Slate.com
Table of Contents
fighting words
Sarah Palin's War on Science
foreigners
ad report card
Why I Can't Vote for John McCain
HSBC's Bizarre Lumberjack Ad
gabfest
Advanced Search
The Almost-Over Gabfest
books
gardening
Making Comics After Mauschwitz
Talking Dirt
bushisms
hot document
Bushism of the Day
How the GOP Scares Jews
chatterbox
human nature
Robert Rubin's Free Ride
Drones vs. Terrorists
corrections
human nature
Corrections
Pre-Birth Defects
dear prudence
human nature
Baby's Pit-Bull Pal
The Robot Proxy War
dialogues
jurisprudence
Getting Bush Right
He's Not Robin Hood
dispatches
jurisprudence
Dropping In on Obama's Kenyan Grandmother
Wingtip Warriors
dispatches
map the candidates
Hail Sarah
Stopping at Home
drink
map the candidates
Good News About the Recession!
All Politics Is Not Local
election scorecard
medical examiner
McCain's Gains
VIP Syndrome
explainer
moneybox
McCain's Secret Polls
Dividend Dopes
explainer
moneybox
Can Ted Stevens Vote for Himself?
Big Biz Still For GOP
explainer
movies
Must Obama Prove He's a Natural-Born Citizen?
Good Grief
explainer
movies
White Supremacists by the Numbers
Yuck
explainer
music box
Will Early Voting Skew Exit Polls?
Still Current
explainer
other magazines
How Bad Are Electronic Voting Machines?
Dear Mr. President
faith-based
poem
Witches' Brouhaha
"Ach, Wien"
poem
slate v
The Slate Poetry Podcast
Dear Prudence: Dating Mr. Wrong
politics
sports nut
Track the Presidential Polls on Your iPhone
The Future of Sports Television
politics
sports nut
Yes, He Can
Dispatch From the World Series
politics
swingers
Together at Last
How Does a Red State Turn Blue?
politics
swingers
Don't Worry, Be Happy
The Pennsylvania Party
politics
swingers
October Unsurprise
Sweet on Obama
politics
swingers
Slate Votes
Are You a Swing Voter?
politics
technology
Political Halloween
A Radical Business Plan for Facebook
politics
technology
Registering Doubt
Texts You Can Believe In
politics
television
That's Not Funny
The Return of 30 Rock
press box
television
The Liberal Media and How To Stop It
The Real Housewives of Atlanta
press box
the dismal science
Countdown to the Obama Rapture
They Made a Killing
recycled
the green lantern
Vote!
Black and Orange and Green
recycled
today's business press
Who Gets Obama's Spare Change?
Stingy Spending Sinks Economy
recycled
today's papers
What If We Banned Polling?
Economic Scare
slate fare
today's papers
Obama Carries the Great State of Slate
Spreading the Wealth
slate fare
today's papers
Reload Overload
Knocked Up
slate v
today's papers
From the Last Debate to the Final Week in Two Minutes
The Greatest Gift
slate v
today's papers
What's at Stake on Election Day
Dominion Domination
slate v
today's papers
Introducing Charlie Rose on Slate
The Last Days
today's papers
World on Fire
war stories
High Risk, Limited Payoff
what's up, doc?
The Good News and Bad News About MS
far better than most. (Among other things, the bank is in the
habit of keeping more deposits than loans on its books—fancy
that.) Which raises another question: At a moment when many
Americans are suffering financial shell shock, does it make
sense to build your brand around an unsettling clash between
policemen and protesters? Wouldn't it be better to talk about
your bank's 140-year history, its 100 million customers
worldwide, its $1 trillion (and change) in deposits?
xx factor xxtra
A Bequest of One's Own
ad report card
HSBC's Bizarre Lumberjack Ad
What does a violent environmental protest have to do with banking?
By John Swansburg
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 6:16 AM ET
The Spot: Protesters guard a stand of trees, preventing a team
of loggers from advancing. The police arrive and forcibly wrest
the protesters from the forest. One young woman, her hands ziptied behind her back, glares at a bald logger as she's led to a
police cruiser. "Are you happy now?" she asks. Cut to a small
jail. The woman is released from a cell, having been bailed out
by the bald logger. She leaves the jail in a huff and gets on a
motorcycle. The bald logger follows her out—and gets on the
same motorcycle. As they drive along a woodland road, the
woman, who has been holding on to a rear handlebar, puts her
arms around the waist of the logger, who smiles almost
imperceptibly. A narrator says: "The more you look at the world,
the more you recognize that people value things differently.
HSBC, the world's local bank."
(Click here to watch the 90-second version making the rounds
on YouTube; when the ad airs on television, it's in a 30-second
cut.)
This spot feels more like a movie than a television ad. It's shot in
a convincing cinema verité style. It's got a narrative arc,
complete with a surprising plot twist and a provocative ending. It
tackles, unflinchingly, a defining political issue of our time.
And, yes, that is Joanna Newsom on the soundtrack. If Portland,
Ore., had an annual Very Short Film Festival, "Lumberjack"
would be a shoo-in for the People's Choice award.
Forgive me for asking so crass a question about such a poignant
tale—but does any of this make you want to open a moneymarket account at HSBC? Headquartered in London, HSBC is
the largest European bank and is a major player in Asia, where it
got its start. (HSBC is short for Hongkong and Shanghai
Banking Corporation.) While no bank will emerge from the
global financial crisis unscathed, HSBC has weathered the storm
Given the circumstances, HSBC could be forgiven for giving the
competition a good smack upside the head. How do you like me
now, Royal Bank of Scotland? Peep the balance sheet, UBS! But
Tracy Britton, head of the bank's U.S. marketing division, told
me the best way for HSBC to exploit its foresight is to stay the
course. "Lumberjack" was conceived before the financial crisis
struck, but HSBC plans to stick with the spot, and the larger
branding effort of which it's a part. Last week, the bank bought
out New York, filling the magazine with a dozen ads in its
"Different Values" print campaign. Like "Lumberjack," the print
ads stress the bank's different-strokes-for-different-folks
message.
Does "Lumberjack" deliver that message? There's no denying it
grabs the viewer's attention, thanks in no small part to Newsom,
the indie-rock harpist whose voice reminds me of the mournful
summer breeding call of the common loon. The $5 footlong
jingle this is not. The visuals are similarly arresting: The forest
location is lush, and the loggers and tree-huggers both look their
parts. I particularly admire the tension-building shot, in the 90second version, of a stoic protester taking off his spectacles as
the police advance. Also the shot of the protester who is wearing
a very realistic bear costume.
The melee that ensues is disturbing—the menacing K-9-unit
German shepherd puts one in mind of Birmingham—but
carefully choreographed to show both sides behaving
aggressively. As for the denouement, in which we learn that the
female protester and the bald logger are in a relationship, it's
either irritating or touching, depending on your taste in such
things. For me, it works: It's like a 21 st-century version of one of
those Ernst Lubitsch meet-cute pictures, in which the man who
sleeps in pajama bottoms and the woman who sleeps in pajama
tops fall in love at the pajama rack.
The ad loses me, however, when it tries to connect the story to
the brand. One reason the spot is so captivating is that it holds
you in suspense about what it's selling. At first, you're thinking
Greenpeace memberships. Then the logger and protester make
nice, and you're wondering if there's some new line of recycledpaper-stock Hallmark cards. When the HSBC logo pops up, it's a
surprise, and not a pleasant one. If, like me, you've been taken in
by the touching story of a world where Polly the Protester and
Larry the Logger can find common ground, the reveal feels
slightly icky. You've just been given goosebumps by an
international banking conglomerate—sucker!
And what exactly do loggers and tree-huggers have to do with
banking? Tracy Britton explained to me that HSBC caters to a
sophisticated clientele, many of whom have interests overseas.
The aim of this ad isn't, it turns out, to sell me a Choice
Checking account—HSBC has other campaigns touting such
products. "Lumberjack" is supposed to reinforce the bank's
global experience to customers who own real estate in Belgium,
say, or a small business with clients in Cambodia. The loggers
and tree-huggers are metaphors, deployed to show that HSBC
understands the diversity of viewpoints in the world—which in
turn allows the bank to better serve customers in New York and
Phnom Penh, alike.
In the past, HSBC has made this pitch in a more straightforward
fashion. In this TV spot, a narrator explains that in "some Asian
cities, it's considered acceptable for a commuter to fall asleep on
the shoulder of a stranger." He makes this statement over footage
of an Asian man falling asleep on the shoulder of a stranger …
in the New York City subway. Here the message is plain: "What
works in some places doesn't work in others. Let us worry about
this so you don't have to."
The fundamental problem with the new "Different Values"
campaign is that values—whether or not to cut down a forest—
are very different from customs—whether it's kosher to snuggle
up to the guy next to you on the train. Other cultures' customs
can seem strange to us provincial Americans, so smart
businesspeople find partners who understand those customs.
That makes sense. Values, though, are something else entirely.
Do you want to work with a bank that simply recognizes that
different people have different values? That some people see a
lost wallet as an obligation and others as a temptation, as one of
the print ads suggests? Shouldn't a bank have values of its own?
Shouldn't it be the wallet-returning type?
Grade: C+. The irony is that HSBC does seem to have some
unique values, values that have allowed it to steer clear of the
straits so many of its competitors find themselves in at the
moment. But you wouldn't know it from watching
"Lumberjack." As for the unsettling mise-en-scène, it could be a
smart strategy—the ad has sparked conversation. Perhaps
Citibank's next ad should take place at an Iraq war protest (bring
home the troops before my new six-month CD matures!). Bank
of America could go historical and set a spot during the summer
of '69 (free love—and free checking!). But I, for one, would
prefer not to have my psyche rattled by bank advertising at the
moment. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned.
Advanced Search
Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET
books
Making Comics After Mauschwitz
Art Spiegelman in search of a second act.
By Sarah Boxer
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 9:50 AM ET
Apologies to Adorno, but I've got a question: Is it really possible
for Art Spiegelman to make comics after Mauschwitz? That
question hangs over every comic strip and book that he has
penned since Maus: A Survivor's Tale, his path-breaking catand-mouse comic about his father's life in Auschwitz. The book,
published in two parts, My Father Bleeds History (1986) and
And Here My Troubles Began (1991), won a special Pulitzer
Prize in 1992.
Click here for a slide show on Art Spiegelman.
bushisms
Bushism of the Day
By Jacob Weisberg
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 1:43 PM ET
"Yesterday, you made note of my—the lack of my talent when it
came to dancing. But nevertheless, I want you to know I danced
with joy. And no question Liberia has gone through very
difficult times."—Speaking with the president of Liberia,
Washington, D.C., Oct. 22, 2008
Click here to see video of Bush's comments. The Bushism is at
0:23.
Got a Bushism? Send it to bushisms@slate.com. For more, see
"The Complete Bushisms."
.
.
.
chatterbox
Robert Rubin's Free Ride
How does Clinton's Treasury secretary escape blame for the market
meltdown?
By Timothy Noah
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 1:38 PM ET
The housing bubble has burst. The financial services industry is
a ward of the state. Insurance companies and automakers are
tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. Consumer credit is drying
up along with consumer confidence. Banks have stopped lending
money, and big corporations have started laying workers off.
The stock market is at a five-year low. But amid the greatest
financial panic since the Great Depression, the market for one
asset stubbornly resists correction: the immaculate reputation of
Robert Rubin, former Treasury secretary and pre-eminent
economic wise man of the Democratic Party.
Rubin hasn't been Treasury secretary since 1999, and he
certainly bears less responsibility than Alan Greenspan, Phil
Gramm, Christopher Cox, and assorted other Republican poohbahs. American voters, who are expected to favor the
Democratic presidential ticket this Tuesday, aren't wrong to
assign the principal blame for this crisis to the GOP. But the
financial deregulation that allowed markets to boil over began
well before President George W. Bush took office. Three
decisions relevant to the market meltdown—two of them
unambiguously bad in retrospect, the third a likely source of
future trouble—can be attributed to Rubin.
Derivatives. In 1998, Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity
Futures Trading Commission, proposed bringing derivatives
under her jurisdiction. Rubin joined forces with Greenspan and
Arthur Levitt Jr., then chairman of the Securities and Exchange
Commission, to successfully derail the proposal in Congress.
Rubin shared Born's worry about the derivative market's
unregulated growth, and in his 2003 memoir, In an Uncertain
World (co-authored by Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of the
Washington Post Co. unit that includes Slate), Rubin would later
write that derivatives "should be subject to comprehensive and
higher margin limits." So why did he oppose Born? Rubin
doesn't discuss the episode in In an Uncertain World, but
according to an Oct. 15 article by Anthony Faiola, Ellen
Nakashima, and Jill Drew in the Washington Post, Rubin fought
Born's plan for essentially political reasons: So "strident" a
power grab by the CFTC, Rubin believed, would invite legal
challenge, which in turn would create havoc in the derivatives
market. Unfortunately, after killing off Born's proposal, Rubin
never developed a less "strident" regulatory alternative—even
after the September 1998 collapse of the Long Term Capital
Management hedge fund, attributed in large part to its extensive
investment in derivatives, demonstrated that concerns about
these unregulated financial instruments were extremely well-
founded. As a consequence of Rubin's obstruction and inaction,
the market for one particular derivative—credit-default swaps—
grew like a noxious weed. The credit-default swaps were
unregulated insurance contracts on securities derived partly from
subprime mortgages. If indiscriminate subprime mortgages were
the vehicle that brought about the market meltdown, creditdefault swaps were the fuel.
Greenspan. As the previous example demonstrates, in economic
decision-making Rubin was often joined at the hip to Alan
Greenspan, the Reagan-appointed chairman of the Federal
Reserve Board who served until February 2006. (A famous
February 1999 Time magazine cover dubbed Rubin, Greenspan,
and Rubin's deputy and successor Lawrence Summers as "The
Committee To Save the World.") Greenspan, whose press was
once even more ecstatically favorable than Rubin's—Bob
Woodward titled his 2000 book about Greenspan Maestro—has
since been identified as the principal architect of the economic
meltdown. That's not only because he resisted regulation of
derivatives more emphatically than Rubin ("I think of him
constantly cheerleading on derivatives," Greenspan's onetime
deputy, Princeton economist Alan Blinder, recently told Peter S.
Goodman of the New York Times) but also because he failed to
rein in the subprime lending that created the meltdown and
encouraged the housing bubble by keeping interest rates low. If
Greenspan is Public Enemy No. 1, then the guy who got Bill
Clinton to reappoint Greenspan surely ranks as Public Enemy
No. 6 or 7. That would be Rubin. In early 1996, when
Greenspan's term as Fed chairman was due to expire, Clinton
considered replacing Greenspan with Felix Rohatyn. Rubin
talked him out of it. In Maestro, Woodward makes clear that
Rubin's view was shared by many others, including the more
liberal Laura Tyson, who succeeded Rubin as director of the
National Economic Council, and Vice President Al Gore. But
Rubin's endorsement carried the most weight. Woodward crafts
a tender homoerotic scene out of Rubin's telling Greenspan he's
gotten the nod from Clinton:
Rubin was … at the G-7 meeting in Paris,
where he and Greenspan had a chance to speak
privately. Taking advantage of a quiet
moment, they walked together toward a series
of large plate-glass windows at one end of the
room, with a view of Paris before them. The
two men had established a feeling of trust,
perhaps as much as two adult males in high
government posts might find possible. For
Greenspan, such friendship, closeness and
agreement gave him a sense that they were
working for the same firm. Greenspan had
once remarked privately, and only halfjokingly, that he considered Rubin the best
Republican secretary of the treasury ever,
though he was a Democrat.
"When you get back," Rubin said, "the
president's going to want to talk to you."
Greenspan could tell by the body language that
it was all favorable.
Glass-Steagall. This1933 law prevented commercial banks from
doing investment banking (and vice versa). In his 2002 book,
The Roaring Nineties, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph
Stiglitz (an adversary of Rubin's in the Clinton White House)
identifies Rubin as a prime mover in the 1999 repeal. The
principal argument in favor of repealing Glass-Steagall was that
financial institutions—most notably, Citigroup, where since
1999 Rubin has been a sort of rainmaker/consigliere—had
already worked out ingenious ways to circumvent it. New York
Times financial columnist Joe Nocera recently pointed out that
repeal of Glass-Steagall enabled Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, and
Bank of America to survive while stand-alone investment banks
Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Bros. went belly-up.
The argument against Glass-Steagall's repeal was that it would
encourage banks to extend too much credit to companies whose
stock their financial arms were trying to sell. It has yet to be
demonstrated that this conflict of interest contributed to the
current meltdown. But as the crisis accelerates the sort of
mergers made possible by the 1999 repeal—according to
Nocera, the big banks that just received a $125 billion
investment from Treasury are already saying, entre famille, that
they will spend the money not on loans but on mergers—
opportunities for such abuses will multiply. Another problem
with bank consolidation is that it will create more financial
institutions deemed "too big to fail." As Robert Reich recently
observed in his blog, if government needs to bail out giant
corporations because their failures would wreck the entire
economy, that's an excellent reason not to allow these
corporations to become so big in the first place.
Say what you will about Greenspan, he has publicly admitted
error. So has Arthur Levitt. Rubin, though, is in no rush to voice
regret, and no one seems inclined to press the issue.
Rubin's genius for avoiding bad press is legendary. In a rare
critical piece about Rubin in the March 2007 American
Prospect, Bob Kuttner wrote that in reviewing newspaper and
magazine features published about Rubin during the previous
two decades, he "literally could not find a single feature piece
that was, on balance, unflattering." Kuttner missed a column I
wrote in 2002 complaining about the scant coverage given to a
sleazy phone call Rubin made to a Treasury undersecretary
about Enron just before that company went bust. (Citigroup was
one of Enron's biggest creditors.) But I take his point: As far as
most journalists are concerned, Rubin walks on water. The man's
ability to do so even as the deregulatory culture he helped foster
comes crashing down—the only significant knocks I can find are
in one column by Robert Scheer, one by Robert J. Samuelson,
and one by Harold Meyerson—is nothing short of extraordinary.
Rubin's Teflon is so scratch-proof that Barack Obama can enlist
him to represent his campaign on CBS's Face the Nation without
worrying that John McCain's ever-more-desperate campaign will
make an issue of it. The program's host, Bob Schieffer, asked not
a single question about Rubin's roles in blocking Born's proposal
to regulate derivatives, in reappointing Greenspan, or in
repealing Glass-Steagall. Fareed Zakaria did a little better on
GPS (the awkwardly titled CNN show he hosts; click here for
Part 1 and here for Part 2), remembering at least to ask Rubin
whether he regretted his deregulatory policies during the Clinton
administration. Rubin replied that regulating derivatives would
have been politically impossible. Zakaria didn't follow up by
noting the well-publicized collapse of Long Term Capital
Management. On neither show was Rubin asked what role he
may have played in Citigroup's loading up on mortgage-backed
securities polluted by subprime loans. Zakaria (who is thanked
in the acknowledgments to Rubin's memoir for reviewing the
manuscript) set the tone at the start of his interview by quoting
Clinton's description of Rubin as "the most effective Treasury
secretary since Alexander Hamilton."
It's time to reconsider that judgment. Rubin has been widely
touted for Treasury secretary in an Obama administration, but in
the GPS interview Rubin wisely removed himself from
consideration. Perhaps he knows that Senate Republicans would
never question him as gently as Zakaria and Schieffer did.
corrections
Corrections
Friday, October 31, 2008, at 7:08 AM ET
In an Oct. 29 "Explainer," Christopher Beam incorrectly defined
a "natural-born citizen" as a citizen born in the United States.
The traditional interpretation also includes those born to U.S.
citizens overseas.
In the Oct. 27 "Explainer," Nina Shen Rastogi incorrectly stated
that a 2005 study of the AccuVote TSx voting machine was part
of a top-to-bottom review of California's voting systems. It was
conducted under the state's regular certification process; the topto-bottom review took place in 2007.
If you believe you have found an inaccuracy in a
Slate story, please send an e-mail to
corrections@slate.com, and we will investigate.
General comments should be posted in "The Fray,"
our reader discussion forum.
dear prudence
Baby's Pit-Bull Pal
I fear my niece will be injured, or worse, by this unpredictable pet.
won't let up, because you couldn't live with yourself if you didn't
do everything to prevent a possible tragedy.
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 6:26 AM ET
—Prudie
Get "Dear Prudence" delivered to your inbox each week; click
here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to
prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.)
Dear Prudence Video: Dating Mr. Wrong
Dear Prudence,
My sister is 20 years old, has an 18-month-old daughter, and is a
great mother. She doesn't have much money, so she recently
moved in with a new roommate. The roommate has a pet pit
bull. I met the dog a couple of days ago, and while she is very
sweet, she also seems to be pretty nervous. I know I was a new
person to this dog, but overall what I saw was potentially a very
dangerous situation for my niece. I told my sister that, and she
told me that she trusts the dog and thinks she's well-mannered.
She said that the dog and her daughter get along well, the dog
doesn't mind if the child pokes her, and that the dog lets the child
sleep in her dog bed sometimes! Is this one of those situations
where I can't tell her what to do, so I should leave it alone? Or
should I call child protective services?
—Uneasy
Dear Uneasy,
No wonder the dog is nervous. Suddenly a small human is
sticking fingers in her eyes and sleeping in her bed. You're
probably sweet and well-mannered yourself, but surely you
would lash out at someone who invaded your home and poked
your orifices all day. That a pit bull is involved adds to the
potential damage if the dog strikes back, but even a placid basset
hound could be provoked to take a hunk out of a toddler's face
under these circumstances. When a dog uncharacteristically
attacks a child, often the aggressor was the child who simply
didn't understand that you can't pull on a real dog's tail the way
you can your favorite stuffed animal. Your sister is a 20-year-old
single mother; that alone indicates she still lacks the ability to
understand how acting on her impulses can lead to life-changing
events. You must intervene, but try to exhaust all your
possibilities before you consider calling the authorities. Tell your
sister that her daughter's safety is at issue here and that even the
best-behaved dog can lash out at a toddler. Show your sister and
her roommate this article about mixing kids and pets, the point
of it being that both girl and dog need to be chaperoned as
carefully as if this were a Victorian courtship. Your sister and
her roommate must understand that unless their darlings are
under direct supervision, they must be physically separated.
Add, for the roommate's benefit, that if her dog bit your niece,
no matter what the circumstances, it could end up being
destroyed. If things don't change immediately, offer to help your
sister find another living situation. Explain to your sister you
Dear Prudence,
I have been married for four years to my very loving husband.
We started dating when we were 18 and 21, and made the
somewhat unwise decision of marrying when we were still quite
young. Unfortunately, we ran into a lot of problems early on in
our marriage, and I carried on an affair with another man for 10
months. I made a terrible mistake and know that I have done
irreparable damage to our relationship. Either way, I came clean
about it. We went to marriage counseling, moved out of the city
where the affair occurred, and made a renewed commitment to
each other. I couldn't be happier. The problem, however, is that a
year later my husband is still punishing me psychologically for
what I did. When we get into fights, he likes to say, "Well, why
don't you just go back with him then?" He knows this hurts me
very much. I have been understanding and supportive in his
effort to deal with his feelings on the matter, but I'm starting to
think that we might not ever get over it. Is my punishment for
this affair that I have to let him verbally abuse me for the rest of
my life? I don't know what else I can do to help him and feel that
I have done all I can. Help!
—Despondent
Dear Despondent,
You "unwisely" decided to marry, you have done "irreparable
damage" to your relationship, and you're "despondent" over the
prospect of being "psychologically punished" for the rest of your
life, yet you say you "couldn't be happier" in your marriage. You
don't sound that happy. Many people meet their spouses as
teenagers and go on to have long, fulfilling marriages. Others
start chafing at the realization that this first serious relationship
is also supposed to be the last—you didn't just have a fling, after
all, but a fairly long affair. Of course, it's possible for two people
with as rocky a start as yours to conclude that they really do
want to be together and make it work. But it never will if one
partner is enjoying the view from the moral high ground because
it allows him to better aim his verbal dirt balls at the other. You
should to tell your husband that you need new rules of
engagement when you two fight. You have acknowledged and
apologized for your violation, so now it's time for your marriage
to be about the two of you, not the affair. Tell him part of your
recommitment to each other needs to be that the past be allowed
to fade away. If he can't agree to that, then you two need to get
back into counseling and figure out whether you really want to
get old together or whether you want to get out while you're still
young.
—Prudie
Dear Prudie,
I work in an office of about a dozen people. I love my job and
enjoy working there. However, there is one woman I find to be
somewhat rude. She constantly makes disparaging remarks
about people who are overweight—she tells stories about
"disgusting fat lards" she encounters outside of work and makes
comments such as, "Fat people are so gross" or "Fat people
should be killed," and so on. I asked her once why she dislikes
fat people so much, and she responded by saying, "I don't hate
fat people. I feel embarrassed for them." My wife is noticeably
overweight by about 40 pounds. She is the most beautiful, smart,
kind, and wonderful person in the world; she is my best friend
and I can't imagine loving her any more than I do. So I feel very
hurt and offended when my co-worker makes these remarks. I
thought about talking to her supervisor, but, as I mentioned, this
is a very small company, and I'm afraid to "shake things up."
The whole situation has gotten to the point where I no longer
enjoy coming to work because of it. Please help.
Dear Boo,
Too bad your husband can't leave the duck blind for the night.
His orange vest and hat with ear flaps would be a perfect
costume—especially when he starts blasting pumpkins with his
shotgun. Don't turn this into a Harry Chapin song. Just because
your husband chose hunting over haunting this year does not
mean that during every future soccer game or piano recital he
will be out tracking deer. (Although, just to make sure, you
could tell him no way is he going off for spring alligator-hunting
season in Texas during the kids' high-school graduations.)
You're right, at ages 2 and 4, your children will little note nor
long remember that they had to face this year's trick-or-treating
without their father. What you don't want to do is telegraph to
them that you're unhappy and Dad has done something wrong.
So put on your princess costume, meet up with some other
families, and have a wicked time.
—Prudie
—Silently Offended
Dear Silently,
It wouldn't matter if your wife was the size of Keira Knightley;
it's your co-worker who's a pig. No one should have to listen to
such bile about any group of people. And given that two-thirds
of Americans are overweight, your colleague is daily wishing for
the death of the majority of your firm's customers, which can't be
good for business. You need to tell this loudmouth that you no
longer wish to hear any more of her opinions on people who are
overweight. Explain politely but firmly that the content and tone
of her remarks don't belong in the workplace, and you're asking
that she immediately desist. If she won't, then go to a supervisor
(preferably a plump one) and explain that you've tried to deal
with this yourself, but your co-worker's barrages are affecting
how the office functions. Then please write a mega-best-seller
about a man who finds his plus-size wife to be the most beautiful
woman in the world.
dialogues
Getting Bush Right
Debating W.: Making the truth more dramatic.
By Michael Isikoff, Oliver Stone, Ron Suskind, Jacob Weisberg,
and Bob Woodward
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 11:50 AM ET
From: Ron Suskind
To: Oliver Stone, Jacob Weisberg, and Bob Woodward
Subject: Debating W., the Man and the Movie
Posted Tuesday, October 21, 2008, at 10:35 AM ET
Dear Oliver, Jacob, and Bob,
—Prudie
Dear Prudie,
My husband chose hunting over Halloween. We have two
kids—ages 2 and 4. Halloween is something that is only magical
for a few years, and he is going to miss it this year. This is an
annual hunting trip that I always give my blessing to, but his
decision just crosses the line. He cannot control the calendar, but
he can choose to skip a year. I conceded—he is going, but since
this is their opening weekend for hunting, I'm sure I am not the
only wife having this argument. Did I do the right thing in letting
him go, or should I have fought harder? In the long run, he's the
one missing the memories, and the kids probably won't notice
he's not there, but it breaks my heart for them. It's my "Cat's in
the Cradle" moment!
—Boo Hoo
So, it begins—the first, cinematic rough draft of the Bush
presidency: W. is now, as they say, at a movie theater near you.
This is a rarity; as far as I can tell, there have been only two
major feature films about a president (one on FDR and Cliff
Robertson in PT-109) to fill the big screen during the term of the
presidents who were their subjects. To this point, the first rough
draft of history for this tumultuous period has, in large measure,
been a pile of books. I've written three; Bob, you've written four;
Jacob, you have one; and Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Tom
Ricks, and many others have made seminal, bound contributions.
The Bush Library. It will grow. There will be many more
volumes and plenty more movies.
And, Oliver—if I may call you that—you have my admiration
for relying on the Bush Library rather than indulging in
supposition and dark fantasy. For a first cut, W. is an ardent,
earnest, improvisationally fascinating effort that gives some
narrative shape to this era's Shakespearean saga. Still, as
someone who has read the key books (much less written a few),
I found watching W. to be a strange, disembodying experience,
two hours in a Cuisinart.
Things are sometimes mixed up—people say more or less what
they really said, but in a different place. Yearlong Oval Office
debates get boiled into a moment of heated exchange. Imagined
yet plausible events stand alongside actual, often historic
occurrences. But it's Hollywood. This is part of a conventional
cinematic squeeze and squish, composting life into a progression
of scenes, episodes, and incidents that leads to something.
The question is where. That's where matters get thornier, where
questions of causation intrude about what intent or
circumstances drive action. On balance, I thought the movie was
a sound representation of the visible, widely known forces at
play. Based on my reporting and that of others, I felt that Dick
Cheney, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld were eminently
recognizable and that their positions were clearly, if briefly,
articulated. The plot and dialogue revealed the basic nature of
the characters—a real feat. You managed to reintroduce some of
the world's most famous people to the audience.
This is one of the great values of this type of movie: Notable,
often tendentious public figures can be freed from caricature. I
think that happens here, especially with Bush (played by Josh
Brolin), Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss), and Powell (Jeffrey
Wright). These are skilled actors, and they manage to make all
three quite human and multidimensional. In fact, in the case of
Bush and Cheney, many viewers may find themselves trying to
resist the on-screen charms of this duo. I found this to be true in
real life as well: Many people who've worked for and around
both men say that Bush can be warm and charming and that
Cheney, while frightening, is an oddly alluring, intelligent
presence.
Yet I found one key—maybe the key—relationship to be
exaggerated. The evidence, as it is now assembled, doesn't show
"Junior" to be engaged in such a battle with "Poppy." Hell, if
Bush 41 showed as much angry fortitude as he does in James
Cromwell's impersonation, he probably would have won reelection in 1992. Bush the Elder's manhood is definitely not in a
blind trust. Beyond that, in terms of dramatic coherence, I found
it hard to believe that the loveless father-son tension, as
portrayed in the movie, would lead to 43's vengeful outrage over
Saddam Hussein's attempt to kill 41. (Besides, there are plenty
of foiled assassination attempts on presidents; sort of comes with
the job.) While this may have been overplayed, the missing actor
in the life of W. was 9/11, along with a real disquisition about
how, or whether, the catastrophic event changed Junior.
All of these questions, many unanswered, flow into the movie's
central drama and denouement: the cause for war. What got us
into Iraq? Why are we there? Did Bush know, or at least suspect,
that there may not be WMD? Did the beast of Iraq spring, fully
formed, from Bush's brain, from his Oedipal architecture? Did
President Bush take this nation to war under false pretenses?
I realize, of course, that this question is in a sense unanswerable.
The difficulty you face, Oliver, is one we all face. Five-plus
years into this war—a war, most certainly, of choice—the
reasons we invaded Iraq remain largely shrouded in classified
files, lost conversations, carefully guarded secrets. Like the rest
of us—from the most seasoned reporters to the tourists walking
alongside the ornate iron fence on Pennsylvania Avenue—you
had to make use of the prevailing best guesses.
That's why this movie—vivid, raucous, reality-based, wellacted—is a first cinematic rough draft. One of the movie's most
jarring scenes, a real keeper in terms of the crisp dialogue and
acting and gravity, is the moment Bush is told there are no
WMD. He feels as if he's been conned, misled. He rages against
his senior advisers. They look away. Rumsfeld takes a "screw
you" bite of pecan pie.
Someday, with the arrival of new disclosures and fresh evidence,
someone will rewrite this scene. Because Bush was not so much
a victim of circumstances and birth order—or of bad advice
from ambitious advisers—as he seems in W. He knew more than
he's letting on. He made choices of his own free will. And in the
fullness of time, he'll be held responsible for his actions, as
history eventually demands of all presidents.
From: Jacob Weisberg
To: Oliver Stone, Ron Suskind, and Bob Woodward
Subject: Fathers, Sons, and Presidents
Posted Tuesday, October 21, 2008, at 12:27 PM ET
Dear Oliver, Ron, and Bob,
Thanks to the three of you for joining in the discussion. W.
arrives at what looks like the end of an era—not just of a
disastrous eight-year presidency but arguably of the conservative
ascendancy that began in 1980. How the Bush family, which
once typified pre-Reagan Republicanism, came to play such a
pivotal role in this period is a central part of the story. If we want
to understand recent history, we need to understand this
unreflective family in a way its members will probably never
understand themselves.
Oliver, you'll be glad to hear that I disagree with Ron about your
treatment of the father-son relationship. To me, the evidence
does show George W. to be engaged in an epic battle with his
dad. That Oedipal struggle is at the very heart of his presidency's
failure. The son came to define so much of himself—his
personality, his religion, his decision-making—in opposition to
his father. More important, 43 developed his substantive view of
the world by rejecting his father's moderate, diplomatic realism.
Seeing his father as a failed president (while at the same time
wanting to avenge him), W thought the path to success on issue
after issue was to reject 41's choices in favor of 40's. You've lost
some nuance along the way, but I think you depict the contours
of this vexed relationship accurately.
As promised, I won't waste your time complaining about small
inaccuracies and changes made for dramatic effect. I do want to
challenge you, however, on two places where your version of
events is simply at odds with what we know to be true. The first
is your basic interpretation of the Iraq war. A crucial scene in the
film takes place in the White House situation room. The key
players are all there (including Karl Rove, who would not have
been). Colin Powell makes his case against the invasion to no
avail. Then, Dick Cheney, played by Richard Dreyfuss, stands in
front of an electronic map and delivers a lecture.
America's natural resources are being used up, Cheney says, and
most of the world's oil and gas is right here in the Middle East.
To remain rich and powerful, we have to exploit Iraq's huge
untapped reserves. When challenged on the issue of exit
strategy, he replies (if I've got this right—I was taking notes in
the dark): "There is no exit strategy. We stay." Once the United
States owns Iraq, Cheney declares, we'll be in strategic position
to control Iran—"the mother lode." As the map lights up with
red dots indicating American bases, he goes on: "Control Iran,
control Eurasia, control the world. Empire—real empire.
Nobody will fuck with us again!"
Oliver, if you'd played the film as a Dr. Strangelove-style farce,
you might have gotten away with this. The scene is one "mwaha-ha" cackle from Dreyfuss away from satire. But we're meant
to take this seriously. Do you really think Cheney persuaded
Bush to go to war so we could get Iraq's oil and then Iran's? And
if so, why do you think that?
Another case in point: The film depicts a meeting between
George W. and his dad during the 1988 presidential campaign.
The son pops the famous Willie Horton ad into the VCR and
tells his father that "Karl" says this could win you the election.
That's strong stuff, the elder Bush responds. Just make sure no
one can connect it to the campaign. George W. says not to
worry, they're going to run it through an independent
expenditure committee. "Good work, son," the dad says. "You're
earning your spurs."
Great scene, except that no one has ever suggested that George
W. had anything to do with the Willie Horton ad, no one has
ever proved that George H.W. approved it, and Karl Rove had
nothing to do with Bush's 1988 campaign at all. If father and son
conspired in the way you depict, they would have been guilty of
a federal crime, namely evading contribution limits by
coordinating with an outside group. I can't prove that this didn't
happen. But as far as I know, you have no basis for thinking that
it did.
Oliver, I know that you don't want to be thought of as a
conspiracy theorist. But these are conspiracy theories with no
evidence to support them. So, why did you put them in your
movie?
From: Bob Woodward
To: Oliver Stone, Ron Suskind, and Jacob Weisberg
Subject: Bush Was the Decider
Posted Wednesday, October 22, 2008, at 10:33 AM ET
Oliver, Ron, and Jacob,
Ron, I'm struck that you feel we don't have a general
understanding of the cause of the Iraq war. You write, "The
reasons we invaded Iraq remain largely shrouded in classified
files, lost conversations, carefully guarded secrets." While
significant new information may one day come out, I strongly
disagree. I believe there is already an expansive record in the
Bush library, and the work that has been done on the Iraq war
answers this question.
The foremost cause, in Bush's mind, was 9/11. It set an
atmosphere of "We are in peril, we need to do something." Bush
believed Iraq was a threat. The second was, I believe, his
conviction that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction.
Recall that the House and Senate voted on a resolution to give
the president support and authority to use the U.S. military in
Iraq as he deemed "appropriate and necessary." The atmosphere
at the time was very much "We are threatened, there is trouble.
Saddam Hussein is a threat." Too many officials and people
believed this. Third, the war plan that was presented to President
Bush in a dozen or more briefings, and subsequently outlined in
several books, shows that it was thought the invasion would be
comparatively easy and that it got easier as the war plan was
refined. Fourth, there was an undeniable momentum to war at
the time. Fifth, in Oliver's movie and in many of the books, the
portrait of Bush is that of "the Impatient Man." When some
intelligence suggested that the chief U.N. weapons inspector,
Hans Blix, was not being fully forthcoming, Bush ordered war.
The military was ready, and the invasion looked like it was
going to be easy. Congress and the public supported it. And the
press, very much including myself, was not inquisitive enough to
dig deeper into the allegations of weapons of mass destruction.
While there certainly may be some substantial revelations yet to
come, the idea that this is basically unanswerable, I think, is
wrong. In Plan of Attack, I quote from a top-secret memo of
Aug. 14, 2002, called "Iraq: Goals, Objectives and Strategy."
One of its stated purposes was to "minimize disruption in
international oil markets." Oil was put on the table as one of the
reasons for war, and I think this adds to the background noise.
Ron, you say of Bush, "He knew more than he's letting on." I
think there's truth to that, but I also believe he let on quite a bit.
To those of us who dug in the vineyards of the Bush
administration, the basic causes of the war in Iraq are there.
You also write that Bush "made choices of his own free will." I
think that's exactly right. He was heavily influenced by Cheney
and a number of others, but the decisions were his. As he said to
me, "I believe we have a duty to free people," to liberate people.
Many have said this is something that was concocted after
weapons of mass destruction failed to surface. But I watched
him jump in his chair when he said it, and I think it is a deep and
genuine conviction on his part. Certainly many would disagree
with it, but I think this conviction was one of his primary
drivers. I doubt very much that there was some mysterious,
Oedipal force at work or that there is a secret reason that remains
carefully guarded. The drivers in all of this are not really
shrouded.
At the same time, there is an overall sense or feel in the movie
that gets a number of things correct. Bush's notorious casualness
and inattention to detail are on full display. The movie conveys
his disengagement, his odd and frequent sense of being removed.
I think one of the best scenes in the movie is when Bush makes
it clear to Cheney that he's the boss—that Cheney can push and
argue and have his say, but Bush is the boss. That's why I say
(and I think Bart Gellman agrees with this in Angler, his book on
Cheney) that the vice president was incredibly important,
powerful, and persuasive, but that President Bush made these
decisions on his own. He did so, as Ron said, "of his own free
will."
The issue for history in the coming years and decades will be
further examination of how Bush exercised that free will. I don't
think he felt the constraints of his father's legacy, or even
Cheney's influence or Powell's distance or Rumsfeld's attitude of
"I'm in charge of the military." Again, I think Ron has hit on it:
It's a question of the president's free will. In the end, the movie
shows that.
I think the bending and distorting of history were not necessary
for this film to make its point, but it does show that the Iraq war
was and is George W. Bush's.
My caveat, obviously, is you don't know what you don't know.
Jacob, you make note of the scene in W. where Bush and his
advisers debate whether to go to war. In it, the Colin Powell
character makes his case against the invasion. The problem is, as
best I can tell, no such meeting ever took place. The president
never called the National Security Council and the top advisers
together to have a real knock-down, drag-out, come-to-Jesus
meeting. It gives Powell more credit than he deserves. This is the
broad meeting that Bush should have had to hash it out among
his advisers. Powell's plea to the president in August 2002,
which he recently affirmed, was that the administration needed
to look at the consequences of war, but he never argued openly
to the president that he should not invade Iraq.
You also make the point that Cheney's comments in this
mythical gathering of Bush's war Cabinet did not occur. The idea
of "empire," which certainly may have resided in the minds of
some, including Cheney, was to my knowledge never really put
on the table. The idea that the real issue was Iran, again, may
have been in their minds, but there is no record of this discussion
at that time. Additionally, I think you have a good point about
the pinning of the Willie Horton ad from the 1988 campaign on
George W. Bush. I've seen no evidence that this was the case.
From: Ron Suskind
To: Oliver Stone, Jacob Weisberg, and Bob Woodward
Subject: Getting Bush—and His Dad—Right
Posted Wednesday, October 22, 2008, at 1:37 PM ET
Just so there's not a lot of hubbub over not very much, let me
reiterate what I said about the father-son relationship. I thought it
was somewhat overplayed and exaggerated in the movie. I didn't
say that there was nothing to it. Clearly, it has been a defining
relationship for 43, both as a president and a man, as I've
reported—and it has been a central feature in Junior's impulse to
"make things personal" as a way of organizing a complex world.
I thought the relationship was more nuanced than the movie
indicated, and was overstated as the driving force in Bush's
architecture, especially in terms of Iraq. In the first few years of
his presidency, in fact, Bush was actually feeling somewhat
liberated from his long, uneven relationship with 41, making it
less of a causal force in his march to war.
From: Oliver Stone
To: Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind, and Jacob Weisberg
Subject: Viewing Bush With Compassion
Posted Wednesday, October 22, 2008, at 6:23 PM ET
First, it's truly an honor for me to join this discussion with three
men who have done so much in cracking the code of secrecy
around the Bush administration. You have done this nation a
great service, ironically following in the footsteps of Bob and his
colleague, Carl Bernstein, in the tormenting of Richard Nixon.
Stanley Weiser, the screenwriter for W., and I could not have
produced a defensible script for this film as recently as one or
two years ago without the investigative work of you three, as
well as that of James Risen, David Corn, Michael Isikoff, Jane
Mayer, Barton Gellman, Thomas Ricks, Frank Rich, Michael
Gordon, Bernard Trainer, Larry Everest, and Sy Hersh among
several others, who have partially pulled back the curtain on this
administration's actions over the past seven years—and I'm
certain more is yet to come.
Our purpose was a dramatization. As you know, these quotes
and speeches are strung over years and numerous meetings. As
dramatists we simplify and condense, yet I don't think we
crossed the line of the spirit of what happened. By example, in
illustrating Ron's 1 Percent Doctrine, we hope you understand
why we included it in a lunch scene, wherein the theory is
illustrated through a piece of lettuce in a bologna sandwich.
Drama requires a concrete representation of the abstract.
As dramatists, we're shaping a pattern that we see repeating itself
in this W's presidency. In my opinion, you could almost describe
the dialogue of these eight years as a loop in the sense that the
body language, the understanding, the dialogue remains very
much the same. The stimulus changes; whether it's the economic
debacle or the Iraq war, it doesn't seem to matter to Bush in the
way he responds to these situations. His speeches are remarkably
similar, as is his delivery of them. So basically we have to make
our patterns dramatic and economic. And in the film we are only
dealing with the first three years of the presidency.
And in presenting an immense public figure like W—or Nixon,
for that matter—we felt that it was essential that the film
empathize (though not sympathize) with the subject at the
center. I have strong negative personal feelings about this man.
But as a dramatist, I consider it professional to remove my
feelings, to allow the audience to live through him and see him
as human.
In not showing 9/11—as Ron points out—I'd say that to that end,
we felt 9/11 was an event that most of the viewers would have
experienced and know about intimately. In fact, it was the
subject of my last film, World Trade Center, which was about
the harrowing events of that day. Our film, W., opens a month or
so later with a discussion of the "axis of evil" speech,
underlining the broader context of the need for revenge after
9/11. Bush, in this scene, is now an authoritative figure who has
found his identity as a "war president"; in many scenes that
follow, we try to show how he, Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and
others politicized the 9/11 attack to erode many of our freedoms
and to settle personal scores—which, in the end, is W's worst
sin, in my book.
As for the role of his father, I think the most eloquent discussion
of this lies in Jacob's book The Bush Tragedy. There are many
anecdotes and quotes of this strong attachment between father
and son. This is further argued in the book First Son, by Bill
Minutaglio, a respected Texas journalist whose work provided
for us a crucial record of his earlier years. Bob, you touched on
this as well in State of Denial, quoting Scowcroft: "George W.
couldn't decide whether he was going to rebel against his father
or try to beat him at his own game. Now, he had tried at the
game, and it was a disaster." In summation of this idea, I think
Jacob truly hit on one of the most original aspects of this story—
in fact, the film doesn't really resemble another political film that
I know of, and the many journalists that I've talked to in the last
few weeks have never really mentioned another film, which is
rare.
So there is an original mixing of mythologies in this, involving
(as Jacob points out) the prodigal son becoming the respectable
son in Act 2. But not really. He turns out to be, in the third act of
his life, an Icarus figure from Greek mythology, whose wings
were melted by the sun when he tried to fly higher than his
father.
The issue of the 11-minute-long scene of the meeting in the
"situation room" is a very interesting one to me, and we should
probably discuss this in a future post. Yes, the scene is entirely
invented, as I am sure there is no way that these principals could
have assembled in one room and so clearly summed up their
points of view. But, I think the dialogue fairly represents the
point of view of Cheney (geopolitical domination), Rumsfeld
(draining the swamp, shaking up the Middle East, re-establishing
the Pentagon's dominance after the Afghan war), and Powell
(objections to the war). Bob, if I remember correctly, mentioned
that there was some shouting behind closed doors between
Powell and his group and Cheney and his group. I agree that we
made Powell probably stronger than he was, but in the end, we
remained accurate to his capitulation. We see him as the "good
soldier," who all his life prepared for this moment of standing up
for a principle, yet, in the end, he folded. The right thing Powell
could have done was resign, as Cyrus Vance did, as secretary of
state before the war.
Not to belabor this too much right now, but Cheney's advocacy
of an energy policy that focused on the Middle East, coupled
with his arguments for pre-emptive war, are well-known. In a
speech in 1999 at the Institute of Petroleum, he argued that, "By
2010 we will need on the order of an additional 50 million
barrels a day. So where is this oil going to come from? … While
many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the
Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest
cost, is still where the prize ultimately is." Certainly we can
agree that questions about energy, security, and regional stability
were a prominent part of the discussion leading up to the war.
But we went further and imagined a complete geopolitical
strategy for Eurasia, where 80 percent of the world's energy
resources lie, to ensure, in Cheney's mind, the survival of the
United States. This is viewed as an outgrowth of his thinking
developed in the Project for the New American Century.
Finally, to Jacob's point about the 1988 presidential election and
the critical role W played in his father's campaign: He was the
go-to guy on the campaign for outside groups, including
evangelical organizations. One such organization, the National
Security Political Action Committee, produced the Willie
Horton ad. It's simply inconceivable to me to think that W, who
proved in his campaign to be a shrewd political operative, did
not know about it before it was aired. We do connect dots here,
but it's consistent with a central element of W's personality: the
need to be tough as nails and resolute in all fights—even when
wrong, and especially during political contests. He learned this
lesson the hard way after losing an early congressional race in
Texas, which we also explore in the film.
While we attempted to paint a human portrait of George W.
Bush, I firmly believe that history will not spare this man. His
record of playing the fiddle while Rome burned will speak for
itself. But I believe our film offers, ironically to me, a strange
compassion for W, who is so hard to like. By trying to achieve
compassion rather than condemnation, I do hope that we can
open our thinking and understanding to the great price we have
paid for allowing him to be our leader for the last eight years.
Compassion for the man, yes, but a greater compassion for our
country. And maybe some long-forgotten humility from all of
us. Whether our leaders understand it or not, there is great
strength in humility.
From: Jacob Weisberg
To: Oliver Stone, Bob Woodward, and Ron Suskind
Subject: Why Did Bush Go to War?
Posted Thursday, October 23, 2008, at 10:11 AM ET
Dear Ron, Bob, and Oliver:
Before I respond to Oliver, I'd like to take up Bob's assertion that
we know why Bush went to war in Iraq. Bob, thanks more than
anything to your four books, we do know an amazing amount
about the circumstances. But I'm with Ron in thinking that basic
mysteries about the decision remain. Among the questions I'd
like to have answers to:
—On what date did Bush make the decision?
—Where was he when he made the decision?
—Who else was in the room?
—What did he think his reason was at the time?
In explaining why you think Bush went to war, you mention a
number of different reasons, which aren't mutually exclusive:
1) 9/11 created an atmosphere of peril.
2) Bush believed Saddam had WMD.
3) He thought the war would be easy.
4) There was a lot of momentum toward war.
5) Bush was impatient with the U.N. inspections.
6) He thinks America has a duty to liberate oppressed peoples.
Members of Bush's war council, including Wolfowitz, Cheney,
Rice, and Rumsfeld, had additional reasons that may have
influenced him as well. Among them:
7) They thought Saddam was helping al-Qaida.
8) They thought Saddam had supported terrorism against the
United States.
9) To stop Saddam's violations of human rights.
10) To show American power and resolve.
11) To catalyze democratic change in the Middle East.
12) To prove we could win wars with better technology and
fewer troops.
13) Enough with this creep already.
Others have proposed possible personal and unconscious reasons
that pushed Bush toward war:
14) To protect his father and his family.
15) To get revenge on his father's enemy.
16) To fix his father's mistake in leaving Saddam in power.
17) To fix Clinton's mistake of letting the problem fester.
18) To prove himself a strong and consequential leader.
Oliver's film suggests a few more possible reasons.
19) To secure access to Iraqi oil.
20) To set the stage for an assault on Iran.
21) To create a new American empire.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. And it's likely that Bush's
decision was made for some combination of these reasons (or at
least of the first 18 of them). It's also possible that the conclusion
was overdetermined—that Bush just thought, "There are so
many good reasons for getting rid of Saddam, I don't need to
decide exactly why we're doing it."
Bush's rationales have shifted over time. Unless he keeps a
secret diary, I seriously doubt he could give an accurate answer
to the question himself. As Rumsfeld might put it, the issue of
why Bush went to war is a known unknown.
From: Bob Woodward
Subject: Why Bush Went to War: It's in My Book
the decision took place in the summer of 2002 is on pages 197 to
207 of my book.) This issue has big implications. If I'm correct,
it means that the back-and-forth over U.N. authorization, the
argument about inspections, the congressional debate, and the
public debate about whether to go to war were all largely a
charade from Bush's point of view.
So, Bob, with all due respect to your amazing reporting, you
haven't yet persuaded me that we really know the when and the
where of the decision, let alone the how and the why.
Posted Thursday, October 23, 2008, at 11:36 AM ET
That's a good list of reasons, and as with most human decisions,
a series of events, attitudes, and personalities converged to lead
Bush to his decision. I still don't think there is a basic mystery. I
hate to say this, but read Pages 253 to 274 of Plan of Attack.
That was my best effort from all kinds of sources, notes,
documents, calendars, and interviews with the key players,
including Bush. I don't think there was a single moment when he
made the decision, but there was an evolution, and it's in those
21 pages. Needless to say, much went before that, but I think
that period from Christmas 2002 to Jan. 13, 2003, was critical.
Whether it was the making of the decision or the crystallizing of
it, most of the answers to your questions are there. Some day we
may learn more, but I haven't seen anything that adds to or
changes that record.
From: Jacob Weisberg
To: Oliver Stone, Bob Woodward, and Ron Suskind
Subject: I Read Your Book—and I Still Have Questions
Posted Thursday, October 23, 2008, at 12:08 PM ET
Those pages are heavily underlined in my copy of Plan of
Attack. To me, they suggest some kind of crystallization or point
of no return in the war planning. But I think some significant
evidence points to Bush making his decision to depose Saddam
much earlier, in late June or early July 2002.
On July 7, Condi Rice told Richard Haass, the director of policy
planning at the State Department, that the decision had already
been made. Colin Powell confirmed this to Haass. On July 23,
Richard Dearlove, the head of British intelligence, returned from
a trip to Washington and told Tony Blair that Bush had already
decided to depose Saddam. (The minutes of that briefing have
come to be known as the Downing Street Memo.) In his Aug. 26
speech to the VFW, Dick Cheney laid out his case against Iraq in
a way that you describe, in Plan of Attack, as "just short of a
declaration of war." (For anyone interested, the argument that
From: Ron Suskind
To: Oliver Stone, Bob Woodward, and Jacob Weisberg
Subject: Has Angry Oliver Gone Soft?
Posted Friday, October 24, 2008, at 10:24 AM ET
Oliver, Bob, and Jacob,
Let me dive in between two of our most able interlocutors—
Jacob and Bob—about the remaining mysteries of the march to
war. As I've said repeatedly, history's early drafts of this era are
formed by many diverse contributions. We journalists are all
part of a team, as I see it—competitive, surely, among ourselves,
but more pointedly, we are aligned against the evolving cults of
message-discipline and secrecy. In other words, we're all in this
together.
Bob, clearly, has sat in what journalists generally consider
"access heaven" in his unmatched colloquies with Bush. You
have witnessed Bush jumping out of his chair to make a point,
and many other moments from your interviews provide some
signature scenes of this period. But, I wonder, Bob, if you think,
looking back, that access to Bush has not been as valuable—
hour for hour—as it has been with other presidents whom you've
interviewed. I think it's fair to say that Bush and his team don't
believe that truthful public disclosure and dialogue are among
their central obligations. Other presidents have railed against the
troublemakers in the press, but they felt, often reluctantly, that
letting the American people know their mind—the good-enough
reasons that drive action—was part of their job description.
Frankly, I think the best book of your quartet is State of
Denial—the one for which, I gather, you were not given access
to Bush. But that's a rare occurrence. (The last president you
wrote about who wouldn't grant an audience was Nixon, and, of
course, you and Carl notched a few historic bell-ringers back
then.)
By the way, Oliver, I thought it was a fascinating twist that you
placed many of the quotes from Bob's interviews into Bush's
mouth during press conferences. In past presidencies, many of
the chief executive's most pertinent utterances have come during
press conferences. Maybe it will be that way again in the
future—a more effective, sunlit (or spot-lit) version of public
dialogue, to my mind.
It's the gambler's philosophy, a model that rests on pure nerve, a
familiar two-step in the nation's history and culture, and one you
see so often of late in public and private spheres in America.
Eventually, complex reality will make itself felt.
But in terms of the reasons for war, the decision to invade, the
selling of the war—and specifically (to mangle that signature
phrase) what leaders knew and when they knew it—I think that
despite Bob's ardent efforts, there will be many more disclosures
and clarifications in the years to come. Just in my last book, The
Way of the World, I came across fresh, detailed accounts of
battles from January 2002, when senior officials of the Defense
Department and CIA were instructed by the White House to
begin a one-year, logistical planning process for the invasion. At
that point, it was not a matter of if. It was, in essence, a 12month ticking clock for the execution of an approved policy.
What's more, in the spring of 2002, the White House told senior
intelligence officials that WMD would be the lead justification
for the invasion. The response from intelligence officials,
especially those with expertise on Iraq, was that using WMDs as
justification for war was a perilous gambit—advice that the
White House ignored.
