Title: LITTLE ROCK NINE
Date: 10/30/09
Program Number: 1834
HOST: BONNIE ERBE
PANELISTS:
DEL. ELEANOR HOMES NORTON,
(D-DC)
GENEVIEVE WOOD,
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION
MELINDA HENNEBERGER,
POLITICSDAILY.COM EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
KAREN CZARNECKI,
FORMER LABOR DEPT. OFFICIAL
TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY
DC TRANSCRIPTION
- WWW.DCTMR.COM
MS. ERBE: This week on To the Contrary, up first can a flu shot shortage topple health care reform? Then, kids think moms should do the housework. Behind the headlines, remembering a segregated South.
(Musical break.)
MS. ERBE: Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe. Welcome to To the Contrary, a discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives. Up first, preventing an epidemic.
Health centers and clinics across the country turned away people this week who were in search of the H1N1 or swine flu vaccine. The Obama administration admits of the 120 million doses that was promised this summer, just more than 23 million have been delivered. By week's end, the government reported almost 100 deaths nationwide and dozens of schools across the country closed to prevent spread of the flu. Some Americans now question whether the Obama administration is up to handling what could become a major public health emergency.
Opponents of the president's health care reform say the vaccine shortage is proof the government shouldn't be in the health care business. This didn't stop Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats from unveiling a health care reform bill on Thursday that includes both a public option and an expansion of Medicaid. But a new survey finds support among women for the public option may be waning. The majority of women surveyed say they're pleased with their current health insurance and do not agree that a federally run health care program is the answer. Another study finds more than half of all medical bankruptcies are filed by women, most of whom had some form of insurance.
So Congresswoman Norton, is this shortage and the handling of the shortage by the Obama administration proof that the government shouldn't be in the health care business?
DEL. NORTON: Oh, no. The administration is doing just fine. It's the private sector that's growing the vaccine. And the eggs seem to be on their own timetable.
MS. WOOD: Bonnie, there're a lot of reasons the government shouldn't be managing our health care system, but I would say overpromising, under-delivering, which is what we see in this case, is just one example.
MS. HENNEBERGER: I don't think that it's Obama's fault that the manufacturers, as Eleanor said, failed to do what they had promised to do. But on the other hand, if we have an epidemic of the kind we had in 1918, I think health care reform will be low on our list of problems. I don't understand, though, why women would be any more concerned about the public option given that if we're really for competition, as we say we are in this country, then we should be celebrating competition from the government for these insurers.
MS. CZARNECKI: Well, I think it's proof of the admitted political naiveté of this administration and the fact that you can't have a flu shot in every pot.
MS. ERBE: All right. Let's start first with the shortage and what - this week alone, I understand, there were almost 100 deaths. I heard a figure of 1,000 somewhere. And mothers waiting in line for hours and hours and being turned away for shots for their young children. What's going on? Do we have a pandemic or an epidemic going on here?
DEL. NORTON: We don't. But what we do have is a strain of flu that we've not seen before. And they've had to start from scratch. They can't start from where they were last year on the flu. They had to start from scratch. But look, the administration has done everything that an administration is supposed to do. Those shots are out the moment they are grown. And they've set up - they've declared an emergency that says you don't have to do it by the rule. You can administer the shots anywhere. But when people see kids dying, you get a run on shots that aren't available because the private sector said they were going to do something and didn't do it. So I guess the question is, can we depend on the private sector to run health care?
MS. WOOD: Oh, boy, here we go. (Laughter.)
(Cross talk.)
MS. WOOD: - which is, look, when you have a situation like this, nobody can fix it perfectly, including - well chief among who can't do it would be the government. I think if they'd made a mistake here was early on coming out promising these things and - I'm not saying that we shouldn't tell people to be careful that we need to watch what's going on, but I think there was a lot of hype and of course that's partially the media's fault, but the problem is you told people we're going to have 120, now you -
MS. ERBE: I didn't know. You didn't know.
MS. WOOD: - President Obama did. We're going to have 120 million doses of the vaccine. Now, we're nowhere close to that. Now you've had the hype of people getting in. some people have been very sick. In some cases it's been more minor, but the problem with that is then you really create the kind of run on the drug and there's no confidence that anybody, including the government can do something about it.
MS. HENNEBERGER: But you want to have people getting this vaccine, so I think the public education they did was a good thing. The problem was not having the vaccine to back it up. So -
MS. WOOD: That's right. That's right.
MS. CZARNECKI: Oh, I think they did a great job in the public awareness campaign. The problem is -
MS. ERBE: But let me ask you this, though. What if they hadn't this summer said, "we're going to have" - pick a number - whatever number it should have been? Or what if they hadn't done anything? Or what if they said "private firms are promising us 120 million. We don't really know if it's going to be that."
