SANDY’S DESTRUCTIVE PATH
THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE
NOVEMBER 4, 2012
ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? How the Presidential Campaign Became a Blood Sport
11.04.12 #21 CONTENTS
Enter POINTERS: Romney vs. FEMA, Christie Spat, Anderson Gets Canceled MOVING IMAGE DATA: Bloodshed and the Box Office Q&A: Al Sharpton
Voices HOWARD FINEMAN: Race to the Bottom
THREE DAYS IN OCTOBER BY JON WARD
SANJAY SANGHOEE: The NRA’s 2012 Anxiety HOWARD STEVEN FRIEDMAN: Save the Independent Voter From Extinction
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QUOTED
Exit ART: Portrait of a Nude Model
THE IDEALISTS BY DAN FROOMKIN
TECH: Facebook Profile Photos Are Serious Business APPROVAL: Getting to Know You GREATEST PERSON: Debbie Gori THE GILDED AGE: Culture Wars Couples TFU
WRONG TURN BY BEN HALLMAN
FROM THE EDITOR: The Election Issue ON THE COVER: Photo-illustration
by Jesse Lenz for Huffington
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
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The Election Issue N THIS WEEK’S Election Issue of Huffington, Dan Froomkin looks back four years to a time when “the world seemed full of possibilities — particularly for the people who spend their careers trying to make the world a better place.” Revisiting some of the idealists who believed Obama’s 2008 election would inaugurate
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an era of sweeping progressive change, Dan finds them, as he puts it, “chastened by the reality that Obama is a politician, not an activist.” He looks at their disappointments, from Obama’s abandoned campaign promise to close Guantanamo Bay to the way the president surrounded himself with financial insiders like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. Elsewhere in the issue, Ben Hallman drills down on the foreclosure crisis, one of Obama’s sig-
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
nature failures. The numbers tell the story: only 2.3 million American families have received assistance to help them avoid foreclosure, far short of the president’s 2009 promise to bring relief to between 7 and 9 million families. And Ben shows the awful reality behind the abstract numbers: the “cruel irony” faced each month by families “paying an inflated mortgage on an investment sold to them as the soundest financial decision they could make.” As he puts it: “Sometimes the toughest part of a journalist’s job is tracking down a person whose experience properly illustrates a story. Finding people who feel they have been screwed by their mortgage company, though, is distressingly easy.” As we enter the last week of the campaign, Jon Ward puts the spotlight on the three debates that drew millions of TV viewers and gave new life to the floundering Romney campaign. We see just how much the Romney camp invested in the debates — seizing the opportunity to move beyond their candidate’s lackluster convention performance, clumsy response to the Benghazi attack, and
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disastrous “47 percent” remarks — and just how much President Obama’s poor performance in the first debate shook the members of his inner circle. Jon takes us inside the swarm of reporters confronting David Axelrod and David Plouffe, “the twin Finding swamis of the Obama people who high command,” and feel they have lets us feel their rebeen screwed lief after the second by their debate “stanched the mortgage bleeding for Obama.” company is Reflecting on past distressingly debates that swung easy.” elections — including Kennedy-Nixon in 1960 and Reagan-Carter in 1980 — Jon predicts that, should Mitt Romney unseat the president on Tuesday, the first 2012 debate will join their historic ranks. Finally, tap here for a page we’ve put up for anybody who wants to lend a helping hand to those affected by Hurricane Sandy.
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ROMNEY’S FEMA REMARKS COME BACK TO BITE HIM
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One unusual plan Mitt Romney floated during primary season made headlines as Hurricane Sandy bore down on the East Coast. In a GOP primary debate, Romney described his vision to CNN’s John King: close FEMA and transfer disaster relief to the states — or better yet, privatize it. “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction,” he said. “And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.” A Romney spokesperson confirmed Sunday night that the candidate’s position on the issue has not changed.
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HAITI DEVASTATED BY SANDY
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CHRIS CHRISTIE FACES ‘MANOA-MANO’ CHALLENGE
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BRING IT ON STAR DIES AT 32
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Hurricane Sandy killed dozens in the U.S., but the storm also ravaged Haiti, where it took at least 54 lives. It also caused widespread crop destruction and flooded streets, setting the stage for a spike in cholera cases. In Port-au-Prince, where some 370,000 people displaced by the 2010 earthquake live in tent camps, thousands of families were left homeless. “We are hungry, things for me are bad, our tarp is torn,” one victim told the Washington Post. “It’s misery.” Atlantic City Mayor Lorenzo Langford had strong words for Chris Christie after the New Jersey governor accused him of sending mixed messages on evacuation ahead of Hurricane Sandy. Langford, a Democrat, told NBC’s Matt Lauer that he wanted to confront Christie “mano-a-mano” to dispute the governor’s “dead wrong” accusations. “Isn’t it sad, that here we are in the throes of a major catastrophe and the governor has chosen a time such as this to play politics,” he said.
Actress and R&B singer Natina Reed was killed by a car as she walked on a highway outside of Atlanta last Friday night. The driver of the car called 911 and was determined to be not at fault for the accident. Reed, who was 32, was best known for singing with the 1990s girl band Blaque and for starring in 2000’s Bring it On. She leaves behind a 10-yearold son, whose father is the rapper Kurupt.
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OBAMA PREDICTS GOP ‘WAR’
Republicans will wage war against each other if Obama is reelected, the president said in a pre-taped interview on Morning Joe Monday. “The question’s going to be, how do Republicans react post-election?” he said. “Because there’s going to be a war going on inside that party. It just hasn’t broken up. It’s been unified in opposition to me.” Obama has blamed some economic disappointments of his first term on partisan gridlock and Republican obstructionism.
ANDERSON GETS CANCELED
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THAT’S VIRAL ATLANTIC CITY UNDERWATER
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Anderson Cooper’s daytime talk show, Anderson Live, won’t return for a third season. The show, which debuted last fall to mixed reviews and was retooled for its second season, suffered from low ratings and the business realities of daytime talk television, a studio executive told the New York Times on condition of anonymity. Cooper said in a press release: “I look forward to doing more great shows this season, and I’m sorry we won’t be continuing, but I have truly enjoyed it.”
A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories. HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES
SANDY FROM SPACE
WOMAN SELLS HER VIRGINITY FOR OVER $750K, MAN DOESN’T GET QUITE AS MUCH
THESE ARE NOT PHOTOS OF HURRICANE SANDY
WAS DONALD TRUMP’S ANNOUNCEMENT A GIGANTIC WASTE OF TIME?
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Sound and Fury
MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
As we start to pick up the pieces in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, some of the communities hit the hardest will not return to normal life anytime soon. Parts of Atlantic City, N.J., remain underwater, New York City’s subway system is ravaged and an entire neighborhood in Queens, N.Y., burned to the ground. Ahead, images of Sandy’s breathtaking fury — and devastating aftermath. Tap here for a page we’ve put up for anybody who wants to lend a helping hand to those affected by Hurricane Sandy.
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Flooding in DUMBO, Brooklyn.
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The boardwalk at Long Beach, N.Y.
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Onlookers cling to a gate alongside a shopping center loading dock, where Bay Parkway meets Gravesend Bay in Brooklyn, as storm surges from Hurricane Sandy wash ashore.
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A parking garage is flooded in the Financial District.
Water rushes into the Carey Tunnel, formerly known as the BrooklynBattery Tunnel.
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Sea water floods the construction site at Ground Zero.
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Hospital workers evacuate patient Deborah Dadlani from NYU Langone Medical Center.
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The wreckage after the fires in Breezy Point, Queens, which destroyed 80 to 100 homes.
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Hurricane Sandy ripped off the facade of this Chelsea apartment building in NYC.
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A firefighter and police officer look upwards at the construction crane perched precariously atop a Manhattan luxury highrise, broken by Sandy's high winds.
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AP PHOTO/FRANK FRANKLIN II
What remains of the homes destroyed by the sixalarm fire in Breezy Point, Queens.
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AP PHOTO/CHARLES SYKES
A parking lot of yellow taxi cabs is flooded in Hoboken, NJ.
DATA
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200
175
20
0
150
17
5
125
15
10
0
12
5
00
100
10 90
0
80
75
75
70
50
50
175
100
125
25
150
25
75
50
25
5
16 5
75
23 0
16
Bloodshed and the Box Office 75
75
165
230
305
605
530
455
380
75
30
5
165
23
38
0
0
230
50 years, 23 James Bond films and many, many deaths. How do killings — at the hands of 007 and others — translate into ticket sales? 5
45
5
53
0
380
455
60
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK SOURCE: BIME ANALYTICS. SHUTTERSTOCK
5 530
TAP BELOW FOR INFO
605
TAP FOR ADDITIONAL CREDITS
5 60
0
0
305
38
53
5
45
30
200
60
50
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Al Sharpton Explains Why He Works 18-Hour Days
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RAYON RICHARDS
Q&A
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Q&A
DON’T KNOW IF I WOULD have brought Al Sharpton on to do a show!” Rev. Al Sharpton himself admitted this fall at the oneyear anniversary party of his MSNBC nightly program, PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton, according to the New York Observer. His civil rights accomplishments over the past four decades have at times been overshadowed by his public missteps and inflammatory rhetoric, but this election cycle a more focused, slimmer Sharpton, 58, has brought even his adversaries — like Newt Gingrich — on his show for thoughtful debate. Huffington spoke with him about what gets him out of bed each day, including voter suppression attempts, marriage equality and the elusive notion of a post-racial America. — Leigh Owens Why in 2012 are we still having to fight for the right to vote? I think that it is something that is unbelievable, but at the same time we realistically have to deal with. There are forces that never wanted to see women, blacks and Latinos vote, and I think that we’re seeing a 21st-century version of how they intend to at least minimize that vote... This is one of the real fights of our time, to maintain our right to vote. We’re in post-racial America because we have a black president, right? That’s right. And to me, the sad part is, not only has a lot of White America bought into we’re in post-racial America, a lot of Black and Latino America has bought into it. And
therefore, with guys like me that are out there, people say, “Oh they’re just causing trouble.” No, we’re about to lose it all. What is it going to take to awaken people? As people hear it, that’s one of the reasons why I work 18-hour days and do radio, tv and NAN [National Action Network, his nonprofit civil rights organization]. People hear it, they wake up. A lot of it is communicating. For example, we did the voter ID march reenacting the Selma to Montgomery march in March of this year. When I got back to New York, after we did 10 days doing the march and had a big rally in Montgomery really making the voter ID thing a national issue. When I got back to New York, I got a call from Ben Crump
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and the parents of Trayvon Martin. I’d never heard of the case. And when they told me about the case, and I said, “Alright I’ll help make it national.” I brought the family up, put them on my TV show. Michael Baisden, Tom Joyner and I hit the airways and called for a rally. 30,000 people came to Sanford [Florida]. I didn’t even know where Sanford was. Once people hear it, and once you mobilize, people will come out. In terms of marriage equality, as a religious leader but also as an activist, have you ever had a period in your career where you felt conflicted? I came out for marriage equality in 2003. I was not always there. But I have a member of my family that was gay who told me, “Why is it that my mate and I can build a life, and if something happens to me where I’m not in charge of my health, they can’t make decisions for me? Or that we can build wealth together but then we can’t share it together?” That’s what started changing me. Why do I need the permission of your beliefs to operate my life? And suppose if I come to power, can then I make laws against you being a Baptist? So I came out in 2003, and I went
into the Democratic primary in 2004 raising this issue. I had black ministers tell me, “I’m not going to let you preach in my church for that,” and I told them fine. I’ve seen a growth now in the faith commu-
Al Sharpton came out in support of marriage equality in 2003.
AP PHOTO/GRANT HINDSLEY
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nity. You have others that are adamant, others that come out when the president came out. Eventually other civil rights groups have come out. But we’ve been there a long time. You cannot be a civil rights activist and not be for civil rights for everybody.
Q&A
What would you say to the Chick-Fil-A CEO? I would say that you have the right to your beliefs, but you don’t have the right to impose those beliefs. That good ministers convert people, they don’t force them. Even God gives you a choice. So why do we remove the choice from people? In what name do we say that by law, we’re going to make people do things?
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Al Sharpton speaks to reporters before the memorial service for Rodney King this past June.
