National Review Dumps Buckley's Son for Voting Obama
A few days ago, the writer Christopher Buckley, son of the late William F. Buckley, wrote that he was voting for Barack Obama:
It's a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They'd cut off my allowance. ... Obama has in him -- I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy "We are the people we have been waiting for" silly rhetoric -- the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader.
Though Buckley didn't write the endorsement for the National Review, the conservative magazine his father founded, his vote for Obama has resulted in his departure from the magazine.
Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted -- rather briskly! -- by Rich Lowry, NR's editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.
My father in his day endorsed a number of liberal Democrats for high office, including Allard K. Lowenstein and Joe Lieberman. One of his closest friends on earth was John Kenneth Galbraith.
The election isn't even over yet and Republicans have started forming a circular firing squad.
Building a New Football Stadium at UNT
I have a letter to the editor in today's North Texas Daily, the student newspaper I edited back in the Mesozoic Era, to support a student fee to build a new football stadium at the University of North Texas:
As an NT alumnus and former Daily editor, I'm disappointed that the current staff of the newspaper didn't endorse the athletic fee referendum.
Fouts Field is an eyesore that detracts from the university. It's the fifth-oldest building on campus, the conditions inside are abysmal, the viewing experience is bad because of the infield track and the electrical system is so inadequate that 19 portable generators are required to host games there.
It's amazing that the Mean Green were able to win four conference championships and one bowl game while playing at Fouts.
The question here isn't really if NT needs a new stadium, it's when NT will get one. The current proposal asks less of students to support athletics than any other Texas school with a Football Bowl Subdivision program. The stadium will bring other events to Denton in addition to football, and it will enable the athletics program to attract more corporate support, more televised games and more alumni donors.
In the 17 years since I graduated, I've been amazed upon my return visits by the number of new buildings that have sprung up on campus. The Murchison Performing Arts Center, in particular, should be a point of pride for everyone associated with NT.
The new stadium has the potential to be just as important to the future of the university. I hope current students look hard at the merits of the athletic fee because I think they'll conclude, as I did, that this is a fair way to share the cost of the stadium between students, alumni, donors and corporate supporters.
Football-loving alumni like myself are chomping at the bit to get this thing built. We just can't do it on our own.
One thing you come to realize after leaving NT, if you care about the school, is that students have a short opportunity to make their mark and leave their alma mater better than when they arrived.
I think this stadium is a chance for current students to do that, and I hope that after you've looked at the issue, you'll ultimately agree.
The University of North Texas is a large public school north of Dallas with a student enrollment of 34,000, making it the third largest university in the state. Despite its size, the school lacks the financial support of the better-known institutions in Texas like UT and Texas A&M. I attended UNT from 1988-91, graduating with a bachelor of arts in journalism.
Because I'm in Florida, the Mean Green sports programs are my only real tie to the school, aside from a yearly summer pilgrimage with my kids to the campus in Denton.
It seems inarguable to me that Texas schools seeking stronger alumni support need strong athletic teams, and the decrepit Fouts Field is holding my alma mater back. There are other things that UNT does particularly well -- its music programs are nationally acclaimed, for instance -- but academics doesn't park alumni in front of their televisions every Saturday in the fall. College football gives millions of people an excuse to obsess over their school.
The timing of the vote couldn't be worse. Students are being asked to support a $7 credit hour increase in student fees at a time when the economy's imploding and the football team is 0-6 after six straight blowouts. But I think it will pass, because students know that Fouts is a dump and they'll want to be the generation of students who built a stadium. When I return to Denton, a school where I was newspaper editor and my friend Wade Duchene was student body president, the only things I can find from our time there are a tree planted on Earth Day 1990 and a weird metal plaque on the ground near the administration building that contains just two words: "Helixon-Ruuska."