MS. CZARNECKI: That's what they should have done. You're absolutely right. They did a great job talking it up.
MS. ERBE: Would that be better, would that have been better than the situation now?
MS. CZARNECKI: They were overly optimistic, overly rosy. And if you talked to anyone in the health care community, talk to your own doctors, if you have a condition, they say here's the best case scenario. Here's the worst case scenario. The administration - and if you take a look at Kathleen Sebelius' comments - took the best case scenario instead of saying here's the range that we're looking at. We're hoping for it to be here, but it might be here. And I think they really overpromised and they couldn't deliver. And that's why -
(Cross talk.)
MS. CZARNECKI: - confidence is not there -
MS. HENNEBERGER: If she had said, "Oh, my God, we probably we won't have enough vaccine," wouldn't we then be -
(Cross talk.)
MS. CZARNECKI: - should have taken a more conservative approach -
MS. ERBE: Congresswoman?
DEL. NORTON: They didn't overpromise. They had private parties. The only people - the only parties who grow this vaccine say, "We got it." They do get it. They know how to grow it. And we can get you on time 120 million doses. The failure was there.
MS. ERBE: But wait a second, Congresswoman -
DEL. NORTON: You don't understand what the failure was and I'm not even blaming them. I'm saying the reason for it is that even they had no experience doing it.
MS. ERBE: Okay, but they did call in - Karen was in the Bush administration and she said before the taping of the show that they had called in experts from the 1970 problem. And also President Bush, just five years ago, had the same problem. So why couldn't they have known that it is frequently a mistake on the part of the private sector not to deliver as many as promised.
DEL. NORTON: I think that makes my point. They called in all the experts. They agreed, as every Democratic administration does. Let's see what went right and what went wrong. And still, the manufacturers - and I pray that you focus on where the problem is. It is a new strain. The manufacturer knows how to do it with the old time flu. This thing is growing slower than the other vaccines did. And on that, there is something left to providence or whoever does this.
MS. ERBE: Okay, but let's switch topics a little bit now. Where are we - the House Democrats, of which you are one, unveiled some more proposals this week. Where do we - what's going on with health care? What's the next step? How long before it's actually a bill? And will it contain a public option?
DEL. NORTON: We really have done something here because our caucus is nothing short of a cross-section of America. We had to get people from absolutely Republican districts - it's not our members - Republican leaning districts, people from more liberal districts, like me, we had to get the people in the middle. We had to deal with the regions. My colleagues, on the other side, have one clump of people from the South and a few others. And they all agree on the same thing. So they don't - all they've got to do is say no. And that's all they're doing.
What we've done is we've had to listen to what America is saying. What we got is we're saving you $150 billion over the next 10 years in health care. You're going to have no preexisting condition be an object. We have met the president's mark. That was tough. And guess what? The public option has come roaring back so that even the Senate, which said no, never, is going to put it in their bill or so it claims.
MS. WOOD: And it's going to be a disaster. I don't think it's going to get through with all of that. And the fact is a lot of folks in the Democratic Party, we talked to many of them, who were not supportive of the public option or anything else multiplied in this 1,990 page document, who I would love to know how many Democrats or anybody on Capitol Hill have actually read it. And furthermore, look, this thing would put almost - the goal of Nancy Pelosi - herself said - over 90 percent of Americans would have the option now of being in government health care, which is Nancy Pelosi's goal. I don't know it for sure, but that's her goal.
DEL. NORTON: That is untrue. Wait a minute. I can't let that go by. Only about 12 million people will qualify to be in the public option. So she said - what she said was our bill covers 96 percent of the American people. Almost everyone would be in their all employer based health care.
(Cross talk.)
MS. WOOD: - but have some form of government controlled health care.
(Cross talk.)
MS. ERBE: That is it. From health to home.
Women may be making gains in the workforce, but when it comes to household chores, even children still believe it's a woman's domain. According to a new study in the "Journal of Family Issues," not only do girls do more work around the house than boys, but the time kids in general spend on chores is directly related to the number of hours their father is at work. For each extra hour a father works, his children on average do two more minutes of housework a week. But this isn't true when moms work more. Why? Some experts say despite major changes in the workforce, it's still acceptable for working fathers to opt out of housework, leaving it to the kids to help their mothers pick up the slack.
The study's author, sociologist Constance Gager says, quote, "We expected that as a generation or two of women have gone out into the labor force, the gender differences would have faded in their children, but that's not happening."
So are mothers doing enough to have their partners pick up a bigger chunk of the work at home, the childcare, and the housework?
