Several days ago I argued that what made Barack Obama's "big" speeches sound unusual was that they attempted something that among politicians is indeed rare: Not expressing our preexisting views with new clarity and edge but instead asking us to change our minds. I also said it was no accident that Obama had saved these ambitious speeches until he was in the White House, since a campaign was a time for troop-rallying rhetoric rather than asking people to think too hard.
Herewith one message in agreement and one in dissent. First, from Eric Redman, author of The Dance of Legislation (and longtime close friend of mine) who had been a devotee of Richard Neustadt's famous presidential-power analyses in college and eventually delivered a eulogy for Neustadt and contributed to a memorial volume about him. The turn in Obama's rhetoric after the election, Redman says,
made me think of Neustadt's enigmatic advice in 1968 when I was about to take time off from school to go write speeches for Senator Magnuson. Dick had written campaign speeches for President Truman. His writing was finely worked, highly polished. I asked for
advice in the craft. He frowned and thought carefully. Then he said,
"Remember, a campaign is not a good time to educate the public." I puzzled over that for 35 years, and repeated it, partly for a laugh (which it produced), in my eulogy at his memorial service.
It was not until I was doing the research for "Neustadt in Brazil" [in the memorial volume] that I listened to him on tape explain (in response to a questioner criticizing Lula [da Silva, prez of Brazil] for not living up to his campaign promises) that the time to educate the people (impliedly with speeches) is when you are in office. Neustadt was not only recommending that Lula do it, he was explaining why it would work. Then it all made sense to me, and I was even able to explain to some who had heard the eulogy and, like me, been puzzled ever since hearing the original advice.
Now, and after the jump, dissent from Carlyn Meyer, who thinks I am under-valuing the content of Obama's stump speeches through the campaign:
While I appreciate your annotation of the five big speeches since his
election (plus the race speech), I have to disagree that the basic
stump speech differed in quality. If anything, he used it to test out
his broad concepts and way of speaking to people. Here's why:
Belatedly, on the Cairo speech & Obama rhetoric in general
Ten days ago I was writing a dispatch about Barack Obama's speech in Cairo, when the internet service where I was (in Shaanxi) cut out. The elections in Iran and general question of political change in the Middle East are a topical reminder to get back to this point:
As I started to say earlier, here is a way to think about why Barack Obama's "big" speeches of the past 15 months seem different from normal political rhetoric. It's because they are.
Here are the ones I'm counting as big speeches, starting with the most recent and working backward:
I'm not even counting convention speeches, the inaugural address, his State of the Union, or a bunch of other performances. They were all fine but more like other, normal "good" political speeches.
These six -- including an astonishing five of them in an eight-week burst -- were different from normal rhetoric in the following basic way:
Most of the time, "effective" speeches boil down to finding a better, clearer, cleverer, more vivid, or more memorable way to express what people already think.
An extraordinary statement from someone now being quarantined in Shanghai is below and after the jump. First, a bit of context:
The World Health Organization has of course now declared H1N1 a "pandemic," while emphasizing that its effects so far are mild. You can look long and hard at the WHO's main site about the disease (nerds will note that the site's URL retains its original basename "swineflu" rather than the less porcophobic current term) without seeing any recommendations for widespread quarantine programs or closing of national borders etc.
To put the disease's toll in perspective: of the 30,000 cases reported so far all around the world, about 150 people appear to have died from this variant of flu. And in many "though not all" of these cases, according to the WHO, the victims had "underlying chronic conditions." For comparison: since the time I woke up this morning, about 150 people have died of tuberculosis in China alone.* Estimates vary, but "normal" seasonal flu typically kills around 1,000 people per day worldwide.
[*TB math: According to the UN,
China's average annual death rate from tuberculosis is about 15 per
100,000 population. For a Chinese population of 1.3 billion, that would
mean about 195,000 TB deaths per year, or about 535 per day.]
Of course any new disease strain raises new concerns about potential mutations. And of course a big, poor country like China has different public health considerations than, say, Switzerland might. But bear in mind the dimensions of this current disease threat relative to other real concerns while reading this account from earlier this week, by a person currently quarantined in Shanghai. The writer is originally Chinese but now with U.S. citizenship. It is quite long, but you will not regret reading to the very end. It begins:
When I landed in Shanghai on Saturday afternoon, a team of medical
officials wearing white bio-hazard suites boarded the plane with heat
wands and measured everyone's temperature. All passengers were required
to remain in their seats while they went around to each individual to
check them for physical symptoms of H1N1. These measures had become
standard protocol in China due to fears of a H1N1 outbreak. We all
passed the inspection and were let off of the plane. I thought I was
free to enjoy my two weeks in China.
Numerous previous items (here, here, here, here, and others) have addressed the Chinese government's success in erasing June 4, 1989, from the collective memory of their country's next generation. Two more accounts, both from foreigners who have recently raised the issue with young Chinese people, and each of which shows some of the drama associated with the issue here.
First, from someone now teaching in a major manufacturing city in China. (Yes, I know, this really narrows it down.):
Today [several days ago], a few other foreigners and I were looking at an MSNBC retrospective (miraculously, not blocked) of the important day that happened recently, and just of reveling in the amazing photos and videos with lots of "wows" and stunned silences.
A 23-year old Chinese girl we know very well was sitting next to us and peered over, and said, "What's that? What's going on?" We tried to dissuade her; since in many ways it's not in her or our best interest for her to see, but she forced herself into our huddle and was looking, and noticed all the Chinese people wearing headbands, the blood, the violence, the shouting at the police, and so on. So she started asking, shocked by the fact that this had to be somewhere in her homeland, "What is this!? What's going on!? Who are these people?! Where is this?!" She was just awestruck and horrified.
So we told her the whole story from the W perspective, making diplomatic but honest allowances since most of us don't truly believe that "things" are generally that bad at all; certainly not here and now. But she just listened to us, staring at the videos and pictures, and none of us could see her face, which was bowed intently at the computer screen and veiled by her long hair. All of a sudden, she started weeping. Just weeping. She had had no idea that it had ever happened.
It can be really hard to live here, but it's something like this that makes me love this country and these people, especially here in my city of residence. Where others might see darkness, sadness and ignorance, it's often possible to see hope, beauty in the struggle, and real, unedited life.
The second account:
I am currently living in Shanghai, a recent US college graduate and
English teacher (born in '84). I have a Chinese girlfriend (born in
'89), and since we began dating some months back I have mentioned TAM
to her a few times.
I left the city this morning for a long-planned reporting trip 600 miles to the southwest, in Shaanxi province. As I implied yesterday, I was glad to have the option to leave Beijing. But updates I have received from various sources fall into these categories:
1) Several people have written to say that the going was surprisingly easy. For instance, this account from a Chinese-American man in his 20s whom I know in Beijing:
We were tourists and took many many photos, even asking the
plainclothed police who were keeping their eye on us to take one or
two. We didn't get hassled; in fact, aside from the ridiculous numbers
of cops, obvious and otherwise, there seemed to be no difference from
when I was there two weeks ago, showing friends around. Time: 8am.
Persons: myself, another Chinese-American, and two white guys. Just
wanted to add that data point to your blog, especially in light of the
note of caution you posted.
2) For fully authorized foreign TV news crews, the problem of the day was not so much frontal confrontations with security officials as -- well, you have to see the pictures to believe it. The Shanghaiist site has a roundup of photos and videos of the ever-so-suave "umbrella trick" as practiced on news crews from CNN, BBC, and AFP. This is the kind of thing that makes you hold your head and say: Rising major power in the world?
3) Speaking of the CNN/BBC blackout difference I mentioned previously, it's possible that our apartment house is getting its BBC feed through some outside-normal-systems satellite connection. I hear from other people in China that the normal, authorized (ie, subject-to-censoring) foreign satellite feed cut off CNN, BBC, as well as French TV 5 at all the predictable points.
4) My wife, lacking the excuse of travel to Shaanxi, and equipped with the multiple tools a woman can use to alter her appearance from one day to the next, went back to Tiananmen Square today looking like a different person from the one whose presence the authorities had noted the previous night. Her report on the day's activities is here and after the jump.
I went to the square at noontime, expecting to see pretty much what we
saw last night: the square off limits, people walking along the
roadside or staring at the flag and Mao's giant portrait.
More about this in a few hours: literally have five minutes left at an internet place in Shaanxi province (long-scheduled trip away from Beijing this afternoon) (More about Beijing on this June 4 later too).
The main point is: this was yet another in the series of speeches that individually and as a group really are out of phase with anything we have known in contemporary political rhetoric. I mean a sequence that began most noticeably with the "race and America" speech in Philadelphia 15 months ago and has continued with five or six clear high points since then (most recently at Notre Dame, as discussed here) and no obvious flop. I did not see or hear coverage of this speech but based only on the text, which I've just read, I have a hypothesis about the trait that makes this discourse unusual and welcome.
The five minutes are up, so To Be Continued a few hours from now.
June 3, 2009
Today in Beijing
I am guessing that you will see no real-time TV reports from the Tiananmen Square area today, and little or no photography. This is based on personal experience there last night, China time, which also leads to personal advice for anyone in Beijing thinking of going there today.
During my time in Beijing over the past year and a half, I've often seen the square itself totally closed off to visitors, as it is at the moment. There are always plenty of security forces around -- soldiers in green uniforms, various kinds of police in blue uniforms, and "plainclothes" forces who are pretty easy to pick out, like strapping young men in buzz cuts all wearing similar-looking "leisure" clothes. But I have not seen before anything like the situation at the moment.
There are more representatives in all categories -- soldiers, police, obvious plainclothesmen -- than I recall seeing even during the Tibet violence in early 2008 or through the Olympic games. Also many people whom you would normally classify as fruit vendors, tourists from the Chinese provinces, youngish white collar workers male and female, and skateboarder-looking characters wearing cargo shorts and with fauxhawk haircuts, were last night walking up and down the sidewalks with their eyes constantly on visitors and drifting up next to people who were holding conversations.
The way to avoid their attention is keep moving briskly along the sidewalk rather than stopping as if you think there is something particular to look at in the square today. The way to draw it is to stop and look around, to pay attention to the security forces themselves, or to have a camera in your hand. If the camera comes out, it may be pointed at one of the scenic highlights in the center of the square. A nighttime glamour shot of the Great Hall of the People, taken from across the Square with a glowing Monument to the People's Heroes in the middle ground (and no actual people in the square) is within bounds. This is how it looked last night:
A view down toward Mao's Mausoleum, again across an emptied square, is also OK.
But to point a camera in any direction not shown in these shots is to ask for immediate trouble. In particular if security forces in any of the categories above are in the field of view. I say this with first-hand certainty, based on experiences I will describe later when I am living someplace else.
Two other, related notes: As reported yesterday, CNN is still blacked out whenever words like "In China today...." or "Twenty years ago in Bei...." come across the airwaves. Whereas BBC TV is airing uncensored footage of tanks in the square twenty years ago and repeatedly using the phrase "Tiananmen massacre." And just as I type, the admirable Quentin Somerville of the BBC is talking, live from Beijing, about the "ruthlessness at the heart of the Communist government." (And just this second, in a Borges-worthy moment, Somerville said that international coverage was being blacked out across China -- so I got to see him saying that I was not able to see him. Still, the general point is true.)
Second note: Hillary Clinton's official "Message on the Twentieth Anniversary of Tiananmen Square," here, was necessary, appropriate, properly phrased, and -- even though it will have no effect inside China -- exactly the right thing to have done. More on this theme shortly.
Back to practicalities: if you in Beijing and are near the square, be careful. Seriously.
June 2, 2009
Two more about June 4
In response to previous "lost memory" dispatches -- here, here, and here -- two more notes I thought worth sharing, the first from a Chinese person I know and the second from an American teaching in China.
The Chinese person was of grade-school age in 1989. He wrote in response to this plea from another Chinese person recently put under house arrest:
First and foremost, to hear a student-aged person saying "don't give up freedom" and read Yuhua's op-ed on NYT are like reading romanticizing of that history. What i read in these, call me detached or cynical, are their own sentiments and emotions unrelated to what actually happened 20 years ago, rather than true and fair understanding of it, which is what i want to read and remember. I don't deny those people have their own faith and dreams, sometimes glorious. But celebrating their faith and dreams through memorization of that history is absurd. Feels like ripping the history of its true meaning and rewriting it for one's own sake. And this is a lot worse than forgetting or misreading history.
Second, I don't understand why the (managed or controlled) oblivion of that part of history should be such a big event. There are tons of other events in modern China history that we don't know or remember. So why single out this particular part of history? Was it because of the fact that death occurred to thousands of unarmed students? Well, if that's case, we should lament a thousand times for those died during the great famine, political movements and culture revolution, not to mention the millions killed during the civil war. I can clearly remember that we were taught during high school that in each of the great campaigns in the civil war, tens of thousands of enemies were killed. Great military successes. But we were never taught in the same book that those were also human beings, killed in that large number and then forgotten (I guess they were probably not part of "the people" Yuhua was talking about). I don't mean to be sarcastic or cold-blooded about this. What i want to say is that our history is never short of such carnage episodes and since we have forgotten or ignored so much of it, why pick this out in particular and romanticize it. Only to make it sound very very very absurd!
After the jump, the dispatch from the foreign teacher:
Carried overseas on BBC, and in prepared text here from the Washington Post. WhiteHouse.gov site, by the way, is once again weirdly behind-the-curve in getting material up.
Argumentative crux of the speech to the left (emphasis added):
I have opposed the creation of such a Commission because I believe that
our existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver
accountability. The Congress can review abuses of our values, and there
are ongoing inquiries by the Congress into matters like enhanced
interrogation techniques. The Department of Justice and our courts can
work through and punish any violations of our laws.
This is the reply to people, including me, who think there needs to be some kind of investigatory commission. Taken at his word, he's saying: Congress can do the investigating, the courts (and my Department of Justice) can prosecute. In theory, this works out well. A new president moves ahead; the System provides accountability. We'll see.
Argumentative / explanatory crux of the speech to the right:
I do know with certainty that we can defeat al Qaeda. Because the
terrorists can only succeed if they swell their ranks and alienate
America from our allies, and they will never be able to do that if we
stay true to who we are.
This has been, from the start, the central indictment of the Bush-Cheney approach to al Qaeda. Anything-goes tactics may or may not win battles, but they certainly lose wars. Dick Cheney's speech, cut off by BBC about ten minutes in, is ineffective not just because of its anger/contempt but also because what is billed as a response is in fact one cycle late, simply re-stating the claims Obama went out of his way to rebut (rather that keeping up with the cycle by answering anything Obama said).
Subtle harpoon crux of the speech, in the last paragraph:
We will not be safe if we see national security as a wedge that divides
America - it can and must be a cause that unites us as one people, as
one nation. We have done so before in times that were more perilous
than ours.
The entirety of the Bush-Cheney approach rested on the assumption that there had never been a threat as great as the one demonstrated by 9/11. Condi Rice said this explicitly, in her disastrous (and, in a just world, career-damaging) "al Qaeda was more dangerous than the Nazis" comment at Stanford. The parts of Cheney's speech I saw today, and everything we know about Bush's decisions and statements in office, assumed without argument that they faced choices between due-process and national security more painful than those that George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or FDR wrestled with. A reminder that others have faced difficult choices and dire threats is useful for judging our response and placing it in the long context of American values that Obama repeatedly emphasized.
May 18, 2009
On eloquence vs. prettiness
Based on its transcript -- here at the Washington Post site, oddly not yet in any obvious place at WhiteHouse.gov [Update: it's now on the White House page, here]-- Barack Obama's Notre Dame commencement speech was another extraordinary performance. "Extraordinary" meaning that it was like his speech last year in Philadelphia about race relations, his speech last month in Prague about nuclear weapons, and, only slightly less impressive, his speech last month at Georgetown University laying out his long term economic plan. Or, on a small scale, his answer in Strasbourg about "American exceptionalism."
What made these presentations extraordinary was not any single phrase or sentence, nor any paragraph-long flight of fine language. Indeed, I can hardly remember any phrase or sentence from any speech Obama has ever given. (Phrases or sentences are to be distinguished from campaign slogans, like "Yes we can" or "not 'red states' or 'blue states' but the United States of America.") Instead the power of those speeches comes from the quality of their thought -- from the ideas and truths the speaker is trying to grapple with:
In the case of the race speech, the different burdens and resentments Americans of all background held, and why we had to face and work through them. In the nuclear speech, the dangers that remained long after the Cold War had ended, and America's special opportunity and responsibility to find a solution. In the Notre Dame speech, the difficulty of resolving, in an open democracy, differences of moral certainty that are fiercely held on all sides. And so on. A passage from this latest speech after the jump.
This kind of eloquence is different from what I think of as rhetorical prettiness -- words and phrases that catch your notice as you hear them, and that often can be quoted, remembered, and referred to long afterwards. "Ask not..." from John F. Kennedy. "Blood, toil, tears, and sweat" from Winston Churchill. "Only thing we have to fear is fear itself" from FDR. "I have a dream," from Martin Luther King. Or, to show that memorable language does not necessarily mean elevated thought, "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" from the early George C. Wallace.
At rare moments in history, language that goes beyond prettiness to beauty is matched with original, serious, difficult thought to produce the political oratory equivalent of Shakespeare. By acclamation Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address is the paramount American achievement of this sort: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness
in the right as God gives us to see the right..."
The reason to distinguish eloquence of thought from prettiness of expression is that the former tells you something important about the speaker, while the latter may or may not do so. Hired assistants can add a fancy phrase, much as gag writers can supply a joke. Not even his greatest admirers considered George W. Bush naturally expressive, but in his most impressive moment, soon after the 9/11 attacks, he delivered a speech full of artful writerly phrases, eg: "Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our
enemies, justice will be done." Good for him, and good for his staff.
Rhetorical polish, that is, can be a staff-enhanced virtue. The eloquence that comes from original thought is much harder to hire, or to fake. This is the sort of eloquence we've seen from Obama often enough to begin to expect. ___
US no-show at Shanghai Expo: the hows and whys (updated)
Last month Adam Minter of ShanghaiScrap, did our initial Atlantic report on the looming self-inflicted embarrassment of America's no-show status at the 2010 Shanghai Expo / World's Fair.
The strands of the story are tangled, to put it mildly, and have been hard to follow in scattered press reports. So Minter's latest detailed backgrounder is very useful in explaining how things reached this point, why it matters, and what if anything could be done. Among the points he clarifies, in a list of problems that have affected the proposed US pavilion:
A. Cost. Shanghai Expo 2010's [one of the US contenders] $61 million pavilion
budget - down from an earlier $84 million budget - is inordinately
expensive, and surely the most expensive national pavilion after the
elaborate Chinese design. "For that kind of money [$61 million]," an
experienced American businessman in Shanghai told me. "You could build
a thirty-story residential tower on that site and still have money left
over. But these people want that money for a two story pavilion." In
comparison, Germany's elaborate pavilion design is projected to cost US$40.8 million; Norway's elegant structure,
a comparatively minor US$22 million. And even those might be
overpriced. At the Beijing 2008 Olympics, major commercial pavilions
were built for around $1000 per square meter - that is, less than US$5
million. So far, Shanghai Expo 2010, Inc., has failed to provide a
detailed public accounting of how it plans to spend its proposed US$61
million, leading to wild and unsubstantiated speculation among
experienced China hands in Shanghai.
[UPDATE: I hear from informed sources that there is some controversy about the importance of whole cost issue, with some other pavilions costing more than this US figure -- and the real question being whether the US can spend this much money in a sensible way with so little time to go. More details as they come in.]
One image of the proposed US structure Minter is referring to, from this site:
Full set of images of other countries' structures here. One example I like from that site: the Israeli pavilion, with components of the Whispering Garden, the Hall of Light, and the Hall of Innovations. Israel is a tiny country and this is a relatively small structure, but FWIW Israeli's entire budget for the expo, including construction, is $6 million.
And here is Italy's (no budget listed). The story is worth following.
May 16, 2009
Twitter-scale reaction on new ambassador to China
I am at a computer for about 90 seconds until late tonight, but: the reported selection of Utah's Republican governor Jon Huntsman Jr as the Obama Administration's new ambassador to China is an interesting and surprising choice -- and at face value, a shrewd one. Huntsman is reportedly fluent in Mandarin, based on his time as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan; has an adopted Chinese daughter (plus another from India, in addition to biological children); is experienced in Asia, as a boy-ambassador to Singapore (at age 32) during the first Bush administration; and -- so I gather -- is on the modern-science as opposed to the flat-earth side of the debate about the environmental + climate issues that constitute the most important impending business between the US and China. More later, but on first impression a clever choice from American-interest point of view (completely apart from what it means for internal party politics in the US). Will also give the Chinese leadership something to think about: why the new Democratic president has appointed a rising Republican politician. Sign of bipartisan US views toward China? Etc?
Subject to revision if there is something important I don't know about Huntsman and his record!
May 14, 2009
The CIA vs. Sen. Bob Graham: how to keep score at home
It's easy! If the CIA says one thing and former Sen. Graham says another, then the CIA is lying. Or, "in error," if you prefer.
