Let's Talk
About Palin's
Family Challenges
September 6, 2008
Gov. Sarah Palin's commando muscle-flex in St. Paul Wednesday night eviscerated the argument that she might not be capable of handling the vice presidency and five children at the same time. Indeed, we were left with the distinct impression that on a slow day, she could clean up America, balance our budget with a little help from eBay, and win the Iditarod -- all with 10 kids tied to her back.
What Sarah Palin did not do, however, is put an end to the latest national conversation about "trying to have it all." Because the question we're all asking isn't can she do it, but why is she doing it? Mrs. Palin, you see, happens to be bucking a new national trend. Even as most mothers across America chuckle appreciatively about pit bulls and lipstick and applaud her bravado, they are making choices that look very un-Palinesque.
This week we've heard our feminist foremothers argue that any sentence mixing the words woman, kids and work is inappropriate -- heretical even. "A man wouldn't face this sort of scrutiny," they grumble darkly.
But Mrs. Palin and her career aspirations are not falling victim to a secret cabal of men trying, once again, to impose an impossible standard on women. And this is not a redux of the old Mommy Wars -- that stale, red herring of a debate between "career" moms and their "stay at home" counterparts.
Mrs. Palin is actually putting a spotlight on a new women's movement we call "Womenomics." Thanks to women's fast-growing market value we can finally live and work in a way that wins us time and avoids that agonizing choice of career or kids. Today as never before women can define success on their own terms.
Fed up with 50- and 60-hour weeks and a career ladder we didn't build and don't want to climb, women are looking for jobs that demand fewer and freer hours. We want to work but we also want quantity time, as well as quality time, with our children. Most of us no longer buy the onwards-and-upwards drive to the corner office (or in Mrs. Palin's case, the West Wing) at the cost of a fragmented family life. More and more, women are choosing a tapestry of family and work in which we define our own success in reasonable terms -- even if we sacrifice some "prestige."
In 1992, 57% of women with degrees wanted more responsibility at work, but by 2002 that figure had plummeted to 36%, according to the Family and Work Institute. Four out of five women want more flexibility at work and call it a top priority; 60% of us want to work part-time. What we're saying is we'll trade responsibility, title -- even paycheck -- for more time and more control. And we have company. Increasingly men say they too want more flexibility at work. Gen X and Gen Y won't even talk about sitting at a desk for 10 hours a day.
What makes this revolution possible is that it's grounded in hard-core economics. Women are the hottest commodity in the hunt for talent.
We're 58% of college graduates, we get graduate degrees in greater numbers than men. Companies are waking up to the fact that women are more than a politically correct nod to diversity. We help the bottom line. A recent 19-year study of 215 Fortune 500 firms found that companies that have more women in executive positions make more money. Companies with more women in senior management get higher valuations on the American Stock Exchange.
Overwhelmingly, women are using this professional clout to redefine work, not chain themselves to it. And companies, eager to keep us and terrified of the cost of replacing us, are responding. They've discovered that offering work-life balance actually increases productivity. There are accountants who get home at 3 p.m. every day but remain on the fast track. Top New York Law firms have part-time partners who are still players. Can investment banks be far behind?
This isn't really about whether Mrs. Palin can do the job with five children. Will she do it all well? That depends on your yardstick, at least on the home front. How much time is "enough" with your children, or at work, is an extremely personal decision. The point is we now have reasonable options -- it's not all or nothing. Our mother's generation may bemoan the fact that there is still a dearth of female CEOs, but our generation knows a big part of the reason why isn't that we can't get there, but that most of us don't want to make the sacrifices necessary, as the jobs are now defined, to get there.
It's important to understand why, then, Mrs. Palin has hit a nerve. It's not because she's a woman with children trying to do a man's job. It's because she's actually pushing the combination of professional and personal ambitions beyond the sensibilities of this generation of working moms. As women, we may be awed by her, but she's not necessarily a role model for so many professional women who now say they want to do it differently, that they don't want to do 150% of everything all of the time.
So what you are hearing is less condemnation than a collective gasp of amazement -- and exhaustion -- at the thought of juggling five children, one of them an infant, and the most extreme example of a job with little or no flexibility. It would make supermom feel feeble. And we should celebrate the fact that all of this can now be discussed openly.
