Online political observers say President-elect Obama’s innovative, online-fueled campaign will likely evolve into a new level of online communication between the public and the White House — the Internet-era version of President Franklin Roosevelt’s famous “fireside chats” between 1933 and 1944.
For more than three decades Eugene Allen worked in the White House, a black man unknown to the headlines. During some of those years, harsh segregation laws lay upon the land. He trekked home every night, his wife, Helene, keeping him out of her kitchen. At the White House, he worked closer to the dirty dishes than to the large desk in the Oval Office. Helene didn’t care; she just beamed with pride. President Truman called him Gene. President Ford liked to talk golf with him. He saw eight presidential administrations come and go, often working six days a week. “I never missed a day of work,” Allen says. His is a story from the back pages of history. A figure in the tiniest of print. The man in the kitchen.
When it looked as though Obama was going to win the election, former photojournalist Matt Mendelsohn went to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC expecting to find a huge crowd of celebrants.
I’d spent most of election night in front of the TV in Arlington, Va. But around 11 p.m. I couldn’t sit idle any longer, which is why I sped to the memorial. When I arrived, I found a TV crew sitting on the plaza above the Reflecting Pool, waiting, I assumed, for a mob to arrive. I approached with cameras in hand. One of them looked up and said with a slight roll of his eyes, “Nothing to see here.”
Instead he found a small group of people listening to Obama’s acceptance speech on a transistor radio and shot this wonderful picture of the scene. I can’t think of an image that better characterizes the grass-roots, get-out-the-vote, small-donations-by-millions-of-people aspect of Obama’s campaign. (via 3qd)
Hopefully I’ll have some time this afternoon to update the 2008 Election Maps page; I’ve got lots of good submissions waiting in my inbox. Thanks to everyone who sent in links and screenshots.
Idea for the Obama administration: fireside chats. On the radio, on satellite radio, as a podcast, transcripts available online soon after airing. Done live if possible, a genuine lightly scripted chat. Maybe Obama could have special guests on to talk about different aspects of policy and government. Bush does weekly radio addresses but they’re short, boring, and scripted.
And I gotta tell you, if change.gov is indicative of how the Obama administration is going to use the web to engage with Americans, this is going to be an interesting four years.
Ok, that’s probably the last Obama post for a bit. Back to your irregularly unscheduled programming.
“Teaching keeps you sharp,” Obama said. “The great thing about teaching constitutional law” — his subject — “is that all the tough questions land in your lap: abortion, gay rights, affirmative action. And you need to be able to argue both sides. I have to be able to argue the other side as well as Scalia does. I think that’s good for one’s politics.”
In writing the article, Finnegan ran across some people who thought Obama could be President someday but chose not to include those quotes because it felt “not only absurdly premature but like bad juju”.
If you followed or were at all interested in the 2008 presidential election, this seven-part series by a group of Newsweek reporters is a must read. The reporters were granted exclusive access to the campaigns of Barack Obama, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton for a year on the condition that they wouldn’t print anything until after the election was over. The series, of which the first three parts are currently up on the Newsweek site, is a fascinating look at how the political process works and contains all manner of salacious political gossip.
Part One: How Obama was persuaded to run and found his campaigning rhythm and his first scuffles with the Clinton campaign.
In some ways, running for president was a preposterous idea for someone who had served as a two-term state legislator and had spent only two years in the United States Senate. But Obama, a careful student of his own unique journey, could see the stars coming into alignment-the country was exhausted by the Iraq War (which he, alone among leading candidates, had opposed as “dumb” from the outset). As Obama saw it, the conservative tide in America was ebbing, and voters were turning away from the Republican Party. People were sick of politicians of the standard variety and yearned for someone new-truly new and different. Another politician with a superb sense of timing, Bill Clinton, perfectly understood why Obama saw a golden, possibly once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity. The former president believed that the mainstream press, whose liberal guilt Clinton understood and had exploited from time to time, would act as Obama’s personal chauffeur on the long journey ahead. “If somebody pulled up a Rolls-Royce to me and said, ‘Get in’,” Clinton liked to say, with admiration and maybe a little envy, “I’d get in it, too.”
