libertad t.v., oui!

SUSAN SACHS
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
January 23, 2009 at 3:44 PM EST
Paris — For decades in France, an evening in front of the television began with the news followed by a solid 15-minute dose of commercials before the entertainment shows started at 9 p.m. But urged by the government to break free from “the tyranny of audience ratings,” the five national public broadcasting channels took the singular step last week of eliminating all advertising after 8 p.m. By 2011, French public TV is supposed to go entirely commercial-free.
Still, at a time when more media are scrambling for ever fewer advertising dollars, the ad-free revolution is not one anyone else, including the CBC, seems in a hurry to join.
If anything, the CBC is looking for ways to bring in more ad dollars by increasing its audience share in the competition with all the American and private stations available. “If we were to drop advertising, it creates an enormous financial problem,” said Richard Stursberg, vice-president of English services. “And my general sense is there's very little appetite in Canada to increase money to the CBC from government sources.”
The French makeover was spurred, in part, by the widespread complaint that prime-time public TV looked too much like commercial TV because it had to bid for the same shows, the same audience and the same advertisers. The removal of ads was welcomed by many as a strike against consumer culture. As Pascal Thomas, a former head of the Film Directors Society told Le Monde newspaper, ads have “a perverse effect” on creativity. Now, instead of chasing advertisers who want big audiences, broadcasters can theoretically risk showing more cultural fare and fewer blockbuster movies.
The CBC's challenge, Stursberg said, is a more existential one. The issue is not whether reliance on ads lowers the quality of programming, he said, but whether an audience can be found for Canadian programming.
“The difference between English Canada and France is that the French prefer French shows, and here historically they prefer foreign shows and entertainment programs,” he said.
France Télévisions, the French public broadcaster which runs the five channels, has to meet other requirements.
Under existing law, at least 70 per cent of its programs must be European and 50 per cent of those must be of French origin. A government-sponsored reform bill working its way through parliament would require the bulk of those European shows to be broadcast in prime time rather than lumped together in the middle of the afternoon or late at night after most people have gone to bed.
The theme of the reform is that public television should aim for the high-brow and not “the lowest common denominator,” as a government audiovisual commission put it last year.
Audience appeal should be an ambition, it said, not an obsession. To drive the point home, the Minister of Culture said last week that reality TV shows, presumably those like the CBC's top-rated Dragons' Den, would be expressly forbidden. “Look at the BBC. They don't have commercials. But at the same time, they run shows that would have no place on our stations,” said Alain Belais, director of international relations at the French broadcaster. “Not having advertising doesn't necessarily mean we won't be paying attention to programming that attracts an audience,” he added. Finding the balance between quality and audience, and between nationally produced programs and foreign blockbusters, is the test for all public broadcasters.
For the CBC, Stursberg said, success is bringing Canadian content to a broad cross-section of Canadian viewers. The bigger the audience share it draws – and he points out some Canadian shows are beating American shows in prime time – the happier he is.
Public television's mass appeal has also been more important, at least in the abstract, in Britain than in France.
“The French debate is conducted in the language of ‘culture' and ‘creation' rather than in terms of the audience, where in Britain it's seen as important that the BBC offers something that appeals to everyone,” said David Levy, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University in London and the only non-French member of the commission that proposed the France Télévisions reform.
With advertising, the French public channels drew their biggest audiences with a somewhat different programming mix from that of the CBC's and many other public broadcasters.
The top-drawing programs last year on France 2, the main national public station, were a French movie comedy called Camping, the American crime show Without a Trace, a TV movie based on a Maupassant story and the French-British rugby match.
But on a week-to-week basis, the differences from commercial television tend to blur. On Monday, for example, France 2 offered three back-to-back (dubbed) episodes of Without a Trace. The biggest private channel, TF1, showed a French film followed by another American police series, Criminal Minds.
On Tuesday, France 2 started with historical fiction on the assassination of King Henri IV and followed with a reconstruction of a 1987 criminal trial. TF1 had a reality show called Koh-Lanta, a French takeoff on Survivor.
Without advertising, the public channels could sharpen the distinction. “Now they have the chance to set themselves apart [from private channels] in prime time and not just late at night and in the middle of the afternoon,” said Bruno Patino, a former editor of Le Monde's website and now the director of the public radio station France Culture.
For now, the public channels are just moving up their lineup, starting at 8:35 p.m., after the national news, to fill in the time that used to be given over to commercials. Given the 18-month lead time for new shows, viewers probably won't see much of a change in programming for some time.
The financial consequences of going ad-free will similarly not be immediately felt.
About 30 per cent of the French broadcaster's budget, or about €450-million ($733-million), came from advertising revenues, with the rest coming from a €116 ($189) tax on television sets. The French parliament is still debating alternative revenue sources. The government has promised to cover the shortfall for the next few years. Unions have been opposed to the measure, with staff at France 3, one of the state channels, walking off the job to protest the changes. The reform has been criticized for possibly handing an advertising revenue boon to private broadcasters such as TF1, owned by Martin Bouygues, a friend of President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Sarkozy has said he wants to fund public broadcasting by taxing Internet providers and the expected windfall ad revenues of private TV stations. But the recession has put a damper on his plans. “I think advertisers are going to invest less overall,” said Rémi Babinet, the head of BETC, France's biggest ad agency. “So there won't be a transfer of the public television advertising spending to the private channels.”
CBC television is facing a similar problem but with fewer options. It has also seen a sharp drop in the economic turndown.
“I've been in the TV business for a long time and in my life I've never seen a fall as precipitous as this one,” said Stursberg. “We won't get more money [from the government] so we're trying to figure out a smart way through these challenges.”
At the same time, the CBC is looking at fiercer competition for ad dollars very soon as limits on all television advertising will be lifted in September. That is not necessarily good news for the CBC. “In a flat or shrinking ad market, ad dollars will go to American shows, which already come with a built-in 14 minutes of commercials,” said Stursberg. “If more commercial time is opened up, the money will go to those at the expense of Canadian productions.”With files from Agence France-Presse
Special to The Globe and Mail