When I walked past that plaque a few summers ago, I had to be one of the only passers-by in years who recognized the significance. Will Helixon and Jay Ruuska were the student body president and vice president when I arrived at UNT in 1988. I'm guessing they planted one of the trees, but because the plaque is so vague and lies flat on the ground, it looks like some kind of frontier gravestone.
Obama Campaign Remembers Earliest Donors
I just got an email from Barack Obama telling me something interesting -- I was one of his earliest donors:
You were one of the first 100,000 people to own a piece of this campaign. You provided the strength needed to build a movement.
Back then, few pundits or insiders thought we had a chance. But thanks to you, we overcame steep odds. Twenty months later, millions of Americans all across the country have joined you, working for change.
But in these final three weeks, our opponents are signaling they will do whatever they can to distract voters and distort the truth, so we need to redouble our efforts.
We need to grow this movement by 100,000 new donors before Friday.
By promising to match the contribution of a new supporter, you'll encourage them to give for the first time. This is your last opportunity to partner with a fellow supporter and make your donation go twice as far.
At the time I first gave money to Obama, I wasn't backing his campaign yet. I make a practice of giving small contributions to candidates early in presidential primaries to learn more about them. I gave money to Obama, John Edwards and Joe Biden, deciding on the eve of the Iowa Caucus that Biden was my preferred candidate. Once you give money to a politician you never hear the end of them. Edwards sent me text messages before each debate. Obama paired me up with other donors. Biden's wife Valerie sent me campaign updates in email. I had trouble explaining my contribution policy to a BusinessWeek reporter in January without sounding insane.
I even heard from Biden a few times after he dropped out.
If Obama wins the election, voter concerns about the economic meltdown will be cited as the main reason, but I think the campaign he's run has as much to do with his success. Obama's motivated people to work for his campaign in numbers I've never seen before in past elections, and he's gotten his volunteers to do the real work of campaigning -- knocking on doors and hitting the phones -- rather than just putting up signs in their yards. Over the past two weeks I've received five phone calls and a personal visit from Obama supporters. They want to know first who I'm voting for, and second if I'll volunteer time to getting the vote out here in Florida. I've also been invited to a neighborhood gathering of Obama supporters.
Registered as a Democrat in the red states of Texas and Florida during presidential elections, I've never been personally visited by a campaign before, even in 2000 when Florida was anticipated to be one of the most important swing states. Obama's better at getting people to own a piece of his candidacy than any Democrat in my lifetime. The email he sent today, which shows he kept track of his earliest donors, is an inspired way to encourage us to do more in the home stretch.
Though it's still possible for John McCain to rally and beat Obama -- Democrats should never underestimate our ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory -- the former community organizer has built an extremely well-organized community of voters. Considering the number of Republicans who ridiculed that part of his background during their convention speeches, I'm hoping he gets the last laugh.
Sarah Palin: 'How Dare They Boo Piper!'
My favorite Amy Carter moment was when a reporter asked her if she had any message for the children of America. She looked at the reporter square in the eyes, thought for a few moments, and then gave this brilliant reply: "No."
-- Danny Miller, Huffington Post
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin dropped the puck at the Philadelphia Flyers game Saturday night and was greeted with either a loud chorus of boos or a mixed response, depending on which media account you read. On the videos I've seen, such as this one, you can hear a lot of boos before the Flyers public address system cranks up the volume on patriotic music all the way to 11, which makes me think they were hearing a pretty negative reception.
Palin came out on the ice with her daughters Willow and Piper, the younger girl dressed in a Flyers jersey. A Fox News producer, Shushannah Walshe, says that Palin intentionally dressed Piper that way to discourage boos:
The GOP Vice-Presidential nominee said at an earlier fundraiser that she would stop some of the booing from the rowdy Philadelphia fans by putting her seven year old daughter, Piper in a Flyers jersey. She said, "How dare they boo Piper!"
Her secret weapon may have worked.
National Journal corroborates the producer's account.
