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Time use surveys
Modified on 2015/05/26 07:48 by Sean Zheng — Categorized as: Chapter 3 - Integrating a gender perspective into data collection
This section of the manual draws extensively on the United Nations publication
Guide to Producing Statistics on Time Use: Measuring Paid and Unpaid Work
(2005). Readers are strongly encouraged to consult the above-mentioned publication, as more detail as well as additional information are covered at length.
Uses of time-use data for gender statistics
Time-use data show how individuals allocate their time to specific activities over a specified period - typically over the 24 hours of a day and over the seven days of a week (United Nations, 2005). These data are generally obtained through two types of survey instruments: 24-hour time diaries and stylized analogues of these diaries. In time diaries, the respondents report all activities undertaken during a prescribed period of time and the beginning and ending time for each activity. In stylized versions of diaries, respondents are asked to recall the amount of time allocated to certain activities during a specified period of time. Compared to stylized questions, diaries can be a more reliable tool for measuring time use and therefore a more reliable tool in obtaining gender statistics; however, the resources required and the burden on the respondents are considerably higher.
Time-use data are the basis for obtaining gender statistics related to several topics: time allocation patterns; unpaid work; participation in all forms of paid work; working time, work locations and the scheduling of economic activities; work-family balance; the investment of time in education and health; welfare and quality of life; and intrahousehold inequality.
Time-allocation patterns. Time-use data can show differences between women and men in time-allocation patterns (types of activities and their schedule during a specified period of time), reflecting differences in roles and expectations with regard to family, domestic life and participation in work and social activities outside the home. Women, for example, tend to spend more time than men taking care of children and less time than men working for payment outside of their homes. The schedule of various episodes of activities may also be different for women and for men. For example, men may be more likely than women to spend time on paid work activities during the night; or, time spent with children may be more concentrated for men in the evening hours and during the week-end. Gender differences extend beyond the traditional distribution of roles in paid and unpaid work. Different patterns of leisure activities may be described for women and for men. In some societies, for example, men may spend more time than women doing sports and fitness activities.
Unpaid work. Time-use data are essential in estimating the participation of women and men in unpaid work (activities unaccompanied by remuneration) and the value of this unpaid work for the economy. Some types of unpaid work are not covered by conventional labour statistics or the System of National Accounts. Conventional labour statistics are limited to activities that contribute to the production of goods and services, as defined by the System of National Accounts, and cover mainly market activities and some unpaid non-market activities. Unpaid work referring to own-account production of services is outside the general boundary of the System of National Accounts and therefore not covered at all in conventional labour force statistics. Examples of unpaid work include cleaning dwellings, performing small repairs, preparing and serving meals, caring for and instructing children, caring for other persons in the household and certain types of volunteer community services. Data on time use for those types of activity are typically obtained in time-use surveys or time-use modules attached to labour force surveys, living standard surveys or other multitopic surveys. The data obtained can be used to estimate household production in satellite accounts that extend measurement of gross domestic product (GDP) to include non-System of National Accounts production, making the national accounts more complete and comparable across countries. At the same time, time-use data on unpaid work is crucial to making the contribution of women to the economy and society more visible. Women, more often than men, tend to be involved and spend a great amount of time in unpaid work in the home and community. When only cash transactions are taken into account in the measurement of economic production, a large portion of women's work remains unaccounted for.
Participation in all forms of work. Time-use data have an important role in improving estimates of employment and labour force participation through more extensive capturing of the participation in non-market activities that are within the general production boundary of the System of National Accounts. These activities refer to the production of goods for own consumption, such as agricultural work, fishing, hunting, cutting firewood, carrying water, threshing and milling grain, making butter and cheese and slaughtering livestock. Such activities are taken into account by current concepts of labour force and employment and should be covered by conventional labour statistics. As a result of bias in data collection, however, these activities are often underreported in labour force surveys or censuses. Women in particular tend to have their participation in labour force underreported, because they tend to be more often involved in non-market economic activities and because it is often assumed (by interviewers or respondents themselves) that women's activities are limited to the domestic area. Time-use surveys are more suited for capturing the involvement of women and men in atypical cases of non-market activities that should be considered within the general production boundary of the System of National Accounts, and for obtaining a measure of the amount of time allocated to those activities.
Working time, work locations and the scheduling of economic activities. Characteristics of work such as working time, work locations and the scheduling of economic activities are often different for women than for men. Time-use data can be used to improve the measurement of time spent for economic activities and to better identify work locations and the scheduling of activities during the week and within 24 hours. Time-use surveys may be able to provide better estimates of working time than labour force surveys, especially when the distinction between periods of work and non-work may be unclear or when such periods are frequently interchanged. They may also provide better estimates of when work is carried out, and at what locations. Work is increasingly undertaken in non-traditional places. A good portion of paid work may be performed at home or while commuting. Contextual information (i.e., for whom and for what purpose is the activity done) is important in order to identify activities outside the workplace that are actually performed for an institution, even if they appear to be personal. Reporting work-related activities may also help to identify, non-paid activities that are performed for work. For example, self-employed persons may carry out various activities that are important for their business but are not formally remunerated, such as socializing.
Work-family balance. Time-use data can provide great insights into the gender specifics of the interaction of work and family life and the relationship between the labour force participation of various female and male household members and their involvement in domestic care activities. Time-use data can also show how the gender division of labour is changing with the change in the balance between market and non-market activities. This is especially the case when there is supplementary information available regarding local infrastructure, domestic appliances and the consumption of market services that substitute for households' own labour (maids, childcare centers and nursing care, for example).
Investment of time in education and health. Time-use data can contribute to understanding gender differences in investment in education and health. Data on children's investment in education may refer to time use spent on activities such as being in school and doing homework or other learning activities, as well as on the balance between time spent on learning activities and time spent in employment or doing housework. Data on time use can also be used to better understand gender differences related to physical access to school when girls and boys do not use the same means of transportation or do not attend the same schools. Furthermore, data regarding the use of technology such as the Internet, computers or telephones in performing various activities can be used to assess gender gaps in access to communication and technology.
Time-use data can be used to understand the relationship between gender and health. Commonly, time-use data cover activities of care for the sick and disabled, which are more often the responsibility of women than of men. Time-use data may also cover transportation to health facilities and waiting time to obtain a consultation, which may show gender differences in accessing health services. Lastly, some data needed to assess the time lost to ill health, which are often used as a measure of health status for individuals and as a non-consumption indicator of poverty, can also be obtained in time-use surveys or multipurpose surveys collecting data on health and time use.
Welfare and quality of life. Time-use data on leisure and the psychological well-being experienced while performing various types of activities can be used as measures of welfare and quality of life for women and men. In certain contexts, the shortage of leisure can be an indicator of poverty. Poor people have to spend most of their time producing the income required for basic needs and do not often have time for leisure. Leisure may include social interactions, relaxation, cultural activities, solitude, physical exercise or participation in sports or games; however, the definition of an activity as leisure is cultural and varies from person to person. Cooking is often given as an example of an activity that may be a chore for one person, but leisure for another person. Women are usually responsible for cooking, and this activity is often identified as a household chore; however, cooking, for example, may be performed once in a while by the husband, as a hobby, and therefore it may be identified as leisure. Shopping is another example of an activity that can be defined as household chore or individual leisure.
Variables that measure psychological well-being while performing each activity (for example, whether people experience negative emotions such as tension or stress or positive feelings such as enjoyment or content) can also be used to differentiate between activities that are performed as duty and activities that are performed as hobby, and to give an indication of the quality of life. Women are most often in charge of taking care of their children, for example. A woman may experience positive feelings while spending time with her children when the availability of childcare services prevents the time invested from becoming a burden. When care services are not available and the woman is the only care provider, however, negative emotions and lower quality of life may be associated with some of the activities related to the care of children.
Intrahousehold inequality. Data related to the amount of time spent by all household members on household chores can be used as an indicator of household and individual living standards and help redefine poverty in terms of the lack of time resources. At the household level, for example, "household time overhead" is defined as the minimum number of hours that a household must spend on the basic chores vital to the survival of the family, such as the preparation of meals, washing clothes, cleaning the house and time spent fetching water and firewood for cooking. A household with low household time overhead is better off than a household with a high time overhead. How the burden of work is distributed among women and men of the household is an important contribution by time-use data to the understanding of intrahousehold inequality. The household maintenance tasks are not distributed evenly among household members and have a different impact on women and men. As a result, women are, more often than men, "time poor". Furthermore, data on time use can show how the gender allocation of time within the household is changed when access to public services, infrastructure or domestic appliances is provided. They can also show whether the household time overhead is covered by girls or boys when adults, especially women, spend more time on market activities, and whether there are gender differences in the impact on time devoted to schooling and learning activities.