(Background here and here, in which Graham says that some of the briefings in which he was allegedly filled in about waterboarding and related techniques never occurred. This matters, because the CIA's claims are part of the same argument that Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in Congress had known about and acquiesced to waterboarding all the way along.)
Part of the payoff of reaching age 72 and having spent 38 years in public office, as Graham has, is that people have had a chance to judge your reputation. Graham has a general reputation for honesty. In my eyes he has a specific reputation for very good judgment: he was one of a handful of Senators actually to read the full classified intelligence report about the "threats" posed by Saddam Hussein. On the basis of reading it, despite a career as a conservative/centrist Democrat, he voted against the war and fervently urged his colleagues to do the same. "Blood is going to be on your hands," he warned those who voted yes.
More relevant in this case, Graham also has a specific reputation for keeping detailed daily records of people he met and things they said. He's sometimes been mocked for this compulsive practice, but he's never been doubted about the completeness or accuracy of what he compiles. (In the fine print of those records would be an indication that I had interviewed him about Iraq war policy while he was in the Senate and recently spent time with him when he was on this side of the world.)
So if he says he never got the briefing, he didn't. And if the CIA or anyone acting on its behalf challenges him, they are stupid and incompetent as well as being untrustworthy. This doesn't prove that the accounts of briefing Pelosi are also inaccurate. But it shifts the burden of proof.
May 7, 2009
Last crop of political-art nominees
Starting with a late favorite in the polling, Rembrandt's The Night Watch (two other Rembrandts among previous nominees, here). The main resonance is of course between the central figure in one scene and his counterpart in the other.
We're nearing the end here. Four more proposed Old Master precursors for the memorable Obama group portrait. Previous candidates here. Probably one more crop to come, then the exciting lessons of our brief look at art.
First, Governors of the Wine Merchants Guild, by Ferdinand Bol. I won't pretend that this was the Old Master I was thinking of, since I'd not aware of having seen it before. But still:
Next, a detail from Raphael's School of Athens, featuring the raised-finger gesture we see from Obama.
After the jump, two more with the raised-finger motif.
More on public health, PR, and China's role in the world
From a reader with a Chinese surname, in response to my suggestion that Chinese officials stick to scientific data, rather than claims about national dignity, when discussing public health issues like the current flu situation:
"Western journalists are accustomed to the shrewd answers from their own politicians facing offensive/aggressive questions. It's well known that they, the western politicians, are afraid of negative reports for their own political skins. Therefore you may also assume that Chinese officials should behave the same way, if they ever want to be accepted by the western world.
"Unfortunately, I have to say that three years stationing in China has not made you thinking like a Chinese. For most Chinese officials, their reaction toward negative western media reports is mostly about domestic consumption. They have to be resolute and principled when it comes to rebutting the 'western defamations' driven by 'ulterior motives'. It's not only about national pride, but has more to do with not being perceived by Chinese people as weak and not being able to stand up to hostile westerners. This may help you better understand why nationalism is so useful for communist government."
This rings true, and reinforces a point I made several months ago about why the voices of official China -- the government and its spokesmen -- were often so inept in presenting their case to the outside world, even though many individual Chinese people could be quite sophisticated and skillful. As this reader suggests, the root cause is that the system here is mainly inward-looking.
The complications of addressing both internal and external audiences is hardly unique to China. American politics provides examples of this every day. Same with Japan, where bone-headed politicians often play to domestic right-wingers by visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, not knowing or caring that this drives people crazy here in China.
But at the moment, the internal/external problem is particularly acute for China, because its scale and foreign interactions are so great and its officials' awareness of how things sound to foreign ears seems so limited. For instance, I don't even think they would recognize the irony of hearing that their current detention of Mexican passport holders, whether they have been to Mexico recently or not, might "hurt the feelings of the Mexican people."
UPDATE: After the jump, a further note just received from the same reader ______
I'm going to start moving through these more briskly now. A pattern is emerging in the elements that make the Obama group portrait seem Old Masterish. Previously here. For now, three from Frans Hals. First, Regents of the Old Men's Almshouse -- as with The Anatomy Lesson, thematically strangely appropriate for the Chrysler-bankruptcy team.
If all but six people were removed from the Obama portrait, leaving only (from left) Geithner, Summers, Obama, Browner, Rattner, and Bernstein, they would match the positions and angles of the six Regents surprisingly well.* Though Carol Browner probably wouldn't be wild about the one matched with her.
Next, Officers and Sergeants of the St. Hadrian Civic Guard
And, the famous Meagre Company, apparently so named because the figures are all thin. On this basis, the Obama group portrait should be called Somber Company.
More coming. __ * Geithner, Summers, and Obama you know. The woman is Carol Browner; Steve Rattner is behind her with round glasses; Jared Bernstein is just in front of him with gray hair.
Mexican government protests detentions in China
Via Reuters, this official protest about the detentions in mainland China (as mentioned here last night) and the sealing off of hundreds of people in a hotel in Hong Kong.
The apparent waning of worldwide panic about the virus's lethality and ease of transmission probably means that we'll see fewer stories about over-reaction as the days go on. As always, it is instructive to see the way governments and institutions react in time of stress.
May 2, 2009
News as art, continued
Back to the "what does this scene remind me of?" category, previously here, while still looking into further flu news in China. Many nominations for this painting, usually with apologies for the larger Messianic implications:
After the jump, for greater clarity of detail, an early non-Leonardo copy of the painting as it once may have looked. Plus another version not by Leonardo. More to come, with eventual wrap-up thanks to all contributors.
Flu news from China: Mexican citizens being detained
This is developing news here in Beijing about treatment of those who hold Mexican passports. It is based on first-hand reports from people I trust:
- A family of tourists -- two parents; a son age 8; and daughters ages 6 and 4 -- were staying in a five-star Beijing hotel. Like all foreigners in China, they had presented their passports for inspection on arrival. Their passports were from Mexico. At 4 am last night they heard a pounding on the door. Public-security officials asked them to come to the hospital for a few quick tests. In fact they were taken to a hospital and not allowed to leave. They received no drugs or treatment of any sort and were placed in a room where the beds and sheets still bore the marks of the previous ill and bleeding patients. They managed to contact Mexican officials by phone -- which was the first the Mexican government had heard of their situation. There is no indication that they are sick. They were assured that they would be treated as well as "any Chinese citizen." (!) This evening, another family of three has been taken from a hotel because they are Mexican.
- As international flights arrive in Beijing, from any destination, passengers are being asked to show their passports before the plane comes to the terminal. Those with Mexican passports are not allowed to enter the city. They have been taken to a hotel for quarantine and are still there. Some 40 to 50 people are now being detained in this way. To be clear, this is not being applied to people who've recently been to Mexico, or who are showing signs of disease, or who have been exposed in some other way. It has been purely a matter of whether they are Mexican citizens.
- A Mexican official in Guangzhou booked a round trip flight to Cambodia. On arriving back from Cambodia (ie, a million miles away from Mexico), he too has been detained, on the basis of his passport.
You can understand why China is nervous, given its dense urban populations and its experience with SARS. You can understand quarantines based on recent presence in a diseased area or possible exposure to diseased people. You can comprehend why direct flights between Mexico and China have for now been called off.
But there is no decent reason for quarantine and detention based solely on nationality. To the best of my information, this blanket quarantine of Mexican citizens is not being applied anyplace else on earth. Let's hope this is a panicky mistake by Chinese and Beijing-area officials and will soon be reversed. It is also worth recognizing the overall aplomb and openness that the Mexican government has been showing in handling the flu outbreak.
Another nominee from Rembrandt...
...in the "art prefigures" life category, previously here and here. The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Nicolaes Tulp, 1632. Some obvious differences in composition. But some nice similarities. In the role of the instructive Prof. Tulp we have the instructive Pres. Obama. In the role of the cadaver, we have the Chrysler Corporation, though out of view. (Yes, yes, I have owned several Chrysler cars and know it will be stronger than ever after the restructuring, etc.) More to come.
May 1, 2009
Browser update
Reports keep trickling in of people having crashes with the latest official release of Firefox, as first mentioned here. I have no way of knowing whether this is signal or noise -- an actual trend, or merely random blips among FF's millions of users.
I do know that the latest Firefox beta, 3.5b4, has been running smoothly around the clock, at least for me. Available here. And as previously indicated, I will indeed try Opera when I get some "spare" time.
FWIW, this sociology of browsers from Marty Manley:
Am testing a site these days, so I keep 3 browsers open: IE,
FF 3.0.1 and Chrome. In two days, I have had four hard FF crashes -- unheard
of. FF also lost track of all saved passwords, although it recovered (maybe
thanks to Xmarks).
BTW, Chrome seems ever stronger. If this were college, IE would be the entitled
rich kid who acts smart, but isn't, Firefox the impressive high achiever who is
actually a bit lazy and dilettantish, and Chrome the kid who works nights to
pay bills, is rock solid, and is steadily getting stronger and stronger.
Or, if you prefer, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. As to Opera --
the garden variety A student of sound quality but without a compelling or
differentiating architecture -- I think she makes a fine Secretary of State.
The Syndics of Pennsylvania Avenue
The nominees are coming in for the Fine Arts precursor to yesterday's news photo of the Obama auto-industry task force, as explained here, with several plausible contenders. First up: Rembrandt, with Syndics of the Amsterdam Drapers' Guild, 1662. More nominees on their way. And in the meantime, on the general phenomenon of Fine Arts precursors to current images, see Lawrence Weschler's Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, with excerpt here.
I like some of the matchups of Tim Geithner and Gary Locke with their Amsterdam counterparts. Also, a fact worth mentioning to viewers of the second picture: surprising as it might seem given this picture, Lawrence Summers is actually quite a good athlete. The more I look at this picture, the richer it is.
April 30, 2009
News as art
From my misspent years in DC, I believe I can identify every person in this photo (just now, from Doug Mills of the NYT):
But why didn't I take more Fine Arts classes in college? Then I would know exactly which Old Master tableau this lineup so powerfully reminds me of. The human dramas suggested by these faces. This is an impromptu work of art.
April 29, 2009
Two sentences on the 100 Days press conference
I agree with my colleague Andrew Sullivan that the session was somewhat "dull."
But I think it was dull in the same way Obama's inaugural address and his hour-long economic speech at Georgetown were initially thought to be: in that it was serious, meaty, sober in keeping with the topics under discussion, and therefore consistent with the Administration's long-term operational, governing, and communications strategy.
April 28, 2009
The world's view of Obama
Do you wonder how the rest of the world is responding to a new American president? I do too! But because I'm living out here among the non-Americans, my job was to try to offer a report on their reaction. It's here, as part of the Atlantic's "First 100 Days" coverage.
April 27, 2009
Highly recommended: 'Lords of Finance'
If you were engrossed by today's NYT saga about Timothy Geithner as head of the NY Fed -- and even if you skipped past the story or didn't hear of it at all -- please make haste to read the saga of a previous incumbent of the job. Lords of Finance: The Bankers who Broke the World, by Liaquat Ahamed, tells the story of Benjamin Strong, head of the NY Fed through the 1920s, and of his central-banker counterparts in England, France, and Germany who, together and unwittingly, helped bring on the Great Depression.
Lords of Finance as it appeared to me on the trusty Kindle1 here in Beijing; physical copy not easy to get locally.
Economic theory has its place (and for me its place was grad-school classes). Well-done economic history is often far more illuminating. This is extremely well done history, and is worth mentioning now because of the obvious resonance between this tale of cleaning up after a bubble and today's predicament. Sample passage, about the 1920s but somehow sounds familiar:
Watching other people become rich is not much fun, especially if they do it overnight and without any effort. It was therefore inevitable that all this frenetic activity -- the thriving stock market, the new issues, the ballyhoo about a new era, the buying and selling of Florida real estate -- provoked a chorus of voices demanding that the Fed do something to stop the "orgy of speculation," a phrase that would become so commonplace over the next few years as to lose all meaning.
As it happens, Liaquat Ahamed and his wife Meena are friends of mine and my wife's, but I would recommend this book even if we'd never met.
April 20, 2009
Torture from Afar
Since the time the torture memoranda were released last week, I've been in parts of rural China where most people would have a hard time naming the current US president, let alone expressing a view about how he should handle those who endorsed a policy of torture or who carried it out. Now that I'm returning to big-city China, I see that the memoranda are inside-page news in the region's papers. This is so even in Hong Kong, where the editors can judge it on normal "news" grounds and not with whatever complications go into mainland Chinese reporting of the issue.
Nonetheless I contend that a full process of American self-examination and accountability will make a tremendous long-term difference in international views of the United States. Even among those who at the moment don't know that there is any controversy going on within the United States.
For as annoyed as foreigners may get with America and Americans, there have been two saving graces in the world's opinions of our country. One has been its permeability. Anywhere you go, someone has an uncle or cousin in America. The other, less openly stated, has been a belief that at some point there are rules in America. Long periods may pass when the rules are ignored. Big boys may bend the rules in their favor. Some offenses are never made right. And so on. But in the end, the American system is supposed to recognize injustice and respond -- including with public accountability for even the mightiest figures. It has this in common with the British and some other systems -- which is what Gandhi relied on in knowing he could "shame" the Brits. For all the increases in liberty within China over the last generation, this is a striking difference with the world's currently-rising power. No one expects China's current leadership to conduct a "truth commission" about the Cultural Revolution or Tiananmen. But people finally expect America to apply its own rules, even against its own people. Fulfilling that expectation is not sufficient for restoring America's image international standing. But it is necessary.
So even though most of the world's population has no idea of what is in the torture memos or of what will happen because of them, in the long run the Administration's decisions will have a significant worldwide effect. Being true to the world's idea of America does not (in my opinion) crucially turn on prosecuting individual CIA or military interrogators. Instead it depends on full clarifying disclosure of the reasoning that led to these practices -- thus, maximum disclosure of the memos -- and full examination of the decisions that public officials made.
At this point I don't think it's sensible to talk about legal sanctions for Administration officials from George W. Bush on down. But the historical record of what he approved, and what Dick Cheney recommended, what David Addington egged on, and what John Yoo and (sitting Federal Judge) Jay Bybee and others rationalized, should be established in unambiguous detail. For this, some American version of a "Truth Commission" is probably the best solution. Many other countries would not bother. America -- to be true to itself -- must. This will matter in the world's eyes. More important, it will matter to us.
April 16, 2009
More on Robert Gates's rationale
I mentioned last week Robert Gates's remarkably lucid argument for why the Air Force should stop most future purchases of the wonderful-if-we-could-afford-it-but-we-can't F-22 fighter plane.
Yesterday, he went to the Air War College, at Maxwell AFB in Alabama, to lay out the rationale for thinking about the F-22 and defense planning in general. Why "go to the war colleges to discuss this topic?" Gates asked rhetorically in the speech. Because "these recommendations are less about budget numbers than they are about how the U.S. military thinks about and prepares for the future."
If you're interested in such thinking and preparation, the speech is very much worth reading. It includes passages like the following, which to put it mildly are not what we've mainly heard from Secretaries of Defense over the decades (emphasis added):
Another important thing I looked at was whether modernization programs, in particular ground modernization programs, had incorporated the operational and combat experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem with the Army's Future Combat Systems vehicles was that a program designed nine years ago did not adequately reflect the lessons of close-quarter combat and improvised explosive devices that have taken a fearsome toll on our troops and their vehicles in Iraq, and now in Afghanistan.
Finally, I concluded we need to shift away from the 99 percent "exquisite" service-centric platforms that are so costly and complex that they take forever to build and only then in very limited quantities. With the pace of technological and geopolitical change, and the range of possible contingencies, we must look more to the 80 percent multi-service solution that can be produced on time, on budget, and in significant numbers. As Stalin once said, "Quantity has a quality all of its own."
Does this mean that everything Gates proposes is right, that the defense budget has been pared to the essentials, and that all systemic problems have been solved? Of course not. The best single starting point for the necessary ongoing critique is the venerable "Defense and the National Interest" site here, or the book America's Defense Meltdown which I have so often touted, now on sale here.
But Gates in this speech (and some previous ones) does the very things I found admirable in Barack Obama's recent long-form economic presentation. He treats the audience like adults, he fairly presents opposing viewpoints, and he explains why he nonetheless considers the path he's on the most sensible one. All in all, he sounds like a man who makes his own decisions on the basis of evidence and logic -- and who presents issues as if he expects the public to do the same. That's worth noticing.
Update: For an extensive (and very supportive) parsing of the intellectual and argumentative structure of Obama's economic speech, see this entry at XPostFactoid.
April 6, 2009
Words I never thought I'd hear from a Secretary of Defense
It is important to remember that every defense dollar spent to over-insure against a remote or diminishing risk - or, in effect, to "run up the score" in a capability where the United States is already dominant - is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in, and improve capabilities in areas where we are underinvested and potentially vulnerable. That is a risk I will not take.
Emphasis mine; sentiments his. This has obvious bearing, as Gates made clear, on whether it is worth "running up the score" in an area of current U.S. dominance by buying more F-22s, among other systems. (Previously on the F-22 here and here.) More later on the details and implications of Gates's budget, and whether he'll be systematic in applying the rationale he has laid out. For the moment, the simple logic of his statement is worth noting. As is the sense of shock at hearing something so logical as part of a budget presentation. ___ * Update: I see that Fred Kaplan is already on the case.
April 5, 2009
More on Obama, exceptionalism, and impromptu speaking
The transcript of the NATO press conference I mentioned a few hours ago is now available here, via CQ Politics. For some reason, I don't see the transcript at the official WhiteHouse.Gov site, though a blog item about the conference is here. Ie, if the transcript is there, at the site run by this famously tech-hip White House staff, it is not in an immediately obvious location, like via a link from the aforementioned blog entry, nor does it come up on a "NATO press conference" search of the site.
After the jump, the text of what Obama actually said when asked about "American exceptionalism." To my relief, it more or less resembles the way I characterized it from memory! On re-reading, I'm more impressed by how terse it is -- and, as mentioned earlier, how hard it would be to improve on it in the same space, especially in real time.
Also after the jump, two other excerpts, prompted by this comment from reader Edward Goldstick:
I think two other moments were even more 'remarkable' than the one that caught your attention (though it is, too):
1) In response to the provocative Major [Garrett] of Fox News who asked about Afghan laws that supposedly endorsed spousal rape and other dubious practices, I found that Obama walked confidently between the moral imperatives that the questioner presented so blithely and the primacy of the post 9/11 mission and the complex and uncomfortable realities in which the United States and NATO are currently operating.
2) Perhaps it was a setup, but I thought the question to the audience about US journalists getting questions from the other heads of state was a sly move... though I won't hide my lack of surprise (nor my glee) when he used Sarko as a target.
On #2, the context of which will be apparent in the excerpt, what I noticed was his light use of the term "Sarkozy" -- not "President Sarkozy" -- which had the same cheeky effect as the reference to "the Brits." Details below. ___
It's after midnight in China, but I wanted to mention in real time an oratorical performance that deserves a second look. It's from Barack Obama's NATO press conference that just wrapped up, and the part worth studying is the two or three minutes that followed a question by Edward Luce of the Financial Times.
I have nothing against Luce, who wrote a very good recent book about India, but here he asked in what can only be called plummy tones whether Obama still clung to the idea of "American exceptionalism." The general phrasing of the question held that idea out at arm's length as a kind of yahoo colonial oddity.
"I believe in American exceptionalism," Obama said after one beat for thought. "Just as the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism..." I don't have a transcript here, but what was impressive was how rapidly he seemed to have figured out the full shape of his answer; how effortlessly the term "the Brits" (and the instant pairing with "the Greeks") offset the seeming Oxbridge hauteur* of the question; and how he went on to give so balanced a response that no one, Yank or otherwise, could fail to be satisfied.
Of course he was proud of his country, Obama said. But it was also objectively exceptional in several ways: it still had the world's largest economy; its military power was unmatched; and -- with emphasis here -- its Constitutional principles enshrined values and ideals that truly were exceptional. Therefore it should be proud of its role in the world, and embrace its responsibilities.
Then came the pivot, introduced as usual with the word "Now..." Of course America's strength didn't mean it could do things wholly on its own. And of course Obama's pride in his country didn't blind him to the fact that it sometimes could be wrong, nor to the idea that other people from other countries had good ideas that had to be heeded. Indeed, the very fact of American leadership made it all the more important to show respect and listen attentively. He wrapped it all up by saying he saw "no contradiction" between the idea that America was exceptionally strong and had an exceptional leadership role, and the reality that it needed to work with others as part of a team.
When a transcript or YouTube clip comes out, give it a look. The thoughts may seem banal, but I challenge anyone to come up with a clearer explanation of American exceptionalism to an international audience in the same number of words -- not to mention doing so on live TV with maybe five seconds to figure out what your answer will be. In a world where evidence mattered, these few minutes would put an end to the "can't talk without a teleprompter" madness. More important, they're a way of explaining to Americans the potential and limits of our international role.
