Hillary's Checkers Speech

Hillary Clinton gave the gracious, positive, upbuilding endorsement speech today that was needed to help heal the Democratic Party.

This speech, like Nixon's "Checkers" speech, will also save her place as a valued leader in the future of the party and the government.

Whatever Obama and Clinton talked about at Senator Feinstein's house, it worked.

Kumbaya.

Let's build.

McCain, Clinton, Obama: Three Forms of Authority

Laurie Fendrich, a Hofstra art professor, has blogged for the Chronicle of Higher Education about the three main presidential candidates of the moment representing Max Weber's three forms of legitimate authority. As a sociologist, I am obliged to work Max Weber into all conversations, and am glad for this opening.

Weber argued that for most of human history, the main form of legitimate authority in society has been tradition -- that is, the fact that "our ancestors did it" and "we have always done it this way" was the best reason to act one way rather than another. He noted, though, that the main achievement of the political economy of modern societies was to develop a quite different theory of legitimate authority, the rational/legal. Society was supposed to act upon laws that applied to all, which were created by a rational process of elections and executed by a rationally administered bureaucracy. The other kind of authority is the wild card of the charismatic leader. Weber thought a charismatic leader, or prophet, was the main way traditional societies changed; Weber also thought that the periodic appearance of a charismatic leader could save modern rational societies from stultifying into an iron cage of bureaucracy.

Fendrich, and her colleague sociologist Mark Landis, saw the three candidates as representing the three types of authority:
McCain represent tradition;
Clinton represents rational bureaucracy;
Obama represents charisma.

The impending McCain/Obama race will represent a straight competition between tradition and charisma.

I think there is something to this idea. Obama is clearly charismatic, and McCain is clearly the most past-oriented of the three. And Clinton's strength has, more or less, been in her mastery of the machinery of government execution.

Still, Weber himself argued that the United States was born a rational/legal country, without an established traditional authority. All serious American politicians are vying to lead a rational, bureaucratic legal machinery. This is the foundation of the great stability of American government.

That said, I can see the value in seeing the upcoming election as a contest between two rational, legal, bureaucracy-respecting Senators. One wants to lead by continuing the (recent) traditions of his party; the other by transcending the recent divisions of the parties by using his personal charisma to inspire others to act in untraditional ways.

French Annul Fake Virgin's Marriage, Then Regret It.

A French judge annulled a marriage because the bride lied about being a virgin. The annulment happened two months ago. When the story recently came out in a legal journal, the French Justice Minister shrugged it off. No big deal. This is to be expected if marriage is just a private contract. One party lies in a contract, the court can abrogate the agreement.

And then the details came out. The bride and groom are Muslims. The wedding reception was still going on in the immigrant neighborhood when the groom came back downstairs to announce that the bride had not bloodied the sheets.

The hue and cry has been enormous. The Justice Minister, herself the daughter of North African immigrants, was forced to reverse her initial reaction and appeal the annulment.

The French, like many Western Europeans, want marriage to be a private choice if the couple uses secular and middle class standards of who can be involved, of what sexes, for how long, perhaps how many to include. On the other hand, they want marriage to be publicly regulated if the couple uses religious or working class standards of what makes a proper marriage.

Marriage became a public institution when the church and the state regulated and celebrated the couple's vow to one another, their children, their community, and, for the vast majority of people on earth, to God. Marriage became a public institution to protect the vulnerable -- usually the woman, often the poor, always the children. It is a great civilizational step forward that marriage is a public institution. Society rediscovers this when the state is asked to back a private marriage contract that undermines that protection.

President Obama Will Make Black Republicans Possible

In 1964, E. Digby Baltzell saw that

Kennedy’s victory in 1960 will, in the long run, serve to bring many affluent and capable Catholic leaders in this country into the conservative ranks of the Republican establishment. (The Protestant Establishment, p. 315)

Baltzell saw that once the caste exclusions of Catholics were broken, they would be free to sort into their natural class affiliations. Richer people, other things equal, tend to become Republicans. Events have proven Baltzell right, and today Catholics tend to sort along class lines when they vote. There is no "Catholic vote."

