Why Senate Republicans Fear Deb Haaland

By Julian Brave NoiseCat, The Washington Post

28 February 21

lexander Stuart, the third interior secretary, once declared that the United States’ mission was to “civilize or exterminate” native people. The Interior Department has done much to carry out that terrible mission, with the seizure of tribal lands, forced assimilation of Native American children and much more. So it is impossible to overstate the significance — particularly to Native Americans — of the fact that President Biden has nominated a Native American woman, New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland, to head the department that manages much of the land and resources taken from native nations and maintains relationships between those nations and the U.S. government. If confirmed, Haaland would not only be the first Native American to serve as interior secretary — she would also be the first Native American Cabinet secretary.

At her confirmation hearing this week, Haaland, a tribal citizen of the Laguna Pueblo, introduced herself in her family’s Keres language, which today has only 13,000 speakers. She acknowledged that the land upon which the hearing was taking place once belonged to the Piscataway people — a rebuke of Stuart and the countless politicians and bureaucrats who dedicated themselves to the cause of Indigenous annihilation.

“The historic nature of my confirmation is not lost on me,” she said. Indeed, we have had many interior secretaries with close ties to powerful men in the C-suite and on Capitol Hill. But we have never had an interior secretary who tended to traditional gardens, cooked for pueblo feast days and stood with the Oceti Sakowin Nation at Standing Rock in defense of tribal treaty rights.

Perhaps as a consequence, Haaland’s nomination has proved particularly contentious, as Republican senators, many from Western states, used the hearing to attack, sometimes with remarkable animosity, what they misleadingly portrayed as her extreme views on fossil fuels and national parks.

Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the senior Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, shouted over Haaland, accusing the congresswoman of wanting to legalize drugs to replace tax revenue from oil and gas. (Haaland backed legalizing and taxing cannabis as a congresswoman, but never advocated doing so instead of taxing fossil fuels.) Montana Sen. Steve Daines — who, like Barrasso, has received more than $1 million in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies — demanded Haaland retract a tweet stating that “Republicans don’t believe in science.” (In 2019, Daines said, “To suggest that [climate change] is human-caused is not a sound scientific conclusion.”)

Utah Sen. Mike Lee expressed his dissatisfaction with the designation of Bears Ears as a national monument, asking whether Haaland thought it was “appropriate for stakeholders, people who have some sort of economic interest in the land or some sort of connection to the land ... to be involved in the national monument designation process." Lee was apparently unaware that the nominee’s Pueblo relatives are among the tribes that consider Bears Ears a sacred place, tracing their connections to the land to time immemorial.

Haaland appeared unperturbed. We Indians, after all, are well-practiced in the art of accommodating and poking fun at our antagonists; we’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. When Daines asked the secretary-designate why she co-sponsored a bill protecting grizzly bears in perpetuity, Haaland responded with forthright charm: “I imagine, at the time, I was caring about the bears."

Conservatives have portrayed Haaland as a divisive partisan, but in 2019, she introduced the most bills with bipartisan support of all House freshmen. On Tuesday, Republican Rep. Don Young of Alaska — a conservative congressman from an oil state — introduced Haaland as a strong nominee and friend who works across the aisle and whose perspective as a native person is needed at Interior. “Anyone who thinks we’re going to call off fossil fuels immediately is smoking pot,” he added — a rebuke to environmentalists, yes, but also to his colleagues in the upper chamber.

What Haaland actually brings — and what the Republican Party seems to consider so dangerous — are experiences and perspectives that have never found representation in the leadership of the executive branch. In fact, Republicans’ depiction of the first Native American ever nominated to the Cabinet as a “radical” threat to a Western “way of life” revealed something about the conservative id: a deep-seated fear that when the dispossessed finally attain a small measure of power, we will turn around and do to them what their governments and ancestors did to us.

This is not, in fact, some sort of continent-size conquest in reverse — but Republicans should fear antagonizing Native American voters. These Americans played crucial roles in the 2020 election on both sides of the aisle: Menominee and Navajo voters helped Democrats win Wisconsin and Arizona’s electoral votes, as well as the latter state’s Senate seat. Meanwhile, Donald Trump held North Carolina in part by promising members of the Lumbee tribe federal recognition. In 2022, Republicans will look to defend or pick up Senate seats in all of those states and more. Some, such as Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who was adopted by a Tlingit clan and who rode the Indigenous vote to a historic write-in victory in 2010, cannot win without native support. Native voters tend to prefer the Democratic Party, but not nearly as much as other racial groups do. As Democrats nominate the first Native American Cabinet secretary, and as Republicans line up to try to stop her, that partisan balance could be changing.

