John’s Busier Blog Has a New Name

Before the election, I called it “Politics and Profits:  Business and the 2008 Election.”  Now it’s called “Politics and Profits: The Meltdown.“  In a “rebranding post,” I explain the new direction.

Did You Watch “Journey to Palomar?”

Hope you did.  “Journey to Palomar” is playing on PBS stations all over the country between now and the end of the year.  The DVD comes out tomorrow.

Here’s what I wrote about a screening of an early edit I was fortunate enough to see back in May 2006:

At the end of the special showing of “The Journey to Palomar” at Cal-Tech Friday, the applause was long and loud. The auditorium was mostly comprised of men and women who looked to be in their 60s, 70s and 80s. My family was there because the documentary film was the labor of love of two of my best friends, Todd and Robin Mason.

It was the first public showing of a completed version of the film — a film whose progress my wife and I have tracked for about five years. The subject is George Ellery Hale, a solar astronomer who was also an impresario of astronomical science, the man without whom the giant telescopes at Mt. Wilson and Palomar would never have been built.

As told by the Masons, Hale’s story has elements of P.T. Barnum, Albert Einstein and “A Beautiful Mind.” Hale was the son of a Chicago industrialist, and he brought to his scientific endeavors an entrepreneurial zeal one generally does not associate with astrophysicists.

Among Hale’s patrons were Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, President Woodrow Wilson. Hale was not afraid to shake down these powerhouses of politics and captains of industry for the money needed for his projects — for the development of Cal Tech itself, and for the telescopes that would eventually validate the idea of an expanding universe, measure the immensity of the universe and the distance between galaxies, and discover such faraway phenomena as quasars, the unimaginably bright objects hundreds of millions of light years away that devour suns by the thousands.

The centerpiece of the story is the Palomar Observatory, for decades the largest telescope on earth with its legendary 200-inch diameter mirror. The final decades of Hale’s life were dedicated to the creation of this great tool of discovery, beginning with his success in persuading an offshoot of the Rockefeller foundation to fund a telescope of this size in 1928.

The observatory was not completed until 1948, ten years after Hale’s death.

Particularly fascinating is the story of its enormous mirror, which was made from Pyrex by Corning Glass Works in a process that gives a whole new definition to the word “arduous.” There’s a little PR story in all this. The nation got very excited about this mirror, and followed its saga from the New York-based factory’s giant ladles full of superheated molten glass, to its cross-country trainride to Pasadena for polishing, to its climb up Mt. Palomar to be placed in the telescope structure where it is still used today.

Imagine it: People lined up alongside the train tracks to watch this huge mirror packaged for travel go rolling by. Platforms were built at Corning to allow VIPs to see the glass being poured. It was a publicity bonanza for Corning, although, as the film shows, they finally had to remove the audience to allow the workmen to concentrate on the mirror.

Hale put everything on the line to make the Palomar Observatory a reality — including his sanity. To use terminology of the times, Hale suffered from neurasthenia, which probably referred to a combination of extreme stress and chronic fatigue syndrome. Hale is presented in the documentary as a man of great charm, energy and persuasive power, but the effort to maintain that luminous personality caused several nervous breakdowns, frightening hallucinations, and periods during which Hale retreated from the whirlwind of activity he himself had created.

I knew the film was going to be great, having had pieces of it screened in my living room or on my computer over the past few years. But seeing it whole, with a gray-haired audience at Cal Tech, was unexpectedly moving. To most Americans, Hale is a forgotten man — hence the need for “Journey to Palomar.” To the 300 500 people in the audience Friday, I imagine Hale is a kind of saint, an icon of the religion of science.

Hale is one of that small group of men — along with Einstein, Lemaitre, Hubble, Gamow, Friedemann, to drop a few names — who gave us our understanding of the universe and, in doing so, answered (for some of us) the fundamental questions that religion tries to address: Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?

Some of these great scientists answered these questions theoretically, using mathematical equations. Others found answers through observations of the sky that penetrated the veils of time — all the time that has ever existed. For many years, Hale’s telescope at Palomar was the essential tool for making those observations, and discovering the answers to those ancient questions. It was a great scientific achievement, but also a colossal, exhausting feat of schmoozing and cajoling to make it happen.

Hence, the long, loud applause by the Cal Tech alums. In their youth, I imagine some of them spent cold nights at Palomar, a mountain in San Diego County just a little west of the Anza-Borrego desert. Or they helped with research, performed critical calculations, or analyzed spectroscopic data for red-shift.

Today’s astrophysicists stand on the shoulders of giants, but the ladies and gentlemen at I met Friday at Cal-Tech stood by their sides, and lifted these giants skyward. I felt very grateful that Todd and Robin had done so much to honor what they had accomplished in their paean to George E. Hale.

P.S.: The story of 20th Century astronomy is very much a California story, in particular a Pasadena story. California ought to have a holiday to honor our state’s proud heritage as a center of scientific understanding. I don’t mean another day off for ski weekends — I mean a day when everyone, especially students, would be encouraged to learn about California’s legacy of scientific achievement, and pay homage to the men and women who worked, mostly in obscurity, to bring them about. It would be great if each year’s celebration included a showing of “Journey to Palomar” on public television.

Come On Over to My New Blog

I’ve rebooted my blog for Dolan Media Company.  From 50,000 Feet… is on ice.  For now, I’m going to focus on Politics and Profits: Business and the 2008 Election. My theory is, political reporters don’t usually write much about business, and business reporters write even less about politics.  The business of America still being business, I think we need a lens that can encompass both.  So I’m writing about business issues that politicos are either addressing or avoiding but should be addressing.  And about political issues that affect business, and about how business looks after itself when politics happens.

I have to say, I’m having fun with this one.  My passion for blogging had flagged a little.  Now it’s back.  Please come over and give it a read.

Does Obama Really Need a VP?

This piece, admittedly by a right-winger, claims Barack Obama is toying with the media and clearly intends to choose Hillary Rodham Clinton as his VP.

I don’t think so. She’s obviously his best choice from one standpoint — her electoral prowess — and the worst from many others.  After all, she declared John McCain was a more plausible president than Obama. That and many other quotes denigrating Obama’s experience will already be used against him, but coming from the mouth of his VP candidate? Deadly.  What many of us suspect about Obama, that he’s not quite ready for the job of president, she has said explicitly.  So has her husband.

But I cite the post mainly because it illustrates how much of a pickle Obama is in with respect to choosing his VP nominee.  Nobody helps him. Everybody hurts him.  He’d be better off running alone.  To quote from the blogger, Patrick Ruffini:

Just look at the other names on the short list:

• Joe Biden’s mouth is a constant source of embarassment. And how would the PUMAs take to a failed second-tier candidate leapfrogging someone with 18 million votes?
• Evan Bayh has been vetoed by the netroots
• Kathleen Sebelius would be a clear and direct affront to the PUMAs, much more so even than Biden. The first woman VP/President — and one you’ve never heard of — would increase the sense of Clintonian alienation.
• Tim Kaine. Hahahahahahahahahaha
• Wesley Clark would provide the military experience Obama needs, but his comments about McCain’s service are a problem.
• Chris Dodd is a crook.

What if he didn’t pick anyone?  If he’s elected and then dies in office, the Speaker of the House, presumably Nancy Pelosi, would be perfectly acceptable to Democrats.  Even the PUMAs (which used to mean Party Unity My Ass, and now means People United Means Action) would probably grant Pelosi is acceptable.

Is there a constitutional problem with leaving the VP slot vacant?  Undoubtedly.  So what if Obama picked a literal nonentity. Say, the winner of a lottery, or perhaps a special political edition of Jeopardy! The winner would have to swear that in the event of Obama’s demise, he or she would immediately resign, stepping aside for the Speaker.

Of course, Obama could short-circuit all this and just nominate Pelosi for the vice-presidency.  Her political style is more suited to a VP campaign.  She’s a shin-kicking ear-biter, and she’s obviously totally unimpressed by the McCain mystique.

But since what I’m proposing is probably too absurd, my guess is Obama will pick Joe Biden.  He’s much more than a “failed second-tier candidate.” He’s a sherpa for an inexperienced president. He’s instantly credible in all the ways Obama is not yet.  Evan Bayh has the next-best chance, but Obama would have to stand up to a lot of criticism from the left netroots, where he’s described with language such as “fucking worthless to the progressive cause.” Not a lot of wiggle room there.  After watching Gov. Kaine on Charlie Rose a few weeks ago, I was nonplussed as to how he ever got on the short list.  If he’s a rising star, it’s going to be a slow rise. It would almost be unfair to subject him to national attention at this point in his career.

The blood is thinning in the political ranks of both parties.  The VP sweepstakes illustrate that perfectly.

Gore Back At Number One Observatory Circle?

Fate

Somehow, this story reminds me of “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

I mean, if Obama/Gore battles it out with McCain/? to a near draw and it comes down to…oh…Tennessee?  And he loses again?  I wonder if that’s crossing his mind.

