Just as the smoove moves Obama deployed as a fedora-sporting youth to win Michelle were used to interpret his political sexing of the American people during the campaign, Kantor writes:

...examining the first couple's relationship - their negotiations of public and private life, of conflicts and compromises - offers hints about Barack Obama the president, not just Barack Obama the husband.

Long before many Americans, Michelle Obama was seduced by his mind, his charm, his promise of social transformation; long before he held national office, she questioned whether he really could deliver on all his earnest pledges.For nearly two decades, Michelle Obama has lived with the president of the United States. Now the rest of us do, too

Now that we have been seduced by his mind, we live with Obama. But not in his house. Just metaphorically—in the house of America. So, what can we learn from the Obamas' "negotiations of public and private life... conflicts and compromises" in their real house? Compromise is just another word for "settling," and clearly that's the stage the public is at in its metaphorical relationship with Barack (Which should be followed by a few years of passive-aggressive sniping, followed by a messy divorce in which our children are the only losers.) Then, of course, there was just that big compromise on health care. And in fact the compromises detailed in the Times piece seem as one-sided as Republicans would like to claim that health care one is. Consider the "compromise" that facilitated Barack's 2004 U.S. Senate run:

During that race, Michelle was still a somewhat reluctant partner: at the outset, they made a deal that if he lost, he would get out entirely. "It was a compromise," Marty Nesbitt, one of the president's closest friends, told me. "O.K. One. More. Try," he explained, banging out each word on a side table.

This was not a compromise. This was Barack getting to do what he wants to do, and not doing it if he fails to do it. In the Barack-Michelle household, it seems most of the compromises had a similar sort of uncompromising character. Which is sort of how the bail-out was passed in our house?

Also, now that we all live with Barack we put huge pictures of him and his family all over everything—just like he and Michelle do in their real house:

Here is a shot of the Obamas entering a Cinco de Mayo reception, his arm draped protectively around her back. Next, a photo of the president placing a kiss on his wife's cheek after his address on health care to Congress. Poster-size versions of these and other photographs are displayed in rotation along the White House corridors.

The number of pictures reflects the quantity of our love.

And, living with Barack—at least in the good old days—we would sometimes get sexy with him in a very public way:

Friends who visit the White House describe occasionally turning corners to find the first couple mid-embrace. They also seem unusually willing, for a presidential couple, to kiss, touch and flirt in public. It may be that they are broadcasting their affection to the rest of us, an advertisement of their closeness. Or they may simply be holding tightly to each other as they navigate new and uncertain terrain.

But the most important thing about our lives with Obama is that when things get rough, we don't break down or seek counseling or engage in awesome hate sex. We take it down a notch. We have a teachable moment, like Barack and Michelle did when the stress of Barack's first, failed campaign for U.S. Senate threatened their marriage:

Did you ever seek counseling? I asked.

The first lady looked solemnly at the president. He said: "You know, I mean, I think that it was important for us to work this through. . . . There was no point where I was fearful for our marriage. There were points in time where I was fearful that Michelle just really didn't - that she would be unhappy"...

In the end, what seems more unusual than the Obamas' who-does-what battles - most working parents have one version or another - is the way they turned them into a teachable moment, converting lived experience into both a political message and what sounds like the opposite of standard political shtick.

And then Obama holds us for a long, long time.

Over the past 10 weeks, she's come close a couple of times to surpassing but this is the first instance during that time period when she has more words on the page (310) than the person who the interview is supposedly about (305). When interviewing Benjamin Todd Jealous, Solomon clocked in at 303 words, while Jealous only had 357, and when interviewing Howard Dean, she got off 278 words and 395. Doesn't that mean that the column is now officially about Solomon? Maybe that's why It's called "Questions With..." instead of "Answers From..."

Each of Solomon's columns bears the tag "Interview has been condensed and edited," a tag that was added after a dust up concerning the accuracy of her questions and answers. It is now well known that Solomon finesses what both she and her subject say in any given interview. That means that, rather than running a transcript and dealing with a taciturn subject, Solomon has chosen to give herself more column inches than who she was interviewing. Family Guy may be painfully unfunny, but that's a little harsh, even for the acid-tongued Solomon.

It's been a year since Radar folded, what the hey is Maer Roshan doing with himself these days? He is "working on some TV projects" out in LA, and going to the beach and working out, John Koblin reports. Wonderful!


Jonathan Lethem's new novel Chronic City is using the same cover photo that Portfolio used for its inaugural issue, the NYO points out. Meaning that the book will fade away, but not before Jonathan Lethem spends his entire $100 million budget.


I have come to the (late) conclusion that the New York Times Magazine, which gave us the immortal, meaningless phrase "The Way We Live Now," is America's Most Pretentious Magazine. Not bad, just pretentious. What do you say about that, NYT Mag editor Gerald Marzorati? "Does the Magazine have an ideology? At the risk of giving some of my colleagues hives, I think it does. Call it Urban Modern." Thanks, we might!