Avoiding gender bias in data collection
Several aspects specific to time-use surveys are important in avoiding gender bias in data collection: the classification of activities covered; the recording of contextual information; the recording of simultaneous activities; the coverage of relevant individual and household characteristics; and sample coverage.
Classification of activities
Time-use classifications should be detailed enough to identify separately the activities mainly undertaken by women or mainly undertaken by men. It is important that activities with great gender differences in time use be collected in as detailed a manner as possible and later, at the stage of the coding, analysis or presentation of data, they are not collapsed into larger categories where the gender differences disappear. Also, when using light diaries or stylized analogues of time diaries, the predefined list of activities of interest should capture the specificity of the type of activities carried out by women and men, and the different amount of time allocated to each. It is important that the data collected be as detailed as possible. For example, instead of one category of care for children, adults or the elderly, more categories should be defined, such as care of children, care of ill adults, care of the elderly and care of the disabled. Fetching water and fetching firewood should also be included as separate activities among other types of non-market work.
Time-use classifications should allow for a distinction between market work, non-market work, domestic activities and volunteer work and enable the provision of data that can be linked to official statistics emanating from the System of National Accounts and labour statistics frameworks. This is especially critical in situations in which time-use data are used to measure unpaid work in satellite accounts that extend the measurement of GDP to include non-System of National Accounts production. Furthermore, the distinctions between different types of work are particularly important in understanding the specific contribution of women and men to the economy and society.
For example, the International Classification of Activities for Time-Use Statistics uses the System of National Accounts as a basic framework and distinguishes between productive activities within the System of National Accounts, productive activities outside the System of National Accounts, and personal activities. Also useful for understanding gender differences are the categories of unpaid non-System of National Accounts activities included in the classification. For instance, three of the major groupings of the classification are "unpaid domestic services for own final use within households", "unpaid caregiving services to household members" and "community services and help to other households".
Recording of contextual information
The separation between different types of work and between work and leisure is possible only when additional contextual information is collected in the time-use surveys. The context in which activities take place include the location of an activity, the other people present, the person or institution for whom the activity was done, the purpose of the activity and any remuneration that may have been received for the activity. Contextual information is crucial to coding and classifying activities reported in the time-use surveys. For example, information on the persons or institutions for whom a particular activity was being carried out, and whether payment was involved, would be needed to identify volunteer work, unpaid work within the household and unpaid work outside of the household.
Other contextual information can be useful from a gender perspective. For instance, subjective information on well-being experienced while performing an activity may be used in constructing measures of quality of life for women and men. Also, information on the ownership of assets and durable goods such as domestic appliances, and information on types of fuels used in the household and types of water sources can be used for valuing unpaid work and the construction of satellite accounts.
Recording of simultaneous activities
Time use for specific types of activities, often related to unpaid work and often performed by women, can be adequately identified only when simultaneous activities are recorded. An activity may be carried out in parallel with one or more other activities over an interval of time. For example, a woman may take care of her children while cooking or while doing the laundry. When estimates of time use are based only on primary activities, many activities, such as caring for children, older persons, ill or disabled persons, for example, are clearly underestimated. These "missing" activities would typically be reported as secondary or simultaneous activities.
A large proportion of secondary activities tend to be underreported. For example, respondents may perceive domestic or personal care activities as not important. Probing questions can bring out unreported simultaneous activities. When multiple activities are recorded in a questionnaire for the secondary activity and only one activity can be recorded in the database, priority should be given to activities such as unpaid domestic work, childcare, care of the elderly and care of the sick and disabled.
The ability to collect data on simultaneous activities depends on the methods of data collection used. For example, it is difficult to record simultaneous activities through a telephone interview. Underreporting of secondary activities may be more likely to appear when using activity lists and stylized questions that constrain people to summarize their activities into a total of 24 hours.
Coverage of relevant individual and household characteristics
Gender differences in time allocation for specific activities tend to vary in different groups of population and at different life stages. Individual characteristics commonly recorded in time-use surveys refer to sex, age, marital status, the presence of children, education and labour force status. This information will allow time-use data to be disaggregated at the level of particular groups of women and men. When time-use data is collected for only one person in the household, and the questionnaire needs to be kept to a minimum, it is important for the demographic, social and economic characteristics of the partner of the respondent to be recorded. When data on time-use is collected for all relevant household members and more extensive background characteristics can be recorded, however, individual characteristics should be captured for all household members. In addition, information on housing characteristics or other measures of wealth of the household should be collected. Such information will enable the identification of patterns of intrahousehold allocation of time resources according to various types of living arrangements and wealth group of households.
Sample coverage
Samples used in time-use surveys should cover all relevant groups of population and all seasons. In particular, children and older persons should not be excluded by the survey sample. It is also important for the sample of days included in the survey to cover all seasons relevant to agricultural or other weather-dependent activities.
Data on time use for multiple persons from the same household are the basis for understanding intrahousehold allocation of time and resources. A full accounting of time use during the past 24 hours for all eligible household members is necessary in order to study how housework and childcare are allocated among household members, and how a change in one person's labour activities affects the use of time by other household members.
Bittman, Michael (2000). Issues in the design of time-use surveys for collecting data on paid and unpaid work. Paper presented at the Expert Group Meeting on Methods for Conducting Time-use Surveys. New York, 23-27 October.
Eurostat (2009).
Harmonized European Time-Use Surveys: 2008 Guidelines.
Harvey, Andrew S., and Maria Elena Taylor (2000). Time use. In
Designing Household Survey Questionnaires for Developing Countries: Lessons from 15 years of the Living Standards Measurement Study.
Margaret Grosh and Paul Glewwe, eds. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.
Hoffmann, Eivind, and Adriana Mata (2000). Statistics on working time arrangements: issues and the role of time use surveys. Paper presented at the Expert Group Meeting on Methods for Conducting Time-use Surveys. New York, 23-27 October.
Grosh, Margaret, and Paul Glewwe, eds. (2000).
Designing Household Survey Questionnaires for Developing Countries: Lessons from 15 years of the Living Standards Measurement Study.
Washington, D.C.: World Bank.
United Nations (2005).
Guide to Producing Statistics on Time Use: Measuring Paid and Unpaid Work.
Series F, No. 93. Sales No. E.04.XVII.7.
___, Economic Commission for Europe, and World Bank Institute (2010). Developing gender statistics: a practical tool. Geneva. ECE/CES/8.


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According to a pair of reports out of Mississippi, Brett Favre is expected to soon be named offensive coordinator for Oak Grove High School in Hattiesburg. It's not yet official, but the school board will meet on Monday night, Favre will meet with the Warriors' head coach within the next week.
"He is going out there," said agent Bus Cook, "and it will give him something to do."
[Sun Herald, WDAM]

subset: commoncrawl


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Yesterday [11/28], my [Daily Kos] diary on the Washington Post and New York Times articles regarding the existence of torture at a black-site, Special Operations-run prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, sparked a lot of comments. These spanned the spectrum from incredulity at the torture reports to speculations regarding Obama's place in this story.
I want to do a number of things with this follow-up diary. I'd like to highlight one of the New York Times prisoner interviews (long excerpts of which are now posted at the Times), that of Hamidullah, a 42-year-old poor farmer from rural Kandahar Province, who due to the war had to leave his farm, and now tries to make his living as a "spare auto-parts dealer".
I also want to take note of a letter from the ACLU to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates "on efforts to bring U.S. policy regarding the treatment, detention and trial of juveniles into compliance with international law." In addition, I think it's worth noting a special report at the Boston Globe on the struggle between the Obama administration and spy agencies over the declassification of decades of secret government documents.
The interview with Hamidullah
I've chosen to highlight this interview because the seizure, detention, interrogation, and release of this 42-year-old farmer took place entirely within Obama's months as commander-in-chief. Note that, per the earlier articles, the White House had no comment to make on this and other stories published over the weekend.
There can be, of course, no independent verification of Hamidullah's story. That would be impossible at this point. The existence of the Bagram black site prison is "classified." However, the New York Times noted that the interviews were conducted independently, and were consistent in their details with what other human rights workers interviewing detainees had reported. Since these prisoners were released, I'd add, and not considered ideological or organized opponents of the U.S., they don't, it seems to me, have any particular advantage in making the reports they do.
From the Hamidullah interview (as much as I believe fair use will allow - all bold emphases I have added):
I was in my house with my family, and we had a guest. It was night; about 11:30 p.m. They raided the house and arrested me and my guest. They tied my hands and blindfolded me. A kind of hood was put on my head. It was five and a half months ago in early June....Hamidullah notes that the Red Cross is not allowed "to see or communicate" with any of the prisoners. He reports his being stripped naked in front of the interrogators and interpreters. While he says he didn't literally see anyone tortured, he could hear "crying" and "moaning" of other prisoners.
