Frank Rich: the two Americas

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From his NYT column…

On one side stands Mr. Obama’s resolutely cheerful embrace of the future. His vision is inseparable from his identity, both as a rookie with a slim Washington résumé and as a black American whose triumph was regarded as improbable by voters of all races only months ago. On the other is John McCain’s promise of a wise warrior’s vigilant conservation of the past. His vision, too, is inseparable from his identity — as a government lifer who has spent his entire career in service, whether in the Navy or Washington.

Given the dividing line separating the two Americas of 2008, a ticket uniting Mr. McCain and Hillary Clinton might actually be a better fit than the Obama-Clinton “dream ticket,” despite their differences on the issues. Never was this more evident than Tuesday night, when Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain both completely misread a one-of-a-kind historical moment as they tried to cling to the prerogatives of the 20th century’s old guard…

He’s very good on McCain:

Mr. McCain’s speech in a New Orleans suburb on Tuesday night spawned a cottage industry of ridicule, even among Republicans. The halting delivery, sickly green backdrop and spastic, inappropriate smiles, presumably mandated by some consultant hoping to mask his anger, left the impression that Mr. McCain isn’t yet ready for prime-time radio.

But the substance was even worse than the theatrics. Incredibly, Mr. McCain attacked Mr. Obama for being insufficiently bipartisan while speaking to the most conspicuously partisan audience you can assemble in today’s America: a small, nearly all-white crowd that seconded his attack lines with boorish choruses of boos. On TV, the audience came across as a country-club membership riled by a change in the Sunday brunch menu.

I like his idea that the real ‘dream ticket’ would be McCain+Clinton. And his analysis of their websites:

You could learn a ton about the Clinton campaign’s cultural tone-deafness from its stodgy generic Web site. A similar torpor afflicts JohnMcCain.com, which last week gave its graphics a face-lift that unabashedly mimics BarackObama.com and devoted prime home page real estate to hawking “McCain Golf Gear.” (No joke.) The blogs, video and social networking are static and sparse, the apt reflection of a candidate who repeatedly invokes “I” as he boasts of his humility.

Thanks to Dave Winer for the tweet.

Later: Charlie Leadbeater pointed me to Noam Cohen’s NYT piece about Obama’s campaign, in which he observes, en passant,

Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor whose book “The Wealth of Networks” is a manifesto for online collaboration, points out a crucial difference between Mr. Obama’s approach to attracting supporters and that of his chief rivals. “On the McCain and Clinton Web sites, there is a transactional screen,” Mr. Benkler said. “It is just about the money. Donate, then we can build the relationship. In Obama’s it’s inverted: build the relationship and then donate.”

Beating the Drudge effect

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This morning’s Observer column…

There is a way out of the morass, but it requires the application of old-fashioned journalistic skills and values. Or, more prosaically, sceptical, investigative reporting. The fact that something is circulating on the net is not, in itself, news – any more than is the fact that microbes circulate in drinking water. You can find anything you want on the net, and I mean anything. So what?

The rot that so offends Obama set in when ‘mainstream’ reporters began to relay what they found on the net in their own publications. And that happened a long time ago with the Drudge Report and the vicious right-wing campaign to bring down Bill Clinton.

A good example of how to deal with internet rumours was provided last week by David Weigel of Reason magazine…

Blues and Royals officer forced to moonlight as male model?

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From this morning’s Financial Times. I know that General Sir Richard Dannett is concerned about the impact of low pay on army morale, but have things really come to this?

Is this ad a spoof? Is there a Second Lieutenant Hulme? If so, why hasn’t his CO torn a strip off him? I remember a time when officers in the Household Division were forbidden to be seen in London wearing a civilian clothes and carrying a parcel — because that was deemed to be the role of servants.

Ballmer: print media are toast

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Well, apparently he told a clutch of Washington Post editors that

There will be no media consumption left in ten years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

Here’s the video.

Levi Sumagaysay at GMSV is not impressed.

