McCain share of white vote by state, and by region; Source: Exit Poll Data by Edison Mitofsky

Obama's vote share among people with a postgraduate degree by state

More:

“Here in Alabama, where Mr. McCain won 60.4 percent of the vote in his best Southern showing, he had the support of nearly 9 in 10 whites, according to exit polls, a figure comparable to other Southern states.”

“Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi.”

“Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter, a statistical analysis by The New York Times shows.”

NY Times

Andy Gelman’s take on the 2008 results-

“As with previous Republican candidates, McCain did better among the rich than the poor,.. but the pattern has changed among the highest-income categories…”

November 10, 2007: “I love my wife and my five sons and their five wives. Wait a second. Let me clarify that. They each have one.” Mitt Romney (Economist gave this quip the title - Best Freudian slip; ABCNews.com)

December 12, 2007: In kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled ‘I Want to Become President.’ “Iis Darmawan, 63, Senator Obama’s kindergarten teacher, remembers him as an exceptionally tall and curly haired child who quickly picked up the local language and had sharp math skills. He wrote an essay titled, ‘I Want To Become President,’ the teacher said.”
From: Clinton campaign’s press-release.

December 13, 2007: “It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’” Shaheen on Obama
Bill Shaheen (husband of NH Senator-elect Jeanne Shaheen; national co-chairman of Clinton’s campaign at that point)

February 24, 2008: Bill Clinton speaking about Hillary’s inability to win caucus states - “the caucuses aren’t good for her. They disproportionately favor upper-income voters who, who, don’t really need a president but feel like they need a change.” Audacity of Hopelessness by Frank Rich

March 8, 2008: “She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything,” Samantha Power; Obama’s foreign policy adviser.

March 10, 2008: Hillary Clinton chief spokesman Howard Wolfson declared Monday that Clinton does not consider Obama qualified to be vice president.

March 11, 2008: “I will not be discriminated against because I’m white. Geraldine Ferraro

“If we can’t trust Mitt Romney on Ronald Reagan, how can we trust him to lead America?”
From John McCain’s attack ad on Romney

“The Clintons will be there when they need you,” said a Carter friend. (Maureen Dowd, NY Times)

May 3, 2008: When asked, at the Republican presidential primary debate at Simi Valley, whether any of the candidates did not believe in evolution , three candidates - Tancredo, Brownback, and Huckabee - raised their hands.

May 9, 2008: “Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.” (Hillary Clinton, Interview with USA Today)

Google News Archives timeline graph of citations of 'Clinton Accuses Obama' between August 2007 and August 2008

August 21, 2008: “I think - I’ll have my staff get to you. It’s condominiums where - I’ll have them get to you.” (John McCain unsure about the number of houses he owns.)

A special tribute to Palin:

September 24, 2008: “As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where– where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border.”
(Interview with Katie Couric, CBS News)
In defense of Palin, she never said that she could see Russia from her house. (Time)

September 25, 2008: Couric: And when it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?
Palin: I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.
Couric: What, specifically?
Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.
Couric: Can you name a few?
Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too.
CBS News
October 1, 2008: “Well, let’s see. There’s — of course — in the great history of America rulings there have been rulings.” Sarah Palin (When asked by Couric to name a Supreme Court decision she disagreed with other than Roe vs. Wade; CBS News)

News Coverage of Sarah Palin and Joseph Biden

Ratio of News stories by day covering Sarah Palin and Joseph Biden

Coverage of Sarah Palin's interview with Gibson, Couric, and Tina Fey's impersonation on SNL

Ratio of stories citing John McCain that also cited Sarah Palin vis-a-vis Ratio of stories citing Barack Obama that also mentioned Joe Biden

Palin's coverage: MSNBC and Fox

The era of televised debates started with Senator Kennedy debating Vice-President Nixon in 1960. The debates came about at the suggestion of Adlai Stevenson – whose influential column in ‘The Week’ first proposed the idea. The debates made history, with footage of Nixon, wiping sweat of this brow, looking unshaven and snappish, firmly embedded in the presidential campaign folklore. But the televised debates of 1960 almost didn’t come off.

