Jeremy Lin came out of nowhere to turn the New York Knicks' season around, but the conversation about his unlikely rise to fame has often included a racial component. (Photo: AP/Kathy Knomicek)

(Disclaimer: I know this space is typically reserved for matters of serious report, like politics and, well, more politics. Rest assured I’ll return to politics soon enough. And for my faithful readers who know nothing of sports save the ins and outs of the presidential horserace or the ups and downs of congressional polling statistics, bear with me because you’re going to learn something very important about the character of our nation that politicians are unlikely to share with you.)

Linsanity has overtaken almost everyone I’ve spoken with during the past week.

In the incredible case you’ve escaped it, Linsanity refers to the global obsession–or craze–with Jeremy Lin, the professional basketball player whose play for the erstwhile forlorn New York Knicks has set everyone atwitter with his out-of-nowhere story. He was the star of his state-champion high school team in Palo Alto, California, but wasn’t highly recruited to play college ball. Instead of accepting a walk-on role, he enrolled at Harvard, a school better known for brains than brawn. He excelled in the classroom and on the court, but after graduation was overlooked by NBA scouts.

Surprisingly, to me, I’m no exception to the Linsanity madness. I love college basketball, but generally yawn when it comes to the professional game. But I’ll admit that I’ve succumbed and can’t get enough of the guy. Or his amazing story.

Unfortunately, all this celebrity carries a racial edge to it, which is the part that fascinates me most. Lin is an American whose parents emigrated from Taiwan to the United States in the mid-1970s. He’s one of the few Asian Americans to ever play in the National Basketball Association and the first of Taiwanese heritage.

After posting a 7-15 record to begin this strike-shortened NBA season, the Knicks have gone 8-2 in the two weeks since Lin became the starting point guard. After Lin scored 38 points against the Los Angeles Lakers on February 10 and fired the last-second game winner over the Toronto Raptors on Valentine’s Day, his star glowed brighter than all the lights on Broadway.

Everybody is talking about Lin, from grizzled sports writers to Bible-toting Baptists to even (here’s an odd-fellows political tie-in) the president, a Tea Party activist, and a former GOP vice presidential nominee. All cheered their support.

But that hasn’t stopped the nasty boo-birds. Lin’s success brought out the racist stereotypes and ugly words from folks who should know better. Boxer Floyd Mayweather, Jr. tweeted that the media is making too much of him because he’s an Asian American. Nationally syndicated sports columnist Jason Whitlock apologized for making a crude joke at Lin’s expense. And an offensive headline popped up on ESPN’s website that forced the sports outlet to fire a writer, suspend an anchor, and apologize profusely to Lin and the entire Asian American community. But perhaps the racial insanity reached its zenith with a tasteless Saturday Night Live opening sketch.

The subtle (and not-so-subtle) racial nature of this chatter reveals less about Lin’s hoop dreams and so much more about our discomfiture with the changing diversity of our nation. The outbreak of racial puns and sophomoric humor is a shiny mirror that reflects what many Americans may feel but know better than to say out loud.

Regardless of who wins the GOP nomination, the Republican candidate will rely on either the economy stopping its current positive trend or turning to social issues that have lost traction among the American public. (Photo: AP/Paul Sancya)

First, the prime conservative argument against re-electing President Barack Obama is that he’s responsible for the lack of jobs and high unemployment. For conservatives to make that argument stick, though, they’ll have to bet against prosperity.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) previewed the conservative argument in a critique of the White House budget proposals. “The president offered a collection of rehashes, gimmicks, and tax increases that will make our economy worse,” Boehner said.

But as of late, the economy seems to be turning around, not getting worse. Indeed, that argument hit a snag last week, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the January unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent, down from 8.5 percent in December and 9.1 percent back in August.

The January figure continues a trend of good news. The December figure was surprisingly revised upward to 203,000 new jobs from the previously reported 200,000, and November’s figure was revised upward to 157,000 from 100,000. Altogether, it’s a promising sign that things are beginning to look up. Or, as The New York Times reported, “the recovery seems finally to be reaching American workers.”

If—and it’s a huge “if”—the job creation pace continues as it has in recent months, then the economic argument against President Obama loses its luster. Regardless, few economists predict the unemployment rate will return to the double-digit figure of late 2009, and many are crossing their fingers that it might fall a few tenths of a percentage lower. That’s good news for the nation, but not so cheery for a Republican presidential nominee.

That brings us to the second line of attack the forthcoming GOP nominee is likely to fall back on to win. For lack of a better name, let’s call it a return to divisive culture wars. This gambit is an attempt to rally hard-right conservative voters by attacking immigrants, gay and transgender Americans, and women’s health rights.

Once again, the conservative approach is drilling into a dry well.

