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Slate.com
Table of Contents
explainer
Dead by Election Day
family
ad report card
Lost Cause
The Pill Killer
fighting words
Advanced Search
Disregarding Henry
books
foreigners
Cheney's Handiwork
A Temporary Thaw
books
foreigners
Is Humanitarian Intervention Dead?
The Black President
chatterbox
human nature
Sarah Palin's College Daze
Undead Babies
chatterbox
human nature
GOP, RIP?
Debate Bait
corrections
jurisprudence
Corrections
Where the Trail Leads Next
culturebox
jurisprudence
Nobel Gas
The Downsides of Diversity
culturebox
low concept
The Bluest Eyes
McCain's Next Stunt
day to day
low concept
To Choke or Not To Choke?
The Poetry of Sarah Palin
dear prudence
map the candidates
To Abort or Not To Abort?
Recovering
do the math
medical examiner
We're Down $700 Billion. Let's Go Double or Nothing!
Still in the Lyme Light
drink
moneybox
Drinking Away Your Sorrows
How the Bailout Is Like a Hedge Fund.
dvd extras
moneybox
Your DVD Player Sleeps With the Fishes
Washington to New York: Drop Dead
election scorecard
moneybox
Turning Blue
The Happy Talk Express
explainer
movies
Who Moderates the Moderators?
All Aboard the Crazy Train
explainer
movies
You Say Depression, I Say Recession
Shyness Is Nice
explainer
obit
What Makes a Lawyer "Special"?
Paul Newman
explainer
other magazines
Does Congress Always Take Off for Rosh Hashanah?
Virginia Slim
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
1/105
poem
the browser
"The Crying Hill"
Blogging for Dollars
politics
the chat room
Track the Presidential Polls on Your iPhone
Up for Debate
politics
the dilettante
Champ vs. Doggone
The Paul Newman Scene I Can't Get Out of My Head
politics
the dismal science
The Fact-Free Debate
You've Just Been Offered a Great New Job in Charlotte!
politics
the good word
Tie Goes to Obama
Diagramming Sarah
press box
the good word
Don't Blame Gwen Ifill If the Veep Debate Sucks
What Kind of Accent Does Sarah Palin Have?
Schoolhouse Rock
the green lantern
Replication
Should We Dispose of Disposals?
Science
today's business press
Sex Dramedy
Markets Pray House Can Deliver
shopping
today's papers
Home Slice
A League of Their Own
slate v
today's papers
From the Conventions to the First Debate in Three Minutes
Upping the Ante
slate v
today's papers
Dear Prudence: Who's Your Daddy?
Take the Bill and Run
sports nut
today's papers
Cocktail Chatter: Baseball Playoffs Edition
Failure To Lead
swingers
today's papers
Chinese Democracy
Compromising Positions
swingers
today's papers
So You Think You're a Swing Voter?
Critical Mass
swingers
today's papers
Don't Take It for Granite
Bombs Over a Bailout
technology
today's pictures
Everything Means Nothing to Me
Today's Pictures
technology
twitterbox
I'm a PC, and I'm Worried About My Image
Gwen Ifill Lost This Debate
television
war stories
The End of Star Wars
She Still Knows Nothing
television
war stories
Subprime Time
Obama Wins on Foreign Policy
The Big Sort
what's up, doc?
House Members Aren't Supposed To Just "Vote Their Districts"
Burnout U
2/105
xx factor xxtra
The Un-Hillary
ad report card
The Pill Killer
talking solemnly about the pill's pros. The commercial ditches
the usual side-effects voice-over, instead enlisting a lovely
brunette to deliver lines like, "DRSP is a different kind of
hormone that may increase potassium, so you shouldn't take Yaz
if you have liver, kidney, or adrenal disease. …" It doesn't quite
click—why would this woman warn her twentysomething
friends that women over 35 shouldn't smoke on the pill? And
why are her friends nodding intently instead of downing their
drinks while their eyes glaze over?
Can a new ad make a contraceptive vaginal insert seem cool?
By Torie Bosch
Monday, September 29, 2008, at 6:50 AM ET
The Spot: "Tired of your old birth-control routine?" a voiceover asks. Synchronized swimmers ring the edge of a round
pool, moving in unison and chanting the days of the week in
turn. They let out sighs of frustration after each repetition,
exhausted by the tedium. "Maybe it's time to break free from the
pack with NuvaRing," the announcer suggests. One swimmer
jumps out of the pool, shakes her hair out of her bathing cap,
and tears off part of her suit, turning her modest one-piece into a
sexy bikini. She lounges beneath an umbrella while the other
swimmers keep at it, then heads to the hot tub with some
girlfriends as the voice-over chatters about blood clots. "Say
good-bye to the old song-and-dance and hello to NuvaRing," the
announcer concludes. (Click here to watch the ad.)
The genius of this ad is that it makes something as simple as
swallowing a pill once a day seem arduous, old-fashioned, and
quaint. The spot plugs NuvaRing, a contraceptive vaginal insert.
Instead of taking a pill daily, you wear the NuvaRing—which
uses hormones similar to those in the pill—for three weeks, take
a week off, and then insert a fresh ring. No longer will you have
to take time out of your busy schedule—or your afternoons
hanging poolside—to pop a pill, the ad suggests.
NuvaRing's ad isn't the first to present the traditional pill as a
tiny, pastel-colored ball and chain. One birth-control patch,
Ortho Evra, used the slogan "On your body, off your mind." But
the synchronized swimming spot, which uses playful imagery
and a catchy days-of-the-week chant in place of a heavy-handed
slogan, is insidiously persuasive. Although taking the pill is not
at all hard, this ad had me briefly pondering making the switch
myself.
Part of the spot's appeal lies in its light tone. The makers of
condoms and Viagra have long used tongue-in-cheek humor to
make the hard sell. But women's birth-control spots have gone
the earnest route, showing women constantly preoccupied
with—and burdened by—the pill. An ad for a pill called Yaz
blasts a peppy cover of the '80s Scandal hit "Goodbye to You"
and promises that Yaz will relieve menstruating women of
fatigue, cramps, irritability, and acne. Another Sex and the Cityinspired Yaz spot shows sophisticated, cocktail-sipping women
The NuvaRing commercial, by contrast, uses lighthearted details
to suggest that birth control can be a no-sweat part of your life. It
shrewdly portrays the pill as an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy,
something out of your mother's or even grandmother's youth,
like a one-piece bathing costume, a swim cap, even
synchronized swimming, an activity that prizes conformity over
individualism. In an animated version of the ad, the pool deck
even appears to be made of checkered linoleum, like a '50s-era
kitchen. The NuvaRing, on the other hand, is the choice of the
freedom-loving, loose-haired, midriff-bearing, sunglasseswearing girl who flirts with the waiter proffering drinks and has
her own style and idea of fun.
Of course, the commercial has a point that it's important—and
sometimes difficult—to take traditional birth control pills with
clockwork regularity. Women risk getting pregnant if they fail to
follow the pill's rather stringent instructions. It's not hard to skip
a day or two, fail to take it at the same time every day, forget to
start a new pack, or neglect to use backup contraception when
taking antibiotics or other medications that can reduce the pill's
efficacy. Planned Parenthood's Web site notes that taken as
directed, fewer "than 1 out of 100 women will get pregnant each
year," while "[a]bout 8 out of 100 women will get pregnant each
year if they don't always take the pill each day as directed."
What the NuvaRing ad fails to acknowledge is that using the
ring properly may not be easy, either. When you take the pill
daily, you get into a rhythm and associate it with, say, brushing
your teeth or going to bed. Remembering to remove the
NuvaRing every third week and replace it every fourth seems
more difficult. Are users supposed to associate these changes
with the appearance of the full moon? The arrival of the new
Real Simple? Writing a check for the cell phone bill? Setting an
alarm in Outlook might work, but it's not always convenient to
change your vaginal ring when you happen to be checking your
e-mail. NuvaRing's manufacturer does nod to this problem on its
Web site, offering small timers for users to carry around with
them. But how are you supposed to remember to check the
timer?
Grade: B+ The ad's smartest move is glossing over the ick
factor of the contraceptive device itself. It doesn't mention how
you insert it, how it affects your period, whether it can fall out,
and what to do if that happens. Those details are left to the Web
site and your doctor. One fairly alarming warning: "NuvaRing®
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can slip out while you're removing a tampon, straining during a
bowel movement, or during intercourse." Maybe there's
something to be said for sticking with the old-fashioned.
Advanced Search
Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET
books
Cheney's Handiwork
Unveiling his methods, and some of his motives.
By David Greenberg
Friday, October 3, 2008, at 10:42 AM ET
For most of American history, no one would have dreamed of
writing a vice-presidential biography. From 1804, when the 12th
Amendment established our current method of choosing VPs,
until 1901, when William McKinley's assassination placed
Theodore Roosevelt in the Oval Office, the No. 2 position was a
steppingstone to oblivion. T.R., elected in his own right in 1904,
broke the pattern. Calvin Coolidge followed suit. By the mid1970s, VPs were routinely going on to become their parties'
standard-bearers. Walter Mondale and Al Gore epitomized the
vice president in the era of big government—forces to be
reckoned with, armed with experience to match the president's
and portfolios and constituencies all their own.
Dick Cheney is something else altogether. As Barton Gellman
astutely appreciates in Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, that
is due not to the warlock-like powers some have ascribed to him
but to the situation in which he has served. Both Mondale and
Gore worked for detail men, presidents who would never let
underlings set their most important policies. Cheney has served a
man who very much likes to delegate—and to delegate to
Cheney in particular. Gellman also leaves no doubt that what
influence Cheney has had—which has been plenty—he has
enjoyed thanks to Bush's indulgence. "The president made it
clear from the outset that the vice president is welcome at every
table and at every meeting," White House Chief of Staff Josh
Bolten tells Gellman. And when, after the 2006 election,
Cheney's control of the foreign policy agenda weakened, it was,
Gellman explains, "because the president wanted to try a new
direction."
Perhaps a bit mischievously, Gellman goes out of his way to
shower praise on the vice president. In contrast to the
unreflective, superficial Bush, Cheney is routinely described
with awe and reverence by many of Gellman's sources—
judgments that Gellman mostly lets stand without challenge. Old
colleagues and new visitors to Cheney's office alike paint the
vice president as a quick study, exhibiting a command of policy
minutiae, an iron will, and a finely honed strategic sense. In an
administration that has become infamous for its incompetence,
Cheney is the man who knows what he's doing.
But so does Gellman. His praise for Cheney's strengths as an
infighter and policymaker, though no doubt sincere, are also a
backhanded form of damnation, since they complete his portrait
of a stealthily ruthless, hypercompetent majordomo. There can
be no doubt after reading this fair but quietly withering book that
Cheney's role in shaping Bush's presidency—governing from the
right, not the center; skirting procedures to achieve his goals on
taxes and the environment; and above all setting an extremist
course in the war against al-Qaida—has been overwhelmingly
malign.
The basic facts of Gellman's story are not new. Like many
regular newspaper readers, I had known for a long time that
Cheney had supported the administration's most legally
questionable policies, from the warrantless domestic wiretapping
to the treatment of military prisoners. But I don't think I'd
realized until reading Angler that so many of these policies
originated with Cheney and his right-hand man David
Addington (who, it should be noted, is as central a character to
this book as the vice president himself). And while Gellman is
hardly the first to make much of Cheney's remark after Sept. 11
that "We also have to work … the dark side," I don't think that
any other journalist, with the exception of The New Yorker's Jane
Mayer, has assembled so concisely and carefully the portrait of a
man determined after 9/11 to use any means necessary—and
some unnecessary—to go after Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida
or anyone who might have anything to do with them.
Moreover, Gellman also exposes at least one case in which the
vice president seems to have put his personal agenda ahead of
his patron's. In the effort to pass the 2003 tax bill—Bush's
second big round of cuts for the wealthy—the president had
previously decided against deeper, politically unpopular
reductions in the capital-gains tax. But according to Gellman,
Cheney furtively worked behind Bush's back to help House
Republicans replace the administration bill with an alternative
that included the controversial cuts—a fact that "hardly anyone,
in or out of the White House, knew," Gellman reports. Cheney
himself ultimately cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to get
it passed.
Little stories like this one, piled one after the next, form a picture
of a man determined to use to the fullest all the power that Bush
would allow him and then some. In keeping with other accounts,
Cheney emerges here as a canny survivor of the Nixon and Ford
White Houses, who has for decades longed to restore to the
presidency the sorts of unchecked powers, at home and abroad,
that Congress, the courts, and the public had worked to curtail
after Watergate. And his decision at the start to rule out
succeeding his boss ironically served the cause: It was a choice
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that buffered him from the political consequences of the policies
he has worked to implement.
As much as anyone, Cheney is responsible for the Nixonian
miasma that enveloped the Bush White House from early on.
Yet journalism being only the first draft of history, key questions
about Cheney's White House operations remain. Some concern
the outcomes of his handiwork: For example, after a strangerthan-fiction showdown with Cheney's allies at the hospital
bedside of Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI chief Robert
Mueller persuaded Bush to revise his illegal wiretapping
program. But Gellman doesn't reveal who really won the battle,
resorting to vague language. "Over the next weeks and months,
the program changed. It stopped doing some things, and it did
other things differently."
Gellman points out their many differences—in their appetite for
studying detail, in their personal styles, in their political
judgments. Yet they share a supreme confidence that their goals
are correct, a willingness to bend or break rules to reach them,
and an inflexibility about changing course. Despite the claim of
White House flacks that Bush likes to hear clashing opinions,
Gellman notes, he actually prefers consensus and finality.
According to a Cheney aide, the president liked to be told "your
senior advisers believe X"—and then to stick with that decision.
It was a message, when the crises of the Bush years came, that
Dick Cheney rarely failed to deliver.
books
Is Humanitarian Intervention Dead?
We also crave to know more about Cheney's motives. Gellman
suggests that Cheney favored war with Iraq not because he
feared Saddam Hussein's intentions, but because he wanted to
knock off an easy target and send a message around the Middle
East. I don't find the argument persuasive—I'm inclined to think
Ron Suskind had it right in emphasizing Cheney's "1 percent
doctrine," the idea that after 9/11 the government had to take
even minute probabilities of danger much more seriously—but
without documents or more inside reporting from Cheney's inner
circle, we can't know for sure. Indeed, Gellman elsewhere writes
that Cheney considered the "nexus" of terrorism, rogue states,
and deadly weapons to be his paramount concern—suggesting a
genuine fear of a nuclear-armed rogue dictator, not the reckless
gamble of using a war to test a theory.
Most important, with so much attention given to the infighting
among second-tier administration officials like Addington, Jack
Goldsmith, and James Comey, the president is offstage too much
of the time, and Cheney himself often lurks only in the shadows.
So we remain curious about Cheney's relationship to Bush. How
much did the president know about Cheney's active role in
fashioning and refashioning policies? Did he approve? Was he
aware of the bureaucratic maneuvers that, for example, gave
Addington influence over the nominally more senior White
House Counsel Alberto Gonzales? Why did the president—as
Gellman reports—draw from the short list that Cheney had made
of acceptable Supreme Court justices in picking John Roberts,
only then to depart from it in nominating Harriet Miers, and then
return to it for the choice of Sam Alito? And how did Cheney
view Bush in all of this—with respect, affection, or disdain?
None of this is to denigrate Gellman's reporting, since it would
take a combination of Lincoln Steffens, Joe Alsop, and Bob
Woodward to crack the secretive bond between the nation's two
most powerful men, neither of whom has much fondness for the
news media. But we can speculate. Gellman's portrait suggests
that Bush was all too happy to defer to Cheney on the defining
issues of his presidency, for the two men usually saw eye to eye.
History offers some sobering lessons.
By Samantha Power
Remember "humanitarian intervention"? The phrase described
military intervention in sovereign states to prevent civilians from
being murdered en masse. Before reading Gary Bass' vivid new
exploration of the historical roots of modern-day humanitarian
intervention, Freedom's Battle, I had thought that the practice of
humanitarian intervention might be marked with a tombstone
"Born 1991, northern Iraq—Died 2003, Iraq." But Bass, with
whom I often discussed this issue in the 1990s, shows that
debates over rescuing imperiled civilians date back to the 19th
century. It was then that the British dispatched a fleet to Greece
to prevent Turkish atrocities against Greek rebels and civilians,
the French occupied Syria to rescue imperiled Christian
minorities (a British fleet stood at the ready offshore), and the
British nearly invaded the Ottoman Empire to halt the
"Bulgarian Horrors" in 1876.
"Humanitarian intervention" is a problematic phrase for the
obvious reason that "intervention," which in Bosnia (1995) and
Kosovo (1999) meant bombing, is a fundamentally unhumanitarian act. The word intervention is also unhelpful
because it means a range of different things to different people.
Some use the word to signal the deployment of military forces.
Many others (including me) see intervention as lying on a
continuum—with mediation, diplomatic denunciation, travel
bans, asset freezes, arms embargoes, and the deployment of
consensual peacekeepers (as in East Timor in 1999) understood
as often being the wisest responses to atrocities. Given their
risks, war and occupation seem advisable only in rare
circumstances where the risks of using other tools are even
greater. (In my view this consequentialist test was passed in
Bosnia and flunked in the run-up to the 2003 war in Iraq.) But
one thing is certain: A decadelong mainstream debate over
humanitarian intervention ground to an abrupt halt in the wake
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of the Bush administration's disastrous invasion of Iraq. In 2008
the governments of Burma, Sudan, and Zimbabwe can sleep
easy knowing that, while they might be criticized for their
brutality, they will not be stopped.
Bass, a humanitarian hawk, rebuts the notion that civilian
suffering only recently assumed an influential role in world
affairs. He tells colorful tales of popular human rights and
humanitarian campaigns in the 19th century, unearthing a cast of
familiar personalities who played unheralded roles as social
activists. Lord Byron met his death in Greece in 1824 attempting
to bring financial relief to the Greek rebels. He was joined in the
"philhellene" cause by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, economist
David Ricardo, and French novelist Victor Hugo. The
philhellene movement convened public meetings, mobilized
press coverage, and lobbied, while also buying weapons and
outfitting troops. And it eventually succeeded in pressuring the
British government to send a squadron to the region, which
attacked and sunk most of the Ottoman fleet. In delving into this
and other cases, Bass shows how "freedom at home can help
promote freedom abroad." The demise of censorship and the
explosion in news circulation helped fuel popular movements
aimed at combating massacres abroad. Indeed, Bass' study
foreshadows Canadian Gen. Romeo Dallaire's observation that,
during the Rwanda genocide in 1994, "a reporter with a line to
the West was worth a battalion on the ground."
As he did in his last book, Stay the Hand of Vengeance, a
riveting history of war crimes trials, Bass moves convincingly
from the present to the past, drawing parallels where they exist
but rarely stretching analogies too far. I found it surprising to see
how little the practice and critique of humanitarian intervention
have changed in more than a century. One can draw a few
general lessons from then and now. First, states that intervene
militarily to stop massacres almost always do so in response to
popular outrage. Governments are guided primarily by national
security and economic concerns, and large-scale suffering tends
to register only when powerful domestic political constituencies
force it onto the agenda. For instance, William Gladstone got
under the skin of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli only
when his pamphlet, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the
East, took Great Britain by storm. Unfortunately, policies that
are reactive to popular sentiment are often ill-conceived and
inattentive to complexities. (The philhellenes overlooked
atrocities carried out by Greek rebels, focusing only on those
committed by Turks; the French were biased toward the
Maronites, seeing them as blameless in the violence against
Syrian Druzes.) Often the outsiders' response is aimed less at
solving the problem at hand than at appeasing domestic unrest.
Second, countries that act militarily on humanitarian grounds
never do so consistently. When Britain stood poised to intervene
over Turkish atrocities against Greeks in 1822, one Ottoman
minister snapped: "Why do not the Christian Sovereigns
interfere to prevent the Emperor of Russia from sending his
subjects into Siberia? Because they know very well what answer
they would receive! Thus there is one law of humanity for
Turkey and another for Russia!" The hypocrisy of interveners
takes two forms: lateral and historical. Lateral hypocrites
denounce human rights abuses in one region but ignore them in
another. Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the
very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant
intervention elsewhere.
Yet those who support intervention on moral grounds are often
quick to hail their own virtue. John Stuart Mill thought so highly
of the British nobility of purpose that he said such unselfishness
was "a novelty in the world; so much so … that many are unable
to believe it when they see it." In sending French forces to Syria,
Napoleon III issued an open letter denouncing the "pitiful
jealousies and unfounded distrust of those who suggested that
any interests except those of humanity had induced him to send
troops to Syria." In fact, countries that intervene militarily rarely
do so out of pure altruism. The French deployed forces to Syria
partly because of disgust over the massacres of Maronites, but
also because doing so might solidify Napoleon III's influence in
the region and win over Catholic voters at home. The Russians
intervened in the Ottoman Empire in the hopes of gaining
control of water ports. Bass quotes from All the King's Men
when Willie Stark lectures pure Adam Stanton on doing good:
"You got to make it, Doc. If you want it. And you got to make it
out of badness. Badness. … And you know why? Because there
isn't anything else to make it out of."
But how sustainable is this in the 21st century? The Bush
administration is hardly convincing when it endorses waterboarding one day and calls for peacekeepers to be sent to halt
genocide the next. This century's debates over humanitarian
intervention occur in a globalized world where a country's
policies in one place are visible elsewhere, and in a polarized
world where a country's lack of credibility or legitimacy
undermines its ability to draw allies to its side. Understanding
the 19th-century cases, Bass writes, "should contribute to a more
humble, sober version of the practice in the future."
Historically informed caution certainly seems the right antidote
to Bush-era recklessness. An ethnic, national, or religious group
must be in immediate danger of being massacred on a large
scale; a credible multilateral body must support the intervention.
The countries intervening must forswear up front the pursuit of
commercial or strategic interests in the region. They must
commit to remaining for a finite period and in numbers befitting
their limited mandates (though, as Bass notes, it's important to
be careful not to allow the killers to wait out the intervention and
to deploy a force sizable enough to protect civilians). Finally, the
countries entering a foreign land must have done so on the basis
of the good-faith calculation that the benefits of such action
would outweigh the costs—to the victims, the region, and the
intervening parties.
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While instituting such requirements should reduce the risks of
cynical or counterproductive interventions, the conditions are in
fact so stringent that it is not obvious how or when, in today's
world, such conditions might be met. Countries are hardly
rushing to contribute troops to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in
Darfur. And since China and Russia frown on external
interferences that aren't of their own making, multilateral
consensus is likely to be elusive. On this score, Henry Kissinger
seems increasingly correct that "a doctrine of common
intervention can furnish a more useful tool to frustrate action
than the doctrine of non-interference."
History is laden with belligerent leaders using humanitarian
rhetoric to mask geopolitical aims. History also shows how often
ill-informed moralism has led to foreign entanglements that do
more harm than good. But history shows the costs, too—in
Rwanda and today in Darfur—of failing to prevent mass murder.
The fate of future atrocity victims may turn on whether it is
possible to find a path between blinding zeal and paralyzing
perfectionism.
chatterbox
Sarah Palin's College Daze
Why did she attend five different colleges?
By Timothy Noah
Wednesday, October 1, 2008, at 6:51 PM ET
Sarah Palin's performance in her CBS News interviews has been
so poor that one can't avoid speculating about the depth of her
ignorance. As I noted earlier, the Republican vice-presidential
nominee can't be faulted for fumbling Charlie Gibson's pompous
question about the Bush Doctrine in her ABC News interview,
because there's no consensus about what the "Bush Doctrine"
even is. (Click here and here to read essays by Charles
Krauthammer that provide two contradictory definitions—
neither of them Gibson's.) But Palin's befuddled nonanswers to
Katie Couric's questions (click here, here, here, here, and here)
raise too many questions. Was she really unsure about the
meaning or proper pronunciation of the word caricature? Had
she truly failed to notice that John McCain jumped down Barack
Obama's throat when Obama publicly proposed attacking alQaida in Pakistan's ungoverned tribal regions? Why couldn't she
name a single newspaper or magazine that she read on a regular
basis before being tapped for the national ticket? Why couldn't
she name a single Supreme Court decision she disagreed with
apart from Roe v. Wade?* In an earlier (2007) interview with
Charlie Rose on PBS, why did Palin, after mentioning C.S.
Lewis ("very, very deep") as a favorite author, go on to cite
George Sheehan, a onetime columnist for Runner's World? You
can shrug off any one of these questions as unfair, but together
they merge into one rude but necessary query: What does Palin
know (besides, that is, how to play basketball and the flute)?
Tangible evidence of whatever data populate Palin's cranium is
hard to find. In Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's
Political Establishment Upside Down, Kaylene Johnson reports
that Palin started devouring newspapers while still in elementary
school. "She read the paper from the very top left hand corner to
the bottom right corner to the very last page," Palin's sister
Molly tells Johnson. "She didn't just read it—she knew every
word she had read and analyzed it." What stories in particular?
Johnson doesn't offer any examples. We learn, too, that a juniorhigh schoolmate who was a year ahead often sought Palin's
assistance in writing book reports. "She was such a bookworm,"
this Palin friend tells Johnson. "Whenever I was assigned to read
a book, she'd already read it." Such as? Again, Johnson doesn't
say.
As the daughter of a schoolteacher and coach, Palin never
doubted she would go to college. But here the evidence of
Palin's thirst for knowledge grows even more elusive. Palin's
college career is so checkered that her own press spokesperson
initially had trouble getting straight whether, during a period of
five years, Palin attended four colleges (wrong) or five (correct).
Palin made the circuit of three of these colleges with her highschool basketball teammate Kim "Tillie" Ketchum. In describing
the two girls' joint pursuit of higher education, Johnson makes it
sound like a trip to the ladies' room.
First, Palin and Ketchum (and two other high-school friends)
lighted on the University of Hawaii-Hilo. Drawn by the promise
of warmth and sunshine, the four girls quickly learned that Hilo
was, in fact, quite rainy and immediately either transferred out or
declined to register. (The school has no record Palin ever
enrolled.)
Next stop: Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu, where it was
sunnier and where an aunt of Palin's lived nearby. Palin enrolled
in the business administration program. Two of the four girls got
homesick and returned to Alaska, but Palin and Ketchum stayed,
renting an apartment one block from the ocean in Waikiki. By
the end of freshman year, Palin and Ketchum decided they'd
grown tired of this hard-won sunshine and arranged to transfer
out.
Next stop: North Idaho College in Coeur d'Alene. (Palin was
born in Idaho.) Here, Johnson writes, they "immersed
themselves in a more traditional college life" and lived in a coed
dorm. According to Ketchum, Palin, who enrolled as a general
studies major, remained interested primarily in sports, but Palin
spent a semester working in a TV production studio. This past
June, North Idaho College's Alumni Association named Alaska
Gov. Sarah Palin a distinguished alumna and invited her to give
the commencement address in 2009. But Palin attended the
school for only one year—a spokeswoman for the college told
7/105
the Associated Press, "We were not able to track down club
affiliations or anything"—before departing. This time, Ketchum
stayed put.
Next stop: the University of Idaho in Moscow, where today a
leadership award is named for Palin. According to Johnson,
Palin transferred here "to continue her studies in journalism and
political science." (Among Palin's journalism classes, Couric
might be surprised to learn, was "Interviewing.") But it seems
likelier that Palin transferred to be nearer to her brother Chuck,
who played running back for the school's football team. Palin
didn't write for the school newspaper—a friend recalls she was
more interested in broadcast journalism—and her academic
adviser, Roy Atwood, does not appear to remember her. After
one year, Palin decided to take some time off.
Next stop: Matanuska-Susitna Community College in Palmer,
Alaska, not far from Palin's hometown of Wasilla. This was
apparently to be near her high-school boyfriend (and future
husband) Todd Palin. Johnson doesn't bother to mention this
academic sojourn in her book. Palin took classes here for one
semester.
Next stop: Back to the University of Idaho for three more
semesters. Palin graduated in spring 1987 with a journalism
degree.
There's no evidence that Palin encountered any academic
difficulties in any of these places—indeed, Ketchum told
Johnson that she and Palin got "straight A's" at Hawaii Pacific
University—but one can't help wondering, in the absence of
contrary evidence, whether this rolling stone ever found the time
to accumulate much moss. That same question has been raised
about Palin's lightning-quick rise in politics. In the Oct. 1
Christian Science Monitor, Andrew Halcro, a Republican
member of the House of Represenatives, recalls a conversation
with Palin when he ran against her for governor in 2006.
"Andrew," Palin said, "I watch you at these debates with no
notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off
facts, figures, and policies, and I'm amazed. But then I look out
into the audience and I ask myself, 'Does any of this really
matter?' "
According to Halcro, it didn't. Palin creamed him because "she's
a master, not of facts, figures, or insightful policy
recommendations, but at the fine art of the nonanswer, the
glittering generality. Against such charms there is little Senator
Biden, or anyone, can do." The evidence of Palin's CBS News
interviews suggests otherwise, but we'll just have to see.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden should find the time to study this video of
one of Palin's 2006 gubernatorial debates. This is no moment for
overconfidence—especially in a guy who's been known to brag
fatuously about his IQ and to embellish his own academic
record.
Correction, Oct. 2, 2008: An earlier version of this column
written before the clip was made public stated, incorrectly, that
Palin could name no Supreme Court decision of any kind apart
from Roe v. Wade. This assertion was based on a report in
Politico, which in turn attributed the (inaccurate)
characterization to an unnamed Palin aide. (Return to the
corrected sentence.)
chatterbox
GOP, RIP?
Nearly three decades of Republican dominance may be coming to an end.
By Timothy Noah
Tuesday, September 30, 2008, at 6:45 PM ET
The Republican-led defeat of President Bush's Wall Street
bailout plan caused an immediate financial catastrophe: The
stock market fell an unprecedented 777.68 points, wiping out, by
one estimate, $1.2 trillion in wealth. But the greater and more
lasting damage may be to the Republican Party itself.
Percentagewise, the Sept. 29 crash was one-third the size of
Black Monday, the stock-market crash of Oct. 19, 1987. As I
write, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen more than
halfway back up (though stock prices remain volatile). It's still
possible to believe that the economy will return to normal in a
year or two. For Republicans, though, the events of Sept. 29
could well be remembered as the start of a decades-long exile
from power—much as Democrats remember Nov. 4, 1980.
That's not to say that John McCain is certain to lose this year's
election to Barack Obama. As I've noted before, this race has
experienced so many abrupt reversals that we're all starting to
suffer from "game-changer" fatigue. At the moment, though,
things seem to be going the Democrats' way, with Obama up
five or six points in national polls and swing states like
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Missouri trending toward him.
Meanwhile, the GOP has virtually no hope of retaking Congress;
indeed, it's projected to lose seats in both the House and the
Senate. Even if McCain wins, his past record of unpredictability
combined with the likely imperative of working with a
Democratic Congress suggest he'll spend much of his time
fighting with members of his own party. That would seem
especially likely given the current banking crisis, which has
forced the Bush administration, the House and Senate leadership
of both parties, and McCain himself to practice lemon socialism.
The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald
Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government
was a common enemy. Middle-class social conservatives loathed
the government for legalizing abortion, forbidding prayer in
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schools, and coddling minorities through welfare and affirmative
action. Upper-class libertarian conservatives loathed the
government for soaking the rich through the income tax and
weakening businesses through burdensome regulation. The only
useful function of the federal government was to provide for the
common defense. This was a con for two reasons. First, the
middle and upper classes were both dependent on the federal
government for a variety of benefits, including Social Security,
trade protection, scientific research, and assorted localized
spending (termed "pork barrel" by those who don't receive it and
"economic development" by those who do). Second, the
distribution of this government largesse greatly favored the rich.
In the April 1992 Atlantic, Neil Howe and Philip Longman,
citing unpublished data from the Congressional Budget Office,
reported that U.S. households with incomes above $100,000
received, on average, slightly more in federal cash and in-kind
benefits ($5,690) than households with incomes below $10,000
($5,560). This was four years before the Clinton administration
eliminated Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the
principal income-support program for the poor. When tax breaks
were added to the tally, households with incomes above
$100,000 received considerably more ($9,280) than households
with incomes below $10,000 ($5,690). Clinton subsequently
expanded tax subsidies to the poor through the Earned Income
Tax Credit, but not enough to undo this disparity. "[I]f the
federal government wanted to flatten the nation's income
distribution," Howe and Longman concluded, "it would do better
to mail all its checks to random addresses."
The Reagan coalition survived because nobody wanted to
believe this and because both upper and middle classes were
bought off with President George W. Bush's tax cuts. (That the
tax cuts favored the wealthy didn't seem to matter.) But the
proposed $700 billion bank bailout made it hard for Republicans
to cling to their cherished illusion that government exists only to
indulge spendthrift widows and orphans. Moreover, the $700
billion was needed to save the very beau idéal of conservatism,
the free market. It was needed so badly that (after a few
alterations to protect the taxpayers' investment) liberal House
Democrats like Barney Frank made common cause with
conservative House Republicans like John Boehner to urge its
passage. To a Republican Party that had come to believe its own
propaganda, this simply didn't compute. So, House Republicans
voted against their standard-bearer's own bailout by a margin of
2 to 1, a dose of free-market principles that sent the Dow into the
crapper.
It should be remembered that a fundamentalist belief in
untrammeled capitalism is not the first but, rather, the second
pillar of Reagan-style Republicanism to fall. The first was the
belief that the United States should extend military power
wherever enemies lurk, regardless of what our allies do. Reagan
didn't actually practice this doctrine, except to overthrow a
teensy regime in Grenada and to deploy (and, after a deadly
terrorist bombing, withdraw) U.S. Marines in Lebanon; he
preferred to level stern rhetoric against the Soviets ("Evil
Empire") while subsidizing proxy wars abroad, not always in
accordance with the law. That the Soviet Union started to
disintegrate on Reagan's watch is mistaken by many for proof
that it's possible to defeat a powerful enemy by calling it names
and spending a lot of money on (but never actually using)
military weapons. President Bush, alas, took Reagan at his
saber-rattling word, waging a war against Saddam Hussein so
unilateral that, except for a few Kurds, there was no indigenous
fighting force to prop up the way we propped up the ARVN in
South Vietnam. The result was and remains, even after violence
in Iraq has been greatly reduced, a lingering feeling even among
Republicans that the Iraq war was at best a distraction from the
more necessary fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban.
This is not, I'll confess, the first time I've believed that the
Republican ascendancy has ended. In 1994, I felt sure that the
warmed-over Reaganite nostrums of Newt Gingrich's "Contract
With America" spelled defeat in the midterm elections. Instead,
the Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress for
the first time in four decades. I also thought the GOP was
cracking up in 2000, when, desperate to find fault with every last
aspect of the Clinton administration, it started bad-mouthing
prosperity. I got that wrong, too. So maybe the GOP isn't really
dead.
It sure looks dead, though.
corrections
Corrections
In the Oct. 1 "Chatterbox," Timothy Noah wrote, incorrectly,
that in an interview with Katie Couric of CBS News, Sarah Palin
could name no Supreme Court decision apart from Roe v. Wade.
Palin could name no Supreme Court decision that she disagreed
with apart from Roe v. Wade. The incorrect sentence was written
before CBS News released the clip and was based on a
characterization by an unnamed Palin aide as quoted in Politico.
In the Sept. 30 "Explainer," Noreen Malone originally
understated the independence of the Office of Special Counsel
and included a reference to Patrick Fitzgerald that was unclear
about the actual scope of his authority. She also incorrectly
stated that the Supreme Court upheld the law governing special
prosectors in 1998. The court upheld the law a decade earlier, in
1988.
In the Sept. 30 "Shopping," Laura Moser mistakenly referred to
the Federal Bureau of Investigations, plural. It is the Federal
Bureau of Investigation.
9/105
In the Sept. 29 "Science," Daniel Engber described a scene in
Californication in which David Duchovny's character performs
cunnilingus on an underage girl whom he'd taken to be his wife.
The girl's exact age was never stated, and he mistook her for his
girlfriend.
In the Sept. 26 "Jurisprudence," Charles Homans stated that Ted
Stevens' wife, Catherine, was seated in the second row of the
courtroom during his trial. She was not.
In a Sept. 26 "Movies," Josh Levin misquoted a line from Eagle
Eye. The correct quote is "she could probably turn a train into a
walking duck."
If you believe you have found an inaccuracy in a
Slate story, please send an e-mail to
[email protected], and we will investigate.
General comments should be posted in "The Fray,"
our reader discussion forum.
culturebox
Nobel Gas
The Swedes have no clue about American literature.
By Adam Kirsch
Friday, October 3, 2008, at 12:10 PM ET
When Saul Bellow learned that he had won the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1976, he reacted to the news in the only way a great
writer can or should: He tried hard not to care. "I'm glad to get
it," Bellow admitted, but "I could live without it." This month, as
the Swedish Academy prepares for its annual announcement,
Bellow's heirs in the top ranks of American literature—Roth,
Updike, Pynchon, DeLillo—already know they're going live
without the Nobel Prize. Horace Engdahl, the academy's
permanent secretary, made that clear this week when he told the
Associated Press that American writers are simply not up to
Nobel standards. "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular," Engdahl
decreed. "They don't translate enough and don't really participate
in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."
It did not take long for American writers to rise to the bait. The
Washington Post's Michael Dirda pointed out that it was
Engdahl who displayed "an insular attitude towards a very
diverse country": It is a bit rich for a citizen of Sweden, whose
population of 9 million is about the same as New York City's, to
call the United States "isolated." David Remnick noted that the
Swedish Academy itself has been guilty of conspicuous
ignorance over a very long period: "You would think that the
permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but
has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name
just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical
lectures."
All of these criticisms are, of course, true. But the real scandal of
Engdahl's comments is not that they revealed a secret bias on the
part of the Swedish Academy. It is that Engdahl made official
what has long been obvious to anyone paying attention: The
Nobel committee has no clue about American literature.
America should respond not by imploring the committee for a
fairer hearing but by seceding, once and for all, from the sham
that the Nobel Prize for literature has become.
When Engdahl accuses American writers of being raw and
backward, of not being up-to-date on the latest developments in
Paris or Berlin, he is repeating a stereotype that goes back
practically to the Revolutionary War. It was nearly 200 years
ago that Sydney Smith, the English wit, famously wrote in the
Edinburgh Review: "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads
an American book?" Ironically, though, while Engdahl decries
American provincialism today, for most of the Nobel's history, it
was exactly its "backwardness" that the Nobel committee most
valued in American literature.
Just look at the kind of American writer the committee has
chosen to honor. Pearl Buck, who won the prize in 1938, and
John Steinbeck, who won in 1962, are almost folk writers, using
a naively realist style to dramatize the struggles of the common
man. Their most famous books, The Good Earth and The Grapes
of Wrath, fit all too comfortably on junior-high-school reading
lists. Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Prize, in 1930,
wrote broad satires on American provincialism with nothing
formally adventurous about them.
Such writers reflected back to Europe just the image of America
they wanted to see: earnest, crude, anti-intellectual. There was a
brief moment, after World War II, when the Nobel Committee
allowed that America might produce more sophisticated writers.
No one on either side of the Atlantic would quarrel with the
awards to William Faulkner in 1949 or Ernest Hemingway in
1954. But in the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has
been exactly one American laureate, Toni Morrison, whose
critical reputation in America is by no means secure. To judge
by the Nobel roster, you would think that the last three decades
have been a time of American cultural drought rather than the
era when American culture and language conquered the globe.
But that, of course, is exactly the problem for the Swedes. As
long as America could still be regarded as Europe's backwater—
as long as a poet like T.S. Eliot had to leave America for
England in order to become famous enough to win the Nobel—it
was easy to give American literature the occasional pat on the
head. But now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that
looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the
United States, European pride can be assuaged only by
pretending that American literature doesn't exist. When Engdahl
10/105
declares, "You can't get away from the fact that Europe still is
the center of the literary world," there is a poignant echo of
Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard insisting that she is still
big, it's the pictures that got smaller.
Nothing gives the lie to Engdahl's claim of European superiority
more effectively than a glance at the Nobel Prize winners of the
last decade or so. Even Austrians and Italians didn't think
Elfriede Jelinek and Dario Fo deserved their prizes; Harold
Pinter won the prize about 40 years after his significant work
was done. To suggest that these writers are more talented or
accomplished than the best Americans of the last 30 years is
preposterous.
What does distinguish the Nobel Committee's favorites,
however, is a pronounced anti-Americanism. Pinter used the
occasion of his Nobel lecture in 2005 to say that "the crimes of
the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious,
remorseless" and to call for "Bush and Blair [to] be arraigned
before the International Criminal Court of Justice." Doris
Lessing, who won the prize last year, gave an interview
dismissing the Sept. 11 attacks as "neither as terrible nor as
extraordinary as [Americans] think," adding: "They're a very
naive people, or they pretend to be."
It would be nice to think that the Swedish Academy was not
endorsing such views when they selected Pinter and Lessing or
the similarly inclined José Saramago and Günter Grass. But to
prove the bad faith of Engdahl's recent criticisms of American
literature, all you have to do is mention a single name: Philip
Roth. Engdahl accuses Americans of not "participating in the big
dialogue of literature," but no American writer has been more
cosmopolitan than Roth. As editor of Penguin's "Writers From
the Other Europe" series, he was responsible for introducing
many of Eastern Europe's great writers to America, from Danilo
Kiš to Witold Gombrowicz; his 2001 nonfiction book Shop Talk
includes interviews with Milan Kundera, Ivan Klima, and Primo
Levi. In his own fiction, too, Roth has been as adventurously
Postmodern as Calvino while also making room for the kind of
detailed realism that has long been a strength of American
literature. Unless and until Roth gets the Nobel Prize, there's no
reason for Americans to pay attention to any insults from the
Swedes.
culturebox
The Bluest Eyes
The pleasures of watching Paul Newman.
By Dana Stevens
The first thing you think upon hearing the news is "But Paul
Newman isn't someone who can die." Whatever species he
belonged to, he of the aquamarine gaze-blazers and the Romancoin profile, it couldn't have been a mortal one. The space he
invited viewers into was a kind of hyperlife, a state of sharpened
attention and heightened vibrancy; if Paul Newman was in it, it
was a Paul Newman movie, regardless of the size of his role.
His best roles were the ones that acknowledged that quality of
being not superhuman, but somehow extra human. When he
played a sour, bitter, reduced man, like the crippled and closeted
Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the fit wasn't right. He could be
a bastard, like the unrepentant prodigal son in Hud, but it had to
be a bastard who inhabited his body fully and joyously. (Has
anyone on-screen ever reveled in the brute pleasure of being
young as completely as Hud Bannon?) And when he combined
that potent physicality with out-and-out sweetness—when he
goofed around on a bicycle for Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid, for example—well, forget it. You'd do
anything for the guy.
There are so many different ways of framing Newman's 50-plus
year career: You could trace the passage from his early, Actors
Studio-trained muscularity to the almost Buddhist subtlety of his
late style, or the way he used his aging body as an instrument to
explore a whole new type of role, like the frail alcoholic lawyer
in The Verdict (1982).
But the theme that kept recurring as I revisited Newman's
films—an inappropriate theme, perhaps, given the
circumstances—was his sexuality. Not so much Newman as an
object of sexual desire, though God knows he made a worthy
one, but as its subject. From his earliest leading-man roles to his
late character studies (and even in parts that, unlike Hud, weren't
explicitly priapic), Newman played characters whose desire
lived close to the surface. He related to other actors by coveting
them, teasing them, or seducing them, which is another reason,
perhaps, that his Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof feels airless. In
secret mourning for his dead male friend (and hampered by the
Hays production code that muffled the explicit gayness of the
character), Brick had no one on-screen to desire.
In this clip from The Left-Handed Gun (1958), an odd little
existential Western scripted by Gore Vidal and directed by thennewcomer Arthur Penn, Newman plays a tormented, half-bright
Billy the Kid in the Stanislavski-influenced vein that led some to
dismiss him as a Brando copycat. Here, Billy burns his own
death notice (mistakenly published in a sensational broadsheet),
declares his resurrection to a smoldering Mexican senorita (Lita
Milan), and has his way with her in a barn. It's true that Newman
was still feeling his way toward a mature style, but what's
remarkable about this scene is the way he makes Billy's rage
inseparable from his lust.
11/105
Four years later, in Hud, Newman had relaxed into his own
physical power. He didn't need to project overt brutishness in
order to hint at the menace behind his charm. In this scene, the
irresistible-yet-loathsome Hud tries to seduce the housekeeper
who works on his father's farm (a never-better Patricia Neal,
who won an Oscar for the role). In a brutal scene later in the
film, he will attempt to rape her—a threat that already seems
imminent in the way Newman nibbles at that daisy. (Can you
imagine Marlon Brando nibbling a daisy?)
The Long, Hot Summer (1958) marks the first time Newman
played opposite the woman who would become his wife of 50
years, Joanne Woodward. Widely acclaimed on its release, the
movie feels dated and florid now, largely because of the
unfortunate casting of a supremely uncomfortable-looking Orson
Welles as the paterfamilias of a decaying Southern family. (The
movie was loosely based on Faulkner's Snopes family stories.)
Still, its mood of erotic languor remains captivating, and
watching Woodward and Newman fall in love before your eyes
is positively electric.
itself into his smallest expressions and gestures. As his own
beautiful body aged, Paul Newman's acting grew ever more
deeply embodied, and ever more beautiful.
day to day
To Choke or Not To Choke?
Monday, September 29, 2008, at 5:55 PM ET
Monday, Sept. 29, 2008
Summary Judgment: Now Out: Choke, St. Anna, Eagle Eye
What are critics saying about three new films? The lineup
includes Choke, based on a Chuck Palahniuk novel; Miracle at
St. Anna, the latest Spike Lee effort; and Eagle Eye, a thriller
starring Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan. Listen to the
segment.
The two had met years earlier during a Broadway production of
Picnic, but because Newman was married at the time, they kept
away from each other until the filming of The Long, Hot
Summer. (Since Newman's first wife had not yet officially
granted a divorce, they had to be discreet about their affair. In an
interview in the DVD extras for the film, a much-older
Woodward fondly recalls that "there were a lot of hotel rooms,"
as Newman, sitting by her side, demurs, "Maybe they don't need
to know about that.") Here, Newman, as drifter Ben Quick, and
Woodward, as prim schoolteacher Clara, finally acknowledge
their slow-burning attraction to one another. The two actors
seem almost amused by the way the dialogue resonates with
their real-life involvement. It's as if you can hear them thinking,
I can't wait to get you off this set.
.
This last clip is also from a movie Newman made with
Woodward, the 1990 Merchant-Ivory drama Mr. and Mrs.
Bridge. But Woodward barely features in this scene, in which
Newman's character, a rigidly conservative Midwestern
businessman, glances out the window as his daughter (Kyra
Sedgwick), an aspiring actress in the full bloom of youth,
sunbathes on the lawn. Without speaking a word, and in just a
few seconds, Newman registers at least four distinct emotions:
paternal disapproval at his daughter's scanty attire, a troubled
stirring of arousal, the immediate stern repression of that arousal,
and finally a moment of solitary sadness. It's not that you come
away thinking that Mr. Bridge wants to do his own daughter—
this is a Merchant-Ivory film, not some Italian melodrama about
incest—but you see at what cost he's kept the world of the flesh
at arm's length his whole life.
Dear Prudence,
My husband insists that I get an abortion. We have a 5-year-old
daughter we had planned to raise as an only child, so this
pregnancy was unexpected. My husband told me that he is not
happy enough in our marriage to go through another pregnancy
and childbirth with me. Our daughter has Down syndrome, and
when we found out, my husband went through a phase of
depression but kept strong for my sake. I, on the other hand,
made things very difficult for him. I had unrealistic expectations
and wanted him to be in tune with me all the time. I have
admitted and apologized for my terrible behavior, and I had
thought we had come to a point of stability and happiness. He
now tells me that he feels like nothing but a moneymaking
machine, and he does not want to support my daughter and me
any longer. I want to help him, but he wants me to stay home
with our daughter and his elderly mother, who lives with us. I
told him that we should go through marriage counseling, but he
doesn't want to. I do not want to get an abortion; it is a moral
issue for me. But I also do not want an unwanted child. I want to
The delicacy of that moment is what I mean by the Buddhism of
Newman's late style. It was as if the raw sexual energy of those
early roles had passed through a refiner's fire, concentrating
dear prudence
To Abort or Not To Abort?
My husband wants me to terminate the pregnancy, but I don't.
Thursday, October 2, 2008, at 6:57 AM ET
Get "Dear Prudence" delivered to your inbox each week; click
here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to
[email protected]. (Questions may be edited.)
12/105
save what is left of my marriage, not only for myself but for my
daughter. I thought that I was in the happiest time in my
relationship. Please, tell me what to do.
—Hurting
Dear Hurting,
You have to accept that your marriage may be over no matter
what you do. Your husband threatens to leave you if you have
the baby. But if you abort a child you want in order to save your
marriage, there won't be much of a marriage to save. You cannot
allow your husband to bully you into an abortion (and, for the
record, I am ardently pro-choice). It is truly unfortunate your
husband won't agree to counseling, because you two have a
mountain of issues to sort out. You have a special-needs
daughter, and no matter how much you adore her, a handicapped
child puts strains on even the strongest marriage and requires a
painful reassessment of your dreams for the future. You and
your husband are so out of sync that you believed you two
worked through a period of estrangement while he's been
thinking he just wants out. He feels as if he's nothing more than
a paycheck, but it doesn't sound as if he has much sympathy for
your day-to-day existence taking care of your daughter and his
elderly mother. Tell him you still love him and believe that
together you can repair your marriage and find joy in your new
child. Say that if he won't go to a counselor with you, you will
go by yourself—because you are going to need a lot of support
in the coming months. And keep in mind that at some point, you
may need a lawyer to let him know that no matter what his
fantasies about being free of his financial obligations, with the
birth of his second child, they just got bigger.
—Prudence
Dear Prudence Video: Who's Your Daddy?
Dear Prudence,
I'm a mom of three teenagers who each have cell phones with
texting capability and computers with instant messaging. What I
find amazing is how little actual real-voice conversation goes on
between boys and girls. My kids tell me that often it's easier to
instant message and/or text than talk to someone "live,"
especially if the other person is someone whom they normally
would feel nervous talking to face-to-face, and in fact may not
talk to at all if it weren't for the texting/instant messaging. My
son even asked a girl to homecoming via instant message, which
I found shocking and totally improper! By the time I found out,
it had already been done. A boy has also asked my daughter out
by texting. She is not allowed to date yet, so I told her to call the
boy personally and turn him down. I've talked to my kids and
insisted that they limit their texting as they will never know how
to talk to actual humans if they don't try it every now and then.
Am I the only one who is worried by this trend among kids, or
am I overreacting and should just get used to it?
—Person to Person, Please!
Dear Person to Person,
As this New York Times article points out, Barack Obama
announced his vice-presidential pick via text. The article also
reported that a survey of wireless users found the average
consumer sent or received 357 text messages a month (compared
with 204 phone calls), while teen users sent or received 1,742
text messages. In other words, give it up, Mom. Sure, you could
use the "If all your friends were walking into traffic, would you
do it, too?" argument—and actually, in this case, you'd have a
point, since people are walking into traffic while texting. But
every new communication technology creates its own disruption
of social norms, especially for the older generation. You wish
your children would behave decently and at least use the
telephone. But in When Old Technologies Were New, author
Carolyn Marvin writes that after the telephone arrived in the late
19th century, there were fears it would cause mass exposure of
family secrets and allow young people to conduct their social
lives without the supervision of their elders—and it did. Back in
1877, the very same New York Times characterized the telephone
as having an "atrocious nature." So, relax, and be assured that
someday your children will say to their children, "Where are
your manners? Can't you just text your friends?"
—Prudence
Dear Prudence,
My boyfriend and I are in our late 20s and have been dating for
six years. We have been living together almost as long and are
practically inseparable. Our relationship didn't start out as good
as it is now. I cheated on him with his then-closest friend, "Joe,"
about four months into our relationship. It was a very short affair
that I was (and still am) sincerely ashamed of. I feel that Joe,
who is quite a bit older, took advantage of my inexperience and
started the affair, which is part of the reason I have such a strong
resentment. After many tears and candid discussions, my
boyfriend and I recovered, and Joe was essentially removed
from our lives. But a couple of years ago, my boyfriend and Joe
started running into each other through work. Eventually, they
started talking, and now he and my boyfriend are hanging out
together more and more frequently. I have hardly spoken two
words to this man—and I don't want to. Just recently, my
boyfriend asked him to house-sit while we were on vacation. I
was upset to find out about it, but my boyfriend was offended
when I expressed my displeasure. He doesn't understand my
resentment and I don't want to reopen that long-buried trial. I
don't want to forgive and forget—I don't want to see this guy
ever again!
—Wishing for "Just the Two of Us"
Dear Wishing,
This reminds me of that old Henny Youngman joke: "My best
friend ran away with my wife, and let me tell you, I miss him."