well, the party's symbol IS a jackass

January 25, 2009
Partisan, Playful and Profane,

Obama Aide Tries to Hold It In
By MARK LEIBOVICH
WASHINGTON — Earlier this month, Barack Obama was meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers when Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, began nervously cracking a knuckle.
Mr. Obama then turned to complain to Mr. Emanuel about his noisy habit.
At which point, Mr. Emanuel held the offending knuckle up to Mr. Obama’s left ear and — like an annoying little brother — snapped off a few special cracks.
The episode, relayed by someone familiar with the incident, underscores some essential truths about Mr. Emanuel: He is brash, has a deep comfort level with his new boss, and has been ever-present at Mr. Obama’s side of late, in meetings, on podiums and in numerous photographs.
There he was, standing at Mr. Obama’s desk in one of the first Oval Office pictures; there he was again, playfully thumbing his nose at his former House colleagues during the inauguration; there he was, accompanying the president to a meeting with Congressional leaders on Friday.
Mr. Emanuel is arguably the second most powerful man in the country and, just a few days into his tenure, already one of the highest-profile chiefs of staff in recent memory. He starred in his own Mad magazine cartoon, won the “Your New Obama Hottie” contest on Gawker.com and has become something of a paparazzi icon around Washington.
In recent months, he has played a critical role in the selection and courtship of nearly every cabinet member and key White House staff member.
Renowned as a fierce partisan, he has been an ardent ambassador to Republicans, including Mr. Obama’s defeated rival, Senator John McCain. He has exerted influence on countless decisions; in meetings, administration officials say, Mr. Obama often allows him to speak first and last.
“You can see how he listens and reacts to Rahm,” said Ron Klain, the chief of staff to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “You can see that his opinion is being shaped.”
One reason Mr. Emanuel, 49, has drawn so much attention is that he seems to be in a kind of recalibration mode.
How will the feisty, bombastic and at times impulsive former congressman blend with the cool, collegial and deliberate culture of Obama World? And one that is trying to foster bipartisanship? This is someone who once wrote in Campaign and Elections magazine that “the untainted Republican has not yet been invented” and who two years ago — according to a book about Mr. Emanuel (“The Thumpin’ ” by Naftali Bendavid) — announced to his staff that Republicans are “bad people who deserve a two-by-four upside their heads.”
Attempts at a New Aura
It is clear to friends and colleagues that Mr. Emanuel is trying to rein himself in, lower his voice, even cut down on his use of profanity.
“As chief of staff, you take on the aura and image and, in some instance, the political values of the person you work for,” said the former congressman Ray LaHood, an Illinois Republican who is now secretary of transportation. “I think he’s beginning to morph himself into the Obama image.”
Mr. Emanuel acknowledged in an interview that stereotypes of him as a relentless hothead had some factual basis. But it is an exaggerated or outdated picture, he said.
“I’m not yelling at people; I’m not jumping on tables,” he said. “That’s a campaign. Being the chief of staff of a government is different. You have different tools in your toolbox.”
Still, his high profile and temperament are at odds with that of some past White House chiefs of staff: They were often low-key types who put the “staff” part of their job titles before “chief” — as Andrew H. Card Jr., the longtime chief of staff to former President George W. Bush, suggested to Mr. Emanuel last month.
Mr. Emanuel, who had hopes of becoming the next speaker of the House, has stepped into a job characterized by short tenures — just under two and a half years, on average — high burnout rates and the need to subjugate personal ambitions to the service of the president.
He is not accustomed to fading discreetly into the background. As a staff member in the Clinton White House, a three-term House member from Chicago and the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he was viewed by many as a consummate purveyor of a crass, kneecapping brand of politics.
Mr. Obama acknowledged as much at a 2005 roast for Mr. Emanuel, who is a former ballet dancer, during which Mr. Obama credited him with being “the first to adopt Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ for dance” (a number that included “a lot of kicks below the waist”). When Mr. Emanuel lost part of his middle finger while cutting meat at an Arby’s as a teenager, Mr. Obama joked, the accident “rendered him practically mute.”
The video of that roast has become a recent sensation on the Internet and buttressed a view among some Republicans that Mr. Emanuel’s appointment was, in the words of the House minority leader, Representative John A. Boehner, “an ironic choice for a president-elect who has promised to change Washington, make politics more civil.”
While acknowledging that he can be something of a showman, friends say Mr. Emanuel has calmed considerably over the years.
“He’s more temperate now,” said David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser and longtime Emanuel friend who dismissed much of his flamboyant reputation as “pure myth.” He added, “A lot of it is a reputation he earned as a younger guy.”
On the Go Before Sunrise
Late Friday afternoon at the end of his first week in the White House, Mr. Emanuel was sitting in his corner office, sick with a cold, baggy-eyed and looking tired. “Everyone keeps saying, ‘Are you having fun?’” he says. “Fun is not the first adjective that comes to mind.”
He woke as usual at 5 a.m., swam a mile at the Y, read papers and was in the office at 7 for the senior staff meeting at 7:30. There was a meeting in the Situation Room about Afghanistan, a leadership meeting, a conversation with the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, a meeting with Senator Orrin G. Hatch, budget meetings, several conversations with the president.
Mr. Emanuel, in the interview, rejected any notion that he is reinventing himself for his new job. But he is mindful, he said, that he must fit into a culture that was forged over two years on a campaign, “a group that was part of a journey together.”
Mr. Obama had settled on his fellow Chicagoan to be his chief of staff well before he was elected. He was drawn to Mr. Emanuel’s experience in both the White House and Congress and called him “the whole package” of political acumen, policy chops and pragmatism. He is also a skilled compromiser. “He knows there is a time in this business to drop the switchblades and make a deal,” said Representative Adam H. Putnam, Republican of Florida.
