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Worst Week inWashington
The Fix’s By Chris Cillizza
Sunday that “there is no doubt there are enough seats in play that could cause Republicans to gain control” of the House, he was, of course, stating the obvious. Political prognosticators of all sorts — including your humble Fix —
I
have long been talking, writing and talking some more about the fact that a Republican takeover of the House is possible (if not probable) this fall.
But sometimes in Washington, frankness isn’t a popular trait. And, boy, did Gibbs learn that the hard way. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) led a closed-door meeting of Democratic members that amounted to an extended Gibbs smack- down — the proceedings of which inevitably were leaked to the media. In a subsequent interview, Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (N.J.) nicely summed up the sentiment in the room. “What the hell do they think we’ve been do- ing the last 12 months?” he said of the White House. “We’re the ones who have been taking the tough votes.” Pelosi’s meeting was followed by another meeting — this one be- tween House Democrats and President Obama — that Gibbs described on Thursday as “quite productive.” Ahem. Republicans, meanwhile, could barely contain their glee at seeing their message — “We can take the House back, really we can” — sec- onded by the official White House mouthpiece. House Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) said that Gibbs had thrown House Democrats “under the bus,” while National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (Tex.) played a tape — how quaint! — of Gibbs’ comments at a gathering of House Republicans. Robert Gibbs, for saying what everyone was thinking, you had the “Worst Week in Washington.” Congrats, or something.
Have a candidate for the Worst Week in Washington? E-mail
chris.cillizza@
wpost.com with your nominees.
t took only 17 words for White House press secretary Robert Gibbs to set off the circular firing squad. When Gibbs told “Meet the Press” host David Gregory last
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SUNDAY, JULY 18, 2010
specting black American would ever openly join that conservative movement or support its goals. Right? I’m exaggerating a bit, but really I’m just channeling a debate that erupted last week. At its annual convention in St. Louis, the NAACP passed a resolution de- nouncing the “racist element” within the tea party movement. “We don’t have a problem with the tea party’s existence,” explained President Benjamin Jealous. “We have an issue with their acceptance and welcoming of white supremacists into their organizations.” Sarah Palin, the highest-profile tea party supporter, wrote on her Facebook
It’s time for a black tea party I
by Sophia A. Nelson
have never participated in a “tea party” demonstration or rally. Nor do I think I ever will. The reason is simple: I am black and I am proud and no self-re-
racially charged and denigrating signs at tea party rallies. I do not support those who spew racial venom, especially when incendiary words come from leaders within the movement, as they did last week from Mark Williams, national spokesman for the Tea Party Express. And I abhor and reject anyone who would spit upon or yell racial epithets at an esteemed public servant such as Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), and other black members of Congress, as tea party sup- porters reportedly have done. But that visceral hatred is not the en-
tirety of the movement. I admire the principle of protesting peaceably against your government. I, too, am fed up by vast unemployment, underemployment, and making do with smaller paychecks and increasingly burdensome taxes. Like many protesters, I agree that the govern- ment has gotten too large and has a say over too much of our lives. I think that our nation’s immigration laws should be
I support many of the core goals of the tea party movement, not as a black American — but as an American
page last week that “the charge that tea party Americans judge people by the col- or of their skin is false, appalling and is a regressive and diversionary tactic to change the subject at hand.” The whole discussion is a prime exam- ple of how we have, once again, become a very polarized nation, both politically and racially. I’m supposed to be on the NAACP’s side of this argument. I am a member of the nation’s oldest black sorority and the founder of a national organization that focuses on professional black women. And I have a book coming out early next year on the unique challenges facing col- lege-educated black women in the Unit- ed States. I have a lot to lose by lining up with the wrong crowd: I could be pegged an Uncle Tom or a sellout. And so I have been fearful and silent. But I am increas- ingly uncomfortable staying quiet. The fact is that I support many of the
WILLIAM B. PLOWMAN/NBC VIA GETTY IMAGES
core goals of the tea party movement, not as a black American — but as an Amer- ican. Let me be very clear about what I agree with and what I find intolerable. I do not support those who hate my presi- dent because he is a black man — and that kind of hatred is often displayed on
