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:
Things I like about the G20 in Pittsburgh today:
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.
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.
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.
I do miss the cheese fries and cherry milkshakes. And Geeta and I sat at that same table the last time we ate at Ben’s.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7822643.stm?lss
It seems this is a month old, but it’s all good.
Obama Orders Halt to Prosecutions at Guantánamo
While I think it’s good to close down this negative symbol of America, I’m still curious what the new administration plans to do with the detainees. Now that we’re back with a lawyer president, much less a law professor, I hope he has a plan.
After all, what team beat the ‘Skins to continue the Washington pro football presidential-prediction index?
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.
… and by a huge victory, at that.
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.
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.
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.
My old compatriots at Slate did their incredibly lopsided list last week of which staffer is voting for whom. Since I used to work there, I figured I might as well pile on.
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:
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.
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.
