Our bumpy electoral system (random data point)

I have missed voting in only one presidential election during the many years in which I've been eligible. It wasn't in 1988, while we were living in Japan -- and when we succeeded in getting absentee ballots so we could vote in Washington DC. My one omission was, gasp, the razor's-edge 2000 election*, but I was voting in California that year, where the race wasn't even close.

I'm getting worried that 2008 may be my second no-show. Something like one percent of the entire electorate is voting from overseas, or so I am told by various expatriate groups. In any case it's enough to make a difference in close elections and close states. My vote is not likely to make an Electoral College difference, as my non-vote didn't eight years ago. (I'm voting in DC.) But I really like voting anyway, and here's how it has gone.

In theory, voting from overseas is easy. The requirements are:

Being registered. No sweat. Fully signed up in DC.

Request an ballot, through this streamlined form at VoteFromAbroad.org. This is a great site that provides a great service. You tell it where you're registered, and it pulls up the right official form to request an absentee ballot from your state. Our your District, in our case. My wife and I filled out the forms to get our DC ballots. We listed a friend's address in DC where the ballots could be sent (if mailed to China they would never get here), and we gave the request forms to a friend headed to SF to mail them in early September. (If mailed from China they would never get there.)

But.... the absentee ballots never arrived. Rather, as of the moment I write, nearly eight weeks after they were requested, have not yet arrived at our US address. So we go to the...

Emergency write-in provision. To allow for circumstances like ours, another site conveniently lets you print out a write-in ballot for president, which you can mail to your home jurisdiction. Write in ballots available here or here (Republican- and Democratic-sponsored sites). To qualify, you have to do what we've already done: already be registered, already have requested the absentee ballot, but not yet have received it.

So, we printed out those absentee ballots, hand-wrote in our choices for President and VP, and gave them to another US-bound friend to mail. Will they ever get there? Will they ever be counted? We will never know. So I just hope the election is not close. At least not in DC.

My compatriots based in America: enjoy your convenient right to vote!
____
* Bizarrely, just before the election I was flying a small airplane across the country to the Berkeley CA area, where we were living at the time. I planned to arrive at the Concord CA airport on the night before the election. But an early blizzard and ice storm kept me grounded in Duluth for four days, and I watched the election and preliminary recount drama from bars in the Lake Street area while drinking Minnesota's own Summit beer.

An essay by someone who has never worked in a political campaign (updated)

From the Wall Street Journal op-ed page:

There is something odd -- and dare I say novel -- in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics.

What???  A general-election presidential campaign consists, roughly speaking, of appearing before one crowd after another all day long. I know this from having worked in one, but all you have to do is watch TV to get the idea.

I know, it is hardly shocking that the WSJ would publish a piece suggesting that Barack Obama is the wrong man for the times. (This one by Fouad Ajami.) Nor that it would reach, Pravda-like, to find the latest argument against him. Haven't looked, but I bet that when Sarah Palin was drawing big crowds the Journal's editorialists noted this with approval.

But doesn't a certain self-protective "wait a minute, can we really say that?" instinct kick in at some point? Are there no copy editors any more?

Update: Actually, there are no copy editors any more! Marge duMond, head of the crack copy editing team at our own Atlantic Monthly, reminds me of this dispatch soon after the Murdoch takeover of the WSJ, which disclosed that the WSJ was laying off large numbers of its editors. The Journal's new managing editor said:

The reformed structure means that it is essential for reporters and bureau chiefs to ensure that copy filed to the news desk is clean...

Yes, that's a foolproof plan.

After the Obama infomercial

Let's review what we have seen from Barack Obama through the two years of his campaign:

- Skills in formal oratory that, in my view, you'd have to go back to John F. Kennedy to match. Bill Clinton could, and can, hold an audience spellbound, but his speeches are a collection of brilliant apercus more than a central argued-out idea. (Illustrative experience: read one of Clinton's books, and read Obama's first book.) In his main speeches, starting with the 2004 Boston convention speech and with a particular highlight in the "Jeremiah Wright" speech about race in Philadelphia, Obama has been both interesting to listen to serious in trying to present a main idea. The other competitor would be Ronald Reagan. I don't think most of his speeches pass the "serious big idea" test, but I know that some people do.

- Skills in using technology to raise money for which there is no real precedent (as Josh Green was one of the first to describe, in this Atlantic article).

- Skills in Get Out the Vote organizational efforts that we saw in the Iowa primary and which we're primed to look for next Tuesday.

- Skills in one-on-one debating technique that led to all three presidential debates being seen by the public as big Obama wins. And now, with the informercial:

-  Skills in telling stories (and evoking emotions) through pictures that we associate mainly with Reagan and no one since.

- And (update) skill in personal presentation, which means that the candidate is never seen as being testy, rarely seems rattled, seems to know where he wants to go and makes some progress every day -- the only candidate this really resembles is Ronald Reagan.
 
We can wonder later on -- and, minus something we can't now imagine, we can wonder pretty soon -- about the organizational and analytic skills Obama will display in office. But as a collection of talents brought to bear in a campaign, this is quite remarkable. And the sequential underestimations -- by the Hillary Clinton camp, and now by the Republicans -- will merit future analysis.

A modest step against "security theater" -- in Beijing!

As recently mentioned here, with links to many other articles and posts, the phenomenon of "security theater" that both Jeff Goldberg and I have discussed in Atlantic articles is an unfortunate world-wide trend.

Security theater is typified by make believe measures that make it seem as if authorities are "doing something" about security but that may have little connection to the threats that are most serious or the ways they might be thwarted. In the old days, an example would be the "have these bags been in your possession?..." catechism at airport check-in counters. These days, the reflexive demand to "show ID" before going into buildings or the ignored-by-all recordings in US airports that begin, "This is a security announcement. The threat level is elevated.."

The other classic trait of worldwide security theater is the ratchet-like irreversibility of the process. For instance, as mentioned in my earlier post, some of the "special Olympic" security precautions instituted this summer in Beijing show no sign of ever going away. (Like bag screening for all subway passengers.) There is a bureaucratic/political explanation for this, which is that no one is likely to be blamed for the cost or inconvenience of such measures, whereas any public official can easily imagine the resulting witch hunt if a "precaution" were removed and... something went wrong.

But here's an exception!   A few hours ago, I arrived at the new international terminal at Beijing Capital airport -- the one with the delightful airport identifier PEK -- and found myself simply able to walk in from the sidewalk through the main entrance door. None of the one-by-one machine scanning of bags, wiping them for explosive residue, or sniffing by bomb-dogs that had caused long lines in the entry corridors all this summer. Those practices started about a month before the Olympics, but some time recently someone apparently was willing to take the risk of calling them off. Worth noticing.

This hardly seems sporting

On the right, the brave little USB memory stick of yesteryear, now retired.

On the left, the new, metal-clad, password-protected, online-backed-up, run-over-it-with-a-truck-and-it-will laugh, RSA-encrypted, programmed-to-self-destruct-if-you-enter-the-wrong password-too-manytimes, IRONKEY that is replacing it, kindly sent by a friend. That's the actual metallic ironkey in the middle, sitting on top of its explanatory brochure.

 


The USB stick is heard to say, "But I was pretty strong too! For my size."

Phonetics & politics

As previously noted, foreign names and nouns often suffer badly in the transition into Chinese characters, mainly because Chinese phonetics has no way of rendering a number of sounds common in English and other Western languages. For instance: no good way to render a string of two or three consonants in a row, like the str sound that begins "string" or nds that ends "ends."  Details another time.

As a result, it can a real cryptic/rebus type challenge to figure out what foreign name a Chinese translation is meant to represent. During Olympic basketball games, Kaiwen Jianeite was the local name for Kevin Garnett.

But some foreign names work just fine. For instance, one made exclusively of simple vowel or consonant-vowel sequences. The three Chinese characters 奥巴马 very nicely and naturally spell out the sequence O BA MA.  (The O usually rendered AO, but close enough; it also was used as the first syllable of Olympics.) Thus, from a local Beijing expat booster:
 


Perhaps it helps that "Obama" is not itself originally a Western name? "McCain" is a little more of a challenge, rendered in characters 麦凯恩, or MAI KAI EN. I think of the first character, which literally has to do with grains, as homage to Scotland, since it's also the beginning of McDonald's in Chinese: 麦当劳, MAI DANG LAO.

Have seen a number of Happy Meal-themed 麦当劳 apparel on the street during my time in China. Nothing yet with GOP-themed 麦凯恩. And I'm still waiting to see an Olympic/election hybred-themed shirt saying something like 奥巴马 加油!*
_____
 *The story of 加油, "Let's go!" also explained here.

Chuck Spinney makes another call (updated)

Six weeks ago, at the peak of the post-GOP convention bubble of enthusiasm about Sarah Palin, when John McCain was ahead in tracking polls and Barack Obama was buffeted by "Muslim" and "celebrity" and "elitist" attacks, Chuck Spinney, the former defense analyst, made a call that looks very good in retrospect. He said, in part:

"I am beginning to sense that McCain's behavior is destroying himself and that Obama has the good sense or instinct to take a deep step back and let McCain dig a hole so deep he can not get out....I have this vague sense that Obama's goal (maybe instinct is a better word) may be to create an atmosphere (perhaps by looking weak, inter alia)  that encourages McCain to reinforce this self destructive behavior and thereby make his hypocrisy obvious to a majority of the undecided voters."