Or maybe it goes the other way.  Maybe he was fated to be President.  Could the possibility tempt him?

For most observers, the idea of Gore as Obama’s VP would mean he’s in charge of the climate.

Yes, at first blush another Vice Presidency would be beneath Gore. But Obama has no huge emotional investment in either energy/environment/climate change or science & technology, and Gore cares about them passionately. Obama could give him primary authority in those areas without having a full “co-Presidency.” It’s hard to see how Gore does more for what he cares about from the outside.

But Gore might see it as a route back to winning what he thought he already won.

I wonder if Gore’s 10-year challenge to sever electricity from fossil fuels will help or hurt him?  Suddenly, the Republicans have an incentive to run the numbers on his idea.  It won’t be hard to make it look very expensive.  And what if Obama/Gore wins, serves eight years, and the US is falling short (as it surely will, since Gore’s goal is impossible)?

LA Ignored the Warnings

You could use the title for almost any story about reverses affecting Los Angeles’ economy, but this one happens to be about LAX.  According to LA Biz Observed blogger Mark Lacter, and the Daily Breeze, LAX is facing losses in its lucrative overseas business, business that has a largely unseen positive effect on the Los Angeles economy.  It’s so unseen that City Hall has utterly mismanaged the needed upgrades at LAX for the past 15 years, preferring to listen to NIMBY-minded voters than the economists, labor leaders and airline executives who kept telling them LAX’s huge advantage in international flights was not God-given, and that the airport needed some major fixes or the airlines would go elsewhere.

Sure, Air India’s decision to stop flying out of Los Angeles could be blamed on high fuel prices.  That alibi was already claimed by the Department of World Airports chief executive. But Air India still flies out of San Francisco, and fuel costs just as much up there.

The fact that you could reach dozens of cities overseas via nonstop flights from LAX gave this region an enormous edge economically.  But the locals didn’t care much about that and it was easy and more beneficial to make LAX and its stewards a target for political posturing.  And eventually, much easier for those stewards to tell the city council whatever nonsense it wants to hear.  It’s not their airport.  It’s Los Angeles’.

This is the problem with term limits.  The idea was to force the politicians to focus on their responsibilities as elected officials and not on their electoral fortunes.  This part of term limits has failed. The politicians are much less connected to the city they serve than they were in the days of John Ferraro and Gilbert Lindsey.  In Los Angeles, you now have a political culture built around tearing down city assets rather than protecting them, because having a few notches in your belt positions you for the next campaign.  So what if a critical institution like LAX is weakened?  That’s a trivial concern to the city’s political leadership now.

P.S. Bill Boyarsky has a post explaining what council members really think about when they think about LAX.

I’m Still Here…

…even though I’ve gone nearly a month since my last post.

Do I still want to be a blogger?  I enjoy writing, in fact I need to write.  I’m writing all the time, commenting quite frequently on a couple of blogs (Dodger Thoughts and Althouse) and sporadically on others, sometimes using my real name, sometimes one of a couple aliases.   I have a screenplay I’ve been working on since 2005, which I’m still editing (and of which a few friends are waiting to see drafts — coming!)  I’ve been arguing with or trying to entertain (sometimes hard to tell the difference) a few friends and family members concerning the election.  And, most importantly, I’ve been working.

As some might recall, this blog began during a long period of unemployment caused by my shocking encounter at the crossroads of politics and the criminal justice system.  The blog was my lifeline during that period.  It was how I maintained my voice in the communities of which i had long been a part.  It was also a kind of journal of that period, although a journal in only the most oblique sense, since I could not discuss my case except superficially (and still can’t, since the case is still on appeal.)  It was also my personal exploration of the blogging medium.  And it was my refrigerator, serving the same function of providing a white space where I could tape an article where my housemates could see it, except now my house is the virtual world.

For the first year or so, I wrote in this blog almost compulsively, posting every day, sometimes two or three times a day, writing about things I understood–like Los Angeles, politics, PR and marketing, the environment and related public policy issues, sports and music–and things I didn’t.  No one could tell me not to write whatever I wanted.  That freedom is the essence of blogging.

Part of that freedom is also…not to write.  Or to write something or somewhere else.  And then come back to this.

If you like reading my stuff or want to keep up with me, here’s what I think I’ll do.  I’ll put an RSS feed of this blog on my page on Facebook.  I’m on Facebook. You’re probably also on Facebook, whoever is reading this. The feed will show you when I’ve updated this blog.  I will also leave a note if there is a particularly noteworthy (notes for the noteworthy? What a concept) post.  The rhythm will be arhythmic, but you’ll never feel like you’re reading filler.  That’s my only guarantee.

Really, It’s All About Obama III: Why Are They Tied?

The press and political world are wondering why John McCain has apparently evened up with Barack Obama, despite a week of embarrassing flubs.  How could Obama have lost ground?

But if you start from the assumption that this election is all about Obama, it’s really not surprising at all.  He said it himself:

“If you are satisfied with the way things are going now, then you should vote for John McCain,” Obama says before rattling off a list of current concerns, including rising gas prices, home foreclosures and job losses as the country fights two wars. Then, Obama promises “fundamental change.”

With the exception of Ted Kennedy, John McCain is the best-known politician in America who hasn’t been president or vice-president.  Whether he is “McSame” is a matter for debate, but one thing’s for sure.  He is who he is and you know who he is.  If he has a bad week, if he misspeaks, if he changes his mind on offshore oil drilling or tax cuts, it doesn’t alter our view of him.

The picture of Obama isn’t so clear yet.  The things he says resonate more because they add proportionally more to the sum of knowledge about him.  When Obama alters his positions, there is more of an impact on his overall reputation, because his initial set of positions represented most of what we knew about him.  He is in a real bind on Iraq, because he owes his nomination to his ability to chide Hillary Clinton for her pro-war vote in 2002.

The conventional wisdom is that he can “run to the center” without penalty, but I challenge that opinion.  You could not imagine an article like this one appearing with regard to any of the Democratic candidates since 1976, all of whom tried to position themselves as centrists after securing the nomination.  Some repositionings didn’t seem legitimate, perhaps.  But none have been portrayed as betrayal:

In the breathless weeks before the Oregon presidential primary in May, Martha Shade did what thousands of other people here did: she registered as a Democrat so she could vote for Senator Barack Obama.

Now, however, after critics have accused Mr. Obama of shifting positions on issues like the war in Iraq, the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants, gun control and the death penalty — all in what some view as a shameless play to a general election audience — Ms. Shade said she planned to switch back to the Green Party.

“I’m disgusted with him,” said Ms. Shade, an artist. “I can’t even listen to him anymore. He had such an opportunity, but all this ‘audacity of hope’ stuff, it’s blah, blah, blah. For all the independents he’s going to gain, he’s going to lose a lot of progressives.”

Later in the article, Shade allows as how she is far out of the mainstream, and the theme of the article is that Obama doesn’t really need to worry about the far left.  But it’s another clue to Obama’s situation that some in the far left thought Obama was one of them.  It’s the amplitude of surprise that impresses me.  Compare that with McCain’s situation.  The far right knows he’s not one of them.  When McCain strikes a centrist pose, they might resent it, but they expect it and have accounted for it already.  They’re surprised when he agrees with them.

It’s all about Obama.  If his statements and positions gel into a coherent whole, a graspable persona, and a philosophy, he probably wins.  But if voters are still trying to square Statement A with Statement B, voters will probably settle for McCain.

Really, It’s All About Obama II

This WSJ column by Fouad Ajami reminded me of something else I want to put on my “do’s and don’ts” list for Barack Obama:

• Don’t pretend your election is going to put a halt to anti-Americanism, or that it only started with George W. Bush.

An excerpt:

American liberalism is heavily invested in this narrative of U.S. isolation. The Shiites have their annual ritual of 10 days of self-flagellation and penance, but this liberal narrative is ceaseless: The world once loved us, and all Parisians were Americans after 9/11, but thanks to President Bush we have squandered that sympathy.

It is an old trick, the use of foreign narrators and witnesses to speak of one’s home. Montesquieu gave the genre its timeless rendition in his Persian Letters, published in 1721. No one was fooled, these were Parisian letters, and the Persian travelers, Rica and Usbek, mere stand-ins for an author taking stock of his homeland after the death of Louis XIV and the coming of an age of enlightenment and skepticism.

“This King is a great magician. He exerts authority even over the minds of his subjects; he makes them think what he wants,” Rica writes from Paris. “You must not be amazed at what I tell you about this prince: there is another magician, stronger than he. This magician is called the Pope. He will make the King believe that three are only one, or else that the bread one eats is not bread, or that the wine one drinks is not wine, and a thousand other things of the same kind.” Handy witnesses, these Persians.