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Maybe your boyfriend is a particularly forgiving sort, or maybe
he really, really enjoys Joe. But given how painful the episode
was and how strong your feelings are, it's rather odd he would
invite this guy to stay at your house, leaving you with the image
of him sleeping in your bed and nosing through your
unmentionables. Since you are able to keep your distance from
Joe, you shouldn't try to make him completely verboten to your
boyfriend; be confident enough to let your boyfriend see him
separately from you. But if your relationship is as good as you
say, he should be able to understand when you explain that you
won't try to change his friendship with Joe as long he won't try
to make you have one. Tell him that you don't think you'll ever
get rid of your residual guilt about and anger at Joe, and you
certainly don't want him hanging around your house.
—Prudence
Dear Prudie,
My parents divorced when I was about 6, and my father was
never one for visits. When I was 11, he moved cross-country,
and I never saw him again. I'm 30 now, and last week I received
a certified letter with his death certificate and his will. I am
feeling very confused about how to mourn someone I didn't
really know but feel I should have known and loved. Mostly, I
feel an overwhelming and refreshed rejection due to the very
blunt statement in the will that my siblings and I were
intentionally excluded. It is confusing to have one parent who
loves you and is extremely proud of you while the other one
intentionally removed you from his life. His will listed names
and contact information of other people in his life. I am
considering calling one of them to ask if he or she would be
willing to tell me what my dad was like. I am hesitant because I
don't know if I deserve to intrude on their lives when he so
clearly did not consider me a part of his. Is this a terrible and
selfish idea?
do the math
We're Down $700 Billion. Let's Go
Double or Nothing!
How the financial markets fell for a 400-year-old sucker bet.
By Jordan Ellenberg
Thursday, October 2, 2008, at 1:20 PM ET
Here's how to make money flipping a coin. Bet 100 bucks on
heads. If you win, you walk away $100 richer. If you lose, no
problem; on the next flip, bet $200 on heads, and if you win this
time, take your $100 profit and quit. If you lose, you're down
$300 on the day; so you double down again and bet $400. The
coin can't come up tails forever! Eventually, you've got to win
your $100 back.
This doubling game, sometimes called "the martingale," offers
something for nothing—certain profits, with no risk. You can
see why it's so appealing to gamblers. But five more minutes of
thought reveals that the martingale can lead to disaster. The coin
will come up heads eventually—but "eventually" might be too
late. Most of the time, one of the first few flips will land heads
and you'll come out on top. But suppose you get 10 tails in a
row. Just like that, you're out $204,700. The next step is to bet
$204,800—if you've got it. If you're out of cash, the game is
over, and you're going home 200 grand lighter.
But wait a minute, maybe somebody will loan you the $200,000
you need to stay in the game. After all, you've got a great track
record; up until this moment, you've always ended up ahead! If
people keep staking you money, you can just keep betting until,
eventually, you win big time.
—Rejected Daughter
See where I'm going with this?
Dear Rejected,
It is perfectly normal that this new information would be so
freshly wounding. For years you were used to not having a
father in your life. Then you find out it's too late to ever have
one, and you're back to feeling abandoned all over again. There
is nothing selfish about wanting to know more about this man.
Just be prepared that whatever you find out will probably hurt. If
it turns out he always left behind everyone he was close to, you
will wonder what made him so destructive. If you find out he
made a new family and was devoted to them, you will wonder
how he could have been so cruel to all of you. Understand that
there will always be a mystery at the heart (and about the heart)
of a parent who leaves his children behind, and be grateful for
the loving mother you have.
—Prudie
The carefully synthesized financial instruments now seeping
toxically from the hulls of Lehman Bros. and Washington
Mutual are vastly more complicated than the martingale. But
they suffer the same fundamental flaw: They claim to create
returns out of nothing, with no attendant risk. That's not just
suspicious. In many cases, it's mathematically impossible.
To explain why, I need to introduce the mathematical notion that
underlies every price computation in finance, from options to
insurance to credit default swaps: expected value. Suppose
somebody approaches you and says, "I propose a game of
chance. I flip this coin, and if it comes up heads you get $100. If
it comes up tails, you get nothing. How much will you pay me
for the right to play this game?" In other words: What is the
value of a 50 percent chance of winning $100?
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If you played this game all day, you'd probably win about half of
the time. Most people, then, would value the coin flip game at
$50, which is just the probability of success (50 percent, or 0.5)
times the value of a successful outcome ($100). In general, to
compute the expected value of a game you need to add up the
values of all possible outcomes multiplied by their respective
probabilities. Consider, for instance, the riskier game where you
win $100 if the coin lands heads but lose $100 otherwise. Each
of those outcomes happens 50 percent of the time; so the value
of this game is
(0.5) x ($100) + (0.5) x (-$100) = $0
The equation just records the obvious fact that this game favors
neither you nor your opponent. It's a wash.
What's the expected value of the martingale? Like the game
above, it's no more than a bunch of coin flips, each one of which
has a value of 0. So the whole game has a value of 0.
On the other hand, if you start with a big bankroll (or generous
lenders), it's pretty unlikely you'll encounter a run of luck bad
enough to knock you out of the game. It's a little messy to
compute exactly how unlikely, but we don't need exact figures to
make the main point. (If exact figures are your bag, though, I've
worked them out in .) To simplify matters, let's say there's a 99
percent chance you wind up $100 ahead. Then the expected
value of the martingale is
(0.99) x ($100) + (0.01) x (catastrophic outcome) = 0
But we already know the expected value is 0! Simple algebra
suffices to solve the resulting equation—for the bet to have a
value of 0, "catastrophic outcome" must be -$9,900.
In other words, the martingale strategy doesn't eliminate risk—it
just takes your risk and squeezes it all into one improbable but
hideous scenario. The expected value computation is
unforgiving. No matter what ultrasophisticated betting strategy
you adopt, you can't expect to make money in the long run by
flipping a fair coin. There's always a risk of loss—and the
smaller the chance of losing, the uglier the potential loss
becomes. The result is a kind of "upside-down lottery." If you
play the Powerball, you'll probably lose the cost of a ticket, but
you might win big. In the martingale, you'll probably win a little,
but if all six numbered balls match your ticket, then the bank
comes around and takes away everything you've got.
You probably wouldn't sign up for that game. But the news of
the last few weeks confirms that we've been playing it for years.
And it looks like the balls just lined up. Oh, and there's one more
difference between the thickly interwoven financial markets and
the lottery: If one person wins the Powerball, just one person
gets rich. If one massively leveraged financial firm loses while
playing the martingale, it can bring the whole system down with
it.
The complex derivatives behind the current financial havoc
aren't literally martingales, but what's wrong with the martingale
is one of the things that's wrong with the derivatives. There's no
question that you can reduce risk drastically by combining
different investments in a single portfolio; that's what plain-Jane
instruments like index funds do. What sounds an alarm is the
claim that you can get low risk and high returns in the same
happy package. "Once the limits of diversification have been
reached," John Quiggin, an economist at the University of
Queensland, told me, "rearranging the set of claims involved
isn't going to reduce risk any further, so if all parties appear to be
making risk-free profits, the risk must have been shifted to some
low-probability, high-consequence event." In other words, if it
sounds too good to be true, it's probably heading toward some
outcome too bad to be borne. Or, as financial skeptic Nassim
Nicholas Taleb wrote last week, "It appears that financial
institutions earn money on transactions (say fees on your
mother-in-law's checking account) and lose everything taking
risks they don't understand."
The martingale's bad reputation is just about as old as the
martingale itself; the word, which dates back almost five
centuries, is said to come from the hinterland town of Martigues
in southern France, whose residents weren't known for their
gambling savvy. The quantitative superstars who inhabit the
back offices of the financial industry, and the people who
regulate them, are no star-struck hicks. So why did they fling
themselves so boldly into martingale-style investments?
One way the banks got fooled was by convincing themselves
that the coin wasn't really fair. The only way to make money in
the long term by betting on coin flips is to have some reliable
way of predicting the outcome—for example, if you know that a
flipped coin will land on the side it was flipped from about 51
percent of the time. Not long ago, the credit market was
convinced that the upward trajectory of house prices had reached
some kind of escape velocity and that the usual laws of finance
were powerless to bring prices back down. It was supposed to be
like betting on a coin that was heads on both sides.
A better way to account for the financial markets' irrational
behavior is to concede that it's not as irrational as it looks.
There's one kind of game in which a martingale strategy makes
sense: a game in which it matters whether you win or lose, but
not by how much. If you're a hockey team down by a goal with a
minute left, you pull your goalie; that strategy has a negative
expected value, but losing by two or three goals is no worse than
losing by one. If you're a presidential candidate behind in the
polls with time running short, you choose an unknown smallstate governor for your running mate, or you suspend and then
reanimate your campaign in a 48-hour period. What's the
downside? If the magnitude of the loss doesn't matter, trading a
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big probability of a narrow loss for a smaller probability of a
truly spectacular flameout is just smart play.
many people simply aren't willing to let a tanking economy
come between them and their favorite cabernets.
And this is what makes some people queasy about the federal
bailout of the banks. It just might be that the prospect of a
bailout—which could make a total collapse no worse for the
banks than a garden-variety bear market—could have helped
cause the martingale boom. There seems to be little question that
the country needs the bailout now. But unless some real pain for
the martingalers is built in, we'd better be ready for a return to
maverick finance down the road.
Judging by the auction scene, you'd certainly never guess that
Wall Street was imploding. The weekend before last, Chicago's
Hart Davis Hart recorded the fourth-largest sale ever, unloading
1,746 lots of trophy wines and pulling in more than $11 million,
significantly more than the pre-auction estimate. The two largest
U.S. auction houses, Acker Merrall & Condit and Zachys, have
also had successful sales in recent weeks. The Liv-ex 100, an
index comprised of blue-chip wines, is up 9 percent this year,
and prices for a number of top Bordeaux and Burgundies remain
at or near record levels. Clearly, there are enough players
impervious to the economic downturn to keep prices steady for
the moment. And according to an article in yesterday's Financial
Times, it is possible prices may even rise; amid all the carnage
elsewhere, some investors are touting the fine-wine market as a
safe and rewarding place to park one's money. Evidently, wine
cellars are now fulfilling the same function that mattresses once
did.
drink
Drinking Away Your Sorrows
How has the financial crisis affected the wine world?
By Mike Steinberger
Last week, New York magazine published an article about an
unnamed Lehman Bros. trader coping with the firm's sudden
demise and his lost riches. One thing caught my eye: On the day
it became clear that Lehman was kaput, the trader pulled a 1997
Barbaresco Santo Stefano out from under his desk, and he and
some colleagues proceeded to drink it from paper cups. The
producer went unnamed (Santo Stefano is a vineyard), but the
story said the wine cost $700. I e-mailed the writer, Gabriel
Sherman, who told me the bottle was a double magnum. Piecing
together these details, I'm reasonably certain that the Lehmanites
were numbing themselves with the 1997 Bruno Giacosa
Barbaresco Santo Stefano. Giacosa is a winemaking god, and
reading about the shabby treatment accorded his wine—stored
under a desk! drunk from paper cups!—prompted the first real
schadenfreude I've felt since Wall Street went on life support.
But the sacrilege of a few desperate vulgarians aside, what does
the turmoil in the financial sector and the souring economy mean
for the wine market?
Indeed, despite the housing bust and the gyrations on Wall
Street, demand for custom-built wine cellars is holding up rather
well. Jim Deckebach, the CEO of Cincinnati-based Wine Cellar
Innovations, says business has slowed a bit since the onset of the
credit crisis last summer; the total dollar value of the company's
sales has dropped 6 percent to 7 percent in the last year, and
some customers have scaled projects back or put them on hold.
According to Deckebach, this is the first slowdown that Wine
Cellar Innovations has experienced since he founded it in 1984.
Even so, the firm is still doing its usual 20-45 cellars per week,
each with a price tag of between $5,000 and $350,000, and he
says it just had one of its best weeks ever for new orders.
It is a question very much on the minds of auctioneers,
importers, retailers, and restaurant owners. Wine writers have
already rendered their judgment: For months now, we have been
peddling advice about drinking well on the cheap, a trend
obviously grounded in the belief that oenophiles are becoming
increasingly budget-minded. At the same time, many observers
have been expecting prices for the most sought-after wines to
sink in tandem with the economy. So far, though, that hasn't
happened, nor has there been much if any softening of demand
for the everyday stuff. Why the buoyancy?
But enough about millionaire wine drinkers; what about the rest
of us? Chistopher Ruhm, an economist at the University of
North Carolina-Greensboro, has studied the relationship between
alcohol consumption and recessions and says that people tend to
ease up on booze during lean times, either because they have
less money to spend or because they fear that their jobs or
incomes may be vulnerable. "There is pretty clear evidence that
when the economy weakens, alcohol sales fall," he says. Ruhm
thinks one reason for the reduced intake might be that people are
less inclined to go out to bars and restaurants; they'll continue to
imbibe at home but will cut back elsewhere (if true, this may
explain why drunken-driving fatalities also decline during
recessions). Interestingly, though, wine seems less sensitive to
economic downdrafts than either beer or spirits, which suggests
to Ruhm that there is a socioeconomic dimension to
oenophilia—that the people drawn to wine tend to be older and
more affluent.
It could be that the pain just hasn't filtered down to the wine
market yet. But the firm prices may also indicate how deeply
rooted America's wine culture has become—it is possible that
And so far, at least, things seem to be playing out almost exactly
as Ruhm's research indicates they would. According to Nielsen,
bars, restaurants, and nightclubs have seen a sharp falloff in
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business, and many proprietors report that the customers who are
showing up are purchasing fewer alcoholic beverages and less
expensive ones (i.e., draft beers and house wines). At the retail
end, however, wine sales appear to be galloping along. In a
Nielsen survey released in June, 86 percent of respondents said
the slowing economy has had little or no effect on their wine
buying (similar numbers were reported for beer and spirits
sales). The most recent sales data published by Nielsen confirm
this: Total wine sales in dollars were up 4.7 percent for the 52week period ending Aug. 23, and turnover in some price
categories showed even better growth—10 percent in the $9$11.99 range, 8 percent for wines $15 and above.
In addition to its auction business, Zachys has a huge retail
operation in Scarsdale, N.Y., which is home to many financiers.
Jeff Zacharia, the company's president, says that he has seen no
decline in floor traffic to date. Certain wines are having trouble
attracting buyers; some high-end California cabernets ($100 and
up) are struggling, but their problem seems to be sticker shock
more than anything else. "The prices were pushed too quickly
when the quality wasn't there," says Zacharia, "so there's a
shakeout taking place." But he says other categories, such as
2005 Bordeaux, continue to sell well and that while customers
may be opting for less expensive choices, they are not inclined
to reduce their wine consumption in the face of all the grim
tidings on Wall Street. "Wine is a staple for people now; it's part
of the lifestyle," he says. "Instead of buying a $40 bottle, maybe
they'll go for a $25 bottle now, but they want wine on the table."
That will no doubt change if the more dire predictions about the
country's economic outlook come to pass. But if the bottom
really does fall out of the barrel, at least there's a Depression-era
song that can be easily updated for our straitened circumstances:
Brother, can you spare some wine?
Simply put, the new four-disc set amounts to one of the most
spectacular achievements in the brief history of home theater.
The original DVD box set, released by Paramount in 2001, was a
huge disappointment. Dark scenes were murky, bright scenes
were washed out, and several shots were marred by the video
equivalent of pops, ticks, and static. For instance, in Part II's
opening close-up of Al Pacino standing in his darkened office, it
looked as though mosquitoes were swarming down his face.
Paramount's executives were loath to admit it at the time, but the
problem was that the original negatives for both films were in
terrible condition, the result of studio neglect and technical
mishaps in an era before film preservation became a concern,
then a cause.
In 1972, when The Godfather came out, big box-office hits were
shown first in the big cities, then in the smaller towns, then in
the second-run theaters. By the time the run was over, the prints
were frazzled. When The Godfather Part II came out in 1974,
the original film was revived as well, as it was all through the
1980s. The prints were worn out, so Paramount churned out new
ones—and they churned them straight off the negative. Film is
delicate, and the printmaking machinery can be harsh, with its
sprockets, rough-edged reels, and (back then) less-than-sanitary
conditions. With each churning, the negative became more and
more damaged—dirtier, scratched, and torn. (These days, prints
are usually made from a duplicate negative derived from a
master print, called an "inter-positive.")
Over the years, the Godfather negative was also shuttled to
several different film labs, some of which were careless beyond
belief. Whole sections of the film were ripped apart and crudely
spliced back together with Mylar tape. One reel was lost; the lab
substituted a dupe—a duplicate negative—in its place. Robert
Harris of the Film Preserve, who oversaw the new restoration,
found the missing reel just last year in the Paramount vaults,
inside a can mislabeled "Reel 1B, Dupe 2."
dvd extras
Your DVD Player Sleeps With the Fishes
The restored Godfather trilogy: the best reason yet to go Blu-ray.
By Fred Kaplan
Tuesday, September 30, 2008, at 11:11 AM ET
Just as Bruce Springsteen's Live: 1975-85 box set drove lots of
rock fans to buy a compact-disc player back in the mid-'80s, so I
suspect the "Coppola Restoration" of the Godfather trilogy will
compel lots of film lovers to buy a Blu-ray disc player today.
It should. Francis Coppola's masterpieces, The Godfather and
The Godfather Part II (really, who cares about Part III?), haven't
looked so good since they first came out three decades ago.
The negative for The Godfather Part II wasn't in such bad shape;
anticipating a hit, the studio executives made more prints from
the outset so they didn't have to go back to the negative for
more. Still, it too was filthy, scratched, and full of rips and tears.
When the first DVD was mastered seven years ago, Paramount's
archivists tracked down the best IP they could find—it was a
copy of a copy of a copy—and cranked it through a telecine, a
machine that transfers film images into digital video. There was
no restoration beyond that. Meanwhile, the negative—the
original work of art, so to speak—continued to deteriorate.
In 2006, Paramount bought Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks
Studios. Coppola called Spielberg, an old friend, and asked
whether he could use his influence to rescue The Godfather.
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Spielberg lobbied the higher-ups, who agreed to finance a
restoration. Robert Harris—who has conducted some of the most
meticulous restorations of the past couple decades (Lawrence of
Arabia, Vertigo, Rear Window, and My Fair Lady, among
others)—got involved in discussions that September. He and a
large team began work in November. It took them a year and a
half to finish.
First, they repaired the original negative to the point where it
could be put through a digital scanner without breaking. Then
the machine digitally scanned the negative at a "4K" sampling
rate—that is, at a rate of 4,096 pixels per line, much more than
even a high-def image.
The significance of this is that 4K scanning (which is still rarely
employed in restoration work, in part because it's so expensive)
is a high enough sampling rate to capture everything that's on a
frame of 35 mm film. In other words, Harris and his team started
with a digital replica of the film—not some compressed
approximation, as is the case with most digital transfers.
They then set about restoring the image to what it looked like
more than 30 years ago. Frame by frame, they erased every
scratch, speck, pop, and bit of dust. Often, the damage was
beyond fixing, so they had to search for other film elements—
dupes, IPs, prints, whatever—to find an image in good enough
condition to work with.
Then they had to do the color correction. This was a harder job
than usual. The colors on the negative hadn't faded much, but in
this case, that wasn't the issue. The colors on the negative bore
little resemblance to those on the theatrical print. Gordon Willis,
the cinematographer, had manipulated the colors in the film lab,
aiming for a lush effect—a "brassy yellow," as he called it—
reminiscent of old photographs. Willis created this effect
through photochemical "color timing." Harris and his team had
to replicate digitally what he had done.
Luckily, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had a
print of The Godfather that was in perfect condition. (This was
the approved master print that Technicolor stored with the
academy when the film was complete. It had never been shown
in a theater.) So, when Harris & Co. did the digital color
correction, they could use this print as a reference. They also
worked side by side with Allen Daviau, a brilliant
cinematographer who, in turn, consulted by phone with Willis
himself. (Harris is a stickler for this sort of thing. When he
restored Hitchcock's Vertigo, he asked Jaguar to send him a
color chip from the 1957 model of one of its cars—the same car
that Kim Novak drove in the film—so that he could match the
shade of green exactly.)
This sort of fastidiousness—and the seven-figure budget that
Paramount allotted to the project—paid off. These discs are
gorgeous. Take that opening scene of The Godfather Part II, the
close-up of Pacino. The mosquitoes are gone; Pacino's flesh
tones are burnished. His facial expressions are complex,
ambivalent; on the old DVD, his face looked stiff,
expressionless. And now you can see dark wooden shelves
behind him; in the old DVD, there was just an amorphous
blackness.
Or take the scene in the original film in which Pacino shoots the
Mafia rival and the crooked cop in the restaurant in the Bronx.
The restoration lets you see the anguish that Pacino is going
through just before he pulls the trigger; you couldn't see this in
the old DVD. (Harris spent four months finding the film
elements that make this scene look right.) I could make similar
comparisons throughout both films.
The restoration is available on Blu-ray and regular DVD discs.
Do you need the Blu-ray? The restored DVD is extremely good,
too, and if you don't have a high-def TV with the highest
resolution, there's no point in owning a Blu-ray player at all. (For
specifics on this and other technical points, click here.) But if
you have the right TV and have been thinking about investing in
a Blu-ray player, you now have the perfect excuse. Think of
digital images as a dot-to-dot drawing, with pixels as dots. The
more dots there are—the closer the dots are to one another—the
more detailed the picture will be. Blu-ray has five times as many
pixels—five times as many dots—as DVD.
As a result, facial expressions have that much more detail; fastmoving objects are smoother, less jagged; colors are more
saturated. In short, assuming the digital mastering is done well
(and it's done superbly here), a movie on Blu-ray looks more the
way a 35 mm film looks when it's projected in a really good
theater. That's what home theater is about—to make you feel, as
much as possible, like you're in a theater while you're sitting at
home.
If upgrading your TV isn't in the cards just now, there is another
option. After Robert Harris and his team finished the restoration,
they produced several new 35 mm negatives and masters from
the 4K digital files. Then Paramount made a small number of
prints from these new negatives. Theoretically, they should look
very similar to the prints shown back in the 1970s. Over the next
few weeks, the new prints of The Godfather and The Godfather
Part II are showing at theaters in New York, Hollywood,
Cambridge, Palm Desert, Chicago, Baton Rouge, Seattle,
Baltimore, and Toronto. Go see them.
sidebar
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You can watch regular DVDs on a Blu-ray player, but you
cannot watch Blu-ray discs on a regular DVD player. For Bluray to be worthwhile, your HDTV should have a resolution of
1080i or 1080p—that is, it should display (not just receive but
also display) 1,080 lines of data. (1080i means TV's scanner
reads every other line, the odd-numbered lines as it passes one
way, the even-numbered lines as it passes the other; 1080p
means it reads all the lines both ways. There are also HDTVs
with 720p resolution, but they won't show Blu-ray to its best
advantage.) Your HDTV should also have high-definition
multimedia interface or digital visual interface video inputs; if
your set is more than a few years old, it probably doesn't. When
hooked up with special HDMI/DVI cable, these inputs allow
digital video signals to pass between a DVD/Blu-ray player or
cable box and your TV directly,and with no compression. Earlier
HDTV connections, made through the three (Y, Pb, Pr)
component inputs, shunted the signal from digital to analogue
and back to digital again, losing a little bit of purity in each
passing.
Blu-Ray players have a resolution of 1080p—that's 1,080 by
1,920 lines, or about 2 million pixels per frame. DVD players
have a resolution of just 480p—480 by 768 lines, or about
400,000 pixels. Blu-ray discs can hold so much more data in part
because the Blu-ray player's laser—literally a blue-ray laser—is
much thinner than the red-ray laser on regular DVD players.
Hence it can focus more precisely on the digital bits. Hence
many more bits can be squeezed onto a Blu-ray disc.
DVDs look better on a high-definition TV, even though they
don't have high-def resolution, because electronic processing
gear inside an HDTV "up-converts" all non-HD to images to
HD. However, some TVs have better processing gear than
others. And "native 1080"—that is, an image that is naturally
1080i or 1080p—will always look better than an image that's
processed to get there.
A clarification on 4K sampling: There are no televisions or disc
players that can display 4K images (about 12 million pixels).
When Robert Harris and his team were finished with their 4K
restoration, they had to compress the data down to 2 million
pixels per frame to make the Blu-ray discs—down to 400,000
pixels per frame to make the DVD. Compression is its own art
and science; many of the very early DVDs looked bad, mainly
because the technicians hadn't yet figured out how to do the
compression.
election scorecard
explainer
Who Moderates the Moderators?
Does Gwen Ifill get to pick the questions for the Biden-Palin debate?
By Jacob Leibenluft
On the eve of Thursday's vice-presidential debate between Joe
Biden and Sarah Palin, conservative commentators questioned
the impartiality of moderator Gwen Ifill, whose forthcoming
book is subtitled Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Does a
moderator like Ifill get to decide which questions to ask during
the debate?
Yes. The moderators have near-absolute control over the script.
The official rules for the debate are set out by the Commission
on Presidential Debates in the form of a memorandum of
understanding between the two campaigns. That memo isn't
released to the public, but a leaked copy of the rules from 2004
can be found here (PDF). While the document touched on how
tall the podium would be ("fifty … inches from the stage floor to
the outside top of the podium facing the audience"); where the
thermostat should be set ("an appropriate temperature according
to industry standards"); and whether the candidates could use
their own makeup people (yes, they could), it didn't say all that
much about the questions. The document simply stipulated that
the moderator should "use his or her best efforts to ensure that
the questions are reasonably well balanced in all debates ... in
terms of addressing a wide range of issues of major public
interest facing the United States and the world."
Moderators typically go about this process by identifying the top
headlines in the news and examining polling to determine the
most pressing issues of the day. According to an interview she
gave to historian Alan Schroeder for his book The Presidential
Debates: 50 Years of High Risk TV, Ifill came up with her
questions in isolation prior to moderating the veep debate in
2004, receiving only some assistance with research from a
NewsHour staffer. (A few weeks ago, she added that colleagues,
passers-by on the street, and people at her gym have all offered
their unsolicited advice as to what she should ask.) Bob
Schieffer, who will host the final debate this year, claims to be a
bit more solicitous in his process, seeking out the advice of his
CBS colleagues, outside journalists, and "people who follow
things in Washington" before coming up with his own list of
questions three days before the event.
Turning Blue
New polls show swing states moving toward Obama.
There are exceptions to the moderators' freedom. Some of the
debates may have specific areas of focus, like foreign or
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domestic policy. But even those constraints end up subject to the
discretion of the moderator: At last Friday's debate, Jim Lehrer
asked the candidates several questions about the financial bailout
despite the fact that a spokesman for the debates commission
told The Hill that the focus would remain on foreign policy.
The process of coming up with debate questions has changed
with the advent of the single moderator. Up until 1996,
candidates were typically questioned by a panel of journalists.
The panelists would often compare notes ahead of time to ensure
they weren't covering the same ground; in the 1976 vicepresidential debate, they went so far as to establish a set order
for their queries. Perhaps the most famous moment in a vicepresidential debate was partially the product of planning: The
panelists in 1988 agreed beforehand to ensure that one another's
questions were answered completely. As a result, they pressed
Dan Quayle about his preparation for the vice presidency—
prompting him to compare himself to John F. Kennedy and
inspiring Lloyd Bentsen's famous retort.
For the town-hall debate, which will be moderated next Tuesday
by Tom Brokaw, members of the audience will be supplying the
questions. In all likelihood, these questions will be screened
ahead of time: At the town-hall debate in 2004, about 150 voters
were selected by the Gallup organization—with equal numbers
of "soft" Bush supporters and Kerry supporters—and asked to
write down questions once they arrived at the venue. After
screening to ensure that all questions were "appropriate," thenmoderator Charlie Gibson was supposed to select questions at
random while ensuring they touched on a wide range of issues.
Questioners didn't know ahead of time if they would be selected
to read their questions; if they strayed from what they had
submitted beforehand, their microphones were supposed to be
cut off. This year, however, the process of screening questions
may be a little more complicated since Brokaw will also use
questions submitted through MySpace.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Anne Bell of the NewsHour on PBS, Diana
Carlin of the University of Kansas, Alan Schroeder of
Northeastern University, and Scott Warner of the Commission
on Presidential Debates.
After the House rejected a $700 billion bailout of the financial
sector on Monday, Lyle Gramley, a former Federal Reserve
governor, warned that "we're in a recession now, and the
numbers show the recession deepening." According to a USA
Today/Gallup poll conducted over the weekend, one-third of
adults believe the economy is in a depression. What's the
difference between a recession and a depression?
Severity. One widespread definition of a recession—the one
used by newspapers—is a decline in the gross domestic product
for two or more consecutive quarters. The term depression, by
contrast, commonly refers to a grave, prolonged recession during
which the GDP declines by more than 10 percentage points.
Most economists, however, quibble with these lay
characterizations since they don't take into account the
unemployment rate or consumer confidence. The National
Bureau of Economic Research, for example, defines the term
recession as a "significant decline" distributed across the
economy lasting more than a few months, usually visible in the
numbers for GDP, employment, industrial production, and
wholesale-retail sales. Understood as a natural part of the
business cycle, a recession is the period between when activity
has reached its peak and when it reaches its low point or
"trough." There is no corresponding NBER definition of a
depression, nor can economists agree on an official dividing line
between a depression and a bad recession.
The last time the U.S. economy experienced a depression as
measured by the 10-point standard was in the 1930s. Although
the Great Depression is often studied as one long event, it
actually comprised two separate downturns: The GDP declined
by more than 30 percent from 1929-33, then by about 18 percent
from 1937-38. At one point, a quarter of the U.S. population was
unemployed. The Finnish economy tumbled into depression
more recently. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Finland
lost a significant portion of its export markets. Its GDP slumped
by about 11 points in the early 1990s, and unemployment
reached the 20 percent mark.
Recessions are actually rather common. According to the NBER,
the U.S. economy experienced an eight-month recession from
March 2001 to November 2001 and another one from July 1990
until March 1991. During the early 1980s, the economy slumped
twice—in the first half of 1980 and from July 1981 until
November 1982.
explainer
You Say Depression, I Say Recession
Are we talking about the same thing?
By Juliet Lapidos
During the 1980 presidential election season, Ronald Reagan
described the economic downturn as a "depression," and Jimmy
Carter attacked him for using the term inaccurately. Reagan
countered with this quip: "Let it show on the record that when
the American people cried out for economic help, Jimmy Carter
took refuge behind a dictionary. Well, if it's a definition he
wants, I'll give him one. A recession is when your neighbor loses
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his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is
when Jimmy Carter loses his."
explainer
What Makes a Lawyer "Special"?
The difference between special counsels, special attorneys, and special
prosecutors.
By Noreen Malone
Connecticut federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy was tapped
Monday to look into the 2006 firing of nine U.S. attorneys,
allegedly without cause. Some news reports describe her as a
"special prosecutor," others just call her a "prosecutor. So what's
the difference?
Independence. A "special prosecutor" is an outside lawyer
brought in to investigate a government official accused of
wrongdoing. He or she isn't directly accountable to the people or
agency under investigation, avoiding the potential conflict of
interest that a regular prosecutor would have. But Dannehy
comes from within the Department of Justice and will report
directly to the attorney general and his deputy: Technically, she's
a "special attorney," rather than a special prosecutor. That means
she was appointed under a section of the U.S. code that allows
the government to assign department lawyers to cases outside
their home district. Dannehy lives in Connecticut but will be
acting under the power of the U.S. attorney for the District of
Columbia. (A DoJ spokesman told the Explainer that the
department will neither correct nor encourage the description of
her as a "special prosecutor" in news reports.)
The term "special prosecutor" first came into use in the United
States during the Teapot Dome scandals of 1920s, when Calvin
Coolidge appointed outside lawyers to look into the corrupt
land-leasing practices of federal officials. Special prosecutors
were given more official status in the aftermath of Watergate,
when Richard Nixon finagled the firing of the one assigned to
investigate him. The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 called
for the position of "special prosecutor" to be separate from the
executive and legislative branches and to be appointed by a
three-member panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals.
The act also gave special prosecutors the power to issue
subpoenas, start grand jury proceedings, hire a staff, use the
resources of the Department of Justice and FBI, and get a
security clearance if needed. (Later, the name "special
prosecutor" would be officially changed to "independent
counsel.")
The Supreme Court upheld the law governing special
prosecutors in 1988, but Congress let it expire in 1999 in the
wake of Kenneth Starr and the Clinton investigation.* In its
place, the Department of Justice created regulations (PDF)
allowing for the selection of an outside "special counsel" on
those occasions when there's a conflict of interest within the
department. Unlike the independent counsels that came before, a
special counsel is appointed by the attorney general, so he
doesn't enjoy the same strict separation from the executive
branch. He does have more freedom than a "special attorney"
like Danahey, though: He has "independent authority" to
exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions and is not
subject to day-to-day oversight by DOJ officials. Moreover, the
AG has only very limited authority to reverse a Special
Counsel's decisions, or to remove the Special Counsel. By
contrast, Danahey was not only appointed by the attorney
general, but she is also directly accountable to him: Mukasey can
direct, superintend, and reverse her decisions.*
Explainer thanks Peter Carr of the U.S. Department of Justice,
Katy Harriger of Wake Forest University, Sean Malone of Jones
Day, and Paul Rothstein of Georgetown University.
Corrections, Oct. 1, 2008: This article originally misstated the
year the Supreme Court upheld the law governing special
prosecutors. It was upheld in 1988, not 1998. (Return to the
corrected sentence.)
The original version of this paragraph understated the
independence of the Office of Special Counsel and included a
reference to Patrick Fitzgerald that was unclear about the actual
scope of his authority. (Return to the corrected passage.)
explainer
Does Congress Always Take Off for
Rosh Hashanah?
Yes, but members do have to work on Sukkot.
By Abby Callard
The House of Representatives is taking two days off this week
for Rosh Hashanah in the midst of an unresolved financial crisis.
Meanwhile, the Senate is still in session. Do members of the
House take off for every religious holiday?
No. Representatives get a break for Easter, Passover, Rosh
Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Christmas Day. The Senate
operates according to a very similar schedule, except it remains
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in session for Yom Kippur and, at least in 2008, for Rosh
Hashanah.
The holiday schedule can vary from year to year. Leaders from
both parties set up a tentative list of days off every January,
before Congress convenes. Lawmakers can adjust the schedule
as needed and suspend holidays in case of an emergency. The
tentative 2008 schedule for the Senate, for example, listed two
days off for Rosh Hashanah. The chamber remained in session
anyway, although no votes were scheduled to take place between
Monday morning and Wednesday afternoon.
In the early days of Congress, when it was more difficult to
travel long distances home, sessions lasted only from December
to early spring—so the Jewish High Holidays were de facto days
off. Members often met on religious holidays that fell within the
session, including Christmas Day. (Religious services for
members and their staffs were sometimes held inside the Capitol
building.) Congress typically recessed for Easter, but on some
occasions, such as during World War II, the holiday break was
delayed or canceled.
It wasn't until 1958 that members began traveling home on the
weekends and a yearlong session evolved. Since then, the party
leaders have regularly scheduled days off for Christian and
Jewish holidays, although there is no official law that requires
them.
Bonus Explainer: How many members of Congress are Jewish?
Twenty-nine in the House and 13 in the Senate. There are also
two Muslim and two Buddhist lawmakers, all serving in the
House, and 16 Mormons.
Explainer thanks Sen. Dick Durbin's office and Don Ritchie of
the Senate Historical Office.
explainer
Dead by Election Day
What happens if a presidential candidate passes away at the last second?
By Nina Shen Rastogi
Vice-presidential candidates Sarah Palin and Joe Biden will face
off in their first and only debate this Thursday in St. Louis, Mo.
Quite a few Explainer readers have asked what would happen if
one of the presidential candidates were to die or become
otherwise incapacitated before Election Day: Would Palin or
Biden assume the nomination?
Not necessarily. Each party has its own protocol for this
scenario, but in neither case does the running mate automatically
take over the ticket. If John McCain were to die before the
election, the rules of the Republican Party authorize the
Republican National Committee to fill the vacancy, either by
reconvening a national convention or by having RNC state
representatives vote. The new nominee must receive a majority
vote to officially become the party candidate. If Barack Obama
were to die before the election, the Democratic Party's charter
and bylaws state that responsibility for filling that vacancy
would fall to the Democratic National Committee, but the rules
do not specify how exactly the DNC would go about doing that.
(Congress could also pass a special statute and push back
Election Day, giving the dead candidate's party time to regroup.)
What happens if the party doesn't have time to select and
endorse a new candidate? In 2000, Akhil Reed Amar outlined
for Slate some of the head-scratching scenarios that might occur
if a candidate died just before the election, without enough time
to prep new ballots or to decide how votes should be counted.
The outcome would be a little more straightforward—though not
necessarily more politically satisfying—if the candidate dies
between the general election on Nov. 4 but before the Electoral
College votes on Dec. 15. There's no federal law that mandates
how electors must cast their votes; theoretically, if the candidate
to whom they were pledged dies and their party has not made a
preferred successor clear, electors can vote for their party's VP
candidate, a third-party candidate, or a leading preconvention
contender within their own party. Under this scenario, however,
individual state laws have the potential to make things murky,
given that each state has the power to determine exactly how its
electoral votes are to be cast and distributed.
Bonus Explainer: What if the candidate dies after the election
but before the inauguration on Jan. 20? The 20th Amendment
states that if the president-elect dies before beginning his term,
then the vice president-elect assumes his or her spot. However,
the point at which a candidate officially becomes "presidentelect" is debatable. He or she definitely assumes the title after
Jan. 6, when a joint session of Congress officially counts the
Electoral College votes and declares a winner. But the shift
could be said to occur immediately after the Electoral College
vote. (See Pages 2 and 3 of this PDF article from the Arkansas
Law Review.)
If a candidate dies after Dec. 15 but before Jan. 6, Congress,
when it convenes, has to decide whether to count the votes cast
for him. (In 1872, three electoral votes cast for the late Horace
Greeley were discounted by Congress, but it's unclear whether
votes cast for a living candidate who subsequently dies would be
treated the same way.)
If Congress decides the votes are valid, then the laws of
presidential succession kick in, and that candidate's running mate
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moves up the ladder. If Congress decides to throw out the votes,
then the question becomes whether the living candidate can be
said to have a majority of the overall electoral votes—if not,
then, according to the 12th Amendment, the House of
Representatives must elect the president from among the three
candidates with the most votes.
Explainer thanks Bruce Ackerman of Yale Law School, John
Fortier of the American Enterprise Institute, Heather Gerken of
Yale Law School, Nathaniel Persily of Columbia Law School,
and Michael Szin of the Democratic National Committee.
There is a simple and practical solution to the soccer ball
disappearing act, I know. I should designate a spot—a box,
whatever—where the balls go. Then I can reward the kids for
bringing them home and safely depositing them in that spot. And
when practice comes around the next week, we will all know
where to look for the needed ball. I will find and designate such
a box as soon as I'm done ranting, but that won't solve the
existential dilemma that's really plaguing me. Objects mean so
little to my kids and most of the kids we know. They are cheap,
they are expendable, they can be replaced easily. "Can't you
order more online?" my sons have taken to saying when I worry
over a lost object.
By Emily Bazelon
Wednesday, October 1, 2008, at 7:14 AM ET
This tempts me to let loose the Laura Ingalls Wilder lecture. No,
I won't spare you. In The Little House in the Big Woods, when
Laura is about 5, she gets one rag doll named Charlotte. One.
The family also has one picture book. When Laura and her
sisters each get her own tin cup, it is a noteworthy event. Much
is made over each of these possessions precisely because there
are so few of them. There's little abundance and little largesse—
in fact, less and less as the books go on and the family leaves the
relatively hospitable big woods of Wisconsin for the far harsher
prairies of Kansas and South Dakota.
Where do all the soccer balls go? There must be a hidden
graveyard for them or a coach who picks them up after practice
and cuts them up to make leather jackets. Two Fridays ago, we
had four soccer balls: two for 8-year-old Eli to practice with; a
slightly smaller one for his younger brother, Simon; and a
special, pristine ball that Eli's teammates in Washington, D.C.,
signed for him when he left the team last summer because we
were moving to a new city. Last Friday, five minutes before
Simon's soccer practice, we had only one ball. The unblemished
one with the signatures. Understandably, Eli didn't want Simon
to take it to practice. But where had all the other ones gone?
Neither of my boys knew. I tore around the house and the
garage. Well, actually, Eli allowed, one or maybe two of the
balls had somehow failed to make it home from practice the
previous week. What to do now? Fume.
Forgive me for romanticizing the parsimony of necessity. I don't
mean to suggest that I long for the moments of deprivation that
the Ingalls girls and their mother endured. (No matter how well
Pa played the fiddle, I'm eternally grateful not to be related to
him.) But I do think that our toss-and-go culture has its own
stifling qualities. Especially when combined with our overly
solicitous approach to childrearing. The day after my fruitless
search for the missing soccer balls, I drove Eli and a couple of
his friends to their weekend soccer game. We got out of the car
and onto the field, and one of the kids asked, "Did you bring my
water bottle?" I said, "No, that's your job." And then I felt guilty,
because I could hear the bite in my voice, and also because I
wasn't entirely confident that I was right. Is it an 8-year-old's job
to remember his own water bottle? How is he supposed to know
that if an adult has always done that for him? And in any case,
maybe I should just lighten up.
family
Lost Cause
Why do my children lose everything?
"Lose something every day. Accept the fluster/ of lost door keys,
the hour badly spent./ The art of losing isn't hard to master," poet
Elizabeth Bishop wrote. Yet I can't accept the fluster. My
children's penchant for leaving their belongings strewn behind
them—a long tail of balls and toys and lunchboxes and socks
and shoes and sweatshirts—makes me fear that they are heedless
prima donnas who will never be ready for the responsibilities of
adulthood. And then, of course, I'm forced to concede that I
seem to have raised them to be this way. The ritual of losing
things makes me wonder about the line between taking good
care of your kids and impossibly coddling them. Have middleclass American parents like us forever blurred the distinction?
This is what my husband thinks. Paul is of the shrug-it-off
persuasion about losing things. He is unmoved by the Laura
Ingalls Wilder lecture. He takes the sunny view that misplaced
objects will turn up around the house (though he did go back to
the field to find one of Eli's soccer balls the day it went missing,
he notes). Mostly, Paul doesn't see the loss of a few soccer balls
as a character flaw or evidence that the kids will become
helpless teenagers and then adults. He figures that this is all part
of growing up: They'll get the hang of keeping track of their own
things eventually.
How sanguine. I do concede that children should not be made to
feel that they have only a few precious belongings when in fact
more can be had for $5.99 and a few mouse clicks or a stop at
23/105
the sporting goods store. In the end, we did order more soccer
balls online. I'll even admit that it's handy to have a few spares.
But I can't stop feeling like the constant churning of possessions
is exhausting and somehow immoral. One of my co-workers said
he has a friend who tells her kids, when they ask the inevitable
"where is" and "can you help me find" questions: "If I find it, I'm
throwing it away." I'd never be that bold, and besides, I'd never
be able to countenance the wasteful result of carrying out such a
threat. But I understand the impulse. Somehow, these children of
ours need to learn that there's a reason to come back carrying the
things they left with. It's my job to impart that, and for a while,
even to remind them. But it's their job to trot back onto the field
at the end of practice, find the ball they brought, and bring it
home. Maybe this won't, in fact, make them better people. But it
will make me feel better.
fighting words
Disregarding Henry
Both candidates kowtowed to the disgraceful Kissinger. Only Obama cited him
correctly.
By Christopher Hitchens
Sunday, September 28, 2008, at 10:32 AM ET
How extraordinary to find that, for two straight days, the
American media would preoccupy themselves with the question
of who had the greater right—in a debate over foreign-policy
"experience," of all things—to quote Henry Kissinger. And how
even more extraordinary that it should be the allegedly anti-war
Democratic candidate who cited Kissinger with the most
deference and, it even seems, the greater accuracy.
It began with that increasingly embarrassing process that might
be describable (but probably isn't) as the on-the-job education of
Gov. Sarah Palin. On last Thursday's CBS Evening News, facing
the mild-as-milk questioning of Katie Couric, the thriller from
Wasilla should have been relieved when the topics stopped being
about the Bush doctrine or the thorny matter of Russian-Alaskan
propinquity and could be refocused instead on Sen. Barack
Obama's weakness. But, having duly attacked him for being
ready to meet with the dictators of Iran and Syria without
"preconditions," she was reminded that her new friend and
adviser Henry Kissinger, furnished to her only that very week by
the McCain machine, endorses direct diplomacy with both
countries. "Are you saying," Ms. Couric inquired with complete
gravity, "that Henry Kissinger is naive?" The governor's lame
response was to say that: "I've never heard Henry Kissinger say,
'Yeah, I'll meet with these leaders without preconditions being
met.' "
This enabled CBS to tack on a post-interview fact-check
moment, confirming that Henry Kissinger did indeed favor such
talks with such regimes "without preconditions." This cannot
have been hard to do, since only last week at a forum at George
Washington University, consisting of himself and four other
former secretaries of state, Kissinger had told his audience:
"Well, I am in favor of negotiations with Iran. And one utility of
negotiation is to put before Iran our vision of a Middle East, of a
stable Middle East, and our notion on nuclear proliferation at a
high enough level so that they have to study it." He then added
something that can hardly have startled anyone who ever
watched him usurping presidential prerogatives during the Nixon
and Ford administrations: "I actually have preferred doing it at
the secretary of state level" before, as the New York Times put it
with uncharacteristic brusqueness, "he trailed off." Nonetheless,
asked if such talks should be "at a very high level right out of the
box," his response was to say, "Initially, yes," which is as much
as to say "yes." He then said: "I do not believe we can make
conditions for the opening of negotiations," which would appear
to justify the use of the term unconditional in conjunction with
"very high level."
"Trailed off" is too kind a phrase even so for the drivel spouted
above. Apparently Kissinger believes that the Islamic Republic
of Iran is unaware of what we think about its nuclear program,
has not studied our position, has not learned anything from its
protracted and dishonest negotiations with the European Union
and the International Atomic Energy Authority, but might be
induced to do so if favored by a sit-down with Condoleezza
Rice. Apparently, he does not know that the envoys of the
Iranian foreign ministry are only ciphers, easily overridden by
the mullah-dominated "Guardian Council" that holds all real
power in Tehran. Evidently, he also thinks that Iran is deeply
concerned about the maintenance of stability in the region. But
then, Kissinger's last memorable intervention in this area was to
tell the readers of the Washington Post op-ed page that
neighboring Iraq should be handled with care because it was a
Sunni majority country. He has been to some trouble since to
erase and rewrite this laughable ignorance on his part from the
written record: For a trace of his evasiveness, please check here.
Finally, of course, there is Kissinger's habitual fondness for any
form of dictatorship. To have been the friend of Pinochet,
Videla, and Suharto, while almost simultaneously fawning on
Brezhnev and especially on Mao, is to have been a secretary of
state who was soft on fascism—and soft on communism, too!
Unconditional talks with Ahmadinejad and Assad? Why not?
They are the sort of people with whom he (and Kissinger
Associates, the firm that introduces despots to corporations)
prefers to do business.
Thus for McCain, a full day and night after the exposure of his
shaky running mate to such ridicule, to make the same mistake
himself in Oxford, Miss., was really something to see. It was
even worse if you heard it on radio, as I initially did, than if you
saw it on television. (You can hear that geezerish whistle in his
pipes much more ominously than when you are looking at his
24/105
elderly face.) Anyway, on the same question of "without
preconditions," he walked into Obama's tersely phrased riposte,
which was to quote Kissinger in precisely the same way as
Couric had already done. McCain looked and perhaps felt a fool
at this point, and may have been only slightly cheered up when
Kissinger told the Weekly Standard after the debate that he after
all doesn't, at least not for this precise moment, "recommend
presidential high-level talks with Iran." Which, when compared
with his earlier remarks, makes it seem that he has no idea what
he currently thinks and should either be apologized to by, or
should apologize to, either Sarah Palin or Katie Couric, or
conceivably both.
But the true farce and disgrace is that this increasingly glassyeyed old blunderer and war criminal, who has been wrong on
everything since he first authorized illicit wiretapping for the
Nixon gang, should be cited as an authority by either nominee,
let alone by both of them. Meanwhile, I repeat my question from
two weeks ago: Does Sen. Obama appreciate, or do his peacenik
fans and fundraisers realize, just how much war he is promising
them if he is elected? Once again on Sept. 26 in Mississippi—at
the end of a week when American and Pakistani forces had
engaged in their first actual direct firefight—he repeated his
intention of ignoring the Pakistani frontier when it came to hot
pursuit of al-Qaida. Out-hawked on this point, as he was nearly
out-doved on the Kissinger one, McCain was moderate by
comparison. Obama went on to accuse Iran of having built more
centrifuges than most people think it has. This allegation has a
confrontational logic of its own, above and beyond the minor
issues of preconditions and the "level" of diplomacy. I think
Obama is to be praised for doing this—always assuming that he
does in fact know what he is doing. But as we all press bravely
on, the debate would look more intelligent, and be conducted on
a higher plane, if it excluded a discredited pseudo-expert who
has trampled on human rights, vandalized the U.S. Constitution,
deceived Congress, left a trail of disaster and dictatorship behind
him, and deserves to be called not a hawk or a dove but a
vulture.
sidebar
Return to article
Here's the link to the original Kissinger op-ed that appeared in
the Jan. 13, 2002, Washington Post, describing Iraq as a country
with a "Sunni majority." Only the headline and byline remain,
which either means there's a technical snafu or that Kissinger or
the Post removed the text. But at Kissinger's own site, he's
reprinted the piece with the relevant correction, without noting
that the article has been altered.
Still, you can't escape the Internet. This blog post copied and
pasted the original. As did this Danish news site. As did
Highbeam (password required).
foreigners
A Temporary Thaw
Belarus' president reaches out to the West, but can we trust him?
By Ilan Greenberg
On the ground in Belarus, Russia's politically tempestuous belle
poitrine, it is hard to overlook the graveyards. There are the
actual cemeteries—almost a third of the country's population
died during World War II, including 90 percent of its Jews. And
there is the metaphorical death mask wrapped around the face of
Belarus society—with easily the most repressive government in
Europe, Belarus' tattered pedestrians, empty stores, and
crumbling apartment blocks look like they are in the
authoritarian, unreconstructed Soviet dictatorship that the
country has remained since independence nearly two decades
ago.
But during a trip to Belarus, I saw the way people in Belarus
defy their history and their leader—the intransigent and at times
buffoonish president, Alexsandr Lukashenko—to dig out an
oasis of normality during their day-to-day lives. Master of a
nation of 10 million highly educated citizens in the heart of
Eastern Europe, Lukashenko may rule the public square but not
the public conversation nor the public mood. In Minsk, picnic
spots are carved out of every square foot of green space while
rich social evenings are excavated out of loud, inclusive, beery
conversations in bustling, well-managed restaurants. Through
the sheer force of national will, Belorussians seem to push their
government to an on-high abstraction.
It's an understandable impulse to push government away when
national politics is ruled by capricious whim. Lukashenko has
recently been giving off neck-jerking mixed messages. He has
warned that Belarus will cut off all communication with Western
countries if they fail to recognize the legitimacy of the Belarus
parliamentary elections that were held Monday. (The United
States has expressed concern about discrepancies in the voting
process, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe said the "election fell short of democratic standards.") It
is a draconian threat set against Lukashenko's unexpected
promise, in response to overtures from the West, to substantially
improve ties with the European Union and the United States if
they only credential his election as democratic.
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The West has also taken the election seriously. A high-ranking
official at the EU Embassy in Washington, D.C., told an
audience last week at Radio Free Europe: "The freer the election,
the more likely Belarus will enjoy better relations with the
West."
Most Belarus-watchers say no. Lukashenko's feelers to the West
are probably a means to seek leverage in his relationship with
Russia, which has doubled the price it charges Belarus for
natural gas and with which his relationship is generally more
troubled than is frequently understood.
Lukashenko has been whipsawing Belarus observers all summer.
Angered by American sanctions against his government,
Lukashenko in May summarily expelled 10 U.S. diplomats.
After their expulsion, the top American diplomat in the country,
Jonathan Moore, held a press conference where, visibly angry,
he taunted, "For the United States, the political prisoners in
Belarus are much more important than the number of American
diplomats in Belarus."
Ties with Russia have been more difficult this year than in the
past, surmises Alex Brideau, an Eastern Europe analyst in the
Tokyo office of Eurasia Group. Brideau points out that even
though Belarus—and Lukashenko in particular—are highly
dependent on the Russian government for support, there have
been tensions for years, particularly in Lukashenko's
relationships with senior Russian leaders. "The leadership in
Minsk likely still sees Moscow as its main supporter over the
long term, but the problems in the relationship this year may
have led Lukashenko to try to send a message to President
Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin that they need to pay
attention to him," said Brideau.
Then in late August, Lukashenko released the country's last two
political prisoners. The State Department cheered the move,
declaring it had "a real potential for an improvement in relations
with the United States." Yet the 54-year-old president promptly
arrested 20 journalists for mocking him in a cartoon, and days
later he declared his support for and "solidarity" with Russia's
decision to invade its southern neighbor Georgia.