Voices
HOWARD FINEMAN
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Race to the Bottom I HAD MY FIRST SIT-DOWN with Barack Obama in his Senate office. The sun was streaming in. He came around from behind his desk with that beaming smile, his tie loosened. He sat in a deep chair, his feet up on the coffee table. I was taken with his confidence, talent, grasp of the issues and buoyant charm: the real deal. That was early in 2007. Later that year I sat down with Mitt Romney on the Republican primary-season campaign trail. I had interviewed him years earlier, at his suburban Boston home. He hadn’t changed a bit: chilly smile,
ILLUSTRATION BY LESLIE HERMAN
wary but gracious, well-informed, a mix of a steely mind, ferocious ambition and earnest Mormon good will: a class act. Today I ask: Where did those two men go? Or were they mirages? The way both have campaigned this year makes me wonder. Is there something about the
Howard Fineman is the editorial director of the Huffington Post Media Group
Voices presidency—or the pursuit of it— that attacks the character of men and women under its spell? I ask because this has not been an uplifting, inspirational campaign year—unlike, say, 1984, when the voters genuinely agreed with President Ronald Reagan that it was “morning in America again”; or 2008, when Obama’s victory was an epic affirmation of the ideal, if not always the reality, of racial justice in America. Not this year. It has been a joyless slog of accusations and recriminations in a dreary time, when not enough is going as we had hoped, but voters are wary of alternatives and disdainful of politics itself. The 2012 combatants claimed to have cared about big ideas, but really didn’t; claimed to have traveled the high road, but mostly worked the down low; claimed to be talking about the future when they were mostly arguing about the past. This was supposed to be about letting the people speak, but often seemed like a top-down propaganda war among behemoth billionaires, their “independent” TV ads, social media and brute cash. As for honesty, there is no false equivalency. The president
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trimmed, but Mitt was by far the more mendacious of the two. Once a moderate governor, he claimed this year in the GOP primaries to have been a “severely conservative” one. Then, in the national debates against the president, Romney tried to tack to port again. The ideological twists required him to become (or reveal himself as) a guy with no compunction about ignoring—or rewriting—the facts of his political and This was business career, supposed to be whether it was what about letting he did and did not the people support as governor; speak, but what he did and did often seemed not do at Bain; and like a top-down what he had or had propaganda not said in public. war among The president is behemoth hardly blameless in billionaires.” this dismal season. He ran on fear, not hope; he ran essentially without a new agenda and spent most of his time and campaign dollars in a vicious—and ultimately unsuccessful—attempt to make Romney out to be a Mephistophelian combination of Gordon Gecko, Daddy Warbucks, Donald Trump and the man in
Voices spats on the Monopoly box. It wasn’t an approach worthy of who Obama is, or who we thought he was. But he and his crew decided it was the only way to win. The central, enduring image of the 2012 campaign took place on a “town hall” stage on Long Island, where the two men circled each other, stood toe-to-toe and talked over each other: two Harvard Law School graduates acting like WWF warm up acts. To give some sense of nobility to what was essentially a dirty ground war, the two men painted their clash as a matter of grand philosophy: between Jefferson (Romney) and Hamilton (Obama); between the free market and the idea of federal government. The truth is that both of them— and most voters—knew that the dispute was really more a matter of math: how to cut the federal pie. It has been a good ol’ American war over Who Gets What. And both sides know where this ultimately will end: on some kind of compromise over taxes, spending and entitlements to show the world that we’re plausibly committed to managing our finances. The president expressed willingness to do a $4 trillion, ten-
HOWARD FINEMAN
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year debt-reduction deal (with a ratio of $2.50 in spending cuts, including Medicare, to $1 in new tax revenue). Republicans couldn’t deliver, so Obama backed off. On the campaign trail, Romney joined the “severe conservatives” and refused to endorse The truth even a $10-$1 deal. It was hardly a Profiles is that both in Courage moment. of them—and Democrats doubt most voters— that a President knew that the Romney would try dispute was to change course, really more a let alone take on the matter of math: GOP Tea Party. But how to cut the the man is devoted federal pie.” to spreadsheets, and knows the deal called America won’t “pencil,” as they say in his world, without new revenues. Meanwhile, he and the president spent the last, storm-tossed days of the 2012 campaign calling each other names in and around Ohio: something about Jeeps and who was telling the truth and where they are and will be made. (Answer: Not Romney.) It seemed a fitting finale for a presidential contest that never got off the ground.
Voices
SANJAY SANGHOEE
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The NRA’s 2012 Anxiety IF THERE IS ONE THING that the National Rifle Association does not do, it is get scared easily. But this October, that may have changed. The lobbying group, financed by gun manufacturers to push the agenda of gun owners, has long been an aggressive
ILLUSTRATION BY LESLIE HERMAN
defender of gun rights and the Second Amendment, even to the point of absurdity, and its prime tactic in this regard has always been to play offense. But it was President Obama who went on the offensive in the second presidential debate, and in a brief and generally ignored exchange hinted that he would like to reinstate the Assault Weapons
Sanjay Sanghoee is a banker and author of thriller novels Merger and Portrait of Malice
Voices Ban of 2004. The NRA reacted with forceful ads against him in several states. Ostensibly, the ads were directed at the president’s judicial appointments, who are pro-guncontrol, but that is nonsense. A few judicial appointments, even on the Supreme Court, will make very little difference to the issue of gun rights since the legislative side is all but impotent. The president himself has done almost nothing during his four years to promote gun control and has repeatedly expressed his support for the Second Amendment. So why is the NRA so nervous? Perhaps it’s because the organization understands its enemy more clearly than even his supporters do, and they know the implications of a second Obama term. Gun control has always been a no-win issue for Democrats. After all, with 90 firearms for every 100 Americans, it is clear that gun owners form a very large voting bloc in this country, and given the passion with which a lot of them love guns, and the extremism with which some of them interpret the Second Amendment, it is obvious that any politician who advocates gun control is gambling with those
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votes. As a first-term president with a lot on his plate, including a massive economic crisis, spiraling healthcare costs, rising oil prices, explosive unrest in the Middle East, a catastrophic oil spill and congressional gridlock, not to menNot only tion a reelection camis the NRA’s paign, it is no wonder campaign to that Obama opted not glorify guns to add this particular irresponsible, issue to his agenda. its opposition But a second term to even is a different story. common-sense If Obama wins in gun laws like November, he will background be in an unusually checks is powerful position blatantly to take on the NRA unpatriotic.” and the issue of gun control in a way that has not been seen in more than a decade. With no more campaigns to fight and with two of his biggest commitments—the economy, which is gradually recovering, and the Affordable Care Act, which is firmly in place—under control, the president will be free to take action on this matter with boldness and reason. His balanced view on guns ensures that he would only push for reforms that are critical to protecting the safety of Ameri-
Voices cans — such as banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and restricting the sale of unlimited amounts of ammunition — and leave the core of the “right to bear arms” intact so that citizens can continue to protect their homes and families. This will net him the valuable moral support of the wider public and give him a true mandate to restore sanity in our society. The reality is that after the recent string of massacres, starting in Colorado, America is getting extremely tired of senseless shootings, and even more tired of the reckless attitude of gun rights advocates who choose to ignore the gun violence sweeping our nation. Not only is the NRA’s campaign to glorify guns irresponsible, its opposition to even common-sense gun laws like background checks is blatantly unpatriotic and dangerous. It gets away with this sort of recklessness because of the vast sums of money at its disposal, which it can use for misinformation campaigns and lobbying — and because of the lack of political will in Washington to tackle gun control. But I view Obama as the type of
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man who does not intimidate easily and who, once he decides to do so, could really give the NRA a run for its money. Anyone who doubts this should remember how he won the battle on health care and the ferocity with which he pushed it through in the end, despite the machinations of the Republican Party and the insurance companies. Whether you like Obamacare or not, the president’s mettle on that was undeniable. The NRA knows this and also knows Should that, should Obama Obama get four get four more years, more years, he is likely to take he is likely to on gun control and take on gun put a serious dent in control and put the group’s efforts to a serious dent bully America into in the group’s submission. That is efforts to bully precisely why the America into organization is going submission.” after him now, and why it’s worried that he might win on Tuesday. It may be an unintentional compliment, but the NRA has revealed its own belief that Obama is a tough president who can get things done, and in the process, given all of us another reason to vote for him.
Voices
HOWARD STEVEN FRIEDMAN
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Save the Independent Voter From Extinction
F
OR SOME VOTERS, there is no thinking involved. They are kneejerk voters for one party or another, regardless of the candidates or how disgruntled they might be with their party. Nothing will bring them to vote for the candidate from a different party. Many of them vote the same as their parents, as if they inherited a gene for Democrat or Republican along with their hair color and height. This is a comfortable world to live in, unencumbered by the need for facts or options. They vote unconsciously, or as many of them like to say, “I finished doing my thinking about politics years ago.” ¶ Some voters cast their ballot based on only one issue. Whether it is gay marriage, women’s rights, tax policy, or military spending they only need to know where the party stands on that one issue in order to decide. Those who vote based on a single social issue tend to be those same party loyalists I mentioned above. Single-issue voters on non-social issues sometimes ILLUSTRATION BY LESLIE HERMAN
Howard Steven Friedman is a statistician/ economist for the United Nations who teaches at Columbia University
Voices move parties over time. Some voters focused on American-Israeli relations moved to the Republicans with George Bush 43rd and have no intention of moving back. Others passionate about the military moved over to the Democrats as they saw greater support for veterans under the current administration than under the Republicans. The voters who are truly independent seek to analyze candidates’ positions to determine which candidate is most aligned with their viewpoints. This group is a rare breed, one that is likely overestimated in many polls (just ask yourself what percent of the people you know haven’t already decided who they are voting for). Independent voters long for more choices, yet America is currently trapped in its two-party system. These voters are starving for data, information, meaningful dialog, fact-based debates and intelligent reviews of policies and proposals. But with the polarization of media coverage, objective sources of information are drowned out by the shouting matches that dominate the airwaves. Independent voices are quashed by winner-take-all-elections, the Electoral College and the Com-
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mission on Presidential Debates. Independent voters suffer during debates that consist of well-rehearsed zingers and memorized diatribes. This Commission effectively prevents third parties from participating by requiring a 15 percent polling rate before a candidate may join the presidential debates. Before the Commission began moderating the elections in 1988, the League of Women Voters was in charge; the league resigned as debate moderator, Independent claiming that “the demands of the two voters long for campaign organiza- more choices, tions would perpeyet America is trate a fraud on the currently trapped American voter.” in its two-party Yet that fraud persystem.” sists to this day with little momentum to overturn the two parties’ effort to silence other voices. Independent voters need information and options. They need to know that democracy involves thoughtful consideration of candidates, the present situation and the future. If independent voters are not fed these vital necessities, they will soon become extinct, along with the fading light of America’s democratic process.
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QUOTED
“ This is mommy when she was 21. This is what not to do.”
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“ Mitt’s tips on the storm: if you find your family in danger, go to your other house.”
— HuffPost commenter alicante
— Snooki to David Letterman on how she will have to explain Jersey Shore to her son
“ Somebody said the other day to me that this is as bad as Watergate. Nobody died in Watergate.”
— Sen. John McCain to Face
the Nation about the Benghazi attack
“ America needs Warren. America needs 1,000 Warrens to stop the country from falling apart.”
— HuffPost commenter asu2012
on a new poll showing Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown in a dead heat
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QUOTED
“ When she fell, the world stood. She will rise again, she will stand again. She can stand now.”
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“ And yet, France has a lower rate of abortion compared to the States. They also enjoy lower teenage pregnancies which means less welfare and assistance for young mothers and their children.”
— HuffPost commenter arschenhaller
on a French bill to make abortions free
— Ziauddin Yousufzai on his daughter Malala Yousufzai’s
recovery after being shot by the Taliban, according to the AP
I am not worried at this point about the impact on the election. I am worried about the impact on families. I am worried about the impact on our first responders. I am worried about the impact on our economy and on transportation.
— President Obama
on Monday as Sandy approached the East Coast
“ Nothing like spending a whole lot of money to have sex with somebody who doesn’t know how to have sex.”