The Pew survey tells us that some foreign precincts show a landslide victory for Barack Obama. France leads the pack; fully 84% of those following the American campaign are confident Mr. Obama will do the right thing in foreign policy, compared with 33% who say that about John McCain. There are similar results in Germany, and a closer margin in Britain. The populations of Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan have scant if any confidence in either candidate.

The deference of American liberal opinion to the coffeehouses of Istanbul and Amman and Karachi is nothing less than astounding. You would not know from these surveys, of course, that anti-Americanism runs deep in the French intellectual scene, and that French thought about the great power across the Atlantic has long been a jumble of envy and condescension. In the fabled years of the Clinton presidency, long before Guantanamo, the torture narrative and the war in Iraq, American pension funds were, in the French telling, raiding their assets, bringing to their homeland dreaded Anglo-Saxon economics, and the merciless winds of mondialisation (globalization).

(snip)

Meanwhile, a maligned American president now returns from a Europe at peace with American leadership. In France, Germany and Italy, center-right governments are eager to proclaim their identification with American power. Jacques Chirac is gone. Now there is Nicolas Sarkozy, who offered a poetic tribute last November to the American soldiers who fell on French soil, before a joint session of the U.S. Congress. “The children of my generation,” he said, “understood that those young Americans, 20 years old, were true heroes to whom they owed the fact that they were free people and not slaves. France will never forget the sacrifice of your children.”

The great battle over the Iraq war has subsided, and Europeans who ponder the burning grounds of the Islamic world know the distinction between fashionable anti-Americanism and the international order underpinned by American power. George W. Bush may have been indifferent to political protocol, but he held the line when it truly mattered, and the Europeans have come to understand that appeasement of dictators and brigands begets its own troubles.

It is one thing to rail against the Pax Americana. But after the pollsters are gone, the truth of our contemporary order of states endures. We live in a world held by American power – and benevolence. Nothing prettier, or more just, looms over the horizon.

It would cost Obama nothing politically to acknowledge this.  In doing so, he need not endorse Bush’s leadership — just America’s.  A change we could really use beginning in 2009 is bipartisanship and greater continuity in US foreign policy.

Really, It’s All About Obama

I hope my last post makes clear what I think the 2008 election is really all about. It’s about Barack Obama.  Obama is the only interesting choice, but I am uneasy about him, as are many Americans.

John McCain is a safe choice, but a most unsatisfactory one.  He’s safe enough to function in this election as the default.  If Obama lays an egg, we’ll get McCain, and he’ll be no worse and probably a good deal better than what we have now.  But most of us would be disappointed, wouldn’t we?  We are rooting for Obama to succeed, but not betting everything on it.

I have my own list of things Obama has to do and other things he has to avoid.  I’m sure you have yours.  I’m sure mine isn’t like yours, but I’d enjoy reading yours, and I’ll keep adding to mine:

• Don’t be too liberal.
• Don’t do class warfare.
• Don’t be naive on foreign policy.
• Don’t pretend it’s the 1930s or the 1960s.
• Don’t let your past campaign rhetoric stand in the way of doing what’s right in Iraq. Go there and come back with a new message.
• Don’t let yourself get rolled by the unions. Make them shape up first.
• That goes double for the public employee unions.
• You’ll probably get away with breaking your word on public financing of campaigns.  Don’t get cocky.
• Don’t be too clever by half.  Telling McCain you’ll meet him at a town-hall forum on the night of July 4th and only then is infuriatingly disingenuous.
• Do more town halls.  If your advisors tell you this isn’t your best format, tell them “Practice makes perfect.”
• Don’t play the race card.
• Don’t get pissed off when the media starts getting tougher on you. If they ever do.

To be continued….

Obama Can Reboot the Federal Government

Barack Obama apparently resents it when he’s accused of being vague about the policies he’ll pursue as president, seeing such questions as a political trap.  He’s not unjustified in this fear, but since he doesn’t have a record of doing anything in particular in the public sphere — if he had a signature issue, it was ethics and campaign reform, and he just jettisoned that with his decision to raise unlimited private funds in his general election bid — he does have to be more specific than another candidate with a record and a reputation might have needed to be.

I think the promise of Obama is that he will bring to the US government of the new opportunities for collaboration and network formation that creative people have developed in the past five years, using the Internet’s capabilities as their primary tool.  Social media is why my son’s life is going to be very different from mine.

Social media could also be why Obama’s presidency could be very different from any of his predecessors.  Who knows, maybe the state of the art is such that McCain would also embrace these techniques, but if you had to pick between them as to who would usher in that future first, it wouldn’t be a contest. It’s Obama.

There’s a tension, however, between the futuristic orientation of Obama’s young supporters and the essential stodginess of the Democratic Party — a condition Obama’s acolytes haven’t really experienced yet.  The Democratic Party gives life to, and is the death of, idealism in youth.  The situation was nicely captured in today’s Sunday New York Times Magazine, in a short piece by NYU sociology professor Dalton Conley.  Here are some of the key grafs:

The chatter these days is that the Republicans are a party that has run out of ideas. The Soviet Union is long gone; welfare has been reformed; market logics have permeated almost every aspect of our lives (eBay, anyone?). The truth is that the triumph of conservative ideas may present a political problem for the ailing Republicans, but the party that’s truly lacking in new ideas is my own, the resurgent Democrats.

There is lots of talk in progressive policy circles that we need a “New New Deal” or some other sort of postindustrial revision to the social contract. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, after all, were forged in a society in which, for the most part, social organization was concentric. By way of analogy, think of Russian nesting dolls: children were nested in families; each family had one breadwinner; that breadwinner worked for a single employer; those employers were firmly rooted in the United States; and, to top it all off, the vast majority of people living in the country were citizens. This form of social organization made the social contract possible. There were clear parties to cut the deal, so to speak.

(snip)

Today, by contrast, the most common model of social organization is crosscutting social groups.

(snip)

These more complex social arrangements create many problems for the old social contract.

(snip)

So perhaps we need to reimagine these nesting dolls and instead think of the social contract along the lines of a computer network or the hub-and-spoke airline network in the U.S. In such “scale free” networks, distance has been collapsed by long links that allow you to skip between any two points in a couple steps. The government’s role is less as a backup provider — in case one link of the nested chain breaks down — and more as honest broker and resource hub across groups.

In health care, for example, the government could act as a pooler, forming health-insurance-purchasing cooperatives, randomly assigning unaffiliated individuals to groups that would then contract with private insurers. Likewise, the state could set up universal investment accounts for retirement savings, college savings and health expenditures. In education, the feds could mandate that any institutions of higher education that receive government dollars must make their research and course materials available online in an open-source format free of charge.

Private companies and nonprofits are already stepping in to fill this role. The Freelancers Union allows self-employed individuals to purchase health insurance at less expensive group rates. And M.I.T. and iTunes U have already inaugurated the open-courseware movement. But government has an important role to play. After all, the state can absorb a lot more risk than smaller entities can. Think how well government-backed V.A. and F.H.A. mortgages worked after World War II as compared with how the private market has fared lately.

(snip)It’s not surprising that the private-sector, new-economy companies are ahead of government in adapting to the networked society, but if progressives want a victory in the world of ideas and policy — and not just a couple of good election cycles — they are going to have to stop talking F.D.R, J.F.K. and L.B.J. and start thinking eBay, Google and Wiki.

On my other blog, From 50,000 Feet, I wrote about Obama as viewed similarly in a Wired story.

These aren’t the ideas that will get Obama elected, surely.  He already gets mocked as the “egghead” in the race.  He’s compared in an uncomplimentary fashion to such famous Democratic intellectuals as Adlai Stevenson and Michael Dukakis.

But someday, somehow, one of our presidents is going to rescue the federal government from its sclerotic ways and figure out how to treat us like valued customers.  I think it will have to be a Democrat, because only a Democrat will be trusted to reconfigure social safety-net programs, and only a Democrat can butt heads with the public-employee unions that exist to kill efficiency reforms and expert to emerge with anything to show for it.

Obama can grow in the areas where he is now weak.  McCain is what he is. He’s the Pope Benedict XVI of this election, the safe, stall-for-time choice for president who will hold the office honorably while both parties figure out what their new directions will be.  Obama might not be ready (see my last post), but modernizing the colossus that is the US government is a task no one will ever be ready for.  You have to start somewhere, and Obama brings more of the kinds of tools we’ll need than anyone else with a credible chance to become president in 2012.

Is Obama Ready? (*updated)

Okay, Barack Obama, you’ve survived the Hillary gauntlet.  She “threw the kitchen sink” at you, and you hung onto your delegate lead until finally you inched over the top.  You also survived the revelation that Rev. Jeremiah Wright, your pastor, mentor, spiritual advisor and the guy you bring your children to listen to every Sunday is a racist extremist.  Kudos on both.  It couldn’t have been easy.

But you were also lucky. Hillary Clinton is the emblem of a despicable political machine, to which there was a post-traumatic response among some Democrats, particularly the intellectual types who sleep-walked through their skanky reign, recited the talking points on TV when asked, and cheered Bill as if he was Stagger Lee giving a commencement address at Harvard.  You gave them a wake-up call, and you offer an opportunity for cleansing.