Beginning a long driving tour around Minsk one bright
afternoon, my friends Olya, a waitress, and her husband, Sasha,
a bullish-looking 35-year-old, swung by my hotel in a spankingnew BMW to pick me up for dinner. Sasha explained his
business: importing cars from Germany. From Olya's back-seat
squirm, I gathered Sasha's method of acquiring expensive cars
was not a topic of further conversation. Both the car and Sasha
purred from neighborhood to neighborhood. Sasha drove well,
but Olya voiced increasingly angry corrections when Sasha
made, at an accelerating pace, conversational wrong turns.
(Olya: "Minsk is not one of the most beautiful cities in Europe";
"there is not a lot to do in Minsk"; "Jews do not control this
country.") But when I asked about the Belarus government, there
was no disagreement: Both scowled at me and promptly changed
the subject.
A sizable number of Belorussians support Lukashenko, a skilled
populist admired for standing up to the West and, when it suits
him, to Putin. Yet he is often as much a source of embarrassment
as an architect of national repression. Like some of the
president's colleagues elsewhere in the former Soviet Union,
Lukashenko has the post-Soviet taste for verbal goose-stepping.
He once called Hitler "not all bad." And before the 2006
presidential elections, he warned that anyone attending
opposition protests would have their necks twisted "as one might
a duck." Even more serious, Belarus is one of the world's most
dangerous illegal arms exporters. Lukashenko has sold
armaments to Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah.
So is this week's election an opportunity for the West to entice
Belarus from some of its roguish behavior, perhaps loosening
Russia's grip on one of its most steadfast allies?
"Lukashenko's move to free opposition politicians from prison
suggests he is willing to ease tensions with Washington and
Brussels, and the U.S. government's lifting of some sanctions
suggest it is willing to acknowledge the steps he has taken," said
Brideau. "The thaw may not go much farther than it already has,
however, as the two sides are very far apart. I think it likely that
the U.S. and Europe will be very cautious about overtures from
Lukashenko, out of concern that he could at some point change
course again."
In any case, it will take more than a mild warming of relations
with the West to alter the enduring Soviet hangover that
pervades daily life in Belarus. After a week in Minsk, I went to
Vitsebsk, a hilly, forested, largely preserved city in the far
northwest near Latvia remembered (when it is remembered) for
sheltering Marc Chagall until early adulthood. Chagall opened
an art school in Vitsebsk in 1919, and the town continues to
claim the arts as a civic birthright.
In Vitsebsk, at last, Belarus steps away from its Soviet Forever
fantasy and yields to its long Eastern European history. Cafes fill
with art students. Couples stroll through well-tended parks, past
men on benches concentrating on games of chess. The ballet and
three theaters are booked solid for the night.
But to the eastern shore of the deep canyon sculpted by the
Vitsba River, a carapace of crooked streets wind through
neighborhoods of ancient, faltering little homes with sad metal
roofs. Warmed by coal stoves responsible for the blackened
trees, the houses huddle against tiny stores and small gardens;
only a museum occupying Chagall's childhood house gives
notice that this honeycomb of Eastern European outlier life was
once a Jewish shtetl and is now home to Belorussians who
appear no more moneyed, forced by a warped politics to inhabit
a world just as small as a century before—and perhaps smaller.
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foreigners
The Black President
A 1926 Brazilian sci-fi novel predicts a U.S. election determined by race and
gender.
By Manuela Zoninsein
Monteiro Lobato is a household name in his native Brazil, bestknown for "Sítio do Picapau Amarelo" ("Yellow Woodpecker's
Ranch"), a series of children's books that has been adapted for
television on several occasions. He was an active businessman
and libertarian and is considered the founder of Brazil's
publishing industry, but his 1926 science-fiction novel, O
Presidente Negro (The Black President)—which foresaw
technological, geopolitical, and environmental
transformations—is attracting the most interest this year, since it
anticipated a political landscape in which gender and race would
determine the outcome of a U.S. presidential election.
O Presidente Negro envisions the 2228 U.S. presidential
election. In that race, the white male incumbent, President
Kerlog, finds himself running against Evelyn Astor, a white
feminist, and James Roy Wilde, the cultivated and brilliant
leader of the Black Association, "a man who is more than just a
single man ... what we call a leader of the masses."
You may notice some similarities to the John McCain-Hillary
Clinton-Barack Obama face-off; and so did Editora Globo, the
publisher of O Presidente Negro, which reissued the novel
during the Democratic primaries in a stroke of marketing genius.
Prior to Obama's rise, O Presidente Negro was best-known as an
odd sci-fi work, predicting the U.S. government's use of
eugenics, a racist ideology that had attracted a following in
Brazil at the time Lobato was writing (and, later, in Germany).
As a result of this association, more often than not, bookstores
hid the novel at the bottom of a stack of titles in the Brazilianliterature section. (Today's Brazil is increasingly concerned with
civil rights, as indicated by recent experiments with affirmative
action in education and government.)
Of course, there are several differences between Lobato's story
and the circumstances surrounding the 2008 election. In Lobato's
fictional world, the United States prohibited the mixing of
races—believing it would lead to "disintegration" or
"denaturalization"—and thereby conserved white and black
races in "a state of relative purity." Lobato also failed to predict
the civil rights movement, which undid his predictions of an
extreme version of "separate but equal." Unlike Roy, born in a
supposed age of "pure races," Obama, born of a white mother
and black father, witnessed America's social revolution.
In the 2228 of the novel, the white women's party, the Sabinas (a
reference to the Roman legend of the rape of the Sabine
women), has apparently reached feminism's pinnacle: Women
are no longer considered equal to men—they are simply
different and entirely independent. Homo, the ruling white men's
party, and the Sabinas each command 51 million voters.
In previous elections, voters sided with their gender, with no
regard to race. But with the creation of the Black Association,
black men and women unite to create the largest political party,
giving Roy 54 million supporters. Kerlog is forced to broker an
alliance with Roy: black votes in exchange for easing the
"Código da Raça" ("Race Code"), which set limits on the growth
of the black population through selective breeding and genetic
manipulation. To Kerlog's frustration, when the time comes to
cast ballots, citizens loyally vote with their identity group, and
the black man wins the presidency.
In response, Kerlog threatens race war. He persuades Astor to
protect the interests of the white race and encourages an alliance.
Lobato, at his most sexist, writes that Astor accepts this proposal
on the grounds that man "is woman's husband for thousands of
reasons ... long live man!" With hardly a second thought, she
shepherds the 51 million female voters to the cause of the Homo
Party. Kerlog demonstrates to a despairing Roy that his race will
never assume control, and on the morning Roy is set to assume
the presidency, he is found dead in his office. (Lobato hints at
murder.) Kerlog calls for a re-election and emerges victorious.
White leaders then mastermind the end of the black race in
America, using a senseless and tragic sterilization technique, and
Roy's dream of serving as the first black man in the nation's most
powerful post is left by the wayside.
Long considered a historical relic, O Presidente Negro's
popularity had dwindled so much that Editora Globo let it fall
out of print, but 6,000 copies have been sold since a March 2008
rerelease. Brazil's intellectuals, bookworms, and bloggers are
now madly debating Lobato's racist proposition and gasping at
the prescience of one of their country's most quixotic
personalities.
Now that McCain has selected Gov. Sarah Palin as his running
mate—hoping, some critics say, that women will vote as a
gender bloc, transferring loyalties to whichever party has a
woman on the ticket—perhaps the publishing house can expect
yet another sales bump. Only if Obama makes it to the White
House would Lobato's prescience fall short. If that happens,
maybe Editora Globo's sales streak will come to an end.
human nature
Undead Babies
27/105
The retreating boundaries of organ harvesting.
By William Saletan
If you think the next president will have a hard job, try being a
transplant surgeon. You can't tell parents of a dying kid when to
pull the plug, but you have to be there, ready, the minute he
expires. You have to wait till he's dead but not so long that his
organs become useless. You can give him drugs to keep his
organs healthy, but you mustn't technically revive him. And you
can't remove and restart his heart till it's been declared kaput.
Pick up the New England Journal of Medicine, and you'll see the
far edge of this tortured world. In the journal, doctors at the
Denver Children's Hospital describe how they removed hearts
from infants 75 seconds after their hearts stopped. The infants
were declared dead of heart failure even as their hearts, in new
bodies, resume ticking. The federal government funded the
procedure; other hospitals are looking to adopt it.
Is it wrong? If only the question were that simple. We like to
think moral lines are fixed and clear: My heart is mine, not
yours, and you can't have it till I'm dead. But in medicine, lines
move. Dead means irreversibly stopped, and stoppages are
increasingly reversible. Meanwhile, thanks to transplantation,
entitlement to organs is becoming socialized. When life support
ends, says one bioethicist, "not using viable organs wastes
precious life-saving resources" and "costs the lives of other
babies." Failure to take and reuse body parts looks like lethal
negligence.
How can we get more organs? By redefining death. First we
coined "brain death," which let us take organs from people on
ventilators. Then we proposed to allow organ retrieval even if
nonconscious brain functions persisted. That goal has now been
realized through "donation after cardiac death," the rule applied
in Denver, which permits harvesting based on heart, rather than
brain, stoppage.
Stoppage is complicated. There's no "moment" of death. Some
transplant surgeons wait five minutes after the last heartbeat.
Others wait two. The Denver team waited 75 seconds, reasoning
that no heart is known to have self-restarted after 60 seconds.
That's pretty dicey. Why push the envelope? Because every
second counts. Mark Boucek, the doctor who led the Denver
team, says waiting even 75 seconds makes organs less useful.
Actually, doctors don't wait for the donor's death. They arrange
it. Not the illness or injury, of course, but the timing of demise.
The Denver team calls this "anticipated" death, with donation as
part of an "end-of-life care plan." Robert Truog, an ethicist who
supports the Denver protocol, calls it "orchestrated withdrawal
of life support," with the patient "monitored" for cardiac arrest
and harvesting. The countdown in Denver began at around 20
minutes. Only the last 75 seconds took place after technical
death. In the interim, doctors injected drugs to keep the organs
viable for transplant.
The problem with some organ-sustaining measures is that they
might technically reverse death. Oxygenation, for example,
supplies the circulation whose absence was supposed to be the
cause of death. To fix this problem, doctors have learned to
block blood flow so that only the organs slated for transplant get
oxygen. The rest of the patient remains safely dead.
The heart is a trickier problem. It's the one organ that technically
has to die when, as in Denver, the donor is cleared for harvesting
based on "cardiocirculatory death." How can a heart be certified
as irreversibly stopped when the plan is to restart it in a new
body?
Boucek offers two answers. One is that even if the heart resumes
pumping in a new body, it couldn't have done so in the old one.
That used to be true. But today, hearts can be restarted by
external stimulation well after two or even five minutes. Second,
he says the heart is dead because the baby's parents have decided
not to permit resuscitation. In other words, each family decides
when its loved one is dead. In a commentary attached to the
Denver report, another ethicist proposes to extend this idea,
letting each family decide not just whether to resuscitate but also
at what point organs can be harvested. Brain death? Cardiac
death? Persistent vegetative state? Death is whatever you say it
is.
Enough, says Truog. Stop redefining death. Let's accept that
we're taking organs from living people and causing death in the
process. This is ethical, he argues, as long as the patient has
"devastating neurologic injury" and has provided, through
advance directive or a surrogate, informed consent to be
terminated this way. We already let surrogates authorize removal
of life support, he notes. Why not treat donations similarly?
Traditional safeguards, such as the separation of the transplant
team from the patient's medical team, will prevent abuse. And
the public will accept the new policy, since surveys suggest
we're not hung up on whether the donor is dead.
But down that road lies even greater uncertainty. How
devastating does the injury have to be? If death is vulnerable to
redefinition, isn't "devastating" even more so? The same can be
asked of "futility," the standard used by the Denver team to
select donors. Is it safe to base lethal decisions on the ebb and
flow of public opinion, particularly when, as Hastings Center
President Thomas Murray points out, the same surveys show
confusion about death standards? And can termination decisions
really be insulated from pressure to donate? Even if each family
makes its own choice, aren't we loosening standards for
termination precisely to get more organs?
Modern medicine has brought us tremendous power. With that
power comes responsibility. Boundaries such as death, heart
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stoppage, and ownership of organs have guided our moral
thinking because they seemed fixed in nature. Now we've
unmoored them. I'm a registered donor because I believe in the
gift of life, and the job of providing organs falls to each of us. So
does the job of deciding when and how we can rightly take them.
determine whether the evidence demonstrates that any criminal
offense was committed with regard to the removal of Iglesias."
human nature
The report finds that Gonzales approved the removals of a group
of U.S. attorneys "without inquiring about the process Sampson
used to select them for removal, or why each name was on
Sampson's removal list. Gonzales also did not know who
Sampson had consulted with or what these individuals had said
about each of the U.S. Attorneys identified for removal."
Investigators also found that "Sampson's repeated assertion that
'underperformance' was the decisive factor in the removal
process was misleading." Investigators learned that some of the
fired U.S. attorneys (like Nevada's Dan Bogden) were placed on
Sampson's list based on Monica Goodling's unsupported
suggestion. John McKay, from Washington, similarly appears to
have been put on the list by some specter.
Debate Bait
Hot-button questions for Biden and Palin.
By William Saletan
jurisprudence
Where the Trail Leads Next
What does the inspector general's report on U.S. attorney firings really mean
for the Justice Department?
By Dahlia Lithwick
For those of us who had been waiting over a year to learn the
connection between the abrupt firing of nine U.S. attorneys and
the assorted muck-a-mucks who run the Bush administration, the
release this morning of the inspector general's report (PDF) was
anticlimactic. In light of massive obstruction by the White
House (which brazenly refused to turn over internal documents)
and other "key witnesses," (including Karl Rove, Harriet Miers,
Monica Goodling, Pete Domenici, and Domenici's chief of staff,
Steven Bell), the gist of the IG's investigation—done in
conjunction with the Office of Professional Responsibility—was
that somebody with the authority to compel testimony and the
release of documents seriously needs to do an investigation.
Still, 392 pages on, the document itself makes for some great
reading. It concludes that there is "significant evidence that
political partisan considerations were an important factor in the
removal of several US Attorneys." It paints former U.S.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his former deputy Paul
McNulty as having been totally checked out, having "abdicated
their responsibility to adequately oversee the process" while
underlings like Kyle Sampson merrily consulted a "dog-eared"
chart he was constantly revising, destroying, and re-creating.
While the report does not unearth any criminal wrongdoing, it
finds that "the most serious allegation that we were not able to
fully investigate related to the removal of David Iglesias, the
U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, and the allegation that he was
removed to influence voter fraud and public corruption
prosecutions. We recommend that a counsel specially appointed
by the Attorney General assess the facts we have uncovered,
work with us to conduct further investigation, and ultimately
The report indicates that investigators "found evidence that
complaints to Rove and others at the White House and the
Department by New Mexico Republican political officials and
party activists about how Iglesias was handling voter fraud cases
and a public corruption case led to Iglesias's removal."
The evidence indicates that in at least three of the firings, "the
White House was more involved than merely approving the
removal of presidential appointees as Department officials
initially stated."
The report faults Gonzales et al. for failing "to provide accurate
and truthful statements about the removals and their role in the
process" (i.e., they lied). Among other things, the IG found that
Gonzales "claimed to us and to Congress an extraordinary lack
of recollection about the entire removal process. In his most
remarkable claim, he testified that he did not remember the
meeting in his conference room on November 27, 2006, when
the plan was finalized and he approved the removals of the U.S.
Attorneys, even though this important meeting occurred only a
few months prior to his testimony."
The report also concludes that Kyle Sampson's system for
determining who was fired was "casual, ad hoc, and anecdotal,
and he did not develop any consensus from Department officials
about which U.S. Attorneys should be removed."
In light of the report, Attorney General Michael Mukasey was
quick to appoint a prosecutor (but apparently not a "special" one)
to look into this mess. This is a dramatic departure for Mukasey,
who has largely spent his time in office pretending that whatever
happened at the Justice Department prior to his arrival was either
someone else's problem or not, in fact, a problem at all. Having
somehow set the reset button on the entire department, he has
frequently chastised critics of the Bush administration for their
vengeful ways. He recently asserted that (in response to an
equally damning IG report) that "not every wrong, or even every
violation of the law, is a crime." And he's taken the position (in
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the same speech) that those responsible for misconduct have
perhaps been punished enough (having already suffered
"substantial negative publicity").
way out. … It is irrebuttable and it is proved to be true. In
everything now that someone like me does, there's a backwash
into your whole life ... because of race."
One thing the appointment of a prosecutor virtually guarantees is
that we will still be talking about the U.S. attorney firings long
after President Bush has packed up his David Addington
bobblehead doll and vacated the White House. And that means,
in at least one context, that the Michael Mukasey argument that
lawlessness ends on the day when wrongdoers leave office might
finally be put to rest. It would make for a much cleaner story if
everything that went wrong at Justice could be pinned on poor,
hapless Kyle Sampson and forgotten. But that's not the story the
IG report tells. What's really gone wrong here lies largely in the
behavior of Sampson's bosses who were either asleep at the
switch or happy to leave him hanging out to dry on the theory
that only the stupid testify. It's a theory that's catching on rather
quickly.
One can dispute whether Thomas' impression of a "backwash" is
fair or reasonable, but nobody can argue that his most passionate
legal writing vibrates with his anger about it. In a sharp dissent
in a 2003 case allowing race to be used as an admissions factor
at the University of Michigan's law school, Thomas described
affirmative action as "a cruel farce" under which "all blacks are
tarred as undeserving." In an earlier case he wrote that such
programs "stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority."
The importance of today's report isn't so much in the details of
who did what to whom. It's in the "gaps" at the top and the
promise that after November, somebody might still care.
jurisprudence
The Downsides of Diversity
What Clarence Thomas might have to say about Sarah Palin.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Saturday, September 27, 2008, at 1:02 AM ET
When it comes to the perils of affirmative action, there's nobody
as eloquent as Justice Clarence Thomas. In a speech given
earlier this month to leaders of historically black colleges,
Thomas went so far as to suggest the Constitution likely
prohibits it: "I think we're going to run into problems if we say
the Constitution says we can consider race sometimes." In both
his legal writing and his autobiography, Thomas has railed
against affirmative action, not simply because it constitutes
"reverse discrimination" against white males, but because of the
crushing lifelong stigma it affixes to the "beneficiaries" (a word
Thomas puts in quotation marks).
Thomas' writings on affirmative action frequently mine this vein
of shame and stigma. In his autobiography, My Grandfather's
Son, he concedes he was admitted to Yale's law school in part
because of his race but then goes on to describe the humiliation
of post-graduation interviews with "one high-priced lawyer after
another" in which he was "asked pointed questions, unsubtly
suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades
indicated." He told ABC News that "once it is assumed that
everything you do achieve is because of your race, there is no
Critics have scoffed at Thomas' tendency to view affirmative
action exclusively through the narrow lens of his own life, but
it's clear the "badge of inferiority" has tainted a lifetime of
enormous achievement. He will never forgive America for the
chances he was given, or for how small it has made him feel. I
can't help but wonder what Thomas would say to vicepresidential nominee Sarah Palin, who is now suffering the same
stigma of affirmative action, and who shows signs of the same
blend of defensiveness and outrage that have so shaped Thomas'
career.
Like Thomas, Palin has been blasted for inexperience, and she
has fought back with claims that she is not being judged on her
merits, but on her gender, just as he felt he was inevitably judged
on his race. While it's possible to assert that Sarah Palin is the
most qualified person in America for the vice presidency, only
approximately nine people have done so with a straight face.
That's because Palin was not chosen because she was the
second-best person to run America but to promote diversity on
the ticket, even the political playing field, and to shatter (in her
words) some glass ceilings. When she was selected, the Weekly
Standard's editor, Fred Barnes, enthused: "As a 44-year-old
woman Mrs. Palin brings desperately needed diversity to the
Republican ticket." That's certainly a noble goal, but it's one
most conservatives have disparaged for decades. The most
savage bits of Thomas' Michigan law school dissent warn
against fetishizing "diversity" as an "aesthetic" concern of
"elites." Thomas hates the notion of flinging the first minority
you can lay hold of at a glass ceiling. The McCain campaign just
elevated it to priority No. 1.
The dangers of this kind of rough quest for aesthetic diversity
pervades Thomas' memoir. It's not just his perception that the
world mistrusts the abilities of the recipient of affirmative action
but the fact that he sometimes learns to mistrust the world.
Thomas' experience at Yale taught him to doubt anyone who
sought to help him, especially those "who offered you a helping
hand so long as you were careful to agree with them but slapped
you down if you started acting as if you didn't know your place."
Palin has also become a recipient of the know-your-place
treatment, as she enters—at this writing—her 29th day of an
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almost-total media blackout. Palin has been allowed to speak to
just three television reporters. No press conferences and no
informal interviews. A nation is permitted to know her almost
exclusively through photo ops in fabulous shoes that smack of
empty tokenism.
Clarence Thomas would say that in its most toxic formulation,
affirmative action demands that its beneficiaries be seen and not
heard, and that is precisely what Palin is experiencing. Where
Clarence Thomas has always excoriated liberals for promoting
token blacks so that America might someday look just like a
Benetton commercial, John McCain has mastered the fine art of
turning women into campaign accessories, a flag pin with nice
calves.
Liberals inclined to blindly support affirmative action would do
well to contemplate the lessons of Sarah Palin and Clarence
Thomas. Although the former exudes unflagging self-confidence
and the latter may always be crippled by self-doubt, both have
become nearly frozen in a defensive crouch, casualties of an
effort to create an America in which diversity is measured solely
in terms of appearance.
Perhaps as a result of this simplistic sorting process, Clarence
Thomas has learned to neatly divide the entire world into angels
and demons. (In his book he reduces everyone to either a
"rattlesnake" or a "water moccasin.") Palin similarly casts
everyone as either a supporter or a "hater." Thomas has come to
believe that anyone who opposes him is a racist. Palin genuinely
sees anyone who doubts her qualifications as sexist. There is
much that is laudable about affirmative action, but its tendency
to divide people in often crude ways is not. It can lead to a class
of "beneficiaries" who also see the world in crude ways, and to
even-cruder ways of talking about the very complicated and real
gender and race disparities that continue to plague America.
A version of this appears in this week's Newsweek.
low concept
McCain's Next Stunt
2.
Announces that Track Palin has captured Osama Bin
Laden—in Iraq. (Peter Van Buren)
3. Adopts "don't ask, don't tell" policy on the
environment. (Linse Henley)
4. Rears head and flies into Russian airspace. (Ryan
Greenlaw)
5. Has President Bush use his executive privilege to
declare McCain the winner. (Matt Logan)
6. Proposes a game of Risk with Obama—winner takes
all. (Anonymous)
7. Bolsters Sarah Palin's foreign-policy credentials by
giving her a German shepherd, a Siamese cat, and a
Dutch long-eared rabbit. (Cheryl Lynn Helm)
8. Announces his Cabinet: the Harlem Globetrotters.
(David Churchman)
9. Upon reflection, admits that "ABBA sucks." (Larry
Miller)
10. Announces that if elected he will appoint Gen. Petraeus
secretary of the Treasury. (Roger Tompkins)
11. Heads to Switzerland and brazenly toggles the on/off
switch of the Large Hadron Collider. (John Flowers)
12. Tints his hair a warm chestnut brown. (Kathryn Schorr)
… and here are some of the proposals that were sent in by
multiple readers:
1.
Funds bailout by selling Cindy McCain's clothing,
jewelry, or homes.
2. Switches spots on the ticket with Palin.
3. Drops Palin, announces Joe Lieberman, Mitt Romney,
Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or
Michael Phelps as new running mate.
4. Divorces Cindy, marries Palin.
5. Doesn't divorce Cindy, moves to Utah, marries Palin.
6. Divorces Cindy, moves to Massachusetts, marries Joe
Lieberman.
7. Announces Palin is pregnant.
8. Announces Cindy is pregnant.
9. Announces he is pregnant.
10. On eve of the election, changes his name to Barack
Obama.
11. On eve of the election, changes his name to McLovin.
12. Takes time away from the campaign to reflect on the
death of his best friend, Goose.
Slate readers predict the candidate's next Hail Mary.
After John McCain suspended his presidential campaign last
week, Slate invited readers to suggest other Hail Mary stunts the
Republican candidate might pull before Election Day. You sent
us nearly 1,000 ideas. Here are some of our favorites:
1.
low concept
The Poetry of Sarah Palin
Recent works by the Republican vice presidential candidate.
By Hart Seely
Pledges to send former Wall Street CEOs to
Guantanamo. (John Kirkbride)
31/105
It's been barely six weeks since the arctic-fresh voice of Alaskan
poet Sarah Heath Palin burst upon the lower 48. In campaign
interviews, the governor, mother, and maverick GOP vice
presidential candidate has chosen to bypass the media filter and
speak directly to fans through her intensely personal verses,
spoken poems that drill into the vagaries of modern life as if
they were oil deposits beneath a government-protected tundra.
These corporations.
Today it was AIG,
Important call, there.
(To S. Hannity, Fox News, Sept. 18, 2008)
"Befoulers of the Verbiage"
Thursday's nationally televised debate with Democrat Joe Biden
could give Palin the chance to cement her reputation as one of
the country's most innovative practitioners of what she calls
"verbiage."
The poems collected here were compiled verbatim from only
three brief interviews. So just imagine the work Sarah Palin
could produce over the next four (or eight) years.
"On Good and Evil"
It is obvious to me
Who the good guys are in this one
And who the bad guys are.
The bad guys are the ones
Who say Israel is a stinking corpse,
And should be wiped off
The face of the earth.
That's not a good guy.
(To K. Couric, CBS News, Sept. 25, 2008)
It was an unfair attack on the verbiage
That Senator McCain chose to use,
Because the fundamentals,
As he was having to explain afterwards,
He means our workforce.
He means the ingenuity of the American.
And of course that is strong,
And that is the foundation of our economy.
So that was an unfair attack there,
Again based on verbiage.
"Secret Conversation"
I asked President Karzai:
"Is that what you are seeking, also?
"That strategy that has worked in Iraq?
"That John McCain had pushed for?
"More troops?
"A counterinsurgency strategy?"
And he said, "Yes."
"You Can't Blink"
You can't blink.
You have to be wired
In a way of being
So committed to the mission,
The mission that we're on,
Reform of this country,
And victory in the war,
You can't blink.
So I didn't blink.
"Outside"
I am a Washington outsider.
I mean,
Look at where you are.
I'm a Washington outsider.
I do not have those allegiances
To the power brokers,
To the lobbyists.
We need someone like that.
(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)
"Haiku"
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"On the Bailout"
Ultimately,
What the bailout does
Is help those who are concerned
About the health care reform
That is needed
To help shore up our economy,
Helping the—
It's got to be all about job creation, too.
Shoring up our economy
And putting it back on the right track.
So health care reform
And reducing taxes
And reining in spending
Has got to accompany tax reductions
And tax relief for Americans.
And trade.
We've got to see trade
As opportunity
Not as a competitive, scary thing.
But one in five jobs
Being created in the trade sector today,
We've got to look at that
As more opportunity.
All those things.
It's funny that
A comment like that
Was kinda made to,
I don't know,
You know ...
Reporters.
"Small Mayors"
You know,
Small mayors,
Mayors of small towns—
Quote, unquote—
They're on the front lines.
map the candidates
Recovering
Both V.P. candidates have the day off. Obama is in Pennsylvania, and McCain
is in Colorado.
By E.J. Kalafarski and Chadwick Matlin
"Challenge to a Cynic"
You are a cynic.
Because show me where
I have ever said
That there's absolute proof
That nothing that man
Has ever conducted
Or engaged in,
Has had any effect,
Or no effect,
On climate change.
"On Reporters"
medical examiner
Still in the Lyme Light
Politicians and Hollywood enter the debate over "chronic Lyme disease."
By Kent Sepkowitz
In the 30 years since its discovery, Lyme disease has been in the
headlines every time you turn around. First came its
identification in the 1970s, a cautionary tale of alarmed moms
forcing doctors to examine a problem happening right under
their self-satisfied noses. Then, in those prudish pre-AIDS days
of public health, it provided a scary-enough new disease for
journalists to crow about—though unlike herpes, the rival hot
disease at the time, Lyme was completely above the belt.
This year, Lyme has outdone itself, coming in with not one but
two big skirmishes. Both relate to the puzzling and demoralizing
condition often referred to as "chronic Lyme," a syndrome that
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includes fatigue, headaches, forgetfulness, and other symptoms.
In May, Richard Blumenthal, attorney general of Connecticut,
the disease's ground zero, announced an antitrust investigation of
the Infectious Disease Society of America—specifically
addressing the treatment of Lyme, including chronic Lyme.
Blumenthal targeted the professional society because of the
perceived potential for collusion resulting from the 2006 IDSA
guidelines on the diagnosis and management of Lyme disease. In
his investigation, he found "serious flaws" propagated by those
numskull doctors and pressed his point effectively enough to
force a re-review of the guidelines by yet another panel of
experts.
And then Hollywood piled on as the movie Under Our Skin ("An
infectious new film about microbes, money, and science") began
to make the rounds at film festivals. This movie, too, digs deep
at the IDSA and sees the entire Lyme-treatment world in
conspiratorial terms, suggesting doctors dabble in human disease
for fun and profit.
(Disclosure: I am a card-carrying member of the IDSA. I pay
dues. I attend meetings. I read society writings. Like most
professional societies, IDSA is a somewhat clumsy collective, a
bunch of people not really comfortable with Robert's Rules but,
like diabetic children cheerfully going off to summer camp
together, still in need of the assurance given by meeting with
other people with the same problems.)
The smoking tractate in all this is "The Clinical Assessment,
Treatment, and Prevention of Lyme Disease, Human
Granulocytic Anaplasmosis, and Babesiosis: Clinical Practice
Guidelines by the Infectious Diseases Society of America." As a
guideline promulgated by a professional society, it continues a
fashion that became the rage about 15 years ago when HMOs
insisted that treatments be standardized. Rather than have the
HMOs set the rules, professional societies, for reasons of pride,
cash, and selfishness, began to churn out tome after tome—
IDSA has about 50, and we occupy only a small corner of the
medical world. The guidelines are often used by insurance
companies to determine what constitutes an allowable medical
treatment; with chronic Lyme, many patients have found months
of intravenous antibiotics to be helpful, yet insurance carriers
had been hesitant to pay, given the high cost of the treatment.
In the Lyme guidelines, the IDSA expert panel declared it could
find no evidence to support the existence of chronic Lyme
disease, which led HMOs to deny payment for long-term
intravenous antibiotic therapy for many patients. To support its
rejection of chronic Lyme disease, IDSA cited among the 405
referenced articles from the medical literature, many written by
panel members—for some, a medical version of insider trading
and something Blumenthal and the Under Our Skin crowd scoff
at. (Admittedly, medical publication is a self-fulfilling, selfpromoting circle in which insurgents crawl to the top, then
maintain their lofty positions by squashing pretenders and
rewarding only the most groveling toadies.)
It may appear suspicious to outsiders for IDSA members to cite
their own expertise. But these are the articles that established
their bona fides to sit on the panel. Unless we should exclude all
experts from any expert panel because they are experts, it's a
problem we are stuck with. Though I must agree with one aspect
of the outsiders' view: Most experts, bless their hearts, are a
mess. They are spilling over with professional rivalries and
hostilities, limping from turf wars, and liable to tantrums and
intellectual narrowness, and they sport egos growing like new
blisters and every bit as fragile. But be kind—they have spent
their careers working on a certain disease. They have run the
trials, given the talks, staged the symposia, and written the
standard-setting articles. It is impossible to get in a room people
who both know everything about a subject and are free of
conflict. (I find the conflict-of-interest charge ironic, given the
large number of nonspecialists making big bucks in the
treatment of chronic Lyme.)
Even if one discounts the self-aggrandizement of medical
publishing, the experts do have one thing patients, moviemakers,
and even AG Richard Blumenthal lack: experience in treating
infectious diseases. Dealing with infections all day, every day, is
informative. Stated another way: Why do the Car Talk guys
know what that rattle is when your car turns left but not right?
They know what is and what is not possible in their field of
expertise, and they narrow things from there. The carburetor, for
example, is not likely to rattle, because troubled carburetors
wheeze and kick. Click and Clack know this.
So, too, for doctoring, despite Lyme's peculiar pedigree: It is
related closely to syphilis, that most wily of all infections. We
still cannot grow either bacterium (the one that causes syphilis
can be cultivated after inoculating the testicle of a rabbit; for
Lyme, no comparable animal-assistance program has been
developed), and we still do not have accurate blood tests to
diagnosis these two infections. This substantial shortcoming
would appear to make the existence of something unexpected,
like chronic Lyme, more plausible. Yet the similarities between
Lyme and syphilis actually support the IDSA doctors here. Yes,
there is much about syphilis we don't know—but like Click and
Clack and their carburetor, we do understand what it doesn't do.
Syphilis doesn't resist treatment. Plus, when you have it—really
have it, especially in your brain—it is not at all difficult to find.
Its pathologic footprints are everywhere. And once treated, it
does not enter a prolonged stage that requires years more of
antibiotics to beat back.
However, Connecticut and Hollywood both smell a rat. They see
a gaggle of uncaring doctors in it for the dough and ego and
intrinsic joys of sadism. And for them, this dismissal of chronic
Lyme is nothing but another example of patients insisting a
disease is making them sick while doctors scratch their heads
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and can't find a trace—shades of chronic fatigue and Morgellons
and fibromyalgia. Myself, I don't believe in chronic Lyme, but
the people afflicted with the syndrome likely have some disease
or another, medical, psychiatric, or something in between—and
the third-class-citizen status afforded them is an embarrassment
to doctors everywhere. Perhaps the biggest loser in the debate is
Sigmund Freud. One hundred years after his revolutionary work,
the worst thing a doctor can do in 2008 is to suggest that a
patient's problems are emotional, that physical pain arises from
emotional turmoil. I've made the suggestion to a few patients
along the way, and it is roughly akin to telling someone you
think he is a pederast. People want physical problems—hardcore ailments like broken legs and lobar pneumonia. Try treating
those with Zoloft.
make all American citizens investors in the world's biggest
fund—and a democratic one at that. Taxpayers won't just be the
investors. We'll own the management company, too. Best of all?
For at least a few months, we'll have the former CEO of
Goldman Sachs run our investment for a very small fee. Call it
the "Universal Hedge Fund."
Given the impasse between doctors and patients over a condition
that affects thousands, may I make a modest proposal? Let's
study the problem. Not another McCain Commission of blueribbon windbags to meet and congratulate one another—rather,
let's do a clinical trial to determine the effectiveness of
antibiotics: double-blind, placebo-controlled, the whole works.
Doctors and patients together could design the study, as is done
with AIDS and many cancer trials. And if antibiotics work,
great—the doctors are wrong yet again. If they don't, then it is
on to the next therapeutic approach till we find something that
does the trick. Just one ground rule: Neither side can assume the
other is a sleazeball (hear that, patients?) or a nut (you, doctors).
After all, this is a real public-health problem before us,
regardless of the cause—and it is surely in the interest of one
and all to place the debate on sound footing.
The fund's bylaws give the manager (the treasury secretary)
significant discretion. He can buy troubled mortgage-related
instruments from finance companies (Section 3[9][a], Page 5).
But he can also invest in "any other financial instrument that the
Secretary, after consultation with the Chairman of the Board of
Governors of the Federal Reserve System, determines the
purchase of which is necessary to promote financial market
stability" (Section 3[9]B, Page 6). The manager then has the
authority to manage the assets as he sees fit (Section 106[B],
Page 22), collecting revenue streams, holding bonds to maturity,
or flipping them for a quick profit (Section 106[c], Page 22).
Like many of today's sharpest hedge funds, the Universal Fund
will also have the ability to drive a harder bargain by demanding
equity stakes, or new debt securities, from the institutions it is
helping (Section 113[d], Page 35). It can also do what many of
the big hedge funds, and so-called "funds of funds," do: bring in
outside managers to run the investment (101[C][3], Page 8).
moneybox
How the Bailout Is Like a Hedge Fund.
It's massively leveraged. It's buying distressed assets. It's taking equity stakes
…
By Daniel Gross
The Wall Street bailout is alive again. In an effort to make the
$700 billion bailout palatable, the architects of the law have
larded it up with all sorts of goodies, such as increasing the
levels of deposit insurance, sparing some taxpayers the ravages
of the Alternative Minimum Tax, and extending tax breaks for
alternative energy. Henry Paulson's three-page sprig has
sprouted into a 451-page Christmas tree. (The current version of
the bill, in all its lengthy glory, can be seen here.)
What's most interesting about the Emergency Economic
Stabilization Act of 2008 is just how much it reads like a
prospectus for a hedge fund. In the past, hedge funds—secretive
pools of capital—were open only to qualified (read: rich)
investors. But with the stroke of a pen, President Bush will soon
Hedge funds use leverage: That is, they borrow money to
amplify their returns. The Universal Hedge Fund will use
massive leverage, borrowing up to $750 billion, which it will use
to buy up distressed assets. The Universal Fund might best be
described as a multi-multistrategy fund. Its stated goals are to
maximize returns to its investors while promoting general
market stability and bolstering the crippled housing market.
There are some important differences between the Universal
Fund and its private sector peers. Hedge funds thrive on secrecy.
The Universal Fund will operate with maximum transparency,
disclosing all new sales and purchases on the Web within two
days (Section 114[A], Page 39). Rather than send in all our
money upfront, we hedge-fund investors will give the manager
$250 billion to start with (Section 115[A][1], Page 40). And the
proceeds won't be distributed via dividends or end-of-year
partnership distributions. Rather, revenues and profits "shall be
paid into the general fund of the Treasury for reduction of the
public debt" (Section 106[d], Page 22).
The Bush administration's desire to turn all Americans into
participants in the capital markets through the privatization of
Social Security never got off the ground. But in the last months
of its second term, it has managed to pull off something of a
coup. Soon enough, we'll all collectively own various securities
issued by lots of big companies. Too bad the Ownership Society
is happening only because we became a Bad Debt Society.
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moneybox
Washington to New York: Drop Dead
The Republicans' intransigence kills the bailout bill—and possibly McCain's
electoral chances.
By Daniel Gross
Well, maybe we don't need much of a private-sector financial
system after all. That's the conclusion that most House
Republicans, and a minority of House Democrats, seem to have
reached in voting down the $700 billion bailout bill on Monday.
Maybe it's best that, in a few weeks, there will be essentially two
large banks left in the country, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup.
After all it has done, perhaps that's what the financial sector
deserves.
Was the bailout bill killed by malice or by incompetence? It's
hard to argue against incompetence since it has been so rampant,
especially on the Republican side of things in Washington. The
congressional leadership and the White House clearly lacked the
heft—or the energy—to whip recalcitrant members into line. "I
don't understand why President Bush didn't go to members of his
party and say vote on this," Maria Bartiromo wondered on
CNBC Monday afternoon. (Maria, if you have to ask, you don't
want to know.) Sen. John McCain, who interrupted his campaign
to deal with the crisis, claimed—via his surrogates—that he
wielded great influence in improving the deal and making it
palatable. Then he left town as it collapsed.
Sure, the bill could have passed if more Democrats had voted for
it. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi and co. were able to bring along 60
percent of their caucus. Why did so many House Republicans
bail? Some say it's because Pelosi hurt their feelings by pointing
out that Republicans were in charge when things went to hell. It
also could be that a lot of them got religion on fiscal matters. (Of
course, having approved an expansion of Medicare, massive
increases in all sorts of spending, and huge tax cuts that led to
the addition of trillions of dollars in public debt, this is a strange
moment to stand on principle.)
Obviously, Republicans were motivated in no small part by
political calculations—short- and long-term. But it's really hard
to figure out what those calculations might be. Yes, incumbents
of both parties—especially those incumbents facing tough reelection campaigns—don't want to be on the hook for this vote.
But consider the big picture: Despite all the hemming and
hawing, investors and analysts seem to think there will
eventually be a deal—because there has to be. So, let's say that
the House Republicans manage to draw out the process for a few
more weeks. Maybe the final deal will be less costly to
taxpayers—say, $300 billion instead of $700 billion. And maybe
they will succeed in stripping some of the measures that
corporate America and Wall Street find abhorrent (like limits on
executive pay). Even in that best-case scenario, is there any
reason to think that GOP politicians will be rewarded for their
intransigence?
For in the meantime, the chaos they've created by coming to the
table and then throwing a fit works to their disadvantage. Each
time a deal is close to done and then gets scuppered, the market
(and its many participants) freaks out. Huge quantities of wealth
are destroyed. The markets fell about 8 percent after today's
stunt, likely wiping out close to $1 trillion in wealth. In so doing,
they're turning off whatever base the party had left on Wall
Street and likely closing off a huge source of campaign cash.
Asked for his evaluation of what took place today, Lawrence
Fink, the CEO of asset management giant Blackrock, said,
"Major disappointment came from the Republican side." A
Republican congressman who shows up for a fundraiser in
Manhattan this week is likely to get tarred and feathered. In
some congressional races, I suppose financial dislocation and
bank failures could plausibly be good news for Republican
challengers—but only if the challengers can pin them on the
incumbent Democrats.
Finally, it's clear that the chaos is poison for the top of the ticket.
McCain's poll numbers have eroded throughout September as
the financial crisis picked up pace. The volatility in the markets
doesn't seem to be doing much for the more volatile candidate in
the race. Every time the market falls a few hundred points,
Obama seems to pick up support. On Intrade, where the price of
McCain's presidential contracts have slipped to their lowest
levels in months, traders now give Obama a 60 percent chance
of winning.
In general, I've found a lot of the analogies between the present
situation and the Great Depression to be way off. But there's one
area in which the analogy might hold true. Just as happened in
1932, it's possible that the Republicans' incompetence and
bullheadedness in managing a financial crisis could lead to
Democrats controlling both the White House and Congress.
moneybox
The Happy Talk Express
The economy is a mess. The financial markets are in a panic. But these idiots
think we mustn't say anything negative.
By Daniel Gross
Having difficulty coping with financial stress? Forget Bernanke
and Paulson. Think Rogers & Hammerstein. In the excellent
production of South Pacific at the Lincoln Center in New York
(something tells me tickets there will be easier to get soon), one
of the highlights is the song "Happy Talk." "Happy talk, keep
talking happy talk," sings Bloody Mary. "Talk about things you
like to do." Elsewhere in New York, there's a sense afoot that the
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real problems we face aren't the crippled financial system or the
slowing economy, but rather all the bad stuff people are saying
about them.
In other words, not enough Happy Talk.
To ward off panics, financial media organizations are keeping
Unhappy Talk to a minimum. "We're very careful not to throw
words around like 'meltdown' and 'free fall,' " CNN
correspondent Ali Velshi, who is getting mucho face time thanks
to the meltdown and free fall, told the New York Times. The
Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is engaging in unMurdochian restraint, banishing words like crash and
pandemonium. Maybe I have a limited vocabulary, but I'm not
sure how else to characterize a month in which the country's
largest financial institutions, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, had
to be nationalized; Lehman Bros., the fourth-largest investment
bank, filed for Chapter 11; AIG, a component of the Dow Jones
Indsutrial Average, had to turn over most of its stock to the
government in exchange for an $85 billion loan; the government
had to guarantee money-market funds to stop people from
hoarding cash under their mattresses; the nation's largest savings
and loan, Washington Mutual, failed; and the nation's greatest
financial minds declare that a bailout the size of the Netherlands'
GDP is needed to stop the bleeding. Yes, we have to be careful
about crying fire in a crowded theater. But calling Wall Street's
meltdown a meltdown is more like crying fire in a crowded
inferno.
It's one thing for media organizations to censor themselves. It's
quite another for the government to ban certain types of speech.
Short-selling is the practice through which investors borrow
shares from one another; sell them, hoping or expecting they will
fall; and then buy them back at a lower price and return to the
original owner. Shorting stocks is an essential component of
hedge funds' strategy: It's how they manage risk. But just as the
last refuge of scoundrels is patriotism, the last refuge of
incompetent CEOs is short-bashing. "I will hurt the shorts, and
that is my goal," Richard Fuld, chief executive of Lehman Bros.,
said last April. Instead, he delighted the shorts by running the
company into the ground.
Short-sellers don't kill companies. Managers do. But in late
September, the Securities and Exchange Commission banned
short-selling of financial and finance-related stocks. Call it the
bucket list—a list of companies that might kick the bucket if
short sellers were able to operate. The list, which started with
799 lucky duckies, is now approaching 1,000 and includes IBM
and drug-store chain CVS. (Hey, at some level we're all finance
companies). The list also includes two publicly traded hedge
funds. In other words, you can't bet against the guys who are
now forbidden to bet against stocks. Joseph Heller, call your
agent.
What's wrong with this? Economists tell us that a stock price is
nothing more than the sum total of information about a company
and its prospects. The trading day is thus a debate in which
people express favorable opinions (by buying the stock) or
negative ones (by selling the stock). Banning short-selling is like
holding a debate but telling people they can argue only one side.
It's like wholly disregarding half of the extant opinions. It's like
Fox News.
The third set of Happy Talkers are incumbent politicians. The
past year has shown plenty of evidence of unsound
fundamentals—eight straight months of job losses, the failure of
financial institutions, etc. And yet the word from Washington (at
least the Fox News-watching half of Washington) for much of
2008 has been that things are just fine. "The fundamentals of our
economy are strong," President Bush said in August.
There's nothing wrong with trying to bolster confidence. But if
you ban pessimism as a matter of course, it creates a false
impression, which makes the fall all that more shocking and
disorienting. Putting on a happy face too frequently can also
make it harder to rally the troops in a time of crisis, as
management guru John Kotter writes in his new book, A Sense
of Urgency. It's tough to convince people of the need to make a
significant change, pronto, if they've been conditioned to think
that everything is hunky-dory. Which is why Washington
policymakers have had to dial up the fear factor, big time, to
light a fire under Congress. A few weeks ago the fundamentals
were sound. This week, if you tuned into C-SPAN, it looked we
could be staring at a replay of the Great Depression.
The source of our current angst and distress isn't a surfeit of
recent negative talk. To the contrary, several years of excessive
Happy Talk and an acoustical system that dims the voices of
those expressing contrary opinions have been important
contributing factors to the crisis. An environment in which
discouraging words are seldom heard may be fine for a place
where the deer and the antelope play, but not for the frenzied
range where the bulls and the bears roam.
A version of this article also appears in Newsweek.
movies
All Aboard the Crazy Train
Anne Hathaway in Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married.
By Dana Stevens
Jonathan Demme has reached a point in his career where he can
make whatever movie he damn well pleases. A documentary
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about a Haitian radio host (The Agronomist)! A portrait of
Jimmy Carter on book tour (Man From Plains)! A Neil Young
concert film (Neil Young: Heart of Gold)! And while Demme's
recent remakes of old spy thrillers (The Truth About Charlie,
The Manchurian Candidate) have been muddled flops, that
doesn't seem to trouble the director one bit—he just trains his
ever-curious camera on what's next.
Demme is so hip at this point he can comfortably return to being
square. Not that the man who made Stop Making Sense was ever
all that square, but Demme did make his name with small,
intimate dramas about friendship and loneliness and the
inexorable pull of family ties (Melvin & Howard, Something
Wild). With Rachel Getting Married (Sony Pictures Classics),
the story of an addict who's released from rehab to attend her
sister's wedding, he returns to that rich subject matter. But
Demme's gaze has changed in the intervening years. Something
Wild was a paean to forward motion, the road-trip romance par
excellence. Rachel Getting Married is about a different kind of
journey—the backward time-travel that happens, willy-nilly,
whenever you visit home.
The title is a kind of joke, given that its maddening antiheroine,
Kym (Anne Hathaway), spends the movie frantically diverting
her family's attention from the fact that Rachel (Rosemarie
Dewitt) is, in fact, getting married. Kym, a charismatic blackclad waif in the Edie Sedgwick mold, is a master at shifting the
focus back to her own long-running personal drama of drug use
and self-destruction. Years before, she was responsible for a
terrible accident while high; in the decade or so since, she's
cycled in and out of various high-end rehabs and seen her
nurturing noodge of a father (Bill Irwin) divorce her loving but
distant mother (Debra Winger). While Kym's life has been stuck,
Rachel's has taken off: She's earning a psychology degree and is
about to marry an adoring African-American musician named
Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe). When Kym arrives at their parents'
sprawling Connecticut compound, her first move is to usurp the
maid-of-honor title from Rachel's best friend (Anisa George);
her second is to attend a local 12-step meeting and sleep with the
cutest guy there, who also happens to be Sidney's best man.
So you think you know what kind of movie you're in for: an
intelligent middlebrow psychodrama about sororal competition.
(You may even think you just saw it last year; Noah Baumbach's
Margot at the Wedding had a remarkably similar setup.) But
from Rachel's first vertiginous moment, the script by Jenny
Lumet (Sidney's daughter, a first-time screenwriter) begins
swooping and diving into unexpected places, as does the D.V.
camera hand-held by Declan Quinn. Quinn's freewheeling
cinematography at times recalls Dogme films like The
Celebration. If this film had been made in conventional threequarter-shot fashion with an overlaid music score, it might read
like a groovier Ordinary People. Instead, Demme lets the
camera roam at will and finds a narrative excuse to embed music
into every scene: He fills the house with musicians practicing for
their wedding performances—a jazz band on the back porch, a
lutist on the stairs. At one point a character has to ask the
musicians to pipe down so the family can continue with their
recriminations in peace. All this music and movement lends the
movie a shaggy, Altman-esque texture, a sense that its scope is
wider than any one character's story. The feuding sisters may
provide the film's center, but anyone is free to pick up the talking
stick and say his or her piece, and during a long rehearsal-dinner
sequence, many of the wedding guests do.
I've never been much of an Anne Hathaway fan. She always
seemed, to borrow a phrase some brilliant blogger once used
about Gwyneth Paltrow, to be "sprinkling herself with fairy
dust." But Hathaway transcends her usual complacency in this
role and resists the temptation of using Kym's (and her own)
wounded-bird appeal to let the character off the hook. Bill Irwin,
the great stage clown who's a Demme regular, is marvelously
expressive as the girls' overanxious father. And when the
luminous Debra Winger first appears onscreen as their
withholding mother, you want to grab her and say (on your own
behalf as well as her daughters'): Where have you been all these
years?
movies
Shyness Is Nice
Michael Cera in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist.
By Dana Stevens
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (Sony) is so slight it's almost
diaphanous—an hour after seeing it, what the movie leaves
behind is not so much a memory as a mood. Still, it's a fine
mood, lit with the sparkle of the Manhattan skyline and scored to
a wistful indie-pop soundtrack. Teen viewers accustomed to the
rapid-fire vulgarities of Superbad and Pineapple Express may
snort at this movie's emo guilelessness. But like its source, a
young-adult novel of the same name by Rachel Cohn and David
Levithan, Playlist is unabashedly romantic. Some people really
were made for each other, the movie asserts, and New York does
look beautiful by night. You got a problem with that?
Besides its heroes' iconic names, Playlist makes no reference to
the Nick and Nora of the Thin Man comedies of the '30s and
'40s. And unlike their martini-swilling screwball counterparts,
this Nick and Norah are straight-edge New Jersey teens who can
party all night without downing so much as a beer. Nick
(Michael Cera), the only straight member of a queercore band
called the Jerk Offs, is still mooning over his ex-girlfriend, Tris
(Alexis Dziena). He burns her homemade CD mixes with titles
like "Road to Closure, Volume XII," which Tris promptly tosses
in the garbage. Norah (Kat Dennings), Tris' classmate and the
daughter of a famous record executive, secretly retrieves these
38/105
CDs from the trash—like Nick, she's a music geek with
omnivorous tastes.
Over the course of one night, the two will fall for each other
while roaming New York City in search of two things: a show to
be played at an unnamed venue by the underground band
Where's Fluffy? and Norah's hard-partying best friend, Caroline
(Ari Graynor), who wanders off into the night after one tequila
shot too many. The where's-Caroline subplot soon devolves into
a string of standard-issue gross-out gags (though Gaynor, an
Angie Dickinson look-alike, is funny and admirably game). But
as Nick and Norah bounce from hipster bar to all-night diner to
drag cabaret (in a lower Manhattan whose most fantastical
feature is its abundance of good parking spaces), you can't help
but root for them to hook up—not that that outcome is ever in
any real jeopardy. The competitive Tris makes a few halfhearted
attempts to win back Nick while Norah endures some pawing
from her ex, Tal (Jay Baruchel, nailing a small role as a sleazy
arriviste). But essentially, this is a one-crazy-night movie in
which all that matters is the mysterious momentum that propels
our protagonists from one shimmering backdrop to the next.
Like Before Sunrise or the lovely karaoke-bar sequence at the
center of Lost in Translation, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
captures the excitement of exploring a city with someone you
barely know and really, really like.
obit
Peter Sollett (Raising Victor Vargas), directing from a script by
Lorene Scafaria, seems unsure of whether he wants to be John
Hughes or Paul Weitz (the director of American Pie, who also
co-produced this movie). I wish Sollett had forgone the broader
stuff and gone with his sharp instinct for romantic comedy,
which, at its best, calls for more than just snappy banter. I
particularly dug a love scene in a recording studio in which the
central couple's off-screen passion is registered on an audio
soundboard and a moment when Nick uses his windshield
wipers to wash away the memory of an old love.
