The Strange Death of Liberal America

Image:  Steve Helber/Associated Press

For some reason Republicans are fond of quoting Thomas Jefferson, even though Thomas Jefferson is about as far from the current version of the Republican Party as you can get. The problem is that when Republicans misquote Jefferson they either get it wrong or just make it up.  The latest GOP leader to distort Jefferson is Bob McDonnell, the newly-elected Governor of Virginia who delivered the Republican reply to Barack Obama’s State of the Union.

After letting viewers and listeners know he was delivering his response from the “historic House Chamber of Virginia’s Capitol, a building designed by Virginia’s second governor, Thomas Jefferson” McDonnell went on to quote Jefferson directly:

It was Thomas Jefferson who called for “A wise and frugal Government which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry ….and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned…”

The problem is that is not exactly what Jefferson said. Here is the complete quote, which is from Jefferson’s First Inaugural:

Still one thing more, fellow-citizens — a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

Why McDonnell distorts Jefferson

You will immediately notice how McDonnell conveniently left out important parts of Jefferson’s speech. Below is the speech as Jefferson gave it with McDonnell’s “editing” in bold:

Still one thing more, fellow-citizens — a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave [men] them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

Someone might argue that McDonnell was only condensing Jefferson’s words but not distorting their meaning, as is often done when you are quoti8ng someone else, especially in the short time McDonnell had to deliver his response, but such a defense of McDonnell’s editing is disingenuous at best.

To prove that point let us start with what McDonnell decided to cut from Jefferson.  First, and most important, is Jefferson’s phrase “which shall restrain men from injuring one another.” This is not merely an omission that when left out does not change Jefferson’s idea. Leaving it out distorts the entire meaning of what Jefferson said.

Distortion number one

In this speech, as in his other writings, Jefferson, who did believe in limiting central government, was making it clear that the very definition of a wise and frugal government was one which restrained people from harming one another.  In other words, this is one of the earliest expressions of what I have termed liberalism: the belief that a central role of government is to keep the playing field level.

As well all know Jefferson chose each word carefully. In this case he uses the word “restrain.” Restrain is an active verb. It suggests that government has a role of preventing in advance those injuries. You restrain a dog on a leash to prevent it from attacking someone. Jefferson is suggesting that the dogs of our society who are prone to attack others need to be kept on a leash.

The second key word is “injure.” Even back in Jefferson’s time a party in a lawsuit was referred to as the “injured party.” Jefferson is evoking that larger sense of injury not merely physical harm. In legal terms he was not just referring to what we might term criminal actions but civil ones as well.  To paraphrase Woody Guthrie, they can rob you with a pen just as easily as with a gun. Jefferson knew that.

To verify that is what Jefferson himself meant one need only read the rest of the speech. After that sentence he goes on to speak further about what he terms “the essential principles of our government.” The list of principles Jefferson articulates not only parallel what I term the four cornerstones of liberal America–economic and social justice, voting rights, educational equity, and media fairness–but echo the words he wrote for the Declaration of Independence:

Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political;

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none;

The support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies:

The preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad:

A jealous care of the right of election by the people — a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided;

The diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason;

Freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected.

Curiously Jefferson’s words echo more the sentiments that Barack Obama outlined in his State of the Union Address than McDonnell did in his reply.

The omission of the phrase that government shall “shall restrain men from injuring one another” by the Republican reply to Obama condenses in a few words the differences between the two parties. This incarnation of the Republican Party does not believe that government has a role to play in preventing people from being abused or injured. They believe the market will take care of that.

Bob McDonnell himself made that abundantly clear in his speech:

Top-down one-size fits all decision making should not replace the personal choices of free people in a free market.

And no government program can replace the actions of caring Americans freely choosing to help one another.

What government should not do is pile on more taxation, regulation, and litigation that kill jobs and hurt the middle class.

This rhetoric is exactly what Obama was criticizing in his speech.  Note the inflammatory phrase “Top-down one-size fits all decision making.” It is what is known as a straw man. No one, Democrat or Republican has ever said they believe in such a policy, but McDonnell is cleverly trying to wrap the Obama Administration in that straw.