Obama, you might get lucky again.  John McCain isn’t as despised as Hillary, but he’s not a beloved figure among his own party, and he’s undeniable tied to George W. Bush on enough policies that the public’s rejection of what’s now being called “the GOP brand” might get him to the White House.

At that point Obama, I hope you can take a few weeks to figure out what it means to be the Leader of the Free World and the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military in the known history of the planet.

You need to take a class or something.  You’re making some appalling errors right now.

———–

On NAFTA:  During a Democratic debate, Obama quite clearly threatened to unilaterally withdraw the US from the treaty if Canada and Mexico weren’t willing to renegotiate.  It came out that his economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee met with Canadian officials as an Obama representative to tell them to take Obama’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric as “political posturing.”  When a memo regarding this meeting was publicized, Obama’s campaign tried to issue a carefully parsed denial, but eventually had to acknowledge the meeting did happen and comments about the politics of NAFTA were made.  Obama and his campaign reaffirmed, however, their anti-NAFTA bonafides. The story hurt Obama, and he lost the Ohio primary.

Now that he’s the nominee, he’s doing the usual things, including giving reassurances to Wall Street of his intentions.  His method was a sit-down with Fortune magazine, during which he was asked about NAFTA.  Not too surprisingly, Obama took a more moderate position on the treaty.  The position shift isn’t what made him look bad.  It was the clumsy way he did it:

“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake,” despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? “Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don’t exempt myself,” he answered.

(snip)

Now, however, Obama says he doesn’t believe in unilaterally reopening NAFTA. On the afternoon that I sat down with him to discuss the economy, Obama said he had just spoken with Harper, who had called to congratulate him on winning the nomination.

“I’m not a big believer in doing things unilaterally,” Obama said. “I’m a big believer in opening up a dialogue and figuring out how we can make this work for all people.”

This isn’t a shift in tone or emphasis.  This is Obama talking about himself as if he doesn’t recognize that “politician” who was running around Ohio, getting all overheated and talking about unilateral moves that Obama doesn’t believe in.  As if he was just seized by a passionate hatred of NAFTA, and not making calculated statements to draw votes from NAFTA-hating Ohio unionists, statements that these Ohioans would be justified in now calling lies.

In the big leagues, Obama, politicians shift around all the time, depending on the audience and the temper of the times. The moderate uniter-not-a-divider George W. Bush of 2000 would hardly recognize the Onward Christian Soldiers Bush of 2004.  But you don’t make the shift by casting yourself as an unreliable source of your own beliefs. “Yeah, I said that, but I must have been crazy,” is a fair paraphrase of what Obama told Fortune.

He did it again on an even more sensitive subject: The status of Jerusalem in a hypothetical Israeli-Palestinian accord.  From a Reuters story Tuesday that was headlined: Adviser denies Obama showed naivete on Jerusalem:

Democrat Barack Obama misused a “code word” in Middle East politics when he said Jerusalem should be Israel’s “undivided” capital but that does not mean he is naive on foreign policy, a top adviser said on Tuesday.

Addressing a pro-Israel lobby group this month, the Democratic White House hopeful said: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

The comment angered Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as the capital of a future state. “He has closed all doors to peace,” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said after the June 4 speech.

Obama later said Palestinians and Israelis had to negotiate the status of the city, in line with long-held U.S. presidential policy.

Daniel Kurtzer, who advises Obama on the Middle East, said Tuesday at the Israel Policy Forum that Obama’s comment stemmed from “a picture in his mind of Jerusalem before 1967 with barbed wires and minefields and demilitarized zones.”

“So he used a word to represent what he did not want to see again, and then realized afterwards that that word is a code word in the Middle East,” Kurtzer said.

The U.S. Congress passed a law in 1995 describing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and saying it should not be divided, but successive presidents have used their foreign policy powers to maintain the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and to back talks between Israel and Palestinians on the status of Jerusalem.

I am not running for president, and I don’t consider myself an expert on the Palestinian issue, but even I know that Palestinians take offense when US politicians promise U.S. Jewish leaders that Jerusalem will be Israel’s.  This time it was Kurtzer uttering the “yeah, he said that but he must have been crazy” formulation, describing the misleading and confusing images in Obama’s mind that led him astray.

It’s also bound to be noted by conservatives and McCain’s campaign that Obama seems intimately aware of what Jerusalem looked like when he was all of six years old, but had no clue what his Weather Underground friend Bill Ayers was up to, blowing up buildings two years later.  But more to the point, the claim that Obama is “not naive” doesn’t alter the inherent naivete in a presidential finalist talking off the top of his head on the most touchy international topic imaginable.   Jennifer Rubin, an Obama critic who blogs for Commentary Magazine, spreads the responsibility to Obama’s campaign:

Even more so, if the advisor says Obama didn’t understand what he was saying. But wait a minute. Didn’t Obama have advisors on Israel assisting him with the speech? Where were they? Once again, this suggests that there is too little adult supervision of a candidate unaccustomed to speaking on the world stage about issues in which there are lots of code words, indeed in which every word (e.g. “preconditons,” “immediate withdrawal”) has meaning to Americans’ foes and friends.

The link on the words “adult supervision” will take you to another embarrassment, but this one implicating his “likely National Security adviser” Richard Danzig, who compared foreign affairs to Winnie-the-Pooh.  He was probably kidding, Rubin suggests hopefully.  But I’ve seen so many Democratic candidates destroyed by seeming unequipped to defend the country.  You know, the Dems are supposed to be “the Mommy party.”  To make the same point, I would have picked any book in the world but Winnie-the-Pooh.

Obama has had a meteoric rise to power, to the threshold of the presidency, which I believe he should be favored to win almost no matter what he does.  But please, Obama, don’t scare the grownups, or else a lot of us might take our secret ballots and secretly pick someone else.

*Update, 6/20/08:  The NY Times columnist David Brooks disagrees with any hint that Obama is naive.  It’s all strategery, Brooks says:

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.

Those Selfless Angelinos of 1984

Give me a break!

This is from the LA Times’ series on traffic:

When Los Angeles traffic experts get depressed at the sorry state of the freeways, their minds sometimes drift to the improbable days of 1984, when the Olympic torch blazed through town and the city’s sea of cars parted.

For more than a week, downtown and Westside freeways worked as their creators had intended, whisking drivers from place to place.

The respite from congestion was flickeringly brief, but many still ask: Can the experiment be repeated?

For the 16-day event, transportation agencies put aside turf wars. Employees carpooled or worked staggered hours or took vacations. Truckers shifted deliveries to off-hours. Construction projects were rescheduled. Arterial lanes were reserved for buses. Two-way streets became one-way streets.

Actually?  Despite all the measures, the entire city was braced for the worst traffic in memory.  The staggered hours, shifted truck deliveries, etc. were implemented to keep the already crowded freeways from congealing into a gridlocked meltdown, among other things delaying athletes and media from reaching event venues.  It was assumed that the traffic would still be terrible.  It was a shock, a thrilling surprise, that traffic jams disappeared almost entirely.

But that’s not how young Times reporters and their sources remember it:

“We had essentially no congestion,” said David Roper, retired operations chief for the California Department of Transportation’s Los Angeles division. “What was behind all this was the feeling ‘I don’t want to be the guy who screws up the Olympics.’ “

You cannot be serious. This wasn’t altruism, it was fear!  So many people I knew left town entirely.  Everyone remembers that the 1984 Games made a profit.  What’s often forgotten is that it made a profit from a brilliant sponsorship campaign, and not from ticket sales.  Most Olympic events were not sold out.  Few wanted to brave the traffic.

The reporters’ point is, it only takes a small percentage of drivers to stay off the freeways for the commute to go smoothly for everyone else.  Today was proof.  I had to go downtown for the first time on a weekday since gas prices zoomed past $4 a gallon.  My route is basically the entire Harbor Freeway.  I didn’t go at the traditional peak, but even at 10 a.m., it’s usually blocked from somewhere north of the 105 through downtown.

Not today.  It was clear all the way, even through that crazy stretch where cars try pick their way to the correct lanes for the 5, 101, 110 and the exits.  And I’m sure it’s because of the gas prices. I hear anecdotally  that companies are shortening the work week, instituting telecommuting and making other arrangements to keep their employees from searching for work closer to home.

This is a big, fat, prize-bait series the Times is running.  Obviously, it was conceived before gasoline got so expensive.  The writers might not have expected it, but summer 2008 is going to be another Traffic Miracle, thanks to whatever you blame for high oil prices.  Maybe by the end of the week, they’ll have figured it out.

The Murderous Mrs. C.

