Rough Week for the PR Biz

First, there was this oops (as described by Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson)….

One of the feature stories in (Wired’s) package is a case study by Fred Vogelstein of Microsoft’s blogging initiative, which is something I’ve been really impressed by. Today the company has more than 3,500 bloggers and its corporate messaging has gone from mostly press releases and scripted executive speeches to more of an authentic conversation in public between rank-and-file employees and customers.

(snip)

Yet the old company culture is not gone, as evidenced by an executive briefing memo from Microsoft’s PR firm, Waggener Edstrom, that Vogelstein was inadvertently sent in the body of a scheduling email. At nearly 6,000 words, it’s an amazing document and a telling counterpoint to the laissez-faire spirit of the open blogging initiative. Because it so aptly illustrates the parallel open vs. closed cultures that now exist at Microsoft, as in any big company trying to evolve a command-and-control messaging process to an out-of-control age, we decided to post the whole thing online in the spirit of transparency.

The memo coaches the executives on what to say and what not to say. It talks about Vogelstein’s interviewing style and possible biases (also how he’s “tricky” and “digs for dirt”–the memo cautions the executives to avoid certain paths and to watch out for traps).

(snip)

On a personal note, it’s kind of freaky to read the memo describe how I was wooed (even manipulated, if you want to think of it that way) into commissioning the piece:

“CharlesF met with Chris Anderson during his fall tour in ’06, placing the idea that Microsoft is thinking differently and creatively about its outreach….Dan’l Lewin met with Chris Anderson in October and also emphasized the company’s work in the arena, pushing the story further…Jeff Sandquist traveled to the Bay Area to meet with Chris and his editorial team. They were highly engaged in Jeff’s conversation…” 

Yes, that’s pretty freaky.  Also freaky:  6,000 words, which works out to 13 single-spaced pages, much of it in 10-point type.  All this in preparation for what was evidently going to be a positive story.  The memo itself is linked in the body of Anderson’s post.  I started to read it, but then realized happily that I’m not being paid to read that kind of crap anymore. 

Hoo boy.  If I might offer a critique, if this was designed to prep an executive to be interviewed, it’s too much.  You’d freak him out.  When I worked in PR, I was accused of overwriting when I let a two-page memo stretch to three.

Then there’s the New Yorker’s long piece about my former firm’s (Edelman) work for Wal-Mart, and their efforts to get the Democratic Party to see the good in the discount giant.   The writer, Jeffrey Goldberg, lets us know early what he thinks of Edelman, Wal-Mart and the PR business with this little summary of the players:

The job of the Edelman people—there are about twenty, along with more than three dozen in-house public-relations specialists—is to help Wal-Mart scrub its muddied image. Edelman specializes in helping industries with image problems; another important client is the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington lobbying group that seeks to convince Americans that oil companies care about the environment and that their profits are reasonable. Edelman does its work by cultivating contacts among the country’s opinion élites, with whom it emphasizes the good news and spins the bad; by such tactics as establishing “Astroturf” groups, seemingly grass-roots organizations that are actually fronts for industry; and, as I deduced from my own visit to Bentonville, by advising corporate executives on how to speak like risk-averse politicians.

After that paragraph, I’m sure the folks in Bentonville hit the liquor department (does Wal-Mart sell liquor?).  The rest of the story doesn’t get any better.  Out of respect to my former colleagues, I won’t quote any more of it.  Just so they all know: I don’t think the story is entirely fair. 

Back to the Wag-Ed mistake: I have been there!  When I was at Edelman, we represented Community Memorial Hospital during part of its fight with Ventura County over something the hospital’s president, an eccentric fellow named Dr. Michael Bakst, believed would cost his privately-run institution a whole lot of money. I don’t recall the details.

I was up in Ventura, getting ready for an important press conference.  Unfortunately and unavoidably, the press conference coincided with an in-house event at the largest paper in Ventura, the Star, which all reporters were required to attend.  I worked it out with the reporter that we would fax him the release when we made the announcement. (In 1995, we weren’t e-mailing press releases yet.)  I had a secretary in LA all set to do this.  I told him where the release was, where the right stationary was, the fax number, what time to send it….

Somehow, my secretary thought it was okay to print a document onto the stationary, and then, without looking at it, shove it straight into the fax machine.  Whoever was supposed to be supervising him figured he couldn’t screw that up, and let him handle it alone.  After the fax went through, the secretary looked at what he’d sent. 

It was a draft of a memo written by one of my colleagues — a distressingly cynical memo, splattered with scare quotes that made it seem like, wink-wink, we knew the press conference just was a big scam to manipulate stupid reporters.  The secretary, realizing his error, called the reporter and begged him to destroy the erroneous fax.  The reporter said he would. 

The secretary figured he was in the clear, so he never told me about this.  I talked to the reporter later that day, and never gave me any hint of the fax he had seen. The story that ran in the next day’s paper was completely straightforward.  Nobody had any reason to suspect anything was amiss, least of all me.  It seemed like it had been a successful day.

A week later, my phone rings.  It’s Dr. Bakst.  “What kind of operation are you people running down there in Los Angeles? Trying to make me look bad?”  Dr. Bakst had a suspicious streak, and I’d encountered it already a couple of times.  The hospital’s administration was full of rumor-mongers.  I thought this was just another test of my loyalty.  I tried to calm him down, but he continued, accusing me of telling the editor of the Star he was “some kind of phony, trying to put one over on the media.” 

“I never talked to the editor of the Star.”

“Oh yeah?  Well, where did he get these quotes?” which he proceeded to read to me from the editor’s weekly column.  “I’m seriously thinking about firing you guys.”

All sense of reality seemed to be ebbing away. How…what…huh?  I told Dr. Bakst I’d investigate and hung up.  I started storming around the office like a confused rooster in a solar eclipse.  Hearing this ruckus, my secretary quietly approached me:  “I think I might know something about this.”

After he told the story, I fired him on the spot–the only time I’ve ever done that–not for his idiotic mistake, but for keeping it a secret.   My staff and I tried to do damage control, but it was too late.  The client bolted — a client we could ill-afford to lose. Dr. Bakst later hired Fleishman-Hillard, but not before calling to offer me a job, which seemed like a strange thing to do as he was kicking me out the door.

Although I might appear to have been an innocent victim, I do accept the blame to this extent:  About a week earlier, the secretary had come to see me to ask my advice about “investments.”  It turned out he was being drawn into a pyramid scheme by some people he’d met at a dance club.  I couldn’t believe he was that stupid, to fall for such an obvious rip-off.  And yet I trusted someone that dumb to perform a crucial task. 

Fast-Moving Storm in LA

I was driving downtown, north on the Harbor Freeway around mid-day yesterday, and the traffic was backing up.  There was a lot of wind.  I called who I was meeting with, who told me about a big rainstorm downtown.  I could believe it, because here’s what I was driving into:

But by the time I got downtown, here’s what it looked like:

Within a couple of hours, I was back in the South Bay, driving through Redondo Beach, about to hit the Esplanade from Avenue I.  Looking toward Malibu:

If I ever left LA, I think I would miss the winter/spring the most!

Thoughts on Downtown Growth and Traffic

As of this writing L.A.’s mayor and council continue to negotiate over whether to allow the city to sell “air rights” over the Convention Center to developers to “further downtown’s residential boom” by allowing taller residential projects than the zoning code currently allows.

This is quintessential “smart growth” as it is has been defined over the past 15 years in Los Angeles and other major metropolitan centers.  Because downtown isn’t the Westside or the San Fernando Valley, this particular smart growth initiative has blossomed in ways that others have not.  There are no homeowner groups eyeballing these new downtown projects from the competing philosophical perspective that growth is growth and growth is bad. 

One of the biggest assumptions behind the downtown residential boom is that these new people won’t use their cars as much.  Could be, although the parking situation downtown is a far cry from Manhattan’s.  In Manhattan and a few other urban centers with lots of residents, owning a car is a costly nuisance.  Urban planners in Los Angeles and elsewhere evidently hope this will eventually become the case in cities all over the country.  

This scenario is hard for me to imagine, I must admit.  Sure, there are lots of jobs downtown, but there are a lot more jobs not downtown.  Will every couple moving into one of these new downtown digs want to confine themselves to both working downtown in perpetuity?  Unlikely.  If a better gig opens up in Burbank or Santa Monica, then they just become another traffic-clogging commuter.   If their downtown employer subsidizes parking, isn’t it likely a downtown dweller would take advantage of it just the same way a commuter from Temecula would? 

Downtown is a lot cooler than it was, and in theory LA Live will make it cooler still.  But not cool enough to stay their all the time.  When I lived in New Jersey and drove into Manhattan to visit my carless friends, I don’t know who they were happier to see:  Me or my car.  My car meant they could catch up on their grocery shopping…or go to Connecticut to smell clean air and see real trees.

The expansion of residential options by building housing downtown is a fine justification for it.  L.A. has a housing shortage, and if downtown is where the homeowner-group-afflicted political system will tolerate new housing, then downtown is where it should go.  But beyond that, I don’t think policymakers should hope for much else to change.  Traffic congestion in Los Angeles is still awaiting a solution.