— HuffPost commenter Franklin1776 on a Brazilian woman selling her virginity for $780,000
JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
11.04.12 #21
FEATURES THREE DAYS IN OCTOBER THE IDEALISTS WRONG TURN
THREE DAYS IN ★ ★ ★ OCTOBER ★ ★ ★
HOW THE DEBATES CHANGED THE RACE
PREVIOUS PAGE: SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
★ ★ ★ BY JON WARD ★ ★ ★
THE NIGHT BEFORE THE FIRST DEBATE in Denver, I ran into Kevin Madden, the 40-yearold, square-jawed senior aide to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in the lobby of the Denver Renaissance Hotel. Madden is about as disciplined and professional as they come in political communications. But when I saw him that night, he was tired, and despite his poker face, it showed. He’d been on the road with Romney almost every day for the previous three months, and it was clear he missed his wife and three sons. Romney’s flagging campaign wasn’t helping things.
AP PHOTO/CHARLES DHARAPAK
THREE DAYS IN OCTOBER
I had just arrived from the airport, and as we talked over our late dinner in the middle of the lounge, a young child on the other side of the expansive lobby started crying. Madden glanced over. “I’d give just about anything to have some screaming kids right now,” he said. Others on the Romney campaign were milling about as well. They seemed to be in good spirits, despite Romney’s bad poll numbers. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), senior Romney adviser Stuart
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Stevens and Austin Barbour, Stevens’ deputy, walked over to Madden and me. Barbour was quietly confident that Romney would perform well in the debate the next evening. Portman, who played President Barack Obama in debate preparation with Romney, told a story about the time he saw President George W. Bush take a nasty spill while mountain-biking at his ranch in Texas, but then rebuke aides who rushed to his side and tried to put his bike on the back of a truck. Bush got back on the bike and finished the ride. Perhaps it was an analogy for what he hoped Romney would do the next night.
Advisers to Mitt Romney, Kevin Madden, right, and Ed Gillespie, listen as their candidate addresses reporters at a campaign stop in North Las Vegas.
“ PEOPLE ARE GOING TO PICK UP THEIR TVS AND THROW IT OUT OF THEIR LIVING ROOMS, METAPHORICALLY ... AND SAY, ‘WHAT DO I DO HERE?’ ”
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Yet despite the modest optimism, there was no mistaking it: Romney had endured a terrible September. The Republican convention did little for him at the end of August. The Democrats then had had a successful convention that gave Obama momentum. And Romney’s bungled response to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya on the anniversary of Sept. 11 began a terrible two-week stretch. Five days after the Benghazi attack, Politico dropped a story about dysfunctional campaign infighting. And the day after that, the video of Romney’s “47 percent” remarks hit the news cycle. Romney’s propensity for gaffes did not seem lost on his campaign staff. At a Romney fundraiser at the Ritz-Carlton in Sarasota, Fla. on Sept. 20, I was sitting in the back of the ballroom as Ronna Romney, the ex-wife of Mitt’s older brother Scott Romney, spoke to a crowd of about 250 people. I noticed that a Romney campaign official did not seem to be paying attention to Ronna’s remarks, and mentioned it. The aide leaned over and said, “Maybe she’s more on message.”
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The debates presented an opportunity for Romney to get back on track. After months of wallto-wall coverage of every move and utterance the candidates had made, the 90-minute verbal sparring sessions slowed down the news cycle, as both candidates went underground for several days before each match up. Romney and his team saw the debates as a potential gamechanger and prepared accordingly. The GOP nominee tended to do his preparation in a variety of places — campaign headquarters in Boston; a Marriott in Burlington, Mass., about 30 minutes from downtown Boston — and then he liked to show up early to the city where each debate was being held and do prep there for at least a day. “It didn’t occur to anybody not to take it seriously,” Romney senior adviser Ron Kaufman told me. “Romney’s a person who takes things seriously. It was important. He knew the audience was tens of millions of people who were going to be interested in the race. Why wouldn’t you take it seriously?” Right after Labor Day weekend in early September, a full month before the first debate, Romney
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spent two days in Windsor, Vt. for his first immersive debate prep experience. I learned later that longtime Romney adviser Beth Myers, who oversaw the process for selecting his running mate, had been the loudest voice insisting that Romney block out large chunks of time to get ready for the three debates. Myers, one Romney adviser said, was also the one responsible for choosing Portman as the one to play Obama in prep sessions. Obama took a different approach to the debates than Romney, going to more remote locations and then flying into the debate city the day of the showdown. Obama spent two days at the Westin Lake Las Vegas Resort in Nevada before the first debate in Denver, two full days at the Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, Va., ahead of the second debate on Long Island, and then two days at Camp David ahead of the final debate in Boca Raton, Fla. Obama, whose busy schedule as president made it difficult enough to set aside large chunks of time to prepare, didn’t seem as keen as Romney on cramming either. He decided to skip an afternoon session ahead of the first debate to go see the Hoover Dam.
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And when a supporter asked how the prep was going, Obama joked, “It’s a drag. They’re making me do my homework.”
‘WE’VE UNSTUCK THE SON OF A BITCH’
A few days before the first debate, I sat in a Chicago high rise across from Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, in his office. I asked him if he was relaxed. The storyline at that point had become, essentially, “How in the world did Obama manage to end up in such a good position, despite a bad economy and some very unpopular signature legislative accomplishments?” Obama was up in the national polls, and looked like he might be on the verge of running away with Ohio. One Republican in Ohio told me Romney was “stuck in the mud” there. Messina insisted that he wasn’t taking it easy, however, and said that he expected things “to tighten.” And Ben LaBolt, the national spokesman for the Obama campaign, told me he was bracing himself for a Romney surge. Yet Messina insisted that even if Romney made a move, the Democrats were outpacing the Republicans in early voting and their
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ground game. Their grassroots organization, he said, would carry them through the last month. “I think Citizens United has so changed the air wars that at the end, people are going to pick up their TVs and throw it out of their living rooms, metaphorically, and look at their family and friends, and neighbors, and say, ‘What do I do here?’ And that’s the moment that we have a huge advantage,” he said. Messina noted that he was go-
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ing to “work every day for the next 40 days to win this election.” But then, for a moment, he permitted himself to savor the near future after an Obama win. He would, he said, “take a deep breath and go watch the University of Montana beat Montana State.” Messina is a University of Montana alum. The intrastate grudge match is scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 17, 11 days after the election. “Baucus and I are going. We already have our seats,” Messina said, referring to his old boss, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.).
Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager.
“ FLORIDA ‘IS LIKE A FREIGHT LINER, AND ONCE IT TURNS — AND I THINK IT’S TURNED — IT’S HARD TO TURN BACK.’” ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
“We’re going to go and have a really big Moose Drool Beer,” he said. All that faded, of course, the day after the first debate. In the spin room afterwards, on the campus of the University of Denver, Romney aides had a pretty easy night of it. They fielded questions of course, but didn’t need to say much. Romney had clearly won, and worse, Obama had contributed greatly to his own loss. The president had been so passive that Saturday Night Live later mocked him, suggesting that Obama had even let Romney claim that he killed Osama bin Laden. The press devoured Obama’s advisers when they finally entered the room after a more than 10-minute delay. David Axelrod and David Plouffe, in particular, the twin swamis of the Obama high command, were swarmed by packs of reporters. The only time I had seen anyone under more pressure in a spin room the entire election was when Texas Gov. Rick Perry faced reporters himself after
the GOP primary debate outside Detroit, in November 2011, to try to explain himself after his horrifying “oops” moment. Back at the Renaissance hotel, the mood was ecstatic. Madden and fellow Romney advisers Stuart Stevens, Eric Fehrnstrom, Ron Kaufman, Ben Ginsberg and others mingled with a group of campaign staff and reporters. They were careful not to be too jubilant. But there were a lot of smiles. The next morning, I left the Renaissance and walked down the street about three blocks — rolling my suitcase behind me through hotel parking lots and gravelly, trash-strewn bus stops — to the Holiday Inn where Obama had spent the night. A bus was standing by to carry me and other reporters to a nearby rally, and within an hour we were deposited in a park on the banks of Sloan’s Lake, about 10 feet away from performing artist Will.i.am, who was trying to warm up a few thousand Obama supporters. The crowd, shivering in the cold, was still shell-shocked from the president’s woeful perfor-
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Governor Romney waits to deliver a speech at a rally in Hobbs, N.M.
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mance the previous night, and Will.i.am told a somber story about the need to stay positive. Nobody on the Obama campaign — not Messina or anyone else — was pondering which beer they might be drinking on Nov. 7. The Ohio Republican who had complained of Romney being “stuck” before the debate, told me several days after the debate that things had changed. “We’ve unstuck the son of a bitch and we’re back on the highway,” he said.
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OBAMA STOPS THE BLEEDING
Ahead of the second presidential debate, a Romney campaign aide told me that they had built a replica of the set on which Romney and Obama would face off. This is something both Republicans and Democrats have done for many presidential cycles. An official involved in Obama’s debate prep, told me they did the same this year, as they had in 2008, and said that Democrats have done this going back to Bill Clinton’s first campaign in 1992.
Obama and Romney shake hands at the third and final presidential debate in Boca Raton, Florida.
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A realistic town hall set, the Obama adviser said, “makes a huge difference for the mock debates.” “Obviously, you want the candidates to know how close their opponent will be, what the personal dynamic will be. On the town hall the movements are important,” the Obama adviser said. “Serious business! And ludicrous at the same time.” Pictures of the Romney mock set up, in a ballroom at the Marriott in Burlington, Massachusetts, revealed a striking level of detail. Romney staff built three-tier risers in a circle, put red hotel ballroom chairs on them, placed a moderator’s table at one end and two director-style chairs at the other end for the candidates, and draped what looked to be about 10-foot-high blue curtains around the entire thing. They set up TV-style lights on scaffolding that shined on Romney and Portman, who stood in for Obama, from three angles. There was a digital timer with red lights on the ground in front of the moderator’s desk. Perhaps most important, the Romney campaign set up video cameras exactly where they would be during the real town hall, so Romney could practice with that in mind.
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It wasn’t perfectly identical to the real thing. The debate set at Hofstra University had six risers, compared to the Romney’s campaign’s eight. But it was very close. It allowed Romney and Portman to field questions while walking around and facing questioners sitting in the audience. The Romney campaign prepared their candidate for what to do if Obama invaded his personal space, like Al Gore did to George W. Bush in 2000. They were most concerned that Romney not be caught in a situation where he was seated on his chair and Obama was walking toward him or hovering over him, launching verbal grenades. If seated, and Obama approached, Romney was told, make sure to stand up to him, literally. It turned out Romney was more than prepared for physical confrontation. In fact, he came close to overdoing it when he essentially told Obama to sit down. All the adrenaline seemed to get the better of him when he tried to talk over the moderator, CNN’s Candy Crowley. The atmosphere was so charged that Romney’s son, Tagg, famously joked a day later that he wanted to “take a swing” at Obama (a remark he apologized to
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the president for personally after the third debate). After the town hall, an aide to Romney who saw him immediately after he came off stage said Romney was “furious” with Crowley for speaking for the president when Romney was quizzing him on Benghazi, allowing the president to avoid answering why there were conflicting explanations from the administration. But, the aide said, Romney cooled off after he decided
that the impact of the debate had been limited. The first debate had fundamentally altered the contest between Romney and Obama, because Romney, in the flesh, was not the malevolent creature that the Obama campaign had been telling voters about since the summer. The second debate, coming 13 days after the first (with a vice presidential debate in between), stanched the bleeding for Obama. He was forceful and in command. But the polls continued to show Romney gaining ground. The Republican’s momentum had slowed, but not stopped.
Moderator Candy Crowley and presidential candidate Mitt Romney exchange words during the second debate at Hofstra University.
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WHO’S BLUFFING?
