Herman Cain Still Exists

And I continue to have inadequately informed opinions about what that means.

I keep hearing that nobody really knows who his advisors are, but I'm not really sure what that means. What exactly is "the Cain campaign." If you try to call them...does anybody answer the phone? Who's doing the fundraising? Are any of these people professionals? I find the idea that they might not be intriguing. Obviously, there's an entire industry built up around taking dim-but-likable Republican governors and grooming them for national campaigns. Has Herman Cain been denied this resource by the powers that be? Or has he rejected it? If he has rejected it, is it because he's crazy or is it because he has no actual interest in winning the nomination? And then it makes me wonder about how the process works for other candidates. I mean, what would George W. Bush's tax plan looked like if he had been forced to come up with one on his own with the help of a guy he knew who had a degree in accounting? Very possibly much more rational than the 9-9-9 plan, but mostly it's just a ludicrous scenario. So much of the way modern politics works is based on the idea of the candidate as a product, manufactured and sold to us by a larger organization.

Or maybe Herman Cain has exactly the same set of organizational resources that any candidate would be expected to have at this point, but you just can't control a guy who's determined to give his opinions on "Ubeki-beki-beki-stan," any more than you can make Sarah Palin anything but Sarah Palin. Except I secretly kind of admire the Ubeki-beki-beki-stan line...since it's the only thing I know about Herman Cain's foreign policy views, I choose to believe it's his way of expressing his belief in a profound refocusing of the agenda on purely domestic matters.

Holy Fuck Herman Cain.

a.k.a. who wants to watch me tip toe very carefully around racial issues?

So Herman Cain is polling pretty well these days. Really well, in the last Zogby poll. Nate Silver's latest article about his prospects is interesting, and the one he wrote back in May is even more interesting, and I'm in the awkward situation of admitting that I really know next to nothing about the guy. I don't know whether to file him away in my head along with Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, or Bob Dole. It seems like Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic has taken kind of a special interest in him, which is both a good and a bad sign. Friedersdorf used to guest blog for Andrew Sullivan quite a bit, and I generally was impressed with a lot of his writing...but less impressed with how impressed he was by Ron Paul. But yeah, I'm about a mile away from trying to guess exactly what kind of Republican Herman Cain is.

Which leaves me with the obvious, which is that he's black. I'm pretty sure I have no sympathy for the idea that there's something automatically wrong with being a black Republican...he has as much right to disagree with me about the discentivising aspects of a comprehensive social safety net as anybody else. Apparently he gets a lot of play out of claiming that blacks who vote for the Democratic party have been brainwashed, which is pretty off-putting, but at the same time I don't know that I'm the type to condemn someone for being hyperpartisan. So I dunno. I guess the question I have at the moment is what exactly this says about the Republican Party, which I am more or less familiar with. Or if not Herman Cain specifically, how about the fact that since Obama won the Democratic nomination, the two most high profile people who have been selected by the Republicans on the national stage have been Sarah Palin, and Michael Steele (I guess technically Boehner breaks this trend, but I'm going to ignore him for convenience's sake) and if Herman Cain does manage to bag the nomination, he will be the culmination of a very interesting pattern. Sarah Palin's nomination was pretty obviously an embarrassment...a distilled version of every cynical thought that the Republican party has about tokenism and affirmative action, come back to bite them in the ass. For a while I thought Michael Steele was basically a repetition of the same pattern, but I've kind of revised that opinion after seeing him on the Daily Show after his chairmanship. He actually comes across as a pretty intelligent and competent guy, for a Republican. Obviously it's not a coincidence that the Republican party followed the election of the first black president by immediately electing their first black chairman, and if Herman Cain gets nominated this year I don't doubt it will be partially because of sentiments like this...but I guess my question is: if that means the 2012 Presidential Debates wind up being between our current black President and a black conservative Republican nomine, is that a bad thing? Or is this how change happens?

(Obviously it's a bad thing if Herman Cain turns out to be a farce of a candidate on the level of Sarah Palin, or if he has no interest in being anything as a candidate aside from the perfect vehicle for conservative resentment of Barack Obama's success, but so far I don't see much reason to assume that's the case).

Structural Unemployment

So apparently we're supposed to debate whether the current rates of unemployment are a symptom of a structural problem or a cyclical problem, but for some reason that debate always just makes me end up feeling like the Chamber of Commerce, and the subset of people who get paid to write about their opinions, each contain a whole lot of assholes. Also, I have a hard time seeing it as an either/or proposition. Overall unemployment is high, and employers are taking this opportunity to outsource as much of the risk and cost associated with training workers as they can by insisting that the training be completed on your own time and your own dime before they'll even consider interviewing you. Never mind that individual workers (or really, want-to-be workers) aren't very well equipped to deal with the potential downside of investing too much in the wrong kind of training and are operating at a significant information disadvantage when it comes to knowing which kind of training is most needed, individual workers are expendable and employers don't really care if they find a place in the workforce or not.

I guess the flip side of this is that the increase in labor force mobility in the past few decades has cut into the advantages to employers of investing in training. And I'm not sure what the actual solution would be. But I think it's pretty clearly a problem with the way the current system works, and one that makes me grind my teeth every time some fat cat decides to whine that he'd love to hire some people if only he could find qualified applicants.

Blue Dogs, dingy skies.

Woohoo! First mention of the Merced area on the Atlantic Cities site. Oh wait, it's kind of negative...

Why Does California's Central Valley Have Such Bad Air Pollution?