These thoughts are prompted by a new treatise in this month’s Reason, just posted online, whose title tells you what the writers, Sam Staley and Ted Balaker, think about city planners: “How Traffic Jams are Made in City Hall.”  The specific cases they discuss are in Minneapolis and Atlanta, but there are lots of correspondences with L.A.  The whole thing is worth reading, assuming you don’t get too upset when received wisdom is challenged.  An excerpt:

In 2005 the Urban Transportation Monitor, a biweekly industry newsletter, surveyed more than 600 transportation professionals to find out their thoughts on traffic congestion. About 19 percent responded. Of those, 45 percent thought the profession was “doing all it can do” to stop congestion. Half thought congestion was the result of too many people using their cars, and 45 percent attributed it primarily to the desire to live in low-density suburbs.

The preferred solutions were predictable: 51 percent thought mass transit should be improved or expanded, and 50 percent thought the government should manage demand better by getting people to telecommute or carpool. Only 29 percent believed increased highway capacity could be a cost-effective way to reduce congestion significantly. (The survey did not ask whether new capacity should be provided if it were privately funded.)

Many believed the problem is simply too many cars. Fifty-one percent said one of “the main reasons for the high level of congestion in many metropolitan areas” is the desire “of many to use cars for all their trips.” Indeed, of the 11 options offered by the survey, that was the biggest vote getter. For traffic engineers, planners, and other transportation professionals, the solution to traffic jam is to keep us from using our automobiles.

The planning profession clings tenaciously to its foundational myths. Even as overwhelming evidence to the contrary piles up, planners keep claiming that cars are inefficient and socially destructive; that expanding road capacity isn’t practical; and, most fundamentally, that the government can determine how we choose to travel by planning where and how we live.

That last assumption is the logical conclusion of a rather sophisticated (if largely incorrect) way of looking at human behavior. It’s rooted in a common-sense observation: How we live influences how we travel. If we live on a farm, we are going to travel by car. Buses simply don’t go out to farms to pick people up and take them into town for work or to buy groceries. Trains don’t either. A neighbor might, but she would probably be driving a car and doing this as a service because you don’t have a car. School buses are the exception that proves the rule. They pick up a large number of kids, but only because they’re being delivered to one destination, the school building.

The flip side is the experience of the Manhattanite. If someone lives in the densest neighborhood of an American city, cars are costly, frustrating, and inefficient. Most Manhattan residents can get to their destination far more efficiently using the subway, taking a bus, or walking. Because parking is so costly, they also can get around fairly efficiently using taxis.

So people in dense urban areas have more choices, and personal automobiles are inefficient ways to get around town. Congestion, in fact, leads people to use alternative modes of transportation. Many regional planners, like those in Atlanta, conclude that the way a region develops dictates how people are likely to travel and what transportation strategies are most feasible. And the way to influence development patterns, they believe, is to carefully plan where and how much to invest in the transportation system. But proximity to work is only one of many factors people consider when finding a home; other criteria, such as price, neighborhood safety, and proximity to good schools, are often deemed more important than living close to the office.

Of course, Atlanta is not Manhattan. In fact, it’s virtually the opposite. At 1,783 people per square mile, Atlanta is the poster child for low-density residential development. The New York metropolitan area is three times as dense, with 5,309 people per square mile. Manhattan’s density is even higher: more than 50,000 people per square mile.

According to the Atlanta commission, “Land use is an important determinant of how people choose to travel. No other variable impacts [mobility] to a greater extent. The Regional Development Plan policies help shape future growth and protect existing stable areas by encouraging appropriate land use, transportation, and environmental decisions.”

To say this is an exaggeration would be charitable. While land use can influence travel behavior in small and crude ways, to claim that it is the biggest factor distorts the mainstream research on the subject. A 2004 study sponsored by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) cautioned against the tendency to “overemphasize vertically mixed uses such as ground-floor retail and upper-level residential.” In particular, it noted that “outside of dense urban locations, building mixed-use products in today’s marketplace can be a complex and risky proposition; few believe that being near a train station fundamentally changes this market reality.”

This isn’t to say that these developments can’t generate more transit riders. The FTA study found that those living near rail stations were five to six times more likely to commute using transit than other residents. While those seem like dramatic effects, the majority of commuters near transit stations (often two-thirds or more) still use cars to get to work. Moreover, many of the people living in these transit areas were transit users already. They just moved so they could be closer to transit.

Put differently, if 5 percent of a region commutes using transit-about the national average-then 25 or 30 percent of those living in a transit-oriented development will commute using transit. This is consistent with case studies of transit use in San Francisco and Chicago. (Incidentally, those results invariably come from studies of predominantly heavy rail commuter systems, such as subways. Light rail and buses are more fashionable in planning circles these days, but they’re also slower and carry fewer riders.)

To get such high use rates, densities have to be very high. The traditional American home with a private yard doesn’t fit this model. The typical new house in the United States is built on about one-fifth of an acre. A study in San Francisco found that doubling densities from 10 units per acre to 20 units per acre would increase transit’s commute share from 20 percent to 24 percent.

In short, even cramming four times more people into the typical U.S. subdivision of 4-5 units per acre would produce only a modest uptick in transit use. And it isn’t an uptick for the region. It’s an uptick for the neighborhood-those living within a quarter mile of a transit stop. There is virtually no effect beyond the immediate vicinity of the transit stop, regardless of density.

At these densities, Americans would literally have to give up any hope of having a decent-sized yard and most would have to live in townhouses. The land use pattern would have to fundamentally change, resembling the landscape more common in the carless 19th century than in the highly mobile and adaptable 21st century.

Forget, at least for the moment, whether the government should effect such a sweeping change. It almost certainly can’t. In a forthcoming report, Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit organization that publishes this magazine) and Randal O’Toole of the Thoreau Institute examine data from the National Personal Transportation Survey and find that doubling an urban area’s density would, at most, reduce the total number of car trips by 10 percent to 20 percent. No U.S. urban area has managed to double its density or to reduce car travel by such magnitudes.

Hang ‘Em All, Says Mickey Kaus…and Other Thoughts About the LA Times

The LA Times’ implosion over the “how dare you think my PR person girlfriend influenced my decision to give her client some great PR” scandal (I can’t think of a shorter shorthand for it) has led Mickey Kaus to call for… well, I’ll let him say it:

Conclusion that’s now clearer than ever: Blogger John Gabree notes that you need a strong local paper to have a strong local political culture. Los Angeles has neither. The Times was making progress under Dean Baquet. But the best thing it could do for the city now is to simply disappear, instantaneously if possible, and open up space for decent alternatives to operate without the legacy cost of 900 tantrum-prone staffers of variable abilities. …

Well, there’s such a thing as “brand equity” at stake if the paper simply disappeared.  Sam Zell isn’t buying a printing press and a bunch of delivery trucks. He’s buying the newspaper’s reputation for….

Okay, now I see what Kaus means.

(But can the blogosphere stand having 900 new blogs about the good old days of Los Angeles journalism all at once?  Better let the folks at WordPress know about this.)

Curiously, I haven’t seen much on the mainstream PR blogs about this episode. 

It is evident to pretty much every blogger who writes about the news media that Martinez created a massive conflict of interest by engaging Brian Grazer to edit his section of the Times when he knew his girlfriend was a PR rep to Grazer and his company.  He apparently wants to go down in flames saying there was no actual conflict, that his girlfriend actually had no influence on his decision, it was sheerly a coincidence that the first person he thought of to name as “guest editor” was his girlfriend’s client.  Mr. Martinez:  That’s why they call it “conflict of interest.” The words mean exactly what they say.   You don’t need proof of a quid pro quo to establish a conflict of interest.  You only need to demonstrate that, in this case, Martinez had two conflicting roles in the affair:  Editing the LA Times opinion pages, and being the boyfriend of Glazer’s PR rep.  

If there is any doubt that Martinez’ position is absurd, substitute “money” for sex in this equation.  If Andres Martinez was receiving regular payments from Kelly Mullens or her firm, even for a legitimate purpose, he wouldn’t have had the luxury of quitting.  He’d have been fired, instantly.

But what about Ms. Mullens and her company?  Are the ethical standards in the PR business now so low that her company’s role isn’t worth noting in all this?  Again, substitute money for sex.  If a PR agency was paying an editor, and the editor bestowed a favor upon a client, that would clearly be wrongful behavior by the PR agency, wouldn’t it?

Taking a step back, I’m willing to concede we don’t know what Martinez and Mullens discussed in their private time together.   For all anyone knows, the first time Martinez mentioned the Grazer’s name to Mullens as guest-editor, she might have said, “Glory be!  Did you know he’s been a client of mine? In fact, we’re trying to sign him up again.  Land sakes!”

But in the next breath, Mullens should have realized that her company’s role with Glazer was fatally compromised.  She should have called her boss and said, “We can’t represent Glazer in anything he does with the LA Times.” A law firm or an accounting firm would have reacted that way.  It’s unethical to be on either side of what could be construed as a corrupt bargain.  But I have yet to see any PR industry spokesperson or any of the high-profile PR-boosting bloggers say that, or even mention the episode.    

