If you're wondering why there were no election fiascos, like those that occurred in 2000, or why we have reason to be hopeful about an Obama administration, you must read this behind-the-scenes account by two leading constitutional and election law scholars.

Richard Pildes and Sam Isaacharoff, both professors at NYU Law School, served as lawyers to the Obama campaign. Their story is amazing. Take a look.

Now that the election is over, we are free to talk about our experience. Since the start of the primary season, we have been working as part of the Obama campaign's legal team on voting and election issues. On Election Day and the days leading up to it, we were in the "boiler room" at campaign headquarters in Chicago, where we worked with others to monitor voting issues that arose around the country and to respond to any systemic problems that might require legal intervention or a response to legal intervention others initiated.

One striking aspect of this experience was how well organized the Obama campaign was to address these issues. As has been reported about other aspects of the campaign, our direct experience in our arena was that it would be hard to imagine a more sophisticated and well-run structure for oversight of these issues. Without giving away any secrets about exactly how this was done, we can say that we were aware of every potential problem at polling places throughout the battleground states. This awareness ranged from the minor details, such as polling places that ran out of pens, to the more significant, such as challenges to the eligibility of individual voters to vote. Some of these issues tested the commitment of citizens, as with the long lines in Virginia. Some had the quality of bizarre melodrama, as with the polling sites in Washington State that ran out of provisional ballots in English and tried to make do with the ones printed in Chinese. Through it all there was the captivating commitment to democratic values that filled even a room of tired and strained lawyers with admiration and respect.


The professionalism of the campaign's entire culture, from top to bottom, was also impressive. We were at the top of a pyramid of information coming in, much of it mediated by younger campaign workers, often in their 20s. It was obvious they had internalized the campaign's codes: no drama, stay in your own lanes, calm professionalism, and no leaks. Working within such a culture was a pleasure and made our work as smooth as possible -- even though our physical quarters consisted of five thrown-together card tables for 15 people in a small room on the concrete floor of a building that had yet to be carpeted and that quickly covered our clothes with dust.

As it turned out, we are all fortunate there was no legal confrontation that rose to the level of the 2000 election. But there was a great deal of legal activity that mostly flew below the radar screen of public attention. In cases brought either by the political parties or outside groups, there was litigation on Election Day and the days right before in Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey (concerning election procedures in New Mexico). And of course, during Election Day, while the script was still being written, we had to approach every potential issue as if the election's outcome could turn on it.

For both of us, the election's outcome has a surreal quality of closing a circle. Early in our careers, one of us used to get together with President-Elect Obama to discuss our casebook, The Law of Democracy, from which he taught when he was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. The other of us began our legal career by being part of a successful lawsuit that led to the first seating of an African-American congressman from Misssissipi in the 20th century.

Being in Grant Park, Chicago on Election Night to witness Mr. Obama's victory address was the most moving experience of our professional lives.

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Since Sarah Palin made her appearance at the Republican National Convention, I've been inundated with fowarded emails and blogs about Palin. When my middle schooler came home one day, wanting to know about "the role of lipstick" in this election, I experienced a migraine just explaining it to her.

Why are we talking about this nonsense?

Some 90 banks have gone under, Lehman Brothers lost $3.9 billion in one quarter, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars continue to rage on, and my daughter and the rest of the country are debating the "lipstick on a pig" comment?

Then I read another forwarded email about Palin, which put this all into perspective. It was credited as having been written by Cathryn Michon. I don't know this writer, and I certainly do not agree with everything she had to say in her email.

But her meta-message--Palin is a huge distraction--made utter sense to me. She wrote:

The GOP is trying to distract us with Sarah Palin and her endless drama, and it's working. It's the best free advertising they've had in this election cycle...
They now have a Teflon lady attack dog (if you attack, or even question her, you're automatically sexist) and they are expertly using her to distract us....

The more attention you pay Sarah Palin, the more emails you forward to your friends about her, the more it becomes a story the MSM is justified in covering Women...will be incensed that the "liberal media" is picking on her. Undecideds will decide this election, and if you give women undecideds a grudge that makes them turn out for McCain, all will be lost....
Sarah Palin and Karl Rove are Lucy, holding a football, enticing you to kick it.

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When my daughter was born 12 years ago, I was delighted when a dear friend bought us three shares in Disney stock. Now I'm not so delighted.