It is, of course, easy to judge, swiftly and harshly. For a writer or
filmmaker, that is often the path to diminished outcomes. Listen,
Oliver, I was quite moved by your entry, by how the effort to
feel compassion for Bush has widened your sensibilities,
spurring an appreciation—as, clearly, you hope the movie will—
that "there is great strength in humility." I hear you. But I'm sure
some readers, and viewers of W., are asking themselves, "Is this
progress, or has angry Oliver gone soft?"
Mind you, this is just one example, a glimpse of the continent
that remains in shadows, despite the tireless efforts of journalists
with official access (like Bob) or without it (like me and many
others). At day's end, many of the self-correcting features of our
system of governance—congressional oversight, a strong
judiciary, a robust press—failed in this era. Even a special effort
like the Silberman-Robb Commission, slated to dig into the
megascandal of pre-war intelligence and the selling of a war of
choice, was halted at the gates of the White House. That's like
investigating a murder without ever going to the scene of the
crime or questioning those with motive or intent. It is, to my
mind, an American tragedy that this administration will leave the
stage with a host of basic questions left unanswered—questions
that you, Jacob, ever thorough, outline nicely.
But, Oliver, what left me feeling a touch of ennui at the movie's
conclusion is how this played out cinematically—not in spite of
your use of available sources but, maybe (ironically), because of
it. Bush comes off largely as a victim of circumstances, a man
overwhelmed and overmatched. How could there not be WMD?
Why is this war turning into a debacle? Who's responsible?
I don't buy it. Never have. Here, on balance, you and I agree,
Bob. It's a matter of Bush exercising free will. It's his war. He's
responsible. What qualities in W's architecture drove events? It
was his preternatural faith in the power of confidence. He felt
that believing in something with absolute certainty (even if it's
willed rather than earned) is the key to victory, the spine of
leadership. And once victory is won, no one will ask
inconvenient questions about how it was achieved. The Bush
view, then, is win first and win big—and if there's a mess, we'll
clean it up later. And, someday, the winners will write history.
From: Bob Woodward
To: Oliver Stone, Ron Suskind, and Jacob Weisberg
Subject: Deposing Saddam vs. Going to War
Posted Friday, October 24, 2008, at 11:16 AM ET
Jacob, yes, I have read and underlined many portions of your
book. Here is the problem, as I see it—and this is based on
extensive conversations, many at the time in 2002, with those
directly involved:
It is crucial to make the distinction between 1) a decision to
"depose" Saddam and 2) the decision to go to war to do it. First,
the Rice-Haas conversation, as best I can tell, was really about
the decision to get rid of Saddam, not necessarily to go to war.
Recall that Powell, with Bush's blessing, launched a rather active
diplomatic effort at the United Nations that lived for months. In
fact, in news coverage, the unanimous 15-0 U.N. Security
Council resolution in November was depicted as a big victory
for Powell and diplomacy. In addition, the October 2002
congressional resolutions supporting a war were viewed as tools
designed to give more weight to the diplomatic track.
Second, detailed reporting on the so-called Downing Street
memo shows that Richard Dearlove insisted that the minutes
were not accurate at the time, and within a week they were
redone to reflect what he maintained he had said to Blair at the
briefing. It is much less dramatic and conclusive than the
Downing Street version. I have never been able to get a copy of
the redone minutes, but numerous people directly involved say
they show less-sweeping conclusions.
Nonetheless, it is clear that Bush did not think diplomacy would
work, and there are elements of a Japanese Kabuki dance in all
of this. But I don't think he had decided finally on war at that
time. As he has said, in August 2002, he had not yet seen a war
plan that he thought would work. Yet he was pointing toward
war, and there was an inescapable momentum toward war.
The Rice-Haass conversation and the Dearlove briefing (as
allegedly corrected), however, don't really support the
conclusion that there was some charade or that Bush had made a
final, secret decision on war. That charade came later, in January
2003, when he had decided yet publicly insisted that he had not.
Historians will be able to pick through the various records
someday and, I hope, answer these questions in a more definitive
way.
From: Jacob Weisberg
To: Oliver Stone, Ron Suskind, and Bob Woodward
Subject: Why Oliver's Bush Rankles Me
Posted Friday, October 24, 2008, at 3:20 PM ET
Ron Suskind thinks the decision to go to war had already been
made in January 2002. I think it happened during the summer of
2002. Bob Woodward thinks it wasn't made until January 2003. I
suspect we have somewhat differing views, as well, on the
balance of reasons for the war and the influence of various Bush
advisers, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. To me,
our back-and-forth supports the point that there's a lot we still
don't know about the most important decision of George W.
Bush's presidency. But I think we agree, at least, that this issue is
going to occupy memoirists, journalists, and historians for years
to come.
Now back to W. Oliver, thank you for your thoughtful response
and for the kind words about my book. To return the
compliment, I really admire your ability to empathize with
politicians you hate, something I thought you managed to do in
Nixon as well as in W. Josh Brolin didn't turn his character into a
cartoon; he played him with the energy, charisma, and caustic
wit that draw people to George W. Bush in real life. Watching a
lot of scenes in the movie, you can't help just liking that bad boy,
which I imagine is an unsettling reaction for a lot of your
audience. I had a similar feeling when I was writing The Bush
Tragedy. The more I looked at Bush in a family context, the
more human and sympathetic he became. When you understand
his personal struggles and limitations, it's hard not to feel for the
guy.
But I have to say that your approach to telling this story
continues to rankle me. I certainly understand the need to
dramatize. But even in a film or novel, there is a responsibility to
truth. An essential attribute of any successful historical fiction, it
seems to me, is plausibility. You have to present scenes and
dialogue that might have happened, even if they didn't happen.
Among recent films, I thought The Queen did this very well.
Most of it was imagined, but the narrative and characters meshed
with known reality. I recognize that your method is different, but
it put me off every time I heard Bush say something that I knew
he'd actually said in a completely different context. It wasn't
filling in the blanks; it was reality purée.
You haven't said anything to justify the two crucial scenes I
complained about. In my earlier post, I asked you to explain why
you had Cheney making the case for war on the basis of a new
American empire. Your answer is that you imagined it as "an
outgrowth of his thinking." Isn't Cheney's actual thinking scary
enough for you without extrapolating additional homunculi? To
me, what you do here is not so different from John McCain and
Sarah Palin contending that Barack Obama is a secret socialist
because he wants to shift more of the tax burden to the rich. The
words you put in Cheney's mouth are ones he wouldn't ever say.
As support, you offer a quote from a speech he gave in 1999 to
the effect that America's oil is likely to continue coming from
the Middle East. But Cheney pointing that out when he ran
Halliburton doesn't in any way support your movie's depiction of
him as vice president arguing for American control of Iraqi and
Iranian oil. Your version isn't a theory. It's a paranoid fantasy.
And with apologies for belaboring this, your Willie Horton
scene just has no basis in reality. In his father's 1988 campaign,
George W. was not responsible for relations with all outside
groups. He handled relations with the religious right. In
"connecting the dots," as you put it, you are positing a federal
crime that no one else, to my knowledge, has ever accused
George W. Bush of committing.
I think I've made my point here, Oliver, so I'll let you have the
last word.
My thanks again to all of you for joining in the discussion this
week. I've really enjoyed it.
From: Oliver Stone
To: Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind, and Jacob Weisberg
Subject: Who Will Be the Next George Bush?
Posted Saturday, October 25, 2008, at 8:55 AM ET
Bob, Ron, Jacob,
Forgive my tardiness in response. I'm working long hours over
here in England and France getting W. open. It's tough to keep
this pace up, and it's late here. But it's great to see how you're all
fighting with one another. I love it.
I'd add this to the issue of Ron's accusation that in the movie
Bush is some kind of innocent "Candide." At times, certainly,
Josh Brolin plays him with charm and goofy innocence—but
Bush is hardly innocent. What could be clearer in this movie,
coming after his supposed evangelical conversion, than the size
of his ego? It seems to me in contradiction to the demands of the
born-again faith, wherein you surrender your ego to Jesus Christ.
"This is my war, not his! I will not renegotiate this," he yells at
Condoleezza Rice in the Bush-Scowcroft-Wall Street Journal
scene two-thirds of the way through the film. W also clearly tells
the assemblage in the central Situation Room scene, "I'm a gut
player, always have been, and I am just so bone tired of this
Saddam. ... We have got to get this war going." And earlier in
the same scene: "The working Joe's not thinking about oil. We're
talking 9/11 terrorists and WMDs. We're talking freedom and
democracy. We're talking about 'Axis of Evil.' "
In another scene, he clearly tells Dick Cheney that he is the
"decider," and he tells Karl Rove that he makes up the ideas. All
men serve him. And, as Jacob portrays so wonderfully in his
book, he is a creature of outsized ego, resulting partly from the
fact that up until the age of 40 he was a man brewing with
frustration. Forty years is a long time to wait when your father is
better at sports, politics, oil, money, diplomacy, and even
academics than you are. I can see in Bush's press conferences, at
the very least, a seething anger and impatience with any kind of
criticism that seems to affect every aspect of his life. Jacob, in
his book, goes into detail about the idea that as a first-born,
black-sheep son who has been criticized for so much of his life,
Bush reacted by hardening his willpower to the point at which
any criticism would only encourage him in the opposite
direction. There are many examples of this: his reactions to the
vast 12 million-to-15-million-person protest throughout the
planet against his policies in Iraq, his reaction to his father's and
Brent Scowcroft's criticisms of the war, and his contemptuous
indifference to questions about his judgment from the press,
among many other instances.
It is Bush's unchecked ego that drives him to willfully disregard
facts and rely on so-called instincts, as well as his naive belief
this was a just and winnable war simply because good is
supposed to triumph over evil. Saddam and terrorists are clearly
evil, and America is clearly for freedom and democracy; what
could possibly go wrong?
Add to the mix the Project for the New American Century—
whose statement of principle is "American leadership is both
good for America and good for the world." The PNAC had a
sense of supreme purpose: It had been advocating regime change
in Iraq since 1998—and counted among its chief advocates
Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, who were strategically
placed in the White House. There you have it: a combustible mix
of ambition and faith. A perfect storm wherein Bush's ego blends
with the collective desire for revenge after 9/11, the Darwinian
global-domination instincts of Cheney, and the needs for reelection of Karl Rove.
And not to overlook this: We have not talked much about
Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism expert, who
writes of W.'s immediate impulse after 9/11:
The president dragged me into a room with a
couple of other people, shut the door, and said,
"I want you to find whether Iraq did this."
I said, "Mr. President. We've done this before.
We have been looking at this. We looked at it
with an open mind. There's no connection."
He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam!
Find out if there's a connection." And in a very
intimidating way.
As Bob points out in Plan of Attack, by the Camp David meeting
on Sunday, Sept. 16, Bush had decided, "We won't do Iraq now.
... We're putting Iraq off. But eventually we'll have to return to
that question."
However, it wasn't long before Bush returned to that question:
"By that November 21 [2001], when he took Rumsfeld aside,
Bush had decided it was time to turn to Iraq. 'I want to know
what the options are.' "
While Tommy Franks and Rumsfeld went full speed ahead on
their war plans for Iraq from November 2001 on, Franks was
telling his commanders: "This is fucking serious. You know, if
you guys think this is not going to happen, you're wrong."
In April 2002, again according to Bob, when Bush hosted Tony
Blair and his family at his ranch at Crawford, a British television
reporter interviewed the president about Iraq.
"I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go," Bush said,
announcing his explicit intentions almost a year before he
launched his pre-emptive strike on Iraq.
In the fascinating discussion the three of you had setting
different timelines for the actual origin of the war, I would only
point out the one thing that stood out in my mind at the time: As
an infantry veteran, I was struck by the commitment of Bush to
send 100,000 soldiers to the Gulf in December 2002. This was
the typical kind of "hide in plain sight" deployment often used in
cases such as Central America in the 1980s and in previous
Middle Eastern conflicts. Nevertheless, you don't send 100,000
soldiers, plus a fleet of naval ships, to a region with the idea of
their coming back without having used the power. It would've
cost a fortune, and it was a policy from which George Bush
could not have retreated without great embarrassment and cost.
It smelled clearly of war. So I think by December it was more or
less decided.
I think there is a larger implication, however. I think we make
too much of Iraq specifically. I think Bush's anger needed a
larger pasture in which to graze. If it had not been Iraq, I think
he would just as easily have turned us against Iran or, for that
matter, Venezuela or Cuba or North Korea, another co-star in his
"Axis of Evil" speech. The mindset is there from the
beginning—of "us vs. them," the "evil-doers," the "terrorists"
(which is really an undefinable term in the perspective of
history). This is the essence of the Bush Doctrine, which allows
the chief executive to tell us, Orwellian-style, who our enemy of
the moment is.
The bigger issue is the mindset that exists in such thinking, that
it's going to occur again in the cycle of our foreign policies.
Even should Obama win, I can foresee these hostile situations
arising over and over from such flammable policies as our
expansion of NATO and our recent Russian/Georgian conflict.
Bush and his ilk, in opposition, will continue to raise their voices
in dissent at any kind of "soft power" response coming from the
United States. We will be expected to answer perceived threats
in a partial military manner because of the fierceness of our
opposition party. Already Obama seems to be going in that
direction in Afghanistan; it's beginning to look to me like
another version of Iraq/Vietnam. We seem incapable as a system
of reforming the military-industrial complex.
Finally, I just want to reiterate that the compassion this film
displays toward the feelings of George Bush has not changed my
sensibilities about the clear path of destruction and diminishment
to which he has led our nation; yet I don't think Bush wakes up
in the morning thinking about the bad things he does or could
do. He believes he's a good guy; he's with the angels. In fact, I
don't think he has had a moment of uncertainty about his virtue.
He believes it to his core, and clearly a part of America, to a
degree, believed in this, too.
Our next terrible president will not come wearing wolf's clothing
or twisting a mustache. He—or she—will seem benign, friendly,
and patriotic; someone who can convince us that the nuance of
international relations is actually quite simple; someone with
whom we'd want to have a beer. This is one of the main lessons I
hope the film conveys: Will we recognize the next George W.
Bush who enters national politics? Will we see the train wreck
coming before we are in it?
Jacob, as I am finishing this post, I see your recent one
questioning two big scenes in the film. I would like to respond to
this in my next post.
From: Michael Isikoff
To: Oliver Stone, Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind, and Jacob Weisberg
Subject: What Bush Learned From Reagan
Posted Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 9:54 AM ET
Special W. Dialogue Bonus: After reading this discussion,
Michael Isikoff, co-author of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin,
Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, was moved to respond.
His post is below.
Oliver, Bob, Ron, and Jacob:
After reviewing this discussion, I'd like to weigh in on the debate
over the core question: When and why did President Bush
decide to go to war in Iraq? It is, when you think about it, rather
amazing that there isn't a consensus on this. It was, after all, the
defining moment of Bush's presidency.
My old and esteemed boss Bob Woodward contends he fully
answered the question in his book Plan of Attack and places the
moment when Bush chose war in January 2003. My new
Newsweek colleague Jacob Weisberg demurs and places it
sometime in the summer of 2002. My neighbor Ron Suskind
argues the decision was already made by early 2002.
At the risk of being self-referential, I'd point Slate readers to one
of the scenes Stone lifted wholesale from Hubris, the book
David Corn and I co-authored in 2006 about the selling of the
Iraq war. It appears, slightly modified, in the movie; Stone
tinkers a bit with the actual dialogue. But he's got the essence of
it right. I think it tilts the scale toward Suskind.
The scene in question takes place May 1, 2002. Bush, while
whacking tennis balls to his dogs on the White House lawn, is
being briefed by press secretary Ari Fleischer and another
communications aide, Adam Levine, for a History Channel
interview he is about to give that afternoon about the life of
Ronald Reagan. (That's the real setting as reported in Hubris. In
the movie, Stone substitutes Karl Rove for the somewhat
obscure Levine, and Fleischer walks in midway through the
discussion.) Fleischer relates the pesky questions he was getting
at the press briefing that day from Helen Thomas about why
Bush seems so intent on starting a war and getting rid of Saddam
Hussein. Bush lets a loose with a string of expletives.
"Did you tell her I don't like motherfuckers
who gas their own people?"
"Did I tell you I don't like assholes who lie to
the world?"
"Did you tell her I'm going to kick his sorry
motherfucking ass all over the Mideast?"
Fleischer replies: "I told her half of that."
In the movie, Stone actually tones down the expletives and
substitutes a different line—"Did you tell her I don't like
assholes who try to kill my father?"—in the middle of this tirade.
(Bush actually did make a crack about Saddam trying to kill his
father, but that was at a Texas fundraiser for John Cornyn on
Sept. 26, 2002.) But the rest of the movie dialogue is pretty
much as Bush said it. And there wasn't much doubt about what
Bush had in mind. "You know where we're going here," Levine
recalled thinking at the time.
There are two obvious points to make about this. The first is that
Bush's outburst was early—well before Congress authorized the
war resolution in October 2002 and before the November 2002
U.N. Security Council resolution giving Saddam one last chance
to come clean on his supposed weapons of mass destruction. It
also came before Bush, according to Woodward, made the
decision to wage war the following January. Woodward may
well be right about the formal decision. But under the operating
assumption that diplomacy isn't the customary way to kick a
foreign leader's ass across international borders, I think the May
outburst is fairly indicative that Bush had pretty much made up
his mind about what he intended to do long before the final sign
off.
My second point speaks to motivation, and here's where the
Ronald Reagan interview that day sheds some light. While
researching Hubris, Corn and I got hold of the actual written
memo prepared for Bush in which the White House
communications staff had written out the likely questions the
president would get from the History Channel interviewer. Bush
then wrote on it, scribbling his thoughts about the points he
wanted to emphasize. The memo with Bush's jottings is a
fascinating document. It offers a pretty good window into not
just what Bush admired about Reagan but also how he saw
himself in the spring of 2002. "Optimism and strength," Bush
scrawled at the top of the memo. Also, "decisive" and "faith."
Next to a question about Reagan's direct, blunt style, Bush wrote
"moral clarity." He drew an arrow next to the word forceful.
Alongside a question about the 1983 suicide-bombing attack on
the U.S. Marines barracks in Lebanon (which killed 241 U.S.
troops), Bush wrote, "There will be casualties."
When it came time for the actual interview, Bush hit these points
and used an interesting analogy that Stone includes in W.:
Recalling one of the iconic speeches of the Reagan era, one that
the late president's admirers have long pointed to as a decisive
moment in the fall of the Soviet Empire, Bush said that Reagan
"didn't say, 'Well, Mr. Gorbachev, would you take the top three
bricks off the wall?' He said, 'Tear it all down.' … And the truth
of the matter is, I spoke about the Axis of Evil, and I did it for a
reason. I wanted the world to know exactly where the United
States stood."
We can debate endlessly what really motivated Bush in making
the audacious decision to invade Iraq—the threat of WMD, the
cooked-up evidence about connections between Saddam and alQaida, the need to be pre-emptive in the post-9/11 era, the desire
to secure Mideast oil supplies. But I think the "tear it all down"
line captures the essence of Bush's worldview. Why monkey
around with diplomacy, U.N. inspections, and halfway
measures? And the search for one key moment to pinpoint the
"decision" time is probably illusory. Bush the Decider didn't
actually decide in Cabinet or war-council meetings. His White
House didn't thrash out option memos and debate them
endlessly. He decided on what his gut told him, and his gut
instincts were that he had had enough of trying to "box in"
Saddam Hussein and that it was time to kick his ass and remove
him through military force.
The enormous consequences of such gut decisions—the human
and financial costs of the war in Iraq—may be one reason
another Republican presidential candidate known for making gut
decisions may be having such a difficult time in the polls right
now.
From: Oliver Stone
To: Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind, Jacob Weisberg (and Michael Isikoff)
Subject: Making the Truth More Dramatic
Posted Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 11:50 AM ET
In response to Jacob's last post, and the responsibility we bear to
the truth, I believe we can defend the plausibility of any single
scene (except, of course, the surreal dream scene with his father
at the end). We are just not going to agree on the favored method
for presenting historical drama. Jacob would clearly prefer a
dramatization with mostly imagined dialogue, as in The Queen,
while I believe putting people's own words in their own mouths,
though perhaps from another context of time and place, adds to
the authenticity of the piece—as long as it doesn't cross the line
of plausibility (i.e., the president may well have said something
similar in this context).
Regarding Willie Horton, yes, I agree the Bush/Quayle
campaign wasn't literally behind the ad. But let's not forget, there
were ties between the National Security Political Action
Committee (which produced the ads) and the campaign: Three
former employees of Roger Ailes (a media consultant for the
Bush campaign) worked on the ads. In fact, the FEC investigated
a connection between Ailes and NSPAC, which resulted in a
deadlocked 3-3 on finding illegal coordination. So, while there
was no illegal coordination, as you well know, campaigns
routinely tread carefully up to that line.
Moreover, I think it's naive to believe that presidential
campaigns are so pristine as not to even know about these
reprehensible ads before they air. And that's exactly what's
portrayed in the film. The commercial was one of the turning
points of that campaign, and it was this campaign that, according
to many observers, showed W to be a shrewd operative. It seems
quite plausible, therefore, that W, in dramatic context, may well
have shown his father the ad and explained that it was funded by
NSPAC.
As to Cheney and his concept of the domination of world
resources, you accuse me of "paranoid fantasy" and compare me,
surprisingly, to McCain and Palin. Well, I've been there before.
(Frankly, I've been compared to worse historical figures.) But I
don't think many people would think that I'm far off the mark in
the plausibility of the Cheney character arguing for control of
Iraqi, Iranian, and Eurasian resources.
I'm bewildered, first, by your categorical disregard for his 1999
speech before the Petroleum Institute. The key quote remains:
"The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the
lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies." Do you
really think his views changed that much in three years? I'm sure
you remember that in 2001 the vice president's energy task force
spent a great deal of time courting every significant oil company
to weigh in on the national energy policy—even though this was
denied by everyone at the time. And what was the conclusion of
Cheney's task force? That "by any estimation, Middle East oil
producers will remain central to world oil security."
In September 2002, the Bush administration issued a new
national security strategy that codified the themes of Cheney's
1992 defense guidance: maintaining overwhelming military
power to "dissuade potential adversaries" from attempting to
even equal U.S. power, and enhancing "energy security" by
expanding "the sources and types of global energy supplied,
especially in the Western Hemisphere, Africa, Central Asia, and
the Caspian region."
In October 2002, Oil and Gas International reported that U.S.
planning was already under way to reorganize Iraq's oil and
business relationships. In January 2003, the Wall Street Journal
reported that representatives from Exxon Mobil, Chevron,
ConocoPhillips, and Halliburton, among others, were meeting
with Vice President Cheney's staff to plan the postwar revival of
Iraq's oil industry. One-time Bush speech writer David Frum
wrote in The Right Man, his 2003 biography of his boss, that the
"war on terror" was designed to "bring new freedom and new
stability to the most vicious and violent quadrant of the Earth—
and new prosperity to us all, by securing the world's largest pool
of oil."
In August 2005, Bush acknowledged this connection himself—
answering "growing anti-war protests," according to AP (Aug.
31), "with a fresh reason for U.S. troops to continue fighting in
Iraq: protection of the country's vast oil fields, which he said
would otherwise fall under the control of terrorist extremists."
Regarding Iran, W. points to its centrality geographically.
According to Gen. Wesley Clark, memos calling for the
overthrow of seven countries in five years, including Iran and
Iraq, were circulating in the Pentagon within two weeks of 9/11.
And in State of Denial, Bob documents a secret, influential
November 2001 meeting dubbed "Bletchley II," which
concluded the United States couldn't defeat Islamic radicalism
without first overthrowing Saddam, which, according to one
participant, would lead to "Iranian overthrow." Current threats
against Iran flow from this overall strategic vision.
I think in closing that we would agree that the fascinating
portrait of Cheney as a Hobbesian, completely realistic,
America-first survivalist, and (in contradiction to the Bush
theology) a Darwinian of the first order, wherein the strong eat
the weak, is quite plausible. That Dick Cheney, in his
methodical, quiet, 1 percent way, must surely be thinking of the
future of America in the next 50 years. In his entire government
experience, he's been nothing less than loyal to his version of its
perceived interests. Unfortunately, as was the case with many
"armchair patriots" before him, defending those interests has led
us into a "black hole." We made Cheney's plan for world
domination as alluring and economically brief as possible for a
dramatic audience. However, reading books such as Larry
Everest's Oil, Power, and Empire, you will find a realistic,
certainly plausible assessment of world energy policy, as
perceived by the oil companies. There is a wonderful moment, I
think, in the "Situation Room" scene, where Colin Powell looks
over at Cheney after his monologue and says, somewhat with
awe, "Spoken like a true oilman."
Signing off. Enjoyed very much,
Oliver
dispatches
Dropping In on Obama's Kenyan
Grandmother
What it means to be an Obama in Africa.
By Andy Isaacson
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 2:36 PM ET
KOGELO, Kenya—Last Sunday morning, while Barack Obama
stumped in Colorado, his paternal grandmother, 86-year-old
"Mama Sarah" Obama, stood before a microphone and a crowd
of several hundred villagers on a plot of land in Kogelo. Beside
her was Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, whose helicopter
had descended unexpectedly onto her tin-roofed homestead
moments earlier. Streams of excited villagers ran across the
surrounding corn and cassava fields and from a soccer game at
Senator Barack Obama Secondary School.
senior position, you become rich. Leaders here steal. But our
lives go on. We are a hardworking family. We should not just
stand idly and think Barack is going to fix everything for us."
Odinga addressed the crowd and the Kenyan TV cameras that
followed him in Luo, the local tongue: "Today we have gathered
here to say hello to Mama Sarah. The boy from here, he's gone
to compete. We are praying for him so that he succeeds. Are you
happy with Obama?"
A 36-year-old cousin of Barack's, a hairdresser in Nairobi who
has returned to Kogelo to support Mama Sarah during the final
weeks of the campaign, told me that he tries to maintain a low
profile. "I won't be able to walk freely," he said, asking that his
name not be publicized out of concern for both unwanted
attention and personal safety. His girlfriend, he added, doesn't
even know about his family ties to the U.S. senator. "She might
think I've been hiding money from her. She'll expect a lot." Last
August, Italian Vanity Fair "discovered" Barack's half-brother
George, who lives in the marginalized outskirts of Nairobi; his
plight was sensationalized by international media and in turn
exploited by conservatives who suggested that the candidate
doesn't care for his own family. Because of the widely
brachiated nature of the Kenyan Obama family tree, as for many
traditional African families, notions of family are very
complicated. Certainly, the Obamas that Barack seems closest
with appear loved, financially secure, and not at all resentful.
"We are happy!" the crowd responded.
"Are you happy with him?"
"We are!"
Though I may have been the only person for miles around who
actually has a vote in the U.S. presidential election, the occasion
seemed oddly like a campaign rally. In a sense, it was. For Prime
Minister Odinga, who, like the Obamas, belongs to the Luo
tribe, and whose loss in a tainted presidential election last
December touched off devastating ethnic violence, the
appearance with Sarah Obama was not only an expression of
solidarity, but also unambiguous political groundwork for what
he might one day claim as a direct channel to the White House.
For Obama's grandmother, the arrival of the Kenyan prime
minister was another indication of how the phenomenal rise of
an Obama child has changed the lives of the other Obama family
half a world away.
"At the beginning, I thought it was something that would be
short-lived, but it's been getting bigger every day," Obama's
uncle Said had told me earlier that day on the drive from the
provincial city in Kisumu for what I expected would be a quiet
interview with the family matriarch. "It will continue to be a
major preoccupation—or maybe my employment." Said wasn't
referring only to his changed daily routine, which now involves
rising at 4 a.m. to track the latest U.S. campaign news on
Anderson Cooper 360—"people will ask me to comment on a
development, and I don't want to be caught unawares"—before a
full workday as a technician for a spirits company, followed by
night school for his business management degree. Said was also
referring to what it has meant, and what it may mean for at least
the next four years, to be an Obama in Kenya: the frequent visits
from people asking for money or help getting a U.S. visa; the
requests to help sponsor scholarships for study in the United
States; and the random pale faces, African dignitaries, and
international journalists that have been arriving at Mama Sarah's
home on a daily basis for the last year, paying respects and
seeking favors and quotes.
"You can't fail to see there's a perception that we are in a better
place economically," Said said. "People know that if you are in a
A perception of family wealth was likely the motive of an
attempted burglary of Mama Sarah's home in September. When I
arrived at the homestead, I was met by armed Kenyan police
officers posted behind a newly erected 8-foot fence. I was asked
to sign a visitors log. Hundreds of names from all over the world
had filled the book since the first entry on Sept. 16. The guards
were securing what may be the world's most modest gated
compound: With the exception of a small solar panel on the
corrugated tin roof of Mama Sarah's two-room home, the most
obvious signs of affluence appeared to be a pair of cows, which
mooed as I walked in.
Mama Sarah's living room had obviously been configured to
accommodate visiting delegations. Several wood couches and
chairs were neatly arranged arm-to-arm around the perimeter of
the cement floor, their cushions covered by plain white cloths
with embroidered fringes. A television draped in a decorative
cloth sat atop a table in one corner, and a life-size photo cutout
of a smiling Barack presided over the room from another. Other
Barack memorabilia and family portraiture hung from the walls:
a framed black-and-white image of Barack Obama Sr., an image
of Sasha and Malia Obama watering a seedling in front of a
Masai tribesman while Barack snapped a picture, and an
autographed poster from Barack's Illinois state Senate campaign,
signed, "Mama Sarah: Habari! And Love."
"Barack is a good listener," Mama Sarah told me. "He is
somebody who pays attention to the plight of people. With those
kinds of attributes, I think he will be in a better position to sort
out the problems that are bedeviling the world. I think he's got
all it takes to be a world leader." Clearly reining in her normally
spontaneous personality, Mama Sarah was proud and onmessage: "We are leaving everything to God. We know it's been
a long wait, and, God willing, we hope that everything is going
to be OK."
for cooperation. We also think that Africa will get more attention
than it has received in the past."
The day before, in Kisumu, I was talking about Obama to a
boatman on Lake Victoria when a nearby car radio blared the
following judgment: "God has already chosen Obama on Nov. 4!
Who are you to say no?" Nowhere in Kenya—perhaps nowhere
in the world outside of blue-state America—is there more
optimism about an Obama victory as in Kisumu, a
predominantly Luo city on Kenya 's western border with
Uganda, which still bears the scars of last winter's election
violence. Indeed, the widely held fear that vote-rigging on Nov.
4 could snatch the election from Obama reflects the lingering
sentiment among Luos here that Kenya's tainted presidential
election—in which Odinga officially lost to Mwai Kibaki—was
stolen from them. I've been asked several times, "Do you think
John McCain can steal the votes?"
With that, Odinga and Mama Sarah walked toward the car that
would drive the prime minister to his helicopter. He was a step
ahead of her, and just as it seemed he was about to get into the
car, a reporter reminded him that Mama Sarah was behind him,
anticipating a goodbye. Odinga turned, offered a warm and
genuine embrace, and then drove out of the compound.
Obama's likeness appears on watch faces, key chains, posters, Tshirts, calendars, and women's shoes. Hawkers offer CDs of
Obama-inspired reggae and Luo songs in the open-air bus depot.
Mockups of $1,000 bills with Obama's portrait filling the oval
are plastered on public minivans. ("I just asked the designer to
pimp the van, and it came back like this," the driver told me.) A
generation of newborns named "Obama" are entering the world.
A schoolteacher in a local village says her students sing Obama
songs: "He is a genius/ He is a hero/ He comes all the way from
Africa/ To go compete in the land of the whites/ He makes us
proud/ For at least he's made Africa known to the world." The
campaign 8,000 miles away has been closely observed. When I
arrived in town, my tuk-tuk driver offered punditry of the third
debate: "For the first 20 minutes, it was competitive and McCain
was good, but then Obama was much smarter."
dispatches
Daniel Otieno, the local bureau chief of Kenya's the Nation
newspaper, believes the fierce partisanship is a legacy of the
area's early bullfighting days, when Luo clans rallied behind
their favored bull. "Barack Obama is their bull," he says, adding
that "a victory on Nov. 4 will be felt as a consolation for the
Kenyan election." Bundled with that pride is an exaggerated
expectation that Obama will support Kenya, and especially the
Kisumu area, currently crippled by the country's highest
incidence of HIV/AIDS. Unemployment here is rampant, and
many of the young and jobless I spoke with believe an Obama
presidency will directly improve their lives—a belief that I hope
does not turn into resentment if and when they are disappointed.
While the TV cameras rolled in front of Mama Sarah's home,
Prime Minister Odinga attempted to temper these expectations.
"Kenyans know that Barack will be first and foremost the
president of the United States of America, not a Kenyan
president in the United States." He added, "Under an Obama
presidency, trade and investment between Kenya and the United
States will increase. Kenyans hope that there will be more scope
The villagers dissipated, the reporters disassembled their tripods
and climbed into SUVs, and Mama Sarah headed toward the
house. Said called out, "Intercept her!" Then he led her by the
arm to a waiting chair in the shade of an avocado tree, where a
Canadian TV crew was setting up for an interview.
Hail Sarah
Palin courts believers in Virginia.
By Christopher Beam
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 2:17 PM ET
Sarah Palin's rally Monday in Fredericksburg, Va., began with a
prayer. "Thank you for all you have given us," intoned Susan
Stimpson, chairwoman of the county Republican Party. If she
had really wanted to help, though, she would have prayed the
polls are wrong.
A new Washington Post/ABC poll released Monday put Barack
Obama up eight points in Virginia, one for every day left in the
election. His advantage is even stronger in Northern Virginia,
where he outpolls McCain 2-to-1. In the southwest, which a
McCain adviser recently called "real Virginia," McCain is still
leading. He's also up among veterans and people who go to
church at least once a week. But overall, the state looks
dangerously close to seceding—this time from the South.
You wouldn't know it from McCain's schedule. He and Palin
have logged a total of four visits to Virginia in the last month.
Three of them happened yesterday—first in the Washington
exurb of Leesburg (enemy territory, according to the polls), then
in the northern-ish town of Fredericksburg ("Don't call us north,"
pleaded a McCain supporter. "Please don't call us north"), and
finally Salem, a town of 24,000 southwest of Richmond. And it
wasn't McCain doing the visiting—it was Palin, solo.
It's no surprise the McCain campaign dispatched Palin, rather
than McCain himself, to woo Virginia. She's been attracting
bigger crowds—Fredericksburg drew an estimated 6,000 to the
outdoor Hurkamp Park, and at least 10,000 people filled the
Salem Civic Center, home of the Salem Avalanche. She's also
better-suited to execute the strategy that's most likely to save
McCain. The state's blueward swing owes much to demographic
shifts, as immigrants and yuppies swell Northern Virginia's
exurbs. Nor can McCain hope to match Obama's organization.
The campaign's Hail Mary strategy, therefore, appears to be
based on mobilizing the conservative base.
Palin has enthusiastically risen to the task. Her message on
Monday was the usual folksy populism on steroids. Obama
won't just raise your taxes, he's a socialist. He's not just unready
to be commander in chief, he'll invite an attack. He doesn't just
have bad ideas about Iraq, he never uses the word "victory." "Joe
the Plumber" made an appearance in Palin's speech; Tito the
Builder, the newest member of the campaign's middle-class
everyman super team (which, with "Rose the Teacher," "Doug
the Barber," and "Cindy the Citizen," is starting to sound a lot
like a commune) was there in person. Palin's folksy one-offs
have now been seared into her teleprompters: At two events, she
said Obama was "just kinda flip-floppin' around there" on taxes.
(If that wasn't enough, there were bails of hay lining the stage in
Fredericksburg.) And she touched on the messy stuff: "It is not
mean-spirited or negative campaigning to call someone out on
their record, on their plans and their associations."
She's also what political nerds might call a "validator" for
McCain—she lets people know it's OK to vote for him. Just as
white union leaders make their members feel more comfortable
with Obama, so Palin makes religious conservatives more
comfortable with McCain. She also validates their doubts—
which, at this stage of the campaign, are mostly about the polls.
Palin dismissed the media and Democrats who say Obama has
the race locked up. "I'll tell you something about polls," said
state Sen. Richard Stuart as he warmed up the Fredericksburg
crowd. He described how he was down in the polls a week
before Election Day and still won. I heard someone else posit the
theory that pollsters poll only Democrats, so of course Obama is
winning. One voter, Lori Haimel of Boones Mill, assured me
that polls are wrong because they rely on home landlines during
the day, while professionals are at work.
There are plenty of reasons to doubt polls, and this election has
enough X-factors—race and turnout among them—to justify
healthy second-guessing. But there's a difference between
skepticism and denial. Obama has been surging not just in
Virginia but everywhere, thanks largely to the flagging
economy. And it's pretty clear that the Republican leadership
believes the polls: The RNC is now buying ad time in Montana
and West Virginia.
Luckily for Palin, this denial is accompanied by enthusiasm—
both positive and negative. The negative energy, which seems to
fuse with evangelical fervor, is directed at Obama. Deborah
Cleaveland, decked in fur and leopard-print gloves and flanked
by her grandchildren, carried a sign to the rally in Salem with a
line from Proverbs: "When the righteous are in authority, the
people rejoice; but when the wicked rule, the people mourn."
She doesn't think Obama is the Antichrist, she told me. But
there's a decent chance he's a prophet sent to announce the
coming of the Antichrist. As for why God would allow Obama
to get elected, "He may be drawing things to an end."
Campaign officials tend not to dwell on End Times for practical
as well as symbolic reasons. "Morale is good," said Tyler
Brown, a McCain spokesman in Virginia. "We're gonna keep
fighting it out." I believe him. When Palin's motorcade breezed
by the football stadium in Salem, the crowd screamed. One fan
shook a sign: "Why vote for Sarah? Because she's one of us!"
When Palin stood under the giant field lights, the crowd chanting
her name, fans in the stands wearing coordinated colors to spell
out "USA," I couldn't help but think we'd suddenly fastforwarded to 2012.
drink
Good News About the Recession!
Maybe restaurants will finally slash their exorbitant, ridiculous wine prices.
By Mike Steinberger
Friday, October 31, 2008, at 11:59 AM ET
Oenophiles are divided over lots of issues—the merits of red
Burgundies, the virtues of new oak, the utility of Riedel
glasses—but they all seem to agree that restaurant wine prices
are, on the whole, abusively high. In the just-released seventh
edition of Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide, critic Robert Parker
blasts restaurants that charge exorbitant markups; he says this
practice reinforces "the mistaken notion that wine is only for the
elite and superrich" and urges consumers to shun establishments
that engage in it. (Bizarrely, Page Six ran an item last month
about Parker's broadside; evidently, it was a very slow gossip
day.) Extortionate markups do send a regrettable message, but it
is nothing that a deep recession can't cure. In the current
economic climate, gouging on wine is not just unsporting but
suicidal. Restaurants looking for strategies to survive the
downturn ought to begin by cutting the prices on their wines.
Restaurant wine service is an eternally fraught subject.
Conflicting opinions have even been slipped into the pages of
Slate. Last January, I wrote an article praising American
sommeliers; five months later, an indignant Christopher
Hitchens demanded to know why such creatures even exist. In
denouncing sommeliers, Hitchens hit on an essential point:
Restaurants want you to drink as much wine as possible. Not
only that: The more you spend on a bottle, the happier they are.
They will sometimes even sacrifice a bit of the profit they might
earn from solids in order to get clients to pony up for liquids. In
a profile last year in The New Yorker, British chef Gordon
Ramsay admitted that he kept food prices at his newly opened
Manhattan restaurant lower than they needed to be as a way of
enticing customers to go crazy on wine.
The emphasis on wine has a simple explanation: Wine sales are
the lifeblood of many restaurants. Ronn Wiegand, a Napa,
Calif.-based restaurant consultant who holds the rare Master of
Wine degree, says that wine accounts for 10 percent to 15
percent of total sales for casual restaurants and as much as 60
percent at fancier establishments. Restaurants generally have
low profit margins and thus need to slap markups on pretty much
everything they put on the table. But a $250 Bordeaux is
obviously going to make a far greater contribution to the bottom
line than a turnip, which is why restaurants invest so heavily in
their wine programs—not just filling their cellars with excellent
rieslings and syrahs but also providing competent sommeliers,
good stemware, excellent storage, and other amenities. For
decades now, markups of 2.5 to three times the wholesale price
have been the industry norm. According to Wiegand, such
multiples are an economic necessity for most restaurants;
anything less and they may have trouble sustaining themselves.
But not every wine on the list has to be marked up at the same
rate. So long as the average cost per bottle is in the 2.5-to-threetimes-wholesale range, list prices for individual wines need not
follow any formula. And, in fact, most restaurants that take wine
seriously use a system of progressive markups: They generally
slap the biggest markups on inexpensive wines and the lowest
ones on pricy bottles (the idea being that the closer an expensive
wine is to its retail price, the more apt the customer will be to
bite).
Indeed, as individual bottlings go, it is a pricing free-for-all,
something the Wall Street Journal discovered when it set out to
make sense of wine list economics. The Journal recently ran an
article titled "Cracking the Code of Restaurant Wine Pricing,"
which found that wine prices can swing dramatically even within
the same neighborhood. There was, for instance, the 1999 Dom
Pérignon that was selling for $155 at the Legal Sea Foods in
Washington; the same champagne was fetching $250 at the
McCormick & Schmick's just up the road. Even within the same
family of restaurants, prices can differ substantially from one
location to the next; the article noted that the 2005 Duckhorn
merlot was listed for $96 at the Ruth's Chris steakhouse in Dallas
but was going for $160 at the Ruth's Chris in Pittsburgh. Why all
the discrepancies? Wholesale costs vary from city to city,
restaurants sometimes get great deals on particular wines, and
they often set prices according to the competition they face, the
quantities they expect to sell, and the image they wish to project.
However, it is also the case that many restaurants price wine
simply according to what they think they can get away with. The
Journal article mentioned Las Vegas several times. Restaurant
wine prices in Las Vegas are notoriously high, which is not
surprising: The city is a magnet for spendthrifts who understand
that money brought to Vegas stays in Vegas and that getting
soaked is part of the experience. Last year, Food & Wine's Lettie
Teague noted that Las Vegas and Miami had some of the stiffest
markups of any American cities and suggested that one reason
for this is that they are principally tourist destinations, which
means restaurants have little incentive to use wine prices to
cultivate loyalty or encourage repeat visits; chances are, they are
going to see a customer only once, and they thus want to squeeze
as much out of him or her as possible. New York is also known
for its lofty wine prices, but the huge markups there have
primarily been a function of Wall Street's profligacy: There was
almost no limit to what traders and bankers were willing to fork
out for wine, and many restaurants were only too happy to test
their limits. It was the same story in London, where the markups
became, if anything, even more egregious—and the clients
hardly blanched. In an incident in 2002 that made headlines
around the world, a group of bankers spent $63,000 on wine
during a dinner at Petrus, a London restaurant owned by Gordon
Ramsay. (Most of them were fired.)
Now that investment banks have been sucked into a black hole
of their own making, restaurants in London and New York are
already beginning to suffer. Two London eateries owned by
another top British chef, Tom Aikens, went bust earlier this
month, and these are likely to be only the first of many
casualties. Restaurants always take a pounding during economic
downturns, and that is certainly true now. S & A Restaurant
Corp., which owned both the Bennigan's and Steak and Ale
chains, went bankrupt in July, and companies like Ruth's Chris,
McCormick & Schmick's, and Morton's are all struggling.
The easy profits are over, and restaurants hoping to weather the
recession ought to think about dialing back their wine prices.
Kevin Zraly, a New York-area wine educator who helped
pioneer the use of progressive markups when he oversaw wine
service at Manhattan's Windows on the World, says that at this
point, restaurants just need to fill seats and should scale back
their wine markups as a way of attracting diners. "Wine is a tool
to get people into restaurants, and in this economy, wine prices
need to be dropped to do that," he says. "We had adjustable-rate
mortgages, now we need adjustable-rate wines." He also says
that restaurants that allow customers to bring their own wines
but charge relatively high corkage fees should think about
reducing the amount they charge for BYOB. Zraly believes $20
per bottle is a reasonable tariff.
Some restaurants have long taken an unorthodox approach to
wine sales—by allowing free BYOB, for example, or by
charging slender markups. Landmarc, a popular New York
restaurant, prices wines at just above retail and makes up the
difference on volume. Richard Betts, the wine director at the
Little Nell in Aspen, Colo., instituted an across-the-board 30
percent price cut in wine prices in 2001 and says the restaurant's
seven-figure annual wine sales are now double what they were
then. Betts says that people who previously would order only
one bottle of wine with dinner began ordering two, there were
more repeat guests, and favorable publicity brought scores of
new ones to the restaurant. Now that fat markups are likely to
become a customer repellant, other restaurants will ideally be
tempted to experiment with their wine policies. Given the grim
economic outlook, slashing wine prices probably won't be
enough to save many establishments, but they might as well die
trying.
suggest a shift in the race is imminent. A memo released by
McCain's pollster Bill McInturff this week falls into that
category: McInturff never mentions national head-to-head
numbers but, instead, argues that McCain is gaining support
among rural voters, non-college-educated men, and "Wal-Mart
women." (Internal polls sometimes go on to test a campaign
message—for example, by giving a series of statements about
the candidates and seeing how voters react. A pollster following
ethical standards is obligated to say so if their results are skewed
by those messages.)
election scorecard
McCain's Gains
State polls show slight shifts toward McCain.
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 12:05 PM ET
explainer
McCain's Secret Polls
Why do a campaign's internal numbers look so different from the public data?
By Jacob Leibenluft
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 6:34 PM ET
Most public polls find Barack Obama with double-digit leads in
Iowa and Pennsylvania, but members of the McCain campaign
cite internal numbers showing a tight race. A campaign might
have its own reasons for releasing numbers that favor its cause,
but is there any other reason why internal polls might differ from
the ones produced for the public?
Not really. In general, media organizations and private campaign
pollsters compile their numbers in the same way. But there are a
few key differences. First, a newspaper or TV station might be
more likely find their respondents with random-digit dialing—
calling any phone number that works and then asking whoever
picks up whether he or she is registered to vote. Campaign
pollsters often save time by pulling their samples from a list of
all registered voters. In theory, the pollsters who use the voter
files run the risk of missing voters whose information isn't up-todate, but a study by two Yale professors (PDF) using data from
the 2002 elections suggested that these samples were actually a
little more accurate than those collected via random phone calls.
Still, the difference between the two methods probably wouldn't
affect the outcome all that much, particularly given all the
challenges in figuring out who counts as a "likely" voter,
anyway.
Campaign polls may differ more in their specific focus. At the
state level, public polls tend to look primarily at the "top-line"
numbers—which candidate is winning overall. An internal poll
may ask more questions about voters' demographics, their
political leanings, and how they feel about the issues or the
candidates. So even if the top-line numbers suggest that a
candidate is losing, a campaign pollster could find data that
Even if public polls and internal polls were conducted in exactly
the same way, the results we hear about might still be different
for a simple reason: Campaigns like to release only good news.
Given that there will be a certain amount of random noise from
poll to poll, the same methodology could produce several polls
with different outcomes. In that case, a media organization
would release all the numbers, while the campaign pollster
might leak only the data that show his candidate winning. Two
different analyses (PDF) using data from the early 2000s found a
bias of a few percentage points among partisan polls that had
been released to the public—although it's worth noting that
outside pollsters can also have a so-called "house effect,"
favoring one party or another throughout a given year.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Whit Ayres of Ayres, McHenry & Associates
Inc., Charles Franklin of the University of Wisconsin, Adam
Geller of National Research Inc., Alex Lundry of TargetPoint
Consulting, Thomas Riehle of RT Strategies Inc., Michael
Traugott of the University of Michigan, and Doug Usher of
Widmeyer Communications.
explainer
Can Ted Stevens Vote for Himself?
Yes, on a technicality.
By Noreen Malone
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 11:20 AM ET
Sen. Ted Stevens was found guilty of seven felony counts on
Monday for failing to disclose gifts and services he'd received
while in office. Despite the conviction, he pledged to continue
his campaign for re-election. As a convicted felon, will Stevens
be able to vote for himself next Tuesday?
Yes. Alaska law states that convicted felons are barred from
voting if their crime is one of "moral turpitude," which in Alaska
includes a wide swath of illegal activities. "Receiving a bribe" is
listed among them, although the state government set up a
special review of the Stevens case. In a decision released
Wednesday night, the Alaska Division of Elections announced
that the senator's crimes were, in fact, of moral turpitude but that
a guilty verdict wasn't enough to make him a convicted felon for
purposes of voting. Until February, when he's sentenced—and
thus "convicted," according to a more formal definition—he'll be
able to exercise his right to vote. (Stevens' crimes of moral
turpitude may also be grounds for disbarment in Alaska and the
District of Columbia.)
A federal judge in Pennsylvania this week threw out a lawsuit
that challenged Barack Obama's eligibility for the presidency by
claiming he's not a U.S. citizen. A California judge tossed out a
similar lawsuit in September, after a member of the state's
American Independent Party claimed John McCain was not a
"natural-born citizen." Do presidential candidates have to prove
their eligibility for office before they get on the ballot?
Even if he weren't allowed to vote, Stevens would still be able to
continue his Senate campaign. There's no law barring felons
from the Senate, and he fits the only constitutional requirements
for the position: He's an Alaskan resident over the age of 30 and
has been a U.S. citizen for more than nine years. State law does
stipulate that a candidate for the Senate must be a registered
voter—and thus not a felon who committed acts of moral
turpitude—when he files for the office. But Stevens had not yet
been found guilty when he filed.
No. Ballot access rules vary by state, but in general, you don't
have to prove eligibility unless someone challenges it. Article II
of the U.S. Constitution requires that a presidential candidate be
a "natural born citizen"—in other words, a citizen born in this
country or, according to traditional interpretation, born to U.S.
citizens overseas (as opposed to a naturalized citizen born
overseas).* You also have to be at least 35 and have lived in the
U.S. for at least 14 years. But none of the 50 states asks for birth
certificates or long-term residency documents to prove that a
candidate qualifies for a spot on the ballot. (Obama released a
copy of his birth certificate, anyway.)
Bonus Explainer: If Stevens wins re-election but is expelled by
the Senate, can Gov. Sarah Palin appoint herself to his seat? No.
In most states, when a Senate seat is vacated midterm, the
governor of the state appoints someone to fill it. That was the
case in Alaska until 2004, when public outrage over Gov. Frank
Murkowski's 2002 appointment of his daughter Lisa to his
vacated Senate seat prompted accusations of nepotism and led to
a ballot initiative requiring that special elections be held within
90 days. (Palin may still be able to make a temporary
appointment within those three months.)
In general, governors aren't allowed to pick themselves to fill a
vacant Senate seat. Some, however, have tried to get around that
constraint by resigning from office and then letting a newly
bumped-up lieutenant governor appoint them instead. Those
who do this are rarely re-elected: One exception was "Happy"
Chandler of Kentucky, who had himself appointed in the 1930s.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Jack Chenoweth of the State of Alaska
Legislative Affairs Agency, Gail Fenumiai of the Alaska Division
of Elections, Steven F. Huefner of Ohio State University, and
Don Ritchie of the U.S. Senate Historical Office.
explainer
Must Obama Prove He's a Natural-Born
Citizen?
The flimsy rules on eligibility standards for presidential candidates.
By Christopher Beam
Wednesday, October 29, 2008, at 6:25 PM ET
Instead, they take the major parties' word for it. In presidential
primary elections, most states put "generally recognized
candidates" on the ballot automatically. California, for example,
recognizes candidates who qualify for federal matching funds,
appear in public-opinion polls, "campaign actively" in
California, and appear on other states' ballots. Presidential
electors usually do have to affirm their eligibility—by
demonstrating that they are over 18, registered voters, and state
residents. The candidates themselves face no such requirements.
Third-party candidates, however, do have to show some ID. In
Maryland, anyone who wants to get on the presidential primary
ballot but isn't "generally recognized" (as vaguely defined by the
state) has to sign a Certificate of Candidacy affirming, "I meet
the qualification for the above mentioned office as set forth in
applicable law." Illinois, too, requires independent candidates to
affirm that they are "legally qualified … to hold such office."
Violation is considered perjury. (If you really want to burnish
your cred, Illinois has an optional loyalty oath.)
Eligibility requirements are different for state and local offices.
Candidates for the House of Representatives must be at least 25
years old. Senators have to be 30. Residency requirements vary:
In Virginia, congressmen have to live in their district; in
California, they don't. Most states require candidates to affirm
that they meet the requirements. Virginia, for example, asks
House candidates to swear that they're 25, they live in their
district, they've never been convicted of a felony, and they've
been a U.S. citizen for at least seven years.
How do you challenge a candidate's eligibility for president or
any other office? You have two options: report them to your
secretary of state or take them to court. Some Secretary of State
offices have investigation units that handle fraud, and
investigations can lead to felony charges. Taking candidates to
court is trickier. For one thing, you need "standing"—proof that
the candidate's actions harm you. A federal judge ruled recently
that ordinary citizens don't qualify for standing, and Congress
would have to pass a law to change that. Political parties, on the
other hand, might have a better chance in court, since they would
clearly get hurt if an ineligible opponent won.
Magic numbers abound among white supremacists. The digits
4/20 celebrate Hitler's birthday, and the number 5 represents
resistance to law enforcement in the form of this five-word
response to interrogation: "I have nothing to say." The number
311 refers to the Ku Klux Klan, because K is the 11 th letter,
repeated three times. So does 33/6—that's three times 11, with
the number six standing for the current period of the Klan's
history, which the group has divided into six eras.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Susan Conner of the Madera County Clerk's
Office, Paul S. Ryan of the Campaign Legal Center, and
Lorraine Thompson of the Virginia State Board of Elections.
Correction, Oct. 30, 2008: This article originally defined a
"natural born citizen" as a citizen born in the United States.
(Return to the corrected sentence.)
explainer
White Supremacists by the Numbers
What's up with 14 and 88? And what about the shaved heads and white
tuxedos?
By Brian Palmer
Wednesday, October 29, 2008, at 5:31 PM ET
Law enforcement officials in Tennessee have arrested two white
supremacists who planned to assassinate Barack Obama, the
New York Times reported Monday. The skinheads had a scheme
to attack the presidential candidate while wearing white tuxedos
and top hats. They also intended to murder 88 people and behead
14 African-American children—numbers that "have special
significance in the white power movement," according to the
Times. What's the deal with these skinhead numbers and fashion
choices? (Note: A few of the links in this article go to whitesupremacist Web sites.)
88 and 14. As the Times article explained, the number 88
represents the phrase "Heil Hitler," because H is the eighth letter
in the alphabet. White supremacists are also fond of the number
18 to represent the initials A.H. (Other tight-knit groups use a
similar code: The Hells Angels, for example, are attached to the
number 81.)
Shaved heads. The white supremacist hairdo goes back to 1960s
British politics. The original skinheads were not necessarily
racists but rather young men whose aesthetic celebrated reggae
and ska music and the masculine English worker. As the decade
progressed, some skinheads fell under the influence of antiimmigration politicians who warned of an imminent race war.
The group splintered into a militant wing (with no hair) and an
apolitical wing (with short hair). The skinheads transitioned to a
new musical genre called "Oi!" and British neo-Nazi musicians
soon followed. As skinheads moved toward white supremacism,
white supremacists flocked to the skinheads. Still, not all
skinheads today are part of the white-power movement.