Then they put me in the Tor jail. I can't remember the number of days I spent there because it's hard to tell days from nights in the black jail, but I think every day they came twice to ask questions.
They took me to their own room to ask the questions. They beat up other people in the black jail, but not me. But the problem was that they didn't let me sleep. There was shouting noise so you couldn't sleep....
The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place. It is a place where everybody is afraid. In the black jail, they can do anything to detainees.
When they took us they tied up our hands and blindfolded us and covered our ears....It may be easy for some to dismiss Hamidullah's tale, or the fact that he feared at the time he would never get out of the main Bagram prison, after transferred there from the black site, because he'd talked to other prisoners who had been there "for years." But for those who do, they should think of the moral burden carried by themselves for making such a dismissal, under these circumstances. What we need instead is a full investigation. No more secrets!
When I was in the black jail it was very difficult. I couldn't even think how I felt. If I wanted to go to the bathroom, I banged on the doors for hours and no one came. It was too difficult.
ACLU Asks Obama Administration to Comply with UN Protocol on Children in Armed Conflict
Before the Washington Post published their story on the Bagram black site, highlighting the torture of teenaged captives of U.S. Special Forces, earlier this month the ACLU had written a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, "requesting updated data on juveniles in U.S. military custody in Iraq and Afghanistan and information on efforts to bring U.S. policy regarding the treatment, detention and trial of juveniles into compliance with international law."
In May 2008, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child conducted a review of U.S. compliance with the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict. The U.S. is a signatory of this protocol. The review found that 513 Iraqi children were imprisoned by the U.S. military as "imperative threats to security." Moreover, the U.S. "had transferred an unknown number of additional children to Iraqi custody." As of April 2008, approximately 10 juveniles were reported being held at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan.
We know now, thanks to the Washington Post article the other day, which interviewed two teenaged prisoners previously incarcerated at the Bagram black site, what kind of mistreatment, amounting to torture, in my opinion, these children and teens have experienced.
From the Post article:
The two teenagers -- Issa Mohammad, 17, and Abdul Rashid, who said he is younger than 16 -- said in interviews this week that they were punched and slapped in the face by their captors during their time at Bagram air base, where they were held in individual cells. Rashid said his interrogator forced him to look at pornography alongside a photograph of his mother.The ACLU letter to Gates noted that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in its review had uncovered reports of juvenile mistreatment by the U.S. military, including length of detention and conditions of confinement of juvenile detainees, and lack of adequate access to education, legal services and physical and psychological recovery services.
The committee also was concerned that children were being charged and prosecuted for war crimes without consideration for their status as juveniles. Last Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Canadian Guantánamo detainee Omar Khadr, who was 15 when he was captured by U.S. forces, will be charged in a military commission for allegedly throwing a hand grenade that killed an Army medic and wounded others in Afghanistan.The human rights community and progressives in general should see to it that Gates' feet are held to the fire on this, and pressure put on the Obama administration to fulfill their obligations to the Protocol on Children in Armed Conflict.
The full letter to Gates can be found here. The full report of the U.N. CRC is here (PDF).
Report: Obama to Maintain Secrecy on Millions of Military/Intel Docs
While not specifically about torture or the Bagram base, not too tangentially, this story about the fight over state secrecy, in terms of ever finding out what this government does, is important. The Boston Globe has a special report by Bryan Bender on how the Obama administration, flummoxed by intelligence agency interference and obstinacy regarding the declassification of documents, many over 25 years old, has led Obama to decide to continue the secret hold on these materials, which originally were to be released on Dec. 31 of this year.
The release was an extension of earlier holds put on the declassification by both Clinton and Bush administrations. The Bender article describes the struggle within the state bureaucracy over these documents, and it's difficult to see anyone, including Obama, who to his credit has made some play for greater transparency and openness, looking good about what is unfolding. The Obama administration appears to not have just been defeated on this, but some of their new proposals apparently are contrary to earlier policies regarding openness made in the early days of the administration.
From the Boston Globe article:
WASHINGTON - President Obama will maintain a lid of secrecy on millions of pages of military and intelligence documents that were scheduled to be declassified by the end of the year, according to administration officials.Besides the larger picture around declassification and ever knowing our own history, the failure to declassify even old documents -- in this case, over 400 million pages of documents going back to World War II -- means that the scandals and abuses of the present day are also likely to never be fully understood or revealed, including the facts around U.S. use of torture.
The missed deadline spells trouble for the White House's promises to introduce an era of government openness, say advocates, who believe that releasing historical information enforces a key check on government behavior. They cite as an example the abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War, including domestic spying and assassinations of foreign officials....
The failure to meet the disclosure deadline "does not augur well for new, more ambitious efforts to advance classification reform,'' said Steven Aftergood, a specialist on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. "If binding deadlines can be extended more or less at will, then any new declassification requirements will be similarly subject to doubt or defiance.''
It is time this country squarely face the momentous task of changing the direction we are headed. Recent events are clearly demonstrating the folly of putting all hope of change into one man, or even the electoral process alone, per se. We need powerful investigations, a vibrant and active press and citizenry, and a political leadership that is not afraid to make the hard choices.
If Obama makes a decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan, and not begin a withdrawal, it will be a decision as fateful as Bush's to illegally invade Iraq. It will be near-impossible to double-back on this path once launched (indeed, the fact that Obama is about to escalate the war is related to the instance of first invading that country).
As an example of how it otherwise could be, see Ray McGovern's excellent article at Truthout, discussing a different president's decision on a different war, and a sober assessment of how things could have been different.
Originally posted at Daily Kos


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For Seniors: E-Mail a Note from iPad 2
If you want to share what you wrote with a friend or colleague, you can easily e-mail the contents of an iPad 2 note. Share notes from a meeting, a list of favorite books or movies, favorite recipe, and more.
If you e-mail a note to yourself, you can import it into a word processor and add formatting and pictures if you like. You can also print the note (something you can't do in Notes).
2Type one or more e-mail addresses in the appropriate fields.
At least one e-mail address must appear in the To field. The Cc field is used to send a copy of the message to someone; Bcc sends a blind carbon copy, which means that other people who receive this message will not know that it was sent to the Bcc address.
You can tap the button with a plus sign (+) on it in the top right corner of the e-mail message form to display your contacts list and choose recipients from it.
3If you need to make changes to the subject or message, tap in either area and make the changes.
The subject is initially the name of the note, but you can change it if you want. The e-mail message is the contents of your note, although you can add to the message text if you like.
4Tap the Send button.
Your e-mail is on its way.
To cancel an e-mail message and not send it, tap the Cancel button in the e-mail form and then tap Don't Save. To leave a message but save a draft so that you can finish and send it later, tap Cancel and then tap Save. The next time you tap the e-mail button with the same note displayed in Notes, your draft appears.


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Ferrari and the Shanghai Expo reach an agreement for a permanent Ferrari display
Maranello, 19 October – Today Ferrari Chairman Luca di Montezemolo and Shanghai Expo Development Group President Ding Hao signed a three-year agreement regarding the permanent presence of Ferrari in a large exhibition area inside the Italian Expo hall.
After the success of the Italian area at the Expo and in particular of the Ferrari stand where the HY-KERS – Ferrari's first model with hybrid technology – was displayed, the new exhibition area will enable visitors to admire models and other intersting artefacts representing the past, the present and the future of Ferrari.
During the signing ceremony Luca di Montezemolo thanked Ding Hao and the entire delegation who had pushed to have the presence of Ferrari. "We are very pleased," Montezemolo said, "to have the possibility to present Ferrari to the Chinese public. This permanent exhibition further strengthens the connection beteween Ferrari and China, where we have been officially present since 2004, but where we already sold the very first car in 1992. A commercial success with a continuously growing market, which by the end of the year will be the second biggest after the USA. Passion and attention is dedicated to us also by our numerous Formula 1 fans, who have been supporting us since the first edition of the Chinese Grand Prix, which was won by the Scuderia on the Shanghai circuit in 2004. Ferrari wants to make even better known its culture, its values, its advanced technology, style and design in a country where these characteristics are more and more appreciated."
Meanwhile President Ding Hao underlined that "it is a great pleasure and it makes us proud that we have Ferrari with us. A recent survey showed that almost all of the people surveyed were ready to visit the Italian stand if it is assured that Ferrari will be present. This confirms how much the Prancing Horse is loved in China. After my short visit today I was able to understand even better what the company stands for – its values and its tradition of technology and innovation, but first and foremost its teamwork. I hope that Ferrari will work with us in a team for the overall success of this initiative."
