Let’s start at the beginning, one of the major knocks on the Democrats and liberals is that they are soft on national security and have a doe-eyed view on foreign policy. They are seen as a group of kumbaya singing, “why can’t we all just get along” hippies that think the world could be made into a better place if we just practice some soft diplomacy. This label makes me sick to my stomach, because it’s the Conservative Hawks that have a simple minded view of the world; Dick Cheney and his pals at the Weekly Standard are war-bent ideologues who believe in unilateral heavy handed diplomacy and preventative wars that make us less safe and more hated around the world. That being said, unfortunately it’s the Democrats that have historically lost the foreign policy debate.

Up until now that is.  The last five years have proven just how much damage a Republican foreign policy approach can have in a short time. Their unilateralism has alienated us from the rest of the world. The Iraq debacle has proven the utter stupidity of a preventive war. Also, the administrations’ callous attitude towards funding VA hospitals has left a lot of military families out in the cold. Did I mention the torture memos fiasco? Needless to say, this less then stellar track record has left Republicans without one of their most powerful attacks on Democrats. And that’s a big hit, since strong foreign policy is a full third of the GOP platform along with social and fiscal conservatism.

All this changed with Dick’s one masterful stroke. By making the claim that Obama has made America less safe, he has set the GOP up for the ultimate “I told you so”, one that could ultimately bring them back to power. Unfortunately, terrorism has become all too common in today’s society and will definitely happen again, considering we are in the midst of two wars, a rising religious extremism, and the increasing ease of travel. If it happens under a Democratic watch, it will swing the foreign policy pendulum back to the Hawks and the GOP could ride that all the way back to a majority or even a presidency.

“Not fair” you say? “It was Bush who could have stopped 9/11 and didn’t” you proclaim. “It’s the Iraq war, entered under a false presence that was coaxed out of tortured detainees, which made us less safe. Needlessly killing thousands of soldiers.” You bemoan. “Waterboarding isn’t practiced by Israel in ticking bomb situations and they live with terrorism everyday.” You exclaim. “After Abu Ghraib, all harsh interrogation techniques were stopped by all agencies. So from 2005 to 2009 did Cheney make us less safe by stopping these practices?” you ask.

And that’s how Dick Cheney put the Democrats on the defensive. Now I’m not saying he will ultimately win this debate, but it’s definitely the best hand the Republicans had to play and he was the perfect man to play it.

I’m sure that most you unemployed folks have been doing all of this and to no avail. The only thing I haven’t done is put on a suit and go door-to-door with my resume in hand.  What annoys me is that there is little advice that is specific to a recession. For example; everyone says that you should network and that it’s the greatest way to get a job. But what I’ve noticed is that when you sit down for an informational interview or just a plain phone call to a distant contact, all you get is sympathy and the, “I’ll stay on the lookout for something.” In this difficult time people don’t offer to take your resume and shop it around because they don’t want to get your hopes up. So all you’re left with is condolences and a future contact. Sure these people would love to help you out, but they can’t, and so they won’t for fear of letting you down.

Don’t get me wrong, all this advice is great and I definitely became a better job candidate as a result of soaking it all in. But now, everyone is looking for a way to get ahead and since everyone is following these sound suggestions, it doesn’t give anyone a leg up. I feel that the standard job seeking advice is actually more suited for people who are still employed. That’s the perfect time to expand your LinkedIn network, to establish a presence in the blogosphere and develop an expertise in a certain area, to reach out to employees of companies you are interested in and facilitate a healthy relationship with them.

However, if you haven’t done any of that and find yourself standing in your previous employers’ parking lot with all your now useless work shit, it seems obnoxious to ask that person who’s fumbling for his keys to develop a blog presence over the course of 6 months and then to leverage these new connections into some sort of job.

The truth about the job search in today’s economy is that it’s all about patience and luck. Once you’ve become the best possible presentable candidate and you’ve leveraged all your connections all you can do is keep chugging along and hope for something to pop up. As they say, it only takes one person to hire you.

First things first, there are several reasons why anyone who has been unemployed for a while should be able to talk about his or her experiences in a positive way. It gives you something to talk about at your interviews. It will show them that you’re a self-starter and that you’re interested, motivated, and passionate. It also gives you something to talk about with friends, so you aren’t always sulking around them and have interesting things to say. Finally, if you have something positive to talk about you’re probably doing something positive that you might actually like and that makes you feel good about yourself, connects you with the world, and gives your life some semblance of structure.