White tuxedos and top hats. This one is a little more obscure.
The all-white outfits might refer to the hood and robe of the
Klan. Or they might be a nod to the Anthony Burgess novel A
Clockwork Orange. In that book (and the subsequent Stanley
Kubrick film), a group of violent youths called droogs, clad in
white jumpsuits and bowler hats, terrorizes England by night. In
the 1970s, some English skinheads donned the white outfit and
dubbed themselves "Clockwork Orange skins." Supporting this
theory is that one of the would-be assassins in Tennessee
appears to be wearing eye makeup in photos. Eye makeup is not
associated with the white supremacist movement in the United
States, but it was an aspect of the droog aesthetic. However, one
of the youths was also involved in the Goth subculture, in which
makeup is common.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Timothy Brown of Northeastern University and
Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League.
explainer
Will Early Voting Skew Exit Polls?
The late David Lane, a member of the Ku Klux Klan and cofounder of a white-power revolutionary group, detailed his
philosophy in an article called "88 Precepts." (Precept No. 11:
"Beware of verbose doctrines.") The number 14 refers to a 14word mission statement he wrote while propagandizing from
federal prison: "We must secure the existence of our people and
a future for white children."
No.
By Juliet Lapidos
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 4:47 PM ET
More than 30 states allow no-excuse early voting, either by mail
or in person, and this year one-third of the electorate is expected
to cast a ballot before Election Day. (That's up from 22 percent
four years ago.) Will all these trigger-happy ballot casters screw
up exit polls on Nov. 4?
Nope. In states with lots of early voters—like Georgia, where
one-fifth of registered voters have already recorded their
decisions—the same outfit that conducts exit polls for the
National Election Pool starts telephone surveys about a week
before Election Day. Phone numbers are generated by computer
with random-digit dialing, but only respondents who have
already voted, or who plan to ahead of time, are questioned
fully. Then analysts merge the data collected by phone with
results from interviews conducted at polling stations, keeping the
early/day-of ratio pegged to that of the actual vote total.
Estimates from absentee polls have been quite accurate
historically. Oregon, for example, has had a vote-by-mail system
in place since 1998, and pollsters haven't found big
discrepancies between official results and survey answers. This
year, some may worry that a Bradley effect will show up on
telephone interviews but not in exit polls, since the latter are
more anonymous. (For an exit poll, you just fill out a piece of
paper and drop it in a box.) That would be the case only if the
Bradley effect turned out to be real, something hotly contested
during this campaign, and if the effect were the result of a
conscious decision to dissemble rather than an unconscious one.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com, Michael
Dimock of the Pew Research Center, and Joe Lenski of Edison
Media Research.
explainer
How Bad Are Electronic Voting
Machines?
comes from an opinion piece published by the National
Academy of Engineering last year. According to the author,
Michael Ian Shamos, "it has been reported anecdotally" that 10
percent of the machines fail "in some respect" on Election Day.
That means the machine required some technical intervention,
not that it was necessarily taken out of service. The high
estimate of 20 percent comes from a 2005 study conducted by
the state of California.* In that paper, the authors were testing
only one of the six machines used in Pennsylvania—the Diebold
(now Premier) AccuVote TSX, a machine whose software has
since been updated. Furthermore, 14 of the 34 documented
failures were printer jams, which won't be a problem in
Pennsylvania since the state doesn't produce paper voting
receipts.
The fact is that no one really knows how often electronic voting
machines fail. The Election Assistance Commission—an
independent governmental agency charged with establishing
election standards—doesn't collect comprehensive statistics on
failure rates. (Various nonprofits, such as Election Protection
and VotersUnite!, do collect individual complaints.) However,
according to federal standards set in 2002, machines may fail as
often as once in 163 hours and still make certification. If the
chance of a failure were randomly distributed throughout that
163-hour period, a given machine would have up to around an 8
percent chance of breaking down during regular use on Election
Day. But these standards define "failure" quite broadly—a
software glitch that causes the machine to freeze up for 10 or
more seconds, for example, would count. (Individual states don't
have to follow the federal guidelines, though many of them do.)
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Matt Bishop of the University of CaliforniaDavis, John Gideon of VotersUnite!, Joseph Lorenzo Hall of
University of California-Berkeley and Princeton University,
Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center at New York
University, Michael Shamos of Carnegie Mellon, and David
Wagner of University of California-Berkeley.
Do they really fail one out of five times?
By Nina Shen Rastogi
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 6:10 PM ET
Civil rights groups filed a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania
Department of State last week calling for paper ballots to be
provided in any precinct where half the voting machines fail on
Election Day. The complaint asserts that 10 percent to 20
percent of the direct-recording electronic voting machines used
in Pennsylvania are likely to fail on Nov. 4. The machines will
be used in 34 percent of counties around the United States. Are
they really so bad that they fail one out of five times?
No. The 10 percent to 20 percent figure cited in the
Pennsylvania lawsuit is somewhat misleading. The low estimate
Correction, Oct. 28, 2008: The original sentence stated that the
2005 AccuVote TSx study was part of a top-to-bottom review of
California's voting systems. It was conducted under the state's
regular certification process; the top-to-bottom review took
place in 2007. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
faith-based
Witches' Brouhaha
Fending off religious tourists and struggling to organize a coven on Halloween.
By Lee Ann Kinkade
Wednesday, October 29, 2008, at 6:56 AM ET
In a grove near you, pagans are gathering to celebrate Samhain,
the night when the veil between the living and the dead, between
this world and others, is thin. We will wear cloaks and have
ritual daggers, called athemes, at our waists. The prerequisite
silver jewelry will gleam in the firelight. Natural fabrics flow as
freely as the mead. There will be an unfortunate excess of tiedyed material. In other words, we will look most like your
picture of witches.
This picture leaves out an important detail, and I don't mean the
whole human-sacrifice-and-stealing-Christian-babies thing.
Planning a ritual, whether it's for Halloween or any other
holiday, is a conflict-filled battle. It's like trying to herd jack
rabbits on horseback. Those who practice witchcraft tend to be
strident nonconformists, and the very nature of paganism, which
has no unifying body or text, means that we have no obligation
to believe the same thing or listen to anything beyond the
dictates of our own consciences to unite in perfect accord. Often
we flow together, achieving unity in which we are transported
beyond ourselves, connected with the earth we love and the
energy we feel from it.
And just as often, we don't.
A few weeks before the ritual comes the discussion. It may
begin with a priestess asking what song we should sing for the
Spiral Dance, the part of the ritual in which we dance clockwise
("sunwise" is our term for it) to generate energy and to unite us
with the god and goddess. One person suggests "There Is No
End to the Circle." Any number of coven members nod; the rest
groan. Somebody says, "We did that last year." Somebody else:
"Exactly. It's traditional with us." Another person asks, "So,
we're faux fam-trad now?" A new coven member tries to
remember what, exactly, a fam-trad coven is. Inspired by the
discussion, someone spontaneously sings out, "There is no end
to this song, there is no end." The high priestess glares.
Eventually, the debate is resolved simply because everyone is
sick of talking about it. Now the rest of the ritual has to be
planned—and it's just more of the same. Scintillating debates
may rage on such issues as vegan vs. nonvegan cakes and
alcoholic vs. nonalcoholic ale. The more essential parts of the
ritual, the invocation of the elements and the arrangement of
altars, seem to work themselves out fairly easily. Like most
family fights, any acrimony is focused on the details.
Once we've agreed on the parts of the ritual, we actually have to
execute that plan—and the nonconformists have to remember
what they agreed to do and do it, which is a challenge in and of
itself. The Samhain ritual in which we performed "There Is No
End to the Circle" was lovely and went relatively smoothly,
though we started late, just as we always do. I've given up on
that score—I'm the only witch I know who has any interest in
punctuality. The song itself is broken up into three parts, sung by
the maiden, mother, and crone, each corresponding to an aspect
of the goddess. As the youngest woman in the coven (this was
depressingly long ago), I danced the part of the maiden. Sadly,
between my cerebral palsy and the pack a day I smoke, songand-dance routines are really not my thing. Further complicating
things, several people seemed to have forgotten when they were
supposed to come in, which led to hissed directions from about
five self-appointed stage managers. But everyone was pleased by
the time we sat down for the traditional cakes and ale.
These problems aren't restricted to our Halloween celebrations.
A few years ago, I led the Lughnasadh ritual. The festival, which
takes place on Aug. 1, 2, or 6 (we can't even agree on a date),
honors the beginning of the harvest and the sun god, which bring
me to my two major complaints about Lughnasadh. I hate
making corn muffins in August. It makes the house much hotter
than it ever needs to be. In addition to corn muffins, the festival
calls for a bonfire—in August. In Virginia. There's nothing quite
like a grumpy high priestess to set the tone for a spiritual
experience. As soon as we had cast the circle, it began to pour.
As members of a nature-based religion, this seems like the sort
of condition we should be able to cope with. And I suppose we
did. My sister removed my wrap (it's a good thing it was a
private ritual, because that's all I was wearing), and we held it
over the as-yet-unlit bonfire until we successfully ignited it. So
far, so good. But the spell, as it were, was broken. As I was
invoking the relevant deities, I heard a crack and a hiss.
Someone had opened a beer. I glared. She ignored me and began
to chat with somebody else. I began to think longingly of
religions that stress obedience, remembered that those traditions
tend to have poverty and chastity associated with them, and felt
a certain nostalgia for of my days as a solitary witch.
These sorts of events inspired me to leave the coven behind. I
currently work with one other witch, whom I've known since we
were 3 and 5. We plan our rituals with little fuss and no doctrine.
Our litmus test is, Does it feel right? One decision we've made is
to rebuff curious friends who ask to join our Halloween rituals.
It seems like half the people I know want to be pagan on
Halloween. I have no problem with a little religious tourism. I'm
a bit of a spiritual slut. I have never turned down an invitation to
a Seder. Bach thundering through a church transports me. But
when I see visions of bacchanals dancing in my nonpagan
friends' heads, I get a little testy. Certain experiences are too
comforting, too sacred to be spectacles. For me, Samhain is one
of them.
So it will be just the two of us this year—imperfect people doing
our best to honor the pagan ideal of "perfect love and perfect
trust." We will light the candles, cast a circle, honor our dead.
We are aware of our connection to all other pagans, who are
doing the same thing in big rituals, in solitary practices,
celebrating with children who will behave like kids at any
religious celebration: with wide eyes, wondering attention,
giggles at the wrong moment. My working partner and I will
close the ritual with words that Starhawk, one of the leaders of
the neopagan community, wrote not long before we were born
but that nonetheless feel traditional to us: "The Circle is open but
always unbroken. May the peace of the Goddess go in your
heart. Merry meet, merry part, and merry meet again."
sidebar
Return to article
"Fam-trad" is short for family-traditional and refers to a coven
that has roots in the underground practice of witchcraft, before it
became legal, instead of in the neopagan movement, which I am
part of and which began in the 1960s. Pagans not born into the
faith sometimes look a little wistfully through the windows of
fam-trad life, longing for historical connection with the folk
cultures that sustain us. Occasionally, the need for validation
manifests in bouts of flagrant posing: My grandmother was
Aleister Crowley's acolyte. Or fam-trad witches may throw their
weight around: My grandmother was introducing me to the fairy
folk when you were in Sunday school. For the most part, as the
pagan community becomes multigenerational, these fights
become relegated to the upper regions of the blogosphere.
fighting words
Sarah Palin's War on Science
The GOP ticket's appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.
By Christopher Hitchens
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 11:43 AM ET
In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low
cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending
that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering
new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in
petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic
stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things
could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday,
when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced
wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good
xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research
took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid
you not."
It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for
showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The
experimental creature that he employed in the making of this
great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly.
Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful
resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a
laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great
variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and
since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature
"issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had
some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center
for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The
fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any
financing of research into its habits and mutations is money
well-spent. It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the
governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a
great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel
into a center of high-tech medical research.
In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in
her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the
man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain
has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several
times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless
speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the
DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as "unbelievable."
As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American
pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species
Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the
best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting
up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take
samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the
DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial
compared with the importance of understanding this species, and
I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of
other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was
be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a
"paternity" or "criminal" issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service
was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that
he associates in his mind with DNA.)
With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be
something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed
plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to
ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the
teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea
through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the
argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least
probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies
were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any
other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or
not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the
better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We
could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says
that she doesn't think humans are responsible for global
warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of
her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"—in
other words, someone who believes that there is no point in
protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of
days will soon be upon us.
comfortable with was Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party (I
lived in England in the 1980s and '90s), I didn't actually do it.
Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska,
which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says
that Alaska will be "one of the refuge states in the Last Days."
For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely
held among those who brood on the "End Times," that some
parts of the world will end at different times from others, and
Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of
its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New
York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme
Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past
(perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political
career became more attractive). High points, also available on
YouTube, show her being "anointed" by an African bishop who
claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this
hysterical superstitious nonsense is "spiritual warfare," in which
true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has
spoken at "spiritual warfare" events as recently as June. And
only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of "prayer
warriors" in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on
the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had
convened a prayer meeting to beseech that "God's perfect will be
done on Nov. 4."
The larger point, though, is that if I'm not voting for McCain—
and, after a long struggle, I've realized that I'm not—maybe it's
worth explaining why, because I suspect there are other
independent voters who feel the same way. It's not his campaign,
disjointed though that's been, that finally repulses me; it's his
rapidly deteriorating, increasingly anti-intellectual, no longer
even recognizably conservative Republican Party. His problems
are not technical, to do with ads, fund raising, and tactics, as
some have suggested. They are institutional, to do with his
colleagues, his advisers, and his supporters.
This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has
placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a
religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who
despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally
and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the
educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual
warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic
bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a
clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.
foreigners
Why I Can't Vote for John McCain
I admire the man, but his party has been taken over by anti-intellectual
extremists.
By Anne Applebaum
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 8:17 PM ET
This weekend, while reading the latest polling data on John
McCain, Sarah Palin, and their appeal—or growing lack of it—
among "independent women voters," it suddenly dawned on me:
I am, in fact, one of these elusive independent woman voters,
and I have the credentials to prove it. For the last couple of
decades, I've sometimes voted Democratic, sometimes
Republican. I'm even a registered independent, though I did
think of switching to the Republican Party to vote for John
McCain in 2000. But because the last political party I truly felt
I should say here that I know McCain slightly: He spoke at a
party given for a book I wrote a few years ago, though I think
that was as much because of the subject (Communist prison
camps) as the author. But it's not his personality I admire most.
Far more important is his knowledge of foreign affairs, an
understanding that goes well beyond an ability to guess correctly
the name of the Pakistani president. McCain not only knows the
names; he knows the people—and by this I mean not just foreign
presidents but foreign members of parliament, journalists,
generals. He goes to Germany every year, visits Vietnam often,
can talk intelligently about Belarus and Uzbekistan. I've heard
him do it. Let's just say that's one of the things that distinguished
him, for me, from our current president, who once confessed that
"this foreign-policy stuff is a little frustrating."
The second thing I liked about McCain was the deliberate
distance he always kept from the nuttier wing of his party and,
simultaneously, the loyalty he's shown to a recognizably
conservative budgetary philosophy, something that many
congressional Republicans abandoned long ago. Fiscal
conservatism, balanced budgets, sober spending—all these
principles have been brushed away as so much nonsense for the
last eight years by Republicans more interested in grandstanding
about how much they hate Washington. McCain was one of the
few to keep talking about these principles. He was also one of
shockingly few to understand that there is nothing American, let
alone conservative, about torture and that a battle for civilized
values could not be won by uncivilized means.
Finally, I admired McCain's willingness to tackle politically
risky issues like immigration, the debate about which has long
been drenched in hypocrisy. Those who want to ban it are
illogically denying both the role that immigrants, especially the
millions of illegal immigrants, already play in the American
economy, as well as the improbability of forced deportations;
those who want to allow it without restriction don't acknowledge
the security risks. McCain tried to put together a bipartisan
coalition in an effort to find a rational solution. He failed—
blocked by the ideologues in his party.
But if these traits appealed to me, I'm guessing they would have
appealed to other independents, too. Why, then, has McCain
spent the last four months running away from them? The
appointment of Sarah Palin—inspired by his closest
colleagues—turned out not to be a "maverick" move but, rather,
a concession to those Republicans who think foreign policy can
be conducted using a series of clichés and those in his party who
shout down the federal government while quietly raking in
federal subsidies. Though McCain has the one of the best
records of bipartisanship in the Senate, he has let his campaign
appeal to his party's extremes. Though he is a true foreign-policy
intellectual, his supporters cultivate ignorance and fear: Watch
Sean Hannity's "Obama & Friends: History of Radicalism" if
you don't believe me. Worse, in a fatal effort to appeal to the
least thoughtful, most partisan elements of his base, McCain has
moved away from his previous positions on torture and
immigration. Maybe that's all tactics, and maybe the "real"
McCain will ditch the awful ideologues after Nov. 4 if, by some
miracle, he happens to win. But how can I know that will
happen?
John writes this week about a sense of hopefulness that has come
over many of the people working for the McCain campaign.
Here's what I do know: I would give anything to rewrite history
and make McCain president in 2000. But in 2008, I don't think I
can vote for him. Barack Obama is indeed the least experienced,
least tested candidate in modern presidential history. But at least
if he wins, I can be sure that the mobs who cry "terrorist" at the
sound of his name will be kept away—far away—from the
White House.
John says 10,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong.
gabfest
The Almost-Over Gabfest
Listen to Slate's review of the week in politics.
By Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz
Friday, October 31, 2008, at 10:41 AM ET
Emily attempts to correct John's pronunciation of the word dour.
Emily suggests that John McCain is getting some traction with
his campaign's latest effort, which is to cast Barak Obama as a
socialist who wants to redistribute wealth in the country.
John talks about the size of the crowds at campaign rallies for
Obama compared with those for McCain.
The gang also discusses whether attacks on Obama's character
will appeal to undecided voters. John points out that undecided
voters typically vote for the challenger in a presidential race,
which should mean Obama, since the Republicans currently hold
the White House. One factor in McCain's favor is that during the
primaries, the undecided voters favored Hillary Clinton over
Obama.
John says the optimism in the McCain camp is likely misguided,
because there are too many data points favoring Obama—so
many red states seem to be leaning toward the Democrat or are
considered likely wins for Obama. He says Obama's early
strategy of challenging McCain across the country, rather than
focusing on primarily Democratic states, is now paying off.
David praises Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic Party,
who designed the so-called 50-state strategy after the
Democratic defeat in the 2004 presidential election.
Emily breaks the discussion of politics with her cocktail chatter,
in which she brags about her hometown Philadelphia Phillies
winning the World Series.
Listen to the Gabfest for Oct. 31 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
John chatters about the early vote in this election. As many as
one-third of all voters will have voted by Election Day, so it is
possible that the election will effectively be over by then, though
no one will know for sure.
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
David talks about Slate's effort to have staffers publicly state
who they will vote for next Tuesday. Of those who took part, the
count was 55 for Obama and just one for McCain. David claims
that almost all major news organizations would find similar
results.
Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics.
This week, it's all about the last week of the presidential
campaign—with a shout-out to the Philadelphia Phillies.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
Posted on Oct. 31 by Dale Willman at 10:41 a.m.
Oct. 24, 2008
Posted on Oct. 17 by Dale Willman at 11:20 p.m.
Listen to the Gabfest for Oct. 24 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
Oct. 17, 2008
You can also download the program here, or
you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest
podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
Emily Bazelon, David Plotz, and special guest Michael Newman
talk politics. This week, the latest from the presidential
campaign trail, a vice-presidential candidate's wardrobe, and a
supersecret topic.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
David discusses how the wheels seem to be coming off the
McCain campaign. The Republican candidate can't seem to keep
one theme going for more than a few days, and his running mate,
Sarah Palin, has publicly disagreed with McCain several times
over the past few weeks.
This phenomenon is the subject of a story by Robert Draper in
this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
Joe Biden apparently stuck his foot in his mouth this week.
Liza Mundy has an interesting piece in Slate about how difficult
it was to write a biography of Michelle Obama because the
Obama campaign controls information about the candidate and
his family so tightly.
The Republican Party has spent $150,000 on clothes for Sarah
Palin, according to published reports, sparking controversy.
Cindy McCain reportedly wore an outfit worth approximately
$300,000 at the Republican convention and faced very little
criticism for it.
Emily chatters about a new law in Oklahoma that requires
doctors to provide ultrasounds for any woman inquiring about an
abortion.
Michael discusses the recently concluded Nike Women's
Marathon in San Francisco. The race has sparked controversy
because of an unusual occurrence—one woman crossed the
finish line first, while another had the fastest time.
Listen to the Gabfest for Oct. 17 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
John Dickerson, David Plotz, Emily Bazelon, and Hanna Rosin
talk politics. On the agenda this week: the last presidential
debate, where it leaves the presidential race in general, and why
Andrew Sullivan blogs.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
Joe the Plumber takes over the political scene after Wednesday's
debate on Long Island, N.Y. But it turns out that Joe isn't all that
he seems.
John disagrees with the others when he says that Obama did the
best in the debate, especially when he walked through both his
tax and health care plans.
David says it was sheer genius when Obama talked about whom
he associates with during the debate.
John asks the group whether the race is over, with Obama the
winner. David says McCain could do something spectacular to
salvage a win, but otherwise the election will go to Obama.
Hanna, meanwhile, says the race will be much closer than the
polls currently indicate.
The four discuss Obama's strength in the race, shown by the fact
that he is pushing deep into what was once considered
Republican territory.
They discuss Andrew Sullivan's recent piece in the Atlantic,
where he talks about his experiences as a blogger.
Emily chatters about a group of Uighur Chinese dissidents being
held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by American troops.
Hanna talks about the TV show Project Runway.
David wonders why so many Republican men wear Van Dykes.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
John brings up Malcolm Gladwell's piece in The New Yorker;
David finds Gladwell's thesis to be bogus.
David does not chatter because he's working on the launch of
Slate's redesigned Web site, scheduled for Monday.
Posted on Oct. 17 by Dale Willman at 4 p.m.
Oct. 10, 2008
Listen to the Gabfest for Oct. 10 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
David Plotz, Emily Bazelon, and Bill Smee talk politics. This
week, the world economy is in meltdown, the presidential
campaign trail is getting very nasty, and Oliver Stone prepares to
tell us all about a certain lame-duck president in W.
The trio critiques the newly released Oliver Stone movie, W.
Bill backs out of offering any cocktail chatter, saying he is
boycotting the cocktail scene this weekend in sympathy with the
plummeting stock market. He says he will instead stay home
drinking canned beer while watching baseball playoffs rather
than sipping a cocktail.
Emily chatters about an ABC News story earlier this week about
how workers at the National Security Agency may have been
spying on Americans.
David explains how he's been swamped with e-mails from a
conservative Christian group complaining about a Slate column
by Tom Perrotta, in which he talks about vice-presidential
candidate Sarah Palin's sex appeal to some Americans.
Posted on Oct. 10 by Dale Willman at 5:04 p.m.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
gardening
The initial discussion focuses on the continuing world economic
meltdown. Bill talks about a column by the New York Times'
Nicholas Kristof, in which he compares the United States'
actions today to those of Japan during its last economic crisis in
the early 1990s.
Talking Dirt
David praises a piece on National Public Radio by Adam
Davidson that explains why banks are reluctant to loan to one
another right now.
The driest, dullest entry in almost any garden how-to book is the
advice on soil. It's a shame: The tale of soil is full of weird
characters and fascinating processes we understand barely, if at
all. It's also unfortunate because soil is the single most important
factor determining success in your garden. Right now, this
autumn minute, is the time to improve your soil. Right now,
conveniently enough, is when you have a free supply of the ideal
soil conditioner—fallen leaves.
Emily, meanwhile, mentions the recent move by the British
government to partially nationalize banks there in response to
the economic crisis, and compares that with the U.S. response.
One question during all the economic turmoil is: Where is
President Bush? While the markets collapse, the president seems
unusually silent.
David talks about Barack Obama's temperament as outlined in a
profile of the candidate in The New Yorker in 2007. He
characterizes Obama's temperament as oceanic, and he compares
that with John McCain's wild behavior.
Despite Obama pulling away slightly in both national and state
polling, as George Packer writes in an article about Ohio in The
New Yorker, it is possible to become overconfident.
John Dickerson may have missed today's show, but he writes
this week about the angry tone on display at a recent McCain
rally in Wisconsin.
How to prepare your garden's soil now for spring planting.
By Constance Casey
Wednesday, October 29, 2008, at 6:55 AM ET
Most books include that same old dreary litany about finding out
whether your soil is clay or sand, with the added burdensome
assignment of getting a soil test. The soil test, something I've
never done, seems darkly reminiscent of a biopsy; you can learn
a fair bit without a test. Just look around the neighborhood and
note what plants are doing well in local conditions.
It's worth knowing what Mother Earth has dealt you in the dirt
department. But there isn't much you can do about the type of
soil you have—clay or sand. You can sit around despairingly
running sand through your fingers or squishing sticky clay into
balls, and, of course, you can complain forever and say how
much nicer it would be to have a garden in Shropshire, England;
Champaign-Urbana, Ill.; or Tallahassee, Fla.
What any gardener possesses is basically flour ground from
rocks with organic frosting on top. What you can change pretty
easily is the health and texture of that frosting—the structure of
your topsoil. Structure refers to how the soil sticks together or
doesn't. How clumps of soil cohere determines the availability of
pore spaces for air and water to enter, and how easily roots can
penetrate.
Autumn is the best time to improve the organic layer of your
soil. Lo, with almost extreme efficiency, nature has provided
you with bushels of what you need—brown leaves.
A major source of misery for me when I worked in New York
City parks was seeing my fellow gardeners using a leaf blower
to blast dead leaves off the planted beds. The useful foliage was
then bagged and trucked to a landfill. First, the poor plants were
getting Hurricane Ike-style winds—but without moisture.
Second, it's fine to simply leave leaves on perennials. By spring,
they'll have broken down into humus. The ideal would have been
to run a lawnmower over leaf piles and put the chopped-up leaf
litter around the plants. Lacking a working lawnmower, what I
did was collect leaves in hidden piles to break down on their
own over the winter and use in the spring or the following fall.
The roots, even of big trees, take in most of their moisture and
nutrients from an amazingly thin layer of soil—less than a foot
down and often only the first few inches. We used to think of
soil as that brown substance useful for holding plants upright,
into which we could inject fertilizer. Aside from a beneficial
earthworm or troublesome mole, most gardeners didn't care
much about what was living underground.
In fact, the fertility of those top inches depends on an incredibly
complex society of small creatures—mites, beetles, sow bugs,
water bears, nematodes, millipedes, springtails, fungi, and
bacteria—that we're only beginning to understand. As Leonardo
da Vinci observed, "We know more about the movement of
celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot." It's only in the
past couple of decades that soil ecologists have systematically
applied microbiological techniques to learning more.
Magnified, soil mites are lobsterlike critters (like crustaceans,
mites are arthropods) with impressive armor and scary chewing
parts. Their job, along with the above-named allies, is to break
down organic matter (like leaves, stems, insect corpses, and
dung) into a soluble form that can be taken up by plants.
How crucial are they? Let me quote from a book with an
amazing title: Life: A Natural History of the First 4 Billion Years
of Life on Earth by Richard Fortey. Fortey is a paleontologist,
and in a scoop of soil he can find mites hardly changed since the
creatures of the Devonian Age. He is also a gorgeous writer:
If the spring tails were to undergo a mysterious
demise, together with the mites that live in soil
and the minute fungi upon which they feed,
quite soon there would be an ecological crisis
of a magnitude we can scarcely imagine.
Nutrients would become locked away, the soil
would become progressively impoverished,
larger plants would die, and soon animals
would follow suit. Novels that seek to portray
post-holocaust worlds always seem to assume
that the soil will magically survive, and that a
bean cast into seared soil will quietly proceed
to a successful crop. But the soil is not a
passive medium; it is alive. I doubt whether
there would be many readers for a postholocaust novel that was concerned with the
hero's desperate search for mites. Bu alas for
the world if the mites and their diminutive
allies failed to prosper!
Since the earth emerged from the sea, there has been a mutual
dependence between plants and animals; the tiny animals feed
the plants. The big animals, including us, eat the plants. Plants'
roots, it turns out, aren't passive participants. They exude sugars,
acids, and other compounds to attract or repel bacteria and fungi
and stir up microbial action.
Autumn is the best time to keep the helpful creatures warm and
fed, because they're probably at their most populous. The ground
will retain warmth late into autumn, and the creatures will
continue to decompose the organic matter. Autumn soil prepared
with a couple of inches of compost and a couple more of mulch
will protect the organisms from temperature extremes and keep
those organisms active long into winter.
The best down quilt to lay on your planting beds is compost.
Next-best: leaf mold from last autumn's leaves and, after that,
this year's shredded leaves. And if you want to just go out and
buy something, get bags of shredded bark.
One caveat: Don't use oak leaves. Part of the mighty oak's
mightiness is that the leaves are slow to break down—they'll
make a layer like Naugahyde. Other big leaves, like maple and
tulip poplar, mat together and in northern gardens can freeze into
a giant pancake that keeps water and air from the soil below.
You want to build your soil rather than dose it with fertilizer.
Scary though the thought is, you actually want to participate in
the cycle of decay and rebirth. The nutrients you give the critters
go into the roots and up to the leaves. They return to the earth
this time of year, when the leaves drift back down. Since we're
all quoting FDR these days: Don't leave those all-important soil
creatures ill-housed, ill-clothed, or ill-fed.
hot document
How the GOP Scares Jews
Pennsylvania GOP to Jewish voters: Obama will bring on Holocaust II!
By Bonnie Goldstein
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 5:15 PM ET
"paid for by Republican Federal Committee of PA—Victory
2008" disclosure (Page 2), the state party's communications
director told the AP that it did not authorize the e-mail and that it
has fired the campaign strategist who created it. The strategist,
Bryan Rudnick, insists that he received several levels of
approval to send the e-mail but won't name names.
Thanks to JTA for posting the e-mail.
Please send ideas for Hot Document to documents@slate.com.
From: Bonnie Goldstein
Posted Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 5:15 PM ET
"We did not write this letter to scare you," the Republican Party
of Pennsylvania assures 75,000 in-state Jewish voters in an email sent out Oct. 23. But "in the 5,769 years of our people,
there has never been a more important time for us to take proactive measures in order to stop a second Holocaust." Care to
guess which presidential candidate the Pennsylvania GOP judges
most likely to bring on Holocaust II?
Posted Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 5:15 PM ET
"Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s
and 1940s and made a tragic mistake," the e-mail intones. "Let's
not make a similar one this year" (Page 2). Signed by three of
the state's most prominent Jewish Republicans, the e-mail goes
on to suggest that Barack Obama's worldview is somehow
sympathetic to that of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran,
driving home the point by quoting Ahmadinejad's famous
characterization of Israel as a "stinking corpse" that should be
"wiped off the face of the earth." It also quotes Hamas political
adviser Ahmed Yousef praising Obama: "We hope he will [win]
the election."
human nature
But don't be scared!
The evolutionary struggle between terrorists and drones has
taken a new turn.
The Pennsylvania Republicans neglect to mention in their e-mail
that three days before their message went out, al-Qaida endorsed
their candidate, John McCain. The Republicans also state,
erroneously, that Obama "taught members of Acorn to commit
voter registration fraud" (he didn't) and that Obama is
"associated with" William Ayers, who "thought the terrorists
didn't do enough on 9/11." Ayers, whose connection to Obama is
slight, told the New York Times that he, as a former member of
the violent Vietnam-era protest group the Weather Underground,
"didn't do enough." That interview was published on Sept. 11,
2001, but was conducted well before that day's terrorist attack.
The McCain campaign has disavowed the letter, and two of the
signatories—Sandra Schultz Newman, a former Pennsylvania
Supreme Court justice, and I. Michael Coslov, a steel-industry
executive—did the same after it made headlines. The third
signatory is Mitchell Morgan, a Philadelphia-area fundraiser for
McCain and other Republicans. Although the letter carried a
Drones vs. Terrorists
Are terrorists regaining the advantage over our killing machines?
By William Saletan
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 9:55 AM ET
Here's a quick sketch of where the fight stands. In attacks that
escalated from the 1970s through Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists
exploited and demonstrated a huge advantage over life-valuing
societies: They're willing to target our civilians and use their
own civilians as suicidal mass killers. We're unwilling to
reciprocate. In broader terms, they're more willing to kill and die
than we are.
In the last few years, however, we've developed a
countermeasure: drones. By sending mechanical proxies to do
our spying and killing, we avoid risking our lives. Recently,
Taliban and al-Qaida fighters in Pakistan have gone into
Afghanistan and killed our troops. Instead of sending our troops
into Pakistan, we've sent drones. Since August, the drones have
fired at least 19 missiles at targets in Pakistan. Since the drones
fly overhead and aren't human, we can send them many miles
into Pakistan and get them out without fear. Unlike ground
troops, they can take their time identifying targets, thereby
minimizing civilian casualties. The New York Times reports, for
example, that last Friday's drone strike on a religious school
killed eight people, "all of them militant fighters, according to
local residents."
In theory, fewer civilian casualties and the absence of ground
troops should make drones relatively palatable to local
governments. On Monday, I cited a Times story that suggested
this effect was working in Pakistan. Here's the key passage:
A senior administration official said Sunday
that no tacit agreement had been reached
between the sides to allow increased Predator
strikes in exchange for a backing off from
additional American ground raids, an option
the officials said remained on the table. But
Pakistani officials have made clear in public
statements that they regard the Predator attacks
as a less objectionable violation of Pakistani
sovereignty.
civilization needs a military advantage over terrorism. Drones
look like a good way to achieve that. The border conflict in
Pakistan has become a test case for this struggle—the world's
first robot proxy war. But the drones aren't really robots, and
that's the problem. We're their masters, and we can be
intimidated. All you have to do is take the local population
hostage through suicide bombing, and the local government will
turn on us.
Another part of me realizes that this susceptibility is the only
thing standing between us and an apocalypse. If human control
and human susceptibility are the problem, then the simplest way
to re-establish the drones' supremacy is to release them from our
command, turning them into real robots. No more vulnerability
to blackmail. No more fretting and cringing over the shedding of
blood. Then we can finally stop worrying about the terrorists ...
and start worrying about the drones.
human nature
That posture of comparative tolerance may be ending.
Yesterday, Pakistan summoned the U.S. ambassador and
presented a statement conveying a "strong protest" against "the
continued missile attacks by U.S. drones inside Pakistani
territory." The statement added: "It was emphasized that such
attacks were a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty and should be
stopped immediately."
Pakistani leaders have long played a double game with their
people, publicly denouncing American military activity while
privately tolerating or facilitating it. So, it's not clear whether
this statement is sincere or just for show. Either way, it
demonstrates that drone attacks aren't immune to the political
problems commonly associated with manned air or ground
attacks. And the Times report suggests a more ominous
possibility: "Many Pakistanis, including representatives of
political parties in the government coalition, say they believe the
increase in [recent] suicide attacks, including the bombing of the
Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on Sept. 20, is in retaliation for the
American strikes."
In other words, the terrorists may have found a trump card over
the drones. The terrorists can't kill the pilots who operate the
drones from the United States. But the terrorists can kill local
civilians, thereby generating political pressure on the local
government to pressure the United States to call off the drones.
And because the drones are operated by humans who answer to
other humans who are susceptible to pressure over the loss of
life, the terrorists win. The drone controllers are more sensitive
to death than the terrorists are.
Part of me finds this turn in the struggle infuriating and
dismaying. To compensate for its aversion to bloodshed,
Pre-Birth Defects
Prenatal tests, genetics, and abortion.
By William Saletan
Wednesday, October 29, 2008, at 7:46 AM ET
Is it dangerous to know too much about your unborn baby's
genetic flaws?
This weekend, front-page stories in the Wall Street Journal and
Washington Post raised that question. The articles addressed
new prenatal tests that can screen fetuses for 150 to 200 genetic
abnormalities. Critics worry that as the tests spread, they'll lead
to more abortions.
It's pretty rich to see pro-lifers wring their hands about this
information while, at the same time, they campaign for
ultrasound laws. As Emily Bazelon has pointed out, you can't be
for information when it discourages abortions but against
information when it leads to abortions—not if your real purpose
is, as pro-lifers insist, simply to inform women. And my
libertarian hackles go up when paternalists fret that genetic tests
might cause undue "anxiety" in "emotionally vulnerable"
couples. If you're going to let people raise their own kids, you'd
better trust them to think for themselves.
So, I'm not for restricting these tests. On the other hand,
purveyors of the tests are way too sanguine about information
being value-neutral. Pro-lifers have a legitimate worry, and the
rest of us should think about it: In ways that are not entirely
rational, genetic tests can shift a couple's presumption from
continuing a pregnancy to aborting it.
If you're cool with being pregnant and you don't think anything's
wrong with the baby, your default plan is to keep going. But
now you get a test result that exposes a genetic glitch. If you
have time to end this pregnancy and try again, what are you
going to do?
How serious is the glitch? We don't know. As the Post and
Journal explain, the new tests detect genetic "variations,"
"alterations," "abnormalities," "deletions," and "additions." In
many cases, they can't predict whether these glitches will cause
disease. They can only tell you that the glitches are "associated"
with diseases that are "usually" severe. As one proponent puts it,
the tests "identify smaller pieces of DNA that are either added or
subtracted, and many of these can cause disease." Can cause
disease. The Journal story focuses on a fetus diagnosed with
autosomal recessive polycystic kidney disease. That fetus is now
a 20-month-old boy. He's pretty messed up, but his doctor says
he doesn't have ARPKD after all. What does he have? "Unclear."
This is the world we're entering in prenatal testing. It's a world
where you'll know more and more about which diseases your
baby might get. Instead of thinking the baby is normal, you'll
know it's abnormal. And from talking to your doctor and looking
up the associated diseases on the Internet, you'll get a very clear
picture of how awful the child's life might be if it gets the
disease. With that picture in the front of your mind and the
"abnormality" label in the back of your mind, your conceptual
frame—and your default plan—can change. Genetically,
something is definitely wrong with your baby. What are the
chances it won't get the disease? Can you live with yourself if
you fail to prevent this, knowing what you now know?
We already have evidence that prenatal testing, even with
uncertainty, can dramatically increase the abortion rate. Ninety
percent of women turn to abortion when they find out the baby
has a Down syndrome chromosome, even though the effects of
that glitch vary considerably. And what's the biggest driver of
these abortions? Cheaper, earlier tests that are now being
proposed or recommended to all pregnant women.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Freedom and
responsibility go hand in hand. Information about your
pregnancy is good, and the decision about what to do with it is
yours. But you have to choose wisely. And to do that, you have
to understand how selective, unclear information can alter your
frame of mind.
human nature
The Robot Proxy War
Bush's man-hunting machines—and Obama's.
By William Saletan
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 7:50 AM ET
In less than three months, Barack Obama will be president of the
United States. How will he change our border war in Pakistan?
Not much. We'll keep fighting insurgents there the way we're
fighting them today: with aerial killing machines.
Last year, Obama declared that under his presidency, "If we
have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets
and President Musharraf won't act, we will." John McCain
criticized Obama's policy as rash, suggesting it would undermine
the Pakistani government. The United States should try covert
action in Pakistan "before we declare that we're going to bomb
the daylights out of them," said McCain. A month ago, in their
first debate, McCain again condemned Obama's position,
arguing that the next president should "work with the Pakistani
government," not "attack them."
Today, the New York Times reports what's actually going on
along the Pakistani border. The report, based on interviews with
U.S. and Pakistani officials, exposes the Obama-McCain debate
as a charade. We're already getting actionable intelligence about
terrorist targets in Pakistan. We're already blasting them. And
the Pakistani government is working with us to facilitate these
attacks. The covert action, the cooperation, and the aerial
assaults aren't competing options. They're the same thing.
Here's the crux of the Times story:
The White House has backed away from using
American commandos for further ground raids
into Pakistan after furious complaints from its
government, relying instead on an intensifying
campaign of airstrikes by the Central
Intelligence Agency against militants in the
Pakistani mountains. … [A]ttacks by remotely
piloted Predator aircraft have increased
sharply in frequency and scope in the past
three months. Through Sunday, there were at
least 18 Predator strikes since the beginning of
August. … Once largely reserved for missions
to kill senior Arab Qaeda operatives, the
Predator is increasingly being used to strike
Pakistani militants and even trucks carrying
rockets to resupply fighters in Afghanistan.
Many of the Predator strikes are taking place
as deep as 25 miles into Pakistani territory. …
So forget McCain's feigned dismay that Obama would send
missiles deep into Pakistan. President Bush is doing that already.
Is Bush thereby jeopardizing the Pakistani government? Far
from it. He's substituting missiles for ground troops to appease
and protect the government. According to the Times,
A senior administration official said Sunday
that no tacit agreement had been reached
between the sides to allow increased Predator
strikes in exchange for a backing off from
additional American ground raids, an option
the officials said remained on the table. But
Pakistani officials have made clear in public
statements that they regard the Predator attacks
as a less objectionable violation of Pakistani
sovereignty.
Is Pakistan outraged by the missiles? Hardly. The Times reports:
As part of the intensified attacks in recent
months, the C.I.A. has expanded its list of
targets inside Pakistan and has gained approval
from the government in Islamabad to bolster
eavesdropping operations in the border region,
according to United States officials. … Husain
Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the United
States, told the Council on Foreign Relations
this month that there was cooperation between
the two countries in deploying "strategic
equipment that is used against specific
targets."
Maybe this explains how our drones have nailed a series of
enemy nests over the past four weeks. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.
Bam. Bam. And that's not even counting all the hits we scored in
early September. (Update: While I was writing this, the drones
struck again, this time nailing a Taliban commander who was
paying his respects to the families of people killed in a previous
drone strike.) What, exactly, is our mysterious upgraded
surveillance capability? Nobody's telling, but I have my theories.
Many things will change when Obama is elected. Other things
will stay the same. And then there's a third category: things that
are profoundly changing, and will continue to change, regardless
of who's president. One of these things is anti-terrorist warfare.
The war on terror is becoming a war between madmen and
machines. A few years ago, jihadis had the upper hand because
they didn't mind killing or dying. Now they're being blown away
by remote-control pilots who can't be killed. The machines in the
sky don't bleed, and they spare us the difficulties of an official
troop presence. Pakistan has become the world's first robot
proxy war.
There was a Democratic president before Bush. Acting on
intelligence, Bill Clinton sent missiles into Afghanistan to kill
Osama Bin Laden, and he didn't ask permission first. Under
similar circumstances in Pakistan, Obama would do the same
thing. The difference is that Clinton had to fire his missiles from
thousands of miles away. Obama can do it from overhead.
jurisprudence
He's Not Robin Hood
What Obama really meant by "redistributive change."
By Emily Bazelon
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 4:23 PM ET
On the stump, John McCain now segues from Joe the Plumber to
"Barack the Redistributor." As in "redistributor of wealth and
taker of your money." These are the Republicans' bad words of
the week, much as "community organizer" was during this
summer's convention. The prompt is a 2001 Chicago Public
Radio interview Obama gave, pushed by Fox television and the
Drudge Report on Monday. (Here's the transcript.)
In that interview, Obama was talking in law professor-speak, and
in a couple of places in his discursive remarks he refers to
"redistributive change." When he used the term, he was speaking
against the backdrop of an old debate in the legal academy,
which was not about who should pay higher taxes. So, what's the
real context for Obama's remarks? It is both storied and, in the
end, ho-hum.
In 1964, law professor Charles Reich wrote a hugely influential
article called "The New Property." Reich's idea was that some
benefits, once conferred by the government, couldn't be taken
away without some sort of legal process. Reich's "benefits"
weren't necessarily for the poor. "When he was a law clerk to
Justice Black, Charlie was struck by the injustice that a doctor,
licensed to practice law in New York, could lose his right to
practice—in this instance because of allegations he'd fought
against Franco—without any procedural protection," says Yale
law professor Judith Resnik, who taught the civil procedure class
I read Reich's article for in law school. Reich's idea was that a
government license could be a form of property, in the sense
that, once granted, it shouldn't be taken away without a fair
hearing. In 1970, the Supreme Court picked up on this idea in
the context of welfare benefits. In a 6-to-3 decision, Goldberg v.
Kelly, the court said that the state could not terminate those
benefits without giving the recipient a hearing.
And that's pretty much where the idea of using the federal courts
as a vehicle of economic justice begins and ends. There was an
effort in the legal academy, in the wake of Goldberg, to establish
poverty as a classification, like race, ethnicity, gender, and
religion, that draws extra scrutiny from the courts when
governments make categorizations based on it. But the Supreme
Court didn't go for it. "Thundering greatness shall forever elude
it," University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein wrote
of Goldberg 20 years after the decision, arguing that its
influence proved limited. In the 2001 radio interview, Obama is
talking along with another University of Chicago law professor,
Dennis Hutchinson, who says, after a passing reference to
Goldberg, "The idea that you can use due process for
redistributive ends socially, that will be stable, was [an]
astonishing assumption in [the] minds of litigators, and it didn't
last very long." And Obama adds, "And it essentially has never
happened."
Obama then gives an example of the redistributive road not
taken: the 1973 case San Antonio School District v. Rodriguez.
A group of parents asked the Supreme Court to find that Texas'
method of school financing, which was based on local property
taxes, violated their kids' fundamental right to education.
Because their kids' schools were in a part of the state with a
lower tax base, their schools got less money. In a different 5-to-4
lineup, the court turned the parents down. The Constitution
didn't "explicitly or implicitly" provide for a right to education,
the majority said—and Texas had not created a suspect class of
poor students, which meant they had no right to due process. The
state was free to fund schools unequally, as many still do.
Obama says about Rodriguez that the court "basically slaps those
kinds of claims down and says, you know what, we as a court
have no power to examine issues of redistribution and wealth
inequalities."
Maybe Obama is regretful about the way Rodriguez came out.
Though he doesn't say so directly, that's a plausible reading,
given his use of "slaps down" and his statement later that he's
"not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change
through the courts." But as Orin Kerr points out on the Volokh
Conspiracy, Obama is speaking more in descriptive terms than
he is advocating a position, so it's hard to tell. If anything, he
comes off, per usual, as the opposite of a fire breather—given
the opportunity to sound off about the courts and economic
justice, he instead seems muted.
What's more, the idea that courts do have a role to play in the
funding of schools gained a lot of traction after Rodriguez—in
the state courts, as opposed to the federal ones. Sometimes, that
is because state constitutions provided for a right to education. In
some states, like California, judges instructed the state to take
steps to equalize school funding from district to district. In
others, like Kansas and Kentucky, and in ongoing litigation in
Connecticut, the court decisions are framed in terms of adequacy
of funding—making sure each district has enough, rather than
the same amount. Either way, it's redistribution of what's
become a rather routine sort. This is what Obama was talking
about when he said in the radio interview, "Suddenly, a whole
bunch of folks start bringing these claims in state court under
state constitutions that call for equal educational opportunity,
and you see state courts with mixed results being more
responsive to it."
What comes through far more clearly in the interview is a
tactical point: Obama thinks it's a mistake to rely too much on
courts to further any broad agenda. He says, "I think one of the
tragedies of the civil rights movement was that the civil rights
movement became so court-focused. I think there was a
tendency to lose track of the political and organizing activities
on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power
through which you bring about redistributive change, and in
some ways we still suffer from that." And then he continues,
"Maybe I am showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a
law professor, but you know … the institution just isn't
structured that way."
This is a whole separate, bitter, ongoing fight in legal circles—
over when to turn to courts as a means of change and when to
turn to the legislature, which is directly accountable to the voters
and so perhaps the safer and more stable route. It's a truism that
conservatives favor legislative change and see the courts as an
undemocratic end run around it. They especially think that about
any push for "redistributive change," Obama's subject here. In
this interview, Obama comes down on the traditionally
conservative side, albeit for presumably different reasons. He
thinks the civil rights movement misjudged the courts' utility—
they were good for providing for a right to vote and for black
people to sit with white people at a lunch counter, to use
Obama's examples, but they're not good for deciding who's
entitled to what government benefits or property rights. "Obama
is with Bork on this," Cass Sunstein, an Obama adviser, told me,
referring, of course, to the arch-conservative, famously notconfirmed-to-the-Supreme Court Judge Robert Bork.
OK, but if Obama doesn't think the courts will wave the magic
wand of redistribution, isn't he still pulling for the legislature to
wave it? This is where the McCain attack, in Sunstein's words,
"is so ludicrous that to deny it makes one feel like one has come
to crazy land." On the one hand, of course Obama is for
redistribution. So is any politician, including John McCain, who
favors a progressive income tax. Governments constantly take
more from one group and give more to another. That's what
Medicare is about, and the whole idea of funding public schools
in the first place.
The McCain attack isn't about these broad and popular
programs, of course. It's about the notion that Obama's "basic
goal" is "taking money away from people who work for it and
giving it to people who Barack Obama believes deserve it," in
the words of McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin. "Europeans call
it socialism." For this—the Obama version of large-scale wealth
distribution—there is no evidence. There is only his support for
garden-variety social-welfare programs, like unemployment
insurance and the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax refund for
low-income working people. "Of course it's not a surprise to say
that Obama wants the EITC or to expand the unemployment
insurance program, or that he's in favor of education reform
that's going to cost some money and will give a decent education
to people who don't have it," Sunstein says. "But we already
knew that. And it's not socialism." True. But it doesn't make for
much of an attack on the stump.
jurisprudence
Wingtip Warriors
Why those "armies" of lawyers are our last, best hope for an honest Election
Day.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Saturday, October 25, 2008, at 7:53 AM ET
It's become a truism of elections that both camps will "lawyer
up" before the big day. Briefcase-to-briefcase, wingtip-towingtip, the legal emissaries of both Barack Obama and John
McCain seem to be taking their cues from the 2000 election,
which—according to some accounts—was either decided in a
Florida skirmish known as the "Brooks Brothers Riot" that
ended the manual recount in Miami-Dade County, or—
according to more mainstream accounts—in the august halls of
the U.S. Supreme Court along crassly partisan lines. Ready or
not, here they come.
This time around, each camp has again amassed small battalions
of lawyers—and the private jets necessary—to parachute into
local disputes at contested polling places. Forget what the
opinion polls say going into Nov. 4. To paraphrase Boss Tweed,
when it comes right down to it, it's not the votes that count, but
the vote counters. And it's the armies of lawyers who will be on
guard to ensure the votes get counted.
A report issued last week by the Pew Center on the States, titled
"What if We Had an Election and Everybody Came," warns of
impending Election Day mayhem: "Like the infamous Nor'easter
that sank the Andrea Gail, another perfect storm may be
brewing, only this one has the potential to combine a record
turnout with an insufficient number of poll workers and a voting
system still in flux." Thanks to the 2002 Help America Vote Act
(which currently appears to be doing nothing of the sort) Ohio
Republicans were emboldened to bring a novel dispute over the
eligibility of newly registered voters that went all the way to the
U.S. Supreme Court last week. That leaves 49 states, 11 days,
and thousands of quick-thinking attorneys to enjoin, protest, and
litigate every other possible election claim ranging from dead
men casting ballots to touch-screen voting machines with minds
of their own.
To that end, Obama and McCain have signed up thousands of
lawyers, although neither campaign wants to discuss exact
numbers or litigation strategy. Both campaigns have also deftly
reached out to citizen-lawyers in this election, even seeking
lawyer volunteers on their Web sites—some of whom report
being called back almost before they have entered their
information.
What will these attorneys be looking for on Nov. 4, and what do
they plan to do if they find it? With an estimated 9 million new
voters registered, lawyers on each side will be ghost-busting
their election nightmare of choice: Democrats claim Republicans
seek to suppress the vote—particularly student and minority
votes—through polling-place intimidation, threatening robo
calls, and illegal voter-roll purges. Republicans respond—indeed
John McCain expressly announced at the final debate—that
Democrats are "destroying the fabric of democracy" by signing
up Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and Daisy, who will all then vote in
coordinated efforts to steal the election. (There is virtually no
empirical evidence for this type of polling-place vote fraud, but
as the Supreme Court recently indicated, when it comes to
quadrennial elections, paranoid public hysteria should always be
met with greater or equal levels of paranoid judicial hysteria.)
Pre-emptive lawsuits have already been filed and resolved,
which is, in some sense, far preferable to litigating recounts in
December. Lawyers for the Democrats have evinced a readiness
to litigate vote suppression early and often, just last week
prevailing over Ohio Republicans' efforts to force the state to
name 200,000 new voters whose registrations don't match
government databases. Obama lawyers also filed suit in
Michigan to stop Republicans allegedly planning to use
mortgage foreclosure lists to challenge voters. That suit settled
with an agreement not to do so. On the other side, lawsuits filed
by the state Republican Party in Montana (challenging the
registrations of mostly college students and Native Americans)
and Wisconsin (also seeking to match new voters to state
databases) have met with little success. And in addition to these
pre-emptive legal teams, both campaigns will also have a second
string of elite lawyers on standby in the event that the election
goes into constitutional overtime.
But what about the thousands of lawyers who will be pressed
into service on Election Day itself? Thankfully, they don't all
work for the two campaigns. Jonah Goldman, director of the
nonpartisan National Campaign for Fair Elections, says they will
deploy 10,000 legal volunteers on Election Day; some will be
tasked with manning hotlines and others will be on the ground at
the polls. Elite New York law firms will oversee call centers,
including one Spanish-language hot line, all intended to provide
"nonpartisan straight advice," to voters encountering problems,
says Goldman. Professor Richard L. Hasen, who teaches election
law at Loyola Law School, confirms that most of the thousands
of lawyers working on Election Day will not necessarily be
racing to a courthouse to file dramatic pleadings, but hanging
around the polling places, making sure new voters are not being
harassed, using faulty machines, or forced to use provisional
ballots (if Democrats) or that election officials are properly
checking everybody's IDs (if Republican). If nothing else, all
these teams of vigilant lawyers will be watching one another,
which in a tense and angry election year may not be such a bad
thing.
Election litigation is a boom industry, even in a crumbling
economy. Hasen recently published a study indicating that the
number of lawsuits filed over elections rose from an average of
94 in the four years before the 2000 election to an average of
230 in the six years after. Paradoxically, the best way to
inoculate America against the growing pandemic of "vote fraud"
allegations from the political right, and the anxiety over
widespread voter intimidation and suppression from the left,
may be by throwing more lawyers at it. That's why the single
most important role for the armies of attorneys working the 2008
election may ultimately just be to be there: to avert the biggest
conflicts and bear witness to the small ones. Send in enough
lawyers, and you may just ensure that a watched polling place
never boils.
causing voters to consider their candidacy. This is basic
American politics in action.
A 2006 Harris poll found that only 18 percent of Americans trust
attorneys completely. That's a sad and unfair reflection on the
contempt we feel for the profession in this day and age. One
can't help but wonder what it says about public confidence in our
voting systems, then, that despite our almost complete lack of
faith in them, we will rely almost exclusively on lawyers to
protect the integrity of this election.
To determine this, we crunched the data from Slate's Map the
Candidates tool, which has been tracking the candidates' public
schedules the entire election, including the party primaries.
Below, you'll find a map of the Democratic ticket's campaigning
vs. the Republican ticket's campaigning since the start of the
general election and the differential between the two. In the
differential map, Obama's advantage is shaded blue; McCain's is
shaded brown. Once you click on the box below, you can roll
over the states to see how many more times one ticket has
appeared in a state than the other presidential pair.