And, yes, Obama did end the press conference by ducking a question about Kosovo. But knowing what not to answer is a part of rhetorical effectiveness too. Update: He also appeared to refer to the language of Austria as "Austrian," thus: "I don't know how you say it in Austrian, but we call it wheeling-dealing." If this had been GW Bush, it would have been taken as an obvious gaffe, as in his calling the residents of Greece "Grecians." Here you can't be sure whether it's a plain error or a knowing casualism, as in saying that Australians speak "Australian" -- eg, in the ad that says, "Foster's: Australian for 'beer.' " * UPDATE #2: The questioner has convinced me that he didn't really mean it that way. See this mea culpa.
March 25, 2009
One last point about teleprompters, Obama, and speaking
Obama's opening statement at this evening's press conference, delivered no doubt with the help of a teleprompter, sounded smoother and more polished than his real-time answers through the rest of the event.
The same is true for any public figure who has learned to use a teleprompter (harder than it seems) and whose teleprompter-ready material suits his or her natural speaking style. It sounds smoother than extemporized speech because it should be smoother. People don't naturally speak in parsed and polished sentences, even eloquent people. When we are listening to what we know is spontaneous rather than scripted speech, we listen in a different way -- we listen past grammatical glitches, repetitions, and other things that would be "flaws" on a printed page or in a formal oration. If you don't believe me, look back for any extemporized performance that was judged to be riveting by audiences in real time. (A campaign rally, a TV interview, a debate, the closing argument in a trial.) If you then read a word-by-word transcript, it will look like a mess.
The important point with Obama is that the content, command of fact and concept, and overall intelligence of his extemporized answers matched that of the scripted presentation. That could not have been so if he were teleprompter-dependent. For example: by the end of his term, George W. Bush had become quite effective in delivering a formal speech. His interview- and press conference performance if anything deteriorated through his time in office.
The whole "Obama can't talk on his own" concept is bizarre, given his performance through two years of stump speeches and debates during the campaign. But it seems to have gotten so much credence in the right-wing world that it is worth addressing head on.
4) Boy, if some of the questions from reporters were examined as mercilessly for their logic, factual basis, clarity, coherence, emotional tone, etc as Obama's answers were.... I know, they're not the most powerful people on earth with the might of the presidency behind them. But unlike him, the reporters are not reacting on the fly but instead have hours and hours to think of exactly the way they want to make their point. Just an observation.
Three-sentence instant reaction to Obama press conference
1) After seeing a session like this, it is hard to understand how right-wingers can keep up their "Obama can't talk without his teleprompter" theory -- although it's hard to know, given his campaign-debate performance etc, how anyone could have advanced this view in the first place.
2) All successful politicians know how to turn a question to the answer they want to give ("The real point is..."), but Obama showed several times exactly how that should be done -- eg, when asked about changing tax rules for charitable deduction, he brushed that aside and said "what does affect charitable giving is the economy, and..."
3) Explicitly, in his closing comments about being in it for the long haul "even though" he had not brought peace to the Middle East or solved the economic problem in his first 60 days, and implicitly in his manner, he conveyed the same, steady, 'let's keep plugging along and we'll make it' message that had run through his presentations through the campaign.
OK, those are very long and ungainly sentences, but there are only three of them.
March 12, 2009
In fairness...
... After learning something about the now-resigned Chas Freeman, I came to disagree with, and think tendentious, Jon Chait's opening salvo against Freeman in the Washington Post. And I have received enough pro-Freeman letters from his working associates in the last two days to make we wonder: is there anyone who actually dealt with the man who considered him a crackpot, an anti-Semite, a menace -- terms thrown around by his critics? Obviously Dennis Blair -- Naval Academy graduate, Rhodes scholar, former CINCPAC, Asia/China expert, no one's idea of a nut -- thought Freeman's irreverent perspective so valuable that he sought it out. Personal knowledge isn't everything, but it is dramatic to me that people who have known Freeman seem so solid in support for him, in contrast to those who don't. It's all moot now.
Still, in fairness: Chait's take-down of the absurd Amity Shlaes interpretation of the Great Depression and the New Deal is both important in its own right and a model of the systematic demolition of a flawed though alluring argument. Among the admirable aspects of this essay is that it it painlessly conveys some of the Ec 101 principles that somehow have been assumed out of existence in day by day political discussion.* This is very well done; worth reading; and worth learning from. I look forward to more from Chait in this area. ___ * Eg that critics of a stimulus bill can denounce it because it means "more spending" suggests that they don't understand anything that has been written about economics in the last 70+ years. The point of a stimulus bill is to spend extra money and therefore bring total economic output to a higher level than it would otherwise attain. Even having to mention this point is like having to explain the connection between caloric intake and body weight, or the role of gravity. But Chait nicely and non-condescendingly lays it out in his article:
Prior to Keynes, the economy was held to be self-correcting. The only cure for a recession was to let wages and prices fall to their natural level. The prevailing attitude, as Paul Krugman writes in his recently re-issued book The Return of Depression Economics, was "a sort of moralistic fatalism." Keynes upended the orthodoxy in a way that was every bit as dramatic as Galileo challenging geocentrism. He insisted that recessions are not a natural process, or the invisible hand's righteous judgment against our sins, but a simple failure of consumer demand.
When people worry about losing their jobs, they sensibly cut back on their spending. But that decision, in turn, reduces demand for goods and services, which results in reduced income or lost jobs for other workers. Keynes called this phenomenon "the paradox of thrift": what makes sense for individuals turns into a disaster for society as a whole. The recession was therefore a failure of collective action that required government action. Government needed to encourage spending by reducing interest rates or, failing that, to inject spending into the economy directly by deliberately running temporary budget deficits.
March 10, 2009
The end for Freeman
As I mentioned originally, I had no intention of getting into the Chas Freeman matter. It has ended in an ugly way -- Freeman's departure statement is intemperate, but even calmer people might sound testy if they had been accused of "hostility toward Jews generally" without, to my knowledge, any evidence for that claim.
I want to think carefully before saying much more about this episode. For the moment my sentiments are closest to those expressed by David Rothkopf, friend and stalwart supporter of Freeman, in this post at the Foreign Policy blog:
The genesis of that crisis is that we have lost perspective on
what the criteria for selecting and approving government officials ought to be.
Financial trivia, minutiae from people's personal lives and political litmus
tests have grown in importance while character, experience, intelligence,
creativity and wisdom have fallen by the wayside. Ridiculous threshold
obstacles stand alongside obscene ones and when taken with the relentless
personal attacks associated with high level jobs in Washington -- the low pay,
and the extreme difficulty of getting anything done -- we are seeing even those
selected for senior jobs turn away in droves. We are at a moment of not one but
an extraordinary array of great crises and challenges for America and we are
effectively keeping the people we need most out of the positions we most need
filled.
Emphasis mine. The friend I quoted when I first raised this topic said that, in his view, the controversy over Freeman's appointment amounted to the "self-lobotomization" of the US policy-making apparatus. He was talking just about Freeman, but the problem is clearly broader, as Rothkopf points out. Thought experiment: Steven Chu, our new Secretary of Energy, was previously director of the UC-run Lawrence-Berkeley Lab. The Lab receives a tremendous amount of funding from the US government, largely through the DOE. Chu himself is recused from being involved in such deals for a ceratin period. Suppose instead that this background had been considered a "conflict" that would bar him from office. You could imagine people making the argument, if Chu's reputation were less bullet-proof or if he had offended some interest group.
One other point. Rothkopf ends his post this way:
The
result [of problems described above] is not a government of people without conflicts of interest or troubling
ties, rather it is a government full of people whose conflicts and ties are
with groups powerful enough to protect them. This among other reasons is why I, as
a Jew with a memory, was so opposed to the attacks on Freeman. But for the
record, the most compelling reason I found for believing Chas Freeman would
have been a superb Chairman of the National Intelligence Council was one that
seldom came up in all the articles I read. I actually know him.
As I initially pointed out, I do not know Freeman and had never paid attention to him before this controversy. But it turns out that nearly twenty people I know well enough to respect and trust have themselves known and worked with Freeman. Every one of them supported his nomination. And -- as it is unfortunately relevant to point out in these circumstances -- most of them are Jewish.
We'll all think about this episode for a while.
March 9, 2009
Two more on Chas Freeman and China
I realize that there's no point in getting into an endless endorsement-competition to see how many authorities can be lined up for and against the embattled Chas Freeman, nominee-apparent as head of the National Intelligence Council.
But anyone who has seen a Washington scandal get rolling understands the almost unstoppable momentum when one "revelation" follows another and you wait breathlessly to see what the next one will be -- and when the "embattled" victim will finally give in. That is very much how it looked for Freeman when -- on top of the original complaints about his views on Israel -- apparently-damaging new information about his views on China popped up.
To put a brake on the momentum, and to give a chance for deliberation about a man's reputation and a president's ability to get the range of advice he wants, I think it is worth reinforcing the idea that the people who know Freeman and China policy best think the complaints about him on this front are a crock. That was the point of the previous post with the views of Sidney Rittenberg and Jerome A. Cohen. Here, the views of the China scholar John Frankenstein of Brooklyn College, and the Beijing-based blogger and writer (and rock musician) Kaiser Kuo:
John Frankenstein:
I have known Chas Freeman ever since we were
next door neighbors at the State Dept's Chinese language School in
Taiwan over 35 years ago. (At the time he was studying Hong Lou Meng;
most of us were struggling with Hong Qi) He's damn smart, speaks his
mind, dedicated to the best interests of the United States, and has
little tolerance for bullshit. I cannot think of a better choice for
NIC chairman than Chas.
Kaiser Kuo, in an entry two years ago from his Ich Bin Ein Beijinger blog, reported details from a speech Freeman gave on the importance of independent-minded intelligence analysis, especially as it applied to China. According to the transcript Kuo quoted, Freeman said:
To deal effectively with China, Americans need to understand it in terms of its own complexities and authentic aspirations. This is unlikely to be achieved by officials engaged in writing narrowly focused and highly tendentious reports mandated by Congress to justify the single-issue agendas of our military-industrial complex or, for that matter, our humanitarian-industrial complex. Nor can it be accomplished by analysts stir-frying intelligence to suit the political appetites of those they work for....
Predictions about China based on a priori reasoning, ideologically
induced delusions, hearsay, conjecture, or mirror-imaging have been
frequent and numerous. They have racked up a remarkable record of
unreliability. To cite a few relevant examples: contrary to repeated
forecasts, the many imperfections of China's legal system have neither
prevented it from developing a vigorous market economy nor inhibited
foreign investment -- of which China continues to attract more than any
other country, including our own. China's failure to democratize and
its continuing censorship of its media, including the Internet, have
not stifled its economic progress or capacity to innovate, which are
increasingly impressive. China's perverse practices with respect to
human rights have not cost China's Communist Party or its government
their legitimacy. On the contrary, polling data suggests that Chinese
have a very much higher regard for their political leaders and
government than Americans currently do for ours.
The second paragraph, with Freeman's observations of China, rings almost all* true to me -- based on living here for nearly three years. The first paragraph, about the importance of truly independent-minded intelligence analysis, commends him for the job rather than disqualifies him. So let's slow down, stop the stampede, and -- since we're talking about a "non-confirmable" post that is presumably within the president's discretion -- look for actual proof that Freeman's views on other topics are so extreme, deep-held, and unreasonable that he should be banned from further service as a bigot or pariah. It doesn't look to me as if such proof is there. ___ * Exception, for later discussion: I think there is more tension/contradiction between the Chinese government's determination to control the media and public discussion, on the one hand, and its desire to foster an innovative economy, on the other, than Freeman suggests here. Also, his comments about the relative popularity of US and Chinese officials was made during the late GW Bush era, not Obama's time. But all that is for another time -- and is certainly not a reason to think he should be banned from public office.
Chas Freeman and China
For the record here are two interesting statements on Chas Freeman and his fitness for public office, by people deeply familiar with the China-related part of his experience and outlook. Quick points of context:
- I don't think anyone seriously contends that Freeman's views on China are the central reason for the opposition to him. As Andrew Sullivan convincingly (IHMO) demonstrated, the real argument, for better or worse, concerns his views on Israel.
- On the other hand, his most often-quoted view about China -- that the regime erred mainly in waiting too long to crack down on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations -- has added to the argument that he is a doctrinaire "realist" who has no time for ideals of any sort.
- The two people whose views I quote below have absolutely unquestionable standing to speak on this subject. One is Sidney Rittenberg, who first went to China with the US Army in 1945 and ended up spending 35 years there, 16 of them in solitary confinement for alleged espionage and disloyalty to the Mao regime. The other is Jerome A. Cohen, of NYU Law School and Paul Weiss, who has been tireless in his efforts for legal reform in China and was instrumental in freeing John Downey, who had been held in Chinese prison for two decades after the Korean War.
Both of them strongly support the expansion of individual liberties and civil society in China. Both of them strongly support Chas Freeman and his candidacy for his now-disupted job.
After the jump, a long email Rittenberg sent me today about Freeman. Here, comments each of them made on a private China-related discussion group, quoted with their permission. Read these and ask yourself: based at least on the China part of his background, does this sound like a man so far beyond the range of reasonable opinion that he must be prevented from holding appointive office?
Rittenberg:
To my knowledge--and from personal experience--Chas Freeman as DCM
[Deputy Chief of Mission, #2 to the Ambassador] in Beijing was a stalwart supporter of human rights who helped many
individuals in need. Not political bluster,but intelligent and
courageous action. He is strong in both wisdom and integrity.
Cohen:
Chas Freeman is one of the most brilliant,
analytical, balanced and skeptical people I have known in the last four
decades. I first knew him as a young State Dept China-watcher and was so
impressed I persuaded State to stake him to a year at Harvard Law School
so he could finish his JD and hone his skills in international law. Chas
had left HLS after two bored, ho-hum years to join the Foreign Service,
but when he returned he took full advantage of the opportunity and, if
memory serves, had a perfect third year record. I have not been close to
him since that time but we have occasionally crossed paths and I always
benefited from and enjoyed the experience.
Chas is a keen observer, a wicked
wit and a fearless critic. It is ludicrous to portray him as a "panda
hugger" who endorses the slaughter of June 4 or someone who can be
seduced by Saudi enticements. As far as I know, he has always been fiercely
independent, and an enemy of "group think", and I will be glad
to have him analyzing Israeli politics and policies as well as other problems.
In 1973, when Chas was helping to establish the pre-Embassy U.S. "liaison
office" in Beijing, a time when the Cultural Revolution led PRC officials
to obscure their titles from foreigners by identifying themselves as "responsible
member of the department concerned," Chas had his own name cards printed
in Chinese and English bestowing the same sobriquet on himself.
I congratulate
Admiral Blair on selecting Chas to be "responsible member of the department
concerned" and certainly will think less of President Obama and his
advisors if they back down.
I've mentioned once or twice, or maybe fifty times, my wonderment at the contrast between the sophistication with which Chinese officialdom can address domestic audiences and sensitivities, and the comic-if-it-weren't tragic cluelessness of many official efforts to explain China's views and "feelings" to the outside, non-Chinese-speaking world.
I don't have time for a full presentation-and-gloss at the moment, but see if this recent item, which I found while leafing through back copies of my favorite newspaper, the China Daily, rings any bells. It was about the nomination of Gary Locke, former governor of Washington, as US Commerce Secretary, and it featured "inside" analysis from an experienced Chinese diplomat:
Story as it looked on the page, showing the local Chinese angle:
Near the end, the experts step in, displaying their perfect ear for the nuances of the way race is lived and discussed in Obama-era USA. Analytical conclusion of the story, from someone with that indispensable on-the-ground knowledge of America:
The building formerly known as Tomorrow Square. Maybe everyone will agree not to notice it:
A fight I didn't intend to get into: Chas Freeman
I have never met Chas Freeman, the man whose reported selection as head of the National Intelligence Council has drawn such criticism, including from my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg. Not having had a chance to assess him first hand, and not having put in time studying his views, I have not felt comfortable weighing in on the dispute about whether his outlook was unacceptably extreme. Here's the gist of the argument against him: that he is too close to the Saudis (as a former US Ambassador to the Kingdom, and now head of a think tank that has received Saudi funding); too tolerant of repression in China (because of comments saying the Chinese regime had no choice but to crack down in Tiananmen Square); and too deaf to the moral claims of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East.
But very recently I met with a friend who had worked years ago with Freeman -- on China, not the Middle East -- and was upset about what he called the "self-lobotimization" of US foreign policy that the campaign to discredit Freeman represented. As I've looked into it, I've come to agree.
His first point was that Freeman was being proposed for a post within the president's discretionary appointment power, like one of his White House aides, and therefore didn't have to reflect the Senate's sense of who should be in the job. The more important point, he said, was that Freeman's longstanding contrarian inclination to challenge conventional wisdom of any sort, far from being an embarrassing liability, was exactly what a president needed from the person in this job.
A president's Secretary of State had to represent the country's policies soberly and predictably around the world. His National Security Advisor had to coordinate and evenhandedly present the views of the various agencies. His White House press secretary had to take great care in expressing the official line to the world's media each day. His Director of National Intelligence had to give him the most sober and responsible precis of what was known and unknown about potential threats.
For any of those roles, a man like Freeman might not be the prudent choice. But as head of the National Intelligence Council, my friend said, he would be exactly right. While he would have no line-operational responsibilities or powers, he would be able to raise provocative questions, to ask "What if everybody's wrong?", to force attention to the doubts, possibilities, and alternatives that normally get sanded out of the deliberative process through the magic known as "groupthink." As Dan Froomkin of NiemanWatch wrote in an item that called Freeman "A One-Man Destroyer of Groupthink,"
He has... spent a goodly part of the last 10 years raising questions that otherwise might never get answered -- or even asked -- because they're too embarrassing, awkward, or difficult.
For him to be put in charge of what [Laura Rozen of Foreign Policy] calls "the intelligence community's primary big-think shop and the lead body in producing national intelligence estimates" is about the most emphatic statement the Obama Administration could possibly make that it won't succumb to the kind of submissive intelligence-community groupthink that preceded the war in Iraq.
Again, I don't know Freeman personally. I don't know whether the Saudi funding for his organization has been entirely seemly (like that for most Presidential libraries), which is now the subject of inspector-general investigation. If there's a problem there, there's a problem.
But I do know something about the role of contrarians in organizational life. I have hired such people, have worked alongside them, have often been annoyed at them, but ultimately have viewed them as indispensable. Sometimes the annoying people, who will occasionally say "irresponsible" things, are the only ones who will point out problems that everyone else is trying to ignore. A president needs as many such inconvenient boat-rockers as he can find -- as long as they're not in the main operational jobs. Seriously: anyone who has worked in an organization knows how hard it is, but how vital, to find intelligent people who genuinely are willing to say inconvenient things even when everyone around them is getting impatient or annoyed. The truth is, you don't like them when they do that. You may not like them much at all. But without them, you're cooked.
So to the extent this argument is shaping up as a banishment of Freeman for rash or unorthodox views, I instinctively take Freeman's side -- even when I disagree with him on specifics. This job calls for originality, and originality brings risks. Chas Freeman is not going to have his finger on any button. He is going to help raise all the questions that the person with his finger on the button should be aware of.
Read carefully this NiemanWatch Q-and-A with Freeman from 2006 (or read any of Freeman's recent policy articles here) and ask yourself two questions: do these sound like the views of an unacceptable kook? And, would you rather have had more of this sensibility, or less, applied to U.S. policy in recent years?
March 5, 2009
More on Newt and airplanes
If you'd like to hear more about Newt Gingrich's plan to "reform" air-traffic control from someone who really knows the subject, I heartily recommend this entry from Don Brown's generally admirable Get the Flick site. Brown is a retired air-traffic controller with a knack for explaining technical matters clearly - and with an attitude, which makes reading his accounts fun. I think he is closer to Andrew Sullivan's original mockery of Newt than to my more respectful reference. In any case, definitely worth considering if you care about the topic.
March 4, 2009
Tom Geoghegan comes in 7th
Congratulations to Cook County Commissioner Mike Quigley, who came in first, with 22% of the vote, and gets the Democratic nomination (in an overwhelmingly Democratic district) to succeed Rahm Emanuel as Representative from the 5th District of Illinois.
Tom Geoghegan, often mentioned here, finished in 7th place with 6% of the vote. After the jump, the email he just sent out to supporters.
As I've said all along, I don't know the politics of the district but I do know that Geoghegan is an outstanding voice and thinker in contemporary politics. If his run for Congress, unsuccessful at this stage, call more attention to his books and outlook, it will have done some good. And having some idea of how hard it is to run for any political office, my heart is with just about anyone who gives it a try. (Just about....) ____
Let a thousand-and-one flowers bloom at the Atlantic!
(Following the previous thousand blooming flowers, here.)
I hear via my aviation grapevine that my colleague Andrew Sullivan is making fun of Newt Gingrich in general, and in specific for this idea about modernizing the US air-traffic control system:
[Newt says:] "One of the projects I'm going to launch -- we don't have a name for it yet -- is an air-traffic modernization project... You can do a space-based air-traffic-control system with half the current number of air-traffic controllers, increase the amount of air traffic in the northeast by 40 percent, allow point-to-point flights without the controllers having to have highways in the sky, and reduce the amount of aviation fuel by 10 percent." [Andrew asks:]
Why would I be even more terrified to get on a plane after that "reform"?