In 1959, FCC received a complaint from the colorful perennial candidate Lar Daly who was running against the powerful mayor, Richard Daley. Lars complained that television was covering Richard Daley on issues unrelated to campaign –if there’s such a thing, and argued, as the law – Section 315(a) of Communications Act of 1934 - mandated then, ‘equal time’. FCC decline Lars’ request, but also asked Congress to take action. To address such issues, Congress created four exemptions to equal time law. It ruled that ‘Bona fide candidates’ may appear in Bona fide newscasts, Bona fide news interviews, Bona fide news documentaries, and “on the spot coverage of bona fide news events”. However the exemptions made weren’t thought to allow for coverage of presidential debate. Hence, to allow for the presidential debates, Congress suspended the Equal time law for just 1960, and only for candidates running for president, allowing for the 1960 debates to happen.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s reluctance to debate Barry Goldwater meant that the Democrats in Congress shelved the bill to suspend equal time law for the year. 1968 and 1972 had Nixon running for president, and given his prior experience against Kennedy, it meant a summary no to presidential debates. But the history of televised presidential debates is as much a history of politics as telecommunication law intersecting with politics. So let me make a brief detour to talk a little more about Communication law- In 1971, amendment to the Communications Act required stations make a reasonable amount of time available to federal candidates. Once time is made available under this provision, the equal time requirements of Section 315 did apply. The 1971 amendments also addressed the rates which stations can charge candidates for air time. Before 1971, Congress only required that the rates charged candidates be comparable to those offered to commercial advertisers. Now, Section 315 commands that as the election approaches, stations must offer candidates the rate it offers its most favored advertiser. Thus, if a station gives a discount to a commercial sponsor because it buys a great deal of air time, the station must offer the same discount to any candidate regardless of how much time he or she purchases.

In 1976, debate coverage was allowed under the ‘Aspen decision’, which interpreted presidential debates as following under “on the spot coverage of bona fide news event” exception legislated by Congress in 1959– if the debates were organized someone other than the media, and broadcast live, and in their entirety. This was obviously highly disingenuous but repeated cases in Supreme Court failed to reverse the decision. With the decision in place, people scampered to find an organization willing to organize the debate. League of Women Voters finally accepted the responsibility, and organized the 76 debate. The debates were held under their sponsorship till 84, and after 88 under Commission on Presidential debates. The debates until of recently were focus of extensive lobbying by the candidates – and negotiation on format (town hall/single moderator or panel of journalists/etc.), podium height, temperature in the hall, whether candidates could use notes or not, among other things – was intense and common. Only now, CPD has been able to leverage its power to limit the list of negotiable items. However bigger problems remain – constant questions about the utility of debates, and the rather arbitrary criteria for allowing for a third-party candidate to debate.

Then - if it was the threat of ‘factions’ that led to the institutional design of American democracy, we have succeeded, almost entirely. The American political system has become a stable duopoly, with ‘factions’ –even troublesome ones like 1968 McCarthy supporters – now residing largely within the parties, mostly quietly.

But to discuss success of institutional systems that reward ‘broad coalitions’ in American context is to not fully discuss them at all. While it is true that in the American context, the ‘first past the post’ electoral system (if indeed the kind of electoral system ‘predicts’ the number of parties) has produced a largely stable two-party system (with occasional bouts of third-parties, the latest being Ross Perot in 1992; and the longest lasting being the ‘left-wing’ parties in the Teddy Roosevelt era), the system has had much less success in India, which boasts of thirty plus parties, with each ploughing its own furrow.

So clearly, there are limits to what institutional design can achieve. A closer inspection may reveal that some of the fault lines are visible even in US. One may argue that the term ‘broad coalitions’ is a misnomer– especially in the American context - where a significant number don’t vote, and where you can win an election by appealing to the ‘median evangelist’ or ‘median racist’, in Republican Party’s case. Similarly, one must question why significant ‘third parties’ like the Socialist party came to be important players, given the ‘logic’ of wasted votes. But overall, the system has worked well.

Party on

Democracy is perhaps best understood as a Schumpeterian ideal of mass public choosing from competing elites. Parties emerge as natural coalitional vehicles in a democracy to allow elites to stand on ideas, and not as elites. They allow provide the more ambitious members of the public to gain power, in exchange of co-option, partial indoctrination, and work. And furthermore, they allow for only people who aver by the dogma to rise to the top. But reality impedes. More so now, when media have made possible for politicians to come to the fore with only limited help from the party machinery.

Stable Coalitions

If factionalized political systems amplify every segment’s sane and insane demands, political systems that demand ‘broad coalitions’ are, by design, tethered to broad dysfunctions within a society.

At the heart of it – there is nothing seemingly ‘stable’ or even vaguely comprehensible about the ‘broad coalition’ that the Republican Party commands – it is a coalition of the rich, and the poor, the ‘fiscal conservatives’, and the taxation-averse (sometimes both), the social conservatives who elect Larry Craig, the libertarians who want government to legislate marriage (and more), etc. The subtext of this coalition, its glue, is of course race.

