The other day I was thinking of famous people, so then I thought I might as well put together all the ones I’ve seen in person into a comprehensive but shameless post. So here you go.
Trent Reznor: Saw him at the Pittsburgh airport. (He grew up about an hour north, in Meadville.) He got his own bags. Short dude, but cool hair.
Jeremy Piven and Adrian Grenier: Driving an SUV and heading to a fried-seafood restaurant with a really skinny girlfriend, respectively. For some reason that trip to L.A. became the “see people from Entourage” trip. I also saw Mrs. Ari Gold on the trip before that one.
Whoopi Goldberg: She was walking up Sixth Avenue. That’s pretty much it.
Jim Lehrer: At a book-launch party in D.C. at Ben Bradlee’s house. (I met him too, but that’s an interesting anecdote for another time.) Lehrer = super nice and introduced himself as if the rest of us would have no idea who he is. (“Hi, Jim Lehrer, nice to meet you.”)
L.L. Cool J: Walking through O’Hare airport. The woman ringing up my gum bailed in the middle of our transaction to go stare at him.
Dennis Kucinich: Strangely, in 2.5 years in D.C., and even having lived on Capitol Hill, Dennis Kucinich was the only recognizable politician I encountered. (Presidential motorcades don’t count.) I was out on a run and the Rep from Ohio was walking with some staff. Seriously short dude.
Wolf Blitzer and Christiane Amanpour: I met them at the CNN 25th anniversary party in Atlanta. Wolf is pretty short, and Christiane drinks Miller Lite.
Bill Cobbs: I didn’t know his name either, but I just now learned it when I looked up the guy from Night at the Museum that I saw waiting for a car in NYC.
Joey Porter: Saw him in NYC when the gate agent called for “Passenger Porter, Joey.” He flew coach. I told him “Nice game” and he said “Thanks.” It was craziness!
Joe Biden: Getting on a plane to D.C. in LaGuardia. Since I saw him in NYC, he doesn’t count for D.C. politician sightings. Tall, and mo old.
Chris Noth: Eating lunch with some homeless-looking guy in the same Hell’s Kitchen restaurant as me and two female friends. The two friends completely flipped out. Chicks.
Blair Underwood: He was waiting to cross the street in NYC, then I think he got on a bus. But why would Blair Underwood ride the bus? So I’m only 90 percent sure it was him, rather than 100 percent. But if it was Underwood, I would say he has, in fact, gotten on a bus.
Don Cheadle: On the five-hours-later-than-scheduled flight I finally caught to D.C. on the same day as the Biden sighting. A coworker on the flight, sitting directly behind Cheadle, completely missed him even with all the people mysteriously hanging around his seat. Short dude.
Michael Stipe, Christina Ricci, Mike Tyson and Heather Graham: All seen at a Guggenheim benefit party in NYC that I attended thanks to a helpful friend who worked there. Unfortunately I was a bit out of place: me and Mike Tyson were the only people not in suits, and I’m pretty sure that he’s the one of the two of us who could pull that off. Whoops. But I did make eye contact with Heather Graham. She and Mike Tyson later went on to star together in The Hangover. Coincidence?!??!?!
Updated Omissions 8/19:
Michael Phelps: A recent addition; I was watching the first Presidential debate with some UMich sectionmates at The Blue Leprechaun bar, then Phelps rolled in with an entourage of 15 college-age party types and the bar owner kicked us out of our spot. When we left 10 minutes later, there was a line around the block to get in.
Ted Turner: He was down the hall at one of the TIME conferences. I also saw Bill Clinton and Bill Gates at this thing, but they were scheduled speakers, which would be cheating to include.
Bob Novak: I’m surprised I forgot him, since he just died yesterday. Saw him at the restaurant where I was eating dinner with some coworkers. No CIA secrets were revealed to me.
The WSJ opinion page is notoriously right-leaning, particularly compared to its news section, but an editorial today is pretty far out even for them. Check this, from “The Absentee Senator“, Wall Street Journal:
This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire’s team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn’t been counted, setting off a hunt for “new” Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she’d discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.
First, Norm Coleman’s concession was hardly “gracious” — he drew out the process in court for seven months, leaving Minnesota down one senator the whole time. And if anybody is the model for election legal street fights and sketchy vote-count maneuvering through the courts, I think that would have to be the guy who “won” in the 2000 Presidential election.
Truly the Steeler Nation has powers that cannot be comprehended by mere humans. A certain individual would be wise to switch over from the Chicago Bears.