Despite the evidence that suggests most Americans support immigration, the leading Republican presidential hopefuls have taken a hard, unwelcoming approach to the issue. In particular, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has reversed his erstwhile tacit support of immigration reform to court conservative presidential primary voters with a tougher stand. His flip-flop on the issue prompted Ann Garcia and Philip E. Wolgin, who track immigration issues for the Center for American Progress, to compare Romney’s mutable position to that of failed GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) of Arizona.

“Ultimately, Mitt has nothing to gain and everything to lose with his anti-immigrant strategy,” Garcia and Wolgin wrote. “Just ask Sen. McCain.”

And as my colleague Ruy Teixeira noted recently, young people are especially immigrant friendly, suggesting that conservatives ”are on the wrong side of Latino public opinion.”

Similarly, gay marriage isn’t a cutting-edge issue with growing numbers of voters. A series of polls conducted last year demonstrated that a majority of Americans support full marriage equality for same-sex couples, a marked reversal from years prior that showed clear majorities in opposition.

Yet GOP hopeful Rick Santorum met earlier this week with opponents of a new law in Washington State that legalized same-sex marriage and promised to stand with them. “I told them to keep up this fight, that this is an important issue for our families,” Santorum said of his meeting with more than 100 conservative pastors and other so-called “values voters” on Monday in Olympia, Washington.

On women’s health, it’s true that President Obama may have inadvertently given his future opponent an opening with the decision to require employers to offer contraceptive care in health insurance policies. This drew the ire of Catholic and other religious leaders who argued that it would require them to pay for something they’re morally opposed to providing. Predictably, the GOP candidates seized on the issue and criticized President Obama as “anti-religion.”

But is this really an issue with legs long enough to run to victory? I don’t think so. According to a poll this month by Public Religion Research Institute, a majority of Americans (55 percent) agree that “employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost.” Roughly 6 in 10 Catholics polled (58 percent) agreed with that statement.

The firestorm of criticism pushed the administration late last week to offer a compromise that calls for insurance companies to provide contraceptives to women who work for employers unwilling to provide the benefit. “Some folks in Washington may want to treat this as another political wedge issue, but it shouldn’t be,” the president said in offering the compromise.

Of course they do. What else do they have to offer voters?

Occupy Wall Street protestors march in New York City near Zuccotti Park in October, 2011. Occupy Wall Street began as a movement to expose the growing class stratification in America. (Photo: AP/Craig Ruttle)

Of course, the former Massachusetts governor didn’t mean to do this. He probably laments having told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien last week that he wasn’t worried about the poor because they have a safety net to support them. Nor is he losing sleep over the plight of the wealthy. If, as I suspect, he meant exactly what he said, he leaves little doubt with his attempt to clarify. “I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 to 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling,” he explained.

So he believes that the overwhelming majority of Americans are in that great, nebulous economic cloud called the middle class (or “middle income,” in his words). It’s an easy mistake—most Americans would agree with him, believing the middle class is larger than it really is.

These days Americans seem more class-confused than class-conscious. A Gallup poll released last December suggests that Americans consider an annual household income of $150,000 to be rich—even though in the more expensive parts of our nation, this income is decidedly middle class. Figuring out who is poor is even more difficult. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last month, nearly 20 percent of households earning at the poverty level ($15,000 or less annually) believe they’re solidly middle class.

Clearly belief in the American Dream is alive and well, but in fact the middle class is shrinking. As the income of the top 1 percent skyrocketed to 24 percent of all income in 2007 from 9 percent in 1974, the share of income going to the middle 60 percent of Americans fell to 47 percent from 52 percent. From 2001 to 2007 incomes of the top 1 percent increased by 60 percent after adjusting for inflation, while the median income fell. More than one-third of our nation’s population is living on a low income and teetering on the edge of poverty. To top it off the United States now lags behind other developed countries such as Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden when it comes to economic mobility.

What’s more, most Americans seem less concerned about the poor or the disparity of incomes in our nation than they were earlier in the decade. The Gallup poll found that respondents were more dubious that economic disparity is real than they were eight years ago. Fifty-eight percent of those polled rejected the view that the United States is a nation of “haves” and “have-nots,” compared to it being nearly 50–50 in 2004, when former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards drew headlines for pointing out “two Americas.”

None of this should be surprising. In the face of historic protestations to the contrary, Americans don’t want to believe that our nation is rutted by rigid lanes of class stratification—seeing instead celebrated rags-to-riches tales throughout our history as the norm. But our society always has been defined by class all the way back to its founding days. In the beginning of the Republic, all citizens weren’t equal; franchise responsibilities rested only among the upper class—white, male property owners.