It’s not going to happen in my lifetime, though. True, there are people who haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in years for various reasons. (The content is free on the Net. They’re trying to be green by using less paper. They don’t like getting ink on their hands. They don’t have time to read.) Yes, newspapers and magazines will continue to fold. Many will continue to lay people off or wait for them to get so sick of their jobs that they quit. And the quality of these publications will suffer, as they already have. But print media will stick around. I won’t even go into the many reasons that have to do with, um, that’s where many online publications get their content. Instead, I’ll focus on user experience. Technology has yet to deliver a replacement for the convenience of having a paper product to take along on the subway, to the bathroom (insert joke here), to the doctor’s office and to read at the checkout stand. True, some people can read newspapers and magazines on their iPhones, their Kindles. But not everyone can afford gadgets that cost hundreds of dollars, plus the monthly subscription/connection charges. Sometimes, it’s just easier to stick a couple of quarters — maybe four — into a slot and pick up a paper whose pages you can turn and fold, and which you can let your fellow commuter have when you’re done. You won’t see anyone giving up his Treo so a stranger can read the news on it. Also, you never have to worry about a newspaper running out of batteries or needing to be rebooted.

When the technology finally comes around, I’m sure lots of people will be ready for it. But the transition won’t be abrupt, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on whether you work in the newspaper industry. And digital won’t cancel out print. They will continue to coexist, although digital will surely be more dominant.

Levi’s right. Ballmer is just the latest subscriber to what John Seely Brown calls ‘endism’. Media ecosystems don’t work like that.

Life, death, tragedy

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This is the saddest story I’ve read in a long time.

An eight-year-old boy has been found hanged in his bedroom in Lancashire.

Joshua Aldred was found unconscious by his grandmother in Lytham on Thursday night. He was taken to hospital in Blackpool but died a short time later.

Joshua’s mother and grandfather had recently died from cancer …

Sex and the Cineplex

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On the one hand…

The film takes everything that was unsettling about the series — gratuitous materialism, deliberate elitism, cafeteria feminism — and re-serves it up in a grotesquely glittered confection, in which posh real-estate, $55,000-diamond-rings, and gaudy designer bags serve as unapologetic proxies for relationships, and even the main characters’ children are reduced to accessories. This visual orgy comes with fewer of the redeeming elements — the occasional recognition of hypocrisy, the chatty histrionics, the schmaltz — that swaddled and padded and helped us forgive the irritating unrealities of the series. And since so much of Sex and the City’s success was in its structure — episodic therapy, 30 minutes a week, over six long, tumultuous years — there’s a sense in which the filmic format (here dragged out to two hours and twenty minutes) betray the show’s stumbling essence.

On the other hand…

And yet, and yet — the delightfully confused, giddy-but-torn, no-but-yes feeling that washed over so many women as they took in the series is there in the film as well. Despite its annoyances, it’s often funny and almost always fun, and its length is a strength as well as a weakness, since it provides more of what makes women return to Sex and the City: Not the happy endings, but all the messy ambiguity beforehand. The willingness to wallow in the mess, rather than racing ahead to happily-ever-after, explains why the Sex phenomenon has provided more fodder for the post-feminist culture wars than any television series or movie before or since — and why it will be a long, long time before any other pop culture phenomenon usurps its role in those debates. So those wringing their hands over its legacy might as well take their cues from Carrie’s fictional Vogue editor, Enid: “Spare me a week of faux-soul searching, and just say yes.”

Talk about having it both ways.

I won’t be going, btw. My teenage daughter’s seen it and even she was underwhelmed.

Clinton explained

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From James Fallows, writing in The Atlantic…

The Clinton team doesn’t worry about hurting Obama’s prospects of winning in the fall, because they assess those prospects at zero. Always have. Obama might not win if he leads a bitterly divided party, but (in this view) he was never going to win. Not a chance. He would be smashed like an armadillo in the road by the Republican campaign machine, and he would be just about as ready as the armadillo for what was coming.

When Clinton still had a plausible shot at the nomination, this assumption removed all guilt from beating up on Obama. As in: “I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.” By whittling Obama down, the Clintons were saving the party from a suicidal mistake.

And now that Hillary Clinton no longer has a plausible chance, she (and Harold Ickes etc) don’t need to wake up in the middle of the night and worry: Oh no! Maybe we’re paving the way for George Bush’s third term! They are sure that Obama’s nomination means exactly that, no matter what they do. So by definition they can’t be making things worse. It is like sticking pins into a corpse — you’re not really hurting it any more. And if these efforts in fact make Obama’s victory less likely — well, then, reality will conform to their preexisting view…

As it happens (and as Fallows belatedly acknowledges) others got here before him.

Quote of the day

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“Maybe he is interested in some subject, but it isn’t a subject we teach here.”

From one of Lord Snowden’s school reports during his time at Eton.

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