Part Two: John McCain’s campaign gets off to a terrible start and then suddenly recovers.
Along about Thanksgiving, reporters began to notice a change. The size of the crowds was increasing, and McCain began to creep up in the polls, especially in New Hampshire. He was blessed by the quality of his opponents. In the grim days of summer, when a NEWSWEEK reporter had asked why he shouldn’t join the rest of the press corps in reading the last rites for McCain’s presidential aspirations, Rick Davis had responded with an incongruously cheerful smile. Nothing personal, he said; our opponents are all good men, some of them are my friends-but politically speaking? “Look, at the end of the day,” he said, “the rest of these guys suck.” However crude, his judgment was not off base. Ex-businessman Mitt Romney seemed to treat the campaign as a management-consulting project, as if he were selling a product and trying to increase market share. He had no fingertips as a politician and came off as a phony, even when he was perfectly sincere. Rudy Giuliani seemed to be building a cult of Rudy, constantly talking about his performance on 9/11 to a nation that wanted to forget about the terrorist attacks, and he badly miscalculated by believing that he could wait until the Florida primary in late January to make his move. Former senator Fred Thompson seemed old and half asleep. Former governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas was emerging as an engaging showman and a lively dark horse-but as an evangelical minister with no foreign-policy experience, he almost certainly could not win.
Part Three: The role of the candidates’ spouses, the continuing clashes between the Obama and Clinton campaigns, and Obama’s Star Trek joke.
Obama carefully conserved his energy. He was not a man of appetites, like Bill Clinton, who would grab whatever goodie passed by on the tray. Obama was abstemious. Indeed, to the reporters following him, he appeared very nearly anorexic. Most candidates gain the Campaign 10 (or 15). Hillary was struggling with her waistline, as she gamely knocked back shots and beers in working-class bars and gobbled the obligatory sausage sandwiches thrust at her in greasy spoons along the Trail of the White Working-Class Voter. Obama, by contrast, lost weight. He regularly ate the same dinner of salmon, rice and broccoli. At Schoop’s Hamburgers, a diner in Portage, Ind., he munched a single french fry and ordered four hamburgers-to go. At the Copper Dome Restaurant, a pancake house in St. Paul, Minn., he ordered pancakes-to go. (An AP reporter wondered: who gets pancakes for the road?) A waiter reeled off a long list of richly topped flapjacks, but Obama went for the plain buttermilk, saying, “I’m kind of traditionalist.” Reporters joked that if he ate a single bite of burger or pancake once the doors of his dark-tinted SUV closed, they’d eat their BlackBerrys. Frustrated by reporters fishing for trivial “gaffes,” Obama did not like coming back to the plane to talk to the press. As he trudged back from time to time to deal with the reporters’ incessant questions, he looked like a suburban dad, slump-shouldered after a long day at the office, taking out the trash.
I got another sense, however: a sense that he was conserving focus. Fed went through all his subsidiary responsibilities as the President of Tennis (as Steve Tignor calls him) without concentrating on anything, or at least on as few things as possible.
Concentration takes mental energy, as anyone who has fought off five break points before shanking a ball on the sixth knows. And whenever I saw Federer on the grounds, he seemed to be using as little of it as possible. Practicing with Nicolas Kiefer on Ashe a few days before the tournament, he mostly just messed around. He would hit a few familiar Federer shots, the heavy forehand, the penetrating slice, then shank a ball and grin, or yell. Either way, he wasn’t really concentrating all that hard.
Update: The Times used 96 pt. type for the front page headline on at least one other occasion: January 1, 2000. I wonder if there are others. (thx, jeff)
Update: Fuck you too, Arizona and Florida. Also, several people objected to the strong language I used here, saying that I can’t curse an entire state where many voted against the ban, it was all the Mormon Church’s fault, and in one case, that it was hypocritical of me as a New York resident to complain. You know what? I’m *upset* about this and a little profanity, a little lashing out, is totally fucking warranted.
Last night as the election results were coming in online, I took screenshots of a bunch of the now-familiar red/blue electoral maps being used by the larger media sites to show election results and posted them all on this page. (There are currently 25 maps…I’m adding more in a few minutes.)