What kind of parent would expose a seven-year-old child to a potentially abusive crowd in an attempt to defuse hostility? Philly fans are notorious for being tough -- they once booed Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin as he was being taken off the field strapped to a gurney with a potential spinal injury.
I hate to encourage the Palin sideshow, since the economic meltdown has already made her a non-factor in this election, but there's something skeevy about the way she's used her kids in this campaign. When Bristol Palin's pregnancy was announced, as intense media coverage and ugly blog speculation about the teen were at their height, the McCain/Palin campaign orchestrated an event during the Republican National Convention so McCain could greet Bristol and the child's father, Levi Johnston, on an airport tarmac as the news media broadcast the event live.
McCain's public embrace of the teens was bizarre. If the purpose was to put Bristol Palin and her boyfriend at ease, it could've been done privately. Instead, the campaign used them to demonstrate the social tolerance of the Republican presidential candidate, making a press spectacle of Palin's daughter at the same time they were issuing statements telling the press to lay off Palin's family.
Now Piper Palin's being used as a prop to save her mother the embarrassment of being booed by a sports crowd in a swing state.
Contrast that approach to how the Carters, Clintons and Bushes treated their young daughters during their campaigns and subsequent presidencies. The children were kept out of the public eye as much as possible, reinforcing the message they were off-limits. Chelsea Clinton, Jenna Bush and Barbara Bush never worked political events until they were in their 20s -- aside from the obligatory family gatherings at the end of convention nominating speeches. If Palin has made a single campaign appearance without trotting out her kids, I haven't seen it.
Scoring the Second Obama/McCain Debate
On a night when he had to change the dynamics of a presidential race he's losing, John McCain wandered all over the place during Tuesday's presidential debate, both figuratively and literally. Sometimes walking around to no purpose as Barack Obama spoke, McCain even had the bad luck at the end of blocking the camera, an Abe Simpson moment that separated moderator Tom Brokaw from his teleprompter.
As the faltering economy dominates the election, McCain continues to struggle to put together a steady message that provides comfort to concerned lower- and middle-class voters. Instead, he sprang a dramatic new proposal on the world without laying any groundwork first. Last time around, he proposed a spending freeze. Tuesday night, he offered to buy up all bad mortgages in the country:
As president of the United States, Alan, I would order the secretary of the treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes -- at the diminished value of those homes and let people be able to make those -- be able to make those payments and stay in their homes.
A visitor to Workbench recently derided me as a "socialist," a term that may never be less effective than it is today when directed pejoratively at a liberal. The U.S. just took over our largest insurance company and made a $700 billion bail-, er, rescue of our largest banks. Now the Republican candidate in the race wants to take ownership of hundreds of thousands of American mortgages, a massive aid proposal that could keep Americans in their homes at the cost of a ginormous new bureaucracy. The party of small government has become the party of all government. President Bush is one guayabera shirt from being Fidel Castro. Now if we could just get our right-wing socialists to bail out uninsured Americans the way they rescued unscrupulous Wall Street bankers.
Because he doesn't develop his ideas -- throwing them out as recklessly as he chose Sarah Palin -- McCain can't sell them in a manner that engenders confidence in his ability to carry them out. As Obama spoke about the need to help middle-class people, McCain instead referred twice to how we have to "buy up these bad loans," a phrase that took CNN's wired-up undecideds straight to their unhappy place.
McCain said "I know" 16 times during the debate, but he often didn't follow through and explain how he'd exhibit his knowledge in practice. Americans just have to take his word for it. This was most clear on the subject of Osama Bin Laden. "I'll get Osama bin Laden, my friends," McCain said. "I'll get him. I know how to get him. I'll get him no matter what and I know how to do it."
Like President Nixon's secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, McCain has a secret plan to get Bin Laden. If he knows how to get him, why hasn't he told Bush?
I don't think Obama was great during the debate, but he did a much better job of addressing economic concerns and criticizing the fiscal recklessness of President Bush. He repeatedly tied McCain to a Republican administration that was handed a budget surplus and will scurry from office leaving the nation desperately in hock to China:
When George Bush came into office, our debt -- national debt was around $5 trillion. It's now over $10 trillion. We've almost doubled it.