As for making fun of Newt in general, have at it! But on this idea, he turns out to be saying something smart.
To play the role of Mr. Gradgrind for a moment, if you're terrified getting on a plane, it has to be for reasons beyond the realm of the statistical or the "reality-based," since on average this is about the safest way you can spend your time. Often entire years pass without a single death from a crash on US airlines - something that can't be said of riding in a car, walking down the street, taking a bath, lying in your own bed, etc. Yes, when things go wrong, they're grisly, but traffic deaths, random murders, bathtub drownings, etc are also bad ways to go.
(And yes, yes, I realize that Andrew is exaggerating for effect.)
Still, there are risks both real and perceived in flying. The system Gingrich is talking about is designed to reduce at least the real ones.
What he has in mind is no doubt a variant of what is called "NextGen," for Next Generation Transportation. It involves a satellite-based navigation system (think: GPS) called ADS-B. Not everyone agrees on every detail of these new systems. But the approach as a whole constitutes a mature, vetted, sensible, picked-over-for-years proposal that has most everything going for it except the long, slow process of getting it accepted and implemented. I described its potential back in 2001 in this Atlantic cover story and the related book Free Flight. More available here, here, here, and here.
As for why this system is more modern: Today's air traffic control system is essentially like a telephone network in which you must ring up a central switchboard and ask an operator's help in placing each call. The new system would allow a lot more automated routing - with less needless, switchboard-operator-type human intervention but (as with anything in aviation) human and automated safety measures piled on triple-depth.
As for why it could be more efficient and ultimately safer: Today's system funnels a great deal of traffic through a small number of specified routes - which therefore become the only crowded places in the sky. A newer system would allow more planes to take a variety of courses, staying out of each other's way. (It doesn't solve the problem of too many airplanes wanting to land at the same few over-crowded airports, but as a side effect it is designed to make smaller, under-used airports more attractive and practical.) In a sense it's like the difference between cars, which can take a variety of routes through town, and trolleys, which go where the tracks are laid and nowhere else. I am oversimplifying, but there actually is something to Gingrich's plan. It's part of what is good about him, not what's bad.
Should this be the basis of the GOP's new program? They could do a lot worse -- and, as I'm sure Andrew agrees, they probably will.
March 2, 2009
New hope for Bobby Jindal
Still in the internet twilight zone, but happened to pass a TV that was, improbably enough, replaying Bobby Jindal's "response" speech from last week. I am the last person to say this, but let me confirm the prevailing view: Wow.
One way to think of this is: It's been a mixed week for the Rhodes Scholar tribe. Nancy-Ann Min DeParle, known in RS parlance as being of "Tennessee and Balliol College," has just been named the new White House health-reform czar(ina?), and Dominic Barton ("British Columbia and Brasenose College") was chosen capo di tutti capi of McKinsey & Co. Congratulations! On the other hand, we have .... that speech, by Gov. Jindal ("Louisiana and New College.") Maybe they can revoke these things for excessive public embarrassment? This could be called the Mel Reynolds provision? ("Illinois and Lincoln College, plus federal prison.")
Actually there is both precedent and hope for Gov. Jindal. His speech was no more humiliating a flop than was the 1988 Democratic convention speech by that other boy-wonder southern governor then making his debut on the national stage, Bill Clinton ("Arkansas and University College.") Clinton very quickly figured out that if everyone was laughing at him, the only way to come out ahead was to join in and ultimately lead the hilarity. So within a week he was on the Tonight show trading barbs with Johnny Carson about just how terrible his speech had been. Politicians' self-deprecation can never be 100% sincere, but that doesn't matter. We appreciate the gesture.
This pirouette is a little trickier for Jindal, because in addition to making fun (as Clinton did) of his ridiculous stage presence he'd probably also have to mock what he actually said, which was more or less the straight Limbaughesque anti-government line. If he's as smart as everyone thought until last week thinks, he'll figure out a way to show that he understands why people would snicker at a governor of Louisiana saying, "Who needs the federal government? Who needs warnings of natural disasters?" while recovery from Katrina is nowhere near complete. Turning the situation in his favor would be an act of Clintonlike dexterity, and would ideally happen under the auspices of today's Johnny Carson, Jon Stewart.
Daily Show bookers, throw this man a lifeline! Gov. Bobby, follow the trail that Gov. Bill has blazed! And act soon. Self-deprecation delayed is self-deprecation that just makes things worse. I'd love to hear Clinton counsel Jindal on this one.
February 24, 2009
Interesting little tool to use during tonight's speech
Speechwars.com, which lets you see how often presidents have used any given word in State of the Union addresses over the years. For instance, here are the varying uses of "freedom" and "liberty" since the earliest days:
Lots of surprising results available. For instance, here is China-v-India:
Try it for yourself to see how much is old and how much new in tonight's speech. (I'll be traveling while it happens so can't play along myself.) Hint: no S.O.U. address has yet contained the word "nationalization."
February 22, 2009
Interesting Tom Geoghegan interview re single-payer health care
For reasons explained several times in the past six weeks (here, here, and here), I really hope my long-time friend Tom Geoghegan can win next month's special election for the Congressional seat from the Fifth District of Illinois. This is no slight on any of the other candidates in the race. I know very little about them or the politics of the district. But I know enough about Geoghegan, based on decades of friendship starting when we were teenagers, to be 100% sure that he would bring an unusual level of honesty, intelligence, humor, and again honesty to national politics. I am saying honesty twice because I mean both the personal-probity and the plain-speaking variety.
Anecdote I just remembered: the first time I heard the name "Barack Obama" was from Geoghegan. He was visiting our house in Washington in the early 2000s, after Obama had made it into the Illinois State Senate and then lost his 2000 race for Congress against Bobby Rush, and before (I think) Obama's anti-Iraq-war speech of late 2002. "Watch this guy," Tom told my wife and me. He knew Obama from labor-organizing work on the South Side, since Geoghegan had spent much of his career representing dislocated workers in that area. "He can be our Lincoln." I thought: Yeah, yeah.
Now, back to Tom Geoghegan's honesty: His recent half-hour TV interview with Jeff Berkowitz, available on Geoghegan's campaign web site here and shown below, is a good illustration. You don't want to miss the host's unintentionally campy welcome to the program, 56 seconds into the clip. "Berkowitz is my name. Politics is our game." But the part worth studying is from 2:15 through about minute 10, when Geoghegan unashamedly argues in favor of a single-payer health coverage plan. And after that, he argues with similar directness for "soak the rich" progressive income-tax rates and nationalizing the failed banks -- or "the Greenspan plan," as we now know it.
If I were on Geoghegan's policy team, I'd be suggesting that when making the case for single-payer, he spend less time talking about Europeans and more talking about the success of VA hospitals in the US. (Phillip Longman's classic article on the VA as health-care model is here, and subsequent book here. For another time, my own recent experience with an extremely top-of-the-the-line doctor who told me how much simpler his practice would be if he could handle all his patients with the minimum of paperwork, bureaucracy, and insurance-driven hassle of his practice at the VA.) Still, it's impressive to watch a politician clearly explain why it would be cheaper and better to get rid of the massive insurance-company bureaucracy.
So whether you're interested in Chicago politics, health-care policy, or the process of making "daring" points on TV, this interview has its rewards. More about this interview, plus general campaign info, from one of Geoghegan's neighbors and supporters at the GSpot blog, here.
1) It turns out that the Senate Finance Committee has put out a set of FAQs addressing some of the problems E. McCaughey "discovered" in the fine print of the deal. It specifically knocks down the central Big Brother claim McCaughey makes -- namely, that federal health bureaucrats will use new electronic records to monitor your doctor's decisions about your care, and then penalize any doctors who deviate from federally-defined standard practice. The FAQ says:
Q: Will the health IT director have any influence on the decisions doctors and patients can make together about tests and treatment? A: Absolutely not. This position's function is to make sure that doctors and other health care providers use good, secure technologies as they change their record-keeping systems from paper to computers.
And
Actually, the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology is not even new. President George W. Bush created the office by Executive Order a number of years ago. The bill simply codifies the office and gives it a specific job.
There are a bunch more, all in "absolutely not" or "actually" spirit. In fairness to McCaughey, she couldn't have seen this FAQ before she wrote. It came out on Tuesday of this week, after her column on Monday. But it makes you wonder: Did she bother to call anyone to check out her claims and inferences? Did she consult anything apart from her own imagination?
2) As numerous readers have written in to remind me, there is an in-house Atlantic angle to all of this. My current Atlantic colleague Andrew Sullivan was the editor of The New Republic in 1994, when the original McCaughey story came out. I like Andrew very much personally; I am very glad he's on the Atlantic team; I agree with him on most issues and disagree on some, including whether this article should ever have been published. Notwithstanding all or any of that, my beef here is with McCaughey, not with him.
I understand enough about both the editor's and the writer's role to understand that at a certain point, an editor has to trust the writer's basic honesty and operational competence. Good magazines have good fact-checking departments -- and our magazine has a great one. But you can't "check" a reporter's basic honesty. There is a difference between re-confirming facts to be sure the writer didn't miss something and having to treat a reporter like a defendant, whose every motive, claim, and observation is subject to doubt. When a publication -- or any organization -- gets into that position, as the New Republic eventually did with Stephen Glass, the normal precautions do no good. To put it differently, the 10% of an article you can check rests on faith that the other 90% you can't check, starting with the author's claim to be reading evidence honestly, is also true. If that faith is misplaced, you can easily get burned.
So: this is explicitly not an invitation to revisit the merits of publishing the original article 15 years ago. My complaint is with people who would believe or repeat similar claims from the same source (McCaughey) now.
Also: I see now that Rick Ungar, of Culture11.com, put out a line-by-line demolition of McCaughey's claims immediately after her column ran, here.
Thanks also to Neil Mackenzie for a lead. (And, for the final awkwardly-timed installment of my family-duties saga of recent weeks, I am about to leave internet range for another four days. At least this final duty is a pleasant one; next posting here likely to be in the wedding-announcement category.)
Let's stop this before it goes any further
The award for "Most destructive effect on public discourse by a single person" for the 2000s, so far, goes to Dick "no doubt" Cheney. ("Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Cheney, speech to national VFW Convention, August 26, 2002. Of course, this is a career-achievement award, not limited to this one event.)
My nominee for the winner in the 1990s would be Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey. At various stages in her career she has been a banker, a Republican politician, and a staffer at conservative think tanks, but she entered the public stage in the mid-1990s in the guise of a dispassionate, independent researcher who considered it her duty to inform the American public about the dire threats it faced. Come to think of it, that is more or less the guise Cheney took in warning about the threat from Iraq.
In McCaughey's case, the equivalent of weapons of mass destruction was the original Clinton Health Reform plan. In 1994 she wrote a cover story in the New Republic "revealing" a number of hidden dangers in the Clinton plan that less careful analysts had somehow missed. Unfortunately for McCaughey, most of what she wrote was false. Unfortunately for the Clintons, most of what she claimed was echoed uncritically and became part of the conventional wisdom of why the bill couldn't pass.
After the jump, a passage from my 1995 Atlantic article "A Triumph of Misinformation" about McCaughey's article and its effects. More on this topic in my 1996 book Breaking the News -- and especially about why sloppy press coverage did as much to thwart health-care reform under the Clintons as it did to bring on the Iraq war under Cheney and Bush.
Why bring this up now? Because McCaughey has sprung up again to "reveal" another hidden danger in another Democratic administration's plans. Buried inside the new stimulus bill, she has discovered, are new big-brother tactics similar to those she warned against years ago. In a recent Bloomberg.com opinion column she wrote:
One new bureaucracy, the
National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective....Hospitals and doctors that are not "meaningful users" of the new system will face penalties. "Meaningful user" isn't
defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who
will be empowered to impose "more stringent measures of
meaningful use over time" (511, 518, 540-541)
For what is wrong with her "analysis" this time, check out this
in The Washington Monthly, which also has a chronology of how
the (right wing) press -- led by Fox, Limbaugh, and Drudge -- is again
picking up flatly disprovable lies. (Eg, the "new" bureaucracy she
warns about already exists, and was established under GW Bush.)
Seriously, every one of McCaughey's statements about public policy from
this day forward should be subjected to the "Oh yes, and how did it
turn out last time?" test. We are in OJ territory here. Stop this new
claim before it gets real traction. ___
Last month I mentioned, here and here, my enthusiasm about and support for Tom Geoghegan's candidacy to succeed Rahm Emanuel (and before him Rod Blagojevich and Dan Rostenkowski) as Congressman from the Fifth District of Illinois.
The campaign actually has a professional-looking web site now. Its latest entry is a 22-minute video of Tom on a local interview show, called "The Interview Show." It is worth watching both to get a sense of Tom's personality, wryness and all, and to be reminded how it can sound when a public figure talks clearly and non-patronizingly about public problems. We're getting used to it from Obama, for example with the press conference last night. This is another illustration. Donation page is here.
Placeholder on recent news
As mentioned recently, for me this has been a period of extraordinary family and personal complication, ongoing for a few more days. Items for the web-site to do list, perhaps tomorrow:
* The fire at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in China: if we'd been in our apartment in Beijing last night, we would have in fact been outside the apartment, watching what was happening a quarter-mile up the street near the new CCTV tower. Last year, on the final night of Chinese New Year, my wife remarked that it was a miracle that the city hadn't gone up in flame. (To explain: this fire happened on the final night of this year's CNY.)
* Obama's first press conference, which I thought extremely accomplished in ways obvious and subtle. The answer that most repays careful study is the response to an economic question from our former Atlantic colleague Chuck Todd (transcript here, search for "Chuck.") Impressive aspect, about which more later: the premise of the question was -- no offense, Chuck -- somewhat confused. Obama addresses the confusion in the first paragraph of response and then has a conciliatory loopback to make an additional useful point.
* Introduction of Kindle 2. I think my wife will enjoy the Kindle 1 that is about to be hers.
* This NYT story about a change in emphasis at Newsweek, based on the recognition that weekly news magazines simply cannot compete in delivering "breaking news" to their readers.
The venerable newsweekly's ingrained role of obligatory coverage of
the week's big events will be abandoned once and for all, executives
say.
"There's a phrase in the culture, 'we need to take note of,'
'we need to weigh in on,' " said Newsweek's editor, Jon Meacham.
"That's going away. If we don't have something original to say, we
won't. The drill of chasing the week's news to add a couple of
hard-fought new details is not sustainable."
Ah, the battles over exactly that principle ten+ years ago at the weakest of the news magazines, US News. More later on this too.
* An impressively brave post by my friend Steve Clemons about a quite startling change in the leadership of the Japan Society of New York. Twenty-plus years ago, when I first went on a Japan Society fellowship for a stay in Japan (as many journalists have done since then), it would have been inconceivable that a just-retired Japanese government official (and former Mitsubishi exec) would be in charge of this American organization, for reasons that Steve Clemons clearly lays out. Although the Japan Society is not quite the same lobbying organization that AIPAC is, it would be like having an Israeli government official head that organization. This is truly startling.
* And, later, a wrapup on the real action for me of the last few days: final visit for family reasons to my home town. The moving vans arrive tomorrow to take the last shipment from my parents' house. Onward.
January 27, 2009
Adjusting a mistuned policy: what a thought! (Public diplomacy with China dept)
In talking about Timothy Geithner's warnings on Chinese "currency manipulation" several days ago, my main criticism involved proportion.
Yes, the dollar/RMB exchange rate is one important element of US-Chinese interactions. But even if we're talking only about economic issues, it is not (in my view) the most important among them. And as soon as we think about the vast range of political, strategic, scientific, cultural and other ways in which the two countries will affect each other, it falls far down the list. I bet that from later historians' perspectives, whether the two countries can successfully grapple with climate/environmental/energy issues will matter most about their dealings in these next few years.
So why would the Administration choose to kick things off by talking about currency wars -- and nothing else?
Two positive developments today. One is a column by Rebecca MacKinnon which lays out very clearly why it is worth thinking about proportion and public opinion even in China, where the media are still heavily controlled and no national policy is subject to popular vote. She has a lot to say, in the form of a "Dear President Obama"-style open letter, but here's the gist:
if you really want to take U.S.-China relations to a new strategic
level that rises above the day-to-day issues, you need to find new ways
to engage the Chinese people themselves -- not just their government....The point is that while these people are not citizens of a democracy,
they are by no means an undifferentiated mass of brainwashed drones.
The other is a set of comments to reporters by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (first time I have typed those five words), in which she provided exactly the proportion missing in earlier remarks. The gist here, via Centrist Vector:
Previously on the Security Theater concept here, here, here, and here, for starters.
1) From the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, or AOPA, a pro-small plane aviation lobbying group (of which I'm a member), indication that the Obama administration's general freeze on last-minute Bush regulations and diktats might stop implementation of one of the stupidest, least defensible, most purely theatric "security" measures, the creation of a permanent Air Defense Identification Zone, or ADIZ, over Washington DC. Yes, the Guantanamo orders are more important. But this could be significant too.
2) Conference summary, with video and links, from Cato's conference just before the inauguration on "Shaping the Obama Administration's Counterterrorism Strategy." Wide-ranging, useful to hear as the Obama team considers what, if anything, is worth preserving from the Bush "global war on terror." Useful complementary essay here.
3) Yesterday I drive to DC National Airport for the first time in more than a year and see the same big neon sign I remember so unfondly from days gone by. Security Threat Level: Orange.
Really, what is the point of this? 99.9% of the people who look at it don't even see it any more, since it's just part of the "boy who cried wolf" ignorable background. Anyone who does think about it has to wonder: is there a threat to the entire country? Just to Washington? Is there new information? Is there anything different I'm supposed to do? Does this sign have any purpose other than to make me just a little bit more fearful and a little bit more accepting of anything done in the name of "security"?
Yes, there are serious ongoing genuine threats to the safety of people in this country and many others, and we need to support all shrewd, effective measures to deter them. But does it occur to no one in the government that we do terrorists' work for them by making our own population cower all the time, rather than to be brave in the face of danger? Taking his lead from President Reagan, President Obama can say: "Transportation Security Administration, Tear Down This Sign!"
4) Someone has finally seen how security theater can become part of our economic stimulus plan. Playmobil is offering new action toys:
I grew up playing with little toy Army men who refought Gettysburg and Okinawa. My kids grew up with Star Wars action figures. Isn't it heartwarming to think of today's kids growing up with toy TSA security screeners! (Thanks to Gavin Bradley for this tip.)
January 25, 2009
Broader point about Geithner, Obama, China, and "manipulation"
Here's what increasingly bothers me about the recent flap over Timothy Geithner's "currency manipulation" criticism of China. I am showing this in "extract" format below not because I am quoting someone else because I am quoting the thought that has been running around in my head:
Because Barack Obama has been so knowing-sounding and aware of complexities on so many issues, it's natural to assume that he and his team will display the same sophistication when it comes to dealing with China. But in reality, virtually nothing that the President or his appointees has said or done on the subject has shown much sophistication at all. I made this point at various stages in the campaign. But as time goes on you inevitably start wondering: If these people are so smart, when will they get around to acting smart about the country whose cooperation they need more than any other's to avoid true financial catastrophe?
Now, the reasoning behind that assertion:
- During the campaign, Obama did not (to my knowledge) give a speech about relations with China, unlike his major addresses on his European tour or his speech about Israel when at AIPAC. Fine: it wasn't a big, direct in the campaign. What he did say was pretty much confined to "I won't buy poisonous Christmas toys for my kids" in early campaign debates. Meanwhile, his web site did have an all-points China policy, noting the various ways in which the countries cooperate and compete.
- Since the election, there has been one indirect but important signal of the new Administration thinking creatively about how to handle China. That is the nomination of Steven Chu as energy secretary.This was significant not because Chu's parents were immigrants from China (though that was huge and celebrated news inside China) but instead because in recent years Chu has been deeply involved in efforts to work out US-Chinese collaboration on environmental and climate-change issues. Anyone who has thought about this problem understands that if America and China are not both seriously committed to dealing with this issue, it's not going to be dealt with.
- The all-star economic team we're relying on to avoid true financial/economic catastrophe will need to work with China on just about every aspect of this plan. China has been the main buyer of Treasury notes (as you might possibly have heard). It has its own domestic economic emergency to deal with, and the tools it chooses in responding to that crisis will either ease or aggravate other countries' problems.
- Yet what is the most famous thing we've heard about China from any member of the Administration since the time the transition began? This, as reported in the China Daily:
As I argued here recently, China's management of the RMB's value (as opposed to the huffy and hyperbolic term "manipulation") is one part of the economic snarl that the US, China, Europeans, and others need to contend with. And it could become a more important and more dangerous part, if the Chinese authorities decide for their own reasons that they will try to push the RMB's value back down again, after letting it rise for years. (For details, here.)
But at the moment the exchange rate is not the most important element of US-China relations, even the financial aspect of those relations. And it most certainly is not the only element in US-China relations, which is the impression the Chinese readership and leadership could get from recent Obama Administration signals. This would be as if the only thing Obama had said about Mexico so far was, "Stop flooding us with illegal immigrants." It may seem unsporting, but it's worth pointing out that the reason Geithner's tax problems are being overlooked is that his expertise is thought to be so necessary in dealing with China among others.