A version of this piece appears in Newsweek.
map the candidates
Stopping at Home
Obama in Iowa and then Chicago for trick-or-treating. Biden is in Ohio and
Delaware. McCain in Ohio, Palin in Pennsylvania.
By E.J. Kalafarski and Chadwick Matlin
Friday, October 31, 2008, at 11:47 AM ET
map the candidates
All Politics Is Not Local
Does it matter where candidates campaign?
By Chadwick Matlin and Chris Wilson
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 3:30 PM ET
Since the primary season ended five months ago, Barack Obama
and John McCain have made about 370 campaign stops in 32
states. Their running mates—who started campaigning only
about two months ago—have added about 200 stops to that total,
and their spouses have stumped slightly more than 100 times.
What does this grueling schedule accomplish? When politicians
thunder into town, they hope to attract thousands of people,
hundreds of voter commitments, and dozens of headlines. From
there, they hope word of mouth trickles across the community,
But this election, the positive effects of campaigning are tough
to spot. A clean cause-and-effect relationship was always
unlikely—let's give the American voter a little credit for not just
supporting whoever has swooped into town most recently. But in
most cases, it's tough to find any correlation between the number
of campaign events and the poll returns. There are a variety of
explanations—a national economic crisis, the dwindling power
of local news headlines, and the increased emphasis on grassroots organization, just to name a few. The bottom line: When it
comes to the candidates' schedules, this election appears to be
much more about national strategy than local appearances.
For a closer look, we've pulled out four states that suggest both
the futility and the advantages of extended face time in a state.
The number of stops from June 9 through Oct. 28 are listed
below each state name.
Iowa
(Obama 3, Biden 1, Michelle Obama 0; McCain 6, Palin 3,
Cindy McCain 0)
In the Hawkeye State, McCain and Palin have tried to make up
for lost time. The GOP ticket has made five more stops in the
state, primarily because Obama doesn't think he needs to contest
it. He leads by 12 points in Pollster.com's average and has never
trailed McCain. McCain, though, insists that his internal polls
show the state is competitive, and he continues to campaign. The
Republican ticket has held four events there this month. The
Democrats haven't been there since early September.
During the primaries, McCain barely competed in Iowa's caucus,
choosing to focus on New Hampshire instead. Partly as a result,
McCain came in fourth. From July 1, 2007, through the caucuses
on Jan. 3, 2008, McCain made 63 appearances in the state,
compared with Obama's 186 (full tallies here). In Iowa, the
candidates' attendance records during the caucus season seem to
be more important than their appearances during the general
election.
North Carolina
(Obama 9, Biden 7, Michelle Obama 4; McCain 3, Palin 5,
Cindy McCain 2)
The McCain campaign didn't see North Carolina coming. Obama
and Biden have dominated the Tar Heel state, making twice as
many total stops (16) as McCain and Palin (eight). (The 2-1 ratio
still holds when spouses are included: The totals become 20 to
10.) After dabbling in the state once in June and once in August,
Obama and Biden held a combined four events there in
September. Obama made another three appearances before Palin
or McCain showed up for the first time in early October. By
then, the polls had already turned, and Obama was in the lead.
McCain and Palin have made eight stops there this month, which
seems to have stopped Obama's surge, but they haven't picked
up any ground. Obama leads McCain by two points.
The best theory one could give about Obama's attention to the
Old Dominion is that it made Virginians more sympathetic to
this general trend toward Obama. This hasn't been true
everywhere. In other states where he was modestly behind in the
early summer but has not since visited as frequently, like Indiana
(five stops since July), the mid-September boost is much less
evident.
We've set up heat maps of all the candidates' travels here. If
you'd prefer to customize the timeline yourself, visit Map the
Candidates. You can also use it to follow their travels for the
remaining week of the campaign.
medical examiner
Pennsylvania
(Obama 16, Biden 9, Michelle Obama 3; McCain 21, Palin 14,
Cindy McCain 12)
McCain and Palin have out-campaigned their opponents in
Pennsylvania by a larger margin than in any other state, notching
35 appearances to 25 between Obama and Biden. Yet the state
now rests comfortably in the blue column. Since June, no less,
only three polls have found McCain tied with or leading
Obama—and all three were in the two weeks after the
Republican National Convention. McCain campaigned heavily
in Pennsylvania in that span, making five stops between Aug. 30
and Sept. 11, twice with Palin.
Not coincidentally, those were McCain's best two weeks in the
national polls, too, a bump largely attributed to the initial
giddiness over Palin's selection and a calmer economic
landscape. McCain is almost certain to lose the state, but it is not
for lack of effort.
Virginia
(Obama 16, Biden 9, Michelle Obama 2; McCain 5, Palin 6,
Cindy McCain 2)
Obama made six unanswered stops in Virginia in July and
August, then another eight after John McCain showed some
belated interest in the formerly red state. But it wasn't until midSeptember that Obama saw the first sign he was gaining any
traction there. (McCain was in Virginia twice in June but didn't
return until Sept. 10; his last visit was two weeks ago.) It's
unclear whether Obama's campaigning, plus nine stops by Joe
Biden since Sept. 4, have much to do with their eight-point lead;
the break in Obama's favor since mid-September coincides
almost exactly with his move ahead of McCain in national polls.
That, in turn, coincides with the week the economy became
unmoored.
VIP Syndrome
Why the rich and powerful might get substandard medical care.
By Zachary F. Meisel and Jesse M. Pines
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 6:26 AM ET
Not long after Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was diagnosed with
brain cancer this summer, he summoned his very own group of
national cancer experts, a "tumor board," to discuss his case and
recommend treatment. The New York Times called his health
care "extraordinary" for several reasons: Tumor boards are
usually convened by doctors for complicated cases, not by
patients, and rarely is it possible to summon "more than a dozen
experts," as Kennedy did, on short notice. While it may not be
surprising that someone with fame, stature, or wealth would
receive more attention when ill, it seems unfair that he should
get better medical care than the rest of us.
Actually, he doesn't. Although the senator has unlimited access
to expert doctors, he suffers from a different disease that rarely
afflicts soccer moms but can be even deadlier than cancer: very
important person syndrome. VIP syndrome strikes when doctors
and nurses treat VIP patients differently—and, in the end, the
medical care is worse, not better. Because VIPs are special,
doctors and nurses deviate from usual protocols. As a result, the
patient receives something other than the standard of care.
Doctors act differently with VIPs because caring for celebrities
is distracting. They know their decisions will be scrutinized not
only by hospital administrators looking over their shoulders but
also by the press and public. Doctors who would normally ask,
"What's the best care for a 76-year-old man with a malignant
glioma?" instead wonder, "What do we do now that Senator
Kennedy has a malignant glioma?" The answer is sometimes
different because of the tendency to overthink decisions and
overemphasize treatments celebs think they need—even if those
treatments are experimental and not necessarily the standard of
care.
VIP syndrome affects not only treatment but also testing
decisions. If Joe the Plumber requests a CT scan he doesn't need,
doctors simply say, "No, Mr. Plumber." But Joe Biden can get
any CT he wants. Some health care programs for corporate
executives even involve routine full-body CT scans as screening
tests as part of the "chairman's physical." The problem is that
these expensive and detailed tests may actually increase the risk
of cancer from radiation exposure and have never really been
shown to improve anyone's health. And if there is an incidental
finding, as there often is, more tests might be ordered, which
may lead to unnecessary biopsies. And doctors perform heroic
procedures on VIPs not just when there is clear benefit but when
there is any question of benefit. After Harvard doctors
recommended that Kennedy not have brain surgery, the doctors
at Duke overrode that decision in favor of removing the tumor.
Another problem: When procedures are performed, the most
senior guy does it. The senior guy is not necessarily the most
skilled at doing the procedure—because he has been busy being
an academic chairperson and is out of practice.
So, who gets VIP syndrome? It can strike anyone who is clearly
famous or important, like a Kennedy, a Baldwin brother, a big
hospital donor, or the superrich. And much like other diseases,
VIP syndrome can be contagious: Relatives of famous people
can easily catch it. (Kennedy's family members also had their
own tumor boards.) VIPs even have their own special hospital
floors. While these units have better nurse-to-patient ratios,
fluffier pillows, and concierge service, the nurses are not
specialized. For example, a VIP with a broken hip may not get
the nurse who usually takes care of orthopedic patients. And
many VIP wings are located far away from the rest of the
hospital. One prestigious academic hospital has a VIP section
with oak-paneled rooms and high-thread-count bed sheets, but
among medical students and residents, it's known as "Marberia,"
a conflation of its real name and Siberia, because of its remote
location. As a result, VIPs may get seen last in the morning
because doctors have to trek to different buildings on rounds.
And if a VIP has a true emergency, like a cardiac arrest, in the
comfy unit, doctors may be dangerously far away.
VIP syndrome is compounded when the patient is in critical
condition. After President Ronald Reagan was shot, the doctors
couldn't hear one another because so many people were shouting
at the same time. Imagine trying to make a good medical
decision or communicate when the E.R. is teeming with
administrators, Secret Service agents, and gawking hospital
staffers not involved with the case. Even when doctors have the
time to think clearly, they still make mistakes when dealing with
celebrities: Former President Gerald Ford was discharged from
the hospital with the diagnosis of an inner-ear infection when, in
fact, he had suffered a stroke.
As we have both encountered as practicing emergency
physicians, some VIPs travel to the hospital toting their own
doctors. While a trained advocate can be helpful, it can
sometimes interfere with medical decision making and lead to
diagnostic delays and mistakes. In this story from the Boston
Globe, when a VIP came into the E.R. complaining of chest pain
from swallowing a large pill, the "boutique bedside bodyguard"
insisted on an immediate echocardiogram, a heart test rarely
performed in the E.R. VIPs also have issues with privacy
because everyone is interested in their health. In 2007, after
super-VIP George Clooney was in a motorcycle wreck, 27
hospital employees were investigated for inappropriately
peeking at his X-rays and leaking his test results to the media.
VIP privacy is a common problem: UCLA Medical Center
workers have snooped into the medical records of Britney
Spears, Farrah Fawcett, and Maria Shriver.
Since most of us are not VIPs, why should we care? Because
VIP syndrome can affect you, too, especially if you're in the
same hospital—the VIP will get her MRI first, so you may have
to wait a little longer. But if you don't happen to be waiting for
the same MRI scanner, you can benefit from an ill VIP. When a
celebrity comes down with your disease, the illness can suddenly
become more important: VIPs sometimes start foundations when
they get sick—like Michael J. Fox did with Parkinson's disease.
But the truth is that most VIPs, especially the very famous ones,
actually want to be treated as regular patients. In addition to
having to deal with clicking cameras and googly-eyed
autograph-seekers, VIPs probably know that fame can also mean
star-struck doctors and nurses. So, what can wary VIPs do to
make sure that they don't get VIP syndrome? Alas, not much.
Even when the VIP checks in under an assumed name, going
incognito in a hospital can be next to impossible. Trust us.
Sunglasses might help them avoid paparazzi on the street, but a
thin hospital gown doesn't do the same trick. Word spreads
quickly among nosy hospital staff.
Though doctors don't always do right by their prominent
patients, VIPs do have ultimate access. And for anyone who has
tried to navigate the U.S. health care system, access to doctors is
paramount. VIPs don't wait for appointments, they don't get
bounced to the E.R. for routine care, nor do they get boarded on
E.R. hallway stretchers for 12 hours. But access and attention
don't always translate into better outcomes, especially if the care
team doesn't follow protocols. The truth is that there is probably
a happy medium: If you are Joe Six-Pack, it may help to be
mistaken for a VIP because you won't have to wait weeks for a
doctor's appointment. But if you are a candidate for vice
president, you'd be better off if hospital staff thought you were
just a hockey mom.
moneybox
Dividend Dopes
Companies that are failing today were paying dividends a just few months
ago. What gives?
By Daniel Gross
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 6:26 PM ET
Just as there are a lot of geniuses in bull markets, there are a lot
of idiots in bear markets. And in both instances, not everyone is
equally deserving of the title. Ideas that seem shareholderfriendly and prudent when stock charts are soaring seem
shareholder-hostile and reckless when the charts are plunging
down. One telling example of this: Companies that spent loads
of money paying out dividends and buying back stock seem
brilliant in good times and stupid in bad times.
In the recent bull market, there was a lot of pressure from
investors and new incentives (favorable tax treatments for
dividends) for companies to pay dividends to long-term
shareholders, rather than hoard profits, or use them for
acquisitions. And with the climate highly favorable to profits
(low interest rates, rampant global growth), CEOs had plenty of
cash piling up on their balance sheets. Dividends were a taxefficient means of rewarding shareholders who stick around (not
to mention executives with big stock holdings). Companies also
eagerly repurchased shares during the bull market, for two
reasons. First, repurchases would compensate for the dilution
created when executives and employees exercised stock options.
Second, by reducing the number of shares outstanding,
repurchases would make profits look more impressive.
Professional investors often value shares by looking at their
price-to-earnings ratios—i.e., the amount of profits earned per
each share outstanding. The lower the better. Reduce the number
of shares, and suddenly the p/e ratio falls even if earnings are
flat. (One dollar of earnings spread over 10 shares, is 10 cents
per share. But $1 of earnings over nine shares is 11.1 cents per
share—an 11 percent increase.)
Data provided by Howard Silverblatt at Standard & Poor's show
a significant shift in both dividends and buybacks in the years of
the Bush boom. Members of the S&P 500 boosted dividend
payouts from $141 billion in 2000 to $225 billion in 2006, $247
billion in 2007, and $123.66 billion in the first half of 2008.
That's $595 billion from the beginning of 2006 through first half
of 2008.
Today, many executives likely wish they could have some of
that money back. Think about the number of companies that in
recent months have gone bankrupt or are begging the taxpayers
for help. Many of these firms that have admitted they're running
out of cash were paying out dividends until very recently. AIG,
the insurance company that is now a ward of the state, has a long
and distinguished dividend history. From the beginning of 2007
through mid-2008, it shelled out about $2.85 billion in dividends
on common stock. General Motors, which has a similarly storied
dividend history, has paid out 25-cents-per-quarter dividends
(adding up to about $844 million) over the last six quarters. In
May and June, GM was purportedly healthy enough that it could
pay out a dividend. In August, GM was so sick it needed billions
in taxpayer money to make it through the winter. Lehman
Brothers paid a dividend of 17 cents a share for the quarter that
ended Feb. 28; six months later it was toast. In each of these
instances, given the magnitude of their problems, slashing the
dividend—or eliminating it entirely—might not have made the
difference between survival and failure. (AIG has already
borrowed nearly $100 billion from the Federal Reserve.) On the
other hand, there always comes a point where, depending on
your size, the lack of a few hundred million dollars could mean
the difference between surviving or dying. In each case, the
managers would have been in at least a marginally better
position to weather the tsunami if they had more cash.
Many CEOs likewise might regret the aggressive sharerepurchase initiatives they embarked upon during the height of
the bull market. S&P 500 members splurged on buybacks,
boosting the total from $131 billion in 2003 to $589 billion in
2006, $515 billion in 2007, and $202 billion through the first
half of 2008. The total from Jan. 1, 2006, through June 30, 2008:
$1.3 trillion. Alas, these shares were disproportionately bought
high.
When the brilliant hedge-fund manager Edward Lampert melded
Sears and Kmart to form Sears Holdings, retail veterans scoffed
that he didn't know what he was doing. But until relatively
recently, Lampert defied the critics. Lampert, frequently viewed
as a proto-Warren Buffett, used the cash thrown off by the stores
to make some acquisitions, invest in the stores, and buy back
prodigious amounts of shares. As the company notes in its most
recent earnings release, in the past three years Sears has bought
"approximately 38.7 million of our common shares at a total cost
of $4.8 billion," paying an average price of $124 per share.
When Sears' stock was bumping along near $190, that seemed
like a genius move. But the stock today trades at about $57, and
the company has effectively lost about $2.2 billion on that
investment. (Here is the five-year chart of Sears Holdings.) Put
another way, the amount of cash spent buying back shares is
equal to about two-thirds of Sears' current market value. And in
today's environment, a few billion in cash could not only prove
an excellent buffer, it would give Lampert more freedom to do
what he has done in the past—purchase wounded or busted
retailers and turn them around.
Both dividends and share buybacks are now in decline. Among
the S&P 500, buybacks peaked when the market peaked in the
third quarter of 2007, and dividends peaked in the fourth quarter
of 2007. On October 3, S&P reported that some 138 publicly
held companies slashed their dividends in the third quarter,
saving $22.5 billion. Buybacks are drying up, too. The pace in
the second quarter of 2008 ($88 billion) was the lowest since the
fall of 2005, down by half from the third quarter of 2007.
moneybox
Big Biz Still For GOP
Why can't corporate America end its perverse love affair with Republican
politicians?
By Daniel Gross
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 5:49 PM ET
Three articles from the Wall Street Journal show the strange
myopia of businesses and business groups when it comes to
politics. One article detailed how big retailers (Home Depot,
Wal-Mart, Lowe's, Target) are warning employees about the
possibility that a Democratic sweep could give unions the upper
hand (translation: Vote Republican!). A second describes how
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is mounting a huge $35 million
campaign—twice the amount it spent in 2006 congressional
races—to support "almost exclusively Republicans in contested
Senate races." And Federal Express CEO Fred Smith gave an
interview to the editorial page in which he endorsed Sen. John
McCain: "Because I agree with him on trade, taxes, energy and
health care."
Let's take each in turn. Big retailers such as Home Depot, WalMart, and Target, the Journal reports, are freaked out that
Obama and a Democratic Congress would pass the Employee
Free Choice Act, "which would do away with secret balloting
and allow unions to form if a majority of employees sign cards
favoring unionization." Now, don't get me wrong. EFCA may be
a disaster for retailers. But of all the woes facing companies—
the credit crunch, crappy growth, a disastrous job market, a lost
decade in the stock market—unions are the least of their
problems. So far this year, legions of retailers have gone
bankrupt—Steve & Barry's, Linens'n'Things, the Ponderosa and
Bonanza restaurant chains—victims of excessively optimistic
projections, poor expansion choices, mismanagement, and
horrific capital structures. Unions had nothing to do with their
failure.
Retailers that survive face a bigger challenge. We've just
concluded an economic expansion in which median incomes
failed to rise. The people who shop at Wal-Mart, Home Depot,
and Target are basically making the same amount of money they
were in 1999. There are many reasons why wages failed to rise
in this expansion, among them: globalization, outsourcing, and a
decline in the educational attainment of workers. But unions
aren't one of them. What's more, long-term stock charts put the
lie to the binary concept—Republican, anti-big-labor good;
Democrat, pro-big-labor bad. Check out these charts of Home
Depot (up about fivefold in the Clinton years, down about 60
percent in the Bush years), or Wal-Mart (boom in the Clinton
years and drift in the Bush years, or Target (ditto).
Now, with consumer confidence at a record low, credit difficult
to come by, and demand shrinking, retailers are facing a bleak
outlook. And they're worried about the prospect of greater
unionization at some point in the future?
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce seems to be chiefly guilty of
bad timing. While the chamber technically doesn't endorse
political candidates, on Oct. 23, it announced a big field
operation to educate voters in battleground states. The Journal
has also reported that it is pouring millions of dollars into Senate
races to buck up Republicans such as Mitch McConnell, Susan
Collins, John Sununu, and Norm Coleman, along with token
Democrat Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. More Democrats, the
chamber fears, would mean "policies favoring increased
unionization, higher taxes, more restrictions on trade and more
regulation on the financial-services and housing sectors." Once
again, the past 16 years provide a great controlled experiment:
eight years of a Democratic regime that was comparatively prolabor, higher tax, pro-regulation, and anti-free trade, followed by
eight years of a Republican regime that was comparatively antilabor, decidedly low tax and anti-regulation, and pro-free trade.
Pop quiz: For the members of the Chamber of Commerce, and
for corporate America at large, which eight years were better?
(And as a matter of pure political strategy: Is it wise for the
chamber to spend millions against a Democratic Party that is
likely to control Congress and the White House?)
Federal Express CEO Fred Smith couched his binary political
take more as a matter of personal preference and less as a
question of what would be good for the company he runs. (He
endorses McCain "because I agree with him on trade, taxes,
energy, and health care," and doesn't endorse Obama because "I
just disagree with him on trade and taxes and energy and health
care.") Fair enough. But once again, one wonders what
conclusions Smith might draw from the past 16 years of running
Federal Express. From 1993-2000, the president was a guy he
disagreed with on trade, taxes, energy and health care in office,
and from 2001-08 the president was a guy he agreed with on
trade, taxes, energy and health care. How did that work out for a
Federal Express shareholder? Check out this long-term chart of
Federal Express and see for yourself.
So, why do some members of the business class cling so bitterly
to the notion that Democrats and unions inevitably spell doom
while Republicans and the absence of unions always spell
nirvana? It could be, as colleague Liza Featherstone suggests in
the about-to-be-posted "Money Talks" podcast, that CEOs are
really most worried about their personal income taxes, rather
than the macroeconomic climate. Could be. But I suspect the
real reason is theology. Just as religion frequently involves
simplistic good/evil comparisons, members of the church of free
enterprise frequently hew to the first (thou shalt not unionize)
and second (thou shalt not bow down before Democrats)
commandments.
In the past 16 years, a bunch of really big-picture economic
developments have influenced the trajectory of the nation's (and
the globe's) economy. These include, but are not limited, to: the
Internet, free-trade agreements, the emergence of China and
India, the fluctuating price of oil and commodities, and climate
change. But the people we've elected to serve in Congress and in
the White House haven't had much of an impact on any of those
trends. In so many areas—homeownership, the stock market,
investor participation rates—the past eight years have been
something of a lost decade. We can't blame President Bush and
former Republican Rep. Tom DeLay for all of this. But it's pretty
clear that the policies promoted by a Republican president and a
Republican-controlled Congress didn't do a lot to stimulate
broad-based growth. At the very least, recent economic history
should cause people to re-examine some of their assumptions
about the relation between politics and the private sector. I'm not
saying it doesn't matter who sits in the White House or who
controls Congress. But it doesn't matter nearly as much as many
businesspeople think it does.
movies
Good Grief
Why I love the melancholy Peanuts holiday specials.
By Dana Stevens
Friday, October 31, 2008, at 12:20 PM ET
What sound is most evocative of autumn? The crackling of dry
leaves? The singsong chant of trick-or-treaters? The zip-zipping
of corduroy jeans as you walk down the street? For anyone who
remembers watching the original Charlie Brown Christmas
special in 1965—or in any of the 42 years it's aired since—the
single best aural reminder of the waning year has to be the
bouncy piano vamp of Vince Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy," better
known as the Peanuts song. The Van Pelts' theme doesn't appear
until midway through A Charlie Brown Christmas, but it was so
instantly and indelibly associated with Charles Schulz's
characters that it became the opening song for subsequent
specials.
Those specials—at least the big three: the Halloween,
Thanksgiving, and Christmas shows that were recently released
in a "deluxe holiday collection" by Warner Bros.—have a mood
unlike any animated film for children made before or since. For
one thing, they're really, really slow—slow not just by our ADDaddled contemporary standards but also next to the programming
of their own time. Just compare the meandering pace of A
Charlie Brown Christmas (in which Charlie tries, and fails, to
direct a single rehearsal of a Christmas play) with the
generation-spanning epic crammed into Rudolph the Red-Nosed
Reindeer (1964). But what really sets the Peanuts specials apart
is their sadness. Even digitally remastered, with the background
colors restored to their original vivid crispness, the Peanuts
holiday specials have a faded quality, like artifacts from a lost
civilization. As Linus observes of the wan, drooping pine sprig
Charlie Brown eventually rescues from a huge lot of pink
aluminum Christmas trees, "This doesn't seem to fit the modern
spirit."
Here I could write an epic poem detailing the multiple felicities
of the Peanuts specials: the van Gogh-esque night sky that
dwarfs Linus and Sally as they wait in the pumpkin patch for the
Great Pumpkin, Linus' stirring reading from the Gospel of Luke
at the end of A Charlie Brown Christmas, the impossibly hip
"Little Birdie" song that plays in the background as Snoopy and
Woodstock prep for their Thanksgiving feast. But I'll let you
rediscover the specials' quiet joys for yourself, and I'll stick to
describing the added value this collection provides: the
fascinating but far too short making-of documentaries that are
appended to each disc.
Those early specials were the output of a small creative team
that was given free rein by CBS, as long as the results continued
to pull in a giant Nielsen share. (The debut of A Charlie Brown
Christmas was watched by literally half the viewing audience, a
percentage unimaginable in our cable-fragmented era.) These
were men who took their Peanuts very seriously indeed: Schulz,
producer Lee Mendelson, and legendary animator Bill
Melendez, who died last month at 91. It was Melendez who was
responsible for figuring out how to turn Schulz's famously flat,
spare drawings into moving pictures with backgrounds, as he
recounts in interviews here. How were the characters' flat,
boatlike feet actually supposed to walk? (Melendez had to invent
a special gait, several beats faster than the normal human
footstep, to make them move convincingly.) How does Charlie
Brown's single strand of hair change shape when he moves from
a profile to a front view?
The making-of featurettes also detail Schulz's close involvement
in the writing and animation process. He insisted on the absence
of a laugh track and on giving the Peanuts kids the voices of real
children, many of them nonprofessionals. Since the kids, who
ranged in age from 6 to 11, rapidly aged out of their parts, there
was an ongoing search for new voice talent (though sometimes it
could be found close to home; Christopher Shea, the original
voice of Linus, was eventually replaced by his younger brother
Stephen). The younger actors, still unable to memorize lines (or,
in some cases, to read), had to have their lines fed to them half a
line at a time by Melendez, who supervised all the recording
sessions and provided the nonverbal stylings of Snoopy. This
line-by-line editing process is what lent the Peanuts voices their
signature choppy rhythm—if you listen carefully, you can hear
the seams between words. Mendelson, a charming storyteller,
remembers how a girl voicing the part of Sally once had to be
rushed into the studio for an all-night recording session before
she lost her front tooth, which would have given her a lisp that
matched poorly with the scenes she'd already recorded.
If these making-of features disappoint, it's only because they
leave you wanting something longer and more comprehensive
(like this 1985 Schulz-hosted tribute to the 20th anniversary of
the Peanuts specials). An interview with Schulz's grown son
Monte provides a tiny glimpse of his father as the troubled,
egotistical man portrayed in this 2007 biography of the
cartoonist. Monte describes how, as an airplane-mad boy, he
suggested Snoopy's Red Baron persona to his father, who
promptly incorporated it into his strip. But Schulz refused to
acknowledge his son's contribution, in interviews or in
conversation, until the final years of his life.
Vince Guaraldi, who deserves a two-hour documentary of his
own, appears in only a few tantalizing images, improvising at
the piano from a storyboard drawn by Schulz. It was Guaraldi's
idea to use a trombone to simulate the off-screen voices of
adults, and the "wah-wah" bleat of unseen teachers and parents
became a defining feature of the Peanuts universe. After
Guaraldi's early death in 1976, the musical standard of the
Peanuts specials went way downhill, as evidenced by this
Flashdance-influenced Flashbeagle number from 1985. The
extras in this collection include three latter-day Peanuts specials,
from 1981, 1988, and 1992—perfectly pleasant viewing but
illustrative of the shows' decline from their '60s heyday.
Making-of documentaries about animated films have a unique
fascination; it's a trip to witness the collaborative process by
which a bunch of photographed drawings can somehow
convince us that we're really watching Lucy yank away that
football. Still, all the knowledge in the world about how these
shows were produced can't account for the melancholy beauty of
the opening of A Charlie Brown Christmas, in which pokerfaced children skate on a pond to the strangely funereal carol
"Christmastime Is Here." Or the bleak hilarity of Charlie
Brown's Halloween-candy haul: "I got a rock." If the featurettes
were the high point of this collection for me, it's only because,
like everyone else who grew up with them, I can never see these
wonderful specials again for the first time.
movies
Yuck
Zack and Miri Make a Porno will make you never want to have sex again.
By Dana Stevens
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 12:28 PM ET
By the standards of post-Apatovian gross-out comedy, the plot
of Zack and Miri Make a Porno (The Weinstein Company)—
two broke platonic pals agree to collaborate on a homemade
porn film and fall in love in the process—qualifies as positively
sweet. This movie could have been an effervescent neoscrewball romance, Bringing Up Baby with nut-sack jokes. So
there's no blaming the subject matter for the fact that Zack and
Miri feels so dispiritingly graceless.
The cast isn't really at fault, either. Seth Rogen and Elizabeth
Banks, though their chemistry is a little off here, proved they can
have good on-screen sex in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and the
very funny Craig Robinson (who, like Rogen, is a regular
Apatow player) nearly commits Grand Theft Movie in every role
he plays. Nope, I'm afraid there's no one to blame but writerdirector Kevin Smith if viewers walk out of Zack and Miri never
wanting to have sex again. A cult figure among the Adult Swim
crowd, Smith has always been better at the foulmouthed and
frankly sophomoric (Clerks, Mallrats) than the wistful and
sincere (Chasing Amy, Jersey Girl). This movie ups the ante in
both categories; it wants its audience to guffaw at dick jokes and
swoon over the perfect kiss. That combination of raunch and
heart isn't impossible to achieve—at his best, Apatow can pull it
off—but it requires a nimbler pen and a sweeter soul than Kevin
Smith brings to this movie.
Zack (Rogen) and Miri (Banks) play unambitious and barely
solvent twentysomethings who share a squalid apartment in
Pittsburgh. He works as a barista in a strip-mall coffee shop; she
sells clothes at the mall. As their unpaid bills pile up and
eviction notices loom, Zack hatches a plan to cash in with a
homemade adult video—a plan Miri resists until their power and
water are shut off on the same day.
After securing seed money from Zack's co-worker Delaney
(Robinson), the roomies hire a cast of willing exhibitionists
(including Kevin Smith stalwart Jason Mewes and real-life porn
stars Traci Lords and Katie Morgan) and rent a studio space in
which to shoot their outer-space sex opera, Star Whores. After a
last-minute setback, the crew is forced to reshoot at Zack and
Delaney's coffee shop after hours, where they decide to jettison
the George Lucas angle and title their new masterwork Swallow
My Cockuccino.
The movie's central joke—that loving, intimate sex, of the kind
Zack and Miri will eventually have on camera, makes for lousy
pornography—is both clever and affecting. And the scene in
which the two friends finally get it on is one of the few
aesthetically successful moments, as Smith uses two different
soundtracks to contrast the lovers' ecstasy with their onlookers'
boredom. But Zack and Miri keeps throwing away the
opportunity to be more than a string of undifferentiated puerile
gags. The moment these characters start discussing feelings,
their dialogue turns stiff: Would anyone from Zack and Miri's
uninhibited Generation Y circle be caught dead using the
boomer euphemism "making love"?
Boogie Nights (one of my favorite films of the '90s) and the
2003 Spanish gem Torremolinos 73 were both delightful (if
idealized) fantasies about porn-making as a source of personal
and artistic liberation. But though Zack and Miri staunchly
maintains that its characters find creative fulfillment in their
group project, we never really see them experiencing that joy.
Maybe that's because Zack and Miri and their crew are barely
characters at all; they're wisecrack delivery systems. As for the
porn itself, what sex we do see is simulated; the nudity is
minimal (the inflated breasts of porn stars seem more like
costumes than body parts), and there's a single, albeit deeply
disgusting, scatological sight gag. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
is neither dirty enough to satisfy Kevin Smith fans nor romantic
enough to get your date into bed.
music box
Still Current
Thirty years of AC/DC.
By James Parker
Wednesday, October 29, 2008, at 6:53 AM ET
The zeitgeist can be a keen ironist. Even as the punks of the mid1970s were fuming and scheming in their English or American
ratholes, menacing the future with dreams of a stripped-down
rock 'n' roll noise that would kill all the hippies forever, their
omens were being unexpectedly fulfilled by two tiny Scotsmen
in Sydney, Australia. By 1975, the band built by Malcolm
Young and his little brother Angus was already the complete
statement: sawn-off Chuck Berry riffs, blood-throb bass,
pistonlike 4/4 drums, and boisterously anti-social lyrics,
everything delivered with a special edge of mania. Their only
technology was amplification (and just a bite of distortion on the
guitars). It was all in the finest sense reactionary, which meant
that nothing like it had been heard before. With hindsight, it
seems inarguable: It may have been the Dead Boys who wrote
the call-to-arms "Sonic Reducer," but at the dawn of punk rock,
the planet's most severe and animally empowered sonic
reductionists were AC/DC.
They weren't punk rockers, of course—they didn't snipe or
thrash or clatter. This sound was huge-boned, blues-rooted.
Scowling Malcolm (5' 3"), chop-chopping out the chords on his
Gretsch with a skinny arm, was a rhythm player of pulverizing
succinctness. Lead guitarist Angus (5' 2") was a duckwalker and
a headbanger; between the goblin-wing stumps of his two
sticking-out elbows, his head flailed slowly back and forth,
mouth open, in massive gestures of affirmation and assent. His
performances were paroxysms, but his solos were clean—crisp
picaresque mini-narratives that screamed and chuckled and
resolved. Vocalist Bon Scott was a tattooed brawler, shirtless,
more of a working-class Dionysus than an anarchist, with a
unique quasi-flamenco wail that he maintained (according to a
source in Murray Engleheart's excellent AC/DC: Maximum Rock
'n' Roll) by gargling port before shows. There was a romance to
him: Mark Kozelek, in his 2001 album of acoustic AC/DC
covers What's Next to the Moon, managed to distill a doleful
poetic essence from the Scott-era songs. "Love at First Feel," in
particular, was transmuted in Kozelek's hands from pub-rock
smut into something approaching the authentic ache of eros.
They were punk-ish, nonetheless: The incoming kids could find
common cause with AC/DC. "You can stick your 9-to-5 livin',"
rasped Scott in "Rock 'n' Roll Singer," "And your collar and your
tie/ And stick your moral standards/ 'Cause it's all a dirty lie!"
Angus—an ex-skinhead—liked to drop his trousers for the
camera, spazzed out onstage in a school uniform, and waded into
the audience as required: "I'll shit and piss on people if need be,"
he promised a journalist. Scott always seemed to have a freshly
knocked-out tooth. The artwork for their debut album, High
Voltage, featured a dog cocking his leg on an electrical service
box. Notorious moments had occurred live on Australian TV.
Aggro, furore—an "Antipodean Punk Extravaganza" as John
Peel dubbed them upon their arrival in London in 1976.
Indeflectibly, they did their thing: not punk rock, not heavy
metal, but the same highly synthesized atomic boogie that they
would continue to play for the next 30 years. A significant
hiccup occurred in 1980 when the amazing Scott rather
bathetically exceeded his body's capacity for intoxication,
passing out in a parked car in a London side street and never
waking up again. But the band hardly faltered. Within six weeks,
the Young brothers had installed flat-capped screamer Brian
Johnson at the mic, and preparations were underway for perhaps
the greatest comeback album of all time: Back in Black.
As a frontman, Johnson has more than held his own against the
Scott legend, and as a writer, he started strong ("Knockin' me out
with those American thighs," one of the great AC/DC lines, is
his), but over the long haul it must be admitted that, lyrically,
there has been something of a falling-off. Scott was a wag and a
storyteller. Johnson is a straight-up double-entendre merchant
("Sink the Pink", "Givin' the Dog a Bone," etc.), and by 1990
he'd worn himself out, at which point AC/DC's lyrics department
was more or less taken over by the Young brothers. "Her hot
potatoes/ Will elevate you/ Her bad behavior/ Will leave you
standing proud" ("Hard as a Rock").
Musically, however, the compound admits of no adulteration.
One cannot be influenced by AC/DC—one can only rip them
off. The Cult did it, as did the Darkness and most recently Jet
("Cold Hard Bitch"). AC/DC rip themselves off all the time:
Like Motorhead and the Ramones, their worst productions tend
to mechanically travesty their best. The hero of Black Ice
(Columbia), their latest, is producer Brendan O'Brien, who
seems to have approached the band almost anthropologically,
honoring their manners and rituals with a scrupulous recording
process. The songs are tired, but Phil Rudd's kick drum sounds,
literally, like magic. And every AC/DC album has its bull's-eye
moment: On Black Ice, it's "Rock 'n' Roll Train," a euphoric
stomp with a startling zigzag riff that only the Youngs could
have written. A kind of fertile monomania possesses them,
sonically and thematically. Witness, for instance, the careerlong
fidelity to the motif of balls: "She's Got Balls" (1975), "Big
Balls" (1976), "Got You by the Balls" (1990), and—most
triumphant—the album Ballbreaker (1995). Around 2017,
expect an AC/DC greatest hits package called Balls in the Air.
Naturally, they have been accused of devil worship, though
there's never been the faintest whiff of occultism about them.
The devil in AC/DC songs ("Hell Ain't a Bad Place To Be") is a
bloke-ish and convivial presence, a sort of cloven-hoofed
drinking partner. And in the mid-'80s they had their obligatory
flap with Tipper Gore and the PMRC. But that's all over and
done with. These days they are held in the ageless, half-mystical
global esteem accorded to certain religious personages and royal
families. They move millions of units and play to hundreds of
thousands. A recent profile in the New York Times could do little
but numbly recite their enormous sales figures. Brian Johnson is
now 61; his voice is rubble. Angus, continuing to wear the
schoolboy shorts, has thrashed his little body almost to a
standstill. Such things no longer matter. AC/DC's music, in all
its pulse-lifting, mind-canceling, ball-breaking obviousness and
enormity, persists like a cosmic punch line: What if this is the
meaning of life?
other magazines
Dear Mr. President
Newsweek gives unsolicited advice to the next commander in chief.
By Sonia Smith
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 4:24 PM ET
Newsweek, Nov. 3
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations,
pens a memo to the future occupant of the White House on the
uncomfortable geopolitical realities he will face starting Jan. 20.
"The challenges of this era have no single national origin and no
national solution. Multilateralism is the only realistic way ahead.
The operative term is 'integration.' We need to bring other major
powers into the design and operation of the world—before the
century is overwhelmed by the forces globalization has
unleashed," he writes. Haass also suggests rehabilitating the
office of the vice president, post-Cheney: Take away the V.P.'s
policy portfolio, and return him or her to the realm of trusted
counselor. … Republican donors are none too pleased that their
campaign cash went to clothing the Palin family in Valentino.
The decision to raid Neiman Marcus for clothes was made after
the campaign realized "she didn't have the fancy pantsuits that
Hillary Clinton has," one staffer said.
Weekly Standard, Nov. 3
With the cover depicting Barack Obama driving a tank about to
mow down John McCain, Fred Barnes, one of the original Sarah
Palin boosters, writes off all those conservatives who endorsed
Obama in the last weeks. Katherine Parker, Peggy Noonan, and
David Brooks dislike Palin simply because they have not met
her. If they had, Barnes maintains, they would know she is
"dazzlingly likeable and enormously persuasive." … William
Kristol's editorial dubs those conservatives who jumped ship
"pathetically opportunistic." … A dispatch from Reykjavík
captures what life is like for Icelanders since their prime minister
declared "national bankruptcy" on Oct. 6. Shopping malls are
almost empty due to high inflation—the krona has lost 64
percent of its value against the euro this year. Even a woman
selling hand-knit Icelandic sweaters is hard up—resources are
plentiful, but no one on the island can afford the finished
product.
The New Yorker, Nov. 3
Margaret Talbot unpacks how Bristol Palin's pregnancy, which
further endeared the family to the evangelical base, illustrates
that American culture is divided into two camps: social liberals
who are deeply troubled by teen pregnancy and conservatives
who seem to embrace it, as long as no one has an abortion.
Evangelical teens are more likely to say they will wait till
marriage, but surveys show they end up having sex earlier than
other groups and without contraception. As for moderates,
Talbot writes of a new "middle-class morality," in which teens
recognize that the abstinence-until-marriage paradigm is
unrealistic but are cautious about having sex. "They might have
loved Ellen Page in 'Juno,' but in real life they'd see having a
baby at the wrong time as a tragic derailment of their life plans,"
Talbot writes. … Tom Bissell profiles Cliff Bleszinski, the
flamboyant 33-year-old wunderkind game designer behind Epic
Games' wildly successful Gears of War. Bleszinski's attention to
his image over the years—white snakeskin boots, fur coats,
thoughtfully coiffed hair—makes him "exceptional in an
industry that is … widely assumed to be a preserve inhabited by
pale, withdrawn, molelike creatures."
New York, Nov. 3
An article finds that Barack Obama's team, wary of the
challenges Obama would face as president, has been plotting its
White House transition for months. Advisers are reading books
about FDR and aiming to avoid the chaos that characterized
Clinton's first 100 days in power. The team is "[a]ll too aware
that, should he win, these cascading crises will leave Obama
with no time to gain his sea legs and terrifyingly little margin for
error." … An article goes behind the scenes at the Broadway
staging of Billy Elliot, delving into the day-to-day lives of the
three young teens who share the title role and the limelight while
puberty remains at bay. "To some parents, this would no doubt
be a terrible picture: overworked, overdriven kids living adult
lives in an artificial world. But as the Billy parents see it, their
sons are experiencing the pleasure and utility of their gifts to the
fullest extent; they are never bored or idle but, rather, devoted
and fulfilled."
Wired, November
A piece examines a Facebook-powered Egyptian youth
movement that Hosni Mubarak's government has struggled to
curb. Harnessing the power of the social networking site, two
young Egyptians started a group for the "April 6" youth
movement, which now contains 70,000 members. The group
eventually garnered the unwanted attention of the security
services and led to the arrest of one of the leaders. While online
activism is sometimes called "slactivism" in the West, it matters
in places where the freedom of assembly is curtailed. "Although
freedom of speech and freedom of religion may be democracy's
headliners, it's the less sexy-sounding freedom of assembly that,
when prohibited, can effectively asphyxiate political
organization." … An interactive slide show showcases how a
"green revolution" could transform agriculture and food
consumption. From the collection of charts, one learns that
supermarket items travel an average of 1,500 miles to reach
Iowa, a steer requires six tons of food and 18 months to become
hamburger, and that six years of drought have cut Australia's
grain exports by more than 50 percent.
Ah, sweet scandal: No one admits it,
but we all know this dance.
poem
The Slate Poetry Podcast
Your favorite poets read their work to you.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 2:29 PM ET
Now you can listen to Slate poetry wherever you go. Below,
browse Slate's weekly lineup of new and renewed work by
leading poets, selected by Robert Pinsky and read to you by the
author. Or subscribe to Slate's new Poetry Podcast feed on
iTunes and carry the poems with you.
.
Oct. 28, 2008: "Ach, Wien," by Rita Dove. Click the arrow on
the audio player to hear Rita Dove read the poem, or download
the recording here.
Oct. 21, 2008: "Reading Faulkner at 17, You Foresee Your
Reckoning," by Catherine Pierce. Click the arrow on the audio
player to hear Catherine Pierce read the poem, or download the
recording here.
poem
"Ach, Wien"
1803
By Rita Dove
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 2:30 PM ET
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Rita Dove read this
poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to
Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.
Oct. 14, 2008: "Spring Comes to Ohio," by Joseph Campana.
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Joseph Campana
read the poem, or download the recording here.
Oct. 7, 2008: "On Love, on Grief," by Walter Savage Landor;
reintroduced by Robert Pinsky. Click the arrow on the audio
player to hear Robert Pinsky read the poem, or download the
recording here.
The truly great cities are never self-conscious:
They have their own music; they go about business.
London surges, Rome bubbles, Paris promenades;
Dresden stands rigid, gazes skyward, afraid.
Vienna canters in a slowly tightening spiral.
Golden facades line the avenues, ring after ring
tracing a curve as tender and maddening
as a smile on the face of a beautiful rival.
You can't escape it; everywhere's a circle.
Feel your knees bend and straighten
as you focus each step. Hum along with it;
succumb to the sway, enter the trance.
politics
Track the Presidential Polls on Your
iPhone
Introducing Slate's Poll Tracker '08: all the data you crave about the
presidential race.
Friday, October 31, 2008, at 7:08 AM ET
If you're a political junkie like we're political junkies, you have a
problem. You can track the McCain-Obama polls only at your
computer. If you go to a ballgame, or a meeting, or your
daughter's wedding, you enter a politics vacuum, cut off from
the data you crave.
No longer. Today Slate introduces Poll Tracker '08, an
application that delivers comprehensive up-to-the-minute data
about the presidential election to your iPhone, iPhone 3G, or
iPod touch. Using data from Pollster.com, the Poll Tracker '08
delivers the latest McCain and Obama polling numbers for every
state, graphs historical polling trends, and charts voting patterns
in previous elections. Poll Tracker '08 allows you to sort states
by how contested they are, how fresh their poll data is, or how
heavily they lean to McCain or Obama.
You can download Poll Tracker '08 on the iPhone App Store. It
costs just 99 cents, a small price to pay for satisfying your
craving for data anytime, anywhere. Get it on the App Store.
Apple, the Apple logo, iPod, and iTunes are
trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S.
and other countries. iPhone is a trademark of Apple
Inc.
politics
Yes, He Can
Barack Obama should be able to disclose his small-dollar donors pretty easily.
By John Dickerson and Chris Wilson
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 6:50 PM ET
Barack Obama refuses to release the names of the 2 million-plus
people who have given his campaign less than $200. According
to campaign officials, it would be too difficult and timeconsuming to extract this information from its database.
So how come we were able to do it in a couple hours? Not
literally—we don't have access to the campaign's list of
donors—but we created a database of similar size and format in
a Web-ready file and posted it online. (You can view a sample
text version of it here. The full version is 824 MB.)
But before we get into the technical details (though, if you're
with the Obama campaign and want to skip ahead, please do),
it's worth dwelling on the reasons for the Obama campaign's
reluctance to disclose this information. It can't be legal: No law
prevents Obama from releasing these names.
Politically, there would be several advantages in releasing the
names. Obama has campaigned (effectively) on a platform of
making government more transparent, citing his efforts to do so
in Chicago and Washington as signature achievements. He has
also disclosed the bundlers who raise large amounts of money
for his campaign. Finally, making the list public would rebut
McCain's broad and unsubstantiated claims that the list (and the
huge sums of money it represents) is shot through with fraud.
Of course, releasing the information would also be politically
risky, since the inevitable errors in a database so huge (errors of
the kind McCain also had, like a contribution from "Adorable
Manabat") would give McCain an opportunity to scream fraud.
Then again, he does that sometimes even without evidence.
And from a purely logistical standpoint, we have a hard time
believing the campaign lacks the expertise to do this. We know
the information is already in a very sophisticated database—it
has to be, because the Obama campaign has been manipulating
the information for more than a year as it continues to raise
money from these small-fry donors. It also uses the information
to contact and track donors to make sure they get out and vote on
Election Day.
So much for the arguments. Now for the technical details. We
created a randomly generated dummy database in Excel that
consisted of 50,000 donors. Each entry had a field for all the
data normally disclosed in a typical FEC filing for donors who
give $200 or more: first name, last name, two address lines, city,
state, ZIP code, employer, occupation, the amount of the
donation, and the date it was given. (Excel 2003 maxes out at
around 65,000 rows, and the Obama campaign is certainly using
something much more sophisticated.)
To create an xml database from this data that approximates the
size of Obama's donor database, we wrote a short script in
Excel's built-in version of Visual Basic that looped through the
database of 50,000 pretend donors 50 times, for a total of 2.5
million entries, adding each entry to an xml file. Even on a
wheezing, overworked Dell Optiplex GX280 (2.8 GHz
processor, 504 MB of RAM), this took exactly two hours. The
resulting xml file was 824 MB—big, but not unheard of. Any
competent developer could take this file and make a searchable
application from it.
Web developers would be quick to point out that a huge xml file
like this is too bulky for an online application to easily parse. For
the Obama campaign to create a searchable database like the one
the McCain campaign released, it would probably need to take a
few extra steps to convert the xml document into something that
can handle the size of the dataset, like MySQL. But simply for
the purposes of releasing the raw data, a universal format like
xml is sufficient.
Unsurprisingly, a campaign spokesman rejects the premise of
our little experiment, saying the task they face is far more
difficult than we think. The campaign's last FEC report, he notes,
runs to 176,000 pages. But the number of pages isn't the relevant
metric here; it's the size and shape of the database. And we're
talking about something far less complex than an FEC report.
Finally, since it's online, it requires no printer. All we're doing is
rearranging 1's and 0's.
Obama aides also deflect the question about the names of the
campaign's low-dollar donors by saying that the McCain has
lapsed in reporting the names of more than 100,000 donors.
They're right—and they illustrate the point by helpfully pointing
to an online spreadsheet. Which also proves our point that it's
easy to put this data together in a digestible form. So how 'bout
it, guys?
politics
Together at Last
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama campaign together for the first time.
By John Dickerson
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 2:13 AM ET
KISSIMMEE, Fla.—The all-drama president came to testify on
behalf of the no-drama candidate. Wednesday night at a chilly
outdoor rally under a cloudless sky, Bill Clinton joined Barack
Obama for the first time of the election season. You may have
remembered that there was once tension, upset, and anger
between the two. Obama supporters claimed Clinton had tried to
use Obama's race against him. Clinton was outraged at the
charge. All was forgiven in a man-hug.
When Clinton was a candidate, he loved to campaign late into
the night, so it was fitting that he took the stage at 11:15 p.m.
The former president went right to work, making the case for
Obama and urging the audience to spread the word and work for
his election. He testified to Obama's temperament, highlighting
his careful response to the economic crisis. "Before he said
anything, he wanted to understand," Clinton said, describing
Obama's process of deliberation. "If we have learned anything
over the last eight years, it's that we need a president who wants
to understand. Who can understand."
No one could question Clinton's passion. At home, you wouldn't
have needed to have the sound up to get his message. Clinton
pointed his finger into the crowd in his signature style almost
immediately and kept at it, in what soon became a 13-minute
festival of gesticulations. He spread his arms, clenched his fists,
and put his hand to his heart. It looked like an exercise routine or
a religion. When he illustrated the decline in family income that
had taken place since he left office, he swept his hand in an arc
like he was trying to describe the fall of a redwood.
During the primaries, when Clinton was campaigning for his
wife, he warned audiences about good storytellers. "I could stand
up and give you the prettiest speeches in the wide world," he
said, referring to Obama, "and I could give a pretty good one
'cause I came out of a tradition of storytellers where we listened
and learned how to tell stories." But talk has to be backed up, he
said, arguing that Hillary could do that better than her more
eloquent opponent.
In Orlando, Clinton made the opposite argument. It was Obama's
campaign (built largely on pretty speeches) that proved he was
ready for office. "If you have any doubt about Senator Obama's
ability to be the chief executive," Clinton said, "just look at all of
you. ... He has executed this campaign. He can be the chief
executor of good intentions."
As Clinton spoke, Obama sat behind him on a stool, watching
placidly and smiling occasionally. When Clinton's testimony
was done, Obama provided the symbol that captured the event.
He shook Clinton's hand and then embraced him.
Obama then embraced Clinton's legacy. Throughout his
Democratic primary fight with Hillary Clinton, Obama
downplayed President Clinton's achievements. He famously said
Ronald Reagan was a more transformational president and
blamed "Clintonism" for selling out Democratic principles in an
orgy of what Obama called "triangulation and poll-driven
politics."
In Orlando, Obama was transformed. He boasted about the
Clinton record—22 million new jobs and a rise in median
wages—like he was a tour guide at his Little Rock library. To
cap the praise shower, he heralded Clinton's political move to the
middle, saying that "one of his greatest contributions was to
reconfigure the Democratic Party."
As Clinton listened, he too showed no emotion until Obama
botched a joke. As if to paper over the flub, Clinton erupted in
laughter as if someone had suddenly put his stool on vibrate.
In the end, the event was politically transactional and a little
underwhelming. I was expecting the two great political talkers to
maybe engage in the equivalent of dueling guitars. But there
were no transcendent moments. In fact, when Obama moved
past the 25-minute mark in his speech and kept doling out new
policy pronouncements on expanding broadband lines and labor
provisions for trade deals, it started to feel as if his proximity to
Clinton had infected him with a little of the former president's
verbosity.
Finally, though, Obama came back to his core message. He
called on the audience to change politics by having "the strength
and grace to bridge our divisions." He wasn't referring to the
ugliness that once existed between himself and Bill Clinton, but
he could easily have been. If this is how Obama bridges
divisions with his enemies, we might expect that if he wins and
he needs John McCain, the two former rivals will be bear
hugging by springtime.
politics
Don't Worry, Be Happy
The McCain campaign is unusually upbeat. Does it have reason to be?
By John Dickerson
Wednesday, October 29, 2008, at 6:49 PM ET
In McCain's most optimistic scenario, he loses a few Republican
states like New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and Iowa. He just
has to hope that he doesn't lose too many of them. (Losing a
biggie like Florida or Ohio would be curtains.) He could make
up for a small loss of GOP states with a victory in Pennsylvania
or New Hampshire.
How do McCain aides get around this dire picture without the
aid of strong drink? Let's just say that McCain's campaign now
relies on hope more than Obama's does. They hope that the
Obama organization isn't as impressive as signs suggest it is.
They hope that the greater enthusiasm apparent among
Democrats turns out to be less than advertised on Election Day.
They hope that the public polls that show a big Obama lead are
poorly designed, overstating participation by young voters and
African-Americans. They hope undecided voters will all break to
McCain in the end.
With only five days left until Election Day, John McCain's
campaign aides seem happier than they have been in a while. For
the last few days, the campaign has been increasingly buoyed by
what it says has been improvement in its internal polling of 14
battleground states. Aides see a tightening race in states that are
crucial to their long-shot march to 270 votes and victory. Even
McCain himself is upbeat. "He's been happy for the last few
days," says one aide. "That's a change."
The McCain path to victory relies heavily on the campaign's
pollster, Bill McInturff, who is conducting surveys in
battleground states every day. For the entire campaign, McCain
aides say, McInturff has often been a bit of a wet blanket.
Whenever they've felt good, he's been the voice of caution,
explaining that the landscape was bleaker than they thought.
Recently, though, his internal campaign updates have actually
been eagerly anticipated: The subject line of a recent one said "a
memo you will want to read."
What are we to make of this? Where do we plot the mindset of
the McCain campaign on a continuum that stretches from deceit
(aides know they're losing badly and they're play-acting) to
Drudge-like self-delusion (they're mindlessly clutching at, and
believing in, any glimmer of positive news) to truth (there
actually are real signs of hope)? The line can be hard to define,
but it seems to me that the McCain campaign is somewhere
between self-delusion and truth.
Could McInturff be blowing pretty rings of imaginary smoke?
Perhaps. But he has a good reputation for honesty among
pollsters. It's also not in his professional interest to play
Pollyanna. Who wants to be known as the Baghdad Bob of
pollsters, making crazy claims that turn out to be untrue? Plus,
his ability to get future clients depends on his integrity.
There are a lot of reasons for campaign aides to be engaging in
self-delusion. The press is full of stories about how badly it has
been run. Peddling the idea that things are working well enough
to close the gap in polling helps buck up the campaign. Plus,
after two years of campaigning, no one wants to be forced to go
through the motions just for the sake of appearance, so if they
believe they're making progress (regardless of whether they are),
it's easier to get out of bed in the morning.