The new editor of the resurrected version of Vibe magazine will be Jermaine Hall, formerly editor in chief of the (now-dead) King magazine. Is there still room in the magazine industry for scantily clad women? Only time will tell.

NYT Picker caught the editor's note, which is inexplicably not on the paper's web site, and points out that Siebert's sin is strikingly similar to what Maureen Dowd did when she lifted a paragraph from Josh Marshall's blog a couple months ago. Only Siebert, a contributing writer for the Times Magazine, got rapped with a lengthy editor's note that explained the mechanics of his mistake, while Dowd got off with a one-line correction that explained nothing.

Siebert's story ended with an account of a whale that was found stranded in fishing lines in 2005 off the coast of San Francisco, and its reaction after rescuers freed it. According to the editor's note, Siebert lifted some of his descriptive language from an e-mail account of the event that had been sent to him:

Some of the language in the retelling of that event was identical to descriptions of the rescue in an e-mail message that circulated widely after the incident. Specifically, the lines that the whale swam "in joyous circles" after it was freed and "nudged" the divers gently, "as if in thanks"; that the divers thought it was "the most beautiful experience they ever had"; and that one diver said he would "never be the same" appeared in the e-mail message, which was sent to the Times' writer, Charles Siebert, in the course of his reporting.... Mr. Siebert said that he unwittingly incorporated some of the phrasing from the e-mail message that he had been sent earlier. The Times does not allow writers to replicate language without attribution, and had the editors known of these repetitions, they would not have published the passage in that form.

This hippy-dippy testimonial from one "Dr. Ingeborg Puchert," found on the web site of the "University of Healing," contains some—but not all—of the phrases at issue, and seems like the sort of thing that would get widely circulated via e-mail. Siebert also relied on—but didn't lift any language from—a San Francisco Chronicle account of the same event.

Writing is, in its own way, hard—not as hard as real work, but still. We can understand how Siebert could either cut and paste something into his story with the intention of chopping it up into quotes and later forgetting to attribute it, or write something that he thought was his own synthesis of various sources but actually included phraseology bouncing around in his head that he didn't know at the time was a direct quote from one of those sources. It's not necessarily a cardinal sin, and—if Siebert is telling the truth—it's categorically different from someone deliberately plagiarizing someone else's work.

But it's not different—at all—from what Maureen Dowd did in May, when she "inadvertently" copied an entire paragraph written by Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall into her column. Dowd's explanation for the slip was that she was "talking to a friend of mine...who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column...but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me." We have to assume, giving Dowd the benefit of the doubt, that she was referring to an e-mail conversation, because it's preposterous to imagine that her friend verbally recounted a 43-word paragraph word-for-word and that Dowd took it down in her notes as such. So it was an instance of a Times reporter unintentionally lifting language from an e-mail.

When Siebert does it, he gets a 232-word editor's-note-lashing explaining, in finite detail, how the error happened. When Dowd does it, she gets this:

Correction: May 18, 2009
Maureen Dowd's column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall's blog at Talking Points Memo.

We've asked the Times why the two cases received differential treatment, and why the editor's note isn't available online. And we've emailed Dowd to ask her why she thinks Siebert's lifting was apparently seen as more problematic than hers. And we couldn't immediately track down contact info for Siebert—let us know what you think, Charles.

You will read it, and feel better about how Obama is not doing this or that quickly enough or even at all. Or, if you don't want to read it, because it is long or because something about Matt Bai bugs you, try Ezra Klein's summary. See? Don't you feel better about things now?

Ok. Now. You probably don't want to read Kevin Baker's essay in the upcoming Harper's, "Barack Hoover Obama," which is more or less the exact same observation, only presented less optimistically. And, specifically, it addresses the inkling of dissatisfaction we have each time we hear that Emanuel phrase repeated: don't you have, right now, a rather historic opportunity to redefine what the "possible" means?

No doubt, President Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would claim that by practicing "the art of the possible," they are ensuring that "the perfect does not become the enemy of the good." But by not even proposing the relevant legislation, Obama has ceded a key part of the process-so much so that his retreat seems not so much tactical as a reversion to his core political beliefs.

A major theme of Obama's 2006 book The Audacity of Hope is impatience with "the smallness of our politics" and its "partisanship and acrimony." He expresses frustration at how "the tumult of the sixties and the subsequent backlash continues to drive our political discourse," and voices a professional appreciation for Ronald Reagan's ability to exploit such divisions. The politician he admires the most-ironically enough, considering the campaign that was to come-is Bill Clinton. For all his faults, Clinton, in Obama's eyes, "instinctively understood the falseness of the choices being presented to the American people" and came up with his "Third Way," which "tapped into the pragmatic, non-ideological attitude of the majority of Americans."
[...]
Just as Herbert Hoover came to internalize the "business progressivism" of his era as a welcome alternative to the futile, counterproductive conflicts of an earlier time, so has Obama internalized what might be called Clinton's "business liberalism" as an alternative to useless battles from another time-battles that liberals, in any case, tended to lose.

