Obama: losing the message war vs. the idea war?

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s the problem with the stimulus? According to Jeanne Cummings of Politico, it’s all about spin, and Obama doesn’t have the resources he used to command to get his message across.

Say what? As President of the United States, he’s hampered? Whatever happened to TR’s bully pulpit?

Note that whenever President Bush (remember him?) had trouble selling one of his presidential programs, it was his own fault. Never mind that most of the MSM was against him from the start, as opposed to the pro-Obama press.

Now granted, Bush really was a somewhat poor communicator—although never as poor as the press and/or his opponents made out. But those of us who never drank deeply from the Obamalove well have noticed that although Obama has a nicer flow of rhetoric, the actual content has never been all that great or all that informative.

Cummings contrasts the resources Obama used to command as campaigner with those he now has in the White House. Poor guy, they just can’t compare:

Obama’s campaign was lauded for its visionary use of modern tools for old-fashioned politics. Through the Internet, it recruited supporters, collected dollars, rallied supporters and organized get-out-the vote operations. But when these modern heroes arrived at the White House, it was like the lights all went out.

Their contact with their millions-fold supporters was cut off, literally, as e-mail systems broke down and ”˜The List’ of political supporters was blocked at the iron gate…

Even with closet-sized spaces, the White House can only accommodate about only about 200 or so people for jobs ranging from national security to health care reform to Internet guru.

The Obama team “built this incredible campaign and now they have these ridiculously primitive tools. The communication tools they mastered don’t exist in the White House. It’s like they are in a cave,” said Trippi…

According to Evan Tracey, president of Campaign Media Analysis Group, about $65,000 has been spent on pro-stimulus ads in a handful of states.

In the last week of the presidential campaign, Obama was spending an average of $250,000 a day on commercials in the Philadelphia market, alone.

The solution is crystal clear: Obama needs a bailout. The government should vote to give this man more money! And soon—or we’ll have a catastrophe.

Tears, idle tears: we know not what they mean

The New Neo Posted on by

We sometimes speak of having a “good cry,” reflecting the common assumption that crying when upset can lead to a release of tension and make us feel better.

This NY Times article reports on research that indicates that this is more true in some situations than others:

The study found crying with just one other person present was significantly more likely to produce a cathartic effect than doing so in front of a larger group.

In addition, depressed people don’t seem to benefit as much as others from crying.

To me, both findings are in the nature of, “Well, duh.” And the study didn’t appear to deal with what is perhaps the most common setting of all for crying: alone.

Crying is nearly universal, but not all that well understood. So let’s just let the poets (Tennyson’s wonderful and mysterious “Tears, Idle Tears”) have the last word [emphasis mine]:

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

Naysaying the stimulus bill is stimulating for Republicans

The New Neo Posted on by

As the stimulus bill becomes more and more unpopular with the American public, the Republican Party seems for the moment to be the unexpected political beneficiary, because of their opposition to it.

I haven’t read the bill myself, since it’s over seven hundred pages long. But those who have (and my hat is off to them) describe it as composed of programs that actually might have the desired effect of stimulating the economy, plus another bunch of proposals that will not.

Here’s a summary from Joshua Zumbrun of Forbes:

We estimate some $350 billion is likely to flow into the economy quickly, $255 billion won’t do much, at least not in a useful time frame, and the impact of $144 billion in promised payroll tax cuts are a toss up. The remainder, about $135 billion, is comprised of dozens of smaller programs that would have little individual effect.

Some of the non-stimulus proposals involve energy and the environment, education, and infrastructure spending.

So what are the Republicans proposing? According to Byron York, writing in The Corner:

Several Republicans now want to throw the whole bill out and replace it with a package that is nearly all tax cuts ”” “twice the jobs at half the price.”

The stimulus package highlights not only the usual political jockeying for position and power in Congress, but the very real economic disagreements between the two parties. Republicans have gotten away from their traditional fiscal conservatism in recent years, but now is the moment they just might return to it—especially since a return to principle may suit their political fortunes, as well.