With moderate Democrat Joe Manchin III of West Virginia publicly backing Haaland, her path to confirmation is clear. It would be unwise for the GOP to stand athwart Indian country’s chance at history.

Obama and Springsteen Are Here to Lull America

By Lauren Michele Jackson, The New Yorker

28 February 21

eorge W. Bush took up painting. After the maximum number of goes at America’s top gig, during which he invented a calamitous war overseas and a network of imperious government agencies at home, the former President put himself out to pasture. He and Laura Bush settled on an estate in the swanky Preston Hollow neighborhood in north Dallas. He wrote memoirs, made a few dutiful appearances, and returned to his post at Rangers games. While other former Presidents had reinvented themselves in public, Bush dipped through oil pots, crafting thickly textured portraits of the veterans of his wars (along with dogs, still-lifes, and world leaders, including himself). Some might call this solo exhibitionism, but it was also a public service of its own, sparing everyone the reminder of what was. Keeping out of the public eye, Bush knew, was the best he could do.

Our other recent former President—no, not that one—has taken an altogether different approach. Since leaving office, Barack Obama has vigorously campaigned for fellow-Democrats and released the first volume of his Presidential memoirs. He has also, with the former First Lady Michelle Obama, become the public face of a burgeoning media empire. The Obamas’ company, Higher Ground Productions, has a multiyear deal with Netflix, with a lineup of projects calculated not just to entertain but to “educate, connect and inspire us all,” as Barack told the Times. (Earlier this month, Netflix shared the trailer for one of them, a kids’ cooking show hosted by Michelle called “Waffles + Mochi.”) Michelle’s best-selling memoir, “Becoming,” from 2018, marked, as Doreen St. Félix wrote at the time, her reincarnation as a “potentially billion-dollar American brand.” This past July, she launched “The Michelle Obama Podcast,” with a very special first guest: her husband. And now the former POTUS is podding, too, with the launch, last Monday, of Spotify’s “Renegades,” on which he joins his buddy and co-host, Bruce Springsteen, to chat about “race, fatherhood, marriage, and the state of America.”

The friendship between the two men, who recorded the podcast sitting toe to toe on Springsteen’s estate last year, grew out of a series of encounters during Obama’s Presidency. There was a dinner at the White House, they explain at the beginning of the first episode. They “loosened up” over drinks and talked philosophy; the wives “hit it off.” It was then, Obama says, that he realized how much they had in common, “the same issues . . . the same joys and doubts.” They were drawn together as fellow “outsiders.” That they are both rich and famous goes unmentioned, as does their 2017 yacht trip with Oprah Winfrey and Tom Hanks, off the coast of Tahiti. It’s almost too easy to poke fun at the whole thing. I dare you to name something more archetypally boomer than these two cherished idols—the Boss and the Chief—dubbing themselves rebellious in a Spotify-exclusive podcast, sponsored by Comcast and Dollar Shave Club. (“How do I handle grooming below the belt?” the ad spot asks; mercifully, neither host is made to read it.)

As Willa Paskin wrote in a recent piece for Slate, the Obamas are far from the only ones who are treating content creation as an inevitable extension of public service. Counting off the politicians who have recently announced some audio or visual something or other (Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Mike Pence), Paskin notes the trend’s unsettling inversion of Donald Trump’s path to the White House: political capital deployed in the name of entertainment. But it is remarkable just how fully Obama has embraced the soft-power gambit. Take, for instance, his habit of cultural list-making—favorite books, movies, music, TV, “memorable songs from my administration.” Something even fluffier than taste-making is at work. It’s one thing to imagine Obama tucked away with the latest Jonathan Franzen novel; now we are urged to picture him bingeing “The Queen’s Gambit.” Even recommendations from Oprah and Reese Witherspoon have more of an edge.