Still, the landscape looks pretty bleak. A flood of public polls
show that McCain is down in several important, traditionally
Republican states. The news organizations and analysts that have
reported and sifted the numbers guess that, at the moment,
Obama would garner upward of 310 electoral votes by winning
not only all the states John Kerry won but also Ohio, Virginia,
and several other states that went for Bush in 2004.
McInturff released a memo yesterday that outlined his case for
why it's still possible for McCain to pull a rabbit out of his hat.
Here's what he sees: His poll of battleground states shows
Obama with such a small lead, it's within the margin of error,
which means it's effectively tied. In Iowa, he sees the race
tightening to within a few points. In Pennsylvania, it's in single
digits (though that could mean nine). (The average of other
pollsters say McCain is down by a dozen in Iowa and
Pennsylvania.) Moving toward McCain, say his aides, are
women making less than $60,000 and white men with only some
college education.
Of course, when it's in your interest for things to look positive,
you tend to see them positively. When any campaign talks about
"internal polls," be wary. They can be manipulated for spin
reasons—allowing them to present pseudoscientific numbers to
make a political point—or they can just be wrong. Their formula
for turnout may be as faulty as those calculations that valued
mortgage-backed securities. McCain's pollsters think they've
taken the "Obama effect" into account—the number of new
voters and lapsed voters who will actually participate—but what
if they've wildly undercounted?
The McCain campaign also says its message about Obama's plan
to "spread the wealth" is taking hold. Republicans are coming
back to McCain, they say, and Obama's favorables are dropping
a little. They say they are now able to drive the message about
Joe the Plumber as effectively as Obama is able to push any of
his messages. And they say the robo-calls, which many in the
political business say are useless, are working to raise doubts
about Obama.
Whether the Joe the Plumber message is punching through as
much as the McCain camp says, it does have one psychological
benefit: For the final stretch of the campaign, his aides know
each day what they're supposed to be talking about. For a
campaign that has had many messages and themes, that's
encouraging in itself. "We are not just going through the
motions," says an aide. "We're fighting to win." For McCain,
whose heroes of film and literature are often doomed
protagonists who battle on despite near-certain defeat, perhaps
just being in the fight again is reason enough to be elated.
Watch McCain's closing argument on the stump in Florida.
politics
October Unsurprise
Have you heard the latest stunning, mildly interesting revelation?
By John Dickerson
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 6:28 PM ET
Time is running short this year for an October Surprise, one of
those late-breaking news developments that upsets the
presidential race. In 2000, just days before Election Day, we
learned of George Bush's 1978 DUI charge. Karl Rove has said
that the disclosure depressed evangelical support for Bush. And
four years ago, there was the late disclosure of a tape from
Osama bin Laden, which John Kerry says cost him the race.
So far—and there are still three days left!—there has been no
revelation of a similar magnitude. But that has not kept the
campaigns from yelling, "Surprise!" The hope is that an effective
last-minute drama will (in McCain's case) change the dynamic or
(in Obama's) hasten it. Failing that, a surprise moment will
motivate the party base and give a campaign a winning news
cycle. The campaign is slipping into a monotonous phase and
any shiny new object may garner some attention.
Which raises the question: What distinguishes a fake October
Surprise from the garden-variety, depressingly familiar
overhyping of some little thing that we'll all forget in 12 hours?
One thing: It relies on the dwindling clock for its fake drama. It's
the idea that the Obama and McCain campaigns have been
hiding some incendiary secret that's just slipped out at the
eleventh hour. On Monday, as John McCain campaigned across
Ohio and Pennsylvania, he referred to an audio recording
"revealed only yesterday" that showed Barack Obama was a
closet socialist. (Revealed only yesterday!)
In Hershey, Pa., on Tuesday morning, McCain had even fresher
dirt: a quote from Joe Biden saying the Obama tax cut would
apply to even fewer people than his running mate had claimed.
That's not what he said, but by noon the McCain campaign was
hosting a conference to connect the dots for reporters about
Obama's "creeping tax plan." This is politics as orchestrated by
Perry Mason.
But the McCain campaign was not alone. Obama aides sent out
an e-mail Tuesday morning declaring that McCain's top policy
adviser had made a "stunning admission" that the health
insurance most people currently get from their employers is
"way better" than the health care John McCain's plan pushes
people into. Burdened by the realities of hiding the secrets of
McCain's plan, he could no longer stifle the truth. By the
afternoon, Obama aides were holding their own conference call
about this stunning admission.
You knew it wouldn't be long before Obama himself would
show just how stunned he was about the admission. "This
morning, we were offered a stunning bit of straight talk—an
October surprise—from his top economic adviser," Obama said
Tuesday in Harrisonburg, Va. The adviser "actually said that the
health insurance people currently get from their employer is—
and I quote—'way better' than the health care they would get if
John McCain becomes president."
You can imagine the dramatic possibilities when Obama takes
over our airwaves tomorrow night during his half-hour
infomercial. Perhaps an aide can rush on the set to deliver news
of the latest shocker.
"DEVELOPING" reads the Obama e-mail message announcing
the "stunning admission" about McCain's health care plan. I
hope this was a bit of wry irony from Obama campaign Press
Secretary Bill Burton, parodying the stilted language of the
Drudge Report. Drudge has become justly famous by giving us
October surprises every month of the year—or every day, for
that matter. He is the Town Crier who is always bawling. It's
been a wildly successful strategy for Drudge, based on the
theory that people never read more than the shocking headline
and don't bother to question whether the headline is true. Lately,
however, as the gruel has gotten thin, Drudge has had to hype
ever-more-ridiculous nonstories and outlier polls to create
drama. Soon he may start quoting polls from Mrs. Fleischman's
first-grade class.
These fake October Surprises are silly because they're not that
surprising. After a campaign marked by daily charges and
countercharges, the public's endorphin receptors are numbed.
The stunning admissions both campaigns are getting excited
about are no different than the gaffes and low-level deceptions
we've been dieting on for months. And the stunned October
Surprise drama from both McCain and Obama is merely the
refined flopping and fainting we've seen during the campaign's
marathon of phony umbrage taking.
There's another factor that may erode the October Surprise
franchise: Lots of people have already voted. The one area
where these counterfeit acts might have a sufficient impact is
with each party's base. Base voters are easily stirred by the latest
indignity, and they're not often the ones who bother using
Google to check the context of the latest bombshell.
I'm not trying to jinx us all by calling for an October Surprise.
This election has been surprising enough. A placid lope toward
Election Day would be just fine with me. The only surprise I'd
like to see would be press conferences in which follow-up
questions were allowed. But I'm more likely to find woodland
gnomes in my garden. And that really would be a surprise, since
everyone knows they don't come out after September.
among "independent women voters," it suddenly dawned on me:
I am, in fact, one of these elusive independent woman voters,
and I have the credentials to prove it. For the last couple of
decades, I've sometimes voted Democratic, sometimes
Republican. I'm even a registered independent, though I did
think of switching to the Republican Party to vote for John
McCain in 2000. But because the last political party I truly felt
comfortable with was Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party (I
lived in England in the 1980s and '90s), I didn't actually do it.
Click here to read the rest of Applebaum's entry.
Karim Bardeesy, Editorial Assistant, The Big Money: Not
Voting
I'm Canadian, so I can't vote here. But I want Barack Obama to
win. His campaign has touched more people, entrusting them to
carry a story to their friends and neighbors about the positive
role government can play. It's an example for all who care about
public life—the turnout here on Nov. 4 might even exceed the
59 percent turnout in Canada's Oct. 14 election. And the world's
embrace of Obama, combined with the inclusiveness he brings
to international affairs, will be transformative.
Emily Bazelon, Senior Editor: Obama
We asked Slate's staff and contributors to tell us whom they're
voting for on Election Day and why. These are their responses.
Click here to read Editor David Plotz's explanation for why we
share this information with you.
I am voting for Barack Obama because I agree with his tax
policy, and I like his health and energy plans fine. I think he'll
help restore our bruised image abroad. And I know he is about
1,000 times more likely than John McCain to choose Supreme
Court justices who will resist rather than further the push to the
right by Bush's picks, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice
Samuel Alito. So for me, it's an easy call. But even if I were less
sure of Obama on those fronts, I think I would vote out the
Republicans as a matter of stewardship. They led us to a war of
hugely questionable value, gave us an overweening theory of
presidential power, and have now left us with a scary financial
crisis. John McCain isn't George Bush, but his plans and
promises are too much like the standard Republican fare that has
gotten us into trouble. And won't get us out of it. Enough.
Please, please, it's time for new faces.
Michael Agger, Senior Editor: Obama
Christopher Beam, Staff Writer: Obama
Grace under pressure.
Because I'd rather have a president who is intellectually curious,
shrewd, even-keeled, eloquent, and analytical than one whose
chief campaign selling point is being unpredictable. Because I'd
like to keep the number of Alitos on the bench to one. Because I
think Obama will be more cautious about withdrawal from Iraq
than people think. Because world opinion does matter, and the
United States needs rebranding. Because I don't care about
health care choice, I just want to see an affordable doctor.
Because I don't want the Clean Air Act to be a misnomer
anymore. Because the thought of Sarah Palin in the Oval Office
makes me want to drink.
politics
Slate Votes
Obama wins this magazine in a rout.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 2:23 PM ET
Holly Allen, Web Designer: Obama
I'm excited to cast my vote on Election Day for Barack Obama.
His views match up better with my own.
Anne Applebaum, "Foreigners" Columnist: Not McCain
This weekend, while reading the latest polling data on John
McCain, Sarah Palin, and their appeal—or growing lack of it—
Oh, who am I kidding, demographics are destiny. will.i.am for
SecDef!
Torie Bosch, Copy Editor: Obama
I didn't vote in the Virginia primary because I couldn't choose
between Obama and Hillary Clinton—neither candidate much
appealed to me. But I'll be voting for Obama because I'm a
Democrat. He may not have the experience I'd like to see in a
presidential candidate, but I agree with his stances on issues like
the war in Iraq, abortion, and health care. I also admire the
idealism and hope he's inspired in the party—and I'd like to keep
Tina Fey here on Earth.
Emily Calderone, Video Producer, Slate V: Obama
In my opinion, voting for Obama is a no-brainer. While I don't
think he's going to magically cure all of America's ills, I do think
he's a big step in the right direction. What I admire most about
Obama is his lack of cynicism (a quality the McCain campaign
has in spades). How delightful. How helpful. How forward
thinking. He's calm, collected, and surprisingly lacking in ego.
These qualities spell success in my book. What's most important
to me? Women's rights. That's where Obama scores a big fat "F"
for feminism.
Abby Callard, Intern: Obama
I will be voting—in the swing state of Virginia, more
importantly—for Barack Obama.
Daniel Engber, Associate Editor: Obama
I could spin some story about the relative merits of John McCain
and Barack Obama, but let's be honest: I would have voted for
any Democrat who competed in the primaries over any
Republican who might have been nominated. Why? Because I
side with the Democrats on the things that matter most right
now: foreign policy, economic policy, and health care. Those
issues on which I'm most likely to diverge from the party line—
e.g., the environment, the death penalty—don't seem nearly as
important.
Jim Festante, Web Designer: Obama
I'm so tired of the partisanship that has been a staple of the Bush
presidency and the McCain-Palin ticket. To infer (and to do so in
such an overt, unapologetic manner) that somehow small-town
America is the "real" America, the America with good values
and moral judgment, is such an insult, especially when it's
convenient for them to use New York City and Sept. 11 as
political props.
Sophie Gilbert, Intern: Not Voting
I'm English, so unfortunately I don't have a vote. However, if I
did, like Gordon Brown, Boris Johnson, and around 80 percent
of my fellow countrymen, I'd be voting for Obama. He's more
thoughtful and less irascible, and his economic plan makes way
more sense.
Nathan Heller, Copy Editor: Obama
1. I don't want Roe v. Wade overturned: my body, my decision.
2. Biden (Violence Against Women Act and foreign-policy
experience) vs. Palin (anti-abortion and aerial hunting).
3. Gun control: I probably support more gun control than could
ever be reasonably expected to stand up in court, but Obama's
views are closer to my own.
4. No Child Left Behind is horribly flawed. While both
candidates understand that, I can only see Obama reforming the
system in a meaningful way.
5. I'm from Chicago.
Liberals of a certain ilk—the kind who know the market price of
organic chard—have a reputation for condescension. Liberals of
this sort, their discontents suggest, believe that people vote
Republican only because they don't know better. But the
Republican Party has developed the worse habit of patronizing
its own supporters.
Click here to read the rest of Heller's entry.
Melinda Henneberger, Contributor: Obama
When it all comes down to it, I'm just relieved to know that
whatever happens Nov. 4, Bush is done.
You want me to count the reasons? Nah, you don't have that kind
of time.
Matt Dodson, Software Engineer: Obama
Christopher Hitchens, "Fighting Words" Columnist: Obama
I'm going with Obama. I fall into the category of folks who
believe America is in dire need of change. Some people suggest
that Obama's ideas for change are far-reaching, idealistic, and
naive, but to me, they're simply common-sense solutions to the
problems we're facing today.
From Hitchens' recent column endorsing Obama: "The
Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this
year, and ... both its nominees for the highest offices in the land
should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators,
congressmen, and governors who endorse them."
Jennifer Huang, Intern: Obama
many Americans feel for him, but I feel like his worldview is
Carter-esque, and I fear his economic policies will be, too.
Because I trust that he will be competent.
I'm voting for Barack Obama because he has the right intellect,
temperament, shrewdness, and curiosity. When he questions
specialists, he always asks the central questions. I like the fact
that he's "cool"—better that than a hothead. Though this
wouldn't be a good reason to support him if it were the only
reason, his victory would go a long way toward repairing our
image in the world (though, of course, he'll have six months to
form policies that justify the redemption). Finally, a McCainPalin defeat would help redeem our own politics by
demonstrating that mendacity and cynicism don't always
succeed.
However, I also think an Obama presidency can be a boon for
Republicans, and not just because of the havoc a Democratic
White House and a Democratic Congress could wreak. I don't
hate President Bush like so many do, but even I can say his
presidency has been a disappointment. And the Republican-led
Congress was a disaster, as McCain pointed out, not in so many
words, in his convention speech. I'm hopeful that an Obama
victory would be a wakeup call as well as an opportunity—an
opportunity for those who believe in limited government,
individual freedoms, and free markets (yes, even in this crisis) to
regain their influence, to take back the party from the religious
right and social conservatives that have gained so much
influence. So regardless of what happens on Nov. 4, I won't be
too upset. But neither will I be too excited.
Mickey Kaus, "Kausfiles" blogger: Obama
James Ledbetter, Editor: The Big Money: Obama
Michael Kinsley, Founding Editor: Obama, of course
My voting rationale is not strictly economic, but this is what I do
for a living, so: The general-election debate over economic
policy at times has been substantive, but it has rarely been
honest. There was a telling moment in the first debate, when
neither candidate was willing to specify which of his economic
programs would have to be jettisoned because of the current
economic crisis. That, alas, is the noise-to-signal ratios that you
get in presidential politics, and so you have to do your own
analysis.
Fred Kaplan, "War Stories" Columnist: Obama
1. I believe in voting the party, not the man or woman.
Democrats generally reflect my views better than Republicans.
2. It's important not to ratify failure, and the current Republican
administration is a failure.
3. Historically, as I demonstrated in Slate a few weeks ago,
Democratic presidents have a better economic record, EVEN BY
REPUBLICAN STANDARDS (lower government spending;
higher GDP, ignoring distribution questions, etc.). Republican
irresponsibility about tax cuts without spending cuts has
bankrupted this country. Twice.
Click here to read the rest of Kinsley's entry.
Juliet Lapidos, Assistant Editor: Obama
I'm a big-government liberal who wants universal health care
and a sustainable energy policy. So, naturally, I'm backing the
Democratic ticket. I don't dislike John McCain, but ever since he
picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, I've questioned his
judgment. He's old, and she's not qualified. While I'm not
smitten with Barack Obama, I'm confident he won't damage our
standing in the world and think he might even improve it.
Click here to read the rest of Ledbetter's entry.
Jacob Leibenluft, "Green Lantern" and "Explainer" Columnist:
Obama
For all the talk of a divided electorate, it's a bit shocking to be at
a point where 80 percent or so of Americans think the country is
on the wrong track. Barack Obama's policies, advisers, and style
of leadership seem far more likely to offer a decisive shift from
the last eight years. As for John McCain, if—with a recession
looming, a financial crisis unfolding, and seven-plus years of
stagnant income growth on the books—your first instinct is to
blame earmarks, that's a problem.
Josh Levin, Associate Editor: Obama
Rachael Larimore, Deputy Managing Editor and Copy Chief:
McCain
This is a difficult election for me. But voting for John McCain is
an easy choice. He's a man I admire, I agree with many of his
policy positions, and, since I am a moderate but loyal
Republican, I feel a kind of kinship with him. Barack Obama is
an exciting candidate, and I wish I could share the enthusiasm so
I'm too cynical to believe that Barack Obama is a different kind
of politician or that he's any kind of silver bullet for America's
problems. (I do, however, like to think of America's problems as
a gigantic werewolf. Scary!) But after eight years of George W.
Bush, I am heartened by the fact that he seems to be a thoughtful
person—someone who will rely on his brain rather than his gut,
and someone who will surround himself with smart people and
give weight to their opinions. John McCain, by comparison, has
a tendency both to act impulsively and to surround himself with
the kind of people who insist that he tap Sarah Palin as his vicepresidential nominee. That's my campaign slogan: Obama in
'08—He Didn't Pick Palin.
had been on the ballot this year, I might have thought harder
about this vote. But over the last four years, that McCain has
transmogrified into exactly the kind of divisive agent of
intolerance he once decried, and now I'm terrified at the thought
of him in charge.
Dahlia Lithwick, Supreme Court Correspondent: Not Voting
Chadwick Matlin, Staff Writer: The Big Money: Obama
I will not vote. I am still Canadian. If I could, I would vote for
Barack Obama because I am raggedy from the politics of
division. I can't really blame John McCain for dipping into it in
recent weeks, but I wish Sarah Palin would have relished it a bit
less. We can't fight global terror, repair the economy, or do
much of anything in America if we're too busy plotting how to
firebomb the neighbors.
Chad Lorenz, Copy Editor: Obama
America cannot return to leading the global community without
restoring the legitimacy it had before the war in Iraq and the
shameful human rights abuses it has perpetrated since Sept. 11.
In addition to successfully ending the war, the next president
needs to regain the confidence of our allies, cautiously engage
our enemies, and acutely detect emerging international threats.
Barack Obama's foreign-policy ideals are rooted in nuanced
diplomacy and open-minded reasoning, not arrogance and
heavy-handed ultimatums. Coping with the world's latest
economic and environmental challenges will require a
multilateral approach, and Obama's background shows every
sign of respecting that method. He's the candidate I trust far
more than anyone to erase the mistakes of the past eight years
and reconstitute America's role as a responsible, trustworthy,
cooperative global citizen.
Noreen Malone, Executive Assistant: Obama
David Sedaris framed the choice with this metaphor: "Can I
interest you in the chicken?" … "Or would you prefer the platter
of shit with bits of broken glass in it?" I definitely want the
chicken.
Farhad Manjoo, "Technology" Columnist: Obama
This is the third presidential election in which I'll cast a ballot,
but only the first time that I'll be voting for someone: The last
two times, I was voting against Bush. I'm choosing Obama for
one main reason: He's the smarter candidate. I don't just mean
he's got smarter policies, though he does. I mean he seems to
have the higher IQ. His books and speeches suggest deep
intellectual curiosity—a calm, analytical, rational mind of the
sort we haven't seen in the White House in years.
I've long admired John McCain; I rooted for him in the 2000
primaries, and I might have picked him over Al Gore in the
general that year. I also admired his stance against soft-money
political donations and the Bush tax cuts. If that John McCain
Until I started writing about the economy, I didn't realize just
how bad of a president John McCain would be. Half-baked
mortgage plans, a politically motivated silence on the bailout
plan, and an obvious lack of understanding about how money
works in this country show McCain's economic understanding is
not sound. Obama, meanwhile, has offered little brilliance on the
economy, but he has displayed competence. Economic
competence, a dogged and (at times) brave devotion to full
diplomacy, and an impressively managed campaign are all it
takes to swing my vote this year. And so I must fulfill my cliché:
a young, white, urban twentysomething voting for Barack
Obama.
Natalie Matthews, Designer: Obama
Obama's campaign has demonstrated an appreciation and
understanding of both design and the power of the Internet, two
things I deal with on a daily basis. Also, as someone who uses
public transportation and sees the value in it environmentally,
fiscally, politically, and socially, I also respond to his policy to
"strengthen America's transportation infrastructure."
Melonyce McAfee, Copy Editor: Obama
I think a Barack Obama presidency would improve America's
international profile. The Bush administration's proud
xenophobia has come to define the U.S. overseas, and McCain
and his running mate are perpetuating that wrongheadedness. On
the home front, Obama has inspired a return to civic life for
many Americans who had given up on the idea that the
government could ever represent them and their needs. I hope
this spark to mobilization and activism will continue past
Election Day. I'm a lifelong Democrat, and many of Obama's
policies jibe with my values, so I won't pretend that I ever
considered voting for McCain, though I did admire him for
being a centrist who could get things done in the Senate. But the
religious paternalism and faux folksiness that he's adopted as a
last gasp to win the election have killed any respect I ever had
for the guy.
Michael Newman, Politics Editor: Obama
If you're truly an undecided voter, as few people are, this is a
golden age: You can read all the news and analysis and
commentary you can stand, browse the blogosphere, look at
polls, examine position papers, watch the debates and various
videos, talk with your friends, check in with your mother, etc.
And certainly I'm not going to tell you not to do all that stuff.
(Check this page often!) But there's such a thing as too much
information. For me, the most useful reading of this campaign
was two unusually honest and well-written political memoirs:
Dreams From My Father and Faith of My Fathers. I liked and
admired both John McCain and Barack Obama before reading
them, and still do after. But I'm more comfortable with Obama's
perspective on politics and life than I am with McCain's.
that will focus on creating viable sources of renewable energy
and reducing carbon emissions; to support a cautious and
multilateral foreign policy that ensures American security with
diplomacy, not a cowboy hat; and to support economic policies
that benefit all Americans instead of just the wealthy. Of course,
maybe that's just my demographic talking, but it's what I believe.
Timothy Noah, "Chatterbox" Columnist: Obama
Sen. Barack Obama is my choice for reasons that (I hope) reach
further than the expectations of my demographic or tribe or herd.
I admire Obama's quality of balance: between attention to details
and grasp of ideas; or to put that somewhat differently, between
politics and ideals. Beyond that quality of balance, he has
demonstrated in action an impressive ability to keep his balance
through two challenging, stressful campaigns, for nomination
and election. Like many millions of Americans, I have gone
from finding Barack Obama inspiring—I might say "merely
inspiring"—to feeling that he is reliable. We need a trustworthy
president.
It's a point of pride that I managed to get through this election
without professing shock at John McCain's supposed defection
to the Dark Side. I do not think that McCain, a man of good
character who once seemed a plausible candidate for the
Democratic ticket, has sold his soul to the devil. Smart liberals
like Robert Wright and Josh Marshall say the McCain-Palin
ticket has waged the most despicable presidential campaign in
modern memory. I doubt they'll continue to believe that much
past Nov. 4. McCain-Palin doesn't rank even as the most
despicable presidential campaign in 2008. (That would be
Hillary Clinton's primary campaign, which is far more
susceptible to the accusation that it exploited Obama's race.)
Robert Pinsky, Poetry Editor: Obama
David Plotz, Editor of Slate: Obama
For his charisma, his cautiousness, and his cool. In a time of
high stakes, we need someone who can sort out the best course
of action without bridling in anger. A candidate who actually
nods when his opponent makes a powerful counterargument—as
Obama did several times during the last debate—is a rare bird.
Of course, Obama is untested in many regards. My main concern
about him is this: How will he deal with making an unpopular or
tough decision? Can he keep his cool then without losing
confidence in himself? I believe so, and that's why he has my
vote.
Ever since McCain inexplicably went ballistic on me in my first
(and last) interview with him a decade ago, I've suspected he
was too volatile to be president. Nothing that has happened
during this campaign has changed my mind. McCain's veering,
swerving campaign, his weak team of advisers, his bizarre
behavior during the economic bailout, and his appalling
selection of Sarah Palin confirm that he lacks the temperament
to be president. By contrast, Obama has shown during this
endless campaign that he has a first-class temperament. He also
has a stellar collection of advisers, a natural curiosity, and an
absolutely ruthless political sense. Those will take him far.
President Obama will surely disappoint America—given the
expectations, how could he not?—but I'm confident he'll lead the
country more steadily and more effectively than President
McCain would.
Troy Patterson, "Television" Critic: Obama
Dan Pozmanter, Developer: Obama
The conduct of his campaign, in its rejection of the politics of
50-percent-plus-one, promises a practice of statecraft at least
marginally less cynical than America has seen in recent decades
(and may nearly have come to believe she deserves).
This will be one of the easiest votes I've ever cast. We are faced
with a choice of continuing down a path of eroding civil
liberties, endless war, and economic instability, or turning
around and taking that first step back to a sane world. For me, as
a proud supporter of the Accountability Now PAC, it comes
down to the core issue of respect for our constitutional rights and
the rule of law. The Bush administration has insulted both, and
McCain has been right there at his side. I'm voting for Barack
Obama to restore respect for our country's legal foundation and
our fundamental rights.
Click here to read the rest of Noah's entry.
Meghan O'Rourke, Culture Critic: Obama
Somerset Perry, Intern: Obama
As a young, (almost) college-educated intern at a mainstreammedia publication, who grew up within an hour's drive of San
Francisco, I'm not exactly what you would call a swing voter. I'd
like to think that, with a little more luck, Somerset the Student
would have been just as well-known as Joe the Plumber, but
that's probably wishful thinking. So, yes, I'm voting for Obama.
I'm voting for him to support an energy and transportation policy
Nina Shen Rastogi, Contributor: Obama
After eight years of Bush, I want to know that my country is
being shepherded by a calm, sober, deeply thoughtful person—
one who's committed to repairing our reputation abroad and
promoting rational dialogue at home. And if there was any
question in my mind, the wildly different tones struck by the
Democratic and Republican national conventions absolutely
sealed the deal for me.
selecting Sarah Palin, shows such poor judgment that I can't
imagine Obama doing worse. I used to think McCain was
honest, but his lies about Obama raising taxes, practicing
socialism, and palling around with terrorists have made my
decision easy.
Mark Salter, Software Engineer: Obama
Bruce Reed, "The Has-Been" Columnist: Obama
I'm voting for Obama because, after the last eight years, our
country desperately needs a president who, in Lincoln's words,
will think and act anew—to repair our politics, restore our sense
of common purpose, reform our government, and give our
people the hope and opportunity to get ahead.
Ron Rosenbaum, "The Spectator" Columnist: Obama
Because, as I suggested nearly a year ago in this column, he is
one of the only presidential candidates I've seen who has the
courage to challenge conventional wisdom—he gives me the
feeling he thinks for himself. And because—as I wrote in this
column in April—an Obama victory will be a non-negligible
landmark in the long history of the civil rights movement. Not
the end of racism or redemption from the crime of slavery, but
something to celebrate nonetheless. Because having the right to
be president is not the same as having won it.
Shmuel Rosner, "Foreigners" Columnist: Not Voting
I would vote if I could, but I can't. I'm an Israeli, not an
American. But whom would I vote for? I can't answer that.
Being a foreign observer doesn't only mean that I can't cast a
vote; it also means that my priorities are different. All I see is the
Israeli interest from an Israeli standpoint. I'm not just a one-issue
voter, I'm a one-issue voter with no way of understanding—
really understanding—how I'd feel if I had the opportunity to be
an American voter.
I am voting for Obama; I want a president—not a beer and
barbecue buddy—who can clean up the mess that the current
administration has left this country with. I feel that Obama has
all of the right qualities that I am looking for in a president.
Jack Shafer, Editor at Large: Bob Barr
I've cast a ballot for the Libertarian Party candidate for president
in every election since I cast my first, which would be my writein ballot for John Hospers in 1972. A long line of chowderheads
have headed the Libertarian ticket since Hospers (don't ask about
the veep candidates), but I've continued to punch Libertarian on
my ballot because no other candidate or political party comes
close to reflecting my political views of limited government, free
markets, civil liberties, and noninterventionist foreign policy.
This year the party put up as its candidate a former Republican
House member from Georgia, Bob Barr. As Libertarian
candidates go, he's a chowderhead's chowderhead.
Click here to read the rest of Shafer's entry.
Elinor Shields, Deputy Editor, The Big Money: Obama
But let me add this: You have two very impressive candidates.
I am voting for Barack Obama because I'm a British-American
who wants the world to see a different side to this country. Plus,
I admire him. He brings the poise and openness to lead on the
economy, environment, and diplomacy. John McCain,
meanwhile, makes me worry. His stance on the financial crisis
and his VP pick point to poor judgment and opportunism.
Click here to read the rest of Rosner's entry.
Bill Smee, Executive Producer, Slate V: Obama
William Saletan, National Correspondent: Obama
I will vote for Obama, and I've written a haiku to explain one of
the main reasons why:
The basic purpose of voting is to get rid of leaders who govern
badly. Second, the lesson of Sept. 11 is that you can't predict
which challenges will confront a president, so you'd better pick
somebody with the judgment and temperament to handle
whatever comes. Both points argue for Obama. My gut says he'll
be the best president we've had in a very long time, but my gut
has been wrong before. There's some risk that he'd be pushed
around as he seeks consensus and tries to avoid conflict. But
there's a greater risk that McCain would cause unnecessary
conflict, create new problems, and fail to solve old ones. I worry
about Obama's executive inexperience, but McCain has the same
weakness, and McCain's most important decision so far,
McCain picked Palin.
Already 72.
Might die in office.
Mike Steinberger, "Drink" Columnist: Obama
I am in favor of sanity, decency, and responsibility, so I will be
voting for Obama. Colin Powell, in his very moving
endorsement of Obama, said pretty much everything I feel.
Assuming (praying) that the polls prove to be accurate, I intend
to awaken my 7-year-old son late on election night so that he can
witness the moment an African-American man speaks his first
words to the nation as president-elect. I am even planning to let
James have a sip of the champagne that I'll be using to clear the
lump from my throat.
Dana Stevens, "Movies" Critic: Obama
I wasn't going to include any reason why—because duh—but
then a friend pointed out this line from David Sedaris' latest New
Yorker column: "I think of being on an airplane. The flight
attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and,
eventually, parks it beside my seat. 'Can I interest you in the
chicken?' she asks. 'Or would you prefer the platter of shit with
bits of broken glass in it?' " So, yes, I'm having the chicken.
Seth Stevenson, Contributing Writer: Obama
I'll be proudly voting for Barack Obama. (Or, for all you
Palinphones: And, too, those who would seek to be desiring of
that Obama administration that pro-Americans are wanting so
much out there, also, and honoring our great nation so much,
you betcha.)
Maureen Sullivan, Copy Editor: Obama
It's been a long time since I've been actually excited about a
Democratic candidate—not just voting my principles against
those of the GOP. (Though with this ticket, there's almost as
much of that this time around as well. I'm frankly sickened by
GOP rally participants who yell racial epithets and tell a black
cameraman to "sit down, boy," yet are supposed to represent the
"real America." No wonder world opinion of the United States is
so low.) Finally, after an inhumanly stiff Al Gore and a truly
uninspiring John Kerry, comes Barack Obama: frighteningly
smart, incredibly articulate, insanely cool under pressure. The
first time I saw him interviewed during the primaries, I was
shocked at his authenticity: no canned lines or delivery—this
man spoke like a human being, not an automaton. It was my first
glimmer of hope for a Democratic ticket in a long, long time.
Click here to read the rest of Sullivan's entry.
John Swansburg, Associate Editor: Obama
Unless I'm mistaken, I am Slate's only Obamican. Back when
the primary season began, I was ambivalent about Obama and
Clinton—I thought either would be a formidable generalelection candidate. So I decided to register as a Republican and
vote in New York's GOP primary. It wasn't that there was a
Republican whom I liked more than either Democrat—it's that I
really liked the idea of voting against Rudy Giuliani, who scares
the living daylights out of me. (His sneering speech at the
convention may be the lowlight of my time in the party.) Of
course, by the time the primary rolled around, Rudy wasn't even
in danger of winning his home state, and I'd learned a valuable
lesson about trying to meddle in the other party's affairs.
(Actually, I've sort of enjoyed being a Republican—makes it
really easy to avoid the insufferable Obama organizers prowling
the streets of New York asking people whether they're
Democrats. Nope!) I ended up voting for John McCain in the
primary, but like my comrades Christopher Buckley and Colin
Powell, I'm breaking ranks for the general election.
Ellen Tarlin, Copy Editor: Obama
I cannot think of one reason not to vote for Barack Obama: He's
pro-choice; he's anti-war; he wants to get out of Iraq and finish
the job in Afghanistan; he wants to fix health care; he's pro-gay
rights (though won't go all the way to being pro-gay marriage);
he wants to cut taxes for the real middle class; he's calm, cool,
collected, even-handed, unflappable. He seems like an
exceptional human being, a good politician, and someone who
can begin to repair the damage Bush has done to our
relationships with our allies and to our standing in the world.
He's got class. As for the accusation that he doesn't have enough
experience: No one has enough experience. Nothing prepares
you for the presidency. Nothing can. But Obama has the
temperament and the humility to surround himself with smart
people and let them do their jobs.
Click here to read the rest of Tarlin's entry.
June Thomas, Foreign Editor: Obama
Two words: Supreme Court.
Garry Trudeau, "Doonesbury" Cartoonist: Obama
Julia Turner, Deputy Editor: Obama
I'm voting for Obama. Not because I'm confident he'll be a great
president. He is inexperienced. He faces military and economic
calamities. And—as The Best and the Brightest attests—filling
the White House with whip-smart technocrats won't necessarily
make for good policy. But I'm confident that he'll try to protect
things I care about, like the Constitution, education, and choice.
I also think his marriage to Michelle, which appears to be an
equal partnership when it comes to decision-making and childrearing, demonstrates feminism in practice at least as well as a
Clinton presidency (or, certainly, a Palin vice-presidency)
would.
Jacob Weisberg, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, The Slate
Group: Obama
No surprise here: I'm voting Obama. I've been following his
career since he was in the Illinois Senate and rooting for him to
run for president since the spring of 2006, when I read his first
book and interviewed him for a magazine story. I came away
from that encounter deeply impressed by Obama's
thoughtfulness, his sensitivity to language, and his unusual
degree of self-knowledge. This guy is the antidote to the past
eight years. He's wise where Bush is foolish, calm where Bush is
rash, deep where Bush is shallow. My admiration for him has
grown steadily over the past 22 months. Unlike McCain, Obama
hasn't allowed running from president to distort his beliefs or his
character. His campaign has been true to what he thinks and who
he is as a person.
Chris Wilson, Editorial Assistant: Obama
At one point, my plan was not to vote for either McCain or
Obama, thinking I could regard the election in a more sobering
light when relieved of the burden of choosing a favorite. It was
all a mind game; my voting for Barack Obama was a foregone
conclusion. I'm a liberal person and I usually vote for
Democrats, and while I'm not proud of being a totally
predictable voter in this election, I don't mind admitting it. Any
further justification would be post facto reasoning for a decision
I made by default a long time ago. Plus, I literally wrote the
book on Obamamania.
Tim Wu, Contributing Writer: Obama
Most of all, I like his obvious inner calm. It suggests that his
decisions will come from somewhere other than expediency,
anger, or fear. It's like electing Obi-Wan Kenobi as president.
Emily Yoffe, "Dear Prudence" Columnist: Obama
Please, please, Barack, don't become another Jimmy Carter.
Total:
Barack Obama: 55
John McCain: 1
Bob Barr: 1
Not McCain: 1
Noncitizen, can't vote: 4
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It's not his campaign, disjointed though that's been, that finally
repulses me; it's his rapidly deteriorating, increasingly antiintellectual, no-longer-even-recognizably conservative
Republican Party. His problems are not technical, to do with ads,
fundraising, and tactics, as some have suggested. They are
institutional, to do with his colleagues, his advisers, and his
supporters.
I should say here that I know McCain slightly: He spoke at a
party given for a book I wrote a few years ago, though I think
that was as much because of the subject (Communist prison
camps) as the author. But it's not his personality I admire most.
Far more important is his knowledge of foreign affairs, an
understanding that goes well beyond an ability to guess correctly
the name of the Pakistani president. McCain not only knows the
names; he knows the people—and by this I mean not just foreign
presidents but foreign members of parliament, journalists,
generals. He goes to Germany every year, visits Vietnam often,
can talk intelligently about Belarus and Uzbekistan. I've heard
him do it. Let's just say that's one of the things that distinguished
him, for me, from our current president, who once confessed that
"this foreign-policy stuff is a little frustrating."
The second thing I liked about McCain was the deliberate
distance he always kept from the nuttier wing of his party and,
simultaneously, the loyalty he's shown to a recognizably
conservative budgetary philosophy, something that many
congressional Republicans abandoned long ago. Fiscal
conservatism, balanced budgets, sober spending—all these
principles have been brushed away as so much nonsense for the
last eight years by Republicans more interested in grandstanding
about how much they hate Washington. McCain was one of the
few to keep talking about these principles. He was also one of
shockingly few to understand that there is nothing American, let
alone conservative, about torture and that a battle for civilized
values could not be won by uncivilized means.
Finally, I admired McCain's willingness to tackle politically
risky issues like immigration, the debate about which has long
been drenched in hypocrisy. Those who want to ban it are
illogically denying both the role that immigrants, especially the
millions of illegal immigrants, already play in the American
economy, as well as the improbability of forced deportations;
those who want to allow it without restriction don't acknowledge
the security risks. McCain tried to put together a bipartisan
coalition in an effort to find a rational solution. He failed—
blocked by the ideologues in his party.
But if these traits appealed to me, I'm guessing they would have
appealed to other independents, too. Why, then, has McCain
spent the last four months running away from them? The
appointment of Sarah Palin—inspired by his closest
colleagues—turned out not to be a "maverick" move but, rather,
a concession to those Republicans who think foreign policy can
be conducted using a series of clichés and those in his party who
shout down the federal government while quietly raking in
federal subsidies. Though McCain has one of the best records of
bipartisanship in the Senate, he has let his campaign appeal to
his party's extremes. Though he is a true foreign-policy
intellectual, his supporters cultivate ignorance and fear: Watch
Sean Hannity's Obama & Friends: History of Radicalism if you
don't believe me. Worse, in a fatal effort to appeal to the least
thoughtful, most partisan elements of his base, McCain has
moved away from his previous positions on torture and
immigration. Maybe that's all tactics, and maybe the "real"
McCain will ditch the awful ideologues after Nov. 4 if, by some
miracle, he happens to win. But how can I know that will
happen?
Here's what I do know: I would give anything to rewrite history
and make McCain president in 2000. But in 2008, I don't think I
can vote for him. Barack Obama is indeed the least experienced,
least tested candidate in modern presidential history. But at least
if he wins, I can be sure that the mobs who cry "terrorist" at the
sound of his name will be kept away—far away—from the
White House.
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Isn't it awfully condescending, after all, to assume your
adherents will swallow alarmist claims already shot down (e.g.,
that Obama consorts with terrorists, will "raise your taxes")? Or
that a multimillionaire whose upscale economic plan defies the
laws of mathematics can presume to channel the "heartland"? Or
that a guy who can barely hold his campaign together could
seem a wise and disciplined leader? McCain says he's not Bush,
whose disdain for the intelligence of the American public went
from an insult to an actual destructive force. Maybe, but
McCain's scorn and fear-mongering are still too close for
comfort.
Obama's issues and party are mine. I don't believe he heralds a
"new politics"; everything suggests he's calculating, ingratiating,
and a deft networker. I happen to think these are useful qualities
for leadership on the world stage. When cornered on an abstract
issue (race, abortion), he responds in nuanced and evenhanded
terms. This impulse feels new to political life. Or, at least, longlost. At such moments, there's simply no comparison between
him and McCain, an old soldier cowed by his party leadership,
or Sarah Palin, a local pol who croons talking points in summerstock diction. Obama doesn't seem like someone out to fool me.
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4. Republicans have a consistent record of hideous demagoguery
in presidential campaigns. (Dems are not blameless, but
Republicans are far, far worse.) The story of this election is how
McCain made a Faustian bargain and lost.
5. McCain is no dummy, but Obama is smarter. Although you're
not supposed to say so, I think having a very smart president is,
on balance and allowing for exceptions like Nixon, a good thing.
6. Obama is African-American. I wouldn't vote on race if there
were a good reason not to, but all else being equal, having a
black president will be a good thing for this country.
7. Electing Obama will give us a big PR boost in the world—just
when we desperately need one.
8. Social issues (abortion, gay rights, civil liberties, etc.).
9. Oh yes, Sarah Palin. Give me a break. Not only is she patently
not qualified to be president, but her alleged charm totally
escapes me. She seems like an unpleasant, cynical, scheming,
nasty, vindictive person. McCain is likable and admirable. I feel
sorry for him. Palin will be a pleasure to vote against.
A confession: When I read the details of Obama's agenda, I
disagree with about 80 percent of it. (Capital gains tax break for
small businesses, etc.) I don't care.
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It doesn't take a mathematical genius to see that there is no way
to underwrite the hundreds of billions—even trillions—that
might be required to prop up the financial system and continue
to fund entitlements and cut taxes and fund wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan and balance the budget. Ronald Reagan sold us this
snake oil in the '80s and proceeded to rack up monumental
deficits that dwarfed those for which he chided Jimmy Carter. In
that sense—the sense of lying—it is fitting that McCain
constantly cites Reagan as his hero. McCain cannot be stupid
enough to believe that such enormous sums can be wrung out of
the veto pen or a ban on earmarks. His posturing for the last two
months has been transparently zany. He "suspended" his
campaign, supposedly to work on a bailout bill. He had next to
nothing to do with its drafting, and then when it was loaded up
with all the ridiculous legislative giveaways he claims to
despise, he quietly voted for it—and couldn't even be bothered to
speak from the Senate floor. It's his principles that he's
suspended, and voters can sense it.
And, OK, presidents don't make economic policy by themselves.
(Certainly, the sitting one doesn't.) But gather all of McCain's
economic advisers in a room, and you'll shortly want to install
rubber wallpaper. The man actually boasts of consorting with
Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, who between them could not
utter a significant syllable about this financial meltdown when
they spoke at the Republican Convention. His longtime
economic adviser Phil Gramm is culpable enough for our current
misery that a less forgiving country would jail or effectively
exile him. (Don't take my word for it; ask Carlos Salinas.) I hope
that Gramm's grave will carry the inscription: "We have sort of
become a nation of whiners," his analysis in July of the state of
the U.S. economy.
And so: I can understand voters' apparent belief that Obama will
be much better equipped to handle the economy than McCain.
That says less than I wish it did about Obama's policy and
advisers, but it says everything about a complete inability to take
McCain seriously.
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McCain made a bad decision. He chose not to leave a
Republican Party that was drifting rightward while he drifted
leftward. To win the GOP nomination, McCain had to scramble
back to the right, withdrawing his criticisms of Christian right
bullies and endorsing what he'd once identified, correctly, as
President Bush's tax giveaway to the rich. The policies he
embraced were terrible and the rhetoric he spewed was dishonest
and sometimes offensive, but they were the things he had to say
to hang onto the Republican base. The same goes for his choice
of the looser-lipped and quite obviously unqualified Sarah Palin.
Because fate has a sense of humor, a credit crisis ended the 28year Republican ascendancy just a few weeks after the party
faithful formally welcomed McCain back into the fold. (At least
I think it did; if McCain ends up winning after all, I reserve the
right to formulate a harsher judgment.)
It won't surprise anybody to learn that I will vote for the other
guy. Obama seemed an implausible candidate when he first
announced because he was so short on experience. But after Joe
Biden and Chris Dodd got knocked out of the primary race,
experience was no longer on the menu; neither Hillary Clinton
nor John Edwards had much, either. Meanwhile, Obama's
disciplined and level-headed campaign style and his
commonsensical grasp of domestic and foreign policy proved his
mettle. It doesn't hurt that along the way he gave at least one
speech that my grandchildren will study in school. Obama ain't
the messiah, but I think he'll be a good president and maybe a
great one.
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On issues related to foreign policy, especially matters
concerning the Middle East, it's easier for me to identify with
John McCain. I live in a tough neighborhood, and McCain
seems to be the candidate most comfortable with the idea that
countries in areas like that sometimes need to use force.
However, I also see the advantages of Obama, especially the
chance for America to recover its image. (Just don't expect too
much.) I see how friendly countries like Israel can benefit from a
United States that is more acceptable to the broader world.
I also realize that what we see now is hardly an indication of
what the presidency of either man would be like. That might be
problematic for those people who vote for a specific policy and
get something else, but for an outsider, it's also comforting. Both
Obama and McCain can become strong leaders, and they can do
the right things even in areas where they now promise to do the
wrong things. I'd vote for that.
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Raffi Khatchadourian's profile of Barr in this week's New Yorker
depicts him—accurately, I think—as no more Libertarian than
your standard Newt Gingrich clone. Barr, Khatchadourian
reports, is against the legalization of such illicit drugs as crack
and heroin. Khatchadourian continues:
[Barr] wrote the Defense of Marriage Act,
voted for a constitutional amendment
outlawing flag desecration, and even tried to
legislate against Wiccan soldiers who wanted
to practice their faith while in the service. A
churchgoing Methodist, Barr rarely invoked
religion when discussing policy with his aides,
but he told constituents that "God's hand" was
guiding his votes.
Some libertarian.
There's more bad Barr news. A Cato Institute blog item,
reviewing Barr's House votes from 1995 to 2003, tags him an
enemy of free trade. In 2003, Reason magazine called Barr "one
of the most conservative members of Congress." In his defense,
Barr told Newsweek that was then and this is now. He's grown!
Since being voted out of Congress, he's laundered his hard-right
résumé with a consultancy at the American Civil Liberties
Union. He has stated his regrets for having voting for the Patriot
Act.
Who is the real Bob Barr? When he was an unrepentant hardright Republican, he did have notes of libertarianism to him. But
in his libertarian rebranding, he can't quite mask his old, musky
self. He's a fraud.
This much I know about Barr's opponents: Barack Obama
proved in his acceptance speech at the Denver convention that
he's a classic Democrat, a proponent of big government and
economic intervention—just like George W. Bush, and we know
what sort of misery eight years of those policies have brought. I
love the way Obama sings but I hate the lyrics.
I'd like to say I have an equivalent sense of what John McCain
stands for, but how can I, seeing as he has no clear idea of what
he believes beyond what he shed in his last brain spasm? My
friends in Arizona have always laughed about how easily the
East Coast press fell for his straight-talk bullshit. You'll see,
you'll see, they said. And they were right.
Which brings me back to Barr and the absentee ballot I cast for
him this morning (Oct. 23). He gets my vote not because he'd be
a good president. He wouldn't. He gets my vote not because he
has a chance of becoming a president. He doesn't. And I didn't
vote for him because he represents my views. He doesn't. I voted
for Barr because he happens to stand adjacent to a set of values I
cherish and that I've gotten into the habit of resubscribing to
every four years—peace, prosperity, and liberty.
You got a problem with that?
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It's too bad that it takes the economy being in the toilet to get
swing voters to take a hard look at whether they want to support
the GOP when it unabashedly backs deregulation and the
ensuing rampant greed of Wall Street, which we're now all
paying for through the bailout. (And if there were ever a time I
could agree with the Republican battle cry of "I don't want my
taxes to pay for this," it's when a large company runs itself into
the ground, assumes the government will pay for it, and then
goes for some spa treatments that presumably we'll end up
paying for eventually, too.) But a lot of people are out of jobs,
and that changes the way decisions are made when a crisis hits
that close to home. I'd love to think that Obama will get elected
because he's spent his career thus far working for just causes (his
GOP-mocked community organizing, after all, was helping those
who'd lost their jobs), but if the sour economy gets him in the
door, I'm not sure I care. The last eight years have brought us a
pretty much purposeless war and an Osama Bin Laden still at
large, not to mention the current economic mess. I'm not sure
how we can gamble on any more.
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And I cannot think of one reason to vote for John McCain: He's
pretending to be pro-life, his choice of running mate is a
frightening joke, his health care plan would not provide health
care to those without it and would take it away from those who
get it through work. He doesn't understand economics. He's proderegulation, pro-big business. He is pro-war yet anti-veteran.
He has abandoned any political beliefs he might have sincerely
held to win the Republican nomination. He has run a very dirty
campaign. I don't believe a word he says, I don't trust him, and I
can't imagine our country would be better off with him at the
helm. He's a hothead, he's belligerent, and in the presence of
opponents, he acts like a petulant child. As for the assertion that
Republican administrations are fiscally conservative and
nonintrusive: This is the party line, but it's simply not true.
Nobody has gotten us into more financial trouble than Ronald
Reagan and Presidents Bush I and II. It was Bill Clinton who got
our country into the best economic shape I have seen in my
lifetime. And nobody has so trampled our civil liberties and
eroded our privacy as Bush II. Will McCain, Washington insider
for 26 years, "reform Worshington"? I don't think so.
politics
Political Halloween
McCain's message: Be afraid of Obama. Be very afraid.
By John Dickerson
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 7:03 PM ET
DAYTON, Ohio—Who says John McCain doesn't have a tight
campaign message? At his rally here Monday, the message was
clear and pithy:
show that, over the last month, voters nationally and in key
states like Virginia have come to trust Obama more on the
question of taxes. Making hay of a seven-year-old quote about
the civil rights struggles of a previous generation is not going to
change the dynamic.
In Dayton, McCain also questioned Obama's readiness to face a
foreign crisis, as he did last week, and raised the specter of
Democrats controlling the White House and Congress. "Can you
imagine an Obama, Reid, Pelosi combination?" he said to
scattered boos.
Boo.
In three acts, McCain presented the Obama Horror Show. If
Obama is elected, your taxes will go up, you'll be unsafe from
foreign threats, and, especially if Congress goes Democratic, you
will be forced to endure an era of unchecked liberalism.
Obama aides have long argued that their candidate offers hope
while McCain offers fear. Judging by the balance of messages
both candidates are giving voters before Election Day, it's hard
to disagree.
The minute McCain took the stage at a high-school gymnasium
in Dayton, he unspooled the chain of nightmares Obama would
unleash after the inauguration. McCain heralded "Joe the
Plumber," as he has for the last two weeks, to make the case that
Obama's tax policies are aimed at redistributing wealth. He also
pointed to a 2001 interview in which (so the McCain campaign
says) Obama claimed one of the tragedies of the civil rights era
was that it failed to redistribute wealth. "That is what change
means for Barack the Redistributor," he told a crowd of about
2,000, which didn't fill the gym. "It means taking your money
and giving it to someone else."
Since McCain has been labeling Obama a redistributor, it was
certainly convenient that Obama used a version of that word in a
sentence in an interview seven years ago. But it's hard to see
how the new attack is going to change the bleak political
landscape for McCain.
One reason his attacks are not effective is that Obama's remarks
are simply not very subversive. Reading them in context, and
trying to keep from napping, it's clear that when Obama talks
about redistribution, he's not talking about taxing the rich to give
handouts—as McCain would have us think. Obama's talking
about the Supreme Court's reluctance to force school districts to
spend money to provide equality in schools. Later in the same
interview, when Obama again discusses redistribution, he also
talks about the complexities of school funding after Brown v.
Board of Education.
With so little time left, McCain needs clear and effective
critiques. So far, his tax attacks have been ineffective. Polls
Though the central thrust of McCain's argument is about the
danger of an Obama presidency, the McCain pitch is not all
negative (just as Obama's "closing argument" of hope for the
future uses the McCain-Bush boogeyman). McCain makes an
affirmative case for his policies—promising to cut taxes, reduce
spending, and buy up mortgages to keep people in their homes.
His closing oration is a call to restore America's greatness that is
generally positive. It's even rousing, especially by McCain
standards. When McCain says, "I'm an American, and I choose
to fight," it sparks the crowd. He's just got to hope that the mix
of fight and fright does enough to help him come from behind.
politics
Registering Doubt
If we can nationalize banks, why not our election process?
By Richard L. Hasen
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 4:03 PM ET
Like our financial system, our voter registration system needs a
federal government bailout. Before the election, while the public
and press are still paying attention, we should get both
presidential candidates to commit to a more sensible, secure, and
universal voter registration process.
When it comes to charges of "voter fraud" and "vote
suppression," each election is worse than the last. This year,
John McCain has claimed that some fraudulent voter registration
cards turned in by ACORN employees threatened the "fabric of
democracy." The Obama campaign has sent letters to Attorney
General Michael Mukasey accusing Republicans of deliberately
trying to suppress the vote. And the Ohio Republican Party is
battling the Ohio secretary of state—in litigation that's already
made it to the Supreme Court—over mismatches between voter
registration and motor-vehicle-department databases. Now
House Minority Leader John Boehner wants the Department of
Justice to get involved to stop voter fraud. That went so well last
time, so why not?
These charges and countercharges are the real danger to the
fabric of our democracy. If people are not convinced their votes
will be accurately counted, they are more likely to view election
results as illegitimate and, therefore, the government less worthy
of our respect and willingness to abide by the rule of law.
What can be done about it? Though there are many things that
can be done to improve our election system—from nonpartisan
election administration, to a uniform ballot design for federal
elections, to improvements in our voting machinery—the most
urgent fix is needed for our system of voter registration.
Right now, voter registration takes place primarily on the county
level, and it requires a lot of effort on the part of outside groups
such as ACORN, the political parties, and others. These groups
sometimes work with volunteers, but more often than not they
pay people to collect voter registration forms.
This is where a lot of the registration fraud comes from. Even for
workers not paid by the card, a low-wage worker doing voter
registration may be tempted to falsify information to keep his or
her job, going so far as to register names in the phone book or
cartoon characters. (This is why registration fraud does not lead
to actual election fraud: These false names are not part of any
effort to get thousands of people to the polls claiming to be
someone else to vote for a candidate whose supporters cannot
verify how anyone at the polling place has voted.)
government could assign each person a unique voteridentification number, which would remain the same regardless
of where the voter moves. The unique ID would prevent people
from voting in two jurisdictions, such as snowbirds who might
be tempted to vote in Florida and New York. States would not
have to use the system for their state and local elections, but
most would choose to do so because of the cost savings.
There's something in this for both Democrats and Republicans.
Democrats talk about wanting to expand the franchise, and
there's no better way to do it than the way most mature
democracies do it: by having the government register voters. For
Republicans serious about ballot integrity, this should be a
winner as well. No more ACORN registration drives, and no
more concerns about Democratic secretaries of state not
aggressively matching voters enough to motor vehicle databases.
Finally, universal voter registration is good for the country, not
only because it will make it easier for those who wish to vote to
do so, but because it should end controversy over ballot integrity
that threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our election
process. If President McCain or Obama makes this a priority, we
can have the system ready in time for the president's re-election.
politics
The New York Times recently reported that ACORN turned in
about 400,000 registration cards that were duplicates,
incomplete, or fraudulent. And in California, a Republicanleaning group has been accused of changing Democratic
registrants to a Republican affiliation without their permission.
Why not, when they were paid $7 to $12 for each Republican
registration?
The solution is to take the job of voter registration for federal
elections out of the hands of third parties (and out of the hands
of the counties and states) and give it to the federal government.