 Here are some suggestions that I have found helpful in my pursuit of filling that pesky resume gap:

1)      Coaching- If you played high school sports, you have something to contribute to a team. Coaches are always overloaded and need all the help they can get. It’s not to difficult to volunteer at a local high school and then ask if you can take the title of assistant coach. You never know, you might even get a few thousand bucks out of it.

2)      Political Campaigns. There will be an election somewhere near you coming soon. These local elections always need more help and you might even get a more important position then just volunteer cold caller.

3)      Join a Society or Nonprofit. There are plenty of them around and you can actually take an organizing role. Something that will show that you are responsible and dedicated and not just a simple volunteer.

4)      Be a simple Volunteer. You can volunteer in any field, if you’re a marketing assistant; there are plenty of non-profits who would love your services. If you’re an IT consultant, I’m sure there are websites to be made for the price of on the house.

5)      Audit a class. You can learn the thing you’ve always wanted to learn, or gain knowledge in a field that will directly help you in your future job.

6)      Take certificate test or an entrance exam. This is always useful to have.

7)      Take up blogging. Become a social media expert, most companies would like to have someone like that and if you can say that you know the difference between RSS, StumbleUpon and Diggit, it could give you an edge.

8)      Organize a group around something you care about. Regardless of how small it is, you can still talk about the group you founded and how much fun you’ve had doing and how much you’ve learned.

9)      Camp Counselor. Summer is around the corner and there are plenty of kids that need to be looked after.  

 There are plenty of other ideas and ways to go about being unemployed. However, for me personally, I’ve been able to add more to my resume in the last four months then I ever thought was possible by following some of that advice. Also, when you have lots of things to talk about other people start viewing you in a positive way that could pay dividends down the line. They think, “Wow, what an impressive person, I would have probably just sat around and sulked all day.” Later on they could recommend you to someone they know. However, if you just have the old, “I’ve been going to the gym, catching up on TV shows, and read that Abe Lincoln biography,” people, especially interviewers, will be very underwhelmed. Have you had similar experiences? What innovative ways have you found to fill that resume gap?

Yes, these statements are racist and are inappropriate in any setting, unless you’re at your local KKK meeting. Yes these statements, when broadcast over the radio, breed hatred amongst susceptible people and therefore make the world a worse place. With all that being said, I still don’t think his future firing will accomplish anything.

 First of all, there is a huge market for this media and therefore he will find himself a new job very quickly and someone equally as ignorant will take his timeslot at WTKK. Severin not being at 96.9 will not change anything in anybody’s life, except that Bostonians will have to listen to someone less talented than him.

 Second. While these particular statements were very straight forward with their racism, they weren’t that different then what usually comes out of these right-wingers mouths. Regardless of whether its Michael Savage claiming that autistic kids are faking it or Billy Cunningham calling the President of the United States a Marxist-Leninist-Gestapo-Fascist, these statements are unified in that they skirt around their blatant bigotry while everyone who is listening understands the underlying ignorance that is the base behind what spews out of their vile mouths. The problem arises when people agree with this unspoken bigotry, but otherwise listeners understand that these people make inflammatory borderline racist remarks to generate ratings.

 So why listen to this? It’s a question I get all the time from my friends. Don’t you have something better to do then torture yourself with angry and scared people that yearn for a past that never really existed?

 Well, the current news culture can be broken down into three parts. 1) Fawning over Obama 2) Liberals who don’t think he is doing enough 3) People who disagreed with him from the get-go and who still despise most of what he is doing. The people in the last category are by far the most hysterical and therefore the most entertaining. And if one wants to learn about the political landscape, s/he can’t just cut out a third of it because it offends his or her sensibilities.

 Also, I don’t need to listen to people with whom I already agree. They aren’t going to tell me anything new. They will not present an argument to make me see the world in a new light. If I think waterboarding is torture, why would I listen to someone telling me that over and over again? However, if someone could convince me otherwise, that could be valuable. So that’s why I think that listening to right-wing radio is important; so that I can know what the other side is thinking and to keep my own liberal ideas in check.

Finally, Jay Severin embodies everything that is great and awful about Democracy. It’s great that people are free to voice their opinions, but with that comes the drawback that you have racism, sexism, anti-Semitism etc. If you are going to live in a free society you have to let people like Savage and Severin exist. There is a price to pay for being the leader of the free world and he is ours. That’s why I listen to him, and I sorely hope he comes back, because that way at least I can keep an eye on him and know what the right-wing is thinking.