 His full dispatch is quoted here. An earlier, very prescient call during the Obama-Hillary Clinton showdown in the primaries is here.

Here is his latest judgment, in an email:

How much do you want to bet the Sarah Palin won't replace Ted Stevens after being induced to run in a special election by "popular demand"?

I have learned not to bet against Chuck. This possibility is indeed interesting.

Update: As many readers have politely pointed out, this scenario depends on Stevens being re-elected one week from now, and then leaving or being forced from his seat to open a vacancy. The "being re-elected" part seems increasingly unlikely. Still, Spinney made the right, timely calls in the previous cases!

'My Beijing Birthday,' now in Beijing

Last week I mentioned how much I enjoyed and admired the documentary film My Beijing Birthday, which was having a special showing in Hong Kong.

This week it's having another screening in Beijing -- tomorrow night, Tuesday, October 28. Details below.

The trailer for the film, here, which I didn't mention before, will give you an idea of the approach and tone, including the before-and-after of kids who were playful tots in 1996 and have changed in heartening and heartrending ways since. I can't recommend this highly enough.

EVENT DETAILS:

Date:       Tuesday 28th October 2008

Time:       18:00 Registration

                18:30 Screening 

Venue: Saatchi & Saatchi

The Penthouse 36/F Central International Trade Centre Tower C

6A Jianguomen Wai Avenue, Beijing, China 100022

Our U.S. banker overlords

As my friend Joe Nocera pointed out in his terrific piece yesterday in the NY Times, some of the (shameless) banks that have benefited from the huge public bailout bill are (shamelessly) planning to use the money not to loosen up lending to their client businesses, helping to offset the inevitable damage to the "real" economy that the credit freeze-up is causing. Instead they are using it as cheap capital for their own expansion plans.

Grrrrrrr.  Or as Nocera put it, after hearing a JP Morgan Chase official indiscreetly confess this plan:

[T]he dirty little secret of the banking industry is that it has no intention of using the money to make new loans. But this executive was the first insider who's been indiscreet enough to say it within earshot of a journalist.

 I asked another industry insider about this -- and about whose fault the misallocation (waste, diversion, rip-off -- choose your term) was. This person made clear that the same behavior should be expected from other banks, starting with Citibank, and he gave this explanation:

Frankly I think the fault lies with Paulson (and his boss...). The bankers didn't ask for it. Paulson pushed it on them. (Read WallStreet Journal commentary on the meeting, from witnesses) but after the bankers realized they had no choice but to say yes, they also saw it was an incredible gift which floated from the sky: cheap equity

I don't think there's sufficient public awareness of a profound diversion of $ 250 BILLION which got shifted deftly from "starting to fix the mortgage-backed security crisis" to "relatively low cost equity to banks for them to use however they see fit".

Remember that 35-year old guy who Paulson was going to appoint to oversee the purchasing program of the mortgage-backed securities? What's his job now? I imagine he has little to do anymore (because $ 250 billion of the initial $ 350 billion -- within the total $700 billion TARP program [Troubled Asset Relief Program]-- has already been earmarked for this "nice new equity" deal" hence the 35-year old only has the rump $ 100 billion to play with).

Ps I don't think it was design. I think it was impromptu. Paulson had been fixated on the asset purchase program up until time Congress approved the $ 700 BN TARP. Then Gordon Brown in UK applied the bank equity deal in England for some UK banks. And a day or two later, Paulson followed the UK practice shifting away from asset purchase to equity donation.

Financial press has made it clear that the UK came up with the formula which Washington (ie Paulson) eventually adopted. But US public is very much unaware

This will become a bigger issue.

Subversive Panda II: More freedom, more confusion (updated)

Recently I mentioned the winsome advertising-panda of the Dongsishitiao subway stop in Beijing. (Cameo reminder photo below; previous post here, with link to larger picture.)



I asserted that the English version of the slogan -- "More Freedom, More Happiness" -- was ambiguous in a subtly provocative way. Was the beloved symbol of the Chinese nation really saying, "the freer you are, the happier you will be"? Or saying that only to visitors who could read the English translation? Or saying it inadvertently via mistranslation?

As for the Chinese version of his slogan, 更多自由, 更多欢乐 -- that is, the version that 99.9% of the passersby would pay attention to -- I (wisely!) declared myself agnostic on how that should be read. And I had no explanation for the oddity of a panda talking about freedom in the first place.

The wisdom of the readers:

1) Many people, Chinese and otherwise, said that the ad was really a way of stressing that the pandas of Chengdu and greater Sichuan province now enjoyed bigger, freer enclosures than before and therefore are happier.  Sounds like a stretch to me, but: OK. More on the pandas of Sichuan and the now-destroyed Wolong Panda Reserve in this article and this slideshow and these posts.

     1A) One man suggested that it was an ad for tea. The cup in the panda's hand paw in fact says "tea." 

     UPDATE 1B): John Zhu and some other native-speakers of Chinese have said that the "freedom" implied by the term 自由 really implies the ease, leisure, and kicking-back approach to life with which Chengdu is associated. By this reasoning, the ad is speaking neither about bigger enclosures for pandas, nor wider political liberties for people, but simply a nice-and-easy vacation in Sichuan.

2) I have had a delightful and instructive introduction to the mysteries of language via emails like the two I list after the jump. Basically the pattern has been this: an expert on the Chinese language who is not a native speaker (linguistics professor, long-time resident, etc) writes to say: "Obviously the Chinese phrase means X..." The meaning of X varies from one expert to another. Then a native Chinese speaker will write in to say, "I dunno... could mean one thing, could mean the other."

3) And, with gratitude to all who wrote, my favorite reply was from reader KS who said that Subversive Panda "will be the name I suggest for my son's rock band, when he's old enough to have a rock band."

Illustrations of point 2, below.
________

Continue reading "Subversive Panda II: More freedom, more confusion (updated)" »

More on the lean times / VC / startup front

In three accounts over the last week and a half (here, here, and here), I've mentioned how the chaos of financial markets is spreading to the tech sector, and what that might mean for the timing, scale, and duration of damage to the "real" economy in which companies make products and create jobs. 

Continue reading "More on the lean times / VC / startup front" »

Subversive panda?

A subway ad, at the Dongsishitiao station on Beijing's Line 2, that involves a very interesting language issue. I've passed by this ad a number of times in the last month but didn't have a camera handy until now.



English speakers could, I think, read these English words in two ways:
    1) More freedom, and also more happiness (no causal relationship, "bigger and better"); or
    2) The greater the freedom, the greater the happiness (cause-effect, "the more, the merrier").

I've gotten different views from my native Chinese-speaking friends about the connotations of the Chinese version, 更多自由, 更多欢乐. Some say that it could be read both ways, like English; others, that it mainly means #1. So there are various possibilities here, all interesting: that this is a slyly subversive message in both languages; that it is an unintentional transmission of a subversive message though inexact translation; or that it is a fully intentional and brilliantly conceived transmission in English only, letting foreign-language readers conclude that an increase-freedom campaign is underway.

I can't say, but I'm tantalized by the possibilities.

What is has to do in either language with panda-themed tourism is a different question.

For old times' sake (updated)

Beijing, 3pm, October 22, 2008 -- 32 days after the Olympic/Paralympic emergency "clean air" rules came to an end. Feels like home again!



UPDATE: After a big thunderstorm last night and passage of a cold front, it's beautiful the following morning. Picture shortlybelow.

Here is what a good cold front will do! Same pattern during the Olympics. For the first two days of the Games, despite all the cleanup measures, the air was opaque. Then a powerful cold front brought intense thunderstorms, and behind it clear, cooler dry air. Problem is, the fast-moving fronts are much rarer in northern China than in the eastern two-thirds of North America,where they're moving through every few days. Subject for another time.

For now, the view on October 23, 2008, at noon:

Must-see in Hong Kong: 'My Beijing Birthday'

If you're in Hong Kong tomorrow night, October 23, and you're not hospitalized, in jail, running the control tower at Hong Kong airport, or otherwise in possession of a good excuse for not attending, please get to the Hong Kong Arts Center by 7pm to see a screening of the wonderful hour-long documentary, My Beijing Birthday. Details here.

My wife and I saw a preview screening of the film before a small audience in Beijing back in July. (The audience was small mainly because of the pre-Olympic Beijing security hysteria. Authorities were discouraging or prohibiting gatherings of any size, for any reason, on grounds of general paranoia.) My main reaction after seeing it was the hope that very large audiences would be able to see it soon.

The set-up and plot-line sound bizarre when described. Howie Snyder, a New Yorker and skillful Mandarin-speaker now in his 40s, was in Beijing twelve years ago attending a school for traditional Chinese "cross-talk" stand-up comics. All the other students in the class were Chinese eight-year-olds. They specialize young here. Part of the film is footage of Snyder and his classmates back then; the other part is a revisit to the school this year, showing very dramatically what the passage of time has meant for Snyder, for the city of Beijing, for the tough-but-heart-of-gold director of the school, and for the kids, now age 20.

The film is funny and poignant in its own right; it made me fonder of Beijing than I would otherwise be; and it is one of the most powerful demonstrations of a theme I've tried to get across in most articles for the Atlantic: that this is a great big country not of a billion-person mass but of a billion-plus highly individualistic people.