enforced most vigorously. And I agree that capitalism and a strong national de- fense are the best ways for this great country to continue to thrive, defeat ter- rorism and lead as the world’s sole su- perpower. These are sentiments that many of my black friends, neighbors and family members share. Although I may be virtu- ally alone among my black peers in say- ing this publicly, I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. In a recent USA Today/Gallup poll, only 77 percent of people who identified as members of the tea party described themselves as white. And talking to my friends — fellow black professionals — I hear the same kinds of things: Our taxes are too high, I had to tap into my retirement account, I could lose my home if my husband loses his job, I worry about what kind of future we are leaving our kids with all of this na- tional debt. Even people who disagree with me
don’t think that a public war of words over race is the best way forward. “How is condemning the actions of a few white fools in the tea party going to help put food on the table of unemployed black folks?” a black lawyer friend in his late
30s — a staunch Democrat — asked at a recent dinner party. He didn’t see how an NAACP resolution was going to create jobs in cities where black men are experi- encing unemployment at Great Depres- sion levels. “The NAACP needs to come up with something better than that move,” he said. Another friend at the dinner, a black woman who works for a member of Con- gress, agreed. “We need to wake up. Black folks are hurting bad in this cur- rent economy, as are many whites and Hispanics. We better start finding a way to work together and stop all of this ra- cial name-calling,” she said. “We need a Rainbow Coalition tea party to set this thing off before we all end up getting dumped in the Boston Harbor.” I agree. I got lambasted last week after I wrote a commentary for the Root sug- gesting that blacks may want to give the tea party movement a second look on substance and perhaps even emulate it. We should, I argued, start our own tea party as a way to protest the historic loss of black wealth since 2007. This did not go over well. How could I take those rac- ist people seriously, some asked. Well, I don’t take racists seriously. I am alarmed by the racial animus and incivil- ity that continues to build among our cit- izenry — on all sides. But such voices do not represent the entire tea party move- ment. And it’s the movement’s ideas I take seriously. To really move forward, we don’t need provocative proclamations and condem- nations. We need the NAACP and the tea party leadership alike to come up with tangible solutions, ideas that lessen some of the economic and social pain we are all experiencing. So why can’t black Americans have a
tea party movement of our own? That is, why can’t we get energized by politicians and proposals that would put people back to work and reduce the burden of taxes? I am all for social programs that feed and help people in rough times, but we need to do more than keep heads above water. No community is more in need of this
message than the black community. It’s too bad that the bigots and the bad ac- tors in the tea party movement have drowned out the substance of a message we all should hear.
Sophia A. Nelson is a contributor to the Root and BET. She is the author of the forthcoming book “Black. Female. Accomplished. Redefined.”
Spoiled rotten, a timeless complaint I
by Alfie Kohn
f the subject is kids and how they’re raised, it seems our culture has ex- actly one story to tell. Anyone who reads newspapers, magazines or blogs knows how it goes: Parents
today either can’t or won’t set limits for their children. Instead of disciplining them, they hover and coddle and bend over backward to protect their self- esteem. The result is that we’re raising a generation of undisciplined narcissists who expect everything to go their way, and it won’t be pretty when their sense of entitlement crashes into the un- forgiving real world. Read 10 articles or books on this topic and you’ll find yourself wondering whether one person wrote all of them, so uniform is the rhetoric. The central premise is that the problem’s dimen- sions are unprecedented: What’s hap- pening now contrasts sharply with the days when parents weren’t afraid to hold kids to high standards or allow them to experience failure. That’s why this generation is so self- centered. Take it from journalist Peter Wyden, the cover of whose book depicts a child lounging on a divan eating grapes while Mom fans him and Dad shades him from the sun: It has become “tougher and tougher to say ‘no’ [to chil- dren] and make it stick,” he insists. Or listen to the lament of a parent who blames child development experts for the fact that her kids now seem to be- lieve that “they have priority over every- thing and everybody.”
Or consider a pointed polemic in the Atlantic. Sure, the author concedes, kids have always been pleasure-seekers, but longtime teachers report that what we’re now witnessing “is different from any- thing we have ever seen in the young be- fore.” Forget about traditional values: Things come so easily to today’s entitled children that they fail to develop any self-discipline. Powerful stuff. Except that those three
indictments were published in 1962, 1944 and 1911, respectively. The revelation that people were say- ing almost exactly the same things a cen- tury ago ought to make us stop talking and sit down — hard. So let’s consider three questions: Are parents unduly yielding or overprotective? Are kids to- day unusually narcissistic? And does the former cause the latter?