Newman loved those stories. He loved to talk about the little
kids who had no clue who he was, this friendly old guy who kept
showing up at camp to take them fishing. While their counselors
stammered, star-struck, the campers indulged Newman the way
they'd have indulged a particularly friendly hospital blood
technician. It took me years to understand why Newman loved
being at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. It was for precisely
the same reason these kids did. When the campers showed up,
they became regular kids, despite the catheters and wheelchairs
and prosthetic legs. And when Newman showed up, he was a
regular guy with blue eyes, despite the Oscar and the racecars
and the burgeoning marinara empire. The most striking thing
about Paul Newman was that a man who could have blasted
through his life demanding "Have you any idea who I am?"
invariably wanted to hang out with folks—often little ones—
who neither knew nor cared.
I've already lobbed so many valentines at Michael Cera that the
poor kid is probably hiding from me behind his locker door. At
the age of 15, he fully grasped the unorthodox comic strategy of
the Fox series Arrested Development and entered into its world.
At 19, he quietly stole both Superbad and Juno from his far
more effusive co-stars. Critics are starting to get on Cera, now
20, for always playing the same stammering, diffident nice-guy
role, but when was that ever a problem for the comic he's most
often compared to, Bob Newhart?
After reading this recent profile of the press-shy young actor, I
half-hope that Cera does drop out of the acting game, not for our
sake (I could watch him stammer on a weekly basis, and if
Arrested Development were still on, I would), but for his. The
idea of him "stretching" to play some Oscar-bait tormented hero,
and being critically savaged for his trouble, is just too painful to
contemplate. As we used to scrawl in high-school yearbooks:
Don't ever change, Michael. Stay sweet.
Paul Newman
He used his fame to give away his fortune.
By Dahlia Lithwick
The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp opened in Connecticut in 1988
to provide a summer camping experience—fishing, tie-dye,
ghost stories, s'mores—for seriously ill children. By 1989, when
I started working there as a counselor, virtually everyone on staff
would tell some version of the same story: Paul Newman, who
had founded the camp when it became clear his little saladdressing lark was accidentally going to earn him millions, stops
by for one of his not-infrequent visits. He plops down at a table
in the dining hall next to some kid with leukemia, or HIV, or
sickle cell anemia, and starts to eat lunch. One version of the
story has the kid look from the picture of Newman on the
Newman's Own lemonade carton to Newman himself, then back
to the carton and back to Newman again before asking, "Are you
lost?" Another version: The kid looks steadily at him and
demands, "Are you really Paul Human?"
For his part, Newman put it all down to luck. In his 1992
introduction to our book about the camp, he tried to explain what
impelled him to create the Hole in the Wall: "I wanted, I think,
to acknowledge Luck: the chance of it, the benevolence of it in
my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others; made
especially savage for children because they may not be allowed
the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it." Married to Joanne
Woodward, his second wife, for 50 years this winter, Newman
always looked at her like something he'd pulled out of a
Christmas stocking. He looked at his daughters that way, too. It
was like, all these years later, he couldn't quite believe he got to
keep them.
39/105
Of course, it wasn't all luck. He lost his son, Scott, to a drug
overdose in 1978, so in 1980, he founded the Scott Newman
Center, which works to prevent substance abuse. When he first
began to donate 100 percent of the proceeds from his food
company, Newman's Own, to charity, critics accused him of
grandiosity. Grandiose? Tell that to the recipients of the quarterbillion dollars he's given away since the company's creation in
1982. First Paul Newman made fresh, healthy food cool, then he
and his daughter Nell made organic food cool. Then he went and
made corporate giving cool by establishing the Committee
Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy. And all this was back in
the '90s, before Lance Armstrong bracelets and organic juice
boxes.
But Newman never stopped believing he was a regular guy
who'd simply been blessed, and well beyond what was fair. So
he just kept on paying it forward. He appreciated great ideas for
doing good in the world—he collected them the way other
people collect their own press clippings—and he didn't care
where they came from. Whether you were a college kid, a
pediatric oncologist, or a Hollywood tycoon, if you had a nutty
plan to make life better for someone, he'd write the check
himself or hook you up with somebody who would.
other magazines
Virginia Slim
The New Yorker on Barack Obama's push for Old Dominion.
By Daniel Riley
The New Yorker, Oct. 6
A story handicaps Barack Obama's chances in an increasingly
blue Virginia, focusing on the state's rural southwest. A team of
Virginia Dems—including Gov. Tim Kaine, Sen. Jim Webb, and
Democratic guru David "Mudcat" Saunders—weigh in on
Obama's "Appalachia problem." First, organization: Obama has
opened eight campaign offices in the region to McCain's one.
Second, message: "Obama would be well served emphasizing a
populist theme for the rest of the campaign," says Webb. … A
feature reports on the covert operations of the Environmental
Investigation Agency, a nonprofit group working to combat
illegal logging. Timber gets smuggled from Russia into China
and ends up being sold at Wal-Mart—a black-market business
that often boasts profits "better than drug smuggling." Along the
way, the EIA "spies" risk getting entangled with the local mafia.
Today there are 11 camps modeled on the Hole in the Wall all
around the world, and seven more in the works, including a
camp in Hungary and one opening next year in the Middle East.
Each summer of the four I spent at Newman's flagship
Connecticut camp was a living lesson in how one man can
change everything. Terrified parents would deliver their wan,
weary kid at the start of the session with warnings and cautions
and lists of things not to be attempted. They'd return 10 days
later to find the same kid, tanned and bruisey, halfway up a tree
or cannon-balling into the deep end of the pool. Their wigs or
prosthetic arms—props of years spent trying to fit in—were
forgotten in the duffel under the bed. Shame, stigma, fear, worry,
all vaporized by a few days of being ordinary. In an era in which
nearly everyone feels entitled to celebrity and fortune, Newman
was always suspicious of both. He used his fame to give away
his fortune, and he did that from some unspoken Zen-like
conviction that neither had ever really belonged to him in the
first place.
New York, Oct. 6
The magazine's 40th-anniversary issue features an essay by Kurt
Andersen that traces the most significant New York City
movements and moments of the last four decades. "The
nationally branded version of 'the late sixties' may have been
mainly about flowers and sunshine, but the New York edition
was edgy, even grisly, always embedded with the imagination of
disaster—that is, New Yorkier." … In another piece, Jay
McInerney reflects on the ascendancy of the "yuppie" during the
1980s: "Once we had a name for them, we suddenly realized that
they were everywhere, like the pod people of Invasion of the
Body Snatchers—especially here in New York, the urbanest
place of all. We might have even recognized them as us."
McInerney argues that gym-joining, brand-worshipping yuppie
culture "has become the culture, if not in reality, than
aspirationally."
Hollywood legend holds that Paul Newman is and will always
be larger-than-life, and it's true. Nominated for 10 Oscars, he
won one. He was Fast Eddie, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy.
And then there were Those Eyes. But anyone who ever met Paul
Newman will probably tell you that he was, in life, a pretty
regular-sized guy: A guy with five beautiful daughters and a
wonder of a wife, and a rambling country house in Connecticut
where he screened movies out in the barn. He was a guy who
went out of his way to ensure that everyone else—the thousands
of campers, counselors, and volunteers at his camps, the friends
he involved in his charities, and the millions of Americans who
bought his popcorn—could feel like they were the real star.
Newsweek, Oct. 6
The cover story takes a close look at the leadership styles of
John McCain and Barack Obama. McCain is "Mr. Hot, a
candidate who makes no apologies for his often merry mischiefmaking"; Obama is "Mr. Cool, at once impressively intellectual
and yet aloof." The authors suggest that the "drama of the
autumn"—the vice-presidential nominations, the conflict in
Georgia, and the financial crisis—"has served perhaps the
noblest end we could hope for, shedding light on how each man
would govern." … A tribute bids farewell to Paul Newman, "one
of the biggest stars in Hollywood history," who hadn't "a shred
of the diva in him." Despite his class and good looks, Newman's
roles rarely pivoted on romance: "It's hard to think of another
40/105
star so beloved by both men and women who had such a dismal
on-screen amatory track record. His most successful long-term
relationship was with us."
Weekly Standard, Oct. 6
The cover story traces the history of car-seat laws. The car seat
appeared 30 years ago as "a novelty device." But after the
introduction of car-safety legislation, some began to worry about
"the specter of government intrusion into the everyday lives of
citizens." Advocates soon discovered that many people were
simply incapable of installing their car seats properly, inducing
an entirely new set of concerns. … A piece surveys a recent
inventory of "Islamic books and videos in Muslim chapel
libraries in 105 federal correctional institutions." The findings—
"a marked predominance of Wahhabi and other fundamentalist
Sunni literature" in addition to "plentiful materials from the
Nation of Islam"—are significant, says the author, because of
"Muslim extremists' openly stated intent to spread their ideology
through prisons."
Los Angeles, October 2008
In the magazine's "Sex Issue," a feature showcases the attempts
of a former high-school classmate of David Spade's to unpack
Spade's uncannily successful ways with women. Convinced that
Spade possesses a singular clef d'amour, the author—still single
at 42—recounts nights out with Spade in L.A. and Las Vegas,
conversations with the women in his life, a trip to the set of
Spade's sitcom, and a high-school reunion. Still, he fails to
discover the secret of "the greatest ladies' man of all time." … A
piece examines the strange dynamics of the celebrity sex tape—
equal parts exhibitionism, voyeurism, narcissism, career move,
fantasy, and occasional grand bore. "Like stripper chic of the
'80s and the porn-star chic of the '90s, the sex tape became hip."
………………….........…….I'd call my baby back."
Or, I am hearing again that old man
facing a silent field of land mines,
circled by barbed wire, calling
his daughter's name over a loudspeaker
on his crying hill near the Golan Heights.
The sunlight glints off his eyeglasses.
She arrives like an apparition unbound
from a stone. Whenever he comes here,
he goes away with pocketsful of dirt.
He's lamenting her mother's ashes
given months ago to the Sea of Galilee
one sunset. What is she saying to him,
her head thrown back, her black hair
flowing around her? She has a bouquet
of red roses. But for a second, an eye
blink, he thought she'd been wounded.
Do the flowers mean a birth or death?
A whisper floats out of the loudspeaker.
He remembers when he was wild-hearted,
climbing these hills with his two friends,
Seth & Horus, both dead now for years.
They were kings, three laughing boys,
daring the small animals to speak.
politics
Track the Presidential Polls on Your
iPhone
Introducing Slate's Poll Tracker '08: all the data you crave about the
presidential race.
poem
"The Crying Hill"
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Yusef Komunyakaa
read this poem.
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.
Lately, I've stood between one self
& another self, trying to call across
the gone years, & my voice floats
from a tower of Babel, saying,
Yes, I need my arms around you
to anchor myself. Or, maybe I hear Ray
with the volume turned down, singing
……...…"If I were a mountain jack
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.
By Yusef Komunyakaa
41/105
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
Champ vs. Doggone
The debate's winners: Palin and Biden. Its loser: McCain.
By John Dickerson
The puzzle of the vice-presidential debate looked as if it was
going to be relatively easy. We knew the words we would use to
describe it—embarrassing, gaffe, and twaddle. All that was left
was to figure out which candidate to fix them to. Either Joe
Biden would fulfill his role as the man known for producing
word clouds before that became an Internet term or Sarah Palin
would produce one of those fearless answers that proved the
topic she was certain about was one with which she had only
passing familiarity.
It turned out to be harder than that to score. Those words will sit
unused. People watching for a car crash were disappointed. Palin
did well, and so did Biden. He was the winner by my standard—
he knew his brief, he kept himself in check, and he was
commanding. The CNN and CBS post-debate polls called it for
Biden. The Fox focus group (not an exact comparison) called it
for Palin.
But regardless of who won or lost, a vice-presidential debate
doesn't matter unless it produces a major gaffe. This one didn't.
So, people will vote on the person at the top of the ticket, and by
that criterion, even if you think Palin won the debate, it's hard to
see how she changed the race much. That's not great news for
John McCain. Both national and state polls are going in the
wrong direction for him.
What Palin did do is stop the bleeding. Six in 10 voters see her
as lacking the experience to be an effective president, and onethird are now less likely to vote for McCain because of her.
Those numbers might improve. If nothing else, McCain will now
have an answer when he gets questions about why he picked
Palin. It was those kinds of questions that made him irritable and
sarcastic in interviews this week. Now he can just point to the
debate.
Palin's performance will also allow the campaign to keep up the
media war. As Palin put it in her closing statement, she was able
to talk without the filter. But a little straight talk: Palin's problem
with the press was not that we filtered her answer but that she
had no answer for us to filter. Another quibble: She said she
wasn't going to answer some of moderator Gwen Ifill's questions
but then at the end took credit for taking tough questions. I think
they call that chutzpah in Wasilla. Nevertheless, she and her
allies will keep up the fight—which is great, because pressbashing rallies the base in a way that is not unappealing to
middle-of-the-road voters. All voters hate the press.
The 90-second format, with little time for follow-up, favored
Palin. She has one answer. She doesn't appear to have a second
one, and she never had to give one. To the television audience,
she no doubt looked in command. For those who were worried
about her capacity given her horrible interviews with Katie
Couric, her performance suggested something important: that
she could grow. In a focus group pollster Peter Hart held in St.
Louis, Mo., the day of the debate for the Annenberg Public
Policy Center, a number of participants said she lacked
experience but suggested she could grow into the job. By doing
well, Palin showed she studied and could hold her own. That's a
low standard, but as a political standard, being used by the voters
who will determine the election, she passed.
Republicans are no doubt thrilled with the performance, and that
matters. The McCain team says they've surpassed Bush's
performance in 2004 in the number of volunteers making phone
calls and knocking on doors. Palin's performance will keep them
dialing and knocking. She's also helped her future prospects in
the party, too. Partisans could excuse her bad interviews as press
bias, but anyone who wants a future as a national politician in
2012 or beyond needs to perform in a debate.
But all of this takes McCain only so far. His campaign has been
bleeding for reasons other than Sarah Palin. The issue of the
moment is the economy, and that's Obama's issue. That's why
Obama is ahead in the national polls and now ahead in a score of
battleground states. It's why McCain had to pull campaign
operations out of Michigan. McCain couldn't overcome the bad
economy there. Yes, Michigan has been a state that has been
hard hit, but the economy's bad everywhere.
Those who watched Biden during the primaries knew he could
do very well on the issues in a debate. His answers have strong
punctuation at the end. He was particularly sharp when talking
about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He also scored political points
providing a useful sound bite for his candidate when he
questioned whether John McCain was really a maverick. The
McCain team doesn't think their candidate can win if he can't
convince swing voters he's a maverick—that's why Palin used
the word repeatedly.
42/105
Biden also kept his erratic character in check. In every cutaway
shot, he looked as though he was listening attentively, and he
treated Palin with respect (though he could be heard to sigh on
occasion). And when he broke down when talking about the
death of his first wife and daughter, it seemed genuine.
At times what was supposed to be a throw-down turned into a
hoedown as the candidates tried to out-folksy each other. Sarah
Palin took us to the sidelines of the soccer games. (First hockey,
now soccer—we'll be getting a spring sport soon.) Biden took us
to the gas station and Home Depot. Palin was dropping her G's
and using expressions like doggone. Joe was speaking to the
Catholics with "God love him" and reminding us a few times
that his father called him "Champ." I'm just glad there wasn't
dancing. Although, if there were, we might have been able to use
those words.
politics
The Fact-Free Debate
How the debate reads with all the facts removed.
By Chris Wilson
Presidential debates are the World Series of the fact-checking
business. When candidates trade charges and countercharges for
90 minutes, they create a lot of factual debris, and there is a
legion of people out there looking for anything that smells
funny. During Friday's debate between Barack Obama and John
McCain, the fact-checkers were out in force at the New York
Times, the Washington Post, PolitiFact and Factchecker.org.
(And that's not counting the fact-checking done by each of the
candidates; take them for what they're worth.) Rarely have the
forces of truth, or at least accuracy, been so mobilized.
Which is all well and good—if you accept that it really matters
whether the candidates' facts are actually correct. As Slate's
Farhad Manjoo argued earlier this month, however, it's not at all
clear that the costs of lying outweigh the benefits. And the
history of debate gaffes is marked by crimes of style, not
accuracy. Do the facts that candidates spew at debates matter at
all, or do viewers secretly tune out any sentence with a number
in it and wait for the next one-liner? To test the question, Slate
experimented with redacting every objective statement from the
debate transcript, leaving only the rhetoric that strings the facts
together.
As always, the line between fact and opinion is a little hazy here,
but in general the fact-checker's edict applies: If it's checkable,
it's a fact. In practice, this means we slashed any statement
drawing on actual data or recalling past events while sparing
hypotheticals, platform statements, and personal anecdotes.
More important, we were agnostic as to whether the redacted
facts were accurate.
You be the judge: Is the fact-free debate all that different from
the original? Drop me a line with your thoughts. (Don't be fooled
by the sparse facts in the first few minutes. There are 203
redacted statements in the entire transcript.)
Mouse over the redacted facts to see the original text.
LEHRER: Gentlemen, at this very moment tonight, where do
you stand on the financial recovery plan? First response to you,
Senator Obama. You have two minutes.
OBAMA: Well, thank you very much, Jim, and thanks to the
commission and the University of Mississippi, "Ole Miss," for
hosting us tonight. I can't think of a more important time for us
to talk about the future of the country.
You know, we are at a defining moment in our history.
Redacted.
And although we've heard a lot about Wall Street, those of you
on Main Street I think have been struggling for a while, and you
recognize that this could have an impact on all sectors of the
economy.
And you're wondering, how's it going to affect me? How's it
going to affect my job? How's it going to affect my house?
How's it going to affect my retirement savings or my ability to
send my children to college?
So we have to move swiftly, and we have to move wisely. And
I've put forward a series of proposals that make sure that we
protect taxpayers as we engage in this important rescue effort.
No. 1, we've got to make sure that we've got oversight over this
whole process; Redacted.
No. 2, we've got to make sure that taxpayers, when they are
putting their money at risk, have the possibility of getting that
money back and gains, if the market -- and when the market
returns.
No. 3, we've got to make sure that none of that money is going
to pad CEO bank accounts or to promote golden parachutes.
And, No. 4, we've got to make sure that we're helping
homeowners, because the root problem here has to do with the
foreclosures that are taking place all across the country.
43/105
Now, we also have to recognize that this is a final verdict on
eight years of failed economic policies promoted by George
Bush, Redacted, a theory that basically says that we can shred
regulations and consumer protections and give more and more to
the most, and somehow prosperity will trickle down.
It hasn't worked. And I think that the fundamentals of the
economy have to be measured by whether or not the middle
class is getting a fair shake. That's why I'm running for
president, and that's what I hope we're going to be talking about
tonight.
LEHRER: Senator McCain, two minutes.
House Republicans that decided that they would be part of the
solution to this problem.
But I want to emphasize one point to all Americans tonight. This
isn't the beginning of the end of this crisis. This is the end of the
beginning, if we come out with a package that will keep these
institutions stable.
And we've got a lot of work to do. And we've got to create jobs.
And one of the areas, of course, is to eliminate our dependence
on foreign oil.
MCCAIN: Well, thank you, Jim. And thanks to everybody.
LEHRER: All right, let's go back to my question. How do you
all stand on the recovery plan? And talk to each other about it.
We've got five minutes. We can negotiate a deal right here.
And I do have a sad note tonight. Senator Kennedy is in the
hospital. He's a dear and beloved friend to all of us. Our thoughts
and prayers go out to the lion of the Senate.
But, I mean, are you -- do you favor this plan, Senator Obama,
and you, Senator McCain? Do you -- are you in favor of this
plan?
I also want to thank the University of Mississippi for hosting us
tonight.
OBAMA: We haven't seen the language yet. And I do think that
there's constructive work being done out there. So, for the
viewers who are watching, I am optimistic about the capacity of
us to come together with a plan.
And, Jim, I -- I've been not feeling too great about a lot of things
lately. So have a lot of Americans who are facing challenges.
But I'm feeling a little better tonight, and I'll tell you why.
Because as we're here tonight in this debate, we are seeing, for
the first time in a long time, Republicans and Democrats
together, sitting down, trying to work out a solution to this fiscal
crisis that we're in.
And have no doubt about the magnitude of this crisis. And we're
not talking about failure of institutions on Wall Street. We're
talking about failures on Main Street, and people who will lose
their jobs, and their credits, and their homes, if we don't fix the
greatest fiscal crisis, probably in -- certainly in our time, and I've
been around a little while.
But the point is -- the point is, we have finally seen Republicans
and Democrats sitting down and negotiating together and
coming up with a package.
The question, I think, that we have to ask ourselves is, how did
we get into this situation in the first place?
Redacted.
Redacted.
So -- so the question, I think, that we've got to ask ourselves is,
yes, we've got to solve this problem short term. And we are
going to have to intervene; there's no doubt about that.
But we're also going to have to look at, how is it that we
shredded so many regulations? We did not set up a 21st-century
regulatory framework to deal with these problems. And that in
part has to do with an economic philosophy that says that
regulation is always bad.
LEHRER: Are you going to vote for the plan, Senator McCain?
This package has transparency in it. It has to have accountability
and oversight. It has to have options for loans to failing
businesses, rather than the government taking over those loans.
We have to -- it has to have a package with a number of other
essential elements to it.
And, yes, I went back to Washington, and I met with my
Republicans in the House of Representatives. And they weren't
part of the negotiations, and I understand that. And it was the
MCCAIN: I -- I hope so. And I...
LEHRER: As a United States senator...
MCCAIN: Sure.
LEHRER: ... you're going to vote for the plan?
44/105
MCCAIN: Sure. But -- but let me -- let me point out, Redacted.
A lot of us saw this train wreck coming.
officer, who, frankly, at the end of each month, they've got a
little financial crisis going on.
But there's also the issue of responsibility. You've mentioned
President Dwight David Eisenhower. Redacted.
Redacted. We haven't been paying attention to them. And if you
look at our tax policies, it's a classic example.
Somehow we've lost that accountability. I've been heavily
criticized because Redacted. We've got to start also holding
people accountable, and we've got to reward people who
succeed.
LEHRER: So, Senator McCain, do you agree with what Senator
Obama just said? And, if you don't, tell him what you disagree
with.
But somehow in Washington today -- and I'm afraid on Wall
Street -- greed is rewarded, excess is rewarded, and corruption -or certainly failure to carry out our responsibility is rewarded.
As president of the United States, people are going to be held
accountable in my administration. And I promise you that that
will happen.
LEHRER: Do you have something directly to say, Senator
Obama, to Senator McCain about what he just said?
OBAMA: Well, I think Senator McCain's absolutely right that
we need more responsibility, but we need it not just when there's
a crisis. I mean, we've had years in which the reigning economic
ideology has been what's good for Wall Street, but not what's
good for Main Street.
And there are folks out there who've been struggling before this
crisis took place. And that's why it's so important, as we solve
this short-term problem, that we look at some of the underlying
issues that have led to wages and incomes for ordinary
Americans to go down, the -- a health care system that is broken,
energy policies that are not working, because, you know,
Redacted.
MCCAIN: No, I -- look, we've got to fix the system. We've got
fundamental problems in the system. And Main Street is paying
a penalty for the excesses and greed in Washington, D.C., and on
Wall Street.
So there's no doubt that we have a long way to go. And,
obviously, stricter interpretation and consolidation of the various
regulatory agencies that weren't doing their job, that has brought
on this crisis.
But I have a fundamental belief in the goodness and strength of
the American worker. And the American worker is the most
productive, the most innovative. Redacted.
But we've got to get through these times, but I have a
fundamental belief in the United States of America. And I still
believe, under the right leadership, our best days are ahead of us.
LEHRER: All right, let's go to the next lead question, which is
essentially following up on this same subject.
And you get two minutes to begin with, Senator McCain. And
using your word "fundamental," are there fundamental
differences between your approach and Senator Obama's
approach to what you would do as president to lead this country
out of the financial crisis?
LEHRER: Say it directly to him.
OBAMA: I do not think that they are.
MCCAIN: Well, the first thing we have to do is get spending
under control in Washington. It's completely out of control. It's
gone -- Redacted.
LEHRER: Say it directly to him.
OBAMA: Well, the -- John, Redacted. And...
MCCAIN: Are you afraid I couldn't hear him?
LEHRER: I'm just determined to get you all to talk to each other.
I'm going to try.
OBAMA: The -- and I just fundamentally disagree. And unless
we are holding ourselves accountable day in, day out, not just
when there's a crisis for folks who have power and influence and
can hire lobbyists, but for the nurse, the teacher, the police
We Republicans came to power to change government, and
government changed us. And the -- the worst symptom on this
disease is what my friend, Tom Coburn, calls earmarking as a
gateway drug, because it's a gateway. It's a gateway to out-ofcontrol spending and corruption.
And we have former members of Congress now residing in
federal prison because of the evils of this earmarking and porkbarrel spending.
45/105
You know, we spent Redacted. I don't know if that was a
criminal issue or a paternal issue, but the fact is that it Redacted.
And it has got to be brought under control.
MCCAIN: Redacted. He didn't happen to see that light during
the first three years as a member of the United States Senate,
Redacted.
As president of the United States, I want to assure you, I've got a
pen. This one's kind of old. I've got a pen, and I'm going to veto
every single spending bill that comes across my desk. I will
make them famous. You will know their names.
Maybe to Senator Obama it's not a lot of money. But the point is
that -- you see, I hear this all the time. "It's only $18 billion."
Redacted Do you know that it's gone completely out of control
to the point where it corrupts people? It corrupts people.
Now, Senator Obama, you wanted to know one of the
differences. a million dollars for every day that he's been in the
United States Senate.
That's why we have, as I said, Redacted. It's a system that's got
to be cleaned up.
I suggest that people go up on the Web site of Citizens Against
Government Waste, and they'll look at those projects.
That kind of thing is not the way to rein in runaway spending in
Washington, D.C. That's one of the fundamental differences that
Senator Obama and I have.
LEHRER: Senator Obama, two minutes.
OBAMA: Well, Senator McCain is absolutely right that the
earmarks process has been abused, which is why Redacted.
And he's also right that Redacted, although that wasn't the case
with me.
I have fought against it my career. I have fought against it.
Redacted. I didn't win Miss Congeniality in the United States
Senate.
Now, Senator Obama didn't mention that, along with his tax
cuts, Redacted.
Now, that's a fundamental difference between myself and
Senator Obama. I want to cut spending. I want to keep taxes low.
The worst thing we could do in this economic climate is to raise
people's taxes.
OBAMA: I -- I don't know where John is getting his figures.
Let's just be clear.
Redacted. Redacted.
But let's be clear: Redacted. Redacted.
I think those are pretty important priorities. Redacted.
Now, $18 billion is important; $300 billion is really important.
And in his tax plan, you would have Redacted.
So my attitude is, we've got to grow the economy from the
bottom up. Redacted.
But let's go back to the original point. John, nobody is denying
that $18 billion is important. And, absolutely, we need earmark
reform. And when I'm president, I will go line by line to make
sure that we are not spending money unwisely.
But the fact is that Redacted.
And that means that the ordinary American out there who's
collecting a paycheck every day, they've got a little extra money
to be able to buy a computer for their kid, to fill up on this gas
that is killing them.
OBAMA: And when you look at Redacted, I think that is a
continuation of the last eight years, and we can't afford another
four.
And over time, that, I think, is going to be a better recipe for
economic growth than the -- the policies of President Bush that
John McCain wants to -- wants to follow.
LEHRER: Respond directly to him about that, to Senator Obama
about that, about the -- he's made it twice now, about your tax -your policies about tax cuts.
LEHRER: Senator McCain?
MCCAIN: Well -- well, let me give you an example of what
Senator Obama finds objectionable, the business tax.
MCCAIN: Well, again, I don't mean to go back and forth, but
he...
Right now, Redacted.
LEHRER: No, that's fine.
Now, if you're a business person, and you can locate any place in
the world, then, obviously, Redacted.
46/105
Redacted.
OBAMA: John, Redacted.
But, again, I want to return. Redacted. I can tell you, it's rife. It's
throughout.
MCCAIN: You've got to look at our record. You've got to look
at our records. That's the important thing.
Redacted. Look at them. You'll be appalled.
Who Redacted? Who has been the person who Redacted?
Who's the person who has believed that Redacted? And
Redacted.
And Redacted.
So the point is, I want people to have tax cuts. Redacted.
Redacted.
I know that the worst thing we could possibly do is to raise taxes
on anybody, and a lot of people might be interested in Senator
Obama's definition of "rich."
Let's give every American a choice: Redacted, and, two -- and
let Americans choose whether they want the -- the existing tax
code or they want a new tax code.
And so, again, look at the record, particularly the energy bill.
But, again, Senator Obama has shifted on a number of occasions.
Redacted.
LEHRER: Senator Obama, you have a question for Senator
McCain on that?
OBAMA: That's not true, John. That's not true.
OBAMA: Well, let me just make a couple of points.
MCCAIN: And that's just a fact. Again, you can look it up.
LEHRER: All right.
OBAMA: Look, it's just not true. And if we want to talk about
oil company profits, Redacted.
OBAMA: My definition -- here's what I can tell the American
people: Redacted. And Redacted.
Now, look, we all would love to lower taxes on everybody. But
here's the problem: Redacted. And...
Now, John mentioned the fact that business taxes on paper are
high in this country, and he's absolutely right. Here's the
problem: Redacted.
MCCAIN: With all due respect, Redacted.
And what that means, then, is that Redacted.
OBAMA: No, but, John, the fact of the matter is, is that
Redacted. We've got an emergency bill on the Senate floor right
now that contains some good stuff, some stuff you want,
including Redacted, but you're opposed to it because Redacted.
It's Redacted. You just want Redacted. And that's a problem.
Just one last point I want to make, since Senator McCain talked
about Redacted. Now, what he doesn't tell you is that Redacted.
So Redacted. Here's the only problem: Redacted.
It is not a good deal for the American people. But it's an example
of this notion that the market can always solve everything and
that the less regulation we have, the better off we're going to be.
MCCAIN: Well, you know, let me just...
LEHRER: We've got to go to another lead question.
MCCAIN: I know we have to, but this is a classic example of
walking the walk and talking the talk.
We had an energy bill before the United States Senate.
Redacted.
LEHRER: All right. All right, speaking of things that both of
you want, another lead question, and it has to do with the rescue
-- the financial rescue thing that we started -- started asking
about. And what -- and the first answer is to you, Senator
Obama. As president, as a result of whatever financial rescue
plan comes about and the billion, $700 billion, whatever it is it's
going to cost, what are you going to have to give up, in terms of
the priorities that you would bring as president of the United
States, as a result of having to pay for the financial rescue plan?
OBAMA: Well, there are a range of things that are probably
going to have to be delayed. Redacted. The economy is slowing
down, so it's hard to anticipate right now what the budget is
going to look like next year.
But there's no doubt that we're not going to be able to do
everything that I think needs to be done. There are some things
that I think have to be done.
47/105
We have to have energy independence, so Redacted, but most
importantly by starting to invest in alternative energy, solar,
wind, biodiesel, making sure that we're developing the fuelefficient cars of the future right here in the United States, in
Ohio and Michigan, instead of Japan and South Korea.
We have to fix our health care system, which is putting an
enormous burden on families. Just -- a report just came out that
Redacted.
They are getting crushed, and Redacted. I'm meeting folks all
over the country. We have to do that now, because it will
actually make our businesses and our families better off.
The third thing we have to do is we've got to make sure that
we're competing in education. We've got to invest in science and
technology. Redacted. We've got to make sure that our children
are keeping pace in math and in science.
And one of the things I think we have to do is make sure that
college is affordable for every young person in America.
And I also think that we're going to have to rebuild our
infrastructure, which Redacted, our roads, our bridges, but also
broadband lines that reach into rural communities.
contracts. We now have defense systems that the costs are
completely out of control.
Redacted.
So we need to have fixed-cost contracts. We need very badly to
understand that defense spending is very important and vital,
particularly in the new challenges we face in the world, but we
have to get a lot of the cost overruns under control.
I know how to do that.
MCCAIN: Redacted. But I think that we have to examine every
agency of government and find out those that are doing their job
and keep them and find out those that aren't and eliminate them
and we'll have to scrub every agency of government.
LEHRER: But if I hear the two of you correctly neither one of
you is suggesting any major changes in what you want to do as
president as a result of the financial bailout? Is that what you're
saying?
OBAMA: No. As I said before, Jim, there are going to be things
that end up having to be ...
LEHRER: Like what?
Also, making sure that we have a new electricity grid to get the
alternative energy to population centers that are using them.
So there are some -- some things that we've got to do structurally
to make sure that we can compete in this global economy. We
can't shortchange those things. We've got to eliminate programs
that don't work, and we've got to make sure that the programs
that we do have are more efficient and cost less.
LEHRER: Are you -- what priorities would you adjust, as
president, Senator McCain, because of the -- because of the
financial bailout cost?
MCCAIN: Look, we, no matter what, we've got to cut spending.
We have -- as I said, we've let government get completely out of
control.
Redacted. It's hard to reach across the aisle from that far to the
left.
The point -- the point is -- the point is, we need to examine every
agency of government.
OBAMA: ... deferred and delayed. Well, look, Redacted. That
is a big project. That is a multi-year project.
LEHRER: Not willing to give that up?
OBAMA: Not willing to give up the need to do it but there may
be individual components that we can't do. But John is right we
have to make cuts. Redacted.
Redacted and we have to change the culture. Tom -- or John
mentioned me being wildly liberal. Redacted but I think it is
that it is also important to recognize Redacted.
LEHRER: What I'm trying to get at this is this. Excuse me if I
may, senator. Trying to get at that you all -- one of you is going
to be the president of the United States come January. At the -in the middle of a huge financial crisis that is yet to be resolved.
And what I'm trying to get at is how this is going to affect you
not in very specific -- small ways but in major ways and the
approach to take as to the presidency.
First of all, by the way, Redacted.
MCCAIN: How about a spending freeze on everything but
defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs.
I think that we have to return -- particularly in defense spending,
which is Redacted -- we have to do away with cost-plus
LEHRER: Spending freeze?
48/105
MCCAIN: I think we ought to seriously consider with the
exceptions the caring of veterans national defense and several
other vital issues.
LEHRER: Would you go for that?
OBAMA: The problem with a spending freeze is you're using a
hatchet where you need a scalpel. There are some programs that
are very important that are under funded. I went to increase early
childhood education and the notion that we should freeze that
when there may be, for example, this Medicare subsidy doesn't
make sense.
Let me tell you another place to look for some savings.
Redacted. It seems to me that if we're going to be strong at
home as well as strong abroad, that we have to look at bringing
that war to a close.
MCCAIN: Look, Redacted. We have to have wind, tide, solar,
natural gas, flex fuel cars and all that but we also have to have
offshore drilling and we also have to have nuclear power.
Redacted. You can't get there from here and the fact is that
Redacted. Nuclear power is not only important as far as
eliminating our dependence on foreign oil but it's also
responsibility as far as climate change is concerned and the issue
I have been involved in for many, many years and I'm proud of
the work of the work that I've done there along with President
Clinton.
LEHRER: Before we go to another lead question. Let me figure
out a way to ask the same question in a slightly different way
here. Are you -- are you willing to acknowledge both of you that
this financial crisis is going to affect the way you rule the
country as president of the United States beyond the kinds of
things that you have already -- I mean, is it a major move? Is it
going to have a major affect?
OBAMA: There's no doubt it will affect our budgets. There is no
doubt about it. Not only -- Even if we get all $700 billion back,
let's assume the markets recover, we' holding assets long enough
that eventually taxpayers get it back and Redacted. If we're
lucky and do it right, that could potentially happen but in the
short term there's an outlay and we may not see that money for a
while.
And Redacted so there's no doubt that as president I'm go doing
have to make some tough decision.
The only point I want to make is this, that in order to make the
tough decisions we have to know what our values are and who
we're fighting for and our priorities and if Redacted, then I think
we have made a bad decision and I want to make sure we're not
shortchanging our long term priorities.
MCCAIN: Well, I want to make sure we're not handing the
health care system over to the federal government which is
Redacted. I want the families to make decisions between
themselves and their doctors. Not the federal government. Look.
We have to obviously cut spending. Redacted. I would suggest
he start by canceling some of those new spending program that
he has.
We can't I think adjust spending around to take care of the very
much needed programs, including taking care of our veterans but
I also want to say again a healthy economy with low taxes would
not raising anyone's taxes is probably the best recipe for
eventually having our economy recover.
And spending restraint has got to be a vital part of that. And the
reason, one of the major reasons why we're in the difficulties we
are in today is because spending got out of control. Redacted.
And spending, I know, can be brought under control because
Redacted. And I got plans to reduce and eliminate unnecessary
and wasteful spending and if there's anybody here who thinks
there aren't agencies of government where spending can be cut
and their budgets slashed they have not spent a lot of time in
Washington.
OBAMA: I just want to make this point, Jim. John, it's been your
president who Redacted who presided over this increase in
spending. This orgy of spending and enormous deficits
Redacted. So to stand here and after eight years and say that
you're going to lead on controlling spending and, you know,
balancing our tax cuts so that they help middle class families
when over the last eight years that hasn't happened I think just is,
you know, kind of hard to swallow.
LEHRER: Quick response to Senator Obama.
MCCAIN: It's well-known that I have not been elected Miss
Congeniality in the United States Senate nor with the
administration. Redacted. I have a long record and the
American people know me very well and that is independent and
a maverick of the Senate and I'm happy to say that I've got a
partner that's a good maverick along with me now.
LEHRER: All right. Let's go another subject. Lead question, two
minutes to you, senator McCain. Much has been said about the
lessons of Vietnam. What do you see as the lessons of Iraq?
MCCAIN: I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear that you
cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly
lose a conflict. Our initial military success, we went in to
Baghdad and everybody celebrated. And then the war was very
badly mishandled. Redacted. This strategy requires additional
troops, it requires a fundamental change in strategy and I fought
for it. And finally, we came up with a great general and a
strategy that has succeeded.
49/105
This strategy has succeeded. And we are winning in Iraq. And
we will come home with victory and with honor. And that
withdrawal is the result of every counterinsurgency that
succeeds.
not. The next president of the United States is going to have to
decide how we leave, when we leave, and what we leave behind.
That's the decision of the next president of the United States.
Redacted.
MCCAIN: And I want to tell you that now that we will succeed
and our troops will come home, and not in defeat, that we will
see a stable ally in the region and a fledgling democracy.
Redacted...
LEHRER: Well, let's go at some of these things...
The consequences of defeat would have been increased Iranian
influence. It would have been increase in sectarian violence. It
would have been a wider war, which the United States of
America might have had to come back.
So there was a lot at stake there. And thanks to this great
general, David Petraeus, and the troops who serve under him,
they have succeeded. And we are winning in Iraq, and we will
come home. And we will come home as we have when we have
won other wars and not in defeat.
MCCAIN: Redacted.
LEHRER: What about that point?
MCCAIN: I mean, it's remarkable.
LEHRER: All right. What about that point?
OBAMA: Which point? He raised a whole bunch of them.
LEHRER: Two minutes, how you see the lessons of Iraq,
Senator Obama?
OBAMA: Well, this is an area where Senator McCain and I have
a fundamental difference because I think the first question is
whether we should have gone into the war in the first place.
Now six years ago, I stood up and opposed this war at a time
when it was politically risky to do so because I said that
Redacted, and as a consequence, I thought that it was going to
be a distraction. Now Senator McCain and President Bush had a
very different judgment.
And I wish I had been wrong for the sake of the country and
they had been right, but that's not the case. Redacted. Redacted,
and most importantly, from a strategic national security
perspective, Redacted.
We took our eye off the ball. And not to mention that Redacted,
at a time when we are in great distress here at home, and we just
talked about the fact that our budget is way overstretched and we
are borrowing money from overseas to try to finance just some
of the basic functions of our government.
So I think the lesson to be drawn is that we should never hesitate
to use military force, and I will not, as president, in order to keep
the American people safe. But we have to use our military
wisely. And we did not use our military wisely in Iraq.
LEHRER: Do you agree with that, the lesson of Iraq?
MCCAIN: The next president of the United States is not going
to have to address the issue as to whether we went into Iraq or
LEHRER: I know, OK, let's go to the latter point and we'll back
up. The point about your not having been...
OBAMA: Look, I'm very proud of my vice presidential
selection, Joe Biden, who is the chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, and as he explains, and as John well
knows, Redacted.
But that's Senate inside baseball. But let's get back to the core
issue here. Senator McCain is absolutely right that Redacted as
a consequence of the extraordinary sacrifice of our troops and
our military families.
They have done a brilliant job, and General Petraeus has done a
brilliant job. But understand, that was a tactic designed to
contain the damage of the previous four years of
mismanagement of this war.
And so John likes -- John, you like to pretend like the war
started in 2007. You talk about the surge. Redacted. You were
wrong.
Redacted. You were wrong. Redacted. And you were wrong.
And so my question is...
LEHRER: Senator Obama...
OBAMA: ... of judgment, of whether or not -- of whether or not
-- if the question is who is best-equipped as the next president to
make good decisions about how we use our military, how we
make sure that we are prepared and ready for the next conflict,
then I think we can take a look at our judgment.
50/105
LEHRER: I have got a lot on the plate here...
MCCAIN: Redacted.
MCCAIN: I'm afraid Senator Obama doesn't understand the
difference between a tactic and a strategy. But the important -I'd like to tell you, two Fourths of July ago I was in Baghdad.
Redacted.
OBAMA: That's not the case.
MCCAIN: That's what ...
OBAMA: What he said was a precipitous...
I was honored to be there. I was honored to speak to those
troops. And you know, afterwards, we spent a lot of time with
them. And you know what they said to us? They said, let us win.
They said, let us win. We don't want our kids coming back here.
And this strategy, and this general, they are winning. Senator
Obama refuses to acknowledge that we are winning in Iraq.
OBAMA: That's not true.
MCCAIN: They just passed an electoral...
OBAMA: That's not true.
MCCAIN: Redacted. And peace comes to the country, and
prosperity.
That's what's happening in Iraq, and it wasn't a tactic.
LEHRER: Let me see...
MCCAIN: That's what Admiral Mullen said.
OBAMA: ... withdrawal would be dangerous. He did not say
that. That's not true.
MCCAIN: Redacted.
And I'm -- I'm -- understand why Senator Obama was surprised
and said that the surge succeeded beyond his wildest
expectations.
MCCAIN: It didn't exceed beyond mine, because I know that
that's a strategy that has worked and can succeed. But if we
snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and adopt Senator
Obama's plan, then we will have a wider war and it will make
things more complicated throughout the region, including in
Afghanistan.
LEHRER: Afghanistan, lead -- a new -- a new lead question.
Now, having resolved Iraq, we'll move to Afghanistan.
OBAMA: Jim, Jim, this is a big...
MCCAIN: It was a stratagem. Redacted.
OBAMA: Jim, there are a whole bunch of things we have got to
answer. First of all, let's talk about this troop funding issue
because John always brings this up. Redacted.
And it goes to you, Senator Obama, and it's a -- it picks up on a
point that's already been made. Do you think more troops -more U.S. troops should be sent to Afghanistan, how many, and
when?
OBAMA: Yes, I think we need more troops. I've been saying
that for over a year now.
Redacted.
We had a legitimate difference, and I absolutely understand the
difference between tactics and strategy. And the strategic
question that the president has to ask is not whether or not we
are employing a particular approach in the country once we have
made the decision to be there.
The question is, was this wise? Redacted. We need more troops
there. We need more resources there. Redacted.
And I think that we have to do it as quickly as possible, because
Redacted.
Redacted. They are feeling emboldened.
And we cannot separate Afghanistan from Iraq, because what
our commanders have said is Redacted.
So I would send two to three additional brigades to Afghanistan.
Now, keep in mind that Redacted.
Redacted.
But we can't do it if we are not willing to give Iraq back its
country. Now, what I've said is we should end this war
responsibly. We should do it in phases. Redacted.
And that is a strategic mistake, because Redacted and that
Redacted.
51/105
So here's what we have to do comprehensively, though. It's not
just more troops.
We have to press the Afghan government to make certain that
they are actually working for their people. And I've said this to
President Karzai.
No. 2, we've got to deal with a growing poppy trade that
Redacted.
No. 3, we've got to deal with Pakistan, because Redacted, and
although, you know, under George Bush, Redacted, they have
not done what needs to be done to get rid of those safe havens.
And until we do, Americans here at home are not going to be
safe.
And we're going to have to help the Pakistanis go into these
areas and obtain the allegiance of the people. And it's going to be
tough. Redacted. And it's going to be tough. But we have to get
the cooperation of the people in those areas.
And the Pakistanis are going to have to understand that
Redacted.
So we've got a lot of work to do in Afghanistan. But I'm
confident, now that General Petraeus is in the new position of
command, that we will employ a strategy which not only means
additional troops -- and, by the way, Redacted.
So it's not just the addition of troops that matters. It's a strategy
that will succeed. And Pakistan is a very important element in
this. And I know how to work with him. And I guarantee you I
would not publicly state that I'm going to attack them.
LEHRER: Afghanistan, Senator McCain?
MCCAIN: First of all, I won't repeat the mistake that I regret
enormously, and that is, after we were able to help the Afghan
freedom fighters and drive the Russians out of Afghanistan,
Redacted.
And the result over time was the Taliban, al Qaeda, and a lot of
the difficulties we are facing today. So we can't ignore those
lessons of history.
Now, on this issue of aiding Pakistan, if you're going to aim a
gun at somebody, George Shultz, our great secretary of state,
told me once, you'd better be prepared to pull the trigger.
I'm not prepared at this time to cut off aid to Pakistan. So I'm not
prepared to threaten it, as Senator Obama apparently wants to
do, Redacted.
We've got to get the support of the people of -- of Pakistan.
Redacted.
Now, you don't do that. You don't say that out loud. If you have
to do things, you have to do things, and you work with the
Pakistani government.
Now, the new president of Pakistan, Kardari (sic), has got his
hands full. Redacted.
Redacted.
And, yes, Senator Obama calls for more troops, but what he
doesn't understand, it's got to be a new strategy, the same
strategy that he condemned in Iraq. It's going to have to be
employed in Afghanistan.
OBAMA: Nobody talked about attacking Pakistan. Here's what I
said.
And if John wants to disagree with this, he can let me know,
that, if the United States has al Qaeda, bin Laden, top-level
lieutenants in our sights, and Pakistan is unable or unwilling to
act, then we should take them out.
Now, I think that's the right strategy; I think that's the right
policy.
And, John, I -- you're absolutely right that presidents have to be
prudent in what they say. But, you know, coming from you,
who, you know, Redacted, I don't know, you know, how
credible that is. I think this is the right strategy.
Now, Senator McCain is also right that it's difficult. This is not
an easy situation. You've got cross-border attacks against U.S.
troops.
And we've got a choice. We could allow our troops to just be on
the defensive and absorb those blows again and again and again,
if Pakistan is unwilling to cooperate, or we have to start making
some decisions.
And the problem, John, with the strategy that's been pursued was
that, Redacted, we alienated the Pakistani population, because
we were anti-democratic. We had a 20th-century mindset that
basically said, "Well, you know, he may be a dictator, but he's
our dictator."
And as a consequence, we lost legitimacy in Pakistan.
Redacted. And in the meantime, Redacted.
That's going to change when I'm president of the United States.
52/105
MCCAIN: I -- I don't think that Senator Obama understands that
Redacted. Everybody who was around then, and had been there,
and knew about it knew that it was a failed state.
But let me tell you, you know, this business about bombing Iran
and all that, let me tell you my record.
Redacted.
And I saw that, and I saw the situation, and I stood up, and
Redacted.
Redacted. That was the right thing to do, to stop genocide and
to preserve what was necessary inside of Europe.
I supported what we did in Kosovo. I supported it because
Redacted.
And I have a record -- and Somalia, Redacted.
So I have a record. I have a record of being involved in these
national security issues, which involve the highest responsibility
and the toughest decisions that any president can make, and that
is to send our young men and women into harm's way.
And I'll tell you, I had a town hall meeting in Wolfeboro, New
Hampshire, and a woman stood up and she said, "Senator
McCain, I want you to do me the honor of wearing a bracelet
with my son's name on it."
He was 22 years old and he was killed in combat outside of
Baghdad, Matthew Stanley, before Christmas last year. This was
last August, a year ago. And I said, "I will -- I will wear his
bracelet with honor."
And this was August, a year ago. And then she said, "But,
Senator McCain, I want you to do everything -- promise me one
thing, that you'll do everything in your power to make sure that
my son's death was not in vain."
That means that that mission succeeds, just like those young
people who re-enlisted in Baghdad, just like the mother I met at
the airport the other day whose son was killed. And they all say
to me that we don't want defeat.
MCCAIN: A war that I was in, where we had an Army, that it
wasn't through any fault of their own, but they were defeated.
And I know how hard it is for that -- for an Army and a military
to recover from that. And it did and we will win this one and we
won't come home in defeat and dishonor and probably have to
go back if we fail.
OBAMA: Jim, let me just make a point. I've got a bracelet, too,
from Sergeant - from the mother of Sergeant Ryan David
Jopeck, sure another mother is not going through what I'm going
through.
No U.S. soldier ever dies in vain because they're carrying out the
missions of their commander in chief. And we honor all the
service that they've provided. Our troops have performed
brilliantly. The question is for the next president, are we making
good judgments about how to keep America safe precisely
because sending our military into battle is such an enormous
step.
And the point that I originally made is that we took our eye off
Afghanistan, we took our eye off the folks who perpetrated 9/11,
Redacted and Senator McCain, nobody is talking about defeat
in Iraq, but I have to say we are having enormous problems in
Afghanistan because of that decision.
And it is not true you have consistently been concerned about
what happened in Afghanistan. At one point, Redacted. You
don't muddle through the central front on terror and you don't
muddle through going after bin Laden. You don't muddle
through stamping out the Taliban.
I think that is something we have to take seriously. And when
I'm president, I will.
LEHRER: New ...
MCCAIN: You might think that with that kind of concern that
Senator Obama would have gone to Afghanistan, particularly
given his responsibilities as a subcommittee chairman. By the
way, when I'm subcommittee chairman, we take up the issues
under my subcommittee. But the important thing is -- the
important thing is Redacted and I know what our security
requirements are. I know what our needs are. So the point is that
we will prevail in Afghanistan, but we need the new strategy and
we need it to succeed.
But the important thing is, if we suffer defeat in Iraq, which
Redacted, then that will have a calamitous effect in Afghanistan
and American national security interests in the region. Senator
Obama doesn't seem to understand there is a connected between
the two.
LEHRER: I have some good news and bad news for the two of
you. You all are even on time, which is remarkable, considering
we've been going at it ...
OBAMA: A testimony to you, Jim.
53/105
LEHRER: I don't know about that. But the bad news is all my
little five minute things have run over, so, anyhow, we'll adjust
as we get there. But the amount of time is even.
New lead question. And it goes two minutes to you, Senator
McCain, what is your reading on the threat to Iran right now to
the security of the United States?
MCCAIN: My reading of the threat from Iran is that if Iran
acquires nuclear weapons, it is an existential threat to the State
of Israel and to other countries in the region because the other
countries in the region will feel compelling requirement to
acquire nuclear weapons as well.
Now we cannot a second Holocaust. Let's just make that very
clear. What I have proposed for a long time, and I've had
conversation with foreign leaders about forming a league of
democracies, let's be clear and let's have some straight talk.
Redacted.
I have proposed a league of democracies, a group of people - a
group of countries that share common interests, common values,
common ideals, they also control a lot of the world's economic
power. We could impose significant meaningful, painful
sanctions on the Iranians that I think could have a beneficial
effect.
mortal enemy. That was cleared away. And what we've seen
over the last several years is Iran's influence grow. Redacted.
So obviously, our policy over the last eight years has not
worked. Senator McCain is absolutely right, we cannot tolerate a
nuclear Iran. It would be a game changer. Not only would it
threaten Israel, a country that is our stalwart ally, but it would
also create an environment in which you could set off an arms
race in this Middle East.
Now here's what we need to do. We do need tougher sanctions. I
do not agree with Senator McCain that we're going to be able to
execute the kind of sanctions we need without some cooperation
with some countries like Russia and China that Redacted but
potentially have an interest in making sure Iran doesn't have a
nuclear weapon.
But we are also going to have to, I believe, engage in tough
direct diplomacy with Iran and this is a major difference I have
with Senator McCain, this notion by not talking to people we are
punishing them has not worked. It has not worked in Iran, it has
not worked in North Korea. In each instance, our efforts of
isolation have actually accelerated their efforts to get nuclear
weapons. That will change when I'm president of the United
States.
LEHRER: Senator, what about talking?
The Iranians have a lousy government, so Redacted. So I am
convinced that together, we can, with the French, with the
British, with the Germans and other countries, democracies
around the world, we can affect Iranian behavior.
But have no doubt, but have no doubt that Redacted. And it is a
threat not only in this region but around the world.
What I'd also like to point out Redacted.