See it in Hong Kong, or see it someplace else, as Snyder continues to work out distribution deals. (I believe it is now on the film-festival circuit.) You will thank me.

Sobering news dept: The Hobbesian world of startups

Twice in the last week (here and here) I've mentioned the presentation that a leading California VC firm, Sequoia Capital, gave to CEOs of the companies it had funded. The message was: severe turbulence ahead, strap yourselves in, and to survive you must throw every bit of surplus weight and cargo (ie, employees and expansion plans) off the craft.

My friend the business strategist Lawrence Wilkinson (who is involved in a company with one of my family members) recently posted a fascinating item on his "Scenarios and Strategy" site about the other side of this interaction: the ways some private equity firms are using tough times to get very tough on the companies they have backed.

The tension between funders and entrepreneurs is familiar and well-explored territory. Any interesting account of the tech economy presents it as a major theme. To take one example from many possibilities: Charles Ferguson's High Stakes, No Prisoners, the tale of creating and selling his own tech company. Yes, this is the same Ferguson who last year produced the influential Iraq documentary No End in Sight. The basic tension of course arises from the fact that VCs want to use the scarce resource they control -- money -- to get more of the scarce resource that company founders control, namely shares of corporate ownership, including the cut of the rewards if a startup makes it big.

But Wilkinson, who has seen many rounds of this battle before, says it has taken on a newly nasty tone. According to him, many of VCs and other funders are now saying: bad times mean your company isn't growing as fast as we hoped. So, we will take more of "your" share:

I've been awash in reports, some in the press, some from friends, of private equity investors leaning on the companies in which they have stakes to reprice those stakes- to give the investors more.  The arguments from one case to the next are idiosyncratically different in their details, but they all have the same general thrust:  "we made our investments expecting more growth than it now seems likely the company will achieve, so you (the company) should give us a bigger stake."...

The issue is in no way misrepresentation... The issue that called the question was.. the sudden dramatic downturn in the economy:  credit is tight; anxiety is high; spending has dropped like a rock...  a situation triggered- and to some extent at least, abetted, if not indeed caused- by the excesses of the very financial firms now doing the demanding.

I've been around long enough to have gone through several busts; I've learned that many (if not most) investors understand opportunism to be not just their right, but their obligation.  (And indeed, I've seen some forms of opportunism contribute powerfully to turn-arounds.)  But I've never seen opportunism practiced in such a rapacious way as these recent days- nor, I'd suggest, so desperately nor short-sightedly selfishly....

It's a situation all too resonant with the first version of the Paulson Bail-out Plan: privatize the upside; socialize the risk.

The whole thing is worth reading, and is another illustration of the ways in which the recent  financial turmoil, serious enough on its own, is taking on a more destructive and longer-lasting form as it begins to burden the operations of the "real" economy.

I don't quite believe this, but... (USB finale+1)

This really is the last chapter in the saga of the brave little USB stick. (Multi-part background here.)

To helpful friends writing in to say that it is time to give the poor thing a rest, leave it on the shelf in its treasure box, don't risk shorting out the whole laptop, and for God's sake use some of the other USB memory devices sitting around the house, I say: Thanks! Got it! Already put this plan into effect!

But before it goes away for good, this final USB achievement to note. Yesterday, one day out of its WD-40 bath, the USB stick would properly store and list files, but apparently had something wrong enough with it that it could not pass the integrity test for Windows Vista's "Ready Boost" function.

Today, it passes that test. Proof in the Vista screen shot below. The ReadyBoost cache is the next to last file listed, 4GBs in size. I won't say "USB Stick, heal thyself!," but something happened.

And as soon as that shot was taken, the plucky device was "Safely Removed" from its slot and placed in its satin-lined box, where it watches over the rest of the tech establishment. Talk about going out on top.

USB: Finale

It is time to revisit our friend, the brave little USB.

As previous accounts have described, it has been a difficult couple of months for this blameless device. Two inadvertent trips through a Beijing washer and dryer, each followed by restorative dunks in WD-40; loss of protective carapace, rotted away by this same WD-40 or perhaps the local air; and most recently and alarmingly, a heart-stopping pop, spark, and instant shutdown when drops of Chinese beer "somehow" got on it the USB's naked circuitry while it was plugged in and operating.

Sigh.

This morning, after a weekend's thorough laving and drying, I plugged it in once again, expectations low. I powered up the computer, and -- see for yourself, this time on a Mac:



Different-angle live action shot:

In case it's not obvious, the red light in the middle shows that the USB is still working. For further proof, here's a screen shot of the files on USB stick, done just after I created a new file with today's date and saved it directly onto the USB. If I had a live-audio feature, you could confirm that I am now playing "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" from the MP3 file shown:
 


So, what have we learned from this heartbreaking, inspiring, and unavoidably embarrassing set of mishaps? Relevant questions and answers after the jump.
________

Continue reading "USB: Finale " »

Non-politics: David Allen's 'GTD Times'

It was only four years ago that I wrote in the Atlantic about David Allen, the "productivity expert" and inventor of the influential Getting Things Done (GTD) approach to life. I say "only" four years because it feels as if Allen and his outlook have been with me for a much longer time.

It's hard to top the wonderful LifeHacker blog as a source for practical tips about gadgetry workplace tools, habits, and shortcuts, many in the GTD spirit. But for the last six months, David Allen's organization has been operating its own "official" blog, called GTD Times. I like it -- and as a sample, I direct your attention to this recent post, arguing that you really do become dumber and slower if you try to do too many things at the same time. This applies not only to that modern plague of texting-while-driving (or walking) but also to having a zillion IM and other popup windows on your screen while you work. For doubters, there is a sobering online test to demonstrate the point, taken from the book The Myth of Multitasking.

What other point was I going to make? I forget, I was thinking about something else...

The little USB stick...

... is going to make it! (Background here.)

Photos and case report when it comes out of the recovery room.

Phew.

Three colleagues

Often I make some explanatory or background comment about my own article in each new issue of the Atlantic. But I don't like to say much about other articles, because on the merits I'd end up saying: Hey, read them all, they're all great! Usually, and especially in this issue, they are.

For special reasons I want to mention three current items by my colleagues.

1) Jeffrey Goldberg's hilarious-but-serious takedown of the TSA. The wasteful spectacle of "security theater" has been on my mind for a long time, as the folly of this system was evident from pretty near the start. Very soon after 9/11, the only two airline-security measures that really matter -- fortified cockpit doors, and the vigilance of a flying public that now knows what a hijacking can mean -- were in place. Since then we've erected an edifice that imposes a huge indirect cost on the traveling public while (as Jeff points out in the article) doing very little to discourage serious terrorist threats. Two years ago in the Atlantic, I quoted John Mueller, author of Overblown, to similar effect:

The widely held view among security experts is that this airport spending is largely for show. Strengthened cockpit doors and a flying public that knows what happened on 9/11 mean that commercial airliners are highly unlikely to be used again as targeted flying bombs. "The inspection process is mostly security theater, to make people feel safe about flying," says John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State and the author of a forthcoming book about the security-industrial complex.

But there seems to be a ratchet effect in "security theater" projects. Once a "safeguard"  is adopted, no one dares propose taking it down. Here in Beijing, X-ray screening for all handbags, briefcases, and other parcels taken onto the subway was introduced as a special Olympic-security measure last July. The games are gone, but the screeners (and the long lines of people waiting in front of them) are still there. If logic and evidence had any power to change a system, Jeff Goldberg's article would have some effect.

2) Barbara Wallraff, in the latest entry in her new Atlantic blog, asks for a word to describe people whose street etiquette takes a certain form. My nominee is "the people of Beijing and Shanghai." I was actually planning to write something about the mysterious difference between Chinese and Japanese walking-styles on the street. (Pedestrians in Tokyo, in general, act as if they're aware that ten million other people need to fit onto the same streets, and make themselves small. Pedestrians in Shanghai or Beijing, in the same overgeneralization, act as if they're the only ones walking and make themselves big.) Details, theory, evidence, and photos for another time.

3) Andrew Sullivan, in this item, has very nice and accurate things to say about the Atlantic's elegant redesign, and about the virtues of actually subscribing to the magazine. He is right on all counts -- and also has a very polished and non-bloggish essay about blogs in this issue. As for subscribing, in the short term the physical magazine really is an important complement to the (ever more important) web site, in that it can combine photos, art, and text in a way not matched on screen. I feel this difference very keenly overseas, where I get print issues five or six weeks late. It's simply different to read a magazine like this on a designed page. And in the long run, this is part of how businesses like ours survive.
 

Intersecting arcs: McCain, Powell

The plotlines and character-motivations of the two Bush Administrations, 41 & 43, are perhaps too broad and obvious ever to support a first-rate novel. At least that is what reviews of Oliver Stone's W suggest to those, like me, who have not seen the film. (Not yet on the pirate-video market here in Beijing. Maybe next week.) Or if could be simply that Stone and other Bush chroniclers have taken a family saga of Shakespearean scale and presented it without corresponding richness and nuance.

Still, someone will eventually do something compelling with the intersecting stories of John McCain and Colin Powell, including the latest chapter that began today.

Close contemporaries, born eight months apart; both headed toward military careers, but from very different starting points -- immigrants' son, versus son and grandson of admirals. Lives changed by the Vietnam War, including ultimately putting both on the track to top-level politics.

