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February 15, 2004

What makes America exceptional?
: In the comments to my post below on change and fear and the campaign, someone calling himself Franky challenges us: "Name the exceptional things about America that make it great..."
OK, we'll bite.
Go into the comments, dear readers, and name the exceptional things about America that make it great.
Sure, I could start another thread on what needs improvement -- our health insurance, our education, our race relations, our tax structure, all the things I'd like our presidential candidates to be addressing instead of George Bush himself. But that's not Franky's challenge. And though I never was a flag-waver and a nationalist and a parade-day patriot, ina time when we are under attack, it is only right to answer back and recognize what it is we're protecting. I don't want to change all this. I want to improve on it. I want to protect it.
So I'll step up and start the bidding. Here's my starting list:
1. Freedom of speech. We protect that single freedom, our greatest freedom, more dearly than any nation you can name.
2. Freedom of religion. We don't ban headscarves and yarmulkes, we fight to protect our citizens and immigrants' right to worship as they please.
3. An economy that powers the world with courage and capital and ingenuity and imagination.
4. A creative class that is unparalleled -- otherwise, why would the rest of the world pay so much to see our movies and hear our music and read our books and watch our TV?
5. An entrepreneurial class that has created, in just recent memory, Amazon, Google, eBay, Starbucks, Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, CNN...
6. A respect for technology that has given birth to the Internet and the transistor and cures of no end of diseases.
7. A standard of living that is the envy of the world and, no, I don't feel guilty about that.
8. A work ethic that beats the pants off of, say, Germany's and France's and earns that standard of living.
9. A political process that, though flawed as any human enterprise, has stood up to every stress and strain and continued to uphold the principles of a free nation.
10. Your turn...

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The male anti-defamation league
: I'm only a half-hour through watching Iron-Jawed Angels, the HBO movie on suffrage, and I'm already upset at how every man is portrayed as a 2-D pig. Hadn't we gotten past that?

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And we thought evolution was tough
: British education authorities plan to require the teaching of atheism in religion class.

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Esther Dyson on Dean
: Esther Dyson, leading light of the tech industry and occasional blogger, writes about the Dean campaign.

But I asked one group of campaign staffers at Bloggercon what they had changed in response to all the online feedback
they were getting, and the answer was how they changed their Websites. I
had meant: How did their candidate change his policy?
Second, the candidates who got the attention did not necessarily get the
votes. There's an old saying in advertising: "Good advertising is the best
way to kill a bad product." I'm not going to argue whether Dean would have
made a good or bad president, but clearly quite a few people, when asked,
decided he would not. His stridency, which attracted a core of active,
activist supporters, evidently alienated many other prospective
voters.

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Joblog
: Martin Roell puts up a blog with recommendations of people he knows looking for jobs. This is another element to add to my Technorati job idea below: references.

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Their day shall come
: Dan Okrent's latest column is up -- a chatty and entertaining interview with himself (in which he admits that some Timesmen are -- gasp -- snotty and mean to him). He finally tiptoes up to the issue of standards for Times columnists:

Q. What about the editorial page and the columnists? You never write about them.
A. As it largely should be. Most correspondents who complain to me about opinions expressed in editorials or in the space allotted regular columnists are likely to receive this reply: "Editorial writers and columnists are free to express whatever opinions they wish, and readers are free to disagree with them."
However, some related issues that have come up have attracted my attention. One is whether (or how) The Times's editorial positions determine its news coverage. Another is whether columnists should be free, as they are now, to decide whether and when to publish corrections of their own mistakes. One especially determined critic keeps asking "whether there is such a thing as an unfair opinion." (An e-mail note I received this week charged that one columnist "has crossed the line from acceptable or at least standard partisan nonsense to actual irresponsible journalism.") These are all provocative questions, and I hope to be addressing each of them at some point - the corrections policy first, certainly within the next couple of months.

My advice, bloggers: Fact-check their ass. The next time Dowd says something you think is wrong or unfairly truncates a quote, gather the facts and figures, publish them on the blogosphere to gather more facts and figures and get everything airtight, and email Okrent (at public@nytimes.com).

: Atrios says he gives Okrent mixed reviews but doesn't say why. That as unsatisfying as a tofu taco.

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All men are created equal...
: I'm not a big fan of Juan Cole but I am a fan of what he's doing now: starting a project to translate great works of American democracy into Arabic. Let's hope he does include Thomas Jefferson in that library and not Michael Moore.