Today there is a "black vote." African Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. In fact, African Americans are more reliable Democratic voters than registered Democrats are. The vast majority of black elected officials are Democrats. Rich African Americans - including billionaire Oprah Winfrey - are strong Democrats.

I believe that the 2008 presidential election will resemble the 1960 election in many ways. Many people have drawn the parallel between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy, not least the members of the Kennedy family. I think the election will be a squeaker either way, and I am not predicting an Obama victory.

I think the parallel can be drawn in the way Baltzell suggests:
An Obama victory in 2008 would, in the long run, serve to bring many affluent and capable black leaders in this country into the conservative ranks of the Republican establishment.

Baltzell's Vision of the Ethnically Mixed Establishment

E. Digby Baltzell, in The Protestant Establishment (1964), gives this rare personal clue to the origin of his vision of an aristocratic establishment:

In fact, I visualized the possibility of an ethnically mixed establishment, which underlies the theory of American leadership developed in this book, during my own experiences in the ward rooms and officers clubs of the South Pacific. At any rate, the American ideal of equality of opportunity in a hierarchically organized social structure had never been so nearly realized as in the selection of reserve officers who led our armed forces during the Second World War. (301)

He goes on to say that he thinks John F. Kennedy forged an ethnically mixed "best and the brightest" administration out of his experiences in the war, as well as his life in Boston. He was an outsider as an Irish Catholic, but he was also an aristocratic insider as a rich man's son, a famous mayor's grandson, a Choate and Harvard man. The New Frontier does not seem so daringly mixed to us today -- they look like privileged white men. But at the time the pulling together on terms of equality by Northern WASPs, Southern Protestants, Catholics, and Jews from all corners of Europe was a great achievement.

It falls to today's rising generation to make the honey-colored establishment drawn from all races and corners of the earth a reality.

What Presbyterian Bishops Do

Presbyterians do not, of course, have bishops. We are very decidedly non-episcopal. The presbytery is an ingenious republican arrangement to accomplish most of the functions of a bishop, without the authoritarian dangers.

However, there are a few things that bishops do, when they are functioning well, that presbyteries cannot accomplish. A good bishop knows the people in the diocese and has a personal relationship with at least the leaders of the congregations. The presbytery is not well-designed for the person-to-person actions of bishops.

A presbytery, as a republican organization, always needs to be finding the right person for the next job. This is especially important in getting the right mix of pastors and elders to staff the crucial committees and oversee the vital ministries of the presbytery. What a presbytery needs is someone in a position to have a wide range of contacts over the several congregations of the body.

The Presbyterian bishop needs to be chief talent-spotter.

Since the presbytery needs someone to accomplish this function, we keep growing some kind of talent spotting system. This is often jury-rigged and haphazard, depending on the personal contacts of the chair of the nominating committee as much as anything else.

I believe presbyteries should be smaller and more organically connected than they now are. This would go a long way to bringing the people doing the calling in touch with the people who should be called.

At the same time, I think a modest Executive Presbyter role is a useful one to the presbytery. Small presbyteries may not be able to afford full time executives. In that case, I think right-sized presbyteries trump the need for a dedicated executive. Even a small presbytery, though, should be able to afford part of someone's time -- perhaps the pastor of a smaller church, or a mostly retired person, or someone with a well-employed spouse -- to be the connector.

Perhaps what we need is not a Presbytery Executive, but a Presbytery Maven. Or Presbytery Magpie.

Stomp, Girl! Stomp!

Another delightful anecdote from my sister about my niece, now six:

She was given a box of 4,500 wildflower seeds by a friend, which we planted this weekend. After putting them on the ground, the instructions said to walk on the seeds to push them into the earth, over an area of about 100 square feet.

An hour later, she's still tip-toeing through the tulips (so to speak) because a) she has tiny feet and b) she believes she, I don't know, needs to sneak up on the seeds by walking very slowly and silently.

Stomp, Girl! Stomp!

The Ministry Can Adapt to Returning Moms Better Than Other Professions Can

All working mothers juggle work and family. For professionals the problem is usually worse. Professionals normally work longer hours than wage-workers or most white-collar workers. Professions that directly provide service to clients can be particularly demanding, both in expecting long hours and in being available to clients at odd hours. Many moms trained for professions are not practicing at all at any given moment. Some drop out and never come back. One study found that only 7% of mothers aged 25-49 with children under the age of 18 work more than 49 hours per week outside of the home. 50+ hours per week is normal for professionals.