The second sentence is equally disingenuous.  Note the use of the word “replacing.” Like McDonnell’s distortion of Jefferson this phrase is another unnecessarily inflammatory straw man. Of course no one would oppose replacing a private charity with a government program and no one has. But McDonnell’s rhetoric is designed to cast yet more straw around Barack Obama and the Democrats.

Then there is the final sentence, an interesting laundry list: “taxation, regulation and litigation.”  McDonnell seeks to lump these three together, which as anyone knows, they are not, except maybe in McDonnell’s mind.  Adding the qualifier “that kill jobs and hurt the middle class,” only begs the question, which taxes, which regulations, which litigation?

McDonnell cleverly leaves us hanging by this noose he has fashioned.   He won’t tell us the answer to the question, which is simplistic at best and demagoguery at worst.

Distortions number two and three

Note McDonnell conveniently left out the phrase, “ them otherwise.” This is important to understanding Jefferson’s thinking. Jefferson was saying that first government should insure that its citizens do not injure one another; then once that was done people were free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement. This is not an idle omission.

Including the phrase means that pursuits of “industry and improvement” can only be accomplished if the nation has a climate free of injury.  Injury distorts these relationships, Jefferson tells us.  By leaving out the “otherwise” McDonnell implies that either the prevention of injury is not a legitimate government function or that it actually distorts industry.

Given the quotes above, it appears he and the Republicans believe it is not a legitimate government function, at least when it comes to industry.  I cannot emphasize this too much. By his omissions I doubt McDonnell or the Republicans would say that government should not prevent some injuries; it’s just that when it comes to industry, regulation gets in the way.

A quick aside. My guess is that mist people listening to McDonnell assumed that the word industry meant business, and I think McDonnell intended people to think that, but Thomas Jefferson was using industry in its broadest sense, meaning any human endeavor, whether the arts or science or philosophy as well as business.

This leads to the second distortion which is the curious omission of the rest of Jefferson’s phrase “improvement.” Again, remember Jefferson’s use of language. The word improvement is purposely broad for it can mean the improvement of one’s mind or one’s economic situation.  If we think of improvement that way, then Jefferson’s opening about the role of government becomes even more important, for if government does not prevent “injury” then people will have a tough time improving themselves.

The final omission of Jefferson’s last sentence tells us all we need to know about McDonnell’s distortion. Jefferson uses the phrase “the sum of good government.” By that he means we cannot, as McDonnell has done, take just some of his words, we must accept them all or we do not have good government. By picking and choosing what of Jefferson he will accept and what he will not, McDonnell committed the most serious sin one could to Thomas Jefferson, for Jefferson, as we have seen, saw government as a series of interlocking parts. Take away one of the parts and government would cease to function.

The final word

We live in an era where the Internet and the mass media instantly broadcast any misquote or distortion as if it was real. By the time Snopes.com or some other truth seeker tracks down the error, it will have been circulated to millions of people. By distorting Jefferson, McDonnell was committing a serious crime, for you can bet now millions of people believe his quote is what Jefferson said and have no knowledge of the original.

I do not doubt that in a few years the McDonnell version will even appear in a few textbooks.  We must grant that either McDonnell was an idiot who did not understand what he was doing and also did not read or understand Jefferson’s Inaugural, or that the omissions were intentional.

As Barack Obama said in his State of the Union, it is time to stop this kind of distortion. If the Republicans have a case to make against big government, and I believe they do, they should be aloe to state it without having to resort to misquoting Thomas Jefferson to bolster their case. Like Jefferson, I chose my words deliberately. McDonnell’s speech misquotes Jefferson because it omits key words and phrases and by doing so distorts Jefferson’s meaning.

The next time the Republicans choose someone to reply to the President let us hope they will choose someone who can at least give an honest speech.  Americans deserve no less.

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Democrats have seen this coming for quite some time now. Personally, I thought some of the fears they voiced in the press were designed to light a fire under their own people so they would turn out on Election Day. So what happened in Massachusetts?  What are the implications for Barack Obama?