Powell declining to take what could have been a promising path to the Republican nomination in 2000; McCain trying hard for that nomination but losing out to a slime-rich campaign by GW Bush and Karl Rove. It was during a debate in this campaign that McCain delivered his famous and withering line directly to Bush's face, about his campaign's character-assassination ads. The line, spat out with more contempt than anything McCain later displayed toward Obama, was "You should be ashamed" -- and, when Bush tried to answer, "You should be ashamed."

After that, diverging arcs: Powell providing cover and legitimacy for the Bush-Cheney WMD argument in favor of the Iraq war, and despite acclaim for his record as Secretary of State clearly understanding how his historical standing had been diminished. McCain increasing his "maverick" reputation, before that term became a joke, right through his defense of John Kerry against the Bush-Rove Swift Boat ads in 2004.

And now the arcs reverse again. Powell, with his endorsement of Obama, taking a cleansing step not because he is endorsing a Democrat or the person who, instead of him, has a chance to become the first black President. But rather because Powell is at last free to say the many "Cut the crap!" things that his fealty to the Administration had kept him from saying publicly while in office or until now, ranging from the perverse effects of anti-Muslim hysteria to the dangers of scorched earth political campaigns.

Meanwhile, John McCain, once laid low by those very tactics, embracing them as his best chance for victory this year. Powell, tainted by his association with the Bush Administration, choosing at age 71 to restore his reputation for recognition of higher principles. McCain, who earlier opposed Bush tactics, choosing at age 72 a path that in the end is likely to bring him both defeat and dishonor. Maybe we need a Shakespeare to do this story justice.
 

On Obama's steadiness

As mentioned yesterday, what struck me most, in reviewing Barack Obama's oratorical and debate performance since the first cattle-call, Gravel-equipped televised primary debate early last year, was his unchanging nature. He got better as he went along, but as an improving version of the same thing. I said I couldn't be sure whether Obama's consistency arose from deliberate strategic choice, flawlessly executed over a very long time, or whether it simply reflects the way he is. Odds favor the latter.

Reader D.M. writes about the way this trait has worked in the general election campaign:

I'm hoping it is a deliberate calculation on Obama's part, or else it is genuine and not a calculation at all, because it is brilliant.  By being a rock- steady, unflappable, boring (according to some commentators) - Obama accomplishes two things. It's a lot harder to find any personality hooks for passionate dislike.  See, e.g. Hillary's dynamism, Bush's feigned Texas dialect, McCain's temper.

Second, by being bland, consistent and totally straight, any tactical changes by opponents makes them look erratic, scheming and without integrity.  Had Obama joined in the personal mudslinging, he would have slipped his tether, and would have looked just like McCain.  He's a mirror against which we view the opponent.  He's a survey marker against which all territorial changes of opponents can be measured. It really is a new kind of politics.

And in a related post here, Michael Batz argues that through the course of the debates, Obama has won the argument for "argument" -- that is, for a calm and reasoned approach to issues, not by going with emotion, anger, and the gut. He wrote to me:

In short, McCain is going for emotion and Obama for reason. Ordinarily, I'd go with emotion, but crazy times flip everything on its ear. I also am amazed, honestly, that Obama has used these debates to UTTERLY reverse his public persona from the great lofty orator with few specifics to the down-in-the-numbers reassuring policy wonk at the same time he practically destroyed McCain's leadership mantle by baiting him into anger and carefully pushing the message of McCain as erratic and unpredictable. It's pretty remarkable.

As always, I give the time-battered caution that we can't know how and whether these traits will work in office until we get a chance to see. But in making it likely that we will get that chance, the campaign approach has indeed been remarkable.

And, as a subject for a later day, I remember how often, how vehemently, and with what certainty Obama's detractors during the Democratic primaries said that he could not, possibly, in any way, in any real world, withstand the onslaught of GOP negative campaigning once it geared up against him. That he's been seriously underestimated twice -- by the Hillary Clinton camp, and now by McCain -- doesn't prove his potential in office but is interesting.

OK, I lied, one more thing about debates

My recent article about the 2007-2008 primary campaign debates -- you remember, "Raise your hand if you can spell 'Paraguay' " -- applied well to the general-election debates in some ways, and was overtaken by events in some others. (Note: this item supersedes my previously-advertised "last words" about the whole topic of debates.)  

Here is what strikes me in retrospect as the most important continuity between the earlier round of debates and what we've just seen: It is continuity itself, specifically the unchanging nature of Barack Obama's presentation of himself, his personality, and his message.

I mentioned in the article that Hillary Clinton was technically a much more polished debater than Obama through the primaries. She answered quickly and crisply; she always got to her talking points; she was almost always on her game and almost never fazed. The problem was that the deeper identity and personality she presented changed dramatically from one debate to the next. Conciliatory toward her rivals in some encounters, harshly critical in others, the shifts matching U-turns in the campaign. With equal levels of effectiveness, she could appear to be a different person each time:

Hillary Clinton's level of skill remained consistent; the ends toward which she used it varied. We have seen this pattern before, with Al Gore's performances in his three debates against George W. Bush in 2000....  By scoring logical points but confusing his identity, Gore hurt himself with the "jury." So did Hillary Clinton.

Obama, by contrast, had varying levels of skill through the debates -- but almost no variation in the personality, message, or what we now call "temperament" he displayed:

Barack Obama's evolution through the debates was just the opposite of Clinton's. To an amazing degree, his message never changed; it matured.

Knowing where Obama ended up by the late debates and primaries, it is easy to see what he was trying to say early on. In his often fuzzy answers in the early debates, sometimes so long in the buildup that he didn't get to the main point before his time was cut off, Obama tried to do two things. He grappled with the question at hand--paying for his health-care proposals, dealing with Pakistan--while also moving to the "real question" about the need for a "new kind" of politics.

The pairing of those answers was second nature by the last debates but not in the early rounds. In these he wasted time on hedges and footnotes, and did not manage to make his slight pause before answering seem like a sign of reflection, as it came to later on.

Again, knowing how things are ending up, it's easy to see a pattern looking back. John McCain, likely Hillary Clinton, has suffered from internal shifts and contradictions in his message and affect. Gracious, high-minded, and bi-partisan seeming in some cases. (The first half of his convention speech; interviews like the one mentioned here in which he pleads for a civil, high-road campaign; his generous remarks about Obama just now at the Al Smith dinner in New York; and of course the identity he cultivated with the press over the previous decade or two.) And on the other hand: the choice of Palin, the Bill Ayers-style campaigning, and most of all his ill-concealed contempt and choler through all three debates.

Obama, like all politicians, has trimmed or shifted on some issues and straddled some mismatched policies. But that it is so hard to find contradictions in his style, personality, and larger "work together" message either says something impressive about his discipline or shows something deeper about his essential nature. To persuadable voters, I think it has come across as "integrity" in the neutrally descriptive sense: that is, wholeness and consistency, as opposed to internal tension and contradiction. What it would mean in office we'll see if he wins. I think we've already seen that it is a huge electoral asset.

Continue reading "OK, I lied, one more thing about debates" »

As if it were all a dream

Next Monday, it will be one month since the special Olympic-era traffic and pollution rules came to an end in Beijing. Through most of the last ten days, the skies and air have been spectacularly clear and beautiful in town. Here, blue skies are reflected in office windows in the Dongdan area a few days ago:



Today - oh boy. Traffic like the bad old days, and same for the smoky skies. Let us hope this is an aberration, rather than the new (and old) normal.

Nerds-with-a-heart only: the passion of the USB

Poor little USB!  Previous chapter here, which includes links back through the whole trail of tears. When last sighted, the USB had been through a Chinese washer and dryer twice, had been resurrected through the miracle balm of WD-40, and was now chugging along in a working computer, minus any protective shell.

(Reminder picture here:)


 
Let's not get into the details, but ... while operating in that exposed state, the little USB got some, ummmm, beer all over it. It made a snazzling sound, there was a little spark, and suddenly there was no more "Removable Drive F:" on the computer. The beer was only Yanjing, the Beijing area's answer to Shanghai's REEB, so it was as benign and watery a splash as it could be. Still....

Powered down the computer, and started the USB on a long, long soak in WD-40. Now the extensive drying out process begins (below, fresh out of the WD-40, on a napkin from a local eatery). When the vapors of WD-40 have dissipated in a day or two, we'll see just how much this tough little device can take.
 
 

Jackal with a human face (updated)

Last words from me about debates until 2012 (at the soonest)

Here's why the third debate, and all three debates, helped Obama so much more than McCain.

In general-election debates, it's a losing strategy to "rally the base." That's what your own campaign events, and your fund-raisers, and your targeted ads, and your running mate are for. Especially by the time of the second and third debates, the job is to "rally the center." That's where most of remaining persuadable and undecided voters are.

Everything about Barack Obama's approach to this debate, and all debates, was consistent with this reality. Almost nothing about John McCain's approach was:

- Obama took every opportunity to steer questions back from campaign tactics to governing issues. ("It's been a tough campaign, and we have hurt feelings, but what really matters is avoiding four more years of...."  All quotes here are from memory and therefore approximate, but true to the general spirit.)

- He took every opportunity to talk about "working together" to deal with those issues, ("The reality is, it's going to take Republicans and Democrats working together.")

- He took nearly every opportunity to suggest encompassing rather than polarizing approaches to the substance of those issues. ("Do we want to reduce the cost of health care or expand the coverage? We've got to do both...")