The spin room at the final debate, at Lynn University, was a circus. It was so packed with reporters and campaign officials that it was hard to move around. And there were sideshows such as actor Pauly Shore, who somehow got a press pass so that he could walk around and promote a new show, and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, a hand puppet who at one point ran past me chasing someone. A few factors guaranteed that the third debate would be less consequential than the first two. The topic was foreign policy, a subject that is complicated and does not move many undecided voters. The San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals were playing Game 7 of the National League Championship Series. Monday Night Football was also on. And it was the third and last debate — by now, the novelty of seeing the candidates face each other had worn off. Viewership ended up being around 59 million, compared to 65 million for the second debate and 70 million for the first. Each side recognized that how they framed the night would be as important as what the two can-
didates said during the debate, so there were more big names in the spin room beforehand than usual. Messina came through and talked to the press. Madden, who was usually around before debates, stood a few feet away holding court with his own group of reporters. Democratic National Committee press staffers kept a steady stream of surrogates coming through, including Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, the vice president’s son. I asked Messina if he thought the debates had been unusually significant. I prefaced my question by noting, lightheartedly, that the pre-debate spin room was a more “contemplative” place, hoping to prod him away from talking points. “Do you need a hug?” Messina joked, laughing. The crowd of reporters around us also cracked up. But Messina wasn’t about to be distracted from sticking close to his script. “We’ll have political science write books about it. What I care about is 15 more days to get 270 electoral votes,” Messina said. There were some Obama surrogates who don’t spend their lives
“CERTAINLY THESE DEBATES HAVE PROBABLY HAD MORE IMPACT ON THIS RACE THAN HAS BEEN THE CASE IN MANY PREVIOUS ELECTIONS.”
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sparring with political reporters, however, who were a little more frank about the impact of the debates. Michelle Flournoy was undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2012 and could be secretary of defense if Obama gets a second term. When I asked her for her impression of the debates, she said Obama had been better over the course of all three debates, but admitted, in a nod to the first one in Denver, “Certainly these debates have probably had more impact on this race than has been the case in many previous elections.”
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In the era of televised debates, a few stand out. The Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960 were the first to be shown on TV, and are widely credited for giving the younger, more photogenic Kennedy a big edge. Ronald Reagan’s one 1980 debate with incumbent Jimmy Carter, a week before election day, is thought to have given Reagan a large boost toward victory. And veterans of George W. Bush’s campaign said that after Al Gore sighed his way through the first 2000 debate, that helped Bush overcome a deficit of a few points.
Romney cracks a joke with adviser Ron Kaufman aboard his campaign charter plane before its take off from San Diego.
“ WE’LL HAVE POLITICAL SCIENCE WRITE BOOKS ABOUT IT. WHAT I CARE ABOUT IS 15 MORE DAYS TO GET 270 ELECTORAL VOTES.” ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ If Romney wins on Nov. 6, the 2012 debates will quickly enter that small group of determinative debates. Much of the talk in the spin room was less about the debate and more about the state of the race. “What do you think?” reporters asked one another over and over, having heard the spin from both sides enough to be able to recite in their sleep. CNN’s Peter Hamby and I compared notes and came to the same conclusion. “It’s a genuine jump ball,” Hamby said. I chatted with National Review’s Robert Costa and BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith. Smith thought Romney had the momentum. Costa mostly agreed, but he insisted that Romney still had an uphill climb. The spin room was still buzzing an hour after the final debate had ended. And the Obama campaign saw the need to continue spinning the next morning. Axelrod and
Messina held a conference call with reporters in which they talked at some length about why they thought Obama had won the debate, and why they were in a good position to win on Nov. 6. Axelrod tried to smack down what he called a “mythology” that states like Florida and Virginia were slipping away from Obama. As Romney flew west from Florida to Nevada, Madden told reporters on the plane with him that Florida “is like a freight liner, and once it turns — and I think it’s turned — it’s hard to turn back.” That night, at a rally with 12,000 people in Colorado at Red Rocks, Romney said the debates had “supercharged” his campaign. The next day in Reno, he said Obama had been “diminished” over the course of the three weeks. After the last debate, Obama still held the edge in three key swing states: Wisconsin, Nevada and Ohio. Without one of them, Romney would fail to get the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the election.
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But a multitude of signs — Obama’s anxious push to score points in the final debate, Axelrod and Messina’s conference call, a move by the Obama campaign to put out a new 20-page booklet to try to demonstrate an agenda for a second term — pointed to unease in Chicago. Madden called the pamphlet “a glossy panic button.”
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Axelrod was clearly piqued by the Romney campaign’s crowing. “I’m just telling you guys, we know what we know and they know what they know, and I’m confident that we’re going to win this race,” he said. “And we’ll know who’s bluffing and who isn’t in two weeks, and I’m looking forward to it.”
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Barack Obama has a moment alone to gather his thoughts before being sworn in as 44th president of the United States.
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DC’S PROGRESSIVE ACTIVISTS THOUGHT OBAMA WAS THE ONE — AND HE BROKE THEIR HEARTS. BUT NOT THEIR SPIRIT. BY DAN FROOMKIN PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEPHEN VOSS
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FOUR YEARS AGO, ON THE DAY BARACK OBAMA WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, THE WORLD SEEMED FULL OF POSSIBILITIES — PARTICULARLY FOR THE PEOPLE WHO SPEND THEIR CAREERS TRYING TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE. Advocates for economic fairness, gay rights, civil liberties, the environment and campaign finance reform were filled with hope for momentous change. They weren’t just celebrating the end of eight years of deregulatory disaster, constant war, growing inequality and state-sanctioned torture under the Bush administration. They were responding to Obama’s explicit commitment to such key progressive goals as closing Guantanamo, repealing the Bush tax cuts for the rich, capping carbon emissions and introducing comprehensive immigration reform.
“Like much of the progressive world, I was incredibly excited,” said Deepak Bhargava, who runs the Center for Community Change, a group founded 44 years ago to honor Robert F. Kennedy and devoted to empowering poor and minority communities. He hosted a party at his house on election day. “There were calls and hugs and cheers and tears,” he recalled. Gay activists like Americablog editor John Aravosis were elated. “With Democrats controlling the presidency and the Congress? And gay-friendly at the same
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time? We actually thought a ton was going to get done,” he said. Even government watchdogs were optimistic. “We had a president who had been articulating a priority on whistleblower protection, government transparency and contractor reform — the meat and potatoes issues that we care about the most,” said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight. “It seemed very plausible that many of the things we’d been working for would come to pass in his presidency,” said Lisa Gilbert,
then a lobbyist on money and politics issues for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and now director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. Four years later, however, progressive activists from all corners have savored far fewer victories than they had anticipated, and licked many more wounds. They are chastened by the reality that Obama is a politician, not an activist. They are humbled by the profound grip that money has on the Democratic party, as well as Republicans. And perhaps more than anything, they have learned that if you don’t push a president hard, you don’t get the best out of
Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change, speaks in front of the U.S. Supreme Court June 25, 2012, in Washington, D.C.
John Aravosis, gay rights activist and editor of Americablog.
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him. Given the chance, they won’t make the same mistake twice.
THE PATH TO HEARTBREAK
Even at the beginning, some Cassandras of the public-interest community — particularly those who’d been around longer — were skeptical that Obama would deliver the change he had promised. Nan Aron, the longtime president of the Alliance For Justice, which advocates for reshaping the judiciary in a more progressive direction, had learned during the Clinton years that Democrats can behave very differently from Republicans once they seize power. They’re not as aggressive, she said — especially on many of the issues she cares about most deeply. And Obama’s slogans didn’t persuade her otherwise. “There was no ‘audacity of hope’, with respect to the work that we do,” she said. “I was afraid that with the economy and health care consuming all the political energy, our issues were going to be sent to the back of the line. “I told friends when he was elected: ‘I’m just counting the moments until my heart’s broken,’” Aron said. As it turned out, heartbreak came
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faster for some than for others. For the gay community, the elation ended abruptly when Obama invited evangelical pastor Rick Warren, an outspoken supporter of Proposition 8, the anti-gaymarriage ballot initiative in California, to give the invocation at his inauguration. “It was unfathomable that he would pick this right-wing bigot,” Aravosis said. “I had friends who didn’t even come to the inauguration.” Aravosis remembered thinking to himself: “We’re totally screwed. If he’s willing to do this to us, then what else is possible?” Now, he says, “I think that to some degree, that was totally prescient.” For supporters with other interests, Obama’s earliest political appointees were a dismal sign of what was to come. Less than three weeks after the election, Obama announced that his economic team would be led by two consummate financial insiders: Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers. “Policy is personnel, and you bring in these people, and for me the handwriting was on the wall,” said Jeff Faux, the founder of the Economic Policy Institute and one of many progressives who had hoped Obama would hold Wall Street accountable for the finan-
Nan Aron, president of the Alliance For Justice.
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cial crisis and end three decades of economic policy that favored the super-rich over the middle class. “My heart started to sink.” The first three days of Obama’s presidency began boldly, with the president signing a series of executive orders and memos that seemed to almost reverse the polarity of the executive branch after eight years of the Bush administration. There were new orders on transparency and open government, on ethics for political appointees and forbidding the hiring of lobbyists. Obama banned torture and vowed to close the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But on the fourth day, the White House also issued a waiver to permit William Lynn, a lobbyist for defense industry giant Raytheon, to become deputy secretary of defense, circumventing the new ban on hiring lobbyists. Brian and her colleagues at the Project on Government Oversight were horrified. “We were: ‘WHAT?’,” she said. It turned out to be only the first of many waivers for corporate lobbyists, making a mockery of the lobbyist ban, which nevertheless still had the unintended consequence of making it nearly impossible for public-interest lobbyists
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to move into the administration. Gay activists who had campaigned for Obama without reservation increasingly felt stabbed in the back. When supporters asked in early January whether the administration would get rid of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the mili-
“ HE WAS GOING BACK ON A CAMPAIGN PROMISE THAT COULD HAVE SAVED THOUSANDS OF LIVES.” tary’s ban on openly gay soldiers, incoming press secretary Robert Gibbs famously answered with one word: “Yes.” “That one-word answer turned into a lot of mumbles after that,” Aravosis recalled. After just a few weeks in office, Obama punted the matter to a Pentagon working group, which was given a year to study the matter. Then another blow: In June 2009, the Obama administration continued the Bush administration’s legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the federal law defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Obama had promised to repeal it. “You’ve got to be on the right
Jeff Faux, founder of the Economic Policy Institute.
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side of this, and they were on the wrong side,” Aravosis said. “The shit hit the fan.” By November, Aravosis and other gay activists launched a “don’t ask, don’t give” campaign. They vowed not to donate another penny to the Democratic National Committee or the Obama campaign until Obama kept his promises to the gay community. For those hoping for an expansion of government regulations protecting health, safety and the environment after eight years of devastating retreats, Obama’s selection of Cass Sunstein to lead the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs was nothing short of a betrayal. Sunstein was an accomplished intellectual in law and behavioral economics, and one of Obama’s old University of Chicago Law School colleagues. But his approach to regulation was skeptical, not activist. Watching Obama’s acceptance speech in Chicago on election night “gave me goose bumps,” said Rena Steinzor, president of the pro-regulation Center for Progressive Reform. But when Sunstein was appointed, “that’s when I got upset,” she said.
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Sunstein proceeded to delay, micromanage beyond recognition or simply scrap dozens of ambitious rules to protect people and the environment. He and Obama both started talking about the dangers of excessive regulation rather than the desperate need to re-regulate in an era of financial implosions and massive oil spills. Steinzor saw the administration’s approach to regulation as an obvious attempt to curry fa-
“ IT’S EMBARRASSING TO ME. WHAT DID HE REALLY SAY OR DO THAT GAVE US A REASON TO BE SO OPTIMISTIC?” vor with deep-pocketed corporate interests. Its ultimate expression, she said, was when Obama succumbed to a massive lobbying campaign by the energy industry on September 2, 2011, and blocked his own EPA’s sciencebased proposal to reduce smog. “He was going back on a campaign promise that could have saved thousands of lives,” Steinzor said. Obama’s 2008 campaign platform explicitly stated that he would “fight for continued reductions in
Rena Steinzor, president of the proregulation Center for Progressive Reform.
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smog and soot” and “listen to his scientific advisors on air quality standard.” Combine that with other failures to protect the public and the environment, and Steinzor’s prognosis was very bleak. She predicts “tremendous harm” ahead. “There will be code red days — many, many of them — in the inner cities. Explosions in the Gulf. Collapsing mines. Fatal catastrophes at chemical plants and refineries. Young teenagers succumbing to heat stroke and worse in the fields. Poisoned food from China.” Now she looks back at her hopes on election day and feels naïve. “It’s embarrassing to me,” she said. “What did he really say or do that gave us a reason to be so optimistic?”