So this is a serious threat. This is a serious threat to security in
the world, and I believe we can act and we can act with our
friends and allies and reduce that threat as quickly as possible,
but have no doubt about the ultimate result of them acquiring
nuclear weapons.
LEHRER: Two minutes on Iran, Senator Obama.
OBAMA: Well, let me just correct something very quickly. I
believe the Republican Guard of Iran is a terrorist organization.
I've consistently said so. What Senator McCain refers to is a
measure in the Senate that Redacted.
And ironically, the single thing that has strengthened Iran over
the last several years has been the war in Iraq. Iraq was Iran's
MCCAIN: Redacted. Without precondition. Here is
Ahmadinenene [mispronunciation], Ahmadinejad, who is,
Ahmadinejad, who Redacted, and we're going to sit down,
without precondition, across the table, to legitimize and give a
propaganda platform to a person that is espousing the
extermination of the state of Israel, and therefore then giving
them more credence in the world arena and therefore saying,
they've probably been doing the right thing, because you will sit
down across the table from them and that will legitimize their
illegal behavior.
The point is that throughout history, whether it be Ronald
Reagan, who Redacted.
Or whether it be Nixon's trip to China, which Redacted. Look,
I'll sit down with anybody, but there's got to be pre-conditions.
Those pre-conditions would apply that we wouldn't legitimize
with a face to face meeting, a person like Ahmadinejad. Now,
Senator Obama said, without preconditions.
OBAMA: So let's talk about this. First of all, Redacted. So he
may not be the right person to talk to. But I reserve the right, as
president of the United States to meet with anybody at a time
and place of my choosing if I think it's going to keep America
safe.
54/105
And I'm glad that Senator McCain brought up the history, the
bipartisan history of us engaging in direct diplomacy.
What Senator Obama doesn't seem to understand that if without
precondition you sit down across the table from someone who
Redacted, you legitimize those comments.
Senator McCain mentioned Henry Kissinger, Redacted.
Now, understand what this means "without preconditions." It
doesn't mean that you invite them over for tea one day. What it
means is that we don't do what we've been doing, which is to
say, "Until you agree to do exactly what we say, we won't have
direct contacts with you."
There's a difference between preconditions and preparation. Of
course we've got to do preparations, starting with low-level
diplomatic talks, and it may not work, because Iran is a rogue
regime.
But I will point out that I was called naive when I suggested that
we need to look at exploring contacts with Iran. And you know
what? Redacted.
Again, it may not work, but if it doesn't work, then we have
strengthened our ability to form alliances to impose the tough
sanctions that Senator McCain just mentioned.
And when we haven't done it, as in North Korea -- let me just
take one more example -- in North Korea, we cut off talks.
They're a member of the axis of evil. We can't deal with them.
This is dangerous. It isn't just naive; it's dangerous. And so we
just have a fundamental difference of opinion.
As far as North Korea is concerned, Redacted. By the way,
North Korea, most repressive and brutal regime probably on
Earth. Redacted.
We don't know what the status of the dear leader's health is
today, but we know this, that Redacted.
And we ought to go back to a little bit of Ronald Reagan's "trust,
but verify," and certainly not sit down across the table from -without precondition, as Senator Obama said he did twice, I
mean, it's just dangerous.
OBAMA: Look, I mean, Senator McCain keeps on using this
example that suddenly the president would just meet with
somebody without doing any preparation, without having lowlevel talks. Nobody's been talking about that, and Senator
McCain knows it. This is a mischaracterization of my position.
When we talk about preconditions -- and Redacted -- the idea is
that we do not expect to solve every problem before we initiate
talks.
And you know what happened? Redacted.
When we re-engaged -- because, again, the Bush administration
reversed course on this -- then we have at least made some
progress, although right now, because of the problems in North
Korea, we are seeing it on shaky ground.
And -- and I just -- so I just have to make this general point that
the Bush administration, Redacted.
MCCAIN: Of course.
OBAMA: If we can't meet with our friends, I don't know how
we're going to lead the world in terms of dealing with critical
issues like terrorism.
MCCAIN: I'm not going to set the White House visitors
schedule before I'm president of the United States. I don't even
have a seal yet.
And, you know, the Bush administration has come to recognize
that it hasn't worked, this notion that we are simply silent when it
comes to our enemies. And the notion that we would sit with
Ahmadinejad and not say anything while he's spewing his
nonsense and his vile comments is ridiculous. Nobody is even
talking about that.
MCCAIN: So let me get this right. We sit down with
Ahmadinejad, and he says, "We're going to wipe Israel off the
face of the Earth," and we say, "No, you're not"? Oh, please.
OBAMA: No, let me tell...
MCCAIN: By the way, my friend, Dr. Kissinger, who's been my
friend for 35 years, would be interested to hear this conversation
and Senator Obama's depiction of his -- of his positions on the
issue. I've known him for 35 years.
OBAMA: We will take a look.
Look, Redacted.
OBAMA: Of course not.
MCCAIN: Redacted.
MCCAIN: And I guarantee you he would not -- he would not
say that presidential top level.
OBAMA: Nobody's talking about that.
55/105
MCCAIN: Of course he encourages and other people encourage
contacts, and negotiations, and all other things. We do that all
the time.
LEHRER: We're going to go to a new...
MCCAIN: And Senator Obama is parsing words when he says
precondition means preparation.
OBAMA: I am not parsing words.
MCCAIN: He's parsing words, my friends.
OBAMA: I'm using the same words that your advisers use.
They have Redacted, and some of those loose nukes could fall
into the hands of al Qaeda.
This is an area where I've led on in the Senate, Redacted. That's
an area where we're going to have to work with Russia.
But we have to have a president who is clear that you don't deal
with Russia based on staring into his eyes and seeing his soul.
You deal with Russia based on, what are your -- what are the
national security interests of the United States of America?
And we have to recognize that the way they've been behaving
lately demands a sharp response from the international
community and our allies.
Please, go ahead.
LEHRER: Two minutes on Russia, Senator McCain.
LEHRER: New lead question.
MCCAIN: Well, I was interested in Senator Obama's reaction to
the Russian aggression against Georgia. Redacted
Russia, goes to you, two minutes, Senator Obama. How do you
see the relationship with Russia? Do you see them as a
competitor? Do you see them as an enemy? Do you see them as
a potential partner?
Again, a little bit of naivete there. He doesn't understand that
Russia committed serious aggression against Georgia. And
Redacted that is basically a KGB apparatchik-run government.
OBAMA: Well, I think that, given what's happened over the last
several weeks and months, our entire Russian approach has to be
evaluated, because a resurgent and very aggressive Russia is a
threat to the peace and stability of the region.
Their actions in Georgia were unacceptable. They were
unwarranted. And at this point, it is absolutely critical for the
next president to make clear that we have to follow through on
our six-party -- or the six-point cease-fire. They have to remove
themselves from South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
I looked into Mr. Putin's eyes, and I saw three letters, a "K," a
"G," and a "B." And their aggression in Georgia is not
acceptable behavior.
I don't believe we're going to go back to the Cold War. I am sure
that that will not happen. But I do believe that we need to bolster
our friends and allies. And that wasn't just about a problem
between Georgia and Russia. It had everything to do with
energy.
Redacted.
It is absolutely important that we have a unified alliance and that
we explain to the Russians that you cannot be a 21st-century
superpower, or power, and act like a 20th-century dictatorship.
And we also have to affirm all the fledgling democracies in that
region, you know, the Estonians, the Lithuanians, the Latvians,
the Poles, the Czechs, that we are, in fact, going to be supportive
and in solidarity with them in their efforts. Redacted.
And to countries like Georgia and the Ukraine, I think we have
to insist that they are free to join NATO if they meet the
requirements, and they should have a membership action plan
immediately to start bringing them in.
It's not accidental that Redacted.
MCCAIN: And they showed solidarity with them, but, also, they
are very concerned about the Russian threats to regain their
status of the old Russian to regain their status of the old Russian
empire.
Now, I think the Russians ought to understand that we will
support -- we, the United States -- will support the inclusion of
Georgia and Ukraine in the natural process, inclusion into
NATO.
We also ought to make it very clear that Redacted.
Now, we also can't return to a Cold War posture with respect to
Russia. It's important that we recognize there are going to be
some areas of common interest. One is nuclear proliferation.
By the way, I went there once, and we went inside and drove in,
and there was a huge poster. And this is -- this is Georgian
56/105
territory. And there was a huge poster of Vladimir Putin, and it
said, "Vladimir Putin, our president."
It was very clear, the Russian intentions towards Georgia. They
were just waiting to seize the opportunity.
So, this is a very difficult situation. We want to work with the
Russians. But we also have every right to expect the Russians to
behave in a fashion and keeping with a -- with a -- with a
country who respects international boundaries and the norms of
international behavior.
And watch Ukraine. This whole thing has got a lot to do with
Ukraine, Crimea, the base of the Russian fleet in Sevastopol.
Redacted.
So watch Ukraine, and let's make sure that we -- that the
Ukrainians understand that we are their friend and ally.
LEHRER: You see any -- do you have a major difference with
what he just said?
That means that we, as one of the biggest consumers of oil -Redacted -- have to have an energy strategy not just to deal with
Russia, but to deal with many of the rogue states we've talked
about, Iran, Venezuela.
And that means, yes, increasing domestic production and offshore drilling, but Redacted. So we can't simply drill our way
out of the problem.
What we're going to have to do is to approach it through
alternative energy, like solar, and wind, and biodiesel, and, yes,
nuclear energy, clean-coal technology. And, you know, I've got a
plan for us to make a significant investment over the next 10
years to do that.
And I have to say, Senator McCain and I, I think agree on the
importance of energy, but Senator McCain mentioned earlier the
importance of looking at a record.
Redacted.
OBAMA: No, actually, I think Senator McCain and I agree for
the most part on these issues. Obviously, I disagree with this
notion that somehow we did not forcefully object to Russians
going into Georgia.
And so we -- we -- we've got to walk the walk and not just talk
the talk when it comes to energy independence, because this is
probably going to be just as vital for our economy and the pain
that people are feeling at the pump -- and, you know, winter's
coming and home heating oil -- as it is our national security and
the issue of climate change that's so important.
Redacted. And, absolutely, I wanted a cessation of the violence,
because it put an enormous strain on Georgia, and that's why
Redacted.
LEHRER: We've got time for one more lead question segment.
We're way out of...
Because part of Russia's intentions here was to weaken the
economy to the point where President Saakashvili was so
weakened that he might be replaced by somebody that Putin
favored more.
LEHRER: Quick response and then...
Two points I think are important to think about when it comes to
Russia.
OBAMA: That's just not true, John. John, I'm sorry, but that's
not true.
No. 1 is we have to have foresight and anticipate some of these
problems. So back in April, Redacted. That made no sense
whatsoever.
MCCAIN: ... it's hard to get there from here. And off-shore
drilling is also something that is very important and it is a
bridge.
And what we needed to do was replace them with international
peacekeepers and a special envoy to resolve the crisis before it
boiled over.
And we know that, if we drill off-shore and exploit a lot of these
reserves, it will help, at temporarily, relieve our energy
requirements. And it will have, I think, an important effect on
the price of a barrel of oil.
That wasn't done. But had it been done, it's possible we could
have avoided the issue.
The second point I want to make is -- is the issue of energy.
Russia is in part resurgent and Putin is feeling powerful because
of petro-dollars, as Senator McCain mentioned.
MCCAIN: No one from Arizona is against solar. And Senator
Obama says he's for nuclear, but Redacted. So...
OBAMA: I just have to respond very quickly, just to correct -just to correct the record.
MCCAIN: So I want to say that, with the Nunn-Lugar thing...
57/105
LEHRER: Excuse me, Senator.
And we were -- we were opposed by the administration, another
area where I differed with this administration. Redacted.
OBAMA: John?
MCCAIN: ... Redacted.
OBAMA: I -- I just have to correct the record here. Redacted.
And, Senator McCain, he says -- he talks about Arizona.
LEHRER: All right.
OBAMA: I've got to make this point, Jim.
LEHRER: OK.
And there were a series of recommendations, as I recall, more
than 40. Redacted. I'm proud of that work, again, bipartisan,
reaching across the aisle, working together, Democrat and
Republican alike.
So we have a long way to go in our intelligence services. We
have to do a better job in human intelligence. And we've got to -to make sure that we have people who are trained interrogators
so that we don't ever torture a prisoner ever again.
We have to make sure that our technological and intelligence
capabilities are better. We have to work more closely with our
allies. I know our allies, and I can work much more closely with
them.
OBAMA: He objects...
MCCAIN: I have voted for alternate fuel all of my time...
But I can tell you that I think America is safer today than it was
on 9/11. But that doesn't mean that we don't have a long way to
go.
OBAMA: He -- he -- he objects...
LEHRER: One at a time, please.
OBAMA: He objected...
LEHRER: One at a time.
MCCAIN: No one can be opposed to alternate energy.
OBAMA: All right, fair enough. Let's move on. You've got one
more energy -- you've got one more question.
LEHRER: This is the last -- last lead question. You have two
minutes each. And the question is this, beginning with you,
Senator McCain.
And I'd like to remind you, also, as a result of those
recommendations, we've probably had the largest reorganization
of government since we established the Defense Department.
And I think that those men and women in those agencies are
doing a great job.
But we still have a long way to go before we can declare
America safe, and that means doing a better job along our
borders, as well.
LEHRER: Two minutes, Senator Obama.
OBAMA: Well, first of all, I think that we are safer in some
ways. Obviously, Redacted. We have done some work in terms
of securing potential targets, but we still have a long way to go.
What do you think the likelihood is that there would be another
9/11-type attack on the continental United States?
We've got to make sure that we're hardening our chemical sites.
We haven't done enough in terms of transit; we haven't done
enough in terms of ports.
MCCAIN: I think it's much less than it was the day after 9/11. I
think it -- that we have a safer nation, but we are a long way
from safe.
And the biggest threat that we face right now is not a nuclear
missile coming over the skies. It's in a suitcase.
And I want to tell you that one of the things I'm most proud of,
among others, because I have worked across the aisle. I have a
long record on that, on a long series of reforms.
But after 9/11, Senator Joe Lieberman and I decided that we
needed a commission, and that was a commission to investigate
9/11, and find out what happened, and fix it.
This is why the issue of nuclear proliferation is so important. It
is the -- the biggest threat to the United States is a terrorist
getting their hands on nuclear weapons.
And we -- Redacted. And I actually believe that we need missile
defense, because of Iran and North Korea and the potential for
them to obtain or to launch nuclear weapons, but I also believe
that, when Redacted, then we're making a mistake.
58/105
The other thing that we have to focus on, though, is al Qaeda.
Redacted. We can't simply be focused on Iraq. We have to go to
the root cause, and that is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's
going to be critical. We are going to need more cooperation with
our allies.
And one last point I want to make. It is important for us to
understand that the way we are perceived in the world is going
to make a difference, in terms of our capacity to get cooperation
and root out terrorism.
And one of the things that I intend to do as president is to restore
America's standing in the world. Redacted.
OBAMA: And this is the greatest country on Earth. But because
of some of the mistakes that have been made -- and I give
Senator McCain great credit on the torture issue, for having
identified that as something that undermines our long-term
security -- because of those things, we, I think, are going to have
a lot of work to do in the next administration to restore that sense
that America is that shining beacon on a hill.
LEHRER: Do you agree there's much to be done in a new
administration to restore...
MCCAIN: But in the case of missile defense, Redacted.
We seem to come full circle again. Senator Obama still doesn't
quite understand -- or doesn't get it -- that if we fail in Iraq, it
encourages al Qaeda. They would establish a base in Iraq.
The consequences of defeat, which would result from his plan of
withdrawal and according to date certain, regardless of
conditions, Redacted -- possible defeat, loss of all the fragile
sacrifice that we've made of American blood and treasure, which
grieves us all.
All of that would be lost if we followed Senator Obama's plan to
have specific dates with withdrawal, regardless of conditions on
the ground.
And General Petraeus says we have had great success, but it's
very fragile. And we can't do what Senator Obama wants to do.
That is the central issue of our time. And I think Americans will
judge very seriously as to whether that's the right path or the
wrong path and who should be the next president of the United
States.
LEHRER: You see the same connections that Senator McCain
does?
OBAMA: Oh, there's no doubt. Look, over the last eight years,
this administration, along with Senator McCain, have been
solely focused on Iraq. That has been their priority. That has
been where all our resources have gone.
In the meantime, bin Laden is still out there. He is not captured.
He is not killed. Al Qaeda is resurgent.
In the meantime, we've got challenges, for example, with China,
Redacted. And they are active in countries like -- in regions like
Latin America, and Asia, and Africa. They are -- the
conspicuousness of their presence is only matched by our
absence, because we've been focused on Iraq.
We have weakened our capacity to project power around the
world because we have viewed everything through this single
lens, not to mention, look at our economy. Redacted.
And that means we can't provide health care to people who need
it. We can't invest in science and technology, which will
determine whether or not we are going to be competitive in the
long term.
Redacted. So this is a national security issue.
We haven't adequately funded veterans' care. I sit on the
Veterans Affairs Committee, and we've got -- I meet veterans all
across the country who are trying to figure out, "How can I get
disability payments? I've got post-traumatic stress disorder, and
yet I can't get treatment."
So we have put all chips in, right there, and nobody is talking
about losing this war. What we are talking about is recognizing
that the next president has to have a broader strategic vision
about all the challenges that we face.
That's been missing over the last eight years. That sense is
something that I want to restore.
MCCAIN: I've been involved, as I mentioned to you before, in
virtually every major national security challenge we've faced in
the last 20-some years. There are some advantages to
experience, and knowledge, and judgment.
And I -- and I honestly don't believe that Senator Obama has the
knowledge or experience and has made the wrong judgments in
a number of areas, including his initial reaction to Russian
invasion -- aggression in Georgia, to his -- you know, we've seen
this stubbornness before in this administration to cling to a belief
that somehow the surge has not succeeded and failing to
acknowledge that he was wrong about the surge is -- shows to
me that we -- that -- that we need more flexibility in a president
of the United States than that.
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As far as our other issues that he brought up are concerned, I
know the veterans. I know them well. And I know that they
know that I'll take care of them. And I've been proud of their
support and their recognition of my service to the veterans.
University in St. Louis. My PBS colleague, Gwen Ifill, will be
the moderator.
For now, from Oxford, Mississippi, thank you, senators, both.
I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you, and good night.
And I love them. And I'll take care of them. And they know that
I'll take care of them. And that's going to be my job.
But, also, I have the ability, and the knowledge, and the
background to make the right judgments, to keep this country
safe and secure.
politics
Tie Goes to Obama
Neither candidate won a clear victory.
Reform, prosperity, and peace, these are major challenges to the
United States of America. I don't think I need any on-the-job
training. I'm ready to go at it right now.
By John Dickerson
OBAMA: Well, let me just make a closing point. You know, my
father came from Kenya. That's where I get my name.
We've learned recently that John McCain likes chaos. First there
was his surprise pick of Sarah Palin, then there was his holdonto-your-hats rush back to Washington this week. The first
presidential debate could have used a little of that homegrown
mayhem. It was a very sober and even exchange with nary a hint
of serendipity.
And in the '60s, he wrote letter after letter to come to college
here in the United States because the notion was that there was
no other country on Earth where you could make it if you tried.
The ideals and the values of the United States inspired the entire
world.
I don't think any of us can say that our standing in the world
now, the way children around the world look at the United
States, is the same.
And part of what we need to do, what the next president has to
do -- and this is part of our judgment, this is part of how we're
going to keep America safe -- is to -- to send a message to the
world that we are going to invest in issues like education, we are
going to invest in issues that -- that relate to how ordinary people
are able to live out their dreams.
And that is something that I'm going to be committed to as
president of the United States.
LEHRER: Few seconds. We're almost finished.
MCCAIN: Jim, when I came home from prison, I saw our
veterans being very badly treated, and it made me sad.
Redacted.
I guarantee you, as president of the United States, I know how to
heal the wounds of war, I know how to deal with our
adversaries, and I know how to deal with our friends.
LEHRER: And that ends this debate tonight.
On October 2, next Thursday, also at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time, the
two vice presidential candidates will debate at Washington
Obama and McCain looked like equals onstage. McCain turned
in a marginally stronger performance, but Obama looked strong
enough, and in a tough year for Republicans with Obama leading
in the polls, that's a victory for the Democrat. Obama did what
he needed to do to convince people he could be commander in
chief—his challenge for the night. McCain showed he could talk
about the economy—his challenge—but not so brilliantly that he
dented Obama's advantage on the issue.
Obama's big test was to help viewers see him as a possible
commander in chief. There were a lot of people watching who
have never taken such a considered look at the Democratic
challenger. He was firm in his beliefs and clear in his views on
foreign policy. He performed better than he did on the 40
minutes of economic policy the two men discussed at the start of
the debate.
McCain repeatedly asserted that on foreign-policy issues Obama
"didn't understand." But Obama didn't look like a man who
didn't understand. McCain was essentially calling Obama a
Sarah Palin—but Obama didn't look like one. He walked back
his position on meeting with rogue leaders as far as he credibly
could, and he was clear about when he would use military force,
which balanced out his talk about diplomacy.
Obama will benefit from having the better sound bite of the
night. Cable-news producers didn't have many to choose from
for the endless analysis of the debate, but one clip they'll show
will certainly be Obama's criticism of McCain on Iraq. "You
said it was going to be quick and easy," Obama said. "You said
we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You
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were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as
liberators. You were wrong. You said that there was no history
of violence between Shiite and Sunni. And you were wrong." It
was assertive, and it weakened McCain's claim to superior
judgment.
Obama is lucky this was his best sound bite—because he gave
McCain some good material to make a campaign commercial
that makes just the opposite point. Eleven times Obama said
McCain was right. Before the debate was even over, the McCain
team had spliced those into an ad for the crucial post-debate spin
war.
Looming over the two men was an enormous American eagle
with the traditional arrows in one claw and olive leaves in the
other. It was fitting that McCain stood under the arrows. It's not
that all his answers favored military action. But he clearly had a
martial cast to his posture as he took tough stands against
Russia, Iran, and North Korea. That's his worldview. The
question is whether that's the way the swing voters he needs to
convince see things. In the post-Iraq world, polls show that
Americans are wary of using military force to protect the
national interest. Swing voters, who almost by definition tend to
embrace a more moderate view, are probably closer to Obama's
worldview as it was framed in the debate.
McCain was at pains to show that he knew the world very well.
Almost every one of his foreign-policy answers had a little
footnote. He'd either visited the region or talked to the leader in
question. He sounded like Al Gore as he easily pronounced a
host of complicated names and places with ease. (He got to
"Tymoshenko" and "Yushchenko" so quickly and easily, it
sounded like he was reading from Dr. Seuss.)
McCain, who had a bad week, looked at ease and in control. It
may have been his best debate performance of the year. He
delivered no zingers, but he also had no stumbles, and despite a
few groaner jokes, he didn't lapse into too much boilerplate.
Democrats had been whispering for days about his temperament.
I mean, suspending his campaign to rush to Washington? What
was that about? McCain's temperament seemed cool and even.
His aides say that on the flight from Washington, he was joking
and teasing his staff, even though he'd left a chaotic mess in
Washington. McCain does seem to like chaos.
From a political perspective, McCain was surprisingly strong
during the conversation about the economy. He made a call for
accountability and then relentlessly hammered the overblown
spending in Washington. The potential problem for McCain is
that people may have heard "cut spending, cut spending" and not
have taken away anything that will help them in their daily lives.
Obama countered by returning everything he said on the
economy to a discussion of the middle class.
Obama wouldn't talk straight when moderator Jim Lehrer
repeatedly asked the two men to name cuts they'd make to
accommodate the financial bailout. McCain did talk straight—
suggesting an across-the-board spending freeze. That was candid
but politically deadly. Obama has ads he can run about all the
attractive-sounding programs that will be "cut" by such a freeze.
Obama is lucky that his "you were wrong" sound bite will live
on past the debate, because at several turns he didn't stand up for
himself. I can imagine Obama fans were frustrated their man
didn't throw a few big punches. As the two debated Obama's
position on meeting with foreign leaders, McCain repeatedly
overstated Obama's standpoint. After several rounds of backand-forth, Obama only tepidly asserted his stance. When they
debated the economy, Obama challenged the idea that McCain
could change Washington's spending habits after voting with
Bush 90 percent of the time, but as he did so he petered out. He
ended by mumbling, "I think, just it's, you know, kind of hard to
swallow." Pfffft.
There was lots of great body language to read. Obama looks
down when he's saying something unpleasant—like delivering
an attack on his opponent. Obama looked at the audience more
(as Kennedy did in 1960), McCain talked to the moderator (as
Nixon had). When McCain was talking, Obama looked at him,
like he was a listener. McCain stared straight ahead when
Obama was speaking, which at times made it appear as if Obama
was scolding him for denting the car.
It was a bit of a disappointment there weren't more fireworks,
since the format was designed to have the two candidates engage
each other. At one point the moderator nearly begged them to
take each other on. It was not to be. Just a day earlier they had
met in the White House separated by five politicians. On the
stage, in Mississippi they seemed almost as far apart.
press box
Don't Blame Gwen Ifill If the Veep
Debate Sucks
What a stupid format.
By Jack Shafer
A 90-minute televised window through which we've been
invited to compare the political stands, leadership abilities, and
temperaments of vice-presidential candidates Sarah Palin and
Joe Biden is about to open.
The organizer of the Oct. 2 face-off at Washington University is
calling the event a "debate." But like the McCain vs. Obama
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session that preceded it—overseen by the same outfit—the
Washington University matchup will demand less from the veep
candidates than a five-minute appearance on Meet the Press. The
rules governing its operation all but guarantee it. So if the debate
ends up revealing less about Palin's and Biden's positions than
can be found on a bumper sticker, if either candidate escapes
tough questions and seeks refuge in homey anecdotes, if the
debaters stop talking scant seconds after they start, don't blame
moderator Gwen Ifill of PBS. Blame the format.
Negotiations between the McCain and Obama campaigns
resulted in a 90-minute format that calls for the two candidates
to stand at podiums and field questions in turn from moderator
Ifill. Answers may not exceed 90 seconds, and two minutes of
open discussion will follow each question. Each candidate will
give a 90-second closing statement.
According to the New York Times, the McCain campaign pushed
for this arrangement, which is more restrictive than the twominute-response, five-minutes-of-open-discussion format of the
first McCain-Obama debate, because the looser "format could
leave Ms. Palin, a relatively inexperienced debater, at a
disadvantage and largely on the defensive."
How much can a candidate say in 90 seconds? Depending on his
or her mouth speed, somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 to
300 words. During the 2004 vice-presidential debate between
Dick Cheney and John Edwards, the candidates were allowed
120 seconds per question, and they rarely spoke more than 400
words. (The rules that year allowed for 90-second rebuttals and
discussion-extension intervals at the moderator's discretion.) To
give you a sense of the brevity of 400 words, this article is just
passing the 300-word mark.
Whether you give a candidate 90 or 120 seconds to speak,
abbreviated formats leave the weakest ones plenty of room to
hide. Because no rule forces the candidate to burn all of the
allotted time answering the question, he can evade complexity
and nuance by giving a rehearsed 30-second sound bite,
especially if there is no provision for a follow-up question—
which there usually isn't. And as we observed in the Sept. 26
McCain-Obama debate, the referee can't force the combatants
into an "open discussion" if they choose not to punch: "I'm just
determined to get you all to talk to each other," frustrated
moderator Jim Lehrer said early in that debate.
The veep format at Washington University favors Palin, if
Andrew Halcro is any guide to her debate techniques. Halcro
repeatedly debated Sarah Palin in their contest for the job of
Alaska governor in 2006. He writes in today's Christian Science
Monitor that Palin was the "master of the nonanswer" in debates.
He continues: "During the campaign, Palin's knowledge on
public policy issues never matured—because it didn't have to.
Her ability to fill the debate halls with her presence and her gift
of the glittering generality made it possible for her to rely on
populism instead of policy."
We all have estimates about how long Sarah Palin could speak
about nuclear proliferation, health care, immigration, the Wall
Street bailout, the Iraq war, or the Kyoto Treaty without
resorting to homilies and canned phrases. But force Joe Biden to
go long on any one of those topics and who knows what sort of
trouble his motormouth would get him into? Biden usually
requires 90 seconds just to warm up and lubricate his vocal
cords, after which he reliably barks some ridiculous gaffe. The
90-second maximum protects both veep candidates from their
weaknesses.
The Cheney-Edwards debate from 2004, also moderated by Ifill,
provides a preview of how inconsequential these bouts can be.
Approaching the transcript, I expected a bloody prizefight
between two heavyweights. Instead, I found two bantams on
their bicycles, backpedaling. Ifill asked each candidate only 10
questions, with most of the 90-minute session given over to
tedious rebuttals and responses. The day after the CheneyEdwards debate, the Washington Post concluded that "the format
was calculated to keep the fireworks subdued" and that the
calculation had paid off.
WorldNetDaily suggests this week that Ifill's forthcoming book,
The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, may
compromise her performance as moderator because the book's
success depends on the success of the Obama campaign. (See
also Michelle Malkin and Tim Graham at the Media Research
Center.) Might Ifill take a dive for Joe Biden before an audience
of tens of millions in hopes of increasing sales of a book
scheduled for release in January? That doesn't square with
common sense, nor does it square with what I know about Ifill's
work. If you're interested in her thoroughness and fairness as a
moderator and have caffeine enough to read the entire CheneyEdwards debate transcript, do so. You'll see that she conducted
herself in a completely professional—and boring—manner.
Instead of knocking moderators, let's knock the format, which
the campaigns ultimately control. Back in the early 1990s,
Walter Goodman of the New York Times called for a debate
template that forced candidates "accustomed to delivering
bromides on the stump and toying with interviewers" to actually
grapple with issues. Forget about time limits, Goodman
counseled, writing:
When the usual slogans start popping out,
leave it to the moderator to remind the
candidate what the question is, and to press for
a straight answer.
The candidates could also be compelled to
confront each other, give and take, no place to
hide. Instead of the charges and insinuations
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that float through their commercials, there
could be rebuttals and counter rebuttals. A
tough, fair reporter—and specimens are
available on all the networks—can abet that
healthy process, too.
Who could oppose Marquis of Queensberry-style rules
governing 90-minute championship bouts between the
candidates? Surely not WorldNetDaily, Michelle Malkin, or Tim
Graham. The only candidate afraid of showing what they've got
is the candidate who's got nothing to show.
*******
No discussion of Gwen Ifill is complete without mentioning the
laden-with-innuendo 245-word piece that she co-bylined with
Maralee Schwartz and the late Ann Devroy for the Jan. 10, 1989,
Washington Post about Jennifer Fitzgerald. Many had gossiped
in the absence of proof that President George H.W. Bush had
had an affair with Fitzgerald, so the politically connected knew
exactly what Ifill, Schwartz, and Devroy had on their minds
when they wrote this in their lede:
Jennifer Fitzgerald, who has served Presidentelect George Bush in a variety of positions,
most recently running the vice presidential
Senate offices, is expected to be named deputy
chief of protocol in the new administration,
sources said yesterday.
Send similarly scurrilous ledes to [email protected].
And remind me to revisit Ifill's book when it comes out in
January. (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 debate in the
subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to
[email protected].
Schoolhouse Rock
Replication
Looking for education reform in Obama's poverty platform.
By Paul Tough
Science
Sex Dramedy
What can Choke and Californication teach us about sex addiction?
By Daniel Engber
Some addictions are funnier than others. There aren't many good
heroin comedies; not even Ben Stiller can wring a laugh out of
smoking crack. Alcoholism, on the other hand, has its moments,
and by long-standing convention smoking huge quantities of
marijuana is truly hilarious. So where in this humor hierarchy
shall we put the compulsion to have sex?
It was high comedy as recently as 2007, when Will Ferrell's
satyrical lead in Blades of Glory reveled in his sex addiction as
"a real disease with doctors and medicine and everything!" Now,
with the Friday premiere of the film Choke, a darkly comic sexrehab drama starring Sam Rockwell, and the Sunday debut of the
second season of Showtime's Californication, a half-hour family
dramedy with David Duchovny as a recovering sexaholic, the
condition seems to have found its place somewhere closer to the
middle of the spectrum.
Choke has elements of a classic stoner film—something like
Harold and Kumar Can't Stop Masturbating. A couple of
slacker dudes create cheerful mayhem as they pursue their fix,
clash with co-workers, and evade the law. But there's plenty of
emotional pain to go with the sexual hijinks—severed
friendships, the death of a parent, the discovery of rock bottom
while bent over a public toilet. Californication also teeters
between humor and pathos: The season begins with Duchovny's
character swearing off sex for the sake of his family, then
chronicles his efforts to abstain. In Episode 1, he inadvertently
performs cunnilingus on a young woman whom he'd taken to be
his girlfriend.* (Oops!) But no matter how wacky the
indiscretion, each misstep results in a miserable argument and a
tearful near-breakup. (Then there's the added, implied drama of
Duchovny's real-life travails with compulsive sex.)
So is Don Juanism funny, or is it sad? The pop-culture
ambivalence reflects an uncertainty that extends all the way
through the medical establishment—to the sex therapists,
psychologists, and psychiatrists who can't agree on how to
define sexual addiction, or indeed whether it should be called an
"addiction" at all. Partisans for the diagnosis see it as a valuable
tool for expanding treatment and gaining acceptance for a longsuffering minority. Opponents view it as a dangerous intrusion
of morality into medicine and yet another avenue for the
marketing of self-help books and psychopharmaceuticals. But
the debate rests on a much bigger question posed by modern
brain science: What does it mean to be an addict in the 21st
century?
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The modern notion that you can be "addicted" to sex, or to any
behavior—like eating, shopping, gambling, or texting—has been
in ascendance among scientists only for the past quarter-century.
An early version of this idea did show up in the writings of
Sigmund Freud, who in 1897 described the compulsive use of
alcohol, morphine, and tobacco as a substitute for masturbation,
the "primary addiction." (His follower, Sandor Rado, an
important figure in early-20th-century American psychology,
referred to the drug high as a "pharmacogenic orgasm.") But his
theory carried little weight with researchers unaffiliated with
psychoanalysis.
time in a medical journal in 1978; five years later, the diagnosis
was popularized by addiction therapist and rehab entrepreneur
Patrick Carnes in his book Out of the Shadows.
By the time of World War I, researchers on drug dependence
had begun to make regular, clinical use of the word addiction—
to suggest a psychological disorder, an affliction of the will
rather than the body. A few decades later, the focus had begun to
shift to the chemistry of the drugs themselves. These scientists
were more interested in the particular effects that a substance has
on the body—the biological dependency it creates—than the
behavioral patterns of its users, the addiction.
It's a reversal of Freud's formulation from more than a century
ago. We used to see drug abuse as a psychological problem—
like compulsive masturbation. Now, with our advanced
knowledge of the brain, we're starting to see compulsive
masturbators as victims of a disease, like drug addicts.
This neurophysiological approach to drug use reached its zenith
in the 1970s, when scientists finally worked out the connection
between addictive drugs, neurotransmitters, and the neural
"pleasure centers" of the mesolimbic reward system. The 1973
discovery of opiate receptors in the brain made it clear that our
normal pleasure response is something like a scaled-down
version of a drug high: Heroin and morphine work by mimicking
our natural brain chemicals, and overstimulating our mesolimbic
pathway.
At the same time, a hippie-era boom of recreational drug use
forced researchers to broaden their definitions. Opiates weren't
the only habit-forming chemicals that triggered the mesolimbic
system—so did substances like cocaine, cannabis, and
Quaaludes. Drug-rehab programs started to treat patients for
broad "substance-abuse" problems rather than dependencies on
particular drugs. Since all these drugs shared a common brain
pathway, a defect in that pathway could make someone
susceptible to all of them at once.
The new science of drug addiction opened the door for
behavioral addictions, too. If activities like eating and sex could
activate the same pleasure centers as heroin, morphine, and
cocaine, it was a small step to assume that repeated behavior
might generate its own dependency. You don't need dope to get
a dopamine spike, so just about anything could take on the
trappings of a chemical high.
Sure enough, psychologists of the era began to construe habitforming or compulsive behaviors in chemical terms.
"Pathological gambling disorder," for one, was introduced into
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in
1980 and was soon defined in parallel with substance-use
disorders. Meanwhile, "sex addiction" was laid out for the first
Through the 1990s and until today, the rhetoric of behavioral
addiction became even more reliant on neurochemistry.
Pornography is now described by some psychologists as an
"erototoxin" that triggers the release of an addictive cocktail of
neurotransmitters and hormones. A few weeks ago, Carnes
explained to the New York Times that an orgasm releases as
much dopamine as an alcoholic beverage.
For all that, we're no closer to accepting the uneasy truth that
addiction is something in between—a neurological disorder of
free will, as National Institute on Drug Abuse Director Nora
Volkow would have it. She argues that a healthy brain can fend
off unhealthy impulses and desires. When the brain
malfunctions, we lose the ability to inhibit compulsive behavior,
a situation she likens to driving a car with no brakes.
In popular culture, the tension between behavior and disease
translates into a confusion between comedy and tragedy. Is a sex
addict like Will Ferrell's character in Blades of Glory—who even
trolls for partners at his 12-step program—just a self-indulgent
horn-dog? (The joke about sex addicts hooking up at group
meetings also turns up in Choke, an episode of Cheers, and an
episode of Nip/Tuck.) Or is he more like a cancer patient, with
no control over how or why he is afflicted?
When it comes to compulsive sexual behavior, the professionals
have their own ambivalence, which plays out as a question of
semantics rather than aesthetics: The community argues over the
inclusion of behavioral addictions—or even the word addiction
itself—in the next version of the DSM. Some argue that the
euphemistic use of dependence has done little to eliminate the
stigma associated with the condition. Others see the
medicalization of behavior—sexual or otherwise—as a form of
social control.
In a certain sense, they're just as confused as we are.
Correction, Sept. 30, 2008: The original version of this article
described Duchovny's character as performing cunnilingus on
an underage girl whom he'd taken to be his wife. Her age was
never confirmed, and he mistook her for his girlfriend. (Return
to the corrected sentence.)
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shopping
Home Slice
room does the shredder take up—is it compact or unwieldy?
Other relevant considerations: How easy is it to empty the trash
can? Are there any noteworthy design extras, like an LCD screen
or a "basket full" indicator, and do these extras make much of a
difference?
What's the best household paper shredder?
By Laura Moser
Not long ago, I received an ominously official-looking
correspondence from the Minneapolis/St. Paul branch of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation.* The enclosed letter informed
me that I had recently been the victim of identity theft, but an
agent was there to help me sort my life out.
The letter raised a few questions. First off: Why the Twin Cities,
a place I had visited once on a post-collegiate road trip and
otherwise had exactly zero connection to? Second: If my identity
had really been thieved, why hadn't I noticed? Why no longdistance phone charges to Sierra Leone, purchases of front-load
washers in Singapore, or warrants for my arrest in New Zealand?
I ignored the letter and its several follow-ups, feeling rather
sorry for the hapless criminal who had taken the trouble to swipe
a financial profile as slender as mine. It was only after hearing
several more consequential identity-theft stories from friends
that I decided to get serious about protecting my personal
information. I opened a new bank account, changed all my
online passwords, and—once those hassles were out of the
way—went in search of the highest-security paper shredder on
the market. Never again would I blithely drop a glossy NO
INTEREST PAYMENTS UNTIL MARCH 2010 offer into the
recycling bin … not without first obliterating all personal
information displayed thereon.
Methodology
For several months now, I have been collecting junk mail so
assiduously that I came to fear ending up like Harlem's
legendary Collyer brothers, who were buried alive under piles of
their own garbage. It's true: I was staggered by the volume of
paper that got stuffed through my mail slot every day, and that's
after I repeatedly declined unwanted Pottery Barn clearance
catalogs at CatalogChoice.org. The only upside of getting all this
unwanted junk is that it allowed me to put the six shredders I
selected to the test.
Capacity (10 points): The shredders I tested were all light- to
medium-duty, designed for home use, and capable of shredding
from eight to 12 pages at a time. Could these machines really
take on as many pages as the manufacturers claimed?
Design (10 points): Always a crucial factor in assessing an
object that will adorn your work space. Is it pretty? How much
Efficiency (10 points): How loud is the shredder? This question
mattered more than I'd anticipated, as some shredders made such
an ungodly racket that I couldn't bring myself to switch them on
without pregaming a couple of Excedrin first. Other points: Are
the shreds small enough to effectively obliterate personal
information, foiling even the most energetic meth addict's
attempts to piece the pages back together again? How quickly
does paper jam, and how easily can jams be undone? Last but
not least, are these shredders, which ranged in price from $39.99
to $164.99, worth the money?
The results, from functional to phenomenal …
Fellowes Powershred 8-Sheet Shredder, $46.99 (originally
$119.99)
"Powershred" is right, in that this eight-sheet machine sounds
like an arsenal of power tools all in operation simultaneously.
(Imagine being trapped in a small bathroom with a weed
whacker, a chain saw, and a welder, and you will have some
sense of this shredder's high-level clamor—really excruciating
stuff.) The pluses: I like that you can throw CDs and credit cards
in the same slot that takes the paper. Some other models require
you to switch slots depending on what you're shredding. But
once I started feeding material into those machines, I didn't want
to pause. The Fellowes also has some useful safety features, and
you certainly can't beat the price. But unless you plan to shred
wearing noise-canceling headphones and/or aspire to drive a
family of raccoons out of your home office, you might have
trouble with the decibel factor here. I also didn't like having to
remove the hefty top to empty the bin. Next.
Capacity: 6
Design: 5
Efficiency: 4
Total: 15 (out of 30)
Royal AG10X 10-Sheet Cross Cut Shredder, $69.99
The pale-beige color of this machine isn't exactly cheering, and I
regretted that you had to peer closely to notice the warning
graphics over the shredding slot, images that on other models
were thrillingly vivid. (Men's neckties! Infants' skulls!) The
Royal is loud, and for the price it could stand a few more bells
and whistles. De-jamming paper requires toggling the on/off
switch over and over again, and emptying the basket is a messy
business, which is more the rule than the exception, I'm sad to
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report. In fact, most of these flaws are fairly standard issue.
There was nothing egregiously wrong with this perfectly
functional 10-sheeter. Bonus points for accepting even more
paper than its stated 10-sheet capacity.
Capacity: 7
Design: 4
Efficiency: 6
OfficeMax Diamond Cut Eight-Sheet Shredder, $39.99
If you are looking for a supersimple, straightforward "light duty"
model, this Office Max might be just your bag. It's compact,
easy to operate, and can take on a few pages more than its
advertised eight-sheet capacity. And who can argue with the
price? Drawbacks: It's pretty slow, and jams are hard to clear up.
The on/off switch was temperamental, and you have to remove
the top to clean out the bin. Still, if your shredding needs are
fairly low-volume, this nice-sized, bargain-price model is a solid
pick.
Capacity: 6
Design: 5
Efficiency: 6
Fellowes Intellishred 12-Sheet Shredder, $164.99 (originally
$299.99)
This latest, greatest Fellowes shredder is what the pundits might
call all hat and no cattle. It gets all the details down: It has handy
little wheels, an attached basket to store on-deck documents, and
blinking lights to indicate, among other crises, an overstuffed bin
and an overheated engine. This machine was also the quietest I
tested, a quality I cannot commend enough. Final perk: This
shredder has a slide-out bin that seems to me a great leap
forward in shredder design. Pulling out the basket—rather than
decapitating the whole machine—greatly minimizes the
exertions of bin-emptying and the mess of stray shreds flying
about after the fact. The top three shredders all shared this
feature.
And yet, and yet. There is a not-insignificant chink in the armor,
which is that the Intellishred just doesn't shred as many pages as
it should. A row of lights signals exactly how hard the shredder
is working, blinking red at, and then rejecting, any too-thick
bundle. This automatic shutdown feature is certainly useful at
preventing jams; the problem is that it gets activated much too
quickly. Instead of simply inserting a credit-card offer into the
jaws intact, you must first open the envelope, then feed a few
pages at a time—an inconvenience that, to me, violates one of
the primary principles of the home shredder and, for that matter,
consumer appliances in general: Good technology should make
life easier, not complicate it further.
Capacity: 4
Design: 9
Efficiency: 6
Staples 12-Sheet Diamond Cut Shredder, $129.99
Supersize proportions notwithstanding—picture one of those
step-lid trash cans—I was a big fan of this shredder. It lives up
to its touted 12-sheet capacity, swallowing frequent-flier
statements and cell-phone bills in a single swift chomp. You
could even see the bulkiness as an advantage if, like me, you are
unfond of emptying the (conveniently pull-out) bin after every
shredding session. And if you are sitting at your desk, the height
of this cylindrical shredder is just right.
Capacity: 9
Design: 5
Efficiency: 8
Staples Mailmate M3 12-Sheet Shredder, $79.99
At first, the rather higher-than-necessary noise level of this 12sheeter put me off, but its other fine qualities soon came to
compensate and then some. For one thing, it's remarkably
compact, about the size of a laser-jet printer. It's delightfully
easy to empty, with a plastic handle that allows you to slide out
the bin without moving any furniture. The Mailmate also has
quite a lot of oomph, and not just for its size; it had no difficulty
destroying even the thickest, most irresistible offer from some
now-defunct lending institution. My only real quibble, other than
the noise level, is the horizontal paper-feeding mechanism—the
others are all vertical—which can necessitate hovering over the
machine a split second longer than my modern lifestyle really
cared to accommodate: Feeding it 12 pages is just as easy, or as
difficult, as feeding it one. Still, if you are looking for a powerful
identity-protector for a cramped space, you can do no better than
the Mailmate. The next time I hear from the FBI, I hope it's just
that clicking sound on the line that assures me they're tapping
my phone again.
Capacity: 9
Design: 8
Efficiency: 7
Correction, Oct. 2, 2008: The article originally referred to the
FBI as the Federal Bureau of Investigations, plural. (Return to
the corrected sentence.)
66/105
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sports nut
Cocktail Chatter: Baseball Playoffs
Edition
How to fake your way through the 2008 baseball playoffs.
By Justin Peters
Back again, it's Slate's surface-level guide to baseball's
postseason, written for those of you who think SportsCenter is
that indoor soccer complex off Route 41. Don't know Chone
Figgins from Henry Higgins? We're here to help.
National League Division Series, Los Angeles Dodgers vs.
Chicago Cubs
Dodgers talking points: Some statheads like to deride Los
Angeles general manager Ned Colletti as a free-spending relic
whose affinity for overpriced veterans—Juan Pierre, Andruw
Jones, Jason Schmidt—prevents the Dodgers' young talent from
seeing the field. Counter that argument by noting, first, that
Colletti's acquisitions almost always get catastrophically injured,
which frees up playing time for productive youngsters like Matt
Kemp, James Loney, Russell Martin, and Andre Ethier. Second,
point out that overpriced veterans can be mighty useful: The
Dodgers wouldn't have sniffed the playoffs without snagging
Manny Ramirez at midseason. Then sabotage your own
argument by declaring your irrational hatred for Colletti's
predecessor, Paul "Google Boy" DePodesta.
Historical context: While the Cubs have the Dodgers beat in the
long, tortured history department, you can still score some points
by noting that 2008 marks the 20th anniversary of the Dodgers'
last World Series victory, the 50th anniversary of their first
season in Los Angeles, and the 40th anniversary of Jack Wild's
bravura performance as the Artful Dodger in Oliver! Mention
that last one often, because everybody loves Oliver!
Conversation starter: "Do you think the Yankees still prefer Joe
Girardi to Joe Torre?"
Conversation stopper: "Food, glorious food! We're anxious to
try it! Three banquets a day! Our favorite diet!"
Cubs talking points: The Cubs made the playoffs in back-to-back
seasons for the first time in 100 years, thanks to solid starting
pitching, a high-powered offense, Lou Piniella's steady
managerial hand, and the good karma emanating from backup
catcher Koyie Hill, who cut off three fingers and his thumb in an
offseason table saw accident and still made it back to the majors
by September. While you're not sure which factor deserves the
most credit for Chicago's great season, you're nonetheless
worried that, in leaving the catcher off the playoff roster, the
Cubs risk falling victim to the Curse of Koyie Hill's Fingers.
Historical context: The Cubs haven't won the World Series since
1908, when they were led by a double-play combination
immortalized in verse by columnist Franklin P. Adams: "These
are the saddest of possible words/ Tinker to Evers to Chance."
Although "Theriot to DeRosa to Lee/ And sometimes Mike
Fontenot and Ronny Cedeno play second base/ When DeRosa is
in right field" doesn't scan nearly as well, that shouldn't stop you
from reciting it, repeatedly, to anybody who will listen.
Conversation starter: "Say what you want about Ryan Dempster
and Aramis Ramirez—superutility man Mark DeRosa is the
Cubs' MVP."
Conversation stopper: "Koyie Hill's Severed Fingers is the
perfect name for my new death metal band!"
National League Division Series, Milwaukee Brewers vs.
Philadelphia Phillies
Brewers talking points: There's no doubt that the Brewers owe
their wild-card berth to midseason acquisition C.C. Sabathia,
who posted an 11-2 record and a 1.65 ERA in 17 starts after
coming over from Cleveland. If the Brewers hope to advance,
they're going to need at least one other starter to pitch well. The
candidates include Dave Bush (29 home runs allowed this
season), Jeff Suppan (8.44 ERA in September), and Yovani
Gallardo (one start since May 1). On second thought, maybe
they should just get Sabathia to start every game.
Historical context: If the Brewers win it all, they could be the
fattest World Series champions in baseball history. Milwaukee's
40-man roster features 12 players who weigh 220 pounds or
more, including the (allegedly) 270-pound Prince Fielder, the
290-pound Sabathia, and Seth McClung, who ballooned to 475
pounds when he ate then-manager Ned Yost on Sept. 15. (The
Brewers claim Yost was fired, but then how do you explain the
ketchup stains on McClung's jersey?)
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Conversation starter: "If the Brewers don't go anywhere this
year, you can blame it on OBP—Prince Fielder is the only
regular with an on-base percentage over .350."
Conversation stopper: "Forget this baseball foolishness. I'm
betting it all on the bratwurst in the first-ever playoff sausage
race."
Phillies talking points: After a slow start, Ryan Howard led all
of baseball with 48 home runs and 146 RBI—including 10
homers and 28 RBI in September. Nevertheless, the Phillies are
the only playoff team in recent memory that's built around its
middle infielders. Lucky for the Phillies, Chase Utley and Jimmy
Rollins are really, really good—Utley hit .292 with 33 home
runs and a .380 OBP while Rollins, although down from his
usual numbers, nonetheless hit .277 and stole 47 bases. It doesn't
matter that the outfield is mediocre or that the starting staff gets
battered after Cole Hamels and Jamie Moyer. As long as Utley
and Rollins are in, you can't count the Phillies out.
Historical context: Just like in 2007, the Phillies came from
behind in September to take the division away from the New
York Mets. Unlike in 2007, it didn't feel like a fluke this year.
And also unlike 2007, the Mets will never, ever, ever have the
chance to win a playoff game in Shea Stadium again and will
send that stadium to its grave not in a spirit of celebration but of
defeat. Eat it, New York City! Eat it, Mets! Philly! Woooo!
Conversation starter: "Sixteen wins and a sub-4.00 ERA at age
45? I'd like some of what Jamie Moyer's drinking."
Conversation stopper: "Still smokin' at age 49? I'd like some of
what Jamie Lee Curtis is drinking. Hubba hubba!"
American League Division Series, Tampa Bay Rays vs.
Chicago White Sox
Rays talking points: The Rays' master plan of being bad for a
really, really long time and losing their star player to a horrible
wasting disease finally paid off this year. The draft picks they
reaped after a decade of badness (B.J. Upton, Evan Longoria,
James Shields, and many others) took the majors by storm,
leading the Rays to a division title after a sad, barren decade of
futility. Send a thank-you card to ex-GM Chuck LaMar,
complimenting him on his excellent strategy—and send a
sympathy card to DH Rocco Baldelli, who really does have a
horrible wasting disease.
Historical context: After a decade of futility as the Tampa Bay
Devil Rays, the Rays dropped the "Devil" this season and
zoomed to the top of the AL East. Of course, they also had good
players for the first time ever, but this shouldn't stop you from
insisting that the K.C. Royals' decades of futility will be over
just as soon as they change their name to the "Sunshine Bands."
Conversation starter: "Everybody talks about the Rays' young
hitters, but the bullpen's turnaround was the key to the team's
success. Last year, they had one of the worst ERAs in baseball
history; this year, they're fifth-best in the majors."
Conversation stopper: "Sure, Evan Longoria plays a great third
base, but have you seen him in a ball gown? Ravishing."
White Sox talking points: Chicago did everything possible to
blow the AL Central—going 11-15 in September, losing the
sweet-swinging Carlos Quentin to a case of bat rage, starting the
punchless Ken Griffey Jr. and Nick Swisher on a regular basis,
adopting "It's Not Gonna Happen" as the team's unofficial motto.
Although your friends might argue that they squeaked into the
playoffs thanks to solid starting pitching and veteran leadership,
you suspect that the White Sox were galvanized by the fear that,
if they choked, manager Ozzie Guillen would follow through on
his frequent threats and throw them under an actual bus.