Right now as usual there is a lot of spewing about what cost Coakley the race and very little analysis. Frankly without data about the actual vote the rest is speculation. Unfortunately no exit polls were conducted because apparently the polling organizations figured Coakley had it in the bag and so decided not to waste any resources on exit polls.

While we can argue about not having these data, it is possible to go back to the much more reliable method of examining voting data to provide some picture of what happened.

A lousy campaign

That Coakley ran a lousy campaign is the theme of every piece of analysis out there. That is the wrong question and the wrong answer. The real question is first, how did someone who is such a bad campaigner get the nomination in the first place and second, why was she allowed to continue to run such a bad campaign for so long?

This is a campaign that featured gaffes such as misspelling the state’s name and pissing off the garden club. This is a campaign that was so poorly organized that voters who signed up to help did not get called until the eleventh hour. This is a campaign that was so politically clueless they did not bring in the top vote getter in the state in 2008 until all was lost. This is a campaign that was so policy clueless that the candidate ran against Obama’s health care bill in the state where the Senator whose seat she hoped to inherit was perhaps the major supporter of health care reform over the last quarter century.

Talia White has one of the more perceptive pieces arguing that Coakley totally ignored African Americans. By White’s account Coakley’s appearance at the Martin Luther King Day breakfast was embarrassing at the least and insulting at the worst.

Finally there was the notable sound of silence from the Kennedy clan (more on this further down).  You get some idea of their lukewarm support from hearing that Patrick Kennedy, Ted Kennedy’s son, kept referring to Coakley as Marsha instead of Martha during a stump appearance for her.  I blame this not on the Kennedys but on Coakley. It doesn’t take a political genius to figure out that if you are running for the seat held by John and Ted Kennedy, you should first court the Kennedy family’s support and second take every opportunity to involve the Kennedy family in the campaign.

This is especially sad because Ted Kennedy carried on his courageous battle for life for one reason: he wanted to see health care reform passed. Remember it was he who urged that his seat be filled as quickly as possible in the event of his death. In hindsight the rush to do this may have hurt Coakley. But when your opponent makes it clear his main objective is to kill the Obama health care bill that Ted Kennedy worked so hard for, then if you really want Ted Kennedy’s seat you will do battle with everything you have for the issue that mattered most to him.

The refusal to support the bill was Coakley’s biggest gamble and she lost it badly. In a heavily Catholic state where the Kennedys have wisely finessed the abortion issue, Coakley announced in November she would oppose the bills passed by both the House and Senate because of the abortion restrictions in them.

The stance was courageous, but stupid. It backed her into a corner where there was no way out. She would have had to insist on this when elected, torpedoing the compromises that had already been worked out. In short, even had Coakley won there would not have been 60 votes for the bill.  Instead, Coakley could have finessed the abortion issue in the campaign but held it as a trump card when she got to Washington.  Now her defeat gives more aid and comfort to the enemy.

Yet all of this analysis, like much else written so far about the campaign, begs for more data rather than ranting.

Voting analysis

Those of you who followed this blog through the 2008 election may remember the spreadsheets I used to track, and predict, the winners of various primaries and then the final Presidential vote.  Using these same sheets for a post mortem on the race for Ted Kennedy’s seat helps provide some perspective on the loss.

Above is a blank sheet. It is based on the presumption that the key votes for any Democratic candidate come from people of color, the poor,  less educated and organized labor. When Democratic candidates receive high turnouts from these voters they inevitably win as they did in 2008. Finally, one other constituency is key to Democrats winning–women. The so-called gender gap is very real. Democrats typically win when the percentage of women voting is higher than that of men.

In addition, older and younger voters have become a swing vote in the sense that older voters tend to vote more conservatively while younger voters have been one of Obama’s key bases. In some ways the story of the 2008 Democratic primary hinged on whether Obama could turn out enough younger voters to counter Hillary Clinton’s strong support from older voters.

Unfortunately it is difficult to compare Obama’s totals with Coakley’s because there are too many data holes. For example, there are no data on Obama’s percentages among people of color. Data on Coakley’s results are even scarcer given the lack of exit polling.

The vote by county

That means first place to start is with county data.  In order to better understand that we need a county map.