Is there a discernible political dimension to all of this? In the first two episodes of “Renegades” (six more will be released, weekly), Obama and Springsteen’s main mode is reminiscing, though they treat the activity as a tool of critique. The pair are here to meet the immensity of misbegotten history—America’s “founding myths” and “mythic stories”—with their own well-trodden first-person narratives. (“The political comes from the personal,” Springsteen says, sagely.) As a cultural figure, the Boss sits in a cross-racial sweet spot, as an anointed idol for the coded white working class who pairs his aging denim with bright-blue politics. He is also comfortable playing the good white liberal without self-punishing overtures. His home town of Freehold, New Jersey, was “your typical small, provincial, redneck, racist little American nineteen-fifties town,” he says without squeamishness. After a pair of police officers beat a Black cab driver, in July of 1967, Newark rioted. Freehold followed. “I can’t talk to you right now,” one Black friend told Spingsteen at the time. Unlike so many people who share tales of “reckoning,” Springsteen feels no need to concoct a myth of race-blind childhood innocence.

In Episode Two, he discusses Clarence Clemons, the late saxophonist of the E Street Band and, for most of the band’s life, its only Black member. “I always felt our audience looked at us and saw the America that they wanted,” Springsteen explains, while “Born to Run” plays in the background. Here his conversation contains notes of discomfort, hesitations and slight sputters, as Obama invites him to speak on behalf of his departed friend. A longtime partnership like theirs doesn’t offer easy racial lessons, but podcasts bend toward clear, communicable ideas. “It was forty-five years of your life you don’t . . . It’s never something that comes again,” Springsteen says, sighing. The strumming guitar returns.

I am dwelling on the chewier moments of “Renegades,” but for the most part it is clean and pleasant and airy, even when the men are discussing politics directly. Obama briefly addresses the question of reparations, with a nod to Ta-Nehisi Coates, and returns again and again to the memory of John Lewis, the activist who grew into playing by the rules, and whose funeral Obama had just spoken at before recording for “Renegades” began. Discussing the protests of last summer, Obama comes just short of infantilizing the activities of those who were on the ground. “I think there’s a little bit of an element of young people saying, ‘You’ve told us this is who we’re supposed to be.’ ” A guitar strums gently in the background. “And that’s why as long as protests and activism doesn’t veer into violence, my general attitude is—I want and expect young people to push those boundaries.”

Obama’s post-Presidency has been disappointing, in part, because it came with special burdens. In the months after the 2016 election, amid the noxious encroachment of Trumpism, Obama’s conciliatory approach to politics felt flimsier than ever, but there was speculation and, yes, still, hope that his next chapter might provide something to cling to. Those who look back on his Administration now and see only the disappointment of compromise—Obama’s failure, as the writer and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has put it, to “know his whites”—perhaps respect themselves too much to be overheard jamming along to the establishment. But I can understand the people who might still take comfort in hearing Obama right up against their eardrums, doing his host schtick, asking, “Did you see the movie ‘Get Out’?,” referring to a memorable line that invokes his name. By Episode Two, I’d almost grown accustomed to the duo’s rumble and rasp as it followed me into the kitchen, providing a lulling soundtrack as I unloaded the dishwasher and measured out tea.

Such is the pleasure of conversations: having them, hearing them being had. The writer Alex Green has a cheeky coinage to refer to the proliferation of the form in today’s culture: the “Having Conversations Industrial Complex,” which answers the crises of our time with the promise of future dialogue. It is the “listening” and “learning” pledged by corporations and other culpable institutions in the face of political upheaval (one thinks of the corporate slogan from Season Two of “Succession”: “We hear for you”). The conversation “doesn’t need to show tangible results,” Green writes, because “the only role of the conversation is to generate more conversations.”

At the close of the first episode of “Renegades,” Obama revisits one of his Presidential speeches, delivered in Selma, in 2015, on the fiftieth anniversary of the bloody civil-rights protests that occurred there. He begins, as if off the cuff, “Let me tell you about America. We’re Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea. We’re the pioneers and the farmers and the miners and the entrepreneurs and the hucksters.” Then an audio clip from the original speech fades in. You can hear the faint echo of an open space, the noise of the crowd. And then we are back in the studio, and Obama continues quoting his own words. How distant this man sounds from himself, advancing the ideal of American pluralism then and now. The projection of the orator has been replaced by the proximity of the interviewer, and neither from this vantage sounds particularly moving.