To keep ‘broad coalitions’ from heeding to their worst instincts, one needs an informed, civic and liberal minded citizenry. Failing which, while democracy with a relatively free press may prevent famines, it may not always prevent slavery or foreign occupation, if that is a ‘broad coalition’ supports it.

Before we investigate, ‘why the dog doesn’t bark’, it is incumbent upon us to identify who the dog is, why it should bark, and when, and how loudly? And does it bite? And we must investigate whether the implicit and naïve assumption – that barking will result in anything – is actually correct. Only after we answer these, will we tackle some version of Hochschild’s question.

The Dog

The definition of the ‘dog’ depends heavily on the counterfactual that we want to use. For example, is it the bottom 95% of the income earners, or the lowest two quintiles of the income distribution, or the group below median income, or the minority of the federally defined ‘poor’? All of these ‘groups’ can in sense coalesce together to demand more redistribution of income taxes, certainly a ‘progressive’ income tax with substantially higher marginal tax on incomes above their own. But theoretical counterfactuals base their premise of group formation on automatic group formation on basis of economic interests. Such counterfactuals ignore things like extant cross-cutting social cleavages (for example race – disingenuously captured as ‘South/Non-South Dummy’, the Baptist/Southern Baptist dummy etc. in Political Science literature) that come in way of ‘class consciousness’, atomistic drives of the new labor and consumption regimes, apathy, ‘political culture’, historical narratives, and the near absolute dispersion of legitimizing discourses of inequality offered by the ‘society’. These reasons damn the existence of a dog to only those instances when political entrepreneurship meets economic realities powerfully enough to overcome the centrifugal forces mentioned above. So perhaps then the problem really is that the dog doesn’t bark because mostly there is no dog.
However, political coalitions around class do form, and if evidence presented by scholars is anything to go by - they are most salient and most persistent among the rich end of the spectrum. Larry Bartels has recently shown that policy choices reflect elite opinion much more so than mass opinion. “In almost every instance, senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes. Disparities in representation are especially pronounced for Republican senators, who were more than twice as responsive as Democratic senators to the ideological views of affluent constituents.” (Bartels, 2005 - Economic Inequality and Political Representation).

Hochschild, relying on census data from 1929 to 1977, puts forth the fact that while the shares received by poorest two quintiles has changed little between these years, the largest change has been transfer of money from the richest quintile to the third and fourth quintile. Hoschschild’s story is about the ‘Director’s law’ (after economist Aaron Director), which goes something like this –‘Government has coercive power, which allows it to engage in acts (above all, the taking of resources) which could not be performed by voluntary agreement of the members of a society. Any portion of the society which can secure control of the state’s machinery will employ the machinery to improve its own position. Under a set of conditions to be discussed below, this dominant group will be the middle income classes.’ (George Stigler’s summary).

So perhaps there is a dog – a rich and a middle class dog, just not a ‘poor dog’. And that is in itself a ‘mystery’.

To bark or not to bark? And when to bark?

Should it on ‘perceiving’ the narrowing of the opportunities to move to the next class bracket? Or should it be on coming in contact with ‘increased’ inequality between ‘class peers’, as is so nicely documented in a recent series of articles in New York Times –the chronicler of the anxieties of the rich - that show that inequality is the greatest (and gallingly so) in the top 1% with top .001% earning far more than the .01%, which in turn earns substantially less than the next .1%. Or should it be the expansion of difference between the 25th percentile and the 75th percentile? Or having dramatically lower income than say our parents? A lot depends on how we define the dog, and what the dog sees. Both the dog and dog’s vision, if it wasn’t clear from the discussion above, is as much politically constructed as socially (if the two can be pried apart). Perhaps the answer is best approached via historical examples – times when we can be reasonably sure the dog did something or it looked like the dog did something.

If we go back to 1870s, the era of ‘Robber Barons’ and the original ‘gilded age’, the post-reconstruction era of lavish wealth, and even more gratuitous displays, we are at a point of history with indisputable and egregious inequalities. This era with its early stages of thuggish capitalists bought not only the rise of labor but also the trust busting presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. Perhaps there the dog did whimper. Similarly, there is a period again starting 1933 when there is a precipitous climb in the marginal income tax rate, partly brought upon by the war, and by FDR. The top marginal rates as recently as Eisenhower era were over 90%, and now top off at a miserly 35%. It is relatively unclear –except perhaps for rise of communist parties in US and a response to the depression, why we saw such a rise in redistribution of income. But it seems that that was the last time the dog whimpered.

