NU 21, Michigan 14
In case anybody wondered what I decided to do for today’s game:
And yeah, it was hella wet and freezing out there. So the jacket was not about hiding my loyalties — I showed off the shirt plenty of times — but instead about not rollin’ hypothermia-style.
The Real Reason Obama Won
After all, what team beat the ‘Skins to continue the Washington pro football presidential-prediction index?
Truly the Steeler Nation has powers that cannot be comprehended by mere humans. A certain individual would be wise to switch over from the Chicago Bears.
The Next Day
Well, back to reality. Obama won a great victory, but this morning it’s back to looking around and realizing how much there is to fix in the country.
Taking some inventory …
Damn dude, it’s a lot.
President Barack Obama … Unbelievable
… and by a huge victory, at that.
People are chanting “Obama! Obama!”, honking their horns, pounding drums and clapping in unison outside my window in Ann Arbor tonight, and it’s 2:40 a.m. This is louder than any Michigan game and is unlike anything I’ve ever heard. Even when I discount partisanship, the tone feels so much different than the Bush wins of 2000 and 2004 — when I look at the victorious mood I saw back then, it felt that the tone of the celebrations was more, “We won and you didn’t; we proved our ideas right and defeated yours.” Yet today the nature of the happiness seems different, like a huge sense of relief that things really can be what we hoped they could be. Maybe that’s just because it’s been so many years of the other side winning, and so the left side doesn’t know how to gloat; maybe not. But it seems like the difference between a fan who watches his favorite team trounce the visitors versus a guy passing a test that he studied for and still worried he’d fail.
Even up until the last minute, I just didn’t believe Obama would win. It’s not so much that I thought America was racist, but that it was too set in its ways to make such a historic shift in such tumultuous times. People cling to the familiar, I thought. We rally round the known. Yet tonight I saw that so much of the country was so desperate to better things after eight years of the worst un-American leadership it has ever seen that it moved beyond any familiar model and was ready to listen to new ideas.
- The old, heroic American John McCain made a reappearance tonight, just as I thought he would under winning circumstances. That he did so even while losing is a testament to Sen. John McCain. Maybe if he had stayed in his own personality earlier and avoided handing his campaign over to the worst of his party, things would have gone differently. But I don’t know that Republican circumstances could have allowed him to avoid running the campaign he did — there are too many influentials in the Republican Party who continue to bay for liberal blood even after eight years of government dominance, and getting past that obstacle to win the nomination is all but impossible. No matter what the worst of Democratic partisans say, we all saw that McCain never warmed to the ugliest of the attack-dog nastiness that was demanded of him by the party poo-bahs, and that’s why he was ultimately ineffective at it. Perhaps another scored-earth partisan like Bush or the oily Rudy Giuliani would have been able to exploit the nation’s worst attitudes enough to take down Obama, but McCain just seems incapable of that — and that’s a compliment.
I really did feel a great sadness watching him concede tonight, because the entire nation knew that this was the end for a guy who gave his body and so many years of his life to his country. The fact that McCain never would have been able to run the campaign that he probably wanted to run is what has made me so cynical about our political system, because it chews up positive and pure ideals as the barrier for entry into the public forum. Yet watching McCain return to the Senate to ultimately fade from the scene, even with all of his failings — there’s something sad about it all.
- What will make the victory easier to accept for the nation is that there’s no question of the winner — Obama won not only Ohio, but Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, New Mexico, Colorado and potentially even Indiana and North Carolina. (As of now.) Seismic, indeed.
- I keep my emotions in check over political events, but I almost teared up watching Jesse Jackson, Oprah and Obama’s other black supporters weeping with joy at the Grant Park rally. My grandpa who emigrated from Ireland greatly admired John F. Kennedy, and in the Irish admiration for Kennedy and the parallel black support for Obama on dispay tonight there’s something really profound: no matter how awful the things history has done to your race or your nationality, with time and human spirit it’s possible to rise above it and get to a better place. Even if it takes generations, it really can be done. To finally get to witness the end triumph is something very special indeed, and no matter your political leanings, that was special to see tonight.
- As I looked at the McCain rally’s audience today, I wondered more than ever just how the Republican party is going to move into the demographics of the 21st century. While Grant Park was a total mishmash, I couldn’t find any non-white faces in all the Arizona crowd shots and panning shots that I saw. No matter what you consider the “real America”, when that America has to share space with demographic reality, you had better find a way to move towards positive integration.
- Sarah Palin will be back for sure. She won’t stay the national joke many would hope she is.
- I’d like to end on one strange political note, and to acknowledge a historical man who has indirectly led to the greatest racial advance this country has ever seen. You probably won’t guess his name.
He is George W. Bush.