Peggy Noonan is ecstatic that the Democrats nominated Barack Obama, and at least half the reason why is that they didn’t nominate Hillary Clinton:

Mrs. Clinton would have been a disaster as president. Mr. Obama may prove a disaster, and John McCain may, but she would be. Mr. Obama may lie, and Mr. McCain may lie, but she would lie. And she would have brought the whole rattling caravan of Clintonism with her—the scandal-making that is compulsive, the drama that is unending, the sheer, daily madness that is her, and him.

We have been spared this. Those who did it deserve to be thanked. May I rise in a toast to the Democratic Party.

They had a great and roaring fight, a state-by-state struggle unprecedented in the history of presidential primaries. They created the truly national primary. They brought 36 million people to the polls, including the young, minorities and first-time voters. They brought a kind of dogged brio to the year.

All of this is impressive, but more than that, they threw off Clintonism. They threw off the idea that corruption is part of the game, an acceptable fact. They threw off the idea that dynasticism was an unstoppable dynamic in modern politics, that Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton could, would, go on forever. They said: “No, that is not the way we do it.”

They threw off the idea of inevitability. Mrs. Clinton didn’t lose because she had no money or organization, she didn’t lose because she had no fame or name, she didn’t lose because her policies were unusual or dramatically unpopular within her party. She lost because enough Democrats looked at her and thought: I don’t like that, I don’t like the way she does it, I’m not going there. Most candidates lose over things, not over their essential nature. But that is what happened here. For all her accomplishments and success, it was her sketchy character that in the end did her in.

So then the question comes up:  Given the closeness of the contest, should Hillary be Obama’s VP pick?  (No, say I.)  No, says Peggy Noonan.  Here is one of her reasons:

She would never be content to be vice president. She’d be plotting against him from day one. She’d put poison in his tea.

Trust me, in the succeeding paragraphs, there is no rim-shot-bada-bing to indicate Noonan is kidding.  She would expect Hillary to poison Obama, if it meant she would be in the Oval Office. 

Noonan’s column is not the first place I’ve seen this “Hillary would poison Obama” meme.  I wish I’d been saving all the links.  They mostly appear in comment threads, or if it’s the main blogger, they usually try to let you know they’re joking. 

Keep an eye out for it.

When her husband was president, the Clintons were accused in some right wing rubber rooms of having people murdered.  I don’t remember the details, but there was supposed to be a list of premature deaths, and somehow it was tied in with cocaine shipments into the Mena Airport in Arkansas.  They were also accused of using very rough tactics to silence “bimbo eruptions.”  Kathleen Willey’s dead cat, for example.

The mainstream media thought these accusations were hideous, hysterical, evidence of a vast right-wing conspiracy led by crazy people who would say anything.

Now, the suggestion that Hillary would use the Office of the Vice President to carry out a murder plot against the president has become a normal part of political discourse, across the ideological spectrum.

You know, she almost won the nomination, folks.  If the Democratic Party had used Republican primary rules, she would have won. Would these same commentators be suggesting the Democratic Party had nominated a murderer if she was the presidential candidate?  Would they be worrying about John McCain’s water glass at the presidential debates the way they’re worrying about Barack Obama’s tea?  

The Inevitability of the Inevitable: CA Cities Will Go Bankrupt

If you’re the kind of person who looks to government to address the most critical needs of our society, including education, public safety, sanitation and essential services for the needy, then you need to start worrying. Your elected officials’ craven giveaways to public employee unions are about to blow back with hurricane force.

That tax money you happily agreed to entrusted to your elected officials for the greater good is actually going to fund retirement benefits (thanks!!!) that you could never dream of getting from a private employer.  Services intended for children and for your protection will inevitably be cut, drastically, to fund these benefits.  Your taxes will need to be increased (sorry!!!) to pay for them, despite the decline in services.  Or, your city, county or state might have to go this route:

You see, the good Democrats who dominate this blue state of California at the local and state levels are required to raise campaign money from somewhere (we like our jobs!).  With the exception of developers and government contractors, business doesn’t like them enough to send big checks (greedy bastards with no compassion!).

Where are these candidates supposed to find the big checks?  They find them by calling the unions representing the public employees.  Once they get elected, these elected officials owe the unions, big-time (or else!).  So they pay them back, providing an immense return-on-investment, with money intended for kids and the needy (thanks!).  These officials knew it was unsustainable, but, “Hey, we need those big checks!” (And besides, we’re termed-out, so who cares!)

From CNN/Money, an outline of the looming, inevitable crisis:

The jig is up. For years, politicians have been playing what amounts to a multi-trillion-dollar shell game with state and local pensions. They’ve doled out lush retiree benefits to their heavily unionized workforces, knowing that they could shove the cost for those benefits onto future generations of taxpayers.

But a recent financial bombshell dropped by a San Francisco suburb shows why that shell game is now starting to unravel in a nasty way. And it’s a cautionary tale that you can’t afford to ignore.

Here’s the skinny: In late May, Vallejo, Calif., became the largest city in California history to declare bankruptcy. Its financial demise was brought about partly by the real estate crash, which decimated home prices in the area and put a major dent in the city’s tax revenues.

But the real nail in Vallejo’s coffin was the city’s labor costs. Under the current labor agreement, the average police officer walking the beat in Vallejo will be paid $122,000 this year before overtime, according to city documents. An average sergeant will make $151,000; a captain, $231,000. The average firefighter, meanwhile, will bring in $130,000 before overtime.

That’s just the salaries, though. The final budget-crusher was the city’s pension plan. Thanks to retroactive benefit enhancements approved by the city council in 2000, police officers and firefighters can now retire at age 50 and receive an annual pension equal to 90% of their final pay (assuming 30 years on the job), an amount that gets increased every year to help keep pace with inflation. The old plan had given the workers a pension equal to 60% of their final pay at age 50.

So a Vallejo police sergeant making $150,000 a year can now retire at age 50 and receive an annual pension of $135,000, increased each year for inflation. To put that amount in context, you would need to amass a retirement nest egg equal to about $3.5 million to produce a similar retirement income on your own.

According to the Pew Center on the States, there is a $360 billion unfunded pension liability among the 50 states alone, not counting cities like Vallejo (or LA or SF).

Voters need to get involved in this arcane aspect of government, the article’s writer, Janice Revell, says.  Employees should receive the pensions they were promised when they were hired, but taxpayers should pressure elected officials not to give the public employees unjustified and unsustainable upward bumps.  Voter vigilance is necessary because the elected officials simply can’t help themselves (we need those big checks!).

This is an election year. As such, many states and municipalities are under heavy pressure to sweeten the pension plans for their workers – Massachusetts, South Carolina and Pennsylvania are but three high-profile examples. And ironically, just a few hours south of Vallejo, the city of Rialto, Calif., recently approved a similar retroactive pension increase that will give police officers a pension equal to 90% of their salaries at age 50.

The bottom line: If similar changes are being considered in your city or state, the Vallejo disaster tells you that it’s well worth your while to get the facts.

Maybe you’ll discover that your local pension fund is flush with money and that elected officials in your area have out laid out a sound, fiscally responsible plan for funding any pension improvements. But I wouldn’t bank on it.

I’ve been feeling sick about this issue for some time.  As Revell points out, the notion that public employees deserved higher benefits because they are making a sacrifice in accepting lower pay is an out-of-date myth.

What really burns me up, and should burn you up, is the way in which public-employee funded campaigns for increased government spending make illicit use of the neediest in our society — children, the elderly, victims of crime and fire — to pimp voters to part with money that will never reach the intended beneficiaries.  I want to be a liberal, vote like a liberal.  But I’m not willing to be tricked anymore into having my compassion exploited so cynically and so destructively.

The “Silver Lining in High Gas Prices”: A Boost for Telecommuting

When I worked in Mayor Bradley’s office in the 1990s, I was part of a task force designed to increase city workers’ telecommuting.  At that time, oil was cheap, but traffic was horrible and air quality still (then as now) the worst in the nation.

We were mindful of the 1984 Olympics traffic experience, when just an 8 percent drop in the amount of cars on the road resulted in traffic that flowed like midnight.  Small changes can have a big impact on the traffic.  Less traffic idling was another anti-smog strategy.  So, we thought it should be possible for City Hall to set an example for the business community.

How silly.  When it comes to management, Los Angeles’ city government will never “lead the way” on anything.

Both management and labor perceived telecommuting as a threat.  Department heads didn’t want anyone out of their sightlines for any longer than was absolutely necessary.  They assumed the worst of their employees.  The unions demanded that telecommuting become a bargaining issue.  Typical of how city unions work, the labor appointee to our task force missed the first two meetings, then came late to the third and asked to speak with me privately.  She said, “We’re not sure if telecommuting is a way for managers to unfairly reward or unfairly punish our members, but either way, we’re going to oppose it.”  Then she sat at the table with the rest of the task force, repeating a few platitudes, knowing she’d killed the idea.