Mr. Emanuel initially resisted taking the job. But he came around after Mr. Obama kept insisting, saying that these were momentous times and that the awesome tasks he faced required Mr. Emanuel’s help. The then president-elect also assured Mr. Emanuel that the position would be the functional equivalent of “a No. 2” or “right-hand man,” according to a person familiar with their exchanges.
Since taking the job, Mr. Emanuel spent endless hours reaching out to lawmakers. Mr. Reid gave out Mr. Emanuel’s personal cellphone number — with Mr. Emanuel’s blessing — at a caucus meeting of about 40 Senate Democrats earlier this month. (“He seems to speak to every senator every day,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.)
He has be equally solicitous of Republicans in Congress (who also have been given access to Mr. Emanuel’s private contact information). On days he does not swim, he works out — and conducts business — at the House gym: 25 minutes on the bike, 20 minutes on the elliptical, 120 sit-ups, 55 push-ups and many sweaty conversations with his former colleagues. In a recent encounter there, for instance, with Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, Mr. Emanuel secured his support for Leon E. Panetta to become director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Mr. Emanuel has endured, or caused, some early distractions — his conversations with Gov. Rod R. Blogojevich of Illinois about Mr. Obama’s then-vacant Senate seat, his failure to alert Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to Mr. Panetta’s appointment.
So far, Mr. Emanuel has been more chief than staff in performing his job, according to several officials. He advocated fiercely for posts for fellow Clinton administration alums like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Panetta; not so much for the outgoing Democratic National Committee chairman, Howard Dean, with whom he had clashed while at the Congressional Campaign Committee. (“He was never negative about Dean,” said the Obama transition head, John Podesta, who added, “I wouldn’t characterize it as the other way, either.”)
Mr. Emanuel has also served as the administration’s chief headhunter. When the Office of Management and Budget director, Peter R. Orszag, had doubts about taking the job, Mr. Emanuel went into his default mode — jackhammering away at him, tracking him down in Hong Kong. “You can’t sit on the sidelines; you’ve got to come inside,” Mr. Emanuel told him.
Asked if “relentless” would be a fair characterization of Mr. Emanuel’s recruitment method, Mr. Orszag said, simply: “He’s Rahm. Come on.”
The selection of Mr. LaHood demonstrates Mr. Emanuel’s sway with Mr. Obama. After Mr. Emanuel sounded out Mr. LaHood about his interest in joining the administration, he was summoned to a meeting in Chicago with the president-elect.
The interview lasted 30 minutes, just Mr. Obama and Mr. LaHood.
“Look, Rahm Emanuel loves you,” Mr. Obama told Mr. LaHood as he prepared to leave. “He is really pressing me and pushing me. And it’s not that I don’t want to do it, but ... ”
A few days later, Mr. LaHood was picked to be secretary of transportation.
Banter With the Boss
At a White House gathering with Mr. Obama and a bipartisan team of lawmakers on Friday, the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, joked that Mr. Emanuel was too busy to talk to him, so he called the president instead. Mr. Obama said he was always happy to take calls for his chief of staff — a reference to an incident a few weeks ago when Mr. Hoyer called Mr. Emanuel, who was in the back of a car and claimed he was too busy to talk, so he handed the phone to Mr. Obama.
In meetings, it is not uncommon for Mr. Obama and Mr. Emanuel to engage in teasing banter. One White House official recalls an exchange last week in which Mr. Obama said something to the effect of, “Well, I was going to do that, but I didn’t want Rahm to mope for a half-hour.”
But it will not always be so pleasant for Mr. Emanuel. “He’s going to be blamed for a lot of things,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said of his former colleague.
Saying no is a big part of being chief of staff. Infighting is inevitable; so are enemies and rivalries.
In addition to cabinet officials — and the vice president — a cadre of “senior advisers” who have long and varied histories with Mr. Obama will be seeking his attention. They include Pete Rouse (Mr. Obama’s chief of staff in the Senate), Valerie Jarrett (a close Obama family friend) and Mr. Axelrod, whose office is a few feet closer to the Oval Office than is Mr. Emanuel’s. The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, one of the Mr. Obama’s closest Senate and campaign aides, will also enjoy walk-in access to the president.
Mr. Emanuel has been in the job four days — and, by day’s end Friday, it looked more like four years.
He is slumped deep in his couch, periodically swatting at a giant fly that keeps orbiting his office. He is hoping to get out of the office to meet some friends for the Jewish Sabbath dinner. He has a physical therapy appointment for a pinched nerve in his neck. He missed his children — 8, 10 and 11 — who are visiting this week but are soon headed back to Chicago, where they are remaining for now. “For me to be the parent I want to be, I think it’s very hard,” he said, referring to the demands of his current job.
Just then, Mr. Orszag arrived at his door.
“Orz, what’s wrong?” Mr. Emanuel said. “Can you give me a minute, or do you need something?”
He needed something.
Mr. Emanuel left, returned and started talking about how his staffs tended to be loyal. “I drive people as hard as I drive myself,” he said.
Then Mr. Obama came to his door.
“Mr. President!” Mr. Emanuel said, jumping from his couch to his feet in something that resembled a dance move, and they walked out together.

the curious case of caroline kennedy

"it's a bitch girl but it's gone to far 'cause you know it don't matter anyway"

-jeffery mcnary

i caught up with caroline kennedy at the 2004 democrat convention in boston. when asked by my colleague if being at the convention brought back any memories, she and i equally shared shock with the stupidity and hollowness of the question. we shared a laugh, a wink, and she graciously expanded on the question and provided a kind response. i was impressed.

the recent episode of politico-caroline was somewhat surprising. there, a pure spirit stood frozen before the nation like a doe in the headlights of a car...'ya know. so much for that national service thing, huh. so she won't be moving to washington d.c. now. and the loss, from where i stand or sit, is the republic's. darlin', i'm not sure they could handle your thoughtfulness anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdl658l5TTQ&feature=related

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who's your daddy?