After the signing and exchanging of gifts the Ferrari Chairman also presented his guest with a red tie with the Prancing Horse, which was immediately worn with pride.
The Ferrari exposition at the Italian hall in Shanghai will be inaugurated in March 2012.


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An enduring predicament of the Democratic Party was revealed one day in August, 2004, when John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for President, and John Edwards, the nominee for Vice-President, visited a soybean-and-cattle farm outside Smithville, Missouri. The announced purpose was to speak about alternative energy sources (soybeans are an important source of biodiesel), but the goal was to express solidarity with rural white voters, who have been abandoning the Democratic Party in disquieting numbers. About a hundred and twenty-five people, mostly farmers, sat on hay bales in an orchard near the farmhouse. Claire McCaskill, the Missouri state auditor, was there, too; she was running for governor and was eager to appraise the two Senators, whose names would be on the ballot with hers.
Kerry reminisced about clearing fields on a Massachusetts farm and promised to side with small farmers in their struggles against agribusiness. Teresa Heinz Kerry handed her husband a note, and then stood up to speak, recalling a visit to an organic hog farm in Iowa. "It's really inspiring to see the work that they did," she said, and encouraged her audience to consider organic farming. "It can be done. It's economical, and there is a huge market in America."
At that point, Winston Simpson, a hog farmer from Clarence, Missouri, stood up and interrupted. "I said, 'Mrs. Kerry, you've got to understand that hog farmers just freak out when they hear people telling them to go organic,' " Simpson recalled recently. "She looked kind of surprised. I was just there helping out, making a crowd, but I've got an adrenaline problem, and when someone pisses me off I jump up and tell them."
Simpson is a grower-finisher; four thousand or so hogs come to him at forty pounds and leave their pens for slaughter two hundred and fifty pounds later. "I'd go broke if we switched to organic farming," he said. His public advice was informed by tactical, rather than ideological, concerns. "I don't have a problem with people raising food organically. If people want to eat that way, fine, but she shouldn't have been pushing that as a solution to the farm problem. A lot of farmers think of those organics as some kind of élitist lunatic-fringe thing." For some, Mrs. Kerry's performance recalled other moments of Democratic campaign obliviousness, like Michael Dukakis's endorsement of Belgian endive as an alternative crop for Iowa farmers.
Simpson described himself as a loyal Democrat who would have preferred to attend a better-orchestrated Kerry rally. "I'm even pro-choice—that's how much of a Democrat I am," he said. He came to that position, he explained, through his knowledge of animal husbandry. "If you've ever seen a young heifer get bred too soon, you know what a fiasco that is, which is why I think teen-agers should have access to abortion. But I'm out of the mainstream on this." He continued, "I always tell people who are running for office that if they want to get elected in Missouri, when someone asks them for their feelings about Roe v. Wade don't give some long scientific talk. Just say, 'I'm against abortion,' and move on quick."
Simpson, whose son, a former marine, served in Iraq, wishes that Kerry had won in 2004. "Kerry couldn't connect with people," he said. "It's too bad, because just think if they got elected—maybe they could have turned this whole thing around in Iraq. Maybe we would be better off today. But they never took the lesson that you shouldn't give the Republicans things that they could use against you."
Claire McCaskill lost her 2004 race for governor, but the contest was close—fifty-one per cent to forty-eight. Kerry lost Missouri to George W. Bush by a slightly wider margin, fifty-three per cent to forty-six. This year, McCaskill is running for the U.S. Senate. Polls show that the race is a statistical tie, and analysts from both parties consider McCaskill to be one of the two or three strongest Democratic challengers in the country. McCaskill says she is a centrist. She is one of many Democrats—Hillary Clinton being the most visible, and the most diligent—who are trying to establish themselves with middle-class moderates. These candidates see an uncommon opportunity this November—and in November of 2008—to win back many "Reagan Democrats," the voters whom the Party lost to Ronald Reagan a quarter century ago: the white working class, suburbanites, and Catholics. The collapse of President Bush's popularity—brought on most directly by his detached performance during Hurricane Katrina, the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandals, and public displeasure with the mismanaged war in Iraq—is working to the Democrats' advantage. Polls show that even on national security—the issue that has favored Republicans since George McGovern's candidacy, in 1972—Republicans are now no more credible than Democrats.
"We could be seeing in George W. Bush a Hooverian Presidency," the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz told me. "This would go a long way to helping the Democrats rebuild a new version of the grand Roosevelt coalition"—one that included a great measure of the country's working class. Wilentz added, though, that "what you need for a Roosevelt coalition, of course, is a Roosevelt."
For the midterm elections in November, the Democratic Party does not need a Roosevelt. Some agree with Newt Gingrich, who recently told Time that if he were a Democratic strategist he would run a campaign that simply asked voters, "Had enough?" Many liberal Democrats would like to make Bush's record the focus of the upcoming campaign. Centrist Democrats, though—particularly those running in states that have cooled to their party—think that something more is needed this year, and certainly for 2008, when Bush will be retiring. They argue that their party must speak in language familiar to, among others, the disaffected hog farmers of Missouri.
To take control of the Senate—no longer a fantastical notion—the Democrats need to win six seats; for a majority in the House of Representatives, which has been in Republican hands since 1994, they must take back fifteen. The Senate races are populated with centrists like McCaskill. Among those running for the Senate are Jim Pederson, a shopping-center developer in Arizona; Harold Ford, Jr., a thirty-six-year-old African-American congressman from Memphis, who is running a campaign meant to appeal to conservative white Tennesseeans; and Bob Casey, the anti-abortion state treasurer in Pennsylvania, who hopes to defeat the incumbent Rick Santorum.
McCaskill's Republican opponent, the incumbent Jim Talent, has been hurt in the polls by aligning himself against a Missouri ballot initiative to protect stem-cell research. His stand has been inconsistent, which has alienated some of the evangelical Christians who are part of his core constituency. McCaskill, an ex-county prosecutor who believes in the death penalty and says that she worships, in the Missouri manner, "God and common sense," has made her name as the state auditor by running uncompromising investigations of state government performance. Winston Simpson, the hog farmer, said of her, "She's the kind of woman who could really jerk Donald Rumsfeld through a knothole."
McCaskill is disarmingly loquacious. She is fifty-two and speaks with a flat Missouri accent; the day we met, she was wearing a red suit of a style that, in Washington, one associates with Republican women. "I'm having a good day," she said, almost as soon as we'd said hello. "You want to know why? I'll tell you why. Laura Bush is coming to the state to campaign for Talent, and Vice-President Cheney and the President of the United States are coming, too. They must be scared of someone."
The candidate was on a domestic errand. Her sixteen-year-old daughter was applying for a learner's permit, and had forgotten her I.D., so her mother was making a detour home. "Oh, damn," McCaskill said, with a laugh. "I didn't want you to see that I was a rich lady." She is indeed rich, and lives in an oversized modern swooped-roof house beside a creek in a St. Louis suburb. But her wealth is of recent vintage: her second marriage, in 2002, was to a developer. She grew up in small-town southern Missouri. Her father's family kept a feed mill, and her mother had a drugstore that, she says, was "put out of business when Wal-Mart opened up." She worked her way through college and law school as a waitress, and later married David Exposito, with whom she had three children. It was a troubled marriage; Exposito nearly ended McCaskill's political career when he was arrested on a riverboat casino and charged with possession of marijuana. He was sentenced to community service, and he and McCaskill subsequently divorced.
As we drove past strip malls and big-box stores, McCaskill talked about the Democrats she most admires. "I would say I go back before McGovern to find role models. Clinton was an exception in some ways, but certainly not on a personal level. Harry Truman, J.F.K.—those are the role models." She added, "I'm not a liberal. When I was a prosecutor, I saw child murderers, people like that, and so I believe that there is such a thing as evil in this world."
In many ways, McCaskill sounds like any traditional Democrat. She speaks out against oil companies and pharmaceutical companies—she usually gets her biggest applause when she condemns Bush's prescription-drug plan—and she is in favor of abortion rights, although she doesn't make it a central issue. "If people ask, I tell them I'm pro-choice," she said. "That doesn't mean I can't understand the other side of the debate, though." She went on, "Being a Democrat is about balance. It's about being moderate and truthful and strong. Harry Truman, leaders like that, they were strong enough to take on foreign enemies when they needed to, but they were also strong enough to know when not to fight, when to use other weapons besides military force. That's the message the Democratic Party should be sending. We should let the American people know we want to work with allies, work with the U.N., and that we don't like war, but that we'll defend this country's interests with everything we've got."