MS. HENNEBERGER: I guess my first reaction to that is that it's kind of a middle class question. For a lot of women - you can say in an ideal world, sure we should all pick the perfect partner who will be happy to do 50 percent or more of housework, but a lot of women are very happy to find someone who is employed and a kind person. So I just don't see the housework issue - I don't hear on girls' night out women talking about the onerous housework issue. And it's more complicated than that. Like in the study that shows that even little girls do more housework than the little guys. Well, I have twins, 13 year old, boy and a girl, so I just see that - well, first of all, my little girl is just as work brittle as my son, so I don't know that she's doing more. But girls grow up faster and is it such a bad thing if girls take more of the responsibilities -
MS. ERBE: Yes. (Laughter.)
MS. HENNEBERGER: I just think we're more - it may be my bias, but I think we're cleaner and more responsible by nature. (Laughter.)
(Cross talk.)
MS. ERBE: Wait. The congresswoman said why don't you get on that side of table and you said, no, no. Here's your response.
MS. CZARNECKI: I think we still have old fashioned views of this. The men or the young boys do the outside work and the girls do the inside work. I think there needs to be an even split. It's only when you see men who are unemployed, having to stay home and pick up some of the slack inch of it, I know a lot of these people. They're kind of astonished at how much work it is to keep a home, to do the cooking, to do the laundry. Unless you put a man in that position, he isn't going to know. I think women do want a cleaner house and they're not going to accept substandard work from their spouses or their partners. But at the same time, we as women, as mothers, have to make sure that we are training children at a very early age in everybody helping.
MS. ERBE: But let me ask you - I was married the first time in 1979. I thought by the time you guys came along that this would be a problem of the past. And my question to you is whose fault is it? Where does the blame lie that things haven't changed?
MS. WOOD: Well, this is really hard for me because growing up, my dad did at least 50 percent, maybe more of the housework. And my mom and dad both worked. They're both in the education industry. And so it's hard for me. And I kind of heard people along the way, "This is unusual. Your father is unusual." But part of it is my dad, by temperament, is just - is a neat freak and he wants everything very neat and very clean. So I think that has as much to do with it, frankly, as anything. And in general, more women are in that category than guys. I honestly - I don't hear my girlfriends who are married talking about this.
DEL. NORTON: Well, you know what? They ought to talk about it. And let me tell you why they ought to. Feminists, and many of them will be maybe not your friends - (laughter) -
MS. WOOD: No, not my friends, right.
DEL. NORTON: - should not be raising - they should not be raising their girls and boys differently. They should not be offloading more work on their boys. And they should not be allowing the husband to offload it on the girl. And that's what's happening. The women are so overtaxed they can't possibly go to work, do more of the housework than the male does, and then she looks around. Girls, yes, are more willing. You should make them. We're raising people to get divorced because when they, in turn, grow up and they see the unfairness, you get the kind of disputes within the household - we are carrying on to the last generation. As a feminist I say I take the indictment and I think we all ought to take it seriously. If we haven't passed on all of this that we've been preaching to the way in which we're raising children, we ought to accept the criticism and do better.
MS. ERBE: But I want to get back to one thing you said and then ask you another question as well. You said a lot of women and it's - in their 20s and 30s it's usually the women chasing the men to get married. In their 60s and 70s it's usually the widowers chasing the widows to get married. The tables do turn, right. But my point is - you made the point that women - a lot of women are so happy to find the guy who's good to them and -
MS. HENNEBERGER: I didn't mean it quite like that, but -
MS. ERBE: - but I'm talking about a decent - right, that's not at the top of the list. But if this keeps going, doesn't that hold women back? If you keep raising sons who are going to have their wives do most of the work and daughters who are going to do it for their husbands, don't you hold your own children - female children back in the workplace?
MS. HENNEBERGER: I have raised my kids exactly the same way, boy and a girl. Why? Because I don't have the energy to do gender differences with the two of them. But I can tell you that I would never have believed before I had children how much is innate. Is the housework innate? No, not necessarily. And I don't see, as I said, differences with my kids in how much work they are willing to do. But I just think that it's too easy to say it's all about gender. There are personality differences.
My husband, for example, is very willing to help out in any way. There've been times in my career when he's done way more of the childcare than I have. And that's been great for his relationship with our kids. But there are - it's also that - maybe I'm speaking too much out of my own experience. I want it like I want it. So I'm fine with doing that.
MS. ERBE: All right. And I'm fine unfortunately with having to move one because we're out of time. Behind the headlines, the Little Rock Nine, three years after Brown v. Board of Education outlawed school segregation, the most famous school integration in American history took place in Arkansas. On September 25th, 1957, Carlotta Walls LaNier and eight other African-American students integrated Little Rock Central High School. In her memory, a mighty long way, Walls LaNier - sorry - shares her personal story for the first time. She's sat down with To the Contrary to discuss the current state of race relations in America and why she decided to be one of the integrators.
