The Power and the Money

On Cuban immigration, escalators, and helicopter parents

OK, time for me to vent.

President Obama did wrong by suspending the wet-foot Cuba policy. The United States and the Cuban Republic have a special relationship. Seriously, we do. Our histories have been intertwined more than any random pair of neighboring countries since at least 1898, and maybe earlier. Our intervention created Cuba; our internal politics kept it from becoming part of the United States; our intervention propped up governments; and our 1959 divorce was contentious and angry and contentious on both sides in ways that make no sense from purely economic or strategic standpoints. 

It makes perfect sense for the U.S. to treat Cuban migration differently than migration from, say, the Dominican Republic or Mexico or anywhere else. Cuba is, to coin a phrase, “domestic in a foreign sense.”

Sure, yeah, I understand, it was a quid-pro-quo to get Castro on board with normalizing relations. Still was wrong.

FWIW, I am not of Cuban descent and have no family in Cuba.

The London Underground did wrong by forcing people to stand on escalators. It may speed things up for the standees, but their own study showed that it raised times for walkers by 28%. If you’re too goddamned lazy to walk up a bloody escalator, then the extra time is what you should pay.

How about making everybody walk, huh? 

Middle-class parents in the DMV are weird by refusing to let their kids walk around by themselves. Seriously, it is weird. Somehow they have convinced themselves that all of America (let alone the Western world) is like them. But no. Frex this photo of kids scooting with no adults in sight on the Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn:

Or these kids playing handball in Long Island City:

Or this pic from a playground in the Fairmount section of Philly, ditto, at least for the two older kids in the pic, who (gasp) walked five blocks unsupervised to Roberto Clemente park to play with our bambini:

Seriously, you people. Do what you want with your kids, but don’t kid yourself. It’s weird, out-of-ordinary, strange to hover over a seven-year-old like they were four, let alone somebody nine. Let the kids walk, scoot and bike without you! And do not get me started on the proper age to ride the subway alone ...

How Cheltenham voted

We all know how Pennsylvania voted. But my wife and I, with our children, did not work to get out the vote across the entire state. We worked to get out the vote in one little suburban township bordering the city of Philadelphia. Did our efforts contribute to the tragic result of six days ago? Did Cheltenham, like Philadelphia, fail to meet its 2012 vote?

Thankfully, it appears not. Our little borough matched its 2012 turnout and exceeded its 2012 vote. (Data sources here and here.) 

Our small efforts did not fail, even if they were not matched elsewhere. Individual efforts matter. Both to your own willingness to go on and to the ability of the country to overcome. Or the world. 

GOTV in Cheltenham

Back in 2004, I helped run a campaign office in southern Broward County. In 2008, I canvassed. (Well, in the primaries, at least.) In 2012, I limited myself to donating money. I suspect that the trend was not a coincidence/

This time, though, we felt like we had to do something more direct. So we contacted the campaign and volunteered to go where they needed us. To my surprise, that turned out to be Pennsylvania. Virginia, it seems, has leapfrogged Pennsylvania to become practically a solid blue state. At this rate, it would not surprise me to see the Old Dominion become as ignored as the Bay State by 2020. 

We told them that we were willing to go anywhere in southeastern PA within an hour of either West Chester or downtown Philly. Again to my surprise, that turned out to be Cheltenham, a small suburb right on the Philadelphia city line to the north. Like, straight to the north: drive up Broad Street from downtown and bam, you’ll cross into it at the aptly-named Cheltenham Avenue.

One thing I gotta mention: Cheltenham and Philly have one of the starkest city-suburb boundaries that I have seen in a long time, if ever. Wander around the north Bronx: unless you are watching the street signs change color, you’ll never really know when you’ve left the city. Ditto Queens and Nassau; the places where the difference becomes starker are divided by a big giant freeway. Where I live, friends have actually walked the wrong way out into Bethesda because it looks more urban than when you head towards downtown.  Brookline to Boston does not jump out at you. Etcetera. 

But Philly? Jesus. One minute, potholes and run-down taxpayers; the next, smooth roads and rolling hills. Cheltenham, in fact, is not that rich and not all of it is that nice, but damn that border is stark.

The Clinton campaign office is in a perfectly pleasant strip mall of the sort that could be in California. In fact, it really had a spanking-new Sunbelt feel to it, were it not for the fact that the house across the street from the Walgreen’s was built in 1682. 