So where does this lead? Mainly to a hope that the Administration will start recognizing all the different elements of this important relationship -- good and bad, financial and otherwise, business and academic, scientific and purely personal, ones where the US needs to adjust its policy (after the Bush years) and ones where China does too.
There are lots and lots of areas where Chinese government policies deserve criticism. (For a recent example, ridiculous censorship policies.) But there are many other where it deserves support -- and most of all there are areas where the US simply needs China's cooperation for its own and the world's survival. So: less gum-flapping about "manipulation," and more serious recognition of the thousand other issues where, no joke, the two countries really do need each other. Save the harsh criticism for the questions that really deserve it.
January 23, 2009
Interesting extra twist on "censoring" Obama in China
As noted several times earlier (here and here), the CCTV authorities in charge of the live broadcast of Barack Obama's inaugural address apparently got flustered when they started hearing him talk about "dissent" and "confronting communism," and cut away from live coverage.
Now (thanks to several friends who have pointed this out), the official People's Daily has carried a Chinese translation of the speech that includes even the "sensitive" parts. Chinese version here.
I am not capable of judging the refinement of this translation. But I can see that it carries the two passages that caused problems for the broadcasters. Details after the jump.
Moral? First, as mentioned so many times before here and in the Atlantic, the uncertainty about what will be allowed or forbidden is itself an important control tool. If you never know when you might be crossing the line, you end up being extra-careful (which may have been the mentality of the people inside CCTV). Second, and also familiar to readers here, this is a reminder that China itself and even the ruling Chinese Communist Party is full of countless contradictory views, factional and ideological differences, individuals who see things their own way, etc.
And, finally, something about the difficulties this kind of ruling system has in making decisions quickly, before checking what the "proper" response is supposed to be. I won't bother with a long list of similar examples, but I'm struck that while Chinese business and many Chinese individuals are amazing fast-reacting and adaptable, the political structure is much less so.
Usually journalists are in the position of being told that they have lamentably "oversimplified" or "hyped" their discussion of topics -- and told this by the real policy experts in academia or think tanks or specialized government agencies. Often enough, the accusation is true. Part of journalism's basic function is to explain, in simpler (and often necessarily less nuanced) terms, what the real experts are trying to say. If they do that well enough, they can reach people who would never sit still for the full, rococo, expert version and give them a better understanding of important ideas and problems than they would otherwise have.
But now we've got a situation where a journalist (moi-meme) is listening to a renowned expert and wondering, Can he possibly believe that things are as simple and bald as what he's just said?
The expert in question is our old friend Timothy Geithner, who when he was not being grilled about his tax problems today was saying (in his written answer to questions) that China is "manipulating" its currency. Oh my. Where do we start with this.
- That the Chinese government manages the value of the RMB against the US dollar and other currencies is not an accusation but an observation of universally-accepted plain fact. Until about three years ago, the RMB's value was flat-out pegged against that of the dollar, at a rate of just over 8:1. Was that "manipulation"? Yes, in the same sense that the yen was for years "manipulated" at a steady rate against the dollar, or perhaps in the sense that the US "manipulates" its national borders by controlling them. Here's the basic pattern of the dollar's value against the RMB from mid-2003 to mid 2008 (via Yahoo Finance), with the big change to a "managed float" happening in the middle of 2005. It went from more than 8 RMB to a dollar, to less than 7, during this period:
(Update note: There is no Y-axis scale on the left side of this chart, because I couldn't find a chart with a scale at the time. But as noted above, the chart shows a decline from about 8.2 RMB/$1 to about 6.8/1 -- so the dollar lost about 1/5th of its value against the RMB, not 90% as this truncated chart might suggest. Still, the main point is the change from the absolute peg of the pre-2005 years to the managed float since then.)
So, to the completely obvious extent that the Chinese government was manipulating (ie, fixing) the value of the RMB before 2005, they're manipulating it less now. Obviously they are preventing it from rising as fast as it would in an entirely uncontrolled market exchange, but again that's hardly secret from anyone on earth.
- Is the Chinese suppression of the RMB's value a fundamental reason Americans don't sell more goods there? It makes a difference but -- as I argued at very great length in this article two years ago, it's nothing close to being the main reason. Wage rates, Chinese infrastructure, US fiscal patterns, and a lot of other factors play a huge part. Details too exhaustive to go into here.
- Is the Chinese determination to control the RMB's value within a set band an important factor in current world financial patterns? In this article I argued that it was, but in the non-obvious way of directing the fruits of China's labor disproportionately into foreign investment rather than higher living standings for its own people. That is, "manipulating" the currency has been an important part of subsidizing US living standards in recent years. Details in the piece.
- Could a Chinese government attempt to protect its own recently-ravaged manufacturing work force by pushing the RMB's value back down -- after many years of letting it drift higher -- cause problems for the rest of the world? Yes indeed -- as explained in this very valuable post by the Beijing-based financial authority Michael Pettis. So they should be strongly discouraged from doing so.
- Do we think that the Chinese authorities who have put some $2 trillion into US assets will respond blandly to being labeled manipulators -- or to a policy that would effectively devalue the investments they've already made here? If Americans think that, they're naive -- in my view, based on this interview with a man at the center of Chinese decision making.
I lack the energy to go any further down this list, and this is enough to make the point. These are just a tiny few of the factors that go into any US government consideration of how the RMB/dollar relationship affects the economies of both countries. And to boil it down to the bald assertion that "China is manipulating its currency" ignores, vulgarizes, and misconstrues a lot more than it clarifies.
Oh well. My personal pledge: as many cheery things as possible to say about our future Treasury Secretary from this point on. We all have a stake in his success -- including the "manipulative" Chinese!
Last words on the Geithner SE Tax issue
After the jump, samples from a surprisingly strong stream of reader mail about a comment earlier today on whether our Treasury Secretary-designate made an innocent error, or did something more, in neglecting to pay part of his federal taxes for several years. Summary of my view: I think he should be confirmed, since dealing with the economic crisis matters more than anything else. But that doesn't mean that I believe his tax story.
Mail has run approximately 3-to-1 in favor of this interpretation -- which is to say, against Geithner's explanation. (With most but not all people saying they think he should still take office, and soon.) Paragon of fairness that I am, I include samples from three posts on "I'm not buying it" side and two on the "innocent oversight" side. After that, let's move on to coping with the emergency. _____
I recognize that dealing with the world financial/economic crisis is the most important next thing the Obama Administration has to do. Without detailed knowledge, I am willing to accept that Geithner is a crucially well-prepared member of the team that will help in this effort -- and that getting the right team is a first-order national priority. I don't know him, but friends who do know him like and respect him. Fine.
I also think that it is sensible to move past the Zoe Baird / Kimba Woods era (look it up) when any tax irregularity of any sort could be taken as an absolute bar, in itself, to service in any position subject to confirmation. Some standard of reasonable judgment has to be applied here.
So by the standard of what the country needs right now, I would probably vote for Geithner's confirmation as Treasury Secretary, if I were in a position to do so.
But I do not believe, and will never believe, that his failure to pay his own self-employment tax while at the IMF was an "oversight" or a "mistake." I have many many friends who have worked for this and similar organizations. I have myself over the years juggled the complexities of what is self-employment income and what is W-2 income and how to handle income from non-US sources -- and I have a lot less financial acumen than any Treasury Secretary aspirant should and must have. (Though I also use Turbo Tax!) Not a single person I have known from the IMF or similar bodies, not a one, believes that Geithner could have "overlooked" his need to pay US self-employment tax. When I have received similar income from international sources, the need was obvious even to me -- and I wasn't receiving and signing all the forms to the same effect Geithner would have gotten from the IMF. I could go on with details but I'll just say: if this were a situation more average Americans had experienced personally, he would not dare make his "mistake" excuse because everyone would say, "Are you kidding me???"
So we're back to a judgment call. I accept the argument that he is a necessary part of what has to be the best possible team America can assemble at this moment. But I don't like the fact that he is obviously dissembling on this point, and that he obviously was not playing it straight over a long period of years.
January 21, 2009
Marker for later comment: Chinese censorship of Obama's speech
During 48+ hours on US soil during this visit, I've had several flashes of the realization that I have been more affected by the preceding 2.5 years in China than I thought. For instance: if I were still sitting watching CCTV in Beijing, I would have taken it for granted if certain live dispatches from the US or Europe suddenly disappeared from the screen, because an interviewee had unexpectedly made a "sensitive" point.
But from within the US on this trip, I realize that it's actually quite incredible that Chinese broadcast authorities-- representing the world's most populous nation, the one whose relations with the U.S. will make a huge difference to the entire world's future, the country that presented itself to all other countries as a full, major, mature power with its Olympic games -- would pull the plug on live coverage of Barack Obama's inaugural address just because Obama began talking about the virtues of dissent.
Obama apparently also erred by mentioning America's struggle against
communism -- sensitive because, even though much of China seems more
openly market-minded than the United States, it is still officially
ruled by the Chinese Communist Party.
Account from Danwei.org here. My first reaction is, Jeeesh!! Can a big country really act in this tinhorn way? And my second reaction is the depressing realization that I would barely have noticed if I were still on scene.
More on the nuances of this shortly. In the meantime, this is connected to the phenomenon I discussed here. Also, read the comments on that Danwei site. (Plus this.) They bring it all back!
Not from the Atlantic, but worth reading all the same!
1) A very interesting collection of very short essays from the Washington Monthly, in which 19 writers and academics answer the question: what book do you really hope our new reader-president will take time to read? Disclosures: I am a proud alumnus of the Washington Monthly, and I have a brief item on the list. But I was surprised and impressed by the recommendations in general and in turn recommend that you read it.
2) An extensive "Oral History of the Bush White House," by Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum, in the current issue of Vanity Fair. This is a timeline recreation of the last eight years -- not all the big moments and turning points, but a lot of them -- in the words of original participants. I read this two days ago on the flight from Beijing to Washington (don't worry, it only took 20 or 30 minutes of the 13 hours of reading time, with plenty left over to watch the Chinese pirate video of Pineapple Express) and was both riveted and newly shocked about our recent history. Several of my Atlantic Voices colleagues have already reported similar reactions.
If I had been shown this project with no names attached, I would have guessed immediately that Cullen Murphy was involved. During his twenty years as the Atlantic's managing editor, I worked with Cullen on dozens of articles. He had many inspired, favorite approaches, of which one of the most favorite was the careful recreation of "familiar" events, which usually led to surprising results. Two of my Iraq-policy articles -- Blind Into Baghdad, and Bush's Lost Year -- grew out of exactly this approach. This latest package shows the power of this simple idea.
One other thing you missed by not being there yesterday:
First-hand knowledge that widespread newspaper claims (like this one) that crowd-control and logistics for the enormous inaugural event went "smoothly" or "well" were incomplete, to say the least.
As I mentioned yesterday, people headed for the vast "no ticket" zones on much of the Mall got in with relatively little trouble (and no security checks, which made sense given how far away they/we were from the Capitol itself). But getting out was a different matter -- and could have been quite dangerous were it not for the good humor and cooperation of nearly everyone in the crowd. People in my zone pushed by the thousands toward what they thought would be exits but in fact were absolute dead-ends, closed off by newly-erected cyclone fences guarded by police and National Guardsmen on the other side.
Probably those temporary fences would have given way before the people piling into them were literally crushed, but it was a bad situation for which there was absolutely no -- zero -- supervision or guidance from police, park attendants, volunteers, etc. (Comments from police boiled down to "Do not enter! Do not cross this line!" etc. In fairness, they probably had no idea of what was happening and where we were supposed to go.)
I was taller than most people in the crowd so could generally see around me rather than having that terrifying feeling of blind drift. But I did have the unhappy feeling of being carried along by simple crowd movement in directions I didn't intend. As reported yesterday, people like the one below, who climbed into trees or atop Porta-Potties to see where the exits were, eased what could have been a nasty situation. Bear in mind that there were limitless thousands of people behind me as I took this shot, all pushing forward toward what no one realized was a fenced-off barrier. The guy on the Porta-Potty is discovering that there's no way out in the direction people are heading. He and others turned and started shouting that to people -- and the tide moved, eventually, off to the left.
People who did have tickets often ran into the opposite problem -- simply never getting anywhere near the action. Michael Tomasky's comment in the Guardian sums up the situation very well. (He also did a great instant-analysis of the speech.)
So: it was a great and historic occasion; a very strong speech, as I'll eventually elaborate; a reverent and caring and fellow-citizens feeling among the throngs; and all of that. But flawlessly planned and handled it was not. The Obama campaign appears to have been a marvel of foresight and organization. So, on the whole, has the transition been. Let's hope that the Obama Administration is more like its campaign than like its inaugural day.
Very late night inauguration points
Still early for the First Family, who have several more inaugural balls to go, but late for a mere citizen after his quota of evening events -- capped by the pleasure of seeing a Metro car jammed at 1:00am with people in every station of life and mode of dress, from tuxedos and evening gowns to greasy night-shift overalls.
1) More on the speech itself tomorrow, but here is a point to bear in mind. Several of Barack Obama's big rhetorical performances have been recognized as hits from the minute he stepped off the stage. His 2004 Democratic convention speech is one example. His Philadelphia speech on race, which quelled the Rev. Wright controversy last spring, is another.
In many other cases, especially late in the campaign, the red-hots among his supporters thought he had "underperformed" or been "just so-so" immediately after an event, only to see the days-later and weeks-later reaction to the performance turn much more positive. The clearest example was his first debate with John McCain, where supporters thought he had missed chances to go in for the kill -- but over time it was clear that he had established his steady, gravitas-worthy persona.
I think his inaugural speech will be in this second category. Now that I have a chance to look at some blog-world commentary, I see that some is underwhelmed, as after the first debate. I think that the speech was in fact very well-pitched to this moment in history and the messages Obama wants and needs to send. That is, both artful and useful. More detail tomorrow.
2) As I may have mentioned from time to time, I view the Reagan-onward tic of closing all presidential speeches with "God bless America" as just a tic. That is, a substitute for doing what FDR, TR, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and all pre-Reagan American presidents had done: namely, find a "real" way to end a speech. Here is interesting proof that it is a tic. The prepared version of Obama's inaugural address - here, among other sources -- does not include those words at the end. But the transcription of what he actually said -- here -- confirms what we all heard, that he tacked them on at the end.
When he had time to think about the shape of the speech, Obama, as a writer and thinker, realized that he had a strong close without those cliched words. In real time, he threw them in, as any of us (including me) might throw in "you know" or "I mean" when answering a question. Let me say that again: when he had time to think about it, Obama the literary craftsman thought better of it.
3) In keeping with earlier testimony to the basic good will of the crowd -- as I witnessed it as one of the 2 million or so (my crowd here) -- the "boos" when George Bush or Dick Cheney appeared on the screen seemed almost perfunctory. People felt they had to do it, but their hearts weren't in it. To me, the most spontaneous-sounding and surprising cheers were for (a) Colin Powell, and (b) Jimmy Carter, and the most spontaneous surplus-hostility boos were for ... Joe Lieberman. Just reporting on my part of the crowd.
4) I gather that my experience with inauguration security -- easy to get in, tough to get out -- was not the same for people who, unlike me, had real tickets to the inauguration and weren't just standing among the hordes on the mall. (Eg here and here.) More on this later too.
January 20, 2009
Reading assignment before Obama's speech
Full text of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech from 1963 (here and many other places). Everyone knows how that speech ends. Not that many have ever read, or now remember, the first two thirds of the speech that built up to the famous close. Here's a guess that it might be an important complement to hearing Barack Obama's inaugural address three hours from now. And even if not, it's too impressive a piece of thought and rhetoric not to revisit every so often.
More after the event, plus compare-and-contrast reports on this past 24 hours in DC (after the PEK-IAD longhaul) versus other inaugural ceremonies I've seen here over the years -- just about all of them, by the way, in colder weather than today's.
January 17, 2009
Keep hope alive
Good news travels fast around the world. A few minutes ago a woman watching US TV called my sister-in-law in Rome, who quickly emailed the information to me here on the wee-hours watch in Beijing:
My friend Helen just called to tell me that "God Bless America" has been
substituted out! She was watching Obama starting on his train ride to DC,
and he gave a nice inspired speech. And at the end, using the same
[august] intonation, he said instead, " I love you guys" !!
Conceivably over time we would grow tired of this phrase, too -- though you can imagine Obama delivering it with a twinkle in his eye, rather than with the super-earnestness that typically encases the cliched "God Bless America" rhetorical close. But any presidential speech that ends with any words other than GBA is a step toward mental and linguistic freedom. Perhaps Obama really is aiming for greatness.
In conclusion I have only this to say: I love you guys too.
January 16, 2009
Most impressive nomination yet, IMHO
In several previous dispatches (here, here, and here) I emphasized what good news it was that Barack Obama had chosen Steven Chu as his new Secretary of Energy. I based this on Chu's own reputation and record:
Because he is an eminent physicist, Chu's very presence in the job would hearten proponents of more emphasis on pure science. Because he has devoted his attention in recent years to the technological advances and the international cooperation necessary to deal with climate issues, he would both symbolize the important of this challenge and potentially lead the Administration's efforts. There were many other virtues of this choice.
I said all this without having any idea of the kind of team that would surround Chu at DoE. But if this report, on Al Kamen's Washington Post site is correct, he has made an inspired choice for his Deputy Secretary and closest working associate. This is Susan F. Tierney, of Boston.
She has been a leader in energy, environmental, and climate-change issues for decades, in academia, government, and business. Her bipartisan bona fides are such that she was appointed a commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities by Governor Mike Dukakis, and then Secretary of Environmental Affairs by Governor William Weld. She was an assistant secretary at DoE during Bill Clinton's first term, and since then has worked as a consultant at the Analysis Group and served on countless national and international commissions dealing with energy, environmental, and climate issues. She is an honest a person as you will find in public life, and is a skilled manager. Assuming Kamen's report is correct, this is another superb choice.
___ I am not an expert on energy or climate issues, but about Tierney's character and temperament I feel very confident in my assessments. I have known her as long as any person on earth has, since I was just under two years old when she arrived in the household as my little sister. Her mother and father would be extremely proud; her sister and two brothers, plus her husband and two sons and many others, are proud enough to make up. Really, her only failing is that she has never, once, given me any inside info of any sort on any topic that she has been working on. Sisters!
January 15, 2009
Last words on pitying Bush
(At least before his really-final farewell speech in a few hours, which I won't see because I'll be at a factory in the boondocks of Beijing.)
About GW Bush's last press conference as president (previously here, here, and here), a reader says:
President Bush's goodbye conference ... made me think of how I identify his waning days. The official White House website has a video of President Bush giving a tour of the Oval Office. Throughout the video, President Bush makes mistakes and starts over, expecting the mistakes to be edited out of the video. But they weren't. The video makes me feel pity for him, much the same way people have felt pity for him after his press conference: not for what he did say, but for what he was trying to say. At the end of the day, he's still just a man as much as you and I are, and for the first time in the eight years of his presidency, I saw him as human.
The 8-minute video is here, shot in 2006. More background here. Judge for yourself.
January 14, 2009
Bush, by Eugene O'Neill
While watching our 43rd president's final press conference two days ago, I noted in real time, here and here, that I felt the first flickers of empathy for a man whose effect on America and the world I have relentlessly deplored. (Try this, for a sample, a story the Atlantic had the guts to put on its cover just before the 2004 election that I'm still proud of.)
I got a fair amount of "how dare you feel sorry for this guy?" response -- but also one note that conveyed a reaction I wish I had captured at the time. In fairness, this came in two days after the press conference, and I was writing in the wee hours in Beijing with a Yanjing beer in hand while Bush was on the air. Still, I thought it impressive. It is from David Carr, not the NYT writer of that name, from North Carolina:
I too thought the final Bush press conference was a remarkable performance; if an actor were to memorize and replicate it, it would seem like something out of Eugene O'Neill, staged in a barroom, and we might feel pity. The inept man without words realizes that he cannot say what he must say: an admission of failures across the board, a realization that his pipe dreams were deadly, an understanding that his nation and the world now hold him in low esteem and wish him gone. And not to be able to say these things is to remain their captive forever. But there is no expiation for Mr. Bush, and that is the objective tragedy. How can he live without awareness? He also must see how much Barack Obama is his opposite, how much he is admired and welcomed to the office, so unlike the stolen Bush arrival in 2000. It's a remarkable achievement for Mr. Bush: every moment of his presidency is touched with a shame that cannot be bathed away. I think he will disappear; I cannot see any post-presidential role he could fulfill without the full recollection of that shame.
January 12, 2009
Refining the point about GW Bush's final press conference
I mentioned a few minutes ago, while GW Bush's final press conference was underway, that the president seemed unusually "self-aware."
That's not quite right. On matters of policy, he revealed himself to be as isolated and out of touch as his critics (including me) would have assumed all along. Two illustrations: he hotly challenged the premise of one question that his policies had made America less prestigious and respected around the world, saying that was just the view of some "elites" and other pantywaists in part of Europe. Go to China! he said. They still respect us there. Yes, sort of. As I've written many times in the Atlantic, China does not seem in any deep way "anti-American," and they generally think US-China relations are good. But no thinking person has the slightest doubt that the Iraq, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib policies, in particular, have hurt America's image badly here as they have in most other places. To say what the President did indicates how carefully he has been protected from any unfiltered feedback from the real world.
