Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 23

The Democrats choose Charlotte for 2012 convention | Michael Tomasky

So the Democrats have selected Charlotte, North Carolina as the site of their 2012 convention. Not exactly a leading American city. And not really a Democratic city in numbers or spirit. It was the locus, in the 1970s, of the country's most bitter school desegregation battle. Even today it houses the Nascar Hall of Fame. So what's that about?

Being competitive in the Sun Belt. Hoping that Obama might win North Carolina again. Signaling that the D's are ready to compete everywhere (the R's already chose Tampa). Having their convention in a city that doesn't even have one union hotel. Oops, that probably wasn't one of the talking points.

(Just so you know, traditionally, campaigning Democrats have cared about staying in union hotels, while Republicans have not. I guess those days are now officially over, although it seems strange to me because unions, for all their flaws and problems, are still the party's most reliable money and door-knocking source. Obama himself, like many presidents and presidential candidates, might duck the issue by staying in some rich person's massive house.)

Can Obama possibly win North Carolina again? First of all, I doubt there's much correlation between convention location and victory. I do think that Denver as the D's location in '08 helped at the margins; remember how, all those people who packed Mile High Stadium for the big speech, David Plouffe sent them all out knocking on doors that fall? That probably helped.

But this time...on the margins if at all. Obama won NC by .4% in 2008 in very aberrantly friendly circumstances: McCain's silly campaign, the half-termer, the economic crisis. The natural inclination is to think that things will return to "normal" there, which means: Republican.

But I'm not so sure. Here's an interesting set of numbers. I assumed Obama won NC by really pumping up the black vote. But if you look at CNN exit poll numbers, you see that African Americans made up 23% of the overall vote in the state in 2008. After seeing this I went to 2004 as a point of comparison, and it turns out that the black vote in 2004 was higher: 26% of the total vote.

How do you explain this? Well, I'd suspect that a whole lot of white voters turned out to vote against the black guy, thus depressing the black number. Will they turn out in such numbers again? Maybe, if the economy is terrible and we've had a terrorist attack or something.

But it's my guess that a decent chunk of these voters won't turn out. I call this the "sky didn't fall in" vote. That is, America elected a black president, and these voters didn't like this idea at all, but now they see that "the sky didn't fall in, Al Sharpton didn't become secretary of state, and life's okay, and now that he's not dancing with Pelosi anymore he seems better, and I always did sorta like the guy personally, and Republicans seem a little nutty, and what the hell."

I am not saying that these people will now vote for Obama. A few might. But that isn't what I mean. What I mean is, far fewer of them will be highly motivated to bother to drive to the polls to be sure to vote against him.

I think that dynamic could work to Obama's benefit in a lot of states. Unless of course the sky actually does fall in (economy, terrorism), in which case he'll be in big trouble. I could picture anything at this point, from his outperforming last time's gaudy 365 electoral votes (if things are going really well and the GOP puts up an unserious candidate, he might take Georgia, which he lost by five points in '08) to losing. But if you asked me for a number today, I would say about 312 electoral votes (270 needed to win).

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Do we have law in America? | Michael Tomasky

At the level of basic criminal and civil enforcement, sure, we have law in America. Shifty and high-priced lawyering can corrupt the process. But if I steal your car and they catch me, I will likely be convicted. And if I dump toxic waste in your yard and they catch me, I will likely pay a civil penalty.

But at the level of policy-making, we no longer have law in the US. We have only politics. A judge like Roger Vinson in yesterday's decision...he's a conservative, and it's pretty obvious that he knew what political outcome he wanted and worked backwards, constructing his argument. Usually, judges are much better than Vinson at concealing this and cloaking their reasoning in the law's majesty. They don't cite the Boston Tea Party, as Vinson did, a highly charged historical reference in the current climate. But they get to the same place.

We've had only politics ever since Bush v Gore at least, when the conservative justices blatantly turned their back on an alleged principle of conservative jurisprudence (let the states decide) and stopped the counting. Maybe it's gone back even longer. I guess the conservatives here would say the Warren court made political decisions. Maybe it did. No: probably it did.

