Blog category: Barack Obama
Election | November 2nd, 2010
So that happened.
Once upon a time, and by that I mean just a few years ago, I used to get emotionally involved in national elections and politics. Then I thought hard about it, and I realized that caring about this stuff all the time impacts my daily life in pretty much one way: mental stress, because both my ability to impact national events and the likelihood of those national events changing significantly are just above nil. So I looked at it rationally and realized that there was little point to maintaining the same level of emotional involvement: I still vote, I still support ideas, and I still read a lot of news, but that’s really about it in terms of brainpower. There are things in life that I can control, so in mental-energy allocation, I stick to those.
This has had varying success: I think political interest is pretty ingrained in me by now, but for the most part, cynical-but-rational detachment has been pretty good to me. I like Obama, but he hasn’t failed my 2008 expectations because mine were pretty down-to-earth anyway. Now the zen thing seems to be working again: sure, I’m bummed that lots of voters apparently can’t figure out what they want out of government, but these supposedly world-shattering GOPers are going to go to DC, make a bunch of noise about deficits, and then cut absolutely nothing meaningful in federal spending while actually worsening the deficit situation through further tax cuts. (This is actually in line with what the public wants, though, so you can’t accuse them of selling out their constituents.) In other words, nothing will change until the country is somehow forced to change, and we aren’t there yet. (Which is good.) In the meantime, one party won’t even consider logical steps like means testing, while the other party seems to think revenue is somehow unimportant to solvency. Caring about these illogical people all the time makes sense for one’s daily existence? I think not.
On the contrarian increased-involvement side, now that I’m a homeowner and have put down some roots in a city, I finally pay a lot of attention to local politics. So in that sphere, which does impact my life directly, I’ve now started to care significantly. But for the “tidal wave” and “historic permanent shift” and all that: I await the next permanent shift in 2012, and then the one in 2014. Meantime, I got work to do.
My two-year stint in Ann Arbor is now over, but we went out with a bang:
Chicago: let’s do this.
With the big vote coming up this weekend in the House, I wanted to share this plain-language look at what the bill actually contains. Amidst all the shouting, this is a calm layout of the bill:
Salon.com: The healthcare bill: 10 things you need to know
Also, if this bill — which relies on market exchanges and doesn’t have a government-run plan — is what passes as “socialist”, the word has truly lost all meaning.
And I thought we had a prestigious, rub-your-face-in-it speaker at NU in 2002:
President Obama to deliver U-M spring 2010 commencement address
Yet before I think this is too cool, it’s only for the undergrad graduation, as the b-school graduation is April 30. Regardless, that is one serious publicity coup for UMich. Way to go, Blue.
UPDATE: Seems grad students get four tickets after all. Sweet.
I’m not 100 percent bummed about tonight; this will probably force Obama and the Democrats to focus on naked job-creation projects like they should have done in the first place. The only problem is that any efforts to get job projects passed will probably get caught in the newfound morass – by gaining a seat (and maybe more in November?) and never budging an inch to support anything Democrat-initiated, Republicans have created a self-fulfilling prophecy that government can’t solve anybody’s problems.
And apologies to anyone who follows my Twitter posts, from which I basically constructed this entire post. Recycling is good for the Earth, after all.
Tomorrow is the Massachusetts special Senate election for Ted Kennedy’s seat, the coverage of which has been drawing my attention for the past week and a half. While I think it’ll be a disappointment if Coakley loses, as it would indicate reinforcement of the unsuccessful status quo of the past decade, that and a G.O.P. gain in November will surprise me about as much as our Chicago toaster oven will when it burns the toast again. (And by that I mean I will be not at all surprised.)
The stats on midterm elections are frequently trotted out, and they’re almost always bad for the incumbent President’s party. Also frequently trotted out these days is the fact that the “Tea Party” is more popular than either major party, and while that movement doesn’t seem to me to have a platform beyond “visceral howls of opposition”, that’s a lot of voter anger floating around that’s inevitably focused on the team in power.
That said, what potential G.O.P. candidate out there can win in 2012? It looks now like none of them can: Romney is too manufactured to get the nomination; Huckabee commuted the sentence of a prisoner who later murdered four police officers; Palin won’t convince enough general-election voters that she’s competent; and Pawlenty is possible but Midwestern governors are usually too nondescript (remember when people said Tom Vilsack could get the Democratic nomination?). The best remaining candidate is probably Rudy Giuliani, but his personal life is a mess, he’s too socially liberal for the base, he dropped out in 2008 when he couldn’t even win the Florida primary and he’s made enough ridiculous claims recently to turn off most voters. In early 2006 the Democrats had the Hillary machine and Obama was an untarnished star, but there’s nobody in the G.O.P. like that as of January 2010.