January 22, 2009
Kennedy Is Said to Withdraw Senate Bid
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and DANNY HAKIM
Caroline Kennedy has withdrawn from consideration for the vacant Senate seat in New York, according to a person told of her decision.
On Wednesday she called Gov. David A. Paterson, who will choose a successor to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her concerns about Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s deteriorating health (he was hospitalized after suffering a seizure during President Obama’s inaugural lunch on Tuesday ) prompted her decision to withdraw, this person said. Coping with her uncle’s condition was her most important priority, a situation not conducive to starting a high profile public job.
Mr. Paterson had indicated to her that the job was hers if she would accept it, the person said.
She was planning to issue a statement on Wednesday evening.
Ms. Kennedy’s decision comes nearly two months after she, along with several members of Congress and leading political officials, began auditioning to replace Mrs. Clinton in the coveted position.
Her decision to withdraw is certain to startle the political world. Ms. Kennedy had gained the support of some powerful backers in the state, including several labor officials and a top aide to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Kevin Sheekey.
But her pursuit of the seat also set off resistance, with some local Democratic officials suggesting it smacked of entitlement, and polls showing voters preferring Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo for the position. Ms. Kennedy, 51, the daughter of President John F. Kennedy and a resident of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, has never served in public office.
Gov. Paterson plans to announce his selection on Saturday. The governor has been coy about his decision, and while he has praised Ms. Kennedy, he has also spoken approvingly of other candidates, including Mr. Cuomo and Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand, who is beginning her second term as a congresswoman from the Albany area.
Mrs. Clinton resigned from the Senate late Wednesday, immediately after being sworn in as secretary of state.

fatiguer

-jeffery mcnary

“I have a small-town mind. Like the Greeks and Trojans.
Shame. Pride. Importance of looking bad or good.”
-Poem of Disconnected Parts – Robert Pinsky

It’s been said over and again that America is full of opportunities. Yet, as if in some Kafkaesque model, some opportunities appeared too great to be acted upon. For the moment, that all appears a bit moot. And as a troubling and bellicose time of governance turns toward promises and hope, the republic’s grandly imperfect circus now flirts with the possibility of stepping from the low-down to the lofty. These days, amongst the snows of winter, talents of mendacity and ambition seem to meld and get along just fine with high-minded notions of service, of striving, of living out, and living, well, large. The awe has stepped out with the awkward.

Celebration and revelry continue, even for those in the cheap seats. Offstage, and waiting in the wings for change, both activists and operatives have begun their tango, their grasp and grapple for walk on parts and center stage roles with all of the twirling and tart flaws such after campaign-command performances produce. Now, the ongoing and growing cluster of the photo-political, has run from the classical to the vivid, driven in part by helpings of leftover adrenaline and in portion by perceived pay-back long overdue.

With his tony, avant-garde campaign successfully throwing off the hollow baby-boomer mantra of, “I disagree, therefore I am”, and after beating the reactionary right like a piñata, the new fast-tracked, fast paced, ‘President Cool’ appears the topic in the realm of parlor games and the guess work which accompanies both agenda and administration buildup. Growing numbers want a stroll into the clearing, some face time, and there break into one of those ‘well, look’ conversations. Such things never, ever happened in the political career of the guy from Illinois, and with all transparency and full disclosure, it ain’t happening now. Mr. Obama’s centrist and right-of –center appointments are proving unsettling to those perceiving themselves as his ‘base’.

The new Gautama has not gathered in the garden with the victims of post-modernity, black or white, carrying their pre-existing conditions, mythologies, and hyper-vigilance like begging bowls in tow. Rumor and fear abound in such periods, and such expectations are the residue of the permanent campaign. As things unfold, some of the faithful view an increasing, if not pre-planned consortium with the ‘them’, the ‘others’.

“If large numbers of Americans are turned off by politics”, wrote Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, “it’s in no small part because they are sick of the consuming that singular process ‘the campaign’ represents.” They are too long and too costly. They possess the propensity to blur the senses and market false promise. They could be teachable moments, but no. These times could explore the rationale for a grueling primary season, the Electoral College, super delegates, proportional representation. Such exploration proves too heavy. Distractions? Or stone cold and problematic.
These seasons are axiomatic. They are sometimes frightening. They are promissory and cruelly exhilarating. For the loser, nothing softens its ending, and for the ideologue, like the junky, nothing contains a numbing. The historic newness of things can be muddied, scores settled, wounds re-opened and so forth…and so on. And such a season both favored and gave legs to the Obama phenomena, a thing the density of ambition and illusion has continued to shamelessly propel.

The fog of political campaigns themselves holds moments of drama, minutes of name calling. There’s hollow accusation. There’s humor and banality amidst those balloons and bunting. By the time these exercises close out, Americans generally find an odd ingredient of nut cases providing occasional flashpoints, strident choruses, complimenting groans and speculation amongst the spin-room chatter. There is next time. Few, honestly, know what the others mean exactly. Mouths move and sounds are heard. Expectations leave some breathless.