Bush is that reviled type of historical figure who inherits a bad situation, then complicates it and makes it worse to a degree far beyond its original nature. As the worst president in American history, he has in fact done such a poor job for the nation that many of those older voters in Ohio or Virginia who would have otherwise been far too focused on Obama’s race likely said to themselves today, “Race used to be a directly negative factor in a politician, but after the incompetence this country has endured in the past eight years and how angry it has made me, I will vote for anybody the opposition party can offer who represents a break from the present situation.” Obama has a funny name, he’s not white, and he has liberal ideas, but he is something new and became a vessel for hope about a different and better future. That won him the election tonight, and strangely George W. Bush did a lot to open the door.
Strange Realization
I was just now thinking that this is the first election day since 2000 that I’m not working at a big news organization. Two, four, and six years ago I’d be gearing up to be at the office on some weird schedule like 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., hoping we’d order the right kind of pizza for dinner and scrambling to adjust the coverage as new info came in. Everything would be in a huge, crazy rush, and the anticipation of each new development felt like the weight of the world.
Frankly, I miss it.
The Endorsement
My old compatriots at Slate did their incredibly lopsided list last week of which staffer is voting for whom. Since I used to work there, I figured I might as well pile on.
Because it’s late, I’m tired from the immense amount of work being dumped on my head — never listen to someone who says business school is a joke — and I think we’re all nervous and exhausted to see how this crazy thing will turn out, I’ll get this out there:
- I still like some things about John McCain. His socialist / terrorist name-calling campaign makes me really pissed (and legitimately scared for Obama’s life), but sadly you can chalk a lot of that up to the cynical desire to win at all costs that lives at both ends of the political spectrum. (And Obama has it a lot easier: he just has to say “George Bush and John McCain are both Republicans” and that’s all the negative advertising any candidate could ever need.) I like his military experience; I think that’s undervalued in public office these days. I like how he used to buck his party and criticize its worst elements — again, I think most of the not-bucking these days is based on cynical political stuff. Most of the time leading up to late summer, I even thought McCain would make a good president.
But McCain took the win-at-all-costs thing one step too far when he placed a divisive, creationist, happily ignorant hypocrite as his second for the keys to destroy human civilization. Presidents die, it’s happened plenty of times, and choosing your potential successor is not a decision to make based wholly on cynical political considerations. Her handlers let her face the press just a few times, but fortunately that seems to have been enough to scare most voters back to reality. I think there are still good things somewhere under McCain’s ugly 2008 political shell; I think he’ll somehow try to come out of it if elected, though that will be more difficult than ever after yet another year of scorched-earth, “real America” (there’s fake America?), hate-inducing campaigning. But because of Palin, and McCain’s total lack of “country first” principles in choosing her, I can never support their election.
- To get to the other side, I’d like to say off the bat that the cult of personality around Barack Obama weirds me out. After seeing the sausage being made, I don’t get the fawning over a politician. And particularly after 2004, putting your faith in politics is a bad proposition.
But before I get too cynical, one thing I really believe is government as arbiter — non-state actors like business make this nation go more than government ever can, but for that to happen we need fairness, information and protection for when we can’t get it ourselves. This is where we need government: to build our roads, defend our citizens, protect our environment, bring expert knowledge to bear and keep things square all around, at least as best it can. It’s entirely true that government should get out of the way when smart people are out to get positive things done. But the past president actively took government in the wrong direction and treated it as a tool for the powerful and the cynical, not as a protector for America’s best interests. America is a lot more than fattening the top 1% and making false gestures at morality, and the military, the budget, the environment and the consumer have all suffered because the worst administration in American history didn’t bother to look at the whole picture. And when I compare the two candidates, I gotta back the. one who I think is better at seeing and thinking about that whole picture: Obama.
McCain-supporting readers who want to sway me before I vote should know that I learned from all those Bond-villain soliloquies, and have in fact carried out my plan before informing you of it. Your bad. But I hope that you get out and vote no matter who you are -- let's do this.
Why Do Papists Hate America?
There’s an interesting look back today on Al Smith’s 1928 campaign for president, where all sorts of anti-Catholic sentiment got stirred up and Herbert Hoover won in a landslide. The idea that somebody (besides Jack Chick) would drop that today is just laughable — but not so much when you replace “Catholic” with “Muslim”, even if the Muslim part is a falsehood in the first place.
“The most remarkable parallel to 1928 has to do with the idea that Smith was one of ‘those people,’ that the people he represented weren’t real Americans,” said Mr. Slayton, a professor of American history at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. “And when Sarah Palin talks about the ‘real America’ now, I hear an echo of that.”
So yeah, all history repeats itself, ‘n ‘at.
