The Obama rebound?

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Sometimes, it’s ifficult to know what to think. This morning the Today programme carried a chilling article about the upsurge in US gun sales since Obama’s election. On the other hand, here’s an interesting reflection Mark Anderson.

The old adage says, The darkest hour is just before the dawn.

It’s hard to be upbeat these days, when every statistic is worse than the last. But the other day, as I was considering predictions for the coming year, a thought occurred to me: we are experiencing the waning days of the administration I have repeatedly called the worst in US history. Of course things look dark.

Is it possible, once the new administration is in place, that hearing daily announcements of LIPs (leadership, ideas and plans) put forward by people who are both smart and qualified, will have the opposite effect on the public from the constant drumming of fear we continue to have today?

Of course.

Is it also the case that markets react more to perception than to ground truth?

Generally, yes.

So I asked myself, what will the state of mind be of the average American, say, three weeks into the next administration – let’s say, by Valentine’s Day, February 14th?

If their house has just been foreclosed and their car repossessed, we know what they’ll be thinking. But otherwise, I expect it will be radically more optimistic than it is today.

Is that enough to provide a market rebound? It could be.

The future of news

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Interesting long post by Jeff Jarvis…

It’s fair to expect me to put forward scenarios for the future of news. In a sense, that’s all I ever do here, but there’s no one permalink summarizing my apparently endless prognostication. So here is a snapshot of – a strawman for – where I think particularly local news might go. What follows is just a long – I’m sorry – summary of what I’ve written here over time and an extension of the one model I think we need to expand coming out of the conference, where one lesson I took away is that news – on both the content and business side – will no longer be controlled by a single company but will be collaborative…

Those Obama appointments

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From David Brooks

Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

The domestic policy team will be there, too, including Jason Furman (Harvard, Harvard Ph.D.), Austan Goolsbee (Yale, M.I.T. Ph.D.), Blair Levin (Yale, Yale Law), Peter Orszag (Princeton, London School of Economics Ph.D.) and, of course, the White House Counsel Greg Craig (Harvard, Yale Law).

This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.

Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists. They typically served in the Clinton administration and then, like Cincinnatus, retreated to the comforts of private life — that is, if Cincinnatus had worked at Goldman Sachs, Williams & Connolly or the Brookings Institution. So many of them send their kids to Georgetown Day School, the posh leftish private school in D.C., that they’ll be able to hold White House staff meetings in the carpool line…

Lovely piece which, in the end, is not quite as cynical as its opening paras might suggest.

Obama’s energy plan

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From the Obama/Biden site…

# Provide short-term relief to American families facing pain at the pump
# Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future.
# Within 10 years save more oil than we currently import from the Middle East and Venezuela combined.
# Put 1 million Plug-In Hybrid cars — cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon — on the road by 2015, cars that we will work to make sure are built here in America.
# Ensure 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025.
# Implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.

Thanks to Brian for the link.

Eh?

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From today’s NYTimes.com

It’s a long way from $700 billion, but the media start-up Six Apart is introducing its own economic bailout plan.

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program offers recently terminated bloggers and journalists a free pro account (worth $150 annually) on the company’s popular blogging platform. In addition to the free yearly membership, the 20 to 30 journalists who are accepted will receive professional tech support, placement on the company’s blog aggregation site, Blogs.com, and automatic enrollment in the company’s advertising revenue-sharing program.

Anil Dash, a former blogger and current vice president at Six Apart, announced the program Nov. 14, shortly after the company made its own staff cuts. Mr. Dash fired off a blog post: “Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We’re Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you.”

On Monday morning, he had roughly 50 e-mail applications in his inbox, and they have continued to pour in, totaling nearly 300 so far. “It was a bit of a surprise how quickly word got out,” Mr. Dash said. “This has struck a nerve.”

I don’t get this. What’s to stop these people getting a free Blogger or WordPress account? Is this another example of print journalists being clueless about the Web? Am I missing something?

Barry O’Bama

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Needless to say, Barack has Irish ancestors. (Doesn’t everybody famous?) His late mother, Anne Dunham, was a descendant of Fulmouth Kearney who left Moneygall, Co. Offaly (Latitude: 52° 52′ 49 N, Longitude: 7° 57 ‘ 31 W) , for the US in 1850.

But here’s the neat twist: Mr Kearney was a Protestant! Or, as my dear mother used to say (for she was not a woman to mince her words and took a dim view of non-Catholics), a ‘Black Proteshtant’. Yippee!

The defining speech

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In retrospect, this was the defining moment of the campaign. It’s the speech that Obama gave on March 18, just as the media frenzy about his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, was reaching a peak. And it’s an astonishingly grown-up speech. I had hitherto only read second-hand reports of it. I can’t remember when we last had a major politician as sophisticated as this man.

Coping with financial toxicity

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Here’s a modest proposal: treat financial derivatives like pharmaceutical products. Just as there is a Food and Drugs Administration to assess the safety of new drugs, so there should be a Financial Products Administration that assesses the safety of proposed new financial instruments. That’d sort out the industry in short order. Imagine the screams from bankers and their lobbyists!