I would argue, as I have in the past with regard to regulation, that many of the liberal rulings of the Warren court were rooted in some concrete notion of correcting actually existing wrongs. Now, "wrong" may be subjective, but let's be real; there are certain judgments society as a whole not only can but must make. Segregated schools were wrong. Discrimination in housing and association membership and so on was wrong. Sure, there were other decisions that went outside these comparatively uncontested parameters. In those cases, I wouldn't doubt that liberal-leaning judges found legal justifications for conclusions they wanted to reach.

But what wrong is being corrected when today's conservative majority tells the people of Seattle and Louisville: no, you cannot sit down and reason together toward a school desegregation plan that you have reached agreement on through the legislative process and that has broad (clearly not universal, but broad) support in your communities? That corrects no injustice. It offsets an inconvenience for a minority of parents who don't like the arrangement, but it corrects no injustice.

But that is exactly what this Roberts court did, and result is increasing segregation in urban school systems. This is good? This is jurisprudential? Nonsense. It's ideology and politics. Only a liar or a fool could think otherwise.

And more than that, if the law is morally neutral on the question of segregation - that it has no stake in a particular outcome, no interested in deciding that integration is good for society while segregation is bad - then give me anarchy.

I can't wait to see how Scalia squares his upcoming vote against the healthcare act with the commerce clause position he took in Raich, which is exactly the opposite of the one he's going to take when he decides on the ACA. He'll come up with something; there's a legal precedent for everything, and after all he's a clever man. But at this high level, America is not a nation of laws. It's a nation of politics.

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Judge Vinson and the healthcare ruling | Michael Tomasky

The conservative charge that liberal judges "legislate from the bench" dates to the Warren court and the Nixon era. Well, it's time to turn the tables. Because what is this...:

But unlike a Virginia judge in December, Judge Roger Vinson of Federal District Court in Pensacola, Fla., concluded that the insurance requirement was so "inextricably bound" to other provisions of the Affordable Care Act that its unconstitutionality required the invalidation of the entire law.

"The act, like a defectively designed watch, needs to be redesigned and reconstructed by the watchmaker," Judge Vinson wrote.

The judge declined to immediately enjoin, or suspend, the law pending appeals, a process that could last two years. But he wrote that the federal government should adhere to his declaratory judgment as the functional equivalent of an injunction. That left confusion about how the ruling might be interpreted in the 26 states that are parties to the legal challenge.

The insurance mandate does not take effect until 2014. But many new regulations are already operating, like requirements that insurers cover children with pre-existing health conditions and eliminate lifetime caps on benefits. States are also preparing for a major expansion of Medicaid eligibility and the introduction of health insurance exchanges in 2014.

David B. Rivkin Jr., a lawyer for the states, said the ruling relieved the plaintiff states of any obligation to comply with the health law. "With regard to all parties to this lawsuit, the statute is dead," Mr. Rivkin said.

...if not legislating from the bench? That's exactly what it is by the conservatives' own definition. A policy was set by Congress, reflecting, as our theory of government has it, the direct will of the people, which legislators are the vessels of. And now comes a judge to say no, I don't like that law.

Let's not kid ourselves here. There's no principle of law at stake in any of these decisions. Liberal judges will uphold this liberal policy, in part because it does no violence to their view of the commerce or necessary and proper clauses, while conservative judges will strike it down for the opposite reasons. Okay, there's a little bit of constitutional jurisprudence in there, but this is basically ideology and politics. Pretending otherwise is delusional.

So it will go to the Supreme Court, where the only question is Anthony Kennedy's vote. It's my firm view now that whichever side loses in court will be the winner in politics, especially if the court hands down its decision in 2012. That is, if the court upholds the law, millions of enraged tea partiers will come out to vote against Obama and Democrats because of the decision. If the court strikes the law down, liberals will be similarly riled up. Nothing motivates like outrage.

If the Supreme Court does strike the act down, that really should slam the sarcophagus lid on the conservative argument about strict construction and all that rubbish. They legislate from the bench. From Bush v Gore to this, the conservatives on the court will have proven that they decide cases based on the ideological result.

Someone emailed yesterday a four-year-old satire that still rings very true today:

...the Court today announces a new clear standard to guide lower courts in their application of the commerce clause. This new standard will govern when a law exceeds Congress's power under the commerce clause and when it does not. The new standard is this – a law passed pursuant to the commerce clause is constitutional if Justice Scalia likes the law and unconstitutional if he does not. Similarly, if the law is regulating things that Justice Scalia wants regulated, it is constitutional. If it does not, it is not...