- He took every opportunity to identify areas where he and John McCain actually agreed on approaches. ("I agree with John..." might have seemed an over-used trope in the first debate. This time, very selectively, it helped in the control-the-center strategy.)

- He took most opportunities to remain calm, to stay above the fray, to seem amused rather than frazzled, not to take personal offense. As mentioned earlier, he was not quite as perfectly self-contained as in earlier performances. But compared with McCain, he was the one -- in a good sense -- who had taken Prozac, while McCain seemed to be in a 'roid rage. And because of this general self-possession -- realizing, for instance, that there was only upside in being gracious about Sarah Palin -- when he decided to bear down, as in the breathtaking "At your running mate's rallies, when someone mentions my name they say 'Terrorist' and 'Kill him,'" it was the more powerful.

If you go down the same list, you can see that McCain did just about the opposite on every one of the counts. His most effective rhetorical line was that if Obama wanted to run against President Bush, he could have done so four years ago. (For that matter, so could McCain.) But that was undercut, according to the logic above, by emphasizing tactics over issues, by emphasizing partisan division over conciliation, by body-language contempt for his opponent, and by a demeanor that reinforced the short-tempered and dyspeptic impression from the previous debates.

Whatever the instant polls said, however you lined up the debating flow, the person who was already ahead had a plan that could gain him more support, and the one who was behind played to the base.

Concluding points:

- This format is the winner, compared with all the others we have seen. Forces a kind of personal engagement -- though the fact that this was the third and final round probably made a difference too. Clarifying discussion of actual substance, from health care to abortion, and rawly-honest seeming exchange about the excesses of the campaign.

- Bob Schieffer was a winner, raising provocative issues without being mindlessly horse-race oriented or too obsessed with time. His questions about dirty campaign tactics and about Sarah Palin were exemplary in this regard.

- McCain did not help himself with a number of lapses and minor gaffes, from the nature of Trig Palin's disability to the policy of the DC schools. Nor his Tourette's-like perseveration with  the dreaded "overhead projector" in Chicago and hyperbole about Ayers and ACORN, which is allegedly "destroying the fabric of our democracy."

- I love America. In what other country would the finalists for the presidency have the extended "Joe the Plumber" exchanges? On the other hand, I don't want ever to hear about Joe the Plumber again.

- Obama really needs to raise his game when it comes to answering questions about US interactions with China. He fell back on the same old lame "they're manipulating the currency" argument, as simplistic and misleading a slogan as those on other issues he criticizes from McCain.

- This time, McCain looked at Obama (unlike the first debate), and didn't call him "that one" (unlike the second). But he did the equivalent of both in his final statement, addressing Schieffer and others by name and then turning to Obama and saying "and it's been good to be with.... you." Not "you, Senator Obama" or "you, Barack." It was involuntary and gone in a flash, but watch it again and you'll see what I mean.

The net effect of the debates is: they have put Obama in position to win. We'll see what further "game changers" there might be in the remaining 20 days.
 
Fiscal Affairs UPDATE:
1) It was good to see Obama finally connect McCain's promise of a spending freeze with his desire to spend more for project X or Y. He did it by saying: Great to hear about your focus on autism. But with the spending freeze....

2) Notwithstanding general praise for Schieffer, he like all the other debate moderators seemed to be unduly interested in how either of the candidates is going to "balance the budget."

NEITHER OF THEM IS GOING TO BALANCE THE BUDGET -- nor should they be mainly concerned with trying, right at the moment. We're in the middle of a potential economic collapse. One of the lessons Herbert Hoover inadvertently taught is that you shouldn't try to tighten up on public spending during a huge downturn. For details, see the works of JM Keynes, passim. 

Only real time comment during debate #3

Both men look very weary, and who can blame them; and perhaps because of an inner "enough, already!" mood Obama is being less controlled about little smirks and shaking his head  'no-no when McCain says something he doesn't like.  McCain has not controlled his disdain for Obama in previous debates, and he's not even trying now.

But the ten minute or twelve minutes that began with Obama looking at McCain and talking about crowds at Palin rallies saying "Kill him" were riveting TV and seemed to reveal purified versions of the persona each candidate has been presenting through the previous sessions. This debate may matter less in the long-term outcome than the others, since that's typically true of final debates. But because the contenders are engaging each other more directly -- being at the same table, being physically so close to each other, having more trouble containing their emotions, being aware that the whole thing is almost over -- in human terms this is actually the most interesting.

More later.

Non-politics, non-depressing: nice software updates

In the "look on the bright side" spirit, a word about two pieces of software, both previously mentioned but now in new releases, that I appreciate, admire, and rely on all the time.

- SugarSync, by Sharpcast. Several months ago I noted that I found the product's name slightly creepy but was intrigued by its features. I've used it daily since then and have only better and better things to say.

Its purpose is to keep files in sync among a number of computers. It does that in a way so effortless that you stop even thinking about the program's presence. SugarSync easily connects PCs and Macs and, in some circumstances, handheld devices. Meanwhile, it doubles as an online backup for all the files in your computer, which is of course useful if you have a crash but also if you are in one part of the world and realize that file you want is on the computer back at your office or house. It has recently introduced several new features, including one that lets you safely edit files that "live" on your home computer from any internet-connected computer anywhere. Really a smooth product, by whatever name.

- Fusion, by VMware. I have previously praised this software ad nauseam. Its point is to let you run any Windows-based program, driver, system software, you name it, on an Intel-based Macintosh -- and, unlike the Mac's own Boot Camp utility, to do so right alongside native Mac programs, cutting and pasting from one to the other. I've mentioned it before because it has been practically bulletproof. As a side note for later discussion, in general it allows Macs to run Windows programs better and faster than most ordinary PCs, mainly because it supports a "pure" version of Windows rather than one burdened by the horrible, unwanted, pre-installed features known as "craplets" that have made so many PCs so unpleasant to use.*

A new version 2.0 of Fusion has been released, as a free upgrade for users of earlier versions. This new release has eliminated the one problem I'd ever had with Fusion (a screen-corruption issue, discussed here) and has many other enhancements.

The similarity that connects SugarSync and Fusion is that each represents another step toward freeing users from purely practical concerns -- did I remember to copy that file? do I want to work on it with a PC or a Mac? -- so they can concentrate on the actual ideas and work they want to deal with.

One further bit of cheer: If you use either Gmail or Google Chrome and have not committed to muscle-memory the extensive keyboard shortcuts for each of them, you're working harder than you need to. Gmail keyboard tips here; Chrome's, here.
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* If you start with a Mac and buy Fusion, you also need to buy a copy of Windows, ideally XP, which you then install in the Fusion part of the Mac. Since you buy this copy of Windows as a standalone CD/DVD, not as something pre-installed by Dell or HP or whomever, you get it in pure form, not encased in all sorts of other junk that comes on most PCs now.

I'm increasingly convinced by the argument that Windows Vista seems so terrible in part because it mainly comes on newer machines that groan under an intolerable burden of these craplets. I am sorry to say that my once-beloved ThinkPad brand seems, under Lenovo, to be tarnishing itself in this way. Turn back before it's too late, Lenovo! More on this later.

More on the Sequoia Capital presentation

Yesterday I mentioned a presentation by the tech VC firm Sequoia Capital, about what the financial contraction would mean for start-up businesses and the tech economy in general.

After the jump, extra notes on the presentation from someone at the meeting.

This account appeared first on a subscription-only site, TheFunded.com, so I won't quote very much of it. But even a brief sample suggests that when future economics teachers want to give their classes a concise lesson in how economic downturns spread, or what a "vicious cycle" means (a term prominently misspelled in the Sequoia presentation itself, one of several signs of a rush job), they can use this session as a convenient example. Thus:

The VC firms warn that tough times are at hand; their advice is that all their startup companies cut, cut, cut, laying off as many people as possible and eliminating every purchase or investment they don't absolutely need to survive. The startups do that-- and then the companies they used to buy from have to begin cutting drastically themselves, as do the people all these firms have just laid off. Everyone is buying less, and... The point is right out of Ec 101, but this is a particularly clear and real-time example.
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Continue reading "More on the Sequoia Capital presentation" »

This is impressive, and yet sort of sad (USB immortality dept)

Over the last three and a half months, I have recounted the travail of my brave little USB stick:

First an unanticipated trip through the washer and dryer. Then, miraculously, it survives and still works! Then, a warning from a tech savant that corrosion is already setting in. Then, a bath in WD-40 as salvation. Then, another trip through the washer and dryer. And another WD-40 dunk. And all the while...  still chugging along.

Here is how it looked after the first ordeal:


Yesterday, I grabbed it to switch it to another machine, and the plastic housing simply fell off. Post-traumatic stress effects of the washer and dryer? Of WD-40? Of general abuse? Who knows. Yet even in this naked, skeletal condition ....  still it works. Though here is how it looks these days: The bare green circuit board, shown plugged into a ThinkPad, is what's left of the USB stick. It's hard to see in this picture, but its red LED light is flashing, showing that it's actively doing something. (Click for closeup.) The castoff plastic housing, like a shed skin, is beneath it, in two halves.



I will rename my USB stick "Hawking," signifying a being that, as its corporeal shell has suffered and been diminished, has been distilled to its pure thinking essence.

If you want an indication that the McCain camp has conceded...