1. No one strayed from the red and blue. The red/blue combo is overwhelmingly symbolic but there are plenty of other colors in the crayon box; I would like to have seen someone try something different.
2. In the 2000 and 2004 elections, the red/blue map was the focal point of the media coverage. People were fixated by it. This time around, it didn’t matter so much. The maps were interesting for 3-4 hours until the overwhelming nature of Obama’s victory became apparent and then, not so much. By this morning, the maps are already shrinking or disappearing from the home pages of the Times, CNN, and the like.
3. Nate Silver and the rest of the 538 guys nailed it. They got Indiana wrong and there are a couple more states that are still too close to call, but they got the rest of the map right. Their final projection had Obama getting 348.6 electoral votes and they currently have him at 349.
And then he hugs me and I think, ‘Abe Lincoln hugged me. He smells like Old Spice.’ I ask him who he supports in the election, and he smiles and says, “Believe it or not you’re the first person who’s asked me that this year; of course I support Barack. These so called Republicans remind me of Copperheads.” And then he laughed sort of sad a deep ha ha ha laugh and I woke up.
The Copperheads were a group of Union Democrats who opposed the Civil War engineered by Lincoln’s Republican administration. An anti-Lincoln pamphlet produced by the Copperheads — titled Abraham Africanus I. His Secret Life as Revealed Under the Mesmeric Influence. Mysteries of the White House. — brings to mind the ham-fisted attempt to characterize Barack Obama as a Muslim and terrorist.
This page on kottke.org is the #1 result when you Google “obama wins”. Servers may get a little melty around here in the next couple of days. That’s ok…this is what Twitter’s servers are going to look like tomorrow night:
Imagine this video, but with the fail whale instead of a real whale and a nuclear device instead of dynamite.
A bunch of editors, pundits, and analysts choose who they would like to see in the next President’s cabinet. Current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gets many votes to stay on in that capacity. Warren Buffett also gets a couple of votes for Secretary of the Treasury.
BTW, Treasury? Might be time for an updated name…The Department of the Treasury sounds like that part of the government responsible for safeguarding the nation’s jewels, pieces of eight, and fragments of the True Cross.
Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki have come up with a new voting scheme that they say will yield more accurate results in elections. It’s called majority judgement. Instead of voting for one particular candidate, voters are asked to evaluate all the candidates on a scale from something like “excellent” to “reject”. Here are the results of a trial that they ran in Orsay in France (scroll for English)…and you can see how the results differ from the official election results. To put this in a bit of US-centric context, imagine a voting system where honestly evaluating your feelings about the executive readiness of a third-party candidate like Ralph Nader doesn’t necessarily harm a major party candidate’s chances of getting elected. (*cough* Al Gore *cough* 2000 election.)
They’re running an online majority judgement experiment using the 2008 US Presidential candidates…go sign up and vote. (thx, judy)
And then there’s the self-created interview ad that is a product of recent advances in technology. Camcorders that can be taken anywhere. We’ve seen self-reporting from the Iraq War and video diaries created by soldiers. The photographs and videos from Abu Ghraib are part of this phenomenon. Ultimately, video-blogging and self-reporting finds its expression in campaigns like the “Joe the Plumber.” As I understand it, the McCain campaign has posted on its Web pages a request for people to film themselves and discuss why they are Joe the Plumber or Hank the Laminator or Frank the Painter. The intention is to collect these testimonials and then cut them together for a tax revolt television ad.
I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen [sic] about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.
I wonder if McCain had a chance to read it. (thx, tim & jeremy)
There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done — fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.
For people: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
For the United States: “We need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine.”
The more I read of Pollan’s writing, the more I wish he were the Secretary of Agriculture or the head of the USDA or something. Paging Mr. Obama…
Those effects would be small at the margin, but there are those effects that are small at the margin that can change election results. You call and ask people ahead of time, “Will you vote?” That’s all. “Do you intend to vote?” That increases voting participation substantially, and you can measure it. It’s a completely trivial manipulation, but saying ‘Yes’ to a stranger, “I will vote”…
Update: Or perhaps not. This paper by Dustin Cho finds that there’s no “statistically significant” correlation between intending to or being asked if you’re going to vote and actually voting. (thx, max)
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