Anything’s possible in almost three years — caveat up in here — but the conservative part of the G.O.P. is super fired-up and determined to knock off all moderates, meaning they’re either going to nominate someone like Palin who is very unlikely to win the general election or they’ll get angry at having to swallow yet another compromise mainstream candidate like McCain. Either way, not a great situation for challenging a sitting president who’s had time to recalibrate from midterm results.
Things I don’t like about the G20 in Pittsburgh today:
- In Pittsburgh fashion, the citizens are mistaking dreadlocked-white-people protesters for a snowstorm and hunkering down with supplies of bread, milk and toilet paper.
- College-educated anarchists breaking things, garnering tons and tons of sympathy for their cause. And by tons and tons, I mean zero.
Things I like about the G20 in Pittsburgh today:
- National news outlets being forced to do stories (here and here and here) conceding that “Once smoky and horrible, Pittsburgh today is a creative, scenic center of high-tech industry,” or in layman’s terms, “Hey, it’s nice here!” We keep telling you it’s not a dump, but you just can’t stop indulging the “blue-collar” stereotype.
- Mad props from the President and world leaders!
- $8 million into the local economy — even if that’s not a ton, and G20 cities don’t usually see much economic benefit, it’s still a net positive. (Though what’s up with that taken-aback headline, former employer?)
- This humorous image (from Magnus Patris via the blogger formerly known as PittGirl):
- World summits hosted: Pittsburgh 1, Cleveland 0.
- The trend has been building, so it had to tip at some point, for better or worse:
News Corp. to Charge for All Websites, Business Spectator (Australia)
In America, this could work to an extent, because News Corp.’s two big properties here are the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, both outlets with a dedicated (read: rabid) readership that turns there for a specific take on things that really speak to them. But outside the U.S. and for most of the company, I think this is a really bad idea: I don’t see anybody paying to access Sky News online, or junk tabloids like The Sun or New York Post (American, but more reminiscent of a British or Australian News Corp. publication).
I don’t think the blanket approach is a good way to go, and this type of drastic change should have been evaluated on a per-publication basis. (Maybe it was and they went with this anyway, but that would be puzzling.) TIME.com tried this when I was there, and it was a big failure — TIME is going for such a wide volume of readers that they don’t create a really targeted, “I need my fix” demand, and Sky News isn’t exactly media crack, either. Even the NY Times couldn’t pull this off with their opinion section, and that’s at least at the heroin-level of punditry.
More reaction roundup from the NY Times.
I read an opinion piece in the Washington Post criticizing the Obama-as-Joker poster, in which the author argues that the poster is playing on racial fears and says that this poster isn’t as effective as the “Hope” one from the election.
That seems wrong on two counts. First, even the article itself takes a way long rhetorical path before it can make a connection between the Joker and racial fear. The Joker has always been a white guy, except on the ’60s Batman TV show, when you could possibly say he was sorta-Latino thanks to Cesar Romero. This article just doesn’t convince me that there’s anything about the Joker that links to blackness at all — if you want to break this Joker dude down racially, Heath Ledger clearly depicted him as a source of random violence, a.k.a. terrorism, and I’d say there’s a defined ethnic group that has a clear monopoly on being considered terrorists. Also, the Joker is a sociopathic serial murderer, and “weird middle-aged white guy” is the depiction that immediately springs to mind with that term.
Second, the Joker poster is totally blunt, but that’s not really ineffective: the great bulk of people are going to think, “Joker bad and socialism bad, so Obama bad”. I’m already seeing it as online avatars, so clearly it’s blunt enough to work on some level. You could get into the fact that probably 70% of people who dislike socialism have any knowledge of the topic besides negative word association, but the point is the poster ties the president pretty effectively to two things Americans dislike. Fair or not, it’s effective, and it’s not racist.
- The Chicago Tribune launched a redesign today. I’m struck first off how much the top navigation looks like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette site. (Check out the two local-news pages, which for the Trib is the one I read the most.) But they did do a good job of cleaning it up a bit, particularly the headlines toward the bottom of the local-news page that used to get lost with no context, a.k.a. subhead, and the fact that the flyout links under the top navigation bar seem to be pretty flexible for spotlighting new stuff.
- My pick for Michael Vick’s ultimate destination: the Oakland Raiders. Here’s why:
- JaMarcus Russell is not exactly a showstopper;
- Jeff Garcia is too old;
- Oakland likes to take slightly older players with something to prove — think Daunte Culpepper;
- Al Davis is a total jagoff and probably hates puppies.
This guy seems to differ from my opinion, but I think he will be surprised in the end. Or I will. The point is, surprise will happen at some point.
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