People are chanting “Obama! Obama!”, honking their horns, pounding drums and clapping in unison outside my window in Ann Arbor tonight, and it’s 2:40 a.m. This is louder than any Michigan game and is unlike anything I’ve ever heard. Even when I discount partisanship, the tone feels so much different than the Bush wins of 2000 and 2004 — when I look at the victorious mood I saw back then, it felt that the tone of the celebrations was more, “We won and you didn’t; we proved our ideas right and defeated yours.” Yet today the nature of the happiness seems different, like a huge sense of relief that things really can be what we hoped they could be. Maybe that’s just because it’s been so many years of the other side winning, and so the left side doesn’t know how to gloat; maybe not. But it seems like the difference between a fan who watches his favorite team trounce the visitors versus a guy passing a test that he studied for and still worried he’d fail.
Even up until the last minute, I just didn’t believe Obama would win. It’s not so much that I thought America was racist, but that it was too set in its ways to make such a historic shift in such tumultuous times. People cling to the familiar, I thought. We rally round the known. Yet tonight I saw that so much of the country was so desperate to better things after eight years of the worst un-American leadership it has ever seen that it moved beyond any familiar model and was ready to listen to new ideas.
The old, heroic American John McCain made a reappearance tonight, just as I thought he would under winning circumstances. That he did so even while losing is a testament to Sen. John McCain. Maybe if he had stayed in his own personality earlier and avoided handing his campaign over to the worst of his party, things would have gone differently. But I don’t know that Republican circumstances could have allowed him to avoid running the campaign he did — there are too many influentials in the Republican Party who continue to bay for liberal blood even after eight years of government dominance, and getting past that obstacle to win the nomination is all but impossible. No matter what the worst of Democratic partisans say, we all saw that McCain never warmed to the ugliest of the attack-dog nastiness that was demanded of him by the party poo-bahs, and that’s why he was ultimately ineffective at it. Perhaps another scored-earth partisan like Bush or the oily Rudy Giuliani would have been able to exploit the nation’s worst attitudes enough to take down Obama, but McCain just seems incapable of that — and that’s a compliment.
I really did feel a great sadness watching him concede tonight, because the entire nation knew that this was the end for a guy who gave his body and so many years of his life to his country. The fact that McCain never would have been able to run the campaign that he probably wanted to run is what has made me so cynical about our political system, because it chews up positive and pure ideals as the barrier for entry into the public forum. Yet watching McCain return to the Senate to ultimately fade from the scene, even with all of his failings — there’s something sad about it all.
What will make the victory easier to accept for the nation is that there’s no question of the winner — Obama won not only Ohio, but Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, New Mexico, Colorado and potentially even Indiana and North Carolina. (As of now.) Seismic, indeed.
I keep my emotions in check over political events, but I almost teared up watching Jesse Jackson, Oprah and Obama’s other black supporters weeping with joy at the Grant Park rally. My grandpa who emigrated from Ireland greatly admired John F. Kennedy, and in the Irish admiration for Kennedy and the parallel black support for Obama on dispay tonight there’s something really profound: no matter how awful the things history has done to your race or your nationality, with time and human spirit it’s possible to rise above it and get to a better place. Even if it takes generations, it really can be done. To finally get to witness the end triumph is something very special indeed, and no matter your political leanings, that was special to see tonight.
As I looked at the McCain rally’s audience today, I wondered more than ever just how the Republican party is going to move into the demographics of the 21st century. While Grant Park was a total mishmash, I couldn’t find any non-white faces in all the Arizona crowd shots and panning shots that I saw. No matter what you consider the “real America”, when that America has to share space with demographic reality, you had better find a way to move towards positive integration.
I’d like to end on one strange political note, and to acknowledge a historical man who has indirectly led to the greatest racial advance this country has ever seen. You probably won’t guess his name.
He is George W. Bush.
Bush is that reviled type of historical figure who inherits a bad situation, then complicates it and makes it worse to a degree far beyond its original nature. As the worst president in American history, he has in fact done such a poor job for the nation that many of those older voters in Ohio or Virginia who would have otherwise been far too focused on Obama’s race likely said to themselves today, “Race used to be a directly negative factor in a politician, but after the incompetence this country has endured in the past eight years and how angry it has made me, I will vote for anybody the opposition party can offer who represents a break from the present situation.” Obama has a funny name, he’s not white, and he has liberal ideas, but he is something new and became a vessel for hope about a different and better future. That won him the election tonight, and strangely George W. Bush did a lot to open the door.