The chart below compares Barack Obama’s 2008 percentages with Coakley’s. The Obama percentages come from the Boston Globe and the Coakley votes from Dave Leip. Notice how poorly Coakley did across the board, losing double digit percentages in every county but one. The biggest changes are noted in red.

Just to see if you are on your toes and also because I am getting tired of this red/blue state stuff, the counties with the biggest shift are shown in blue.  In order to better understand these shifts we need to go down one more level to look at city voting results.

The vote by city

Data by town from the Boston Globe supply the reasons for Coakley’s defeat.  Start with Boston, the key for any Democrat who hopes to win Massachusetts. In 2008 Barack Obama received 184,000 Boston votes or 80% of the vote.  Coakley only received 105,000 votes and 69%, a drop of 11%–which is also the margin of difference in Boston’s Suffolk County.

That eleven percent essentially cost Coakley the race. Without precinct data, it is hard to take this further, but certainly it is difficult to not assume that the difference was due to a lower turnout and lower support among African Americans.

The chart below shows a comparison between cities in the 2008 Presidential election and the Senate contest. The cities were picked because all of them showed substantial margins by Obama and hence were instrumental in winning the state for him.  The color coding in the Brown-Coakley contest shows those changes. The blue cities are those that Coakley won by large margins, red indicates cities that switched from Obama to Brown and the brown (pun intended) highlights cities that Obama won handily, but in which Brown significantly narrowed the gap.

The colors tell the story of the election. The chart is dominated by brown and red with only a few blue cities.  The other key finding to note is that even in this off-year election Brown totaled more VOTES than McCain in 2008 in virtually all the cities on the list.  This indicates the Brown organization did an amazing job in turning out their voters while Coakley did not.

If we look at the chart in more detail several significant findings emerge. First, the only places Coakley managed to come close to Obama’s lead were largely in college towns: Cambridge and Amherst. In fact Cambridge gave Coakley her largest vote total of any city on the chart. You are not going to win elections by just carrying Harvard and MIT.

One significant exception to the college rule stands out: Wellesley.  Coakley won a town that Obama carried by a 2-1 margin by a mere twelve votes! The female candidate could only barely carry the home town of what is generally regarded as the best women’s college in the country.

The red cities–Lowell, Haverhill, and Dartmouth– that swung from huge Obama wins to Brown wins are interesting.  Haverhill is an old shoe manufacturing town that was once home to John Greeleaf Whittier, Louis B. Mayer, and the first Macy’s department store.  Income and housing values are below the state average while the cost of living is above the national average.  Most of its residents have only a high school education.  Unemployment has skyrocketed to over 10%.

In short this is the kind of town Democrats need to win if they want to stay in power. The Haverhill Gazette laid the blame squarely on health care reform, terming the bill a “monstrosity”  and so “overly complex” most voters do not know whether it helps or hurts them.

Lowell is another old manufacturing town that has been struggling to turn itself around for decades.  An editorial in the Lowell Sun titled “The Shot Heard Across the Nation” stated why Brown won:

There is no great mystery to Republican Scott Brown’s decisive victory in the Massachusetts Senate race. He worked harder than Democratic opponent Martha Coakley, connected with voters in a way she failed to do and clearly stated his position on the issues.

Located not far from Haverhill, Lowell is part of a region known as “the valley.”  Lowell’s profile is almost a carbon copy of Haverhill’s with income and housing values below the state average and residents who are mostly high school graduates.  Like Haverhill, the unemployment graph has taken a huge upsurge over the last two years jumping to 12%.

Dartmouth, the third swing city, has a similar profile to Haverhill and Lowell, although it does not have their history as a once-prosperous manufacturing center.

The city data essentially tell us that Coakley lost because she did not connect with traditional Democratic constituencies, whether the African Americans of Boston or the blue collar voters of Haverhill and Lowell.  With these data we can make some assumptions about our voting projection chart. Of the key constituencies Coakley needed to win: people of color, the less educated, and labor she did not do well with any of them.  If Wellesley is any indication she did not do well with women either.

Who brought you to the dance?