Historical context: Since winning the World Series in 2005, the
verbose Guillen has feuded with seemingly everybody in
baseball, including newspaper columnists, opposing players,
umpires, and his own general manager. Feel free to get into the
Guillen spirit by loudly criticizing everybody with whom you
are watching the game, especially those who are fat or possibly
homosexual. Your friends will think that you're a comic
genius—just like Ozzie!—and, also, that you're a huge jerk. Just
like Ozzie!
Conversation starter: "Don't be fooled by Paul Konerko's lousy
overall numbers—he was one of the best sluggers in baseball in
August and September."
Conversation stopper: "Ken Griffey Jr. is old enough to be Ken
Griffey Sr.'s father."
American League Division Series, Boston Red Sox vs. Los
Angeles Angels of Anaheim
Red Sox talking points: After seven years of letting Manny
Ramirez be Manny Ramirez, the Red Sox finally tired of his
antics and traded him to the Dodgers in July. While popular
opinion holds that the Ramirez trade was addition by
subtraction, you're not too sure about that math: Manny had a
monster second half (.396 BA, 17 HR, 53 RBI) for the Dodgers,
and that kind of production in Fenway might have helped the
Red Sox win the division and secure home field advantage. Still,
a .358 team OBP and a deep starting staff leaves you optimistic
about Boston's chances, even if you now have to settle for letting
Kevin Youkilis be Kevin Youkilis.
Historical context: The impending demolition of Yankee
Stadium means that Fenway Park is now one of only two major
league stadiums built before the Great Depression—the other, of
course, being Chicago's Wrigley Field. Your friends will
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applaud your spirit when you repeatedly encourage the Dodgers
to "drop some depth charges at Wrigley," never realizing that
you're actually advocating a violent and casualty-laden scorchedearth strategy.
Except Asian-American voters. Somehow, amid all the
demographic navel-gazing, the country's third-largest, fastestgrowing minority—now 15.2 million people, or 5 percent of the
population—gets overlooked.
Conversation starter: "Sure, the Indians' Cliff Lee won more
games, but Daisuke Matsuzaka meant more to his team than any
other pitcher this year."
Not this week. Or, more accurately, not for several hours on
Tuesday. That's when a nonprofit group called Leadership
Education for Asian Pacifics held a news conference excitingly
titled "Political Role of Asian Americans Examined" while the
Obama campaign scheduled interviews about its outreach efforts
to Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters. The message
from both events: Asian voters can make a difference. Attention
must be paid.
Conversation stopper: "We might not win the Series this year,
but, hey, at least the Patriots still have Tom Brady."
Angels talking points: The Angels destroyed their American
League competition behind closer Francisco Rodriguez's recordsetting 62 saves. You, however, realize that a lot of saves are
usually indicative of a crappy offense and are more impressed by
the Angels' anonymously efficient starting staff—the top five
starters posted 70 wins and a 3.97 ERA. Although "Joe
Saunders" and "Ervin Santana" sound suspiciously like aliases,
you're not going to ask any questions as long as they keep
winning.
Historical context: With those 62 saves, Francisco "K-Rod"
Rodriguez effortlessly broke the previous major-league record,
which had been held by Bobby Thigpen, an average pitcher
without a cool nickname who had one really good season in the
course of an undistinguished nine-year career. Follow in Ford
Frick's (supposed) footsteps and argue that K-Rod's record
should be accompanied by an asterisk because Bobby Thigpen
really, really needs this.
Conversation starter: "Vladimir Guerrero in a down year is still
more fearsome than pretty much every other hitter."
Conversation stopper: "Gary Matthews Jr. in a down year is …
oh, wait, that's every year."
swingers
Chinese Democracy
Why don't we ever hear about the Asian-American vote?
By Christopher Beam
Presidential campaigns can feel like an informal census. As the
candidates traverse the country, they pander to Latino voters,
African-American voters, working-class white voters, older
voters, younger voters, elite-college-graduate voters … everyone
gets to feel important.
More about that later. But first, a question: Why, with all our
obsessing over demographics, do we hear so little about the
Asian-American vote?
The most obvious reason is size. Asian-Americans make up only
5 percent of the U.S. population. (Note: "Asian-American" here,
and at the press conference Tuesday, is defined in the broadest
possible sense, to include Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese,
Taiwanese, Japanese, Thai, Filipino, Indian, Pakistani, and
Indonesian, among others.) Fifteen million people is a lot, but
not compared with other ethnic groups. African-Americans now
number 38.4 million, according to the 2006 census; Latinos
boast 44.4 million. Plus, Asian-Americans have the lowest
proportion of eligible voters compared with the populations
(about 52 percent) of any racial group. And of those, very few
(about 50 percent in 2006) actually register to vote. So we're
talking about 7 million eligible voters and about 3 million actual
voters.
But wait—it gets worse! The five states with the largest Asian
populations are, in order, California, New York, Texas, Hawaii,
and New Jersey. Not exactly the swingiest places around. There
are two big exceptions: Nevada and Virginia. Both states have
rapidly growing Asian-American populations—they constitute 6
percent of eligible voters in Virginia, possibly enough to swing a
competitive presidential race.
Another difficulty is the Asian-American community's
heterogeneity. Koreans and Chinese and Vietnamese aren't
necessarily more or less fractured than Mexicans and Puerto
Ricans and Cubans. But, unlike Latinos, they speak different
languages. Campaigns can easily cut Spanish-language ads to
run nationwide; it's tougher to run ads in Vietnamese, Chinese,
Japanese, etc. (Only about 60 percent of Asian-Americans speak
English.) Then you'd need to target ethnic media, which is costly
and, on the national level, of marginal benefit.
Then there is the difficulty of targeting Asian-American issues.
This is a problem in ethnic politics generally—opinions on
immigration, for example, are more diverse among blacks than
among the interest groups that lobby on their behalf—but it is
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especially acute among Asian-Americans. Yes, there are general
bread-and-butter issues like health care and education for which
platitudes about access and opportunity are useful. There are
also hyperspecific concerns that are not ideal campaign talking
points: Chinese care a lot about U.S.-China relations. Taiwanese
care about China-Taiwan. Vietnamese favor anti-Communist
policies. And Filipinos often vote based on whoever supports
benefits for Filipino veterans of World War II. Plus, segments of
the Asian-American community often disagree—as TaiwaneseAmericans and Chinese-Americans do on Taiwan, for example,
or Pakistanis and Indians on Kashmir.
Finally, as if demographics and geography and message weren't
challenging enough, there is partisanship. Or, more precisely,
lack thereof. African-American voters break heavily toward
Democrats; Latino voters (with the exception of Cubans) are
also largely Democratic. Asian-Americans, meanwhile, can't
make up their minds. About a third of them are Republican, a
third Democratic, and a third unaffiliated. This last group
consists largely of immigrants—more than half of AsianAmerican were born overseas—who often won't develop party
loyalty for another generation.
An argument can be made—and is—that excessive partisanship
is exactly the problem with a lot of ethnic politics. It goes
something like this: Democrats take black voters for granted,
Republicans don't even try to win them over, and the result is
that they have less influence than they would if they had less
party loyalty.
But an argument can also be made that partisanship enhances
influence. On the national level, the most powerful groups—
unions, African-Americans, evangelicals—are often the most
partisan. A pandering politician wants to maximize the
efficiency of his pandering. So if the strategy is to mobilize the
base, it makes more sense to court a loyal group. (Plus, it gets
you more media coverage. The one time the national media
noticed Asian-Americans this election cycle was when Hillary
Clinton won 75 percent of their votes in California.)
So what are Asian-Americans planning to do about their
underwhelming influence? One idea is something called the 8020 Initiative, a political action committee dedicated to
persuading 80 percent of Asian-Americans to vote for one side.
Since 2000, the group has endorsed a candidate and asked
Asians to support him or her. (They endorsed Gore in 2000 and
Kerry in 2004. In the 2008 primaries, it was Hillary; in the
general, it's Obama.) The goal of the group, the brainchild of
former Delaware Lt. Gov. S.B. Woo, is eventually to turn the
Asian-American vote into a bloc vote that can swing both ways,
Republican or Democrat.
It's a quixotic enterprise. On the one hand, it's an artificial way to
replicate the normally organic process of party identification—
and so far, it hasn't quite worked. "You can't get to 80-20 by
making a targeted approach in a single election cycle," says
Taeku Lee, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
"You build a constituency over time." At the same time, the
Asian-American vote already is increasingly Democratic. By the
time 80-20 could persuade four-fifths of the group to vote one
way, they might already be there. 80-20 does take credit for
Hillary Clinton's winning the California Asian-American vote by
3-1. But swinging party primaries isn't the goal here.
Another solution is strengthening the ground game. In Virginia,
the Obama camp has hired Asian-American field directors and
recruited Asian-American volunteers. It's also distributing
foreign-language campaign literature to local communities in
Fairfax County—in Vietnamese, for example, in Falls Church
and in Korean in Centreville. "We definitely have the potential
to be the swing vote," says Betsy Kim of the Obama campaign.
There's evidence, too: In 2006, Jim Webb won 76 percent of the
state's Asian-American voters and eked out a victory over
George Allen. Many believe those voters—with an assist by
Allen's "macaca" moment—made the difference. McCain also
has done some outreach, but the enthusiasm seems to lie with the
Democrats. One columnist even called Obama "the first AsianAmerican president."
One area where politicians do make concessions is
representation. Asian-Americans make up 5 percent of the
population, but only about 1 percent of elected officials. So they
want candidates to include more Asian-Americans in their
administrations. President Bush earned points by appointing
Elaine Chao secretary of labor. On a questionnaire, Hillary
Clinton promised to select Asian-American judges; Obama
balked at quotas but committed to appointing qualified AsianAmericans.
Experts offer up all sorts of other solutions to the relative
invisibility of Asian-Americans in politics. Terry Ao, director of
the Asian American Justice Center, argues that congressional
districts must be redrawn to consolidate the Asian-American
vote. She also says the U.S. census understates their
population—since Asian-Americans value their privacy and
immigrants are often afraid to provide information—and needs
tweaking. Voter registration is another solution. Once AsianAmericans register, says Lee, they vote in high numbers. Some
activists also encourage pollsters to include "Asian-American"
as a demographic, instead of lumping it in with "Other." And of
course, electing more Asian-American leaders would raise their
profile considerably. The best-known Asian-American
politicians now are probably Hawaii Sens. Daniel Inouye and
Daniel Akaka, both Democrats, and Chao and Louisiana Gov.
Bobby Jindal, both Republicans.
Since 1980, the Asian-American population has tripled. By
2030, it's expected to nearly double again. Meanwhile, AsianAmericans are flooding battleground states like Nevada,
Minnesota, and Virginia faster than other immigrant groups. So
70/105
maybe 80-20 shouldn't be telling Asian-Americans how to vote.
Maybe it should be telling them where to move.
swingers
So You Think You're a Swing Voter?
Think again: It depends on whether you live in a swing state.
By John Dickerson
If you are lonely, declare yourself a swing voter. You'll get lots
of attention. Volunteers will come to your house with reading
material. Politicians will beam at you. The pollsters will come in
swarms. Tell them you are either undecided or committed but
willing to change your mind. Your phone will ring incessantly,
and if it's not a legitimate pollster, it'll be a push-pollster telling
horror stories or a reporter who wants to know your every whim.
If you frequent a diner or some other authentic-looking eatery
near a major airport, a network producer will put you on
television.
current polls, which are now quite favorable for Obama.
Statewide polls can be unreliable, though, because of small
samples and crazy methodology, so analysts also look at other
cues like party registration. If the party that is traditionally the
underdog is signing up lots of new voters—perhaps enough to
make up for the 2004 margin—it might hint that the state is
really in play. In traditionally red Colorado, for example,
Democrats have seen the number of registered voters grow. It's
also worth checking who or what else is on the ballot: Antiunion initiatives in Colorado might help McCain, while popular
candidates like Mark Warner, who is running for Senate in
Virginia, might help Obama.
When determining swing states, there is really only one ironclad rule: Don't listen to what the campaigns say. They will
claim to be competing in states they're not serious about to throw
off their opponent and make them spend time, money, and
attention defending their turf.
Just one thing, though: Do you live in a swing state? You don't?
Oh—then, never mind. If you're lonely, get a dog.
Instead, watch where the campaigns spend their time and money.
The best way to tell whether a campaign is serious about a state
is if the campaigns are spending money on advertisements and
staff and offices in the state. And the most important indicator is
how much time the candidate is spending in the state. If the
candidate's spouse goes but the candidate doesn't, it probably
means the campaign is not hopeful about the state but not yet
willing to take it totally off the list.
There may have been a time when the political world cared
about the views of voters in non-swing states, but with just 34
days until the election—and some voting already under way—all
that matters is what happens in the 15 or so states that will
determine whether Barack Obama or John McCain will win the
270 electoral votes necessary to become the next president.
Iowa is an interesting test case of this theory: It's a true swing
state. Gore won it in 2000. Bush won it in 2004. Obama has
been ahead there consistently in the polls. He started his
campaign with a caucus victory in Iowa. McCain has constantly
bashed ethanol subsidies, as he did in the last debate, which
doesn't endear him to some Iowa voters.
You've heard of most of the battleground states before. Ohio and
Florida are the two most famous, making all of the other swing
states jealous because they've had movies made about them.
Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico are also
among the traditional swing states that have supported
candidates from both parties in recent elections.
The upshot is that Obama campaign aides think they've got the
state locked up. The McCain team, meanwhile, says it's seen a
dramatic pickup in Republican support in Iowa, mirroring a
larger trend it sees across the battleground states. Since the Palin
pick, McCain aides say, the number of volunteers willing to
make calls and knock on doors in swing states has surpassed the
number who did so in 2004 for George Bush. They say this
boost of energy has been particularly strong in Iowa, where
Republicans' support for McCain was far less enthusiastic than
Democrats' support for Obama.
The number of battleground states is not fixed. Different news
organizations have varying counts. NBC, CNN, the Washington
Post, the New York Times, Mark Ambinder, and Pollster.com, all
see it slightly differently. The slight distinction among the
different analysts is about which new states will be accorded the
coveted "swing state" title and which traditional swing states
should fall off the list. Indiana and North Carolina are new states
flickering in the desirable "tossup" category, whereas Iowa, a
state George W. Bush won in 2004, appears to be headed out of
McCain's reach.
To determine the states that are truly competitive, we start with
the states that historically have been close and then look at the
They're blowing smoke, right? Perhaps. But McCain has been to
Iowa twice in the last two weeks, and he's running ads there.
There's nothing more precious in the final days of a campaign
than the candidate's time. A candidate's visit generates
enthusiasm among supporters, helps organize volunteers, and
gets lots of local news coverage. You don't waste that on a state
that's not in play. McCain's advisers might still be wrong about
Iowa. But at least they're backing up their beliefs with their
candidate.
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A few months ago, when the Obama campaign said it was going
to compete in Indiana, it looked as if it was just making
mischief. A Democrat hasn't won the state since 1964. But the
state is starting to look as if it might be a genuine tossup. Polls
are tightening—particularly one from respected pollster Ann
Seltzer—and Republicans seem to feel some genuine level of
threat. The Republican National Committee is running ads there
against Obama.
North Carolina is like Indiana. It is not a swing state in the sense
that it swings from one party to the other from election to
election. It has been reliably Republican since 1976, but there is
a hint it may swing this time. Obama is up in the polls, riding a
wave of concern about the economy and perhaps even growing
fears about Sarah Palin.
Once campaigns fix on their battleground states, they run a twotrack strategy. First, they reach out to their base with highly
partisan appeals. But because they can't win with their base
alone, they hunt for those weakly committed and undecided
swing voters. Though swing voters get lots of attention, they're
nothing without a strong base—as George McGovern, Michael
Dukakis, and John Kerry learned. All three won the swing vote,
according to post-election polls, but none had enough of a base
vote to win.
Just because you say you're an independent or unaffiliated voter
doesn't mean you're a swing voter. A lot of people who are
registered independents turn out to be hidden partisans, and a
portion of those who are registered in one of the two parties are
nevertheless up for grabs. The former Hillary Clinton supporters
have been a vocal example from the current election cycle.
Studies over the years have shown that swing voters tend to be
less engaged with the campaign than partisans and are slightly
less educated and more moderate. They often live in suburbs,
especially what political scientists call urbanizing suburbs,
which can be found between the metropolitan Democratic
strongholds and the Republican fringe suburbs and rural areas—
areas like the suburbs outside Philadelphia, where McCain and
Obama are fighting over the issue of stem-cell research. McCain
pitched himself to moderate voters as a champion of such
research. Obama responded with ads contending, incorrectly,
that McCain is opposed to it. McCain aides are happy even to be
in this fight. The Philadelphia suburbs were thought to be lost to
Republican candidates.
There have been many efforts to find the one key voting bloc
that will turn the election—soccer moms, Wal-Mart Moms,
office-park Dads—but in "The Future of Red, Blue and Purple
America," Ruy Teixeira explains why those descriptions have
always been either too simplistic or wildly wrong. It's more
likely that the winning candidate will need to make inroads into
a variety of swing groups.
McCain will have to retain his party's traditional advantage
among men while trying to convince independents and soft
Democrats to support him. These voters are torn, says McCain
pollster Bill Bill Mcinturff. They "really admire" McCain, he
says, but they also want "to make absolutely sure that there's
going to be change, including change on the economic front."
McCain's aides say that since the Palin pick, they have seen
some improvement among professional women. They also say
it's fallen off as the Obama campaign has reached out to those
same women by stressing Obama's positions on the economy
and on abortion.
The Democratic Leadership Council argues that Obama, even if
he performs well among Democratic constituencies, needs to
make inroads into white working-class voters—those men and
women with no college degree who work and live in the
competitive suburbs. He doesn't have to win that group.
(Democrats haven't since 1984.) He just needs not to lose by a
wide margin. Polls suggest he may be on his way. Obama has
the clear advantage over McCain with voters on the issues of the
economy and who will change Washington. He has also been
shrinking his gap with McCain on which candidate has the
qualities necessary to be president.
As the science of targeting all voters becomes more precise—
Obama voters prefer Starbucks; McCain voters prefer WalMart—identifying voters who are undecided has become even
more refined. Instead of focusing on large blocs of swing voters,
campaigns can now target blocs within blocks, like gun-owning
women with children who live in suburbs. So if you have
decided to be a swing voter, don't be surprised if the campaigns
already know a lot about you when they come calling.
swingers
Don't Take It for Granite
Democrats control New Hampshire, but Obama still faces a tough battle here.
Swing-voter makeup varies from state to state. Latino voters
play a larger role in Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. The
targeted suburbs in Virginia and Pennsylvania are more
moderate than those around St. Louis or Cincinnati. In states like
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, the uncommitted voters tend
to be older, whereas in growth states like Colorado, Nevada, and
Virginia they tend to be younger.
By John Swansburg
CONCORD, N.H.—At first glance, New Hampshire looks like
it's Barack Obama's to lose. Though George W. Bush won the
state in 2000, he did so narrowly. In 2004, John Kerry won a
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slim victory here, making it the only state where Bush failed to
repeat. Then came the 2006 midterms. The Democrats
practically took over the state, unseating two Republican
members of Congress, winning control of both houses of the
state legislature, and returning Gov. John Lynch to office with
74 percent of the vote. They even won a majority on the state's
unusual but influential executive council, when a septuagenarian
probate bondsman named John Shea beat out a moderate
Republican he'd lost to four times previously. (Apparently not
sanguine about his chances, Shea left for a European vacation on
Election Day. After some initial confusion, he was located at a
Belgian hotel and notified of his victory via fax.)
Yet if Obama is going to keep New Hampshire in the blue
column, he's going to have to work at it. The state isn't as
Democratic as the 2006 election makes it seem. And if any
Republican can take it back, it's John McCain.
The Democratic victories in 2006 were the result of several
factors unique to the midterms. This election year, New
Hampshire will do away with straight-ticket voting, but in 2006,
voters had the option of pulling the lever for a party's whole slate
of candidates. The election of John Shea suggests many did just
that. With the wildly popular Lynch at the top of the ticket, and
the Republican Party seen as responsible for a failing war, the
Democrats were poised for a rout.
What that rout belies is a state still closely split between
Republicans and Democrats—at last count, the GOP held on to a
small advantage of 4,891 more registered voters. With the
presidential race now at the top of the ticket, and concern about
Iraq eclipsed by worries about the economy and energy costs,
Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire
Survey Center, expects the 2008 results to look less like 2006
than like 2004. John Kerry carried the state by a mere 9,247
votes, and that was over Bush, whom even New Hampshire
Republicans seem to like about as much as they like Carl Levin.
By contrast, McCain and New Hampshire have maintained a
robust mutual-appreciation society since 2000. In the state
primary that year, he defeated Bush by an embarrassing 18
percentage points. In the 2008 primary, voters passed over a
New Hampshire taxpayer (Mitt Romney, who owns a house on
Lake Winnipesaukee) to revive McCain's flagging 2008
presidential bid.
New Hampshire's license plates have made its "Live free or die"
motto famous, but it's not just a motto. This is a state with no
sales tax and no income tax on wages. It's the only state in the
union without an adult seat-belt law. It's a state that grants its
citizens an explicit "right of revolution"—see Article 10 of the
state constitution—should the people's liberty ever become
endangered. Such a place might seem to have a natural affinity
for McCain, the self-styled "maverick" who boasts of his
willingness to stand up for the causes he believes in, even if it
means breaking ranks with his own party. McCain's causes have
also tended to resonate with the state's voters—his disdain for
wasteful government spending appeals to New Hampshire's
GOP and its right-leaning independents, who man one of the last
outposts of Rockefeller Republicanism.
Yet there's another, simpler explanation for McCain's popularity
here: "His willingness to work his butt off," says David Carney,
White House political director for the first President Bush and a
Hancock resident. Since 1999, McCain has more or less made
New Hampshire his second home (though he probably wouldn't
put it that way, his home-count being a touchy subject). Instead,
McCain is fond of telling a joke starring his late friend Mo
Udall, another Arizona member of Congress who made a bid for
the White House: "Guy in Concord says to another guy in
Concord, 'What do you think of Mo Udall for president?' Other
guy says, 'I don't know, I only met him twice.' "
As McCain says, it's funny because it's true: New Hampshire's
primary has outsized importance, and voters here are used to
getting extra-special attention. McCain has been ubiquitous. In
the run-up to the 2000 primary, he conducted more than 100
town hall meetings; in an effort to save his candidacy in 2008, he
held 101 more. Even Arnie Arnesen, host of the liberal local talk
show Political Chowder, praises McCain for how hard he's
campaigned in the state and for his willingness to go on shows
like hers. "I'd probably be invited to McCain's inaugural and not
Barack's," Arnesen says with a laugh. "And I don't want him to
win and he knows I don't want him to win."
A couple of weekends ago, Obama was in the state for two
public events, an evening rally in Concord, the state capital, and
a Saturday-morning gathering in Manchester, its biggest city.
(With 109,000 residents, it's hardly a metropolis, but compared
with the sleepy villages that dot the rest of the state, it might as
well be Vegas—which is what locals call it.) That same
weekend, McCain did a toe-touch in New Hampshire, making a
quick Sunday-afternoon visit to the small town of Loudon.
Small, that is, except for the two weekends a year when its
population jumps from about 4,500 to 150,000, as RVs full of
NASCAR fans hitch up at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
I'm only an occasional visitor to New Hampshire, but this was
the second time I'd seen McCain at the same event—he'd shown
up for the 2006 race, too. McCain mingled with voters in the
infield and made brief remarks with Cindy standing at his side.
("That's his wife?" I overheard a Bobby Labonte fan ask his
buddy. "Good for him.") The McCains got a warm welcome,
though the fans I was standing with were clearly more excited to
spot NASCAR legend "King" Richard Petty loping around the
dais than to see the senior senator from Arizona on top of it.
Eight years of campaigning here is a lot, but will it be enough?
No one I spoke with, Democrat or Republican, was willing to
venture a guess at who will prevail in New Hampshire, and the
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polls show the candidates in a dead heat. (Same goes for the
other big contest in the state, between incumbent Republican
Sen. John Sununu and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen.) In the end,
the race may come down to a force beyond the candidates'
control—demographics.
Southern New Hampshire has become the Republican
stronghold, thanks to an influx of GOP voters from an unlikely
source: Massachusetts. According to UNH's Smith, the
Massachusetts transplants who have settled in places like
Nashua and Salem tend to cite three reasons for moving: cheaper
housing, lower taxes, and fewer liberals. But at the same time,
retirees from places like New York and Connecticut are moving
to New Hampshire's Lakes Region, and white-collar workers are
moving from elsewhere in blue New England to take jobs in the
state's expanding service sector. These voters may not have been
around to attend multiple McCain town meetings. They may
have moved to New Hampshire not in pursuit of Liberty but
because they got a job at Fidelity. And they're probably going to
vote for Barack Obama.
technology
Everything Means Nothing to Me
MySpace Music lets you listen to pretty much every song ever recorded, and it
still sucks.
By Farhad Manjoo
In March, a Web designer named Justin Ouellette created a
brilliant music-sharing site called Muxtape. Ouellette took his
inspiration from the past—the Nick Hornby era of cassette mix
tapes, a time when countless lovelorn souls fancied themselves
the curators of high-concept custom albums. These days we've
moved on to mixing CDs, but Ouellette—like everyone else
who's bemoaned the state of the recording industry during the
last decade—saw that the Internet had much greater potential to
broadcast our musical tastes. With Muxtape, Ouellette made
sharing music over the Web much simpler than creating a
physical mix tape: Just upload your MP3s to the site, name your
mix, and send the link—an easy-to-remember URL,
yourmix.muxtape.com—to all your pals.
That, at least, was Ouellette's vision—and for five months,
Muxtape was a sublime reality. But not surprisingly, on Aug. 15,
Ouellette's hosting service received a copyright infringement
notice from the Recording Industry Association of America. Last
week, Ouellette published a lengthy account of his dealings with
label executives during the past half-year. His story reveals that
the music industry has a more nuanced take on upstart musicsharing sites than it did in the Napster era. Only some of the
industry reps Ouellette spoke to threatened to shut him down
immediately. The others wanted to discuss ways to license music
to Muxtape—though at terms that Ouellette found onerous.
Ouellette walked away from the talks; he says he's relaunching
Muxtape as a place for bands to release music and manage
relationships with their fans. As a simple mix-tape service,
Muxtape is no more.
I began to realize how much of a shame that is as I tested
MySpace Music this week. Industry observers are calling the
service—a joint project between MySpace and four major record
labels that allows people to stream millions of songs online for
free—a "breakthrough," though that term only highlights the
industry's history of intransigence. Sure, it's nice that the music
industry has finally found a way to give us free music while also
compensating artists. (They'll get a share of the revenue the site
generates from advertising.) But while the site may represent a
breakthrough in business negotiations, it doesn't offer much that
other online music services (both legal and illegal) haven't
offered before. As I struggled to navigate its cluttered user
interface, I thought fondly of dearly departed sites like
Muxtape—services that weren't authorized by the industry but
that succeeded because they offered a better experience than
anything music executives have yet cooked up.
MySpace Music does indeed let you listen to a huge number of
songs through the Web. I found its catalog extensive—I was able
to listen to most songs that I searched for within a few seconds
of typing their names—but not complete. For instance, while I
dug up a somewhat obscure Greek song (Stelios Kazantzidis'
"Efuge Efuge," used in a memorable scene in Season 2 of The
Wire), there were only a handful of tracks available from the
new Jenny Lewis album. While MySpace Music may come in
handy while you're at work or DJing a party, creating a
streaming playlist from a huge catalog of songs isn't completely
novel. At least two other industry-licensed music sites—Imeem
and Last.fm—have offered the same service since last year; they,
too, feature lots of songs but also many omissions. And none of
these sites beat the simple, fast-loading user interface of
YouTube, which remains the best place to search if you feel a
sudden need to hear a song you don't have.
With certain restrictions, MySpace Music also lets you share
your playlists with your friends. This might have been its best
feature, but the restrictions rankle: MySpace will allow you to
make only one of your playlists public—you can't make one mix
tape for your spouse and another for your mom. Worse, you can
share your playlist only through your MySpace profile; if you
want to send it to your co-workers, you've got to be OK with
them seeing pictures of you dressed up as a drunken pirate.
Imeem's playlist-sharing features are much better—it lets you
share more playlists, and you can embed them on other sites.
This gets to the single biggest problem with the MySpace Music
service—it's MySpace's music service. Every feature remains
tied to a social network that has become enormously popular
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despite its terrible user interface and—since the rise of
Facebook—appeals mostly to an adolescent demographic. You
need to have a MySpace account to use MySpace Music; if
you've resisted getting a MySpace profile, the music service isn't
reason enough to sign up. Little about using MySpace Music is
pleasant: Its song search engine, for example, is extremely
limited, giving you no way to refine your query by narrowing it
down to certain albums or versions of songs. When you search
for a popular track—say, Lil Wayne's "Lollipop"—you get
dozens of results and no explanation for how each version
differs from the other. MySpace also lacks any "musicdiscovery" engine—it doesn't tell you what you might like based
on what your friends like or what you've searched for or listened
to in the past. Worst of all, the system is gummed up by ads.
Every inch of every page is plastered with some flashy
sponsorship message; along with being ugly and off-putting, the
ads slow down the entire site.
These annoying ads are expected to be quite lucrative for
MySpace and the music industry. Record labels also hope that
MySpace will present competition for Apple, which has gained
enormous power in the music business through the iTunes Music
Store—the largest retailer of music in the country, beating not
only other online stores but also offline stores like Wal-Mart.
But if the labels want to create an alternative to iTunes, they
would do well to study its rise. Apple's genius was to minimize
its service's restrictions by amping up its usability. People are
willing to put up with iTunes' annoying copy-protection scheme
because finding and buying songs there is amazingly fast, easy,
and fun. The same holds for Hulu, the wonderful TV-streaming
site that NBC and Fox launched last year. Sure, it has ads, but
they don't crowd your entire field of view, and the sponsorship
messages feel like a reasonable price for the service you're
getting. MySpace Music doesn't elicit the same thrill. The site's
design is so terrible and overly commercialized that not even the
service's amazing breadth—remember, you can find nearly any
song you want in seconds—can save it from being a drag to use.
Still, MySpace Music offers some hope. Two years ago the idea
that the music industry might allow a Web company to stream
songs for free seemed unthinkable. But we've been getting music
for free online for years now—a site that offers to give it to us
legally isn't going to succeed unless it throws in features that
haven't been implemented well elsewhere (like sharing
playlists). And it's got to be pretty and work well, too. That the
industry has taken a stab toward creating such a service is
promising. Maybe someday it'll consider doing something as
simple and elegant as Muxtape. As Ouellette put it in his
farewell note: "The industry will catch up some day; it pretty
much has to."
technology
I'm a PC, and I'm Worried About My
Image
Microsoft's $300 million campaign to prove Windows isn't lame.
By Farhad Manjoo
Bill Gates hates Apple's "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads. He argues
that they exaggerate the difficulties of using Windows and,
worse, that they're mean-spirited, maligning 90 percent of the
computer-using public as "dullards" and "klutzes"—folks who
don't belong at the cool table. "I don't know why [Apple is]
acting like it's superior," he told Newsweek last year. "I don't
even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in
these things—or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a
lying person whenever you feel like it? There's not even the
slightest shred of truth to it."
Gates stepped away from a day-to-day role at Microsoft this
summer, but the company's much-discussed new $300 million
marketing campaign follows his critique of the Apple ads. Its
core message: Hey, Apple, who are you calling square? Each ad
begins with a John Hodgman look-alike—played by Sean Siler,
a Microsoft engineer—who declares, "I'm a PC, and I've been
made into a stereotype." He's followed by an international army
of Windows users who tell us what makes each of them so
special: "I'm a PC, and I'm not what you'd call hip," says a black
scientist with a British accent. There's a geneticist, a graffiti
artist, a shark biologist, a jeans designer, a guy who turns cow
manure into fuel, and an astronaut. Gates pops in to say, "I'm a
PC, and I wear glasses." "I wear glasses," replies a school kid in
Africa. The most memorable quip, perhaps unintentionally,
comes from mind-body guru Deepak Chopra: "I am a PC and a
human being. Not a human doing. Not a human thinking. A
human being."
I don't think that's meant to make you laugh. While the ads' tone
is light, they're self-consciously self-serious. The people in these
spots don't just use PCs, they are P.C.—in contrast to Apple's
white-bread twosome, everything about them is politically,
racially, environmentally, and ideologically correct. Where
Apple once held up the great men and women of our age for
their courage to "Think different," Microsoft seems to be saying
that each of us is special in our own way—special enough that
we don't need software to define us. It's the sort of message you
rarely hear now that Stuart Smalley is off the air, and as a
Windows user, I suppose I should be grateful for the affirmation.
In reality, I'm slightly embarrassed by the suggestion that I
should be doing something great with my machine. I'm a PC,
and I spend my days looking for silly things online. Am I using
the wrong computer?
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Still, the new ads mark a clever marketing turn. Unlike Apple,
Microsoft seldom traffics in cultural commentary. Many of its
TV ads resemble spots for luxury cars—they feature lots of shots
of businessmen getting things done and vague promises of future
efficiencies. As a result, most are completely forgettable. There
are only two Windows commercials I can call to mind: the
launching spot for Windows 95, which was great mostly for its
soundtrack (the Stones' "Start Me Up"), and the recent illadvised "Mojave Experiment" campaign for Windows Vista,
which sought to prove that people can be fooled into loving
Microsoft's software.
What makes the new ads notable, of course, is their swagger.
Microsoft has decided to fight Apple on its own turf, taking on
the idea that Steve Jobs and co. are better, smarter, and hipper
than everyone else. In business, taking a rival's ads too seriously
is a risky gambit. In the 1980s, Coke famously responded to the
"Pepsi Challenge" campaign—which showed that people prefer
Pepsi in blind taste tests—by changing its formula. New Coke
didn't work out so well. But unlike Coca-Cola, Microsoft needed
to respond to Apple. Even if they are mean, Apple's ads seem to
be working. While the Mac's market share still isn't close to that
of Windows, Macs have seen faster sales growth than PCs in the
last year, and Windows Vista, routinely panned in Apple's ads, is
now routinely panned by a lot of people who haven't used it.
Even if they are a little saccharine, the core message of
Microsoft's ads—that Apple is snooty—should resonate. That's
because Apple is snooty. Here's a quote from Steve Jobs, circa
the mid-1990s: "The only problem with Microsoft is they just
have no taste. They have absolutely no taste." Apple's corporate
identity is built on that mind-set—on its supposed underdog
exclusivity, on the idea that choosing a Mac is an act of noble
rebellion against the totalitarian IBM-Microsoft regime. Apple
has been very successful in cementing this image. I once asked
Jason Snell, the editorial director of the company that publishes
Macworld magazine, about the difference between people who
buy Macs and people who buy Windows. No one buys
Windows, he said. There are only Mac people: people who've
consciously chosen to buy a computer for its differences. Folks
who use Windows didn't choose to use Windows—they don't
make any decision at all. They just took what everyone else had.
The last time I needed a new computer, I made my decision
based on price, not operating system: A Dell was the cheapest
machine I could find. (I'm not completely a Windows person; as
a tech columnist, I switch computers often, and I've owned
several Macs over the years.) Microsoft's new ads suggest that
my kind of nondecision is OK. Being in the lazy majority is just
fine because, hey, you study sharks, and that's pretty awesome.
To be sure, inclusivity is a harder sell than exclusivity. "Hey,
we're conformists!" just isn't as catchy as, "Hey, we're special
and different!"
But perhaps the Windows hordes can rally around their shared
annoyance at Apple's ads. After two years of seeing Justin
Long's Mac tweak John Hodgman's PC, don't you want to grab
him by the hoodie and tell him to get a real job? But getting
annoyed at Apple isn't the same as rallying around Windows. As
they are, Microsoft's new ads probably won't rehabilitate its
image. Some adjustments are in order: Make the ads funnier,
less serious, and more visually and stylistically appealing. Yes,
make them more like the Apple ads. I'd also suggest expanding
Gates' role: Once regarded as a corporate villain, he has
morphed, over the years, into a saintly figure, and he makes for a
very likable mascot for the firm.
But even though they need work, the new ads mark a good start.
Microsoft isn't facing any sort of emergency. Its market share
isn't plunging. What it needs is a slight adjustment of its image, a
new gloss on an aging brand. If it persists with this campaign—
goosing Apple for being exclusive, painting itself as not terribly
out of touch—it might one day be cool to identify yourself as a
PC.
television
The End of Star Wars
With a new television series, the space opera reaches its logical conclusion.
By Troy Patterson
More mischievous than ever our old friend Yoda these days is.
On the new weekly series Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Cartoon
Network, Fridays at 9 p.m. ET), the tiny Jedi master seems tinier
than ever, trickier, too. Bouncing through a battle scene in the
second episode, he scurries acrobatically—a wise and wiseass
jumping bean. Deftly does he outmaneuver some robots
controlled by an Eartha-Kittenish villainess named Ventress. In
the 3-D digital animation of this series, his skin glows a healthy
shade of moss, and his sprightliness helps this latest George
Lucas diversion achieve some commendable action-adventure
zip.
Watching The Clone Wars, I decided that it would entertain
certain discerning sixth-graders—and this was even after
recognizing that these warm feelings have been conditioned over
three decades. The relentless grandeur of John Williams' old
score simply excites a Pavlonian response, with its fanfare for
common boyishness triggering a stream of drool from any
American male with the slightest trace of geek in his makeup.
To appease the more committed geeks in the audience, I should
note that this show is not to be confused with the article-free
Star Wars: Clone Wars, an animated series from 2003. Rather, it
follows a theatrical film titled Star Wars: The Clone Wars,
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which opened to contemptuous reviews in August and, critics
presumed, existed foremost as a feature-length promo for the
state-of-the-art show that debuts Friday night. The new series
depicts some military campaigns that unfolded around the time
of the two most recent live-action Star Wars films.
Those also being the two most soulless installments of Lucas'
space opera, most sane adults will not have the strength even to
begin sorting out what is up with all the confederacies and
coalitions in this corner of the galaxy. It is enough to that know
that Anakin Skywalker and his cleft chin are around and that
they bring a nobility of purpose to blowing things up. Many of
the objects of this up-blowing are clones, which enables the
show to achieve an impressive body count without disturbing a
parent's moral sense. Some clones, especially the good guys,
experience moments of torture in their hand-me-down spirits.
"We're just clones, sir," one says to his boss in a moment of
peril. "We're meant to be expendable."
Here, Anakin has a spunky wisp of a girl sidekick named
Ahsoka Tano. She's a space-opera cutie (full lips, retroussé nose,
striped hair) on a mission to win over a female audience—a kind
of avatar for both the children who've only recently outgrown
Dora the Explorer and older, dorkier girls given to fantasizing
about entering hyperspace while wearing a tube top. Ahsoka and
Anakin squabble like 10-year-olds playing My First Flirtation.
In the first episode—titled, with a melodramatic majesty that's
vintage Lucasfilm, "Rising Malevolence"—the two of them play
hooky in order to go on a rescue mission with one-in-a-million
odds, and they bicker. At the end of the episode, after disobeying
orders to go on their humanitarian lark, they're ordered into a
meeting with the Jedi Council for a slap on the wrist. Uplifting
Anakin says to perky Ahsoka: "Through it all, you never gave
up. You did a great job, but if I'm getting in trouble for this,
you're gonna share some of the blame, too. So, c'mon, let's go!"
She replies: "Right beside, ya, sky guy!" Then R2-D2 tweets and
toodles like a bemused chaperone.
Cute! Too cute? Does it matter!? The Clone Wars feels like the
logical terminus of Star Wars' three-decades-old adventure in
prolonged preadolescence. In the '70s, critics Michael Pye and
Lynda Myles pegged the wizardly original as "pinball on a
cosmic scale." The new series aspires to the level of a virtualreality game. That's both the source of its great visual charm and
the key to its emptiness, which is too dull to get worked up
about—it's a vision of storytelling as a game that's all sensation,
and it's meant to be expendable.
television
Subprime Time
Watching the financial networks during the meltdown.
By Troy Patterson
With Monday having gone down as Wall Street's bleakest day
since the 1987 crash, Tuesday rated as the hairiest in the history
of the financial news networks. It was business as unusual, with
the journalists of burnished CNBC, gaudy Fox Business, and
dapper little Bloomberg variously barking with compensatory
confidence and squirming abjectly, asking for frank assessments
and pleading for Panglossian answers, quelling panic and
reflecting it. Perhaps CNBC's Dennis Kneale, showing his
sensitive side and feeling bullish about catharsis, made the best
show of converting hysteria into a laugh line: "It's awfully scary
out there, so what should you do with your money? I think you
should cry over it."
That was around 1 p.m. on Power Lunch. The Dow was
bouncing back, and Kneale's colleague Bob Pisani, diligently
parsing the weirdness of traders basing their decisions on the
most fleeting illusions of political winds, was starting to run out
of synonyms for weird. "We're in a bizarre world," he had said.
"Are we in a strange world or what?" he would yet say. It is
quite a peculiar world indeed, thought the viewer, when a
channel promises man-on-the-street reactions from "Main
Street" and then delivers vox pops taped in downtown
Manhattan.
CNBC introduced a few such segments to the strains of a horrorshow score, a snippet of apprehensive violins. At the bottom of
the screen in the chyron, the network asked, "Is Your Money
Safe?" This was the central question of the day, and one that
CNBC tended to address with thoroughness and sobriety, but it
was being posed in a font—grotty, rotted-out, fit for the opening
credits of some apocalyptic thriller or lurid prison
documentary—that implied that your money was presently being
excreted by cash-eating bacteria.
Meanwhile, the Fox Business Network ran promos razzing
CNBC for slacking in its coverage over the weekend. Fox
boasted, "We own this story." (On the off chance it actually
does, would not Tuesday have been a good time to sell?) Being
the financial news network most directly engaged with politics,
Fox cut, around 11 a.m., to John McCain on the campaign trail
in Iowa, where he gave Main Street a meat-and-potatoes lecture
on the credit crisis. Being the financial news network most
directly engaged in propaganda, Fox followed the speech with
analysis claiming that McCain was "really getting into the nittygritty" in the talk, when really the senator had not dared to say
anything that might surprise the most average freshman in the
most remedial macroeconomics course. Being the financial news
network furthest down-market, Fox soon thereafter ran a
commercial for a gizmo that hones the blades of disposable
razors.
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The network was a bit at odds with itself. The screens behind the
anchor desk counted away at an indignant "rescue watch."
Pardon me: "RE$CUE WATCH." At 11:15 a.m., it had been "1
Day, 16:15:30" since, like, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi had
ordered the release of the money-eating supergerms and then
commenced to cackle. Meanwhile, in front of the screen, anchor
Dagen McDowell was fixing a smile bright as searchlights at the
camera, as if trying to restore consumer confidence through the
exuberant baring of optimistic teeth. Like her Fox colleagues
and the CNBC competition, she seemed more than slightly
frazzled and wired—a messenger unwillingly getting
accustomed to the sensation of being shot at. Send in your emails, she implored viewers, "even if it's hate mail! Just don't
make it threats!"
The mood at Bloomberg was notably more subdued, with
academics offering cool reason, investors soberly pushing the
"remarketing" of the failed bailout bill, and the understated stock
ticker crawling with good news in suave green. (Compare this
with Fox's garish neoclassical looks or CNBC's silver graphical
bling and the sound-effect whoosh of its incoming updates.) And
anchor Deirdre Bolton was a revelation in a tweed blazer. On the
Monday of "Wall Street's free fall"—those were Bolton's words,
said with a steel you want to hang onto—Vanity Fair released a
profile of CNBC's Maria Bartiromo and Erin Burnett that gapes
at the extent to which business television has become a babe
game. ("On the floor of the N.Y.S.E., the Fox women are
referred to as 'the Foxtrots,' says the producer of a rival network,
because 'they trot around the floor in unbelievably
unprofessional clothing.' ") Boys, if you prefer your financial
journalism delivered pulchritudinously, but if the crass tartiness
of the Foxtrots only turns your thoughts to plumbing (the need to
make yourself clean again, the urge to hose off their makeup),
then do tune into Bloomberg's In Focus, co-hosted by capable
Bolton and her fabulous cheekbones.
But I suspect that superstardom will elude Bolton, that she is
destined to remain a coterie item, as this subset of TV news has
a rather particular sense of subtlety. The mood at CNBC's
investment-cheerleading show Mad Money was also relatively
subdued on Tuesday. Host Jim Cramer went easy on punctuating
his pro-speculation monologue with sound effects (machine-gun
fire, Handel's Messiah). In abusing a toy bird—his way of
attacking, in effigy, the parrots of conventional wisdom—he
restrained himself to stabbing the thing and working it over with
a hatchet and chewing on its head. Turning to the theme of
intestinal distress, Jim Cramer merely doused a Jim Cramer
bobble-head doll with liquid antacid. On business TV, the
potential for a second Great Depression is nothing to worry
about. The only thing we have to fear is mania.
The Big Sort
House Members Aren't Supposed To
Just "Vote Their Districts"
Why representatives can support the bailout bill even if their constituents hate
it.
By Bill Bishop
the browser
Blogging for Dollars
How do bloggers make money?
By Michael Agger
Last week, the blog search engine Technorati released its 2008
State of the Blogosphere report with the slightly menacing
promise to "deliver even deeper insights into the blogging
mind." Bloggers create 900,000 blog posts a day worldwide, and
some of them are actually making money. Blogs with 100,000 or
more unique visitors a month earn an average of $75,000
annually—though that figure is skewed by the small percentage
of blogs that make more than $200,000 a year. The estimates
from a 2007 Business Week article are older but juicier: The
LOLcat empire rakes in $5,600 per month; Overheard in New
York gets $8,100 per month; and Perez Hilton, gossip king,
scoops up $111,000 per month.
With this kind of cash sloshing around, one wonders: What does
it take to live the dream—to write what I know, and then watch
the money flow?
From the perspective of someone who doesn't blog, blogging
seems attractive. Bloggers such as Jason Kottke ($5,300/month)
and the Fug girls ($6,240/month) pursue what naturally interests
them without many constraints on length or style. While those
two are genuine stars of the blogging world, there are plenty of
smaller, personal blogs that bring in decent change with the
Amazon Associates program (you receive a referral fee if
someone buys a book, CD, etc. via a link from your blog) and
search ads from Google. (The big G analyzes your site and
places relevant ads; you get paid if people click on them.)
Google-ad profiteering is an entire universe in and of itself—one
blogger by the name of Shoemoney became famous (well, Diggfamous) when he posted a picture of himself with a check from
Google for $132,994.97 for one month of clicks.
Blogs with decent traffic and a voice are also getting snapped up
by blog-ad networks, which in turn package them as niche
audiences to advertisers. On Blogads, advertisers can choose the
"Blogs for Dudes!" hive or the "Jewish Republican Channel."
Federated Media groups blogs into subjects such as "Parenting"
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and "News 2.0"; there is also a boutique network for blogs that
don't want to cover themselves with ads called The Deck. These
networks present blogs as "grassroots intellectual economy" and
describe their audiences as loyal, engaged, and likely to see ads
as not just ads, but useful bits of information. This may be a
comfort to squeamish indie bloggers since it hints that putting
ads on your site is not selling out but helping out.
While monetizing your blog may be easier than ever, all of this
comes with an ever-present hammer: the need to drive traffic.
This month, the writer/blogger/productivity thinker Merlin Mann
opened a window onto his angst with an anniversary post. Mann
is best-known as the creator of the Hipster PDA (a modified
Moleskine notebook) and his Inbox Zero talk (turn your e-mail
into actions). In a post titled "Four Years," Mann sketches out
how his site, 43 Folders, grew from a personal dumping ground
for his "mental sausage" into a full-featured destination for
productivity nerds and life-hackers. In 2005, he experienced a
key transition:
At some point that year, 43f became the
surreal and unexpected circus tent under which
my family began drawing an increasing
amount of its income. This was weird, but it
was also exactly as gratifying as it sounds.
Which is to say, "very." But, my small
measure of something like success did not go
unnoticed. In fact, the popularity of small
blogs like 43 Folders contributed to the arrival
of a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers,
speculators, and confidence men, all eager to
pan the web's glistening riverbed for easy gold.
And, brother, did these guys love to post and
post and post.
Mann's problem was especially acute. His income was partially
dependent on advertising, and ads are sold on a cost-perimpression basis. That is, the more traffic you have, the more
ads you can sell (and also the more chances that someone will
click on one of the Google ads or affiliate links on your site).
But a site that teaches you how to streamline your tasks and free
your time yet constantly shovels new posts, lists, and
information at you is oxymoronic—and also kind of moronic.
Mann could have overlooked this contradiction, but he chose
instead to live his advice. Declaring an end to "productivity
pr0n," Mann has promised fewer, better posts and rolled out a
new mission statement: "43 Folders is Merlin Mann's website
about finding the time and attention to do your best creative
work." The further irony here is that Mann's less-is-more
strategy may prove to be more profitable. The usability guru
Jakob Nielsen has long recommended that experts "write
articles, not blog postings," with the idea that demonstrating
expertise is the best way to distinguish yourself from Internet
amateurs and ultimately persuade someone to pay you for your
insights. In Mann's case, that might mean less ad revenue but
more speaking engagements.
Once a blog hobbyist goes pro, he or she faces a daily pressure
to churn out new material. In the wrong mind, that can lead to
top-10 lists, recycled ideas, half-baked notions, lots of viral
videos, and a general increase in information pollution. Is there
any way out of this scenario? In 2005, Jason Kottke announced
that he had quit his job to blog full-time and asked his readers to
become "micropatrons" at a suggested rate of $30. He received
$39,900 from 1,450 people but abandoned the experiment after a
year. Kottke is vague about the reasons why he swore off
micropatronage, but he suggests that he was worried that people
wouldn't donate year after year. In order to build a bigger
audience and potential new donors, he would have had to do
some of the cheesy things to drive traffic (i.e., "Top Five Best"
posts) and/or become a cult of personality (overshare, start flame
wars, social network relentlessly). These days, he accepts ads as
part of the Deck network.
The bloggers at the vanguard of the post-quality-vs.-postquantity debate are those who work for Nick Denton's Gawker
media. This year, Denton introduced a new pay system that gave
his bloggers a base salary and also paid them a quarterly bonus
based upon the amount of page views their items receive. Or to
oversimplify, they were being paid by popularity. (To follow the
complicated ins and outs of the "blogonomics" of the Gawker
pay structure, read Felix Salmon's Portfolio blog.) The memo
explains the decision as an effort to reward and encourage more
original, scoopy items, but, as Denton's writers and ex-writers
quickly pointed out, there's not an obvious correlation between
quality and page views. Despite a few exceptions, such as the
Tom Cruise Scientology video, no one can predict a Web hit.
Do we get the blogs we deserve? We vote by click, after all.
Perhaps we shouldn't look at all those top 10 lists and Britney
Spears photos. Successful blogs, such as Zen Habits, tend to
balance the more fast-food type posts with longer, more complex
ideas that will presumably keep readers coming back—although
there are plenty of people who make a living posting dubious
crap. Perhaps the escape route out of a hit-driven blogosphere is
all of our newfound "friends." The Internet has always been very
good at counting page views but not so great at assigning value
to what's actually in those pages. Facebook, FriendFeed,
StumbleUpon, and the sharing feature of Google Reader have
their annoying, nudgy aspects, but they allow us to rely on one
another to sort out what is interesting and worthy. Put it on a Tshirt: Friends Don't Let Friends Read Bad Content.
the chat room
Up for Debate
Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick take readers' questions about tonight's vice-
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presidential face-off.
Slate "XX Factor" bloggers Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick
were online at Washingtonpost.com to chat with readers about
the vice-presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden.
An unedited transcript of the chat follows.
Emily Bazelon: Hi Everyone,
Thanks for joining us. Dahlia and I are looking forward to
tackling your questions. The pre-debate debate!
_______________________
On the other hand, the account in the NYT of Palin's past debate
performances offers some reason to worry on her account: "Ms.
Palin often spoke in generalities and showed scant aptitude for
developing arguments beyond a talking point or two. Her
sentences were distinguished by their repetition of words, by the
use of the phrase here in Alaska and for gaps. On paper, her
sentences would have been difficult to diagram."
Hmm. Doesn't sound like this is her great strength.
Here's the link.
_______________________
Malvern, Pa.: I am so confused by Sarah Palin I can't even
stand it. How can someone who is obviously articulate in her
own folksy way (based on her Alaska debate videos) come
across as so vacant and inarticulate in the Kate Couric
interviews? It's not that she should be an expert on every
Supreme Court decision; even if she couldn't name one, she at
least should have been able to put together a couple of sentences
like "we're going to nominate judges who won't legislate from
the bench or take liberties with our Constitution." In your
opinion, which Sarah Palin is going to show up tonight? Also, if
you got to ask her one and only one question, what would it be?