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‘THEY WERE COMPLETELY SHUT OFF’ On many issues, public-interest advocates felt the Obama administration took their support for granted, while ignoring their concerns. From the summer of 2009 to March 2010, the Obama administration focused nearly exclusively on passing a health care bill. Technically speaking, the Affordable Care Act was a win for progressives. “I basically regard it as a tre-
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mendous triumph, having gotten legislation through a Congress that, while Democratic, was by no means progressive, and amid huge resistance from the Tea Party,” said Deepak Bhargava, the community activist. But the White House political staff casually sacrificed key elements that the public-interest community supported — most notably, a “public option” that would have provided a government-run alternative to private insurance companies. “The process was tremendously dispiriting in parts,” Bhargava said. Idealists are, by definition, never satisfied with the real world. “This guy can’t do everything I had
Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorOfChange.
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hoped,” said Rashad Robinson, who runs the civil rights group ColorOfChange. “Presidents of the United States are not activists.” Obama was a community organizer once, “but that was years and years ago,” Robinson said. To the kind of people who run for elected office and win, compromise is not a dirty word. And yet Robinson is adamant that on health care, Obama was too quick to give up. “It felt like we compromised too early,” he said. More energy on the left might have strengthened Obama’s bargaining position, Robinson said, and led to better deals with Congress. But the White House had stifled its left flank. At an August 2009 strategy session, for instance, thenWhite House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously called liberal groups who wanted to pressure conservative Democrats to support Obama’s bill “fucking retarded.” What infuriated Faux the most, he said, was “the savage way that the White House went after singlepayer people.” Single-payer advocates favored a single insurance pool run by the government, instead of forcing people to buy insurance from private companies. That idea was deeply unpopular with Re-
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publicans, conservative Democrats and insurance companies. “OK, I can understand Barack Obama sitting in the White House and saying we’ll never get singlepayer through,” Faux said. “But the White House went after them! They were not allowed to testify. They were completely shut off.” “You need somebody on your extreme in order to get a reasonable compromise,” he said. “The
“ YOU’VE GOT TO BE ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THIS, AND THEY WERE ON THE WRONG SIDE. THE SHIT HIT THE FAN.” Republicans understand that. They let their crazies go wild.” For Bhargava, the low point of Obama’s first term came in a meeting in December 2009 that included Summers and Geithner, in which progressive groups made the argument for a second stimulus. By then it had become increasingly clear that the first $800 billion stimulus — a good chunk of which had gone into anti-poverty programs — wasn’t going to be enough to fully revive the economy and bring unemployment to anywhere
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near acceptable levels. But the White House gave the progressives the brush-off. A second stimulus was a political nonstarter, Summers and Geithner told them — it would never pass, and therefore Obama would never propose it. “Honestly I found it pretty depressing,” Bhargava said, “because essentially we were hearing back that there was nothing Washington was going to do about 20 percent unemployment in communities of color.” Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address exposed yet more breaches with the progressive community.
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“Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same,” Obama said. Wrong, said Faux. “If there’s anything that is not true, it’s that! In hard times, the federal government’s the only guy left who can spend money,” said Faux. Obama clearly understands that, Faux said, so his statement was nothing but pandering to Republicans. While listing his goals for the forthcoming year in his 2010 State of the Union address, Obama barely even mentioned the topic of immigration reform. During the campaign, he had promised to introduce a comprehensive bill. What he did, instead, was increase
President Obama on a hot day in May 2012.
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deportations to record levels. “The immigration piece was extremely frustrating,” Bhargava said. “That was the moment when it became clear that this wasn’t perhaps going to be a big priority before the midterms.” Civil libertarians have also felt slighted. “I think in the area of national security, there has been widespread disappointment,” said Aron. “I think the growth of the national security state is worrisome, and it’s an area in which there’s been very little public debate.” Activists assumed Obama would be more assertive in rolling back the Bush administration’s excesses, she said. But Greg Craig, the White House counsel who championed Obama’s campaign promises about closing Guantanamo and trying terror suspects in federal court, was driven out in less than a year, clearing the way for the White House to make important legal and national security calls on purely political grounds. Obama’s political advisers unashamedly argued against expending political capital on rolling back Bush’s torture and detention policies. And although Obama has never been pressed to explain his conflicted position on civil liber-
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ties and human rights issues, the widespread assumption is that he didn’t want to alienate the intelligence community. For whatever reason, Obama announced that he would be “looking forward, not back” and not prosecuting Bush administration officials for their involvement in authorizing the torture of suspected terrorists. “If you do not hold accountable prior officials for their acts, then you have not set the bar any higher,” Aron said. “And if a Republican is elected it’s back to the same old ways, and that’s very dangerous.” The nadir, for Aron, came on February 19, 2010, when a top Department of Justice official essentially whitewashed a critical report on the conduct of “torture memo” authors John Yoo and David Bybee. “It basically meant that they had turned their back on a community of human rights and civil liberties activists who represented constituencies on both sides of the aisle,” Aron said. “That was a very dreary day.”
THE PRESIDENT NEEDS A PUSH
Obama himself acknowledged his failure to fulfill some of his promises at an Univision town hall in Miami in late September. “I think that I’ve learned some les-
Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch.
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sons over the last four years, and the most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside,” he said. “You can only change it from the outside.” Obama went on to talk about the need to pressure Congress. But the record clearly shows that pressuring the president is also a key part of the equation. After Obama was elected, the mass movement that had put him in office essentially disintegrated. “Everyone sort of put all their hopes and dreams in that basket,” Robinson said. People went back home and figured Obama would take care of everything. “There was not a lot of early pushing of the administration,” he said. Later on, however, on those occasions that progressive groups were able to mobilize their supporters again, they often saw results. After months of pressure and protests from the gay community, for instance, Obama finally started working the phones on “don’t ask, don’t tell” and signed the repeal into law on December 22, 2010. A few months later, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Obama had decided that DOMA was unconstitutional, and
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had instructed the Justice Department not to defend the statute in court any more. And in May 2012, Obama said he supported gay marriage. “I’m fine now,” Aravosis said. “In the end what he did was huge. We had to push extremely hard, and I didn’t enjoy that, but in the end we got more than enough for me to
“ OBAMA IS NOT GOING TO BE THE HERO. IF WORK NEEDS TO BE DONE, WE NEED TO DO IT. WE NEED TO BE THE HEROES IN OUR STORY.” support the man for reelection.” Obama’s waffling on the Keystone XL tar-sands oil pipeline during the summer of 2011 turned out the be the issue that finally drove environmentalists into the streets, including two large protests outside the White House in August and November of that year. “I think the community came together really well to say: Look, we’re drawing the line right here, and we need to see good policy from this point forward,” said Phil Radford, who heads Greenpeace U.S.A.
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In January, Obama denied a permit for the pipeline, which would have linked a vast oil deposit in Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. The lesson was clear. “It really made people realize that you need to push the president to be great,” Radford said. With comprehensive immigration reform legislation evidently off Obama’s agenda, immigration activists switched gears. “We launched a campaign to really push the administration to use its executive authority to protect immigrants,” Bhargava said. The biggest push was by and for “Dreamers” — undocumented young people who were brought to the U.S as children, and who would be granted a conditional path to citizenship under the proposed bill known as the Dream Act. Dreamers outed themselves, committed acts of civil disobedience and led protests. Unable to get the bill through Congress, Obama nevertheless announced on June 15, 2012, that he had ordered a stop to deportations of the Dreamers. “That was a huge high,” Bhargava said, “and it actually spoke to me of the lesson of the last four
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years which is that politics has to meet social movements for us to get good outcomes.” Some activists remain hopeful that Obama will embrace their causes more enthusiastically in a second term, since he will be thinking more about his legacy and not about getting reelected. “I’m optimistic that the banner will be taken back up on a lot of these issues,” Lisa Gilbert said. And certainly, despite their disappointments, public-interest advocates still see Obama as much more promising than GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. “I’m not actually entertaining the thought at the moment,” said Bhargava. “It’s the fear that’s driving me to tell whoever I can: However [much] you’re disappointed in Obama, the alternative right now is far worse,” said Faux. But even if Obama is reelected, the past four years have taught public-interest advocates a lesson. “What we’re all going to have to do over the next four years is organize and mobilize,” said Robinson. “Sometimes we need to relearn these lessons,” said Aron. “Obama is not going to be the hero. If work needs to be done, we need to do it. We need to be the heroes in our story.”
HOW OBAMA’S HOUSING POLICY WENT OFF COURSE
BY BEN HALLMAN
this
ON A MORNING IN FEBRUARY, less than a month
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into his presidency, Barack Obama walked onto a stage at a gym in Dobson High School in Mesa, Arizona, prepared to talk about the wave of home foreclosures wrecking neighborhoods across the county. ¶ The plan Obama sketched out on Feb. 18, 2009, suggested a new use for taxpayer money: to pay mortgage companies to restructure those home loans held by struggling families. Together with a refinancing program, the plan would prevent “the worst consequences of said crisis from wreaking even greater havoc on the economy,” the new president said. Georgina Solis, a teacher’s aide at the school, listened closely as she watched the speech on a TV in a classroom. Her husband had recently lost his job as a maintenance worker, and the family had fallen behind on their mortgage payments. “I gave my vote to Obama because he’s a new hope,” Solis said in an interview at the time with the Arizona Republic. “I hope I’ll be able to keep my home because of his policy.” But the clear path to recovery Obama described never materi-
alized outside that Arizona gym. The president said that the programs he announced would help between 7 and 9 million families lower their payments and avoid foreclosure. As of the end of June, just 2.3 million had gotten assistance. That was just the beginning of the plan’s shortcomings. Many of those whose loans were modified, like Solis, now say they feel stuck. Their monthly payments went down, but they are still underwater, meaning they owe the bank more than their home is worth. They can’t sell, and so they must deal with a cruel irony each month: paying an inflated mortgage on an investment sold to them as the soundest financial decision they could make, a must-have for anyone who wants to join the middle class.
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Other homeowners say the mortgage company they turned to for help lost documents, didn’t return phone calls and otherwise turned what should have been a simple financial transaction into an existential nightmare, one that sometimes ended in an unnecessary foreclosure. According to one recent academic study, 800,000 families were rejected improperly or booted from the government’s primary homeowner relief option, the Home Af-
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fordable Modification Program, or HAMP, as a result of errors or misconduct on the part of mortgage companies. Assuming four people per household, that means a population roughly equivalent to the entire metropolitan area where Obama gave his speech, including Phoenix, Mesa and nearby Scottsdale were wrongly pushed toward foreclosure. “Just when I think it can’t get worse something else happens,” said Mary Diab, an Overland Park, Kansas homeowner locked in a three-year battle with JPMorgan Chase that began when she
Attorney Gen. Eric Holder left, and Housing and Urban Development Sec. right, look on as Obama speaks about the details of a housing settlement.