 I think the GOP has so far chosen the “wait and see” approach. For as bad as the economy seems, it’s not nearly as catastrophic as the 24- hour news coverage makes it out to be. Over 90% of mortgages are still being paid in a timely manner. Over 90% are employed in one form or another. So while GDP has fallen 6.1 percent in 6 months and consumer confidence is still near all time lows, people are still going about their daily business. They still drive cars, they still live in homes and they still have clothes. After years of consumer gluttony, people don’t seem to mind living off of the accumulated junk for a little while. And for those unfortunate souls that lost their jobs, well…they are making due with their unemployment benefits (I’ll get back to you on what happens afterwards, once mine run out). So things are bad, but not desperate.

 Meanwhile, Obama has a whole set of issues that he has to juggle. Pulling out of Iraq is not a forgone conclusion. Afghanistan is a shithole, that has now morphed into AfPak and possibly nuclear. Then there are the domestic issues of healthcare reform, credit card reform, mortgage reform, financial reform, bank bailouts, car bailouts, green economy initiatives. Just reading that partial list can make one’s head spin.

 The conventional wisdom is that nobody, regardless of how talented or well liked, will be able to accomplish such a massive agenda. Add into it a little bit of Republican road-blocking and a Fox News organized negative media blitz and you’ve got yourself a GOP campaign circa 2010 and 2012. 

 While this political strategy might have its merits on paper, it is not panning out the way Republicans have hoped. First off, and this is the most obvious reason, the GOP is inextricably linked to George W. Bush. His approval ratings were incredibly low, he is blamed for entering Iraq without justification, and he is blamed for the financial crisis. Those blunders will not be easily forgotten by the voting public. Sure there are plenty of people out there that will defend the GOP by trying to distance it from Bush, but there is no reason to believe that people will forget just how poorly they used to think of Bush and subsequently the Republican Party.   

Also, not only is the party associated with failure, but it also has few new ideas. The party of “No” is a very simple campaign slogan that sticks. It easily reminds voters on how obstructive the GOP was in the early days of the Obama administration. That they didn’t offer any real new solutions and just clamored for more tax cuts for the rich and more deregulation in the financial sector. That platform might resonate with the voters in a time of prosperity, but the fact that working class wages have been stagnant while healthcare costs have skyrocketed makes people want for a little more government initiative.

 Finally, the wait and see approach is hampered by their much talked about lack of leadership. When one thinks about leaders in the Democratic Party, they conjure up images of Obama and Hillary Clinton; strong, intellectually honest, and well reasoning politicians. The Republicans however are now associated with Rush, Hannity, Savage, Bush, Cheney, Rove, Cantor, Boehner, Gingrich, Steele, and McCain. The first three are controversial figures whom a majority of women hate and while witty and entertaining should not be the face of a national political party. Well you see the stark contrast. This might seem like a partisan analysis, especially if you’re drinking the Fox News cool-aid, but that’s what the poll numbers show. These ‘leaders’ can be picked off one by one in an election campaign because they are for the most part controversial figures with a checkered past.

 As a result of this leadership vacuum and their lack of new ideas, and their association with the Bush administration, a reform minded faction is breaking away from the rest of the GOP. This faction is made up of some of the more prominent intellectuals of the Party: Frum, Douthut, Schmidt, Sullivan and now Meghan McCain. They see that this approach is going to fail in 2010 and 2012 and are desperately trying to change the direction of the party. It will be interesting to see how this battle plays out.

 The problem with this debate is the blogs and the media’s mischaracterization of the other side. Conservatives immediately assign a much used label of “blame America first” liberals which instantly discredits whatever point the pundit is trying to make. On the other hand Liberals aren’t helping their cause by consistently playing the role Conservatives have assigned them and using phrases like, “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.”  Liberals need to understand how they are seen by Conservatives and do everything in their power to throw off the yoke of those labels. If you are viewed as a Dove then you must choose your words carefully and make your arguments air tight so a Hawk cant find something to exploit. Left-wingers also don’t give right-wingers their due credit by characterizing them as Rush Limbaugh-Fox News ditto heads.

 However with this in mind, the Republicans are wrong. Their argument that its not torture might hold water in domestic debates, but it sure as hell doesn’t resonate wherever Fox News lacks a strong foothold. It was outlawed by the Geneva Convention. We even prosecuted a Japanese military officer Yukio Asano in 1947 for torture that included waterboarding. He got 15 years of hard labor. So whether you consider the fact that we put a nice starched collar on a prisoner before we threw him through a false wall qualifies the act as not-torture. Or if you think the methods were effective and therefore should be condoned. These qualifications matters little in the international community. We will lose our moral high ground in any negotiations and we will lose the ability to admonish any other country for human rights violations.