Today, I received a letter in the mail from an Orwellian-sounding company called BNY Mellon Shareholder Services, notifying me that "they could not account for one of several boxes of data back up tapes that they were transporting" to an off-site storage facility.

And they have now determined that "one or more tapes" in the missing box contained my personal information, including my social security number.

In their infinite generosity, they've offered me a two-year credit monitoring service for free.
It took some close reading of the letter before I got really enraged.
Turns out this "missing box" was discovered four months ago.

"Due to the way information was stored on the tapes in the missing box, it took some time to determine whose missing information was contained on those tapes."

Turns out this "missing box" was discovered four months ago.
Then, I went online and did a quick google search and discovered a CNET.com story that ran June 4, more than three weeks ago, detailling the "missing" information.

"(An) unnamed storage vendor was transporting 10 boxes of back-up data storage tapes with shareholder information from BNY Mellon Shareowner Services' facility in New Jersey to an off-site storage facility when one box was discovered missing. BNY Mellon Shareowner Services is a stock transfer agent and stock plan administrator for public companies."

Isn't it wonderful that my material may be sitting somewhere off the New Jersey Turnpike? And can you tell me why this bank---which, according to this story, supposedly began notifying customers in mid-May--didn't send me out a letter until June 27, which I received today?

Didn't this warrant springing for overnight mail?

So far, I haven't detected anyone has attempted to use my personal information, but I haven't checked my daughter's credit report yet. But Disney and BNY Mellon Shareowner Services, if you are out there, this is what I think you owe me:

--an apology. There wasn't one anywhere in the single spaced one and a half page letter.
--an apology from a person. There was no signature or name of anyone from BNY Mellon on the letter.
--a promise that the company will go after this "archive services vendor," which was responsible for the missing box.
--some transparency and integrity. It was also a vendor that was responsible for another missing box of information that went missing a few months later, according to the CNET report. Was it the same vendor? Why isn't its name being published?
--a guarantee that if I or my daughter am a victim of identity theft that this company will pay whatever costs are involved to resurrect my credit.

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It is one of those homeowner nightmares: You wake up and discover that you've got a massive leak, and water is pouring out of your ceiling. But your regular plumber is busy and can't come to your house for at least another day.
What do you do?
Well, if you were living in 1995, you'd probably call your neighbors and friends for recommendations for a trusted plumber. And if this plumber turned out to overcharge you or do shoddy work, you might argue with him, take him to small claims court, or register your complaint with the Better Business Bureau.
But, in 2008, you have much better options, thanks to the power of social networking. Let me tell you what I did when it started to rain my house last week.
After discovering that my regular plumber couldn't come until the next day (and seeing the ceiling plaster crumbling), I logged onto two local, online message boards. One was started by a Newcomers club and is a free list serve for working moms, in which members post questions and answers. The other is a town web site in which anyone can post messages on the boards. I did a quick search for plumbers and found a few names that were strongly recommended and began calling.
Finally, one plumber agreed to come over. After opening up my ceiling and spending two hours looking into it, he told me that he was unable to find the source of the leak, but he turned off the water to the bathroom so no more water would be pouring out of my ceiling. The bill was $250. He told me that I had three options, each costly than the next. I could either have him come back and look some more, which would probably cost another $700 or $800; have him replace the pipes in the bathroom ($1600 or $1700), or just renovate the entire bathroom (thousands...).
The next morning, my regular plumber came over and within five minutes announced the leak was coming from the toilet. Needless to say, this is a relatively inexpensive fix.
When the first plumber called me to ask if I'd decided which of those three options I was going to pursue, I told him what happened when my regular plumber came the next day.
Then something surprising happened. He told me he was reducing his fee to $119. "I have a good reputation in this community, and I know you heard good things about me from other people," he said (before he went on to suggest, darkly, that my usual plumber was up to no good.)
Why did he do this? He is a smart businessman. He remembered that I'd told him I'd gotten his name from a few women on the working mom list serve. He wisely assessed that if I felt ripped off, I might complain on the board about him.
Chalk up another one, for the power of the consumer in the Web 2.0 economy.
So what does this mean for people who don't live in my community? Fortunately, there are many online recommendation services, including Yelp, Angies List, and the new Loladex, a new Facebook application in beta testing.
And you always could consider starting your own online message board. Yahoo, Topica, and Google all make it very easy to start list serves.