.... listen to this interview, from today's NPR Morning Edition (audio available after 9am EDT). In it, Renee Montagne questions Steve Schmidt, famed tough-guy, gloves-off strategist for the McCain campaign.

Anyone who has ever been near a troubled campaign -- or a sports team late in a losing game, or a business venture facing harsh reality -- will instantly recognize the signs of internalized defeat in Schmidt's comments:

Rationalization and excuses ("We were ahead until the financial crisis began"). More excuses ("We have the handicap of wearing the 'R' label this year" -- I mean, think about that for a moment, and imagine Karl Rove saying it). More and more excuses ("When someone says something inappropriate at our rallies, the media is all over it. When someone does it at an Obama rally...")  A "we'll do our best" tone as opposed to confidence about being able to win. A rote quality to the pep talk about victory ("Senator Obama is known as a weak closer, and Senator McCain is a strong finisher!"). These quotes are approximate, a few minutes after hearing the spot, but true to the spirit. Given Schmidt's reputation as the heir to Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, that he was not able to keep on his game face is startling.

Anything can still happen. But to me this is the first sign of the McCain team itself recognizing how things stand now.

Very sobering report from Silicon Valley

A number of friends in the SF Bay Area have directed me toward this recent slide show by Sequoia Capital, one of the biggest-deal tech VC firms. It's been widely viewed in the tech world and is said to reflect, and no doubt partly shape, the prevailing sentiment. (Update: Also, I see now, it was recently mentioned on the NYT tech blog.)

At least for me, with an ever-shaky internet connection here in Beijing, the 56 slides of this presentation are quite slow to load. But they have a lot of useful data about the origins of the current crisis, plus a lot of chastening advice for companies that want to survive. I introduce them here as part of the effort to shift attention from the purely financial-market disasters of the moment, important as they are, and toward the longer-term implications for the companies that create products, jobs, and real wealth.  

Clickable version below; or this direct link to "Sequoia Capital on Startups and the Economic Downturn." Caveat lector -- by which I mean, in this case, not so much that the reader should beware of the source as that we should beware of the conditions ahead. 

Last word on my "ignore the DJIA" crusade

In the last few days I've made a quixotic complaint -- that we spend too much time thinking about stock-market prices -- and proposed a wildly quixotic solution. It is that we devise real time credit-congestion maps, showing where companies are about to be financially starved out of viability for lack of working capital, modeled on real time traffic-congestion maps now popular around the world. For visual amusement, here is the traffic situation in greater Melbourne, Australia just now:



Obviously my proposal is in the "thought experiment" category, rather than something that is actually going to occur. (Thus it is in the same category as another longstanding crusade I'll rev up again soon: to get rid of what is commonly but erroneously referred to as the "Nobel prize" in economics. More on that another time. Interim reading here.)  One problem with the real-time credit map is that the underlying data points -- the countless daily business decisions based on available credit, among other factors -- can't quickly or easily be tracked down, and are held by people who often have a strong interest in keeping them private.

After the jump, a reader's note that spells out some of the further complexities of amassing and publicizing such data. But the reader also underscores my main point: the need to find some way to dramatize the reality that today's financial crisis involves things more serious than collapsing share prices.
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Continue reading "Last word on my "ignore the DJIA" crusade" »

More on credit crises and financial indices

I mentioned two days ago my wish that the press and politicians would pay less attention to daily gyrations in stock market prices and use that time, space, and effort to concentrate on other economic indicators and issues. Yes, even though this would require radical shifts in the way CNBC and other news organizations do their work.

The folly of focusing on stock prices is true enough in normal times, because the daily close on Wall Street has much less to do with the real economy than the obsessive level of coverage would suggest. It's all the more true during real economic crises, like the current one, because it intensifies fear while diverting attention from the truly most threatening problems. At the moment, the situation with the greatest potential to destroy companies, jobs, and lives is not the loss of paper value on the stock exchanges, gigantic as that has been, but the run-on-the-bank style credit freeze that is forcing good companies out of business.  

To refine the previous point, it's not that no measures of credit tightness exist. Originally I mentioned LIBOR, essentially a measure of banks' confidence in other banks' ability to repay loans. Many people have written in to suggest that the better measure is the unappealingly  named "TED Spread," which is essentially a measure of how risky commercial loans as a whole seem, compared with parking the money in no-risk US Treasury securities. (Explanation here; also see special features from Slate's Big Money and NPR's Planet Money,  which appeared just before my item.)

Yes, TED is a help. But it has limits of its own -- it's  one generalized measure of sentiment in one big financial center. I still feel the lack of a measure as compelling, as interesting, as able to direct attention, emotion, and action as the ups and downs of the Dow.

My dream would be something equivalent to on-line real-time traffic congestion maps, which show you, in red, the areas that are jammed and, in green, those that are flowing OK. (This one shows the conditions a little while ago in my former home of Kuala Lumpur. These features are not just for Americans any more.)



I'd love to see some comparable dynamic, real-time, real-company credit congestion map. In green, lines of credit that are open and are letting firms employ workers and sell goods. (Ideally, the lines would run from the location of the bank offering the line of credit to the company's HQ or main factory.) In orange, lines that are being withdrawn. In red, companies that being forced to close operations or lay off workers simply because they can't get working capital. It's not going to happen anytime soon, but we'd be better off if it did.

Maybe this will help Cullen Murphy's book?

Start of headline on Maureen Dowd's  column in the New York Times today: "Are We Rome?"

Cover of my friend Cullen Murphy's* excellent 2007 book:


Column, in mock-Latin, is very funny, in a way that is cumulative rather than easily illustrated in a brief clip. Book is very funny -- and erudite and informative and provocative and surprising. Like the column? Buy the book. Hell, buy it even if you didn't like the column. (I mean, "Infernus**, buy it even...."). It's written in English, after all.
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* Cullen was for 20 years the Atlantic's managing editor.
** This is probably in the wrong Latin case, but I don't care!

Tom Wales, October 11

Seven years ago today, Tom Wales, a federal prosecutor, was shot and killed in his home in Seattle. He was 49. Although local law-enforcement officials quickly identified a leading suspect, charges have never been brought and the case is not closed. The universal assumption is that his killing was related to cases he had prosecuted and his publicized leadership of gun-safety efforts. This made him apparently the first federal prosecutor killed in the line of duty.



For more about Wales's career and character, and about the mysteries of the case and the suspect, see this authoritative article by Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker last year. Last month Dateline NBC did an update on the unanswered questions, with transcript here.  I did an online item about the case and its possible overlap with the Bush Administration "fired U.S. attorneys" allegations early last year on this site.

Memory of Bush-era disputes will naturally fade as the Administration itself does. I hope the memory of who Tom Wales was and what he stood for lasts as long as possible.

On presidential statements in time of crisis

To follow up the item from a few minutes ago:

When a president speaks on live TV in a moment of crisis, he should be prepared to do one or both of the following things:

1) Announce some solution, plan, change, initiative, or other specific effort that will address the source of public concern.

2) Explain the problem, or set a mood for coping with it ("we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds.. we shall never surrender"), in a way that changes the public's outlook from what it was before the speech.

If a president doesn't have the ammo to do either of those things, he should not bother. Thus, unfortunately, President Bush should not have bothered to make his statement this morning, which essentially re-stated the arguments he has presented before that did not suffice to stop the panic. Let's hope for more real action over the weekend.

I wish we emphasized some other measures

I have argued for decades that the press pays too much attention to daily stock market movement. Their immediate fluctuations are of interest mainly to day traders (ah, remember when that was a popular pastime). Their longer term connection to real national wealth, welfare, and happiness is imprecise, to put it mildly. This is especially so in the volatile and panicky mood of the moment.

Obviously my effort to get the daily market reports pushed to the inside pages is a doomed crusade. But in the short run, I wish that, instead of the DJIA / S&P 500 / NASDAQ etc, we had some comparably precise seeming, attention-getting, publicized* measure of credit availability. From all evidence, that is the real emergency driving real destruction of real companies creating real products and about to eliminate real jobs.

While waiting to see what President Bush (ah, remember him!) might have to say on the topic, anecdotage that is getting my attention:

Three weeks ago, I mentioned that DayJet, the pioneering air-taxi company, was shutting down not (it claimed) because of overt business problems but because of the impossibility of getting short-term finance. At the time, the credit squeeze might have seemed an excuse for the inevitable diceyness of the air travel business.

But just in the last few days, I've heard separately from three friends who run objectively "viable" businesses that they are on the verge of closing permanently, or laying off much of their staff, because they can't get short-term working capital. One said he was on the verge of having to close a manufacturing facility in the Midwest that, as he put it, "realistically will never open again." And this is from a group of friends that is heavy on writers, political people, academics, etc rather than a lot of business owners. I have never heard stories like this before. When I was living in northern California during the tech crash early this decade, the story was about the relatively slow deflation of (mostly) unrealistic plans rather than the widespread destruction of enterprises with a future.

My minor point: mainly because they're so precise and fast-moving, financial-market measures crowd out attention from what we really need to worry about, the imminent destruction of businesses and jobs that "should" survive.