Data from Piketty and Saez, among others, suggests the oncoming of a new gilded age. For example, according to census data, in 1967, households at 95th percentile had six times more income than ones at 25th percentile, the ratio in 2005 had grown to 8.6. It may yet be that the dog rises again, albeit slowly and feebly. And it may gnaw at immigrants, when it rises, before it gnaws at ‘greedy’ Wall Street guys. Oh, it’s already happening.

The Curious Incident: Why the dog doesn’t bark sooner, or bite?

Sven Steinmo, the clear eyed analyst attributes it to the ‘Political culture’ – the pull yourself up the bootstraps entrepreneurial anti-statist immigrant culture, constitution – the deliberately ‘anti-democratic’ (in words of American historian Gordon Wood) fragmentary government structure, weak parties, weak labor, weak government, and the fact that elites play a critical role in shaping people’s preferences. For Hochschild it is the lack of feudal history, the rapid rise of petit bourgeoisie, people being better off than their parents – at least much of the 19th and 20th century as the vast natural resources of US were exploited to carve out wealth, the fact that people have ‘chosen’ Capitalism (gain) over distributive ideas, deliberate fragmented structure of the government, the fact that poor limit their dreams, the fact that poor don’t demand absence of difference but just end of ‘unjust’ differences, and that the fact that people just want an ‘equal opportunity to be unequal’. For Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish political scientist and economist and Nobel Prize Laureate and most significantly author of the Carnegie (who wanted someone from outside US for objectivity) funded ‘An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy’, it is the ‘American creed’. And perhaps because things haven’t been that bad, mostly. We never ask if things can be better for democracy isn’t about that. It is just mostly avoiding famines. (Amartya Sen)

Class may be dead as a publicly flaunted grouping (except the modest moral middle) but it doesn’t mean people are any less disposed to class wisdom that surreptiously privileges their class. The concept of ‘meritocracy’ as an ordering mechanism is so widely accepted today that it now carries with it the sharp edge of moral righteousness rooted in ‘fairness’. It is understandable that the meritocratic inclusive ideal has been constructed in a way to obfuscate middle class’s own culpability, but it is less clear why the ideal has been accepted by those it disprivileges. To be sure, the acceptance rates are dramatically lower among the disadvantaged, but it is likely that even they accept large portions of the basic premise in a whole range of circumstances.

It is a signal of the success of the system when people choose to believe in a system that disadvantages them. The fact of the matter is that the final aim of all stable power systems is not rule by force but co-option – if not in the fruits, then in its truths. Marx - meet Gramsci.

It is useful to note that the number of people who buy into the ‘dream’ depends on the extant (economic) counterfactuals as well as salience of alternate discourses led by other political entrepreneurs. (But politics provides at least as many counterfactuals as number of entrepreneurial politicians.)

Classifying the Middle

The rise of middle class is generally understood in terms of rise of Capitalism as a dominant economic system, the rise of cities, and the rise of bureaucracy. So it is no surprise that valorization of ‘middle class’ is universally barnacled to such societies.

‘Middle class’ has been described as a rentier class with ‘no social basis’ but one with a specific function. Benefits are distributed asymmetrically in a Capitalist (or for accuracy sake power) pyramid and the top .01% gain significantly more than the next .09% who in turn gain significantly more than the next 1%, and so on. This sharply tapering pyramid is held in place by the inclusive meritocratic rhetoric (some of it is true some of the time), and by the aspirants (middle class) in whose claws ‘success’ seems the nearest. More broadly, each economic system has a legitimizing (sense making) discourse for its winners and losers, and in Capitalism – it is the inclusive, achievable, democratic discourse about merit and hard work. Super rich probably don’t have illusions about how they got their money, but the moral middle is caught up in its need for ascribing their modest success to their own ingenuity and hard work. The moralism of middle class can be better understood if acknowledge its historical roots in Victorian England. One of the defining features of the ‘middle-class’ in Victorian era was its extreme moralism – railing against corrupt degenerate aristocracy, and the equally corrupt breeding-like-rats poor, and trying to define middle class ‘meritocracy’ as the only ethical framework. Hence meritocracy has become the defining ethos of the society–inclusive yet elusive - inclusive enough to keep the bottom salivating, and yet elusive enough to keep it nearly always out of reach of the lower classes.

