Tag: 2020 Summer Olympics

With the mercury topping 39C this year, the risk to athletes is obvious. The schedules of multi-billion dollar televised sports -- such as the English Premier League -- now make that impossible. Yoshiro Mori, president of the Organizing Committee for the Olympics and a former prime minister, recently recommended the idea to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. At first sight, the prospect appears attractive. The trouble is that research in countries that have introduced DST has found smaller benefits than the moral improvers advertise. Japan endured a four-year experiment with DST during the American occupation after World War II. When the Americans left, the Japanese government abolished it. The number of Japanese engaged in agriculture has declined to a tiny proportion of the population, but the booming alcoholic drinks and night-time entertainment industries could suffer. Perhaps what Tokyo 2020 needs is a special "Olympic time zone" that would apply to athletes, officials and media, but not to uninvolved Japanese, who would not need to put their watches forward. The marathon could start at 5 a.m. Olympic time, which might be 7 a.m. Japan time.

The effect of conflating these two very different critiques of “identity politics” has been that in order to discredit the leftist critique, which is associated with an enthusiasm for economic justice arguments, some commentators try to “prove” the value of identity politics by attributing electoral victories to the winning candidates’ embrace of “identity politics” — this without any evidence beyond the race, gender, or sexual identity of the candidate. At the same time, those who trade in “white identity politics” (e.g., identity politics emphasizing whiteness), are not identified as embracing identity politics. To prove that she embraced “identity politics,” Phillips argues that Abrams “publicly and repeatedly expressed solidarity with and welcomed support from LGBTQ groups, labor unions, pro-choice groups, and gun-control advocates.” He writes that by emphasizing identity and focusing on mobilizing voters of color who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, red states like Georgia can go blue. And third, although neither candidate was especially focused on “identity,” Evans, not Abrams, is more accurately described as the “identity” candidate. Evans hammered Abrams on HOPE during primary debates and in campaign ads — consistently emphasizing the racial implications. People of color will be the center of that coalition because they are the majority of the Democratic Party, but this is a coalition that will invite everyone in.” In short, Abrams understands that a winning coalition can be inclusive of white voters without subordinating the interests of marginalized groups. If prospective 2020 candidates take a lesson from Abrams’s victory, let it be this approach. Confusingly, he describes “progressive whites” tautologically as anyone who would vote for a Democratic candidate, while at the same time dismissing the role working-class white voters played in Obama’s electoral successes: Had one in four white working-class Obama voters not switched their allegiance to Trump or a third-party candidate, Trump likely would have lost the election. But the Demos study found that “Working People” is the message that resonates most strongly among both liberals and “persuadables,” because it provides a “foundation in a shared value,” like caring for families. Even while commentators like Phillips and Packnett recognize that successful candidates like Abrams and Obama “stitched together a multiracial coalition of voters,” they, along with certain liberal activists, seem to have embraced the conclusion that “white America believes in white supremacy more than they believe in democracy.” Their insistence that “courting whites” means abandoning everyone else is rooted in the fallacy that voters of color care exclusively about identity — even as studies show that the chief concerns of black voters, like all voters, are economic.

"These are immediate needs," Harris said. Harris is far from alone in twisting herself into a pretzel to avoid looking as though she might potentially be interested in running for president in two years' time. The problem here is the way we, the political/media establishment, treat politicians: Like robots, not people. Do you think you are an overly ambitious ladder-climber if you think about what other jobs you might be interested in doing down the line? Seen through that lens, Harris would be absolutely crazy not to have given any thought to whether she might run for president in 2020. You can debate whether she can win -- or even whether she should run -- but I find it very hard to believe that we should abide by a system that punishes a politician for thinking about being, um, a politician. The idea that politicians aren't like the rest of us creates these sorts of unreasonable expectations as to how they should handle questions about their future ambitions. The idea that this is all a zero-sum game, that Harris acknowledging some interest in 2020 somehow means she is paying less attention to the here and now is, in a word, dumb. Politicians can do two things at once! Politicians, they're just like us!