Well, not negative negative.  Not third most miserable place to live in America negative. Apparently it's even getting better! But I will admit, I have noticed the smog, and I do think it is a genuine problem. Mostly it bothers me from an aesthetic point of view. I want so badly to claim that the Central Valley has a natural beauty that's on par with just about any other place that you can name...and it does, but too many days there's an ugly haze obscuring that. The local news stories that I've read on the same topic (which of course I didn't think to bookmark at the time and now I don't really know that I could find them, so don't expect a citation) have taken great pains to point out that a good deal of smog here is created elsewhere, even suggesting that China is a making major contributions, and that therefore it would be unfair to expect locals to do anything about it. Apparently some recently changed laws on agricultural emissions are already having an effect though, so that's encouraging, and I guess if the price of gasoline keeps marching upwards, fewer people will be choosing long commutes in oversized cars. For my own teeny tiny part of it, I've started taking the bus to and from work most days. It's not quite as glamorous as my initial plan to ride my bike, but it's about as fast.

Historical Fact of the Day

In 1895, most of the graduating class at Amherst College voted for a guy named Dwight Morrow as the most likely to succeed in their year. Dwight Morrow, on the other hand, voted for a guy named Calvin Coolidge.

And now you know.

(Random trivia courtesy of "The Tormented President, Calvin Coolidge, Death, and Clinical Depression" by Robert E. Gilbert. I appear to now be reading through the UC Merced library in order of the Dewey Decimal system)

Back of the envelope social science.

I mentioned last time that the number of people employed by Merced's top ten biggest employers seemed kind of strikingly low to me. Specifically, in a town of 78,958 people, only 10,179 have jobs at one of the places in town that employ more than 311 people. It seems like that could have some ramifications for the local economy as a whole.

Just because it seems especially low to me doesn't mean that it is though. It's not like I'm any kind of leading expert on small city economies. But I can become one with less than 30 minutes and Wikipedia! Right?

So, looking for other "small cities" to compare Merced to I come up with Chico (86,187), Redding (89,861) and Santa Barbara (88,410). I'm sticking in California because theoretically there might be an advantage to not comparing across state lines and thus keeping the majority of laws constant, and realistically there's a handy dandy list of California cities in order of population right there on Wikipedia and I have a better chance of being able to tell the independent small cities from the large suburbs in my home state than I would anywhere else. Unfortunately there's only four cities that are anywhere close to Merced's size in California that don't seem like suburbs to me, so this whole exercise is pretty worthless. Especially since the fourth one is Napa, which doesn't seem to have the top ten employers info that I'm looking for, and might be too close to the Bay Area anyways.

But based on the shitty data that I do have, evidence seems to be that Merced is pretty completely normal. Chico's top ten employers provide 7409 jobs. Redding's provide 7560. Santa Barbara is the one that stands out with 22,450 jobs, 6200 of which are from UCSB alone, which I guess is a good sign for Merced's future. I'm not really sure why Santa Barbara County employs many more people within Santa Barbara than any of the other cities (4000). The population density is pretty much in line with the other places, except for Redding, and both Merced and Redding are county seats too. The number of employees at Santa Barbara City College seems odd, too. Assuming (based on nothing) that it's a pretty average sized community college with twenty to thirty thousand students, that's one employee for every ten students served. Maybe in Santa Barbara everyone gets their own personal garbage man and even community college students get the finest in personalized instruction? But that's a mystery for another day.

(In other news, the Atlantic just launched theatlanticcities.com, which I'm kind of excited about. Except I'm guessing Merced isn't really on their radar of important urban areas to cover...)

((Also, Matt Yglesias totally backing me up that an economy riddled with small-scale employers might be something to watch out for.))

Third Most Miserable Place in America

I don't really have the frame of reference to be able to vouch for this personally, but there does seem to be a perception that there is something superlative about Merced. And more often than not, superlatively negative. The crime rate, the unemployment rate, and the poverty rate all stand out as big drags on the city's appeal. My goal has been to understand this better, because my own instinct is that this is a perfectly nice place to live and obviously I have some personal investment in that theory. My latest discovery poking around statistics and local newspapers has been a very simple fact: Merced is very young. The average age here is 28.1 and 46.1% of people are under the age of 24. Under the age of 24 is also a pretty good description of the individuals involved in a lot of the crime stories in the local paper. Throughout society, there's a strong correlation between youth and crime or violence in general (I should probably find a citation for this but I'm feeling lazy).

What's striking is that Merced is young, even compared to nearby places like Modesto (median age 34.2). Fresno and Stockton are only slightly older, at 29.3 and 30.8* respectively, but you don't generally hear anyone singing those places' praises either. For comparison, the median age in San Jose is 35.2 and in San Francisco it's 38.5. 36.8 is the national median. I think the crime, unemployment, and poverty statistics for the area need to be understood in that light.

The next thing I need to figure out is what it means that, in a city of almost 80,000 people, the top ten employers only account for a little over 10,000 jobs. I guess this wouldn't seem so very odd except that Wal-Mart is number ten at 311 jobs in the area. Where does everyone else work? The kind of small mom & pop businesses that get exempted from every major piece of pro-labor legislation? What are the ramifications of that in the community? Also, I can't help but notice that the real big employers in the area are the county, the city, and the schools...all told it adds up to more than 7000 of those 10,000 jobs at the mercy of falling tax revenue and statewide budget cuts. No wonder it's not a great time to be looking for a job here.