Denial that class truly existed separated the Founding Fathers’ lofty ideals from the Everyman’s (and Everywoman’s) place in society. For the New World’s experiment in representative democracy to take root, let alone succeed, every citizen had to believe that his or her opportunity in life was equal to a neighbor’s, not granted by a monarch or ordained by clergy.

That is the theory. In practice something else is true. The class divide continues to yawn across America. And despite legal attack and changed social norms, education inequality—fueled by economic inequality—continues to assist in the maintenance of a class-based status quo. Noting that many Americans prefer to imagine that class distinctions in the land “have blurred” or “some say they have disappeared,” The New York Times pointed to the contrary in a voluminous 2005 examination of class in America:

But class is still a powerful force in American life. Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more.

Today grassroots activists occupy public spaces in major cities and on college campuses with the cry, “We are the 99 percent.” As the veil of denial rises, it reveals an awkward public discussion on the unfairness of America’s enduring, if hidden, class stratification.

“Tricking the poor to believe they’re in [the middle class], and allowing the rich to hide in it,” writes New York Times columnist Charles Blow, “is one of the great modern political deceptions and how we’ve arrived at our current predicament.”

Our political discussions—or lack thereof—surrounding class in America get politicians in hot water when they say something closer to the truth than we care to admit. Unwittingly, perhaps, this was the funhouse mirror Romney cracked—and possibly allowed Americans to catch a glimpse of ourselves as we are, not as we wish to be seen.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer points her finger in the face of President Barack Obama during an intense conversation on January 25, 2012, at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)

With a waggle of her right index finger last Wednesday, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer erased the question of whether black voters will be enthusiastic about going to the polls in support of President Barack Obama. Now, you can count on it.

Gov. Brewer almost guaranteed that large numbers of black voters will turn out on Election Day because they will march to the polls, still angry about Brewer’s one-finger salute of the commander-in-chief. Nothing motivates voters like anger. So I envision their collective disgust to register in a wave of ballots, striking back at what so many perceive as the ultimate disrespect of the nation’s first black president.

This isn’t a bold prediction. Rather, it’s more of a reasonable assessment of what I’m hearing and reading about the durability of the anger over the now-infamous tarmac photo. As if the picture didn’t convey an outrageous message greater than 1,000 words uttered by a campaign opponent, Gov. Brewer doubled down on the prickly image to say that she poked her finger in the president’s face because she felt threatened by the audacity of that black man dressing her down over comments she wrote about him.

Indeed, I’m willing to be charitable on Gov. Brewer’s behalf. For sure, she could never have envisioned how that split-second of her life under an Arizona sun, captured on pixels and set loose into the blogosphere, would reverberate in communities of color across the land. She probably (and accurately) expected it would help with sales of her book among conservatives who hate President Obama, but it also made her a subject of derision, jokes, and ridicule among progressives in general and the black community in particular. And once a politician becomes the enduring butt of jokes, it’s nearly impossible to repair the damage. Just ask Sarah Palin, who remains a force only among the far right.

Clearly, Gov. Brewer didn’t know at that fateful moment how so many black Americans react to such gestures. No doubt she didn’t know or care that many of us would decipher hidden meanings in her gesture or comments. Maybe she meant no malice. But whatever crossed Gov. Brewer’s mind, she came off as disrespectful and clueless to black voters who are proud and protective of the president. And they will make her pay for being ignorant of their concerns and cavalier of their fears.

The White House, however, tried to downplay the entire incident. The president called it “no big deal.” But of course he would say that and take the high road, while his political operatives made sure the real message was heard in black barbershops, beauty parlors, and churches. That’s where the real political conversations among black voters are vetted, charged, and sustained.

I’m hearing an earful, nearly all of it anger at the perception of unfairness in the way the president (and his wife) are publicly portrayed. The Brewer photo only exacerbated the already-simmering feelings that started with Tea Party activists’ racist signs, were perpetuated by South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe “You Lie” Wilson’s outburst, and continued with Wisconsin Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner’s rude comments about the callipygian attributes of the First Lady’s figure.

Lots of chatter circulates in media accounts of whether President Obama can motivate black voters this November as he did in 2008. He probably can’t. The drama and enthusiasm surrounding the election of the nation’s first black president can never be replicated. But it won’t have to be this time around. Pride has been displaced by anger. Any lingering doubts about commitment and energy for President Obama’s re-election among black voters is now moot.

Jan Brewer, thank you very much.

By 2050 the United States will have no racial majority and the uneven racial and ethnic population growth of the future could very well reshape the course of presidential politics for generations to come. (Photo: AP/ Charles Krupa)

To keep myself interested while waiting for the GOP to complete its circular firing squad, I’ve begun to look down the road to the campaigns to come. No, I’m not talking about the November general election. Rather, I’m fascinated by what it will take to be president in the decades to come, when the United States will be a much-changed nation from what it is today.