Clinton's business liberalism, however, is a chimera, every bit as much a capitulation to powerful and selfish interests as was Hoover's 1920s progressivism. We are back in Evan Bayh territory here, espousing a "pragmatism" that is not really pragmatism at all, just surrender to the usual corporate interests. The common thread running through all of Obama's major proposals right now is that they are labyrinthine solutions designed mainly to avoid conflict. The bank bailout, cap-and-trade on carbon emissions, health-care pools-all of these ideas are, like Hillary Clinton's ill-fated 1993 health plan, simultaneously too complicated to draw a constituency and too threatening for Congress to shape and pass as Obama would like. They bear the seeds of their own defeat.

So yeah, this is just more typical liberal whining about how the guy who never really pretended to be anything more than a mainstream liberalish Democrat has turned out to be a mainstream liberalish Democrat, but still: WE WERE PROMISED A STEALTH SOCIALIST!

[Photo: Pete Souza/The White House]

If you'll recall back to Clinton friend and White House staffer Vince Foster's suicide and the plane crash that killed Clinton administration Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, Christopher Ruddy, at the time working at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, worked diligently to promote his theories that both men were murdered for political reasons, implicating that the Clinton's maybe-kinda-probably had something to do with it in each case. But that's all water under the bridge now for Clinton and Ruddy, who are now a couple of old chums.

Among those he has been friendly with lately is Christopher Ruddy, a conservative journalist who was a chief proponent of cover-up theories involving the Clintons during the 1990s. In his book, "The Strange Death of Vincent Foster," Ruddy rejected official findings that Foster, a deputy White House counsel, killed himself in a Virginia park and suggested the possibility of "a cover-up conducted by people who have, with the help of the press, placed themselves above the law." Ruddy also advanced the notion that Ron Brown, the Clinton commerce secretary who died in an airplane crash in Croatia in 1996, was actually shot in the head.

Ruddy today is the founder and chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative news-magazine. He told me he came around on Clinton after Ed Koch, the former New York mayor, introduced them. That led to lunches and more contacts, and now Ruddy says he was wrong about Clinton. "I do consider Bill Clinton a friend, and I think he would consider me a friend," Ruddy said. "And to think of all the wars we went through in the '90s, it seems almost surreal."

With the passage of time, Ruddy said he came to believe that Clinton was much less liberal than his enemies thought. After all, Clinton overhauled welfare, tamed the deficit and promoted free trade. While still a proud "Reagan conservative," Ruddy said he now thinks the attacks on Clinton in the 1990s went too far. "Did we like and enjoy all the salacious reporting and all the stuff going on in the '90s?" he asked. "I guess we thought, This is just politics. But looking back at my role, I was probably over the top. And if I knew then what I know today, I wouldn't have pursued some of that stuff as aggressively as I did. I did an honest reporter's job. But I have a different take on it now."

Ruddy also attributes his change of heart to Clinton's foundation, which has impressed him and other onetime foes. Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire publisher who financed Ruddy's investigations and other anti-Clinton activities, is now a contributor to the foundation. So is Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman whose Fox News was a regular thorn in Clinton's side. Clinton over the years has also made peace with other former adversaries, like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich. The elder George Bush told me he now considers Clinton "a real friend." When I asked what changed his view, he wrote in an e-mail message: "I didn't know him personally back then. I knew him, but not up close and personal. Now I do."

So if Clinton is friends with all of his old political opponents, who the hell is he hating on these days? Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy and Bill Richardson and Jesse Jackson and just about every other prominent Democrat who had the audacity to support Obama in the primary against Hillary, that's who!

People close to Clinton said he has largely got over his resentment at Obama but not toward Ted Kennedy and his niece, Caroline Kennedy. As Clinton sees it, they say, he did so much for the Kennedys over the years that he felt they became almost family. Nor has he forgiven Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who endorsed Obama even though Clinton appointed him to two cabinet posts. And the man once called the "first black president" remains deeply wounded by allegations that he made racially insensitive remarks during the campaign, like dismissing Obama's South Carolina win by comparing it with Jesse Jackson's victories there in the 1980s.

"None of them ever really took seriously the race rap," he told me. "They knew it was politics. I had one minister in Texas in the general election come up and put his arm around me." This was an Obama supporter. "And he came up, threw his arm around me and said, ‘You've got to forgive us for that race deal.' He said, ‘That was out of line.' But he said, ‘You know, we wanted to win real bad.' And I said, ‘I got no problem with that.' I said it's fine; it's O.K. And we laughed about it and we went on." The other side is moving on, too. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, who once recalled an angry Clinton berating him on the phone for criticizing the former president's campaign rhetoric, is letting bygones be bygones, at least publicly. "No fence-mending is needed," Clyburn said through a spokeswoman.

