Did you know Barack Obama proposed marriage to a woman before he married Michelle? For quite a few years, Obama’s love was Sheila Miyoshi Jager, now a professor at Oberlin College.
.. In early 1987, when Obama was 25, she sensed a change. “He became. . . so very ambitious” quite suddenly, she told Garrow. “I remember very clearly when this transformation happened, and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he already had his sights on becoming president.”
… Discussions of race and politics suddenly overwhelmed Sheila and Barack’s relationship. “The marriage discussions dragged on and on,” but now they were clouded by Obama’s “torment over this central issue of his life…race and identity,” Jager recalls. The “resolution of his black identity was directly linked to his decision to pursue a political career,” she said.
In Garrow’s telling, Obama made emotional judgments on political grounds. A close mutual friend of the couple recalls Obama explaining that “the lines are very clearly drawn. . . . If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.
.. “When it comes to fulfilling his campaign promise to appoint strong, principled judges, Trump is knocking it out of the park.”
Why Don’t Wealthy Conservatives Who Promote Marriage Marry the Poor?
the argument that declining economic prospects for men near the bottom and improved economic prospects for women across the board has facilitated more relationship quits than before.
.. If the best arrangement you can put together says the 25th percentile broke even in a period where the economy more than doubled (which based on my series would suggest that below-25th percentile saw declines), it’s still clear that the economy left these men behind, which is perfectly adequate for the declining-attractiveness theory since mate attractiveness is relative to the society you find yourself
.. All of which is to say: Behind the veil, you’d prefer an institutional regime that didn’t effectively imprison you in bad relationships, lest you find yourself in one as a child or adult.
.. Douthat’s paragraph speaks of marriage and relationships in general terms, but in fact they are very specific things that contain within them very different people. Of late, conservatives have rallied behind the pithy line that people need to “preach what they practice” regarding marriage. But, in fact, people of Douthat’s ilk do not practice what they preach. They preach the importance of marrying poor and working class people, but they don’t actually marry any of these people.
They certainly could marry someone from those classes. Many a person would take up a spouse who makes six figures banging out a few blog posts each week. But they choose not to.After rigging the institutions to capture the majority of the national income and basically all of the national wealth, segregating themselves residentially, intermarrying almost solely in their rich enclaves, and even sealing off their schools from being accessed by the unwashed masses, these rich social conservatives turn around and implore others to marry people that they wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, people they can’t even bring themselves to make even the most minimal of community with.If this all was really that important to them (the most pressing issue in the entire country by their accounts), why don’t they marry any of these people? What is it about them that they find too unattractive to couple with? One really has to wonder.
The Republican Health Care Crackup
By 2010, however, both the Obama administration and the Tea Party opposition were out of step with the times. They both still thought the big political issues in American life were universal health care and the size of government.
.. In fact, another set of problems had magnified and come to overshadow the old set. This new set included:
First, the crisis of opportunity. People with fewer skills were seeing their wages stagnate, the labor markets evaporate. Second, the crisis of solidarity. The social fabric, especially for those without a college degree, was disintegrating — marriage rates plummeting, opiate abuse rates rising. Third, the crisis of authority. Distrust in major institutions crossed some sort of threshold. People had so lost trust in government, the media, the leadership class in general, that they were willing to abandon truth and decorum and embrace authoritarian thuggery to blow it all up.
.. If President Obama had made these crises the center of his administration, instead of the A.C.A., Democrats wouldn’t have lost Congress and the White House. If the Tea Party had understood the first two of these crises, there would have been no opening for Donald Trump.
.. he has no positive agenda for addressing them. He can tap into working class anxiety negatively, by harnessing hostility toward immigrants, foreigners and the poor. But he can’t come up with a positive agenda to make working class life more secure.
.. a group of Freedom Caucus Republicans who still think the major problems in the country today can be cured with tax and spending cuts. We have a Trump administration that has populist impulses but no actual populist safety net policies. And we’ve got a Republican leadership in Congress mired in Reagan-era thinking
.. The Republican plan will fuel cynicism. It’s being pushed through in an elitist, anti-democratic, middle of the night rush. It seems purposely designed to fail. The penalties for those who don’t purchase insurance are so low they seem sure to guarantee Republican-caused death spirals in the weaker markets.
.. But now you’ve got millions of people growing up in social and cultural chaos and not getting the skills they need to thrive in a technological society. This is not a problem you can solve with tax cuts.
.. voters around the world have demonstrated that they’re quite willing to destroy market mechanisms to get the security they crave. They will trash free trade, cut legal skilled immigration, attack modern finance and choose state-run corporatism over dynamic free market capitalism.
.. If you are pro-market, you have to be pro-state. You can come up with innovative ways to deliver state services, like affordable health care, but you can’t just leave people on their own.
When Factory Jobs Vanish, Men Become Less Desirable Partners
Declines in manufacturing employment are shaping the structure of the American family.
They found that manufacturing declines significantly affected the supply of what they termed “marriageable” men—men who are not drinking or using drugs excessively and who have a job. In areas impacted by a trade shock, the numbers of marriageable men relative to women declined, because men had migrated elsewhere, joined the military, or fallen out of the labor force. Fewer men were working in manufacturing, which tended to mean their wages were lower than they had been when manufacturing had more of a presence in their area. And their wages were not significantly higher than women’s wages, which they had been during the heyday of manufacturing.
.. This made the men less appealing to the women, the authors suggest—so there were fewer marriages. They find that trade shocks reduced the share of young women who were married, and reduced the number of births per woman.
.. It’s more evidence that there was something special about manufacturing in America in the middle of the 20th century, because the sector provided good-paying jobs for people without a college education. Those jobs allowed people a comfortable lifestyle, and when they vanish, families changed. “It does appear that places where manufacturing is prevalent, it’s kind of a fulcrum, a cornerstone of a way of life where men have relatively stable, modestly high earnings and women are more likely to be married to them,”