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sought a medical forbearance after a car accident. Diab says she went through three different loan modifications only to discover that the bank had foreclosed more than a year before. Depressed, Diab recently went to see her doctor. “I’m going to write you a prescription for 30 valium and write myself a prescription for having to hear this,” she said her doctor told her after listening to her story. The failure of Obama’s plan to live up to its promise has hindered the economic recovery. Had the plan hit its targets, the foreclosure crisis “would be history,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. The housing recovery that began earlier this year would have begun in earnest in early 2011, and by now default rates would be back to historical norms, he said. Today, opinions are divided on how how long a full recovery will take, with forecasts ranging from one year to three. As it is, while foreclosure rates have come down and sale prices gone up recently, about 1.5 million homeowners remain in serious default or foreclosure, according to Realtytrac. More than 13 million homeown-
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“ HAD OBAMA’S HOUSING PLAN MET ITS TARGETS, THE FORECLOSURE CRISIS ‘WOULD BE HISTORY.’” ers collectively owe $650 billion more than their homes are worth. “That is a serious weight on the economy,” Zandi said. “These households are struggling, homeowners are not spending, banks are leery of them.” This turbulence has helped depress prices, punishing middle class Americans, who rely on their homes for the greatest part of their net worth. According to the most recent numbers available from the Federal Reserve, the value of this investment plunged 40 percent from 2007 to 2010, to $55,000. The slow recovery has also held back employment, as millions of construction workers, mortgage brokers, electricians and others who depend on a robust housing market remain sidelined. Three of the states up for grabs in the 2012
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election, Florida, Nevada and Colorado, are among those hardesthit by the housing crisis. Given the magnitude of the problem — a housing bubble inflated to planet-size by Wall Street and mortgage brokers, combined with many homeowners content to not ask too many questions — there’s probably nothing Obama could have done to fully prevent what was coming. But if Obama loses a close election to Mitt Romney in a campaign defined by the Republican challenger as a referendum on Obama’s economic stewardship, the president’s handling of the housing crisis might be to blame. So what went wrong? Rather than meet the home foreclosure crisis with overwhelming force, as he had attempted to do with the $787 billion stimulus, Obama went with a hastily-constructed program created by his Treasury Department that attempted to walk the line between tough standards meant to keep irresponsible homeowners from benefitting and meaningful homeowner relief. The relief plan was flawed from the start. Rather than buy up troubled mortgages directly — or provide tough oversight and strong penalties for noncompli-
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ance — the Treasury Department provided modest “incentive” payments and then watched from the sidelines as the mortgage companies botched the handling of hundreds of thousands of loans. The plan also did little to address the financial hazard of plunging home prices, even though the president succinctly described the economic quandary underwater borrowers face: “You can’t afford to leave and you can’t afford to stay,” he said in Arizona. Yet instead of offering a plan that would have allowed people to write off some of the inflated debt that they owed, the president announced that the huge mortgage companies the government had just bailed out — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — would relax their rules about who could refinance at a lower interest rate. This is like acknowledging that the river is about to overtop the levee, and suggesting that people stand on a single sandbag to avoid getting washed away. An interest rate reduction lowers mortgage payments, which for some borrowers, can indeed mean the difference between foreclosure and keeping a home. But it does nothing to address the underlying problem that
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Above: A worker removes furniture from a foreclosed home in Richmond, Calif. Below: A “Notice to Vacate” is seen in the window of a foreclosed home in Glendale, Calif.
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the president had just acknowledged: the value of the house is less than what is owed. There was, technically, a debt forgiveness option as part of HAMP, but mortgage companies weren’t permitted to consider it until they had tried everything else to get the payments down, such as extending the term of the loan. Even then it was a rarity — companies are paid based on the value of a mortgage, so writing-off some of that value didn’t make much economic sense. As of June 30, just 60,000 families had seen some of their debt written off as part of a governmentsponsored modification. Over the past year the question of whether banks should forgive debt as part of a modification has emerged as the single-most contentious issue in the housing world. Opponents, led by Edward DeMarco, the acting director of the federal agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which control more than half of all home mortgages in the U.S., say it isn’t fair for some families to get this benefit while other, more responsible homeowners, get nothing. They warn of widespread intentional defaults by
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people hoping to cash in on the taxpayers’ largess. Advocates for homeowners argue that many families bought at prices that were fraudulently inflated by Wall Street banks, which ignored the quality of the loans they were packaging and selling in order to collect big bonuses. (Allegations repeated in recent high-profile government lawsuits against Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase). Why should these banks get bailed out while homeowners get kicked out of their homes, they argue. They point to studies that have also shown that principal forgiveness lowers foreclosure rates, which is good for everyone — including the taxpayers, which now essentially own Fannie and Freddie. At ground level, perspectives differ. Some homeowners are simply happy they got some relief, and figure they can always sell in a few years when prices recover. Others say their homes are worth so much less than what they paid that it seems likely that their modification is just a stay of execution. Solis fits both categories — she is grateful, but also worried. Her home loan was modified with little fuss by her mortgage company, First Franklin, she said in a recent
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phone interview. The monthly payments dropped dramatically, to $786 a month from about $1,400 a month. But though Solis’s interest rate was lowered significantly, nothing was done to reduce the balance of what she owed on the mortgage. She is making payments on a $202,000 mortgage. The house is now worth $93,000, according to Zillow, an online real estate website. In 2014, Solis’ payments will
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begin to go back up again under the terms of her modification, unless Bank of America, which acquired First Franklin, restructures the loan again. The house is also infested by termites. So the family faces a quandary. Do they invest thousands of dollars to repair a home they may not be able to afford to keep in a few years? And does it make sense to keep paying a mortgage when they have little hope of building equity? “We are blessed,” Solis said. “But also trapped.”
Federal Housing Finance Agency Acting Director Edward DeMarco hears from an aide before testifying about oversight of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
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REASON TO BE AFRAID
Obama took office in the midst of an economic freefall not seen since the Great Depression. In January 2009 the economy hemorrhaged 741,000 jobs, the biggest decline in 59 years. Banks that had gotten a massive taxpayer bailout in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers were still teetering on the edge of collapse. Home prices had lost 29 percent of their value over the previous year. Obama’s housing recovery plan was meant to work with the stimulus — which he had signed the day before — to staunch the bleeding. Yet the Treasury Department, which shaped the housing relief plan, was worried about going too far. According to the published accounts of former administration insiders, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was convinced that bailing out irresponsible homeowners would encourage future bad behavior. That fear shaped Obama’s rhetoric and ultimately the programs themselves. “The plan I’m announcing focuses on rescuing families who have played by the rules and acted
“ YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO LEAVE AND YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO STAY.” responsibly,” Obama said sternly, at the Mesa speech. It would not, he said, “rescue the unscrupulous or irresponsible by throwing good taxpayer money after bad loans.” Nor would it help speculators who took risky bets on a housing market, dishonest lenders or people who bought homes they knew from the beginning they would not be able to afford, he said. It was an impossible goal. Weeding out those who had bought a far more expensive house than they could afford from those who fell on hard times because of a job loss or some other misfortune was an impossible goal to achieve. Modification decisions, when made correctly, were based on hard economic data, such as whether an applicant had a job and could afford modified payments — not moral grounds. If he was hoping to forestall right wing criticism of the plan, it
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didn’t work. Later that afternoon, Rick Santelli of CNBC called for a “Tea Party” gathering in Chicago to protest the president’s plan, which he said would “subsidize the losers’ mortgages.” The plan Treasury crafted was meant to limit the government’s role in the process. Rather than buying up troubled home loans and then working with borrowers to restructure them, as the federal government had done during the the 1930s under Franklin D. Roosevelt — and as Republican presidential candidate John McCain had pro-
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posed during one of the debates — the Treasury Department would use Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, bailout money to pay mortgage companies to restructure loans at a lower cost. The choice to use TARP money made sense given the politics at the time. The previous fall Congress had essentially written the federal government a $700 billion check to spend as it saw fit to save the economy from a complete meltdown. Using money already earmarked for economic relief without having to create a
Mitt Romney holds a campaign event in front of a foreclosed home on January 24, 2012, in Lehigh Acres, Fl.
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new government institution likely seemed an attractive option for an administration that had just passed its stimulus bill without a single Republican vote. But the decision to essentially turn over administration of the programs to understaffed and undermotivated mortgage companies was a tactical disaster. Many of these companies, known as servicers, were arms of the same banks that were bailed out with little vetting and few strings attached a few months before. Under the Obama administration’s plan, homeowners would not enjoy the same relief as the banks. Instead, they would essentially need to apply for a loan all over again, with all the paperwork and headaches that implies, and survive a “trial” period that was supposed to last three months but often dragged on for a year or more. Sheila Bair, the former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., writes in a new book that requiring each borrower to prove that he or she could qualify for a new loan was “stupid.” Given the large number of loans that needed to be reworked, as well as the problem of ill-trained and understaffed servicers, she said,
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“the cumbersome process was doomed to failure.” The process didn’t work for Aracelli Davis. In 2010 her husband Ronald, who has Huntington’s Disease, tried to kill himself in the family’s Apache Junction, Ariz. home. Davis had quit her job at a daycare to care for him, but after the suicide attempt she was forced to move him into a nursing home, she said in an interview, her voice quavering. The $632 in disability benefits she had drawn for caring for her husband stopped, she said. She fell behind on her mortgage payments. The family was then “dualtracked” by Bank of America, she alleges in a lawsuit against the bank. That meant that even as she was applying for a loan modification, the bank was proceeding with a foreclosure. In May 2011, Davis said a woman in the bank’s mortgage department told her that everything was on track for a modification. “Don’t worry, we have your papers and will call if we need something,” Davis said thewoman told her. Two days later Bank of America sold the house at auction. Davis had five days to pack up her two kids and all of their possessions
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A for-sale sign foregrounds houses in the North West residential neighborhood in Las Vegas, America’s “foreclosure captial.”
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and leave. Her son, who is autistic, was traumatized, she said. Bank of America declined to comment on the case, it said, because the lawsuit is pending. I’ve heard some version of the Davis story probably 100 times in the past year from homeowners who lost their home or are on the brink of losing it because of what they claim are mortgage company errors. Some of these people made foolish borrowing decisions. But most are ordinary people who fell behind on their payments after they lost their job or got sick. They are at their wits end — they cry themselves to sleep, fret over their financial future and some worry about having to move into their car. And they have reason to be afraid. Large banks have proved so bad at preventing foreclosures that even Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac don’t trust them to do it. Over the past year, Fannie and Freddie, which hire mortgage companies to manage millions of home loans that they own, have paid Bank of America and others $1.5 billion in kill fees to cancel servicing contracts for 700,000 loans. The mortgage giants determined that by moving the handling of these loans to specialty
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companies with a track record of communicating with struggling borrowers, they could prevent thousands of foreclosures, saving between $1.7 billion and $2.7 billion over five years. The mortgage companies have borne the brunt of the blame for the failures, but all this happened under the watch of the Treasury Department and regulators like the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which for years failed to take meaningful actionagainst the biggest banks over servicing practices. “Servicers have been allowed to run roughshod over homeowners, with no consequences,” said Diane Thompson, a foreclosure expert at the National Consumer Law Center. “As a result, the foreclosure crisis has been greatly worsened, with devastating consequences for individual homeowners, communities and our national economy.” As part of a $25 billion legal settlement with the federal government and states, five large banks — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial — agreed earlier this year to implement wideranging reform of their servicing practices or face stiff fines of up to
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$1 million per violation. There are some signs that practices are improving. But a monitor of the settlement appointed by California Attorney General Kamala Harris intervened as recently as September to stop banks from foreclosing on homeowners being considered for a modification in that state — the same kind of dualtracking that cost Davis her home.
THE ‘MORAL HAZARD’
Sometimes the toughest part of a journalist’s job is tracking down a person whose experience properly illustrates a story. Finding people who feel they have been screwed by their mortgage company, though, is distressingly easy. “I’m not sure I believe in America anymore,” said a cab driver who picked me up at Los Angeles International Airport last month. I hadn’t told him I was a reporter, much less one who frequently writes about foreclosures. I had just asked him how things were going. The driver, an Armenian immigrant named Gagik, told me that he had a thriving business selling — improbably — fireplaces in Southern California, prior to the housing crash. When the business failed he began driving a cab to support his
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“ THE SPECTRE OF ‘MORAL HAZARD’ IS AN IDEOLOGICALLY DRIVEN FEAR BUILT ON MYTHOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS …” wife and two daughters, he said. He soon fell behind on the payments on the Burbank home he had paid $700,000 for in 2006. His bank wouldn’t consider lowering the principal amount he owed, even though the home’s value had dropped to just $300,000, he said. “We needed help and they wouldn’t listen,” he said. For homeowners behind on their payments and struggling to keep their homes, mortgage debt relief, or principal reduction, is the golden ticket. Most have heard of it, few have seen it. Almost all want it. Geithner initially said forgiving debt wasn’t a priority. “This program was not designed to start with a principal reduction,” he said at a Congressional Oversight Panel hearing in Dec. 2009. “We
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thought it would be dramatically more expensive for the American taxpayer, harder to justify, create much greater risk of unfairness and our program was not designed to do that.” This is the “moral hazard” argument. Writing off debt threatens the covenant between borrowers and lenders, and encourages those making their payments on time to default and cash in. If the phrase sounds familiar, it is because Bush administration officials, includ-
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ing then Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, frequently used it in 2008 to explain why they failed to throw a lifeline to Lehman Brothers, the investment bank that gorged on subprime mortgages, then melted down. When that decision threatened to ruin the economy, Bush officials pushed the TARP bailout through Congress, threatening financial armageddon should lawmakers fail to act. Banks eventually collected $245 billion with little vetting, and still owe $13 billion. The biggest financial institutions are now even larger than
A woman in Boston protests in front of Fannie Mae headquarters in Washington, D.C., in September 2012.