Obama: reality may not bite yet, but it seems to be nibbling

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama’s hit a bit of a rough patch lately.

He’s finding that changing Washington isn’t as easy as it sounded on the campaign trial. It’s been harder to get a pass from the press and public for his nominees than it was to get one for himself way back when he was running for president instead of actually having to be president.

It will be interesting to see how this novel notion of accountability affects Obama. Something seems to be making him rather tired, however. Yesterday he said as much on a visit to a local school:

“We were just tired of being in the White House,” the president candidly told the gleeful second-graders at Capital City Public Charter School.

“We got out! They let us out!” Mrs. Obama said as the kids and their teachers laughed.

Yes, yes, of course—they were joking. But it’s an odd jest to make, isn’t it? I think it may represent more than a little bit of the truth.

I worried about Obama’s stamina way back in May of 2007, when he offered being tired as an excuse for an early verbal flub. To the best of my knowledge, this vulnerability to exhaustion (and the need to offer it as an excuse) was the very first thing I noticed and wrote about regarding Obama:

Just as the Presidency is not for the shy or those tortured by ambivalence, just as it requires a certain amount of narcissism (perhaps more than is healthy in ordinary life), it also requires true grit and enormous””almost superhuman””endurance. And if the President doesn’t feel up to it all the time, he/she is supposed to shut up about it and not let others see.

The photo accompanying yesterday’s school visit showed Obama and wife reading to the children in the usual photo-op:

obamareads1.jpg

Remind you of anything? It did me. When I saw the picture, I couldn’t help but think of a day in 2001 only a few months after President Bush had become President.

As nearly everyone knows, he was reading to schoolchildren when notice of the terrorist attacks first came to him. He was widely criticized for waiting several minutes for further information from aides before reacting, and for certain actions in the first few hours afterwards that seemed in retrospect to be evidence of confusion and indecision on his part.

I always cut him a lot of slack, even back then when I was an opponent of his. I think he did a remarkable job of regrouping fairly quickly from news that must have been not only shocking, but truly unprecedented.

I do not wish anything even remotely resembling 9/11 on either the nation or on President Obama. But when I saw yesterday’s photo, I could not help thinking that the confusion of his first couple of weeks is hardly an indication that he would face a similar crisis with complete clarity, making split-second decisions that would be any better than Bush’s. Perhaps they would even be quite a bit worse.

[NOTE: Let’s hope Cheney is wrong about this prognostication.]

It’s been quite an odyssey for the Odyssey

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I was browsing in a bookstore. I had gone to the mall for something else (pillowcases, to be exact) and had some extra time to spend wandering, and so I ambled into this particular mall’s only bookstore: B. Dalton, one of the smaller chains.

B. Dalton deals mostly with the sort of “literature” the mall traffic will bear. There was a rather large bunch of teen literature, for instance, and a pretty big cookbook/diet book/weight loss/work on your body/work on your mind section. The store’s fiction area featured mostly very recent works, and was especially heavy with Oprah-esque selections. My guess is that most of the books sold in the store will not be available even five years from now, except as used books

I had a notion to buy a collection of John Updike’s short stories. No dice; B. Dalton only had his latest novel, Terrorists, and nothing else by that author. But since “Updike” is near the end of the alphabet, I found myself standing next to the meager poetry section. I noticed that at least one volume of the collected works of Robert Frost was stocked, as well on several of those “best-loved poems” collections that actually have some decent picks.

And then, a shelf later, there were a few classics. Two shiny fat paperbacks, The Iliad and The Odyssey, stood next to each other.

I wondered how many people who enter B. Dalton actually buy and read these things today. No doubt there are some students who’ve had the works assigned to them. But wouldn’t they be more likely to use Amazon, unlike the strollers and impulse-purchase buyers of B. Dalton’s mall venues?

