Garance Franke-Ruta

Facing an audience of conservative activists, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul let loose with a little safe China- and Egypt-bashing.

Ever wonder what one of those political meetings so described looks like? The answer: exhausting.

President Obama met with the House Republican Conference yesterday. Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah documented the feel in the room.

Good mtg with POTUS today. I took this shot. twitter.com/jasoninthehous...

— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) March 14, 2013

"Today was a good start and I hope that these kinds of discussions can continue," House Speaker John Boehner said after exiting the meeting, which he also described as a "very frank and candid exchange of ideas."

Before there were second-wave feminists, there were women's professional associations. Sandberg is looking to combine the two models to help women lead.


A couple of years ago, I went to the opening of a photography exhibit in Washington's Penn Quarter organized by local news site DCist. It had been maintaining a popular Flickr feed of reader-submitted photos and in 2006 decided to launch an online contest, from which images would be curated for the show. At the time, I'd been dipping in and out of the local art world for around half a decade, first as a reporter and later as a silent observer of the scene, and so recognized many of its leading personages.

That night the room was packed. Beyond packed -- stuffed and sweltering. Yet I saw only one or two faces that I recognized. "Who are all these people?" I wondered. "Where did they come from? And why have I never met any of them before?"

What they were, it turned out, was a new community being born. Internet organizing, whether in the professional or the social arena, has a tremendous and by now well-documented capacity to create vibrant cultural networks where none existed before by knitting together people who have shared interests but no preexisting shared social geography. To be sure, online communities tend to arise around and overlay existing social networks (such as the DCist site, the central node around which a community swarmed that night, and whose 2013 show will hold two opening nights "limited to 500 per evening"). But organizing done through Facebook or Facebook-like efforts also has a tremendous capacity to call people up off the sidelines and create new leaders in the fresh space of a novel community as it emerges.

I've seen it over and over again in the past decade, from Howard Dean's Meetups to Barack Obama's Facebook-inspired social networking/community organizing/GOTV apparatus to reports on the Arab spring to even minor social events, like an Embassy of Sweden Innovation & Technology exhibit/cocktail party in 2008 that drew several thousand people more than could fit in the building, thanks to a Facebook notice that went viral.

It is in this dynamic that the true potential of the Lean In Circles proposed by Sheryl Sandberg can be found -- and why people should take them seriously as a potential force for change.


Sandberg is a chief operating officer, a near-billionaire, a Harvard-Radcliffe College and Harvard Business School Graduate, one of the most powerful women in business, the fifth most powerful in the world, according to Forbes. But the most important data point on her resume, the one that makes most of this possible and which also must be kept in mind when reading her book, is that she is someone who works at Facebook. Who leads Facebook. Who helped invent the Facebook we know today. Hers is a Facebook feminism, and what she's doing in concert with her book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead is taking some of the basic principles that undergird the massive growth of that company under her tenure as second-in-command -- engagement, reach, relevance, and social context -- and applying them to promoting her book and launching an ambitious professional development project for women, the Lean In foundation, funded with her own money.

The biggest wave of critiques against Sandberg so far have come from more traditional and intersectional feminists, and from mommy bloggers. I could rehash the pre-publication backlash to Sandberg, as well as the backlash against the backlash, but the fact of the matter is that all the huffing and puffing about why she's not organizing janitors or home health-care aides or stay at home moms is largely beside the point -- because that's not what her project is about. Sandberg is an unapologetic capitalist and senior manager who began her career in Washington, D.C. She says she's interested in seeing more women in leadership posts in corporate America and in the highest ranks of government. That means more women at the top, more women in positions of power, and more women who have the training and experience to lead within institutions actually getting a shot at doing -- or daring to do -- it. Hers is not a conversation for opt-outs, except to the extent that it might call them back to the field; Sandberg's conversation is for women who have to or want to stay in the game, and to thrive there.

For the first time in American history, there are now more college-educated women than men -- more than a million more. The Sandberg conversation is for the vast swath of college-educated women who work full-time and would like this thing that they spend the majority of their waking hours doing to be (more) rewarding, and maybe need a little bit of a kick in the pants to remember why they got into their chosen field in the first place, and also little encouragement after years being in the gender minority at the office. It is, perhaps, for women who feel as personally stalled as the feminist movement itself is, but who recall a time when they were more ambitious and all the pathways seemed clearer and they were more hopeful about their own lives. It is less for the tiny but vocal community of professional feminists than for post-feminist women who, like Sandberg, came to feminism late or woke up one morning and realized the equal world they'd been promised since they were kids and thought they were entering when they were young does not actually exist. And as much as there is in Lean In about marrying smart and really going for it professionally before you have kids, it's not even necessarily a book for young women, given how many busy professionals don't marry until their mid-30s or have kids until they are pushing 40, or even older. The goal of the Lean In Community, as outlined in documents obtained by the New York Times, is to help women find "personal fulfillment" and "professional success." And, though it doesn't say this, to help them feel less isolated.

Lean In is, in short, a call to engagement for people who are not already part of the public conversation about women and power, but who can be brought into a new conversation through reading her book and through the Lean In Community, which "will be tightly integrated with Facebook." That community's planning documents cite the Young Presidents Organization, microlending collectives, and study groups as models, and lay out plans for a quarterly budget for Facebook advertising, which is to say, using the deep data of Facebook to target messages as with a political campaign. "Our goal is not to create another proprietary women's organization," the document says, adding later: "Lean In will combine practical education and focused discussion to give women the tools they need to realize their goals."

That makes the engagement part of Sandberg's project more of a piece with professional development programs targeted towards encouraging and training women to take more active roles in public life -- such as the Op-Ed Project and EMILY's List and Running Start -- than with 1970s feminist consciousness raising groups derived from Chinese women's speak bitterness sessions, which even at their peak drew maybe 100,000 women (a miniscule fraction of America's female population). People have suggested Sandberg's Lean In curriculum is perhaps overly focused on the positive. But what else should one expect? This is Facebook feminism, an outgrowth of the "like" economy in which the characteristic communication option is a positive one. And I happen to like the LeanIn.org collection of inspirational personal stories; Lord knows I'm deeply informed already about what the systemic and structural problems are. It's cool to hear about how other people have handled inflection points in their professional lives.

Think of it this way: Just because no nation has achieved anything near gender parity in national elective offices without national or political party quotas doesn't mean that groups like EMILY's List and the WISH List are useless in the United States. Women have made huge strides in public office over the past 20 years since private-sector efforts to train and encourage and fund individual women have come on the scene, more than quadrupling their numbers in the U.S. Congress. Are we there yet? No. But no one can propose a path forward that does not involve calling more women off the sidelines into public service -- the whole point of She Should Run, for example, is to get qualified women who might not think of themselves as political leaders to consider contending for office, where all the research shows they are just as likely to win as men. As well, no one will be able to solve the byline gap on the Op-Ed page unless there are also more individual women willing to own their expertise and pitch pieces, which report after report confirms women are more hesitant to do that men and do less often.

In her book, Sheryl Sandberg, manager, has effectively looked around and given American working women a performance review. And, like any good manager, she's made a pep talk about all the cool things you can do in the future a part of that. She's not shy about telling women what they can do better at the same time that she's sympathetic to their challenges. But she's also not afraid to lay out the opportunities that women already do have that they are leaving on the table and say, wait a minute, what about this, and this, and this? Some women have complained that Sandberg's call to lean in is making them feel guilty for not doing even more when they are already trying as hard as they can. But that griping feels a little bit like humble-bragging -- you know, of the "my greatest weakness is I work too hard" variety.

A book doesn't have to speak to everyone to launch a cultural moment. It just has to inspire enough women to make change and provoke a real national conversation. And, let's be real, even when feminism was a mass movement in the 1970s, the vast majority of American women took no part in its organized leadership or formal activities. There's a lot of room between opting out and maxing out; there are women who know they could be doing more if they felt more encouraged, and I suspect they will happily test out the Lean In Circles.

"Leaning in means pushing through the challenges and going down a path with an uncertain outcome...." the LeanIn.org document says in a section soliciting stories. "Leaning back means choosing to stay in a known or comfortable situation."

That's how movements get going. One person or group of people starts one thing and other people judge it inadequate and start their own thing and before you know it there's a whole set of things no one expected happening. But there has to be a catalyst. Someone has to get the ball rolling and to become the first public target -- because make no mistake, any one who advocates for and tries to lead on fundamental social change is signing up for years of being mocked or criticized or even hated, both by potential allies and by opponents. (Respect for movement leaders comes only after they win, if then -- that's something they don't teach in the history books.)

But the important part here is that Sandberg herself is leaning in with this book and with her project. She's already provoked a huge conversation about women and work and likability and ambition and whether we are really all personally flourishing or not, and the book has only been available for sale for a few days. I hope the conversation keeps going, and I'm looking forward to one day having that same feeling I had at that DCist show, walking into another room and having to ask myself, "Who are all these people?", thanks to a new social network that's sprung into being.