I’m not alone in envisioning such progressive, future-forward politics. Stefan Hankin, president of Lincoln Park Strategies, a Washington-based public opinion research firm that advises progressive organizations and Democratic politicians, told me recently that “[t]he future for progressive policies is not about 2012 or the next election in two years. It’s about growing the future and seeing where the path leads us.”

The path that Hankin referred to is the fact that within the next 40 years, possibly sooner, the nation will no longer have a majority white population. In a study that his firm released late last year, Hankin noted that the U.S. population will grow by 19 percent over the next two decades, but such growth will not be spread evenly over all racial groups. Whites will increase almost 4 percent, which pales in comparison to the 63 percent growth rates of Latinos, 55 percent growth of Asians, and the 27 percent increase in the number of blacks. By 2050 the Census Bureau estimates that white Americans will be a statistical minority in the nation, with no racial group comprising more than 50 percent of the population.

To be sure, demography isn’t destiny. But the uneven racial and ethnic population growth of the future could very well reshape the course of presidential politics for generations to come.

To test this hypothesis the Lincoln Park report undertook a speculative, albeit credible, racial analysis of projected state-by-state voting patterns. Presidential elections are determined by Electoral College votes—not the popular vote—meaning state-aggregated tallies carry significant weight in choosing which party wins the White House. With the clustering of minority voters in “Blue” Democratic-leaning states and the concentration of white voters in “Red” Republican-leaning states, the Lincoln Park study hints at how future population shifts may affect the race for 270 Electoral College votes needed to elect a president.

They looked at five different scenarios. In Scenario One, which is based on voting results from the 2008 presidential elections, Democrats may enter the 2012 Election Day assured of 165 electoral votes in solid Blue states and another 86 in states that lean Blue. With 91 electoral votes in swing states, winning in Ohio and Virginia (and picking up Red-leaning North Carolina) were the keys to President Obama’s 2008 victory.

Assuming this pattern holds through to 2024 and 2032, the changing demographic profile strongly favors Democratic candidates. Indeed, by 2032 a generic Democratic nominee has enough to get elected just by appealing to the base and leaning Democratic states alone.

In Scenario 2 researchers speculated what would happen if Democratic support among Latino voters dropped by an arbitrary 10 points from 2008 levels. The race would tighten somewhat. But over time the tremendous support of Latino voters for Democrats greatly disadvantages Republicans. Once again, the core base and leaning Democratic states nearly carry the day by themselves.

In Scenarios 3 and 4 the researchers wondered what might happen with increased white support for Democrats. It’s interesting to note here that no Democratic presidential candidate has garnered the majority of white voters since President Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide victory over Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona. But it doesn’t require a majority of the white vote to give Democrats an insurmountable edge.

In Scenario 3 (no chart) all a Democratic candidate needs is a mere 2 percent gain nationally among white voters, along with continued minority support, to create another landslide situation.

“The result of the model with constant Hispanic/Latino support and increased white support was so overwhelming that it does not merit a detailed exploration,” the report stated in dismissing the need to chart Scenario 3. “Base Democratic states alone were projected to account for 240 electoral votes in 2024 and 254 votes in 2032, while combined Base and Lean Republican states account for only 153 and 141 votes respectively.”

In Scenario 4 a 2 percent gain in white voters for Democrats combined with a 10 percent Latino decline offers what the researchers termed “an interesting electoral choice” for Democrats. The increase of white voters boosts the short-term viability for a Democratic candidate, but has negative long-term consequences. Specifically, this choice would have Democrats relying heavily on Rust Belt states, which aren’t growing as fast as the rest of the country.

Finally, Scenario 5 explains what would happen if Republicans increase support among Latinos by 10 percent, blacks by 10 percent, and white voters by 2 percent. “If Republicans can achieve these gains across racial/ethnic groups, the Electoral College map becomes much more manageable” for Republican presidential aspirants, the report said.

Hankin is more blunt about it. “It’s not about the Republicans winning a majority of any of these (racial and ethnic) groups’ votes,” he told me. “They just have to cut into the majorities that Democrats enjoy. If they can get 10 to 20 percent, then they’re back in the game.”

My colleagues Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin believe the demographic struggle is already shaping presidential politics. In a fascinating paper, “The Path to 270: Demographics versus Economics in the 2012 Presidential Election,” they argue that the outcome of the current election will reflect the demographic changes buffeting the nation.

On the one side is the growing and Democratic-favoring “communities of color, single and highly educated women, Millennial generation voters [defined by Pew as those adults born 1981 or after], secular voters and educated whites living in more urbanized states or more urbanized parts of states.”