Like some Democrats (are you reading this Nancy Pelosi), Coakley forgot who brought her to the dance. In many ways Coakley’s loss reminds me of the disastrous Ned Lamont campaign in neighboring Connecticut. In both cases what I term the “Limousine Liberals,”– well-educated, upper-middle class white voters– were the only ones who saw anything in the candidate. Coakley wins Harvard but loses Lowell and has a lackluster showing in Boston.

Contrary to what the press is saying about some huge Republican tide, the Coakley debacle is an excellent case of the old adage, “all politics are local. ” Reviewing the data, the wonder is not that Coakley lost, but that she kept the race reasonably close.  Massachusetts does not need to worry about suddenly swinging Republican; it needs to worry about the Limousine Liberals capturing their party.

I have said for several decades that the Limousine Liberals are to the Democratic Party what the Religious Right is to the Republicans, a powerful interest group that cannot be allowed to dominate the party.  The problem with Limousine Liberals is not so much what they believe, but that they operate with blinders. This is most evident in the key issue of the Democratic Party and our times–the economy.  Three years ago I argued that the economy not Iraq would be the key issue in 2008 and that if the Democratic Party ignored it they would lose.

I also argued that both Al Gore and John Kerry had ignored people of color in their campaigns and that cost them the White House. The Democrats won in 2008 because they had an African American candidate, not in spite of one.  The Obama coattails that helped to turn out people of color in 2008 that were the key in several close Congressional races.

In short, Martha Coakley forgot who brought the Democrats to the dance.  It has been a long time since I have seen a candidate who made so many tactical blunders: ignoring the Kennedys, people of color and blue collar voters is not how you win elections.

The Clinton factor

In the post-mortems on the Coakley candidacy, people forget that she was a hold-out delegate for Hillary Clinton at the 2008 national convention.   The PUMA-type blogs are full of posts about Coakley. One example:

For those of you who don’t know, Martha Coakley is a strong Hillary Clinton supporter. Coakley was a Clinton delegate to the Convention in Denver and refused to surrender her vote to Dr. Utopia, even when Deval Patrick and the Kennedy spiders pressured her to do so. Coakley stood by Clinton, and Clinton Democrats need to stand by Coakley now.

The PUMA Pac itself was not sure what to do with Brown, given their hatred for Obama (note the silly tactic of spelling Obama with no cap).

He IS a Washington outsider, at least for now (though so was Martha Coakley), so maybe he’ll do enough harm to the obama administration to make it worthwhile for pumas to suffer the fool.

The long view, then, is that Coakley was part of the long-standing Kennedy-Clinton feud. For the Clinton camp to have one of their own in Ted Kennedy’s seat would have been a real coup.  This is the real reason why Coakley did not seek support from the Kennedys and why their support for her was so lackluster they could not even get her first name right.

There are some who will try to spin this as yet another message about turning to the right, but even as the results of the Coakley debacle were trickling in I was reading a recent report on the 2008 election firm Catalyst, the microtargeting effort progressive Democrats launched in 2008.

Its conclusion was startling and should hearten progressives.  Two points stand out:

Obama did better where more progressive registration and persuasion work occurred.

When controlling for demographic factors, progressive activities still appear to explain outcome at the county level in a  way that demographics alone cannot.

Coakley made no use of the groups behind the Catalyst effort (the service employees’ union was a major one) nor its tactics.

The big picture

I have been saying for almost a year that the Obama Administration made a huge tactical mistake by going after health care reform as its first big effort. I compared it to their Bay of Pigs or Bush’s Iraq debacle in that it was a “pay-back issue,” an issue from previous administrations that this one was determined to get through.

Health care reform is a laudable goal and needed desperately, but you do not go into a battle with the troops on your side so badly divided that some of them are opposed to the objective.  To switch metaphors, you also do not take your eyes off the ball, especially as the economy is worsening.

Those unemployment charts from Haverhill and Lowell send a message as clear as their votes in the Coakley election: things are not getting better and people want the White House to deal with the economy not expend precious political capital on another fight.

If I were on the White House staff I would post this chart on my wall and make sure Barack Obama sees it every chance he gets. Curiously if you flip that chart upside down it virtually mirrors Obama’s ratings, which have dropped at a slop rate very close to that of the unemployment rate.