The state's new law restricting abortions to the first 12 weeks is blatantly unconstitutional -- and not that different from what a lot of European nations have in place.

One of the great ironies of American abortion-rights law is that it is one of the few areas of social regulation where America is to the left of Europe. The latest explosion in one of the laboratories of democracy is a piece of legislation in Arkansas outlawing abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy, which passed this week when the Republican legislature overruled the gubernatorial veto of Democrat Mike Beebe.

Should this clear violation of the viability framework laid out in Roe v. Wade be allowed to stand -- and experts on both sides of the abortion fight predict that it won't be -- it would serve to make Arkansas the most restrictive state in the nation when it comes to the legal availability of abortion. (It may not actually become the hardest state to in which to obtain an abortion; other states already have less functional though more legal access to abortion). It also serves to make Arkansas the one American state to take a direct European-style approach to the regulation of abortion.

It's hard to imagine that's what bill sponsor State Senator Jason Rapert -- who previously gained notoriety for racially charged anti-Obama remarks made at a 2011 Tea Party rally -- was going for.

But it's been the case since their abortion laws were liberalized in the 1970s that many of the European nations have abortion laws not much less strict than the one Arkansas just passed. France permits abortions up until the 14th week of pregnancy (which is counted from the date of the last menstrual period, even though ovulation doesn't usually occur until one to two weeks after that). After that, abortions are only available in exigent circumstances, such as severe fetal deformities, or to save the health or life of the mother. France also has a mandatory one-week waiting period for all abortions (they prefer to describe it as a "cooling-off" period), unless by so waiting the woman would pass the 14-week cut-off, which coincides with the end of the first trimester. Other nations that restrict abortions largely to the first trimester include: Germany (14 weeks), Italy (90 days from the last menstrual period), Spain (14 weeks), and Portugal (10 weeks).

Most women in the United States who seek abortions do so within these early weeks as well; according to the National Abortion Federation, 88 percent of all abortions "are obtained within the first 12-13 weeks after the last menstrual period." A third of those obtained after 12 weeks are sought by teenagers, whose irregular menstrual cycles, lack of knowledge about sex and biology, lack of resources, and complex family dynamics combine to make it harder for them to recognize they are pregnant and seek an abortion in a timely manner. "Fewer that 2 percent" of abortions take place after 21 weeks, or in the third trimester, according to NAF.

"This is a very unique bill," said NARAL Pro-Choice America spokesperson Samantha Gordon, speaking of the Arkansas act. "It's the first one of its kind."

The Arkansas bill is the most stringent anti-abortion measure enacted by a state since South Dakota legislators voted to outlaw abortion entirely in 2006; that law was eventually overturned when subjected to a direct vote by citizens after pro-abortion rights forces organized to put it before them as a ballot initiative.

The Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU of Arkansas have announced that they intend to challenge the law, which they call "clearly unconstitutional under four decades of U.S. Supreme Court precedent" and which would not take effect until 90 days after the legislative session ends, in federal court. "Attempts such as this to turn back the clock on reproductive rights will not stand," said Nancy Northup, president and CEO at the Center for Reproductive Rights, in a statement.

James Bopp Jr., the Indiana-based general counsel of National Right to Life, told The New York Times the Arkansas law was pointless, because so likely to be overturned. "As much as we would like to protect the unborn at that point, it is futile and it won't save any babies," he said.

In short, America won't be heading in a European direction on abortion regulation any time soon. What Rapert did next after his law passed helps explain why: He submitted a fresh piece of legislation intended to defund Planned Parenthood in Arkansas. In places like Spain, abortion is regulated through a law that situates it within a complicated weighing of the rights of women and of children, and is part of a comprehensive approach to women's reproductive health care that includes contraception. In the United States, the effort to restrict abortion often goes hand-in-hand with uncompromising efforts to restrict contraception and override the rights of women more generally (for example, the right to bodily autonomy by requiring invasive and medically unnecessary pre-abortion transvaginal ultrasounds, which Rapert pushed before they became controversial). There cannot be any grand European-style compromise on abortion in the United States so long as the goal of abortion opponents is to eliminate all access to abortion, rather than to make it, as a wise man once said, safe, legal, and rare.

Uncle Sam's older, classier sister Columbia fell out of favor after women got the vote. Maybe it's time to bring her back.

The photos of the historic suffragette March on Washington on March 3, 1913, that were all over the place over the weekend were a reminder of how far America has come in the last century, and of how much American women have been at the forefront of pushing the international rights of women forward. But as I admired their bonnets and their courage, their side-buttoned boots and hooded woolen cloaks and looks of fierce determination, the women in the 100-year-old images also raised for me some slightly more prosaic questions.

Why were some staging tableaux wearing breastplates and laurels? Who were they dressed as? And -- perhaps more importantly -- why can't contemporary feminists have costumes that are as regal and classical as those of 1913 -- instead of Code Pink's vulgar giant magenta lady bits?

The answer, it turns out, is that Uncle Sam had a much older and classier sister named Columbia, the feminine historic personification of the United States of America, who has since the 1920s largely fallen out of view. But she was as recognizable to Americans of yesteryear as the man in the top-hat and tails remains today, and when the suffragettes donned robes and armor, they garbed themselves in her rebel warrior's spirit. From the 18th century until the early decades of the 20th, Columbia was the gem of the ocean, a mythical and majestic personage whose corsets or breast-plates curved out of her striped or starred or swirling skirts with all the majesty of a shield. She was honored from the birth of the nation -- "Hail, Columbia!", whose score was first composed for the inauguration of President Washington, was an unofficial anthem until the "Star-Spangled Banner" displaced it as the official national one in 1931 -- to the birth of the recording and film industries, which is why we have had Columbia Records and Columbia Pictures. Yes, that lady with the torch at the start of the movies isn't just some period-costume-wearing chick -- she is a relic of this earlier personification of America, immortalized forever by the most American of industries.

America was Columbia in the same way that England was Britannia and France was Marianne. America's capital is the District of Columbia; New York City's great early private university was Columbia College (now University).

But as skirt lengths rose and corsets were tossed to the wind, Columbia fell out of favor. Perhaps it had something to do with the rise of Lady Liberty as an icon, though in the 19th century the two were sometimes visually interchangeable, if not identical. Perhaps it had something to do with Columbia's role beseeching citizens to endure hardship during the Great War. Or perhaps it was something bigger: Female national personifications in general fell out of vogue as women took on a growing role as emancipated citizens. But for one glorious moment in the early 20th century, the allegorical and the concrete met on the steps of the Treasury building in Washington.

Thanks to these and other women who marched, women's rights in America were secured (even if they remain always and ever contested). A century later, Columbia looks like a lady who knows how to lean in. Enough time has passed, it seems, that we might consider reviving her spirit, and returning her to the pantheon of America characters for the years to come.

In the 19th century, Columbia appeared often in cartoons. Here, she gives a Lady Liberty-like welcome to persecuted Germans in 1881:

She's also been pictured standing up for the rights of Chinese immigrants:

And often been a martial figure, as with this call to remember the Spirit of '61 (1861, that is):

She played a major role in World War I propaganda posters:

According to a new working paper, the answer is no -- not by a long shot.

A working paper by political-science graduate students David Broockman of Berkeley and Christopher Skovron of the University of Michigan suggests that there's an effective supermajority requirement for passing liberal bills within state legislatures because those lawmakers routinely overestimate the conservatism of their constituents.

Their paper, "What Politicians Believe About Their Constituents: Asymmetric Misperceptions and Prospects for Constituency Control," found that "[T]here is a striking conservative bias in politicians' perceptions, particularly among conservatives: conservative politicians systematically believe their constituents are more conservative than they actually are by more than 20 percentage points on average, and liberal politicians also typically overestimate their constituents' conservatism by several percentage points."

The survey studied opinions of nearly 2,000 state legislative candidates and compared it with "actual district-level opinion" based on other surveys.

Dylan Matthews dug into some of their data over at Wonkblog, concluding, "The graphs show that the threshold of support a liberal policy must cross for politicians to back it is well above 50 percent, and above 60 percent for universal health care. If only 55 percent of a district supported universal health care, then more likely than not, their representative will oppose it."

What that means is that the supermajority requirement for support that is the new normal in our national legislature for (many, though not all) liberal bills to pass also exists at the state legislative level.

The study authors don't really get into why. But here's one theory: The overall political views of a district are less important for policymaking than the organized political groups in a district, and conservatives have since the 1970s pursued a strategy of robust organizing within states in the service of pushing conservative policies. In recent years, anti-abortion groups in particular have worked to lobby state legislators, vastly outstripping abortion-rights groups on the ground in state after state and creating a powerful constituency for change in a socially conservative direction.