Moms in ministry face the same kinds of challenges that other professional-career mothers do. In some respects, ministry is worse, because most women pastors work alone or with very few colleagues, so it is difficult to share the load when family duties make unexpected demands. On the other hand, pastors have more control of their hours than most professionals do, so in principle their jobs could be more flexible about motherhood.

More than any other profession, the ministry has gotten used to the idea of second-career pastors. Seminaries and hiring committees are used to seeing middle-aged adults, often married and with kids, starting their careers, even just starting their professional schooling. This poses some problems for churches, and especially for seminaries. Still, they have learned to cope, and to see some advantages of fully mature grown-ups entering the profession.

I see a further opportunity in the fact that the ministry is used to gray-headed beginners: the pastorate should be an easier career for mothers with older children to return to after a child-rearing break.

If we are ever to really adapt the professions to motherhood, we have to institutionalize easier off-ramps and on-ramps. The ministry has already developed the late on-ramps for late-bloomers. Now we can explicitly incorporate these same late-start career structures to minister moms, so that they, and their families, can have a saner life.

Are Aesthetes the Same as Other Members of the Knowledge Class?

Is taste a kind of knowledge like other kinds of knowledge? More exactly, are people who make their living from their taste members of the knowledge class, as people who make their living from more cognitive kinds of knowledge are members of the knowledge class?

George W. Bush, Flower of the Upper Class - Sort of

I have been working through E. Digby Baltzell's substantial body of work on the sociology of America's upper class. His great books were published 30 to 50 years ago, using material from earlier eras. Some have said that the old WASP upper class was done in by the Sixties. In many ways this is true -- the monied elite was already very ethnically diverse when Baltzell was writing, and since then the happy process of intermarriage and assimilation of new money into old money has moved the upper class far from the WASP bastion it was in, say, 1940. And a good thing, too.

As I read about the old WASP upper class, I have been thinking about who their contemporary remainders are. Which brings us naturally to George W. Bush.

George Bush the younger has the WASPiest pedigree of any prominent political figure today. Andover and Yale. Skull and Bones. His dad was Andover and Yale, and Skull and Bones. His grandfather was St. George's and Yale, and Skull and Bones. Did I mention that that sequence is also President, President, Senator? But there is plenty more. His grandfather was a founding partner of Brown Brothers Harriman. The Walker Cup golf trophy is named for his great-grandfather, from whom George gets his "W." His mom, daughter of the McCalls and Redbook publisher, of President Franklin Pierce's family, product of a northern country day school and a southern boarding school, dropped out of Smith to marry her naval aviator. And his brothers. And his kids. On and on.

And yet ...

Baltzell makes the point that the old WASP upper class was primarily a business aristocracy. The Bushes do keep coming back to business -- banking, then oil. George W. has a Harvard MBA, though that degree was regarded as a comedown by the old business elite. His administration has certainly been business friendly, and largely hands-off about everything else (we may debate the business significance of the Iraq war).

Still, in important ways George W. Bush resisted the Old Money prep school curriculum. George H. W. Bush so exemplified the WASP ideal - sports at Andover, volunteer naval pilot in the war, Bonesman at Yale, business entrepreneur, Congress, CIA, Republican Party, Episcopal Church, loyal Vice-President, President - that a former staffer, Richard Brookhiser, wrote The Way of the WASP: How it Made America, and How it Can Save It, So to Speak about the 41st president.

George W. Bush, on the other hand, did the whole Old Money curriculum, but grudgingly. Where the father was a baseball star at Andover, the son was "stickball commissioner." Where his father volunteered for military service and was shot down, the son used his pull to avoid overseas service, and skipped half of his U.S. obligations. The father was Yale all the way. The son was a reluctant student in college -- the football players used him as the standard of whether a course was easy -- and had to be talked into Skull and Bones. He was an indifferent businessman, a reluctant politician, a "Bushican" more than a Republican, a Methodist.

On the other hand, George W. Bush is a real Texan in a way that his father never was. He clearly likes working on the ranch more than affairs of state. His greatest success outside of politics was as cheerleader and frontman for the Texas Rangers baseball team. I think history will judge him a greater success as Governor of Texas than as President of the United States.