Referring to the Kerry-Edwards campaign stop, she said, "I'm sure Teresa's motives were fine. But I think it's a tone thing. It's the 'We know better' thing. Some of it is completely unfair, but there's a critical number of Missourians who believe that people from the East Coast or West Coast don't think that people in the heartland are smart."
In 2004, exit polls showed that sixty-one per cent of voters who said that they attended church on Sunday supported Bush; Kerry received the support of thirty-nine per cent of the churchgoers. Fifty-nine per cent of voters who were married with children supported Bush, to Kerry's forty. It is difficult for Democrats, who are so closely associated with abortion and gay marriage, to shake off entirely their McGovern-era "acid, amnesty, and abortion" label, and the Party's recent history is a reason that many centrist Democrats still feel uncomfortable about the election, last year, of Howard Dean to chair their party. Dean had backing from the Party's antiwar wing, which supported his briefly astounding run for the Democratic nomination in 2004, but his main support came from state Party leaders, and he has rewarded them by funding a handful of field workers in each state to help fortify the local parties.
Dean has tried to reach out to, among others, evangelical Christians, and he doesn't like what he suggests is the Party's gradual abandonment of the socially conservative but economically liberal working class. "The Democratic Party was built on four pillars—the Roosevelt intellectuals, the Catholic Church, labor unions, and African-Americans," he said not long ago. "But we had stopped communicating with the Catholics and with labor, and so all you had left was the Roosevelt intellectuals and the African-Americans." Nevertheless, Dean often seems almost chemically incapable of communicating effectively beyond his base. Not long ago, at a rally in a union hall in a grimy industrial section of Albuquerque, New Mexico, he drew hundreds of Bush-loathing liberals of the sort who animated his 2004 candidacy. The crowd consisted of union members, including many from unions that represent government workers; Navajo activists from New Mexico's vast reservations; a modest number of hardscrabble Latinos; and a much greater number of retirement-age whites, some of whom came to the event from Santa Fe and Taos and who wore sandals and turquoise jewelry.
Dean was late arriving from the airport, so a succession of local Democratic politicians took to the stage to deliver excoriations of the Republicans. (The popular centrist governor, Bill Richardson, skipped the rally, telling me later that he had been busy.) Many nodded in sympathy when the New Mexico secretary of state, Rebecca Vigil-Giron, told a story about the flag that flies over her house. A neighbor—a veteran, she noted—pointed out one day that her flag was "torn and tattered" and asked her if she wanted him to mend it or replace it. She said no, and explained, "I keep it here because it's going to stay flying tattered and torn because that's how this war is going. It's going nowhere. And it will come down when this war is over." The woman seated next to me, Carol Ann Bowman, the secretary of the Torrance County Democratic Party, leaned over. "I just hate this war," she said. "I don't understand how anyone could vote for Bush." Then she confessed, "I have two children who were in the military, and they voted for him. I just don't understand why."
Dean came into the room at a gallop. The applause was raucous and sustained. "It's like a Dean rally," Bowman said, and, at the podium, Dean proved that he is still ready to follow his own muse, even in public. He was soon improvising an attack on Vice-President Cheney. Returning to Cheney's accidental shooting of a hunting companion in February, he said, "I don't want to get on Cheney's case too much, but this is a hunting state, right? I come from a hunting state. What kind of guy has a beer at lunch and then goes hunting and shoots a guy in the face? For God's sake." Dean's face was turning purple and his neck muscles were stretched tight. "I mean, this is a hunting state, this is New Mexico, right? Vermont's the same way. You know, you don't hunt like that. What kind of hunting program is that? I never heard a respectable hunter do that kind of stuff. Nonsense. Enough already. Go back to Vermont—I mean, go back to Washington. For God's sake, don't go to Vermont." Dean looked over at his fretting public-relations man. "All right, we won't go too far. I can see my staff and the choir over here are getting really nervous."
His words were cheered enthusiastically. So was his praise for the absent Richardson, who recently ended electronic touch-screen voting in the state, reverting to a paper-ballot system. Dean got his loudest applause when he suggested that Republicans were conniving with the manufacturers of electronic voting machines, and he singled out Diebold, a favorite target of bloggers whose rage against the Bush Administration seems limitless. The only statement that was greeted with apathy was a blunt pledge to confront America's enemies. If the Democrats are restored to power, he said, "we will not permit Iran to be a nuclear power, we will make the deal with the Chinese to get nuclear weapons out of North Korea, and we will catch Osama bin Laden or kill him, one or the other."
One of the Democratic National Committee's initiatives under Dean has been to place campaign field workers in every state rather than to concentrate resources where the Party's chances seem most promising—in particular so-called "red states" on the electoral map that may be leaning Democratic. Dean told the crowd that his fifty-state program was going to pay dividends. "If we can win races in Mississippi and Alabama and Utah after only less than a year, because these organizers haven't even been on the ground a year, we can win races anywhere," he said. "You know why? Because this is a Democratic country, with a big 'D.' We ought to be speaking about our values everywhere we go, because the truth is, American values are consistent with Democratic Party values. Most Americans believe that it is immoral for small children to go to bed hungry at night, and we believe those kids ought to be fed, but the Republicans are cutting school-lunch programs."
Dean's fifty-state plan has caused fissures in the Party. Congressional leaders want the D.N.C. to direct its money to states where the odds—and the polls—favor the Democrats. Scott Pastrick, a former D.N.C. treasurer, said, "A lot of people think this strategy is pie in the sky, and this feeling is shared by a lot of the traditional donors. They're wondering why we're not putting resources in winnable states." Representative Rahm Emanuel, of Illinois, who chairs the Democrats' congressional campaign committee, and who has fought openly with Dean on this question, is more disparaging. When I suggested that Democrats in Mississippi were probably grateful for Dean's attention, he said, "If you think that Mississippi and Ohio are the same thing, you're an idiot."
In a restaurant in Santa Fe after the Albuquerque rally, I asked Dean if the crowd's lack of reaction to his stand on national security surprised him. His supporters, he replied, "are more liberal than I am." That is true. Because of his early opposition to the Iraq war, Dean was often characterized as a leftist, but he is a pro-gun, anti-gay-marriage (although pro-civil union) fiscal conservative who sounds hawkish on the question of a nuclear Iran. Dean's stance is actually in harmony with the idea put forth by Third Way, a new centrist group that advises Democrats on ways to speak to moderate voters. (Third Way's views are similar to those of the Democratic Leadership Council, which helped Bill Clinton win the Presidency in 1992, but more sharply focussed on the practical business of electing Democrats.) Third Way argues—and Dean agrees—that the Democrats risk perpetual irrelevance if they write off entire sections of the country.
However, when I asked Dean, not long ago, if Democrats might have to risk alienating core supporters in order to attract national-security voters and cultural conservatives, he replied, his color rising, "Certainly not. Absolutely not. Why would you even think of such a thing? It goes contrary to everything we're doing. No, it's the wrong thing to do." For Governor Bill Richardson, a possible Presidential candidate in 2008, "the key to victory is to develop a coherent national message of optimism and opportunity and not incessantly try to appeal to our base." He said last week, "It's more important to try to appeal to disaffected Democrats and Independents who are on the verge of coming back to us. What is important is that we not just criticize the President, that we have alternative, positive policies."
Democrats have a set of policy prescriptions that they hope to enact if they win majorities in Congress, such as increasing the minimum wage, rolling back parts of the prescription drug law, and reinstating budget deficit controls. But they are only muddling toward a Gingrich-style Contract with America, which, in its drama and clarity, gave 1994 voters an understanding of national Republican priorities. Even on the minimum wage there is no consensus: Party moderates believe that a proposal to make college tuition tax-deductible would appeal to more voters than a promise to raise the minimum wage. As if policy differences weren't enough, the Party's many spokesmen tend to speak disparately and concurrently, especially on matters of national security. Witness the confusion, not long ago, when Representative John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, a former marine, called for an immediate pullout of troops from Iraq, leading to graceless scenes of Democratic leaders scrambling to embrace him and keep him distant, sometimes simultaneously.
Rahm Emanuel, who worked in the Clinton White House, says that the collapse of Bush's support—recent polls put his approval rating in the high twenties—is not enough to propel the Democrats back to power. "We still have to pick the lock here," he said, referring to the difficulty of unseating incumbents, especially in congressional districts that, over the years, have been gerrymandered into single-party redoubts. Some of his colleagues, however, do little to restrain their optimism. "I'll tell you this: if the election were held today, we would win," Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, who represents San Francisco, told me earlier this month. Pelosi appeared excited by the prospect of one specific consequence of a Democratic victory: "We win in '06, we get subpoena power." Pelosi has said that the Democrats would reserve the right to investigate every aspect of the Bush Administration, including its rationale for the Iraq war.