Matthews says the data show that "epistemic closure on the right is real," but I don't think it's that conservatives are out of touch with their constituents and unwilling to listen to others, so much as as that they are in touch with a highly organized infrastructure of pressure groups dedicated to lobbying them to vote even more conservatively than their overall constituency might wish. Liberals have never been able to (or, more commonly, sought to) match the extent of state-by-state organizing and statehouse lobbying of conservative groups and causes, even though comparatively small investments can reap major rewards in such environments.

What it's like when the worst years of your life get rolled up into an Oscar-nominated documentary

"Remember when they burnt those people's house down?" Spencer Cox asks.

We are at a reunion dinner for about half a dozen people at a restaurant on the edge of Soho. I haven't seen him since the mid-1990s. He looks unwell. It's late September, 2012. On Nov. 30 we're on a panel together for World AIDS Day at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center. By Dec. 18 he is dead.

I don't remember, so I look it up when I get back to D.C. In 1987, in Arcadia, Florida, Clifford and Louise Ray's house mysteriously burned to the ground after a court ordered the local schools had to admit their HIV-positive hemopheliac sons, despite community objections. Other families had already been pulling their kids out of the school, which also faced multiple phoned-in bomb threats. The family decided their only option was to give up and leave town.

This was right around the same time homophobia in America peaked, according to Gallup polling of the 1986-87 period. It was Reagan's second term, there were no AIDS treatments (AZT wasn't approved until March 1987), the Supreme Court had recently upheld state laws making gay sex a crime in the June 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick ruling, and 57 percent of those surveyed answered yes when asked if gay and lesbian relations should be illegal. Several states were actively considering quarantine measures for people with AIDS, which is to say, tearing some of their most marginalized and frightened citizens away from the only people who loved them and locking them up with strangers who considered them freaks and pariahs, until they died.

It's no wonder that when Nora Ephron had to cancel a speech at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center of New York in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, in March 1987, leading to playwright Larry Kramer subbing in for her, the gay and lesbian community in what was then the epicenter of the emerging global pandemic exploded. ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, was born out of Larry's call to action.

In July I sat down with a rising Harvard senior writing his honors thesis about ACT UP, and about some of the events I was part of more than 20 years ago. I realized then I'd had only four or five other extended conversations about those years over the past 15. I suppose no one talks very much as an adult about what they did as a teenager, but in truth the reality is more complicated than that. Violence, loss, trauma—all are silencing in their own way. And despite growing up under the banner of Silence=Death—heck, I'm the girl who painted those words onto a lot of the fabric backdrops you can see in the Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague, unspooling a bolt of black canvas in my painter father's studio—I have always been reluctant to participate in the age of memoir. What the world sees as talking about history can feel very much to an individual who was part of it—that is, to me—like dwelling. And as a journalist I have preferred to tell other people's stories rather than my own.

"Others would talk about such experiences all the time," a friend IMed me after the September release of How to Survive a Plague, which tells the story of the ACT UP Treatment + Data Committee (of which I was the youngest member) and the Treatment Action Group (of which I was a founding member) and how they worked to transform the drug-approval process and AIDS research in this country, leading eventually to the availability of the only successful antiretrovirals in existence and, once the U.S. and other governments decided to put some money behind drug distribution, the saving of millions of lives around the world.

My only response to that expectation of chattiness is: not if you lived through it. I've written only one reflection on that era previously, for a book a decade ago; it took me two months to squeeze out about 1,200 words, because every time I turned to the subject I either developed such a colossal headache I had to stop, or burst into tears.

Many people who were part of ACT UP have tried to write about it in retrospect, but it took an outsider who was also invested in the story, journalist-turned-filmmaker David France, to bring the story to the mainstream, to the extent that has happened over the past year. France was one of the earliest chroniclers of the epidemic, first in the gay press and later for New York and national media outlets, and a man whose partner Doug Gould, to whom the film is dedicated, died of AIDS in 1992. France's documentary, distributed by IFC and Sundance Selects, has won a slew of awards since premiering in January 2012 in the documentary competition in Sundance, and then in theaters in September. (It's also now available on iTunes and Netflix). It's even been nominated for an Academy Award in the Documentary Feature category.

The movie focuses on three HIV-positive men to tell the larger story of the early years of AIDS treatment activism, when death came quick and violently: Peter Staley, a dynamic former bond trader who in his late 20s was given two years to live before joining ACT UP and undertaking some of its most daring and theatrical actions (if an action involved scaling part of a building or bolting yourself in somewhere with power tools, Peter was likely involved); film archivist and later MacArthur genius award-grantee Mark Harrington, the chain-smoking intellectual force behind T+D on whose amber-screened 286 computer most of T+D's giant technical documents were tapped out; and the late Bob Rafsky, a publicist turned ACT UPper who famously heckled then-candidate Bill Clinton in 1992 and was told in reply a line that would come to define the president, "I feel your pain."

Also featured are activists Jim Eigo, Iris Long, Ann Northrop, Larry Kramer, Gregg Gonsalves, Gregg Bordowitz, Derek Link, Bill Bahlman, David Barr, Spencer Cox, Ray Navarro, and myself. Plus: scientists Emilio Emini, Ellen Cooper, Susan Ellenberg and Tony Fauci, along with an array of activists who, though not named in the footage, will recognize themselves in various scenes, along with their departed friends.

I worked with ACT UP from 1988 through 1991, after which a group of the T+Ders left to start TAG, which Harrington continues to run to this day. I worked with TAG for a couple of years in college, co-founded the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition in 1995, and then left AIDS work entirely in 1997, when I moved to D.C. after graduating from college and fell into journalism. A life as a member of the chorus instead of one of the dramatis personae on the American stage seemed about my speed after what I'd seen; after all, the chorus is always still standing at the end of the play.

ACT UP was the last of the great new social movements of the 20th century, a direct descendent of all that had come before, its members trained by veterans of Stonewall, the Freedom Summer, and the grassroots creators of the women's and gay liberation movements. At its peak, it had a budget of more than a million a year—without a single paid staffer. (In fact, if I recall correctly from my days on the Coordinating Committee, the greatest regular monthly expense was the industrial-strength Xerox machine we rented to produce reports, letters, fliers, and posters.) Independent affiliates took root in more than 100 sites around the world. Roughly 1,000 people came together every Monday night in lower Manhattan in the purest example of democracy I've ever experienced, to argue, plan, cajole and flirt, before breaking for a week in which more than 40 committees and subcommittees would continue the work on everything from neuroscience to HIV prevention to housing policy.

Everything ACT UP did it did analog. It posted posters on actual walls, with wheat-paste mixed in great buckets and slapped up late at night by members risking arrest. People spread messages through phone trees, from their landlines. And when there were protests they were anything but virtual, or done in a flash-mob style. ACT UP believed in training. It believed in planning, logistics, tactics, strategy, clearly articulated and well-researched demands, and, most importantly, it believed in getting results. It was not an outlet for emotion, but a channel for using the unique mix of anger and terror that characterized the times to achieve concrete ends with physical consequences for people in dire straits.

It was group of despised, gorgeous, terrified and terribly, terribly young people who looked death and society in the face and said no, we will not go quietly into that good night. Save us or give us the means to save ourselves. I have never met people since (I'd say before, too, except for me, I was so young, there wasn't much of a before) so committed to staying in the land of the living. It was an assertion of basic human dignity and that fierce will to live in the face of hatred and the neglect that was its vicious stepchild. And it helped change the drug approval and research process in this country, giving the entire world medicines that have saved millions of lives years before they might otherwise have been available or discovered. That is a fact.

The movie tells an incredibly powerful narrative about a micro-community within ACT UP and the larger movement for AIDS treatment research, which itself was a micro-community within a global network of people fighting on behalf of people with AIDS. It is not the whole story of AIDS activism's early years (and obviously, the work continues), but it is the best narrative of this part of the story I have seen so far, and the only one that tells this particular tale. Also out in 2012 was Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman's United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, which combines original footage with interviews from their ACT UP Oral History Project, to tell a slightly different set of stories about the group, though with less narrative panache and more chronological fidelity. If I have any criticism of either film it is that the decision to tell the story of AIDS activism through original footage, while giving the films a raw and powerful you-are-there perspective, privileges the protests over all the other sorts of work the group did that was left unfilmed, either for privacy reasons or because just not very visually interesting. (Jim Eigo has raised the same concern about how ACT UP gets historicized.) Neither movie uses still photos with voice-overs, for example—a traditional approach for documentaries, and one used liberally in David Weissman's We Were Here, the 2011 film about the plague years in San Francisco as told through the stories of five people who lived through the horror in the other major epicenter of the epidemic in America. And yet another angle on the larger story is told through Jeffrey Schwartz's movie Vito, about film scholar and gay activist Vito Russo, who was one of the dozen founders of ACT UP. The reality is that no single film can encompass the full story of a formally leaderless group that had thousands of members. And this is just the first wave of movies about it.