Recently the “first-lady-elect” lamented to an interviewer that you “had to campaign for 18 months, then change your life and relocate in six weeks”. But Clintonista James Carville captured it best in saying, “A campaign is the time to stab your enemies and a transition is the time to stab your friends.” And though few hold for a ‘ghettoization’ of the incoming president, an emerging cadre is beginning to wonder where they’ll turn for their’ stuff’ as faith and slippage collide. Their vetting process was/is flawed, or either they just don’t care. A Boston Globe story stated Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama's presidential campaign and now Special Assistant to the President, was “the chief executive of Habitat Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001…and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems." Secretary of the Treasury designee, Timothy Geithner, while president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had oversight of banks like Citigroup and finds himself in the middle of a failing bank bailout, the fall of Lehman Brothers, and failed to pay more than $34,000 in federal taxes.
Change.

Unique to such enterprises, the champion of the ’08 outing, the longest and most costly in the country’s history, owns his words. Some were tested by his handlers in a governor’s contest in Massachusetts a couple of years earlier. Even for an idiot, they provided a coherent narrative: Change. Hope. Believe. We can. O.K? The contours of the end game were formed by such neuromarketing and a political consultant, David Axelrod, who now occupies an office in the West Wing. Hope.

Larry M. Bartels’ in his, The Irrational Electorate, recently in The Wilson Quarterly, tells us the political campaign “claws at the intelligence of the electorate. Does it really matter whether voters can name the secretary of defense or know how long a senate term is? The political consequences of “public ignorance” must be demonstrated, not assumed. And that requires focusing not just on what voters don’t know, but on how what they don’t know actually affects how they vote. Do they manage to make sensible choices despite being hazy about the details of politics and government? (Okay, really hazy.) If they do, that’s not stupid – it’s efficient.” Believe.

In real life, the somewhat politically moderate Barack Obama found his voice, email lists, and a winning electoral equation, around progressives and black America in particular, later drawing attention from other moderates through a kind of Kantian sensibility. There was never a real coalition so to speak. This has become more visible as campaign buttons are quickly replaced with “me” pins, in some circles. Obviously Barack Obama has had a profound impact on ways of thinking in America, and the world. However, attempting to sort out messages for true vision, and hope for the real deal, may prove daunting, providing varying results. Plugging tenets of rationalism into sockets of empiricism is not for the faint of heart. As more and more campaign promises fail to materialize, one might recall Cicero’s letter to his brother Quintus on electioneering. There he wrote, “…for your status as a ‘new man’ you will compensate by your fame as a speaker.” (Nominus novitatem dicendi gloria maxime subevabis). And although the candidate from Illinois refrained from donning Sioux headdress, as had some of his predecessors in the process, a lack of social inertia in ‘the campaign’ proved magically preserved, and as in the ‘campaign’, there remains a slow response to crisis by the President-elect and his posse. Selective memory, like cafeteria politics, swirled within his transition.

Race and ‘time’ has occupied a position of prominence in the frame of both thought and emotion in the American epoch. Despite the illusion, this campaign proved no different. It provided a surreal sense of ownership. A piece, a prize, a sweet slice of history and involvement with “the man” even through a “t-shirt”, a button. Underappreciated early-on, candidate Obama soon garnered those driven by need and urgency. The icon grew enchanting, shrouded in sophistication and coupled with the need to imagine his sorrows and struggles because some wanted, or needed to. Candidate Obama himself, in addressing the issue of ‘race’ said, “At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black”, or “not black enough”.”

Northeastern Illinois University professor, and member of Chicago’s Task Force for Black Political Empowerment, Robert T. Starks recently wrote, “…when rookie Illinois Senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States, the African-American political leadership, academics, and opinion leaders began a protracted and sometimes heated debate over the propriety of an African-American Agenda to be presented to the presidential candidates. The debate continued throughout the primary season. Initially, the candidacy of Senator Obama was not taken seriously by most of these political actors because of the fact that he was a little known quantity. However, when he won the Iowa caucuses it became clear that he deserved a closer look.”

Longing for empowerment, and weighted by a dramatic tradition, many of these political actors of the ‘sit-in’ generation pulled up late to ‘house Obama’. Mr. Starks, who has been deeply involved in various aspects of political engagements points out that, “While Senator Obama had gained the attention of the black public…most were still unconvinced that he could win the nomination and the presidency. In the meantime, the debate continued without an agreement to begin the process of ascertaining the collective needs of the national African-American community and conveying them to the candidates.”

There certainly was some tension between the “post-racial” transformational campaign of the “skinny kid with a funny sounding name” and the “elders”. Those fault lines, driven by intangibles, those jokes, those habits, those recipes passed down in the average African American household differ from those in the homes of young Barack Obama, in Indonesia, in Hawaii. He wasn’t home wrapped and emerged from a different historical landscape. Some of these “elders” would not be moved, and like a former lover who wants to leave behind pajamas or underwear to be remembered by. When such need is acted out in public, you don’t really want to give a fist “bump”, and just say “cool”, not even in the Obama universe. That racial/political gyroscope continued to challenge the then president-elect in the person of his U.S. Senate replacement and other matters.

“Black political actors were reluctant to put race specific request on the table for fear that it would dampen the white enthusiasm and support that he had gained in the early primaries”, Prof. Starks continued, “The same justification for a lack of an African-American Agenda, or wish list, became even more amplified when it was clear that Senator Obama was destined to be the nominee of the Democratic Party.”