What emerged instead were 9/80 and 4/40 schemes to give some city employees the option of two to four weekdays off per month in return for a longer workday.  What it meant in practice was employees would work the same eight hours worth of tasks, stretched into nine- or ten-hour days, except with an extra day off every week or two.  It was nice for them, but chaotic when it was time to schedule meetings.  Most workers chose Friday to stay home, so Fridays went dead.  Add to that the introduction of casual Fridays — which started after I left the mayor’s office — and the end of each week became a world where Charles Bukowski would have fit right in:  Hardly anyone there, and those who did show up wearing sweats, old T-shirts and shoes you might use for wading into flooded basement.

I don’t know if that’s still the case over there; I haven’t been in City Hall for over four years.  But I digress.

In Southern California, every weekday there are tens of thousands of commuters who drive epic distances to get to work centers in LA and Orange counties.  In the 1990s, the Inland Empire land boom was just beginning.  My last commute was about 30 miles each way and that seemed painful and expensive enough.  Now gas prices have doubled since 2004, and many people are driving west from places like Temecula.   Temecula is almost 90 miles from downtown LA, and more than 65 miles from Santa Ana. Do the math.  If your car gets 20 miles per gallon, pretty good for a beep-n-creep voyage on crowded freeways, it’s costing you nine gallons per day to go back and forth from work = $36 per day just for gas.

I can’t imagine that at least some of those people, and the merciful among their bosses would want to alleviate that.  So, all of a sudden, telecommuting looks less scary, maybe necessary, and perhaps something that will be embraced in a rush.  That’s what Computerworld’s blogger Mike Elgan thinks:

One thing leads to another. High gas prices prompt employers (including the federal government) to allow employees to work from home once a week. Once that’s accepted culturally, an elephant appears in the boardroom: If it’s OK once a week, why isn’t it OK five times a week? (This is what happened with “casual Friday” — its once-a-week acceptance lead to the current trend of casual wear every day.) Once telecommuting is accepted, “extreme telecommuting” — working from the Bahamas or Paris or an internet-connected shack on the Australian Outback — becomes acceptable, too. After all, once you’re out of the office and connecting to the company over the Internet, it doesn’t really matter where you are, does it?

The last remaining barrier to the general acceptance of “extreme telecommuting” is purely cultural — it’s our irrational clinging to obsolete rules for how we work. As the cultural barriers fall, more of us will be freed to work from wherever we please, something which mobile technology and Internet communication already enables.

To me, that’s the silver lining in high gas prices.

Seth Godin, writing about the higher standards business meetings and conferences must meet to make it worth the (increasingly expensive) trip puts the onus on managers to make going to the office a value-added experience, or else:

If you’re a knowledge worker, your boss shouldn’t make you come to the (expensive) office every day unless there’s something there that makes it worth your trip. She needs to provide you with resources or interactions or energy you can’t find at home or at Starbucks. And if she does invite you in, don’t bother showing up if you’re just going to sit quietly.

I’ve worked in three companies that had lots of people and lots of cubes, and I spent the entire day walking around. I figured that was my job. The days where I sat down and did what looked like work were my least effective days. It’s hard for me to see why you’d bother having someone come all the way to an office just to sit in a cube and type.

The new rule seems to be that if you’re going to spend the time and the money to see someone face to face, be in their face. Interact or stay home!

How long before companies in Los Angeles, where the distance of commutes is among the most acute in the nation, adopt this kind of thinking?  I’m not sure they have a choice.

There’s probably money to be made in telling managers how to manage a virtual workforce, because a lot of companies will need to make this shift soon or they’ll lose valuable employees.

(A different version of this post appears on the blog I write for Dolan Media, From 50,000 Feet.)

On McClellan’s Memoir

Over on my other blog, I’ve got a long, long post up about former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s new book.  In it, I describe McClellan as “a guy who will flack for whichever cheese is paying his fee.”  If you want to know what the hell that means, please, by all means, read it!

The Secret to Getting a Movie Deal

The Daily Mail’s Liz Jones learns the secret to financing your movie, while trying to keep from getting seasick on a Cannes yacht party:

And while beautiful women all want to be in the movies, rich men all want to make them. I ask my producer friend whether a party is quite the right place, being so noisy, to pitch an idea to a mega-rich investor. He looks at me as if I’m mad. ‘We don’t pitch at the parties. We get them to trust us.’

And how do you do that? ‘We take drugs together.’ And when you do finally get to pitch, what.. . well, floats their yacht?

‘If you want your movie to get made, you have to pitch an idea that is either about the environment or about pornography. Basically, you have to make an investor feel either guilty or horny.’

And there’s always money for a movie about sin and redemption:

The most poignant moment, though, and one that seems to sum up what Cannes is all about, is when I sit in a booth with Mike Tyson. He has big, soft hands and is wearing an immaculate grey suit with an ironed white hanky in his top pocket.

He is the subject of a documentary by James Toback, the film that receives the biggest standing ovation all week. I ask him to sum up what it’s about, and he says: ‘It’s about how I was really sweet and nice when I started out, then became a monster and lost all my money.’

And what are you like now? ‘Oh, I’m sweet again.’

As I leave his booth, I bump into two predatory blondes. ‘No black man has ever turned me down,’ says one, a glint in her eye. ‘He’s a hit, right? His film’s a hit?’

Person Mike Tyson

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What’s Wrong With Appeasement? You Really Want To Know?

Maybe some people have to have the tragic error of appeasement explained to them. Like Bruce Ramsey, a writer for the Seattle Times. Here is something he actually wrote Friday. I’ve left nothing out, contrary to usual blog practice. I don’t want anyone to think he mitigated his idiocy with lines I left out.

Democrats are rebuking President Bush for saying in his speech to the Knesset, here, that to “negotiate with terrorists and radicals” is “appeasement.” The Democrats took it as a slap at Barack Obama. What bothers me is the continual reference to Hitler and his National Socialists, particularly the British and French accommodation at the Munich Conference of 1938.

The narrative we’re given about Munich is entirely in hindsight. We know what kind of man Hitler was, and that he started World War II in Europe. But in 1938 people knew a lot less. What Hitler was demanding at Munich was not unreasonable as a national claim (though he was making it in a last-minute, unreasonable way.) Germany’s claim was that the areas of Europe that spoke German and thought of themselves as German be under German authority. In September 1938 the principal remaining area was the Sudetenland.

So the British and French let him have it. Their thought was: “Now you have your Greater Germany.” They didn’t want a war. They were not superpowers like the United States is now. They remembered the 1914-1918 war and how they almost lost it.

In a few months, in early 1939, Hitler ordered the invasion of what is now the Czech Republic—that is, territory that was not German. Then it was obvious that a deal with him was worthless–and the British and French did not appease Hitler any more. Thus the lesson of Munich: don’t appease Hitlers.

But who else is a Hitler? If you paste that label on somebody it means they are cast out. You can’t talk to them any more. And it has gotten pasted on quite a few national leaders over the years: Milosevic, Hussein, Ahmadinejad, et. al. In particular, to apply that label to the elected leaders of the Palestinians is to say that you aren’t going to listen to their claims to a homeland. I think they do have a claim. So do the Israelis. In order to get anywhere, each side has to listen to the other. To continually bring up Hitler, the Nazis, the Munich Conference and “appeasement,” is to try to prolong the stalemate.

I trust that Barack Obama does not possess the same historical ignorance.

Hitler telegraphed exactly what he intended to do in his book, Mein Kampf, written years before 1938. Also by then he had violated the Versailles treaty and begun rearming.

There was no evidence that Sudetenland wanted to be part of Hitler’s empire. Hitler had destroyed German democracy. Britain and France presumably understood the difference between democracy and dictatorship, since both countries operated under a democracy.

There was already a flood of Jewish refugees. News of Hitler’s atrocities, albeit downplayed in the British and French press in order to massage public opinion, was still known to the U.K. and French leadership. Winston Churchill and his friends in British intelligence made sure of that. His parliamentary speeches exposed Hitler repeatedly. Prime Minister Chamberlain’s naivete about Hitler and his aims was willful. He had plenty of facts at hand to demonstrate to him that Hitler did not deserve the trust he was vesting in him.

Ramsey writes as if he thinks Hitler is unique in history, and that attempts to compare contemporary enemies to Hitler is…unfriendly? I can’t tell what he means by this: “If you paste that label on somebody it means they are cast out. You can’t talk to them any more.” I don’t think the comparison of “Milosevic, Hussein, Ahmadinejad” to Hitler is inapt, given what they did and what, in Ahmadinejad’s case, he’s openly threatened to do.

I realize the cries of “Munich!” have begun to bore some people. Bore, or agitate. It struck me as strange that Obama and other leading Democrats would rush to identify themselves as the targets of Bush’s remarks to the Knesset. Maybe Bush was trying to be crafty — which is always cute to watch, like watching a toddler try to kick a ball — but the smarter Democratic play probably would have been to say, “What he said.” Because appeasement is still something to be avoided, if you define appeasement correctly as:

• Letting your enemy know you will do anything to avoid war.
• Letting your enemy take this knowledge and use it to their advantage.
• Making excuses for enemy actions and policies that violate law and conscience.
• Giving your enemy concessions based on a flimsy rationale that ignores indisputable facts.
• Convincing yourself that your concessions are trivial — a cheap way to avoid war.
• Using PR spin to isolate domestic opponents to your appeasement policy as “warmongers.”
• Continuing to make excuses for the enemy until you have no choice but to fight back.