Unfortunately, there was no mention in the article about which models and starlets Clinton banged on Ron Burkle's dirty old man fuck-plane, which was a major disappointment. Oh well, maybe next time.

The Mellowing Of Bill Clinton [New York Times Magazine]

Newt used to be the Speaker of the House, and he engineered the Republican Revolution in 1994 and by 1998 he'd resigned in disgrace because his brilliant plan to campaign entirely on LET'S IMPEACH BILL CLINTON was not actually very popular, especially after he cheated on his wife (not the wife he divorced while she was recovering from cancer surgery, that was his first wife).

Now 10 years and the Bush era have gone by, with Newt remaining quiet, but in this Republican leadership vacuum only he and Rush Limbaugh have any cred with anyone, because every elected Republican is more or less a joke.

Unlike the bomb-thrower Rush, Newt likes to build his reputation for smarts with impossibly boring and wonky (but nice-sounding) projects like a plan for "air-traffic modernization" involving space computers and the health care records computerization thing that is now an official Project Worth Caring About name-checked by the president. See, he is an ideas man! A wonk!

But those are the window dressing for what Newt is actually all about, which is Stunts. Stupid stunts instead of governing, or reform, or anything, really. This is the nihilism he pretends to decry in the "margins" of his party, but it is his bread-and-butter. The federal government shut-down. His proposal, in this piece, to suspend ALL TAXES for A YEAR instead of passing a stimulus bill. Remember "drill here, drill now, pay less"? That was him! It was also a bald-faced fucking lie! These are political ideas you put forth to get elected, not so actually solve problems once you are in charge. It is impossible for Newt to distance himself from the "base-rallying" shenanigans of the Bush years when they were just his own brilliant political ideas put into action in the grandest scale possible.

And, Matt Bai, we have always thought you covered Democrats in a particularly obnoxious and condescending way (and not only when they actually deserved it), so it is odd to see you accepting all of this completely 100% wrong nonsense at face value:

As Gingrich explained it to me back in November, just after the election, what he had been preaching to Cantor and other House Republicans was actually more radical than that. Gingrich, who likes to reduce the world to binary options, saw two basic paths for Obama: either he was going to cater to interest groups and his Congressional wing, or he was going to take a more centrist, more reformist approach to governing.

If he chose Door No. 1, then Republicans had to propose a thoughtful, alternate agenda of their own. "Screaming ‘No!' is just not a strategy," Gingrich told me. But he said he was betting that Obama would take the second approach - that he meant what he said about leaving the old doctrines behind and intended to govern in a way that might fundamentally realign American politics. And if that were the case, Gingrich reasoned, not only would it be politically unpalatable to stand in Obama's way, but chances were he would soon face serious fractures within his own party and would need to create a broader coalition of partners to get his initiatives through the Congress.

In other words, Gingrich wasn't suggesting to Cantor and the others that they should simply pretend to like Obama well enough. He was telling them that if Obama was going to move far enough in their direction, their best play - and maybe their only play - was actually to team up with him on legislation if they could.

Yes, and then Obama selected door number 2 and Newt led the charge to vote "no" on everything en masse and, in doing so, they didn't "find their voice" so much as enable the president to ignore them as obstructionists and proclaim that he gave it a shot but those dead-enders won't listen to reason.

So good luck saving the party, Newt.

This David Plouffe story right here illustrates exactly why Barack Obama is our president-elect:

The paradox of this scene was that the Obama campaign’s communications strategy was predicated in part on an aggressive indifference to this insider set. Staff members were encouraged to ignore new Web sites like The Page, written by Time’s Mark Halperin, and Politico, both of which had gained instant cachet among the Washington smarty-pants set. “If Politico and Halperin say we’re winning, we’re losing,” Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, would repeat mantralike around headquarters. He said his least favorite words in the English language were, “I saw someone on cable say this. . . .”

Ignore Mark Halperin! It's that simple, people. And it's never been easier than it is today! Thanks, Time.

Also Obama and Gibbs have been working the press together for years, and Obama will cut Gibbs if the message isn't properly disseminated.

Obama and Gibbs developed a fast rapport. I remember interviewing Obama in early 2005, a few months after he was elected to the Senate, in his temporary office in the basement of a Senate office building. He and Gibbs were sprawled out in virtually identical postures like a couple of frat brothers watching a football game — without the beer.

Clearly they were pushing the message that day that Obama was no prima donna. He was happy to be a team player, complete his freshman dirty work. Obama and Gibbs kept emphasizing that Obama had already sat through countless town meetings in Illinois and committee hearings on Capitol Hill. The article I wrote poked gentle fun at Obama for his and Gibbs’s zealous efforts to show how unzealous Obama was being about climbing the ladder. “Jeez, was it really that obvious?” Obama said to me when I ran into him and Gibbs on Capitol Hill a few weeks later. “Nice going there, Gibbs,” Obama said, pretending to smirk at his sidekick.

