Debate Moderator Writing 'Age of Obama' Book

A lot's being made today of the fact that Gwen Ifill, the moderator of Thursday night's vice presidential debate, has a new book coming out on Inauguration Day titled The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. The story's drawn hundreds of comments on the Drudge Retort.

Ifill has made no secret of the book, which has been mentioned for months in media reports. On Aug. 21, she wrote an essay for Time magazine that describes her motivation for writing it:

... Obama is just one member of a generation of political leaders faced with a new task: honoring the contributions of their forebears without alienating the broader, multiracial audiences they need to win. I've spent part of the past year tracking dozens of these rising stars and have concluded that anyone who thinks Obama is unique is not paying attention.

The essay identifies her as a TV host and the "author of the forthcoming The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama."

Although Michelle Malkin uses the existence of the book to claim that Ifill's "in the tank" for Barack Obama, the book's premise doesn't require him to win in November. As the daughter of a minister who marched in civil rights demonstrations, Ifill's writing about a generation of leaders and using Obama, the most high profile of those black politicians, as the embodiment of a larger trend.

Ifill's a well-respected PBS journalist who moderated the debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards four years ago. Though I expect she'll do a fair job in her role as moderator on Thursday, the book raises undeniable questions about her objectivity because of the timing of its release. Ifill will sell considerably more copies if Obama wins the election, particularly when it hits stores on the same day he takes the oath of office. For this reason, she has a commercial stake in his success that makes it harder to trust her judgment in the debate.

The McCain campaign is complaining that it didn't know about Ifill's book, according to Greta van Susteren. That's hard to believe, given the fact that it was mentioned in an AP story on July 23, two weeks before Ifill was chosen as moderator.

But then again, figuring out what the McCain campaign doesn't know has been difficult since the selection of Sarah Palin.

Politics · Books · 2008/10/01 · 14 COMMENTS · Link

See You Later, Alligator

I got a flier in the mail informing me that the St. Augustine Alligator Farm is now offering a "parents night out" service:

Let us entertain your kids in a safe and educational environment while you and yours have a night out on the town. Have a nice dinner, take in a movie, or just relax at home; whatever you want, we've got the kids. ...

Includes: 2 slices of pizza per person, drinks, hands-on animal presentation, twilight zoo tour, a craft, nocturnal games and lots of fun!

When I'm looking for a relaxing night out with the missus, nothing puts me more at ease than letting my children roam around after dark in a place where they're not at the top of the food chain.

Jacksonville · Florida · 2008/09/30 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

George Orwell's Road to Morocco

The organizers of the Orwell Prize recently began running George Orwell's diary as a blog, 70 years to the day after he wrote each entry. Most of the entries thus far have been mundane -- Orwell was obsessed with observing animals, appropriately enough -- but his Sept. 27 diary contains a particularly vivid description of poverty in Marrakesh, Morocco:

People sleep in the streets by hundreds and thousands, and beggars, especially children, swarm everywhere. It is noticeable that this is so not only in quarters normally frequented by tourists, but also in purely native quarters, where any European is promptly followed by a retinue of children. Most beggars are quite satisfied with a sou (twenty sous equal a penny halfpenny). Two illustrative incidents: I asked a boy of about 10 to call a cab for me, and when he returned with the cab I gave him 50 centimes (three farthings, but by local standards an overpayment.) Meanwhile about a dozen other boys had collected, and when they saw me take a handful of small change out of my pocket they flung themselves on it with such violence as to draw blood from my hand. When I had managed to extricate myself and give the boy his 50 centimes a number of others flung themselves on him, forced his hand open and robbed him of the money.

Orwell mentions in this diary giving bread to a Moroccan city worker who saw him feeding some to gazelles. He refers to this incident again in "Marrakech," an essay he wrote that was published a year later.

Books · 2008/09/29 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Review: 'The Secret Scripture' by Sebastian Barry

So many awful things happen to Roseanne McNulty, the protagonist of Sebastian Barry's Booker-shortlisted novel The Secret Scripture, that at a certain point I couldn't help but look forward to more of them. McNulty's a century-old Irish woman who has been living at a mental hospital for so long that nobody can remember why she was sent there in the first place. A staff psychiatrist, Dr. Grene, undertakes an investigation to determine whether she had genuine mental problems or was institutionalized for "moral" reasons.

As her hospital and home for 50 years is being prepared for demolition, Roseanne tells her life story in longhand, hiding the pages under a floorboard. These passages alternate with the psychiatrist's "commonplace book," his observations from the ongoing investigation.

McNulty grows up Protestant among the Catholics of Sligo on Ireland's northwestern coast, raised by a gravedigger father and a mother he brought home from Southhampton, England. The family becomes caught in the Irish civil war in the early '20s, her father demoted to rat-catcher by the local Catholic priest after he asks him to give last rites to a rebel. Roseanne's mind obscures the worst of her life's tragedies by changing the details, as we learn later, but the ones she relates clearly are grim enough, as when her cherished father accidentally burns down an orphanage and kills 123 girls. Taking his demotion with aplomb, her father had devised his own method of dispatching rats: Dip each in paraffin, kill it with a conk on the head, then drop it into a fire. (It says a lot about Roseanne's childhood that she enjoys tagging along with her father on these jobs.) Unfortunately, step 2 really should follow step 1, as they discover when a paraffin-drenched rat escapes and scurries back into the orphanage, climbs down a chimney and catches fire. Father and daughter keep this mistake a secret between themselves.