T BOB STAAKE E
veryone has an anecdote about a parent who hovered too close or tolerated too much. But is it repre-
sentative of American parents in gener- al? Does research tell us how pervasive permissiveness really is? My efforts to track down national data — by combing both scholarly and popular databases as well as asking leading experts in the field — have yielded absolutely nothing. Scholars have no idea how many parents these days are permissive, or punitive, or responsive to their children’s needs without being permissive or punitive. Thus, no one has a clue whether par- enting has changed over the years — and, if so, in what direction. Researchers have shown that various practices are more likely to produce certain out- comes, but they shrug when asked how prevalent those practices are. Similarly, “you will find next to no scientific data on helicopter parenting,” says Keene State College psychologist Neil Mont- gomery, using the popular term for pa- rental overinvolvement. What we do know about discipline is
that corporal punishment remains ex- tremely popular in this country. In a 1995 Gallup poll, 94 percent of parents of preschoolers admitted to having struck their children within the previous year, a fact that’s not easy to square with claims that parents have become softer or more humane. There’s also endless demand from par- ents for advice on getting kids to do what they’re told. Some of the recom-
mended methods have shifted over the years, but the goal is still compliance. A verbal reward such as “Good job!” is just the mirror image of punishment — a tool for eliciting obedience. The same is true of much “overparenting”: It’s an exercise in control. Yet both are often portrayed as signs of indulgence. When the conversation turns to what the kids themselves are like, we find sep- arate complaints sloppily lumped to- gether: They’re rude, lacking in moral standards, materialistic, defiant, self- centered, excessively pleased with them- selves and more. What are interchangeable, in style and substance, are the polemics them- selves — books with titles such as “Over- indulged Children,” “Spoiling Child- hood,” “The Myth of Self-Esteem,” “Pam- pered Child Syndrome,” “The Omnipotent Child,” “Generation Me,” “The Narcissism Epidemic,” and count- less articles in the popular media. Trust me: If you’ve read one of these, you’ve read them all. Like the “permissive parents” trope, the notion that kids are full of them- selves and out of control is decades, if not centuries, old — despite the critics’ assertion that things are worse than ever. Jean Twenge, who wrote the last two books on that list, establishes her conservative bona fides with broad at- tacks on anything that deviates from back-to-basics education and old-fash- ioned parenting. But unlike her peers, she has actually collected some data —
which have received widespread and largely uncritical media attention. Along with fellow psychologist W.
Keith Campbell, Twenge has looked at surveys of young people conducted over several decades and reported that recent groups say they like themselves some- what more, are more confident and score higher on questionnaires intended to measure narcissism than earlier groups.
But other researchers doubt these
findings, raising multiple concerns about Twenge’s methodology. Kali Trzes- niewski at the University of Western On- tario and Brent Roberts at the University of Illinois (together with their col- leagues) went on to conduct their own analyses — Roberts drew on additional data — and discovered no meaningful differences across generations. Why, then, are we so willing to believe
that kids today are excessively self- confident or self-centered? Social psy- chologists say we selectively notice and remember examples that confirm our as- sumptions — which is why anecdotal evidence is so unreliable: Look, there’s a parent who’s wimpy. And my cousin knows a 20-year-old who refuses to work hard. I knew it was true! But why would we gravitate to these
beliefs in the first place? In a recent scholarly article, Roberts and others ex- plained that complaints about a “Gener- ation Me” — Twenge’s snide label — re- flect people’s age, not the age they live in. “When older people are told that
younger people are getting increasingly narcissistic, they may be prone to agree because they confuse the claim for gen- erational change with the fact that younger people are simply more narcis- sistic than they are,” Roberts and his col- leagues write. “The confusion leads to an increased likelihood that older individu- als will agree with the Generation Me ar- gument despite its lack of empirical sup- port.” In short, they argue, “every generation is Generation Me” — until it grows up.
here’s no evidence, then, that to- day’s parents are more permissive than parents of yesteryear, or that
today’s young people are more narcissis- tic. But even if there were, no one has come close to showing that one causes the other. In fact, a pair of recent studies cast se- rious doubt on that proposition. The first, published in Pediatrics last May, discovered that there is indeed a paren- tal practice associated with children who later become demanding and easily frustrated. But it’s not indulgent par- enting. It’s spanking.
And in a small unpublished study of
the effects of helicopter parenting on college students, Keene State’s Mont- gomery did not discover any sense of en- titlement or tendency to take advantage of people among students who were closely monitored by their parents; to the contrary, such students tended to be somewhat anxious — and also had posi- tive qualities, such as “the capacity to love, feel supported and seek out social connections.” Neither logic nor evidence seems to
support the widely accepted charge that we’re too easy on our children. Yet that assumption continues to find favor across the political spectrum. It seems that we’ve finally found something to bring the left and the right together: an unsubstantiated knock on parents, an unflattering view of kids and a dubious belief that the two are connected.
Alfie Kohn’s books include “Unconditional Parenting” and “No Contest: The Case Against Competition.”
on
washingtonpost.com
Alfie Kohn will discuss this article on Monday at 11 a.m.
at
washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
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