That said, it is the (expertly edited) original footage in How to Survive a Plague that provides its biggest emotional wallop. There are moments in it that just slay me, because those were not just my friends but in some important way the people who raised me. The stricken look on Eric Sawyer's face at Mark Fisher's funeral. Bob Rafsky dancing with his daughter Sara—now a grown woman who I'm delighted to say has become a friend through this film. My friend Mark Harrington flirting with the camera while lighting a cigarette, the epitome of '80s East Village cool. Ray Navarro after he'd gone blind and deaf, trying to imagine life for himself in that state, not long before dying at age 26. What Peter Staley, making his first national media appearance, said to Pat Buchanan on Crossfire. The 1992 Ashes Action, which I did not even know had happened until I saw the movie, in which people threw the ashes of their loved ones on the South Lawn of the White House. Really, there needs to be a plaque on that part of the White House fence; it is the final resting place for so many, including for one of ACT UP's founders, Ortez Alderson, a gay black community activist from the South Side of Chicago. And the music, Superhuman Happiness performing the songs of Arthur Russell, is incredible.

ACT UP worked because America worked. I'm not sure we expected that, even as we hoped for it. It taught me that everything that is marginal and powerful in American life eventually becomes central, part of the great churning from edges to mainstream that is one of the most underheralded but deep-seated patterns of our politics. That politicians only ratify social changes that start elsewhere, while true leadership comes from the grassroots, and the people. And that whoever has the most energy in any political battle usually wins. ACT UP was a fireball of energy.

In the movie I say that TAG was one of the little mercury balls that flew off the main body of ACT UP. What I meant is that ACT UP gave rise to a lot of different things, of which TAG was only one. Housing Works was founded by five ACT UP members as an outgrowth of the work of the Housing Committee. The legalization of needle exchange in New York state and the harm reduction philosophy grew with the help of ACT UP actions. Queer Nation beaded off to focus on gay-rights questions full-time. From the Bronx to Brooklyn, New Jersey to Maine, Albany to Washington, D.C., ACT UP New York worked in coalition and in solidarity with a wide array of groups on HIV-prevention, treatment, and access to care even as it kept up so steady a program of zaps and actions the New York Times once labeled it "ubiquitous."

The first time I saw How to Survive a Plague on the big screen was at its premiere at Sundance in 2011, where it was a selection in the documentary competition. I was a wreck the next day. To say that the movie brought up a lot would be an understatement. Maybe one day I'll write the story of my life, and how I went from being a high school drop-out who left home two months after turning 16 to a magna cum laude college graduate and journalist after a years-long interlude devoted to fighting pandemic death. But I doubt it. ACT UP made me and then ACT UP unmade me; it taught me to write and argue and speak and know that the world is full of exceptions and you just have to decide you are going to be one of them. But life on the other side of the knowledge of life and death meant also that by the time I was 21 I had seen and felt and experienced so much I became convinced that if I had to process one more thing —one more awful thing—I would just keel over and die. I had reached my limit, which might have been lower than that of some of the group's other members, because I had no well of fortitude built up over time to fall back on, because, again, I'd barely had any "before" years. What I did have though was health and youth and what too many of my friends did not—a future. And so at a certain point I made a decision to go on with my life. Because I could. But also because I had to. As Ingrid Bergman famously quipped, "Happiness is good health and a bad memory." Most days I do not at all mind that I have forgotten as much as I have.

But on that January day when I was remembering too much, I took impromptu refuge from the social whirl of Park City in festival mode within the Mormon Family Center on Main Street in an effort to keep my silent and unstanchable tears out of view. There a kindly older woman let me use the computers intended for genealogical research in their public basement lab to start what I hoped would be a piece about the movie but that over the weekend after my return from Utah turned into what you see below. I used the Mormons' Ancestry.com registry to confirm the birth and death dates of the members of ACT UP New York who did not make it, as provided by former member Debra Levine and others on the group's Facebook alumni group in a thread provoked by her and the then-impending 25th anniversary of the group's founding. Along with the names was unleashed a torrent of pent-up grief and bittersweet memories. It was a relief to find others had had as much difficulty over the years talking about the mass death experience as did I. The collective mass death experience. Because every AIDS organization that existed in New York in those years has a list like this one. And every person who lived through those years in certain communities knows they can compile a list like this one, if they have not already, and if they can bear it.

There was a time when we were all alive together.

1988
Steven M. Webb, 32 (suicide)
Joe Teti
William McCann
Frank O'Dowd
Michael (Max) Navarre, 33

1989
Griffin Gold, 33
John Bohne
Michael I. Hirsch, 34
Kevin Sutton, 27
Costa Pappas
Steve Zabel
Brian (Allen) Damage
Barry Gingell, 34
Bill Olander, 38

1990
Clarke Taylor, 46
Keith Haring, 31
David Liebhart, 39
Ortez Alderson, 38
Vito Russo, 44
Kevin Smith
Raymond (Ray) Navarro, 26
William Oliver Johnston, 38

1991
Adrian Kellard, 32
Phil Zwickler, 36
Rick Damiata, 42
Jeff Gates
David Lopez, 28
Anthony Ledesma, 29
Jerry S. Jontz, 35
Dennis Kane, 37
Tim Powers, 33
Daniel Connor
Iris de la Cruz, 37
Alan Robinson
Jay Lipner, 46
Mark J. Fotopoulos, 35
Lee Arsenault
Allen Barnett, 36

1992
Donald P. Ruddy, 38
Martin (Marty) Robinson, 49
Charles Andrew Barber, 36
David Wojnarowicz, 37
Mark Lowe Fisher, 39
Jake Corbin (John Avino)
Luis Salazar, 27
David Serko, 32
Scott Slutsky, 37
Katrina Haslip, 33
Tom Cunningham, 32
John Henry Wagenhauser
Rich W. Korotchen
Alan Contini
Cliff Kali Goodman

1993
Carl Sigmon, 66
Bob Rafsky, 47
Robert Garcia, 31
Tim Bailey, 35
David E. Kirschenbaum, 30
Jon Greenberg, 37
Chris DeBlasio, 34
Michael Callen, 38
Yolanda Serrano, 45
Andrew S. Zysman, 38

1994
Clint Wilding Smith, 40
Gary Clare, 32
Mark Carson, 40
David Roche
Michael Morrissey
Aldyn McKean, 45
James (Jim) A. Serafini, 49
Robert Rygor, 40
Robert Massa, 36
David B. Feinberg, 37
Joe Franco
Casper G. Schmidt
Jay Funk, 35

1995
Lee Schy, 35
Tony Malliaris, 33
Bradley Ball, 34
Andy Valentin
Larry Gutenberg, 46
Robert D. Farber, 47
John Cook
Rex Wasserman
Steve Brown
Kiki Mason, 36
David Bolen, 31
Todd Moore
Michael Slocum

1996
Brian Weil, 41
Rand (Randy) Snyder
Mark Simpson
Howard Pope, 35
Billy Heekin
David Petersen, 54

1997
Wayne Fischer, 39

1999
Rodney Sorge, 30
William Wilson, 51

2000
Stephen Gendin, 34

2001
Robert S. Jones, 47

2002
Frank Moore, 48

2003
Evan Ruderman, 44

2004
Keith Cylar, 45
Rick Mount

2005
Brenda Howard, 58
(cancer)

2006
Juan Mendez, 41

2007
James (Jim) Lyons, 46
John H. (Michael) Gilbert, 40
Eric Schweitzer, 63 (pneumonia)
Anthony J. Seibert, 36

2008
Sydney Pokorny, 42

2009
Rodger McFarlane, 54 (suicide)
Robert Hilferty, 49 (suicide)

2010
Harry Weider, 57 (car accident)

2011
Herb Spiers, 65

2012
Richard Krulikowski, 61
Spencer Cox, 44

There are others whose dates of death remain unknown.

When Russian Machine Never Breaks isn't rocking the red for the Washington Capitals, it keeps a close eye on skaters in places like meteorite-struck Chelyabinsk.

If you were on Twitter last night your first English-language news of the Russian meteor hit -- the largest to come to Earth since the 1908 Tunguska explosion in Siberia -- likely came from a website with a passel of the most amazing Russian dashboard cam videos and a name guaranteed to raise suspicions about its veracity. That is, of course, unless you are a Caps fan, in which case you know that Russian Machine Never Breaks is a great source of news and information about some of the Washington region's most outsized sports figures on one of its best teams -- and not a site given to elaborately staged pranks and hoaxes.