There is an odd and fumbling kinship here with Starks and the thoughts of scholar James MacGregor Burns when the latter recently wrote, “Transformational leadership occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality. Leadership”, he says, “is still in its infancy, and we’ve only began to explore follower-ship.”

Gerald Early, of Washington University, appearing in the October 10, 2008 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, The End of Race as We Know It, suggests, “The presidential campaign of Barack Obama has raised the question of what happens to the black American meta-narrative of heroic or noble victimization if he wins. (Presumably nothing happens to it if he loses; the loss can be blamed on racism, as it will, in fact, be another example of victimization. White folks will always find a way to cut down a successful black man, to not let him get too far, is the common belief. That sort of black cynicism, expressed in different political and aesthetic modalities, underscores both the blues and rap. If Obama loses, he becomes, in black folklore, John Henry, the “natural” man with the courage to go up against the political machine. The moral of the tale, in politics as in life, is that the machine always wins.).”

Prof. Early added, “Many of us black professionals, members of the black elite, keep the embers of our victimization burning for opportunistic reasons: to lev-erage white patronage, to maintain our own sense of identity and tradition. In some respects, this narrative has something of the power in it endurance that original sin does for Christians. In fact, our narrative of victimization is America’s original sin, or what we want to serve as the country’s original sin, which may be why we refuse to give it up.” Continuing he writes, “We have used it shamelessly—especially those who are least entitled to do so, as we have suffered the least—hustled it to get over on whites, to milk their guilt, to excuse our excesses and failures. Being the victim justifies all ethical lapses, as the victim has turned into a sucker’s game, the only possible game that the weak can play against the strong with any chance of winning.”

That story, or at least part of it, will continue as dogma for a while, and highlight disconnects, mis-concepts, and perhaps political maturation failures of Mr. Starks and his crew. For those who perceive the election of Mr. Obama as yet another forum in which to continue the discourse on race and the African American narrative, there’s an awakening unfolding, as to the presence of others awaiting seats at his eschatological banquet.

U.S. Roman Catholic bishops, for example, have wasted no time warning the president-elect against enacting an “evil law” that would deregulate the “abortion industry.” Pope Benedict XVI sent the president-elect a congratulatory telegram hailing his “historic” election, and Mr. Obama, a Protestant, called the pontiff to thank him for his message. The two men hold differing views on gay marriage and stem cell research, as well as abortion. There is wiggle room there, however, and no shame, in placing the agenda of one whose resume gives space to ‘Hitler Youth’ at the bottom of ones check-off list.

At about the same time, Dr. Clayton Smith, a U.S. born hematologist now heading the leukemia and bone marrow transplant program of Vancouver, British Columbia, was quoted as saying he was, “literally in tears” over the election of stem-cell-research supporter Barack Obama. “Watching the election last night was a singular event, like watching the Berlin Wall fall,” he said. Here, the Oba inherits a layup.

On another front, like shards of a broken mirror, the immigration reform issue also awaits “the one”. This son of a foreign exchange student and nephew of an illegal immigrant is expected, by a constituency of Hispanic voters which turned out 66% for him, to halt large scale federal immigration raids. As many as 12 million illegal immigrants are said to be in the U.S. With increasing unemployment in the country, many hold more vigilant border security and less immigration is the way to preserve Americans’ jobs. Others now press for a path to legal residency. Trenches and barricades are sure to find their way into both sides of the issue and the incoming administration will hardly go unruffled.

A Pew Research Center reported that then Senator Obama captured the White House by securing the support of a number of key groups solidly in the center of the electorate. 39% of Mr. Obama’s voters were Democrat with 32% being Republican. This was a significant shift from 2004 when the electorate split even. White voters went 43% for Mr. Obama; 55% for McCain: Black voters went 95% for Mr. Obama and 4% for Mr. McCain: Hispanic voters turned out 66% for Sen. Obama and 32% for Sen. McCain.

The Center’s numbers also reflect a breakdown among white voters as: 41% men for Obama; 57% for McCain: 46% women for Obama; 53% for McCain. Hispanics voted for Sen. Obama over Sen. McCain more than two-to-one, 67% verses 31%.

When it comes to race and the vote, 21% of voters said they personally knew those who would not vote for Barack Obama because he is black. Supporters of Mr. Obama were more likely to know someone who would not vote for him based on race (27%) than were those who supported McCain (10%). Some 21% white and 22% black respondents said they knew someone who wouldn’t vote for Obama because he is black. There’s no difference based on age or gender, but college grads were more likely than those with less education to know someone not supporting Obama because of race (36% vs. 18%).

That perpetual, “most important election ever” theme, played every campaign, took on a more surreal and menacing tambour this time. This campaign in particular could ill afford to be quixotic. Yet it was all promissory, and in that space since Election Day, many have struggled for signs of the administrations direction. One can be blinded by the charm, coolness of President-elect Obama. But a lack of linkages has followed his public career. Like Leviticus, allegiance the gentleman may become difficult and visions hard to follow as all those expectations and get past the stage of euphoria. Question Him? Good luck with that. His ‘handlers’ tag that ‘cynicism’. It’s complicated. If it doesn’t sing the right tune, you can lose friends that way amongst both the chic and sanctified. But does it really take two years and a million or so dollar enterprise to elicit electoral enlightenment?

Another post-election survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds grater satisfaction with the choice of the presidential candidates than after any election in the past 20 years. In addition, Mr. Obama gets by far the highest grades for any winning candidate in that period. “When voters are asked for a single word that describes their reaction” to Mr. Obama’s victory, supporters mentioned their joy with words like, “happy”, “excited”, and “ecstatic” frequently used. A substantial number also mentioned the words “hope” or “hopeful” to characterize their reaction to the election. For now, it’s all good.