And yet here the two books sat, expectant and waiting. As they’ve sat for millenia, ever since their composition and/or compilation by an author or authors who may or may not have been a single individual named Homer, around the 9th or 8th century BC.

That’s a long time to be a best seller, although the royalties aren’t coming Homer’s way anymore (not that they ever did). These two books together are considered the very first works of Western literature.

Hero Odysseus’ wanderings only lasted ten years. But they are as nothing compared to the journey these books have taken from nearly three thousand years ago in an ancient Greece that could not quite have imagined our ubiquitous malls and the B. Daltons that fill them, or the myths and mores of the people we’ve become. And yet, somehow, these books still have a place on these shelves, incongruous though they may seem.

So tell me, oh muse:

Muse, speak to me now of that resourceful man
who wandered far and wide after ravaging
the sacred citadel of Troy. He came to see
many people’s cities, where he learned their customs,
while on the sea his spirit suffered many torments,
as he fought to save his life and lead his comrades home.
But though he wanted to, he could not rescue them””
they all died from their own stupidity, the fools.
They feasted on the cattle of Hyperion,
god of the sun””that’s why he snatched away their chance
of getting home someday. So now, daughter of Zeus,
tell us his story, starting anywhere you wish.

Watch out for the new New Deal

The New Neo Posted on by

This WSJ article by economics professors Harold L. Cole and Le E. Ohanian is a good summary of the reasons some have come to feel that FDR’s New Deal actually prolonged the Depression rather than helping the situation. It’s a cautionary tale of government intervention, in which the right sort (to all except strict air market libertarians) mingled with the wrong:

Some New Deal policies certainly benefited the economy by establishing a basic social safety net through Social Security and unemployment benefits, and by stabilizing the financial system through deposit insurance and the Securities Exchange Commission. But others violated the most basic economic principles by suppressing competition, and setting prices and wages in many sectors well above their normal levels. All told, these antimarket policies choked off powerful recovery forces that would have plausibly returned the economy back to trend by the mid-1930s.

Another factor was the growing power of labor to set artificially high wages. This is one of my biggest concerns with Obama. The labor movement most definitely helped elect him, and he owes them something. High wages sound good to workers, of course. But if they are higher than the company can bear, it will go belly-up and wages will become exactly nothing as unemployment soars and drives the economy down further.

This sort of thing is hardly encouraging, either:

Rep. John Campbell, who owned a slew of automobile dealerships before coming to Congress from Southern California, has been told by a senior executive of Toyota’s American operations that if Toyota were not making substantial profits from its SUVs and pickups, it could not continue making the Prius, which it sells at a loss. The federal government, which is in a position to dictate to mendicants, wants Detroit to make more cars like the Prius and fewer profitable vehicles. This is a novel business model.

The Communist countries taught us the dangers of a managed economy. No one (well, almost no one) is suggesting management of that magnitude and scope. But how much—and what type—is too much? And how much—and what type—is just enough?

So long, PJ, and thanks for all the fish

The New Neo Posted on by

Those of you who follow blogosphere scuttlebutt may already know that Pajamas Media has decided to dump its blogger ads. That means if I want to make up the bit of money I’ve received from that source for the last couple of years, I’ll have to scramble for other ads or pass the PayPal hat.

Some who predicted this long ago are crowing. Some who were getting more money than I from their ads (based on their higher traffic) are grieving or angry.

Me? I expected it. It’s been apparent for a long time that PJ was not getting much ad revenue. It’s also been apparent for a long time that PJ’s original model had changed and that it was relying more and more on a stable of big-name bloggers and their traffic, as well as efforts such as PJTV which were/are of no interest whatsoever to me.

I wrote about my attitude at the beginning of the venture, here. And guess what? I’d say the same today. So I’ll be parsimonious and quote myself:

I don’t think my blog ”“or the blogs of any of us, including its founders”“will live or die by the success of PJ Media. We all define success differently; right now, I consider this blog to have been successful, if not beyond my wildest dreams, then certainly beyond what I considered any realistic expectations. Great readers, and plenty of them”“what more could a person want?