It was the Russian players who put the Washington Capitals on the map in the National Hockey League, and who've since made the team a surefire bet for D.C. residents who like to cheer for winners. And Caps fans are looking forward to more of them coming to the city, too -- players like Evgeny Kuznetsov, a forward who plays for Traktor Chelyabinsk and was drafted 26th overall by the Washington Capitals in 2010. His arrival in Washington has been much-anticipated and closely followed by the men at Russian Machine, a site that describes itself as "A cheerfully demented Washington Capitals site with a healthy fixation on Alex Ovechkin and his Russian bros."

It was the site's Moscow correspondent -- hey, you can't have a top Caps blog without one -- who broke the news to the D.C. crew.

"Fedor Fedin heard about the explosion (we didn't know the cause) through social media and radio around 11:00 PM ET. He relayed it to us," said Russian Machine editor Peter Hassett of Frederick, Md., in an email.

"I scoured Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube using the Cyrillic version of Chelyabinsk and its nickname 'Chelly'. Fedor translated tweets from the only reliable source we could find (@plushev, host of a news radio program in Moscow).

"I was skeptical at first, but once I saw multiple videos from multiple users showing the same contrails and sonic boom in addition to a Russian-language reporter repeating official news releases and a first-person tweet from a North American goalie known to be playing in the region, I bought the story."

Yes, you heard that right -- a Canadian former Atlanta Thrashers goalie now playing for Traktor Chelyabinsk helped break the news online on Twitter, because that's how media works today. You can read Michael Garnett's whole story of being awakened by the crash here.

"There were also tons of unconfirmed eyewitness reports (e.g. rockets, military planes, toxic zinc leaks), but I left those out because I read Twelve Angry Men and I know how reliable those can be," continued Hassett.

"We published the article a little after 11 PM ET and kept on researching. I was a bit surprised there were no reports on the wire until after midnight actually. There had been by the point a few short, Russian-language government announcements that could have been translated and verified."

The Associated Press tweeted out its breaking news alert, which verified with Russian authorities that a meteorite had hit, at 12:21 a.m. EST Friday.

"It's been our biggest story so far," said Hassett. "It would have been a lot more exciting for us had a whole bunch of people not been hurt."

Hassett posted some traffic figures on his Tumblr Friday showing the, ahem, meteoric traffic spike.

What Obama's really proposing is a massive ramp-up in programs to help the children of the poor and lower-middle class, not something for everyone.

So far unmentioned in the nascent debate over the president's State of the Union call to provide universal pre-kindergarten to low- and moderate-income children is that such programs, should they come into existence, would be a huge boon to poor mothers -- especially single moms. It would be a giant economic relief to such women to have access to a high-quality, free educational system for their kids "beginning at birth and continuing to age 5," as the White House described the programs in a memo Thursday. And it would also be great for their kids to have thoughtfully-constructed places to go while their mothers work -- environments designed to help them overcome the deficits their strapped families might otherwise leave them with, making it harder for them to compete when they enter elementary school.

That said, the fine print shows that despite Obama's call "to make high-quality preschool available to every child in America," what he's proposing is not really a universal program as much as a slate of initiatives to expand early options for children of the poor and lower middle class.

Here's the meat of what the proposed programs would actually do, according to the White House memo (emphasis added below, and throughout):

Expand access to pre-school for low- and moderate-income kids.

The President's proposal will improve quality and expand access to preschool, through a cost sharing partnership with all 50 states, to extend federal funds to expand high-quality public preschool to reach all low- and moderate-income four-year olds from families at or below 200% of poverty. The U.S. Department of Education will allocate dollars to states based their share of four-year olds from low- and moderate-income families and funds would be distributed to local school districts and other partner providers to implement the program. The proposal would include an incentive for states to broaden participation in their public preschool program for additional middle-class families, which states may choose to reach and serve in a variety of ways, such as a sliding-scale arrangement.

In D.C. and the lower 48, the federal poverty guideline for a family of four in 2012 was $23,050; 200 percent of that is $46,100 -- a figure that's solidly middle class in some parts of the country, but not particularly well-to-do in many, many others.

Expand Head Start -- a program for low-income kids first launched in 1965 as part of the War on Poverty.

The President will also launch a new Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership program, to support states and communities that expand the availability of Early Head Start and child care providers that can meet the highest standards of quality for infants and toddlers, serving children from birth through age 3. Funds will be awarded through Early Head Start on a competitive basis to enhance and support early learning settings; provide new, full-day, comprehensive services that meet the needs of working families; and prepare children for the transition into preschool. This strategy -- combined with an expansion of publicly funded preschool education for four-year olds -- will ensure a cohesive and well-aligned system of early learning for children from birth to age five.

According to the 2009-2010 Head Start Program Information Report data presented in the report "Head Start Today: A Look at Demographics and Culture and Linguistic Responsiveness," 36 percent were of "Hispanic or Latino" background and 29 percent were "Black or African-American." Another 8 percent were biracial or multi-racial.

Create a home visits system for at-risk families (a.k.a. poor, young, single moms).

The President is proposing to expand the Administration's evidence-based home visiting initiative, through which states are implementing voluntary programs that provide nurses, social workers, and other professionals to meet with at-risk families in their homes and connect them to assistance that impacts a child's health, development, and ability to learn. These programs have been critical in improving maternal and child health outcomes in the early years, leaving long-lasting, positive impacts on parenting skills; children's cognitive, language, and social-emotional development; and school readiness. This will help ensure that our most vulnerable Americans are on track from birth, and that later educational investments rest upon a strong foundation.

Yes, it has come to this. A Washington Examiner round-up of other moments the senator from Florida has casually rehydrated on camera proves Marco Rubio's post-State of the Union swig wasn't the only awkward moment he's had with the wet stuff -- you know, water.

"I think I just drank Clinton Eastwood's water," he says in a Republican National Convention aside featured in the clip.

O tempora, o mores!

I'm still of the school that after everyone has had their fun at Rubio's expense, his remarks on the minimum wage and his vote against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act will be much more consequential for his political prospects than one viral moment from last night. But who knows -- maybe our politics really are that trivial.

There's no clear path to a minimum-wage hike in today's Congress. So why did the president surprise members of his own party and bring it up in the State of the Union?

In 2008, the Obama-Biden transition effort promised, as part of the new president's poverty agenda, that "Obama will ... raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011" and "index it to inflation."

That didn't happen, and when Obama in his 2013 State of the Union address once again brought up the question of raising the minimum wage -- though to a slightly lower amount -- it took some members of his party by surprise. A minimum-wage hike is a perennial progressive Democratic favorite, but it wasn't on the radar to emerge as a top priority for the president and his party in the year ahead.

"[T]oday, a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns $14,500 a year. Even with the tax relief we've put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That's wrong. That's why, since the last time this Congress raised the minimum wage, 19 states have chosen to bump theirs even higher," Obama said Tuesday night. "Tonight, let's declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 an hour."

He tried to make the idea sound bipartisan: "Working folks shouldn't have to wait year after year for the minimum wage to go up while CEO pay has never been higher. So here's an idea that Governor Romney and I actually agreed on last year: let's tie the minimum wage to the cost of living, so that it finally becomes a wage you can live on." (You can see Romney calling for the minimum wage to be indexed to the CPI or another inflation index here.)

On Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner quickly -- and predictably -- shot the idea down, as Republicans have with so much minimum-wage-increase talk in the past. "Listen, when people are asking the question 'Where are the jobs?' why would we want to make it harder for small employers to hire people? I've got 11 brothers and sisters on every rung of the economic ladder. I know about this issue as much as anybody in this town," Boehner said. The speaker in 2006 opposed raising the federal minimum wage to its current $7.25 an hour from $5.15; the last national minimum-wage hike through legislation came in 2007, when Democrats still controlled the House.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who delivered the GOP rebuttal to the State of the Union and has emerged as a prominent new face for the party, also dismissed the proposal. "I don't think a minimum-wage law works," he said on CBS's This Morning.

So why did Obama bring the issue up, knowing it would be a hard sell in the GOP-controlled House -- and even in the narrowly Democratic Senate, which is already grappling with the hot-button issues of immigration, gun control, and climate change?

The answer is that it's good politics for Obama and the Democrats to put the GOP in the position of opposing a popular economic measure that has particular appeal to Hispanics and women ("nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers," according to the National Women's Law Center), two groups the GOP is increasingly trying to woo. And it's good politics to do so just as Republicans are struggling to make some long-deferred compromises on immigration, in part in hopes of helping a future national Republican candidate perform better with Hispanics than did Romney in November. And also: It will give Democrats something to run on in 2014.

As Obama and the Democrats meet with more success in Congress -- especially if there's a real immigration deal -- and as Republicans increasingly highlight a small but diverse group of next-generation GOP leaders from modest circumstances, such as Rubio, Democrats are going to need a fresh wedge issue on which to cast the GOP as the party of the rich, the already-established, and the intransigent. The minimum-wage fight will be clarifying, even if it's not one Democrats can expect to win any time soon.