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Dean's blogger
: Dean's blogger, Matthew Gross, who did a spectacular job creating the candidate's online presence, is back blogging on his own site (which I take as a sign, don't you?).
He's repeating the Trippi mantra: broadcast bad, internet good... broadcast bad, internet good... broadcast bad, internet good. I take that as disingenuous, though. Dean spent a fortune on TV. It didn't take because the candidate didn't take.
And the internet strategy is really just a variant of a broadcast strategy: a way to get your message out to as many people as possible as efficiently as possible.
Broadcast was cheaper and more efficient and effective than whistle-stop tours. And the internet is cheaper and more efficient (but not yet more effective) than broadcast. But it's still about getting the candidate's message out.
It's not the medium that's the problem. It's the message. And no, the medum is not the message. Dean tried to make it the message. But it didn't work.

: Here's Gross' exit interview with the American Prospect.

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Broadcasting from Iraq
: Adam Curry is in Iraq, ready to broadcast.
: Photos up now.

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Change and Fear: What they got wrong about America

: The reason Howard Dean (with Al Gore) lost is that they ran a negative campaign. But the problem wasn't that they were negative about other candidates. It was that they were negative about America.

: First, read the post below about fear, about Gore and Dean trying to say that George Bush is using fear to get elected and get his way -- even as they tried to pump up fear of Bush to get elected and get their way.
Now go read Joe Trippi's blog that's all about change, just like the Dean campaign: change, change, change. They thought we all had a huge hunger to change America.

: And that's what they got fundamentally wrong: We, the voters, didn't want to hear Dean (and Gore behind him) telling us how screwed up our country was and how much we needed to change it.
It's not screwed up. Oh, sure, there are things that are wrong and things that could be better. But that's different from saying we need to change it all.
We wanted to hear a candidate start by saying he liked America, he loved America -- especially at a time when it is under attack from Islamic nut jobs and Euro bozos and even Mexican soccer holligans -- and then propose ways to make it better.
But that's not the fundamental message that came out from Dean: Oh, he said some of it; all candidates do. But the message that cut through it was all about change, change, change.
Now, of course, some of that is to be expected from the party out of power. They have to make the party in power look bad to oust them.
And it's the conservatives who, by their nature, are less about change; they conserve things they way they are.
In addition, many of us are reluctant to wave flags in normal times.
But all that necessarily changes in a time of war, when we all must pull together as Americans to defeat our enemy.
Yet Dean and some of his supporters and fellow candidates refused to see it that way. They acted as if the only war we're in is the one in Iraq and they said it's a wrong war so they could complain about Bush. They refused to see what we all see: We are at war against and under attack from and afraid of terrorism.
And that is what has to change.
The enemy is not within. The enemy is without.
We don't fear our fellow Americans. We fear the terrorists who are killing us.
We don't want to fundamentally change America to survive. We must bring fundamental change -- democratic and economic reform -- to the Middle East to survive.
The voters see that. Dean and Gore don't. That's why the voters rejected Dean (that and the fact that he displayed an unstable personality and immature behavior and a petulant pissiness). But Dean and Gore and Trippi still can't hear what the voters told them. They still want to tell the voters that the voters must change.
Wrong.

LINK | Comments (74)

Dean post mortems
: Clay Shirkey has two good observations on the Dean campaign.

First, on the night of the Iowa defeat, I read the Dean blog and found the campaign blaming the voters -- an absurd thing to do in an election. Clay hears that same theme in Trippi's talk at ETech last week:

This two-faced view of the voters — sacred in the abstract, inconvenient in the concrete — has characterized the Dean campaign since the disastrous Iowa speech, where Dean seemed unable to take in the loss. Any speech he gave should have included a recognition that, given the choice, the citizens in Iowa had placed him third, and a renewed commitment to connecting with voters in the future. Instead, they got a big f*** you in the form of a list all the states where Dean (wrongly) asserted he was going to win, states that he obviously felt didn’t suffer from whatever had caused the Iowans to fail to seal his position as frontrunner.
Blaming the voters is now the hallmark of the Dean campaign. This is a grand tradition, of course — a bad carpenter blames his tools; a bad programmer blames his users. Dean is in Wisconsin, telling voters to pay no attention to the previous results — those people in Tennesee and Missouri and Virginia et al are all sheep. His campaign has become a caricature of the style of politics he has often criticized, continuing because he has the money to support it, despite a string of failures in which he’s come in 4th or worse more often than he’s come in second. This is almost the definition of special interest politics — the success of his fund-raising tools shields him from having to listen to the people whose support would have given legitimacy to the idea of populist politics.

Second, Clay gives us the good news: This is the first and last Internet campaign. That is to say that the Internet will now be a part of every campaign.

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