I was just now thinking that this is the first election day since 2000 that I’m not working at a big news organization. Two, four, and six years ago I’d be gearing up to be at the office on some weird schedule like 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., hoping we’d order the right kind of pizza for dinner and scrambling to adjust the coverage as new info came in. Everything would be in a huge, crazy rush, and the anticipation of each new development felt like the weight of the world.
Because it’s late, I’m tired from the immense amount of work being dumped on my head — never listen to someone who says business school is a joke — and I think we’re all nervous and exhausted to see how this crazy thing will turn out, I’ll get this out there:
I still like some things about John McCain. His socialist / terrorist name-calling campaign makes me really pissed (and legitimately scared for Obama’s life), but sadly you can chalk a lot of that up to the cynical desire to win at all costs that lives at both ends of the political spectrum. (And Obama has it a lot easier: he just has to say “George Bush and John McCain are both Republicans” and that’s all the negative advertising any candidate could ever need.) I like his military experience; I think that’s undervalued in public office these days. I like how he used to buck his party and criticize its worst elements — again, I think most of the not-bucking these days is based on cynical political stuff. Most of the time leading up to late summer, I even thought McCain would make a good president.
But McCain took the win-at-all-costs thing one step too far when he placed a divisive, creationist, happily ignorant hypocrite as his second for the keys to destroy human civilization. Presidents die, it’s happened plenty of times, and choosing your potential successor is not a decision to make based wholly on cynical political considerations. Her handlers let her face the press just a few times, but fortunately that seems to have been enough to scare most voters back to reality. I think there are still good things somewhere under McCain’s ugly 2008 political shell; I think he’ll somehow try to come out of it if elected, though that will be more difficult than ever after yet another year of scorched-earth, “real America” (there’s fake America?), hate-inducing campaigning. But because of Palin, and McCain’s total lack of “country first” principles in choosing her, I can never support their election.
To get to the other side, I’d like to say off the bat that the cult of personality around Barack Obama weirds me out. After seeing the sausage being made, I don’t get the fawning over a politician. And particularly after 2004, putting your faith in politics is a bad proposition.
But before I get too cynical, one thing I really believe is government as arbiter — non-state actors like business make this nation go more than government ever can, but for that to happen we need fairness, information and protection for when we can’t get it ourselves. This is where we need government: to build our roads, defend our citizens, protect our environment, bring expert knowledge to bear and keep things square all around, at least as best it can. It’s entirely true that government should get out of the way when smart people are out to get positive things done. But the past president actively took government in the wrong direction and treated it as a tool for the powerful and the cynical, not as a protector for America’s best interests. America is a lot more than fattening the top 1% and making false gestures at morality, and the military, the budget, the environment and the consumer have all suffered because the worst administration in American history didn’t bother to look at the whole picture. And when I compare the two candidates, I gotta back the. one who I think is better at seeing and thinking about that whole picture: Obama.
McCain-supporting readers who want to sway me before I vote should know that I learned from all those Bond-villain soliloquies, and have in fact carried out my plan before informing you of it. Your bad. But I hope that you get out and vote no matter who you are -- let's do this.
There’s an interesting look back today on Al Smith’s 1928 campaign for president, where all sorts of anti-Catholic sentiment got stirred up and Herbert Hoover won in a landslide. The idea that somebody (besides Jack Chick) would drop that today is just laughable — but not so much when you replace “Catholic” with “Muslim”, even if the Muslim part is a falsehood in the first place.
“The most remarkable parallel to 1928 has to do with the idea that Smith was one of ‘those people,’ that the people he represented weren’t real Americans,” said Mr. Slayton, a professor of American history at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. “And when Sarah Palin talks about the ‘real America’ now, I hear an echo of that.”
A bit corny at the end — even for an Obama supporter like me — but a sadly humorous reminder of why so much of the country thinks we’re heading in the wrong direction.
The Palin fires, however, show signs of banking. Over at Sheffield Lanes, mention of her name summons no glint from older bowlers, or from Jeremy and Joe Long, in their 20s, tipping Buds. They liked Mrs. Clinton but pass on Ms. Palin.
“She’s always talking about the ‘Average Joe,’” Jeremy Long said. “Average me! I don’t want myself in the Oval Office. I want someone smarter.”