Human moments from the ridiculous to the heart-rending lept from the boilerplate at the State of the Union address and the GOP response to it.

Marco Rubio's mid-speech lunge for an awkwardly placed bottle of water during his Republican Party response to the State of the Union immediately became the break-out moment of his remarks Tuesday night.

Before the clock struck midnight, there was already a #ThirstyRubio hashtag, at least four different fake Twitter feeds (such as @Water4Rubio, "Drinking water awkwardly on national Television since 1969."), a basic meme ("Stay Thirsty My Friends"), gifs (and more GIFs), a deconstruction, and even, from Deadspin, a slow-motion version of the Rubio reach set to the indie music tune "Danger of the Water," by the Futureheads.

Rubio (or his social media team) responded in kind -- which was pretty much the only thing they could do once Rubio's otherwise perfectly passable performance (unusual for a SOTU response) was eclipsed by the bad advance work that left him with a long speech, a dry mouth, and no TV-ready glass of water within easy reach.

#GOPResponse #SOTU #gop #tcot twitter.com/marcorubio/sta...

-- Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 13, 2013

Shortly after 10 p.m., "Rubio water" massively outnumbered Twitter mentions of Obama's "they deserve a vote" riff at the end of his speech.

It's too bad, because the other most powerful form of human emotion on display Tuesday night also involved questions of the wet and the dry -- in this case, the dry eyes of Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton and Nathaniel A. Pendleton, parents of slain Chicago 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton. The couple somehow managed to go on national television as guests in the first lady's viewing box just weeks after losing their daughter, who was murdered on January 29, without completely losing their own composure as the president spoke of their child and used the example of their loss to urge members of Congress to allow gun control legislation to come up for a vote.

Said Obama:

Hadiya's parents, Nate and Cleo, are in this chamber tonight, along with more than two dozen Americans whose lives have been torn apart by gun violence. They deserve a vote.

Gabby Giffords deserves a vote.

The families of Newtown deserve a vote.

The families of Aurora deserve a vote.

The families of Oak Creek, and Tucson, and Blacksburg, and the countless other communities ripped open by gun violence -- they deserve a simple vote.

Our actions will not prevent every senseless act of violence in this country. Indeed, no laws, no initiatives, no administrative acts will perfectly solve all the challenges I've outlined tonight. But we were never sent here to be perfect. We were sent here to make what difference we can, to secure this nation, expand opportunity, and uphold our ideals through the hard, often frustrating, but absolutely necessary work of self-government.

It may seem a stretch to yoke these two moments together, yet the gun-control passage was the emotional crescendo of Obama's speech for the same reason the Rubio reach became an instant viral sensation. They were deeply human moments plonked amid the formal language and staging of the highly-manufactured evening, reminders that for all the ideology and political calculations -- and Obama's invocation of the Pendletons was nothing if not pointedly seeking a political outcome -- politics is about people. People want politicians who seem real at the same time they are shocked when they act it. And politics is at its most powerful when it addresses not just the sweeping themes of impending and contested legislation, but the individuals who most need to see major changes in the communities in which they live.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida will be delivering his party's rebuttal to the president's State of the Union address tonight. Advance speech excerpts released by Rubio situate him as a descendent of Cuban-American immigrants -- one who still lives where he's from, and one who carries his community's commitment to the American free enterprise system close to heart. That makes sense, as his is a community he often brings up in remarks in a way that makes him sound both more regional and more grounded than the average U.S. Senator bursting onto the national stage. The excerpts:

This opportunity - to make it to the middle class or beyond no matter where you start out in life - it isn't bestowed on us from Washington. It comes from a vibrant free economy where people can risk their own money to open a business. And when they succeed, they hire more people, who in turn invest or spend the money they make, helping others start a business and create jobs. Presidents in both parties - from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan - have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle class prosperity. But President Obama? He believes it's the cause of our problems.

***

Mr. President, I still live in the same working class neighborhood I grew up in. My neighbors aren't millionaires. They're retirees who depend on Social Security and Medicare. They're workers who have to get up early tomorrow morning and go to work to pay the bills. They're immigrants, who came here because they were stuck in poverty in countries where the government dominated the economy. The tax increases and the deficit spending you propose will hurt middle class families. It will cost them their raises. It will cost them their benefits. It may even cost some of them their jobs. And it will hurt seniors because it does nothing to save Medicare and Social Security. So Mr. President, I don't oppose your plans because I want to protect the rich. I oppose your plans because I want to protect my neighbors.

***

Economic growth is the best way to help the middle class. Unfortunately, our economy actually shrank during the last three months of 2012. But if we can get the economy to grow at just 4 percent a year, it would create millions of middle class jobs. And it could reduce our deficits by almost $4 trillion dollars over the next decade. Tax increases can't do this.Raising taxes won't create private sector jobs. And there's no realistic tax increase that could lower our deficits by almost $4 trillion. That's why I hope the President will abandon his obsession with raising taxes and instead work with us to achieve real growth in our economy.

***

The real cause of our debt is that our government has been spending 1 trillion dollars more than it takes in every year. That's why we need a balanced budget amendment. The biggest obstacles to balancing the budget are programs where spending is already locked in. One of these programs, Medicare, is especially important to me. It provided my father the care he needed to battle cancer and ultimately die with dignity. And it pays for the care my mother receives now. I would never support any changes to Medicare that would hurt seniors like my mother. But anyone who is in favor of leaving Medicare exactly the way it is right now, is in favor of bankrupting it.

***

Despite our differences, I know that both Republicans and Democrats love America. I pray we can come together to solve our problems, because the choices before us could not be more important. If we can get our economy healthy again, our children will be the most prosperous Americans ever. And if we do not, we will forever be known as the generation responsible for America's decline.

From the prepared for delivery version of Obama's speech:

It is our generation's task, then, to reignite the true engine of America's economic growth - a rising, thriving middle class.

It is our unfinished task to restore the basic bargain that built this country - the idea that if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or who you love.

It is our unfinished task to make sure that this government works on behalf of the many, and not just the few; that it encourages free enterprise, rewards individual initiative, and opens the doors of opportunity to every child across this great nation of ours.

A growing economy that creates good, middle-class jobs - that must be the North Star that guides our efforts. Every day, we should ask ourselves three questions as a nation: How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills needed to do those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?

Tonight, I'll lay out additional proposals that are fully paid for and fully consistent with the budget framework both parties agreed to just 18 months ago. Let me repeat - nothing I'm proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime. It's not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth.

Nobody loves workmanlike laundry lists, but four former presidential speechwriters say there's little hope for shorter speeches any time soon.

Four former presidential speechwriters on Tuesday discussed their efforts to reign in recent State of the Union addresses, which have become some of the longest and most unwieldy speeches presidents give, as well as the most widely-watched. But structural forces within the White House, they predicted, will most likely continue to conspire to turn the annual laying out of presidential priorities into mammoth, workmanlike laundry lists, no matter who resides in the Oval Office.

Just ask Jeff Shesol, now a partner at the West Wing Writers Group. When he came to the White House in 1998, he had an idea about streamlining the speeches, which had already grown to gargantuan new lengths under President Clinton.

"When I had just gotten there, to the White House, and I was really full of what I thought were fresh ideas, I wrote a memo arguing for a tightly thematic approach to the State of the Union and to finally reject the laundry list, make an argument for something, and let a lot of other stuff fall by the wayside," he recalled at a panel Tuesday morning organized by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington and moderated by the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart.

"I made my case in a couple page memo and I was told, essentially: 'You're adorable.'" Shesol said.

"I got to work like everybody else on filling out the laundry list."

The net result: One of the two State of the Unions he worked on wound up being the longest ever given, breaking Clinton's previous record-setting performance.

But even when they are not Clintonesque, State of the Unions have been getting longer over the past three decades. Obama's have been, on average, longer than George W. Bush's, which were longer than his father's, which were longer then those of Ronald Reagan. (Wonkblog lays out the details in a nice graphic here.)

State of the Unions are baggy in part because they have to sync up with the president's budget priorities, and partly because they are not so much written as organized, Shesol said. Observed Don Baer, worldwide chair and CEO of Burson-Marsteller and Clinton's former top speechwriter, speechwriters are "at best, stewards for a process" when it comes to the State of the Union -- which is "a mission statement and the setting out of an agenda for the entire presidency, and entire government, at least for a year ahead, and sometimes more than that." They don't decide what's in and what's out and they are lobbied constantly by Cabinet secretaries, interest groups, and constituencies within the government to add a reference to pet programs or name-check specific plans, the speechwriters agreed. The helpful phrase to remember, said former George W. Bush speechwriter John McConnell, is the truthful, "I promise this will receive consideration."