...For instance, Justice Scalia dislikes many things – hippies, long-haired hippies, hippies with beards, long-haired hippies wearing sandals, the homosexual agenda, assisted-physician suicide, Will & Grace, long-haired bearded hippies wearing sandals, long-haired hippies wearing sandals and burning flags, the Florida Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy, Satan, the New Deal, and the equal protection clause.

On the other hand, Justice Scalia likes many things – police, police arresting hippies, laws criminalizing drug possession, laws criminalizing drug possession by hippies, duck hunting, barbeque, John Ashcroft, Jesus, and the equal protection clause in the context of presidential elections.

That's about the size of it.

US healthcareMichael Tomasky
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The US, Egypt, Israel and morality | Michael Tomasky

This is one of those situations, is it not, where you read 20 things and you think good point, fair point, hadn't thought of that, interesting way to look at it, and at the end of it all your head is kind of spinning.

Through it all, though, the one thing I'm suspicious of is heavy moral throwdowns by pundits. Obama must do this or that. X or Y or Z proves the absolute hypocrisy of America, or whomever. Nonsense.

Nobody writing those kinds of things knows what's going on inside. Granted, what's going on outside is important: America should send the right signals to the protestors and the rest of the world. But presumably, there's lots going on that none of us knows about. It would be my guess that especially after today, with those massive protests, Washington is telling Cairo privately that violent repression is out of the question and will produce severe consequences. I would hope that Obama makes another statement, a few ticks stronger than his last one, in the next couple of days.

Meanwhile, these paragraphs from today's NYT story about Washington sizing up ElBaradei as a potential leader of Egypt rang all too true:

But now, the biggest questions for the Obama administration are Mr. ElBaradei's views on issues related to Israel, Egypt and the United States. For instance, both the United States and Israel have counted on the Egyptians to enforce their part of the blockade of Gaza, which is controlled by the militant Islamist group Hamas.

But in an interview last June with the London-based Al Quds Al-Arabi, Mr. ElBaradei called the Gaza blockade "a brand of shame on the forehead of every Arab, every Egyptian and every human being." He called on his government, and on Israel, to end the blockade, which Israeli and Egyptian officials argue is needed to ensure security.

Ah. Now we're learning something important here. The Times goes on to detail the deep distrust of ElBaradei among neocons. Cirincione, fyi, is a good guy:

Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund and a friend of Mr. ElBaradei, said Monday that Mr. ElBaradei wanted Israel to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Israel, along with India and Pakistan, is not a signatory.

One senior Obama administration official said that it was not lost on the administration that Mr. ElBaradei's contentious relations with the Bush administration helped explain why he was now being viewed by some as a credible face of the opposition in Egypt.

"Ironically, the fact that ElBaradei crossed swords with the Bush administration on Iraq and Iran helps him in Egypt, and God forbid we should do anything to make it seem like we like him," said Philip D. Zelikow, former counselor at the State Department during the Bush years. For all of his tangles with the Bush administration, Mr. ElBaradei, an international bureaucrat well known in diplomatic circles, is someone whom the United States can work with, Mr. Zelikow said.

However, he allowed, "Some people in the administration had a jaundiced view of his work."

Among them was John Bolton, the former Bush administration United States ambassador to the United Nations, who routinely clashed with Mr. ElBaradei on Iran. "He is a political dilettante who is excessively pro-Iran," he complained.

Meanwhile, at The Nation, Ari Berman notes:

ElBaradei's emergence has angered pro-Mubarak neoconservatives, such as Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vide president of the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, which is closely aligned with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. "There is a myth being created that ElBaradei is a human rights activist," Hoenlein told an Orthodox Jewish website on Sunday. "He is a stooge of Iran, and I don't use the term lightly. When he was the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, for which he got a Nobel Peace Prize, he fronted for them, he distorted the reports."

So this is what's going on, probably. The administration is feeling some heat from these kinds of sources. Ultimately, Obama and Clinton do not, I would expect and hope, agree with Bolton and Hoenlein. And ultimately, I would expect and hope, ultimately meaning pretty soon, they will embrace Mubarak's ouster more publicly.