So too with his wistful, regretful-sounding comments about the "harsh tone" in Washington DC. He was completely believable in saying that he hoped things would go better for Barack Obama. But does he recall the name Karl Rove? Does he remember which Vice President told a U.S. Senator from the other party to fuck off, on the Senate floor? There is no point refighting these wars. I'm simply saying: the very sincerity of the President's comments indicated how isolated he has been, or what he has chosen to forget.
Nonetheless: I think even people who oppose the Bush Administrations policies would find it somewhat harder to dislike him viscerally after this performance -- rather than getting angrier the more they see him, as with most of his appearances over these last eight years. The self-awareness I mentioned was purely on a personal level. Even though he defended his tax cuts and his other policies and even the execution of the Katrina response, everything in his posture, expression, and body language -- even his emphasis on the word defeat in talking about the 2008 results -- indicated that he has taken in the fact that things have not gone well.
It is true, he can hardly express himself in anything resembling sentences. But he displayed none of the little moue of pride when he got out a tricky name or a big word, a tic very familiar from his past speeches. To me, he helped rather than hurt himself with this last performance. And to recognize what an achievement this is: think how it would be to hear a valedictory hour's worth of Dick Cheney.
I didn't think I could empathize for even a second with GW Bush...
...but for at least the first fifteen minutes of his final press conference still underway, I did. I think it is because the internalized sense of defeat and unease was so patent that any human being would have at least an initial impulse of feeling sorry for him. More, he seemed to have dropped any of the masks he normally wears, and seemed to be expressing his real thoughts, emotions, and feelings, at least for a while. And his comments about Obama had not a trace of snark or edge.
The switch was thrown when someone asked him about tax cuts and he gave a little standard speech. But this is the first time I can remember when I could imagine why people who knew him earlier in his career considered him "likable," or at least appealingly self-aware.
More later.
January 11, 2009
Presidential rhetoric evolves toward its perfect form
From today's NYT, an account of a dry run of next week's swearing-in ceremonies. An African-American soldier built roughly like Barack Obama, Army Staff Sgt. Derrick Brooks, stood in as the "Faux-Bama" as the participants walked through the planned movements on the stage. These included his inaugural address:
Mr. Faux-Bama's entire inaugural speech consisted of six words: "My fellow Americans," he said. "God bless America."
By chance, I was standing in the crowd (teleported from Beijing) watching the run through, as a C-SPAN crowd shot reveals:
Thanks to many readers who wrote in to make sure I knew about the ceremony. Later, a compare-and-contrast exercise between those two modern imperatives of Presidential comportment: the "God Bless America" sign-off and the American-flag pin in the lapel. The similarities are obvious, but there are some interesting differences.
January 8, 2009
Sorry to hear Obama talking this way
This may be a small thing, but:
I hate, hate, hate the lazy modern presidential habit of ending all major addresses with the phrase "And God bless the United States of America" or simply "God bless America."
I love the Irving Berlin song. I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment. But a little chunk is hacked away from the national brain each time a president gets out of a speech not with a thought or original phrase but with this mindless pablum. This has become the political equivalent of "Have a nice day!"
Isn't this how presidents have always talked? God, no. You didn't get it from George Washington. You didn't get it from Abraham Lincoln, either in the hands-down winner as Greatest Inaugural Address Ever, his second or in that work of political haiku, Gettysburg Address. You didn't hear it from FDR.
Many of these titans spoke of God -- but when they did so, it was with some actual thought-content. For instance, from the close of Lincoln's Second Inaugural:
Fondly do
we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass
away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's
two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every
drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,
as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments
of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness
in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the
work we are in...
As I know first-hand, you didn't hear this from probably the most sincerely religious president of recent times, Jimmy Carter. To choose an example of a speech I was not involved in, his "crisis of confidence" speech in the summer of 1979 -- often called the "malaise" speech, though he did not use that word -- touched on spiritual issues but ended this way:
I will do my best, but I will not do it alone. Let your voice be heard.
Whenever you have a chance, say something good about our country. With
God's help and for the sake of our Nation, it is time for us to join
hands in America. Let us commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the
American spirit. Working together with our common faith we cannot fail.
But then Ronald Reagan began using the phrase to mean "The speech is over now," and ever since then politicians have seemed afraid not to tack it on, perhaps out of fear that we'll have the aural equivalent of phantom-limb pain if we don't hear the familiar words.
Apparently Obama began sliding down this slope early last year, but in most of the speeches I heard he ended with a composed thought, not a cliche. (I must not have listened all the way to the end of his otherwise-perfect election night speech in Grant Park.) But just now, groan, he ended his economic-stimulus speech, at George Mason University, in this same lame way. Can there be hope for the inaugural?
You are better than this, Mr. President-Elect. Your speechwriter, though more wizened than some who have held the job, presumably still has the vim to come up with a good closing line -- even one involving God. For example, this from John Kennedy's inaugural, six months before Obama was born:
With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final
judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking
His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work
must truly be our own.
All I have left to say is... nah, to hell with further thought. God Bless America
Via ChicagoReader.com, a rundown on the many other candidates, their positions, and their prospects, here.
"Robert Bartley is spinning in his grave" encomium by Thomas Frank on today's WSJ's op-ed page here.
Update: Kathy Geier, another Chicago friend of Geoghegan's has an eloquent profile/endorsement here.
January 4, 2009
Tom Geoghegan for Congress
Two years ago, I said I was making an exception to the "no active involvement in politics" stance I had maintained through my previous decades of journalistic life. (After leaving a one-time stint in politics in the Jimmy Carter years.) That exception was to support my friend Jim Webb's then-improbable run for the U.S. Senate from Virginia.
Here is exception number two: Tom Geoghegan for Congress. He will be running in the special election for the seat Rahm Emanuel is vacating to become White House chief of staff. This seat, representing the 5th District in Illinois, has a colorful lineage, to put it mildly. Emanuel's predecessor was Gov-for-the-moment Rod Blagojevich. Earlier, for 36 years, the 5th was Dan Rostenkowski's base, before his unfortunate indictment and imprisonment on fraud charges. Tom would continue the tradition of having a difficult-to-spell last name. It's Irish and is pronounced Gay-gan.
The basic background on Tom Geoghegan is here, written by his Chicago friend Rick Perlstein. Having been a friend of Geoghegan's for most of my life, I couldn't be more enthusiastic about his deciding to run.
To the extent Tom is known publicly, it's mainly because of his books, like Which Side Are You On?, The Secret Lives of Citizens, and In America's Courts. These really are masterful and original pieces of thinking and writing, which most writers would be content with as their entire contribution to the human endeavor during the period Tom has turned them out. Which Side, which was published in 1991, begins this way:
'Organized labor.' Say those words, and your heart sinks. I am a labor lawyer, and my heart sinks. Dumb, stupid organized labor: this is my cause.
The remarkable thing is that in Geoghegan's case writing has been a sideline. Day by day for several decades he has been a lawyer in a small Chicago law firm representing steel workers, truckers, nurses, and other employees whose travails are the reality covered by abstractions like "the polarization of America" and "the disappearing middle class." Geoghegan's skills as a writer and an intellectual are assets but in themselves might not recommend him for a Congressional job. His consistent and canny record of organizing, representing, and defending people who are the natural Democratic (and American) base is the relevant point.
The people of Chicago would have to look elsewhere for Blago-style ethics entertainment. Tom Geoghegan is honest and almost ascetic. Because it's an important part of his makeup, I mention too that he is a serious, Jesuit-trained Catholic.
Not living in the 5th district, I can't vote for Tom Geoghegan. But I can give him money, and just did, via his online donation site here. The campaign's mail address is Geoghegan for Congress; PO Box 1145 Chicago IL 60690. Email is GeogheganForCongress @ gmail.com
The race will be wide open, and I have no idea now what Tom's chances might be. It's a winner-take-all, no-runoff contest. I do know that the Congress would be better if Tom Geoghegan were part of it. Check out his record and see what you think.
NOTE: Several typos now cleaned up in what was originally a very late-night post -- including, unfortunately, a mistyped email address for writing to the Geoghegan campaign. The name is hard to spell, but not THAT hard.
January 3, 2009
Maybe Fox News has come to Indonesia?
On New Year's Day I mentioned an Indonesian military policeman's heartening response when he heard that my wife and I were Americans -- not Australians, as he had assumed. I also mentioned the traces of the top-to-bottom corruption of Indonesia in the old Suharto era that can be seen even in its spiffy new airports these days.
From reader Aaron Connelly, of Georgetown U., this amplification and reality check.
It seems the government must have upped the departure tax since I left in late November,
when it was a mere 5,000 rupiah. [For me, it was 150,000.] I suspect this is related to the 20% decline in the value of rupiah vis-a-vis the dollar since October. If it is, this might
be a land speed record for an Indonesian government policy change.
I also wanted to spoil your excitement, just slightly, with regard to the
Indonesian airport official's enthusiasm for the President-elect. It is likely
that this gentleman was either "orang sekular," ["secular person'] or a Muslim. While I
was in Jakarta and Yogyakarta for the three months leading up to our elections,
opinions on Barack Obama were very neatly divided along sectarian lines:
Muslims and secular Indonesians [the great majority] were generally enthusiastic; Christians were
uniformly pessimistic or wary of Obama.
When asked why, Christian Indonesians would tell me that they believed Obama
was a Muslim, or that they were suspicious because their Muslim friends or
coworkers were "too excited" about Obama. I was always surprised to
turn on TVRI [the national network] week to week and hear another "investigative report" on
Obama's Muslim school days. Unlike in the American press, in the Indonesian
newsmedia the "Obama was a secret Muslim" accusations were never
off-limits, though there they were treated as a much more cheerful sort of
intrigue than they were by the Jerome Corsis back in the States. Muslim
Indonesians were fascinated by the possibility, even if they ultimately doubted
the substance of the argument.
The effect of this sort of coverage, however, in the context of Indonesia's
sometimes tense sectarian politics, was to turn off Indonesian Christians to
the President-elect. Asking natives of North Sulawesi and Flores about American
politics in Jakarta, I learned to settle in for a long diatribe against Obama,
our "Muslim Senator," and for a very strangely impassioned, wholly
superficial defense of the virtues of John McCain. It was amusing at first,
frustrating and tiresome by the end of my time there-- because it says nothing
positive about the direction of sectarian politics in Indonesia.
In a followup note, Connelly said he wanted to make clear that when referring to Indonesian Christians he was talking about that country's counterpart to America's "low information voters" -- people who followed US politics hazily if at all. He did not mean the very sophisticated cadre of Christians in think tanks, academia, etc.
In any case it makes you wonder whether the anti-Obama Indonesians found this information on their own, or whether instead Roger Ailes has quietly reached a new target audience.
January 1, 2009
A new era begins....
11 am Indonesia time, January 1, 2009. Present our boarding passes to uniformed military
police supervising the entrance to an international airport in Indonesia, for first
of several connecting flights back to Beijing. For reasons that will be evident after the next posting, I'm not naming
the airport.
"Where you from? Australians?" one of the policemen asks.
It is the most likely guess for people who look like us in this part of the
world. Amerika Syarikat, I reply -
"the United States." We used to live in Malaysia, and after our struggles with Mandarin the Malaysian/Indonesian language feels practically like our native tongue.
The officer pulls himself up to attention and with a huge smile gives
us a snappy military salute. "America - very good!" he said. He lowers the salute and says "Barack Obama!!"
with a big thumbs up.
It's been a while...
(Yes, yes, Obama is a particular favorite in Indonesia because his childhood years in Jakarta make him seem a local boy made good. Still, this is not the spontaneous reaction to the name "America" that traveling Yanks have gotten used to in recent years.)
December 21, 2008
Pensee dept: followup on the "no buffer, no resiliency" economy
Yesterday I mentioned a summary of the latest John Boyd conference, which included the argument that today's lean, hyper-efficient, "just in time" economy was magnifying the effects of today's economic collapse. Problems in one sector instantly become problems in another, since so many businesses were fine-tuned to await the next order, the next payment, the next shipment from someone else.
Via reader Evan Oxhorn, I learn that the novelist David Brin has recently expanded on just this theme. Anyone interested in the first dispatch will find it worth reading Brin's thoughts, here. As a preview:
I refer to a brittle weakness in our economy, courtesy of the same
smartaleck caste of MBAs who brought us derivatives and hyper-leveraged
finance. A frailty that could, potentially, turn some short-term
crisis into full-scale disaster -- and all because of a good theory
that's been taken way too far.
For
decades, we've been told -- by the same fellows who brought us
"efficient finance" -- that manufacturing and commerce should be
fine-tuned to squeeze every penny of profit, by trimming away all
"fat." ... Under this
principle, any reserves that are kept on-premises will only encourage
sloppy management and incur unnecessary storage costs -- a calculation
that has long been exacerbated by shortsighted tax policies that punish
warehousing and inventory-keeping.
This approach, called "Just-In-Time,"
is based upon ... a wholly unjustified wager
that the economy and its supporting systems will always remain stable
and never experience disruption.
The whole question of what today's economic seize-up does to comfortable, accepted economic creeds -- from management theory, as above; to the pluses and minuses of full globalization; to the role of regulators; to theories of trade -- will be with us for many years. I do not remember a time when so many ideas seemed to be pressed so hard by fast-breaking events. Probably the last time it happened quite this way was in the 1930s.
I am enough of an optimist to think that the process of working out new ideas won't be as protracted as that last time, and that it need not end in world war. My cheering thought for the day.
December 19, 2008
Poll results are: NYTimes.com is being blocked throughout China (updated)
There seems to be no question: the New York Times web site is being firewalled right now all across China.
Exactly one person wrote me, from Shunde in Guangdong province, to say that he had no problem getting to www.nytimes.com and following links from the main page.
A second person wrote, from Beijing, to say that his connection was also working - and then wrote back a few minutes later to say, sorry, he forget he had the VPN turned on. Without the VPN, the site was blocked.
All the other replies (of slightly over 100) reported either that the home page wouldn't load at all, or that it loaded but that all of the links were blocked. As explained earlier, both of these are typical of the way the Great Firewall operates.
I got "blocked-connection" reports from people in the far west, in Urumqi; in the south, from Zhuhai and Shenzhen and Dongguan and Guangzhou; from the north and northeast, in Shenyang and Dalian and Changchun; and from all the other big cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Wuhan, Chengdu, Xian, Qingdao, Nanjing, Changsha, Hangzhou, Suzhou) and a bunch of smaller ones like Baoding and Ya'an.
Hypotheses:
Is the site blocked because of this big story today by Jim Yardley, about the economic perils China faces after 30 years of growth? Maybe .... but I have heard far worse prospects routinely discussed here at conferences, on Chinese TV shows, and by Chinese government officials in recent weeks. So that doesn't seem to make sense.
Is it blocked because of this story, by Edward Wong, reporting on the death sentences issued for two Uighurs convicted of killing 17 people in an attack on a police/military station in the far nothwestern town of Kashgar just before the Olympics? This could well be the problem. The threat of separatism in the mainly-Muslim northwestern Xinjiang region is an extremely sensitive topic in China. As Wong points out, his story carries several details of the action that differ from official Chinese government accounts.
Or is it blocked because of this unbelievably fatuous passage in yesterday's column by David Brooks: "Chinese people work hard because they grew up in a culture built around
rice farming. Tending a rice paddy required working up to 3,000 hours a
year, and it left a cultural legacy that prizes industriousness." Yes, culture matters; and yes, the structure of Chinese education, family patterns, and still-dominant agricultural life makes a difference in how people behave (not to mention the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, the years under Mao, the one-child policy, and so on). But to write something like that with a straight face suggests that one has never seen actual Chinese people at work (or ostentatiously not working) or thought about how many factors account for the wild variations in work ethic, purposefulness, scholastic aptitude, basic honesty, devotion to duty, etc among people who all supposedly share the rice paddy legacy. I would give some credit to the Chinese firewall minders if exasperation with this sort of talk were the reason for the shutdown. In fairness to Brooks, in the column he might have just been paraphrasing an argument by Malcolm Gladwell.
Or is it being blocked for some other reason?
I don't know. But this is a more heavy-handed step than I remember seeing in the past two and a half years.
Anyone who really wants to, can get around this barrier. Via proxy server or VPN; by going to the International Herald Tribune's site, which carries many of the same stories but is not blocked; through other news aggregators; by just waiting for the policy to change. But something is going on. (And, as also explained in the earlier Great Firewall article, the goal of interfering with the internet is not to make the barrier air-tight. It's simply to make finding unauthorized information enough of a nuisance that most Chinese people won't bother.)
I'm left with one other mystery: why my own connection in
Beijing has been working just fine, even when I don't use the VPN. Hmmmm. UPDATE: Mystery solved. As of midnight Friday China time, now I can't reach NYTimes.com without a VPN either. The home page loads but all the links time out. I am one with the masses!
Thanks to all who answered.
Another very impressive Obama pick
No, not Pastor Rick Warren; I'm with the multitude thinking this is one of Obama's rare clumsy steps.
Instead: John Holdren, who according to AAAS's Science Insider site will become the president's main science advisor, as head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Unlike, say, the inspiredchoice of Eric Shinseki to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, there is no fancy multi-level symbolism in the selection of Holdren. His nomination is more comparable to that of Steven Chu at the Department of Energy: he is a figure of unquestioned eminence in his field, with significant experience not just in hard science but also in the application of science to public policy.
And like Chu, much of his recent professional attention has been directed at energy and climate questions. Holdren has also worked extensively on nuclear nonproliferation, and seven years ago won the $250,000 Heinz award largely for that effort. Noting the wide range of disciplines and pursuits that have engaged him (he has also directed Woods Hole Research Center), Holdren said in his Heinz acceptance speech:
One might wonder from the array of interests of mine that have just
been mentioned, whether I simply have a short attention span, but I do
like to think that there is some method in this madness. I think that
many, if not most, of the great problems of the human predicament -
population, resources, environment, prosperity, security - are not
separate problems, but are intimately interconnected. And I believe if
they're not all addressed and solved together, they won't be solved at
all.
After the jump, some quotes from Holdren on energy and climate change from an Atlantic article by Mark Sagoff back in 1997.
Here's the only reason I can think of to worry about this pick: Knowing how bureaucratic politics works, but not myself knowing much about Holdren or Chu personally, I can imagine their shared roles as scientists-in-chief working very well, if they're a natural team, or not so well, if they are in the slightest degree turf-conscious or jealous. We'll see. _______
I am shocked to see a factual error in today's Washington Post!
Though to be fair, it is an error that probably only one person in the entire world is likely to have noticed. (Rather, that person's wife, from the computer in the other room just now.)* It comes in this story about Obama's chief speechwriter Jon Favreau, and it is hidden somewhere in this paragraph:
During the campaign, the buzz-cut 27-year-old at the corner table
helped write and edit some of the most memorable speeches of any recent
presidential candidate. When Obama moves to the White House
next month, Favreau will join his staff as the youngest person ever to
be selected as chief speechwriter. He helps shape almost every word
Obama says, yet the two men have formed a concert so harmonized that
Favreau's own voice disappears.
Easily fixed! If the story were merely tweaked to say "the youngest person ever to be selected as a chief speechwriter for someone renowned for giving great speeches," fact-checkers would be content. Not that I'm counting, but Favreau is roughly two months more grizzled than the person who did that job under Jimmy Carter was at the time. Personally, I think the extra maturity will be a plus. _____ * I was emboldened to post this by an email from someone else who noticed. The message's subject line was, "Have you given up the mantle?" No indeed! Until some 26-year old shows up, or someone younger than my 27-years-and-4+-months at the start of the Jimmy Carter era, I'm clinging to the title!
December 15, 2008
While disagreeing with G.W. Bush on almost every item of policy...
... I thought he showed considerable physical agility and temperamental aplomb while the shoes were coming at him yesterday. This is the kind of moment when people simply react, rather than having time to think or control their behavior. He might have been recorded forever curling up in a ball or hiding behind Maliki. He didn't. It's something.
(Offset by the total humiliation of the episode, the reasons for Iraqi grievance, the unseemliness of physical assaults, etc etc.)
1) A great 57-minute TV interview with Chu, conducted in 2004 by Harry Kreisler of UC Berkeley as part of his generally-great "Conversations with History" series.
In my experience over decades of conducting interviews, the people who are truly the greatest masters of their own rarefied fields often have a gift for explaining complex problems to outsiders in vivid, non-condescending ways. Think years ago of Richard Feynman, of Caltech, plunging a rubbery "O-ring" into a glass of ice water to demonstrate how it might have become rigid and failed during the launch of the doomed space shuttle Challenger. Think of Bill Clinton illustrating any point with one of his home town analogies.
Chu comes across very much that way in this session. Modest, funny, and willing to explain the work of of a scientist in terms and images most people can understand. A scientific explainer-in-chief? It would be nice to have such a person once more on the public scene.