Here is that sarcastic article, with the "gentle fun" and all. Also that is clearly the sort of good-natured ribbing, on Obama's part, that is probably scary to hear, for an aide.

Anyway the rest of the story is all "they're just like Bush, message-wise" and "they're so disciplined" and "press secretary's a funny job" and stuff like that, there are still no compelling stories about the Obama campaign team, guys.

Kuczynski, 40, is married to Charles Stevenson, a rich investor 20 years her senior. I.V.F. failed the couple and natural pregnancies ended in miscarriages. They switched their attention, then, to surrogacy. Specifically, to gestational surrogacy, in which "the surrogate mother is carrying a child genetically unrelated to her." Alex encountered, during this process, the class system! "We encountered the wink-nod rule: Surrogates would never say they were motivated to carry a child for another couple just for money; they were all motivated by altruism. This gentle hypocrisy allows surrogacy to take place. Without it, both sides would have to acknowledge the deep cultural revulsion against attaching a dollar figure to the creation of a human life."

But:

We had the money to pay. My husband is a very successful investor; I have made a healthy income for a writer. We were lucky in that we could afford to do what most infertile couples cannot. The questions for us were philosophical. I suppose I could have decided that it was my destiny to remain childless, that it was somehow meant to be. But I hate the phrase “meant to be,” loaded with its small, smug assumptions, its apathy and fake stoicism. I believe that where things can be fixed, they should be fixed. In our case, reproductive technology could make it relatively easy for us to have our biological child.

And, at that moment, having a biologically related child felt necessary. What began as wistful longing in my 20s had blistered into a mad desire that seemed to defy logic. The compulsion to create our own bloodline seemed medieval, and I knew we could enjoy our marriage — our lives — without a child. Yet I couldn’t argue myself out of my desire. A child with our genes would be a part of us. My husband’s face would be mirrored in our child’s face, proof that our love not only existed, but could be recreated beyond us. Die without having created a life, and die two deaths: the death of yourself, and the death of the immense opportunity that is a child.

Thankfully, they found an eminently qualified woman to carry the baby. Cathy is married to a VP of marketing for a credit union! She is intelligent, and her answers to the surrogate questionnaire "were not handwritten in the tiny alloted spaces." She wrote a really good essay. Not just any biologically competent womb can carry a Kuczynski. Despite the fact that all the involved genetic material came from Alex and her husband, surrogate mother Cathy's husband's college degree comes up as an important factor. As does the couple's "renovated mill house on a creek in a suburb of Philadelphia."

Things went sour when Cathy went to Las Vegas, and the unborn baby learned the horrors of commercial air travel and gambling, but everything turned out fine in the end, and they have a beautiful baby boy with a slightly ridiculous inherited name (Maxime), and good for them. Alex still has terrible nightmares about how she didn't deliver the baby all by herself, but hey, at least it is genetically the product of her and her husband, and not some dumb adopted baby.

In Zoepf's formulation, all Saudi militants need to see a nonviolent path is a little helpful instruction, and maybe a new wife:

"All right, Ali,” the sheik said. “Why do we answer calls for jihad? Is it because all Muslim leaders want to make God’s word highest? Do we kill if these leaders tell us to kill?”

Ali looked confused, but whispered, “Yes.”

“No — wrong!” Jilani cried as Ali blushed. "Of course we want to make God’s word highest, but not every Muslim leader has this as his goal. There are right jihads and wrong jihads, and we must examine the situation for ourselves."

At some point though, Zoepf is forced to define jihad, which she says "usually refers to armed conflict with non-Muslims in defense of the global Islamic community." Oh, armed conflict. Like arm wrestling and such. That makes sense. She details all the rewards organizations offer to reformed jihadists: candy bars, wives, Toyotas, employment. It almost makes you want to join the revolution just to get reformed.

We're not against fighting the war of ideas, we just have some questions about how it's being fought. The basic principle that Muslims join the revolution through chance is fine, but is that also the way to get them out of the revolution? By the end of the article, you come to respect the Saudi approach more than ours:

Though it might seem out of place in a society whose religion proscribes the representation of animal or human forms, art therapy is practiced. Awad al-Yami, who studied the subject at Penn State, leads the classes, and chalk drawings by former jihadists decorate the walls of his classroom. Although the sketches — mostly ornate Arabic calligraphy and depictions of flowers — do not especially suggest that demons are being wrestled with, art therapy helps inmates to examine the consequences of their actions, Yami says. “I ask them, ‘If you blow up a car, what will happen?’ The paper gives them a safe place to express some destructive emotions.”

Time for fingerpainting, you guys!