Good Work, Christian Science Monitor
I read this piece two days ago with news-industry glee. Yes, glee:
Christian Science Paper to End Daily Print Edition, NY Times
The CSM is taking the bold step that all newspapers are going to have to take in the next 15-20 years or so: moving solely to the web. They’re an ideal first mover because of their non-profit business model, and thus aren’t losing the big percentages of revenue that metro print papers would drop if they moved today. If you support journalism, it’s time to cheer a paper that’s able to cut the biggest cost of a paper — printing — to keep putting out a solid product.
A Great Summation
Wassup 2008:
A bit corny at the end — even for an Obama supporter like me — but a sadly humorous reminder of why so much of the country thinks we’re heading in the wrong direction.
MTV: Suddenly Great Again
MTV has been essentially a total negative in cultural energy for the past ten years, but then they go ahead and launch this site and totally redeem themselves:
When they say beta, I really hope this one sticks around, because the site counts more than 21,000 videos dating back to Jimi Hendrix clips and plenty of other goodies: Metallica, Run DMC and Grandmaster Flash. I was happy to see Talking Heads as one of the most-viewed vids, so maybe there’s hope for MTV after all.
The intellectual property rights issues on this must be hella complicated, but this is more than worth it. I no longer hate you, MTV! (And thanks, Mark, for pointing this one out.)
You Said It, Jeremy Long
The Palin fires, however, show signs of banking. Over at Sheffield Lanes, mention of her name summons no glint from older bowlers, or from Jeremy and Joe Long, in their 20s, tipping Buds. They liked Mrs. Clinton but pass on Ms. Palin.
“She’s always talking about the ‘Average Joe,’” Jeremy Long said. “Average me! I don’t want myself in the Oval Office. I want someone smarter.”
Never was a truer word spoken. Give me a Rhodes Scholar, war-hero, economic-policy-expert candidate over some beer-swilling jagoff anyday. After the past eight years, we’ve had enough of the latter to last another 275 years. (I hope.)
Online Ad Revenue Drops, But Fear Not
This slightly alarmist but still insightful piece from the New York Times noted last quarter’s decline in overall ad revenue for newspaper websites. The headline “Web Revenue is Stalling” makes it sound as if the online news industry is doomed and will never recover, but that headline could just as easily have been written “As Usual, Advertising Slips In Bad Economy”. I imagine all media will see a decline in growth or outright shrinkage in ad revenue until the economic pendulum swings back the other way, so introducing the story in the “We’re all gonna be out of a job” way is a good attention-grabber but not very accurate.
I did enjoy the part of the piece that went into detail on ad networks, particularly when Steve Stup from WPNI was quoted. I think networks are a positive thing for the present online conditions, though I do appreciate the commoditization argument and how that represents a potential danger. But with online display advertising still in its infancy — no shop right now is seeing online creativity the level of which goes into TV or print — this is a good way to go in enticing old advertisers into the new market. As advertisers become more familiar with the online audience and get a grasp of where their ad dollars will be most effective, then that represents a chance for publications to break away from networks and distinguish themselves as an independent inventory opportunity.
Damn, can anybody tell I just got done writing a corporate strategy paper this morning? The MBA curriculum is crowding my brain.
Unquestionably yes, indeed.But Can He Win the Rust Belt?
This New Yorker article sent to me by The Wife is a really interesting look at the parts of Ohio that would seem like Obama country, but are still a bit shaky:
It’d be nice to write off racial prejudice as no longer an issue, but the big fact is that it still is, particularly in lots of the areas that are going to decide the election. I only hope racism doesn’t get in the way of economic self-interest.
Also, I thought McCain did slightly — slightly — better than Obama last night, even though the whole thing was tremendously boring. Reading the reactions this morning I seem to be alone in this view, but then that’s a good thing. Plus, even if it’s a tie, it automatically goes to That One thanks to the current momentum. (That is not a nice way to refer to someone when they’re sitting right there, btw.)
Of Bacon, and the Ocean Equivalent of Bacon
My friend Bill sent me a link to BaconToday.com, which I now know as the Internet’s finest source of bacon information. (Seriously, that is a professional-looking site, particularly for one devoted solely to bacon. Nice job by 500 Yards Media, whoever they are.) The specific link he sent was this page on bacon cinnamon rolls, which is perhaps the greatest food idea I’ve come across in the past ten years. I remain forever grateful to Bacon Today.
Also, now that I’m living on my own in Ann Arbor, I can once again eat kipper snacks. These are some of the foulest-smelling foods ever put in a can, and as such The Wife is quite vocal in her desire that I not eat them in the house. But man, are they good. Once you fork off the slimy herring skin, the smoke flavor really does render them the bacon of the sea.
Weird Northern European foods: a staple of goodness.
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