I certainly didn’t go into blogging for the money”“that would have been like going into poetry for the money. I may be economically illiterate, but I’m not financially balmy. I can only speak for myself, but I know why I blog, and I don’t think that reason will ever change. I knew from the start what my niche would be”“what the story was that I felt internally driven to tell.

What is it I needed to say, and why am I so compelled to tell my tale? Well, it just so happens that I once wrote a post on that very topic. So if you want the best answer I can give, see here for more.

[ADDENDUM: For what some of my fellow soon-to-be-former-PJ-bloggers have to say, see this, this, and this.]

It’s a disaster

The New Neo Posted on by

From the beginning of the economic crisis back in the pre-election fall, Barack Obama has been consistent about one thing: rhetoric that maximizes whatever panic and fear might be driving it.

And here he goes again. In naming Joe Biden to head a task force on the middle class and its economic woes, Obama uses his usual inflammatory rhetoric (emphasis mine):

This [recent shrinking of the economy] isn’t just an economic concept. This is a continuing disaster for America’s working families. As worrying as these numbers are, it’s what they mean to the American people that really matters.

There is no doubt we are in difficult economic times. But “disaster?” Obama’s words are certainly not “the only thing we have to fear.” But they cannot help but add to the fear that already exists and is probably helping to drive investment and consumer spending down; they neither reassure or inspire confidence.

Obama is not a dumb man, so I can only conclude that the consistent negativity of his pronouncements is deliberate, meant to provoke a fearful response that gives him carte blanche to do whatever he thinks best. In this he is also like the doctor who gives the patient a poor prognosis, knowing that if the person gets well sooner, it may well be interpreted as due to the doctor’s fabulous intervention.

Doing the ipod shuffle

The New Neo Posted on by

The ipod is a wonderful invention, especially for those of us old enough to remember when the music collection of the typical adolescent consisted of just a few scratchy but beloved vinyl records.

If someone had told me back then that one day I’d be able to carry an entire record collection of many thousands of songs in a slim black gadget weighing just a few ounces, and could effortlessly dial up almost any tune I liked at any time I liked and listen to it through the privacy of earbuds, I’d have been flabbergasted and entranced in equal measure.

But sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. Having total control of song selection, being able to hear whatever you choose in the order you wish, can be like having too many chocolates at once.

It used to be that on an album there was a certain ratio of boring ho-hum songs to the socko ones. Using a record player meant you usually had to wait through the bad ones to get to the good ones. This taught a certain amount of patience. Plus, it was often the case that if you listened to the less immediately likable songs enough times, you would come to appreciate qualities in them that were not immediately apparent on the first few listenings. This taught you patience as well, and to keep an open mind.

If you were like me, you sometimes circumvented the whole operation by standing poised at the record player at the end of the song, placing the needle on your favorite over and over till that particular band (or your hand) wore out. Maybe this taught patience, as well, although of a different sort.

With an ipod, every song we select to load is one we like. There are no bummers; every selection is a keeper, or we would not have selected it and kept it.

We can play our favorites over and over almost effortlessly with the mere press of a finger, until they are our favorites no more. We can play our tunes in alphabetical order. We can create playlist after personalized playlist that mix and match the tunes in the ways we deem most agreeable: some for the sad times, some for the happy; some for the contemplative moments, some for the active.

But after a while the steady diet of exactly what we like, exactly what we want, begins to pall. We get—impatient.

Too much richness and predictability can be boring. Human beings like to mix it up. But, wonder of wonders, the ipod folks have anticipated this problem and invented the shuffle, which adds some randomness to the proceedings.

We like to say, “surprise me.” And the ipod does, sometimes giving us old favorites we’d practically forgotten about and never would have chosen for ourselves. And then everything old is new again.