He's a terrible candidate, unable to read from teleprompters and unwilling to do campaign events before 9 a.m.. He chafes at taking directions—told to gently explain once in the first debate that Obama might not understand an issue, McCain condescendingly repeated the mantra "Senator Obama doesn't understand..." ten times. These are unfair and surely maddening criticisms—ability to read from a teleprompter is not actually that presidential a quality, or else Sarah Palin would be qualified—but this is the world we live in, and GOP strategists certainly helped create it.

But more importantly, his high self-regard makes him utterly unable to forgive or get over minor personal slights. He can't understand why everyone else doesn't see how much of an unprepared phony Barack Obama is, and the "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy" attitude is always, always a loser—ask the last five Democrats to run for President not named Clinton. His ability to justify his own inconsistencies isn't shared by the electorate either. In his mind, he can square Palin's inexperience and robocalls and negative campaigning with the honorable man he's always been.

The constant schizophrenic narrative changes are, of course, Steve Schmidt's fault. And here's some inside shit on the Palin pick—the serious grownups had a decent shortlist that included Pawlenty, Romney, and even Bloomberg. But they weren't exciting and mavericky ernough, so Schmidt and Davis quietly picked Palin based entirely on image without examining substance.

The meeting carried on without Schmidt or Rick Davis uttering an opinion about Palin. Few in the room were aware that the two had been speaking to each other about Palin for some time now. Davis was with McCain when the two met Palin for the first time, at a reception at the National Governors Association winter meeting in February, in the J. W. Marriott Hotel in Washington. It had not escaped McCain’s attention that Palin had blasted through the oleaginous Alaska network dominated by Frank Murkowski and Ted Stevens, much in the same manner that McCain saw himself doing when he was a young congressman. Newt Gingrich and others had spoken of Palin as a rising star. Davis saw something else in Palin — namely, a way to re-establish the maverick persona McCain had lost while wedding himself to Bush’s war. A female running mate might also pick off some disaffected Hillary Clinton voters.

After that first brief meeting, Davis remained in discreet but frequent contact with Palin and her staff — gathering tapes of speeches and interviews, as he was doing with all potential vice-presidential candidates. One tape in particular struck Davis as arresting: an interview with Palin and Gov. Janet Napolitano, the Arizona Democrat, on “The Charlie Rose Show” that was shown in October 2007. Reviewing the tape, it didn’t concern Davis that Palin seemed out of her depth on health-care issues or that, when asked to name her favorite candidate among the Republican field, she said, “I’m undecided.” What he liked was how she stuck to her pet issues — energy independence and ethics reform — and thereby refused to let Rose manage the interview. This was the case throughout all of the Palin footage. Consistency. Confidence. And . . . well, look at her. A friend had said to Davis: “The way you pick a vice president is, you get a frame of Time magazine, and you put the pictures of the people in that frame. You look at who fits that frame best — that’s your V. P.”

Schmidt, to whom Davis quietly supplied the Palin footage, agreed. Neither man apparently saw her lack of familiarity with major national or international issues as a serious liability. Instead, well before McCain made his selection, his chief strategist and his campaign manager both concluded that Sarah Palin would be the most dynamic pick. Despite McInturff’s encouraging new numbers, it remained their conviction that in this ominous election cycle, a Republican presidential candidate could not afford to play it safe. Picking Palin would upend the chessboard; it was a maverick type of move. McCain, the former Navy pilot, loved that sort of thing. Then again, he also loved familiarity — the swashbuckling camaraderie with his longtime staff members, the P.O.W. band of brothers who frequently rode the bus and popped up at his campaign events, the Sedona ranch where he unwound and grilled wagonloads of meat. By contrast, McCain had barely met Palin.

Then "the senator took the governor down to a place where he usually had his coffee, beside a creek and a sycamore tree, where a rare breed of hawk seasonally nested," and an hour later McCain had a running mate.

The Making (and Remaking and Remaking) of McCain [NYT]

I am a hobbyist bartender. I have a liquor cabinet. I research classic drinks from the golden age of American cocktails and I make them for me and Susan.

Then she names her favorite "obscure liquor." Rachel Maddow, rational and down-to-earth Lesbian who enjoys making alcoholic beverages, we salute you.

Image Via.
Related: Why Rachel Maddow Never Made It On Fox News [NYO]

SCHWARTZ: A few random thoughts: 1. The question of whether the email of public servants is public or private is an interesting question. Public servants now have reason to behave as if every email might be read aloud in court. This standard might not actually be in the public interest, in the long run. It might make it harder for public servants to do their job. 2. It appears Palin used passwords that were too weak, and didn't change them often enough. Passwords should not be real words. they should include at least three digits and at least one non-alphanumeric character. Example: foo&&b@x7978. That's what a strong password should look like. 3. Weev's take:
i wish they'd done it properly
screenshots? should have archived the mailspool
and waited a few days for the logs to go away
i figure someone is going to get seriously v& for this
maybe not the person who actually did it
but someone
MOE: Uh, v&?