2) Let's analogize one more time to another great Obama cabinet pick, Eric Shinseki as Secretary of Veterans Affairs. "Identity politics" was not the most important element in Shinseki's selection. "Policy politics" was what mattered most: Shinseki's having been right about Iraq. But there was an additional grace note, noted in particular by many Japanese-Americans, that a military leader named Shinseki was given this honor on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day.
So too with Chu. Identity politics is a second- or third-order aspect of this nomination. Mainly his choice says something about the role of real science in public life, about America's commitment to retain its leadership as a research power, and about the redoubling of scientific/technical efforts to deal with energy and climate problems. But in karmic terms it doesn't hurt that Chu, who was born in St. Louis of Chinese parents, will head the very department that, under then-secretary Bill Richardson, was involved in the Wen Ho Lee imbroglio in the late 1990s. (In brief: Lee, who was born in Taiwan and who worked at Los Alamos, was accused of massive theft of U.S. nuclear secrets on China's behalf. The NY Times loudly trumpeted this story. Eventually nearly all the charges were dropped, and the presiding federal judge apologized to Lee for government excesses.)Â Again, this is not a reason to have chosen him, but it's worth noticing.
December 14, 2008
More on the case for Steven Chu at energy
When Eric Shinseki was nominated as the new Secretary of Veterans Affairs, I argued that this was an inspired pick, on its own merits and for its sublime symbolism. (The man whom the Bush administration had ridiculed for being right about Iraq now restored, with honor, to cope with, among other things, the consequences of the Bush policy).
When Steven Chu was nominated as the new Secretary of Energy, I said that this was an even better choice, in both symbolism (no-kidding scientist to head what has become the government's leading science agency) and substance (his post-Nobel prize work has largely involved pushing for fundamental research on energy). Fortunately my friend Steve Corneliussen has done the work of spelling out some of the support for that assertion. Corneliussen, who is a writer rather than a scientist, has worked with the American Institute of Physics and other professional organizations. After the jump, parts of his email reporting reaction among the scientists he has been talking with. ________
More to say about the whys and wherefores later. For the moment: the ability of an incoming administration to select such people, and -- even trickier -- convince them it will be worth their while to move to Washington and wrestle with the most complicated politico / technical / diplomatic problems, given all the hassles and built-in frustrations and lack of privacy in governmental life, is both surprising and encouraging. Very good news.
Update: to flesh out a point made while I was rushing out the door earlier: obviously a Cabinet position is "a [bleeping] valuable thing," as the still-governor of Illinois might put it, and many people scheme and scramble for the offer. Also, I am not in the camp of people who feel very sorry for those who accept the "burden" of public service in high appointed office. It's a great challenge, a great opportunity, and a great thrill.
My point was that there are real trade-offs in public life: making all of your finances public, for example, or realizing that while you're in office everything you do or say is on the record and potentially embarrassing. Precisely the kind of person who is not actively scheming for the job, who already has a very good position (as Chu does), and who may give some weight to these personal tradeoffs, is the kind of person an administration may not manage to attract. When that person brings unusual eminence ot the job, as Chu does, then it's worth noting this achievement.
December 8, 2008
Annals of agitprop
Today's category: phrases that have outlived their time. Today's winner: "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people."
The front page of the Dec 8 edition of the (state-run, English-language, indispensable) China Daily had this item on Chinese-EU tensions, especially Chinese-French, because of Nicolas Sarkozy's recent decision to meet with the Dalai Lama:
Fair enough: it's an area of genuine contention. But then we have the quote from China's deputy foreign minister laying out the specifics of France's offense:
Ah, it "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people." This is the phrase I wait for in every Chinese government statement on matters of international disagreement.
Yes, there is a real concept buried beneath this boilerplate slogan. The concept might be expressed other places as "an insult to the dignity of our nation," or "disrespect for our people and their principles" or something. But it is generally used quite sparingly in other nations' pronunciamentos, because in the end listeners don't find it that persuasive.
Yes, one nation should not gratuitously offend any others -- a point my recent interviewee, the Chinese mega-banker Gao Xiqing, makes very effectively.* And, yes, in many personal dealings, saying "you hurt my feelings!" may be an important part of reaching a resolution. But you don't find Talleyrand, Metternich, George C. Marshall, and even Sun Tzu recommending this complaint as a big part of international strategy. And remember, this is not some sand-bagging trick of mistranslation. These are the English words the Chinese government itself selects.
As I argued last month in the Atlantic, China's official spokesmen make the country seem far less appealing than it really is, because their sloganized responses display so little grasp of how outsiders act, think, and respond. Important evidence that my contention is out of date will be the disappearance of "hurt our feelings" from future official statements. _____ * The way Gao put it, talking about what he learned from hardships working on a railroad gang during the Cultural Revolution:
I learned that, from a social point of view, no matter how lowly
statured a person you are talking to, as a person, they are the same
human being as you are. You have to respect them. You have to apologize
if you inadvertently hurt them. And often you have to go out of your
way to be nice to them, because they will not like you simply because
of the difference in social structure.
Zut alors! C'est une blague!
Many people in the blog-o-world, including several of my Atlantic colleagues, have noted the, umm, similarity between Barack Obama's most famous poster and the recent "SarkObama" campaign by Nicolas Sarkozy in France.
Loyal Atlantic reader Edward Goldstick sent me a note suggesting that I read what the posters actually say. As soon as you do so, it becomes evident that they're not pro-Sarkozy posters at all! They're an elegant little bit of jiujitsu to both mock and pressure Sarkozy by appearing to commit him to positions more progressive/leftist than he in fact holds.
"Produce clean and sustainable energy for Europe," the one on the upper left says. "Yes we can!" "Make polluters pay," says the next one down. "Yes we can!"
Others are in the same vein. And, as it turns out from a story in Le Monde (in French, here) published five days ago, this is part of a guerrilla campaign by Greenpeace to push its climate-change programs during EU talks on the summit in Poznan, Poland, this month.
Ah, the subtle French. But at least we know that Sarkozy is not as derivative as he seemed -- and that it takes much longer for material to make its way from the mainstream French press into English than the other way around.
December 7, 2008
Vox militis* on Shinseki
I am grateful for a flood of mail from active-duty and retired military people, and their families, expressing admiration and excitement about Barack Obama's choice of Eric Shinseki as his Secretary of Veterans Affairs. (On the merits and symbolism of the choice, here; on the politics, here.)
Below, from reader Larry Senechal of Seattle, a representative note of appreciation. After the jump, from a currently-serving Army officer, a representative complaint -- which may surprise many people outside the military.
First, the appreciation:
I'm an old former Marine, infantry type.
General Shinseki is old school General Officer corps,
unlike many Generals and senior officers who go through the revolving
door to become Defense contractor lobbyists, media analysts and Defense
contractor employees. It seems when this happens "Duty, Honor,
Country" are secondary to making money. In my opinion after 37 years
of service to this country, this doesn't seem appropriate payback to a country
who gave them so much and continues to do so with their OWN legacy costs to the
American taxpayer. The stories of just how corrosive this has been on the
military services and our Defense policy abound and have yet to be dealt with
effectively.
My father was a retired senior Army Officer as was my
father-in-law and both highly decorated infantry commanders. My dad often
lamented the growing "revolving" door and the poor leadership of many
in the General Corps and the dileterious effect it was having on the Army. When
the military first started using bonuses during the Clinton years to keep
captains and majors in the service, he observed that the retention problem said
less about the attractiveness of the private sector and more about the quality
of senior leadership who seemed more committed to their careers and less to the
men they commanded. I didn't fully appreciate and understand his remark at the
time. I now do after the last eight years.
Imagine my surprise when I read an article at MSNBC quoting
Shinseki stating,....""You must love
those you lead before you can be an effective leader," he said. "You
can certainly command without that sense of commitment, but you cannot lead
without it. And without leadership, command is a hollow experience, a vacuum often
filled with mistrust and arrogance."
Bonus points for elegance in the Shinseki pick (updated)
Barack Obama is all about bipartisanship, conciliation, binding up wounds, and so forth. Great! If only more presidents saw things that way.
But in his (reported) choice of Eric Shinseki as Secretary of Veterans Affairs, there is also an extremely refined aspect of sticking in the shiv.
Whenever he talks about this selection, Obama (plus his lieutenants) can describe it completely, sufficiently, and strictly in the most bipartisan high-road terms. They have selected a wounded combat veteran; a proven military leader and manager; a model of personal dignity and nonpartisan probity: an unimpeachable choice. Symbolic elements? If people want them, they can work with Shinseki's status as (to my recollection at the moment) the first Asian-American in a military-related cabinet position, not to mention a Japanese-American honored for lifelong military service on Pearl Harbor Day.
As for the other symbolic element -- that Obama is elevating the man who was right, when Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, et al were so catastrophically wrong -- that is something that neither Obama nor anyone around him need say out loud, ever. The nomination is like a hyper-precision missile, or what is known in politics as a "dog whistle." The people for whom this is a complete slap in the face don't need to be told that. They know -- and know that others know it too. So do the people for whom it is vindication. And all without Obama descending for one second from his bring-us-together higher plane.
The artistry here is remarkable. Along with the inspired nature of this choice.
UPDATE: I see from the MTP webcast just now available (below) that Tom Brokaw directly asked Obama about Shinseki's disagreement with Rumsfeld, and Obama said of his new nominee, "he was right." Consistent with the argument above, that's as much as he ever needs to say.
Karmic justice: Gen. Eric Shinseki
One of the truly nauseating moments in the run-up to the Iraq war was the humiliating public rebuke that Paul Wolfowitz, then Donald Rumsfeld's #2 at the Pentagon, delivered to Eric Shinseki, then a four-star general serving as Army chief of staff.
Shinseki, a wounded combat veteran of Vietnam, was by career and reputation a cautious, methodical person. Those who criticized his performance as Army chief mainly complained that he was too traditional and non-innovative in his approach. Thus, he was constantly at odds with Rumsfeld's crew, who viewed him as a passive-aggressive, fuddy-duddy obstacle to doing things in their new lean-and-mean way.
The showdown came just before the war began. Shinseki, who had direct experience with land warfare (in Vietnam) and post-combat occupation (in the Balkans), was urging that the U.S. go in with a force large enough to ensure that it could maintain order and genuinely control Iraq's sizable territory and potentially fractious society after it ousted Saddam. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz hated this whole idea.
After the jump, a passage from my Atlantic article and subsequent book, both called Blind into Baghdad, describing what happened next. I think this also explains why it is so satisfying and right that Barack Obama will (reportedly) name Shinseki to his Cabinet as the Secretary of Veterans Affairs.
(Shinseki after his retirement, at a museum in his honor in Hawaii. Photo from a profile of him at this official Army web site.)
Here's one other point that is not as widely known as Rumfeld's and Wolfowitz's bullying of Shinseki: Despite being unfairly treated, despite being 100% vindicated by subsequent events, Shinseki kept his grievances entirely to himself. Although my book contains accounts of Shinseki's inside arguents with Rumsfeld et al, and his discussions with his own staff, zero of that information came from Shinseki.
I made a complete nuisance of myself requesting an interview, or a phone conversation, or an email exchange, or even some "you're getting warmer" guidance from him. Nothing doing, in any way. (I did track him down at an ROTC commissioning ceremony where he was speaking; he greeted me politely, but that was it.) I am confident in the accounts I presented, which came from a variety of first-hand participants; but Shinseki, who could have had a lucrative career on the talk show/lecture circuit giving "I told you so" presentations, has not indulged that taste at all.
So congratulations to Eric Shinseki, who has stoically served his country for decades and was wounded in that cause, in several senses, on this new honor -- and on the responsibility to help others who have served. Congratulations, too, that a Japanese-American patriot from Hawaii should receive this news on December 7. And not just congratulations but wonderment at the Obama team's deftness in the symbolism and substance of this choice.
Details of Shinseki-Wolfowitz showdown after the jump. _________
When you're in a tryptophan - induced daze and looking for stimulants of the most wholesome and enjoyable sort, the place to start is of course with the latest great issue of The Atlantic.
After that, two suggestions:
1) The Global Trends 2025 report from the National Intelligence Council. (Intro page here; 8MB pdf file of whole report for free download here.) Projections of how the world will look 17 years into the future are by their nature preposterous. One conducted in 1991, looking toward the present day, would have found it hard to imagine the defeat of George H. W. Bush (then on the top of the world politically) and the subsequent Clinton and Bush II and possible Clinton II eras that made possible; the tech induced stock boom, and tech bust, and second boom, and second bust; the current situation of both China and Russia, then mere glimmers of what they are today; the resonance of the names bin Laden and Guantanamo. And... a whole lot more.
Still, for what it is, this forecast is sensible and provocative. It has gotten a lot of ink as a forecast of US "decline," but it is more interesting and less blatant than that. I disagree with a lot of it but am glad to have had the occasion to think through its arguments. And 17 years from now, we can see how it stands up.
2) I can't say this oftenenough: seriously, anybody who presumes to hold an opinion on America's defense needs, defense spending, and long term military strategy really has to read "America's Defense Meltdown," available in free 2MB pdf download here. (More words than the NCI report above; fewer graphics.)
This report has facts; it has figures; it has history; it has to-do lists for the next administration; it has things you might expect and things you don't.
From what you might expect, an introductory passage about what's happened to our military establishment:
Our equipment is the most sophisticated and effective in the world. We easily whipped one of the largest armies in the Middle East, not once but twice, and we have now clearly mastered a once difficult and ugly situation in Iraq. Success in Afghanistan will not be far away, once we devote the proper resources there. Those who take comfort in the last three sentences are the people who need to read and consider the contents of this book the most. Reflect on the following:
• America's defense budget is now larger in inflation adjusted dollars than at any point since the end of World War II, and yet our Army has fewer combat brigades than at any point in that period, our Navy has fewer combat ships and the Air Force has fewer combat aircraft. Our major equipment inventories for these major forces are older on average than at any point since 1946; in some cases they are at all-time historical highs in average age. [etc etc]
For a sample of something you might not expect, the following, from probably the most right-wing of all the authors in the book -- a man whose cubicle wall, in the Senate office building where he worked, was adorned with a poster of Mussolini when I met him in the early 1980s. He is discussing the overall balance between the US Navy and the Russian and Chinese fleets -- especially the looming Chinese "menace" that drives the need for new US ships:
Overwhelming any comparison of fleets is the fact that war with either Russia or China would represent a catastrophic failure of American strategy. Such wars would be disastrous for all parties, regardless of their outcomes. In a world where the most important strategic reality is a non-Marxist "withering away of the state," the United States needs both Russia and China to be strong, successful states. They need the United States to be the same. Defeat of any of the three global powers by another would likely yield a new, vast, stateless region, which is to say a great victory for the forces of the Fourth Generation. No American armed service should be designed for wars our most vital interest dictates we not fight.
Read these between football games over the weekend. You won't be sorry. And consider sending copies of #2, especially, to the Obama household for Christmas.
I will present this coveted prize to the next reporter / pundit / columnist who gets through a discussion of the pros and cons of Hillary Clinton as Sec of State withoutusing the now-unbearably hackneyed term "team of rivals."
Nothing against Doris Kearns Goodwin, who in prehistoric times was my professor in a college course on the American presidency. And nothing against her application of the concept to the composition of Lincoln's wartime cabinet and the political challenge of holding Union factions together before and during war. (For somebody who does challenge that application, go here.)
But this is not the Civil War, Obama is not Lincoln -- and even if he were and all circumstances were identical in every way, out of simple self-respect you'd think people would get embarrassed about using the catch phrase they'd heard a million times for the million-and-first. To me, listening to this unvaried refrain is like hearing "bitchin' !" among my fellow teenagers in the late 1960s or "groovy! " after that. And I'm in China!
We do already have words for the underlying concept, and many other examples in history than Lincoln's bringing Seward et al into his administration. You could call it an "inclusive" approach. Or "big tent" politics. Or "bipartisanship," if the rivals in question are from the other party. Or "coalition-building." Or "compromise." Or a "unity cabinet." If you really want a hoary adage, you have two familiar ones to chose from: something about bygones being bygones, or about keeping your friends close, and your enemies... America needs a lot of things, but not additional cliches to stunt political thought before it has a chance of taking place. (This reminds me of the tech cliche "mashup," to describe what really is an "overlay" or a "combination" or "fusion.")
As I write, the Sunday talk shows have not yet begun in America. My guess is that no one who appears on them will still be eligible for my award at the end of the day. But I am an optimist and hope to be proven wrong!
November 22, 2008
The Asian angle on the Geithner nomination
In an email from Bill Bikales, the senior economist for China/Mongolia with the UN Development program, based in Beijing:
Two nice things about this pick - I should say first that I do not know him personally.
First, his Asia background. Geithner's father, Peter Geithner, was a development specialist who opened the Ford Foundation's China office - the first foreign NGO here, under a special agreement that continues to this day. That was just before Tiananmen Square, and the father was part of the Foundation's difficult but, ultimately, undoubtedly correct decision to remain engaged. Tim apparently also studied Chinese, was posted in Tokyo for Treasury, and focused on Asia studies as undergraduate and graduate student. This is all great background for Treasury's international dealings in the coming years.
Second, he was head of the IMF's Policy and Development Review Department (PDR) for two years. PDR are the people there who provide the intellectual framework for, and monitor and sign off on the work that the country missions do. Some of the best people I ever dealt with at the Fund. I like this because I've thought more than once in recent years that what the US needs to do is take a step back and look at itself just as the IMF looked at, say, Argentina, during those years, and develop a tough IMF program; get your fiscal act in order, get serious about risks in the financial sector, establish external sustainability. Basic flow of funds accounting techniques, the core IMF methodology, would be extremely helpful. Obviously nobody will impose anything on the Congress a la IMF conditionality - but US macroeconomic policy has been seriously off track for 8 years, and a strong IMF style program is precisely what is needed. I will take pleasure these coming months in speculating about what must be going through Geithner's mind. It won't only be bail-outs and stimulus packages - the short-term fixes -- I am quite sure.
November 21, 2008
Why didn't I know this before? (Math dept: Benford's law)
One reason math is so satisfying is that it allows you to see order in what is otherwise the randomness of life. For instance, the famous Fibonacci sequence, which shows up in countless natural patterns like this:
Math is also satisfying when it helps you understand what parts of life truly are random or "chaotic," rather than adhering to patterns you haven't yet figured out. The most obvious example is the minute-by-minute movement of weather systems. The world's vast weather-forecasting computers can assess the layers and eddies of heat and moisture in the air and tell you where "convective activity" -- thunderstorms -- is more and less likely to occur. (An example from NOAA here. I spent hours looking at such stuff in my pre-China piloting days.) But a day before landfall, they can't really be sure whether a hurricane will hit New Orleans or someplace in the next state.
So I was grateful to discover, via Michael Ham's Later On blog, another mathematical tool with surprising usefulness in daily life -- and one that, to my chagrin, I had never heard of before. It is called Benford's law, and it has to do with the distribution of numbers we use to count many naturally-occurring phenomena.
Academic's request for Internet/politics poll participants
I've received a request from Barbara Kaye at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville for participants in an online survey of how the Internet affects political activities and views. Like any online survey, this one is by definition non-random. But I believe it is legit, and is a continuation of surveys done after the past three presidential elections. Here is an abstract of a paper based on a previous survey.
She says she is "specifically looking for liberal/progressive respondents." If you're interested, the survey site is here. Survey is open until November 26.
November 18, 2008
A fascinating document about the internet and "public opinion" in China
Outsiders who follow Chinese events have known for years about Roland Soong's EastSouthWestNorth site*, which draws from Chinese-language and English-language sources for reports and analysis.
I've just seen this post, from a few days ago, which strikes me as something that people who don't normally follow Chinese events should know about. It's the text of a speech Soong prepared for last weekend's annual Chinese Bloggers conference (but did not deliver, for family-emergency reasons). In it, he discusses the differences the Internet has, and has not, made in the Chinese government's ability to control information and maintain power within China.
This is a subject easily misunderstood in the United States, where people tend to assume either that the cleansing power of the Internet will ultimately make government efforts at info-control pointless, or, on the contrary, that the bottling-up effectiveness of the Great Firewall will protect the government from the power of an informed citizenry. (My own Atlantic article on the subject here.)
Soong elegantly illustrates why such categorical assumptions miss the complexity of what's going on. The whole speech is worth reading, but the passage below is especially important for Americans. First he describes the way info would flow when bloggers and net connections first became significant in China, around 2003:
1. A bad thing happens somewhere in China (such as police brutality, government malfeasance, a forced eviction, a coal mine disaster, etc).
2. The local government suppresses all information.
3. All media reports are censored. (But if it wasn't reported in traditional media, there are other alternatives now on the Internet.)
4. The victims begin a petitioning process up the hierarchy in order to seek justice. The road is long and hard, and nothing ever comes out of it.
5. The Internet forums/blogs rushed to report on the case. But within approximately 48 hours, all traces of information are erased by order of the authorities. (Thus, one of the excitements of my blogging activity was to find and translate that information within this time window.)