Pelosi's vision of a subpoena-filled 2007 appeals to her party's most liberal supporters. But there is a worry that such a tack might alienate moderates, and that it would motivate otherwise dispirited Republicans to go to the polls. "You know, if you spend your whole day trying to catch the dog that bit you because all you want to do is kick him, you're not going to win many friends," Brian Schweitzer, the Democratic governor of Montana, told me.
This would be a surmountable problem for Democrats if liberals outnumbered conservatives. But the liberal base of the Democratic Party, even fully mustered for battle, is too small to carry a Democrat to the Presidency, or even to many of the Senate seats being contested in 2006. The math is unforgiving, according to Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way. "Exit polls consistently show that twenty-one per cent of Americans self-identify as liberal and about thirty-four per cent as conservative," he said. "And a plurality, about forty-five per cent, self-identify as moderate. So this means that the Democrats have got to pull almost two-thirds of moderate voters to be the majority party." A recent report by the political scientists Elaine Kamarck and Bill Galston argues that greater polarization in the electorate hurts Democrats, for a simple reason: one out of every three voters belongs to the base that in the past Karl Rove has so successfully mobilized; only one out of five belongs to Howard Dean's.
"In 1976, Jimmy Carter eked out a victory with only 51 per cent of the moderate vote because he won nearly three in ten conservative voters," Galston and Kamarck wrote. "In 2004, John Kerry won 54 per cent of the moderates and still lost by 3.5 points because he won a much smaller share of conservatives. With three conservatives for every two liberals, the sheer arithmetic truth is that in a polarized electorate effectively mobilized by both major parties, Democratic candidates must capture upwards of 60 per cent of the moderate vote—a target only Bill Clinton has reached in recent times—to win a national election." Al Gore received the support of fifty-two per cent of self-identified moderates in his popular-vote victory over President Bush, in 2000, but eighty-one per cent of conservatives voted for Bush—"enough to carry Bush through in states Gore needed," Third Way's Matthew Bennett said.
On national-security questions, it is easy to misread even the most encouraging polls. "Before 2004, the Republicans generally polled somewhere around thirty-five points better on such questions as which party is better able to fight terror," Bennett, who worked for General Wesley Clark during his 2004 Democratic primary run, said. "Now that gap has closed entirely, but almost exclusively because people don't trust the Republicans anymore. It's not because Democrats have done something to take advantage of that." Meanwhile, position papers cascade from Democratic think tanks. The Democratic Leadership Council has just issued a book with the barrel-chested title "With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty," which offers essays by nineteen Democratic foreign-policy and defense experts.
Even the most liberal Democratic officeholders recognize the need to speak to security-conscious voters in ways that will separate them from Republicans. Nancy Pelosi made a game attempt at ferocity when I talked with her. "Here's my thing, and I will say this and you have to bear with me," she said. "I'm a mom. I have five children, and I have five grandchildren. I always say to people, 'Think lioness.' This is how Democrats are. You threaten our children—and that's America—you threaten our country, you're dead. You're dead."
Pelosi, Dean, and Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, recently issued a report called "Real Security," which promises a "tough and smart" program of national defense. The report was met with some skepticism in Democratic foreign-policy circles. Leslie Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations (and a former State Department official in the Carter Administration as well as a onetime Times columnist), said, "Where I grew up, if you have to say you're tough and smart, you're not."
The "Real Security" report declares that the Democrats will "eliminate" Osama bin Laden, given the chance, although it does not say how. It also says it will implement the homeland-defense recommendations of the 9/11 Commission and provide better support and health benefits for American soldiers and veterans. There is no discussion in the report of the doctrine of preëmption, or of Bush's endorsement of global democratization as an antidote to terrorism, and it states that the Democrats will "insist" that the Iraqis themselves "defeat the insurgency." Democrats are sensitive to charges of defeatism—Howard Dean was widely criticized when he said earlier this year that the war is lost—but the Democratic Party's more hawkish leaders (Connecticut's Senator Joseph Lieberman excepted) no longer argue in terms of victory or defeat. "I don't think we're losing," said Tom Vilsack, the governor of Iowa and the chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council (as well as a possible candidate for President in 2008). "It appears to be a draw. People are upset by the fact that their kids are over there and there doesn't seem to be any end to this whole process. It's not pacifism that makes people think this way. They're questioning the credibility and competence of the Commander-in-Chief."
Though Vilsack is no optimist on Iraq, he still puts himself on the more conservative side of the Democratic spectrum. "I don't think the face of the Democratic Party is Nancy Pelosi," he said pointedly. When we discussed why there had been no domestic terrorist attacks since September 11th, he even echoed Bush's argument that fighting jihadists in the Middle East is preferable to fighting them in America: "We have a hundred and thirty-two thousand Americans in a country where they have a lot easier shot at hitting us than they have here. It's a lot easier to attack us in Iraq and Afghanistan, since they're a lot closer."
Rahm Emanuel notes that nearly five years after the September 11th attacks Democrats still lack an authoritative spokesman on national-security questions. "What we need is a single credible voice," Emanuel said. There is also a worry that the Party will confuse antipathy for the Iraq war with a desire to make national security less of a priority. "We make a mistake if we think that just because people are fed up with George Bush they want George McGovern," Kathleen Sullivan, the chairwoman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said. Democrats in Republican-leaning states worry, in particular, that much of the Party's national leadership underestimates the role of patriotism—the impulse to celebrate American virtues, even in difficult times. Brad Carson, a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma, appears to see this as a benign sort of nationalism.
"The well-heeled New York, Northern California world of Democrats considers nationalism a very discredited concept, that nationalism equals Brown Shirts," Carson said. (Carson lost his race in 2004 for Oklahoma's open Senate seat. The winner, Tom Coburn, is among the farthest right members of the Senate.) "In most of the country, nationalism is as normal as breathing. I live in a blood-red state, I know"—sixty-six per cent of Oklahoma voters chose Bush in 2004—"but this holds true across thirty states. The Democrats have to look like they axiomatically stand up for America's interests if they're going to be competitive."
Claire McCaskill fits the Carson model: she sounds pugnacious, and not overly nuanced, on the subject of national defense. Though she believes in multilateralism, she also asserts, "We need to be the strongest country on the planet, so I view our problems as 'What do we have to do to maintain our strength?' In Washington, there's this hyper-dissection of Iran, all these layers of complication— what's going on with China, and Russia, and so on. For Missourians, the issue is: Iran is thumbing its nose at us. If we're so strong, why are they thumbing their nose at us? The reason is because the President is letting it happen. If he's so tough and smart, how did he let this happen?" McCaskill doesn't attempt an answer; the clear implication is that Administration fecklessness is to blame.
Barack Obama, the freshman senator from Illinois, who has quickly won a national following, is troubled by demands for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. "The two foreign-policy issues that have bloggers most fired up are getting the troops out of Iraq and sending troops to Darfur," he said. "They are exactly right to be fired up about Darfur. It is in our national interest to stop states from failing, and to stop genocide. But they also have to recognize that if we are willing to engage militarily in those circumstances, then there certainly are situations that call for direct military engagement in defense of our national interests." Iran, he believes, is an example of a country that might one day warrant the attention of the American military. He looks at the war in Iraq as a test of American credibility—which is why he doesn't support an immediate withdrawal, even though he believed that the original invasion was ill-conceived and badly executed. In front of Illinois audiences, he said, "I'll talk about the fact that we are less equipped to deal with Iran because of the Iraq war." Obama has been criticized on the Party's left for his stance on Iran, but voters in Illinois approve of his position, he said.
There is a desire among many liberals to see the Democrats more energetically oppose the Bush Administration's domestic surveillance program, and its treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and other U.S. facilities—to campaign, in short, against the Administration's perceived immorality as well as its mismanagement. "We have a good message to send about the rights of innocent Americans," Senator Russell Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat, who recently led an unsuccessful attempt in the Senate to censure Bush, said. "We believe that folks who have done nothing wrong should not be abused. If we don't go out there and say it, there's going to be a sense that we're hiding, that they've successfully intimidated us. I see myself in the middle of a creative process of transforming the Party into one of boldness. If you go into your foxhole, they win."
When I asked Rahm Emanuel if he thought that the Democrats should make civil liberties a focus of the upcoming campaign, he replied, "Middle-class American families are proud of their country. Economic security is the issue we should be talking to people about." Obama, making much the same point, said, "Americans want to feel good about themselves and their government. They can be called upon to sacrifice, and they can be ashamed when we fall short of our ideals, but they don't believe that the main lesson of the past five years is that America is an evil hegemon." The proper lesson of Iraq, Senator Christopher Dodd, of Connecticut, said, is that the Democratic Party should run not to the left of President Bush on national security but to the right: "It's a better opportunity than Jack Kennedy had when he ran on the phony missile gap. We have real issues."