And on the opposing side, they write, is the shrinking and Republican-supporting “coalition of older, whiter, more rural and evangelical voters . . . [who are] becoming more geographically concentrated and less important to the overall political landscape of the country.”

Of course, I have no clue about the personalities or issues that will be in play in the presidential campaigns of 2024 or 2032. But I’m convinced whoever is running is unlikely to engage in the nasty, race-baiting tactics that some of the conservative wannabes are currently employing. I feel fairly certain about this because the inevitable march of demographic change that’s ongoing in the United States suggests that the future electorate won’t reward a candidate who sows racial animosity in an increasingly diverse America.

If I’m right then it raises a question that bears asking today of the Republican establishment that so desperately wants to win back the White House: If sweeping racial and demographic change is washing over the nation, why do you tolerate your leading candidates’ backward-looking, divisive, and race-baiting campaigns? Don’t you realize that such behavior threatens the future survival of the GOP?

Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich asks his staff, "what's next" during a campaign stop in Manchester, N.H. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)

Years ago when I started my professional life as a newspaper journalist, I believed sincerely that when people consumed a daily diet of facts along with their morning coffee, they were inclined to make better civic-minded decisions. Now some three decades later, I’m no longer a reporter covering a beat, and I suspect that my youth may have been misspent.

Writing this week in The Wall Street Journal, columnist Carl Bialik noted that voters “have strong opinions about policy issues shaping the presidential campaign, from immigration to Social Security.” But for many of them, their understanding of the facts supporting their views “can be tenuous.” He pointed to studies that repeatedly demonstrate that Americans vastly overestimate the percentage of citizens in the country who are foreign-born by a factor of more than two. Worse, they overestimate the percentage of those who are living here in the shadows as undocumented residents by a factor of six or seven. If those voters have bad facts, it’s nearly impossible for them to reach rational and reasonable conclusions about immigration policies.

Even if these voters have the right facts, however, it may not make a difference. Political scientists John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of California at Berkeley found just that to be the case. In a paper presented at the 2007 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago, the two scholars tested whether giving the public accurate information changed their attitudes toward immigration policies. Sadly it did not. “On average, then, providing correct information does not change attitudes toward immigration,” they wrote.

To give another example: Large numbers of Americans tell politicians they want foreign aid cut. But when pressed to disclose how much the nation should spend abroad, they cite figures that The Christian Science Monitor estimated at 10 times what the nation now spends.

There’s one way to explain such discrepancies: Facts just don’t matter to some people. And to be sure, that’s why unscrupulous politicians engage in the Big Lie. As a propaganda technique, repeating a falsehood over and over emboldens those inclined to believe it to heartily support anyone who tells them what they already know to be true—even if it is not.

Witness, for example, the despicable spectacle of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich campaigning for votes among conservative white voters in New Hampshire by talking tough about black people on welfare. “I’m prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps,” Gingrich said last week.

That widely reported comment prompted broad criticism of Gingrich’s easy lapse into racial stereotyping. The fact that he said it isn’t debatable. He did say it. But this week he told a black man at a political rally that he didn’t.

As reported by my Think Progress colleagues Alex Seitz-Wald and Travis Waldron, Yvan Lamothe, a 59-year-old former New Hampshire state employee and small-business owner, seized the opportunity at a town hall event Sunday to tell Gingrich that he was offended by the comments. “I didn’t say that,” Gingrich declared, presumably with a straight face. Rather, Gingrich said he was the one who should be offended. “I just want to say that frankly this makes me very irritated. The Democratic National Committee took totally out of context half of the sentence, OK?”

Gingrich’s denial brings to mind the old routine by comedian Richard Pryor, when a cheating spouse is caught in the act by his wife. “Who you gonna believe?” the man says in all earnestness. “Me or your lying eyes?”

Unfortunately, far too many Americans seem willing to trust politicians who tell them something completely contrary to what they see, hear, and ought to know to be the factual opposite. And it seems there’s an ample supply of political demagogues willing to tell them just what they want to hear.

Just look at Rick Santorum saying at a New Hampshire campaign event last week, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” Then, when criticized for sounding like a bigot, he claimed he never said it.

Or look at some conservative activists that insist on demonizing Medicaid, arguing that it’s a government giveaway to poor people. In fact, it’s very much a middle-class program as well.

For me, as someone who fondly remembers being a young and idealistic journalist, the idea that some Americans will cling to erroneous beliefs in the face of demonstrated facts is a bitter brew to swallow. The only thing worse is my late-life awareness that there are those who know better but still serve up lies for their own political purposes.

Vernestine Strickland, an eighth-grade teacher at Gwynn Park Middle School, in Clinton, Md., talks with Ashlei Gray, left, and Simone Hoggs about classroom schoolwork. (AP Photo/Matt Houston)

If anyone doubts the impact of having a progressive president in the White House, then consider the Education and Justice Departments’ joint guidance last week that corrects the Bush administration’s misreading of a set of Supreme Court decisions on the use of race to achieve diversity in the nation’s public schools.