That last point is the ultimate folly of appeasement. It is a policy pursued by peacemakers that leads inevitably to war. True, it postpones war, which is sometimes politically desirable to the appeaser, who might only be thinking of the short run, i.e. the next election. But it also gives your enemy time to get stronger, a process accelerated by the act of appeasement, which convinces some fence-sitters that the future belongs to the enemy and not to you.

No one calls him or herself an appeaser. It’s not a philosophy. It’s a verdict, based on objective facts. Saying “I’m not an appeaser” does not prevent you from acting like one. In the moment, it is often easier for a politician to be an appeaser than not to be one. It takes a lot of leadership strength to overcome appeasement’s gravitational pull. The truly chilling thing about Chamberlain’s appeasement was the wild public enthusiasm it generated among French and British citizens. Within two years, members of these cheering crowds would be slaughtered by Hitler’s forces.

The big question Obama will have to deal with when he takes office is whether to fulfill his promise of rapid withdrawal from Iraq, at risk of making it appear to the radical Islamic world that by doing so, he’s appeasing them. Perhaps there is a way to do it and preserve our strength in the region. But if there isn’t, he’ll have to show a lot of strength, the strength to look his most fervent supporters in the eyes and tell them he’s changed his mind. This decision will define his presidency, and it will come at him early.

Obama the Wiki-Man?

On my other blog, From 50,000 Feet, I wrote today about Obama’s campaign management, its ingenious use of the Web, the connection to Facebook, and the implications for his potential Administration and for business management in the years to come.  If you are interested, click here.

Brakes on the Pendulum?

We seem to be coming out of the conservative era in American politics that was first glimpsed with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and zenithed with the elections of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984.  Since George McGovern’s overwhelming defeat in 1972, Democratic candidates for president have all acknowledged the tide was against them.  Mondale and Dukakis claimed they refused to apologize for being liberals, while apologizing.  Carter and Clinton insisted they weren’t liberals at all, and Clinton really didn’t govern like one, achieving all his successes through triangulating the activist wings of both parties. The continued strength of the conservative current was demonstrated in 2000 and 2004 when a deeply flawed candidate, George W. Bush, managed to put his two sharper, smarter opponents on the defensive, forcing them into mistake after mistake. 

This election season feels different.  I guess we’ll find out soon enough, but I think the country is readier for a sharp left turn than at any time since the last liberal era began in 1932.  In 2008, I think you could get a lot of people to agree there are “malefactors of great wealth” to use FDR’s great phrase.  The economic issues that cut the deepest are aimed directly at industries and individuals who seem to have taken advantage of this country to accumulate their wealth, to the detriment of middle class people. The insurance companies.  Big pharma.  The oil companies.  Mortgage brokerages. Hedge fund managers. The presidents of financial institutions who make disasterous investments then drift away, carrying with both arms duffel bags full of severance money. 

The picture of unfettered capitalism painted by the most prominent capitalists on the business scene is not a pretty one.  It was said the magic of the market would benefit all of us.  Lately, it hasn’t, so the conservative warnings against the damage high taxes do to the economy ring hollow.  Politically, it would seem to be a perfect time for a political movement attacking capitalism — in the American formulation, the “excesses” of capitalism.  We don’t really have an intellectually coherent Left in this country in the 19th-century European sense.  But we do have a political location where capitalism’s disappointed, disaffected and disgusted can unite — the Democratic Party.  

And, they are about to nominate the most unapolegetically liberal candidate since McGovern in Barack Obama.  In doing so, they are specifically rejecting a continuation of the successful Clinton legacy.  Today’s Democrats largely no longer find Clinton’s reign to be such a success. Oh, it’s tied in with his and her ethical problems, but even his pure policy plays were either more wins for conservatism (welfare reform, NAFTA), symbolic changes in a liberal direction (the Family and Medical Leave Act, which allows workers to take time off to care for a sick child — at their own expense), or big flops (do I need to remind anyone about health care?).

If you believe Obama, his administration will bring back liberalism in a big way.

Do you believe him?  Check that: I’m not doubting his sincerity.  I think he wants an activist government to create greater security for middle-class voters.  My question is: If he wins, will he be able to pull it off?  Will he take advantage of Democratic majorities in both houses (something Clinton had, but squandered after just two years) and get health care reform passed?  Will he really go after the oil companies and mortgage companies?

Or is that going to be impossible?

This is what I’m dying to find out. Have the pitiless realities of the global economy rendered liberalism obsolete?  Can Milton Friedman be repealed?

I sense the American voters are anxious to find out.  They’d like to believe — “yes we can” — that we can use the tools of government to construct a fairer, more secure, more democratic and more sustainable economy than the one we have now.  Will that belief survive the first two years of an Obama Administration?

If so, Obama could be the next FDR.  But does that seem realistic to you?

P.S. I realize McCain is still close in the polls and might win.  He’s got the national security issue about as locked up as a candidate can, and his domestic-policy views are closer to liberalism than any Republican has tried for decades.  He’s not to be written off by any means.  If this election is about homeland security and national defense, he wins.  

Or: He wins if the American public decides it isn’t ready to revive liberalism.

Or: He wins if the American public concludes Obama doesn’t have enough experience to back up his promises.  

The Brutal Reality of “Getting Tough” on Illegal Immigrants

So, you say you want to get the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants out of the country.  All of them. They’re all lawbreakers and they shouldn’t be here.

How are you going to do that if an illegal doesn’t want to leave?  It’s not the same thing as arresting a domestic criminal and imprisoning them.  We have an infrastructure to facilitate that.  Deporting 11 million people is another thing.  How do you do this?  Literally drag them onto a plane accompanied by a bunch of federal officers, and shoot them full of powerful drugs so they’ll be compliant?

Turns out, that’s what we’ve been doing for years, according to the Washington Post’s Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest:

An analysis by The Post of the known sedations during fiscal 2007, ending last October, found that 67 people who got medical escorts had no documented psychiatric reason. Of the 67, psychiatric drugs were given to 53, 48 of whom had no documented history of violence, though some had managed to thwart an earlier attempt to deport them. These figures do not include two detainees who immigration officials said were given sedatives for behavioral rather than psychiatric reasons before being deported on group charter flights, which are often used to return people to Mexico and Central America.

Even some people who had been violent in the past proved peaceful the day they were sent home. “Dt calm at this time,” says the first entry, using shorthand for “detainee,” in the log for the January 2007 deportation of Yousif Nageib to his native Sudan. In requesting drugs for his deportation, an immigration officer had noted that Nageib, 40, had once fled to Canada to avoid an assault charge and had helped instigate a detainee uprising while in custody. But on the morning of his departure, the log says, he “is handcuffed and states he will do what we say.” Still, he was injected in his right buttock with a three-drug cocktail.

In one printout of Nageib’s medical log, next to the entry saying he was calm, is a handwritten asterisk. It was put there by Timothy T. Shack, then medical director of the immigration health division, as he reviewed last year’s sedation cases. Next to the asterisk, in his neat, looping handwriting, Shack placed a single word: “Problem.”

When he landed in Lagos, Nigeria, Afolabi Ade was unable to talk.

“Every time I tried to force myself to speak, I couldn’t, because my tongue was . . . twisted. . . . I thought I was going to swallow it,” Ade, 33, recalled in an interview. “I was nauseous. I was dizzy.”

As he was being flown back to Africa, his American wife alerted his parents there that he was on his way. His father was waiting at the Lagos airport. It was the first time in three years that they had seen one another. Shocked by how woozy the young man was, his father decided not to take him home and frighten the rest of the family. Instead, he checked his son into a hotel.

Ade was in the hotel for four days before the effects of the drugs began to abate.

Ade had no history of mental illness warranting the use of these drugs, nor of violence.  He was in the US as a student.  According to the post, he pleaded guilty to a felony after he was arrested in a car driven by his cousins where fraudulent checks were found.  At the hotel in Lagos, a family doctor wanted to treat him for his grogginess.  But US officials didn’t see fit to leave information about which drugs they had put in his system.

Ade’s pulse was dangerously low, and when he tried to walk around the hotel room, “he leaned on the wall,” (the doctor) said. “He was talking, but a slurred kind of speech.”

According to the Post’s research, the injection probably contained Haldol, which is used for schizophrenics when they are in acute psychotic states.  Of course, there was another notable use for Haldol.  It was the drug adminstered by the Soviet Union to the dissidents it housed in psychiatric prisons.