To run to the right of the G.O.P., Democratic centrists say, the Party's candidates must learn how to speak the language that conservatives speak. Third Way has distributed a primer on countering the traditional Republican emphasis on national security. It cautions Democrats to "take fear seriously," and says, "Voters will not respond to approaches that ignore fear, mock it or try to intellectualize it away, like calling Bush a 'fear-monger.' " The voters, the guide says, "need to know that you understand the dangers we face." The primer counsels Democrats to "show comfort with the military," and warns candidates not to "pity or patronize the troops when criticizing the war. Remember that they are serving their country and proud of it." The guide goes on to note, "Progressives have always been surprised that the morale among troops deployed in Iraq is quite high—they are doing their mission."
Bush's diminished credibility on national security should help Democrats in local races this fall, Dodd said, but 2008 is a different matter—for the obvious reason that Bush won't be running. A John McCain candidacy, or the nomination of the Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, would alter the dynamic in ways that cannot now be measured; in 2008 voters may have a choice between candidates with more similarities than differences on issues like national defense, health care, individual opportunity, and whatever appears to be the latest iteration of "family values." Dodd is convinced that the Party is so weary of losing that its voters will make their decisions strategically. "The Party won't nominate someone who starts in a hole. They will make that determination if they perceive a person not to be a winner. They want to win. They really want to win."
Claire McCaskill knows the price that Democrats pay when they send a Northeasterner to Missouri. Although she said that she didn't blame Senator Kerry for her own loss—"The person on the top of the ballot always affects what happens to local candidates"—she added that Kerry would not be coming to Missouri to campaign for her. "John Kerry is a good man and a brave man, but he's from the city," she said. When I asked what she would do if Howard Dean showed up to endorse her, she said, "I'm not afraid to say I disagree with Howard Dean. I can go toe-to-toe with Hillary Clinton or Ted Kennedy if I disagree with them."
Hillary Clinton is a sensitive subject for McCaskill. After the governor's race two years ago, many Missouri Democrats assumed that in 2008 McCaskill would make another run against Matt Blunt, the Republican who defeated her. But she has told people in Missouri and in Washington that a ticket led by Clinton would be fatal for many Democrats on the ballot, and that a Clinton candidacy would rule out her chance to win the governorship. "The Democratic Party has to look at candidates who can be competitive in all fifty states," she said. A few days later, at the annual Jackson Day dinner of the Greene County Democrats, in Springfield, Republican protesters held signs labelling her "New York's third senator."
In states like Missouri, coolness toward Hillary Clinton puts many Democrats in an uncomfortable position. Harold Ford, Jr., is close to both Clintons. He is running a strong race in Tennessee—if he wins, he would be the first popularly elected African-American senator from the South. When I asked Ford if Hillary Clinton would be campaigning with him, he said, "I'm not running away from her position on the war or her position on energy independence. I'm doing events with her." When I asked him where, he said, "In Washington."
Some Democrats fear any association with national Democrats, who are perceived to be too liberal. "I had this notion that I could convince people who were skeptical of national Democrats to vote for me because I could bring home the bacon, or because I could find some personal pitch to them," Brad Carson, the former Oklahoma congressman, said. "But it was very hard for people to separate me out from Hillary Clinton. All their ads were Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, and me. They said I was more liberal than these guys, and that if I went to Washington I'd be supporting their agenda. I found that extremely difficult to overcome."
Across Missouri, I heard similar fears. At a breakfast fund-raiser for McCaskill in Kansas City, Katheryn J. Shields, a Democrat who is the chief executive of Jackson County, which encompasses Kansas City, said of Hillary Clinton, "She's great." But when asked if Clinton should be the Party's nominee, Shields said, "That would be a hard one." The outgoing executive director of the Greene County Democrats, Nora Walcott, was more direct. Though she said she was to the left in the Party, she feared that Clinton's liberal credentials would alienate Missouri voters. "You've got to tell the people in Washington not to nominate Hillary," she told me. "It would do so much damage to the Missouri Democratic Party." Clinton's obvious shifts to the center frustrate Walcott on two counts, she said: "I disagree with the way she's going to the right, but my biggest problem with it is that it's not working. People don't believe she's a moderate."
Uncertainty about Senator Clinton's real views seems to be more troublesome than the views themselves. She has always been less liberal than some believe, and at times her centrism is ostentatious, as when she spoke in favor of a law banning flag-burning. Clinton has reached out to anti-abortion voters, she refuses to call for a troop withdrawal from Iraq, and she has become a new friend of Rupert Murdoch, the proprietor of the onetime Clinton-bashing New York Post and Fox News, who is hosting a fund-raiser for her this summer. All of this recently led the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen to write, "Does she know what she believes? Do we know what she believes? Hillary, help us. Who the hell are you?"
Clinton, who is expected to easily win a second Senate term in New York, refused to be interviewed for this article; she has apparently decided not to discuss Democratic political strategies for now. But her chief strategist, Mark Penn, said that Democrats in conservative states would benefit from a Clinton candidacy. "She has a wildly enthusiastic base, much larger than anything we have seen in a long time. People say about her what they say about President Clinton: wherever he went, votes followed." Penn also said that Clinton could win over skeptical voters in red states. She has done so in upstate New York, where she continues to be popular.
Only a few nationally known Democrats have been invited to Missouri to speak on Claire McCaskill's behalf; one was Obama, whom she described as "so popular that we have to get him back." Obama returns the compliment: McCaskill, he told me, "is a terrific candidate who is deeply rooted in Missouri and understands the people of Missouri." He added, "A successful swing-state candidate can and should stand for progressive values, but they've got to appeal to common sense and pragmatism as opposed to ideology. I think what doesn't work in these places is a sense that you are ideologically liberal."
The former Virginia governor Mark Warner, who was the keynote speaker at the Jackson Day dinner in Springfield, was another welcome visitor. (Springfield is perhaps the most conservative part of the state; it is home to John Ashcroft, the former Missouri senator and United States Attorney General, and it is also the headquarters of the Assemblies of God.) The crowd applauded Warner after watching a campaign-style video that highlighted his achievements in education and business development in Virginia. (It did not mention that he had raised taxes.)
Since the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964, only two Democrats have won the Presidency—both moderate Southern governors. Warner, who has shown signs of interest in becoming a Presidential candidate in 2008, argued elliptically against a Hillary Clinton run for President, saying that it would be self-defeating for the Party to nominate someone who has appeal in only sixteen states. He criticized what he calls the "triple bank shot" approach of focussing on the Northeast and the West Coast and hoping for a win in Florida or Ohio: "There's no reason to write off whole regions of the country." Warner said that he represents the "sensible center" of Democratic politics: fiscal soundness and a robust but selective national-defense strategy. When I mentioned that Missouri Democrats seem to resent what they see as the condescension of national Party leaders, Warner said, "Part of this is just showing respect. Respect for culture, faith, values. You know, not everybody wants to live in a big city. The assumption sometimes is 'Why wouldn't you want to be in the middle of where all the action is?' I think people in rural America may talk a little slower, but they get a good sense of whether you understand where they're coming from. Sometimes the folks in the press have translated that into 'Well, that means it's only about faith.' I don't think it's only about faith; it's about values and respect. It's about being comfortable at a NASCAR race as well as in a boardroom."
In 2001, when Warner ran for governor of Virginia, he sponsored a NASCAR truck, campaigned enthusiastically in the state's conservative southwest, and even commissioned a perishable bluegrass song extolling his candidacy. None of this spared him from having to visit Springfield's Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World, which is advertised as the world's largest hunting-and-fishing store. There Warner submitted to one of the most reliable humiliations of Democratic politics: the firing range. Though his spokeswoman described him as "more of a rock climber than a hunter," Warner, entourage in tow, found himself facing a paper target eight yards in front of him.
"Eight yards?" a local reporter asked. "That's not a lot of distance."
The Bass Pro Shops guide gave Warner a petite .22 to fire. "You generally want to start out with something small," he explained. Warner managed to put holes through the target, although he missed the bull's-eye.
Later, he turned to more substantive issues. "One of the challenges we've got right now is that this Administration is undermining the American people's confidence that our national government can get anything right," he told me. "You know, whether it's successfully removing Saddam Hussein or getting Iraq to a stable position, or whether it's reacting in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or getting the prescription-drug-benefit program right."