Since liberalization, middle class has become a significant feature of discourse on India, and within it. While the wildly improbable figure of 300 million people is seen in a variety of communiqués today, this ‘shining’ habit of overstatement has its pedigree in Mani Shankar Aiyar’s words. Aiyar in mid 1980s as a joint secretary in Rajiv Gandhi’s PMO told The Washington Post that India now had a middle class of 100 million people. Whatever the numbers, the ‘middle’ has since then gained in political and cultural significance.

Defining the middle - Middle income and middle class

Gary Burtless, economist with the Brookings Institution, chooses to define the more readily apprehensible “middle income” rather than “middle class”. He bases his definition on the median household income — which last year in US was $48,200, putting middle income range from half of that to twice that number, or $24,000 to $96,000.

MIT economist Frank Levy came up with a definition based on Census data for families in their prime earning years and pegged that range from about $30,000 to $90,000.

The World Bank defines the middle class as earners making between $10 and $20 a day — adjusted for local prices — which is roughly the range of average incomes between Brazil ($10) and Italy ($20).

In the middle of nowhere

India’s purchasing power parity adjusted GDP is $4.1 trillion (2006), giving it a per capita GDP of about $4k. Even if all of India’s GDP was assigned to 250 million, it would mean a gdp/pp of $16k. (This is opposed to $13.3 trillion for 300 million or about $44k/ capita in the US) And since it is obviously not the case, and the truth being closer to $2-3k, the group is necessarily small, and its consumption levels don’t even begin to compare to ones in OECD countries.

Middle class as is commonly understood is certainly not in the median or mean income range, and the boundaries of what it means to belong to it are perennially being pushed outwards to include more commodities that are seen as necessities to belong to this class. But there are certain minimum thresholds. For example, access to sanitation.

“One out of every two persons in the world compelled to defecate in the open is an Indian. This is one of several unsavoury facts brought out in a recent report by the World Health Organisation and UNICEF. According to the report, out of the 1.2 billion people who defecate in the open worldwide because they have no access to toilets, more than half are Indian. An astounding 667 million people in this country have no option but to defecate in the open, a country that would like people to believe that it is on the cusp of becoming a global economic giant.” (India Together)

Indian Middle class

In pseudo-socialist regimes, as was in effect in the first three decades post Indian independence, ‘Class I’ government employees emerged as the embodiments of the ‘educated’ middle class. In India, the ‘babus’ living in government quarters along with the rest of their extended families, with their focus on education for their kids, conservative social attitudes, reasonably self-congratulatory, became the embodiment of the Indian – or certainly Delhi- middle-class. But before we discuss middle class, defined thus, it is useful to acknowledge that thus defined it was but a small sliver of the Indian population, though one which had an oversize impact on its politics, especially post liberalization. (Of the 16 million public sector employees in 1983, only a miniscule fraction belonged to the ‘class 1’ strata.)

In the socialist economy of Nehru era, with its emphasis on building large-scale industrial projects (the modern ‘temples’), perhaps the determining ethos weren’t from the mid-ranking babu, who though I am sure heavily approved of industrialization, but from the West or Soviet looking educated technocrats dominant in the upper echelons of the civil service. Given the relatively weak political systems in which institutions to help wield political power were still being developed, it is likely that the administrative cadre was left to govern not only vast policy areas, but even where the politicians had control.

India’s trajectory – Politics

“Rajiv was the first middle class Prime Minister of India — and was proud of it. He was the first Prime Minister to have ever held a job, to have paid income tax, to have watched with alarm as his provident fund deduction went up and to have struggled to make ends meet.” Vir Sanghvi, Editorial Director to Hindustan Times

Rajiv Gandhi, who became a Prime Minister at the age of 40, was bullish in his ideas about introducing technology. Relatively free from pressures to tend to any particular political constituency, because of the sycophantic culture within Congress, a huge electoral lead, and a name like Gandhi, he, along with his select coterie of foreign and Indian bureaucrats and businessmen, worked to bring about a technology revolution in India.

The rise of BJP had something to do as well with the picture. The ‘only’ way a phantom ‘middle class’ can be a political constituency in an entrepreneurial ‘democracy’ like India’s is if significant people who ‘vote’ (this being key) buy into the rhetoric, or are encumbered with other dimensions like religion, etc. or both. Identity based politics meets class. So while BJP may talk swades, its liberalization policies were no different from Congress’s. So the middle gets to eat the cake and have it too.