Barack Obama won the White House because people perceived that the nation’s problems were largely caused by Republicans and that he would do something to steer the Titanic away from the looming iceberg.  The rise in unemployment in Haverhill and Lowell–and in similar towns across America–carry an ominous message far more important than Brown’s victory. People are now beginning to ask what has Obama done to relieve unemployment?

The Bush Depression ins now in danger of becoming the Obama Depression.  If so, this President is doomed to one term, for if people view the Depression as Obama’s rather then Bush’s–and in two years they have a right to do so–then this nation is in serious trouble, for the alternative is more of the William McKinley top-down economics that will only widen the gao between rich and poor.

If Obama wants a second term then it is time to get rid of Summers, Geithner and the Clinton clones who are making this mess worse (some of them helped to cause it) and bring in some people who can get the job done, not suck up to Wall Street.

But more on that for a future post. Meanwhile congratulations to newly elected Senator Brown, for in a strange way you may be just what the Democratic Party needed–a good kick. You have forced us to look in the mirror. Let’s just hope we understand what we see.

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Even the reporters’ heads seem to be spinning as they try to put what has happened it Haiti in perspective.  They try to fall back on numbers and images, but the numbers keep changing and perhaps only a satellite image can convey the magnitude of what has happened.  One headline likened it to an atomic bomb striking Port-au-Prince.

The real scope of the disaster hits home when you start looking for facts to help understand this international crisis. We do even know how many people were living in Port-au-Prince before the quake hit with estimates varying by as many as hundreds of thousands:  between 2.5 and three million.  A doctor I heard on the radio who is working in Haiti said he estimated three-quarters off the city was rubble.

What makes the situation especially grim is that before the quake Haiti had a health care system already in bad need of repair. WHO estimated the healthy life expectancy at birth of the average Haitian to be 43-44 years.  A statistic that hit especially hard was that before the quake WHO estimated that the probability of dying between the ages of 15 and 60 was 33% for men and 24% for women.

Before the quake only 70% of the urban population had sustainable access to decent drinking water and only 29% had access to decent sanitation. The quake wiped out even those meager resources.  Nineteen percent of all Haitian children under five were underweight and 30% under five had stunted growth.

All these numbers mean that as many as a million of those living in Port-au-Prince were already living on the margins. With the quake destroying hospitals, schools, infrastructure along with homes even those who were fortunate enough to be able to access water and sanitation are now without it.

Tangshan

Seeking to understand what has happened I began researching national disasters.  One of the worst quakes in history hit the Chinese city of Tangshan in 1976, killing at least a quarter of a million people.  Tangshan’s population at the time was about a million.  The picture at the top of this essay is of Tangshan after the quake.

A coal mining town, Tangshan was closed to foreigners for seven years after the disaster. A British journalist was finally able to get into the city and interview some of the survivors.  Here is one story:

As I walked home, I passed a fish pond and noticed the fish jumping up out of the water, indicating that the ground temperature had risen very high. That night, I couldn’t sleep, and I lay in bed, just dozing. Suddenly I was woken by a bright flash in the sky and the room was brilliantly lit as if by lightning. There was a roaring sound like a very big wind except that the air was still, and intermittent sounds of explosions. Then a great shaking motion began, up and down.

I was shocked awake by the light, shook my wife awake and spent a long time looking for my slippers. It is my custom to put my slippers on when I get out of bed.

By the time I reached the door, the up-and-down rolling motion had begun, and the building was rocking so much, I couldn’t get the door open. I went back and clung to the bed. Outside the window, the trees were swinging back and forwards crazily. When the rolling motion finished less than a minute later, I opened the door and ran into the courtyard and found that all the buildings around had collapsed.

The reporter noted that because the quake came as Chairman Mao neared death people took it as a sign that political changes were coming.

Even years later when the reporter visited the city he noted thousands of paraplegics filled the hospitals and many were still living in tar paper shelters originally intended to be temporary but were still standing eleven years later.

A Caltech reprint of a Chinese report on Tangshan calls it the greatest earthquake disaster in the history of the world.  The introduction states:

The report shows what can happen when an unexpected earthquake strikes an unprepared city.