Read it all, because there’s much more, including this bit of black humor:  The federal government’s pitch to recruit the required medical escorts to keep the injections coming.

To recruit medical escorts, the government has sought to glamorize this work. “Do you ever dream of escaping to exotic, exciting locations?” said an item in an agency newsletter. “Want to get away from the office but are strapped for cash? Make your dreams come true by signing up as a Medical Escort for DIHS!”

That brings up the issue of cost.  We’re paying for ICE personnel and a medical escort to fly each one of the deportees back to their home country.  Which, for the violent or truly insane might be warranted.  But not for all 11 million, most of them working or enrolled in school.

Goldstein and Priest of done us a big favor, putting the flesh on the easy arguments of the immigration hardliners.  There are economic arguments on both sides, and reasonable people can come down on the side that says illegals undermine the wage structure.   What this story demonstrates is that the illegal immigration issue is two distinct problems, and we haven’t got a clue on what to do about the biggest part of it: What to do about the people here now; how to address them and keep our souls.

Oklahoma City Memorial — Rainy

Here’s the rainy version of the monument shown in the post below:

I took this photo on my way to a reception that I was surprised to see anyone attended, seeing as how a tornado had (possibly) just struck Oklahoma. Just an hour or two earlier, sirens were blaring, and I saw this kind of stuff on my hotel TV:

They shrug these things off in Oklahoma City, but first they have to go into full-scale panic mode on the TV news. That curled appendage above Britton — what the meteorologist called a “hook echo” — was the alleged tornado, one of two. But my colleagues at this conference never saw this, and blithely got on a bus heading to the Memorial Museum.

I waited til the tornado watch was over, and then took off by foot, carrying a borrowed umbrella. Took me so long to get there, I missed the reception. My friends were surprised when I told them about the tornado, although they admitted hearing a couple of sirens.

I’ll admit it: I’m more afraid of tornados than earthquakes. That’s probably why I live here and not there. I was in a tornado once, when I lived in Barrington, Illinois. Deep in my psyche, I have post-tornado traumatic stress syndrome. I was too young to remember anything about it, but my mother says she took me and my brother, then a baby, into the cellar to wait it out. The cellar was flooded. I stood in the water next to my mother while she held the baby. There was a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, flickering on and off. My mom thought if she could just reach the lightbulb and tighten it, it would stay on.

But she couldn’t quite reach it, and that’s why all three of us are alive today. Happy Mother’s Day!

Oklahoma Monument — Sunny

I’m jumping around the timeline now.  I was in Oklahoma last week.  The day I arrived, within about an hour, Oklahoma experienced a tornado. But a couple days later, all was sunny.  I saw the Memorial to the victims of the Murrah Federal Building bomb attack on both the rainy day and the sunny day.  On the sunny day, I was looking north.

Visiting the memorial museum was, of course, intense. It explores the bombing and its aftermath in very specific, detailed ways, using every medium available. It is the ultimate “found art” museum, and since all the found objects were thrown off by this horrific attack, they connect you directly to the lives of the victims — and their murderers.

I saw a datebook, all scuffed and crumpled, open to April 1995. The owner of the book died. For some reason I found it quite moving that he had put a yellow sticker on April 15 to mark the full moon — the last one he was alive to see.  I saw the famous axle from Timothy McVeigh’s rented truck, the one bearing the VIN number that helped the FBI finger him.  I heard a recording of a water board meeting in a nearby office, which picked up the sound of the loud explosion.  I saw shreds of clothing, shoes, watches, jewelry recovered from the blast, often damaged, and now on display.

These little items are the only way to understand what happened.

This museum has hundreds of such items, plus photos, TV clips, and lots of text explaining the various things that happened. The writing is clear and restrained, and never indulges in the bathos of political posturing. The only place you see that kind of thing is on the contemporaneous video clips — mostly from Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose “feel your pain” exercises apparently worked for them back then, but seem like self-parody from this distance.

When the bombing happened in 1995, my son was 4.  I still remember his little toys from back then.  We got a lot of Disney stuff, some of it from McDonalds, promoting movies like Winnie-the-Pooh and The Lion King.  The last room of the exhibit is for photos of those who were killed, each one inside a clear plastic box with a little ledge for personal items family members might have wanted to include.  Many of the kids from the day-care center who died had Disney toys just like my son’s in their boxes. Seeing those things was a blow to the gut.  Thinking, my boy’s almost 18 now, ready to graduate from high school, thank God, something those Oklahoma children never got to experience.  The whole world was made up of these toys. That’s what they knew.

In Bolinas

The estuary there was at low tide.  This was from the same trip as the de Young photos. My wife and I drove a rented Prius out to see Bolinas and have dinner in Stinson Beach.

I’ll post a picture or two of the main attractions of this estuary — birds and other wildlife.  But I wanted to show this one first.

Can “Second Life” Erase Your Carbon Footprint?

A brief interruption to the photoblog for this environmental brainstorm.

First, from John Tierney’s NY Times-affliated blog, a statement of the problem:

The Daily Mail has gone after celebrities who preach against greenhouse emissions but travel by private jet, like Brad Pitt, Madonna, Barbra Streisand and Coldplay’s Chris Martin. The British newspaper gives its full five-star “hippy-crite” rating to Mr. Pitt for narrating a documentary, “e2: The Economies of Being Environmentally Conscious,” and also taking dozens of private-jet trips last year, including a quick day-trip from Chicago to Los Angeles and back so he could perform jury duty.

Tierney goes on to recommend that Pitt, et. al. wear a carbon-footprint monitor, but that’s only a partial solution, and one that the more environmentally-conscious don’t really need. At some level Pitt, Al Gore, Robert Kennedy, Jr. and other celebs have a pretty good idea of the environmental damage they are doing every time they take off in a private jet. They just rationalize it as important work that can’t be done any other way: More important than mere work or entertainment, which is why Coldplay and Madonna have to clutter up their concerts with speeches and didactic songs; more important than what any of the rest of us are doing, an attitude that gets in the way of their message in a way they never see.

The solution is right here. Stay home, and send your avatar into cyberspace to do your good works for you. According to the LA Times, corporations are beginning to use the virtual world:

Two years ago, companies such as American Apparel and footwear maker Adidas started filling Second Life with stores and buildings. The virtual world’s early inhabitants, who largely disdain anything with a corporate tinge, rebelled by launching terrorist attacks and starting gunfights in the shops. Faced with empty storefronts and ridicule, many companies pulled out.

Now, other companies are carving out parts of Second Life as their own. They are creating employee-only islands and office buildings, then encouraging their staff to meet there. Compared with plane tickets and hotel bills, it’s pretty cheap: a 16-acre private island in Second Life costs $1,000 plus a $295 monthly maintenance fee.

And instead of staring at white walls during conference calls with strangers, employees can wander a virtual paradise and see representations of the co-workers they have never met.

Sun Microsystems, which makes computer servers and software, owns seven islands in Second Life, two of which are open to the public. The rest are used for training sessions and meetings. During its biggest event, a 12-hour corporate meeting held last month, 14 of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun’s top executives hobnobbed with hundreds of employees. Alpine skiing, car racing, live jazz and a sandbox were also part of the event.

At one point, Sun Chairman Scott McNealy, dressed in a San Jose Sharks hockey jersey and holding a golf club, sat in a virtual auditorium next to Chief Gaming Officer Chris Melissinos, who had a mascot for Sun’s Java software sitting on his shoulder (the mascot looks a bit like a penguin).

Hundreds of Sun avatars lounged in the audience, some wearing sneakers and jeans, others in business attire, asking questions about new products, Second Life and Sun’s competitive position. Thousands of other employees watched the virtual meeting on monitors in Sun’s offices in Santa Clara, New York and Tokyo.

If we can go to corporate retreats in Second Life, why not a Coldplay concert, or a movie premiere? Imagine the energy savings if what Sun is doing replace just 10 percent of the traveling we now do. Environmentalists should be leading the way here.

Falling Embers

This was a powerful representation of the civil rights era:  A sculpture made from the charred remains of a torched church from, I believe, Birmingham, Alabama in the early 60s.  The pieces of wood dangled in a precise arrangement from the ceiling. 

Update:  Thanks to a commenter I can now credit the artist: Cornelia Parker.

Portals of Andromeda

Jon Kuhn’s kaleidoscopic, prismatic sculpture at the DeYoung.

Does the title refer to the mythical Greek character punished for her mother’s pride in her beauty?  Or to the constellation?  Or to the galaxy nearest to ours, containing a trillion stars?

Apparently, He Disapproves…

…but of what?  And people who wear a suit like that might not want to be so judgmental.

Another sculpture from the DeYoung.

Nature Nook at DeYoung

From the outside, it isn’t easy to see how the museum’s designers have created these little open-air nooks that have mossy landscaping…

I like the picture enough to show it to you, even though there’s a reflection from the window.   Also note the bumpy surface of the museum’s exterior walls, like someone stamped the wall tens of thousands of times with a spoon.