But these are complicated things. I know that this thread is now going to be full of indignant fulmination against Israel. That's not my intent. My intent is to show that there are a lot of factors in play here. I want to be clear that I obviously do not think the administration should sit on its hands here for Israel's sake; what's going on in Tahrir Square is inspiring and quite clearly deserves the support, issued in the right way at the right time, by the United States of America. Rather, I am saying that the US, given its role in the world, has to weigh things more carefully than any other country in the world does before it speaks and acts. I think we'll do the right thing, but the right thing must be done at the right time in this case.

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Obama can't offer the moral thunder that Egypt craves | Michael Tomasky

The challenge for the US this week is to raise the temperature delicately, rather than seeking to call the global shots

On an emotional level, everyone wants Barack Obama to thunder that Hosni Mubarak must go. And there are bad reasons why the US president won't do that. Egypt is probably exhibit A in the broad US foreign policy imperative of geopolitical stability trumping internal democracy and human rights. It's older than the cold war, this impulse. It was in the 1930s that Franklin Roosevelt supposedly said of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza: "He may be a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch." The same words have been true of Mubarak through 30 years of opposition crackdowns and human rights abuses.

In 2005, then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, to her credit, gave a speech in Cairo that critiqued this policy, with the famous line: "For 60 years, my country … pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region … and we achieved neither." This was while the Bush administration was pushing the "freedom agenda". American conservative commentators and bloggers have been quoting it over the past week as a supposed lesson in what moral clarity looks like. But all you have to do is look at today's headlines to see exactly how little impact her words had.

Nothing against Rice; this stuff isn't easy. But it underscores the fact that there are also good reasons why Obama is in no position to offer the moral thunder the protesters and their supporters everywhere crave. It's not just that the US needs to keep its powder on the dry side just in case Mubarak holds on, and it's not even that the US must be extremely careful about emitting any slight signal that might ratchet up the unrest to a point that leads to a violent crackdown and even more repression. Rather, it's that the US should not be dictating outcomes any more. The modern world requires a US posture that is more fluid and subtle, and that no longer seeks to call the global shots.

We're at a strangely paradoxical point in geopolitical history. On the one hand, we live in a unipolar world. The US is unchallenged in terms of global supremacy. It continues to have immense global obligations that no other country could or should fulfil (you want China to start arranging global alliances?). America remains the global hegemon. On the other, we have seen in the past decade the limits of American power far more clearly than we have seen its possibilities. The world's greatest superpower got badly tangled up in Iraq and is bogged down in a seemingly unwinnable, decade-long war in one of the poorest and most backward countries on the planet. We can't change Iran. North Korea does its thing. Bibi Netanyahu thumbs his nose at the US, as do Hamas and Hezbollah and Bashar al-Assad on the other side.

Meanwhile, on the economic front, China makes deals and finances construction projects across the developing world; and it is Germany, not the US, that appears to be leading the way into the global economic future. Add to that – and this is perhaps most important of all – what Zbigniew Brzezinski has called the "global awakening" of peoples around the world in developing countries, who have more and more access to information and more and more impatience with the old geostrategic arrangements, and we are in a world of mightily reduced American leverage.

The US can respond in two basic ways. One path is the neoconservatives' chosen direction of maintaining hegemony at all costs – which, paradoxically, has reduced American hegemony, because they led the US into the very wars that exposed its limitations, and they made decisions that are directly to blame for doing so (Donald Rumsfeld's conviction that Iraq could be tamed with just 130,000 troops, say). That way lies further disaster, and quite possibly war with Iran one of these days.

The other choice is to manage carefully the transition from a hegemonic world to an awakening world. This is a process whereby the US encourages reform and openness without being seen as dictating outcomes. Here is where writers use words like "challenging", but challenging understates the matter. Doing this will be extremely difficult. For one thing, it's subtle and doesn't lend itself to slogans. It's hard to communicate politically. And never forget domestic politics: the neocons will be banging on about how such a posture signals weakness to the world. And, like a stopped clock, every once in a while, they'll be right.

The challenge for Obama, Hillary Clinton and the rest of the team this week is to raise the temperature delicately, on behalf of the right things: not against Mubarak or the Muslim Brotherhood or for Mohammed ElBaradei, but on behalf of the great global awakening for rights and freedom. That is the "right side of history" everyone is chattering about. Another American gave a pretty good speech in Cairo once, instructing his audience: "You must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party." That was Obama. They're words I hope he's rereading.