Policies and politics can be orthogonal, and they often are – in India like in the US - but they are not charted by prevalent discourse but in fact discourse is created to sustain policies that benefit a few. It is unclear whether the construction of discourse around ‘middle class’ was done by ‘strategic political actors’ (in thrall of massive profits coming from corruption if nothing else), and the supporters from the upper crust (with massive incomes to flaunt of their own), or just a mundane control of discourse effected by new capitalism, or perhaps more likely the prior facilitated by the latter.

India’s trajectory – Economic Liberalization

While Rajiv Gandhi was an important precursor to the ‘middle class’, it wasn’t until the launch of economic liberalization in 1991, that the class gained in currency. It is important to note however that the 1991 economic reforms were launched under the gun of defaulting on debt, which would certainly have had catastrophic implications for the already battered Indian economy. Additionally, Soviet Union, the not-insignificant benefactor of India, collapsed in 1991 (and was on the death bed for some time before that) so there was nowhere else to turn to for help.

India’s trajectory - Media and Globalization

The timing of India’s liberalization was fortuitous in a way - especially as we trace the story of the ascent of the middle class in the past decade - as it coincided with the advent of transnational satellite broadcasting in Asia. In 1991, Hong Kong based (Murdoch owned) Star TV started broadcasting to several Asian countries from a clutch of transponders aboard Asiasat 1. Its mainstay was recycled American programming. Star TV found instant reception due to Gulf War which had revolutionized cable. The satellite dishes/and cable/ operators showed images from gulf war and then showed Hindi movies at the end of the war. Overnight, video parlor owners changed to cable operators offering Star TV’s five channels – including BBC and MTV. BBC was later dropped.

The government took a lax view of the mushrooming illegal cable industry, and didn’t take steps to regularize it until 1995, and even then enforcement was lax, if not non-existent. The rise of cable was significant in shaping the middle class, and how it chose to see itself - at once liberal, and aware of global trends in fashion and entertainment. And still aware of how to yell an order chai to the housemaid.

Not media, but the people in media

But if it were not for further liberalization of media, and new generation that took reigns of that media - the story may still have been different.

The narrative around media’s role in the construction of the new middle class is more completely understood if we move beyond analyzing the product or the stated strategic intensions of the actors, and instead look at the people running media today.

Till early nineties, the only game town used to be the state media. Even the newspapers treaded lightly, if progressively, under threat of government boycott of ads. The dominant ethos in reporting and programming on the state media were the liberalist bureaucratic ethos and on radio dominated by people likely to be friends with university professors. Doordarshan ran public service ads, and social cohesion promoting dramas.

This all changed, first with the introduction of cable, which initially featured ‘foreign channels’ carrying a sprinkling of preppy foreign bred hyphenated Indians, and then with the rise of ‘native’ media led by clawing young brigade. The new recruits to the media industry - young, turgid with ambition, aiming to please, and imbibed in business ethos- were key in hastening the spread of ‘middle class’ discourse. A similar process is underway in American journalism with shift in technology necessitating a significant generational shift. It is patently clear reading ‘Times of India’ with its ‘Leisure’ sections (something which was started by Washington Post – ‘Style Section’ in the 1980s) that newspaper today looks like a vastly different animal than a decade and a half ago. One can argue that some of the change in media was a result of the change in economy, and not a ‘cause’ of some of the changes but the alacrity with which media changed, the speed with which it contorted, and the multiple places in which it behaved as the vanguard speaks of fundamental change in ethos that could only have happened with the active participation of the eager to be indoctrinated/ or already indoctrinated.

Caste and class and class as caste

In India, class and caste have long intersected. Brahmins have long been over-represented in government jobs, especially in the officer cadre, and intelligentsia. Since economic liberalization benefits the well-prepared the most, on average, the disproportionate beneficiaries of the new regime have also been the upper castes. As upper caste elite of the new economic regime shed their caste pretension, and take on class pretensions - not that they are particularly distinguishable - the intolerance of one has been painted over with rectitude of another.

Acknowledgment/Citation

This article is in response to (and at times directly rests upon) the book, India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform, by Dr. Leela Fernandes.