I think I understand President Bush's famous smirk. It means "you can make me go through the motions of this role, but you can't change me inside." I expect he had that look the first day he had to leave Texas for boarding school, and he will have it until he can leave the White House and go back, at long last, to Texas.

Is the Upper Class the One Class-for-Itself?

Marx spent his life trying to get the working class to see itself as a real social group with a common destiny. In his terms, they were a class-in-itself, an objective social unit. They were hampered from acting together to advance their common interest, though, because they were divided by a dozen other identities. The workers of the world were not united because they didn't have a class consciousness. The working class was a class-in-itself, but not a class-for-itself.

Peter Laslett was a great British demographer who wrote The World We Have Lost, the definitive quantitative study of late medieval society. There he argued that in late medieval and early modern society, the aristocracy -- that infinitesimal slice of the top of the social structure -- was the only group in society with a class consciousness. Everyone else lived in such a tiny social world that their consciousness only extended to the limits of people they knew personally. He went so far as to call the world we have lost a "one-class" society, since no one else but the aristocrats were a class-for-themselves.

I mention all this because E. Digby Baltzell, whose work I wrote about yesterday, makes an interestingly parallel argument. In Philadelphia Gentleman, he notes that the community studies that were so prominent in mid-20th century sociology -- especially Middletown, the Yankee City studies, and the Elmtown studies -- erred in seeing each class as a class-for-itself. Such studies found that people knew which side of the tracks you were from, and never let you really cross them. Ambitious young people from the lower classes often left town to advance.

The error, Baltzell says, is that these studies took small cities as representative of national class cultures as a whole. Muncie, IN (Middletown), Newburyport, MA (Yankee City), and New Haven, CT (Elmtown) did have a ruling class whose members knew one another and were tied to one another in a dozen ways. The same was true, more of less, of the several classes below the top in these small cities. In a big city like Philadelphia, though, the upper class likewise knew one another and were connected in a dozen ways. But the several fractions of the middle class, and the many fractions of the working class, and the endless fragments of the poor were not unified, not tied together by many interwoven social ties. This was why ambitious rising men and women of the small cities moved to the big city - no one knew which side of the tracks they came from, or really cared.

In Philadelphia, only the upper class could be a class-for-itself.

Knowledge Class Social Register

This month I am working my way through the writings of one of my favorite sociologists, E. Digby Baltzell. In all of his work, Baltzell argued that a nation is best led when its elite of individuals is molded into a socially responsible "establishment" by a well-functioning upper class of families.

In his first book, Philadelphia Gentleman: The Making of a National Upper Class, Baltzell explores the overlap between the elite and the upper class. To find the elite of the day he turned to Who's Who. To find the upper class, he turned to The Social Register. A crucial question for him is how much overlap there is between the two - that is, what proportion of the elite who run things now come from the intermarried descendants of elites who ran things before. The answer in 1940, the critical year of his book is about 25%.

My concern is with the knowledge class, the class of people who make their living from control of the knowledge necessary to run the social system. Many knowledge class people are in the elite, and thus in Who's Who. This got me to wondering, though: could there be a Social Register for the knowledge class?

There are two obstacles to making a knowledge class social register. One is that there just isn't much of a market for it. The descendants of various monied families make social institutions that bring them together, help them intermarry, and form a social class with a real organic unity. Thus the value of a social register, sometimes called "the stud book" for the upper class. In the knowledge class, though, there is not the same call to keep "old books" families together in the way that there is for "old money" families.

The second is that the knowledge class does not expect that it can produce a distinctive class and way of life by "breeding" (in the sense of nurture), the way the settled upper class does. Most knowledge class individuals rise through a meritocracy that selects an elite. They do not expect that their families will remain in the knowledge elite over generations.

I think this last point is an empirical question well worth pursuing. And if, in fact, significant portions of the knowledge class do keep turning up in the elite generation after generation, then perhaps there could be a market for a Knowledge Class Social Register.