Reversing a pair of 2008 “Dear Colleague” letters sent by Bush officials in the Education Department, the Obama administration told college administrators and kindergarten-through-12th-grade school officials that using race wasn’t forbidden by the high court. Indeed, as Education and Justice Department officials argue, there may be instances when taking race into account is not only permissible but also the wise thing to do.

“The Departments recognize the compelling interest that [schools] have in obtaining the benefits that flow from achieving a diverse student body,” the 10-page guidance sent to college administrators stated. “As the Supreme Court has made clear, such steps can include taking account of the race of individual students in a narrowly tailored manner.”

A separate 14-page guide sent to K-12 school officials made the case even more strongly. “Racially isolated schools often have fewer effective teachers, higher teacher turnover rates, less rigorous curricular resources … and inferior facilities and other educational resources,” it stated. “Reducing racial isolation in schools is also important because students who are not exposed to racial diversity in school often lack other opportunities to interact with students from different racial backgrounds.”

Such clarity in defense of multiculturalism in public education is a far cry from the way President Bush interpreted the Supreme Court’s rulings. Adhering to the narrow line advanced by conservative activists hostile to federal defense of racial diversity, Stephanie J. Monroe, assistant secretary for civil rights in the Bush administration’s Education Department, warned college admissions officers they risked losing federal funding if they promoted racial diversity on campus. “[I]f a postsecondary institution seeks to use racial classification in admissions, it will bear the burden of providing sufficient detail about its process to enable [Education Department lawyers] to determine whether the institution is complying with Title VI,” Monroe wrote. (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits any federally funded government agency to discriminate based on race.)

In other words, the Bush administration refused to defend the value of diversity and forced school officials not to value it either. By contrast, the Obama administration takes diversity as a given and seeks to empower school officials to find ways to make it happen. As The New York Times reported, the new guidelines “focus on the wiggle room in court decisions” to grant administrators wider latitude to encourage diversity.

This is as it should be. Our nation is changing anew, becoming increasingly more racially diverse. Our schools are on the frontlines of this change, producing the citizens—many of them coming from historically disadvantaged and minority communities—who will become the workforce, the taxpayers, and the voters of the future. The Obama administration makes a convincing case that it’s in the nation’s best long-term interest to make diversity a part of this country’s competitive edge.

The Supreme Court said as much in its 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, which affirmed that universities can take race into account as a factor in admissions, a point the new guidelines highlighted. “The skills students need for success in ‘today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints,’” the guidelines said, quoting the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision.

Now isn’t the time to run away from efforts to increase diversity in education. The struggle for equality in education opportunity stretches back to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which should have put to rest any doubt that unequal education cripples every American. For the better part of the last half of the 20th century, Americans labored earnestly to find the correct formula to make the ideal of equal education opportunity a reality for every citizen, only to see a retrenchment during the past two decades or so.

Racial segregation and poverty are all too common in many of the nation’s public schools, especially in urban and minority communities. The rise of separate and unequal schools is a national shame, reflecting the failure of local and federal politicians to demonstrate leadership that makes a virtue of diversity.

No more. With the Obama administration taking an aggressive and proactive stance on school diversity, it gives proof to the saying that “elections have consequences.”

Fox News Channel anchor Shepard Smith, background right, conducts an interview during his "Studio B" program, in New York, Tuesday, May 24, 2011. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Can watching Fox News actually make you dumber than if you didn’t watch any news at all? Sure, some of us believe this, but until now there’s been nothing other than anecdotal evidence and Sarah Palin to support our arguments. Now we’ve got facts that make the case with an empirical flourish.

Researchers with Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Poll asked 612 New Jersey residents a variety of questions to test their awareness and knowledge of current events that dominated the news between October 17 and October 23. The poll’s shocking conclusion was that people who described themselves as heavy Fox News viewers tended to be “even less informed than those who say they don’t watch any news at all.”

Overall, 53 percent of those polled correctly knew that Egyptian street protests led to the overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak’s government, 21 percent mistakenly said the uprisings were unsuccessful, and 26 percent admitted they had no idea what happened. Similarly, 48 percent knew the Syrian protests have been unsuccessful thus far, 36 percent said they didn’t know, and 16 percent erroneously said the Syrians have brought down their government.

But when the researchers drilled down into the numbers to cross tab the results with those who expressed a strong preference for Fox News’s cable broadcasts, they discovered those news consumers were 18 points less likely to know the Egyptian Spring resulted in the overthrow of the government than the people who said they don’t watch any news on television. Fox News viewers were also 6 points less likely to know the Syrians haven’t dislodged their government than the people who watch no news.