GOTV efforts do not involve randomly knocking on doors. Rather, they give you lists of people already identified as supporters and tell you to go out and make sure that they have a plan to get to the polls. Back in 2004, those supporters were identified very crudely. (The link goes to a copy of the voter contact manual we actually used back then.)

Since then, I’m told, identifying these supporters has gotten more sophisticated ... but not that much from what we could see. Every day we went out, we got a printout of houses marked on a neighborhood map. The voters identified were basically registered Democrats who hadn’t turned out in the last election. If there was more sophisticated targeting going on, it sure wasn’t obvious. Big data still looks pretty small.

In fact, let me tell you how small the data is: some of the intel we are out there gathering is whether a subdivision is gated or not. That’s right; the offices don’t know for sure whether they can send their people into a neighborhood. Since they don’t want to waste time on election day, they want early canvassers to find that stuff out ... but that is exactly what we were doing in Hollywood, Florida, twelve years ago. You would think that in someplace as long-contested in Pennsylvania these things would be known, but apparently not. 

The first time we went canvassing they sent us right into a gated community, followed by a closed apartment building. Of course, we had no idea that we weren’t supposed to go into the gated areas. (In 2004, we had no compunctions. If you could get people in, you sent people in.) So we parked our car outside one of the automated exits and strolled right in. The area was integrated and heavily Jewish. Lots of mezuzahs on the doors of scattered townhouses. It lacked sidewalks, which I always find a WTF thing: why would anyone want to live somewhere without sidewalks? And the townhouses were packed together with big open spaces. It sort of felt like a big communal park, a housing project for people fleeing Philadelphia in the 1980s. 

But to return to the point, it might have been gated, but nobody batted an eye at our presence, not passers-by, not people walking their dogs, not the people whose doors we knocked on. One guy did open the door (we had identified his wife) and when we said we were with Hillary and looking for his spouse he gruffly told us, “You can go away now.” But everyone else was shockingly nice.

I could go on with a million discussions, but that would get boring. Instead, let me go to the most pro-GOP neighborhood we found during our expeditions: Oak Lane Road. Now, there were no Trump signs there. In fact, although you can see huge numbers of Trump-Pence signs scattered across highway medians and planed in intersections, people in southeastern Pennsylvania seem to be very reluctant to put them on their lawns. But we did see some Pat Toomey signs around, a sign that the GOP is not nonexistent on the ground. 

Oak Lane Road is what a racist realtor would call a neighborhood in transition. It is integrated, but you get a depressing feeling that its integration is just the interval between the arrival of the first non-white person and the departure of the last güero. The houses are good-sized ones on oversized lots. The lawns are all well kept, better than my own in Northwest D.C. But many of the houses show small signs of decay, even if the shrubs are lovingly tended, and a few looked to be on the edge of abandonment. The architecture doesn’t change much, but it becomes whiter as you move from New Second Street northeast to Ashbourne Road.

I cannot help but wonder if the Toomey signs were related to the demography. 

It turned out that a lot of the voters we identified were first-timers. So we spent a lot of time with their mothers (always mom), trying to figure out a plan to get them to vote, especially since a lot of them were elsewhere in the county but had not re-registered. Early voting in Pennsylvania is possible only at the county seat, where you can vote absentee in person. That is what I used to do in Cambridge, but getting to the election office involved only a short stroll, not an annoying drive to Norristown. So we would help with transport, or get people forms, or whatever we could. Plenty of times that meant just passing the buck to the precinct office. 

Sometimes you find someone who just seemed overwhelmed by life. For example, there was one young single mother with multiple cheery small children. She looked ... exhausted. Not sad, not tragic, just exhausted. My wife did not think that she would vote on a work day, and I sadly think my wife is right. She was the best argument for early voting that I had ever seen.

More fun was the house with the fence and the “Beware of the Dog” sign that concealed a fucking scary dog. The owners’ kids popped out onto their porch, followed by the owner, a big muscled tattooed guy who would have looked scary if you found big muscled tattooed guys with children’s toys scattered on their porch to be scary. He was pretty nice, actually, although he did insist that we had it wrong and he was “a nobody supporter, neutral.”

Ah, maybe.

There was also the 40-something white lady who wanted to have a long election conversation on the porch. So we obliged! We met a lot of MSNBC-junkies on this gig. Her house, by the way, was one of the most run-down ones on the block. She worried a lot about the effect of the upcoming transit strike on turnout. (Once again, we were there for her two older daughters, not for her.)