Never was a truer word spoken. Give me a Rhodes Scholar, war-hero, economic-policy-expert candidate over some beer-swilling jagoff anyday. After the past eight years, we’ve had enough of the latter to last another 275 years. (I hope.)
This New Yorker article sent to me by The Wife is a really interesting look at the parts of Ohio that would seem like Obama country, but are still a bit shaky:
It’d be nice to write off racial prejudice as no longer an issue, but the big fact is that it still is, particularly in lots of the areas that are going to decide the election. I only hope racism doesn’t get in the way of economic self-interest.
Also, I thought McCain did slightly — slightly — better than Obama last night, even though the whole thing was tremendously boring. Reading the reactions this morning I seem to be alone in this view, but then that’s a good thing. Plus, even if it’s a tie, it automatically goes to That One thanks to the current momentum. (That is not a nice way to refer to someone when they’re sitting right there, btw.)
Trent Reznor: Saw him at the Pittsburgh airport. (He grew up about an hour north, in Meadville.) He got his own bags. Short dude, but cool hair.
Jeremy Piven and Adrian Grenier: Driving an SUV and heading to a fried-seafood restaurant with a really skinny girlfriend, respectively. For some reason that trip to L.A. became the “see people from Entourage” trip. I also saw Mrs. Ari Gold on the trip before that one.
Whoopi Goldberg: She was walking up Sixth Avenue. That’s pretty much it.
Jim Lehrer: At a book-launch party in D.C. at Ben Bradlee’s house. (I met him too, but that’s an interesting anecdote for another time.) Lehrer = super nice and introduced himself as if the rest of us would have no idea who he is. (“Hi, Jim Lehrer, nice to meet you.”)
L.L. Cool J: Walking through O’Hare airport. The woman ringing up my gum bailed in the middle of our transaction to go stare at him.
Dennis Kucinich: Strangely, in 2.5 years in D.C., and even having lived on Capitol Hill, Dennis Kucinich was the only recognizable politician I encountered. (Presidential motorcades don’t count.) I was out on a run and the Rep from Ohio was walking with some staff. Seriously short dude.
Wolf Blitzer and Christiane Amanpour: I met them at the CNN 25th anniversary party in Atlanta. Wolf is pretty short, and Christiane drinks Miller Lite.
Bill Cobbs: I didn’t know his name either, but I just now learned it when I looked up the guy from Night at the Museum that I saw waiting for a car in NYC.
Joey Porter: Saw him in NYC when the gate agent called for “Passenger Porter, Joey.” He flew coach. I told him “Nice game” and he said “Thanks.” It was craziness!
Joe Biden: Getting on a plane to D.C. in LaGuardia. Since I saw him in NYC, he doesn’t count for D.C. politician sightings. Tall, and mo old.
Chris Noth: Eating lunch with some homeless-looking guy in the same Hell’s Kitchen restaurant as me and two female friends. The two friends completely flipped out. Chicks.
Blair Underwood: He was waiting to cross the street in NYC, then I think he got on a bus. But why would Blair Underwood ride the bus? So I’m only 90 percent sure it was him, rather than 100 percent. But if it was Underwood, I would say he has, in fact, gotten on a bus.
Don Cheadle: On the five-hours-later-than-scheduled flight I finally caught to D.C. on the same day as the Biden sighting. A coworker on the flight, sitting directly behind Cheadle, completely missed him even with all the people mysteriously hanging around his seat. Short dude.
Michael Stipe, Christina Ricci, Mike Tyson and Heather Graham: All seen at a Guggenheim benefit party in NYC that I attended thanks to a helpful friend who worked there. Unfortunately I was a bit out of place: me and Mike Tyson were the only people not in suits, and I’m pretty sure that he’s the one of the two of us who could pull that off. Whoops. But I did make eye contact with Heather Graham. She and Mike Tyson later went on to star together in The Hangover. Coincidence?!??!?!
Michael Phelps: A recent addition; I was watching the first Presidential debate with some UMich sectionmates at The Blue Leprechaun bar, then Phelps rolled in with an entourage of 15 college-age party types and the bar owner kicked us out of our spot. When we left 10 minutes later, there was a line around the block to get in.
Ted Turner: He was down the hall at one of the TIME conferences. I also saw Bill Clinton and Bill Gates at this thing, but they were scheduled speakers, which would be cheating to include.
Bob Novak: I’m surprised I forgot him, since he just died yesterday. Saw him at the restaurant where I was eating dinner with some coworkers. No CIA secrets were revealed to me.
My old compatriots at Slate did their