(Begin video segment.)
MS. CARLOTTA WALLS LANIER: I wanted to experience everything available to me and not only that, I wanted to get the best education possible. And Brown v. Board of Education - Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board gave me that opportunity.
MS. ERBE: At 14, Walls LaNier was the youngest member of the Little Rock Nine. She says every day at Central High School was a struggle against discrimination.
MS. LANIER: The harassment that took place was ongoing. There was a small group of people who felt it was their job to make it miserable for us. And they did as much as they possibly could. I was never taught hate at home. And that was not a lesson I learned at home. And I was able to still be open-minded and openhearted about people. I considered them ignorant - that that element of people who couldn't be open to change just had to ignorant. And with me, I put myself above all of that. And I had been told, as I grew up, "Don't ever pull yourself down or allow yourself to be pulled down to that level of ignorance and no matter what it was." And so that was how I approached it.
MS. ERBE: Just like the title of her book, Walls LaNier acknowledges society has come a mighty long way, but she says society is not color blind.
MS. LANIER: Just because we have an African-American president does not stop racism. We're still not inclusive in this country. We need to have more dialogue regarding race among people. We can agree to disagree. We are not going to all be on the same page, but it gives you an opportunity to hear someone else's views if you are open-minded about it. So you've got to be willing to be open to these sorts of ideas from other people. And I'm not just talking black-white. I'm talking overall. I'm talking about Muslims and Hispanics and Asians, whether American is put on the end or not.
MS. ERBE: Walls LaNier believes education is the key and it's this belief that helped her overcome discrimination and become one of only three Little Rock Niners and the only female to graduate from Central High School. She hopes students today won't take her sacrifice for granted.
MS. LANIER: Very few of our young people today know about the Civil Rights Act. They don't understand the Voting Rights Act, the Housing Act. All of these things came out of Brown v. Board. It needs to be taught. I want them to know that a lot of people did a lot of things for them to have the opportunities that they have today. And I also say that they need to keep education as their number one goal. I don't hear that today. I grew up that way that when you looked at your priorities in life, I was always told, you get the best education possible and no one can take it away from you. And you know what? That is still true today.
(End video segment.)
MS. ERBE: But is it true today among young people? We see soaring high school dropout rates. Several generations ago even before this great activist, people would have thought for the ability to stay in school. And there was a nation before there was a public school system. So do today's young people just take it for granted?
DEL. NORTON: Well, the dropout rates today are inexcusable, but the fact is that in her generation few Americans graduated from high school. Indeed, coming back form World War II, before the -
MS. CZARNECKI: The V.A. Act.
DEL. NORTON: - yes, that sent a whole generation to college, most people have gone no further than high school. Today, you have much greater, much greater proportion graduating from high school, and from that matter college. But look at the society we have today. A high school education doesn't get you anything. Unless you have some college, you can't compete in this country. And forget about the global economy. So when we see people dropping out of high school - and we think of what she went through to get high school education and a college education, we think what a waste. It's so easy to get a high school education today. Of course, it is harder for many young people who are brought up in the chaos of some of our households. We've got to come to grips with that. That's the only way to stay competitive.
MS. CZARNECKI: I think we do need to focus on education. They talk about America being the melting pot. Well, our schools are the mixing bowls essentially. And if you're not learning a lot of the history of what's happened in this country in the schools, you're not going to read about it unless you're a subscriber to "National Geographic" or the "Smithsonian" Magazine. I think we do have to teach people what - the struggles different people have undergone and what it means today and what it means for the future. And I think the conversations do have to continue. And I do think our schools are going to be the place where the kids are going to learn this.
MS. ERBE: Is it possible, especially Little Rock, with a predominantly African-American population downtown I would imagine, that in those schools they're not teaching the history of civil rights and what African-Americans went through?
DEL. NORTON: Black History Month and I think they probably are in predominantly black schools. I'm not sure in schools throughout the United States.
MS. WOOD: One of the folks who - wasn't that particular year - but who's one of the chief advocates in D.C. for D.C. School Choice, so that more kids get better education - I agree. We disagreed on this a little bit, Eleanor. Virginia Walden-Ford went to Little Rocks Central High back during this period and she's one of the most, I think, articulate and strongest advocates for why we ought to be making education something that is accessible - a good education to every child who wants to get it. And it doesn't mean trapping them in inner-city schools.
MS. ERBE: All right. Hear, hear, except for the last part. (Laughter.) That's it for this edition of To the Contrary. Next week, returning female war veterans say VA care isn't adequate. Please join us on the web for "To the Contrary Extra" and whether your views are in agreement or to the contrary, please join us next time.
(END)