But the final decisions about what goes into a State of the Union are often made by the chief of staff, the communications director, a chief counselor, or the president himself -- and not by the speechwriter.

That kind of massive group process militates against short speeches. "Everyone starts out thinking it's going to be really short and they're going to change the tradition of these things running on and on," said Adam Frankel, a former speechwriter for President Obama, now executive director of Digital Promise. "And then inevitably, over the course of the process, they tend to be a certain length."

And then there's the unpredictable factor of a president who likes to riff.

"In 1995, which was the first year I when was chief speechwriter and I had to manage this process -- it was an unusual year," Baer said. "You remember, Newt Gingrich and the Republicans had taken Congress, there was a fair amount of uncertainty within the White House and among the Democrats about what President Clinton's message and sort of themes were going to be. That uncertainty held right up through the day of the speech."

The 89-minute speech that resulted was never supposed to be that long. "It was written at 5,800 words and, based on the pace that we knew President Clinton delivered his speeches, including applause, that meant it would have ended at 58 minutes. But when he got up to give the speech, because it was going so well, he added enough words for the full text to be 9,200 words, which means it came in -- he was speaking speaking faster toward the end -- it came in at 89 minutes," Baer said.

"I thought that was a little bit of an ignominious mark on my record. It was the longest presidential State of the Union in history -- until the year 2000, when I was only marginally involved, and he went 92 minutes. So I felt better about that."

Added Shesol: "We hold together this pair of records -- that Don's was the longest in words, and one I participated in, one of the ones of the I participated in, was the longest in minutes -- [Clinton] slowed down and enjoyed it."

He's posed as a pirate and toiled on the funerals beat. Now he's taking over the task of writing the president's major addresses.

Cody Keenan may not have a famous doppleganger in Hollywood like his colleague Jon Favreau, but when Favreau leaves the White House on March 1 to pursue a career as a screenwriter, Keenan's visibility is sure to spike in his new role as chief speechwriter at the White House. His first big reveal will be tonight, as he has been working with President Obama to pen the 2013 State of the Union address.

That speech will have been "a collaborative process between the president and his speechwriter," White House spokesman Jay Carney noted last week during a press briefing, "in this case, Cody Keenan." He was "taking the lead on the speechwriting team for this and will be getting a higher profile in the weeks to come -- internally, anyway," Carney said. "But these are speeches that the president takes very seriously. He's a writer himself, so he engages at a very deep level on the framing of a speech, on the writing of it and the editing of it and the shaping of it. So that process continues."

Here are some facts about Keenan:

* He worked with Obama to craft his 2011 Tucson remarks after Gabby Giffords was shot.

That speech was hailed by many as a pitch-perfect call for unity in the wake of a national tragedy, and with guns back in the news and Keenan's history of grappling with the issue -- and also of toiling away on what a friend of his once called the "eulogy and commencement beat" in the White House speechwriting shop -- get ready for an elegiac turn tonight.

The January 2011 speech was the first time Keenan, who was raised in suburban Chicago and Connecticut, popped up on the national press register. A Chicago Tribune story recounted at the time:

... After the much-applauded speech in Arizona, his anonymity is a thing of the past.

Flying back to Washington aboard Air Force One, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters late Wednesday that Keenan had been the speechwriter.

"It's C-O-D-Y K-E-E-N-A-N," Gibbs said. "And I'll double-check that, but I'm almost positive."

"A proud Northwestern fan," he added.

Gibbs said Obama probably had his "first conversations" with Keenan about the speech on Monday. "And what they usually do is the president will -- they'll bring a laptop in and the president will download a little bit on what he'd like to say," Gibbs said.

Obama sent changes back to Keenan about 1 a.m. Wednesday, Gibbs said, and work on the speech continued through the day. "They made edits even after we landed in Arizona," Gibbs said.

Of course, every speech by the president is the president's -- lest anyone forget.

By Thursday morning, Gibbs emphasized that Obama had wielded the heavier pen.

"I think last night was a speech that was very much the president's, and he spent a great deal of time going through his thoughts on this and spent a lot of time working on what he wanted to say," Gibbs said.

* He used to work for Ted Kennedy.

Keenan, a former high-school quarterback who flirted with the idea of becoming a doctor before turning to political science in college, arrived in Washington at the urging of a Sigma Chi fraternity brother and got his first break as an aide in the mailroom of Senator Ted Kennedy. He would go on to work for him for three and a half years, rising to the level of legislative aide, before heading to the Harvard Kennedy School for a masters.

According to a Kennedy School release:

Keenan's past and present collided on April 21, 2009, when President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act with Kennedy in attendance. Keenan drafted President Obama's speech for the event. Kennedy later sent him a handwritten note that read: "Seems like the Kennedy office and the Kennedy School have served you very well!"

Four months after that, Keenan helped the President craft his eulogy for Kennedy. Each time, he found himself deeply moved by the opportunity to write about the man who had shaped his notion of what public service could be. "It really brought things full circle," he said.

Keenan found his way into Obamaland in the summer of 2007, when he interned in the speechwriting shop of the then Democratic presidential primary contender, before returning to school and finishing his graduate degree in 2008 -- just in time to return to the campaign, this time as a full-time speechwriter, for the general election.

* He's compared speechwriting to being a perpetual grad student.

"Our jobs are remarkably like graduate school. You get a paper assignment, you might pull an all-nighter or come in really early to finish, and you hand it in and then you get his marks back and find out whether he likes it or not," he told a Kennedy School interviewer in 2010. "The good thing is he'll make detailed edits when he gets the speech, and he's generous with his time -- he'll walk us through the edits and explain why he made them. That makes us better writers."

* He's game to be the punchline in a sight gag.

Keenan also took a leading role in drafting Obama's 2009 White House Correspondents' Dinner remarks -- and dressed up as a pirate for one of the humorous speech's sight gags.

"We can't just talk to our friends, we've got to talk to our enemies too and I've begun to do exactly that," Obama said, as a picture of him talking to a hook-handed Keenan appeared on screen.

* He keeps a low profile.

At least, he has so far. His mantra for public life comes from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Brownlow Committee Report of 1937, he told a Northwestern alumni publication in the spring of 2011. The ideal presidential aide, it said, "should be possessed of high competence ... and a passion for anonymity."

An impressive array of movement leaders rallies to defend Brent Bozell after Crossroads GPS spokesman Jonathan Collegio called him a "hater."

A spokesman for Karl Rove's American Crossroads got a very public thumping Wednesday when some of the most prominent Tea Party leaders and movement conservative activists in the country signed onto a letter calling for him to be fired. Jonathan Collegio's offense: He dipped into hip-hop slag and called movement-conservative writer L. Brent Bozell III a "hater" during a talk-radio interview that morning. 

"An apology is not acceptable," the signatories wrote, and would in no way make up for the "unjust, personal broadside" against the president of the 25-year-old Media Research Council. Signatories included Richard Viguerie, Morton Blackwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, and Ginni Thomas, a conservative consultant who is also the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. 

Bozell "is not a hater. He's a patriot and someone who loves this country," said Jenny Beth Martin, also a signatory and co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots.

Collegio apologized, saying: "Bozell called us 'fake conservatives' -- which is language that perniciously and unfairly judges the motives of others, and fails to acknowledge that there might be honest differences on strategy within the conservative movement... I regret contributing to the vitriol, and I apologize to Mr. Bozell if it offended him. Believe it or not, I'm a big fan of both him and MRC."

It's just the latest outbreak in an ongoing series of skirmishes over the future of a Republican Party. The GOP is caught between a grassroots that's willing to roll the dice and risk some high-profile electoral losses in order to win other races with out-of-the-box candidates, and an establishment up in arms over the loss of what should have been safe Republican seats -- including some held by incumbents -- thanks to the new grassroots powers. Against that backdrop, a New York Times story about a Rove-backed super PAC's plans for a new project to help incumbents fend off primary challenges raised major hackles among movement conservatives, who felt it was tantamount to declaring war on some of their most cherished members while diminishing their role in the last election cycle that saw substantial GOP gains, 2010. 

"The biggest donors in the Republican Party are financing a new group to recruit seasoned candidates and protect Senate incumbents from challenges by far-right conservatives and Tea Party enthusiasts who Republican leaders worry could complicate the party's efforts to win control of the Senate," the Times reported on Tuesday. The effort is being led by Steven J. Law, president of Rove's American Crossroads group. That evening Rove appeared on Hannity to try to undo some of the damage from the Times piece.

But that didn't stop Bozell, who wrote critically of Rove's decision to give the New York Times, which Bozell considers a biased bastion of liberalism, the story in the first place:

If I were launching a new conservative venture, the last venue I'd choose for the announcement would be the New York Times. Karl Rove has gone to the Times to announce that he has created a new "conservative" entity "to recruit seasoned candidates and protect Senate incumbents from challenges by far-right conservatives and Tea Party enthusiasts."...