As counterintuitive as it might seem, these findings shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Many Americans distrust smart people, as Eastern Washington University philosophy professor Terrance MacMullan points out in a chapter of The Daily Show and Philosophy: Moments of Zen in the Art of Fake News. MacMullan explains this using a very old tool of his trade, the illogical syllogism:

1. All tricky people are smart.
2. No tricky people should be trusted.
3. Therefore, no smart people should be trusted.

Yes, this is silly. But it goes miles to help explain why so many over at Fox News are working overtime to lower the bar of their viewers’ intellectual acumen by passing off right-wing dogma as “fair and balanced” news. Garbage in produces garbage out.

The result: Our nation, which once valued education as the great social equalizer, finds itself with a slate of conservative presidential candidates forced to the far-right fringe to pander to a dumbed-down public.

It’s neither an accident nor an odd coincidence that Fox News viewers did poorly on the PublicMind Poll. In fact it stands to reason that the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks can find, target, and maintain an audience of the ill-informed viewers. It’s a great business model. To paraphrase another great philosopher, P.T. Barnum, nobody grows poorer by selling down to the American public.

That intellectual downscale market is out there, living and voting among us. Newsweek magazine recently posted a slideshow called “America the Ignorant” that was a gallery of oddball opinions held by too large a swath of Americans. The reporters and editors collected a scary set of beliefs that far too many Americans carry around in their heads. Among them:

• Eighteen percent who told Gallup in 1999 that they were convinced the sun revolves around the earth
• Twenty-one percent who told Gallup pollsters in 2005 that they believed witches exist
• Fifteen percent who told Ipsos pollsters in 2011 that they did not believe climate change is happening

There’s no way the president of the United States can govern effectively by following the will of the ignorant. Yet with a huge push from Fox News, some conservatives believe it’s wise for the leader of the free world to act like the smartest idiot in the land. Help us all if they succeed.

Members of the super committee meet on September 13. Ultimately, they failed to agree on a plan for $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction before the committee's Thanksgiving Day deadline. (Photo: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

I have little doubt that most Americans woke up the morning after the congressional super committee admitted defeat and, as I did, yawned.

The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, formed in August after the debt-ceiling standoff, surrendered Monday, offering a terse statement that declared its failure. “[W]e have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline,” the statement said.

Big surprise. All the preceding weekend, members of the committee—six Democrats and six Republicans selected from the House and Senate—took to the chat shows to cast the impending failure on the other party. Democrats slammed Republicans for refusing to raise taxes on billionaires and millionaires; Republicans implausibly countered that Democrats refused to cut spending.

For the most part, though, I suspect the debt-reduction debate is an abstraction to average, work-a-day folks—whether they have a job or not. Most Americans simply want an economy that is growing in ways that give them good employment opportunities and a chance to become more prosperous. Anyone paying attention to the debate in Washington, however, probably sees the bickering on Capitol Hill as business as usual in the game of politics. And, like me, they yawn.

A crisis of some sort comes and goes hourly in Washington, like passengers and trains through nearby Union Station. For the most part it has a modest impact on most people’s daily lives. This latest fiscal drama was supposed to be the endgame to last summer’s near-fiscal collapse, when only a looming default on our national debt led lawmakers to come to a partial debt-reduction deal and then create this super congressional committee to finish the job.

The 12 super lawmakers were granted power in September to draft a binding plan to cut $1.2 trillion from the federal debt by Thanksgiving Day. Well, guess what happened. That’s right, the committee didn’t finish the job. Still, the sun rose the next morning and Old Glory yet waves. I yawned as I tapped on my iPad to read the news and reactions to what the super committee did or, more precisely, did not do.

Now if the doomsayers are correct, the $1.2 trillion (say, just how much is that in real-people money, anyway?) will be cut automatically from the budget beginning in January 2013. Those cuts would be split almost evenly between domestic discretionary and defense spending, the most draconian way to balance the budget.

But of course, even that future-forward crisis may never come to pass. Some lawmakers are already talking about changing the rules so that the automatic cuts, known as sequestration, never occur. “The sequestration is not engraved on golden tablets,” said Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). “It’s a notional aspiration and I think we’d have sufficient support to prevent those kind of cuts from being enacted because of the impact it would have on national security.” President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) think otherwise, stating yesterday that the entire sequestration must proceed if Congress does not find a way to compromise on spending cuts and revenue raising to tackle future federal budget deficits.

That was what the super committee was obviously supposed to do. So what was the point? The answer is simple: politics, the business of Washington.

Fortunately, next year is a big election year. Nothing substantial can be decided until after the next president is known and the new Congress is seated. That means voters will have their say about the shape and course of the nation’s economic fortunes before anything can be settled.