The report’s four volumes contain a great deal of technical data, but even the titles of the chapters provide some idea of the power of a large earthquake:  “Liquification Data of Sandy Soils” and “Liquification of the Saturated Silt Underlying Tianjin Petroleum Plant.” Volume Two contains a thousand pages detailing the damage to buildings in Tangshan.  When you scroll down the Table of Contents it provides for sobering reading and a parallel to what has happened in Haiti. Volume three is over 800 pages that record damage to infrastructure.

The last chapter of that volume is titled “Rebuilding Tanshan” and is over a hundred pages long.  It took over a minute to download that chapter to read it.  Written by three Chinese authors it obviously was heavily censored. Yet it provides some idea of the resources needed to cope with a disaster of that magnitude. The authors note that 110,000 Chinese troops were dispatched to the area.

One story in particular sticks out:

On August 4, the 8th day after the earthquake, the officers and soldiers of the 9th Company heard a weak voice calling for help from the ruins of the Kailuan Hospital.  They dug a trench 10 m long in the rubble and prized layers of collapsed floors and after 6 hours, along with the cooperation of the medical team; they finally rescued Wang Shubin who was a worker at the Tangshan Alumina Mine.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to be trapped in rubble for eight days. I would have gone mad.

Another even more unbelievable story comes from the ruins of the same hospital:

They dug a small hole 10 cm in diameter from which a woman’s weak panting was heard.  They were afraid of hurting the victim if they were to use power tools.  Instead, they used their hands to remove the rubble and broken concrete.  More than 10 soldiers carried away three pieces of concrete slabs each weighing more than one ton and they pulled down the shattered wall on the west side.  On August 9 they finally rescued the woman, Lu Guilan; having been buried for 303 hours under the ruins.

Do the math–303 hours is ten days. I hope that no one is Port-au-Prince has to endure that.

The report goes on to note that it took another 42,300 people to repair railway damage, 3,000 people to repair power stations and another 100,000 disaster relief workers.  To temporarily fix the water supply the Chinese government airlifted 15,000 miles of hose and 40 tons of steel pipe.  In this airlift the report notes that the repaired Tanshan airport experienced one take-off every 26 seconds.

Because of the need to coordinate traffic in the devastated city 400 soldiers were brought in for traffic control. A total of 4.87 million kilograms of food needed to be transported to keep people alive.  Because it was summer, one of the main worries became the risk of the spread of disease from the thousands of bodies buried in the rubble.

Even with these efforts, one candid sentence in the report notes that two months after the quake sanitary conditions were still poor.  The report also points out a problem I had not thought about–what do you do with the garbage in a city that has been virtually destroyed but still has a quarter of a million survivors?

Then comes a section on “Rectifying the social order” that should give us all pause when we think about Haiti:

After the earthquake a small number of people acted improperly.  They seized the opportunity to start rumors and spread reactionary and superstitious remarks and created a mood of fear.  They robbed private properties, raped women and disturbed the public order.

The Need for Help

What happened in Tangshan will probably never be fully documented, but even allowing for China’s understandable desire to show that heroic measures were taken, that quake should provide a grim picture of what it will take to deal with the disaster in Port-au-Prince.

Behind the numbers that continue to flow from Haiti lie numb people walking the streets with broken limbs, bleeding heads and vacant stares in their eyes.  As with any disaster, the press faces the dilemma of showing the unthinkable or averting their eyes.  But they have learned from Katrina and other disasters that their pictures of devastation can pack the power to move people to take action and if ever there was a need for action it is now.

If every American would do what they can for the people of Port-au-Prince, as this country responded to the Asian tsunami, perhaps we can help prevent more people from dying. This is not about liberals or conservatives or politics at all–although inevitably it will become political–it is about helping people.

Given the WHO statistics and the Tanshan report this crisis will not be over in a week or even a month. We are talking about rebuilding a major city.  What will be needed in the coming weeks will be aid that will prevent the survivors from dying.

Sites across the Internet as well as radio and television networks are posting links to places you can make donations. Here is the link to the CNN site that seemed to me to be the most comprehensive.

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