EgyptMiddle EastUnited StatesUS foreign policyBarack ObamaMichael Tomasky
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History's most daring Nazi comparison | Michael Tomasky

As you Brits know from this blog and your other sources, we Americans are forever arguing about Nazi comparisons. Somebody lets rip with a Goebbels analogy, and they get dumped on, and other people act all offended, but the other people typically do the same thing. If you have not seen this amazingly hilarious Jon Stewart clip on the subject, by all means watch.

Well, over the weekend I was watching an episode of The World at War, the marvelous 1970s documentary series narrated by Larry O. Episode 15 to be precise, "The Home Fires," about the domestic situation in England during the war: the industrial production, the quotas and so on.

Attention turned to attempts by the government at press censorship. The press, Olivier intoned, fought these attempts vigorously. They they showed a clip of an apparently famous speech by a young Evening Standard editor by the name of Michael Foot. Speaking out against an attempt to censor the Mirror, Foot said mockingly that the government had assured everyone that if the Mirror relented in this case it would make "no more territorial demands" on British newspapers. He got a huge laugh and repeated it and got maybe a bigger laugh.

No more territorial demands, of course, is what Hitler said after Munich. So Foot was directly comparing Winston Churchill (and Bevin and the whole bunch) to Hitler! During the war! While the actual real-life Nazis were doing their evil Nazi things. Amazing. Yet somehow England survived.

Brits, do you know this speech? I know Foot of course from his Labour years, but this was news to me. The whole episode, which I don't remember seeing when I was young and thought I'd watched the whole series, was just fascinating. Yes, Britons united admirably, but there were strikes and dissent and lots of layers of tension that the show captured well.

Michael FootMichael Tomasky
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Income inequality, Egypt vs US | Michael Tomasky

The protests in Egypt are about democracy first and foremost, but wouldn't you figure there's probably some element of economics in there? There usually is. And we know that there are many desperately poor people in Egypt. This Wikipedia page uses two rankings to show that the average per capita income in the country is just $6,367 (IMF numbers) or $6,200 (CIA World Fact Book).

The United States is around $47,000 in both, while the UK is around $35,00 in both. Qatar, Luxemborg, Norway and Singapore lead the way.

So it's dirt poor. But lo and behold, but some other measures things aren't as bad as they could be. From Think Progress:

According to the CIA World Fact Book, the U.S. is ranked as the 42nd most unequal country in the world, with a Gini Coefficient of 45.

In contrast:

– Tunisia is ranked the 62nd most unequal country, with a Gini Coefficient of 40.

– Yemen is ranked 76th most unequal, with a Gini Coefficient of 37.7.

– And Egypt is ranked as the 90th most unequal country, with a Gini Coefficient of around 34.4.

The Gini coefficient is used to measure inequality: the lower a country's score, the more equal it is. Obviously, there are many things about the U.S. economy that make it far preferable to that in Egypt, including lower poverty rates, higher incomes, significantly better infrastructure, and a much higher standard of living overall. But income inequality in the U.S. is the worst it has been since the 1920′s, which is a real problem.

Here's the chart. The UK by the way ranks 92nd, so slightly less unequal than Egypt.

No I would not rather live there. It's just a dramatic way to highlight the terrible thing that has happened in the US. Our society is more unequal than at any time since 1920. It is not desirable or sustainable. And it makes America an awfully poor model for the developing world.

EgyptUnited StatesMichael Tomasky
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Ayn Rand, socialist | Michael Tomasky

Now this one is fascinating. From Joshua Holland at Alternet:

[Ayn Rand's] books provided wide-ranging parables of "parasites," "looters" and "moochers" using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes' labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O'Connor (her husband was Frank O'Connor).

As Michael Ford of Xavier University's Center for the Study of the American Dream wrote, "In the end, Miss Rand was a hypocrite but she could never be faulted for failing to act in her own self-interest."

She was elderly and sick and needed surgery (lung surgery, after knocking down two packs a day for decades). Presumably she had a fair amount of money. But she turned to Social Security and Medicare. And under her husband's name!

All right, I hear some of you now. We're all hypocrites to some extent. I accepted the Bush tax cuts I oppose (although I do make charitable contributions that I think cover the difference, so I give the money back).