SCHWARTZ: What? oh. I dunno. That's what he said. I'm guessing it means "fucked by the national intelligence establishment." If you run that please be clear that he is NOT taking credit.

MOE: Pareene wrote that the /b/ hacker didn't really seem to know what he was looking for and should have probably figured that out before sharing the password with the world. Do you think this sort of demonstrates the limitations of 4chan, like, ideologically? This was maybe their chance to get mainstream attention for doing something with a potential public interest.

SCHWARTZ: All this demonstrates is that 4chan knows how to break into peoples' email accounts. 4chan has no coherent ideology ... it's more like a series of memes/trends. It might have some sort of ideology but for the fact that it doesn't have a memory. It erases itself multiple times a day. Moot can't afford to archive stuff. Server space is too expensive. So it's really hard for people to follow 4chan for a long period of time. There's no institutional memory. People drop in and drop out. It's like a mosh pit. But I do thinks it's significant that you can have 4chan and other anonymous people breaking national news.

MOE: I guess Sarah Palin is the ultimate meme generation politician.

SCHWARTZ: What do you mean?

MOE: Her absurdity lends itself naturally to Lulz. Her averageness. Her momness. To the kid who doesn't remember Ollie North or Reagan or hear in her rhetoric the echoes of the destructive Reagan-era "culture wars", she is just a clueless lady with a funny accent and a bunch of fucked up kids. And like, of course her password is something stupid, you know?

SCHWARTZ: I guess you're right. She doesn't make me that angry, either. Nor am i especially interested in why she makes others angry. I was already angry.
I've been angry for a long time

MOE: Right, and if she doesn't make us that angry, she is definitely not making 4chan angry.

SCHWARTZ: It's interesting that all these pols use Yahoo! Or that Palin does. She writes pretty long emails. Very different from say, [former Philadelphia mayor and federal probe subject] John Street. The Alaskan government seems to have a rather vital textual culture. It has yet to succumb to the shorthand of the handheld thumbwriting favored by John Street, Eliot Spitzer, etc. What her email tells me is: "I am a mom. I write real, substantial, long, single-paragraph email with sincere expressions of my feelings."

MOE: Yeah, and those are just the earnest, near universally relatable sort of positive qualities 4chan CAN'T STAND.

*Disclosure: Matt is my ex-boyfriend. So no it was not hard to score this interview.

I don't know what Byron's piece is about, but: the cool thing about covering the luxury and consumer goods industry for the Journal is that the whole nature of the relationship between reporters and the companies that they cover is predicated upon the notion that said companies want to look good to their investors. Which is generally the exact opposite of trying to look good to customers!

Essentially that means that the Journal is the one venue in which you will regularly find executives being forced to roll the "curtain" and say, "Here is our ingenious strategy for scamming people this quarter!" Or: "Isn't it amazing how when you put a giant logo over everything suddenly it's like, a Veblen Good?" Etc. etc. etc.

Perhaps there could be a great glossy magazine to be compiled from the observations and interactions and amusing existential outtakes of Journal Media & Marketing section reporters that don't fit into the paper's more traditional, Street-focused vision? Of course, giving reporters an outlet to write longer, more thoughtful stories is adamantly not the point of newspaper weekend magazines.* I mean, the Times Magazine sometimes serves that purpose, but it launched in 1896. T, which launched four years ago, is the model now! And unlike the Sunday newspaper magazines that have folded in the past twenty-odd years— here's a list — T is profitable. Too bad it is so boring to read! (Although, maybe you are not supposed to read it?)

Anyway, by the T model, WSJ editor-in-chief Tina Gaudoin and co. now has to go courting the same companies that regularly line up to embarrass themselves in the name of investor relations in the regular print Journal. Luxury goods advertisements, which make up 10% of the Times' ad revenue (and that doesn't include retailers) are still a fairly rare sight in the pages of the Journal, not because Journal readers think conspicuous consumption is tacky — far from it! — but because the newspaper, despite its new Saturday edition (even though it is where you'll find Peggy Noonan's invariably awesome column), is something most advertisers still assume most readers get and read — and leave — at work.***

But here's the thing: it is a horrible, retarded — or as a Fitch analyst recently paraphrased Confucius, "interesting" — time to launch such a magazine. Because we are basically in the jaws of a terrible recession, don't you read the Wall Street Journal? Spending is down, ad pages will be worse, the Journal does not exactly have any "first mover advantage" here, and by "industry metrics" (ad pages, extravagant launch parties, "buzz" etc.) this magazine is kind of doomed to "failure."

That could make for an opportunity though! The Journal is, from a talent and institutional knowledge perspective, capable of making a good, funny, readable version of T — just by committing to the kind of magazine its reporters might actually read. Which is not to say stories about options back-dating or the exploitation of immigrant labor or executive suite power struggles; that's why they have a daily newspaper so you can read those stories in the morning and then short the stock during the day duh!