Labels: personal finance

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In the year 2008, does anybody want to be identified as a soccer mom?
This was the question that Nancy Star, above, the author of a satirical novel about soccer moms, Carpool Diem, asked at her book party Saturday night.
Turns out not even Nancy would call herself a soccer mom, though she told a funny story about how a reporter from her hometown paper tried to get Nancy to identify herself as a soccer mom.
I was holding a glass of wine in one hand and a piece of shrimp in the other when Nancy told the story, so I didn't take notes. But I believe her conversation with the reporter went like this:

"Are you a mom?"
Yes, two kids.
"Do your kids play soccer?"
Uh, yes.
"Well, then you're a soccer mom!"
And so, the story called Nancy "a self-described soccer mom."

Nancy was embarrassed and decided to look up the term. What she found were a horrifying array of definitions, which boiled down to: SUV driving, cell phone wielding moms who spend all their time catering to their over-privileged brats. (One definition simply began: "the downfall of human society." Read here. )
Interestingly, the term was popularized in the 1990s when politicians suddenly detected suburban moms as a powerful voting bloc. So why is it that soccer moms are suddenly the subject of a new movie, play, books, and a reality TV show?
And what does it say that these shows and books come out just as Hillary Clinton is running her historic campaign for the presidency?
Nancy Star is smart and thoughtful; she isn't the type to pontificate, spinning grand theories off the top of her head.
But I am!


(see me pontificating to Nancy)

So here is what I think: it reflects the confused and contradictory images we hold of women today. We're both celebrated and pilloried as stay-at-home moms, while we also are attacked and lionized for being ambitious achievers.

Labels: soccer moms

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As any women's magazine editor will tell you, the surest way to generate controversy is to run a story about working mothers opting out or at-home mothers opting in.
Both working moms and at home moms feel dissed by each other (and the media), so no matter what is published or aired, you can be sure someone is going to be upset by it.
So, it is perhaps no surprise that soccer moms are the subject of two new novels, Nancy Star’s Carpool Diem, and Meg Wolitzer's The Ten Year Nap, an off-Broadway show, Secrets of a Soccer Mom, an upcoming movie, Soccer Mom, and a new reality show, The Secret Life of A Soccer Mom.

"This show is terrible because it TEMPTS a mother who has been at home with her children to leave them for her dream job!"
"Unless you're about to starve there is no reason for you to be at work. If you didn't want to raise your children, you should not have had them. It's child abandonment."

On the show, a “soccer mom” is secretly set up with her dream job for a week while her husband and children think she is enjoying a week at a spa. Then, drum roll please, the family learns the truth and Mom must make the big decision: Should she follow her career dreams or stay at home?
When I sat down to watch an episode, I expected to see the usual highly scripted unreality that passes as reality programming these days. But watching the episode in which a frumpy mother of four (and wife of a police officer) spent time as a cadet and performed so well she was offered a scholarship to the police academy, I found myself unexpectedly moved.
The mom lit up with pride when the scholarship was announced in front of her family. But she wasn't showered with congratulations by her husband. Instead, he icily declared, "That isn’t going to happen.”
End of discussion.
In a voice over, the mom claimed that the final decision--to turn down the offer--was hers, but she didn't fool anybody. The power dynamics in their marriage was exposed. And it wasn’t pretty.
In 2008, how many mothers have stayed at home because their husbands have decreed this is the way it will be?
I’m looking forward to cracking open my copy of Carpool Diem, Nancy Star's comic novel about the life of soccer moms.
After this show, I could use a dose of humor.

Labels: soccer moms

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So much has been written about the increase in moms "opting out" of the workplace that I thought surely, this new research by the U.S. Census Bureau would get big play.

In a report released Monday, the U.S. Census found that women who became mothers during 2001 and 2003 were more likely to work during their pregnancy and return to work sooner after giving birth than new mothers past.

How was this story played? USA Today ran a brief. New York Times ran a short item buried in the paper, completely ignoring its own cover story years earlier suggesting there was a widespread desertion of the workplace by educated women. And what about Time Magazine, which also ran a cover story? I did a quick search and couldn't find ANY mention on this study on its web site.

Does this data effectively put to an end to the debate of whether moms are opting out? I don't know (but will return to this subject when I can). But in the meantime, I am wondering: why is it that so much of the media covers with far more relish research that supports one view and gives short shrift to the contradictory evidence?

Labels: opting out

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