My major point: the United States is near a moment of fundamental political choice. To have the discussion distracted by -- well, it would be nice to be even-handed about this, but the truth is that the distraction has been 99% from the McCain side, with the ongoing crap about the Weathermen in the 1960s -- is suicidal. A few weeks ago Senator McCain "suspended" his campaign because of what now seems a mild early phase of the financial crisis. Maybe he and Barack Obama could agree over the weekend to suspend discussion of any topic other than avoiding real economic devastation for the time being, at a minimum until their debate next week on economics.

Now waiting to hear Bush.
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* The LIBOR, the London Interbank Offer Rate, is one well known proxy; my point is that the DJIA gets 100 times the attention but is not 100 times as important right now.

I, for one, welcome all Kent Brockman allusions

I am touched (sincerely) that a number of people have written in to explain that the headline I mentioned liking yesterday -- "I, For One, Welcome Our Chinese Banker Overlords" -- was based on a famous riff by Anchorman Kent Brockman on The Simpsons.
 


I take these in the spirit of "psst, you have some spinach in your teeth"-style friendly warnings. It dilutes my gratitude not at all to say, I am aware of this, and it was the point! The drollness and incongruity of applying the familiar Brockman theme is what I thought was funny. And, no, no, no, I'm not implying any similarity among the different kinds of overlords! It just made me laugh.

Serious point: when writing for the mixed audience that comes to web sites -- much more thoroughly mixed by nationality, language skill, age range, and cultural reference points than is the case for most print publications -- it can be a challenge to figure out exactly how much to explain. Some parts of an audience will instantly get any quote or reference -- "Luke, I am your father" / Dave's "Top Ten" List / "Harmonious Society" / "I, for one, welcome.." Others won't. Explain too little, and you're being obscure; explain too much, and you risk sounding over-obvious or killing a joke -- with instant feedback either way.

Anyone who has ever written or spoken via any medium in any age has faced the challenge of knowing the audience. But with newspapers, magazines, and books the problem it's not as tricky because like-minded audiences tend to self-select. That's true to a degree of web sites. But the worldwide reach, the scale, the speed, the unpredictable patterns of searching and linking, etc all make for a larger probability that a given posting may be seen by people outside its "natural" audience.

The solution is probably one that good written publications apply in any case, and that is also generally useful in life: finding  unobtrusive ways to explain allusions when there's even a slight chance they may be missed. In conversation, I absolutely hate it when people say "Have you heard of Mr. X?" or "Does the name Y mean anything to you?" I prefer to say, "Mr X, who of course was Czar of all the Russias, ..." or "Mr. Y, the renowned pimp from Baltimore,..."  If you say "of course" or "the famous" you can convey the information while implying that of course the other party already knows it. On the same principle, I always say my name as the first thing out of my mouth when meeting someone I haven't seen for a while, to avoid any potential "What the hell is this guy's name?" awkwardness on the other end. Correspondingly, I think people are behaving badly when they fail to extend the same courtesy, and I outright hate it when someone asks, "Do you remember me?"  I generally do, but this gets things off on the wrong foot.

In any case, thanks to readers for the reminders. And shortly, the much less lighthearted topic of economic collapse. Jeesh.

I will always find this topic interesting (language dept.)

Air China night flight, Beijing to Seoul. Air crew is Chinese; passengers, mostly Korean. And the language I hear around me, as the flight attendants yell "You must sit down! Our airplane is taking off!" or ask "Do you want rice, or noodles?" ?

Often those very words, in English. Chinese and Korean are both "hard" languages, with limited overlap in writing systems and virtually none in grammar. Though the cultures have interacted for centuries, these days speakers of one language are apparently less likely to speak the other than to know some English. The point is unsurprising but its manifestations are often interesting.

This is not to imply that English will get you far in either place.

And speaking of universal languages, it may not be hard to guess where I dined in Seoul this evening:

A day of conciliation

Before these items get too far out of date, let me say:

1) I generally am on the opposite side from David Frum on questions of politics and public policy. But I have to admire the sobriety and fairmindedness with which he makes this case about the future of the Republicans.

2) As Thomas Friedman knows, I am more impressed by the many ways in which the world is not at all  "flat" than those in which it is. (When I asked him about this on TV two years ago,  he quite charmingly explained that "In the columnist game, you don't sell things 51 - 49.") But having complained about the broad brush he used in that case, let me do homage to the very great precision of his column yesterday on patriotism a la Sarah Palin. It is an achievement to bring into exact focus something that other people have been generally talking-around for a while. He did so in that column.

3) I have no past disagreements to mention in the case of a blog called "Delaware Liberal." But I have to admire its author Jason's headline-writing skill. He refers to an article of mine that the Atlantic published as "The $1.4 Trillion Question." His improved headline is: "I, For One, Welcome Our Chinese Banker Overlords."

A question I've often asked myself

From Kate Atkinson's chilling new novel When Will There Be Good News?, in a scene where a man drives through the hinterland in a rented car:

There was no signal on his phone, and the radio had given out nothing but crackle and hiss for some time now. The CD player contained one disc accidentally left over from the previous rental, and Jackson wondered in what circumstances he would feel so desperate for the sound of another voice that he would listen to Enya's.

(For Enya fans, this is just a little joke, occasioned by the view in our household that the most reliable gender marker is not in fact the Y-chromosome but rather an appetite for County Donegal's answer to Kenny G. No joke, though, Atkinson's book is remarkable.)

Your Town Hall #2 debate wrapup in 3 points

1) From a horse-race perspective, John McCain came in behind and losing ground, in the middle of a financial/economic panic that works against him, and therefore needing a big win. This meant either damaging and flummoxing Obama, or so outshining him in audience rapport, mastery of policy, and empathetic connection through the camera, that the debate could be presented as a turning point. None of that happened. (McCain's best performance was at the end, rejecting a "Yes/No" question on whether Russia is an "evil empire.") At this stage in the race, a tie goes to the leader, and this was not even a tie.

2) "That one." Difficult to discuss. Unwise (and unnecessary) for Obama or his campaign ever to mention themselves. But creates an impression that may be impossible to erase.

3) The betting had been, including from me, that this Town Hall format would best suit McCain -- the informality, the opportunity for jokeyness, the track record of handling such questions easily. To my eye, that betting turned out wrong, partly through McCain's doing and partly through Obama's.

     On McCain's side -- to my eye -- this meant a range of references that collectively amounted to something like George H.W. Bush's weary glance at his wristwatch during his own Town Hall debate with the vigorous young Bill Clinton 16 years ago. The forced and unsuccessful Bob Hope-style jokes, the repeated reference to the "overhead projector," the prevalent  allusions to an era much of the electorate considers past. Tip O'Neill, the early Reagan, the Marine disaster in Lebanon -- important all, but dated-sounding in 2008.

   And on Obama's side, getting away with surprising aggression -- being the first on the personal criticism, trying to shake up the format and have direct colloquy with McCain near the end, taunting McCain by talking about the "bomb bomb bomb" song,  to my eye seeming physically confident in the way Bill Clinton did in that same 1992 Town Hall. A very different bearing from what we've seen from him in any debates this year. Also, in terms of modern stagecraft: Obama balanced his looks between the audience and the camera, so he seemed to engage both; McCain less natural in doing that. (And Obama said "you," when speaking the audience in nearly every sentence; McCain much less frequently.)

 That's all. Up to the electorate at this point, and for me back again to "real" work.

The only thing I will say about debate #2 in real time

Two minutes ago, McCain half-pointing at Obama and calling him, in the third person, that one.

The sense of seeing in real time a gesture that will be regretted for a long time.

One clip worth a thousand words

Andrew Sullivan and others have already mentioned this clip by TPMtv, but here is why I think it is important: It does a lot to explain why many people who felt they "knew" John McCain in his earlier DC life have been slow to face and accept what he has become.

The video alternates clips of the "good" McCain, talking about respect and commitment to high-road politics, with ads and other evidence of the way he is running his campaign.

For another time, discussion of whether the "good" McCain was ever an authentic product. I'll just say, many people including me found it appealing at the time. What is undeniable is the contrast between the way he then seemed and the way he now acts. This is obviously an anti-McCain clip, but I think it's instructive even for his supporters.  And, in real time before tonight's debate, it shows the range of personas he might choose to project.


   

Perhaps a better idea for the 28th amendment?

From a reader, building on on this suggestion:
_____

            Section 1.  No person shall be President or Vice President, or a Senator or Representative, whose relative by blood or marriage within the sixth degree of kindred according to the common law has held such office within the preceding one hundred years.

            Section 2.  No person shall be President or Vice President who has ever been a regularly enrolled student in any college, school or other division of Yale University.

(Sixth degree of kindred is second cousin, great-great-great uncle/aunt, or great-great-great-great grandparent.)

Admittedly this would leave the field open to a Taft in 2012, but democracy always carries risks.

     DN (Yale grad)

_____

"Graphic novel" about the election

Am way behind on "real" writing, so without elaboration:  if you want to see some very funny artwork and narrative relevant to the election, check out this site, produced by Derek Chatwood, aka The Searcher on flickr.

This will be funniest to those who enjoyed Tina Fey's latest Sarah Palin SNL riff. ("We'll ask ourselves, what would a Maverick do?..") It will be least funny who found that disrespectful. And it's not a full graphic novel, just one page, but still.

That barely took one minute! Now back to work. (Thanks to Jarrett Wrisley.)

The 28th Amendment to the Constitution (draft form)

"No Person shall be elected President or Vice President without accepting a session of questioning by the press, such session to last no less than one hour and to be open to normally accredited members of the press in the same fashion as at Presidential news conferences. The questioning shall occur and the results shall be made freely available to the public at least one week before an Election is held."