If I’m wrong, please leave a comment with the URL and I’ll be sure to give it prominent play.  

P.S.  I know about this. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s very worthwhile reading, and his facts about the LA Times and an extremely serious, still-yet-to-be-disclosed conflict are on the money.  Strumpette’s comments section is always interesting, but I’ll be paying special attention this time.  (More news media folks should be reading Strumpette.)  

Watching the Odometer

If present trends hold — unless all of a sudden people stop reading my blog — my total page views should hit 100,000 in the next 24 hours.

A hundred thousand hits in 16 months only makes me a multicellular microorganism in the blogosphere — up from an insignificant microbe! — but if you’d told me I’d ever hit 100,000 views when I started this thing, I wouldn’t have believed it.

To be perfectly honest, I’m sure many of my views have been the result of my humiliating encounter with the federal legal system over the past two years.  I wish I could’ve talked about it more.  The experience is one that begs to be shared in real time. Someday, I’ll be able to say more. I feel obliged to share what I’ve learned.

I also know I have Elliot Mintz and his client Paris Hilton, Tony Soprano, Al Gore, Saul Levine, “Walk Away Renee” Fladen-Kamm, Wendy McCaw, a baby giant squid, the people who park their cars illegally near Pinkberry in West Hollywood, George Allen and his can of black spray paint, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe to credit for a lot of my hits.  If you write about things readers are interested in, they find you.

I should also give a huge hat tip to the blogs that have linked to me, especially LA Observed, the Aesthetic, Here in Van Nuys and Todd And(rlik) on whose list I’ve fallen a bit because I haven’t written enough about PR.   (But see my next post!)

For those of you who came here initially to find out about my trial or one of above celebrities, and then kept coming back because they liked what I do — much thanks.  The encouragement you’ve given me to keep writing will stay with me forever. 

My productivity here is down, I realize.  I have to fit this into a full-time job, a lot more travel, and the slow, steady milling process called the law.  But there are 434 posts here, most of them still somewhat timely, so if I’m having a slow week, please continue to explore and react.

Now, onward and upward to 1 million!    

We’ve Got Global Warming Right Where We Want It

First, former Vice President Al Gore goes to Congress, winning converts to the cause of reversing man-made global warming, and support for his proposal to cap U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide at current levels, and begin cutting them back by 90 percent over the next 43 years.  The political trend gets noticed:

As Gore concedes, he is more salesman than scientist. But most scientists acknowledge that he is absolutely right on the fundamentals: Humans are artificially warming the world, the risks of inaction are great, the time frame for action is growing short and meaningful cuts in emissions will happen only if the United States takes the lead. An increasing number of business leaders and politicians outside Washington are moving his way.

Congress is paying attention to this shift. Representative Henry Waxman of California has signed up 127 co-sponsors for a very tough bill he proposed last week that seeks to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by midcentury, which is close to what Gore wants. When you consider that Gore and President Bill Clinton could not find five senators willing to ratify the far more modest 1997 Kyoto treaty – which called for a mere 7 percent reduction below 1990 levels, with no further reductions scheduled after 2012 – you get some idea of how far the debate has come.

But then, project-by-project, in states across the country, viable ways to actually achieve these kinds of cuts get blocked.  From today’s LA Times:

In a blustery stretch of desert two hours east of Los Angeles, where many of the world’s first power-producing windmills were built, a plan for more turbines has triggered a backlash that echoes a national debate over the merits of wind energy.

A proposal to build about 50 windmills next to Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument has aroused passions in a region already dotted with 3,000 windmills, with opponents charging that the wind energy industry has neither delivered the promised power nor spared the environment.

The industry, which was born in California, now has projects in 40 states and $8 billion in investments over the last two years, according to the American Wind Energy Assn.

Supporters say wind power has come of age and will help slow global warming, while critics contend that it has delivered only a quarter of its promised energy, proved lethal to wildlife and, in the view of many residents, blighted the landscape.

Around the country, Internet blogs and anti-wind energy websites hum with angry postings about projects on picturesque ridgelines, seascapes and farmlands from New England to Texas.

Politicians and celebrities have weighed in. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and his Nantucket Island neighbors have so far successfully fought installation of offshore turbines.

Their opposition, in turn, has prompted criticism that rich liberals are all for alternative power providing it doesn’t mar their views.

So, are we serious about global warming or not?  Wind power is not perfect. But locations like San Gorgonio Pass, where the wind blows constantly, are inherently scarce.  We don’t have the luxury of ruling these sites off-limits, even when there is some other environmental impact.  Local politics should not drive how the pros and cons are weighed.

If we were serious about global warming, there would be a national policy to encourage development of wind projects in locations where there is the highest potential to exploit it for baseline power. Perhaps we should require environmental impact reports for each site — with the burden of proof being shifted to advocates of the no-build option.

I know that Gore and Waxman probably see the coming battles to be about conservation, green industries, solar power incentives, etc.   And certainly that’s going to be part of it.  But a properly located wind energy site is one of the few alternative-energy methods now available that is even close to being cost-competitive with burning fossil fuels.  Shouldn’t we be looking there first? 

Also, why isn’t there more discussion of hydro power?  According to this site, there are 80,000 dams in the U.S.  Only 2,400 of them generate electricity.  Wikipedia’s entry on hydroelectricity articulate the case against the energy source.  But what about installing turbines in existing dams?  If the dams are already built, what’s the incremental environmental damage from doing that?

Gore needs to shift his salesmanship toward selling solutions. Rep. Waxman is following the old Clean Air Act model of setting high standards and forcing local areas to meet them or else face lawsuits and federal sanctions.  That’s great if your purpose is to grandstand against enemies of the environment.  But I’d prefer we try to depoliticize this issue, acknowledge (which Gore does) that it won’t be easy, and stop creating binds for ourselves by simultaneously pursuing two competing environmental goals.  In San Gorgonio, in Cape Cod and elsewhere, we need to make tough choices.

If’ we’re really serious.  

The First Episode of Gumby from 1956–on YouTube

“He’s on the moon all right.”

 

As my son might say, computer animators can’t top this.

Cathy Seipp, R.I.P.

One of Los Angeles’ top bloggers, Cathy Seipp, died this afternoon at the unfathomably young age of 49. 

I didn’t know her, but during the blogging phase of her long journalistic career, she made it possible for me and all her regular readers to feel as if we did.   Her style of mixing commentary with anecdote, her way of boosting her friends and those she admired and, frankly, ridiculing those she considered pretentious or dishonest, created the most pleasing illusion that I was listening to her hold forth at a dinner party.  That’s an art.

In starting this blog, Cathy Seipp was one of my biggest inspirations.  She’s normally associated with the right, but I always thought that particular pigeonhole wasn’t a good fit for her.  Yes, she wrote for National Review Online and the Independent Women’s Forum.  But unlike the vast majority of politically conservative bloggers, Cathy showed no interest in being a water-carrier for Bush or anyone else in the GOP. 

The question most right-wing bloggers seem to ask before they start writing is:  “How can I help the Republicans today?”  Cathy merely seemed committed to the truth as she saw it.  She was a contrarian.  She was impatient with the politically correct fog that descended on mainstream journalism, especially at the LA Times.  But her focus was on life, not elections.  

The greatest tribute I can think of to Cathy Seipp as a writer is that she is impossible to summarize or encapsulate.  She breathed, walked, raved and laughed, and you didn’t feel like you were reading it, you were experiencing it.

There are many better tributes than this one out there to read tonight.  After you’ve read a few of them, I hope you are impelled to look at her blog, whose archives will, I assume, stay up indefinitely.  It is a tremendous body of work, a reflection of our times and of a singular sensibility.

Beneath Contempt*

According to Fishbowl LA, as blogger and media critic Cathy Seipp lies in a hospital ICU bed, approaching the end of her noble battle against cancer, a grotesque subhuman being named Eliot Stein has posted an inane, score-settling fake letter on a site he registered in her name.   

I glanced at it, then clicked away, sick to my stomach.  Obviously, this thin-skinned ideological coward lacked the cojones to take her on when she was conscious, and so now takes the opportunity to have a morbid “last word.”

It is completely nauseating.  I guess there’s some right vs. left angle to this, (There isn’t:  See the first comment below.) but if so, Eliot Stein shames his side of the argument no less than Ann Coulter shames hers.  The only difference I can see is Ann Coulter makes a lot of money selling books, while I can’t imagine Stein enjoys success in doing much of anything.

I assume Eliot Stein has friends and family.  I feel sorry for them.  They must be looking for the exits about now — unlisted phone numbers, new e-mail addresses and so on to keep this lamebrain at a safe distance.  One thing is for sure.  Nobody will take note when this little tiny man passes away.  Cockroaches don’t get funerals.

*UPDATE 3/30/07.  Karma.  

No, Really, I Don’t Know Anything about the Sopranos!