The Constitution grants Congress wide authority over
congressional elections. The next president should propose
legislation to have the Census Bureau, when it conducts the 2010
census, also register all eligible voters who wish to be registered
for future federal elections. High-school seniors could be signed
up as well so that they would be registered to vote on their 18th
birthday. When people submit change-of-address cards to the
post office, election officials would also change their registration
information.
This change would eliminate most voter registration fraud.
Government employees would not have an incentive to pad
registration lists with additional people in order to keep their
jobs. The system would also eliminate the need for matches
between state databases, a problem that has proved so
troublesome because of the bad quality of the data. The federal
That's Not Funny
How the press and his critics misunderstand Al Franken.
By Jonathan Chait
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 1:53 PM ET
In theory, Americans love an anti-politician—an outsider who
tells the voters what he actually thinks rather than suffocating his
personality beneath layers of polspeak. Think of Warren Beatty
in Bulworth, Michael Douglas in The American President. In
reality, voters tend to ruthlessly punish any spark of genuine
personality. And the worst personality trait you can have,
politically speaking, is humor—not the corny, banquet-speaker
humor of Ronald Reagan but humor as a cutting tool of social
analysis.
Consider the case of Al Franken. The Saturday Night Live writer
turned Minnesota Senate candidate spent most of the last year
trailing badly as pundits clucked their tongues at his "potty
mouth." Lately, he has pulled even with his opponent, Norm
Coleman, but he's done so only by riding an overwhelming antiRepublican wave and running a relentlessly dull, cookie-cutter
campaign. Even so, his shameful comic past has marked him
indelibly. Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson warned
that Franken's election would "push our culture toward vulgarity
and viciousness." Even some Democrats apparently regard him
as a bad joke. Not long ago, NBC political director Chuck Todd
waxed incredulous at the prospect of Franken winning. "I have
had multiple very high-level Democrats on the Hill sit there with
their fingers crossed," reported Todd. "They are scared of
Franken winning. More importantly, they fear that if Franken
wins, then every liberal Hollywood type is going to say, 'Hey, I
can run for office, too.' " Coleman recently released a campaign
flier calling Franken "completely unfit for public office" because
of his comedy career.
It's understandable that people might, at first blush, think of
Franken as the equivalent of Sen. Carrot Top—or the next Jesse
Ventura, a fellow Minnesotan to whom Franken is incessantly
compared. It doesn't help that Franken is best known for playing
the goofy character Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live. And
so Franken's comedic career has been transformed in the public
mind into the job-training equivalent of dressing up in tights and
smashing a fake chair over somebody's head.
Actually, while Franken has done lots of straight comedy, he
began his career as a political satirist—a very different thing.
Satire is a form of political commentary. It can be mindless, but
so can an op-ed on fiscal policy in the Wall Street Journal. At its
best, satire clarifies a truth that the subject would like to muddy.
Franken's critics are aware of his political satire, but that, too,
has become another count in the indictment—Al Franken, trash
talker. "He lampooned Rush Limbaugh as a 'big fat idiot,' and he
dismissed Ann Coulter as a 'nutcase,' " clucked U.S. News earlier
this year. Critics who take note of Franken's political books treat
them as the left's answer to Coulter or Bill O'Reilly. But this
misses the satirical point. To get the joke of Rush Limbaugh Is a
Big Fat Idiot, you need only to look at the cover, which features
Franken posing in a tweed jacket in front of a wall of musty
bound volumes, clutching a pipe, looking comically pompous.
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced
Look at the Right has the joke in the title itself. Coulter writes
books with titles like Slander: Liberal Lies About the American
Right, whose charge is meant to be taken at face value. Franken's
title mocks the accusation itself with over-the-top redundancy
and subverts its own claim to truth by appropriating the
corrupted slogan "Fair and Balanced."
Franken does resort to invective on occasion, but this hardly
defines his satirical style. (You could just as easily cherry-pick
Jon Stewart's most obscene sentences—he recently said "Fuck
you" to Sarah Palin—to paint him as a foul-mouthed ranter.) His
books are laced with wonky disquisitions on economic policy
that are themselves laced with jokes. He evinces vastly more
knowledge about domestic policy than most members of
Congress or national political reporters I've met.
To be sure, Franken skewers his targets, a habit which has
contributed to his reputation as a raging left-winger. The Wall
Street Journal has reported that Franken's politics "neatly
mirror" those of the "liberal base." There's a misperception at
work here that conflates blunt opposition to the Republican right
with left-wing beliefs. As a confessed Bush hater who's not
enamored with the left, I'm a fellow victim of this confusion.
Franken is actually a moderate who initially favored the Iraq war
and has praised the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.
Indeed, what Franken reveals of himself in Rush Limbaugh Is a
Big Fat Idiot confounds a lot of blue-state-elitist stereotypes.
Franken recounts having said a prayer for George H.W. Bush
upon his election, defending Bob Dole's honor to a European
journalist, and making multiple overseas trips to entertain
American troops. The Franken persona is best summed up by the
instance when, upon hearing National Review Editor Rich
Lowry claim that liberals had sissified politics, Franken
challenged Lowry to a fistfight. When Lowry refused, they met
for an amiable lunch. If, say, Jim Webb did this sort of thing, it
would be seen as rough-hewn, populist authenticity.
Normally, a politician's self-depiction should be considered selfserving fluff unless proven otherwise. But the book predates any
hints of his interest in elective office. What's more, it's so stuffed
with impolitic statements that it's unimaginable that Franken
could have contemplated ever running for office when he wrote
it. He pokes fun at Christianity ("[W]ill someone explain to me
how Jesus can be both the son of God and also God?"), calls Ted
Kennedy "bloated," and casually admits that "I'd make a terrible
politician."
The most surprising thing about Franken's oeuvre is that, as good
a satirist as he is, he's clearly smarter than he is funny. Dave
Barry once famously defined a sense of humor as a
"measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are
trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason." Franken has
an infinite faith in the power of reason. Time and again, he tries
to present his adversaries with detailed rebuttals and gets
nowhere. One book has a small moment of triumph, in which he
badgers House budget committee Chairman John Kasich into
admitting that Republicans were employing a misleading
measure of their plans to cut Medicare. "I took a few victory laps
around the table," he writes. Franken doesn't write, however, that
Kasich and his fellow Republicans continued to brandish the
misleading statistic anyway.
I would guess that Franken is running for the Senate because he
thinks he will have moments like these, when the superior force
of his reason will carry the day. I have never seen or heard of a
successful politician who thinks like this. I can't imagine he'll
find politics anything but a crushing disappointment. But I'm
eager to see him try.
press box
The Liberal Media and How To Stop It
You can't. But these days, how much does it matter?
By Jack Shafer
Wednesday, October 29, 2008, at 6:49 PM ET
Just two nights ago on his show, Fox News Channel's Brit Hume
led panelists Fred Barnes, Morton Kondracke, and Charles
Krauthammer in a discussion of the purported liberal coverage
of the presidential campaign.
A greater collection of like minds may never have been
assembled. Hume recently told the Los Angeles Times that he's
"a journalist first and a conservative second or third." Barnes is
executive editor of the Weekly Standard and author of the 2006
book Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial
Presidency of George W. Bush. Krauthammer is a leading
conservative columnist and thinker. Kondracke's distinguishing
feature is that he has no distinguishing feature—unless being a
chameleon is distinguishing.
And so, without any sense of irony, the conservative quartet
batted around the subject of liberal media bias. Nobody had a
new idea to share, and because there weren't any liberals on tap,
no real critical view of the premise was aired. It was as
predictable as a theological discussion among a foursome of
atheists.
The panel's general gist was that the press has preferred Barack
Obama to John McCain. Hume came dangerously close to
complicating the conversation by citing "widespread agreement"
in the mainstream media of press biased in favor of Obama over
Hillary Clinton, both of whom are liberals. Was Hume implying
that Obama is more liberal than Clinton, hence the press'
favorite? But brevity being the soul of good television, nobody
pursued the point, and the segment motored on to the usual
touchstones of the press corps' deficiencies in reporting out
Obama's connections to Antoin "Tony" Rezko and the Rev.
Jeremiah Wright. For some inexplicable reason, coverage of the
William Ayers connection didn't come up, so those playing the
Fox News Drinking Game at home probably cried in their shot
glasses.
Although I don't think the New York Times or Washington Post
or any of the other prestigious media machines have tilted
toward a candidate this year, the bellyaching conservatives do
have a point. The press, especially the Washington press, is still
overwhelmingly populated by liberals. I should know. I've been
working here as a (nonliberal) journalist for the last 26 years, not
counting a four-year furlough to the liberal burgs of San
Francisco and Seattle.
I can't say I've ever taken tissue samples from Washington
reporters and scanned their DNA for liberal markers, but
whenever I do a tally—formal or otherwise—the numbers come
back liberal. For instance, while editing Washington City Paper
in the early 1990s, I sent a freelancer to the voter registrars'
offices to check the party affiliations of what I considered the
top 30 or so Washington Post editors and reporters. I don't have
the clip handy, but as I recall about 80 percent were registered
Democratic, about 15 percent independent, and about 5 percent
were Republican.
One of the registered Republicans (I'm pretty sure it was Tony
Kornheiser, but I beg forgiveness if I am wrong) explained that
he and his wife wanted all of the campaign literature from both
parties mailed to their home, so each election cycle they flipped
a coin to determine how they registered. That year he registered
as a Republican because he lost the flip.
A similarly lopsided count of media liberals can be found at
Slate, where we report this week that Obama got 55 of the 57
votes cast by staffers and contributors. That's an extraordinary
turnout. I doubt that Obama will garner 96 percent even in his
home precinct of Hyde Park. Editor David Plotz theorizes that
Obama polled so well at the magazine because 1) most of us live
in extremely Democratic cities on the East and West coasts (as if
geography was political destiny!); 2) the staff skews young, and
all polls show younger voters favoring the Democrat; 3) several
of the magazine's contributors are Obama advisers; and 4) "we
are all journalists," and liberals, as our beloved founder Michael
Kinsley wrote in 2000, are naturally attracted to the profession.
Kinsley holds that a journalist's personal political views say
nothing, one way or the other, about what sort of stories he'll file
and that "any liberal bias in reporting is more than
counterbalanced by the conservative tilt of the commentariat."
(Note to thinkers who argue that a Democratic voter isn't the
same thing as a liberal: Stick it in your ear.)
My personal experience confirms Kinsley's hunch that liberals
flock to media jobs. In the 10 years that I hired at Washington
City Paper and SF Weekly, only one reporter or editor job went
to a self-identified conservative. I can't be guilty of any proliberal bias partly because liberals—I'm thinking Timothy
Noah—tend to creep me out. Yet year after year, the best
applicants were almost exclusively liberal.
Even so, the Obamavalanche Slate recorded this year, like the
similar blowouts for Kerry and Gore in 2004 and 2000, require
additional meditation. In theory, Slate is a quasi-liberal
magazine about politics and culture that publishes opinion,
interpretive journalism, essays, straight reporting, and more. But
I've never witnessed any top editor applying a liberal litmus test
to a prospective hire or freelancer, and I've been here since
before the magazine's 1996 launch.
Far from practicing monoculture, the Slate farm has always
planted conservative and libertarian ideas in its Web pages, as
can be gleaned from scanning the archives, where you'll find the
bylines of such writers as James Q. Wilson, Steve Chapman,
Steven E. Landsburg, Brian Doherty, Richard A. Epstein,
Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Caldwell, Michael Young,
William F. Buckley Jr., Eugene Volokh, Herbert Stein, Ben
Stein, Daniel Drezner, Karen Lehrman, David Brooks, Anne
Applebaum, Sam Tanenhaus, Jonah Goldberg, Tucker Carlson,
Mark Steyn, Matt Labash, Alex Kozinski, Jack Goldsmith,
Douglas W. Kmiec, David Frum, Richard A. Posner, R. Emmett
Tyrrell Jr., Ross Douthat, Lucianne Goldberg, Viet Dinh, James
Pinkerton, David Klinghoffer, Dinesh D'Souza, Wladyslaw
Pleszczynski, Norman Podhoretz, Nick Gillespie, Midge Decter,
Abigail Thernstrom, Stephan Thernstrom, Cathy Young, Radley
Balko, Jill Stewart, Charles Paul Freund, and William McGurn.
And I'm not even counting those heretics Kaus and Hitchens.
So if Slate is so keen on conservative and libertarian ideas, why
do so few staffers tilt that way? One explanation could be that
like-hires-like in almost every field, and that editors depend on
their social networks to fill positions. But that's a pretty thin
explanation if their social networks are big enough to assign
pieces to conservatives and libertarians but not hire them.
Another explanation could be that Slate knows it can't be taken
seriously as a magazine of ideas without considering ideas
outside of its quasi-liberal wheelhouse. But that seems pretty
thin, too. This magazine has never been a debate society. Its
mission has been to prowl for the vital, the new, and the urgent.
I can't solve the Slate Obamavalanche conundrum. But that
doesn't mean I'd support an affirmative action program for
conservatives just because they think they're underrepresented.
Screw that. Conservatives put their minds to filling the ranks of
the commentariat, and they did OK there. If they want to fill
more mainstream reporter and editor jobs, let them tug harder on
their bootstraps.
And if the folks at Fox News Channel really think that the
mainstream media is doing such an awful job of reporting the
2008 campaign, they should direct their complaints to their boss,
Rupert Murdoch, who owns the second-biggest newspaper in the
country, the Wall Street Journal. The best press criticism isn't a
column or a moan of disgust into a TV camera. It's writing a
better story.
******
I stole my nifty headline from a book that I recommended last
May: The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It. I sought
guidance for this piece from notorious liberal Timothy Noah,
whose insights proved worthless, thereby proving that there is a
liberal conspiracy to undo me. Thanks, Tim! Send liberal
complaints via e-mail to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail
may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in
a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates
otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the
Washington Post Co.)
Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time
Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of
errors in this specific column, type the word liberal in the
subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to
slate.pressbox@gmail.com.
press box
Countdown to the Obama Rapture
Watch as the press corps battles its performance anxiety!
By Jack Shafer
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 5:38 PM ET
With the election just a week away and Barack Obama pulling
away from John McCain, tiny tendrils of trepidation are starting
to drift over the liberal members of the commentariat and the
political press corps.
If McCain wins, ample boilerplate exists from which to form
their disposable Wednesday, Nov. 5, stories about his victory:
"He took risks and they paid off … courage of his convictions …
left for dead one time too many … the pundits eat crow … how
could the pollsters have gotten it so wrong—again! … Will his
White House harbor Straight Talk or double talk?"
But if Obama wins, these scribes know that they'll be facing the
toughest assignment of their careers. They've all oversubscribed
to the notion that Obama's candidacy is momentous, without
parallel, and earth-shattering, so they can't file garden-variety
pieces about the "winds of change" blowing through
Washington. They're convinced that not only the whole world
will be reading but that historians will be drawing on their
words. Will what I write be worthy of this moment in time?
they're asking themselves. It's a perfect prescription for
performance anxiety.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to say that the press corps is
in the tank for Obama even if they're voting for him in
overwhelming numbers. Obama irritates many of the reporters
who cover him because he's so controlling and inaccessible. So
they're not as much in love with Obama as they're in love with
the idea of Obama, of the "meaning" of his run for the
presidency, of the redemption he offers a sinful nation that
scratched slavery into its liberty-loving Constitution.
The windows of this mind-set are provided by Slate's Jacob
Weisberg, for whom the Obama election is a national
referendum on racism; the New York Times' Nicholas D. Kristof,
for whom an Obama presidency is an opportunity to "rebrand"
our nation and "find a path to restore America's global
influence"; E.J. Dionne, who sees an Obama presidency as
representing a chance to "rekindle the sense of possibility and
transformation" in American life; and a swooning Andrew
Sullivan, who almost a year ago speculated that Obama might be
"that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about."
For Chris Matthews, of course, the Obama candidacy is a "thrill"
going up his leg, one that will arc over his torso and detonate his
head in the event of a victory.
"Erection of the heart" is the sweet phrase Lester Bangs coined
to describe his physiological response to seeing Elvis Presley in
concert for the first time. Thanks to Christopher Beam for the
column idea. Styling by Chris Wilson. Faculty adviser, Emily
Yoffe. Coffee by Bouvé. Lester Bangs quotation provided by
Bill Wyman. Again, the e-mail address for noteworthy skeptical
articles about the Obama ascendancy is
slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name in
"The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or
elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent
disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
The leading Obama cheerleader among the commentariat is
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, whose "erection of the heart" for the
candidate has no match. Alter sees the presidential election as a
world referendum on the United States and "the common sense
and decency of the American people." Obama symbolizes hope
over fear, and his election would produce an "Obama Dividend"
that would "blow the minds of people in the Middle East and
other regions, and help restore American prestige." Obama, Alter
continues, "knows how to think big, elevate the debate and
transport the public to a new place."
Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time
Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of
errors in this specific column, type the word anxiety in the
subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to
slate.pressbox@gmail.com.
Such overwriting leaves Alter little acreage upon which to build
a monument if his candidate wins, but the problem isn't Alter's
alone. Even political reporters who have scrubbed from their
copy any evidence of Obama lust face the same Nov. 5 dilemma
as the commentariat. How do you pack all the Obama touch
points—healing, hope, change, civility, the second coming of
Camelot, post-boomer politician, inspirer of youth, great uniter,
world president, and so on—into one story without sounding
hagiographic? Isn't that what the commemorative issue of
People magazine is for? Then again, how do you write about
Obama's victory without looping in the touch points? Hence the
performance anxiety.
Reporters do their least self-conscious work when they're
startled by a story they hadn't prepared to write. Think of the
astonishing coverage of the 9/11 attack, natural disasters, and the
2000 election-that-would-not-end. But giving a reporter (or a
pundit) too much time to think about a historic event such as VE
Day, the moon landing, the fall of Communism, or the release of
Nelson Mandela is like entering him into a grandiosity
competition to see who can squeeze the most poetry out of his
keyboard. Suddenly, everybody with a notepad and a word
processor thinks he's Norman Mailer.
Every new president gets a honeymoon, of course, but not like
the one we're likely to witness. As the countdown to the Obama
rapture accelerates this week, say a prayer for the press corps
skeptics, naysayers, cynics, pragmatists, faultfinders, and
scoffers who'd rather not dance at Obama's magisterial ball. And
if they write something noteworthy, send it my way.
******
recycled
Vote!
Why your ballot isn't as meaningless as you think.
By Jordan Ellenberg
Friday, October 31, 2008, at 7:09 AM ET
According to the polling site FiveThirtyEight.com, the chance of
your vote deciding the election is one in 10 million, even if you
live in a swing state like Virginia or Colorado. Why bother
voting at all? In 2004, Slate's resident mathematician, Jordan
Ellenberg, crunched the numbers and explained why voting does
make rational sense. The article is reprinted below.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, you were among the 72,000
people who participated in the Guinness-certified world's largest
chicken dance in Canfield, Ohio, in 1996. You probably feel
pretty proud. But according to Slate's Stephen E. Landsburg, you
shouldn't. After all, unless a previous chicken dance for 71,999
were on the books, your participation made no difference; the
record would have fallen whether or not you'd shown up.
Landsburg is arguing against voting, not chicken-dancing: Your
presidential vote, he says, "will never matter unless the election
in your state is within one vote of a dead-even tie." That, of
course, is extremely unlikely. So, the negligible chance of
casting the deciding ballot is outweighed by the small but certain
costs of voting, like the gas you'll use and the time you'll spend.
And yet people vote anyway, by the millions. Political scientists
call this conundrum "the paradox of voting," and you could stay
up half the night (I just did) reading research literature on the
subject. Why do people vote when it's so unlikely to matter?
Maybe because the pleasurable feeling of doing one's duty
offsets the cost of gas. Maybe because people have an interest in
their candidate not just winning but winning by as large a margin
as possible. Maybe because we're motivated to avoid even small
possibilities of regret—the regret that those Al Gore supporters
who sat out Florida in 2000 surely feel, whether economists
think they're being rational or not.
But let's stick to mathematics. Suppose we grant to Landsburg
that voting carries a certain cost and that your vote should be
considered worthwhile only if it decides the election. Everyone
can agree that's unlikely—but how unlikely? Landsburg first
proposes
modeling voters in a state, say Florida, as 6,000,000 coinflippers, each choosing George Bush with some probability p
and John Kerry with probability 1-p. For instance, if p is 1/2, 1-p
is also 1/2; each voter has an equal chance of selecting Bush or
Kerry. As you might expect, the odds of a tied outcome are not
bad—about 1 in 3,100, as Landsburg computes.
But p might not be 1/2, and even a tiny bias in voter preference
can make a tie exceedingly unlikely. For instance, if p = .51, the
chance of a tie drops to 1 in 101046, a probability so small as to be
effectively zero. (Here's Landsburg's computation.) Your vote is
not going to count.
So, are we back to Landsburg's discouraging conclusion that
voting is most often a waste of time? Not quite, because it's
impossible to know in advance what proportion of your fellow
Floridians are planning to vote for Bush. If you knew p was
exactly 1/2, you'd be sure to get out and vote. If you knew Bush
held a 51 percent advantage, you'd be foolish to bother. But you
don't know, and without that knowledge you can't reason as
Landsburg wants you to.
You don't know, but you can guess. A Sept. 29 poll of 704
Florida voters by CNN/USA has Bush leading Kerry 52-43. For
simplicity, let's dump the still-undecideds and third-party
enthusiasts and say that, among 669 randomly selected likely
Florida voters, 366 supported Bush and 303 Kerry, a 55-45
margin in Bush's favor. If forced to make a guess, we might
expect 55 percent of Florida voters to favor Bush. But how
confident should we be that our guess is right? In particular, how
likely is it that the real proportion of Bush votes in the state is
very close to 50 percent?
The inconvenient truth is that the poll alone can't tell you. If, for
instance, a poll in Massachusetts showed a 10-point Bush lead,
we'd still think Bush was behind, though we might rate the race
closer than we did previously. Our best guess about the true state
of things represents a compromise between our prior intuitions
and the poll results.
The mathematical method by which this compromise is
hammered out is called Bayesian inference. The computations
involved, though elementary, are a bit tedious to include here,
but stats fans can find more in the accompanying computations
page. Let's suppose we start out with the (somewhat unrealistic)
belief that the true vote count for Bush in Florida is equally
likely to be any number between zero and 6,000,000. Given the
52-43 poll result, the Bayesian computation puts the chance of a
tie at about 1 in 5 million. If the polls were exactly even, the
chance would go up to 1 in 300,000. Those still aren't fantastic
odds, but both beat the 1-in-120 million chance of winning
Powerball by a mile.* Suddenly voting seems a lot more
justifiable.
Even if your vote helps swing Florida, Florida might not swing
the election. But if the electoral vote is sufficiently close, many
states could be in a position to affect the national outcome. You
know that if 538 fewer Bush votes had been counted in Florida,
Al Gore would be president. But did you know that only
1,231,944 more Bob Dole voters, carefully apportioned among
Nevada, Kentucky, Arizona, Tennessee, New Mexico, Florida,
New Hampshire, Delaware, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, would have
given their man the election, despite Clinton's lead of 8 million
in the popular vote?
It's precisely this sensitivity to small swings in key states that
makes people fume about the Electoral College—that saturates
Tampa with campaign ads and volunteers and leaves Los
Angeles quiet, that makes elections vulnerable to targeted fraud
beforehand and targeted lawsuits afterwards. So, let's take a
moment to cheer this one fine feature of our system: It puts
many voters in many states on notice that their vote might really
count. The state that swings could be your own. So, ignore
Landsburg! Take your place in this big majestic chicken dance
we call democracy! Vote!
Thanks to John Londregan and Howard Rosenthal for helpful
suggestions and pointers to relevant literature.
Correction, Oct. 14, 2004: This article originally stated that the
chance of winning the Powerball lottery is 1 in 80 million. It is
actually close to 1 in 120 million. (Return to the corrected
sentence.)
recycled
Who Gets Obama's Spare Change?
What happens to war chests when the campaign's over.
By Brendan I. Koerner
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 2:37 PM ET
Barack Obama's campaign recently announced record
fundraising totals of $150 million for September and more than
$600 million for the primaries and general election combined.
What happens to all the leftover cash he can't spend? In 2004,
Brendan I. Koerner explained what happens to a candidate's
war chest after the campaign folds. The article is reprinted
below.
After his dismal fourth-place showing in Iowa, Richard
Gephardt has decided to call off his quest for the White House.
What's going to happen to the millions of dollars still in
Gephardt's campaign war chest?
Although he can't hand the entire kitty to another candidate or
blow it on a deluxe Waikiki vacation, the longtime congressman
has plenty of disbursement options. According to Gephardt's last
filing with the Federal Election Commission, he had nearly $6
million in cash on hand. And that was before he received an
additional $3.1 million in federal matching funds earlier this
month. Because he accepted public financing, Gephardt must
now submit his books to an FEC audit and refund any unspent
public funds to the United States Treasury. He'll also have to pay
off some pretty sizable debts—those placards and TV ads in
South Carolina don't come cheap.
But after all creditors have been paid off, it's likely that Gephardt
will still have a few million dollars to spare. He could save the
money for his next campaign for public office, but that route
seems unlikely; Gephardt has announced that he will not seek
another term in Congress, and it's likely that his political career
is now over. He could also disburse the money to the
Democratic National Committee or a Democratic state party, as
Al Gore did last July. Gore, who still has about $6.6 million left
over from his failed presidential bid, donated $450,000 to the
Tennessee Democratic Party, citing a "special relationship" with
the state he once represented in the Senate.
Gephardt could also give the money to any charities he sees fit,
provided he doesn't receive compensation from the recipient
organizations until the donations have been expended. And, of
course, he could refund the donations, although this is a rarity;
the bureaucratic headache of sending out $50 checks to
thousands of individual donors is usually considered more
trouble than it's worth.
The campaign funds cannot be employed for personal use, such
as buying a hot tub or paying for a kid's braces. But there's a
small loophole for ex-candidates who still retain public office, as
Gephardt does. According to FEC regulations, leftover campaign
funds "may be used to defray any ordinary and necessary
expenses incurred in connection with the recipient's duties as a
holder of Federal office, if applicable." Those expenses include
travel costs associated with "bona fide official
responsibilities"—the FEC guidelines specifically mention factfinding missions as copacetic, for example. Gephardt can also
use the excess cash to defray "the costs of winding down" his
congressional office after his term is up at year's end, though he's
only permitted 6 months to use the money to close up shop.
Gephardt is also barred from simply transferring his war chest to
another candidate. His campaign can make donations to other
candidates, but only according to the rules that govern individual
contributions—a maximum of $2,000. If Gephardt wants the
eventual Democratic nominee to have access to his campaign
funds, his best bet is to sign over the pot to the DNC.
Bonus Explainer: The FEC occasionally lets candidates
accused of financial improprieties use campaign funds in their
defense. Last year, for example, the FEC voted to allow James
Treffinger, a one-time candidate for the Senate from New Jersey,
to use leftover campaign dough to combat corruption charges.
The commission, however, was careful to state that the funds
could only be used to defend against charges related to
Treffinger's campaign—specifically, allegations that he extorted
campaign donations from a sewage-repair company that had
been awarded no-bid contracts in Treffinger's home county. He
could not, however, use the campaign funds to fight
accompanying ethics charges related to his dicey reign as a
county executive. In October, Treffinger was sentenced to 13
months in federal prison.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
recycled
What If We Banned Polling?
A Slate thought experiment.
By Daniel Engber
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 2:33 PM ET
With only a week to go before the election, pollsters are busier
than ever. But some are wondering if the polls can be trusted at
all this year or whether their spurious results might affect the
outcome of the race. In a "Politics" thought experiment
published in January, Daniel Engber imagined an election
without polls. The article is reprinted below.
We learned two things from Tuesday's Democratic primary in
New Hampshire: First, the Hillary Clinton campaign is very
much alive; second, the pre-election polls were virtually useless.
According to the numbers, Barack Obama was on pace to win by
a margin of five to 13 percentage points; instead, he lost by
three.
But opinion polling might be much worse than inaccurate. It's
easy to imagine that the polls themselves affect the outcome of
the elections they're supposed to predict. Voters may be inclined
to jump on the bandwagon of a candidate who appears to be
cruising to victory. Or they may stay home if they think their
favorite is either out of the running or coasting to an easy win.
Many believe that ubiquitous horse-race coverage pushes
second-tier candidates out of the picture—and that Joseph Biden,
Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, and Ron Paul are all suffering at
the hands of meddlesome pollsters.
Is it true that we'd be better off without polls? What would
happen if pre-election polls were banned altogether? Let's
conduct a thought experiment to find out.
Our counter-factual may seem prima facie ridiculous, since any
attempt to ban media organizations from presenting opinion
polls would run afoul of the First Amendment. But the idea
doesn't seem so far-fetched when you consider similar policies
that have been implemented in democracies around the world.
According to a survey conducted in 1997, 39 of 78 countries had
some kind of rule against pre-election polling. In the Philippines,
the government briefly banned election surveys in the 15 days
leading up to a national election. India's Election Commission
banned the broadcast of opinion polls for two weeks in 1998.
Starting in 1977, France had a two-week embargo on opinion
poll results, which was later reduced to two days. Even our
neighbors to the north imposed a three-day embargo in the mid1990s. (The rule was later overturned by Canada's Supreme
Court.)
For our purposes, let's assume a ban that applies to releasing poll
results, as opposed to conducting polls. Using the abandoned
Canadian law as a guide, we'll imagine a situation in which it's
illegal to "broadcast, publish, or disseminate the results of an
opinion survey respecting how electors will vote in an election."
We'll also assume that the embargo lasts for the entire election
season, instead of just the 48 or 72 hours leading up to Election
Day.
First of all, the numbers would leak out anyway. We know that
the Canadian embargo was violated by Internet activists who
published survey results via U.S. servers. In our experiment,
we'd expect to see major media outlets holding to the gag rule,
while bloggers provided a steady diet of rumors and reports
about the latest numbers. Savvy campaign strategists might try
to feed false or self-serving information into the blogosphere,
but true political junkies could consult mainstream media
sources based overseas. (In short, only highly motivated voters
with Internet access would keep abreast of the polling data.)
Without polling numbers to drive their narrative, political
journalists would turn to other, less direct measures of candidate
strength. At the outset of campaign season, the front-runners
would be designated according to the size of their war chests,
and the number of endorsements each had racked up. Focus
groups, man-on-the-street interviews, and even voter brain scans
would get more media play. Political futures markets might
become a central element of mainstream campaign coverage,
rather than the fringe oddity they are today.
Reporters might pay more attention to the turnout at campaign
events, totting up average attendance figures and reporting them
as rough guides to candidate popularity. As a result, campaign
operatives would have an incentive to attract the biggest crowds
they possibly could—and to hire extras to fill seats.
Of course, things might be very much the same without preelection polling. Reporters don't always follow the numbers.
Toward the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, for example,
John McCain was repeatedly described as the Republican "frontrunner," despite the fact that 53 of 57 national polls taken during
that period showed him trailing Rudy Giuliani.
It's also possible that the worried-over "bandwagon" effect may
not exist at all. What data we have from political scientists has
been somewhat equivocal on the matter: Voters don't seem to be
drawn inexorably toward the leader in yesterday's poll. If the
bandwagon effect does exist, it might get canceled out by an
equal and opposite inclination—the so-called "underdog" effect.
Pollsters concede that the effect of pre-election surveys is more
clear-cut in the primaries, where voters are more inclined to vote
strategically than they are in the general election. (It's no
accident that the rise of public-opinion polling in the 20th century
coincided with the movement toward primary elections.) By that
token, a world without polling might help lesser-known
candidates stick around. Meanwhile, the results of each
individual primary election would become even more important
than they already are. In our hypothetical scenario, the results in
Iowa would be the first widely reported numbers of the entire
race. The rankings established in Iowa would create a pecking
order lasting all the way until New Hampshire—with no poll
numbers in the meantime that might back up or deny the
existence of any kind of "bounce."
In real life, pre-election polls seem to affect voter turnout in two
ways. An apparent rout might make the outcome of an election
seem like a foregone conclusion, leading voters to stay home.
But polls showing a tight race tend to excite voters, and make
them more likely to participate. We expect these effects to show
up most acutely among young voters with a modest interest in
politics—the kind who are interested enough to see the polls, but
not fanatical about supporting their candidate.
If that's true, polling might have hurt Barack Obama's chances in
New Hampshire. The polls leading up to Tuesday's Democratic
primary suggested a decisive victory for the senator. But the
polls may have depressed turnout among the young voters who
were most likely to support him. (Independent voters might also
have decided to vote for McCain, in what was thought to be the
closer race.) So, in a world without pre-election polling, Obama
would have had an easier time fending off a late surge from his
opponents—but he'd have a harder time prevailing in close
contests in the future.
The possibilities go on and on. But now it's your turn: What do
you think would happen if our election cycle were spared the
endless opinion polls? Would campaign coverage look any
different? Or maybe the candidates themselves would change
their messages, and their approach. …
Send your ideas, considered or far-fetched, to
slate.thought@gmail.com. (You can also post a message in the
Fray.) The results may be used in a future column.
slate fare
Obama Carries the Great State of Slate
Why we're telling you how we're voting.
By David Plotz
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 2:23 PM ET
Today, Slate's staff and contributors reveal how they're voting in
next week's presidential election. This continues a tradition we
began in 2000 and repeated in 2004. It will come as little
surprise to many of our readers—and certainly as no surprise to
Sarah "Media Elite" Palin—that Barack Obama won Slate in a
landslide. In capturing 55 of our 57 votes, with 1 to McCain and
1 to Libertarian Bob Barr, Obama won an even bigger Slate
majority than Al Gore in 2000 (29 of 37 votes) or John Kerry in
2004 (46 of 52 votes). Incidentally, this is a voluntary project:
Our staff and contributors can reveal how they voted, but they
are not required to.
My two predecessors as Slate's editor, Michael Kinsley and
Jacob Weisberg, each wrote articles explaining why we reveal
our votes. I don't have anything to add to their eloquent
arguments, so please read Kinsley's 2000 piece here (mentally
subbing "McCain" for "Bush" and "Obama" for "Gore"), and
Weisberg's 2004 piece here ("McCain" for "Bush" and "Obama"
for "Kerry").
Why did Obama win the swing state of Slate? Like Mike and
Jacob before me, I don't think a candidate's Slate victory reflects
a bias that has corrupted the magazine during the campaign.
There are obvious reasons why Slate would lean heavily toward
Obama: Most of our staff and contributors live in extremely
Democratic cities on the East and West Coast. (It's worth noting
that our lone McCain voter, Deputy Managing Editor Rachael
Larimore, lives in Ohio.) Slate's voters tend to skew young, and
all polls show younger voters favoring the Democrat. Also, a
significant number of former Slate contributors, among them
Austan Goolsbee, Jason Furman, and Phil Carter, are now
advising Obama. It's understandable that our affection for them
and respect for their views may be accruing to Obama. (He's
taking Jason and Austan's advice on the economy? Then he must
be pretty smart.) And, finally, we are journalists, and, to quote
Kinsley:
No doubt it is true that most journalists vote
Democratic, just as most business executives
(including most media owners) vote
Republican, though neither tendency is as
pronounced as their respective critics believe.
This is a natural result of the sort of people
who are attracted to various careers. It is not
the product of any conspiracy. There is no
Liberal Central Committee drafting young
liberals into journalism against their will or
blackballing young conservatives. And there is
nothing that can be done to change this
disparity, unless conservative press critics
would like to see the media institute a political
quota system, favoring conservatives over
better-qualified liberals (affirmative action for
opponents of affirmative action).
But—for the millionth time!—an opinion is not
a bias! The fact that reporters tend to be
liberal says nothing one way or another about
their tendency to be biased. It does suggest
that when political bias does creep in, it is
more likely to tilt liberal than conservative.
But there are so many other pressures and
prejudices built into the news—including
occasional overcompensation for fear of
appearing biased—that raw political bias
plays a fairly small role. …Of course it is not
easy to persuade folks of this, and many will
never believe it. No doubt it is easier just to
keep your political opinions secret and imply
that you don't have any. But that absurdity or
dishonesty itself undermines your credibility.
Or it ought to.
slate fare
Reload Overload
The site was refreshing like crazy on Friday. We're sorry. We fixed it.
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 12:01 PM ET
Thanks to the many readers who wrote in to point out that the
site was automatically reloading like a maniac on Friday,
making it difficult to read articles, post in the Fray, and generally
enjoy any time spent on Slate. (The bug also made it difficult for
us to publish articles, if that's any consolation.) The problem was
introduced as we released some improvements to our site
redesign. We've now got the refresh bug fixed, so please resume
your normal Slate activities. We're sorry about the mix-up, and
we appreciate your patience.
bringing a little-known Alaska governor to the attention of
McCain's top staff:
And don't forget to send any bugs you notice to
slateredesign@slate.com and submit any feedback on the
redesign to the Slate Fare Fray.
One tape in particular struck [campaign
manager Rick] Davis as arresting: an interview
with [Sarah] Palin … on "The Charlie Rose
Show" that was shown in October 2007.
.
slate v
From the Last Debate to the Final Week
in Two Minutes
A daily video from Slate V
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 2:08 PM ET
Here's an excerpt from the interview that, regardless of your
view of Palin, altered the course of the 2008 campaign (notice
how she says she's still undecided in the GOP primary contest
and how she demonstrates her now-legendary ability to turn
every question back toward her favorite issue, energy):
So, keep an eye on Slate V to see the best of Charlie Rose every
day. And for much more, including full-length episodes, check
out www.charlierose.com.
.
slate v
What's at Stake on Election Day
A daily video from Slate V
Wednesday, October 29, 2008, at 10:38 AM ET
slate v
Dear Prudence: Dating Mr. Wrong
A daily video from Slate V
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 11:42 AM ET
slate v
Introducing Charlie Rose on Slate
New daily videos from the PBS host.
By Andy Bowers
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 3:15 PM ET
Slate is pleased to announce a new video partnership with
Charlie Rose, host of the long-running PBS interview program.
Every weekday, Slate and our video magazine, Slate V, will
present excerpts from the most recent Charlie Rose show,
meaning we'll bring you some of the most interesting thinkers,
artists, politicians, scientists, and business people alive today.
sports nut
The Future of Sports Television
You can catch a glimpse of it online with NBC's Sunday Night Football Extra.
By Robert Weintraub
Friday, October 31, 2008, at 7:13 AM ET
To kick things off, we've collected a small sampling of
interviews from the Charlie Rose archives, excerpts that
demonstrate the caliber of guests you'll be seeing in the coming
months. Here you can watch discussions with the late William F.
Buckley, Warren Buffett, Dr. Stephen Hawking, Steve Martin,
Helen Mirren, Salman Rushdie, Jerry Seinfeld, Bruce
Springsteen, Ted Turner, and Neil Young.
In 1991, Sports Illustrated forecast that in the year 2000 (cue
Conan O'Brien), any sports fan would be able to punch up any
camera angle from any game at any time—in short, to be a
couch-bound producer and director. While it's not quite the
Olympian vision SI prophesied, 21st-century fans can now
approximate the inside of a production truck. During the
baseball playoffs, MLB.com debuted "TBS Hot Corner," a live
video stream that shows four angles you won't find on TV:
"backstop cam," pitcher cam," "dugout cam," and "batter cam."
NBC and NFL.com have also started supplementing NBC's
Sunday Night Football with four extra online-only camera
angles that run alongside a stream of NBC's actual telecast.
And here's another example: On Sunday, Robert Draper
published a much-discussed piece in the New York Times
Magazine about the many reinventions of John McCain's
campaign. The article mentions a certain interview as pivotal in
As a sports-television producer, I was particularly interested in
checking out these new streams. After tuning in to NFL.com for
several games, I'm happy to report that the producer (and
director) haven't been consigned to the dustbin—these do-it-
yourself productions still don't come close to replicating the
experience of watching a game on TV. These online streams
aren't really meant to compete with high-definition television,
though, and shouldn't be approached that way. Perhaps in the
future (the year 2020?), the home viewer will have total control
over everything that comes into his living room. But for now,
let's be content to enhance our TV broadcasts with some extra
online goodies—sour cream and bacon bits for the couch potato.
The setup of Sunday Night Football Extra is much simpler than
that of an actual production truck, which offers myriad camera
angles that change constantly as the operator looks around for
relevant shots. NFL.com offers five looks; the actual game
broadcast begins as the largest shot, in the center, with the other
four options visible in the four corners of the screen. This is
smart—there is no guesswork involved in selecting a different
look, and it allows easy switching back and forth before a play
or if you notice something interesting. When you click on a
different camera angle, it takes over the prominent middle
position. Below the video there is a box with running stats and a
live chat that provides a place for Joe the Computer-Savvy
Plumber to e-mail questions to NBC Sports analysts like Tiki
Barber and Cris Collinsworth. This is mostly white noise,
although it's amusing to picture the former players tapping out
answers between bites of their catered dinner at 30 Rock,
grumbling about the extra duty. (NBC assured me that the
players really do answer the questions themselves.)
An inventory of the camera angles: First is the high end-zone
cam, which is essentially the same as the coaches' film—
formation junkies, this one's for you. While you can't see the
receivers flanked wide or the corners who are covering them at
the snap, the rest of the players are visible. If you want to know
what the QB is seeing when he breaks the huddle—is the safety
in the box? is a blitz coming? should I shift the play to the strong
side to take advantage of the defensive personnel?—plan on
spending some time with this angle. I viewed almost the entire
first quarter of the first game I watched online (Steelers at
Browns) from this vantage.
The low-angle sideline cam is akin to standing on the bench
during the game—great for watching sweeps in the direction of
the camera and for judging whether the ball carrier broke the
plane of the end zone. Otherwise, it's like getting a sideline pass
without getting to stand next to all the players. You miss most of
the action, and you don't get any free Gatorade.
The "Star" cam isolates on one player from each team—or, in
the case of the Tampa-Seattle game, five different players. Other
"stars" have included Pittsburgh wide receiver Hines Ward and
safety Troy Polamalu, Jacksonville QB David Gerrard, and
Cleveland wideout Braylon Edwards. For quarterbacks, this
feature is a bit redundant—the camera's always on the guy with
the ball—but it's fantastic for the other positions. Watching
Polamalu fly around the field at full speed on every play is
fantastic, and not just because his jouncing hair is hypnotic. Few
athletes play with Polamalu's reckless abandon, and it's thrilling
to try to forecast collisions by watching him bounce around the
iso cam.
The Star cam works even better for receivers. After watching
Ward and Edwards for three straight hours, I now understand
why so many wide receivers are narcissistic—their job is to run
one wind sprint after another with only the occasional ball
thrown their way to break up the track workout. Even Ward, by
consensus the most team-first, blocking-happy wideout in the
league (although we cognoscenti also know him as a dirty
player), could be seen remonstrating angrily that he was open,
breaking off routes halfheartedly, and, when teammate Nate
Washington scored on a pass play against the Jaguars, cutting
directly to the bench rather than joining his buddy for a little
celebration. Mostly, he just ran, ran, ran.
Ward also looked up at the JumboTron regularly, hoping to
determine what had happened on pass plays not directed at him.
That's another revelation (or perhaps confirmation) provided by
the extra angles—generally speaking, only the quarterback and
the person who gets the ball know what happens on any given
play. When the players all mumble about "having to check the
film" to decipher why a play worked or didn't, it's not just
dissembling—they likely don't have a clue.
The best angle of all is the cable cam, a bird's eye view from a
camera that's suspended on a wire 20 or so feet above the field.
You know the one—it's the low-flying gizmo that's punched up
for a handful of plays on big-budget telecasts like SNF. After
watching it live for a full quarter, it's clear that the networks are
cheating us. I want more cable cam on TV right now!
The cam-on-a-wire provides a thrilling combo of video game
hyperactivity and crunching impact. While the regular liveaction angle captures much of football's blend of speed and
violence, this look enhances it like an electron microscope and
exposes much of the mauling going on in the trenches to boot.
Watching the cable cam as rain splatters the lens is like being on
the field with a dripping face shield. (I can't wait for online
coverage of games played in wintry conditions.) When Browns
running back Jerome Harrison took a screen pass and juked his
way to a long gainer, I almost had to take some oxygen. In the
Bucs-Seahawks contest, Leroy Hill of Seattle knocked out an
opponent and a teammate on the same hit. From just above the
action, the blow was so jolting and violent I felt for a moment
that Teddy Roosevelt should have outlawed the game when he
had the chance. Sacks are also amazing on the cable cam. If you
don't appreciate Ben Roethlisberger's toughness, watch him
absorb a beating on cable cam. I was ready to petition the league
to let the Steelers have an extra bye week—and I'm a Bengals
fan!
With all this supplementary material on the Web, I'm not about
to complain that SI's idyll hasn't arrived just yet. OK, I'll
complain a little. My biggest beef with Sunday Night Football
Extra is that the extra angles don't come with replays. We all
take instant replay for granted until we don't have it. Watching
the games on NFL.com, I realized that without replay it's
impossible to understand the inner workings of a game that is
much too fast for the naked eye. Statistics and most other
graphics, like the First and Ten yellow line, are also missing.
(The score/time line is omnipresent on all the angles.) Fixating
on the other angles without frequently toggling back to the main
broadcast feed (or having the TV on along with the computer) is
like being inside a tornado—you know there's a major event
going on, but things move too quickly to grasp the big picture.
Watching the cable cam for 10 straight minutes is a huge rush,
but it's pure viscera. It won't help you understand strategy, or
why a play worked (or didn't). A great addition would be to have
an analyst dedicated to the other angles. My dream: Ron
Jaworski calling the high-angle formation cam.
bad-luck charm comes climbing through our section. Mitch
"Wild Thing" Williams, now rather tame-looking in a suit and
tie and with hair cut short, is the guy who blew the Phillies' last
chance at a championship, giving up a series-ending home run to
Joe Carter in 1993. Even so, Williams doesn't get the black-cat
treatment tonight—every man and woman in a Chase Utley
jersey (and they're all wearing Chase Utley jerseys) wants to
shake his hand and grab a photo.
Williams' enduring popularity owes something to his stint as a
local radio host, but it also seems like a response to what the
pitcher was able to achieve despite lacking much natural ability.
Never skilled enough to be an elite reliever, he always took the
ball, gripped it tight, and threw it as hard as he could. Fifteen
years ago, his best simply wasn't good enough. This is the story
of the Phillies, a team that's been cursed by something a lot more
mundane than the heavens: not having enough talent.
The NFL says the online enhancement is a one-year experiment,
with its continuation hinging on usage and positive feedback.
(The league is very satisfied with it so far, according to the PR
man I spoke with.) Of course, once there are enough viewers and
potential ad dollars, the endless excess inherent in regular
football broadcasts will migrate online. Sunday Night Football
Extra doesn't so much reveal what we're missing in traditional
TV productions as it emphasizes the best parts of it, minus the
dancing robots, endlessly repeated promos during play, and
cutaways to the players' mothers in the stands.
The 2008 Phillies don't have that problem or any other visible
affliction. After beating the Tampa Bay Rays 10-2 behind Joe
Blanton's pitching and two Ryan Howard home runs, the Phils
need but one more win to take the World Series. Taking comfort
in the skills of Howard and Utley and Jimmy Rollins and Brad
Lidge and Cole Hamels, the fans in Philly seem to have breezed
through the pessimistic stage of postseason fandom and roared
ahead to planning the victory parade. By the middle innings, the
folks behind me start strategizing about how to run on the field
to celebrate the title without getting arrested. "I think I could run
around the field for a while before anyone could catch me," says
one of the fans. "Those guys are pretty out of shape."
Twenty years from now, when computers and TVs are replaced
by an omnivorous media- consumption device, those elements
will still be firmly in place, even though by that point, we'll be
able to project our own holographic images onto the field and,
through advanced Wii-like technology, tear our knee ligaments
just like Tom Brady—the ultimate fantasy football. As much as I
look forward to dodging the next-generation Troy Polamalu, I'm
fully aware that the experience will involve beer ads and
reminders that 60 Minutes is up next, except on the West Coast,
where it can be seen at its regularly scheduled time.
You can't blame Phils fans for feeling self-confident. The team is
6-0 at home in the playoffs, Rollins and Howard are hitting,
Lidge hasn't blown a save all season, and Hamels—the starter in
Monday night's potentially championship-clinching Game 5—
has looked unbeatable in four postseason starts. Or, as former
Phillies first baseman John Kruk, previewing Monday's game on
SportsCenter, put it: "Hamels is a Southern California kid. What
comes out of Southern California? Scripts. The Phillies couldn't
have scripted this any better." (What comes out of John Kruk's
mouth? Poetry.)
sports nut
Dispatch From the World Series
The Phillies win Game 4, and Philadelphians try to get used to being happy
about sports.
By Josh Levin
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 12:42 PM ET
PHILADELPHIA—Forty minutes before the first pitch of Game
4 of the World Series, the closest thing Philadelphia has to a
Meanwhile, the Rays are playing like they have "OPPONENT"
written across their chests—less a rival for a championship than
an obstacle that will necessarily be overcome. Despite the fact
that Tampa Bay's probably the better team—consider the 97-win
regular season and a playoff victory over the defending
champion Red Sox—there's still a sense in the stands that the
visitors from the American League aren't deserving and aren't
even quite real, a feeling that's natural when confronted by a
squad that long decorated itself with fluorescent marine life. I'm
guessing the Rays would also feel more authentic if they had a
few fans: I count only three Tampa supporters all night, and it's
possible that it's just the same person in several different
sweatshirts.
It takes Tampa Bay about five minutes to live down to
expectations. In the first inning, pitcher Andy Sonnanstine and
third baseman Evan Longoria botch a rundown between third
and home, costing the Rays a run. In the third, second baseman
Akinori Iwamura can't coax an easy grounder into his glove,
leading to another run. Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon also
seems to be trying out for the part of bumbling out-of-town rube
(complete with an earflap-bedecked baseball cap that looks
straight out of Mayberry). Going into the bottom of the fourth,
the Rays trail just 2-1 despite Sonnanstine's remarkable inability
to throw the ball in the vicinity of the catcher's glove. Rather
than see this as an auspicious opportunity to go to the Rays'
deep, well-rested bullpen, the usually sensible Maddon sticks
with his starter. "Left Sonnanstine in too long?" I write in my
notebook. A few seconds later, Ryan Howard hits a three-run,
opposite-field homer to put the Phils up four. My response to
myself: "Yeah, they left him in too long." (In defense of Joe
Maddon, both guys the Rays had warming up in the bullpen at
the start of the fourth inning eventually come in, and both
eventually give up home runs—taking out Sonnanstine probably
wouldn't have worked either.)
should be, and the lead story on the local news is about someone
who's fashioned his garden into a topiary Phils extravaganza.
Just one more win, and the Phillies will have symmetrical
championships: '80 and '08. Of course, it'll take just one more
loss for baseball to be done in Philly for the year; if the Rays'
Scott Kazmir can somehow beat Cole Hamels on Monday, they
get to go back home and line up their best two starters—James
Shields and Matt Garza—for Games 6 and 7. The Rays are
certainly no joke, and the Phillies are no sure thing. On this
night, though, they both could've fooled me.
With the Rays looking lovably inept—they also seem to have
lost the ability to hit, by the way—the one thing that's missing
from this World Series is real antagonism. Of course, not every
championship is contested between arch-enemies—I don't recall
there being much of a blood feud between the White Sox and
Astros or even between the Red Sox and Rockies last year. Still,
it's telling that there are almost as many signs in the stands
dedicated to dissing the Mets as there are to mocking Tampa
Bay's cowbells and mohawks. (The lone dementedly Philly-style
banner: "Do it for Steve Irwin, beat the Rays.") The only real
hostility that the perpetually hostile Philadelphia faithful can
muster is chanting "Eva, Eva" whenever Evan Longoria comes
to bat—and who could resist that? (The Phils fans are getting
positive affirmation on this front: Longoria has yet to get a hit in
the World Series.)
CHARLOTTE, N.C.—North Carolina is certainly not a
bellwether state. At the same time, it is almost certainly true that
if Barack Obama wins North Carolina, he will win the
presidency. A blue Carolina—the polls close at 7:30 p.m. ET, so
we should know fairly soon on Tuesday—could precede a blue
Missouri, Colorado, and Nevada. And while an Obama victory
would be historic for the United States, it would be even more
momentous for North Carolina.
At the start of the game, the fans stood and cheered and waved
their complimentary white towels when the public-address
announcer said they were about to show the crowd on television.
After Howard's fourth-inning homer, nobody needs prodding.
The rest of the night is a slow celebration. The rotund Joe
Blanton—the pitcher!—homers on a line drive and takes the
slowest home run trot I've ever seen. As he nears second base, he
looks willing to sacrifice the run in order to get a reprieve from
running the bases. In the eighth inning, Jayson Werth hits
another liner over the left-field wall, and Howard skies one out
of the park to right for his second of the night. Even the Phillie
Phanatic nearly hits for the cycle, coming within a few inches of
clipping both Rays base coaches with his undersized ATV.
With the Phillies on the verge of winning a title, you'd never
think this town has a sad baseball history. Everyone's wearing
burgundy, the buses all say, "Go Phillies!" where the destination
swingers
How Does a Red State Turn Blue?
Tagging along with Obama and McCain canvassers in North Carolina.
By Laurel Wamsley
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 5:36 PM ET
The state has been reliably conservative for decades—Jimmy
Carter was the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry
North Carolina. Any conversation about change in the state's
politics has to reckon with Jesse Helms, former head of the
Senate intolerance committee, who represented the state for 30
years. Among the Democrats who failed to unseat him were Jim
Hunt, the state's legendary governor; and Harvey Gantt,
Charlotte's only black mayor. Helms' "Hands" campaign ad
against Gantt has become the textbook example of race-baiting.
That legacy is part of the reason why no one expected North
Carolina to be in play this year. But with only days remaining in
the campaign, here we are, with the race effectively a dead heat.
What happened? To try to get an idea, I spent some time with
Obama and McCain volunteers working in and around Charlotte.
But part of the answer, of course, is—nothing happened. North
Carolina has long had a strong Democratic Party. All but three
of the state's governors since 1948 have been Democrats. More
than half of the state legislators are Democrats. And a million
years ago in this campaign, there was actually a North Carolina
Democrat running for president.
It has now been 12 years since Helms was re-elected. (He retired
in 2002 and died earlier this year.) Since 1996, North Carolina's
population has jumped by more than 1.5 million people. Many
of those folks are Democrats, primarily from New York and
Florida, plus plenty of rust-belters from Ohio and Pennsylvania.
The state ranks high on immigration, too; North Carolina's
Hispanic population increased by 8 percent from July 2006 to
July 2007.
All of which has contributed to a very tense election season in
North Carolina. More than 30 cars had their tires slashed at an
Obama rally in Fayetteville, the carcass of a baby bear was left
on the campus of Western Carolina University with two Obama
signs around its neck, and Republican Rep. Robin Hayes
remarked that "liberals hate real Americans that work and
accomplish and achieve and believe in God" as he introduced
John McCain at a rally in Concord.
In addition to North Carolina being a sudden swing state in the
presidential race, it's also busy with Senate and gubernatorial
races. In 2002, Elizabeth Dole defeated Bill Clinton's former
chief of staff by a nine-point margin to take Helms' place. But
Dole has become less popular lately, dogged by a ranking as the
93rd most effective senator and a report that in 2006, Dole spent
just 13 days in the state. Dole's now running a few points behind
state Sen. Kay Hagan, and the top of the ticket hasn't been able
to give her much help. More than $17 million has been spent on
ads in the state's Senate race alone. It's safe to say that any North
Carolinian within sight of a TV has seen a few political ads.