"Well" in the Black Church

I was reading Jonathan Rieder's very interesting account of Martin Luther King's different kinds of rhetoric, The Word of the Lord is Upon Me. One nice feature of the book is that when he quotes portions of King's recorded sermons, Rieder includes the responses and interjections from the congregation. Rieder comments on several of these, including one I had not paid attention to before: "Well." Rieder notes that this word can carry many meanings, depending on its inflection, from "well said" to "it it is well with my soul" to "well, what do you mean?"

This morning I was listening to a recording of Tony Campolo's sermon for Bill Clinton's second inauguration. Much of his sermon turned on the rich expressive style of his black church which Campolo, who is white, was explaining to a predominantly white audience. He, too, talked about the importance of "Well" as a key congregational response to his preaching. He added a nuance that Rieder had not explored: that it is the women who say "well."

I don't know if Campolo was just making a rhetorical flourish, of if he was reporting a general sociological fact. Informed comment would be most welcome.

Marry Our Daughter - SALE!

A friend showed me a wonderful, terrible prank site, MarryOurDaughter.com. On it teenage girls are offered for sale by their parents for brideprices ranging from a few thousand dollars to just under $100,000. The higher priced ones seem to be blondes who want to be good Christian wives and mothers. The cheap ones "wrestle with unchristian urges."

The thing is probably meant as a dig at Christians as well as "inconsistent marriage laws" (this according to Snopes.com).

Nonetheless, as an artifact of relative values, or what are thought to be relative values, it is pretty intriguing.

Obama's Substantive Record

Barak Obama achieves the Gen X way, not the Boomer way. He works directly with the people affected on problems that can be solved. He is more interested in results than showy fights. His is the generation of Just Do It and Git 'R Done -- not "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."

My fellow blogger hilzoy of Obsidian Wings summarized Obama's legislative approach this way:

His bills tend to have the following features: they are good and thoughtful bills that try to solve real problems; they are in general not terribly flashy; and they tend to focus on achieving solutions acceptable to all concerned, not by compromising on principle, but by genuinely trying to craft a solution that everyone can get behind.

Moreover, hilzoy continues, "His legislation is often proposed with Republican co-sponsorship." This is a good thing. This is a way to get legislation actually passed. His work with Sen. Dick Lugar, one of the real statesmen of the Republican Party, on securing loose nuclear weapons is an excellent example of Obama's approach. His work on getting an ethics bill that could actually pass is another. And preparing for avian flu. And regulating genetic testing. And making a federal database of political contributions. Etc, etc.

A legislator's record includes what they did when not in office. When Obama finished his fancy education at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law, he did not just go corporate and cash in. He went to the slums to work with poor people to organize their communities, so that they could make their own lives better. That is about as Gen X (and centrist) a form of giving back as you could name. (And let me be quick to say that Sen. Clinton's service to poor women, and Sen. McCain's military service, when they were done school are equally honorable - a stark contrast with the current president's twenties. And thirties.)

Senator Obama's record as a legislator is a solid roster of working with the other side to achieve worthwhile things. You might oppose what Obama wants to do as president, but it would be unfair and ill-informed to say that he hasn't really done anything.

Obama vs. McCain as Centrists

A friend asked me to respond to David Brooks' recent column, "Talking Versus Doing," in which he charges that Obama is not really a centrist or a serious change agent because he voted for the pork-laden farm bill -- a bill McCain opposed.

I take this criticism seriously. I usually agree with this friend, and with Brooks. Brooks is a decent centrist -- he is only a "conservative" compared to the rest of the New York Times roster.

Brooks actually cited two cases of the corruption of the Washington system. The farm bill was one, and the energy bill was the other. I agree that both are bad bills, more of a sweetheart deal for the biggest agribusiness and oil companies. That they both passed Congress overwhelmingly is a sign of a deep corruption in our politics.

It is also a sign of the necessity of compromise in making legislation. McCain made his reputation as a maverick -- which he is quickly shedding. Obama made his reputation as a coalition builder, which entails voting for lots of bad legislation in order to get something done. These are two different ways of being a centrist.

What has impressed me from the outset about this primary season is that the electorate of each party has chosen, out of a large initial field, the candidate with the greatest appeal to independents. McCain won best in open primaries in which independents and Democrats could vote. The Republican way of doing primaries meant that he wrapped up the nomination early. If Republicans had had proportional primaries, McCain would still be fighting it out with Romney and Huckabee. Obama has won best in caucuses, where people have to take a public stand and offer some kind of reason for their choice. The reason they are most likely to give is that Obama is a uniter, capable of getting things done.