Should I feel guilty?  I’ve been getting a lot of traffic lately to a post I put up about a year ago about The Sopranos.  The point of the post was that there were a lot of spoilers on the Internet the weekend before the first episode of the new season, and avoiding them would take some willpower. 

The post has not a single spoiler in it.  And even if it did, it would be a year out of date.

Well, if you type Sopranos Spoilers into Google, guess whose entry shows up on the first search page?  The search page entire marketing departments and spin-off PR agencies are built around.  I am so optimized.  And I wasn’t even trying. Nobody paid me $50,000 to consult for them on how to do this.  It just happened.

This isn’t the first time.  My Elliot Mintz post from last year still gets lots of hits, and until someone basically copied my stuff into Wikipedia, I was the #1 result of any search for the Paris Hilton/John Lennon publicist.  (I’m still a healthy #3.)  But at least that post had information in it.  You go to my Mintz post, you learn something.  You can impress girls with it.  You can win bar bets.  You can feel in the know.

Not so with my Sopranos post.  It’s just a bunch of pointless drivel.  It was meant for my smaller core of regular readers who check in here occasionally for a glimpse into my mind.  A glimpse taken on a particularly sad and mediocre day, catching me obsessing about a damn TV show.  

A few days ago, I updated the post to underscore its total uselessness.  But they keep coming! So this is my last shot, my last chance to get my integrity back. 

Attention: If you’ve come to my blog for a clue as to how the Sopranos are going to end, you won’t find it here.  I don’t know.  Go here instead.  It has a bunch of credible sounding spoilers in it.  I wish I hadn’t gone there.  I really didn’t want to know what it purports to tell you. It’s probably not true anyway.  But since you’re obviously so determined…have at it.

Do Macs Make You Cranky?

Then you will love this post from the Guardian’s Comment is Free page.  Apparently those Bill-Gates-but-with-a-pot-belly vs. Jimmy-Fallon-except-smart ads migrated to the UK last month, with different actors; David Mitchell and Robert Webb, respectively.  They are a comedy duo of some repute over there. 

The ads backfired on Charles Brooker, and then some.

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, “I hate Macs”, and then I think, “Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?” Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

(snip)

Aside from crowing about sartorial differences, the adverts also make a big deal about PCs being associated with “work stuff” (Boo! Offices! Boo!), as opposed to Macs, which are apparently better at “fun stuff”. How insecure is that? And how inaccurate? Better at “fun stuff”, my arse. The only way to have fun with a Mac is to poke its insufferable owner in the eye. For proof, stroll into any decent games shop and cast your eye over the exhaustive range of cutting-edge computer games available exclusively for the PC, then compare that with the sort of rubbish you get on the Mac. Myst, the most pompous and boring videogame of all time, a plodding, dismal “adventure” in which you wandered around solving tedious puzzles in a rubbish magic kingdom apparently modelled on pretentious album covers, originated on the Mac in 1993. That same year, the first shoot-’em-up game, Doom, was released on the PC. This tells you all you will ever need to know about the Mac’s relationship with “fun”.

Yeah, that Mac mouse button has been a barrier to my switching for a long while.  I love to right-click.   And count me as one who would be more likely to spend $1200 on something made by the glasses-wearing nerd, than $2000 on something put together by the hipster, who was probably out all night nightclubbing and still hadn’t come down from that hit of Ecstasy when he put the machine in the box for shipping.

(Thanks, Assymetrical Information.)

I Did Not Know the Term “Tar Baby” is Racist

I was surfing through MSNBC today and saw a headline that made me do a double-take:  “McCain uses term ‘tar baby’: Later says he regrets it.” 

Here’s what presidential candidate John McCain said, according to the AP:

Answering questions at a town hall meeting, the Arizona senator was discussing federal involvement in custody cases when he said, “For me to stand here and … say I’m going to declare divorces invalid because of someone who feels they weren’t treated fairly in court, we are getting into a tar baby of enormous proportions and I don’t know how you get out of that.”

I’ve used the expression ”tar baby” lots of times.  It is one of the most useful literary metaphors in the American idiom.  What other two-word expression exists to describe a situation where the more you try to fight your way out of a situation, you just get more trapped by it?   

But, according to the AP story on MSNBC, ‘tar baby’ “is considered by some a racial epithet.” 

Really? 

From one perspective, I suppose, everything in “Uncle Remus,” the most recognized source of the “tar baby” story, is racially suspect.  A collection of fables told by an ex-slave, transcribed in a recognizably old-south African-American dialect by a white journalist, Joel Chandler Harris, these were folk tales about the trickster B’rer Rabbit and his battles of wits with B’rer Fox and B’rer Bear.    The stories aren’t racist at all, but the dialect in which they are told is highly stereotypical.  In fact, that dialect might be the source of certain stereotypes that persisted for decades.

The “tar baby” story was the most memorable, giving us not only the one expression, but also, “please don’t throw me in that briar patch!” Which is a way of saying you hope your adversary tries to hurt you by doing something you secretly know will benefit you.  The briar patch was how B’rer Rabbit escaped from the “tar baby” trap. I’ve heard that expression dozens of times in business settings.  It came into wide use in the 1990s.  

The manner in which ”Uncle Remus” is offensive is a little bit contradictory.  The tale-teller’s dialect is considered by some to be demeaning and offensive.  But also, according to Wikipedia,

Alice Walker accused Harris of “stealing a good part of my heritage” in a searing essay called “Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine.” Toni Morrison wrote a novel called “Tar Baby” based on the folktale recorded by Harris. In interviews, she has claimed she learned the story from family, and owes no debt to Harris.

So, in one respect, Uncle Remus is a demeaning stereotype.  In another respect, he is a repository of African American culture that was misappropriated by whites and should be returned to its rightful owners.

It’s certainly not a factor one can ignore:  Could an African-American writer have published a book like Uncle Remus in the 1880s?  Definitely not.  

Wikipedia goes on to provide another perspective:

Black folklorist Julius Lester holds a somewhat kinder view of Harris. He sees the Uncle Remus stories as important records of Black Folklore, and has rewritten many of the Harris’ stories in an effort to elevate the subversive elements over the racist ones.

In fact, Harris does appear to have been somewhat of a folklorist himself, albeit one limited by his race, culture and moment in history.  He was born poor and illegimate in Georgia and grew up to become a journalist in Atlanta.  It was in the Atlanta Constitution where the tales first appeared.

In 1999, a Random House word-of-the-day site provided a definition of “tar baby,” first talking about the tar-baby folk tale, Uncle Remus, and so forth, but then adding this:

The expression tar baby is also used occasionally as a derogatory term for black people (in the U.S. it refers to African-Americans; in New Zealand it refers to Maoris), or among blacks as a term for a particularly dark-skinned person. As a result, some people suggest avoiding the use of the term in any context.

I’ve never heard it used that way.  It’s pretty clear from the context that Senator McCain didn’t mean it that way. It would make no sense.

But given all the controversy around the expression, I think the prudent thing is to stop making further references to Uncle Remus as anything but an historical benchmark. This is the position the Walt Disney Company has taken in refusing to release on video the 1946 film, “Song of the South,” based on Uncle Remus.  At a 2006 shareholders’ meeting, Disney CEO Robert Iger explained the decision this way:

“I screened it fairly recently because I hadn’t seen it since I was a child, and I have to tell you after I watched it, even considering the context that it was made, I had some concerns about it because of what it depicted. And though it’s quite possible that people wouldn’t consider it in the context that it was made, and there were some… [long pause] depictions that I mentioned earlier in the film that I think would be bothersome to a lot of people. And so, owing to the sensitivity that exists in our culture, balancing it with the desire to, uh, maybe increase our earnings a bit, but never putting that in front of what we thought were our ethics and our integrity, we made the decision not to re-release it. Not a decision that is made forever, I imagine this is going to continue to come up, but for now we simply don’t have plans to bring it back because of the sensitivities that I mentioned.”

Where I started with this post was a discussion of the American idiom.  John McCain unthinkingly used a term that was nearly universally recognized as part of it, with a meaning that transcends its cultural origins.  It didn’t make him or any of us a racist for using it.  Like I said, it was an extremely useful and humorous short-hand.

But now we’re on notice. Unless and until the folk tale in question finds its way back into the American idiom via a more authentic source, “tar baby” is out.

What If We Held an Election and None of the Candidates Qualified?

According to the New Republic’s John B. Judis, none of the six major presidential candidates for 2008 is qualified to be president.  Five of them have no foreign policy experience (sorry Hillary, but being First Lady doesn’t really count, and as a senator you haven’t been involved).  The one whose resume shows him to be qualified, John McCain, is discounted by Judis because “in his dogged pursuit of a neoconservative agenda, McCain shows little evidence of having acquired any wisdom from that experience.”

Given what’s at stake in 2008, Judis is right to be alarmed. 