The Catholic priest Father Gaunt is enormously cruel, dispensing moral decrees with absolute certainty to terrible effect in the life of Roseanne, whom he loathes for (a) being so beautiful she's a "mournful temptation" to the men of Sligo, and (b) refusing to convert when she weds a Catholic. After she's seen with another man in a suspicious but innocent circumstance, Gaunt succesfully pursues the annulment of her marraige with the Vatican, then icily relates the news:

If you had followed my advice, Roseanne, some years ago, and put your faith in the true religion, if you had behaved with the beautiful decorum of a Catholic wife, you would not be facing these difficulties. But I do appreciate that you are not entirely responsible. Nymphomania is of course by definition a madness.

More terrible things happen to Roseanne, of course, as likeable a long-suffering protagonist as Father Gaunt is despicable. Barry tells a larger story about Irish strife and the fallibility of history as filtered through human memory, but I don't know enough about Ireland to appreciate it fully. Though The Secret Scripture features two great characters and evocative writing, I'm surprised it rates the Booker shortlist and has become the betting favorite to win. The book's as melodramatic as a romance novel, though it's long on corpses, rats and dementia and short on heaving bodices.

Books · 2008/09/27 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Scoring the First Obama/McCain Debate

This is a pretty traditional debate performance for Obama. Strong on substance. Few mistakes. Little in the way of killer instinct or decapitating lines. McCain, by contrast, is offering an uncommonly strong performance powered, as far as I can tell, by his raging contempt for Obama. -- Ezra Klein

I thought both candidates were strong in last night's presidential debate at Ole Miss, but I'd give the edge to Barack Obama because he had more to prove and John McCain showed so much contempt for his opponent, a trait that's as attractive on him as it was on Al Gore in 2000. McCain avoided eye contact with Obama the entire debate and didn't express a single moment of good regard towards him, even when touting the importance of bipartisanship in solving the Wall Street banking crisis.

Seven times last night, McCain dismissed Obama with the claim that he didn't understand something, capping it off with his statement that "I honestly don't believe that Senator Obama has the knowledge or experience" to be president.

It's hard for me to judge, given my high opinion of Obama, but I don't think McCain helped himself with the sneering dismissal of his opponent, particularly in light of Obama's historic achievement as the first African-American nominee of a major party. If Joe Biden demonstrates even one-tenth as much disregard for Sarah Palin in Thursday's vice presidential showdown, she could answer every question with a fumbling "I'll get back to ya," point out that she can see Russia from her house, and still win the night.

Because this was the foreign policy debate, Obama needed to show a command of international issues worthy of a president and demonstrate the strength to lead the military, and I think he accomplished both. His assertion that the war in Iraq has distracted the country from more important priorities elsewhere, particularly in Afghanistan, is persuasive. Although it doesn't get a lot of attention, the failure of President Bush to keep his promise to capture or kill Osama bin Laden demonstrates our slipshod pursuit of the "war on terror" and undercuts Republicans on national security.

Obama was the only one on the stage who seemed to care that Bin Laden has evaded capture for seven years and Al Qaeda is resurgent in Afghanistan and the lawless border region of Pakistan. In one of his most effective attacks, Obama took McCain to the woodshed over this:

... it is not true you have consistently been concerned about what happened in Afghanistan. At one point, while you were focused on Iraq, you said well, we can "muddle through" Afghanistan. You don't muddle through the central front on terror and you don't muddle through going after bin Laden. You don't muddle through stamping out the Taliban.

I think that is something we have to take seriously. And when I'm president, I will.

Obama's right on the facts here. McCain said in 2003 that we could "muddle through in Afghanistan" as part of his justification for the Iraq War.

According to the transcript, Bin Laden was mentioned seven times during the debate, and six of them were by Obama. The only mention by McCain was in agreement with the terrorist leader! "Osama bin Laden and General Petraeus have one thing in common that I know of, they both said that Iraq is the central battleground," said McCain, justifying a U.S. military presence in Iraq he shows no desire to end.

McCain was better in debate than he's been in his drain-circling campaign, where his flair for drama queen antics nearly made him the first no-show at a presidential debate, but I don't think he achieved what he needed to change the dynamics of a race he's currently losing. As conventional wisdom settles around the first debate, I expect it will be viewed like Kennedy/Nixon in 1960 and Reagan/Carter in 1980, a debate in which the unproven challenger proved himself worthy of the office he seeks.

Politics · 2008/09/27 · 31 COMMENTS · Link

Fox Reportedly Cancels 'Do Not Disturb'

Fox has cancelled Do Not Disturb, according to Michael Ausiello of Entertainment Weekly:

Sources confirm to me exclusively that the critically savaged sitcom, starring a slumming Jerry O'Connell and Niecy Nash, has been axed after three low-rated episodes. The show's Wednesday time slot will be filled with repeats of 'Til Death, which upgrades the network's 9 to 10 p.m. comedy block from excruciatingly painful to unbearably painful.

The first episode of the show was so bad that its creators took the unusual step of apologizing "for being the perpetrators of such bad television."

If you're scoring at home, I missed this one on the TV Death Pool. The first episode was so bad that I thought it might be cancelled between commercial breaks. Jerry O'Connell's capable of being funny, as his Tom Cruise impersonation demonstrates, but Do Not Disturb did a terrific job of burying that aspect of his personality.

Television · 2008/09/26 · 3 COMMENTS · Link