Early Obama devotees insist that he now must claim a progressive agenda. They want the president-elect to ‘go big’. Out of a desire to remain loyal, some have become somewhat apologetic on his starting late. “Give it time”, they say, “he’s not even president yet.” Nonetheless, as the rollout of cabinet appointees and staff steadily continue, the expectations among other liberals have begun a decline.

Many of those thrilled by candidate Barack Obama, have began expressing concern. Journalist/author, Naomi Klein was recently quoted, “If you actually look at his policies, what they reflect is the triumph of the right-wing political paradigm since Reagan, and I think he could set things back dramatically, because for young people who are getting engaged in politics for the first time, for them to be disillusioned is very, very damaging.”
Continuing, Ms. Klein says, “The “yes We Can’ slogan means whatever you want it to mean. It’s very ‘Just Do It. When you hear is, you catch yourself thinking, Yeah! We’re gonna end torture and shut down Guantanamo and get out of Iraq! And then you think, Wait a minute, is he really saying that? He’s not really saying that, is he? He’s saying we’re going to send more troops to Afghanistan. He’s telling regular people what they want to hear, and then in the back rooms he’s making deals and signing on to the status quo.”
Nowhere is this more glaring than the picks for the incoming president’s centrist to center-right, national security team and his own pre-election posturing as an ardent opponent to the Iraq war. Mr. Obama’s White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, a former senior Clinton advisor is a hard-line supporter of Israel’s “targeted assassination” policy an volunteered to work with the Israeli Army during the 1991 Gulf War. In Congress, Mr. Emanuel voted for the invasion of Iraq, and unlike many of his colleagues, continues to defend his vote. An article on Antiwar.com stated , Emanuel, “advocates increasing the size of the U.S. Army by 100,000 soldiers” and creating a domestic spying organization similar to Britain’s MI5. Under President Clinton, he was one of the principals in passing the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Throughout his campaign, Mr. Obama separated himself from the field by highlighting his opposition to the war in Iraq from its beginning. Repeatedly, the candidate promised to begin to end the war on his first day as president. Now, however, not only has every proposed member of this team been supportive of the Iraq war at some point, some more so than others, then President-elect Obama said he’d begin to “design a plan for a responsible drawdown,” on his first day in office. Lately, he described his earlier ‘differences’ as ‘magnified’ during a ‘campaign’ season.

During his campaign, candidate Obama also committed to taxing the windfall profits of oil companies and the repeal of the ‘Bush’ tax cuts for the wealthy and redistributing that money to the middle class. Now President-elect, Obama assumes a more cautious posture, saying he will not enact the former, and will simply permit the latter, the tax cuts, to expire come the end of 2010.

Although Mr. Obama spoke repeatedly spoke out against broken politics, a significant number of his appointments are current or previous office holders, President Obama has appointed two governors, a former governor and former mayor, two senators and three members of congress.

That said, we must acknowledge, in this celebratory time, there is something systemically structurally atrocious with the way America elects its heads of state, members of Congress, the Senate and the casual manner in which ‘we the people’ have allowed the ‘campaign’ industry to flourish and grow, promoting special interest candidates and candidates that cannot possibly deliver on promises made.

At this point it would be a waste of time to argue the nuance of a grand, master plan or message crafted for by Obama’s handlers. Neither a swarm of locusts, nor the parting of Lake Michigan brought the nation to this time. It was more the tawdry legacy of administration after administration failing to hit a mark. It was justice denied “long time”, it was a frenetic and a fumbling dis-ingenuous opposing camp, and it was a list of criminal wars of choice, and the wails of millions craving tangible and substantive change.

Those who’ve grown way tired and sought alternatives to just muddling though. And it was the permanent campaign…an opportunity for the well funded campaign to re-invent itself again and again to hit and hold it’s mark.

The campaign lap dance, convincing some they’d held a chit with the new administration, is not without irony with the dot’s failing to connect at this point. Like the death of a parent or a dream, there’s little wiggle room. The November story has not held legs or wheels for that matter, for Democrats in Georgia or Louisiana, where there have been post Election Day losses to Republicans. Progressive activists have expressed their displeasure

“Many who argued against the idea of an agenda believe that the non-race specific approach taken by Senator Obama was one of the major reasons for his success”, continued Prof. Starks. “…the fact that almost every other racial, ethnic and representatives of social causes known. The Jewish community made it known from the beginning that for any candidate to get their votes they had to pledge their support for Israel. The Hispanic community…for a…humane and liberal approach to the problems of immigrants in general. Gay activist pressed for elimination of discrimination in the workplace…laws that will outlaw hate crimes. Feminist groups…for the closing of the income gender gap and…prevention of the repeal of Roe v Wade. Now,” ask Starks, “who will construct the African-American Agenda?” This must be disturbing for Prof. Starks as well as his cohort willing to extend the incoming presidents ‘sell-by date. Criticism of the President is not encouraged. Yet there has been an expectation of a change of tone.
Robert Pinsky, the former Poet Laureate of the United States, questioned, “Who do we Americans think we are?” He continued, “This is a cultural question, and it is worth asking: many of the great issues in American public life are ultimately cultural issues. The relation of the well-off to the poor; the meaning and the future of race and ethnicity; the degree to and manner in which we share responsibility for the aged, the sick, the needy; even our mission and place among the world's nations: all these depend on our sense of ourselves as a people -- that is, as a cultural reality. In other words, these social issues depend on how we remember ourselves.”
The new administration would be ill advised to comfortably bask for long in the present glow. To simply establish episodes of “Survivor: The White House” with the belief thinking ‘change’ will bring change. It can begin with an immediate revisiting of the ‘process’, the tired ‘permanent campaign’, the mechanics of which confuse prose and poetry with flawed policies.