6. Western media catch wind of the incident, and follow through. This creates an international scandal.
7. Senior Chinese officials take notice, and corrective actions are taken.
Then he describes what has changed in the past five years, in this 2008 update:
The whole Grant Park pageant recalled Little Rock in 1992, when the crowd was swaying to "Don't Stop Thinking about Tomorrow" and the young-looking Clintons were in their full glory.
This was far more sober, as Obama has been throughout; and paradoxically both calming and inspiring. It's easier to sound inclusive when you have won than when you have lost, but Obama -- that is, President-Elect Obama -- did far more than the minimum with the "I will be your president, too" passage.
Performance expectations have been higher and higher for Barack Obama's set-piece high-stakes speeches, and so far he has not fallen short even once. This one was delivered with unusual poetic skill. This can't go on forever, but the string continued in a heartening way this evening.
November 4, 2008
An extremely classy speech by John McCain
Would things have been different if we had seen more of this man during the campaign? We will never know. But all congratulations and honor to him for comporting himself this way at this time.
A wonderful moment for America, which McCain did absolutely nothing to diminish. (The booing yahoos in his crowd are a different matter.) Going out on a high note.
November 3, 2008
Another brilliant GOP campaign move? (Updated)
I am away from a computer most of the time now*. But there's a TV droning in the background, which for the last two hours has been on MSNBC.
During that period, I have seen at least three, maybe four, times a voice-of-doom style TV spot about Barack Obama and Rev. Wright. It opens with a dark-visaged grainy picture of Obama, cuts to Wright's famous "not God bless America, but God damn America!" speech (with the "damn" bleeped out), and ends with bold words on the screen saying something like: Barack Obama. RADICAL. RISKY. General aura of the ad Willie Horton-ish. A group called GOPTrust.org takes the responsibility.
Brilliant move! On the last day of the campaign, using money for a saturation ad campaign (a) in California, no one's idea of a swing state; (b) on MSNBC, with no one's idea of an "undecided" audience; and (c) on a theme that the candidate himself has theoretically forsworn, therefore probably building up as much extra resentment among the California/MSNBC viewers as it does enthusiasm among the GOP base.
Not for the first time during this campaign, I've wondered whether some of McCain's "brains trust" actually are moles trying to make sure he goes down hard. (Previous occasions for wonder: the "suspend the campaign" gambit, the "angry old man" debate-prep strategy, the Steve Schmidt radio interview, the McCain SNL cameo, and, we've got to say it, the Palin choice.)
As skillful as the Obama team has been in its two-year campaign, McCain and his team have been that incompetent and ineffective. Any Republican candidate this year would have been dealt a bad hand. It is remarkable that McCain has misplayed every single card.
UPDATE: I hear from a reader that the ad is also playing in Austin. This is crazy on two fronts: Texas will go for McCain with or without this ad, and Austin will go for Obama with or without. I guess the money is burning a hole in GOPTrust's pocket. Update 2: Apparently this is playing all over the place: Connecticut, South Carolina, and even Gotham itself. Shrewd, as part of discount bulk-buy strategy? Deliberate, as a way of limiting down-ticket losses for House races? Or just "maverick"? Maybe some day we'll know. ___ * At a health-care facility where I am on family business. Now, signing off again.
November 2, 2008
Proof that John McCain has reached the "acceptance" stage
His appearance in the opening skit of SNL last night. (Clip from official NBC site here, with intro ad.)
The premise and execution of the skit were very funny. Much funnier, except for the physical-humor thrill of seeing Tina Fey and "the real" Sarah Palin on screen on the same show, than Palin's appearance a few weeks ago. This time, McCain and Fey, in the roles of McCain and Palin, were QVC hosts shilling for fine election-related collectibles, like Joe the Plumber action figures. The setup, which poor McCain himself had to lay out, was that airtime just before Election Day was essential -- but while Obama could pay for a wall-to-wall half-hour special, McCain and Palin couldn't afford anything more than a spot on QVC.
I just watched it again right now, and it's even better than I remember. The only thing we'll miss when this campaign is finished is seeing Fey in her Palin role. "OK, now I'm goin' rogue..." McCain himself was also a charming performer. Not a bit of the crabbed, offended, uncontrollably angry man we saw during the debates. Instead, a little reprise of the "I know this is all bullshit, and I can laugh at myself" McCain as he consistently presented himself in the 1980s and 1990s.
But no candidate who thought he had a prayer of winning would have appeared on this show.
For a candidate coming from behind, every second of the final week of the campaign is like a second in cardiac-surgery operating theater, with absolutely no room for fooling around or wasting time, money, or effort that could be used to sway that last crucial vote. (Think: the last days of Gore-Bush in 2000.)
For a candidate who thinks he's ahead, and might actually become president, inevitably there's a tone of new seriousness right at the end: What we've been working for years is within our grasp, let's not screw this up, and let's be sobered by how different the world is going to look in a few days.
So if McCain really thought he had a chance of catching up, he wouldn't have wasted time on an audience that might repair his reputation among liberals and journalists but does him no good with the crucial swing votes. And if he thought he were secretly ahead, he wouldn't comport himself this way. He would be more like the stiff character we saw in the debates.
Great TV! But also an unmistakable message.
My anecdote about the political ground game
Three days before the election, walking down State Street, the old-fashioned shopping area in my home town of Redlands*, California. This is a city that went for Barry Goldwater when I was a kid and that has been part of a solidly Republican Congressional district for most of the time since then. For the last 30 years it has supported Rep. Jerry Lewis, once the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and more recently under Federal investigation for doing favors for lobbyists. (His opponent this year is Tim Prince.)
In a State Street storefront that was some kind of variety discounter the last time I saw it, I now see... Obama headquarters! And it is packed. Old people. College students. Everybody on the phones. People walking in and out with material supporting Obama, Biden, and the rest of the Democrats. I cannot emphasize enough how unusual this is. California may be a blue state, but this part of it has not been.
Most of the yard signs around town seem to be McCain-Palin. But in other times, nearly all of the yard signs would have been Republican. A bustling, unembarrassed Democratic headquarters here takes me by surprise. ____
* Personal note: I spent practically no time in the United States during 2007 but have traveled repeatedly from Beijing to Redlands this year. This reason, as mentioned earlier, is the declining health of my father, which will keep me from from dealing with email or doing much more on this site for a while.
October 31, 2008
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.
October 30, 2008
An essay by someone who has never worked in a political campaign (updated)
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.
October 28, 2008
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!
October 26, 2008
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.
October 19, 2008
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 Wsuggest 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.
October 18, 2008
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.
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.
October 15, 2008
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.
October 13, 2008
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.
October 12, 2008
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. ______ * Cullen was for 20 years the Atlantic's managing editor. ** This is probably in the wrong Latin case, but I don't care!
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. ___ * 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.
October 9, 2008
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.
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 mentionedthis 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.
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.
October 6, 2008
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.
October 5, 2008
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.
October 2, 2008
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.
September 29, 2008
Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?
I am late on the follow-up to this story, already addressed by my colleagues Sullivan and Coates, plus, notably, Todd Gitlin. On the other hand, I was early in identifying the original problem!
The original problem was McCain's flat, obvious, no-two-ways about it, witnessed- by-tens-of-millions-of-people refusal to look at Obama at any point during the debate last week. The problem now is the contrast between that indisputable reality and McCain's flat refusal to admit that this was so, in his interview yesterday with George Stephanopoulos. (Excerpt from interview at end of this post; representative photo, via Andrew Sullivan, right here.)
There are three ways to account for McCain's current claim:
1. He did not remember on Sunday morning the way he had behaved on stage 36 hours earlier; 2. The reasons for his behavior were so powerful, instinctive, and atavistic that he was not aware of what he was doing at the time; 3. He was aware of his behavior at the time, and remembers it, but has decided that this is not a plus and so is telling a lie.
Logically I see no alternative to these three options. All in all, the least damaging to McCain is probably the last, the flat-out lie.
UPDATE. At the suggestion of several readers, I'll agree that logically there is a possibility #4, or maybe #3.5: That McCain has mis-remembered his behavior in a convenient and more positive way, so that he is "sincere" in saying that the worst aspects of it didn't happen. This is less a "flat-out lie" than a common sort of self-delusion. Whatever the genesis, his body-language on stage was unbelievably insulting and classless.
________
STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, during the debate, it seemed that you were reluctant to look at Senator Obama.
MCCAIN: I wasn't.
STEPHANOPOULOS: No?
MCCAIN: Of course not.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, we went back through the tape, and some people
were saying that that was showing disdain for him. Is that fair?
MCCAIN: I was looking at the moderator a great deal of time. I was
writing a lot of the time. I in no way know how that in any way would
be disdainful.
The Bush taint becoming the McCain taint? (Updated x3 ! )
A year ago, I polled (reader) opinion on the question of which public figures had risen in public esteem and likely historical assessment thanks to their service in the GW Bush administration. (More here and here.)
Some of the losers were obvious, with Colin Powell at the head of the damaged-reputation list. My proposed winner at that time was Christopher Hill, the diplomat in the middle of negotiations with North Korea. If Gen. David Petraeus had been slightly more careful about allowing himself to be placed in the middle of party-political battles, he would be the clear winner now.
I think it will soon be time to ask the same question about the reputational effect of the McCain 2008 presidential campaign. Let's set aside shifting views of McCain himself, and talk about those around him.
Obviously -- at least to me -- the biggest loser will be Sarah Palin. Two months ago she was the next-generation's hope as a fresh new face for future Republican leadership. Now she is a laughingstock. (Notwithstanding the likelihood that she will do "better than expected" in her upcoming debate.) Some conservatives are warning that her long-term prospects are "in question" because of her performance so far. No, they're not.
But closing fast on her is the once-estimable Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former head of the Congressional Budget Office (ie, Voice of Responsibility) and member of the Council of Economic Advisors. Just now, he appeared on MSNBC to discuss the market crash and failure of the bailout bill, and in the subtlety and fairness of his remarks he was indistinguishable from Tom DeLay in his prime.
"Once again we see the failure of Barack Obama's Democrats to address the nation's true needs," was (approximately) the first thing out of his mouth, when discussing a bill that two-thirds of the members of his own (and the president's) party voted against. He led not with what this means for the real economy; not what the possible solutions were; not the need to work something out fast; but pure spin-room flackery.
This kind of bluster is what flacks are for, on both sides. Their reputations go up when they can say such things with a straight face! Even better, with a face contorted in partisan outrage. It is not the right role for the main economic advisor to a campaign. Somebody from the campaign may need to say this, DH-E. Not you.
UPDATE: The statement just out from the Obama campaign's flacks is more statesmanlike than the interview from the McCain campaign's "substance" guy:
This is a moment of national crisis, and today's
inaction in Congress as well as the angry and hyper-partisan statement released
by the McCain campaign are exactly why the American people are disgusted with
Washington. Now is the time for Democrats and Republicans to join
together and act in a way that prevents an economic catastrophe. Every
American should be outraged that an era of greed and irresponsibility on Wall
Street and Washington has led us to this point, but now that we are here, the stability
of our entire economy depends on us taking immediate action to ease this crisis," said
Obama-Biden campaign spokesman Bill Burton.
UPDATE #2: John McCain's brief statement just now (5:15 pm EDT) was also much more statesmanlike.
UPDATE #3: Here is Douglas Holtz-Eakin himself. As you listen to his comments, starting 30 seconds in, remember that this is someone who pre-McCain had been seen as a reputable economist. And his actual first sentence is, "Today Barack Obama's Democratic party failed the American people." After that party got 60%+ of its representatives to vote for the plan, and the Republicans had ~67% against.
September 28, 2008
The looming problem for Biden in the Palin debate
I'm not joking about this: in the wake of her catastrophic performance in the Katie Couric interview, Sarah Palin has set expectations so low that she is very likely to do "surprisingly" well against Joe Biden on October 2.
That is, to seem more flustered and incoherent than she did against Couric, Palin would have to move herself into "Eagleton zone," where her presence on the ticket would no longer be sustainable.
Any informed-seeming answer she gives will be her first such answer under press questioning -- which in practice means the Gibson and Couric interviews. This is especially true if it's to a "but what about....?" or "are you saying...?" follow-up question. Those follow-ups, from Couric, were the truly lethal ones. Odds are that Palin will manage to handle at least one exchange of this sort, maybe more, and therefore show "improvement" and beat the expectations game.
Either that, or she and the ticket are mortally wounded.
A military perspective on strategy and tactics
Yesterday I mentioned the irony of John McCain's complaining that Barack Obama "didn't understand" the difference between strategy and tactics, given that the Obama campaign seemed guided by a long-term strategy leading to November 4 while McCain was fighting day by day tactical battles.
After the jump, an email just in from Gerald A. Lechliter, a career U.S. Army officer, with some interesting elaborations on this point. I'll use this opportunity to restate a procedural note:
If you send me a message via the "email JF" button on this site, I will assume that I can use some or all of the contents of your message in subsequent posts unless you say otherwise, but that I should not use your name or other identifying details unless you explicitly say that is OK. [Original version of this post did not include G. Lechliter's name, but I got a subsequent message from him OK'ing its use.]
For instance, I'd remove parts of a message that said "I am a 67-year old man from Wyoming currently living at the U.S. Naval Observatory but contemplating a relocation next January" but might use the parts that said, "I have had several heart-bypass operations, and I've begun to reflect on how they might change someone's personality..."
That is a fake email. After the jump, a real one about strategy and tactics. ________
The least self-aware moment for John McCain in last night's debate came at the half-way point, when he said, "I'm afraid Senator Obama doesn't understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy."
In a sense McCain was sticking to his battle plan in saying this -- the plan being on-message hammering-home of the "Obama doesn't understand" theme. In another sense, he lost his way, since he immediately segued not into a discussion of strategic matters in Iraq and Afghanistan but into an anecdote. But that kind of literal parsing of his answer -- tactical analysis, you might call it -- really misses the point.
There has been no greater contrast between the Obama and McCain campaigns than the tactical-vs-strategic difference, with McCain demonstrating the primacy of short-term tactics and Obama sticking to a more coherent long-term strategy. And McCain's dismissive comment suggests that he still does not realize this.
Some examples are so familiar as to need no explanation: McCain choosing the ten-day tactical "bounce" from the surprise choice of Sarah Palin, in exchange for the enormous strategic risk in choosing an un-vetted and now obviously unqualified running mate. Or McCain rolling the dice with his threat to boycott the debate -- and then, once on stage, appearing to be only mildly interested in the financial-bailout deal that 72 hours earlier was the stated reason for overturning all agreements about the debates .
But the personas that the two men chose to present in the debate indicated the difference in a profound way. The truths of debates are these:
Emotional messages, which are variants on "how do I feel about this person?", are all that matter in presidential debates. Issues discussions are significant mainly to the extent they shape these impressions. For instance: a candidate's view on the economy feeds the impression of whether he sympathizes with "people like me." Or views on foreign policy feed the impression of whether he would be "a leader we can trust."
Barring a truly disastrous performance, each side's partisans will think their candidate did well, and will be reinforced in the reasons for supporting the person they already like. Thus John McCain supporters will think he sounded confident and masterful; Obama supporters will think he kept presenting the big-picture perspective on national security and the economy. Which means therefore:
The audience that matters is people who start out undecided or uncertain -- and finally are looking for emotional reassurance about who they can imagine as president for the next four years. In general, such viewers are only now starting to pay serious attention to the campaign -- in contrast to people already committed to helping (or stopping) one of the candidates. That is why the first debate is a unique "re-launch" opportunity for the candidates to present themselves to people who realize it's time to make up their minds.
Everything John McCain did on stage last night was consistent with trying to score tactical points in those 90 minutes. He belittled Obama with the repeated "he doesn't understand"s; he was explicitly insulting to him in saying at the end "I honestly don't believe that Senator Obama has the knowledge or experience" for the job (a line Joe Biden dare not use so bluntly on Sarah Palin); and implicitly he was shockingly rude and dismissive in refusing ever to look Obama in the eye. Points scored -- in the short term, to the cheers of those already on his side.
Obama would have pleased his base better if he had fought back more harshly in those 90 minutes -- cutting McCain off, delivering a similarly harsh closing judgment, using comparably hostile body language, and in general acting more like a combative House of Commons debater. Those would have been effective tactics minute by minute.
But Obama either figured out, or instinctively understood, that the real battle was to make himself seem comfortable, reasonable, responsible, well-versed, and in all ways "safe" and non-outsiderish to the audience just making up its mind about him. (And yes, of course, his being a young black man challenging an older white man complicated everything he did and said, which is why his most wittily aggressive debate performance was against another black man, Alan Keyes, in his 2004 Senate race.) The evidence of the polls suggests that he achieved exactly this strategic goal. He was the more "likeable," the more knowledgeable, the more temperate, etc. (Update: though from here on out he doesn't have to say "John is right..." anywhere near as often as he did last night.) .
For years and years, Democrats have wondered how their candidates could "win" the debates on logical points -- that is, tactics -- but lose the larger struggle because these seemed too aggressive, supercilious, cold-blooded, or whatever. To put it in tactical/strategic terms, Democrats have gotten used to winning battles and losing wars. Last night, the Democratic candidate showed a far keener grasp of this distinction than did the Republican who accused him of not understanding it.
I took a million notes during the debate....
... but let me boil it down to this:
When the details of this encounter fade, as they soon will, I think the debate as a whole will be seen as of a piece with Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, Reagan-Carter in 1980, and Clinton-Bush in 1992.
In each of those cases, a fresh, new candidate (although chronologically older in Reagan's case) had been gathering momentum at a time of general dissatisfaction with the "four more years" option of sticking with the incumbent party. The question was whether the challenger could stand as an equal with the more experienced, tested, and familiar figure. In each of those cases, the challenger passed the test -- not necessarily by "winning" the debate, either on logical points or in immediate audience or polling reactions, but by subtly reassuring doubters on the basic issue of whether he was a plausible occupant of the White House and commander in chief.
I think that's how this debate will be seen. Neither Obama nor McCain made any serious mistakes (except, perhaps, for McCain's churlish on-stage personal bearing); neither had any moments of surprising brilliance or rhetorical flash. McCain performed closer to the top of his debating range than Obama did.
But something similar could be said of the three previous encounters I mentioned. The challengers didn't necessarily "win," but they achieved something significant simply by debating as equals -- especially on national security issues. I think in the long run people will say that this is what happened tonight.
September 26, 2008
The only thing I will say about the debate in real time
Unless it happened when I glanced away, up until this moment, 77 minutes into the 90-minute debate, John McCain has not once looked at Obama -- while listening to him, while addressing him, while disagreeing with him, while finding moments of accord.
This is distinctly strange -- if anyone else notices. Obama is acting as if this is a conversation; McCain, as if he cannot acknowledge the other party in the discussion.
More on non-body-language points tomorrow a.m.
To be serious about Palin and Couric
Gov. Palin's comments about Russia seem to have drawn more attention than any other part of her interview with Katie Couric. I think this is mainly because .. well, they just sound funny. "As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space" and so on.
But, no joke, it is worth spending a little time on what, specifically, we have learned about Palin and her limitations via her attempted answers to Katie Couric. After the jump, three specimens -- one about Israel, one about financial markets, one about domestic spending -- that, as I mentioned after the Charlie Gibson interview, indicate that Palin is disqualifyingly ignorant of the fundamentals of public policy.
After thirty years of meeting and interviewing politicians, I can think of exactly three people who sounded as uninformed and vacant as this. All are now out of office. One was a chronic drunk.
George W. Bush is in a completely different and superior league to what we've seen from Palin. When people made fun of his inexpressiveness in the 2000 campaign (and onwards), it was because he mispronounced words or used cliches. It was nothing like the total inability to express any coherent thought on any issue outside "values politics" that Palin has revealed. (And to be fair: she can talk clearly and with nuance about those values issues, from abortion to prayer, and about some Alaskan questions.)
Details after the jump. The crucial point, of course, is that Palin did not put herself in this position. Her running mate did. ___________
I've now seen much of the Katie Couric / Sarah Palin interview...
... and I genuinely feel sorry for Palin. This really is pathetic. Again it's not a mass/elite matter. Anyone who has been to high school immediately recognizes the terror of facing a pop quiz or an oral exam when you just have no idea what you're talking about.
One hour after her pick was announced, I wrote here:
Let's assume that Sarah Palin is exactly as smart and disciplined as
Barack Obama. But instead of the year and a half of nonstop campaigning
he has behind him, and Joe Biden's even longer toughening-up process,
she comes into the most intense period of the highest stakes campaign
with absolutely zero warmup or preparation. If she has ever addressed
an international issue, there's no evidence of it in internet-land.
The
smartest person in the world could not prepare quickly enough to know
the pitfalls, and to sound confident while doing so, on all the issues
she will be forced to address...
So
the prediction is: unavoidable gaffes. The challenge for the
McCain-Palin campaign is to find some way to defuse them ahead of time,
since Socrates, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz reincarnated would
themselves make errors in her situation. And the challenge for
Democrats is to lead people to think, What if she were in charge?,
without being bullies about it.
My for-the-sake-of-argument assumption was unwarranted. She is not as smart or disciplined as Barack Obama. If she were, she would sound better than she does at this point. And the McCain team has done absolutely nothing to defuse these problems -- nor, to be honest, has Palin herself apparently lea