Indeed, the battle lines are already taking shape. As my colleague Tanya Somander at ThinkProgress points out, conservative leaders are reluctant to cross swords with Grover Norquist, head of the extremist, antitax group Americans for Tax Reform. Norquist holds a death grip on conservative politicians who fear primary challenges if they seek to save the nation by demanding wealthy Americans pay their fair share of taxes.

President Obama vowed not to allow Congress to take the shortcut from their fiscal responsibilities. “There will be no easy-off ramps on this one,” the president said shortly after the super committee announced failure. “The only way these spending cuts will not take place is if Congress gets back to work and agrees on a balanced plan to reduce the deficit by at least $1.2 trillion. … they’ve still got a year to figure it out.”

Yawn! That’s never going to happen. Wake me up when it’s time to vote.

Los Angeles Lakers's Derek Fisher, president of the NBA players' association, speaks during a news conference and union executive director Billy Hunter, left, looks on, Tuesda, November 8, 2011, in New York. (Photo: AP/Frank Franklin II)

About this time in the never-ending cycle of professional sports, fans shift their athletic affection from baseball diamonds to basketball courts. It’s something akin to a circadian rhythm—as red and yellow leaves blanket the lawn and winter chills the night like a well-shaken martini, those of us who love sports get our thrills from the exploits of one-name wonders: Kobe, LeBron, and Melo.

But this year is different. There are no orange (fall’s favorite color) balls bouncing from coast to coast. Instead, a leaguewide lockout has shuttered NBA arenas, putting an end to the games for the moment and, perhaps, for the remainder of this season. Thus far, six weeks have passed since the season was supposed to have started and there’s little optimism that the players and owners will settle their differences to salvage what’s left of the season, which typically stretches 82 regular season games over the November-to-April calendar, followed by two months of playoffs.

Earlier this week, the National Basketball Players Association, the union that represents some 430 professional basketball players in the NBA, agreed to dissolve. By disbanding their union, the professional hoopsters plan to take their efforts toward securing a new contract into federal courts. Without their union to negotiate with the NBA collectively, the players seek to ratchet up pressure on team owners by having a judge declare the lockout a violation of federal antitrust laws.

Referring to the player’s decision, NBA commissioner David Stern told ESPN, “We’re about to go into the nuclear winter of the NBA.”

For sports addicts, however, the bottom line of all this legal wrangling is that we get no slam dunks, no ESPN highlights, and no courtside sightings of Jack and Spike.

I couldn’t care less. Though there’s hardly a more passionate basketball fan than me (though truthfully, I much more prefer the college game to the pros), this dispute leaves me cold. The idea that outrageously rich men who work in short pants are fighting with even richer men who pay them to do so strikes me as the zenith of silliness.

Nobody captured my sentiments better than Michael Wilbon of ESPN, who speaks for average, working people, some basketball fans and many not, as they shrug and wince through recent headlines.

“I’m tired of the debate, tired of what seems like whining over billions of dollars at a time when so many Americans are searching frantically for a second job just to pay the rent,” Wilbon wrote recently.

But, sports fan or not, Americans should pay attention to this ongoing story. While neither the players nor the owners strike me as sympathetic actors in this drama, what’s at stake is as old and nettlesome as any garden-variety labor dispute. Simply put, it’s workers against management.

Despite the nomenclature of players (which implies not working for a their pay) and owners (which smacks of slavery, a point that’s been made during the lockout), the NBA’s woes are a classic, textbook case for the need for and right to collective bargaining. Whatever is fair in this situation must come from the meeting of minds—and bank accounts—of the two parties involved. That can best be done across a bargaining table, not debated in a courtroom or staining the sports pages.

I’ll leave the specifics of the arguments presented by both sides for others to debate. What does concern me most is the way a decision is reached. Whether the players and owners know it, their struggle reflects a larger and more important concern for all American workers.

In the wake of the 2010 midterm elections, radical right-wing conservatives misread their ballot-box victories as a hunting license on unions. In Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states, these Tea Party-led conservatives over-reached by seeking to undermine public unions and to implement over-the-top, management-friendly laws that weaken workers’ rights.

Those hurt by the states’ decisions weren’t millionaire athletes, but low-wage employees. Fortunately, a counteroffensive has beaten back some of the laws, such as the recent voter uprising in Ohio, which has given life to similar efforts in Wisconsin.

Collective bargaining is under assault in this nation, and more is at stake than whether young men get to play games for princely salaries. Indeed, look no further than the dark and empty arenas. Where the rich go to play, workers with hourly contracts to serve as janitors, concession vendors, parking attendants, and so many more are out of work. The enormity of the NBA labor dispute offers a whole new meaning to the saying that life is about more than fun and games.