Three weeks to get it enacted.

Non-politics: Yellow Sheep River in Chinese

As previously mentioned here and here, the Atlantic's October issue has an article I put a lot of effort and heart into. It was about an idealistic attempt to improve the prospects for children living in China's remote, scenic, and very poor far western regions, including an area called Yellow Sheep River. The article, "How the West Was Wired," is here, and a narrated slideshow is here.

If anyone was waiting to read it in Chinese, a translated version, prepared by the "Town and Talent" organization described in the article, is now available here.

I realize that there is some irony in announcing, in English, the availability of a version for people who are not comfortable reading English. (Like the safety cards in airline exit rows: "If you cannot read these instructions, please let the flight crew know...") Still, I know that many Chinese readers are English-literate but naturally prefer to handle long material in Chinese. Here it is.

Our capacity for self-government

From twelve time zones away, it looks as if the United States is in one of those moments where the capacity to get serious and face big problems is sorely tested.

In the short term, a worldwide financial panic and crisis. Just beyond that, the real economic and social problems that come when large numbers of people lose their jobs, their businesses, their investments, their homes, and even larger numbers become fearful about what might happen to them. And then, when we get a minute to think, profound global energy and environmental challenges, security concerns that range from loose nukes to terrorist organizations, plus a couple of ongoing wars and ever-rising medical costs. Just as starters. The United States is still incredibly rich, powerful, and productive.  But the current situation is no joke, for America or the world.

In these circumstances, and with a presidential election four weeks away, is it conceivable that candidates will waste time arguing whether one of them has been in the same room with a guy who had been a violent extremist at a time before most of today's U.S. citizens were even born? (William Ayres was a Weatherman in the late 1960s. Today's median-aged American was born around 1972.) Of course, it's not only conceivable: it's the Republican plan for this final push -- "turning the page" on economic concerns and getting to these "character" and "association" questions about Barack Obama.

Grow up. If John McCain has a better set of plans to deal with the immediate crisis, and the medium-term real-economy fallout, and the real global problems of the era -- fine, let him win on those. But it is beneath the dignity he had as a Naval officer to wallow in this mindless BS. I will say nothing about the dignity of a candidate who repeatedly winks at the public, Hooters-waitress style.  A great country acts great when it matters.  This is a time when it matters -- for politicians in the points they raise, for journalists in the subjects they write about and the questions they ask of candidates. And, yes, for voters.

A comment that dumbfounds me

I know the Washington Post's David Broder slightly, and I've always respected and liked him and enjoyed dealing with him. But what can he have been thinking when writing this, about the VP debate, in his column today?

Those of us who know and admire Joe Biden were happy that a big national audience got to see him at his best -- a sentimental, smart, decent and generous guy.

But he was no better than Palin. She appeared cool as a cucumber, comfortable with her talking points and unrattled by anything that was thrown at her.

I've added the emphasis, my way of conveying a reaction of WHAT???????????!!!!!?????? Such an assessment can be true only if you have decided to assess debate performance on one factor alone, perky self-assurance, and to assign no weight whatsoever to such items as logic, responsiveness to questions, clarity in explaining views, factual knowledge, sentence by sentence coherence, and so on.

As everyone else including me has observed, Palin managed to pass her own particular test in this debate -- which was to improve on her alarmingly ill-informed and paralyzed appearances with Katie Couric. Biden's test was to "do well" in the normal, not the making-special-allowances, sense of that term. Each passed the respective test, but that doesn't mean there was no difference in how they performed.

In his famous 1960s book Paper Lion, George Plimpton described the thrill of running a few plays as quarterback during a Detroit Lions scrimmage. He rightly considered himself a  success simply because he didn't get pulverized. That he avoided being killed by the opposing linemen was indeed impressive, but it didn't mean that they were "no better" at what they did.

The title of one of Plimpton's other books, about what happened when he got to pitch to several major league batters, gets across the idea of the different standards being applied to his appearances in pro sports lineups  -- and to Palin's performance in the debate. It was called Out of My League.

Your VP debate wrapup in four bullet points

Quick guide:

• Ifill, moderator: Terrible. Yes, she was constrained by the agreed debate rules. But she gave not the slightest sign of chafing against them or looking for ways to follow up the many unanswered questions or self-contradictory answers. This was the big news of the evening. Katie Couric, and for that matter Jim Lehrer, have never looked so good.
   
  
• Palin: "Beat expectations." In every single answer, she was obviously trying to fit the talking points she had learned to the air time she had to fill, knowing she could do so with impunity from the moderator. But she did it with spunk and without any of the poleaxed moments she had displayed in previous questions. The worst holes in her answers - above all, about the Vice President's role, also either mishearing or ignoring the question about her "Achilles heel" - were concealed in ways they haven't been before.
  
  
• Biden: No mistakes. This is a bigger deal than it seems, since Biden could easily have seemed bullying, condescending, chauvinistic, or whatever. He didn't. And while he was woolly-sounding in the beginning, he was commanding and authoritative - from his side's perspective - on issues of foreign policy and constitutional balance. And to all appearances sincere in his choking-up near the end when talking about having a child in peril. Overall, don't see how he could have balanced all the conflicting pressures on him much better.
  
  
• The race: No fundamental change. Which is better news for Obama than McCain.
  

That's all for instant-analysis. On to the next debate.

Update: How was it, considered strictly as a debate? Of course Biden did a far better job -- he answered the questions rather than moving straight to talking points, he drew on a vastly broader range of factual references, he attacked his opponents in ways that were relevant to the subject under discussion. But this is not how the event was being watched or scored.
 

The main thing I will say about the Veep debate in real time

The loser 38 minutes in is Gwen Ifill, who is doing nothing at all to keep the discussion on track or having the candidates engage.

The circumstances don't allow her to do anything close to what Katie Couric achieved, but she seems not even to be listening to the answers when moving to her next question.

UPDATE: Forty minutes in, Ifill completely missed the followup on the gay marriage / civil rights question. Where is Katie C?


   

The debate tonight

I have no idea what to expect any more. And, hey, I'm the champion debate watcher in the entire world!

For instance:

• "Everyone knows," based on a long string of past episodes, that some unintentional flash of character revelation usually turns out to be the memorable aspect of a presidential debate. Eg: Nixon looking furtive and sweaty in 1960, Ford momentarily seemed befuddled in 1976, Dukakis seeming bloodless in 1988, etc. All these moments "mattered" because they crystallized a feeling that, in retrospect, people knew they'd "always had" about the candidate.
  
  In the days since the first Obama-McCain debate, it's become ever clearer that John McCain's sourness and anger are the traits unintentionally revealed in the debate and now working against him. His shockingly dyspeptic performance two days ago at the Des Moines Register was as remarkable as Bill Clinton's worst moments during the primary season this year. The difference is that in his prime Clinton never allowed the public to see that side of him. Plus, the image Clinton had cemented back then was of someone who was genial and talented though  undisciplined. Thanks to McCain's hostile refusal to engage Obama as a human equal face-to-face at the debate, the image he is cementing is that of a seething older man. Like Bob Dole in 1996, with less of a gift for one-liners.
  
  It all fits into a pattern in retrospect -- but I don't know a single "expert" who predicted that avoiding eye contact would be the enduring image of the first debate. By similar reasoning, I'm sure that two or three days from now, we'll all say "Of course!" about some moment in the Biden-Palin debate that none of us can foresee now. That's why we watch!
  .
  
• "Everyone knows" that Sarah Palin has set expectations so low that she is likely to do "surprisingly" well. Joe Biden will be judged on whether he gets anything wrong; Palin, on whether she gets anything right.
  
  But each time we think we've seen the bottom of her performance, she has gone on to do even worse. Looking back, her reponse to Charlie Gibson about "the Bush doctrine" now seems harmless and comparatively well-informed. Each of her interviews with Katie Couric has revealed greater ignorance, compared with the previous one.
  
  The latest, about the Supreme Court, was unbelievable not for the most highly-publicized reason (inability to name any Court decision other than Roe v Wade) but for her apparent unfamiliarity with the relationship between the U.S. Constitution and individual states' rights. She asserted, with great geniality and calm, that a right could be "inherent" in the Constitution but then be administered at each state's discretion. Kind of like the right to vote regardless of gender being recognized in the 19th Amendment, but then left to each state to enforce or not. People have remarked on her nervousness when grasping for names or references. I actually find her confidence at moments like this more disturbing, since it indicates that she has no idea of what she has revealed.
  
  I still think she'll beat expectations, because her basic political and empathetic skills have to be better than what we've seen so far. Also, the format of the debate allows less room for the immediate follow-up questions that Katie Couric used to such polite but devastating effect. But it's all a guess.
  
  
• "Everyone knows" that Joe Biden has to be careful tonight -- not make any more of his own frequent gaffes, not do anything that would engender (interesting word in itself) underdog sympathy for Palin. But no one really knows beforehand how much assertiveness by Biden would seem too much, too little, or Just Right. Once it's over, we'll all be able to judge whether he struck the right balance. Ahead of the game, no one can be sure.

Sign of my sincerity in saying this will be deeply interesting: postponing a big trip for 24 hours, because the original schedule would have had me on an airplane when the debate goes live. This is not to be missed.