is that I'll have to quit focusing on Hill positions soon.

I know my story's not special. There are lots of people in the same boat or worse. You can't be from Wilmington and not know that.

I've got to go now. I'm heading down to a Hill office. I heard the new Senator from Oregon is still staffing up and thought I'd drop off my resume. I could email it, but it's more likely to get looked at if I drop it off in person. It's snowing in Washington for the first time this winter, and being from Ohio I've missed the snow, so the walk should be nice.

Update: Ok, so upon reflection this was a ridiculously self indulgent post. If I didn't have a policy of never pulling posts (whether or not I subsequently regret them) I'd certainly axe it. Blah, blah, looking for jobs sucks. I officially apologize for taking up even a small part of your day with this sad sack shit.

Sullivan Descends Into Mindless Drivel

Today Andrew Sullivan posted the 2nd part of his series entitled, “Why Libertarianism Taken to its Logical Extreme is Awful” (see my response to Part One here).

For someone that’s usually so willing to intellectually engage with ideas, his dogmatic adherence to the perfection of market capitalism is almost childlike. In his latest salvo he writes:

The point of capitalism is that actions have consequences. Once that market discipline is removed for a few of the worst, ill-managed, union-crippled companies in America, the stage is set for endless mediocrity, government-run industry (i.e. even more endless mediocrity), and a free-for-all at the government trough. A clear majority of Americans agree, in the new WaPo poll. If this intensifies the recession, so be it. Recessions are sometimes necessary for long-term economic health. And the bigger and sharper it is now the more time Obama has to recover from it. Let them die.

Again, I’ll highlight only the most ridiculous points, as going sentence by sentence would require too large a chunk of my workday. As an aside, if you don’t get a chuckle out of that 2nd sentence then you just don’t have a soul. Limbaugh should sue for copyright infringement.

Let’s start with our “clear majority of Americans” argument. A clear majority of Americans think all kinds of crazy things. I realize they’re picking up the tab, and that is important, but it’s the inconsistency of his argument that feels disingenuous. Neither in his last post on the subject nor this one, has he given any indication whatsoever that he’s inclined to put stock in public opinion. Remember, the public was far more overwhelmingly against a bailout of financial institutions, but Sullivan never mustered anywhere close to this level of opposition.

“If this intensifies the recession, so be it.” Yeah, so be it. Right on. Omelets and eggs, right? The callousness of this statement is really staggering. If you’re not going to attempt to explain why letting the auto industry fail is going to result in a net lowering of economic and personal misery (and again, I think a case could be made), then saying that just makes you sound like an insensitive asshole.

Next comes the whopper, “Recessions are sometimes necessary for long-term economic health”. Why? Because you say so? Are you even going to bother citing anyone? That may well be true, but it sure sounds counterintuitive (replace the word recessions with 'influenza' and eliminate the word 'economic'…still make sense?).

Now we get to: “And the bigger and sharper it is now the more time Obama has to recover from it.” Huh? I have no idea what this even means. Anybody want to hazard a guess? Is he saying that if it’s a really deep recession than it will take longer to recover from it? Well, right…but…

Then, finally, it’s “let them die”. Classy. Does he have some pent up anger against the auto-industry? It’s hard for me not to go back to the Chuck Todd corollary here. I won’t throw out the insinuation without asking the question: Andrew: Do you personally know a single blue-collar worker whose job would be threatened by the failure of the Big Three? Any families? Correspondingly, how many people do you know that work for financial institutions?

I wouldn’t have asked if he’d been 1/10th this hard on the rescuing of financial institutions, at the cost of 40X as much money, but the zeal with which he’s making this argument makes me wonder.

Update: One of you pointed out that after saying I wasn't going to analyze Sullivan's post sentence by sentence, I proceeded to do just that. They have a point. I guess I couldn't help myself.

The Dumbest Post I've Ever Read from Andrew Sullivan

I've read him for years. I don't agree with him on much, but he's intermittently interesting, and it's good to get a variety of ideological perspectives.

But then I come across this post today. He writes:

Every time the government protects someone or some company from the consequences of their own economic profligacy, the chances of future profligacy increase. It's vital that the government let the Big Three automakers go down, and vital that only minimal help be given for those so greedy or so stupid that they took on loans they had no way to pay off.

We're in the middle of the greatest economic downturn in 75 years and Sullivan's version of keeping his eye on the ball is to point out a moral hazard? This is dogmatic allegiance to principle at its most reckless and stupid. It's hard to even know where to start.

The first sentence is nonsense. You could use this rationale to attack the merits of TANF funds, unemployment, or bankruptcy for that matter. Why not bring back debtors prison? That'll teach those damned bankrupt individuals and companies "the consequences of their own economic profligacy".

Secondly, it's "vital" that we let the Big Three fail? Why? Presumably (and we must presume because Sullivan provides zero rationale or analysis) so that we can teach companies what happens when they're run poorly. A fine lesson in the abstract to be sure. But this is no abstract situation. There are millions of jobs at stake. Millions of families and foreclosed homes.

His argument boils down to this: We need to increase unemployment and foreclosure rates by 50%, further depress housing prices, and drastically decrease domestic spending (we'll ignore the increased crime and host of other peripheral externalities) so that future companies and individuals can learn from all this misery and be less inclined to do it in the future. What noble adherence to principle.

Every time new medical advances are made to treat STI's (such as anti-retrovirals or HPV vaccine) I hear religious fundamentalists make a similar argument. If we treat the consequences of risky sex, oh how shall I put it....the chances of future profligacy increase. High risk sex is something to be discouraged right (just like risky borrowing)? So, if no effective treatments for HIV exist then people will be less likely to engage in behavior that makes contracting it possible. So, why doesn't Sullivan's argument hold here? Cause it's all about principle, right?.

Well, no actually. That would be silly, shortsighted, and cruel. If Sullivan wants to object to the auto-bailout, by all means make a case. Hell, I'm not totally sure I'm sold on the idea. But don't offer up some bullshit quote from an Economics 101 textbook and make it a substitute for an educated opinion, particularly when it concerns a complex issue that viscerally effects tens of millions of people.

A Little Perspective

I just wanted to give a shout out to the stupidest op-ed I've ever seen by Robert Kagan, at least since the last op-ed I read by Robert Kagan. It's hard for me to explain how amazingly unhelpful I find this kind of analysis. The opening paragraph really says it all:

The details of who did what to precipitate Russia's war against Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama

Really? The Nazi's huh?

It is exactly this kind of grandiose, anti-realist, analysis that has made our foreign policy decisions so unproductive during the Bush years. Let's everyone say this together now: Seeing the world through this neo-con lens does not work.

If you taped Putin's eyes open and forced him to read this, do you figure he'd be thinking, "damn it all, Robert Kagan is on to me" before smiling menacingly, or do you think he'd just laugh his ass off?