Dahlia Lithwick: Hi there Malvern and thanks for the great
question. My husband put the same query this way last night:
"Dahlia how can you keep saying Pain is horrible at interviews
but will be great at the debate? What? What???!" I think you are
right that the Sarah Palin who shows up tonight will be very
different from the one who tried to fake her way through the
Couric interviews. I have seen video of her earlier debates. She
is good. She has 90 seconds to respond tonite. No cagey
followup questions. I bet you see the gal who wowed them at the
convention more than the one who gets spoofed on SNL. She is
better in a crowd, better in a debate, and better against an
opponent. If I could ask her just one question it would be "Who
isn't a media elite?"
_______________________
Boston: I don't think people should assume Palin is going to be
terrible because of her Couric interviews, because my
understanding is that they all were done on the same day. So
maybe she just got knocked off her stride early on and never got
it back. However, if she can't recover after a break in her stride,
that seems like invaluable information for Biden.
Emily Bazelon: Agreed—good call not to assume Palin can't
handle the debate because she couldn't handle Couric. The TV
interviews were open-ended. Couric asked good follow-up
questions. The debate is a far more canned format. Palin should
be able to stick to what she knows more easily.
Salt Lake City: If, as Politico is reporting today, Palin's strategy
is to go on the attack against Biden, how does he respond
without looking like he's weak or, alternately, looking like a
bully? Personally, I kind of like the idea of (given the recent
economic and congressional meltdown) of "taking the high road"
so to speak ... such as: "in this crisis, the American people are
less interested in a fight than in a clear description of plans to
place us back on the right track ... here are mine—describe
yours." What do you think?
washingtonpost.com: Palin's new plan: Go after Biden
(Politico, Oct. 2)
Dahlia Lithwick: Hey Salt Lake and thank you for writing in.
And I think you are onto something about the attack-doggery.
Seems to me that McCain's chomping away at Obama last week
backfired, or at least the polls suggest the audience was
unimpressed. That surprised me, I confess. I though McCain had
won the debate. But you speak to a new mood in the country that
is more and more fatigued by attacks. People are terrified about
their wallets and their 401ks and their sons in Iraq. Its not clear a
slam at community organizers will close the deal anymore. I
would add that Obama's ability to "take the high road" most of
the time seems to be paying off just now. That said Palin lies to
do scrappy. Its hard to imagine her doing anything else but going
after Biden full tilt.
_______________________
Minneapolis: Ms. Bazelon, I enjoyed your piece detailing the
painful watching of Palin's wretched performance. Do you really
think that Palin's performance in tonight's debate and the rest of
the campaign will make a difference for female presidential
candidates in four years? Has Clinton already broken the glass
ceiling, or is Palin's nomination really making it less likely to
have viable women candidates for the White House in the
foreseeable future?
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Emily Bazelon: Hey thank you. Yes, I do think Palin's
performance matters. Clinton should have definitely broken this
glass ceiling. But that doesn't mean she did. She's one example
of a female candidate for president who oozed competence. But
until we have a bunch of other examples, she and Palin are an n
of 2. That makes them both important to voters' perceptions. I'm
not arguing that Palin can undo what Clinton accomplished
exactly. But she can fuzz it up, create new room for doubt, or
really new excuses for people who remain skeptical about a
woman in the White House, or the Office of the Vice President.
_______________________
Main Street: Who do you think will be the primary viewers of
tonight's debate—those who don't like Palin and are hoping to
see her fall on her face, or those who do like her and are hoping
to see her score against Biden? I don't think there's really a
middle ground at this point.
Emily Bazelon: I think the audience will be big for a VP debate.
For one thing, aren't we all expecting a little entertainment? If
it's all dry and executed via boring sound bite, I know I'll be
disappointed. Given that Palin's poll numbers are down, maybe
there are more detractors out there, and certainly she has sparked
a backlash of women and men who want to see her fail, both
because of her conservative policy views and her persona. But
I'm sure Palin's fans will be tuning in to root her on. They are a
loyal and energized group—as excited about her as Barack
Obama's swooners are about him.
_______________________
Northern Virginia: To me, the buzz around this debate is akin
to that of a NASCAR race—half the people go for the racing,
but the other half go in anticipation of a big wreck or two. I am
very interested in seeing what each candidate has to say and how
they say it, but I will admit—part of me wants to see a wreck or
two.
Dahlia Lithwick: You know I am not even sure I know what a
wreck would look like here. Having endured the brutally awful
"I'll get back to ya" or Palin's anguished inability to discuss any
Supreme Court cases it's hard to imagine tonight being any more
likely to produce a truly groan-worthy moment. That said I am
wearing a turtleneck in the event that I need to avert my eyes. As
Emily noted in her piece, it is NEVER ever pleasant to witness a
car wreck. Any thoughts on whether women are more inclined to
cringe in these moments as men??
_______________________
Miami: Ms. Bazelon, you write: "Sarah Palin's murder boards
have taken place in public. We've all watched her stumped and
stumbling in her interviews with Katie Couric." You know that
Ms. Kouric's interview was totally hostile. No other candidate
for national office has had followups in the form of "name
another—this is your third and final chance, name another." That
questioning is worthy of a third-grade school teacher abusing a
student. You know that; no one can deny that. So, why do you
ignore it in your article criticizing Palin? Look, you folks from
Slate have dug yourselves one big hole. Can you really survive
economically if all you do is pander to left-wing radicalism?
Emily Bazelon: I thought Couric was pretty restrained, actually.
She wouldn't have asked Palin the same question more than once
if Palin had answered it the first time. When she asked Biden
about a Supreme Court case he disagreed with, he answered
readily and fluidly. There are other moments in his interview
that she could have pressed harder on—I posted on Slate this
morning about how his characterization of Roe v. Wade as
representing "consensus" utterly puzzled me. But to me, the
question that matters about Palin's interviews with Couric isn't
whose fault they are. It's how we feel about a vice president who
gives the kind of thin, not knowledgeable answers she gave.
_______________________
Anonymous: From Dahlia's article: "When Palin tanks, it's good
for the country if you want Obama and Biden to win, but it's bad
for the future of women in national politics." I really don't agree
with this—it may be bad for underqualified women in national
politics, and thank god for that. "Pretty and spunky" shouldn't be
enough when coupled with what seems like a one-dimensional
thought process. I don't think Palin cares about knowing the
details—she is a frightening morphing of Cheney and Bush.
She's a Decider taking direction from God and doing her
damnedest to keep her actions and communications out of reach
from the public.
No one from the XX factor seemed to have any love for Hillary
when she was running, but it would be a fantastic thing to see
her debate Palin tonight—we have no lack of competent women
on the national political stage. I'm hoping this experience with
Palin makes people appreciate the qualified women we do have.
It was a cheap gambit to put her on the ticket, and let's all hope it
fails. She will do women aspiring to that higher office no favors
by being an incompetent first.
Dahlia Lithwick: Anonymous, I half-corrected myself on that
front in today's XX factor posting where I finally came round to
observing, as you do, that Palin's problems transcend her gender
and that women are starting to understand that part of gender
freedom is the freedom to suck spectacularly on the national
stage. I agree it would be tremendous to see a Hillary-Sarah
debate but don't discount that some of Palin's toughest critics
have been women too, from Couric's sharp interview to
Campbell Brown's Free Sarah Palin to Kathleen Parker at NRO,
the smart competent women you are looking for have been on
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the front lines of diffusing the charge that attacks on Palin are all
sexist.
_______________________
Salt Lake City: I'm worried Palin is going to be cracking jokes
and one-liners throughout the debate to distract people from the
lack of substance in her statements. Should Biden laugh at her
jokes? Should he try to be funny too (a scary thought,
considering how often his foot is in his mouth)? Or should he try
to be more serious and draw attention away from Palin's
attempts to win our hearts?
Emily Bazelon: Dahlia is the author of the genius piece giving
advice to Biden for the debates (here's the link). I'll add my two
cents: Biden should laugh at her jokes and generally try to come
across as likeable and cheery. Palin does cheery well; he should
try to, too. But I share your fear that if he tries to be funny he'll
step in it. I think his main task is to be substantive and serious
without being condescending. It will be enough if he staves off
disaster by avoiding a big misstep. He's not the main show
tonight. Palin is.
_______________________
Potomac, Md.: Do you really think poll numbers will be
changed materially by this debate, given that so many voters
have formed opinions about Palin from the abysmal performance
in the last month, and that Biden is such a known quantity
already after both a long congressional tenure and presidential
campaigns. Aren't we really just looking for good entertainment
tonight, causing no real change the campaigns' standing?
Dahlia Lithwick: I agree that the poll numbers will go where
they will go regardless of tonight's debate, although I imagine
the hope is that while Biden is, as you say, a known quantity,
Palin might burnish some of that sparkle she had in early
September. Will it change the outcome in November? prolly not.
But would a great performance from her allay the widespread
sense that McCain's judgment is just horrible? I think so.
Emily Bazelon: Good points and smart prediction. Agreed that
the follow-up question is what Palin most has to fear. I can see
her performing the way you predict in terms of pithiness and
one-liners. That's what I would have predicted after watching her
initial launch and her speech at the convention. She seemed
smart, dogged, poised, confident. She needs to be that Sarah
Palin tonight, rather than the defensive, straining, tense
candidate we've been seeing in these TV interviews. Can she
pull that off on the open terrain of a debate?
_______________________
Arlington, Va.: In regards to Couric being hostile to Palin, what
I found most telling was when Couric sat down with both
McCain and Palin, and McCain chastized Couric. It really had
the feeling of a parent-teacher conference about a less-thanstellar student. Palin sat there, silent, letting "dad" do the talking.
It spoke volumes to me, and not in Palin's favor.
Emily Bazelon: Yes I don't think that moment did either
McCain or Palin any favors. I don't really understand why they
sat for that interview. The best way for them to rehabilitate
Palin's image is to stick to the sympathetic airwaves of
conservative talk radio and TV. There, the audience is with
them, and the scorn of the MSM is a plus. The drawback, of
course, is that they need the center as well as the Republican
base to win, and the center isn't Rush Limbaugh's big draw.
_______________________
Washington: Emily, in your article "The Un-Hillary" you talk
about the possibility of a new glass ceiling to replace the one
with the 18 million Hillary cracks. ... What do you think,
specifically, that new glass ceiling will look like? Is Sarah
Palin's entirely flawed and insulting candidacy the last chance
women will get to achieve executive office in the U.S.? Also,
does Pelosi have an effect on this new glass ceiling? Given that
she has been so ineffective and was blamed (wrongly in my
opinion, but blamed nonetheless) for the failure of the bailout
package, do you think they will give the speaker role to another
woman anytime soon?
_______________________
Washington: Just a comment: I think Palin is going to do just
fine tonight. My prediction is that she will hammer at Obama
(and apparently Biden) with pithy statements and well-delivered
one-liners. Seems to me she is a savvy politician, and can get a
little mean and dirty with a smile on her face, which makes it
come across as not so mean—just folksy and blunt. Full
disclosure—I don't like Palin, and Obama's got my vote. That
said, I think Palin is likely to step up to the plate tonight. Unless,
of course, Gwen Ifill asks those pesky, specific follow-up
questions.
Emily Bazelon: That's such a good set of questions. You know,
this is the problem with having so few examples to choose from.
Each one—Clinton, Pelosi, Palin—looms so large in our
consciousness. It's not fair to any of them, really. Sigh. It's more
than I can bear, however, to think that we've seen our last
woman presidential candidate or speaker of the House for a
while. That's such a stark conclusion to draw from the criticism
of either Palin or Pelosi, or all of it combined. Two reasons to
hope otherwise: However these women may falter—and I agree
with you that the attacks on Pelosi have been overblown—they
are still making the presence of women on the national stage into
more of a norm. And also, there must be younger women and
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girls out there with a talent for politics who are watching them
and thinking: I could do that. I know I could.
I think it's all over: McCain abandons efforts to win Michigan
(AP, Oct. 2).
_______________________
Dahlia Lithwick: wow
Pittsburgh: Is there any way to criticize Palin's performances in
her interviews (and, depending on what happens, in the debate)
without falling into the trap about the media "picking on" Palin
or somehow presenting "gotcha" questions? I'm a Republican,
but I am so frustrated by my party right now (a very long story)
and the way they are handing this election. To claim "gotcha
journalism" for a question from a regular citizen makes no sense
to me, but I don't see any way of refuting these arguments with
logic given that every refutation is turned into another attack.
_______________________
Dahlia Lithwick: Pittsburgh. You have just voiced my own
frustration with this current campaign. This seize-the-victim race
or what our wonderful John Dickerson characterizes as the fight
for the greatest "umbrage" at every turn has so completely
diminished the tone of the race. Everyone in the media is forced
to pick their way thru the minefield of unacceptable words or
ideas ("don't. say. lipstick.") and is left feeling silenced and
angry. The public feels that the debate has been sullied by claims
and counterclaims of victimhood and they are left feeling angry.
And even the candidates are so sold on the Umbrage Express
that they begin to claim—as has Palin—both that they will not
talk to the media AND that the media is silencing them. Can you
imagine if we ordered pizza in this sad, roundabout, coded
fashion??? Is this any way to talk to one another about critical
questions of governance? The good news is I think a lot of folks
share your frustration at this narrow political conversation.
Maybe we have hit maximum acceptable umbrage, and can
retreat to sanity?
Long Island, N.Y.: With the success of the media campaign to
set expectations so low for Palin and so high for Biden, is it
possible for Palin to lose and/or Biden to win? Feels like a
brilliant set up to me.
Emily Bazelon: Yes I hear you. It's hard to imagine that Palin
won't exceed expectations. If she strings together coherent
sentences, she'll go a ways toward putting to rest the painful,
grimacing silences in her TV interviews. It'll be up to us to
remember that crossing a very low bar doesn't mean winning. I
don't think, though, that Biden loses if Palin simply doesn't fall
on her face. It's more that anything like a tie will seem like a
victory for her. Unless we remember not to grade on a curve.
_______________________
Montreal: I was excited to see maybe some personality, some
mud-slinging, some cringe-worthy awfulness. "Like watching
two children play with a loaded gun," as Millbank put it earlier.
But it actually is going to be vapid, substanceless and mindnumbingly boring, isn't it? Two people stiffly trying to avoid
saying anything. I'm right, aren't I?
Emily Bazelon: What a disappointment that will be! I'm holding
out for a classic moment or two. Otherwise, it'll be hard to stay
awake!
_______________________
_______________________
Washington: I'm no Biden fan, but I know there is a debate
about the debate, on how he should act tonight. I personally
think he should give short and clean answers. Talk about the
good of the nation. Take zero shots at Palin, but focus on
McCain. If she wants to get nasty while he's nice, that's fine. Let
her talk as much as possible—she is uncomfortable with quiet
spaces.
Emily Bazelon: Focusing on McCain could make Biden seem
like the grown-up taking on the other grown up. On the other
hand, if he ignores Palin entirely, that itself could seem
dismissive or insulting. Plus he is after all running for the same
office she is. So I think it's a tricky line to walk. Short and
clean—hard to argue with that.
_______________________
Bloomfield, N.J.: I think Palin's assumed strategy of glittering
generalities will work. Why? Because it worked last week for
McCain. Time and again he repeated his talking points, even
directly after Obama reasonably—and at length—defused and
parried them. Could it be that Palin was picked specifically
because she's so good at charging ahead with the canned reply,
regardless of what the question was?
Dahlia Lithwick: Bloomfield. Hiya. Why is it you think
McCain's "glittering generalities" worked? The post debate
polling I saw suggested Obama was the winner. You are right
that the qualities Palin has brought to her scripted speeches and
prior debates—folksiness, narrative, zingers, etc—probably
appealed to the McCain camp when they picked her. But I can't
help but feel that they misjudged the mood of the country (or
perhaps more fairly, didn't plan on the financial crisis?) People
are too freaked out for glittering generalities just now. And
especially generalities of the Palin variety in which she uncorks
83/105
the same soundbytes over and over in response to a multitude of
questions. The generalities lose some of the glitter with use, and
start to sound a little shopworn. But maybe thats my own in-thetankness speaking . . .
_______________________
Philadelphia: I'm curious about what you think Ifill's strategy
should be for the debate. Many have said that part of Couric's
effectiveness is that as a woman questioning a woman, she
canceled the gender bias noise around Palin. Ifill is also a
woman (obviously—and a fantastic one at that), but the dust-up
about her upcoming book suggests that the McCain camp is
attempting to insinuate that racial bias will cancel out gender
neutrality here. I don't think Ifill should have to shift whatever
her gameplan is, but do you think she will? And if so, how?
Dahlia Lithwick: So far it looks to me that Ifill has kept her
cool over this flap, treating it with some mild amusement and
not much else. And it would have been a much bigger flap if
folks hadnt known about the book for a while now. The worst
kind of umbrage depends on an invented gotcha moment. That
said it will be hard for Ifill not to be aware that her neutrality is
being loudly disputed in some corners. I wish there were some
deft way for her to acknowledge it and move on. Mostly I
imagine she will be the pro that she is tonight. And I hope she
won't falter on the followups.
_______________________
Chicago: It's a little late in the season to be asking this, but
every time I see or hear Palin, I wonder why it's not Kay Bailey
Hutchison or another qualified woman. Is there really a lack of
strong conservative women, or is there something about Palin
that I—and much of the rest of the country—is missing?
Emily Bazelon: There are other strong conservative women
who McCain could have picked, though I don't think he had a
list the length of an arm to choose from. I wonder, though,
whether Palin beat out the rest precisely because of some of the
qualities that now seem like potential liabilities, not with the
Republican base, but with other voters. She's perky. She's
unthreatening. She's Puritan sexy, per this piece. And whether
you like her or not, she's a fresh face. And she also has deep
resonance among Christian conservatives. Rightly, I think, they
take her as proof that John McCain means it when he says that
he'll do things like appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of
John Roberts and Sam Alito.
When you frame Palin that way, she does offer a pretty unique
set of attributes. Several months ago our colleague John
Dickerson predicted her as VP choice as a process of reverseengineering. Input a) Republican woman 2) pro-life 3) executive
experience 4) Washington outsider 5)conservative bona fides
and the output is Sarah Palin.
_______________________
Arlington, Va.: It seems that the way to shake up Palin is to put
her off the carefully and narrowly crafted track the handlers put
her on. Can Biden do this and not come off looking bad himself?
If so, how?
Dahlia Lithwick: I really do think Biden will disserve himself if
he sees his role as throwing Palin off tonight. I think he needs to
let Palin shake herself up or alternatively to just look smart. He
should act like he is debating a very smart fig tree and mostly
just ignore her. I know its not very vice-presidential but the
alternative will be to look like a bully.
_______________________
Detroit: During the primaries, I supported Hillary Clinton (FYI,
I am a man). I received a lot of eye-rolls and/or looks of
disbelief from my meat-and-potatoes male friends (Republicans
and Democrats)—they just couldn't believe I would support
"her." Now those same friends don't have near the same level of
distaste for Sarah Palin, even though they think she is
unqualified for this nomination. Have you experienced similar
differences in perceptions of Hillary and Palin? Do you think
physical appearance is a contributing factor? I do—and I think
many men always will judge accomplished females, at least
partly, through that filter.
Emily Bazelon: My own sense is that you're right, Palin's
physical appeal is pulling in male voters. That's what I take from
those Palin Is A Fox posters. I'd like to think that your friends
had thought-out policy reasons for dissing Hillary and
embracing Sarah. They think McCain-Palin are right on the war,
on cutting taxes for the wealthy, etc. Or at least that those issues
are what the choice will come down to for them in the end, come
November.
_______________________
Fredericton, New Brunswick: Yes we care up here, 'cause
when housing slumps in the U.S. sawmills close in Canada! Are
there safe words males like me can use to describe what we don't
like about Sarah Palin in blunt terms, and the narrow- or
shallow-minded politics she represents, without coming off as a
bully, sexist pig or dinosaur?
Dahlia Lithwick: Hi Fredericton. I'd stick to words like
"unprepared" and "parochial" in describing Gov. Palin and stay
away from references to lipstick or pitbulls. You can probably
infuse new meaning into the debate we are having down here
about hockey moms. My sister in law is a hockey mom in
Ottawa. I gather that largely means preparing pureed foods . . .
_______________________
84/105
Philadelphia: "The drawback, of course, is that they need the
center as well as the Republican base to win, and the center isn't
Rush Limbaugh's big draw." Which is funny, because—at least
going by the center and moderate Republican people I know—
the Palin selection has sent them running to the Obama camp.
parlayed a lot of bumper stickers into a lot of debate victories
however. I wouldn't underestimate her ability to make a bumper
sticker sound like reasoned analysis.
Emily Bazelon: Yes that's an aspect of the backlash I
mentioned. When I did this chat soon after Palin's selection, a
few women wrote in to say that they'd been Hillary supporters,
they'd thought about supporting McCain—but they were insulted
by his choice of Palin as a ploy to win them to his side. I think if
Palin had more moderate and centrist views this could have
played out very differently. But not believing in evolution, or
allowing for abortion for rape and incest victims—these are
positions that put you in a narrow slice of the American pie.
Midlothian, Va.: Emily, if you've read any of the history
surrounding Roe v. Wade and the work Blackmun did, you'd
understand Biden's answer reflects a deep understanding of the
many factors at work in that decision. Roe was a consensus
decision, in which Blackmun gave a little, took a little and came
up with a rather awkward decision designed to create a
consensus on the court. Powell did something similar in Bakke.
Biden's answer reflects just how smart and intellectually curious
the man really is.
_______________________
Emily Bazelon: Well, sorry, I just don't buy it. At the time, yes,
Justice Blackmun put enormous effort into crafting a
compromise. And since he won 7 out of 9 of the votes of the
justices who were then on the court, in that moment he
succeeded. (I wish he'd framed the decision in terms of women's
right to equality instead of privacy, a word that appears nowhere
in the constitution, but put that aside for now.) My point is that
beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Roe became the
lightening rod we know it today. Biden could have cited polls
showing that the majority of Americans don't want the ruling
overturned outright. But I don't think we're anywhere near
consensus, as a country, on the question of legalization of
abortion, on second trimester abortions, which Roe allows for,
on parental notification, etc. Whatever it's merits, I think there's
a good historical argument that Roe fueled division by
nationalizing a right that parts of the country didn't embrace. To
talk now about it in terms of consensus just seems like wishful
thinking.
Rockville, Md.: Don't forget Geraldine Ferraro—she, Hillary
and Palin make an n of 3.
Emily Bazelon: True!
_______________________
Minneapolis: Dahlia, do you think Senator Biden should bring
up how he raised his family as a single dad after the tragic death
of his wife, especially if Gov. Palin gives him an opening like
"the good old boys in Washington don't know what its like to
raise a family"?
Dahlia Lithwick: Minneapolis, the truth is I tend to become
very uneasy when candidates turn debates into a sort of olympics
of personal hardship. Maybe that is just the Vulcan in me but
unless Biden is really being clubbed senseless in the touching
personal narrative department tonight, I'd probably advise him to
tell stories of other peoples hardships, and be rock solid on
policy and substance.
_______________________
New York: Isn't a debate on this level like an intensive
interview? At some point, the clever vamping has to give way to
a command of the subject at hand. If Biden gives substantive
answers and Palin provides only bumper stickers, that can't look
good. Add to that the fact that the financial world looks to be
tanking. Pithiness just isn't going to do it, I'm afraid.
Dahlia Lithwick: New York I am not sure its so much an
intensive interview as a series of competing monologues
(interrupted in this case by admonitions to "talk to each other"
which will be ignored as they were last week). Still you are right
that in times of crisis, especially an economic crisis, folks are
hungry for real leadership more than bumper stickers. Palin has
_______________________
The other thing that bothered me about Biden's answer was that
he talked about the trimester framework of Roe as if it were still
good law, which it's really not, in light of Planned Parenthood v.
Casey in 1992. The legal standard since Casey is whether a
government regulation is an "undue burden" on a woman's right
to an abortion.
_______________________
Austin, TX: If the McCain camp was so adamant about
choosing a woman for the VP nomination, why pick Palin when
there are more experienced, better prepared women within the
party? Why not Kay Bailey Hutchison, Olympia Snowe or
Elizabeth Dole? They would come with their own individual
limitations, but at least they would be familiar with such basic
matters as Supreme Court History.
Dahlia Lithwick: Austin that will be the enduring question
when all this ends, no matter how it ends. Why pick a mediocre
woman (albeit a mediocre woman with real political abilities)
85/105
when you could have picked an extraordinary one? The answers
don't look good for McCain. Either there was something about
an accomplished, established, seasoned woman politician that
got in the way of his Pygmalion complex, or he truly believed he
didn't need any help at all on the ticket beyond a uterus. Either
way I think he miscalculated and the more women ask "Why not
Condi/Kay/Olympia" et. al. the more that miscalculation seems
to have backfired. This has been great fun and I hope we can do
the Monday Morning Quarterback sometime soon. Thanks so
much for reading and for pushing back at us!
_______________________
Wooster, Ohio: I have to admit that I was a Palin fan ... at first.
I identified with her on many levels—I am the same age, have
four children, am well-educated and have a great job. That all
ended when she started her public interviews. What bothers me
more than the fact that she did not know the answers to the
questions being asked is how she answered them. I honestly
believe I could have answered those interview questions better
than she did, despite having absolutely no foreign policy
experience (except what I read on sites like this).
I believe she is an intelligent woman, with the ability to learn
and catch up on the things she needs to know for the vice
presidency. It is much more difficult to teach someone how
handle tough questions (whether or not you know the
answers)—some individuals are better at handling pressure than
others. I think that is more important. It is much easier to learn
foreign policy, than it is to take control of a "fight or flight"
instinct. She appeared to take flight in those interviews, and we
just can't have that.
possessed no inclination to self-celebration, and so inspired no
inclination to resentment. My two favorite stars, after the
untouchable Cary Grant, are Newman and Nicholson. But if it's
Jack's world and we just live in it, Newman always seemed
happy to live in ours. He was inclined to "ordinary happiness,"
as a professor of mine once beautifully put it, or the prerogative
of the celebrity to freely choose the parameters of normal human
satisfaction. His channel to godliness paved by good looks,
charisma, and infallible instinct in front of a camera, he
nonetheless married long, loved well, and did good works. (If
there is more to this story—aside from racing cars—then I don't
want to know.) Who could begrudge him that twinkle? It was
always on our behalf, never his.
Paul Newman made better films than The Verdict, a boozesoaked bit of Boston gothic from 1982, but it was this
performance I kept replaying in my head after I heard he died.
Newman's charms were abundant, of course, so it was
remarkable to watch him keep them so completely in check. As
a redemption narrative and courtroom drama, The Verdict is
nothing more than solid, but it is that, and through and through,
with David Mamet writing the script and Sidney Lumet
directing. (It's a wee bit overplayed: The Verdict is bathed in so
much whiskey and lace curtain, it's a wonder it doesn't break into
"Danny Boy" midway through the second reel.) But Newman
brings Frank Galvin, the standard Hollywood cliché of the washup, to life. Fans of the movie are quick to cite Galvin's jury
summation, a bravura piece of restraint, to be sure, and a short
scene in which Galvin, the night before the trial opens, shuts
himself in a closet and begins to suspire madly in the throes of
panic.
By Stephen Metcalf
But the scene I kept coming back to sets up the whole film. It's
hardly noticeable. Newman is intent on bedding a fellow barfly
played by Charlotte Rampling. He buys her dinner the night
before voir dire, and for the first time in the film, we come up
close to Newman's face. The deep-set mask of middle-aged
failure softens. Watch Newman here, ye who would be actors;
study him. Where does this come from? "See, the jury believes.
The jury wants to believe." The lines are almost inconsequential.
But Newman is giving us evidence that Galvin is still alive. "It is
something to see. I have to go down there tomorrow and pick out
12 of them. All of them—all their lives—say, 'It's a sham, it's
rigged, you can't fight city hall. But when they step into that jury
box … you just barely see it in their eyes. Maybe, maybe …"
Rampling leans imperceptibly forward. "Maybe what?" And
Newman exhales—just a little—putting a lifetime of defeat into
that exhale, and suddenly Frank Galvin is talking about himself.
"Maybe I could do something right."
Paul Newman was blessed with abnormally good looks and
abnormally good scripts, but also something more: that magical
quiddity that makes you celebrate someone for his strokes of
good fortune. On the evidence of dozens of performances, he
Paul Newman reminded us—with a smile, a twinkle, a total
economy of gesture—how infrequently the beautiful are
comfortable in their own skin, how infrequently the elect are
gracious. He enters, and immediately, the pantheon of Grant,
Tracy, and Stewart, for reminding us of that magical Emersonian
Emily Bazelon: Here's a great comment that goes to your point,
I think:
Thanks, everyone—great questions, and great fun chatting with
you!
the dilettante
The Paul Newman Scene I Can't Get Out
of My Head
It's from The Verdict, but it's not the one you're thinking of.
86/105
place, of America in its own imagination of itself, where the
superhuman and the all-too-human become indistinguishable.
off on selling entirely, clinging to the hope that real-estate
markets will recover.
the dismal science
Of course, these factors can be offset by the forced relocation
that comes with default and foreclosure—when an owner is
unable or unwilling to continue making mortgage payments,
whether to move is no longer a matter of choice.
You've Just Been Offered a Great New
Job in Charlotte!
Too bad you can't sell your house in Tampa.
By Ray Fisman
America has always allocated its resources according to the socalled market mechanism—if the price of oil goes up, people
start building more oil rigs. And if more computer programmers
are needed in Silicon Valley, the "price" of programmers goes
up, motivating more college students to study computer science
and more programmers to move from New York to San
Francisco. But in the wake of our country's subprime meltdown,
many are questioning the market's magical ability to allocate
capital—we've got too many suburban tract homes and not
enough R & D labs and bridge upgrades. Looking to the future,
there may not be much capital to be allocated at all: With credit
scarce, aspiring Googles and eBays will have a lot more trouble
scratching together the funds to open shop.
And now it turns out that the current crisis might also undermine
the efficient redeployment of human resources. A well-timed
recent study by economists Fernando Ferreira, Joseph Gyourko,
and Joseph Tracy finds that homeowners who have "negative
equity" in their homes—that is, a mortgage that exceeds its
resale value—are 50 percent less likely to move than those who
can afford to pay off their mortgages with a home sale. Given
where the housing market is headed, millions of workers may be
locked in place in the years to come, throwing yet more sand
into the gears of America's market economy. A great job
opportunity in Charlotte, N.C., isn't worth much to you if you
can't (or won't) sell your house in Tampa, Fla.
There are both financial and psychological explanations for why
having an outsized mortgage on a relatively modest home
reduces mobility. First, if you owe more on your house than
you'll earn by selling it, you may not have the cash on hand to
close the deal, let alone put a down payment on a new home.
Higher interest rates will have a similar effect, pushing the cost
of a new mortgage out of a potential homebuyer's reach. And if
your mortgage is "underwater," odds are you'd be selling your
home at a loss, a psychologically painful prospect to
contemplate (what behavioral economists appropriately refer to
as loss aversion). Rather than absorb that loss, people who
bought at the market's peak tend to set high asking prices and, as
a result, are forced to sit much longer on unsold homes or hold
As a result of these counteracting forces—the "positive" impact
of foreclosure or the negative effect of loss aversion and
financial constraints—the overall impact of negative equity on
mobility is a matter for the housing data to decide. The
researchers use data from the American Housing Survey, a
biennial survey of homeowners in metropolitan areas across the
United States that has been conducted since 1985, with results
available through 2005. Respondents were asked for the value of
their mortgages and to estimate the current resale value of their
homes—if the first of these was the bigger number, then the
researchers classified the unfortunate owner as having a negative
equity stake in his home. And since the surveyors returned to the
same homes year after year, it's easy to figure out when houses
have changed hands.
Earlier housing booms and busts may seem like mere blips
compared to the current crisis. But the authors were able to
identify many local real-estate ups and downs over the two
decades when the survey was conducted. For example, a
Californian who bought a $250,000 home in 1989 could expect
to get only around $200,000 if he put it on the market eight years
later. Buyers in other volatile markets like Boston and the oil
cities of the South saw similar fluctuations.
The authors calculate that every two years, about 12 percent of
home-owning Americans moved. But for those with negative
equity—about 2.6 percent of respondents during the 1985-2005
period of study—the probability of moving is cut nearly in half.
What does this tell us about the current crisis? The authors are
appropriately circumspect about extrapolating their findings to
the current mortgage meltdown. The magnitude of our housing
problems is unprecedented: Given the free and easy credit
flowing into the housing market in recent years, many buyers
purchased their homes with minimal down payments. Even a
modest decline in home values—say, one that brings them back
to their 2002 levels—will push many homes purchased at the
peak into negative equity. Also, buyers with outsized mortgages
in the past were less likely to resemble the high-risk borrowers
that the subprime mortgage market brought to home ownership.
This new class of borrowers may be much less able to soldier on,
making payments on houses that they could never afford in the
first place. As a result, we've already seen a lot more people slip
into default and foreclosure—nearly 91,000 of them in August
2008 alone. So there will soon be a lot more workers on the
move, whether they like it or not.
87/105
But forcing people from homes they'd like to keep may not be
any better for the efficient functioning of labor markets than
locking in homeowners who would like to move. Foreclosed
workers may be uprooted from jobs in which they're happy and
productive in their desperate scramble to find a place to live
(which, in turn, may not be in a place that offers particularly
attractive employment prospects). The dream of American
homeownership may yet turn into even more of a nightmare for
the efficient workings of the free market.
("I am not a crook"), and crafty shadings of the truth ("I did not
have sexual relations with that woman") can be diagrammed
with equal ease. But some politicians—our current president
included—offer meanderings in the higher realms of drivel that
leave the diagrammer groping for the Tylenol ("Families is
where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream") or the
gin bottle ("I remember meeting a mother of a child who was
abducted by the North Koreans right here in the Oval Office").
So let's take a crack at a few of Palin's doozies. From the Katie
Couric interview:
the good word
Diagramming Sarah
Can Palin's sentences stand up to a grammarian?
By Kitty Burns Florey
There are plenty of people out there—not only English teachers
but also amateur language buffs like me—who believe that
diagramming a sentence provides insight into the mind of its
perpetrator. The more the diagram is forced to wander around
the page, loop back on itself, and generally stretch its
capabilities, the more it reveals that the mind that created the
sentence is either a richly educated one—with a Proustian grasp
of language that pushes the limits of expression—or such an
impoverished one that it can produce only hot air, baloney, and
twaddle.
I found myself considering this paradox once again when
confronted with the sentences of Sarah Palin, the Republican
vice-presidential nominee. No one but a Republican denial
specialist could argue with the fact that Sarah Palin's recent TV
appearances have scaled the heights of inanity. The sentences
she uttered in interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity,
and Katie Couric seem to twitter all over the place like mourning
doves frightened at the feeder. Which left me wondering: What
can we learn from diagramming them?
One thing we can't learn, of course, is whether her words are true
or make sense. Part of the appeal of diagramming is the fact that
just about any sentence can be diagrammed, even when it is
gibberish. Cats chase mice and Mice chase cats present the same
kind of entity to the diagrammer. So does Muffins bludgeon
bookcases. If it's a string of words containing a certain number
of parts of speech arranged in reasonably coherent order, it can
be hacked and beaten into a diagram.
Once we start diagramming political sentences, the diagram's
indifference to meaning can be especially striking. Stirring
words like "I have a dream," the magisterial Declaration of
Independence (a staple of diagramming teachers), bald-faced lies
It's very important when you consider even
national security issues with Russia as Putin
rears his head and comes into the air space of
the United States of America, where—where
do they go?
A diagrammer doesn't care about who "they" are in that last
stuttered question or fuss over the problem of the head-rearing
Putin coming into our "air space." A diagrammer simply
diagrams. I didn't have a clue about what to do with the question
that ends it. Otherwise, in its mice chase cats way, the sentence
is perfectly diagrammable.
Other Palinisms are not so tractable. From the Charlie Gibson
interview:
I know that John McCain will do that and I, as
his vice president, families we are blessed with
that vote of the American people and are
elected to serve and are sworn in on January
20, that will be our top priority is to defend the
American people.
I didn't stop to marvel at the mad thrusting of that pet political
watchword "families" into the text. I just rolled up my sleeves
and attempted to bring order out of the chaos:
I had to give up. This sentence is not for diagramming
lightweights. If there's anyone out there who can kick this sucker
into line, I'd be delighted to hear from you. To me, it's not
English—it's a collection of words strung together to elicit a
reaction, floating ands and prepositional phrases ("with that vote
of the American people") be damned. It requires not a diagram
but a selection of push buttons.
88/105
Granted, diagramming usually deals with written English. We
don't expect speech to reach the heights of eloquence or even
lucidity that the written word is capable of. In our world,
politicians don't do much writing: Their preferred
communication is the canned speech. But they're also forced,
from time to time, to answer questions, and their answers often
resemble the rambling nonsense, obfuscation, and grammatical
insanity that many of us would produce when put on the spot.
Yet surely, more than most of us, politicians need to be able to
think on their feet, to have a brain that works quickly and
rationally under pressure. Do we really want to be led by
someone who, when asked a straightforward question, flails
around like an undergraduate who stayed up all night boozing
instead of studying for the exam?
In a few short weeks, Sarah Palin has produced enough
poppycock to keep parsers and diagrammers busy for a long
time. In the end, though, out of her mass of verbiage in the Sean
Hannity interview, Palin did manage to emit a perfectly lucid
diagram-ready statement that sums up, albeit modestly, not the
state of the economy that she was (more or less) talking about
but the quality of her thinking:
the good word
What Kind of Accent Does Sarah Palin
Have?
Wasillan, actually.
By Jesse Sheidlower
Since Sarah Palin was selected as the Republican candidate for
vice president, many people have made comments about her
unusual speech, comparing it to accents heard in the movie
Fargo, in the states of Wisconsin and Idaho, and in Canada.
Some have even attributed her manner of speaking to her
supposed stupidity. But Palin actually has an Alaskan accent,
one from the Matnuska and Susitna Valley region, where Palin's
hometown, Wasilla, is located.
Alaska is an unusual dialect area. As with most regions of the
Western United States, its inhabitants have typically arrived
from a variety of places, and comparatively recently. Western
dialects are thus usually less sharply defined than many in the
East, where there are long-established stable settlements that
have given distinctive features to the dialect—as, for example,
Scots and Northern Irish did in the Appalachians, or the Puritans
from East Anglia in New England, or Germans and
Scandinavians in the Upper Midwest.
Many Alaska residents came from the Pacific Northwest or
Western Canada, and features of the dialects of these regions are
the most prominent in Alaskan English. Alaskan English even
has a certain amount of "Canadian raising," the sound change
that makes a Canadian about sound something like a boot. There
are also a significant number of immigrants from the Midwest in
Alaska, and they have contributed different elements to Alaskan
speech. And in parts of Alaska, there is influence from Eskimo
and Indian languages, though this is typically found only in
people raised in native villages, and this speech is popularly
associated with remote regions.
Alaska also has its own distinctive lexicon culled from a variety
of languages; it includes sourdough, or "long-time native of
Alaska," and cheechako, or "newcomer" (from Chinook Jargon).
Alaska also gave us the parka (from Russian, ultimately from
Nenets, a Samoyedic language of northern Russia). Overall,
because of the mixture of people and the large number of
newcomers, Alaskan English is often hard to place, with both
Westerners and Midwesterners thinking that it sounds oddly
foreign; indeed, some Westerners have said that Palin sounds
like a Midwesterner, and Midwesterners that she sounds
Western.
Others have wondered whether her accent hails from Idaho,
where her parents are from. But dialect features tend to come
from one's peers, not one's parents, and Palin spent her
childhood in Alaska's Mat-Su Valley, which is where she got her
distinctive manner of speaking. The next town over from
Wasilla, Palmer, has a large settlement of Minnesotans—who
were moved there by a government relief program in the
1930s—and features of the Minnesotan dialect are thus
prominent in the Mat-Su Valley area. Hence the Fargo-like
elements in Palin's speech, in particular the sound of her "O"
vowel. (Despite its name, Fargo took place mostly in Brainerd,
Minn.) However, even in the area, many people speak a more
general Alaskan English, the sort one would find in nearby
Anchorage. Palin's frequent dropping of the final G in -ing
words and her pronunciation of terrorist with two syllables
instead of three are characteristic of general Alaskan English
(and Western English) rather than the specific Mat-Su Valley
speech.
Reaction to Palin's speech has been highly varied. Some people
dislike it, finding it harsh or grating; others regard it as charming
or authentic. These are common responses to a distinctive
accent. Depending on the context, such an accent can make a
person seem stupid or uneducated or, conversely, honest and
folksily trustworthy—often at the same time. Some people
exploit this for effect, emphasizing and de-emphasizing dialect
features to prompt a particular reaction. Linguists call this codeswitching. In this Palin interview with Katie Couric, you can
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hear her enunciating her -ings and her yous more clearly in
responses where she appeared to have a ready answer, and
returning to her more natural -in' and ya when she seemed
stumped, which suggests that Palin may have been deliberately
attempting to minimize her dialect features for that audience.
Thanks to Joan Hall of the Dictionary of American Regional
English and Alaska native James Crippen of the University of
Hawaii.
the green lantern
Should We Dispose of Disposals?
The best way to get rid of your leftover food.
By Jacob Leibenluft
I'm sorry to say I live in an apartment without a composter
for organic waste. Given the circumstances, am I better off
feeding my leftover mashed potatoes into the garbage
disposal, so they don't end up in a landfill? Or should I
throw them in the trash can, so they don't end up the water
supply?
For years, the great garbage-disposal wars have been going on
without most of us even noticing. Cities like New York—along
with many governments in Europe—banned disposals
altogether, arguing that the added food waste would overtax the
water-treatment system. (New York removed the ban for
residential kitchens in 1997.) Meanwhile, the appliance
manufacturers—along with homeowners and restaurants who
prefer getting rid of food through the drain—have argued that
the disposal is actually a green machine, reducing the amount of
trash sent to landfills.
It is true that with the major exception of grease and fats—which
can block pipes and cause overflows—water-treatment systems
are designed pretty well to handle most of the scraps you might
have left over from dinner. The leftovers you shovel into the
sink will eventually make their way to a wastewater plant, where
the sewage goes through "grit treatment," which strains out the
largest solid matter. (Sewage treatment is one of the few
disciplines in which you can use words like grit, sludge, and
scum as technical terms.) Whatever stuff gets separated from the
water is either landfilled, condensed into fertilizer, or digested
by microorganisms.
Still, dumping waste into the water system has environmental
costs. There is evidence that the effluent that is pumped back
into local water streams does affect their chemical composition
and aquatic life. In extreme cases, the result can be something
called eutrophication, which occurs when a higher concentration
of nutrients results in algae blooms. According to one Australian
study, the eutrophic impact of sending your food waste down the
disposal is more than three times larger than sending it to the
landfill. You'll also be using a lot more water if you decide to go
with the disposal—and you'll be indirectly responsible for the
extraction of the metal needed to make the appliance.
(A quick aside: As is often case with life-cycle analyses about
consumer products, most studies on disposals are sponsored or
requested by companies or groups with a financial interest in the
results—like InSinkErator or the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling
Contractors Association. This is often unavoidable: Getting good
data on these devices often requires the cooperation of the
companies that make them.)
On the other hand, it takes a considerable amount of energy to
truck all that garbage from your curb to a landfill. (How much
more will depend on where you live relative to the landfill, but
average data compiled in both that Australian study and one
conducted in Wisconsin suggest a factor of two.) The
decomposition of your trash in the landfill will likely result in
more damaging greenhouse gas emissions, since the breakdown
of your food waste may produce methane so quickly that it can't
be captured. By contrast, some wastewater-treatment systems are
actually looking for more food solids, since that will make the
process of converting waste into energy more efficient. And
wastewater-treatment plants also provide a way to reuse leftover
food as fertilizer—although critics have expressed concerns that
the use of biosolids on land land may not always be safe (PDF).
The research is unambiguous about one point, though: Under
normal circumstances, you should always compost if you can.
Otherwise, go ahead and use your garbage disposal if the
following conditions are met: First, make sure that your
community isn't running low on water. (To check your local
status, click here.) Don't put anything that is greasy or fatty in
the disposal. And find out whether your local water-treatment
plant captures methane to produce energy. If it doesn't—and
your local landfill does—you may be better off tossing those
mashed potatoes in the trash.
Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at
night? Send it to [email protected], and check this
space every Tuesday.
today's business press
Markets Pray House Can Deliver
By Bernhard Warner and Matthew Yeomans
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today's papers
A League of Their Own
By Daniel Politi
The vice-presidential candidates faced off last night in an
eagerly anticipated debate that ultimately failed to deliver any of
the game-changing moments that partisans on both sides were
hoping for. The debate "included humor, emotion and sharp
elbows," notes USA Today, as the candidates kept things
relatively peaceful while they eagerly sparred on taxes, Iraq, and
who can best bring change to Washington. Coming a day after
the Senate voted in favor of the $700 billion bailout plan, it was
hardly surprising the economy quickly took center stage, and Joe
Biden and Sarah Palin each tried to portray their ticketmate as
the candidate most capable of understanding the struggles of the
middle class.
Ultimately, each "escaped without a major mishap," says the
Washington Post, "and Palin seemed to repair an image that had
been damaged by recent media interviews and increasing public
doubts about her readiness for the nation's No. 2 job." While
many predicted Palin would be embarrassed on a national stage
when facing off against the veteran senator, the governor of
Alaska largely held her own. Still, "Palin's novelty was on full
display," says the Los Angeles Times. "She winked repeatedly,
and often uttered remarks in a sing-song lilt more often heard in
a children's classroom than on the national stage." The New York
Times agrees and says that Palin proved she "was unlike any
other running mate in recent memory, using phrases like 'heck of
a lot' and 'Main Streeters like me' to appeal to working-class and
middle-class voters." But even as she displayed more confidence
on the important issues, "her citing of facts sometimes came
across as rote, she twice misstated the name of the top American
general in Afghanistan, and she was chided at times for not
sticking to the subject at hand," says the Wall Street Journal.
While the "experience gap was evident throughout," as the LAT
puts it, the NYT probably describes it best by saying that Palin
"succeeded by not failing in any obvious way." She often relied
on talking points and repeatedly referred to John McCain as a
"maverick." A while into the debate it seemed Biden had had
enough of the word and replied that McCain "has been no
maverick on the things that matter to people's lives." And that
was Biden's strategy throughout the encounter as he mostly
ignored Palin and made McCain the focus of his toughest
attacks.
At one point, when Biden attacked McCain for favoring
deregulation and Palin answered by talking about taxes, the
senator from Delaware did directly criticize Palin's failure to
answer the questions she was being asked. The governor quickly
turned it into a criticism of the media and Washington
politicians. "I may not answer the questions the way that either
the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight
to the American people and let 'em know my track record also."
Biden repeatedly tried to link McCain with the Bush
administration. In what the WP says may have been "the essence
of the night," Palin replied in kind by saying that Americans
would eventually grow tired of the Democratic ticket "constantly
looking backwards, and pointing fingers, and doing the blame
game." Biden was ready with a response: "Look, past is
prologue." The LAT notes that in her eagerness "to portray Biden
as typical of the Washington establishment so despised by
voters, Palin at one point made an argument that echoed
Obama's thrust against McCain" when she said that "Americans
are craving something new and different."
Palin "delivered a livelier and more rhetorically compelling
performance than Biden," says the LAT in an analysis that points
out the governor winked at the audience, gave a "shout-out" to
her brother's third-grade class, and talked of her connection to
voters as a hockey and soccer mom. For his part, Biden seemed
more comfortable when dealing with policy. Still, the debate's
most emotional moment belonged to Biden when he briefly
choked up when talking about the car accident that killed his
wife and daughter. The NYT's Alessandra Stanley says that
"while her showmanship may have exhilarated her fans, it also
helped Mr. Biden, who is normally known as something of a
know-it-all showoff; in contrast to her, he seemed reserved and
sincere."
In the end, the encounter may have left voters wishing there
were more vice-presidential debates. "Palin and Biden were each
appealing in their own way—and in ways that neither McCain
nor Obama were in their first debate last Friday," says the Post
in a front-page analysis. In its own analysis, USAT also
compares the debate with last week's encounter and says the two
running mates "delivered a fierce, fast-talking back-and-forth
with tougher criticism than the presidential contenders traded in
their first debate."
The NYT says that while Palin may have helped McCain by
putting the focus back on the presidential candidates, it didn't
"constitute the turning point the McCain campaign was looking
for" at a time when Obama seems to be gaining ground with
voters. "This is going to help stop the bleeding," a Republican
consultant said. "But this alone won't change the trend line."
There were new signs yesterday that McCain needs all the help
he can get as his campaign announced that it was pulling its staff
and advertising out of Michigan, a Democratic state where
Republicans once thought McCain had a chance.
In a story that looks at the state of the presidential race, the WSJ
points out that polls show Obama leading in almost enough
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states to win the election. The Democratic nominee is ahead or
tied in a few states that voted Republican in 2004, including
Ohio and Florida, and has a lead in Pennsylvania, which is the
other Democratic state McCain's campaign has been targeting.
Of course, a lot can change in a month, but right now McCain's
campaign is "being forced to play defense in territory
Republicans have long taken for granted."
In other news, the LAT fronts a look at how lawmakers who
opposed the $700 billion bailout package have been on the
receiving end of intense lobbying in advance of today's crucial
vote in the House. Some of it has come from independent
citizens, but the powerful blitz has also been the result of a
concerted effort by the country's major business groups to rally
support for the rescue plan. It's still unclear whether the House
will have enough votes to pass the measure, but there are hints
that several lawmakers will be changing their vote, even if
they're not willing to say so publicly just yet.
The WSJ appears to want to send a message directly to
lawmakers with a Page One piece that details how new
economic data seem to suggest the crisis is rapidly getting worse
in both the United States and Europe. Yesterday the Federal
Reserve said that in the last week financial institutions grew
even more reluctant to offer basic short-term loans to companies.
The tightening up of so-called "commercial paper" is the "most
worrying aspect of the crisis," says the WSJ.
While McCain was widely ridiculed for putting much of the
blame for the financial crisis on Christopher Cox, the chairman
of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the NYT suggests
today that the Republican candidate may have been on to
something. The NYT says one of the root causes of the current
crisis can be traced back to a brief meeting in 2004, where the
big investment banks pushed the SEC to allow them to take on
more debt. A few months later, "the net capital rule" was
changed, and "the five big independent investment firms were
unleashed." Although the new rules would allow the SEC to
keep banks away from excessively risky activity, the agency
essentially ended up "outsourcing the job of monitoring risk to
the banks themselves." Cox came onboard a year later, but he
made it clear from the outset that oversight of the banks was not
an important priority, and regulators essentially ignored any
problems that were discovered.
The NYT reports that after months of criticism from the United
States, the Pakistani government has launched a full-scale
assault against the Taliban in the country's tribal regions. "After
years of relative passivity, the army is now engaged in heavy
fighting with the militants on at least three fronts," says the
Times. Even as many in Pakistan are convinced that something
must be done to root out the Taliban, the government has done
little to prepare the country for the fighting and risks losing the
"hearts and minds" of civilians who are increasingly critical of
its alliance with the United States.
The editorial pages of the LAT, NYT, and WP express
disappointment in last night's debate. The WP says that the fact
that "a rather surface-skimming discussion full of evasion and
mischaracterization was viewed as good news" for both
candidates is a reflection of just how low the expectations were.
For its part, the NYT says the debate "did not change the
essential truth" that McCain "made a wildly irresponsible
choice" when he picked Palin. The LAT is the most decidedly
unimpressed with the "Joe and Sarah show," saying that the "two
candidates—aided and abetted by the singularly inarticulate
work of moderator Gwen Ifill—combined to produce one of the
worst debates in modern American presidential history."
today's papers
Upping the Ante
By Daniel Politi
The Senate easily approved the $700 billion bailout plan last
night with a 74-to-25 vote. The Senate's strong, albeit reluctant,
endorsement of the rescue package left supporters optimistic that
the House will approve the measure by the end of the week. In
what USA Today describes as "a maneuver to reverse a stinging
House rejection of the plan," the Senate added several popular
measures to the original bill. How many? Well, just think of it
this way: The rescue package began as a three-page proposal by
the Treasury Department and now clocks in at 451 pages. These
additions include an increase in bank insurance limits and a host
of popular tax breaks for businesses and individuals that add up
to $150 billion. Its passage in the House remains far from certain
as fiscally conservative Democrats have long opposed extending
the tax breaks unless they were offset by tax increases or
spending cuts. Still, Republican leaders said they are optimistic
that the sweeteners would be enough to convince some
lawmakers to change their vote.
"Instead of siding with a $700 billion bailout, lawmakers could
now say they voted for increased protection for deposits at the
neighborhood bank, income tax relief for middle-class taxpayers
and aid for schools in rural areas," notes the New York Times.
Indeed, the Los Angeles Times points out that a few "of the
changes appeared aimed at enticing specific lawmakers,"
including expanded coverage of mental illness and a tax break
for bicycle commuters. The Wall Street Journal says that the bill
now has "a number of tax breaks that have been attacked by
fiscal conservatives, including an exemption from a 39-cent
excise tax for children's wooden practice arrows." But as angry
as they may be about these additions, the Washington Post
suggests that, despite the increased burden on the taxpayer,
many fiscally conservative Democrats will simply hold their
noses and vote yes in order to get the legislation to the president
as soon as possible.