Like everything else that’s wrong with politics nowadays, the roots of the problem in selecting a president qualified to serve as commander-in-chief and our nation’s representative to the world go back to the 1960s, Judis says.  By the 1970s…

(p)opular primaries became the main vehicle for nominating candidates. That meant that the party itself, and the party convention, became increasingly irrelevant. What mattered was a candidate’s ability to win votes in the primaries, especially the early ones. Foreign policy played a peripheral role, and only as a component of the themes the candidate developed. What mattered most was the ability of the candidate–best evidenced by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and even George W. Bush–to make voters feel that he cared personally about them. That demanded special skills from a candidate and from a large campaign staff devoted to polling and media, including advertising.

Jimmy Carter was the first of these post-sixties candidates, and he set the standard that subsequent candidates have followed. Even though the United States was still in the throes of a foreign policy crisis caused by its defeat in Vietnam, he ran primarily on a Watergate promise of personal honesty and integrity. His experience consisted of one term as Georgia’s governor. He had no experience in foreign policy and was being tutored during the campaign by Zbigniew Brzezinski, but the voters didn’t hold it against him. George W. Bush’s campaign in 2000 was a carbon copy of Carter’s campaign. He stressed personal qualities and knew, if anything, even less about foreign policy than Carter did. But he ran a skillful campaign and won.

Few of these candidates could boast any expertise in foreign policy. Many of them, as in the past, were governors. The senators and House members who ran for president were unlikely to have served on the foreign relations committees–committees that are generally shunned by presidential aspirants because they are irrelevant to local constituents and because they don’t provide a basis for fundraising. When challenged on whether they had the experience to be president, many of the candidates cited their experience running for president. The ability to campaign became the test of the ability to govern.

Whenever I read things like this, I always say to myself:  “God must love the United States of America.  Left to our own devices, we’d be screwed.”   I hope we haven’t done anything to piss Him off.  

Who would be qualified to serve as president, who has a chance?  Gore is the obvious choice.  Who else?  

Old Media Gets the Vapors (CORRECTED)*

(via howardowens.com)

In addition to the LA Observed suite, another great Web 2.0-from-the-ground-up site is Pegasus News, which delivers content mostly of interest to Dallas-Ft. Worth area users. On Monday, Pegasus’ Mike Owens Orren posted a story on his ill-fated partnership with the local Fox 4 News outlet — a relationship that started very promisingly, but was killed by someone he doesn’t name in Fox’s corporate headquarters for what can only be described as whimsical reasons.  

At first, Owens Orren writes, it seemed like a great match:

They had the reach; we had the depth. We had the search engine rankings; they had video people wanted to find. We had the indie cred; they had the network cred. They could promote us to a million people at a pop; we could promote them a million times a month in little increments.

The downfall began when Pegasus got Fox to agree the partnership was newsworthy and should be announced in a press release.   At first, an enthusiastic “yes.” But then, “no,” with a request for what seemed to be a slight change in the copy that would introduce the Fox 4 content. (The copy was boilerplate stuff; Fox’s requested edit was the kind of thing only PR people would notice.)  

Pegasus’ web developers needed a few days to make the change (not an unusual frustration in this world), which Owens Orren hadn’t understood to be an urgent matter anyway. However, two days after the request, in a scene that reads like a bad break-up:

Late Wednesday afternoon, my phone rang with Saunders and Mahaney (from Fox 4) on the other end. A vigorously unnamed FOX exec, who it was now admitted had been against the deal happening at all on the conference call about the press release had visited our site and seen that the requested text change had not yet gone into effect and unilaterally called off the whole deal. Yes, no one told us that the request was critical. No, there was no explaining that. No, there was no chance of reasoning, discussing or even learning who had cut the deal off at the nub. No, no part of the partnership could be salvaged. Everything Fox needed to come off our site and we wouldn’t be working together on hyperlocal news.

The best that could be offered was “maybe give it a time interval and try again.” How long? “I have no idea … a long time.”

Given the amount of precious time Pegasus invested in the tech side of this marriage, Owens Orren is understandably a little bitter.  His meta-conclusion rings true, however:

You can wait for corporate media to “get it.” You can think they have. But, in the end, corporations aren’t inherently smart, even if people inside of them are. And corporations aren’t inherently honorable, even if people inside them are. And those who can’t see past their nose and who don’t have regard for their partners will pull stunts like we just saw from Fox.

(snip)

This Little Company is at its best when it is flying the jolly roger. We work and play well with others, but apparently mainly those others that, like us, are on the outside. This episode thoroughly re-taught me that lesson, one that I won’t soon forget. That’s not to say that we can’t work with big corporations — we just can’t until we look the people who pull the pursestrings in the eye and they tell us that they, too, believe. And probably even then, we wouldn’t be safe unless they had a financial stake in our success.

One other thing is clear to me: We will, sooner rather than later, eat these larger media corporations for lunch, unless they learn how to behave in a world of distributed media. Granted, that’s the larger “we.” I can’t guarantee that Pegasus News will be The One, or one of the ones to pull it off. We’ve grown more quickly than you could have ever imagined with fewer resources than you waste in an afternoon. The “people formerly known as the audience” are mobile and transient and will abandon their old media habits without prejudice — perhaps worse, without even realizing they have done so. Blogs, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, RSS, Flickr: how many had you heard of a few years ago? These and others have disrupted the hell out of media in general, but have had less of an impact on local media. That’s changing, and fast.

The unnamed Fox executive who got the vapors about protecting the corporate image, brand, name or whatever from contamination by upstarts will probably have some explaining to do down the road.   

*(Note: In an earlier version of this post, I misidentified Mike Orren as Mike Owens, leaving the impression that I was quoting Howard Owens.  My apologies to both Owens and Orren)

The LA Times Goes Tut-Tut-Tut*

Oh, give me a break, Christopher Hawthorne!

What would a wireless Los Angeles look like?

In the sunniest scenario, the one sketched out rather persuasively by the mayor and his speechwriters, the plan would not only help make online access more affordable and available but expand the public sphere, turning every corner park and sidewalk bench into a possible home for the kind of coffeehouse culture that has always been a defining feature of urban life. It would send a message that the digital realm is a kind of public utility, as accessible as water and electricity.

A more likely effect, frankly, is a noticeable increase in the odd sort of public, shared alienation already on display in cafes everywhere, with people packed in next to one another but staring into their own individual screens. And given the sort of Angelenos who are most obsessed with being always connected, wireless access might fall far short of creating a new kind of social interaction or a revamped notion of communal space in the city. Ultimately, it might do little more than let a thousand PowerPoint presentations bloom in the open air.

The only thing worse than a religious scold is a secular one.

I happen to be writing this in a coffee shop right now, a Starbucks in Rolling Hills Estates.  I’ve visited every Starbucks in the South Bay and San Pedro, and quite a few in LA, including one in Little Tokyo where I waited for the jury, but this one is the most convenient, the biggest and equipped with the most electrical outlets.   Lately I’ve been working at home more, but this environment is almost as cozy.  I talk to people all the time  — brief conversations to be sure, but occasionally more.  I also run into people here, including friends and relatives of my wife and son.  I’ve arranged to meet people — “I’ll be working, you’ll see me, come whenever” — including my mother.

At any given point in the day, I might be the only wi-fi guy, or one of a dozen.  When I used to park here for entire days, I’d note cycles of activity:  Young Moms with their pramfuls of baby in the mornings, ladies taking a break from shopping at mid-day, realtors searching the listings, salespeople doing deals, day-traders, high school kids after 2 (they seem to prefer the noisy frozen blended drinks — so no phone calls then) madly flirting and flopping their skinny bodies on the cushiony seats six to a chair, and the friendly baristas taking their cigarette breaks at the outdoor tables.  I’ve overheard conversations in Spanish, Mandarin, various Arabic dialects, Japanese, Farsi and our native tongue down here, surfer-ese, which of late has taken on some hip-hop overtones. 

I love the idea that I could go almost anywhere in LA, open my laptop and rejoin the blogosphere, and/or do my work.  It completely opens up the day.  How many social and cultural engagements do we avoid because we think we’ll be on the road for too much of the day, out of touch from work?  In wi-fi LA, your life becomes more flexible.  If you know you could, say go to LACMA for an hour at lunch, then stop off somewhere nearby to see if you’ve missed any e-mails from your clients rather than waiting an additional hour to get through the traffic, you’re more likely to go to LACMA, no?  So what if we are “packed in next to one another but staring into their own individual screens….”  At least we’re out and about. The possibility of connection is immeasurably increased.

I don’t get what Mr. Hawthorne thinks we did before wi-fi.  Certainly, the length of the average stay at wi-fi enabled cafes was a lot shorter; and we probably did a lot more drive-through.  Very few of us have the social skills required to have a personal adventure in a coffee shop every day, or the time, unless we have another reason for being there — our work.   You will see much more use of public spaces — isn’t that a good thing? 

No, nothing’s good enough for the reflexive “if they’re enjoying it, there must be something wrong with it” mindset.  To ensure we all feel good and chastened, Hawthorne throws Mayor Villaraigosa’s ”digital divide” rhetoric in his face.