And so while it's true that nobody's completely innocent here, we have had over the last eight years the biggest increases in deficit spending and national debt in our history. And Sen. McCain voted for four out of five of those George Bush budgets.
The transcript shows that McCain has gone another debate without once using the term "middle class." (On the plus side, he didn't use the term "maverick" either.)
Obama has now won both debates, according to the media's polls and focus groups, and I think in part it's due to the Democratic Party's well-earned reputation for being stronger on the economy. Nobody's buying the idea that today's borrow-and-spend Republicans are better than yesterday's tax-and-spend Democrats.
But another reason for Obama's success is the reassuring consistency of his message. He's not reaching for gimmicks and distractions all the time, trying to win news cycles with sideshows about lipstick on a pig and the new trumped-up nonsense about palling around with terrorists. If we need "a steady hand at the tiller" in tough times, as McCain said last night in his closing statement, there's only one candidate in that race. On issues and temperament and ideas, McCain's constantly on the move.
Campaign Ad: 'Maverick Maverick Maverick!'
The ad agency Goodby, Silverstein and Partners has created some inventive fake campaign ads for the presidential campaign. This one's good enough to be a real ad for Obama.
Two more over-the-top ads from the agency can be found on Stunningly Bad.Com.
I've thought for a while that the world needs an ad agency that specializes in creating attack ads for subjects outside of politics. Our most sarcastic voiceover actors shouldn't be put on a shelf for three out of every four years. If Madison Avenue can sell the most powerful job in the free world by employing sneering contempt for rivals, there's no reason the same technique can't be an effective way to sell things like erectile dysfunction medicine, soft drinks and public-service campaigns.
Review: 'Indignation' by Philip Roth
Philip Roth's Indignation describes the short unhappy life of Marcus Messner, a college student in the early '50s who is paranoid about getting kicked out of school and drafted to serve in the Korean War, in spite of the fact that his grades are so strong he could become valedictorian. Messner, the dutiful son of a kosher butcher in Newark, transfers from a local school to Winesburg College in Ohio, trying to escape an overprotective father who has become overwhelmed by fear that his son will die.
Messner's a mess, a bundle of unexpressed antisocial rage who can't get along with his roommates, rejects numerous invitations to socialize with classmates and can't seem to take joy from anything -- not even his first sexual relationship, which falls into his lap in a classmate's 1940 LaSalle Touring Sedan.
I've never read Roth before, but the way he writes sex in Indignation reminded me of the 40-Year-Old Virgin bluffing his way through a discussion of sexual conquest among male friends by talking about "bags of sand."
Sex figures heavily into Messner's story -- excruciatingly bad sex, both in execution and description. Anyone suffering from "prolonged excitation" can cure the problem by reading the sex scenes in this book.
Indignation picks up when it covers the rest of Messner's life, where his Bertrand Russell-inspired atheism causes him to rebel against the requirement that all Winesburg students attend chapel. A prolonged argument between Messner and the Dean of Men -- where Messner schools the dean on Russell's famous 1927 lecture "Why I Am Not a Christian" -- drives the remainder of the book towards a conclusion you know will be tragic for the student. I found the setting of Winesburg, which Roth copped from Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, a pleasant reminder of the way a college can be a world unto itself.
Unfortunately, just when you think the story's going somewhere, the small-page, big-font, 233-page book abruptly ends. Roth constructs a plot device in which he can stop Messner's story at any time, and he does, cutting it off before the crisis that leads Messner to leave school. He never justifies how the young man, who believes that leaving college means certain doom in Korea, throws away his academic career. He never shows you how Messner's father reacts to the thing he most feared, the notion that in life, "the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences."
Instead, you get a seven-page wrap up zooming through all the events you missed because the book ended too soon. Talk about indignation.
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