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Adding to the drama of last night's Senate session, both
presidential candidates went back to Capitol Hill to cast votes in
favor of the bill. Their presence meant that Sen. Edward
Kennedy, who is being treated for brain cancer, was the only
senator who didn't vote. Barack Obama gave a speech on the
Senate floor, and the WP points out that he "echoed President
Franklin D. Roosevelt's first fireside chat to the nation during the
Great Depression" by calling on Americans to have "confidence
and courage" during the economic downturn. John McCain
didn't address the chamber. The NYT reports on a bit of political
tension that was evident last night as Obama "walked to the
Republican side of the aisle to greet [McCain], who offered a
chilly look and a brief return handshake."
The WSJ is alone in mentioning that the new bill also includes a
measure that reaffirms the Security and Exchange Commission's
power to suspend so-called mark-to-market accounting. The
move "was meant to send a message to the agency to re-evaluate
the issue," which has "gained surprising traction" in recent days,
says the WSJ. The banking industry is strongly pushing for the
suspension of the rule that forces financial institutions to report
the current market price of their assets even if they have no
intention of selling them. Some lawmakers are convinced the
change could save taxpayers billions of dollars, while others say
it would merely increase uncertainty. In a proposal so obvious
that TP is mad he didn't think of it before, the WP's Steven
Pearlstein says there's an easy way to split the difference:
"Require banks to disclose market prices right alongside their
own estimates of 'fair value.' Let the investors decide which to
rely on."
The WSJ says the Fed is considering cutting interest rates even if
the bailout package makes it through Congress. The Fed has
been reluctant to continue cutting rates due to fears of inflation.
But after a string of bad economic data, officials are once again
worried about "the risk of a severe recession," which is "known
as a 'tail risk' because its likelihood is small but its effect would
be catastrophic."
Now that the bailout has crossed one legislative hurdle, it's a
good time to look back and answer the all-important how-didwe-get-here question. Today, the NYT offers up a long but
highly readable look at how a "36-hour period two weeks ago …
spooked policy makers by opening fissures in the worldwide
financial system." While it should come as no surprise that the
"credit crisis has played out in places most people can't see," the
NYT does a good job of explaining how the failure of Lehman
Bros. led to a crucial wave of panic among hedge-fund managers
that seemed to have no end in sight. And while the plan to buy
toxic securities may have appeared to come out of nowhere, the
NYT also makes clear that Fed and Treasury officials had been
talking about the possibility since the bailout of Bear Stearns.
In a Page One piece, the LAT takes a look at how McCain's shift
from talking about the dangers of big government to being a
proponent of federal intervention in the financial crisis is a move
the senator "has perfected in 26 years on Capitol Hill." The
Republican nominee may follow his party's line in pushing for
smaller government, but he's also quick to embrace strong
government regulation whenever there's a crisis or scandal.
While this willingness to break from his party's rhetoric is part of
the reason McCain is often called a "maverick," it also means
that it's "hard to discern how the politician who boasts of
delivering 'straight talk' would govern from the Oval Office,"
says the LAT.
On the day when the vice-presidential candidates are set to
debate, the WP fronts a new poll that shows how voters have
quickly fallen out of love with Sarah Palin. Although her
selection was seen as a possible game-changer, the poll reveals
that she could actually end up hurting McCain among key
groups. Six in 10 voters say she lacks the experience to be
effective as president, and one-third say they're less likely to
vote for McCain because of her presence on the ticket. Most
critical to McCain is the revelation that while independent voters
were split on Palin's experience last month, they now "take the
negative view by about 2 to 1," says the Post. But in the
expectations game, Joe Biden is clearly the loser. Voters by a
19-point margin think the senator will do better in the debate.
The NYT fronts a puzzling piece about Biden that shockingly
reveals the senator who has served in Washington for 35 years
isn't really an "average guy." Yes, Biden may be able to say he
comes from a working-class neighborhood, but he now lives in a
much bigger house than the average American! Well, that's not
entirely fair, as the article does reveal some questionable use of
his campaign funds. But ultimately, there just isn't much there as
the entire crux of the article seems to be that he "appears to have
benefited at times from the simple fact of who he is." So, does
that mean he received a below-market interest rate when he went
out looking for a loan? Nope. But the bank did pay special
attention to his application, which hardly seems surprising
considering that any well-known person would have likely
received the same treatment. The NYT also mentions some realestate dealings that do not sound 100 percent kosher but, again,
can't point to anything improper about them.
While Americans worry about the financial crisis, a NYT Page
One story should serve as a reminder about how things could be
much, much worse. In (yet another) fascinating dispatch from
Zimbabwe, the paper details just how ridiculous the country's
hyperinflation has become. The government has imposed strict
limits on how much money Zimbabweans can get out of banks,
which means that many must stand in line for hours simply to
get enough cash to buy a bar of soap. That is, if they're lucky
enough to get anything at all. As money loses value "literally by
the hour," many public employees, including teachers, nurses,
and garbage collectors, have simply stopped showing up to work
because their salaries don't even cover the cost of taking public
transportation to get there.
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The WSJ takes a look at how mackerel has become the currency
of choice among inmates after federal prisons prohibited
smoking in 2004. Americans as a whole aren't big fans of the
oily fish, but demand from prisons has grown in the past few
years. "It never has done very well at all, regardless of the
retailer," says one mackerel supplier, "but it's very popular in the
prisons."
today's papers
Take the Bill and Run
By Daniel Politi
The Senate is taking over. After the House rejected the $700
billion bailout of the financial system, senators decided to step
into the fray and shepherd the bill through Congress. After a day
of behind-the-scenes negotiations, Senate leaders scheduled a
vote on a slightly revised package tonight with the expectation
that the House would approve the measure by the end of the
week. The revisions to the financial rescue plan include a oneyear increase in the limit on federally insured deposits to
$250,000 from $100,000 and a variety of tax breaks. The tweaks
to the bill wouldn't change the basics of the rescue plan, "but
would add a populist tinge at a time when voters appear enraged
at what many see as a bailout of Wall Street, not Main Street,"
notes the Wall Street Journal.
package would appeal to Republicans who voted against the bill
on Monday.
Then again, it's unclear whether simply presenting the same bill
again wouldn't provide the same results. "There was a
widespread sense on Capitol Hill that Monday's vote had
snapped the public to attention about the potential repercussions
of Congress's failure to act," notes the WP. Consequently,
lawmakers' offices were flooded with calls, and there was a
marked shift in tone as constituents who found themselves
spooked by the huge plunge in Wall Street demanded that
Congress do something. "It's completely in the other direction
now," Boehner's spokesman said. But the WSJ says that House
Democrats who voted against the bill received thousands of calls
from constituents who mostly agreed with them.
Now lawmakers might realize that trying to do what their
constituents want is a little difficult when the public as a whole
isn't really sure of what it wants. Then again, with Election Day
rapidly approaching, they have little choice. "It's not a moment
at which people can put the national interest ahead of constituent
interest," a political science professor tells the LAT. The Post
fronts the results of a new poll that reveals that almost all
Americans see the financial situation as a big problem and a
majority describes it as a crisis. Still, the country remains
divided on support for the bailout plan, with 51 percent saying
that they believe the government could prevent the economic
woes from getting worse.
USA Today and the WSJ highlight that key lawmakers hope that
having the Senate, including the two presidential candidates,
vote in favor of the measure would build momentum for the bill
in the House. The Los Angeles Times notes that in the aftermath
of the House's rejection of the measure, "there was no shortage
of suggestions" for new ways to confront the financial crisis. But
in coming up with the revisions to the measure, officials had to
play what the New York Times describes as "a delicate balancing
act" in order to ensure that the changes wouldn't lead to
opposition from fiscally conservative Democrats. While some
lawmakers are quick to predict that the House will approve the
measure, the Washington Post says House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
"responded tepidly to the Senate announcement, and it remained
unclear when the House would consider the revised bill."
The move to increase the deposit-insurance limits was endorsed
by both presidential candidates as well as the Bush
administration yesterday and set "off a bit of a political tiff,"
says the NYT. House Republicans said that they had proposed
the idea over the weekend but that it was rejected, while
Democrats insisted that the issue wasn't even talked about.
Regardless, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle seem
receptive to the increase even as some experts say the $250,000
is completely arbitrary. The Post notes that some think the
government should guarantee all bank deposits until the crisis is
over, a move that has been embraced by a couple of European
countries. The NYT points out that widespread approval for the
move represents "a major lobbying coup for community banks."
The group, the Independent Community Bankers of America,
vowed to begin a big push to muster citizen support for the
bailout all across the country.
Key House officials also spent much of yesterday considering
changes that could be implemented to the financial rescue
package in order to attract more support, but given the Senate's
decision to act quickly, it's unlikely that they will ever see the
light of day. Everyone notes that even as lawmakers worried
about losing some Democratic support with the changes to the
bill from the Senate, Republicans appeared receptive. House
Minority Leader John Boehner was consulted and apparently
"gave the green light" to the changes, believing that the tax
In a more controversial move, lawmakers are also considering
changing an accounting rule that many have blamed for
exacerbating insecurity in the markets. Securities regulators
issued a statement yesterday giving companies more flexibility
in how to figure out the value of complicated assets for which
there are no buyers. But some lawmakers want to take it further
and temporarily suspend the so-called mark-to-market rules,
which require companies to reflect the market prices of their
assets even if they have no intention of selling them. That might
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improve balance sheets, but critics say it would merely provide a
way for companies to hide their losses and could increase
uncertainty.
Even as stock markets were in an upward trend after Monday's
huge sell-off, "the ripple effects from the U.S. financial crisis
intensified around the world," notes the WSJ. Yesterday, a
French-Belgian bank received a $9.2 billion bailout and became
the fifth European financial institution to receive direct
assistance from the government since Sunday. And in what the
WSJ calls "one of the most ambitious measures taken by a
government since the crisis began," Ireland announced that it
would guarantee the debt of its top six financial institutions. The
WP points out that even as they try to put out fires, government
officials around the world recognize that they are "as dependent
as ever on Washington to come up with a solution."
With all the financial-related news, it's easy to forget that the
vice-presidential candidates will face off tomorrow in an eagerly
anticipated event. The NYT says that you have to go back to Dan
Quayle in 1988 to remember a time when "debate expectations
for a major party candidate [have] been as low as they will be on
Thursday for Gov. Sarah Palin." The paper reviews her past
debate performances in Alaska and says that Palin displayed
confidence even as she spoke in vague terms "and showed scant
aptitude for developing arguments beyond a talking point or
two." The WSJ points out that Democrats are trying to raise
expectations for Palin's performance, and Palin played the same
game this week saying that she's been listening to Biden speak
"since I was in the second grade."
The LAT talks to some of her former rivals, who warn that she
might not know the ins and outs of policy issues but has an
uncanny ability to offer up pithy statements that are appealing to
voters. "The political landscape here is littered with people who
have underestimated Sarah Palin," a former rival said. In order to
be successful, Sen. Joe Biden will have to take her seriously as
an opponent while also being careful not to be "overly
aggressive against a candidate who radiates telegenic appeal,"
says the LAT.
USAT fronts a look at how Border Patrol agents are increasing
the number of supposedly random inspections in domestic trains,
buses, and ferries that are far from the border. The agents are
beginning to take full advantage of their authority to search any
mode of transportation within 100 miles of the border to catch
illegal immigrants. And lest you think they're only focusing on
people who are trying to make a living in the United States, a
Border Patrol official affirms that their actions even help the
fight against terrorism. "They never know when we're going to
show up and what form we're going to take," he says.
In the WP's op-ed page, Jonathan Koppell and William
Goetzmann suggest that the best fix for the current financial
crisis would be to have the government simply pay off all the
delinquent mortgages. Although the root of the problem is
homeowners, the bailout plan "ignores this" even as the amount
of money being requested "is almost certainly more than
sufficient to pay off all currently delinquent mortgages." Helping
financial institutions is "a large, complex gamble," but paying
off mortgages would help "ordinary Americans and would
quickly spill over to revive the financial markets."
In what might very well be one of the most pretentious columns
in recent memory, the NYT's Thomas Friedman says readers
should take the financial crisis seriously "because I know an
unprecedented moment when I see one." Friedman then goes on
to say that "I've been frightened for my country only a few times
in my life," and they were all during momentous events. This
ability isn't something he gained with life experience; it's
apparently innate. "[E]ven as a boy of 9," he informs us, "I
followed the tension of the Cuban missile crisis."
today's papers
Failure To Lead
By Daniel Politi
The roller-coaster ride is nowhere near over. That was the
message sent down from Capitol Hill yesterday as initial
optimism quickly gave way to shock when the voting started in
the House and it became clear there weren't enough votes to
approve the $700 billion bailout plan. Lawmakers rejected the
compromise rescue package on a 228-205 vote, and nervous
investors quickly pressed the sell button. The markets began to
plummet at the first sign of trouble, and by the end of the day the
Dow Jones industrial average fell by almost 778 points, a new
record. It was "the most devastating stock market collapse in 21
years," declares the Los Angeles Times. USA Today notes that
the 7 percent plunge "didn't even make the Dow's all-time top
10" but goes on to point out that the broader Standard & Poor's
500 index suffered its worst day since 1987's "Crash Monday."
The Wall Street Journal highlights that the closely watched VIX
index, which is often referred to as "the fear index," closed "at
its highest levels in its 28-year history."
"Rarely has a congressional vote held such high drama and
produced such immediate repercussions," notes the Washington
Post. While it was expected that many rank-and-file lawmakers
would go against the wishes of their leaders, most were
expecting that the compromise bailout plan would pass the
House after the marathon weekend negotiations. Even the White
House declared itself optimistic before the vote. "The outcome
after a slightly more than 40-minute vote on the House floor left
lawmakers almost speechless," says the New York Times. But not
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for long. Republican and Democratic leaders quickly took to the
microphones and angrily blamed one another for the bill's defeat.
In the end, 140 Democrats voted in favor of the bill, and 95
voted against it, while 65 Republicans approved the measure,
and 133 rejected it. Democrats quickly seized the numbers to say
the Republican leadership had failed to live up to its side of the
bargain as each party had pledged to deliver half its votes for the
bill. But Republican leaders said they lost several members at
the last minute and blamed what they described as a partisan
speech by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi before the vote, a charge
that Democrats (and the WSJ editorial board) ridiculed.
Everyone says that yesterday's events more than confirmed
President Bush's lame-duck status, as his influence among
members of his own party is practically nonexistent.
While some lawmakers pointed to ideological reasons for
rejecting the rescue package, everyone says the surge in angry
calls and e-mails from constituents opposed to the measure
played a pivotal role. As the LAT notes, there was no grass-roots
movement in favor of the bill, but there were plenty of groups
that angrily opposed the measure. "People's re-elections played
into this to a much greater degree than I would have imagined,"
said Rep. Deborah Pryce, a Republican from Ohio who is
retiring. Other lawmakers were clearly worried about how their
vote would play with their constituents a mere five weeks before
Election Day. Although members may cite other reasons, "it was
old-fashioned politics that killed the bill. … [T]oo many
lawmakers weren't willing to risk losing their jobs," declares
USAT.
The WSJ goes inside with a look at who cast the "no" votes and
says they "came from a strange-bedfellows coalition" that
spanned the ideological spectrum. Many of these nays came
from representatives of low-income districts, but the one thing
many had in common is a tough re-election fight. While the
majority of Democratic freshmen and all of the first-term
Republican lawmakers voted against the bill, the overwhelming
majority of those retiring from Capitol Hill voted in favor. But
the LAT also points out that many of the no votes came from safe
districts, partly because years of redistricting have created
"politically polarized" areas where "members from those
districts have less incentive to compromise with the other party."
So, what now? Congressional leaders and administration
officials vowed to work together, but no one is sure how to
proceed. "We've got much work to do, and this is much too
important to simply let fail," Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson
said. The earliest the House could consider another bill would be
Thursday, when lawmakers will reconvene after a two-day break
in observance of the Jewish New Year. The NYT says lawmakers
are considering having the Senate advance a bill, since its
passage there is virtually assured. Some are suggesting that
Democrats should propose changes to guarantee more support
from their side of the aisle at the expense of Republican votes,
but Pelosi and other leaders have been insisting that the bailout
must be approved with bipartisan support. For their part,
Republicans suggested they could get a few more votes if slight
changes are made to the bill.
The NYT notes in a separate Page One analysis that many think
the leaders of both parties made a critical mistake when they
agreed to bring the bill to the House floor without having a vote
count set in stone. That's "a bad move at any time, but especially
so in this case given the risk of the markets and the badly
weakened financial system reacting badly," says the NYT that
emphasizes how the bill's collapse represents a huge failure for
the political leadership in Washington.
As lawmakers continue to negotiate, the markets are likely to
continue suffering. A staggering $1.2 trillion disappeared from
the U.S. stock market yesterday in what the NYT describes as
"Wall Street's blackest day since the 1987 crash." The House's
vote reverberated around the world, and all of the major stock
markets in Asia were down this morning. So, even though those
who voted against the bailout may have wanted to send a
message to Wall Street fat cats, they also caused pain in "the notso-fat 401(k) retirement savings plans of millions of Americans,"
notes the LAT. And the truth is that if the markets experience any
more days like Monday, it's "going to hurt the average worker
with money in the market far more than it will hurt a bank
executive with millions of dollars to spare and a generous
pension to boot."
The bailout's failure in the House clearly presented a challenge
to both presidential candidates, who had offered tepid
endorsements, but John McCain is the one with the most to lose.
Last week he claimed that he was suspending his campaign to
ensure that the important piece of legislation would pass
Congress. The LAT notes that two hours before the House voted
against the plan, McCain was telling a crowd in Ohio that he was
instrumental in getting the piece of legislation through Congress,
a message that quickly changed once the votes came in. "The
first defense was to go on offense," notes the NYT. McCain
blamed Obama and the Democrats for injecting "unnecessary
partisanship into the process" before quickly adding that it "is
not the time to fix the blame; it's time to fix the problem." For
his part, Obama reworked a speech that praised the agreement
and instead said there's a "lot of blame to spread around." While
also calling for a bipartisan effort, Obama urged voters to
consider McCain's history of favoring deregulation when they
consider whom to pick in November.
Unless Congress passes something, the Federal Reserve and the
Treasury don't have much ammunition left in their arsenal to
deal with the deepening financial crisis. If lawmakers don't
approve anything, the WSJ and WP both highlight that the Fed
and Treasury would have little choice but to return to deciding
on a case-by-case basis which institutions can be allowed to fail
and which should be rescued. And no one thinks that continuing
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with this ad hoc process would do enough to increase confidence
in the markets and get credit moving again. The LAT says it
remains "an open question" whether the Fed and Treasury have
enough power and resources to prevent "the cascading failure of
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of financial institutions and
paralysis spreading across the whole economy."
And in case voters needed a reminder that even some of the
nation's largest banks aren't immune, most papers front the
government-orchestrated sale of most of Wachovia to Citigroup
for $1 a share, or about $2 billion. Citigroup will inherit
Wachovia's $312 billion loan portfolio, but the government
agreed to pay for any losses after the $42 billion mark. In return
for this guarantee, the government got $12 billion in preferred
stocks and warrants.
Wachovia's sale is the latest example of how Wall Street has
been reshaped in the past few weeks with what the NYT calls "a
wave of shotgun mergers." In a separate Page One piece, the
WSJ says that the "notoriously fragmented American banking
system is going through a decade's worth of consolidation in a
matter of weeks." Now only the strongest banks are likely to
survive, and the consequences of this consolidation will be felt
for years. Customers might see their fees go up because of a lack
of competition, but on the upside, the mere size of these banks
means they'll be less vulnerable to future economic shocks. Then
again, these banks could decide to take bigger risks because they
may be seen as too big to fail.
Faced with a huge economic crisis, the country's political leaders
"have failed utterly and catastrophically to project any sense of
authority, to give the world any reason to believe that this
country is being governed," writes the NYT's David Brooks. Just
as they did with their anti-immigration crusade, House
Republicans "have once again confused talk radio with reality"
and chose to listen to "the loudest and angriest voices in their
party, oblivious to the complicated anxieties that lurk in most
American minds." If the economy tanks, "they will go down in
history as the Smoot-Hawleys of the 21st century."
"The basic problem here is that too many people don't
understand the seriousness of the situation," writes the Post's
Steven Pearlstein. "But it is a measure of how little trust remains
in both Washington and Wall Street that voters are willing to
risk a serious hit to their wealth and income rather than follow
their lead."
today's papers
Compromising Positions
By Daniel Politi
After a dramatic weekend filled with negotiations and
discussions, lawmakers managed to achieve their goal of
reaching a compromise on the $700 billion bailout package
before the markets open today. The House is scheduled to vote
on the 110-page bill today with a Senate vote to follow as early
as Wednesday. "All sides had to surrender something" in order
to reach a deal, notes the New York Times. Still, their work is
hardly over as "weary negotiators said that the hardest part is
still before them" because congressional leaders now have to
step up their efforts to get support for the measure, notes USA
Today. Despite the compromises, the basic outline of the rescue
package remains the same, as it would "effectively nationalize
an array of mortgages and securities backed by them," the Wall
Street Journal summarizes.
Despite signs that some who opposed the bailout plan last week
are now ready to support this new version, the deal still "faces
strong opposition, and it remained unclear Sunday whether it
would have enough votes to pass," says the Los Angeles Times.
The WSJ is a bit more optimistic and says that approval is seen
as likely "despite the measure's unpopularity." Both presidential
candidates offered tepid endorsements. (The Washington Post's
Web site appeared to be down this morning.)
The NYT details how the weekend's marathon negotiating
sessions were filled with tense moments and included lots of
shouting back and forth between lawmakers and administration
officials. At one point early Sunday morning, it seemed as if
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was on the verge of collapse.
"He was tired, but fine," reports the NYT.
So, what's in this deal that would, as the WSJ puts it, "authorize
the biggest banking rescue in U.S. history"? Many of the details
remain murky, but most of the basic items shouldn't come as a
surprise to anyone who has been following the negotiations over
the past week. Lawmakers added stronger oversight to the plan,
which would impose some limits on executive compensation and
also require companies that benefit to provide an equity stake to
the government so taxpayers can get some money back if it
recovers. The bill also calls on the government to do more to
help homeowners avoid foreclosure.
Besides the equity stake, the compromise plan also includes a
measure that would require the president to assess whether the
bailout has cost taxpayers money after five years. If it has, then
the president must submit a plan to Congress that would force
financial firms to pay up to make up for the difference. "This is a
major, major change," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last
night.
The bill would distribute the money in installments, starting with
$250 billion plus $100 billion that could be released by the
president as he sees fit. The other $350 billion would be handed
out if the president approves and if there are no objections from
Congress. If the bill passes, the Treasury would have 45 days to
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outline how the government would decide what to buy and how
much to pay for it. It's clear, though, that the Treasury secretary
would have much flexibility and wouldn't be limited just to
buying up mortgages and mortgage-backed securities.
The measure that would have the government insure the toxic
debt rather than simply buy it—which was what House
Republicans proposed last week, when they threatened to back
away from the deal—"ultimately survived in limited form,"
notes the WSJ. The proposal is included in the bill, but it is listed
along with the power to purchase the securities so it's unclear
whether the Treasury would actually use it.
Much of the discussion this weekend centered on the limits to
executive compensation, which seemed to be a done deal last
week. Some key Democrats were pushing for a one-size-fits-all
approach, but Paulson strongly objected. They finally agreed on
a tiered measure that particularly focuses on preventing "golden
parachute" payouts to executives but is rather narrow overall and
sets complicated limits, depending on how each firm participates
in the deal. In the end, the limits on executive pay "appear
unlikely to be used very often," says the NYT.
If there's one clear winner from this compromise plan, it's clearly
Paulson, the LAT and NYT both point out in nearly identical
analyses. Despite all the wheeling and dealing over the past
week, Paulson got almost everything he wanted, and if the plan
is approved, he and his successor would have a great deal of
power over the U.S. economy. "Paulson's new powers will be
almost breathtaking in their scope," declares the LAT. "Rarely if
ever has one man had such broad authority to spend government
money as he sees fit," notes the NYT. To be sure, lawmakers did
increase oversight and added the equity stake provision that
Paulson didn't like. But ultimately, if there's one striking thing
about the compromise, it's the great latitude that Paulson would
have in deciding how to implement its details.
"The $700 billion question: Will it work?" asks USAT before
outlining the pros and cons. That's the key question as
lawmakers move to approve a deal that is likely to change the
face of the American economy for decades to come. Even if the
plan works beautifully and manages to shore up the credit
markets, "it is unlikely to prevent the economy from sliding into
recession," notes the WSJ. (Of course, many think the U.S.
economy is already in a recession.) "There will be some benefits
of this plan, but we think the economy's already gone too far to
prevent enough damage," an economist tells the WSJ. The NYT
suggests that it's best to see the bailout as a very significant step
that will leave lots of unfinished business to the next
administration. "Managing this issue is going to dominate the
agenda of the next president for two years," one expert said.
In an analysis piece inside, the NYT says that the fight over the
bailout plan has probably provided voters the best view of how
each of the presidential candidates would approach problems if
elected. John McCain showed once again that he believes
"individual leaders can play a catalytic role and should use the
bully pulpit to push politicians." For his part, Barack Obama
demonstrated how he believes that "several minds are better than
one" and showed that "he is wary of too much showmanship."
While some say that Obama may have acted too calm and was
slow to react, McCain is the one who comes out of this with
more mixed reviews from members of his own party. Some
insist McCain showed leadership, but others say he created a lot
of chaos and drama without achieving any tangible benefits for
his campaign.
In a Page One piece, the LAT says that McCain's actions not only
upset supporters, but also "gave new ammunition" to those who
have been raising questions about his judgment. "It was all very
dramatic, but maybe the American public is tired of drama after
the last eight years," said John Weaver, McCain's former
campaign manager. By pushing so hard for a deal, McCain also
managed to alienate some of the more conservative members of
his party, who warmed up to him only after he selected Gov.
Sarah Palin as his running mate.
Meanwhile, there are no indications that McCain's attempts to
suspend his campaign and delay Friday's debate helped him with
voters. USAT and the LAT both publish polls that suggest voters
were more impressed by Obama than McCain during the faceoff in Mississippi. USAT reports that debate viewers gave
Obama a 17-percentage-point lead as the candidate with the best
ideas to solve the country's problems. They also said Obama did
better in the debate, 46 percent to 34 percent. The LAT points out
that while more people still see McCain as more knowledgeable,
Obama was seen as more "presidential" by 46 percent of debate
watchers, compared with 33 percent who picked McCain.
Obama was also seen as more trustworthy and had a clear
advantage as the candidate who "cares about people like you."
In the LAT's op-ed page, Douglas Schoen says that perhaps it's
time we start paying a bit of attention to candidates who aren't
named McCain or Obama. Polls already show a bit of support
for third-party candidates in key states. And in a close election, a
bit of support is all they need to change the outcome. As the
election draws near, "it's not the biggest poll percentages that
demand scrutiny, but the smallest ones," writes Schoen.
"Because it could turn out that the crucial role in the 2008
election will be played by a candidate no one is talking about."
today's papers
Critical Mass
By David Sessions
Sunday, September 28, 2008, at 4:40 AM ET
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The Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times
each lead Congress' late-night progress toward agreement on an
economic bailout plan on Saturday. Yesterday's talks were
propelled by the need to act swiftly, and focused on adding strict
oversight to the $700 billion as well as exploring new ways to
pay for the measure that would avoid sticking taxpayers with the
bill.
"We're moving, we're moving," Sen. Christopher Dodd, DConn., told the WP after last night's session, from which
Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson emerged around 12:30
a.m. (Both he and Sen. Nancy Pelosi called the evening's work
"great progress.") Congress did reach a tentative agreement, the
NYT reports, with congressional staff working around the clock
to finalize language that will hopefully be ready for a Monday
vote. The new plan includes some limits on executive pay and
provides for strict oversight of the rescue monies. Additionally,
the LAT reports, the updated accord is "expected to call for the
money to be made available in installments instead of one
enormous lump sum." Democrats and Republicans both seem to
agree that the bailout should not take place "on the backs of
taxpayers," the WP reports, and even the conservatives most
strongly against it expect the "critical mass" forming behind the
current agreement to push it through Congress.
The NYT begins what is certain to be a long string of
investigation of exactly how the current crisis developed. An
off-lead story goes "behind" the AIG crisis, its headline
reporting the insurer's "blind eye to a web of risk." The LAT's
front page wonders if taxpayers might actually turn a profit on
the bailout, citing the government's 1994 rescue of the Mexican
peso—an investment that yielded a $500 million profit. The
WP's front page focuses on matters of the moment, like whether
the collective turn of the nation's heads toward the economy will
hurt John McCain. Barack Obama has opened up a narrow lead
in national polls as well as significant battleground states,
putting McCain on the defensive. "For McCain, the danger is
that previously undecided voters will become comfortable that
Obama is ready to be president. The longer Obama can hold
even a small lead, the more difficult it will be for McCain to
reverse it."
An expansive, above-the-fold A1 story in the NYT highlights
John McCain's "many ties" to the gambling industry, illustrating
with an accompanying graphic that contributions from gambling
interests to McCain's campaign are double those made to Barack
Obama. McCain is a "lifelong gambler" and "one of the
founding fathers of Indian gaming," according to a professor and
"leading Indian gambling expert." More than 40 of McCain's
advisers and fundraisers have worked for "an array of gambling
interests" ranging from Las Vegas casinos to online poker
purveyors. The only comment the Times received from the
McCain campaign was a hostile suggestion that the story would
"insinuate impropriety on the part of Senator McCain where
none exists" and "gamble away" its remaining credibility.
All three front pages memorialize Paul Newman, the iconic star
of Cool Hand Luke who was known for his piecing blue eyes.
Newman died of cancer in his home on Saturday at age 83. "If
Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American
male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable
renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and
blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to
resist," the NYT eulogizes. Newman acted in more than 65
movies in his 50-year career. (Slate's Dahlia Lithwick
reminisced about Newman here.)
The WP Style section profiles Robin Thicke, a "31-year-old
'white guy who looks like a white guy' (right down to the blue
eyes) but who sings black music to majority-black audiences."
Thick's soulful R&B tracks have gained unprecedented
popularity in the African-American community, with his single
"Lost Without U" becoming the most successful R&B song on
the Billboard charts since 1965—and the first white performer to
top the chart since 1992. Though he has transcended race in
virtually ever quantifiable way, Thicke says it "will always be a
part of the conversation," and enjoys talking about his unusual
spot at the top of the black music industry.
The NYT Metro section stalks dethroned New York Gov. Eliot
Spitzer, who is now a "face in the crowd" around the city. Based
on e-mail messages obtained in a Freedom of Information Act
request and brief on-the-street encounters with Spitzer, the story
pieces together the former governor's current routine and his
plans for the future. He currently works for his father's realestate firm and has possible plans to rehabilitate his image
through charity or pro bono legal work. Spitzer is viciously
defensive of his policy reputation, saying he was "right" about
AIG when he attempted to oust its embattled chairman in 2005.
WP ombudsman Deborah Howell responds to e-mails from 750
angry readers—"more than I heard from about the financial
crisis"—protesting a Pat Oliphant cartoon that ran on the Post's
Web site. The illustration depicted Sarah Palin speaking in
tongues to God, who responded that he couldn't understand her
"damn right wing gibberish." Howell's poll of Post editors finds
that the paper would not have run the cartoon in print.
today's papers
Bombs Over a Bailout
By Lydia DePillis
In a doozy of a news day, Sen. John McCain decided to debate
after earlier saying he'd stay in Washington to fix the economy, a
bailout agreement inched closer to completion, and lawmakers
still managed to debate other spending packages as part of their
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day-to-day business of governing. The papers all lead with the
freewheeling, 90-minute showdown, which was supposed to
center around foreign policy but which moderator Jim Lehrer
allowed to veer extensively into the rapidly evolving financial
crisis. In the latter half of the debate, the candidates launched
into attacks on each others' foreign-policy positions, with
McCain hammering away at Sen. Barack Obama's inexperience
and seeking to distinguish his own record from that of President
Bush. The Illinois senator repeatedly answered McCain's claims
with interjections of "that's not true," attempting to articulate
relatively nuanced positions in prime-time TV terms.
Both candidates expressed optimism that Congress would soon
settle on a plan to resolve the carnage on Wall Street but clashed
over their domestic economic agendas. McCain railed against
"out of control" spending in Washington—floating a spending
freeze on everything but defense, veterans, and entitlements—
while Obama dwelled on his middle-class tax cuts and pinned
the current predicament on a trend toward market deregulation,
on which Bush and McCain have tended to agree. The foreignpolicy discussion lingered on where should be considered the
central front in the effort to combat terrorism, with McCain
insisting that Iraq still deserved substantial troop commitments
while Obama advocated for a shift in focus to Afghanistan.
The Los Angeles Times finds that neither candidate committed
the kind of major gaffe that could have dominated the news
cycle for days, nor did they land the kind of knockout blow that
would fundamentally alter the terms of the campaign. But most
of the papers did highlight the candidates' differences in style.
The Wall Street Journal says that McCain adopted a "folksy"
delivery—chuckling and smiling much more than his gravefaced opponent—while Obama appeared sharper and quicker on
the attack than he had previously. The Washington Post judges
that McCain's voice "dripped with derision" as he belittled
Obama's approach to meeting with leaders of rogue states, which
Obama countered with a chorus of "You were wrong. … You
were wrong" about McCain's support for the entry into war with
Iraq. The New York Times calls McCain "feisty and aggressive,"
but with an attachment to terms that those without several
decades in the Senate might not understand, betraying a
generational gap that defines how the two are understood by a
language- and image-sensitive public.
Meanwhile, congressional lawmakers continue to wrangle over
the details of a bailout that the brass tacks have begun to
puncture. Although Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's original
plan remains largely intact, according to the WSJ, the Post
reports that House Democrats led by Rep. Barney Frank, DMass., have made some tweaks, including granting taxpayers
some equity in banks that participate in the bailout, a plan to
release the money in stages rather than all at once, and limits on
executive compensation. House Republicans, tired of being
pushed around by the majority, looked on Thursday to be closing
ranks around a legislative alternative built on federal insurance
for mortgage assets combined with tax cuts on investment gains.
But the WP fronts a colorful narrative of how McCain's return to
Washington threw a wrench into the negotiations: According to
the reporters, McCain derailed their emerging agreement by
announcing that he wouldn't simply fall into lockstep with the
party leadership. "Just like Iraq, I'm not afraid to go it alone if I
need to," McCain threatened.
Meanwhile, the NYT reports above the fold that the muchmaligned chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission
has admitted defeat, saying that his agency's voluntary oversight
program for the banking industry was "fundamentally flawed
from the beginning." The flagellation came as the SEC inspector
general released a report harshly criticizing the agency's
monitoring of Bear Stearns before it went under in March.
Wachovia became the latest bank to start shopping around for
buyers as well as its stocks took a nosedive Friday with investors
spooking over its large mortgage portfolio. The WSJ says all
potential buyers are staying tight-lipped, but the NYT is reporting
that the bank has entered preliminary talks with Citigroup,
figuring that even a government bailout won't save it from the
trash heap.
In parallel developments on the Hill, House Democrats passed a
$61 billion social services spending bill that won't make it into
law, since Senate Republicans just rejected a companion
measure and President Bush has promised to veto it anyway (OK
by Democrats, who freely admit the measure was designed to
put Republicans on record as opposing social relief programs).
Senate Republicans are pushing for a vote on a $631 billion
measure for the Pentagon, veterans, homeland security
measures, and keeping agencies running at their current levels,
which Bush has indicated he will sign on into law. "This is the
most expensive week in the history of the Republic," commented
Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.
The papers also found room for several international stories of
considerable import. For one thing, modern-day Somali pirates
are wreaking havoc with shipping lanes through the Gulf of
Aden, boarding ships with large weapons and seizing their
cargo. The pirate spokesman, reports the NYT, could not be
reached for comment.
Taking action on the issue being debated in Mississippi, NATO
has adopted a strategy—or at least the name of a strategy—from
Iraq in Afghanistan, undertaking a "surge" of development
projects to turn the rising tide of Taliban activity, the Post
reports inside.
The LAT brings news that North Korea is apparently in the midst
of a construction boom that has analysts baffled: Where is
Pyongyang getting all that cash?
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Russia has struck an oil deal with Venezuela, including forging a
new consortium and a $1 billion military loan for the South
American country. The NYT says the move grows out of events
in Georgia that have "reordered priorities" in Moscow.
The NYT also has a long exegesis of China's milk problems,
looking at how ridden with holes the country's dairy regulatory
system really is. The distraction of the Olympics deepened the
contamination that has sickened 53,000 children, as did
inspectors who gave milk plants clean bills of health, if they
were even inspected at all. But, the LAT notes, some have found
a way around it: renting cows.
today's pictures
Today's Pictures
Wine and vine.
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Gwen Ifill Lost This Debate
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our Twitter project here.
So Gov. Sarah Palin can speak spontaneously in complete and
coherent sentences.
Let's judge her, then, as we would a presumptively seasoned and
competent political leader. By that standard, on issues of foreign
policy, she was outgunned by Sen. Joe Biden at every turn.
And more than Sen. Barack Obama, who could have answered
some of Sen. John McCain's charges more forcefully in last
week's debate, Biden made no effort to muffle his fire. When
Palin called Obama's plan for a phased withdrawal from Iraq "a
white flag of surrender," Biden shot back that the plan was
identical to the policy of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
When Palin repeated her charge that Obama was "beyond naive"
in calling for negotiating with adversaries "without
preconditions," Biden explained what the phrase meant, then
noted that it was supported not just by the five former secretaries
of state who recently co-authored an endorsement of the idea but
by our allies, with whom Palin had just said we needed to work
together.
When Palin recited McCain's line about applying the principles
of the Iraqi surge to Afghanistan, Biden (correctly) noted that the
U.S. commanding general in Afghanistan has said the surge
wouldn't work there. (By the way, it does not bother me at all
that Palin referred to Gen. Dave McKiernan as "Gen.
McClellan." We all make mistakes like that now and then.)
Finally, when Biden said the Bush administration's foreign
policy has been an "abject failure," and proceeded to list the
many ways in which that was so, Palin's only reply was to smile
and say, "Enough playing the blame game." If Obama and Biden
talk so much about change, she added (as if this were really a
clever point), why do they spend so much time looking
backward?
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.
.
To which Biden replied, with uncharacteristic pith, "Past is
prologue." And so it is. At another point, he noted, "Facts
matter." And so they do.
More to the point, he noted that McCain has never explained
how his policies would differ from Bush's on Iran, Lebanon,
Pakistan, or Iraq. In other words, even if Palin is right that 2009
is Year Zero, what would she and her No. 1 do differently? She
didn't answer the question, any more than McCain ever has,
perhaps because there is no answer.
war stories
She Still Knows Nothing
Palin proved that she can speak in complete sentences, but not that she
understands anything about foreign policy.
By Fred Kaplan
When Biden was asked what line he would draw in deciding
whether to intervene in other countries militarily, he cited two
criteria: whether we had the capacity to make a difference and
whether the countries in question were committing genocide or
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harboring terrorists—in which case, he said, they would have
forfeited the rights of sovereignty.
Palin replied merely by hailing John McCain as a man "who
knows how to win a war, who's been there." (McCain has said
this about himself as well several times, though, with all due
respect for his military record, where's the proof of this claim?
What wars has he won, and what did he do there?)
One might disagree with Biden's criteria of intervention as
excessively expansive, but at least it's an arguable position.
Palin's reply was a cliché. That sums up her performance as a
whole.
war stories
Obama Wins on Foreign Policy
form a unified government. It was in this sense that Obama
meant that the surge was tactics while the political goal was
strategy. McCain overshot when he kept saying that the surge
"has succeeded," that the troops will come home with
"victory"—a word that McCain's demigod, Gen. David Petraeus,
has many times explicitly declined to invoke, for good reason.
Obama also did well in countering McCain's proposal for a
League of Democracy—a group of democratic nations that
would confront Iran when the U.N. Security Council can't
because of Russia's and China's veto power. The problem with
this idea, as Obama noted, is that sanctions wouldn't be very
effective without the cooperation of Russia or China. The issue
at stake—keeping Iran from building a nuclear bomb—has
nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with
common security interests. Russia can't be coddled on the
matter, but cutting them off through a new Cold War is a
counterproductive idea. Besides, the other democracies—mainly
Germany, France, and England—don't like the idea, so it's a
nonstarter. It's a fantasy on every level.
He stood up to McCain, and he had a more realistic vision of the world.
By Fred Kaplan
Sen. John McCain basically made four points in the foreignpolicy sections of the first presidential debate: 1) He was for the
surge (which "has succeeded") while Sen. Barack Obama
opposed it; 2) he has experience, while Obama does not; 3) he
wants to form a League of Democracy to impose sanctions on
Iran; 4) Georgia and Ukraine should be admitted to NATO.
Obama dealt with those points—in some cases not as strongly as
he might have, but probably well enough—and made several of
his own: the need to improve our standing in the world, to wipe
out al-Qaida in Afghanistan, to focus on creative diplomacy and
not just bluster to solve problems, and to devise a sound energy
policy in order, not least, to blunt Russia's resurgence.
McCain did little to rebut those propositions except to say that
he knows how to do these things and that Obama's thinking is
naive and dangerous.
Scored on debaters' points, the match was close. Judged on the
substantive issues, especially on which candidate has the more
realistic view of the world, Obama won hands down.
It was odd that McCain put so much emphasis on Iraq. Yes, he
supported the surge, which has played a major—but far from the
only—role in reducing the violence in Iraq. But Obama could
boast that he was against going into Iraq in the first place—
which speaks more to the next president's judgment about
getting lassoed into future conflicts. And Obama was correct that
the surge was always, even on its own terms, a means to an
end—a way to reduce the violence so that the Iraqi leaders could
The two candidates weren't far apart on the question of letting
Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, but their differences, while
subtle, were telling. McCain wants to let both countries into
NATO right away (which would mean war with Russia, if the
treaty were taken seriously). Obama says they should be allowed
to start the application process and should be admitted "if they
meet requirements." The catch is that Georgia can't meet the
requirements, one of which is that a member must have borders
that are agreed upon. Georgia's borders have long been in
dispute. This isn't just a loophole; an alliance can't agree to
defend a member's borders if the borders are in contention from
the outset. Again, it's a nonissue: Georgia is not going to be let
into NATO under the current circumstances, no matter what
McCain says.
McCain's fiercest rhetorical points were the ones that I thought
Obama didn't answer firmly enough. The first was that if we
were to impose a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq, as
Sen. Obama has proposed, the war would be lost. Obama could
have noted two things. First, he is not talking about a total
withdrawal. Second, and more to the point, the person who is
insisting on a withdrawal timetable as a condition of any U.S.
troop presence beyond the end of this year isn't Obama—it's
Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq. Even the Bush
administration has conceded this point. Does McCain want to
keep troops in Iraq over the objection of the Iraqi government?
McCain's second point was that he has experience. Several times
(at least four), he noted that he has been "involved" in every
national-security decision of the past twentysome years. He also
took every opportunity to say, "I've been to Afghanistan, I know
the security needs. … I know how to heal the wounds of war,"
etc., etc. At one point, he said, "There are some advantages in
102/105
experience and judgment," then added, "I don't believe Senator
Obama has that knowledge and experience."
Obama didn't answer these charges directly—but maybe he
didn't have to. I have never been any good at gauging how "the
American people" view these sorts of things, but was McCain
protesting too much? My guess (and it's just a guess) is that by
talking sensibly and coherently about issues of war and peace,
arguing with McCain at his own level or higher—simply by
holding his own—Obama may have effectively rebutted the
charge and made McCain's condescension seem prickly. One
could ask: If McCain has had all this experience, how did he get
snookered on invading Iraq in the first place? If Obama's so
naive (the tag that McCain threw at him several times), how did
he see through it?
And does McCain really want to put such a high premium on the
experience card right now? Next week, after all, Sarah Palin
debates Joe Biden.
what's up, doc?
Burnout U
Depression and suicidal thoughts in medical students.
By Sydney Spiesel
Problem: Over the years, many medical students have talked to
me about their stress. But so have undergraduate students,
interns, residents, fellows, and practicing physicians—leading
me to wonder if medical students' stress was actually
extraordinary. I remember my medical school days as
moderately stressful, but, as my wife points out, I was somewhat
insulated during medical school because I already had a family,
had left behind another career, and was older. Her perspective is
wise, as I have learned from a recent paper in the Annals of
Internal Medicine that looked at stress and its consequences in
U.S. medical students.
Findings: The main findings are worrisome, indeed. The study
included more than 2,000 students at seven medical schools and
looked for evidence of burnout and suicidal thinking. About half
the medical students reported the feelings that define burnout
(emotional exhaustion, a feeling of a loss of personal identity, a
sense of poor personal accomplishment). Many showed signs of
depression and a decreased mental quality of life compared with
peers not in medical school. The most disturbing finding was
that each year about 10 percent of the observed students had
active suicidal thoughts—a symptom we know carries a
substantial risk for a future suicide attempt. Even more—about
one student out of four—had thoughts about suicide sometime
during medical school. The good news is that sometimes things
do get better: Checking in a year later, the researchers found that
about one-quarter of the students who experienced earlier
burnout had recovered and showed a decrease in suicidal
thoughts.
Explanation: Why should medical students be so stressed that
fully half feel burned out and so many have contemplated
suicide? Sometimes it is the result of the process of medical
education itself. Medical students are expected to master an
enormous volume of knowledge—more than can possibly be
achieved. Students experience great anxiety in anticipating the
moment when they just can't recall something of enormous
importance and, as a result, commit some awful error,
potentially harming a patient. Faculty and the residents who do a
substantial amount of clinical teaching press students hard,
leaving them with feelings of incompetence and uselessness.
When students move from the classroom to clinical rotations,
they shift through different medical specialties. Just when they
have a sense of having acquired a basic knowledge base of
pediatrics or psychiatry or orthopedics, they're transferred to a
new rotation, again starting at ground zero. As this is happening,
opportunities for recreational breaks are limited while long hours
can lead to a crushing fatigue.
There are other problems, too. Medical students are frequently
exposed to human suffering and death—experiences most have
never encountered before. They can feel abused, taken advantage
of by institutions or superiors by overwork or inappropriate
assignments ("run down to the cafeteria and pick up our lunch").
Most are experiencing the stresses of dating (and, sadly, no—
real life isn't like the medical TV shows), and many are
wondering if medicine was the right choice after all. There's one
more source of anxiety and depression: Almost no one leaves
medical school without accumulating a huge debt—now
$140,000 on average—which has to be repaid somehow.
Possible solutions: As is usually the case, it is easier to identify
and define a problem than to come up with a fix. We need to be
alert to the signs of burnout, depression, and suicidal thinking in
medical students and to make available the mental-health
services needed to help with these problems. Unfortunately,
medical students with clinical depression are no better (indeed,
perhaps worse) than the general population in seeking mentalhealth services. Medical schools need to create an atmosphere in
which it is understood that there is no shame in seeking help. We
need to change faculty teaching styles toward the positive and
supportive. And senior physicians need to teach by example how
to confront issues of life and death—and what to do and say
when, really, there is nothing to do and say.
103/105
xx factor xxtra
The Un-Hillary
Why watching Sarah Palin is agony for women.
By Emily Bazelon
When Harriet Miers blew her murder boards—days spent
grilling in preparation for her Senate confirmation hearings—she
yanked her own nomination to the Supreme Court. Her
"uncertain, underwhelming responses" made her handlers panic,
and so Miers and the Bush administration called off the show.
Sarah Palin's murder boards have taken place in public. We've
all watched her stumped and stumbling in her interviews with
Katie Couric. Tuesday's tidbit, not yet on the air but courtesy of
Howie Kurtz, is that when asked about the Supreme Court, Palin
mentioned Roe v. Wade and then couldn't name another case.
This time, she didn't repeat stock phrases. She just went silent.
Kathleen Parker at the National Review Online and Fareed
Zakaria in Newsweek have called for her to follow Miers and
pull out. But Palin isn't expendable—the Republican base that
mistrusted Miers loves her. So instead of bowing out, she heads
into her debate with Joe Biden with expectations so low either
she or her opponent seems bound to trip over them.
For women who are watching this all unfold, this means a lot of
analysis, much of it angst-ridden. Conservatives express
straightforward disappointment. "I watch her interviews with the
held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute
button in case it gets too painful," Parker writes glumly.
"Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted."
Many more-liberal women, meanwhile, make the point that
Palin's poverty of knowledge is a big reason to doubt John
McCain's judgment, as Ruth Marcus drives home in her column
in the Washington Post this week. The problem is that Palin is a
vice-presidential candidate who is not ready to be president, not
that she's a woman who isn't ready. Given that, let her fail now,
before she does real damage in office.
But Palin's gender is at the center of another set of reactions I've
been hearing and reading among women who don't support her
ticket, filled with ambivalence over how bad she is. Laugh at the
Tina Fey parodies that make Palin ridiculous just by quoting her
verbatim. And then cry. When Palin tanks, it's good for the
country if you want Obama and Biden to win, but it's bad for the
future of women in national politics. I'm in this boat, too. Should
we feel sorry for Sarah Palin? No. But if she fails miserably, we
might be excused for feeling a bit sorry for ourselves.
Palin is the most prominent woman on the political stage at the
moment. By taking unprepared hesitancy and lack of preparation
to a sentence-stopping level, she's yanking us back to the old
assumption that women can't hack it at these heights. We know
that's not true—we've just watched Hillary Clinton power
through a campaign with a masterful grasp of policy and detail.
Clinton lost in part because she was the girl grind. Complex
sentences, the names of Supreme Court cases, and bizarre
warnings about foreign heads of state invading our airspace
weren't her problem. The fear now is that Palin is the antiHillary and that her lack of competence threatens to undo what
the Democratic primary did for women. Palin won't bust through
the ceiling that has Hillary's 18 million cracks in it. She'll give
men an excuse to replace it with a new one.
Worrying about this can lead you to an odd, even selfcontradictory amalgam of anger and pity. Judith Warner
embodied this in the New York Times when she described
watching Palin smile while sitting down with Henry Kissinger
and feeling a "wave of self-recognition and sympathy" and an
"upsurge of concern and kinship." In the next breath, in proper
feminist fashion she points out that glamorizing incompetence
"means that any woman who exudes competence will
necessarily be excluded from the circle of sisterhood." But then
Warner loops back to her opening sympathy and ends by casting
Palin's nomination as not only "an insult to the women (and
men) of America" but "an act of cruelty toward her as well." The
suggestion is that John McCain inflicted the cruelty when he
picked her.
As Rebecca Traister points out in Salon, there's an obvious
feminist comeback here. Shut down the "Palin pity party,"
Traister urges. "Shaking our heads and wringing our hands in
sympathy with Sarah Palin is a disservice to every woman who
has ever been unfairly dismissed based on her gender, because
this is an utterly fair dismissal, based on an utter lack of ability
and readiness." Good point. And an especially pertinent one on
the eve of the vice-presidential debate. Traister's argument
refutes the McCain campaign's effort to spin the justified attacks
on Palin as sexism. The campaign can't dismiss Palin's critics as
sexist for jumping on her thin, stock-phrase-laden answers to
reasonable questions. It would be sexist—and destructive for the
country—to demand less. But the answer isn't necessarily to
throw the sexism line back in the campaign's face, as Campbell
Brown did on CNN last week. Brown scolded the campaign for
treating Palin as if she's too delicate to handle the press. But
where is Palin in this equation? Doesn't she have to account for
the way she's been shielded from questions that shouldn't be hard
for her to answer?
Traister is right that this is on Palin at least as much as it's on
John McCain. Palin put herself in line for the presidency; she
could have turned down the invitation to join the ticket. She
gains from this campaign no matter what—before it, she had no
national profile, now she has an outsized one, and all the
criticism will just make her true fans love her more. (They're
ready to eat Kathleen Parker alive.) She has cannily based her
appeal on scorning the media, so it hardly makes sense to feel
104/105
pity for her because the media are actually scornful, given all the
fodder she's provided.
For all of these reasons, I should take Traister's advice and stop
agonizing. I'm not ambivalent about Palin's positions on taxes,
stem-cell research, or offshore drilling. Why should I be
ambivalent about how she performs in the debate? What if Palin
does unexpectedly well and gives McCain another boost in the
polls? Better she should go down hard for knowing nothing
about the Supreme Court than that the court should move ever
rightward because the Republicans get to pick the next justices.
And yet. When I watch Palin, I can't help but cringe along with
Parker. Call it women's solidarity, however misplaced. I keep
coming back to this prim phrase: Please, don't make a spectacle
of yourself. String some coherent sentences together. Your
efforts to wrap yourself in Hillary's mantle make no sense in
terms of what you'd actually do in office. But if you could pull
off just a bit of her debating prowess—just a bit—I'll step a little
lighter when I wake up Friday morning.
105/105
105/105

Slate.com

Transcription

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