But free wireless service doesn’t mean a whole lot if you can’t afford a laptop. And the structure of the plans that have been taking shape in other cities suggests that ours may not match the populism of the press-conference talking points. The service in Houston may cost as much as $21.95 per month (with possible discounts for low-income residents). San Francisco may offer parallel services, a subscription plan from EarthLink and a slower, free alternative from Google loaded with targeted advertising.

That sounds quite a bit like the digital equivalent of a highway system split between private toll roads and sluggish public freeways. And it raises the question of how precisely to measure civic progress as nearly every corner of city life undergoes commercialization. If you put a drinking fountain on every corner but allow a private company to charge for each sip, even if it’s only a few pennies, can you really make a case that you’re improving access to clean water?

Actually, I think you can easily make that case.

In that sense, what rings most hollow is the claim from the mayor and his allies that universal wireless is designed primarily to help the city’s electronic have-nots. If that’s the goal, why not take full advantage of the fact that L.A. owns its utility poles, turn this into a wholly public project and make access universal and free? The answer, of course, is that cities feel they can’t manage even a moderately ambitious initiative these days without the capital and marketing muscle the private sector can provide.

Strike the words “these days” from his last sentence, and take away the negative connotation from what is, in fact, a rational awareness of government’s limits.  Even the most liberal mayors and governors realized about 20 years ago that the public sector is unable to compete with the private sector, especially when the private market for a good or service is already well-established.  Where does Hawthorne think the cliche “reinventing the wheel” came from? If the point of Villaraigosa’s wi-fi plan is to deliver wi-fi to as many people as inexpensively as possible, of course the city should tap the wi-fi industry!  It shows great common sense! Does that mean the contractor gets to make some money?  Yes!  Otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

What moral nannies like Hawthorne should focus on is the city’s procurement process. Who is going to get these contracts and by what process?  How can we avoid the “two shades of blue lights on the Vincent Thomas Bridge” effect?  (The result of a lobbyist-brokered compromise to allow two firms to get the lighting business, resulting in the lights on the span being a slightly different shade of blue than the lights on the towers.)  Granted, Hawthorne might not have the opportunity to opine on the Decline of the West, but it’s the details of this project – the marriage of the public and private sector — where you need to be focused.  

*Edited slightly, 3/12/07

Looking Like You’re Doing Something Important*

The successful campaign to get the Nevada Democratic Party to pull out of a debate sponsored by the most successful cable news network represents the essence of vanity politics.  I hate to break it to MoveOn.org and other Democratic activists, but, at least as of this writing, people who watch Fox News are still, surprisingly, allowed to vote.   By shunning their network of choice, aren’t you shunning them as well? 

This editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal was a bit sarcastic, but apt:

Hard-core liberals can’t stand the Fox News Channel. Passing a television that’s tuned to the conservative favorite forces many of them to close their eyes, cover their ears and scream, “La la la la la la la la la!” Then they dash to their computers and fire off 2,500 e-mails condemning the outlet, none of which are ever read.

But liberals’ aversion to Fox News has finally gone over the top. The Nevada Democratic Party had agreed to let the right-tilting network co-sponsor, of all things, an August debate in Reno between Democratic presidential candidates. Party officials were serious about drawing national attention to the state’s January presidential caucus, the country’s second in the 2008 nominating process. What better way for the party to reach conservative and “values” voters who might consider changing allegiances?

But the socialist, Web-addicted wing of the Democratic Party was apoplectic. The prospect of having to watch Fox News to see their own candidates would have been torture in itself. So they set the blogosphere aflame with efforts to kill the broadcast arrangement, or at least have all the candidates pull out of the event. Before Friday, the opportunistic John Edwards was the only candidate to jump on that bandwagon.

You’d think the deal called for having Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter mock the candidates between comments. No, even unfiltered, unedited, live debate between loyal Democrats couldn’t be entrusted to Fox News.

The approach of outfits such as MoveOn.org is so juvenile it’s laughable. Imagine if every political organization created litmus tests for news organizations before agreeing to appear on their programming. Republicans would have boycotted PBS, CBS, NBC, ABC, National Public Radio and The Associated Press decades ago.

So how did the state party, which voluntarily agreed to this debate, get out of it?  By accusing Roger Ailes, Fox News President, of being insensitive to Barack Obama by making the following joke at a radio/TV correspondents’ dinner:

“It’s true that Barack Obama is on the move,” Ailes said, deliberately confusing the Illinois senator’s name with that of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. “I don’t know if it’s true President Bush called [Pakistan President Pervez] Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’ “

Say what?  This is a joke at President Bush’s expense, not Obama’s.  Get it?  See, what Ailes was trying to say was that Skippy the Bush Chimp Hitler is soooo dumb, he doesn’t know the difference between… oh, never mind.  I forgot.  You never laugh at any jokes that don’t have the words “wanker” or “fucktard” in them.

I realize it’s easy enough to write an e-mail or a blog post, so perhaps you can’t argue that this campaign to impose reverse censorship on Fox News didn’t cost the blogging left a whole lot of time.  But, isn’t there something else going on the Democrats should be focusing on? 

*Update, 3/11/07.  In a column about Gov. Bill Richardson’s Nevada strategy, the Review Journal’s Eric Neff subtly shows why this was such a self-sabotaging move by the Democrats.

Richardson, the New Mexico governor with the best resume to be president, knows the West. Democrats rightly believe the path to the White House in 2008 runs through the West, where voters like their guns and open space almost as much as they dislike taxes and government intrusion.

Nevada has done nothing politically to suggest it doesn’t fit that mold. Voters have declared the state pro-choice and approved medical marijuana at the same time they have sought to restrain taxes and have elected fiscal conservatives statewide.

But unless Democrats reach out to Republicans and independents in Elko and Esmeralda counties, you can forget about Nevada going blue. And unless Democrats reach out to all voters nationally, the White House isn’t going to change parties.

When you reach out to people who don’t know you — whether on Fox News or in Carlin — you’re more likely to open people’s minds. The true believers won’t budge, but there are plenty who will.

But MoveOn.org apparently doesn’t want Democratic candidates to get moderate or independent votes.  Instead of winning elections, they apparently would rather exhibit their disdain for Fox News.  Well, hope that works out for you guys.  

Advice and Consent…for VPs and Presidential Spouses

I am not a lawyer, nor a constitutional scholar, nor anything more than a dilettante historian, but I have an idea that we need to correct a problem that has plagued the governance of this nation since at least 1992:  The elevation of the roles of the Vice President and the First Lady to policymaking and governing roles.  

I don’t think a situation like this was ever contemplated by Founding Fathers.

In the future, beginning with the next administration, I propose that if a president wishes to designate their vice president or their spouse to fulfill a functional role, they must obtain Senate confirmation for their service in that capacity.  The Senate would also hold the same power to demand their presence at legislative oversight hearings, with questioning confined to the area in which the Senate has accorded them authority.  

Why do I want this?  

There has been a whiff of royalty, dynasty and cronyism in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.   I think part of this sense comes from the secretive yet decisive roles played respectively by Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney.  There used to be an expression: FOH, for Friend of Hillary.  There are Friends of Dick, too, most suspiciously government contractors that have profited from the war. 

Being a special friend of the First Lady/Gentleman or the VP shouldn’t matter so much. 

The involvement of First Lady Hillary Clinton in the health care initiative, as well as her service as a de facto legal counsel to the president contributed to many of that administration’s lowest points.   She also had a hand in picking some of his cabinet members – who turned out to be the most problematic picks, including AG Janet Reno. 

President Clinton also assigned more authority to his VP, Al Gore, most notably putting him in charge of the “reinventing government” initiative.  Unlike Hillary, Gore handled his extra assignments skillfully and without controversy.  However, Gore’s expanded role — which Clinton bragged about — was the slippery slope that has led us directly to the “undisclosed” Dick Cheney.

Under George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney has truly unprecedented power, as the Lewis Libby case reminded us.   Bush himself has compared Cheney to a “chief operating officer” of a corporation — a stunning assignment of power to an office that throughout history has been circumscribed to presiding over (and breaking ties in) the Senate, standing by in case the president should become incapacitated or die, and serving as a spokesman and advocate on the political hustings.  Bush has given Cheney the power to classify documents and perhaps to declassify them. His influence over military policy, foreign policy and the debates over the legality of torture has been decisive.  Compared with Gore, Cheney has much more power.  Compared with every vice-president before Gore, it’s off the charts.

If a future president wants his or her VP to serve as COO, Congress should have a say.

As the 2008 election approaches, we have as one of the leading candidates Hillary Clinton herself, who would take office with an ex-President (barred by the Constitution from serving in that role again) as First Gentleman.  Think Bill’s going to spend a lot of time advocating that parents read to their kids?  If she wins, I want a high degree of transparency applied to his office.  Among the other candidates, John Edwards’ wife Elizabeth, an attorney, is known to have a big influence on their campaign, and might believe she is qualified to play a Hillary-like role. If so, I want to know all about it, and I want Congress to have oversight.  