Kevin Rudd, leader of the Australian Labor Party, was elected to the Prime Minister’s office about five months ago, on 3rd December, 2007. His first ‘official act’ on taking office was to sign the Kyoto Protocol, and mandate Australia – the largest per capita polluter in the world – to deal with the biggest crisis in the world today. With that signature, Rudd not only wiped clean the Howard era moral bankruptcy, but also put Australia firmly on the path of enacting a progressive climate policy. A few days later, Rudd de facto scrapped “Pacific Solution”, the ignominious Howard era policy that sent all asylum seekers arriving by boat to remote islands for ‘assessment’. Rudd’s policy agenda has been far more ambitious than merely rolling back the perverse policies of Howard regime. Rudd committed his government to tackling homelessness, a growing and salient problem in Australia. In February, Rudd offered a short but unambiguously worded apology on behalf of the government and the Australian parliament for the shameful the treatment of the aborigines.
[Read more at BBC News]

Zapatero’s achievements as head of Spain may have been slower in coming than Rudd’s whirlwind pace, but they have been no less momentous. In his four years at the helm, he “legalized gay marriage, brought in fast-track divorces and laws to promote gender equality and tackle domestic violence. He also introduced an amnesty for undocumented workers.” (BBC. He has introduced “targeted measures to raise the female employment rate (which is still comparatively low in Spain)”, “established the legal right to paternity leave”. Under Zapatero’s capable finance minister, Pedro Solbes, Spain “declared a budget surplus for a third consecutive year, topping 2 per cent of gross domestic product for 2007.” Policy Network

The impact of electing someone like Obama would be similarly momentous for the US, and the penalties for electing McCain (running for the third term of Bush), or Clinton (who is planning to “obliterate” Iran) severe.

Kevin Rudd - White paper on first 100 days (pdf)

The unique status of the veterans and the military in the modern American consciousness can be traced to the revolutionary origins of the United States. The military success in the “War of Independence”, and the “Second War of Independence” (War of 1812), and the heroism of the ‘founders’, is an essential part of America’s collective memory, along with being an essential part of the school history curricula. Tony Judt, in his superb column for The New York Review of Books, writes that one of the reasons militarism continues to persist in US is because -

“Americans, perhaps alone in the world, experienced the twentieth century in a far more positive light. The US was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swathes of territory, as a result of occupation or dismemberment. Although humiliated in distant neocolonial wars (in Vietnam and now in Iraq), the US has never suffered the full consequences of defeat. [Judt makes a reference here to South's defeat in the Civil War and subsequent reaction as exception that proves the rule] Despite their ambivalence toward its recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their country has fought were mostly “good wars.” The US was greatly enriched by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome, in which respect it has nothing in common with Britain, the only other major country to emerge unambiguously victorious from those struggles but at the cost of near bankruptcy and the loss of empire. And compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.”

Vinay, a regular contributor here, adds to the above argument, articulating that the other possible reason for this continued ‘heroification’ of military and veterans is because as a country of immigrants, people in US have often found it hard to find things (like common history) to rally around. In absence of those themes, people have opted to rally behind things that exclude no one. That latent tendency has been buttressed by generations of strategic political actors, and mass culture producers.

The other unique fact that brings the above arguments in sharp relief is the disproportionately (as compared to other countries – excepting ones with mandatory military training) large number of veterans in the US. According to the Statistical Abstract of United States for 2004-2005, the country had 24.9 million veterans. The large veteran population is a result of two things – having one of the largest standing armies in the world, and the preponderance of personnel who serve the army only for a few years (generally as a way to have their college tuitions paid.)

Given the factors outlined above, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the American residency has been dominated by men with prior military experience. However the sheer number is still surprising – for 137 of the 219 years the country since its independence, the country has had a veteran as a president. Associatedly 29 of its 43 presidents have been veterans. There are at least three caveats about the numbers provided above– Eight years of George W Bush’s ’service’ in the National Guard have been excluded; the five years of Lincoln presidency have been included (Lincoln participated very briefly in the Black Hawk War of 1832), and Millard Fillmore’s tenure isn’t included as his experience in the military was after he had left his presidency. One can raise questions about inclusion of some other presidents including Madison (whose service was brief again), however, as one can see, such tinkering is unlikely to impact the numbers much.

The longest time American’s went without electing a veteran was the 32 year period starting with Taft in 1913, and ending with Roosevelt’s death in 1945. Incredibly, during this time, the country took part in the two World Wars.

Perhaps the subsequent question we may want to ask is what impact has election of presidents with prior military experience had on the country. The lessons there remain less clear.

US President mil experience summary table[1] - Get more documents

The proponents of lobbying argue that any law curtailing it impinges on two core First Amendment clauses - that Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”, or curtailing “freedom of speech”. In return, states have argued that they have substantial interests in preventing actual corruption, and perception of corruption, and given lobbyist’s common perception of being dishonest, and a vast array of empirical evidence as to the actual incidence of corruption, they have interests in placing restrictions on lobbying.