But I am not the leading "moral" philosopher of my age on the subject of rates of taxation, as Rand was to her many disciples on the question of the state. Besides which, there is no way to tell the IRS, look, I want to be taxed at the old Clinton rate. Whereas Mrs. O'Connor could surely have turned to other sources. What a hypocrite and fraud.

So, happy Monday. A few other items. One, I have a big-think Egypt-related piece on US hegemony and the right side of history and all that, which I wrote this morning for tomorrow's paper. It should be posted today sometime.

Two, I want to pursue this matter of reader-made quizzes. What's a good logistical way to proceed with this, without me having to post publicly my personal email address?

Three, re the thread on last Friday's quiz: wow. Sometimes I wonder if you folks need me at all. And Madame Max, as one who has pulled Vicious Misanthrope back from the rhetorical brink more than once in this lifetime, permit me to assure you that he's a good egg deep down. Stay with us.

US domestic policyMichael Tomasky
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Tomasky Talk: Facing up to financial crisis

Michael Tomasky reviews a week in Washington politics in which an inquiry delivered its verdict on the 2008 crash – whose consequences are still unfolding across the United States

Michael Tomasky

Friday quiz: 'Swonderful | Michael Tomasky

When do we discover music that was before our time? Maybe through our parents. Maybe through piecemeal introductions via the general culture: seeing old movies, hearing a snippet of an old song in a television commercial. There's an old song from the 1930s called "The Talk of the Town" that goes "everybody knows you left me/it's the talk of the town." I originally learned in the 1970s because Chrysler adapted it and hired Jack Jones to warble in a commercial pushing a new car: "What a beautiful New Yorker/It's the talk of the town..." Sometimes there was a rock-n-roll era cover – when I was very young, Chad and Jeremy covered the 1930s classic "Willow Weep for Me."

But like a lot of people in my general age cohort, I really started to learn about what we call the standards when compact discs came on the scene. I was thrilled to find that I could buy, on one regular-priced CD, a disc that included both Swing Easy! and Songs for Swingin' Lovers (if you have no idea who recorded those two LPs, uh, you might wanna skip this quiz). Later came the big Sinatra Capitol Years box set, and there it was, all in one lush and dazzling place.

So our topic today is the great standards, about which everyone of any age ought to know a little. I used to think these songs existed on a far higher level of sophistication than rock songs, because that was what the culture taught one. And it's certainly true in a technical sense, which, being an amateur guitarist, I comprehend exactly. One encounters jazzy chords in those songs that one doesn't typically find in rock songs, and progressions into diminished sevenths and flatted ninths and so forth. I still can't really play those chords well.

I would argue in counterpoint that rock'n'roll songs eventually became more sophisticated in subject matter. Rodgers and Hart weren't sitting around gazing out upon Desolation Row, or contemplating the death in a car crash of a man who might have been in the House of Lords. On the other hand, some of rhymes in the standards are just fantastic, very witty and urbane.

In any case, much of the music is beautiful, utterly unbound by time and place, and there are certain moods when only Frankie or Tony or Judy or Billie will do, n'est ce pas? Apologies in advance to our British friends for the America-centric nature of these questions, all but one anyway, but a) I should think these songs are as beloved in England as in my country and b) consider it payback for the Swinging London quiz. Let's go.

1. The original lyrics to this 1920s song, by Irving Berlin, included a reference to Harlemites parading up and down Lenox Avenue. As the song moved to Hollywood to be incorporated into film, that was changed, to rich swells (presumably white) strolling Park Avenue ("on that famous thoroughfare/with their noses in the air"):
a. "Top Hat"
b. "Puttin' on the Ritz"
c. "Lullaby of Broadway"

2. In the intro (or "verse," as those old introductory segments were more properly called) to this 1930s song by the Gershwins, the singer says to the target of the song: "There are many crazy things/that will keep me loving you/and with your permission/may I list a few":
a. "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"
b. "My Funny Valentine"
c. "They Can't Take That Away from Me"

3. What singer is most closely associated with the songs that are the correct answers to 1 and 2?
a. Ella Fitzgerald
b. Perry Como
c. Fred Astaire

4. What plea follows these couplets, from successive verses of the 1920s Cole Porter number:
"It's getting late/and while I wait/my poor heart aches on/why keep the brakes on?"
"They say that spring/means just one thing/to little lovebirds/we're not above birds"
"They say that bears/have love affairs/and even camels/we're men and mammals"
a. Let's Misbehave
b. Come Be Risque
c. Don't Run Away