So perhaps it's not surprising that Obama's infamous ground
game still meets some resistance in densely Republican parts of
the state. Though many Republican candidates are avoiding the
party label, Republicans in North Carolina will tell you exactly
what they are. In a campaign narrative that has pitted urban
elites vs. rural voters in "real America," Charlotte falls right in
the middle. The city is the second-biggest banking center in the
United States, and nearly every tall building bears the mark of
either Bank of America or Wachovia. Charlotte has been called
"one big suburb," and it does feel that way—the small
downtown is known as Center City, and then there's everything
else, sprawling for miles and miles into South Carolina.
Charlotte's in the middle politically, too. Four years ago,
Mecklenburg County went for Kerry, but just barely: 51.6
percent to Bush's 48 percent. The neighboring counties of
Gaston and Union are often considered Charlotte's outskirts, and
they voted for Bush by 68-32 and 70-30 margins, respectively,
making them some of Bush's strongest counties in the state.
On Saturday, the Obama campaign rallied groups of canvassers
at its main Charlotte office, tucked behind a Best Buy and a
Target. Twice a day on the weekend, bands of volunteers are
dispatched into Democratic parts of the city to get out the vote.
(Early voting has already started, or residents can wait for
Election Day.) But it's the hard sells that interest me, the
Carolinians who still aren't quite sure about "that one."
So I go to an area called Ballantyne, 16 miles south of
Charlotte's center. Ballantyne is a country club community, a
four-star resort, and the most recent example of Charlotte's rapid
growth. It looks like a suburb, but it's still within city limits.
A busload of Obama supporters from the George Washington
University in Washington, D.C., has come to knock on doors.
The weekend before, they were in Arlington, Va.; two weeks
before that, they canvassed Columbus, Ohio. The students look
young, confident, and like they just rode a bus down from
Washington. A young Obama organizer named Punya gives
them their orders.
Each pair is assigned 100 doors; the campaign is hoping to reach
10,000 doors by Election Day. Punya tells them just what is
riding on their knocks: "Mecklenburg County and Union County
are possibly the most important counties in North Carolina.
You're working in the most important part of the state." She
explains that they'll be talking to like-minded voters but not
necessarily motivated ones: "The majority of people you'll be
talking to are Democrats or undeclared. They're sporadic voters;
they don't vote every year. We want them to vote this year."
I go with two of the students, Marc Friend and Alexa Pollock, to
their assigned territory: a condo complex called Copper Ridge.
There are entryways with about 16 buttons on each. So Marc and
Alexa won't be knocking on doors, they'll be ringing buzzers,
hoping folks will let them inside or come out for a chat.
This hope doesn't get them far. At least half the folks don't
answer. Those who do respond are not very interested in talking
to representatives from the North Carolina Democratic Party,
which is how Marc and Alexa describe themselves. This doesn't
seem like the best possible script—for undecideds, party politics
wouldn't seem to be a big selling point. Marc and Alexa
experiment with a number of variations and find more success
once they start telling people that they are with the Kay Hagan
campaign. Using Hagan's name casts the students as locals rather
than the carpetbaggers they are, and they are treated with more
courtesy than before.
Still, it would be an exaggeration to say they're welcome. At one
point, a woman comes to the door and says: "You can't solicit in
here. So stop ringing the buzzers."
After a phone consultation with Punya, who explains that
political campaigns are exempt from no-soliciting policies as
long as they don't post anything, Marc and Alexa move to the
next doorway and ring another buzzer. The door clicks open, and
a grandmother in a blue sweatshirt with a glittered design
emerges. "We're here with the North Carolina Democratic
Party," says Marc. "Y'all are in the wrong group!" she says.
She's friendly but absolutely serious, and she affirms what has
become clear: This is not Obama Land. And it does not want to
be.
Marc explains to me why he's not discouraged. "It'd be nice if
they could get North Carolina for Obama, but it's not crucial like
Ohio or Pennsylvania," he says. "And if Obama wins—I should
say when Obama wins—he'll need a Senate he can work with.
Not necessarily 60, but 50-some. That's why we're working so
hard for Kay here and [Al] Franken in Minnesota."
Later that day, I tag along with two McCain canvassers, who
have better luck: Pam and Mike Wisniewski, a young married
couple who live in North Charlotte. Like so many others in
North Carolina, they grew up elsewhere—Pam in Florida, Mike
in Michigan. Pam wears a Women for McCain T-shirt; Mike has
one that says "McCain-Palin, Country First." We are in a
neighborhood called Ashbrook, full of houses built in the 1950s,
home to a lot of older residents: It is a McCain canvasser's
dream. Mike and Pam skip the houses that already have McCain
or Obama signs in the yard. Their script dictates that they say
they're there on behalf of the McCain-Palin campaign—no
mention of Liddy Dole—and then ask whether they can count on
his or her support. This time around, people do come to the door,
and many of them have either voted for McCain already or plan
to.
Pam hands out fliers she's made about how Obama's tax plan
will affect small businesses and agrees with an older Asian man
that Obama should release his birth certificate. "My grandmother
has her birth certificate from the 1920s," Mike says to me while
the others chat. "So it's not that hard."
One gray-haired lady tells them she's already voted. "May we
ask who you voted for?" Pam says. "You can ask, but I ain't
going to tell you," the woman responds. Then she shows her
hand. "All that brainpower won't get you through all the things
McCain's been through. But I won't tell you who I'm voting for.
You have a good day, and I think y'all are real smart to be doing
this."
At a small apartment complex around the corner, a man engages
them—but with frustration. "You're too late. I already voted," he
says. May we ask who for? "It doesn't matter—there was nobody
good to vote for. I was thinking of putting my own name in." He
shakes his head. "It's a real disappointment."
The next day is a warm Sunday afternoon, and an Obama
volunteer stands outside the door of the main library in
downtown Charlotte handing out voting guides. The library is an
early-voting site, and the line snakes up the stairs from the
basement, where the polls are. One woman tells me she came
here after spending an hour and a half waiting at a local
community college; another couple says poll workers told them
to come here because the line at their site was three hours long.
For everyone here, if there is a last-minute October surprise, it
will come too late. It's getting late for John McCain, too: 1.6
million people have already voted in the state, and 54 percent of
them have been Democrats, compared with 29 percent registered
as Republicans. It's not necessarily damning since the polls
could fill with Republicans on Election Day. But the numbers
suggest an enthusiasm for Obama that McCain can't match.
Across town, it's game day, and Steve Hinson from Pineville
holds up a huge McCain sign outside Bank of America Stadium,
where the Carolina Panthers are about to kick off. He says he's
worried that Obama might win Virginia but that McCain will
eke out a victory in his state: "Most people we talk to are the
silent supporters, not being as vocal or public as Obama
supporters," he says. "Young people are a lot more vocal about
what they believe."
If the vocal youth turn out big this year, that silent majority
could become a minority. The state probably won't be a bright
shade of Carolina blue for a while. But anyone will tell you the
hues of the landscape are changing. Perhaps in 40 years,
Ballantyne will be a Democratic canvasser's paradise.
swingers
The Pennsylvania Party
As the candidates are discovering, the state's Democrats and Republicans can
be hard to tell apart.
By Dennis B. Roddy
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 6:25 PM ET
BEAVER, Pa.—Pennsylvania is more a nation than a state, less
a state than a confederation. Political science is wasted on the
place because, just when the numbers are in and the formulas
calculated, truculent locals do what they want in spite of
themselves.
The old recipe worked this way: Philadelphia and western
Pennsylvania would vote for whatever Democrat was on the
ballot. This vote would be countered by Republican suburbs in
four counties bordering Philly and by a rural, Republican "T"
that comprised the counties in the state's center and stretched
across its northern tier. This gave undecided voters powers
bordering on the occult, and candidates appealed to them with
the caution of a sinner creeping up on John the Baptist.
Pennsylvania's Democrats and Republicans were, at times,
indistinguishable from one another. Democrats took care to
wave the flag, preferably from the barrel of a hunting rifle
pointed at an abortion clinic. Republicans courted labor unions
and rarely engaged in the kind of Jesus jingoism practiced by
their counterparts in other states.
All in all, this is a state whose politics are far middle and
trending inward.
"These are inherently conservative areas that are a little bit, I
suspect, skeptical about Obama," says Dick Thornburgh, the
former governor and attorney general who hails from Pittsburgh.
That skepticism, he cautions, is "not that they're against him so
much, but they really don't know quite where he's going to lead
the country."
That middle-road extremism causes a few weird hostage trades
as the parties overlap. Consider Jason Colangelo, who was in the
crowd at a Sarah Palin rally last week, howling loudly for the
heads of the Democrats—and all but begging me not to tell his
father that he's voting Republican.
This sense of edging gently into—or away from—the unknown
is fundamental in how Pennsylvania moves: like a glacier
heading into a cliff. You will, if you live long enough to witness
it, see a cataclysmic shift. Your grandchildren might see the
next.
"The word Republican was a swear word in my house," he said,
first giving his name as Jason Christopher before his sister Tami
ratted him out.
In 1991, Thornburgh saw Republican counties switch to
Democrat Harris Wofford, the wonky academic who defeated
Thornburgh in a special Senate election to replace middle-road
Republican John Heinz. That loss presaged President George
H.W. Bush's defeat a year later, both in Pennsylvania and
nationally.
Jason is fed up. He sees Barack Obama as an elitist with dubious
flag cred. He was so infuriated at Rep. John Murtha's fierce
criticism of Marines implicated in a massacre at Haditha, Iraq,
that he vowed not to vote for him. I had to point out that Jason
lives in the 4th Congressional District. Murtha represents the 12th.
Obama has a double-digit lead in almost every statewide poll,
and cross-tabs from the polls pretty much show the state's east,
especially the Philadelphia region, heavily favoring Obama. The
center and north-central parts of the state are predictably
McCain. In the west, where striking steelworkers once turned an
old Civil War cannon on Pinkerton guards and angry farmers
staged a rebellion against a tax on whiskey that had to be put
down by the new federal government, a Survey USA poll shows
Obama at 49 percent and John McCain at 46 percent.
That's nowhere near the reality of the registration figures. Gov.
Ed Rendell, a Democrat who is skilled at spotting the landmines
before running onto the battlefield, predicts that the western
counties outside Allegheny—home to Pittsburgh—could easily
tip to the GOP altogether.
This shift in the state's west was mirrored four years ago by a
surprise in the four Republican counties adjacent to Philadelphia.
Once depended upon to offset 6-to-1 vote margins for the
Democrats in Philly, three of the suburban counties went for
John Kerry. Republican women in those counties, economic
conservatives but social liberals, ditched the GOP over abortion.
In many ways, those Republican women are the mirror image of
western Pennsylvania Democrats, who four years ago leaned
Republican so hard that counties such as Cambria and Greene
tipped into the GOP column for the first time since George
McGovern scared the blue out of their collars in 1972. Beaver
County, which by registration is 2-to-1 Democrat, gave Kerry a
scant 51 percent.
Something's up this year, too—and it could mean a final revision
of how Pennsylvania is read.
Philadelphia and its once-Republican suburbs have become
Barack Obama's new address. McCain and Sarah Palin, who
know they need to strip away one of Obama's leaner states to
carry off an electoral majority, have been prowling the fields and
mountains of western Pennsylvania like Elmer Fudd on the first
day of rabbit season.
It is hard to tell if this is going to make any difference. In theory,
peeling the state out of Obama's grasp by luring its western
voters might work. But those voters trended Republican last time
for a singular reason.
Consider Greene County, a bituminous stretch in the
southwestern corner, bordering West Virginia and sounding a lot
like it. Democrats have held sway there for generations because
of the coal unions. And as coal jobs vanished and sons and
daughters migrated to other states for work, what remained were
retirees and older workers for whom pensions and Social
Security obviated any economic issues. What remained were
God, guns, and gays—issues patented in the last 20 years by the
Republican Party.
These issues continue to hold sway throughout post-industrial
Pennsylvania. But with the economy now tanking, it would not
take a great deal to get these Pennsylvanians to revert to
Democratic form. Similarly, those pro-business, pro-choice
women in Bucks, Montgomery, and Delaware counties near
Philadelphia might worry more about Obama's tax plans than
about McCain's promise to appoint pro-life judges to the
Supreme Court.
Add to all this economy vs. values nonsense the fact that
Pennsylvania is barely a state in any sense of cohesion.
Candidates running statewide must buy into multiple media
markets. There is the Scranton-Wilkes Barre region, where New
York TV stations and Yankees caps abound. Monroe County, a
never-win for the Democrats, could be turned on its ear by the
arrival of—brace yourselves—New York Democrats fleeing
stratospheric housing prices.
Then there are Philadelphians, who often view themselves as
their own city-state. (Writer David Bradley, when I called him
for comment on an election 20 years ago, told me, "Do you
know what Philadelphia thinks the state is for? The lottery.")
Erie and the northwest are as likely to tune into Cleveland or
Buffalo as Pittsburgh. Central Pennsylvania breaks, both
ethnically and culturally, into a couple of places, ranging from
the Pennsylvania Dutch country, where Lancaster County voters
have long been Republican, to isolated valley towns such as
Johnstown, which exists as almost its own media market. (It is a
small one.)
What Pennsylvanians have in common is their lack of
commonality. And it is along those dividing lines that each
campaign is hoping to work the plate tectonics of our 21
electoral votes.
Not many people see this dynamic as it is being worked out. One
of the few who does is Rendell, the state's blunt-as-a-knuckle
governor and the former chairman of the Democratic National
Committee. He pushed the Obama camp to send its candidate
back into the state, at one point dispatching a tart memorandum
to the campaign. Rendell knows that some Republicans in the
Philly suburbs could return to the fold and that guys like Jason
Colangelo could decamp from their party in anger at Obama and
the charms of La Palin. Most of all, he is sufficiently
unscientific enough in his politics to believe that campaigning
actually gets a candidate votes, and McCain has been
campaigning here like crazy.
The Republican strategy in Pennsylvania has focused largely on
wooing veterans and social conservatives, trying to raise
questions about Obama's religion and Americanism, and
attempting to reconnect white voters with their residual fears.
They stumbled last week when Ashley Todd, a 20-year-old
McCain volunteer from Texas, told police she had been mugged
at a cash machine in a Pittsburgh neighborhood and that her
black assailant—let's call him Joe the Robber—flew into a rage
when he saw the McCain sticker on her car. Todd said the robber
held her down and scratched a "B" into her right cheek. Police
noticed the "B" was carved backward, suggesting it might have
been done by dyslexic assassins hired by the Democrats or,
perhaps, by Miss Todd using a mirror. She ultimately confessed
to a hoax.
Things did not improve the following week. State party officials
fired Bryan Rudnick, a consultant, who dispatched an e-mail to
75,000 Jewish voters here invoking the risk of another Holocaust
if Obama were elected. "Jewish Americans cannot afford to
make the wrong decision on Tuesday," it read. "Many of our
ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and
made a tragic mistake. Let's not make a similar one this year!"
Following Obama's Pennsylvania operation is like watching
John F. Kennedy run for president using Walter Mondale's staff.
When Palin gave a speech in Pittsburgh bizarrely suggesting that
Obama wanted to tax trust funds set up by families to see to the
needs of their special-needs children once their parents are gone,
it took all day to get an "official" response from the Obama
camp. When it came, it consisted of a boilerplate denial that
wandered back into the canned rhetoric about how Obama only
wants to raise taxes on families taking in $250,000 a year. It was
an answer so lacking in succinctness as to be useless.
The closest I got to something printable was the initial remark
from Obama's statewide spokesman, who said: "This is crazy.
She's just making stuff up." Indeed, she was. And when I quoted
him, he sent off a frantic e-mail demanding that I take down his
comments because they were not the authorized, vanilla-pudding
response.
Such smugness doesn't sit well with Rendell, who operated as a
human hammer on behalf of Hillary Clinton in the primary and
has since dedicated himself to being the same for Obama.
Looking at both the polling numbers in the west and the nonstop
string of McCain-Palin visits, he sent a message to the Obama
staff. "I said, 'Forget the polls. We need you back here. We need
Senator Obama here and we need President Clinton and we need
Hillary here,' " Rendell said.
On Tuesday, Obama was in Pittsburgh. Bill Clinton was
scheduled for a visit to a neighboring county. Rendell is, if
nothing else, a man who knows how to read and win his state. Or
even his states.
swingers
Sweet on Obama
He's running away with Ohio's famous cookie poll, but the actual polls aren't
so bleak for McCain.
By Rachael Larimore
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 5:58 PM ET
John McCain is in big trouble in Ohio. It's not just that the polltracking sites show Barack Obama ahead, with leads of five to
six points, after averaging the various polls. In a less scientific
but historically accurate indicator—which has correctly
predicted the winner of Ohio's electoral votes the past six
elections—McCain is also getting thumped in the Busken
presidential cookie poll. Busken is a family-run bakery in
Cincinnati, and every election since 1984, it has sold iced
cookies bearing images of the presidential candidates' faces. As
of today, Obama is outselling McCain at Busken's 19 stores by a
cookie margin of more than 2-to-1.
But the margin isn't what strikes Brian Busken, the state's
foremost analyst of politics and baked goods (and the company's
vice president of marketing). Busken says he's never seen
turnout—er, sales—like this. "We started selling them earlier
this election because the election has been such a hot topic, and
this is by far the most cookies we've sold in any election year."
So far the bakery has sold almost 12,000 presidential cookies.
Good news for Busken's bottom line is bad news for the McCain
campaign. No Republican has ever won the presidency without
taking Ohio. Further, the Buckeye State isn't just a swing state.
It's a bellwether. And for good reason: Ohio is a microcosm of
the nation. According to the Census Bureau, Ohioans graduate
from high school, go to college, have children, shop, and buy
homes in numbers almost mirroring national averages. Our
median income is $43,371; the national median is $44,334. Our
population breakdown is slightly whiter than the United States as
a whole, but we have just as many women-owned and blackowned business as elsewhere. Even our commute is almost
identical to the national average. (And we're probably all
listening to the same bad music or talk radio for those 23
minutes in the car.) The state is utterly Midwestern, but it
borders—and is influenced by—the Northeast (New York and
Pennsylvania) and the South (West Virginia and Kentucky).
And the Obama campaign is competing in almost every corner
of it, says David Wilhelm, Bill Clinton's campaign manager in
1992 and former chairman of the Democratic National
Committee. An Ohio native, he's now informally advising the
Obama campaign. "It's a fair criticism" that the Kerry campaign
devoted too many resources to "the three Cs," says Wilhelm,
referring to Hamilton County, Franklin County, and Cuyahoga
County, home to Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland,
respectively. He notes that the three counties account for less
than 30 percent of the general election vote while the next nine
largest counties, home to medium-sized cities like Toledo,
Youngstown, Canton, and Dayton, make up another 30 percent
of the population. The rest is small towns and rural residents.
All that said, Kerry lost to Bush by only about 120,000 votes.
That sounds like a lot, but as the Obama campaign likes to point
out, that's only 10 votes per precinct.
Obama, with local volunteers on the ground in every county, has
good reason to be confident. Campaigning across the state and
relying on local volunteers worked for Bush in 2004, and
trekking into places where Democrats hadn't bothered before
was a key to victory for Democrats in the 2006 election.
Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland might have won anyhow—he
was running against Ken Blackwell, the secretary of state in the
unpopular Bob Taft administration. But fellow Democrat
Sherrod Brown unseating Mike DeWine in the Senate was more
surprising.
The benefits to the Democrats of Strickland's and Brown's
victories are twofold. First, they laid the groundwork for
Obama's strategy. Second, they've re-energized Ohio's
Democratic Party and helped provide an infrastructure for the
Obama campaign to work with. Strickland was a Hillary Clinton
supporter during the primaries but quickly threw his weight
behind Obama once he was declared the nominee. And both
politicians have stumped tirelessly for Obama.
"The one big difference between now and four years ago," says
Wilhelm, is "the election of Ted Strickland, Sherrod Brown, the
emergence of a strong party, a governor who cares about that
party, a senator who cares about that party. One thing that has
been absent this year is the turf wars, the infighting that was part
of the deal in Ohio in the past."
But it's not just infrastructure and strategy. Obama is popular
because Ohioans, like most Americans, trust him more on the
economy. Ohio has withstood a net loss of more than 200,000
jobs since 2000, with more than 236,000 manufacturing jobs
disappearing. During the primaries, Obama slammed NAFTA in
his Ohio appearances, blaming the trade agreement for killing
50,000 jobs.
And then, aside from matters of policy or strategy, there's the
enthusiasm factor. Democrats are genuinely excited about
Barack Obama. The Obama voters I talked to cited the need for
"change" and how they were taken with his ideas. "I feel
strongly about this election," says Eric Sidle, a second-year law
student at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland. "Barack Obama
is a liberal who doesn't run away from his liberal ideals."
So, to review: Voters are excited about Obama. They trust him
more to fix the economy. And he has a better organization and
deeper pockets than John Kerry did against George Bush in
2004. What, if anything, does John McCain have going for him?
In a word: cookies. In past presidential cookie polls, Busken
made cookies of only the presidential candidates. This year, by
popular demand, it is also selling vice-presidential cookies.
Busken didn't have specific poll (I mean sales) numbers for me.
But based on what I've seen in my encounters with voters, as
well as my visits to the bakery, I'll make a prediction: At least a
few reluctant Republicans who aren't excited about John McCain
will vote for him because they are enthralled with Sarah Palin.
McCain's decision to introduce Palin as his running mate at
Wright State University's Nutter Center in Dayton was
coincidental (the rally was announced on Aug. 18, by all reports
before he decided on Palin) but fortuitous. Ohio gave Hillary
Clinton one of her last big primary victories. If one of McCain's
goals was to pry away some of those disgruntled Hillary voters,
and to do so with someone running as a "heartlander," he
couldn't have picked a better location.
"The day she and John McCain appeared at the Nutter Center,
there was an instant surge in the number of volunteers," says
former Sen. Mike DeWine, chairman of McCain's Ohio
campaign. In Summit County alone, he says, home to Akron,
112 people called to volunteer that same afternoon. (In the
previous week, it had received a total of four calls.)
It's hard to say whether a significant number of Hillary voters
have defected to McCain. But the ones who have done so are
heartfelt and outspoken. I attended a Palin rally in early October
in Wilmington, and one of the warm-up speakers was "Cynthia
from Columbus," who said McCain appealed to her because of
his bipartisanship, his experience, and his judgment. And
standing in front of me were Lynn and Andrea King, a mother
and daughter who supported Clinton during the primaries but
now plan to vote for McCain.
"We were very angry that Obama didn't pick her as vice
president," Andrea said. "We were angry to begin with that she
didn't win the primary." Lynn said her support for the
Republican Party may outlast this campaign. "I have a real bad
taste in my mouth for Democrats right now, for the way they
treated Hillary Clinton," she said. "And then after she was a dead
horse, they said, 'Oh, she'd have made a great president.' She was
treated poorly by her own people."
For their part, the Democrats I talked to are not too worried
about disgruntled Clinton supporters tipping the state for
McCain. And there are surely many voters like Niti Patel of
Cincinnati, who said that, while Hillary never appealed to her,
the selection of Palin drove her into the Obama camp. "I was
wavering between Obama and McCain until he picked her. She's
just. …" She trailed off, unable to find the right words.
There's no denying, though, that Palin has fired up a part of the
Republican base that was wavering in its support of McCain.
And it's fired up the women in the party. There were
significantly more women than men in the crowd at that rally in
Wilmington. And a good many were decked out or accessorized
in pink. Pink T-shirts with the GOP elephant and "It's a girl."
Black T-shirts with "Read my lipstick" in pink lettering. There
was even a woman whose resemblance to Palin inspired her to
dress up like the governor, complete with the black power suit,
half-upswept hairdo, and oversized flag pin.
More significant, perhaps, was the enthusiasm of the women
who spoke before Palin. They got the crowd cheering louder.
Before the rally, I met Lois Lomley and Shirley Schulz in the
long line snaking into the conference center. Both were wearing
"Read my lipstick" T-shirts. Before McCain chose Palin, "my
vote was more based on the issues," Lomley says. "But she's a
quick study and a breath of fresh air. She's accomplished so
much."
For all the controversy about Palin's invocation of the
"heartland" theme and her small-town and "real America"
rhetoric, it's not turning off anyone who is inclined to support
her. Even when she steps off the campaign bus to make a quick
stop at Wal-Mart to buy diapers for Trig, as she did in Gallipolis
a few weeks ago, she creates a sensation.
DeWine was with her that day. "When you put 12,000 people in
an open field in Belmont County, which is historically a
Democrat county going back 100 years, that's a lot of people,"
he says. "She's energizing a large number of volunteers. The
reason is that she's real. … She's authentic. That's really the
attraction."
Of course, hers is not the only name on the ticket. The one
thread of a silver lining in the latest Quinnipiac poll of Ohio,
which shows Obama with a 14-point lead, is that voters trust
McCain more on foreign policy. That's why Marshall Lilly, a
moderate independent who's a nonproliferation officer in the
office of Iranian affairs at the State Department, is supporting
McCain. (He'll vote absentee in Ohio, as he recently moved to
Washington and is very careful to clarify that his opinions are
his own and that he's not speaking on behalf of the State
Department.) "I think we saw the consequences of having a very
inexperienced president and a very experienced, strong, and
forceful vice president with Bush and Cheney," he says. "That's
not something I would like to see repeated."
It may not be the most ringing endorsement of Republican
stewardship. Then again, the McCain campaign will take its
support where it can get it—and it's at pains to show that it's not
giving up. The Ohio Newspaper Poll shows Obama leading the
state by three points but has McCain leading by significant
margins in southern and central Ohio, and he and Palin are
fighting particularly hard in those areas. McCain and/or Palin
has made more than two dozen stops in the state since August.
All of which is encouraging to state campaign chairman Mike
DeWine. Either that or he's just keeping up a brave face. "We're
going to carry Ohio," he says, in one of the most unsurprising
statements of the campaign.
sidebar
Return to article
As with every election, the Busken presidential cookie pool has
its rules, caveats, and provisos. The company takes phone orders
and will ship the cookies anywhere in the United States, but only
cookies purchased in its Cincinnati-area stores count toward the
election total. And big purchases—like the 200 cookies that Rob
Portman, former U.S. trade representative and director of the
OMB in the Bush administration, sent to the McCain
campaign—don't count either. "We don't allow them to stuff the
ballot boxes," Busken says.
swingers
Are You a Swing Voter?
A Slate interactive calculator.
By Chris Wilson
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 3:40 PM ET
postgraduate degree, you lose serious points on the swing scale.
(Such voters tend to favor Obama by a wide margin.) Late in the
game, it also matters whether there are a lot of people like you in
your state, a figure represented by the blue meter at the top,
which is set to a default of 33 percent—roughly the average
value for the many different combinations of characteristics. The
campaigns need to be as efficient as possible with only a few
days left, and they don't have time to go after small pockets of
swing voters that represent a fractional number of people in a
given state. You gain points on this calculator if there are a lot of
people who share your characteristics in your state, as displayed
by the first meter.
Needless to say, this calculator is only an approximation of
complex voting behavior, which can only partially be predicted
by a person's age, education, race, and so forth. The application's
behavior is based entirely on polls, with the needle moving left
or right based on how closely each state and demographic is
divided between Obama and McCain. With a week to go before
the election, the needle had better be pretty far to the right if you
hope to get any attention from the candidates.
Sources: Gallup, Pollster, RealClearPolitics, the Census Bureau,
the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
Design by Natalie Matthews. Programming by Chris Wilson.
With the election just a week away, both campaigns are making
their final arguments to voters. The details differ, but the basic
message is the same: This election is all about you. Far be it
from us to shatter anyone's illusions.
technology
In reality, this election is not about just any old average voter
anymore—if it ever was in the first place. As the clock ticks
down, both the Obama and McCain campaigns are making a
final push to win over a very small slice of remaining swing
voters.
A Radical Business Plan for Facebook
Which raises the question: Are you a swing voter? Being
undecided is not enough, in itself, for membership. In fact, very
few Americans, at this late hour, still qualify for the club. Think
you have what it takes? Slate's handy Swing Voter Calculator
can help you figure out whether you make the cut.
A couple of weeks ago, TechCrunch, a blog that hit it big by
chronicling the rising fortunes of Web startups, launched a
decidedly downbeat new feature: a layoff tracker. Silicon Valley
insiders have long wondered how deeply an economic downturn
might hurt tech firms; after all, companies here in the Bay Area
weathered the worst of the last recession, and since then, they've
all adopted leaner, less profligate business practices. (E.g., there
are no more Super Bowl ads featuring sock puppets.) But hard
times are here again. Venture capital firms are telling their
clients to batten down the hatches because free money is gone.
Share prices for the biggest tech companies have plummeted
over the past year. Per TechCrunch, dozens of companies have
announced plans to let go of more than 24,000 workers, and no
one doubts more cuts are coming soon. Even Google's fabled
free-food privileges are being cut back.
As Slate's John Dickerson wrote last month, the state you live in
is by far the most important factor in whether the campaigns will
give you any love. Your personal characteristics could make you
the swingiest of swingers, based on opinion polls of people like
you—but if you live in Alabama, you're simply not worth the
campaigns' time at this late hour. That's the reality of the
Electoral College system, and for that reason the calculator
weighs your home state more heavily than anything else.
At the same time, not all swing voters are created equal. Florida
may be close in the polls, but if you're a black woman with a
Charge people.
By Farhad Manjoo
Friday, October 31, 2008, at 7:11 AM ET
The worst-hit companies are the smallest—the startups that are
the star players in the Valley's recurring tragedy of flameout and
rebirth. With the market down and the financial sector in
distress, startups that launched with only the haziest plans for
making money now have nowhere to go. Young entrepreneurs
flock to Silicon Valley to win billion-dollar IPOs or to sell out to
Google or Microsoft for huge sums, but neither option is feasible
anymore. Now startups have to think of other ways to make
money. The bad news is that the Web economy is dominated by
advertising dollars, and advertising often suffers during a
recession. So what to do? In the absence of ads, an IPO market,
venture capital funding, and guaranteed acquisition, how can
startups make any money?
Allow me to propose something crazy. Tech companies should
start charging people to use their services. No, seriously. Let's
take the biggest example of a Web site that has no clear path to
profitability: Facebook. The social network attracts more than
100 million "active users" around the world, but as of now—as
even its founder Mark Zuckerberg admits—it's still looking for a
"business model" (that is, a way to make tons more money than
it spends).
But let me say that again: 100 million people use Facebook
regularly. Judging from some of the folks in my social network,
a sizable minority of Facebook users have hundreds of "friends"
and check in to the site multiple times a day—call them
superactive users. Let's imagine that Facebook became a tiered
service. A free plan would limit you to 200 friends, one status
update per day, or some other non-Draconian combination of
restrictions. But for $5 a month, the limits would be lifted.
Certainly, many users would balk; tens of thousands would join
Facebook groups to protest the new pay model. Let's assume that
95 percent of users will refuse to pay a dime. That still leaves 5
percent, or 5 million people, to pay $60 a year. That's $300
million in the bank.
I confess that I didn't come up with the idea for this radical
business model on my own. I stole it from David Heinemeier
Hansson, a developer at the innovative Web software company
37signals, a firm that has long proselytized the advantages of
asking people to pay for stuff. The firm makes a tidy sum by
charging small businesses—companies in what it calls the
Fortune 5 Million—$50 or $100 a month to use its suite of
excellent project-management and collaboration apps.
"We've found out that having a price is really cool for making
profits," Hansson pointed out last spring in an entertaining
presentation called "The Secret to Making Money Online." "You
have customers, they pay you money for the product or service,
and you get profits! It's almost too simple to work." Of course,
37signals didn't come up with this idea on its own, either: "I've
heard that over time—hundreds of years actually—this has been
how most businesses have made their money. But somehow that
notion got lost in the Web world."
But wait a minute, you might be thinking. That can't really
work—perhaps Facebook can make a few hundred million
dollars a year by charging people to use its site, but Facebook's
investors have valued the company at $15 billion. Facebook
harbors Google-like aspirations of changing every facet of
society—by mapping our social relationships, it aims to alter
how we make friends, how we do business, how we understand
the world around us. That sounds like a very grand plan, a plan
that deserves to make billions—not just a few hundred million.
But does it? What exactly is so bad about making a few hundred
million a year? Is that anything to scoff at? A strange delusion
overtakes the tech industry in good times. When entrepreneurs
see a few startups selling for billions—in 2006, Google snapped
up money-losing YouTube for $1.6 billion—they believe that
they, too, can realize billion-dollar dreams, and in the process
they overlook million-dollar opportunities. "People tend not to
look closely at the odds," Hansson told me. "There will always
be people winning the lottery, but that doesn't mean a good
financial strategy is to go out and buy lots of lottery tickets."
Instead of taking a heap of venture capital money—lottery
tickets—in the hope of one day getting a huge payout, Hansson
says that Web entrepreneurs would be better off starting their
businesses in the way most offline entrepreneurs do: Use a small
amount of seed capital to make a good product that appeals to a
client base that is willing to pay you for it. Then, over time, use
the money you make from your customers to improve the
product or to create more products—allowing you to attract
more paying customers, which then lets you invest more into the
business, and so on. It's a cycle that has proved quite successful
over the millenniums that humans have engaged in economic
activity.
Hansson calls this the neighborhood Italian restaurant model of
Web commerce: It's a lot easier to start a nice neighborhood
restaurant than it is to start the best Italian restaurant in the world
(the Google of restaurants). But just like their bigger brothers,
neighborhood Italian restaurants make money. Sure, they don't
make as much as the best restaurants in the world, but they do
well enough—and it's not nearly as much of a headache to run a
neighborhood restaurant as it is to run a place where investors,
critics, and the world's press are breathing down your neck.
Indeed, launching a small business online is much easier than
starting one offline. Startup costs have plummeted over the last
few years; using application-hosting services from Google or
Amazon, one or two smart developers can cobble together a
Web app with just a few thousand dollars. And the Web offers
numerous ways to charge for your wares. Like 37signals, you
can levy a subscription fee. But Hansson points to other firms
that have seen success with different strategies. Freshview, a
software company based in Australia, runs a service called
Campaign Monitor that manages e-mail newsletters. There's no
subscription fee; you just pay per use—a flat fee of $5 plus $.01
for every recipient. (E.g., sending a newsletter to 4,500
subscribers would cost you $50.) The Web also lets businesses
offer tiered pricing. FaxIt Nice, a clever startup that lets you
send faxes from your computer, charges $4.99 to send a single
fax or $.18 per page if you buy in bulk.
The beauty of such small Web businesses is that they are wellpositioned to survive downturns. Software from 37signals
replaces collaboration tools that cost thousands of dollars; as IT
departments around the country shrink, Hansson predicts that his
software will increase its market share. Contrast that to the fate
of Web firms that rely on advertising to make money: When the
economy turns sour, large clients will stop buying ads, and
suddenly the Web firms are sunk.
Hansson told me that many aspiring Web entrepreneurs thanked
him for the presentation he gave last spring. "Many felt that
being in San Francisco, they were being pushed to start the next
billion-dollar social-viral-whatever thing, and if they were not
doing that—if they were just trying to think about a business that
makes money—they got the feeling that they were doing it
wrong," he says.
Since then, however, Hansson has seen some evidence that
rationality is coming back to the startup world. Consider the
nascent microblogging sector. The much-ballyhooed startup
Twitter now has more than a million users, but it still has no way
to earn a single penny from them. But in September, a new
microblogging service hit the Web. Yammer is pretty much
identical to Twitter except in one major way—it charges
businesses a fee to manage employees' Yammering. It's unclear
whether this is the right model, but at least it's a model—
something Twitter might have thought of, Hansson notes, if it
hadn't been given a free ride by investors. Incidentally, Twitter
seems to have heeded the message; the company says it'll reveal
its business model next year. Hopefully that won't be too late.
technology
Texts You Can Believe In
Forget robo-calls—Obama's text messages are this campaign's secret weapon.
By Farhad Manjoo
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 4:37 PM ET
Over the last couple of months, John McCain has launched at
least a dozen automated phone campaigns that question Barack
Obama's alleged ties to terrorists, among other charges. McCain,
who was famously targeted by ugly robo-calls in the 2000
presidential primary, defends his effort as "totally accurate."
Several Republicans have criticized the calls. Even Sarah Palin
says she doesn't much like them. The Obama campaign has
scolded McCain to stop the phone campaign; Obama has even
launched his own robo-calls to denounce McCain's robo-calls.
With all this Sturm und Drang, you might think that automated
phone calls will make a difference in the presidential race. They
won't. Robo-calls are the pyrotechnics of politics: They create a
big disturbance, but they don't have a prolonged effect.
Numerous studies of robo-call campaigns show that they're
ineffective both as tools of mobilization and persuasion—they
don't convince voters to go to the polls (or to stay away), and
they don't change people's minds about which way to vote. So
why do campaigns run robo-calls? Because they're cheap and
easy. Telemarketing firms charge politicians between 2 and 5
cents per completed robo-call; that's as low as $20,000 to reach 1
million voters right in their homes.
Compared with TV advertising, door-to-door canvassing, and
mega-rallies, automated phone calls are seductive because they
harness modern telecommunications technology in the service of
political persuasion. That being said, it's Obama's campaign, not
McCain's, that has hit upon the cheapest effective way of
contacting voters via the phone: text messaging. During the last
two years, Obama has collected hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, of cell phone numbers from loyal supporters and new
registrants. Now his campaign is sending out text messages to
people across the country—the texts remind people to register to
vote, to go to the polls, and to organize others on behalf of the
campaign.
On the surface, these texts don't seem that different from robocalls—they're both automated messages and both easy to ignore.
But for reasons that aren't completely understood, text
messaging is different: We pay attention to short messages that
pop up on our phones.
These conclusions arise out of work by Donald Green and Alan
Gerber, two political scientists at Yale whose book, Get Out the
Vote: How To Increase Voter Turnout, is considered the bible of
voter mobilization efforts. Green and Gerber are the product of a
wave of empiricism that has washed over political science
during the past decade. Rather than merely theorizing about how
campaigns might get people to vote, Green, Gerber, and their
colleagues favor randomized field experiments to test how
different techniques work during real elections. Their method
has much in common with double-blind pharmaceutical studies:
With the cooperation of political campaigns (often at the state
and local level), researchers randomly divide voters into two
categories, a treatment group and a control group. They subject
the treatment group to a given tactic—robo-calls, e-mail, direct
mail, door-to-door canvassing, etc. Then they use statistical
analysis to determine whether voters in the treatment group
behaved differently from voters in the control group.
Political scientists have run dozens of such studies during the
past few years, and the work has led to what you might call the
central tenet of voter mobilization: Personal appeals work better
than impersonal ones. Having campaign volunteers visit voters
door-to-door is the "gold standard" of voter mobilization efforts,
Green and Gerber write. On average, the tactic produces one
vote for every 14 people contacted. The next-most-effective way
to reach voters is to have live, human volunteers call them on the
phone to chat: This tactic produces one new vote for every 38
people contacted. Other efforts are nearly worthless. Paying
human telemarketers to call voters produces one vote for every
180 people contacted. Sending people nonpartisan get-out-thevote mailers will yield one vote per 200 contacts. (A partisan
mailer is even less effective.)
Meanwhile, pinning leaflets to doors, sending people e-mail, and
running robo-calls produced no discernible effect on the
electorate. Green and Gerber cite many robo-call studies, but the
most definitive is a test they ran during the 2006 Republican
primary in Texas. Gov. Rick Perry recorded a call praising a
state Supreme Court candidate as a true conservative. The robocall was "microtargeted" to go out only to Perry supporters—
people who'd be most open to his message. But as Green and
Gerber show, Perry supporters who received the call reacted no
differently from those who'd been kept off the list. They were no
more likely to vote, nor, if they voted, to vote for Perry's
candidate.
These findings create an obvious difficulty for campaigns: It's
expensive and time-consuming to run the kind of personal
mobilization efforts that science shows work best. Green and
Gerber estimate that a door-canvassing operation costs $16 per
hour, with six voters contacted each hour; if you convince one of
every 14 voters you canvass, you're paying $29 for each new
voter. A volunteer phone bank operation will run you even
more—$38 per acquired voter. This is the wondrous thing about
text-messaging: Studies show that text-based get-out-the-vote
appeals win one voter for every 25 people contacted. That's
nearly as effective as door-canvassing, but it's much, much
cheaper. Text messages cost about 6 cents per contact—only
$1.50 per new voter.
Not much is known about the specifics of Obama's textmessaging operation (the campaign did not respond to my
request for comment). We do know that the campaign compiled
its list of cell numbers in two main ways. First, the campaign has
requested mobile numbers of new voters at registration drives.
Then, late in the summer, the Obama camp got a huge haul of
mobile numbers through a clever gimmick surrounding Obama's
V.P. pick—if you texted the campaign, Obama promised to text
you back as soon as he'd made his choice.
I joined Obama's text list around that time. (I would have joined
McCain's text message list as well, but he doesn't have one.)
Since then, I've received two or three messages a week from the
Obama campaign. A typical one: "Help Barack. Tell your friends
& family the last day to register to vote in CA is this Monday,
Oct 20th! Visit VoteForChange.com to register NOW. Please
forward."
The texts reminded me to watch the convention and the debates
and to donate money to the Red Cross when Hurricane Gustav
hit. In September, Obama asked me to text him my ZIP code. I
did, and now I get location-specific messages—alerts to phone
banks and debate-watching parties in my area, reminders of
registration deadlines in my state, and appeals for me to
volunteer in neighboring states. The messages are rendered in a
friendly, professional tone (they refer to the candidate as Barack)
and have been free of both fundraising appeals and any kind of
negative campaigning.
The beauty of text messaging is that it is both automated and
personalized. This is true of e-mail, too, but given the flood of
messages you get each day (no small amount from Obama),
you're probably more attuned to ignoring e-mail. Text messages
show up on a device that you carry with you all day long—and
because you probably get only a handful of them each day,
you're likely to read each one.
This is especially true when the message seems to have been
tailored to you specifically—Obama's often are. The campaign
knows a lot about me: At the least, it knows that I live in
California, and because I joined the text-message list in order to
learn the V.P. pick, that I'm fairly interested in politics (and
therefore likely to vote). It's possible that they might know even
more; given my ZIP code and my phone number, they could
potentially have tied my text-message account to my voter
registration file, allowing the campaign to send me messages
based on my party registration, whether I usually vote by mail,
and whether I sometimes forget to vote. (It doesn't appear that
the campaign knows what's in my registration file, though; I'm
registered as a permanent absentee voter, but the campaign
hasn't asked me to mail in my ballot yet.)
Because text messages allow for such precise targeting, it seems
likely that over the next week the Obama campaign will direct
its appeals to voters in battleground states, especially first-time
voters that the campaign has registered during the past year. In
2006, political science grad students Aaron Strauss and Allison
Dale studied how newly registered voters responded to textmessage reminders sent out just before the election. The text
messages increased turnout by 3.1 percentage points. Strauss
says there's a simple reason why: "The most prevalent excuse for
registered voters who don't cast a ballot is, 'I'm too busy' or 'I
forgot.' Texting someone is a convenient, targeted, and
noticeable reminder for them to schedule their Election Day
activities with a block of time set aside for going to the polling
place." In a post-election survey, Strauss and Dale asked voters
whether they found the text messages helpful; 59 percent said
yes.
Obama's campaign seems to know these lessons well. During the
primaries, the campaign sent out multiple messages to supporters
during Election Day; they'll do the same next week. There's
some question about whether text messages will continue to be
effective beyond this election—if telemarketing companies can
get ahold of our cell numbers and we get barraged by political
spam, text-based mobilization efforts may eventually become as
useless as robo-calls. At the moment, though, we're in thrall to
our cell phones—and when Obama texts you next Tuesday,
you'll have a hard time saying no.
television
All the while, Liz and her boss at NBC, Alec Baldwin's Jack
Donaghy, continue their fine squabbling, with its hints of TracyHepburn tension and father-daughter dueling. First, a recently
humbled Jack must seize control of his old job (which may
involve, in contravention of his moral code, submitting to the
sexual advances of a sexless gray lump). Then he needs to quash
a scandal (proceeding from the fictionalized network's having
faked, for the sake of ratings, such Olympic events as
synchronized running and octuples tennis). Jack's ethical
misadventures reflect, maybe, writers'-room fretting about the
compromises required to thrive in the business of show, and
that's swell: The brief vision of an Olympic tetherbell bout is the
kind of silliness that needs no defense. The user-friendly new 30
Rock, making a virtue of its anxieties, may well worry its way to
success.
The Return of 30 Rock
Tina Fey's sitcom becomes much more user-friendly.
By Troy Patterson
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 7:27 PM ET
Even the most ardent fans of 30 Rock (NBC, Thursdays at 9:30
p.m. ET) will concede that it doesn't look its sharpest as its third
season opens. Only the most churlish will be much put out by
this, though. A relatively flat episode of Tina Fey's backstage
farce is still the fizziest thing in prime-time comedy, and some
strategic broadening of the humor can only help widen the
audience of the show that ended last season in, by at least one
ratings measure, 113th place. Having demonstrated the integrity
of its anarchic archness and dart-gun wit, 30 Rock earned the
right to crass things up a bit.
Thus, the season premiere returns us to a land where the natives
(a bit cuddlier than we'd remembered) clamber across a comic
landscape rendered somewhat more crudely than before. Fey's
Liz Lemon—the head writer on the show-within-the-show, two
parts Mary Richards, one part Oscar Madison—enters the scene
swinging her purse through the deco heaven of Rockefeller
Plaza. Brightly pretty, in contrast to her prettily schlubby normal
presentation, childless Liz is dolled up for a meeting with an
official from an adoption agency. Megan Mullally, late of Will &
Grace, plays the adoption screener with her usual big brassiness,
a kind of Broadway glare that washes out the show's more finely
shaded absurdity. The central theme of Mullally's story line is
head trauma—not necessarily a leading indicator of refinement.
Next week's plot contrives to introduce Liz to 30 Rock's fanciest
guest star yet. Goofy on sleeping pills in her first-class plane
seat, Liz drools, almost literally, over a seatmate named Oprah.
Within the radius of Ms. Winfrey's aura, Liz blusters and
babbles with the force of a 4-year-old swooning on Santa's lap.
The show has its celebrity worship both ways, refreshing a joke
about the talk show host's celestial glow even as it basks cozily
in it.
television
The Real Housewives of Atlanta
A perfect show for our financial moment.
By Troy Patterson
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 6:10 PM ET
The Real Housewives of Atlanta (Bravo, Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET)
is the third iteration of a reality-soap franchise that documents
the most exhilarating developments in nouveau riche vulgarity.
The original concentrates on five women living safe behind the
jewel-encrusted battlements of a gated community in Orange
County, Calif., where they make stabs at being adequate parents
while attempting, surgically and sartorially, to extend their own
girlhoods. The second installment features the smooth, hard
shells and delightfully pathetic affectations of a makeshift clique
in New York City. These dames exist to caricature the
pretensions of every status-minded Gothamite short of Mrs.
Astor; at times, the follies seem designed to inspire New Yorkers
to renounce all possessions but the cab fare to the admissions
office of the nearest ashram, kibbutz, or ascetical sleep-away
camp. One might almost forgive the good citizens of Atlanta if
they reacted to Bravo's depiction of their city by reanimating
William T. Sherman so that he could burn it down again.
The latest edition, with its predominantly black cast, brings some
fresh flavor to this little empire's examination of expensive bad
taste. The producers have encouraged their subjects—it can have
required only the slightest effort of persuasion—and edited their
footage such that the central plot of The R.H. of A. is a duel
between divas. The more unappealing of the two is stern, cold,
leonine, faintly desperate Sheree, who explained early on that
she is in the process of divorcing an NFL offensive tackle and
expecting a handsome lump-sum settlement. The lifestyle to
which she has become accustomed is quite silly. Her entourage
includes a "PR girl" (plainly seen to be subcompetent) and a
"creative director" (presumably deranged). In the first episode, a
shopgirl convinced Sheree to buy a purse by alleging that the
cowhide—or snakeskin, or raptor pelt, whatever it was—had
been treated with Botox. I dare you to imagine what the aesthetic
qualities of a product boasting such a selling point might be.
And I am secure in the knowledge that Sheree, owning one,
knows that she's better than me. "I was upper-middle-class
growing up," she says, "but I left that behind."
Her nemesis, the bubbly NeNe, claims far humbler origins, if her
hootchie-ish attire and lively inattention to bourgeois propriety
are fair indications. NeNe has elevated bralessness to a state of
mind. She is the fun-loving type, and why not? Her husband, a
local real-estate mogul, only occasionally scolds her for thinking
of ordering carbohydrates at dinner. Preparing to attend a party
at Sheree's, NeNe dressed with the intent to upstage—only to
discover, at the door, that her name had been "accidentally"
omitted from the list. Circumstances instead required NeNe to
stand there in the driveway and yelp profanely at the publicist
while the valet brought the Range Rover back around.
must-have accessory on this turf—she was very much taken with
the luscious superficiality of performers at a drag show.
This fluff might be the perfect stuff for our time of financial
crisis. On the one hand, the women are so easy to detest that the
show plays like a class-warfare propaganda film—just the thing
to get your bile healthily flowing. On the other, as Simon
Doonan charmingly ventured last week in the New York
Observer, these courtesans are performing a vital function by
shoring up consumer confidence among people with the leisure
time to dish about it: "Please don't knock these craven,
uncultivated, whore-ishly attired self-involved wonderful
ladies," Doonan wrote. "By displacing cocktail chatter about the
impending recession/depression, the R. H. of A.'s allow us to
sleep at night." The show lets us eat the rich like so much
comfort food.
the dismal science
The other Atlanta "housewives"—the term here has no coherent
meaning outside scare quotes—are DeShawn, Kim, and Lisa.
Tender DeShawn, wife of baby-faced point guard Eric Snow, is
new in town. Good help being hard to find these days, she
spends much of her screen time interviewing prospective "estate
managers" and overseeing the whining of her children while the
personal chef makes them pancakes. Brazen Kim is supported by
an unseen sugar daddy—"he's a great friend and a great
provider"—and passes time between assignations by toying with
a career in country music. There's a lovely moment when,
receiving a record producer at the front door, she chucks her
cigarette behind the hedge. Lisa, a real-estate agent, would be
the most likable of the women by a long stretch if she weren't
such a sickeningly indefatigable go-getter. She snared her
husband in near-record speed, meeting and marrying an NFL
linebacker in the space of 53 days. They just had a kid. "Having
a 9-month-old, it revives you," she beams. Then she mounts a
treadmill, because a girl's gotta stay in shape if she's going to
flee mobs of young mothers enraged by lines like that.
Though Lisa is the only R.H. of A. with a discernible work
ethic—as opposed to a steadfast commitment to work it, work
it—her peers share something of her jock-ish perspective. On
this show, people plot their social maneuverings and
conspicuous consumption in the tones of halftime pep talks and
SportsCenter sound bites. "I decided that [I was] really gonna
step up my fundraising game," says DeShawn of the party with
which she locally launches herself. (Her photo hogs the front of
the glossy invitation.) Elsewhere, Sheree's "shoe stylist" claims
that his client owns more than 1,000 pairs of heels: "But we're
not done. We're not done. We will continue to add to the
collection for sure." What is the ideal these female gladiators are
battling to achieve? Well, when Sheree went out on the town
with her "gay boyfriend"—a swishy confidante being another
They Made a Killing
Did people who knew about secret, CIA-led coups use that information to
game the stock market?
By Ray Fisman
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 7:07 AM ET
In 1951, Jacobo Árbenz Gúzman became Guatemala's second
democratically elected president. Árbenz's authoritarian
predecessors had been very sympathetic to American business
interests, particularly those of the United Fruit Co. (now
Chiquita), which had bought up land titles on the cheap from
Guatemala's corrupt elite for its ever-expanding banana empire.
Once in office, Presidente Árbenz sought to take it all back,
nationalizing UFC's Guatemalan assets and redistributing them
to the poor.
But UFC had friends in very high places—the assistant secretary
of state for inter-American affairs, John Moor Cabot, was the
brother of UFC President Thomas Cabot. The secretary of state
himself, John Foster Dulles, had done legal work for UFC, and
his brother Allen Dulles was director of the CIA and also on
UFC's board. Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, we
now know that the various Cabots and Dulleses had a series of
top-secret meetings in which they decided that Árbenz had to go
and sponsored a coup that drove Árbenz from office in 1954.
With a U.S. puppet back in the president's mansion, UFC's
profits were safe. But it appears the company wasn't the only
beneficiary of this Cold War cloak-and-dagger diplomacy: A
recent study by economists Arindrajit Dube, Ethan Kaplan, and
Suresh Naidu argues that those in on the planning process also
profited handsomely. By tracking the stock prices of UFC and
other politically vulnerable firms in the months leading up to
CIA-staged coups in Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, and Iran, the
researchers provide evidence that someone—perhaps one of the
Dulleses, Cabots, or others in the know—was trading stocks
based on classified information of these coups-in-the-making.
This exposé is a contribution to the rapidly expanding field of
"forensic economics," which tries to understand the who, what,
and why of illicit transactions. Since these are activities that take
place out of sight (at least when they're done right), researchers
are forced to look for fingerprints left in the data by smugglers,
bribe-taking politicians, and other lawbreakers.
Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu examine how the stock market reacted
to events that no Wall Street trader should have known about:
top-secret meetings of the coup-plotting cabals at CIA
headquarters and presidential approvals of CIA-organized
invasions. These events would have increased the expected
future profits of companies like UFC—if the CIA-led coup in
Guatemala were successful, for example, UFC would get its
plantations back. If stock traders were privy to the coupplanning process, we would expect them to bid up the prices of
affected companies in anticipation of these higher profits. These
meetings and authorizations were all highly classified, however,
and since you can't trade on information you don't have, UFC's
stock price shouldn't have budged until the coup actually took
place and the investing world learned of the regime change.
Unless, that is, some of the Cabots, Dulleses, or other insiders
were using their privileged information to profit personally from
a future coup. To understand why insider trading would boost a
company's stock price, suppose that someone in on the
planning—perhaps at UFC or at the State Department itself—
started quietly buying up cheap UFC stock in anticipation of the
price jump that would come when the coup took place (or tipped
off his stock-trading cousins about the future boost to UFC so
they could do the same). All of this pre-coup buying would
increase demand for UFC stock, bidding up its price even before
CIA operatives actually got to work overthrowing the
Guatemalan government.
Such trading on inside information is illegal, and when it
involves highly classified details about a future CIA coup, it
verges on treason. Yet the researchers found that prices of
companies affected by the CIA's regime-toppling efforts—UFC
in Guatemala, Anglo-Iranian (oil) in Iran, Anaconda (mining) in
Chile, and American Sugar in Cuba—went up in the weeks and
months preceding the coups. (The authors restrict their analysis
to coups for which they had access to declassified planning
documents and for which U.S. companies had had property
nationalized by the targeted regimes.)
Furthermore, these gains were concentrated in the days
following crucial government authorizations or plans for the
coup (suggesting the trades weren't simply the result of good
guesswork about a coup in the making). For example, in the
week that President Eisenhower gave full approval to Operation
PBFortune to overthrow Árbenz, UFC's price went up by 3.8
percent; the stock market overall was flat that week.