I could go on. It was a lot of fun and everyone was charmed by the kids, who had a ball. (We would call it quits before they got cranky.) On another day we met a family where the door was open and the kids running in and out. They saw us coming, and an adult voice said,  “speak Spanish, they’ll go away.” Speaking Spanish to us didn’t work, but telling us to go away did, even if their youngest boy and my eldest boy struck up a discussion about toy weaponry. And the apartment buildings, where we could not go in but the doormen always turned out to be enthusiastic Hillary supporters.

So vote if you haven’t. Soon this will be over and hopefully the Fat Crybaby will sing. We’re with her.

And how have you spent most of your October weekends?

Chester County, Pennsylvania

Happy Election Day? I wish. Anyway, D.C. has early voting. I voted with my son in tow on Halloween; my wife took my daughter to the polls a few days later. We voted for President, for city council members, and for the District of Columbia to become the Douglass Commonwealth; we kicked ourselves for not having researched the school board elections. (Discussion of D.C. statehood at the link.) 

We have been spending our weekends campaigning in Pennsylvania. I hope to write a little about that before the polls close this evening. Surprisingly (or not) the campaign has consistently sent us to a near-suburb of Philly called Cheltenham. As a result, even though we know Chester County well and sleep there often (when we aren’t with my cousin in Fairmount) we have not done any electioneering there. 

Fortunately, Emma Green of the Atlantic is prepared to step into the breach. Her profile of Chester County is not especially incisive or deep. But it is accurate. And it is very funny how Trump somehow confused Downingtown for a depressed area. 

The county has a pleasant, if in some places stark, urban core in West Chester:

And also rural areas where the kids can build their immune systems in actual farms:

It is a great place for unsupervised little boys to risk their lives. 

Anyway, for those of you who want to know what the election looks like on the ground, you could do worse than the Atlantic profile. 

If you must argue by anecdote, get them right

Yesterday, Jeff Cox of CNBC published a column called “Donald Trump can win Pennsylvania. Here’s why.” 

He’s right! Donald Trump can win Pennsylvania. We go a lot to Chester County, Pennsylvania, where the exurbs of Philly blend into the part of the state not-affectionately called Pennsyltucky.” The last time I was there, I was flabbergasted to see a motorcycle with a confederate flag hanging off it. (That is my car right next to it in the below photo.) My friend was more than flabbergasted, he was horrified: after all, he lives there with his wife and three children and they aren’t white.

So, yes, obviously Trump can win Pennsylvania. 

But that’s not what Cox wrote. Nope, he wrote, “I think the polls are wrong. How do I know? Because I live in Pennsylvania — have for all my life.” He went on, “Pennsylvania’s jobless rate was 5.6 percent in June, with only 13 other states being worse off in terms of unemployment. So with a sagging economy and a rising crime rate, they look for reasons why they’ve been left behind.” 

So is he right? Does Pennsylvania have a uniquely bad economy or a terrible crime wave?

Well, not really. Unemployment has recently ticked up, but in the context of growing payrolls and rising wages. Things are much better than in November 2012.

Pennsylvania payroll employment:

Pennsylvania unemployment rate:

And what about crime? Well, with the caveat that the UCR is only complete through 2014:

Homicide rates after 2006 come from the first half of the year, for comparability with 2016.

It is certainly true that the Fat Crybaby could take Pennsylvania. I have no issue with what Cox had to say about that. But it won’t be because exogenous measurable conditions in the state have deteriorated since 2012. No, if it happens, it will because something ugly that was already there has been unleashed. Right now, the fundamentals favor the Democrats.

Housing prices and upward mobility

 Two years ago, this blog noted that San Jose, California, had incredible upward mobility. But it also suggested that rising house prices put that upward mobility at risk, by reducing geographical mobility. That in turn might prevent people from taking advantage of educational and job opportunities.

Now, the Atlantic voices the same worry: “Today, young Americans increasingly have to choose one or the other—they can either settle in affordable but stagnant metros or live in economically vibrant cities whose housing prices eat much of their paychecks unless they hit it big.”

In California, for example, the problem has only gotten worse. The very same 3-bedroom apartment in Mountain View that we rented for $1,724 in 1993 (in 2015 dollars, $1,040 at the time) now rents for $3,750 — a real increase of 118%. 