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they were before the financial crisis. Despite a new law that gives regulators the power to seize and unwind a “systemically important” bank, critics on both the left and right think TARP set a terrible precedent — that the government will feel pressured to save the banks again should it come to that. “Moral hazard is a very real issue for principal reduction,” said Christy Romero, the special inspector general of the bailout fund. “But taxpayers funding any of these programs is a moral hazard. It will be one of TARP’s longlasting legacies.”
‘WHIPPING BOY’
Last year, as part of the negotiations that would lead to the national mortgage settlement, the issue of principal reduction came up again. State and federal negotiators talking to the banks about penalties wanted some part of the deal to include mandatory loan forgiveness. It’s not clear why the administration, previously ambivalent about principal reduction, now supported the idea. At the time the deal was coming together — the fall and winter of 2011 and into early 2012 — the Occupy Wall Street move-
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ment was at its peak influence. The protests, while relatively small, reflected broad discontent among Obama’s liberal base with his policies, which seemed to favor Wall Street at the expense of homeowners. (Bankers, of course, would take the exact opposite view). Whatever the reason for the change in attitude, the administration had a problem: while banks were willing to go along with a mandatory principal program as part of a settlement, they actually own only about 10 percent of the loans they service. Most of the rest are held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or by private investors who bought mortgage bonds during the run-up to the housing collapse. Whether banks can write down principal on loans held by private investors is something of a grey area — various banks interpret their servicing contracts in different ways. But there was no ambiguity about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans. The two companies, which still owe taxpayers $140 billion from the 2008 bailout that kept them from collapsing, forbid principal write-downs on the loans they control, on the orders of Edward
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DeMarco, a career bureaucrat who oversees the companies as acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Administration. Former colleagues describe DeMarco as a politically conservative housing policy wonk thrust due to unusual circumstances into a job that was supposed to be temporary, but has stretched on for three years. In 2010, Senate Republicans spiked Obama’s choice to appoint a permanent head to the agency, the well-respected former North Carolina banking commissioner Joseph Smith. They decided they like DeMarco running the show just fine. In order to bring more pressure to bear on DeMarco, in January the Treasury Department announced that it would triple the incentives it would pay for each dollar of loan forgiveness offered by investors. An official familiar with the internal debate over loan forgiveness said this move nearly forced DeMarco to capitulate. “DeMarco was getting constant calls from Treasury and the White House,” this official recalls. “It was a full court press.” Yet DeMarco ultimately refused to yield. After months of signalling
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“ SERVICERS HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO RUN ROUGHSHOD OVER HOMEOWNERS, WITH NO CONSEQUENCES.” his clear distaste at the thought of debt forgiveness, DeMarco wrote a letter to lawmakers at the end of July restating his formal opposition. It was the moral hazard, he said. “This could give borrowers who are current on their mortgages a message that the government endorses forgiving a portion of mortgage debt if hardship can be demonstrated, creating a very broad incentive for underwater borrowers to seek ways to become eligible,” he wrote. DeMarco has declined repeated requests by Huffington magazine for an interview, but supporters say he just doesn’t think principal reduction would do much good, and that he fears it could undermine the confidence of the investors who buy the loans that Fannie and Freddie
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sell on the secondary market. For his stance, he has become the unlikely boogeyman of the housing crisis. An activist group that represents underwater homeowners recently protested outside his Maryland home and attempted to deliver him a “pink slip,” suggesting that he should resign. Geithner, who had previously expressed many of the same reservations as DeMarco about loan forgiveness, wrote him a letter expressing his disappointment with the decision. To many outside observers, this
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about-face by the Obama administration, particularly Geithner, carries the strong whiff of hypocrisy. “DeMarco is the designated administration whipping boy,” said David Felt, the former head of conservatorship operations at FHFA. “They know at Treasury that he is right on the policy, but politically that is not a position they want to defend. It is easier for them to say we support writedowns but this damn person won’t get out of our way.” Barofsky, the former TARP inspector general, wrote recently
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner speaks during a press conference at the Treasury building.
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that Geithner’s newfound embrace of principal reduction looks an awful lot like “political posturing.”
MYTHOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS
The tough part about rebutting the moral hazard argument is that some homeowners probably would stop paying their mortgage in order to cash in on the government’s largess. Others who would get the help don’t really deserve it. I spoke with a housing counselor in Florida not long ago who told me that the only client she had that had gotten debt relief, out of dozens, was the one who had made the most foolish gamble on buying his home. But there simply isn’t much evidence to support the prediction that masses of homeowners will take a gamble on their most valuable possession in order to possibly lower their balance. “I think the spectre of ‘moral hazard’ is an ideologically driven fear built on mythological assumptions about people in economic distress and their willingness to hurtle themselves into foreclosure so they can try to game the system,” said Joseph Sant, an attorney at Staten Island Legal Services in New York, expressing the senti-
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ment of many supporters. Meanwhile, much evidence suggests that principal reduction actually prevents foreclosures and saves investor money. Re-default rates on the small number of mortgages modified with debt forgiveness under the Home Affordable Modification Program are less than half what they are program-wide. Remarkably, even DeMarco’s own data suggests forgiving debts is a good idea. At the same time that he announced he was rejecting principal reduction for good, his agency released a report that showed it could help save the taxpayer as much as $1 billion, and the companies up to $3.6 billion. What does Obama think? He has, in the past, acknowledged that the foreclosure problem was more significant than he anticipated, and the programs he promoted less effective. But on the campaign trail he has been silent. Surprisingly, Romney has failed to exploit this vulnerability. In a housing plan released on his campaign web site, Romney said he would “spare thousands of families from going through the foreclosure process” by making foreclosure alternatives easier, but included no details on what he
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would do differently. Previously, during the Republican nominating process, he had said that he thought the best course was to let the market work it all out. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Geithner. But in July, the Treasury Secretary, who has said he will leave at the end of Obama’s first term, whether he wins reelection or not, spoke to Charlie Rose. Rose asked him if there was anything else the administration could have done to
stop the foreclosure crisis. In his response, Geithner blamed Fannie and Freddie for not moving earlier on the program that allows some underwater homeowners refinance at a lower interest rate. He didn’t mention the more prominent modification program, and he didn’t mention principal reduction. All in all, he said, the administration had done what it could with the tools it had, he said. “Our job is to make sure that we are operating at the frontier with the tools we had, he said. “And I believe we did that. I really believe we did that.”
Signs are displayed outside of a foreclosed home in Greensboro, N.C.
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HUFFINGTON 11.04.12
Portrait of a Nude Model BY PRISCILLA FRANK
T’S A SITUATION that would terrify most people: sifting through Craigslist ads, meeting with a stranger, and immediately disrobing. “It’s never been a big deal to me,” Claudia Eve says, appearing a bit bored by the overcautious sentiment. “There are certain trigger words I have learned to steer clear of,” the art model explains to Huffington. “I
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Claudia poses in Bill Durgin’s “Nude 4,” from the 2009 series Nudes & Still Lifes.
Exit will never respond to an ad if someone uses ‘female’ as a noun, but if it’s an adjective, that’s okay.” Claudia looks like a runway model and acts like an artist: thoughtful and assured. Her towering, spindly frame is hidden underneath a button-up shirt and blazer, her short, rain-spritzed hair tucked behind her ears. The pouring rain nearly drowned out Claudia’s hushed voice as she sipped a black coffee in a Manhattan bookstore. The Montreal-born model began posing nude for artists at 19. She had experience in fashion modeling and dreams of being a curator, so the unconventional teenage decision to be an art model made a surprising amount of sense. “I don’t really remember my first session,” she says. “I don’t think I was nude for that one; I was wearing a kimono. I still wear a kimono mostly, but of course now I take it off.” For the past 10 years Claudia has been modeling on-and-off, charging between $20 an hour and $500 a day, depending on the gig. (The flexible hours and control allow her to curate on the side, often incorporating the artists she models for in her own shows.) The atmosphere dictates the specifics
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of the pose and choreography—a Wednesday night “Drink-n-Draw” night would require a far different state of mind than a one-on-one session with a specific painter and his vision. “The quicker poses are performance art,” she explains. “The longer ones I call subsidized meditation.” Craigslist is where most of the matchmaking goes down, making
There are certain trigger words I have learned to steer clear of. I will never respond to an ad if someone uses ‘female’ as a noun, but if it’s an adjective, that’s okay.” every “day at the office” into a possible life threatening situation or once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “There was this one artist who turned out to be, like, a big artist. I just happened to answer his Craigslist ad.” Who? Postmodern pioneer David Salle, whose female forms are known to straddle the line between pornography and “abstract choreography.” The two have been working together for years now, which means Claudia
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gets to summer in the Hamptons, roll around in paint (channel Yves Klein) and make all other less savvy Craigslisters infinitely jealous. “I have an algorithm,” she says. “I know how to find the right gig.” Her algorithm doesn’t account
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for every possible situation, however. “I haven’t had anyone be creepy or disrespectful to me,” Claudia says, flipping through the client list in her memory. “This one man, he wasn’t a creep, he was an affable, older Asian man, but his art was like, manga anime style. So he had me in poses that were way sexier than I normally like to do,”
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Claudia in Jane LaFarge Hamill’s 2009 oil painting, “Turkish Coat 2.”
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Exit Claudia says, spreading her legs and slouching forward to illustrate for the entire coffee shop. “He was very nice, but I didn’t want to be manga! That’s my face on there! If I don’t like the work someone makes, I won’t model for them again.” Still, even with less overtly sexual positions, the tension can be as palpable in the room as the paint fumes. “Yeah, I’ve slept with a few of the artists,” she dryly states, with neither embarrassment nor hubris. One tryst occurred during a contemporary version of Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2,” in which Claudia was climbing up and down said staircase, naked, for hours. She pauses, continuing with a hint of uncharacteristic sentimentality: “There is not much of a story. We bonded. We saw each other for a little while.” While there is a certain romance to this image, it also borders on an old-world muse and master power play that feminist artists and activists have been working hard to move beyond. Yet from Claudia’s perspective, the artmaking process is a collaborative one, and not dependent upon restrictive standards of beauty. “Some people choose me because
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of how I look, but others turn me down. Some say, ‘she is too thin.’” In Claudia’s eyes there is no ideal nude model. “Many of the artists I work with aren’t even drawing me as a human. There are architects and animators who find the shapes hidden in the bodies.” For Claudia, one shoot for artist Spencer Tunick—who photographs large-scale nude installations, with hundreds, even thousands of bodies at a time— nicely captured this sentiment. “There were so many different types of bodies; everyone was so happy. There was one man in a wheelchair. There was a young girl who was clearly anorexic—she had long, fine hair growing all over her. Someone had brought her there to show her all of these people with all of these different bodies. It was beautiful.”
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“Claudia B. in Repose,” by Dexter Miranda, September 2009
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Facebook Profile Photos Are Serious Business BY BIANCA BOSKER
LOGAN LEFLER (SLTVISUALS)
“It’s a conversation starter,” said Alejandra Bornowski of her Facebook profile photo, which she had professionally shot.
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Exit LEJANDRA BORNOWSKI’S Facebook profile picture took weeks to make. In the photo, a radiant Bornowski appears knee-deep in a lake with billowing clouds of dry ice encircling her thighs. The picture has been retouched, and not a hair, freckle or eyelash are out of place. “When people who don’t know me see my profile picture, I want them to be intrigued,” says Bornowski, 24, a former business manager at a Portland, Oregon, matchmaking service who did not pay for the photoshoot, which was done by a photographer hoping to build up his portfolio. “There’s no way anyone else on Facebook has that picture. It’s a conversation starter.” Though Bornowski, like most social media users, has uploaded her fair share of “selfies”—blurry self-portraits snapped with an outstretched arm and a cellphone camera—her most recent Facebook profile photos have been the handiwork of professional photographers. This penchant for profile photos shot by pros puts her in good company: Some social media users are foregoing the vacation photos and party snapshots that have traditionally served as profile fodder in
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People don’t want to look desperate, like they’ve had photos professionally done. Even though they’re paying for the photo, they want the picture to suggest, ‘Maybe I just have a friend who’s great at photography.’” favor of carefully crafted headshots from expert photographers, who say they’ve seen a steady uptick in business from clients wanting photos specifically for social media. “Initially people were just putting up Instagram photos and stuff like that, but increasingly people want to put their best foot forward, and I’m getting more and more requests,” says Manhattan-based photographer Nick Coleman, who runs Coleman Photographix. “The first person to contact me expressly to do shoots for social media profiles was two years ago, and it’s
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steadily picked up since then.” Recognizing the rising demand for expert profile photos, some photographers are marketing themselves specifically to social media users seeking something better than a selfie. Jacklyn Capt of Palestine, Texas, says people “jump” to
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take advantage of the “free Facebook profile headshot” sessions she offers regularly as a way of drumming up new business. Phoenix, Arizona, photographer Leslie Styler advertises sittings for Facebook profile pictures—$45 for five to 10 photos—alongside her traditional headshots. And Coleman maintains an active presence on Twitter and Facebook that he says helps him at-
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Headshots taken by photographer Amy Parrish for social media purposes.