Any leader has to decide that some things cannot be compromised. McCain has his list - which used to include campaign reform, and still includes torture. Obama has his list, which includes the war in Iraq and his Obama-Lugar bill to control loose nuclear weapons. Leaders also have to decide which bad bills to support anyway, because the deal that made them included some worthwhile elements. Each voter will have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the leader's no-compromise list matches the voter's list closely enough.

I believe that Obama and McCain are about equally committed to getting things done. I also see each as being within half a standard deviation of the center. I liked McCain the best out of the Republican field as a potential president, and I am enthusiastic about Obama out of the Democratic field. Neither would be a terrible president.

Whether a Democratic or a Republican administration would be better for the country is another question.

We Lost, Yet Won

Obama got crushed in the Democratic primary in Kentucky yesterday. He lost to Hillary Clinton worse than I thought he would.

Worse still was the reason he lost. Obama held his core -- nearly all the academics I know voted for him, and the college Democrats were overwhelmingly for him. Clinton kept her core of old women and some workers. The big margin seemed to come from people who admitted to pollsters, in face-to-face conversations, that race was a factor in their voting. Chris Matthews reported that a fifth of those voting yesterday -- taking both primaries together -- said this. And he reasonably noted that if a fifth of voters admitted this in public, another X percent vote racially in the privacy of the voting booth.

Still, John Kennedy faced sizable percentages in 1960 who openly said religion was a factor in their voting - yet he still won.

In the larger race for the nomination, though, Obama all but won. Clinton will carry on through the last primary. I believe that the party elders have already arranged for the superdelegates to settle the issue immediately after that. Obama was very gracious in his Iowa speech last night to both Sen. Clinton and Sen. McCain. This bodes well for the fall.

I think the past election that will most resemble this one is 1960. That was a squeaker, which could have gone either way. Senator McCain is no Nixon, but his position as a last-chancer with enemies in his own party is somewhat similar. The parallels between Obama and Kennedy are so striking that I hear about them all the time from people old enough to remember the 1960 election - my birth year.

Last night after Obama spoke they played Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising," as they have as the first song in several rallies recently. A little later, while the talking heads will still chewing over the night's events with the Obama rally in the background, we could hear Brooks and Dunn's "Only in America." Springsteen broke his political silence last time to campaign actively for John Kerry. Brooks and Dunn have been the most prominent musicians performing at recent Republican conventions. I expect the musicians will not change parties this time. But their music can be a symbol of unity. Only in America.

Primary Day in Kentucky

This may be the only time the Kentucky primary matters at the presidential level.

Mrs. G. and I were at the polls early this morning. We voted on a paper ballot for the first time. This should provide us with a little more security than all-electronic voting gives.

The junior G.s, two of whom are now voters, will vote after their beauty sleep.

Gobama!

Why I am Not Meeting President Clinton Today

Bill Clinton is coming to Danville today. The Kentucky primary is tomorrow. Hillary Clinton will win the primary, but Obama will win the nomination in a few weeks.

Today I am mad at Bill Clinton. I have been mad since the South Carolina primary when he started playing the race card, which he has done several times since. The Democratic Party, after great struggle and at great cost, shed our racist past. We should never play to race card again.

Bill Clinton used to be the best campaigner in the party. I believe that if he were campaigning on his own behalf, he would be more sensitive and deft to what should and should not be done. Because he is defending his wife, though, he feels authorized, even duty-bound, to be angry -- or at least snarky -- on her behalf. Any good spouse would be tempted to do the same.

I look forward to the end of the primary season, when the party will unite behind our nominee. I am pretty sure that will be Obama. At that point we will all shake hands, sing Kumbaya, and get on with the real campaign.

But not today.

Jonah's Bad Weekend

The best image of Commencement Sunday at Centre College came from the baccalaureate sermon by chaplain Rick Axtell.

Jonah was swallowed by a giant fish, spent days in its intestines, was vomited up on a beach, walked in the baking desert to a city he detested for a mission that, as he saw it, failed. And then we went and pouted. Jonah had the worst weekend in recorded literature.