Word: whiteness
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When Sgt. James Crowley arrested Professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates for disorderly conduct in July, it's unlikely that Crowley foresaw what was to come: a nationwide debate over race relations that made even Mr. President lose his cool, and an ensuing "beer summit" at the White House that was meant to diffuse the tension surrounding the controversial incident. Though an October night at the bar seemed to indicate that Gates and Crowley have since kissed and made up, the brouhaha evidently has yet to subside...
...seems like a stretch that the Census would have such grand influence, take a moment for a little history. The first Census, in 1790, explicitly asked about only one race: white. Blacks, for the most part, fell into the slave category. Race was about civil status. In the 19th century, concerns about keeping the white race pure led to the addition of the "mulatto" category in 1850 (and "quadroon" and "octoroon" in 1890), a process traced by Harvard political scientist Melissa Nobles in her book Shades of Citizenship. With rising immigration, Chinese and Japanese were added as categories...
...want to protect the status quo on Wall Street? After cobbling together 60 Senators for health reform through endless delays and deals - which thanks to Brown would now require cooperation from at least one Republican along with a number of skittish or recalcitrant or opportunistic Democrats - the White House wants to take financial reform to the court of public opinion and pressure Congress to go along. Obama made it clear that when it came to health care he would sign just about any bill; with finance, he's putting down markers that he's perfectly willing to accept no bill...
...focus also reveals a power shift inside the Administration, a smackdown of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, White House aide Lawrence Summers and other centrists who consider populism a dirty word, and have been accused (often unfairly) of being too close to Wall Street. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, the head of Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, has spent the past year getting frozen out of the White House while blasting Wall Street as a glorified casino; yesterday, he stood next to Obama as the President described the proposed ban on proprietary trading by commercial banks as "the Volcker...
...discourage excessive risk-taking and excessive size. He just happens to be allergic to populism, and Obama political adviser David Axelrod wants to strike a much more populist are-you-with-us-or-the-banks tone in 2010. Axelrod and Obama aide Valerie Jarrett met at the White House on Wednesday with Harvard law professor and TARP watchdog Elizabeth Warren, the mother of the stand-alone consumer-agency proposal and an outspoken advocate for reform; their message was that they'd welcome a fight with Wall Street...