This also creates a bad precedent. Once you leave the realm in which torture is measured on a good vs. bad dichotomy and turn it into a relative concept you can never go back. This is why our country can never leave the high ground in which we universally denounce torture. This is also why the argument that the ends justify the means never stands up to scrutiny.

So, conservatives have ended up on the wrong side of this debate. They will defend it furiously, but to no avail. They will use the age old critique that Democrats aren’t competent enough to protect Americans and that they are endangering our country by releasing these torture memos. This is a silly argument. One which creates a false choice between being killed by terrorists and torturing them.  No Democrat is against forcing confessions out of detainees. Especially ones that we suspect hold key information about future attacks. It’s just common sense that we try to get these confessions out legally. For 50 years we did this with no problem. The FBI still does it without impinging on the International laws. Also, the legal acrobatics needed to turn international torture into domestic enhanced interrogation techniques started before we had a single suspect. As a result of the conservatives’ hypocritical stance, America’s standing in the world has been weakened way more then Obama’s handshake with Chaves could ever do.  

A recent New York Times article, titled: Ailing G.O.P. Risks Losing a Generation makes a claim that contradicts the much rephrased notion that “If you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart, but if you’re still a liberal at 40, then you have no brain.” Well, which one is correct? Are we, as Gen Yers, who voted almost 2:1 for Obama going to become conservative with age? Or have our political identities been formed and crystallized by the stark contrast between Clinton’s success in our formative years, Obama’s 21^st century outlook and Bush’s disastrous presidency?     

I believe that, for the most part, a person’s political identity remains unformed until they reach young adulthood and start following current events. Once they start understanding the issues at hand, their political identity gets anchored somewhere along the horseshoe shaped political spectrum. While it can be argued that a person’s political views change with age, I think they move in relation to their original anchor and shift slightly. In other words, I don’t feel that somehow Rush Limbaugh’s ‘incendiary remarks’ will have high resonance for me when I’m old. This study from the Public Opinion Quarterly circa 1969 supports my claim:

The cross-sectional photograph of human behavior usually given by survey research may in fact show that the older members of a population are more conservative than the younger. But a longitudinal look at this behavior reveals that differences in age are more strongly related to generational than to maturational differences.

So, the GOP’s concerns are very real, and no amount of Meghan McCain’s proposed social media splurge will help reverse the Gen Y allegiance to the Democratic Party. There are many factors that have formed the current generational trend, but one of the largest ones is the incompetence of the last eight years. This incompetence can be split into problems of Bush’s presidency and problems of the GOP as a whole. W.’s personal contribution was: the two wars, the unwinnable global war on terror, turning America into a military aggressor, torture of prisoners for the whole world to see, and Scooter Libby’s scandal. While his party is now associated with purporting a now obviously failed Marxian-style capitalist platform that led to this current banking crisis. A party, that claims to be fiscally responsible, but that can’t lower deficits. A party, that presided over the greatest increase in disparity between rich and poor. Talk about class warfare and redistribution of wealth!

Also besides the aversion to the current GOP, our generation is too young to remember Reagan personally, and his legacy seems much more tarnished then conservatives claim. I know he is considered the greatest thing since sliced bread by CPAC and Fox News, but there are lots of arguments diminishing his greatness. For example, his funding of the Afghanistan’s Mujahideen that led to the rise of Al-Qaida and the Taliban. The Iran-Contra affair, the drastic increase in the federal budget deficit. Conservatives might chalk up these claims as ramblings of just another liberal media follower, but when was the last time you heard that Reagan should be put up on Mount Rushmore or replace Hamilton on the $10 bill?

So, our generation isn’t too enamored with Reagan partly for the stated reasons, but also because Welfare Queens and The Red Threat are not issues that resonate with Gen Y. These are the issues for the Generation X voters that grew up with Reagan. Consequently they self-identified themselves as Republicans back in ‘86 when they were 18-29 and 20 years later were more likely to vote for McCain then younger citizens: 

If this trend, that favored Republicans for the last 20 years, works similarly for Gen Y, then the GOP does indeed stand a chance to loose a whole generation. Well 66% of them at least.  

1) Affordability. Private institutions cost up to 50,000 dollars, while in-state tuitions could be as low as 15,000. You have to consider the opportunity cost of such an investment.