JACKLYN CAPT
Exit tract new commissions. Professional headshots have long been a fixture on dating sites, where an unattractive photo can tank a person’s chances of finding love. Yet their growing popularity on mainstream sites such as Facebook and Twitter underscores the extent to which avatar-to-avatar communication is supplementing face-toface interactions as the way people meet, socialize and get hired. “People used to hire you to take pictures for their business cards. Now, LinkedIn, Facebook and websites are their business cards,” says Jason Tench, chief photographer with Blue Mountain Photo Works in Greenville, South Carolina. Working with a professional photographer—who helps each client pick a specific pose, background and “look” that reflect her personality—allows an individual to better craft her profile picture to convey a certain identity, photographers say. In many cases, clients are looking for one money shot to use across a number of platforms, and not exclusively on a social network. Barbara Barna Abel, a media coach, hired Coleman to take a series of headshots she’s used as her profile photos on Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, About.me, as well as
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for other business purposes. She worked with him to create an image of herself as a “creative professional” who is “friendly and approachable.” Abel chose a photo that’s realistic, but thanks to some slight photo-editing, lighting genius and a professional hair-and-makeup job, “looks like me on a really, really good day,” she says.
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Jacklyn Capt, who holds free Facebook profile headshot sessions to drum up new business, took this shot of her sister, Bekah Fields.
Exit Since social networking profiles now serve as a kind of online resume, Abel advises her clients to have professional headshots taken for their online profiles—whether it’s a personal website or a Facebook page—to ensure even a Twitter account is “on message.” “We live in a visual world, and the first thing people see is not only what you’re posting, but your photo,” Abel explains. “You want to have the best picture you can, and the strongest, most solid effective message possible.” For other users who commission professional profile pictures, the message they’re after is not so much “hire me” as “I’m hot,” say photographers. While even amateurs can now afford top-quality cameras, professionals still offer the nice lighting, slimming angles and careful retouching that separates a so-so picture from a stunner. “People who want pictures for Facebook want others to think, ‘I look like this when I roll out of bed, with my skin flawless and my hair impeccable,’” says Capt. But not too impeccable: some clients, particularly teens and twentysomethings, ask photographers for images that don’t obviously appear to be professional. In many cases,
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photographers try to give the feel of an amateur snapshot—but better. In the quest for more candids, photographers often ditch the solid backdrop typical of corporate headshots for the outdoors: photographer Amy Parrish frequently photographs her clients in the Ohio countryside, or uses the 19th-cen-
As social media grows up, we need to take more seriously the need to control the message. We live in a visual world, and you want to have the best picture you can.” tury, timber-frame barn that houses her studio as a backdrop. According to Capt, her adult clients will credit her handiwork, but teens who use her photos on Facebook will crop out their logo and avoid saying who took their picture. “People don’t want to look desperate, like they’ve had photos professionally done,” Coleman agrees. “Even though they’re paying for the photo, they want the picture to suggest, ‘Maybe I just have a friend who’s great at photography.’”
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I had a child in foster care tell me, ‘It’s mine. Nobody can take this from me.’”
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GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
Debbie Gori
The Things You Can Carry
BY EMMA DIAB
REMOVING A CHILD from a home that is unstable and possibly dangerous is done in the best interest of the child by the state. But the immediate reality of being ripped from your parents and home can be terrifying and confusing. Often, the whole affair is done hurriedly with the intent of getting the child to safety as quickly as possible, leaving no time to gather essentials—a PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRYAN MELTZ
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toothbrush, extra underthings—for the next few nights before reaching the intended foster family. To ease the fear and confusion of the transition period, Georgia resident Debbie Gori has dedicated her time to running Adventure Bags, a non-profit organization that fills book bags with necessities for children who are entering foster care or have been displaced from their homes. Adventure Bags was founded initially by Gori’s daughter, Tracey McMahon, a social worker for the Georgia Division of Family and
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
Children’s Services (DFCS) in October of 2011. McMahon was delayed at the airport while she was escorting three small children in her care to their foster home. They had been removed from their home so suddenly that all they were able to bring with them were black trash bags with a few items thrown in. This was unacceptable to McMahon: she bought book bags at the airport, stuffing them with a change of clothes and essentials such as soap, toothpaste and toothbrushes. McMahon has since stepped down from the role of Adventure Bags president to focus on her job as a social worker, though she does volunteer frequently. Her mother
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Gori, right, chats with a volunteer during a stuffing party at Fellowship Baptist Church in Winder, Ga.
Eric McMahon, Debbie Gori’s son-inlaw, stuffs backpacks with his son Cole during an Adventure Bags stuffing party at Fellowship Baptist Church.
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Exit Debbie, retired and living in Barrow County, has taken the reins, along with Tracey’s husband, Eric. “I had a child in foster care tell me what the bag was to her,” says Gori, “It was hers, and she carried it everywhere. She said, ‘It’s mine. Nobody can take this from me.’ She carried all of her things in there,” recalls Gori, before explaining how the children are often in awe about having something to really call their own.
‘DO IT FOR THE KIDS’ Adventure Bags is currently waiting to hear back on its status for 501C3 certification, to become an official non-governmental organization. The non-profit operates out of Gori’s home, with rooms reserved for fundraising paraphernalia, book bags, and a stockpiled inventory of items for various age groups of infants, kids, tweens and teens. Gori worries that operating from her home reflects badly on the organization, and has even looked into purchasing a house to set up offices for Adventure Bags, but funds are low. Nevertheless, the organization has come a long way in a single year. Various other organizations such as Safe House—a shelter for victims
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of domestic abuse—and Children After the Fire—which aids children who have recently lost everything in a blaze—have approached Gori and received Adventure Bags of their own. In fact, as October is National Domestic Violence Awareness month, all the bags were sent to the various branches of Safe House around Georgia. Gori has also developed a close relationship with the Georgia Divi-
On my side: How hard is it to remember a bag? Well you have to step outside and look at what they’re doing. The initial thing is safety for that child. Get ’em out and get ’em safe.” sion of Family and Child Services, who keep Adventure Bags at their various offices and alert her when they need more. But sometimes, it’s not the first thing on a social worker’s mind when trying to remove a child from a dangerous situation. “On my side: How hard is it to remember a bag?” chides Gori. “Well you have to step outside and look at what they’re doing. The initial thing is safety for that child. Get ’em out and get ’em
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safe. It’s a learning experience for me as well as for them.” Gori also has the presidents of the Barrow County Foster/Adoptive Parent Association on her team, Chris and Misty Manus. It was a pleasant surprise for the retired mother of two when the Manus’ relayed a conversation from their night at a Foster Parents Association event, in which Adventure Bags came up.
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“This lady just got all excited and said, ‘we have two of the three children and I’m going to tell you they will not let go of those bags!” she says, referring to the very children who prompted McMahon to start Adventure Bags.
INSIDE AN ADVENTURE BAG Along with items like toothpaste and shampoo, much thought and effort is stuffed into a single Adventure Bag. Various counties in Georgia have orchestrated “stuffings” for Adventure Bags, in church base-
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Nearly 70 backpacks were stuffed at the church in Winder, Ga.
Exit ments, at schools and Girl Scout troop meetings. Gori made it a point to ask children themselves what they thought would work well in an Adventure Bag. “We’ve had children in there [at stuffing events] who I did not know at the time were actually foster kids, and they gave me the idea to put journals in the bags. A little boy wanted journals ‘so we can write our personal thoughts down.’ Those was his words specifically,” Gori says. “They came up with all sorts of fun things a kid would, you know ‘an MP3 player would be great’ and I’m like sure I’d like one too, but you know,” she trails off, laughing. A well-wisher from Amarillo, Texas, sends Adventure Bags “encouragement cards” to place into the bags, and children have taken to writing them as well—a gesture for children, by children. The bags in demand the most are those for tweens and teens, the age groups that are most frequently ferried around the system. Gori estimates that her organization manages to churn out 50 bags a month, though more are always needed.
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WHAT’S IT GOING TO TAKE? Despite Gori’s successes with Adventure Bags, she remains frustrated. So far, they’re still waiting on the certification to become a 501C3, the lack of which hinders any possibilities of receiving a grant. “Everywhere we’ve ever applied for a grant or anything they always want to know what our status is,” she says. “Unfortunately until we
We’ve had children [at stuffing events], and they gave me the idea to put journals in the bags. A little boy wanted journals ‘so we can write our personal thoughts down.’” reach 501c3 status we’re really limited.” Though Adventure Bags has expanded from six to 16 counties, Gori laments the lack of involvement. “How do I say it without being mean? A lot of people say, ‘how can we help?’ and then you never hear anything else.” She has a simple message for those who truly want to help: “Don’t quit. Remember the kids.”
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THE GILDED AGE
HUFFINGTON 11.04.12
Culture Wars Couples ALBERT AND EVELYN LOCHNER ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA EVELYN: I remember the first words
PETER CRITTENDALE AND TALIA VELASQUEZ DOUGLAS, ARIZONA PETER: I had never seen a woman
so beautiful run so fast. TALIA: I was trying to cross the border into America at the time. PETER: It was while slapping cuffs on her that I noticed those eyes. Those big, beautiful illegal immigrant eyes. TALIA: My people have a saying: “Life is a long road, with many turns.” PETER: Isn’t she great? I remember kissing her the first time. It was glorious, but also scary. Because in the back of my head, I was thinking, “Is she going to take my job?”
ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHRISTOPH HITZ
he said to me: “You are going to rot in hell, baby killer.” ALBERT: This was right outside the Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul. EVELYN: I just sort of kept on walking into the clinic, like I didn’t notice him. But there was totally a connection. ALBERT: It’s true. As she walked out, I handed her my number. EVELYN: He wrote it on the back of a partial-birth abortion pamphlet. ALBERT: And we both just knew.
JOHN AND SUSAN PAIGE FORT COLLINS, COLORADO SUSAN: I’ve always been for gun
control, and as a rule I don’t date gun owners. But for whatever reason, I made an exception. JOHN: I have to admit, there was something strangely alluring about how she wanted to revoke my Second Amendment rights. SUSAN: We had this totally civil discussion, even though there were certain points where we disagreed. JOHN: For example, she didn’t understand that it’s my right as an American to carry a concealed weapon in an upscale bistro. SUSAN: We laughed a lot, and we learned a lot about each other. John, for instance, can’t handle it when a waiter approaches from behind and begins reading the specials. JOHN: I startle easily.
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AP PHOTO/JIM COLE (SANDY); GETTY IMAGES (EAR); LOIC VENANCE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (FACEBOOK); EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (ROMNEY); PARAMOUNT PICTURES (PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4)
Westboro Baptist Church Praises God for Hurricane Sandy
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WOMAN’S EAR FOUND IN MAN’S POCKET
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Kindergarten Teacher Makes Inappropriate Comments About Students On Facebook
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Team Romney Bends Truth With Wildly Misleading Claim
Movie Theater Shows Wrong Film, Terrifies Children
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NOAA (OZONE); GETTY IMAGES/BRAND X (OWL); JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES (BANKRUPT); GETTY IMAGES (BRAIN); TUMBLR (FRAT MEMBERS)
Ozone Hole Shrinks Down
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Thugs Attack Boy With Silly String in Attempt to Steal Pet Owl
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ONE-FOURTH OF AMERICAN CITIES GOING BROKE
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Family Receives Relative’s Brain in a Bag From Funeral Home
Frat House Members Wear Blackface
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