The Cheney precedent is the most worrisome, however.  Cheney has set a new standard for vice-presidential power, which you have to assume every future vice-president will demand be equalled as the price of his or her joining the ticket.  The days when a candidate like John F. Kennedy could recruit a powerful figure like Sen. Lyndon Johnson to run on his ticket for geographical balance — and then ignore him once elected — are over.  Future VPs will expect to be COOs, or something equally impressive, just like Dick.  Their egos will require no less.

Based on the evidence of the past 15 years, it’s pretty clear that co-presidencies don’t work.  You could say the sample size is too small, that Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney were unusually polarizing figures, unrepresentative of future First Spouses and Vice Presidents.  But I would argue the reverse:  Ms. Clinton and Cheney were controversial because their power was so immense, yet amorphous.  They were the unseen hands. And they were protected by Executive Privilege.

This has to stop.  The president’s spouse and the vice president should be go back to their traditional roles and stay there.  In 2008, I have no interest in what Hillary described in 1992 as “two for one.”  I just want one.  I shudder to think where this co-presidency trend is going. If it takes a constitutional amendment, let’s do it.  I can’t think of a better issue for the current Congress to take up.  

  

Bob Hattoy, R.I.P.

Bob Hattoy was a grand human being.  

He is one of the handful of people who educated me about the environment when Mayor Bradley appointed me as his deputy for environmental issues despite my minimal experience with the issue.  This was in 1987, at the cusp of a period of environmental progress that I was fortunate enough to participate in.  He helped me, even though he was allied with Bradley’s rival at the time, then-Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky. He was naturally generous.

Bob was sort of the Robin Williams of the environmental movement — outrageous, lightening-quick, hilarious.  As with any activist movement, some environmentalists are irony-challenged.  Not Bob.  He knew what the other side would say, and he was already making fun of it, simultaneously making fun of himself and all of us.  He came out of politics, and he was a good exponent of the “don’t believe your own press releases” maxim.  He worked hard and passionately, but wore his burdens lightly.  His humor was never cutting, cheap or mean.  It was always apparent he cared about people. Not people in the abstract.  People in the room. People in his life.

In the LA Times obituary, Elaine Woo describes how Bob’s irreverence got him in trouble with President Clinton on the issue of gays in the military:

He told that newspaper in March 1993 that he “almost started to cry” when he heard Clinton say at a news conference that he would consider limiting the assignments of gay soldiers. Such a move, Hattoy said, would be akin to “restricting gays and lesbians to jobs as florists and hairdressers” in civilian life.

By the next year, he was reassigned to the post of White House liaison on environmental matters at the Interior Department, where administration officials thought he would be less likely to be consulted about issues affecting gays and lesbians.

Of course, it was Bill Clinton who made Bob famous when he invited him to address the 1992 Democratic Convention about AIDS.  After mischeviously thanking ”Aretha and God” in that order, Bob mesmerized the crowd and the TV audience, delivering this speech, proving he could be intensely serious when the occasion called for it.  Here is a piece of it, but the whole thing is at the link and deserves your time.

We need a President who will take action, a President strong enough to take on the insurance companies that drop people with the HIV virus, a President courageous enough to take on the drug companies who drive AIDS patients into poverty and deny them lifesaving medicine. And we need a President who isn’t terrified of the word “condom.” (Applause)

Every single person with AIDS is someone worthy of caring for. After all, we are your sons and daughters, fathers and mothers. We are doctors and lawyers, folks in the military, ministers and priests and rabbis. We are Democrats, and yes, Mr. President, Republicans. We are part of the American family and, Mr. President, your family has AIDS and we’re dying and you’re doing nothing about it. (Applause)

Listen. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. But I don’t want to live in an America where the President sees me as the enemy. I can face dying because of a disease, but not because of politics.

I was so fortunate to see Bob for what turned out to be the last time at a beautiful outdoor wedding of a mutual friend last fall.  He was the same guy, funny, sweet, extremely gracious to my wife, hungry for political gossip.  He looked positively vigorous.  But he told me that he veered from good health to bad, and wasn’t always so robust. Things could change quickly.

According to the Times, he moved to Sacramento in January, perhaps to facilitate his service as chairman of the Fish and Game Commission, where he had served since 2002.  He died last weekend from complications of his disease.  I owe Bob a lot, and I’m going to miss him. 

What Artists Can Do

The HBO mini-series Rome is the stuff of nightmares.  Murder was done routinely to achieve political as well as financial ends during the period depicted in the show — a period of civil war that accelerated the bloodletting, to be sure. If the historians consulted for that show are correct, Rome’s elite routinely consigned innocent people including loyal soldiers to an early death merely to acquire what they wanted, and faced no sanction.  Further down the social ladder, slaves, prostitutes, even children were frequently sacrificed for the most trivial of reasons, their murderers also seemingly unpunished.

In America today, and in the countries that also built their governments and judicial systems on Enlightenment principles, the life of every individual is seen as deserving of full protection by the state.  Even if a murder victim is a criminal in the act of committing a crime, our system is supposed to work to redeem that lost life.  In war, the common understanding now is that a soldier’s death is an unusual event, a breakdown in the system, to be avoided whenever possible. 

The jihadists’ willingness to sacrifice themselves as well as the lives of innocents is what avowedly gives them whatever advantage they’ve got.  That we cherish the lives of individuals is interpreted as a sign of our weakness and decadance, says Osama Bin Laden.  The jihadists know they can use our belief that every person has a fundamental right to life against us.  They draw on a more ancient understanding of justice, one that relatively devalues individual life, remorselessly sacrificing thousands of people in the name of crusades for God and power.

How did we get from there to here?  From Rome to the U.S. Constitution?  From the Dark Ages to today?  From nightmares to dreams? 

According to this review on WSJ.com, author Lynn Hunt suggests (in “Inventing Human Rights”) literature made a crucial contribution:

The definition of human rights, she argues, “indeed their very existence, depends on emotions as much as on reason.” Accordingly, rights continue to evolve “because their emotional basis continues to shift.” Jefferson’s assertions resonated, she says, thanks to “brain changes” that had occurred in the 18th century. “Ordinary people had . . . new understandings that came from new kinds of feelings.”

But where did these new feelings come from? Ms. Hunt offers two answers. First, new forms of art, especially the epistolary novel, focused on the lives of ordinary people and thus encouraged a broadening and deepening of empathy. “Can it be coincidental,” she asks, “that the three greatest novels of psychological identification of the eighteenth century–Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48) and Rousseau’s Julie (1761)–were all published in the period that immediately preceded the appearance of the concept of ‘the rights of man’?” Second, the public felt a growing revulsion toward judicial torture, a practice she describes in grisly detail. This revulsion, in turn, stemmed from a new respect for the human body, in particular its individuality.

The reviewer, Joshua Muravchik, finds her theory “not entirely convincing,” by the way. It feels right to me, however.  Who better than an artist, a writer, to go outside the hierarchy of power to show in memorable ways what “the little people” normally trampled by history think and feel; to educate our imaginations to see souls, not masses?

The jihadis need a good novelist.  Or a mini-series.   

Suicide Virus Attacks Music Industry!

Again.

Why oh why, music plutocrats from Pluto, does it make sense to choke off a source that lets your consumers find out about new music? 

The practical result of this ruling…

In a decision that could drive the nail in the coffin to Internet radio providers, the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board has endorsed a proposal by SoundExchange to enact royalty rates for webcasts and streaming music sites that will stay in effect from 2006 until 2010.

SoundExchange, the royalty collecting division of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), will seek to retroactively charge webcasters for streaming content delivered throughout 2006 to users, a decision that could send the sites packing for good.

The new rates will require webcasters to pay for each song streamed to each user, and will increase yearly…

will be to transform Internet streaming radio sites into one of two things:  A former Internet streaming radio site; or a site that plays sure-fire hits with a predetermined, guaranteed audience.  Kind of like the crappy radio music you can dial into today.

Does the music industry have the slightest clue about how listeners use their product?  Have they ever surveyed listeners who bought a CD or a download from a new performer, or from a non-mainstream genre, to find out how the listener became aware of the existence of this music they’ve now added to their life?   It’s not radio, because radio pretty much plays the music people already know.  And, sorry all you marketing geniuses, but it isn’t the advertising, the PR, the promotions, the commercial tie-ins. Or at least not those things alone; and they don’t apply to the fringe styles of music that many Internet streaming sites specialize in.

Mike at Techdirt channels how the recording industry thinks:

They still view the world (especially the internet) as a broadcast medium. Therefore, they want at small number of “professional” content producers who create the content for everyone else. Then they can just sign a few ridiculously large licenses with those large players, and “the people” get to consume it. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the internet as a communications medium — a medium where people express themselves back and forth to each other, rather than a place we go sit back and “consume.”  

Bad for the culture, bad business choice by the music industry.

(via LA Observed and Instapundit.)

Where Lincoln is Iffy

(Via Politico’s Jonathan Martin)

According to the Washington Times’ Ralph Z. Hallow and Stephen Dinan, presidential candidate Rudy Guiliani was on a roll at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) convention, until he screwed up and started praising…Abraham Lincoln!