Courts have for long upheld citizen’s rights to petition the government taking note that the idea of democratic government implies in part a right of the citizen to petition. (Capps, 2005) The “right to petition”, as numerous legal scholars have noted, predates the Bill of Rights and hence is sacrosanct. Furthermore, Courts have also for long upheld the idea that lobbying, in essence, is a way of petitioning one’s representatives. In Liberty Lobby, Inc. v. Pearson (390 F.2d 489, 491, 492 (D.C. Cir. 1967)) [For details on case citation], the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found that peopleinvolved in trying to effect congressional action by engaging in lobbying activities were exercising their right to petition.

However the courts have long also recognized that while the right to petition is an essential one, it is also a limited one. (Capps, 2005) Hence, the courts have ruled that there is no absolute right of a citizen to speak in person with public officials. In absence of absolute rights, and citing countervailing interests like state’s interest in preventing corruption given the likelihood that lobbying will “promote the temptation to use improper means to gain success”, and maintaining confidence in the public decision making process, the courts have sided with the government in a host of cases to restrict contingency fee arrangements, impose registration and disclosure requirements on lobbyists, prohibit lobbyists from making political contributions when legislature is in session (N.C. Right to Life, Inc. v. Bartlett, 168 F.3d 705, 717-18 (4th Cir. 1999)), among others. Courts, while ruling in these decisions, have noted that barring such practices do not substantively curtain the right to petition as they don’t impose a significant (or merely unsubstantiated) burden on the petitioning process, and should a law do so, it may be grounds for it being invalid. For example, in the Oregon Supreme Court decision cited above in the definition of lobbying, the Court found that the biennial registration fee imposed by the state on the lobbyists to be in excess of costs of registration itself, and hence invalid.

The underlying strain in these cases has been the need to balance the needs of the citizenry to openly petition its representatives in line with the basic tenets of a representative government, and the needs of the executive and legislative branch to safeguard the system itself from threats of corruption. While deciding on these cases, the courts have always been keenly cognizant that in line with the constitution’s dictum of three equal and separate branches of the government, they have limited rights in imposing the standards of operation within each branch of governance, for as long as they do not violate the freedoms and rights guaranteed in the constitution. Simultaneously, the court has recognized in the past the merit of not only reducing the actual occurrence of corruption, but also reducing the perception of corruption. In both Buckley v. Valeo (424 U.S. 1 (1976)), and McConnell v. FEC (540 U.S. 93 (2003) - brought after the enactment of McCain-Feingold or BCRA/Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act) the Court has recognized the need to mitigate perceptions of corruption and actual incidence of corruption, and congressional authority to pursue legislation towards that purpose. The Court’s arguments, offered on maintaining the sanctity of the election process of legislators, should theoretically apply to the legislative process as well.

The “freedom of speech” arguments for lobbying stand on less firmer grounds. The right to “freedom of speech” is not and should not be seen as a law guaranteeing the “right to be heard”. Similarly, there is no law protecting the right of a citizen to have a private hearing with the legislator, or more broadly speaking, private speech.

The Courts have sided with the government in a significant number of cases where the state has shown a plausible case for restricting lobbying based on corruption concerns, and wherever they have found that the restrictions don’t disadvantage some content over other. However there are legitimate important rationales that undergird the right to lobby (petition) and courts have been cognizant to not support legislation that is overly broad. The law however doesn’t provide guidance on voluntary disavowal of money from lobbyists for campaigning (without the “magic words” that breach express advertising standard), and nor does it restrict lawmakers from running on a platform that upfront states that the said candidate will not accept ‘favors’ (legal ones) from lobbyists, or will not join a lobbying firm if his or her reelection bid fails (close the “revolving door”). Congress and the Executive - both have significant leeway in enacting significant ethics reforms that will likely sharply curtail the power of “special interests”, and a myriad options (including the one chosen by Edwards and Obama) remain open remain for lawmakers to not ‘choose’ to be influenced by ‘lobbyists’. Combating the influence of special interest would however require more widespread measures – especially as public opinion polls become the key determinants of candidate policy positions and as lobbyists’ influence in manipulating opinion through media or ‘astroturfing’ increases. Fewer options exist to combat that except perhaps a more active citizenry.

Last thoughts - “Democratic Senator Max Baucus, the new chair of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, is offering special interests a chance to go skiing and snowmobiling with him - $2,000-dollars a head, or $5,000-dollars from a political action committee.” reports ABC 7. (pdf)

Citation -

“Gouging the Government”: Why a Federal Contingency Fee Lobbying Prohibition is Consistent With First Amendment Freedoms”. 58 Vanderbilt Law Review 1885. Meredith A. Capps. (2005)