Warner does not believe that the Democrats automatically benefit from popular unhappiness with the Administration. "I think the Republicans bear the vast majority of the blame for these things, but there's a little bit of a 'plague on Washington' feeling now." The Democrats, he said, would serve themselves better by focussing less on Bush's problems. "I get some criticism from Democrats who say, 'Well, Warner, you're not giving us enough red meat all the time.' But the case has been made. We don't need to remake the case of all the mess-ups of this Administration. What we've got to do now is answer the question 'All right, if we turn the keys over to you guys, what are you going to do differently?' " Warner added that the Party needs to start by trying to reach beyond its liberal base: "Sometimes the Democrats advocate tolerance, except for people who don't agree with them."
The Democratic Party of 2006 bears little resemblance to the party that dominated American politics from 1932 until 1964. But if the New Deal coalition has dissolved, there is a persistent desire to revive it—and to modernize it—especially among those who feel estranged from the Party's national leadership. "We used to be the party of the big tent," Montana's Governor Schweitzer said. "We have to respect regional differences. A Democrat in Montana looks a little different than one from Massachusetts. You don't have to agree with my idea about gun control, but you've got to respect it."
Schweitzer's idea about gun control is this: "You control your gun and I'll control mine." In 2004, Schweitzer became the first Democrat elected governor of Montana in twenty years; he won fifty per cent of the vote, to his opponent's forty-six. (Kerry lost to Bush in Montana by fifty-nine per cent to thirty-nine.) Schweitzer did not win by posing as a Republican, he said. "In the first ninety days, we put more money into K-through-12 education than anyone had ever done; we used the money from a new tobacco tax to help small businesses buy health insurance for their employees; we passed a law to incorporate a curriculum about the great achievements of our Indian population into our schools; and we passed a law to require that fifteen per cent of our electricity will come from wind power or solar power. Now, does that sound ruby-red to you? Or does it sound progressive? We're not hiding as Democrats out here." Success, he said, comes in the approach. "Democrats are losing elections because they're less likable sometimes. They want to explain the whole book, and voters want the Cliffs Notes. Most of us go to church on Sunday to hear a sermon. We don't want candidates telling us about all the things that are wrong." There are certain issues that can't be neutralized by a friendlier manner, he conceded, such as the Second Amendment. "We have about nine hundred and twenty thousand people here, and about six or seven million guns. This is who we are. You can't get around it. But you can accept it."
For more than thirty years, since the Roe v. Wade decision, nothing has been so divisive for disaffected Democrats as the Party's stand on abortion. But here, too, the Party appears to have become more pragmatic; it has, for instance, embraced Pennsylvania's Bob Casey, the anti-abortion, pro-gun candidate for the Senate, which would have been unimaginable ten years ago. (Casey's father, the late Pennsylvania governor Robert Casey, Sr., was not allowed to address the 1992 Democratic Convention, because he refused to endorse the Democratic ticket, which favored abortion rights.) Abortion-rights groups are uneasy when Democratic centrists urge them to shift the discussion from "a woman's right to choose" to the need to reduce the number of abortions. Recently, at a meeting held at the Center for American Progress, the left-leaning think tank founded by the former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, an abortion-rights activist named Rachel Laser, a former senior counsel at the National Women's Law Center, was impatient with the refusal of others to view abortion as a moral issue as well as a personal one. "I said at this session that there are 1.3 million abortions in this country and that's too many, and it's too many for the majority of Americans," Laser, who runs Third Way's Culture Project, recalled. "Polls show that a majority of Americans think that abortion is morally wrong some or all of the time, and we have to address that."
After Laser spoke, the moderator asked the audience "by a show of hands, how many people here think that 1.3 million abortions is too many abortions?" As Laser remembers the moment, "It was only me and maybe one other who raised our hands. I definitely touched a nerve. The fact is the majority of Americans are pro-choice, but the majority of Americans also see something sad in what this procedure does." Laser believes that Democrats have an opportunity to attract voters troubled by Republican inflexibility, and she called the South Dakota legislature's recent ban on all abortions a bracing example of extremism. But, she continued, liberal Democrats must learn to speak to people who feel differently about things. "If you're a candidate in many parts of the South or the Midwest, you shouldn't be using the old frames of choice and individual rights, because against the frame of life you will likely lose. You can neutralize the playing field by talking about reducing the number of abortions. If progressives are going to win nationally, they have to meet the American people where they are."
The Democratic Party's challenge, though, is not only to recalibrate its positions on abortion and national security but also to persuade voters that Democrats have something essential to offer: an aptitude for governing. Moderates argue that a year after Katrina Americans are searching for plausible and competent leadership. (Michael Dukakis, who in 1988 campaigned against charisma, may have been a prophet without honor.) But, the argument continues, candidates must express concern for the welfare of their audiences, have a vision of an equitable society, and, perhaps above all, learn to speak without condescension. "Every time a pro-state-income-tax candidate runs in New Hampshire, they get their butt kicked," Kathleen Sullivan told me. "And then what you have is Democrats who say, 'Well, we just have to educate people more.' Well, no, that's not what we have to do. We have to not nominate someone who is for a state income tax. The voters don't need to be educated on this. They know what they believe." Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian, said, "The impulse behind the people who run the party is humanitarian, and humanitarians have a problem in American history—they're always trying to perfect you, make you better." Wilentz added, "Acceptance of human imperfection would do a lot to help the Democratic Party." ♦


text: Tax Reform: Before and After Full Size Version Share | Have A Question About This Topic? Name Email Address Question Thank you! Oops! Related Contents The Facts About Income Tax Millions faithfully file their 1040 forms each April. But some things about federal income taxes may surprise you. You May Need to Make Estimated Tax Payments If… Have income that isn't subject to tax withholding? Or insufficient withholdings? You may have to pay estimated taxes. Tax Management Strategies Learn more about taxes, tax-favored investing, and tax strategies.


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A key project within EnergyAustralia's overall intelligent network program, the Distribution Monitoring and Control (DM&C) project involves the roll-out of 12,000 sensing devices throughout the electricity distribution network, creating a smart grid. The project will enable EnergyAustralia to deliver energy more efficiently and reliably, and allow a greater number and range of environmental solutions to be integrated into the electricity network such as renewable energy.
Under the agreement signed in the first quarter of this year, IBM will design and build the system IT architecture to support the project, in which sensing devices will connect with EnergyAustralia's operational systems using a combination of fourth generation and existing technologies. This world-class intelligent network will carry the necessary data for EnergyAustralia to reduce outages through faster fault location and preventative maintenance and, to work towards managing distributed energy sources such as solar and storage devices.
EnergyAustralia's Managing Director George Maltabarow said the project was an important part of the company's initial investment of $170 million in its smart network rollout.
"This project will help us stay at the forefront of the global intelligent network transformation," Mr. Maltabarow said. "It will give us an instant picture of the electricity network which will help shorten power interruptions by allowing us to quickly locate and repair faults.
"It will also mean preventative maintenance can be better targeted so we can avoid faults and outages in the first place."
In addition to consulting, systems integration and IT services expertise, IBM has invested heavily in solutions such as Tivoli Netcool and Websphere Datapower to assist utilities in realizing their intelligent network visions.
"IBM is delighted to bring its infrastructure, systems integration and project management expertise to bear on this ground-breaking transformation project," said David Murray, General Manager, IBM Communications Sector, Australia.
"Only through the creation of a smart grid that can sense, communicate, analyze and respond, can Australia build the energy infrastructure it needs to meet the challenges of climate change, globalization, and changing consumer demand."
IBM Smart Grid
IBM is working with clients in nearly 50 Smart Grid engagements across emerging and mature markets around the world. More about IBM's 'Smarter Planet' initiative: its vision to bring a new level of intelligence to how the world works -- how every person, business, organization, government, natural system, and man-made system interacts, can be found here: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/26094.wss
EnergyAustralia Intelligent Networks
EnergyAustralia began its intelligent network program in 2006. It was the first utility in the world to build and operate a communications network using carrier grade Internet Protocol (IP) technology. EnergyAustralia has also rolled out 800 kilometres of fibre optic cable to its 200 major substations and depots, installed hundreds of communications switches, and built a trial telecommunications network to allow two-way communication across its electricity network. For more information see http://www.energy.com.au/energy/ea.nsf/Content/Splash (
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Located on the north-east side of Kelowna, the Rutland area is appreciated most for its residents who are down to earth, friendly and welcoming. Many familys are attracted to Rutland because of real estate prices which are generally quite affordable. Rutland is especially popular for young families, seniors, and many university students who love Rutland's close proximity to the UBCO campus. Those people looking to enjoy the active lifestyle that Kelowna offers will also love Rutland's many parks, the Mission Creek Greenway, the Kelowna Family YMCA, and of course the fact that Rutland is Kelowna's nearest urban area to the Big White ski resort. Rutland contains the Uptown Rutland Town Centre, one of two secondary urban town centres in Kelowna.