It is not sexist to have this conversation. It is sexist not to.
Ms. Kay is a BBC anchor and reporter. Ms. Shipman is an ABC News reporter. They are the authors of "Womenomics: The Workplace Revolution That Will Change Your Life," due out next spring by HarperCollins.
Bush Owes His Successor
A Tough Finish on Foreign Policy
September 6, 2008
As the Bush administration enters its last months, its pursuit of a "legacy," especially in foreign policy, becomes ever more frenetic.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's travel schedule is packed. State Department "signing ceremonies" are blossoming, even for agreements that would not have attracted high-level attention just last year. Editorial writers are being quietly encouraged to laud administration successes.
While neither unique nor unexpected, the legacy frenzy masks what should be our real concern until Jan. 20, 2009: the risk of a vulnerable administration making significant, unforced errors and concessions that will burden America well into the future. As our attention turns to a presidential election in two short months, the U.S. is entering a period of vulnerability made more dangerous by the administration's provocative weakness.
Consider first what the State Department sees as one of its greatest successes: North Korea's nuclear weapons program. True to form, Pyongyang recently complained that the U.S. had not taken the final steps to remove it from our list of state sponsors of terrorism. Sadly, but also typically, State Department insiders believe that North Korea has a point, given the waterfall of concessions State has already made.
Pyongyang stopped disabling the crumbling Yongbyon reactor, braying that it might well undo steps already taken and put Yongbyon back in service. Surprisingly, State did not bend its flexible knee immediately, so the North did as it promised, moving -- even if only symbolically at first -- toward re-enabling the reactor. Many observers believe that Pyongyang is simply waiting for an Obama presidency to make the next round of concessions. That's possible, and is certainly a backup strategy. But the North's real aim is based on its reading of the Bush administration's psychology.
In their view, Secretary Rice fears the North Korean "success" slipping away and the deal itself threatened, if the North causes trouble because it remains on the terrorism list. Thus, as the administration's days dwindle down to a precious few, to quote a famous song line, Ms. Rice will inexorably grow more anxious to "save the deal."
In Pyongyang's judgment, this in turn will lead to "delisting," even though the North has come nowhere close to agreeing to the "complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement" of its nuclear program -- which was where the administration started six years ago.
Mr. Bush's course here is clear: He must not generate another Niagara of concessions to Kim Jong-il in his remaining months. If an Obama administration wants to start off by bending its knee to Pyongyang, don't do them a favor. And if a McCain administration is in the offing, don't cripple its possibilities by losing what little leverage the terrorism listing still provides us.
On Georgia, the administration, after a distressingly slow start, has at least now reached the proper rhetorical pitch. The real problem ahead is strengthening the resolve of our European allies. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's recent comment (politely described by the White House as "not rational") that we "created this conflict deliberately to create tension and help one of the candidates in the U.S. presidential campaign" will unfortunately resonate in certain Western European circles.
However, the first efforts to translate the president's rhetoric into action -- such as at NATO's recent foreign ministers' meeting -- have been disappointing. Ms. Rice did not even propose reversing NATO's earlier rejection (at the Bucharest summit in April) of Mr. Bush's proposal to put Georgia and the Ukraine formally on the path to NATO membership.
That rejection undoubtedly weighed heavily in Moscow's calculus to invade Georgia. It could be likened to Secretary of State Dean Acheson's failure to include South Korea within America's Pacific defense perimeter -- which was followed by North Korea's invasion of the South in June 1950.
NATO's meeting in December provides another opportunity to reverse the Bucharest mistake, and administration diplomacy should focus urgently on so doing. Washington must also take other decisive steps -- including withdrawing all proposals for missile defense and nuclear cooperation. We should also quickly enhance training and equipment programs in current NATO members bordering on or proximate to Russia. Visible U.S. diplomacy, such as the $1 billion Georgia reconstruction program, would go far in reversing the provocative weakness that fostered the debacle in Georgia -- and the risk of even greater Russian adventurism, both within the former Soviet Union and beyond.
Unfortunately, Ms. Rice's diplomacy is focused on castigating Israel's settlements on the West Bank, and her continued pursuit of a "peace process" begun at the Annapolis, Md., international conference last November. That process was doomed from the outset, given the ongoing collapse and dissolution of the Palestinian Authority. Mr. Bush's heart never seemed to be in this effort; now would certainly be a good time to abandon it, and the clear misallocation of scarce administration time and resources that process represents.