In the end, this is not a fight between Democrats and Republicans. This is between the Reaganites and the same old moderate Republicans who insisted Ronald Reagan was far too extreme to be elected in 1976 and then in 1980, when Rove worked for George H. W. Bush. They thought the Doles and McCains were always the smart money against the Democrats. It's a fight between Republicans who want to not only run as conservatives, but govern as conservatives, versus the Bush-Boehner-McConnell never-mind approach.

Rove's groups already had a "horrific" reception among conservatives, according to the American Spectator's Jeffrey Lord, on account of their dismal track record in 2012 and Rove's frank public criticism of conservative and Tea Party candidates he believed had gone off the electability rails dating to 2010.

Collegio's comments came in response to questioning during an interview on a Washington talk-radio show, WMAL's Mornings on the Mall with Brian Wilson & Larry O'Connor.

Collegio was pretty clear that American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS did not see themselves as the ones declaring intra-party war. "Look," he said, "American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS ... spent more than $30 million over the past two years supporting Tea Party candidates .... We need better candidates across the board."

"We want to elect the most conservative candidates possible," he said, adding later, "The headline on the Breitbart website that we're declaring war -- that's absolutely false."

Collegio contrasted Rove's support for Marco Rubio with his concerns about Christine O'Donnell and Todd Akin as the sorts of distinctions the group would make.

"I don't know why that headline came up," Collegio said. "This is not a war on the Tea Party. Brent Bozell is a hater. He has a long personal history of hating Karl Rove, too -- he has like weird personal axes to grind."

Collegio declined to comment for this story.

The full letter is below.

 

February 6, 2013

 

 

Mr. Steven Law

President & Chief Executive Officer

American Crossroads
P.O. Box 34413
Washington, DC 20043

 

Dear Mr. Law,

 

We, the free men and women of this great nation, affirm everyone's natural right to speak their mind, but we cannot and will not abide the unjust, personal broadside your aide Jonathan Collegio leveled against a man whose family has dedicated itself to advancing the cause of liberty for over half a century. 

This morning Mr. Collegio attacked L. Brent Bozell, III and labeled him as a "hater" twice in an interview.  His attack was not grounded in reason or principle; its justification was nothing more than disagreement with your newly formed organization. 

Mr. Bozell is what we call in our movement a "legacy." He has devoted his life to the cause of American conservatism as did his father, Brent Bozell II, who wrote "Conscience of a Conservative" for Barry Goldwater.

Maybe you've heard of Brent's uncle, Bill Buckley, whose words you misquote and twist as the basis for your organization enough to falsely suggest you know something about him.   

You may have heard of his other uncle, Jim Buckley, a former U.S. Senator, or Brent's mother, Patricia Buckley Bozell--both important figures and writers in our conservative movement. 

Ronald Reagan often saluted the contributions of the Bozell and Buckley families to the cause of American conservatism.

Mr. Collegio calling Mr. Bozell a "hater" publicly on WMAL radio this morning reflects the language of the establishment Republicans. It is the divisive language of the Left. 

Rather than engaging in an intellectual debate, you, Mr. Collegio, Mr. Rove, and others in the consultant class attack good conservatives and Tea Party leaders and members.

On behalf of the conservative movement, we are demanding you terminate Mr. Collegio.  An apology is not acceptable. 

American Crossroads and the so-called Conservative Victory Project have already been severely marginalized.  The sheer audacity of political consultants maligning a beloved and critically important player in American history is simply a bridge too far.

You obviously mean to have a war with conservatives and the Tea Party. 

Let it start here.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Craig Shirley                                                                       Diana Banister

Reagan Biographer                                                            Director

                                                                                            Citizens for the Republic

 

 

Mark Levin                                                                          Jenny Beth Martin

Author                                                                                  Co-Founder and National   Coordinator Tea Party Patriots

                                                                                               

 

Morton Blackwell                                                             Mathew D. Staver

Chairman                                                                         Founder and Chairman

The Weyrich Lunch                                                          Liberty Counsel

 

 

Tony Perkins                                                                      Austin Ruse

President                                                                            President

Family Research Council                                                   Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute

 

Richard Viguerie                                                               Manuel Miranda

Chairman                                                                           Third Branch Conference

ConservativeHQ.com                                                    

 

Phyllis Schlafly

President

Eagle Forum

 

 

Robert Fischer                                                                   Mark Fitzgibbons

President                                                                            President of Corporate Affairs

Fischer Furniture, Inc.                                                       American Target Advertising

 

David N. Bossie                                                                 Troy Newman

President                                                                            Pro-Life Nation

Citizens United

 

 

Richard F. Norman                                                           Tricia Erickson

Founder and President                                                    President

The Richard Norman Company                                       Crisis Management, Inc.

 

 

Ginni Thomas                                                                    Angelo M. Codevilla                                       

Liberty Consulting                                                            Professor emeritus

                                                                                        Claremont Institute

 

 

William Wilson                                                                   Rick Scarborough

Americans for Limited Government                                   Vision America

 

 

Peter J. Thomas                                                                Colin Hanna

Chairman                                                                           Let Freedom Ring

The Conservative Caucus Inc.

 

Andrea Lafferty                                                                Frank Gaffney

President                                                                         President

Traditional Values Coalition                                             Center for Security Policy

A Super Bowl advertisement for Ram Trucks featuring excerpts from a Carter-era address to the Future Farmers of America Convention struck a chord with its religious imagery.

A decades-old speech from a conservative radio broadcaster who passed away in 2009 became a major topic of chatter when it was condensed and delivered as the audio backdrop for a Ram Trucks ad during the second half of the Super Bowl Sunday.

The speech was originally delivered in 1978, smack dab in the middle of the Carter era, and with its folksy timbre and talk of God, Paul Harvey's words stood out amid the stream of ads that ranged from salacious to ridiculous to sentimental on 21st-century CBS.

This New York Times obituary well-situates Harvey politically, and describes the role he played in American life:

In his heyday, which lasted from the 1950s through the 1990s, Mr. Harvey's twice-daily soapbox-on-the-air was one of the most popular programs on radio. Audiences of as many as 22 million people tuned in on 1,300 stations to a voice that had been an American institution for as long as most of them could remember.

Like Walter Winchell and Gabriel Heatter before him, he personalized the radio news with his right-wing opinions, but laced them with his own trademarks: a hypnotic timbre, extended pauses for effect, heart-warming tales of average Americans and folksy observations that evoked the heartland, family values and the old-fashioned plain talk one heard around the dinner table on Sunday.

"Hello, Americans," he barked. "This is Paul Harvey! Stand byyy for Newwws!"

He railed against welfare cheats and defended the death penalty. He worried about the national debt, big government, bureaucrats who lacked common sense, permissive parents, leftist radicals and America succumbing to moral decay. He championed rugged individualism, love of God and country, and the fundamental decency of ordinary people.

Here's the text of his speech, made newly famous during the Super Bowl:

And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, "I need a caretaker." So God made a farmer.

God said, "I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board." So God made a farmer.

"I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery, come home hungry, have to wait lunch until his wife's done feeding visiting ladies and tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon -- and mean it." So God made a farmer.

God said, "I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt. And watch it die. Then dry his eyes and say, 'Maybe next year.' I need somebody who can shape an ax handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make harness out of haywire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. And who, planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, then, pain'n from 'tractor back,' put in another seventy-two hours." So God made a farmer.

God had to have somebody willing to ride the ruts at double speed to get the hay in ahead of the rain clouds and yet stop in mid-field and race to help when he sees the first smoke from a neighbor's place. So God made a farmer.

God said, "I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bails, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark. It had to be somebody who'd plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk and replenish the self-feeder and finish a hard week's work with a five-mile drive to church.

"Somebody who'd bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says he wants to spend his life 'doing what dad does.'" So God made a farmer.

His full delivery of those remarks against a backdrop of images honoring farmers:

And the Ram Trucks ad:

The same day The New York Times published a big take-out on growing questions around whether Obama actually shot skeet, the White House released an August photo of the president shooting clay targets on the range at Camp David.

The photo was released with mocking Twitter commentary by one current and one former White House senior adviser, both of whom sounded resigned almost to the idea that release of the photo will inflame rather than stanch the conspiracy theories that have already sprung up around the Obama's remark in a New Republic interview that "up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time."

For all the "skeeters": POTUS shoots clay targets on the range at Camp David on Aug. 4, 2012. bit.ly/WlDMYG

-- Dan Pfeiffer (@pfeiffer44) February 2, 2013

Attn skeet birthers. Make our day - let the photoshop conspiracies begin! m.flickr.com/photos/whiteho...

-- David Plouffe (@davidplouffe) February 2, 2013