5. With her "hair piled high upon my head," where did Judy Garland go "to lose a jolly hour" when she "lost my heart instead"?
a. For a walk down the street ("The Boy Next Door")
b. For a ride on the trolley ("The Trolley Song")
c. Deep into the pages of a Hollywood fanzine ("You Made Me Love You")

6. Which composer was not born in Indiana?
a. Johnny Mercer
b. Cole Porter
c. Hoagy Carmichael

7. Match the famous song to the movie in which it was sung:
"Get Happy"
"Make 'Em Laugh"
"People Will Say We're in Love"
"The Lady Is a Tramp"

Oklahoma!
Summer Stock
Pal Joey
Singin' in the Rain

8. What famous songwriting team wrote the Frank Sinatra classic "Three Coins in the Fountain"?
a. Betty Comden and Adolph Green
b. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe
c. Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn

9. Who was the British singer who during World War II was called "the forces' sweetheart," with hits like "We'll Meet Again" and "The White Cliffs of Dover"?
a. Sheila Buxton
b. Vera Lynn
c. Celia Johnson

10. This song, which spent eight weeks at number one in the US in 1948, was written by a man named eden ahbez (that's right, lower-case); when the famous artist who recorded it tried to track the composer down to secure permission to record the song, ahbez was found living under the big "Hollywood" sign in the Hollywood Hills:
a. "Nature Boy," Nat King Cole
b. "Ole Buttermilk Sky," Kay Keyser
c. "Moonlight in Vermont," Jo Stafford

11. Name the correct chronological order in which these five songs were written, from earliest to latest.
"Fever"
"What a Wonderful World"
"I Get a Kick Out of You"
"I Left My Heart in San Francisco"
"South of the Border"

12. In "Pennies From Heaven," what must you have if you want the things you love?
a. Patience
b. Showers
c. A little pain

I think this was pretty easy if you know the subject matter. Let's see.

Answers:
1-b; 2-c; 3-c; 4-a; 5-b; 6-a; 7: "Get Happy" = Summer Stock; "Make 'Em Laugh" = Singin' in the Rain; "People" = Oklahoma!; "Lady" = Pal Joey; 8-c; 9-b; 10-a; 11: "Kick" = 1934; "Border" = 1939; "I Left My Heart" = 1954; "Fever" = 1956; "Wonderful World" = 1967; 12-b.

Notes:
1. Could've been tricky because this lyric is from the "verse" or intro, not the actual song.
2. I would think the idea of listing a few would have led you right to "the way you wear your hat…"
3. Knew it or you didn't.
4. Now those are some great rhymes, eh wot?
5. The word "jolly" was the tip off here.
6. Interesting factoid, no?
7. Could have been too easy on you here.
8. I adore this song. Three coins, thrown by three hopeful lovers; which one will the fountain bless? Lovely. Really bad movie, unfortunately.
9. There's one for the Brits. But she was huge in America, too. Sheila was evidently another female British vocalist, and Celia Johnson, my long-term readers will know, I have a mild crush on.
10. I love the song, but I just learned all this crazy business researching this quiz. Wild.
11. "Kick" you should have known was clearly first. "Border" was a little earlier than I thought, considering that Sinatra didn't do it til the 1950s (but remember, Gene Autry had a hit with it long before). "Heart" was actually written eight years before Bennett recorded it. "Fever" was written and originally performed (before Peggy Lee) by Little Willie John, of all people. I'm not sure I've ever heard his version, have you? And "Wonderful World" was surprisingly late, from the same year as "Nights in White Satin," no less!
12. One of my four or five most beloved songs. Beautiful in every way. Do you know the words in the intro? Incredible:
"A long time ago
A million years BC
The best things in life
Were absolutely free.
But no one appreciated
A sky that was always blue.
And no one congratulated
A moon that was always new.
So it was planned that they would vanish now and then
And you must pay before you get them back again.
That's what storms were made for
And you shouldn't be afraid for…"
And then it starts in, "Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven…" That is deep. Seriously. People who know only the title think the song is just about good luck. It's about far far more than that.

Did you enjoy this? Tell us how you did and share some of your most beloved songs from that era. Obviously, I barely scratched the surface. I'm very interested to see how much this music resonates with all of you.

United StatesMichael Tomasky
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