As my friend Mr. Pinsky continued, “Though the United States assuredly is a great nation, the question remains open whether we are a great people or are still engaged in the undertaking of becoming a great people. A people is defined and unified not by blood but by shared memory,” and vision I might add. In short, the current new age triangulation of the new Obama administration is hardly fresh. For this President, it’s an ‘away game’ and should be played as one.

Broad stripes and bright stars are no substitute for substantive ‘change’. In it’s centrist posturing for the 2010, 2012 elections, the Obama presidency may well be little more than a souvenir for those who’ve wailed and waited and sought change for so long.

america i am

Fragments Tell a Story of Pain and Pride
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
PHILADELPHIA — By now the question that frames a new $14 million exhibition opening on Thursday at the National Constitution Center here is one that shouldn’t have to be asked and should have already been fully answered. It comes from the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, to whom the first gallery in this large exhibition is devoted — the only black intellectual or writer to get such attention: “Would America have been America without her Negro people?”
This show, which ranges over 13,000 square feet and will continue a 10-city, 4-year tour after it leaves here in May, answers Du Bois with a ringing affirmation of black centrality. It isn’t just that blacks in America have made important contributions to a country that in significant numbers forcibly absorbed African slaves and forcibly resisted absorbing their descendants, but that the history of America and the history of America’s blacks are inseparable. They are so intertwined as to become aspects of a single identity in which neither strand can be considered in isolation. “America,” the exhibition says in its title, “I Am.”
It is astonishing to think that a half-century ago such an idea would have seemed alien to much historical interpretation and would have also been posed with a mixture of anxious aggression. This transformation in historical understanding was one of the most important of the 20th century. Now, it is so mainstream that this show, “America I Am: The African American Imprint,” is actually a commercial enterprise created by the television personality and author Tavis Smiley along with Arts and Exhibitions International (whose last great success was the 2007 touring King Tut exhibition). The Cincinnati Museum Center, with which the show’s executive producer, John Fleming, is associated, was also involved.
This commercial aspect also means that there is some emphasis on spectacle, creating gallery environments to evoke the black experience in the United States, complete with sound effects and lighting. There is much focus too on the overall outline rather than analytic details. That is both the show’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
It is a popular historical survey, never touching down too deeply and keeping the narrative in constant view: we pass through the actual doors of Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, through which captive slaves also passed, before the displayed shackles and brands were used by their European and American buyers. Then comes a survey of how inextricably knit into the Southern economy (and much of the Northern as well) these slaves became, and the painful ironies of the founders’ vision of freedom that left slavery as a footnoted exception to their powerful pronouncement of inalienable rights.
The overall narrative is so familiar it risks becoming commonplace, touching on the antislavery movement, the Civil War, the failures of Reconstruction, the contributions of black American culture, the civil rights movement, and an upbeat three-screen film in which black and white American identities intertwine.
The importance of black churches is rightly singled out for more attention than usual, but it is not in the large sweep of this exhibition that we feel the story’s importance, but in the smaller objects on display. These include the abolitionist’s defensive cudgel used by the “league of Massachusetts Freemen” when confronted with slave hunters, a rare American flag used by a “black brigade” in Cincinnati during the Civil War, porcelain figurines of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom, separate bathroom signs from 1927 labeled “White Ladies” and “Colored Women,” a “Bill of Sale” certifying that friends had purchased Frederick Douglass’s freedom for $711.66 in 1846, a model of a small screaming black baby whose wide-open red mouth was meant to be used as an ash tray, miniature Ku Klux Klan figures that look like chessmen, the door key and stool from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birmingham jail cell.
In these objects, in the sheet music, costumes, films and books, in the glimpses of trial and triumph, there is an epic American story to be told. For museums the climax will come when the National Museum of African American History and Culture opens in Washington, scheduled for 2015. What is missing here, though, is the complexity of the struggle, some sense of the political movements at work in different periods, and even some sense of how those debates have evolved in the present day.
Pick any particular subject and you find broad strokes rather than subtle details. The slave trade is summarized in a single map, the Emancipation Proclamation’s focus on the Confederate states alone is not fully explained, the immense failure of Reconstruction in the South is not explored. Many objects, including some I’ve mentioned, receive only cursory identification, so their place of origin or date is left unclear. And in contemporary decades so much has happened that the simple tale told here isn’t enough. Just putting Malcolm X’s Koran on display doesn’t inform the viewer about what issues were being debated in the 1960s in the black civil rights movement, or illuminate the political rage of that era, or provide some idea of the pain and of the stakes.
The exhibition gives just one glimpse of that rage, early in the show, in which a jagged American flag is illuminated in blood-red light, draped in chains and images of protest, under which a quotation from Paul Robeson can be read. But it displays the latent anger of the presenters rather than something about its subject; the exhibition would be more powerful if it explored that rage rather than so uncharacteristically depicting it.
And perhaps, too, the show’s design could have been more taut: Why was Du Bois given the honorific centrality of the opening gallery? How did his interpretations evolve? And what impact does he still have?
What the exhibition does present is a basic primer, which will, perhaps, serve as a popular introduction. The problem is that most of the history here is so well known in outline that it could serve as the foundation for a show rather than its main point, a frame for explanation rather than the object of attention. At any rate, though, this show succeeds in its original purpose. It makes the question, “Would America have been America without her Negro people?” seem superfluous.
“America I Am: The African American Imprint” opens on Thursday and runs through May 3 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia; (215) 409-6700, americaiam.org and constitutioncenter.org.