There are cities where housing is still within the grasp of young middle class people. For example, my 20-something cousin Adam and his girlfriend just purchased a very nice 2-bedroom townhouse in Philadelphia for what amounts to a monthly payment of roughly $1,700, before the interest deduction. But that is not as easy as it sounds. It is true that said monthly payment is basically flat (in real terms) since 1999. (The price of the house has risen by 124% in nominal terms, but interest rates were a lot higher back in 1999.) But because the nominal price of the house has more than doubled, you need a bigger down payment to qualify ... and student loan burdens are a lot heavier now. 

Moreover, there are two other drawbacks. First, one of the reasons why housing is still affordable in that part of Philly is that the schools are awful (albeit improving). You want better schools — and upward mobility with it — you pay more either in housing or in tuition. Second, Philadelphia, for all its charms, is not a first-tier job market the way that Boston, New York and Washington have become. (Let alone San Francisco!) You have to give up other opportunities in order to have decent housing within reach of a normal 20-something income.

America’s coastal housing shortage is good for me, as a homeowner, but terrible for the country. 

Great debate attempt #4: There may be hooptie politics in the U.S. of A., but functioning machines there are not

  Some time ago, I took issue with the use of the word “machine” by two commentators on this blog. Short version: They talked about the role of machines in the election.  I said, “There are no more machines.” They said:  “You’re wrong. Patronage politics lives.”

I now believe that it is time to reassert my contention. There is no more Chicago machine. There may, in fact, be no more political machines in America.

What’s a machine, you ask? Simple. Machine politics happens when politicians make promises and levy punishments on voters at an individual level, and not merely as members of an ascribed group. It isn’t machine politics to support EFCA in return for a union endorsement or union contributions. It is machine politics to tell Joe the Union Leader if he gets his local gets out a certain number of votes, he’s gonna get federal contracts steered his way. 

Obviously, the boundaries are grey. They usually are. (C’mon. This blog has an “empire” tag.) But you can make a strong case that machine politics is dead unless you choose to draw the line so broadly as to make everything into machine politics. 

Consider the Board of Revision of Taxes, in Philadelphia, where I write this. 

In theory, its an independent organization, appointed by elected judges and funded by the school district. In practice, Republican and Democratic Party leaders give jobs away to people who work hard on election day. Machine politics!  Except … uh …. the BRT was originally part of a Republican machine. (Hard as it is to imagine, many northeastern cities, like Philly and Jersey City, were once controlled by left-leaning GOP machines.) As the city became more Democratic, Democrats got control of more of the posts. A real machine shouldn’t let that happen — why would its constituents have an incentive to switch? But the Republican Party has managed to retain control over 20 of the 78 seats on the BRT and give them to the people who get out its votes despite a complete collapse in the ability of the Philadelphia GOP to, you know, get votes out. If one machine replaced another, that shouldn’t happen either. What’s going on in Philadelphia seems more like straight-up corruption rather than machine politics, conventionally conceived.
 
Or consider what a real machine did back in 1972, and try to imagine it happening today. 

In 1972, Richard Daley the Elder could already see the writing on the wall: the days of the classic machine were coming to an end. Royko’s Boss came out in ’71. Michael Shakman began his famous suit arguing that patronage politics violated the 14th Amendment. Ralph Metcalfe defected from the machine with the wonderful quote, “It’s never too late to be black,” and managed to stay in office. His candidate for governor lost. So when a bunch of goo-goos challenged his control over the selection of candidates to the Democratic National Convention, he showed what a real machine does. They attacked the churches where the reformers organized and destroyed their records. Attacked, as in mobs and beatings. The Partido Nacional Revolucionario would have called that a porra. Richard Daley the Younger, I should add, led the porra that assaulted a Catholic Church in the 5th District. They then disrupted the election of the at-large delegates from Cook County. 

Daley lost anyway, save for the at-large. He sued, and when the U.S. Supreme Court punted, he got a machine judge to seat his hand-picked slate over the elected delegates. Except that the judge couldn’t do anything, because, well, the Supreme Court had kicked the problem back into the hands of the Democratic National Committee. Daley’s case wasn’t helped by the fact that in a massive failure of vision his slate contained only one Italian last name and three Polish ones. That’d be like, well, uh … you know, lots of Irish political machines shot themselves in the head over this sort of oversight, be it Chicago’s failure to integrate Italian and Poles and African-Americans, or Boss Flynn of the Bronx trying to pretend for a stupidly long time that all these Jews and Puerto Ricans would just go away. (The Jews did. The Puerto Ricans are. But the machine went away first.) 