In all, shares of coup-affected companies went up by a total of
10 percent following top-secret authorizations, swamping the 3.5
percent gain that came immediately in the coups' aftermaths. If
information hadn't been leaking into the stock market via insider
trading, then the entire impact of the coup should have appeared
only when the very public invasions took place and the investing
world finally got news of the regime change. Unfortunately,
there are limits to what these stock-market forensics can
uncover. When the researchers contacted the Securities and
Exchange Commission to find out who was trading on these
days, they learned that there are limits to what the Freedom of
Information Act could provide. So, we can't pin the apparent
insider trading on anyone in particular.
There's also some evidence, albeit tentative, that the market was
very good at forecasting the coups' success and failure—a
further indication that the traders driving up the price had
detailed knowledge of the covert plans (and their expected
outcomes). The CIA-led invasion of Cuba is referred to these
days as the Bay of Pigs fiasco for a reason, and whoever was
trading on insider knowledge seemed to place his bets
accordingly—the pre-invasion increase in American Sugar's
stock price was much lower than the gains for companies
affected by the other, successful coups in the study.
What about the forensic economics of the Bush administration?
Researchers have already estimated what it's worth for
Republican-connected companies to have George W. Bush in the
White House by looking at what happened to the stock prices of
companies with former Republican lawmakers on their boards
when Al Gore gave up his fight for the presidency on Dec. 13,
2000 (they went up; Democratically connected companies' prices
went down).
If and when the story behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq becomes
public, researchers will surely also be analyzing the share prices
of the many companies that profited from a U.S.-occupied Iraq.
None will see greater scrutiny than oil services giant
Halliburton, whose former CEO Dick Cheney left the company
to become vice president in 2000 and undoubtedly took part in
the invasion's planning. (Some say he was pivotal in the decision
to invade.) In the Iraq war's aftermath, Halliburton received
billions in no-bid reconstruction contracts, boosting its profits
and leading to accusations of corruption.
Halliburton's stock price jumped 7.6 percent the day the Senate
authorized the use of force in Iraq, so investors clearly
anticipated that war would be good for the company. Did
insiders also profit from advance notice of these sweetheart deals
to come? Conspiracy theorists will no doubt be interested in
what happened to Halliburton stock on days when less-public
meetings took place. Cheney himself certainly could not have
traded on any inside information—monitoring of insider trades
and stock transactions is much more sophisticated now than it
was in the 1950s. But perhaps others in the V.P.'s office or at
Halliburton (or their cousins, or their cousins' cousins) might
have been able to do some trading on the sly. If so, they may
have left tracks in the data for researchers to follow.
the green lantern
Black and Orange and Green
Can fun-size candy bars be good for the environment?
By Jacob Leibenluft
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 7:04 AM ET
Trick or treat! Halloween has always been one of my favorite
holidays, and now my son is old enough to be excited about
it, too. But lately I've been feeling a little frightened by the
environmental impact of all those plastic bats and fun-size
candy bars. What's a green Halloween-lover to do?
Halloween may offer the Lantern a chance to dress up as his
namesake, but it doesn't provide many other opportunities for the
eco-conscious. Any holiday that involves creating a ridiculous
costume that you're going to wear exactly once while you gorge
on prepackaged junk food is not exactly tailor-made for going
green.
Let's start with the reason for the season: all that candy. Diets
rich in sugary foods are typically considered less eco-friendly
than those with modest amounts; in Sweden, for example, a
model diet crafted by a team of environmental scientists
suggested consumers cut down on sweets by about 50 percent. A
British report (PDF) called that recommendation a "medium"
priority for greening our food choices. (One risk, the report
noted, was attracting accusations of "nanny state misery-guts
spoilsportism"—a pretty good description of how people react if
someone tries to take away their candy.)
Do sweets deserve such a bad rap? In total, the National
Confectioners Association projects at least $2.2 billion worth of
candy will be sold this Halloween season—and that's a low
estimate, including only what's specifically marketed for the
holiday. That means a lot of extra, nonrecyclable packaging for
all those fun-size candy bars. It also means millions of pounds of
cocoa and corn syrup that needs to be farmed, processed, and
shipped. (Now, if you eat candy instead of dinner on Oct. 31,
you may be replacing calories from other sources—so you can
subtract that from your Halloween toll. But the Lantern guesses
that many Halloween candy binges involve a few extra calories,
too.)
To take a specific example, consider the Cadbury Dairy Milk
bar—which received a "carbon audit" by the British-based
organization Carbon Trust. According to the analysis, a 49-gram
chocolate bar has a carbon footprint of about 169 grams—a ratio
of 3.45 grams of CO2 for every gram of chocolate. That ratio
stacks up pretty well compared with meat but is a good deal
worse than most fruits and vegetables or bread. Digging down,
one interesting result is that the milk used in the candy bar turns
out to be by far the largest component of its carbon footprint—
suggesting that dark chocolate may be an environmentally
friendlier choice.
But other ingredients in candy create other concerns. Corn
syrup—that now-ubiquitous sweetener that is a major ingredient
in many candies—has been criticized as the product of
subsidized "monoculture" farming that wreaks havoc on the
land. Cocoa presents another problem. Like coffee, cocoa
flourishes in many of the world's biodiversity "hot spots"; as a
result, cocoa cultivation has resulted in the destruction of
millions of acres of environmentally fragile rainforest. Still,
there's a flip side: In Brazil, some environmentalists—and
chocolate manufacturers—argue that more eco-friendly cocoa
cultivation techniques may offer the best hope of encouraging
local farmers to save the rainforest. The hope is that as the
market for carbon credits expands, cocoa farmers might be paid
both for their crops and for the carbon sequestered by the
surrounding forest—creating an incentive against deforestation.
In general, the big candy manufacturers have begun placing a
greater emphasis on sustainable cocoa farming—if for no other
reason than to ensure that the world's cocoa supply doesn't
disappear due to overproduction.
So, how do you make a greener Halloween? First, buy an
organic pumpkin—but make sure it isn't coming from too far
away, given how much cargo space your future jack-o'-lantern
would take up in a truck. Second, try to make costumes and
decorations out of old material rather than spending money on
something that may never get another use after Nov. 1. Third, do
your very best to hand out snacks that aren't so bad for the
planet.
Assuming you don't want to be the only house in the
neighborhood offering juice boxes on Halloween, your options
for eco-friendly treats are pretty slim. You can't do homemade
because of concerns over unwrapped treats. It is possible to
purchase organic, bite-size chocolates, lollipops, and gummy
bears, but these aren't perfect replacements: If you can even find
them, you'll have to pay a hefty markup—and those candies still
require a lot of processing and extra packaging. (For an expert's
take on greener Halloween candy, check out the ridiculously
comprehensive Candy Blog, which did a Green Halloween series
two years ago.)
The Lantern's advice? Like your mom probably told you, try
moderation: Give out one candy per trick-or-treater instead of
three, and don't feel the need to stock up on a whole new set of
decorations every year. The orange-and-black holiday is never
going to be very green, but if you don't go overboard, the
environmental toll doesn't need to be quite so scary.
Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at
night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com, and check this
space every Tuesday.
today's business press
Stingy Spending Sinks Economy
By Bernhard Warner and Matthew Yeomans
Friday, October 31, 2008, at 7:06 AM ET
today's papers
Economic Scare
By Joshua Kucera
Friday, October 31, 2008, at 5:56 AM ET
The New York Times gets readers in the Halloween mood by
leading with yesterday's scary economic news, including that
consumer spending has dropped for the first time in 17 years.
The Washington Post leads with another ominous tale, about
how the Bush administration is planning a blitz of new businessfriendly (and consumer- and environment-unfriendly)
regulations in his last weeks in office. The rest of the top stories
are election-related: The Los Angeles Times leads with the
presidential campaign, where each candidate talked about the
bad economic news, with Obama blaming it on Bush policies
and McCain saying his mortgage-buyout plan would fix it. USA
Today leads with campaign-trail interviews of Obama and
McCain. The Wall Street Journal tops its worldwide newsbox
with a campaign catchall, including the two candidates taking
shots at their opponents' running mates. Although, at this point,
election news is more likely to elicit exhaustion than fear, the
NYT does front a poll showing that half of voters said they were
"scared" of what the other candidate would do if elected
president.
"The new rules" sought by the president, the Post writes, "would
be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush
era and could be difficult for his successor to undo. Some would
ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power
plants, mines and farms." The new regulations, up to 90 in total,
would ease commercial ocean-fishing activities and reduce
limits on carbon dioxide-increasing emissions from power plants
and pollution near national parks. Environmentalists say the
rules "will force Americans to choke on dirtier air for years to
come," while an electricity lobby group said they would bring
"common sense to the Clean Air Act."
Gross domestic product shrank 0.3 percent over the last quarter
(July through September), the worst drop since 2001, and bad
news was all around. "Thursday's GDP report showed pervasive
economic weakness," the Journal wrote. The Times notes that
one aspect of the economic news—that capital spending by
businesses declined—is especially ominous, because those sorts
of cuts can rapidly spiral downward. Some are now forecasting
unemployment rates of 8 percent by the middle of next year.
And while government spending and exports were both up last
quarter, there are signs they, too, are slowing down. "We are
now entering the harshest part of the recession," one economist
told the NYT.
The lead stat in the NYT poll is that 59 percent of voters think
Sarah Palin is not qualified to be vice president, an increase of
nine points since the beginning of the month—an increase, the
paper said, driven almost entirely by Republican and
independent voters. Overall, 52 percent said they supported
Obama, 39 percent McCain, 2 percent Ralph Nader, and 1
percent Bob Barr.
Still trying to think of a Halloween costume? How about a
pirate—not the old Johnny Depp kind but the newer, edgier
Somali variety. Both the NYT and LAT run dispatches from
Somalia's pirate country, where offshore banditry is the biggest
employer. Says the NYT: "Flush with cash, the pirates drive the
biggest cars, run many of the town's businesses—like hotels—
and throw the best parties, residents say. Fatuma Abdul Kadir
said she went to a pirate wedding in July that lasted two days,
with nonstop dancing and goat meat, and a band flown in from
neighboring Djibouti. 'It was wonderful,' said Ms. Fatuma, 21.
'I'm now dating a pirate.' "
Maybe wear a suit and monocle and go as a corporate fat cat?
The Journal fronts a good analysis of how the banks now being
bailed out by the government owe roughly $40 billion in unpaid
executive pay, bonuses, and pensions. While the Treasury
Department is putting restrictions on what executives at bailedout banks can now earn, it won't affect these debts. At some
companies, the debts to executives are greater than their entire
pension program. (The $40 billion figure, however, is as of the
end of 2007, and the paper notes that given that much of the debt
was in stocks, it is likely lower now.)
Or an angel: The Post fronts a long, nuanced feature on Jerry
Falwell's Liberty University and how the election is playing out
among evangelical college students.
Several of the papers have fun Halloween-related features. The
Journal fronts a profile of a Brazilian man whose fear of being
buried alive led him to construct an elaborate ventilated tomb
stocked with food and water—just in case. The Post fronts a
feature on Japan's quirky monsters, yokai: "One yokai likes to
plunge a large, hairy disembodied foot through the roofs of rich
people's houses. Another is made entirely of discarded
dinnerware and is more dangerous to himself than to others."
And the LAT has an evergreen about restrictions on sex
offenders at Halloween: In Maryland, they have to hang signs
outside their homes saying they have no candy. In other states,
police will check on sex offenders to make sure they're home.
New Mexico has required them to post signs saying, "Sex
offender lives here." Boo!
today's papers
Spreading the Wealth
By Arthur Delaney
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 5:39 AM ET
All the major U.S. newspapers lead today with news that the
Federal Reserve has lowered its benchmark interest rate by half
a percentage point and with word from Washington that the
government is considering a plan to bail out homeowners facing
foreclosure.
The Fed's move brings the interest rate banks use when lending
to one another overnight to 1 percent, the lowest it's been since
the dot-com bust of 2003, reports the New York Times. The NYT
piles on the gloom, noting that banks remain reluctant to lend at
all, that unemployment is up, and that consumer spending is
down. The sky isn't falling, but the "ground is moving from
underneath us," as an investment-firm economist puts it. (In a
separate front-page story, the Times reports on layoffs emanating
from Wall Street into the greater New York region.) To reduce
foreclosures, the government is putting together a plan to use
$50 billion from its $700 billion bailout of the banking industry
to guarantee $500 billion to $600 billion in home loans.
Negotiators for the U.S. Treasury Department and the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corp. are working on the homeowner bailout
and may announce their plan in a few days, according to the
Washington Post's anonymously sourced lead story. While the
government has so far focused on a bailout for banks, continued
market turmoil and political pressure have pushed officials
toward considering direct homeowner aid. The plan under
discussion would reduce a homeowner's monthly mortgage
payments by cutting the interest rate or extending the repayment
period. In exchange for these favors, the lender would get a
government guarantee of compensation for losses in case the
homeowner defaults anyway.
The Wall Street Journal emphasizes the international nature of
the current financial crisis, reporting that central banks in
countries around the world are taking rate-cutting measures
similar to the Fed's. The Los Angeles Times predicts that the
"depth of the country's economic distress" could be revealed
today, when the government releases its estimate of third-quarter
growth. In its lead story, USAToday notes that credit card
holders are unlikely to see any interest rate relief.
The WP reports that the 33 banks signed up to benefit from
billions in bailout dollars from the Treasury Department are
continuing to pay dividends to shareholders, even though the
money is supposed to be for loans. While foreign banks are
typically required to suspend quarterly dividend payments before
repaying government investments and the U.S. government
required Chrysler to do so in a 1979 bailout, the Treasury says
such a condition would have discouraged banks from
participating in its program.
The NYT fronts a fun story on the different stuff that goes on at
rallies for the Democratic and Republican presidential
candidates. The piece has lots of riffing on rope lines and oneliners. Among other comparisons, the Times reports that Barack
Obama and Sarah Palin get people similarly fired up, whereas
the tickets' "grayer eminences," Joe Biden and John McCain,
tend to elicit less enthusiasm. The Times is also pumped about
early voting, reporting that lots of people are doing it this year.
On a more depressing note, the LAT fronts a story on the fretting
over likely Election Day confusion and vote suppression, and the
Post offers a Page One story on voter controversies in Ohio.
Colombian security forces are under international scrutiny for
killing lots of civilians, according to a front-page NYT story.
Promotions and benefits give soldiers incentive to shoot vagrants
and claim combat kills, a trend the Times says calls into question
the Colombian government's reported gains in its struggle
against the FARC. Colombia is the chief ally of the United
States in Latin America and receives $500 million yearly in
counterinsurgency aid.
The International Monetary Fund has created a new type of loan
for "A-list" developing countries battered by the global financial
crisis, reports the WSJ. The new type of loan comes without the
restrictions usually attached to IMF loans, which typically
require budget cuts or interest rate increases.
USAT tops its front page today with an exclusive story on the
Chinese government putting together a list of U.S. athletes it
feared might demonstrate during the summer's Olympic games.
The athletes roused suspicion because their association with the
advocacy group known as Team Darfur. The U.S. Olympic
Committee, for its part, considered China's concerns complete
bunk.
Many gay couples remarry each other many times in order to
keep up with different and changing laws on gay marriage
around the country, reports the WSJ. It's not clear that there are
more than anecdotes to prove this trend, in which same-sex
couples "tie themselves in knots to tie the knot," but the Journal
does have the goods on gay folks scrambling to wed in
California. In San Francisco, marriage license applications have
tripled in the last month ahead of an anti-gay-marriage
referendum on Election Day.
today's papers
Knocked Up
By Daniel Politi
Wednesday, October 29, 2008, at 6:23 AM ET
USA Today and the Washington Post lead with and the Wall
Street Journal banners the latest wild ride on Wall Street as
investors ignored a flurry of bad economic news and sent the
Dow Jones industrial average up almost 900 points, or 10.9
percent. It marked the second-largest point increase and the
sixth-biggest percentage gain in history. The New York Times
leads with a look at what it calls the upcoming "credit card
crisis." Lenders are cutting back on credit card offers and
reducing credit lines at a time when the declining economy is
making it more difficult for consumers to make ends meet. Even
those with good credit are being affected as lenders try to
prevent more losses, which could amount to $55 billion over the
next year and a half on top of the approximately $21 billion in
bad credit-card loans that lenders wrote off in the first six
months of 2008.
The Los Angeles Times leads with a new poll that shows Barack
Obama with a significant lead in two crucial battleground states.
In Ohio, Obama leads 49 percent to 40 percent among likely
voters, while in Florida his lead is 50 percent to 43 percent.
Voters still see John McCain as more qualified to deal with
terrorism and Iraq, but that's hardly the top issue at a time when
about 90 percent of registered voters in Ohio say the economy is
doing badly. The poll also includes an interesting nugget that
shows how it has been difficult for Obama to shake a persistent
rumor that he's Muslim. Around 7 percent of voters think Obama
is Muslim, while more than 40 percent say they're not sure what
his religion is.
rally might have been little more than a head fake." After all,
yesterday's point gain was second only to the one that took place
on Oct. 13, and we all know what happened afterward. There are
also plenty of signs that the economy is in for a lot more
hardship in the months ahead. Yesterday morning a private
research firm reported that consumer confidence has fallen to the
lowest level in its 41-year history.
USAT points out that some market watchers believe the biggest
reason for yesterday's rally "may have been fear of being left
behind." As the NYT notes, while investors may be more willing
to believe that stocks have decreased enough to justify jumping
into the markets again, no one knows whether their value has
fallen enough considering that if there's a long global recession
corporate profits will surely plunge.
The NYT's David Leonhardt takes an impressively sober look at
whether stocks are actually cheap now and if investors should be
jumping in to avoid missing the boat on an upcoming market
surge. Many of the country's top financial minds say yes. But
others aren't quite so sure and say stocks are only cheap now if
you compare them with their performance over the past 20 years,
which could in fact prove to have been one great big bubble. "It
was a nice party," one expert tells the NYT. "The problem is that
all the bills are coming due at the same time." Some think stocks
could still fall as much as 35 percent before the market hits
bottom. This means that those who sink their money into the
markets now might have to wait decades until their investment
pays off.
USAT fronts a look at how several states are cutting back on
health care programs at a time when the economic slump is
likely to lead more people to require help to pay for medical
assistance. Many states are trying to deal with budget shortfalls
by cutting back on Medicaid, which pays medical costs for
millions of low-income Americans.
Investors were encouraged by signs that the credit crunch is
easing a bit and by expectations that the Federal Reserve would
cut interest rates today, possibly to as low as 1 percent. There are
early signs that the Fed's move to begin buying up commercial
paper, which started on Monday, has helped restore some
confidence in the credit markets.
Speaking of health care, the LAT takes an interesting look at how
states often have different rules on what kind of health services
they provide to illegal immigrants. The piece focuses on dialysis
because it offers a particularly poignant example since many
states don't cover the treatment for illegal immigrants. Dialysis
involves a lifetime commitment that can easily reach $1 million
per patient, but some say that not covering the treatment could
be even more costly. That's because states that don't cover it still
have to treat illegal immigrants when they reach the emergency
room with almost-fatal levels of toxins in their system. And
some argue that repeatedly rescuing patients from the brink of
death not only hurts their long-term health, but also costs more
in the long run.
Still, everyone cautions that yesterday's surge is unlikely to hold
and could turn into "the sixth in a string of failed one-day rallies
in less than a month that lured buyers in only to shred more
wealth," notes USAT. Or as the LAT so eloquently puts it, "the
The WP fronts word that U.S. commanders in Afghanistan say
they need around 20,000 more troops to fight the Taliban.
Around 4,000 troops are set to arrive in January, and up to
12,000 more could arrive sometime in the spring or summer. But
now there's also a request for up to 10,000 more support forces,
such as intelligence officers and engineers, that commanders say
are crucial to build up resources to a point where the additional
troops could actually help the U.S. mission. As opposed to Iraq,
which easily absorbed the extra troops that were part of last
year's "surge," Afghanistan doesn't have the necessary
infrastructure to take in all the additional troops. But the problem
is that support forces are already stretched thin.
While the Supreme Court gets most of the attention when the
media talk about a president's judicial appointments, the NYT
takes a look at how President Bush has managed to change the
face of appeals courts across the country during his two terms in
office. And since many of the judges Bush placed "were among
the youngest ever nominated," they are poised to have a longterm impact on the country. By the time the Bush era is over,
conservative judges will have control of 10 of the 13 circuits,
while judges appointed by Democrats have a majority in only
one circuit. The trend could be reversed if Obama wins, but if
McCain is elected, "Republicans could achieve commanding
majorities on all 13 circuits," reports the NYT.
The WP's Ruth Marcus says that while Obama promised to bring
in a new style of politics, it's not the way he "has run his
campaign or the message he has run it on." There's little doubt
that the Democrat has run a good campaign, but it never
contained "much more than a passing hint of the new politics he
envisions." And even though Obama went back to this theme in
his closing argument, there's little evidence that the Democrat
would change dramatically if he gets to the White House. "I
know how he wants to govern," writes Marcus. "I'm not
convinced he can pull it off."
today's papers
The Greatest Gift
By Daniel Politi
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 6:36 AM ET
The New York Times and Washington Post lead with, while the
Los Angeles Times and USA Today give big front-page play to,
news that Sen. Ted Stevens was found guilty of concealing tens
of thousands of dollars in free home renovations and other gifts.
The 84-year-old Republican senator from Alaska was convicted
on all seven felony counts, each with a maximum penalty of five
years in prison. No one thinks he would get anywhere near the
maximum sentence, but the NYT says he would likely have to
spend at least some time in jail. Stevens blamed "repeated
instances of prosecutorial misconduct" for the outcome and
vowed to "fight this unjust verdict with every ounce of energy I
have."
The Los Angeles Times leads with the infighting that is already
taking place over the future of the Republican Party. The more
conservative wing of the party wants the GOP to once again
emphasize the fight against abortion, gay marriage, and illegal
immigration while moderates say Republicans should be
focusing on broadening their base. USA Today leads with a look
at how Barack Obama's huge fundraising lead is allowing him to
spend much more on advertising than John McCain. This
disparity will be fully evident Wednesday, when a half-hour
prime-time ad for Obama will run on CBS, NBC, and Fox. The
Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with the
presidential campaigns that took both candidates to Ohio
yesterday, where they continued to focus on economic issues.
When he left the courtroom, Stevens asked Alaskans to "stand
with me as I pursue my rights." The longest-serving Republican
in Senate history is up for re-election and will remain on the
ballot despite the guilty verdict. Polls have shown a tight race
but the LAT and NYT highlight that most political analysts
predict the conviction will be enough to put his Democratic
opponent, Mayor Mark Begich, in the Senate.
Democrats were practically salivating yesterday as a victory in
Alaska would get them one step closer to achieving the
filibuster-proof majority in the Senate they so crave. Democratic
candidates around the country immediately seized the moment to
tie their opponents to Stevens and demand that they give back
any money they received from the Alaska senator. If Stevens
does manage to keep his job, it would take a two-thirds vote to
expel him from the Senate, and the issue isn't even likely to be
raised until he has exhausted all his appeals.
While the fight for the future of the Republican Party has been
going on for some time, it's getting more heated now that many
are getting ready for the possibility that a member of their party
won't be in the White House next year. A key argument is
starting to break out over who should be the next chairman of
the Republican National Committee, and some conservatives say
that even if John McCain does win, he shouldn't be allowed to
name the party's leader. All this talk is angering some within the
party who say Republicans should be devoting all their energy to
next week's elections instead of trying to plot their way into the
party's leadership.
The WSJ hears word that the United States is discussing whether
it should pursue talks with members of the Taliban in
Afghanistan, which the paper describes as "a major policy shift
that would have been unthinkable a few months ago." Officials
are also apparently considering creating local militias in
Afghanistan to fight against the Taliban. The recommendation to
participate in talks that would be led by the Afghan government
has been put forward in a draft classified White House
assessment of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. U.S. officials insist
any talks wouldn't include any of the Taliban's top leaders, but
it's far from clear whether anyone with control over the group
would even be willing to participate in these meetings. Of
course, the recommendations could change and the next
president wouldn't be obligated to pursue them. But both
presidential candidates have expressed support for some kind of
outreach to the Taliban and the idea also has the backing of Gen.
David Petraeus.
The NYT and WP front more details about Sunday's raid in Syria
that killed Abu Ghadiyah, an Iraqi who ran an extensive
smuggling network that sent weapons, money, and foreign
fighters into Iraq. It was carried out by Special Forces and was
similar to a raid that took place in Pakistan a few weeks ago. It
appeared to mark the first time that American ground forces
have operated in Syria. The WP highlights that officials say the
raid was meant to serve as a warning to the Syrian government.
For its part, the NYT gets word that this should be seen as an
example of how the Bush administration is "determined to
operate under an expansive definition of self-defense" that
allows U.S. forces to strike militant targets in sovereign nations.
The NYT fronts a look at how the Bush administration is looking
into ways to provide financial assistance to help bring about the
much talked about merger between General Motors and
Chrysler. Officials are looking into whether they should tap into
the $700 billion bailout program for these funds. They could also
get the money from the $25 billion loan program for the auto
industry or go back to Congress after the election. Direct efforts
to help the ailing companies are likely to be met by cries of "me
too" from other industries that are currently in trouble, which, as
the WP notes, could very well put the government in a "tricky
situation of picking winners and losers within the economy."
The WSJ and WP hear word that the Bush administration is
working to quickly release the first $5 billion of the $25 billion
loan program.
The LAT fronts a piece that asks whether it's even worth it for
the government to spend so much money saving the Big Three.
There's little doubt that "the prospect of failure by any of them is
worrisome" since they employ hundreds of thousands of people.
But while many experts predict that a Big Three failure would
lead to huge problems in the economy, others aren't sure the
effects would be quite so devastating. Although there would no
doubt be an adjustment period, the situation wouldn't be so bad
in the long term since other companies could quickly fill the
void.
Inside, the NYT's Andrew Ross Sorkin says government officials
shouldn't be too quick to eat up the claim by General Motors that
it's too big to fail. While there are lots of jobs on the line, the
truth is that a Chrysler-GM merger would likely lead to mass
layoffs as well. Unless the government insists that the companies
implement much-needed reforms, "any investment would just be
a Band-Aid."
The LAT fronts two first-person pieces from reporters who have
been covering the candidates for months. The story about
McCain follows a familiar path of describing how the candidate
that was once open with reporters closed himself off after the
primaries were over. Writing about Obama, Peter Nicholas notes
Obama's intense discipline makes following him around "a bit
maddening" because he's almost never spontaneous and seems to
always follow a set script. Despite all the long days he has spent
trailing Obama, Nicholas "still can't say with certainty who he
is."
today's papers
Dominion Domination
By Ryan Grim
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 2:00 AM ET
The Washington Post leads with a poll showing Barack Obama
up eight points against John McCain in Virginia. If McCain
loses the Old Dominion, he'll have to run the table in states
where he's currently down much more than eight points. The Los
Angeles Times leads with news that voting by mail will be at
historic levels in California and elsewhere, transforming the
relationship voters have with the trappings of democracy. The
New York Times highlights the predicament McCain is in.
The Wall Street Journal's lead space is taken up by the
expansion of the global financial crisis to the Middle East. USA
Today scoops Army plans to continue to use involuntary
extensions of enlistment—so-called stop-loss orders—through
2009 despite its promises to curtail the practice. Above its lead
story, the paper proclaims: "Yo! Phillies could win it all
tonight."
The LAT fronts reports of a dramatic U.S. raid inside Syria,
which the Associated Press broke and which none of the papers
lead with. (It was a lead story on the Drudge Report, though.)
Details are sketchy, but the incursion is reported to have killed at
least eight people. Syria claimed all those harmed were civilians,
and U.S. officials aren't saying much. The LAT does some
curtain-pulling, reporting that although U.S. officials "would not
confirm the attack, they used language typically employed after
raids conducted by secretive Special Operations forces."
Four helicopters apparently flew over the Iraqi border in
Bukamal near the town of Deir Ezzor and may have raided a
building in search of a militant network. Syria did not sanction
the action and was not pleased by the raid.
The Washington Post fronts that rarest of creatures—a trend
story with data to back it up. While everything else tanks, gun
sales are up. Gun owners and lovers alternately cite the sinking
economy and the prospect of an Obama presidency as prime
motivators for the shopping spree. Most gun lovers interviewed
said their primary concern was Obama's gun-control policy,
which they feared would be more restrictive than Bush's—but
some said they'd be voting for him anyway.
In a Post poll taken last month, Obama trailed among collegeeducated white men in Virginia by 30 points. In the latest
survey, he's now tied among that same group. Obama holds a 5244 lead in Virginia, a state where he's opened nearly 50 offices
staffed by more than 250 paid workers and thousands more
volunteers. More than half of voters said they'd been contacted
personally by the campaign—far more than said the same about
McCain.
Obama is winning 2-to-1 in Northern Virginia and tied in the
rest of the state, which Bush carried in 2004 by eight points.
Half of voters had "strongly" or "somewhat" negative views of
Sarah Palin. McCain's attempt to tag Obama as a tax hiker
doesn't appear to be working: By 15 points, Virginia voters favor
Obama, over McCain, to handle tax policy.
The financial storm is now sweeping across the Middle East, the
Journal reports. Kuwait's central bank quickly guaranteed bank
deposits and orchestrated a bailout of a major bank. International
investors are pulling back, and oil prices have dropped some 50
percent from their July highs. Dubai real-estate brokers are
expressing pessimism. Maybe that indoor ski resort in the desert
wasn't such a great idea, after all.
New York Times reporters Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny
check in on the McCain campaign and find it battling on turf that
President Bush carried four years ago, evidence of the
plummeting political fortunes of the Republican Party. McCain
and Palin will do fewer joint rallies, they report, in order to
cover more ground.
Obama, meanwhile, will make his closing argument beginning
on Monday, the pair reports. Obama intends to return to the
uplifting rhetoric of the 2004 convention speech that catapulted
his political career. McCain will make no such shift and will
continue to pound away at Obama as a tax-happy liberal intent
on wealth spreading, they find.
The NYT fronts a shift in Bush administration strategy—or is it a
tactic?—in the Pakistani tribal region teeming with al-Qaida and
Taliban militants and sympathizers. In July, reports the Times,
Bush gave the approval for special-forces raids into Pakistan.
Facing fierce political resistance from the Pakistani government,
Bush has now reversed course and is curbing land raids.
Instead, the administration is relying on unmanned drones
operated by the CIA. There have been at least 18 predator
attacks since early August, compared with just five strikes in the
seven months prior.
The Post runs a front-page look at the FBI's anthrax case against
scientist Bruce E. Ivins, who took his own life. The FBI
desperately wants to convict Ivins in the court of public opinion.
But color TP unimpressed by what the bureau leaked to the Post.
Then again, what does TP know about anthrax science?
The LAT is talking kitchen-table politics of a different kind.
Already, at least 40 percent of voters in California have
requested that ballots be mailed to them. Many more requests are
expected before the request deadline of Tuesday—and the frontpage publicity won't hurt those numbers. One Californian
explains the motivation for mailing a vote in early: "Now I don't
have to pay attention to the flood of ads and last-minute attacks.
I can tune the election out." Good luck with that.
And the Philadelphia Phillies finally figured out a way to plate
runs in pounding the Tampa Bay Rays to take a three-games-toone lead: Keep runners out of scoring position and just knock the
ball out of the park.
today's papers
The Last Days
By David Sessions
Sunday, October 26, 2008, at 6:16 AM ET
The Los Angeles Times fills its lead slot with a look at the
presidential candidates' strategies for the last nine days on the
campaign trail. McCain plans to spend most of his time attacking
Obama's economic plan and warning of a Democratic
supermajority, while the Obama campaign is concerned
primarily with staving off overconfidence. The Washington Post
leads with a look at the increased scrutiny of credit card
donations given to the candidates through their Web sites.
Barack Obama's record-shattering $150 million campaign haul
has raised questions in both parties about the laxly overseen,
anonymous world of Internet campaign donations. The New
York Times leads with the slowing demand for American
products, which means thousands of Americans are losing their
jobs. Many of the United States' highest-profile corporations
have announced layoffs, and economists expect unemployment
numbers to exceed 200,000 when they are announced Nov. 7.
Barack Obama's "message of hope" will remain the same
through Nov. 4, the LAT reports, while John McCain is
sharpening the points of a "three-pronged" final attack that will
focus on Obama's tax plan, his limited experience, and the
excessive power the Democratic Party could wield if he is
elected. Both sides admit the outlook is bleak for McCain, and
the LAT reports that McCain's aides privately discuss his return
to the Senate. Even though Obama leads comfortably in several
states that McCain cannot afford to lose, his campaign is
concerned about "overconfidence." Obama campaign officials
cite the razor-thin margins by which many battleground states
were won in recent elections as caution that the race is still
anyone's game. A framed front-pager in the WP focuses on the
Republican Party's well-oiled get-out-the-vote machine in
Colorado (a must-win for McCain), which may be threatened by
Obama's impressively organized volunteers. Colorado
Republicans say their grassroots experience in the state should
give them an edge.
The WP's lead story reports that lawyers for both parties have
asked the Federal Election Commission to examine Internet
campaign donations, as the presidential campaigns have
"permitted donors using false names or stolen credit cards to
make contributions." Conservative bloggers first raised the issue
when they reported that "test" donations to the Obama campaign
under names like "Osama Bin Laden" were always accepted.
The Obama campaign says it makes strenuous efforts to flag
suspicious donations and points to such irregularities in both
candidates' donor records.
An article in the NYT follows two Hollywood directors who are
preparing to release R-rated comedies while hoping to somehow
escape the shadow of dirty-laughs-with-a-heart extraordinaire
Judd Apatow. It doesn't help Kevin Smith, director of Zack and
Miri Make a Porno, that his movie stars Seth Rogen, the bestknown face from Apatow's wildly popular films. Smith and
David Wain, director of the upcoming comedy Role Models,
both credit Apatow with reinvigorating the R-rated comedy
marketplace, and Smith says he is happy if moviegoers
mistakenly believe Apatow was a part of Zack and Miri.
The WP metro section reports that churches and other ministries
in the D.C. area are on "the front lines" of the economic crisis as
their requests for aid have soared in recent months. Requests at
charities operated by the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington
have increased by 25 percent, and houses of worship of several
faiths have seen a dramatic increase in calls. Churches are
responding creatively: One cut its sermon broadcasts on TV and
radio and decreased support to international missions to focus on
the 300 percent increase in requests for marriage counseling.
A sprawling front-page story kicks off a seven-part LAT series
on "Noir Los Angeles." Part 1 profiles the "Gangster Squad," an
extralegal group of LAPD officers formed in 1946 to fight
organized crime off the record. The squad was known in shady
circles for its gun-to-the-head interrogations and obsessive
eavesdropping on crime bosses like Mickey Cohen.
The WP "Book World" section reviews a psychological
biography of Bill Clinton, a "strange book" that reads like "the
work of someone who at times appears to be in the grips of a
schoolboy crush." The author, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins,
seems to approach Clinton with preconceived designs,
specifically in his attempt to diagnose Clinton with "hypomania"
(a psychological predisposition toward charm in which the
author has a significant professional interest).
The NYT goes in search of the real Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen,
American-girl twins with an aura of tabloid-worthy celebrity but
a murkily defined public identity. The identical (but fraternal
twin) sisters were first known as actors who shared a role on
Full House, but now they would rather be known as
entrepreneurs. They are co-presidents of a multibillion-dollar
entertainment company and manage several fashion lines that
carry their own designs. Mary Kate continues to act, starring in
the television show Weeds, while Ashley is fixated on creating
"a true American brand."
WP ombudsman Deborah Howell sums up a controversy-ridden
week at the paper involving two glaring photo errors (one
accidentally selected photo pictured Jack Valenti, who died last
year) and a slew of subscriber cancellations after the Post
endorsed Barack Obama.
A New Yorker who lost her Wall Street job well ahead of the
current situation pens a column in the NYT about finding relief in
her misfortune and, after a much-needed period of rest, feels
"energized, eager to start a new career, and open to possibility."
today's papers
World on Fire
By Lydia DePillis
Saturday, October 25, 2008, at 10:37 AM ET
All the papers lead with some take on the fiscal fiasco. The
Washington Post runs a banner headline heralding the spread of
the bailout to cover insurers, agreed to under pressure from the
struggling insurance industry. The New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, and Los Angeles Times lead with the international
dimensions of the crisis, as currencies plunge, stock markets
tumble, and traders look to Washington for even more help.
Hartford, Prudential, and MetLife have become the next entities
that are too big to fail, the WP reports, as the Bush
administration agreed to include them and dozens of regional
insurers in a bailout along with banks. In the first high-profile
example, the Treasury gave PNC Financial Services $7.7 billion
to buy Cleveland's National City. Meanwhile, the cost of saving
AIG is still going up, as the company has already burned
through most of the $123 billion in emergency loans it received
in the opening salvoes of the crisis. The Journal highlights how
this shows that the Treasury is becoming a piggy bank for ailing
industries more broadly as automakers also look out hopefully
for a lifeline (back in Weekend, the paper explains how they got
there in the first place).
Bad news flowed in from around the globe as markets in Europe
and Asia reported deep losses in what the WSJ called "a day
when many people around the world became convinced the
economy is in for a long recession." (The paper also declared
that the idea of the U.S. as the powerhouse of the international
economy is now "in tatters.") Japan was particularly gloomy,
with the Nikkei tanking 9 percent and titans like Sony and
Toyota finally showing signs of strain. Emerging economies
have also been hard-hit, with companies from Brazil to
Indonesia sagging badly, and leaders are begging the
International Monetary Fund to take on a greater role in
softening the blow. (First up: Iceland.) While the United States
pumps billions into its finance industry, European governments
have been less willing to swoop in to save their own, although
governments are considering action to calm the soaring yen and
dollar while salvaging the depressed euro, pound, peso, and
ruble.
The Dow dove only about 100 points Friday, but the LAT reports
that Goldman Sachs at least was advocating for another stimulus
package, and traders are waiting on expected interest-rate cuts
from the Fed to loosen up credit. Meanwhile, their wives are
having to reconcile themselves to the idea of a slightly less
lavish existence—even though bank salaries and bonuses have
so far not caught up with the news—and the rest of us hold yard
sales to raise extra cash.
In politics, the election has already begun, as early returns from
Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida show Barack Obama—
surprise!—racking up a heavy head start. That's a change from
previous years, the LAT reports, when Republicans were better
able to mobilize their key constituencies before Election Day;
this year, African Americans are voting early in much greater
numbers. The NYT explains how the McCain camp took its eye
off the ball in Florida, trailing Obama in registration numbers, a
mistake that is now coming home to roost as the new earlyvoting system takes effect. Meanwhile, Obama is already
picking his Cabinet, replacing the veepstakes as Washington's
new favorite parlor game. And things are also looking good for
Al Franken in Minnesota, according to the WP's front page,
leading incumbent Norm Coleman by six points in the latest
state poll.
The picture is not quite as gloomy for the GOP in statehouses,
where the party is looking to flip at least half of the 12 chambers
considered up for grabs.
The NYT takes an A-1 gander at what the U.S. is planning to do
with the 5,000 Iraqi prisoners still considered dangerous when it
hands over military operations to the Iraqi army. The 12,000
people still in detention is a decrease from last year's peak of
26,000, but releasing the rest gets harder with each one. The LAT
also fronts a look at allegations of misconduct at Guantanamo
Bay, where Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann is accused of bullying
cases to trial and using coerced evidence over prosecutors'
objections in an ambiguous legal space with fuzzy lines of
authority.
But move on to the sports section today—there's a World Series
going on!
war stories
High Risk, Limited Payoff
In Syria, a dangerous new escalation of the war on terror.
By Fred Kaplan
Thursday, October 30, 2008, at 5:59 PM ET
The Oct. 26 air raid in which U.S. special-operations pilots flew
two dozen Black Hawk helicopters across Iraq's border and
killed eight people on Syrian territory marks a new phase in the
Bush administration's war on terror—a phase rife with limited
payoffs and astonishingly high risks.
U.S. officials say the cross-border attack was aimed at, and
killed, a high-level al-Qaida agent known as Abu Ghadiyah, who
has long been smuggling jihadists and arms into western Iraq.
However, Syrian officials say the strikes killed civilians,
including a woman and children. They filed a complaint with the
U. N. Security Council, closed down the American School in
Damascus, and canceled their participation in the upcoming
regional conference on Iraqi security.
Even the Iraqi government has joined the Syrians in condemning
the airstrikes and is now insisting that a new Status of Forces
Agreement—the treaty that permits U.S. troops to remain in
Iraq—must include a clause forbidding those troops from using
Iraq as a base for attacking other countries.
Finally, at a time when some members of the Bush
administration have begun to see the merits of reaching out to
Syria—as an inducement to pry it away from Iran, sever its ties
with Hezbollah, stabilize Lebanon, and secure the borders of
Iraq—the air raid, a deliberate violation of Syrian sovereignty,
pushes those goals further out of reach.
The strikes have also enflamed the passions of the Syrian
people—thousands protested in the streets today—so that, if
President Bashir Assad should ever want to cooperate with
America, he might provoke still more protests, potentially a
radical uprising. (All the evidence suggests that Assad would
like to restore relations; his police are keeping the protesters
away from the U.S. Embassy, a sign that he wants to keep things
from getting out of hand.)
Certainly Iraq's porous borders are a problem, which foreign
jihadists have been exploiting for years now. However, earlier
this month, Gen. David Petraeus, the recently departed
commander of U.S. forces in Iraq (now commander of Central
Command), said that the number of these incursions has dropped
to just 20 a month, down from 120 per month a year ago. Iraqi
President Jalal Talabani also told President Bush just last month
that Syria was no longer much of a problem.
Still, that doesn't mean it's no problem, and the argument could
be made that, if a high-level target like Abu Ghadiyah shows up
on the scanners just a few miles across the border, we might
want to exploit the opportunity.
But that temptation at least should be weighed. On the one hand,
what is the tactical benefit of killing him and maybe taking out
this particular safe house—to what extent will the act shock or
foil the enemy, or cut down the flow of foreign fighters and
arms? On the other hand, what is the strategic cost of violating
international law, alienating the regional powers, and impeding a
political settlement of the war in Iraq?
The intelligence isn't in yet, but early indications are that the first
answer is "Not much" and the second is "Quite a lot."
Perhaps the raid could be justified if it were a one-time—or even
a very rare—operation. But it seems we will be seeing more of
these raids in Syria, Pakistan, and perhaps elsewhere.
(Meanwhile, the Pakistani government has also formally
protested the U.S. airstrikes in the frontier territories across the
border of Afghanistan.)
Eli Lake reports in the New Republic that President Bush signed
a decision in July allowing commanders on the ground to decide
whether to launch tactical attacks across borders. The attack on
Syria and the recent attacks on northwestern Pakistan—all taken
without the permission of the Syrian or Pakistani government—
are all of a piece.
One can understand the impulse behind this decision. If, say,
Osama Bin Laden were spotted just across the border, why waste
the time it would take to phone Washington for permission to
strike? He might get away. But this is a rare, and hypothetical,
example. It doesn't justify giving colonels or generals a broad
blank check to make the sort of decision—essentially,
committing an act of war—that should be made, and made very
carefully, by the commander in chief.
Another consideration here: Recent history shows that there are
other ways to deal with the threat of incursions from Syria.
In May 2007, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met for a
half-hour with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem
precisely to discuss border security. (The two were at a regional
conference; Rice approached him for a private face-to-face talk.)
In the weeks and months after Sept. 11, 2001, Syria had
cooperated extensively with the United States, providing some
of the most useful intelligence information about al-Qaida. Syria
ended this relationship in March 2003, when Bush invaded Iraq.
Relations deteriorated further in 2005 when Syria was
implicated in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime
Minister Rafiq Hariri, and in response, the United States
withdrew its ambassador.
At the 2007 meeting with Secretary Rice, Foreign Minister
Moallem said that Syria would like to resume cooperating with
Washington on security and intelligence, if Washington resumed
diplomatic relations—that is, if a U.S. ambassador were returned
to Damascus. The White House nixed the deal.
Later that year, Gen. Petraeus, increasingly frustrated with crossborder trafficking, wanted to go to Damascus to talk with
military officers about possible security measures. The White
House refused to let him go.
Bush and especially Vice President Dick Cheney were still
firmly wedded to the belief that deals should not be made with
dictators—or at least not with dictators who were not our
allies—on the grounds that even sitting down with them
legitimizes their regime.
At the time, whether covering for her superiors or speaking for
herself, Rice justified the refusal to make a deal by saying, "The
Syrians know what they have to do." Maybe they did, but they
didn't know what they would get in return. That's what
diplomacy is about. The Syrians got, and still get, many goodies
for their ties with Iran. To break away from that benefactor, they
need to know we'll supply them with goodies in exchange.
Israel is talking with Syria. Iraq is not only talking with Syria but
also joining Syria in condemning a U.S. action. What is the point
of our continued refusal?
If Rice or Petraeus had been allowed to take their talks further in
2007, last weekend's airstrike might not have been necessary.
Maybe the next president will reconsider the costs and benefits.
what's up, doc?
The Good News and Bad News About
MS
A miracle drug carries some serious risks.
By Sydney Spiesel
Friday, October 31, 2008, at 7:10 AM ET
Problem: Multiple sclerosis is a quite common and often
terrible disease that most frequently attacks young adults—
especially young women. There are two phases to MS—an early
one and a late one. The early phase, in which the disease waxes
and wanes, is caused when the body becomes allergic to its own
tissues—specifically, white matter located in the brain and spinal
cord. The inflammation caused by this allergy (which attacks the
cells that form a protective layer surrounding the long, cablelike
structures in nerve cells responsible for carrying electrical
signals) causes the early symptoms (like visual disturbances or
unsteadiness in walking) and primes the body for the second
phase, in which irreversible damage is done to nerve cells,
causing marked weakness, fatigue, loss of balance and
coordination, bladder and bowel problems, and even changes in
thinking and depression. There is a lot of evidence that if the
early phase is managed in ways that decrease symptoms, the late
phase, during which most of the irreversible damage happens,
can be delayed and perhaps even prevented.
An obvious approach, then, to treating early MS would make use
of medications that alter the body's immune response to decrease
auto-allergy. Indeed, some immunosuppressive medicines
already play an important role in the treatment of MS, but so far,
the results have not been as good as we'd like.
New research: An important new study gives us reason to be
optimistic about this approach. The University of Cambridge
researchers tested Campath-1H, an artificially produced human
antibody that was developed for use in a specialized cancer
treatment. Campath-1H inactivates some cells important for the
immune response in patients with early-phase MS. The study
compared this medication with another drug already in use to
treat MS, and the results were pretty striking. The benefits of the
experimental treatment compared with conventional treatment
were very, very impressive: After three years, the disease
progressed much more slowly and the disability associated with
MS actually decreased in patients who received the experimental
treatment, while patients getting the conventional medication
became increasingly disabled. Because the new treatment
lessened early-phase inflammation and symptoms, it would be
reasonable to expect to have considerable long-term benefits,
since it might delay the development of the late phase of the
disease, in which nerve cells are progressively damaged. (The
medication being tested has no effect at all once a patient
reaches this phase.)
Caveats: This drug, though both powerful and effective, isn't
likely to become part of mainstream treatment for MS. Campath1H can lead to very serious side effects. For example, 3 percent
(six of 223) of the patients on whom it was tested developed
ITP, an illness in which blood leaks through the walls of
damaged blood vessels. Some others developed auto-allergic
thyroid problems. There was one death among the patients who
developed ITP. Because of these risks, the study was closed
early, and it is unlikely that the drug (at least in its present form)
will be promoted for use in MS. But since it is already licensed
for use in cancer treatment, a few doctors are using it "off-label"
for patients with MS, despite the risks.
Conclusion: The mix of good news and bad news raises
agonizing personal decisions for patients and agonizing
professional decisions for doctors. How do we go about
balancing risks and benefits? I suspect that each of us would
have a different answer to this question. For some, the prospect
of advancing disability seems so terrible that they will risk the
dangers of serious and perhaps lethal side effects in the hope for
an improved outcome. Others might choose to avoid the
immediate possible dangers of this treatment in favor of a
longer-term risk of disability (and I should say that some
patients with MS do very, very well), with the hope that future
developments, perhaps drawing on this research study, will lead
to more effective but safer, newer treatments. How would you
choose?
sidebar
Return to article
Exactly why patients with MS become allergic to their own
brains and spinal-cord tissues is still unclear, but some clues
point to a process that begins with a viral infection, perhaps even
a common one. People who live in colder climates—far from the
equator in either direction—are at much greater risk for
developing MS than those in tropical countries. The differences
in risk are enormous: People who live in one location might have
a 75-times greater risk of developing multiple sclerosis. If they
move when young, the risk of MS comes to resemble that of the
people in the new location. However, if people migrate after age
15, they carry with them an MS risk—high or low—that
corresponds to their place of origin. I have always interpreted
this pattern to suggest that early exposure to a virus common in
the tropics causes an infection in children that is harmless but
produces lifelong immunity. On the other hand, people missing
this early pattern of infection and immunity would be susceptible
to an infection later in life—and these later-occurring infections
might start the process that leads to MS.
This is not as far-fetched as it might seem. Poliovirus (which has
no relationship to MS) has a similar epidemiological pattern.
Very young children in tropical countries, perhaps with inferior
sanitation, almost never suffer neurological damage when
infected with poliovirus—and in that setting, almost all children
do become infected early. However, at least before the advent of
the vaccine, children in northern cities with good sanitation, who
probably missed the early, harmless, polio infection that would
have given them immunity, were instead at risk for the paralytic
form of the disease if they acquired an infection with this virus
later in life.
xx factor xxtra
A Bequest of One's Own
sagging IRAs and deflated real estate values, frankly, a family
bequest would be more than welcome right around now. We
eschewed princess fantasies for personal accomplishments, but
as we are eased out of the workforce, it would be nice to rely on
the old man's money.
"Intergenerational wealth transfer," however, is no longer a
significant portion of the retirement equation. Philanthropy,
longevity, and serial marriages begetting multiple heirs have
eroded patriarchal estates. For nonagenarian and octogenarian
parents, a positive net worth is less imperative than a long-term
care plan. Even when substantial holdings remain for heirs, their
bestowal isn't always benevolent.
In midlife, a woman may long for her father's money.
By Bonnie Goldstein
Monday, October 27, 2008, at 6:18 AM ET
When I was a little girl in the 1950s, my mother mistakenly
believed she was an heiress. We lived modestly, but my mother's
father, Poppa Jack, had founded and built a successful company
that manufactured high-school-athletic letter jackets. When his
heart gave out suddenly at 56, an estate attorney informed my
mother, her two sisters, and their younger brother (then all in
their 20s) that their prosperous father had left substantial riches
to be divided among them. The siblings—referred to in the
family as "the kids" for the next 40 years—would get their
"inheritance" at the expiration of a lifelong trust to support their
mother, my Grandma Rose. With the piñata of a future fortune
hanging out of reach, my mother, inheriting her father's
entrepreneurial spirit, opened a dress shop.
Financially comfortable, Grandma Rose married the estate
attorney, Fred, and they lived happily into their ninth decades.
The coat company for years churned out orders for leathersleeved jackets in every combination of high-school colors. My
step-grandfather, who generally kept a dignified veil over
questions about Poppa's estate, once told me the factory was
intended mainly as a source of employment for family members.
Indeed, copious cousins of questionable competence found jobs
there. In the long run, dynastic socialism was bad for business.
Poppa Jack's well-intentioned legacy ran out of gas and into
receivership just as his daughter became a grandmother herself.
For today's mid-life matrons, inheriting wealth has gotten no
easier. We came of age in the 1970s, and unlike many of our
mothers, tossed aside paternalism to pursue intellectually
satisfying careers. Feminists of my era started businesses,
bought property, and invested in the market. We deciphered our
own 401(k) plans. But gender independence notwithstanding, we
accumulated less for retirement than men.
Now we middle-class, middle-aged women are, at times,
struggling to afford our advancing maturity. Considering today's
Economists say there are four bequest motives: accidental,
egoistic, strategic, or altruistic. People leave money to others
because they are bighearted, manipulative, self-centered, or
disorganized. Endowing a middle-aged offspring's
undercapitalized retirement is not on the list. As my
contemporaries take, well, stock, I hear frequent tales of affluent
fathers lacing their legacies with dissension, hurt feelings, or
misunderstanding by passing on assets in an ungenerous or
disorderly manner. Unsettlingly, their daughters find themselves
unraveling wills, insurance policies, and asset preservation plans
rather than simply mourning their parents.
In one case, two unmarried sisters of retirement age, an artist and
a scientist, whom I've known and adored separately for decades,
now maintain a chilly animosity toward each other. Their strongwilled father's intricate but secretive financial deals kept him
actively engaged until he died at 99. A complicated man, he told
each daughter different secrets. While teams of accountants now
painstakingly unravel his byzantine Bleak House financial
portfolio, my friends communicate exclusively and contentiously
through opposing probate attorneys.
Some progenitors can't bear to part with their estates even in
death. A woman from an illustrious family, whose originality
and candor I've always admired, had to take her addled elderly
father to court when he converted the combined fortunes of two
distinguished bloodlines into a perpetual care vehicle for his
garden.
Then there are legatees with warring agendas. A photographer
friend and her sister have been united in disregard for their
stepmother since their father died three years ago. Their own
mother passed away when they were quite young. During the
intervening years, the daughters frequently discussed the family
weal with their dad, a real estate baron. The conversation
continued after the sisters grew up and the magnate remarried. A
cordial relationship among all, paired with prenuptial and
financial agreements, reassured the daughters their legacy was
secure. The conflicted father did leave his daughters abundant
property, but, not so fast—his very healthy second wife can live
in his mansion and off the other assets for the foreseeable future.
In the meantime, the widow says the daughters should get lost.
They can collect daddy's money on the day she dies.
Without an inheritance in hand, my mother practiced
independence. To others expecting a patrimony, I recommend
the same. For our part, my husband and I have some
investments, but our practical retirement plan is: Keep working.
In six years we'll be eligible for Medicare and our small portion
of Social Security. Apart from that, the biggest bump in our
financial future will be inheriting one-quarter ownership in my
mother's shag-carpeted condo.
Theoretically, a great fortune will go to the heirs of my boomer
cohort. Economic models project that by the middle of this
century, at least $41 trillion will transfer to estates and bequests
for today's infants and teenagers. Just to be safe, however, the
kids should develop some skills.
I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that my husband and I won't add
much to the $41 trillion handoff. Not to shortchange our two
kids, but they should not expect an inheritance from us. We
instead direct them to self-reliant futures built on luck,
determination, and enterprise. We've funded their educations and
are glad to help, within reason, on housing. Our 20-year-old son
in San Francisco, in his second year as a college sophomore, will
inescapably be on our rent and tuition payroll for some time.
Though I am confident he will one day be independent, he asked
us recently, in all earnestness: "What is the deal with taxes and
insurance?"
Our single daughter, 16 years ahead of her brother, is a NYC
documentary filmmaker. A few years ago, we loaned her the
down payment for her Chelsea co-op apartment. The loan will
undoubtedly outlive the lenders as her mortgage endures, but the
cozy fourth-floor walk-up forms the beginnings of her estate.
What becomes of it from here is entirely up to her.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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