In interviews afterward, some attendees said Mr. Giuliani lost momentum when he heaped lavish praise on Abraham Lincoln.
    While many conservatives regard the Civil War president as the spiritual founder of the Republican Party, others deeply resent him as a man who ruthlessly suspended constitutional rights and freedoms in order to militarily challenge the South’s belief in its right to secede. Some saw similar disdain for individuals’ rights in Mr. Giuliani’s successful war on crime in New York City.
    Mr. Giuliani took the side of the Bush administration on an issue that troubles civil libertarian conservatives, saying that “you need the tools like the Patriot Act and legal intelligence surveillance.”
    ”Rudy thought he was addressing a Republican audience,” said Mike Long, chairman of the New York State Conservative Party. “Mitt understood this is an audience of people who are conservatives first.” 

Implying, of course, that Mitt Romney wouldn’t be dumb enough to go around saying nice things about the Great Emancipator at a convention of conservatives.

This is the flip side, I suppose, of Bush defenders invoking Lincoln’s and FDR’s wartime transgressions against the Constitution to justify what’s going on today.  To some, this doesn’t elevate Bush.  To the extent that the comparison is seen as apt, it degrades Lincoln and FDR.  

Nonetheless…I am astonished that Lincoln could possibly be controversial at an allegedly mainstream political gathering in the United States in 2007.  The Washington Times is a friend to the right-wing, God knows.  Did the reporters get this story right?
 

Campaign Reform’s Perverse Effects

I was aware that my first political crush, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, was funded in his 1968 presidential campaign by a handful of liberal millionaires who wanted to dethrone Lyndon Johnson and his Vietnam folly.  I was not aware, until reading this George Will column, that it was McCarthy’s challenge that led us down the foolish road of campaign finance reform — a reform process with a great PR image but perverse effects. 

For 35 years, campaign finance limits have been sold as a way of “leveling the playing field.”  In fact, they provide the Establishment candidates of both parties an almost insurmountable advantage.  If Hillary Clinton ends up winning the 2008 Democratic nomination, it will be because of, not in spite of, campaign limits that artificially suppressed the potential for an insurgent, like Barack Obama or a centrist alternative, to challenge her. 

Will says:

Democrats have many interesting candidates, but governors often are the most plausible candidates to be the nation’s chief executive and only one remains in the Democratic race — New Mexico’s Bill Richardson. Three former governors — Virginia’s Mark Warner, Indiana’s Evan Bayh and Iowa’s Tom Vilsack — have left the field.

Vilsack said the demise of his candidacy was determined by ” money and only money.” Well, yes, but there were reasons, political and ideological, why he could not find buyers for what he was selling. Nevertheless, his statement triggered the usual laments about the determinative role of money in politics. This year we are told to be horrified by the fact that by November 2008 the presidential contest will have cost $1 billion. Which means that the two-year process will cost half as much as Americans spend every year on Easter candy.

Candidates do have to spend too much time raising money. But that is because the government, by banning large campaign contributions, has transformed a huge American surplus — money — into an artificial scarcity. The government began to do this for anti-competitive purposes.

The modern drive for campaign finance “reforms” is usually said to have been initiated by Democrats in response to Watergate. Democrats did start it, but before Watergate, in response to their traumas of 1968.

That year, Sen. Gene McCarthy’s anti-Vietnam insurgency disturbed the Democratic Party’s equilibrium by mounting a serious challenge to the renomination of President Lyndon Johnson. McCarthy was able to do that only because a few wealthy people gave him large contributions. Democrats also were alarmed by former Alabama governor George Wallace’s success in 1968, and they mistakenly assumed that Wallace, too, was mostly funded by a few very large contributions.

According to John Samples of the Cato Institute (in his book ” The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform”), congressional Democrats began the process that culminated in criminalizing large contributions — the kind that can give long-shot candidates, such as Vilsack, a chance to become competitive. Yes, the initial aim of campaign “reforms” was less the proclaimed purpose of combating corruption or “the appearance” thereof than it was to impede the entry of inconvenient candidates into presidential campaigns. In that sense, campaign reform is a government program that has actually worked, unfortunately.

Was Al Gore Abused as a Candidate?

Although the post is more than six months old, a lively little discussion erupted underneath my item chiding former VP Al Gore for using a private jet on his promotional tour for “An Inconvenient Truth.”  Someone who signed his comments “algoredotorg” and has a website called Drafting Gore claimed here that during the 2000 campaign, the news media “was incredibly biased against Gore (moreso than any candidate in modern history)…” 

The sub-amateur historian in me didn’t recognize this as a political statement but as a historical claim with little basis; so I went on to list all the victims of media bias who ran for president since 1960.  (Interestingly, in many cases, the media showed unfairness to both candidates, which some news media spokesperson like to claim is proof of their objectivity.  It could also be proof that they are consistent horse’s asses.  You decide.) 

Anyway, being somewhat of an Internet Pangloss, I didn’t really see what “algoredotorg” was really trying to do.  This was not about comparing views of history.  This was about creating an alternate history of the 2000 election.  It’s a campaign.  Salon.com pundit Joe Conason gives it full expression on Salon.com:

The same press corps that once snarled for his blood is now smooching his boots — an implicit apology that might be gratifying to the former future president, if only he were still naive enough to value their esteem.

The sudden fashion for favorable comment won’t influence any thoughtful American’s opinion of Gore, but it should remind us of the dismal media performance that did such a terrible disservice to him and to the nation. Although Gore himself certainly deserves a measure of blame for the catastrophic conclusion of the 2000 presidential election and the events that led up to it, his hateful treatment by the press slanted the campaign against him from the beginning.    

Conason puts Gore on notice:  If Gore decides to run for president, the smooching will stop.  Like my commenter, Conason links to a Daily Howler piece that cites the many mean things pundits said about Gore in the past — the same pundits who like him now and are seemingly encouraging him to join the campaign.  He quotes ominously a statement from ABC’s The Note:

“Basically, the political press wants to tempt Al Gore into the race, and then they will destroy him as a flip-flopping, exaggerating, stiff loser. And Gore knows this.”

I dunno, Joe…that sounded kind of like a joke to me.

If Gore is too sensitive to take the media pounding that all presidential candidates get, then Conason’s right — he should stay out.  It’s like a star ballplayer deciding whether to play in New York or Kansas City.  If he doesn’t like being called out on the back of a tabloid in type face other cities’ newspapers save for presidential assassinations, don’t play in New York. 

But I’ve never heard Gore himself whine about his press coverage in 2000.  Gore is an odd fellow, like most politicians, and the press likes to join in the fun of making fun of public figures’ peculiar qualities.  I think Conason, the Daily Howler and “algoredotcom” do their friend Gore a disservice by making it seem as if harsh press coverage caused Gore’s defeat (or un-selection).   There are plenty of candidates who got terrible press and went on to win the presidency, including the current occupant of the White House.  Of presidents in my memory, I don’t think any of them won because the press was biased in their favor.

Gore lost in 2000 because he ran a bad campaign.  He is getting adulation now mostly because he is being so blunt about the cause that means the most to him, climate change.  It’s pretty clear now that he’s felt the way he feels about global warming since the early 1990s.  But he didn’t talk about it in 1999-2000 because his advisors didn’t think environment as an issue would be decisive.  And maybe it wasn’t – but Gore’s lack of passion was.  He campaigned on focus-grouped issues he didn’t give a shit about, and it showed.  The meme that Gore had to hire a feminist writer to teach him how to be an “alpha male” stuck because, by the time that happened, Gore had already made an impression on the electorate as a guy who didn’t know who he was.

Nobody could possibly say that now.  He is unleashed as an anti-war, pro-environment progressive.  His credentials and experience in economic and foreign policy would make him acceptable to moderates in ways that Barack Obama can’t be.  Gore is far from perfect, and those meanies in the media will continue to pick on his flaws (like the blatant hypocrisy about his personal energy use).  But now, it doesn’t seem to bother him.  He’s grown a layer of Teflon. 

He’s no longer the “old person’s idea of what a young person should be like” – the rap on him back when he first tried to run for president in 1988.  This month, he’ll turn 59.  He’s already won the gravitas primary, which I believe will prove to be the most important aspect of the 2008 contest — and is the big advantage Rudy Guiliani or John McCain would bring to the GOP ticket. 

I think a Gore/Obama ticket is the only sure winner available to the Democratic party in 2008.  A ticket headed by any of the three major announced candidates — Clinton, Obama or Edwards — would have to get a lot of breaks to win.  Gore is, by far, the best messenger for what the Democratic Party is about now, and because of his long experience, he can crowd out feckless characters like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, whose dithering has slid the party backward since last November’s win.  It would be good for the country, and great for the Democratic Party, if Gore decided to run.

So I say to his fans and defenders:  Stop being such wimps about the media!  You’re wrong about 2000, but even if you were right, it’s the wrong thing to be talking about.  Don’t talk about Florida either.  If Gore was robbed or if he wasn’t, it doesn’t matter now.  Gore-as-victim is a loser.  Gore is a leader now; stop babying him.