Wrap your head around that happening in the 2012 . You can’t. It wouldn’t. Not even in places like San Antonio, where machine-like organizations still exist in a way that they’ve faded in Chicago and Philadelphia. Those cities have a problem with corruption, but I’m just not seeing the machines. (Michael Nutter is many things, including a plausible future President of the United States, but a machine politician is not one of them.) Boston, well, Boston kinda sort has a machine, sorta, but it’s weak, and survived because the Irish were smart enough to turn things over to the Italians. Cambridge has one that survives only out of apathy and indirect elections.

New York City could have replicated machine politics. It had an ethnic base and plenty corruption, while Jews and Italians were replaced by Puerto Ricans and African Americans, who were in turn displaced by West Indians, Dominicans, and Chinese. 

Yeah, I know, hugely diverse immigration stream and all that. But a political entrepreneur could have built a machine on a simple West Indian-Dominican-Chinese tripod … heck, they could have built on West Indians alone.

Only they didn’t. And if you tell me that’s because West Indians don’t make good American politicians or don’t become citizens or otherwise lack the necessary chops I will be unable to contain my laughter. It’s because, I think, American institutions and political culture currently make machine politics impossible. The combination of law, free elections, and prosperity has destroyed the great American political machine. 

In fact, the same combination — or at least two of the three — has also wounded the great Mexican political machine. They hang on in parts of Mexico, but generally the country’s politics resemble U.S.-style interest group politics, not the machine politics of yore. “Porras” cause riots after university soccer games; they don’t assault polling places and beat up opposition politicians. They’re also weakened in Panama. I’m not sure that I’m particularly happy about Martinelli’s victory, but it isn’t a victory for machine politics. 

Now, machine politics isn’t dead in Latin America, despite some bruising. Consider “Daleyismo” in Venezuela. ¡Viva la maquina! The Nestor-Cristina team in Argentina is very good at this sort of thing. Danny Ortega is less good at it, as his need to resort to vote-stealing shows, but even the great Daley had to do that on occasion. Correa and Morales, in different ways, are trying to build machines. Dominican politics is dominated by machines, albeit not hegemonic ones … and I think you could say that Mr. Uribe’s conservatives have built there own odd sui generis electoral machine. 

So machine politics lives on in América, but in America it is almost impossible for me to imagine the kind of tactics used by the Socialists-Peronists-Sandinistas-MAS-Conservatives achieving anything other than a wave of negative news stories followed by indictments.

I know less about the Old Continent. There are some machine-like things in Italy these days, although I think a new word is needed for Berlusconi’s very 21st-century political strategy. But to repeat myself, electoral machines no longer seem to exist in America.

Am I wrong? As always, I’m happy to change my mind. And just to be sure that we’re on the same wavelength, a “machine” doesn’t need to be as powerful as the Cook County Democratic Party under Richard Daley to qualify. It just needs to be able to win elections on the basis of personalistic relationship and individual patronage. 

Mummery!

Remarkably few people (okay, one person) wondered why Imperial Stormtroopers had occupied downtown Philadelphia. So I’ll tell you. It was the Fancies of Mummers Day.

I’ll turn the floor over to Amma. “It’s sort of a white people’s Carnival.  And since it’s cold, they can make more creative costumes because they don't have to be concerned with, you know, battling the heat with nakedness.”  

And to continue the parallel, the fancies are sort of like Carnival bands, kinda, only that Mummers tend to be older and fatter as well as paler than your typical Carnival reveler. Which makes it a good thing on multiple levels that they wear more clothes.

Among the Star Wars junkies, you also had political messages:

Roman gladiators:

Mexican wrestlers:

Roller-skating dragons:

Budding superstars:

Cavalry dancing with Indians:

And things that made no goddamned sense at all.

I don’t know if they suspended the alcohol laws or just didn’t bother to enforce them, but never in North America have I seen so many people wandering around with open bottles and cans of beer but nary a paper bag in sight. By nightfall, some streets looked like it had snowed colored aluminum. 

Supposedly there’s a long history here, dating back to the 1840s, combining ancient Irish and Swedish and Finnish customs. (The main newspaper also warned people not to fire their guns into the air at midnight, and then pinned the custom on Finland. Jussi?) I’ll let those who know more than you can find out in two minutes of googling explain it all in comments. 

All I can say is that it’s hella fun, and worth spending your next New Year’s in Philly to participate. And I mean “participate”:  it’s so unprofessional, and starts so far south along Broad Street, that you can’t not get involved in the action. So next year, in 2009, see y’all in the City of Brotherly Whatever the Hell it Is.