This is especially true as Iran continues its unimpeded pursuit of nuclear weapons. Any hope of a fourth Security Council sanctions resolution (let alone, finally, a meaningful one) disappeared in the dust kicked up by Russian tanks entering Georgia. U.S. diplomacy failed on Iran long ago, and the real issue now, for well or ill, is what, if anything, Israel decides to do militarily.
Mr. Bush has been Israel's greatest friend in the Oval Office, and he may now have one more chance to prove it. Instead of rejecting Israeli requests for support, as press reports indicate the Pentagon is doing, Washington should at least be quietly helping Israel increase its defensive readiness.
Pushing back North Korea, standing up to Russia, and supporting Israel against Iran: now there's a real Bush administration legacy. That is the President Bush who was actually elected in 2000, not the one now being lauded by the high minded for his second-term policy reversals. Those people are mostly interested in laying the foreign policy foundations of an Obama administration. Let's hope that President Bush hasn't left the building yet.
Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations" (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
The Jobless Jump
Friday's jobs report for August was dismal by any measure, with payrolls falling by 84,000, and another 58,000 jobs lost in downward revisions for June and July. Private sector job losses were even higher at 101,000 for the month, and overall job losses for 2008 now stand at about 600,000.
The cries of recession are naturally back in four-part political harmony, though those predictions have been wrong so far. We've been hearing that the economy is "already in recession" for at least a year, but there's only been one quarter of negative growth -- a reduction in GDP of 0.2% in the fourth quarter of 2007. The economy has been growing since, albeit too modestly to keep anyone happy.
The August job losses also need to be put into the context of the eight million new jobs created after the Bush tax cuts passed in May 2003 through 2007. At 6.1%, the jobless rate climbed from 5.7%, thanks in part to a surge in the size of the labor force and an expansion of federal jobless benefits. In September of 1996, when Bill Clinton was running for re-election, the jobless rate wasn't much lower at 5.5%.
If you're looking for silver linings, such as they are, average hourly earnings are still rising and have climbed at a 4.3% annual rate in the last quarter. Productivity growth has also been stronger than expected, which paradoxically hurts job creation as cautious companies squeeze out more efficiencies rather than add labor costs. The percentage of private companies adding jobs also popped up -- to 48.9% -- which is the highest in many months. So the economy seems to be muddling along, rather than slipping into recession. Given the magnitude of both the housing slump and the credit writeoffs on Wall Street, the fact that the U.S. economy has avoided a downturn so far can only be called remarkable.
The bad news is that there isn't much reason for businesses to start taking more risks. The credit crunch is continuing, amid uncertainty over the banking system and housing market. The Treasury's plan for a taxpayer backstop of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was supposed to reassure markets, but instead the uncertainty over the fate of the mortgage giants has so far only contributed to higher mortgage rates. Mark that down as another Beltway triumph.
Political uncertainty is also a negative, with the policy risks for 2009 still unknown. A Democratic sweep in November all but guarantees a huge tax increase, which won't restore animal spirits. Meanwhile, the jobless numbers will likely cause the Federal Reserve to maintain negative real interest rates even longer than it already has. This means greater risk of future inflation, and with it further declines in real incomes.
Amid this news, we couldn't help but notice yesterday's White House press release declaring that "the bipartisan economic growth package that President Bush signed into law is having its intended effect." The argument is that the economy would be worse were it not for the $150 billion in tax rebate checks. Thanks for the very small favor. The checks goosed consumer spending for a few months but without any permanent change to the incentives to work or invest.
As a political matter, any rebate impact is wearing off just as the fall election campaign begins. Most voters want to know where the economy is headed now, rather than that it could have been worse in the summer. Yesterday, Barack Obama was naturally blaming Republicans for the job losses, even though the failed "stimulus" was also his idea. He even wants to do it all over again.
Memo to Republicans: This is what happens when you settle for political stimulus gimmicks rather than tax cuts that are immediate, permanent and at the margin. Memo to John McCain: You'll need a better argument than "these are tough times" and "I'll fight for your future."
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