2) Quality. There is no reason to go to a private school if its not one of the best. It doesn’t look any better on your resume that you graduated from some third tier school, then coming from your local state college. If you can get into an Ivy, or one of the elite liberal arts colleges then you have a hard choice, but recent trends show that people are forgoing them to go to state schools. I recently came across a study that showed that people who got into Ivy League schools but decided to go someplace else were getting the same salaries 5, 10, and 20 years after graduation. 

2a) Honors Programs. State schools have honors programs that are generally prestigious. They are also a lot easier to get into once you are enrolled in the general student body. At Umass, all you need is a 3. GPA and fill out an application.  

3) Employment after Graduation. Pretty much nobody cares where you went to undergraduate school, unless it’s an Ivy League. There are so many colleges out there. Quick, who’s more prestigious Drexler or Butler? Truth is, I don’t know and don’t care. The same pretty much goes for your major. A good school has more recruitment and therefore makes it easier to get a good job straight out of college, but that only pertains to first job offers. Considering that our generation likes to change jobs frequently, the first job isn’t as important as it used to be.

4) Graduate School. This is the thing I wish I knew back in high school. Grad schools are looking for the next Einstein. If you went to a great school but graduated with a 3.0, then you have already proven to Grad school admissions office that you are not a genius. However, if you went to state school and got yourself a 3.6, which by the way is very doable, then you still have a chance to be the next Einstein. Obviously, you have to do well on your GMAT, LSAT and such, but a major component of your application is your GPA. It is much easier to get a good GPA at a state school then at a good private school.

So, if you’re contemplating between Tulane, Wisconsin, Arizona State and your State school, you should strongly consider your local university. It’s much cheaper, their honors programs are prestigious, and you will be able to get into a better graduate school after. Also, nobody will care where you went to school or what your major was soon after you graduate, so don’t fret, have fun, meet interesting people, and good grades. 

Hogwash!

This assumes that regular Americans have an attention span of a goldfish and will forget about the Bush Administration. It assumes that the voting population cannot see the Republican hypocrisy of running up the biggest deficit ever and then claiming to be fiscally responsible. This supposed GOP comeback also rests on the assumption that people will forget what caused this calamity. Sure FOX News will scream that it was Barney Frank’s initiative to get everyone a home, and the Fannie and Freddy distorting the market value. Both of these claims are true, but the economy is suffering from a credit freeze and a banking crisis. Those sub-prime mortgages didn’t compile themselves into bundles, then chop themselves up into thousands of pieces and sell themselves at high rates and then leverage those sales at a 30:1 ratio to make further purchases. They also didn’t create a whole separate market that insured these transactions. I got a great CDO that you can CDS, any takers? Under whose watch did that happen? Sure, Democrats held Congress for the last 2 years, but that’s a hard sell to make to the voters.

On top of this aforementioned hard sell, the GOP assumes that voters will view their newly unified party as one that is working for the people. It’s great to philosophize about the role of government in society from your mansion, but when people’s livelihood is at stake, its time to act. The GOP’s solution is, as always, tax cuts. However, people, especially unemployed people, aren’t in need of more money, they need jobs and job security. They know that companies are suffering because nobody is buying their product, and therefore any amount of tax rebate won’t change that.  Everyone is hunkering down until “The Customer” comes back and wants to start doing business again. Until confidence returns, customers will stay at home, and job security will remain shaky.

 I know that Republicans disagree with my last paragraph and will argue about crowding out, wasteful spending, socialism, supply-side economics, and the failure of the New Deal, or whatever else Sean Hannity spews out. That’s fine, but common sense isn’t on their side, because the general public feels like we just tried tax cuts for eight years and they didn’t work. The common rebuttal to that is that we had an unprecedented 52 months of prosperity. However given the disaster it has lead to, the claim seems as preposterous as stating the Madoff Ponzi scheme was a great success because it had years of unprecedented 10% growth.

As Frank Rich said, “The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started.” Their unity has shown them to be hypocrites with no original solutions to 21^st century problems. Despite them claiming to not be the party of NO, it seems that that’s exactly what they have become. Bobby Jindal is a perfect example, making a lot of hoopla about not accepting the stimulus money, and then it’s discovered that he is in fact accepting 98% of it. Also, the whole talk about the “porkulous bill” seems silly when all they can come up with is a fictitious high-speed railway to Vegas and a fabricated marsh mouse funding. In the last couple of weeks, the GOP’s unity has shown them to be ideologues instead of pragmatists and its hard to win an election on ideology alone especially when your only results are Bush’s adjunct failure. Good luck in 2010!