But richly-reported stories like this or even this or the collection that created this book — stories that rely not only on the Journal's matchless access to captains of industry**** but a long-waning commitment to nuance and humor and the seemingly superfluous but telling detail (and um, length) — would get better play in a lifestyle magazine format. And Gaudoin should fight for them, even (especially!) if they stand to piss off potential advertisers, because they're precisely the sort of stories a reader wants to take home. And when Dolce and Balenciaga and LVMH decide to ramp up their marketing budgets again, that is something they will care about.

*Though having been part of a chronically-disappointed Journal staff five years ago it is good to know they're still capable of disappointment!
**Incidentally, the Journal's vaunted "Weekend Journal" section helmed by Joanne Lipman — the gig that won Lipman the job launching the highly underwhelming Conde Nast business monthly Portfolio— was, while an advertiser success, an outlet for which most reporters I knew positively dreaded writing. These days they are probably a little less picky.
***Whereas a "lifestyle magazine" is something people put in the rack next to the toilet where they see the ads again and again, much like those posters in bar bathrooms from which you learned that people forget 80% of what they learn everyday.
****Aka terrible rich people.
[Image noticed by Philaelphia Will Do]

Comments, tips or clarifications, Journalists? Email me.

[MediaWeek]

1. He wants to cut taxes BUT he also wants to raise them!
Barack Obama actually wants to cut taxes by an average of $900 a year for the average household, which is wayyyy more than John McCain. BUT, for the average household in the .01% of households, he wants to raise taxes by an average of $800,000 a year! This is radical socialism yes BUT we agree with former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin who maintains that studies show it is not sufficient to "stifle innovation" especially with regards to how rich people do their taxes.

2. He thinks Ronald Reagan did some good things for the economy BUT he also thinks Bill Clinton did some good things for the economy.
Put another way, he is from Chicago BUT he is also from the Chicago School. As we all know, Barack Obama was a community organizer in Chicago. That job led him to think welfare reform was not a good idea, probably because he worked with people on welfare. But at the same time he also taught a constitutional law class at the very "Chicago School" that is the hotbed of all those people who think despite all evidence to the contrary that markets solve everything. By some form of "osmosis" Barack Obama is said to have absorbed the realization that markets do actually solve some things and now he wants to apply them to solving pollution or something.

3. He likes Bob Reich BUT he also likes Bob Rubin!
So did Bill Clinton, you say? True enough BUT! Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs moneylover Bob Rubin ultimately prevailed in the "Battle of the Bobs" with Labor Secretary Bob Reich over Bill Clinton's economic policy. BUT! It is not 1993 anymore! Fifteen years have passed! Bob Rubin got Bill to cut the budget deficit, which was good for interest rates, which was in turn good for rich people, and also deregulate the fuck out of everything, which was really good for rich people, but guess what he just told the Times? He said: “The distributional issues are obviously more serious now.” A few weeks ago Obama even tried to broker a little peace agreement with the Bobs over dinner!

He was sitting at a conference table, with Rubin two seats to his left and Reich across from him. “One of the points I raised,” Obama told me, “is if you just use you, Bob, and you, Bob, as caricatures, the truth is, both of you acknowledge the world is more complicated.”

4. Barack Obama's gut instincts regarding commonsense economic issues can seem bad BUT other times they seem remarkably good!
Early in the piece, Obama is described for taking his part-time professorship at the University of Chicago to "make extra money." I think we can all agree that you are not supposed to go into academia for the money! But later in the piece, Obama is described giving a speech to a bunch of economists about how laid-off factory workers should not have to all become nurses just because health care is the only sector creating new jobs in the economy because some of them probably would feel like that would be gay and what factory workers really want to do is "make stuff." Obama's suggestion was that we give factory workers jobs improving our roads and national infrastructure. Well, a few days after this speech, that huge bridge collapsed in Minnesota! You have to give the guy props for those political instincts. (And to that end: He changed his mind on welfare reform BUT he has yet to change his mind on ethanol subsidies. Sigh.)

5. Republican wonks say this fiscal policy will result in "European style social democracy" BUT the Obama campaign maintains they are simply following the model of the state where those Republican wonks live!
Yes, Virginia! (Heh.) As Chicago school resistance member Tom Frank has observed, Virginia is very very rich. (But as Tom Frank's fellow Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan has observed, you would not know how rich they are by their governor's Detroit-esque haircuts.) Virginia's thriving economy is one big love note to the economic boons to be reaped from big government spending, but the state didn't get that way by broadcasting its love for big government spending. Quite the opposite: they are all Republicans who support it when the government contracts out its functions in the name of "small government" so executives and lobbyists can reap a disproportionately large percentage of the ensuing economic output. And Virginia's per capita income is now 7% higher than the national average. (Not least because they have five of the country's richest counties.) Whatever, the point is: Obama will follow the economic lead of Virginia in the rest of the country, while trying to reduce the role of lobbyists, as long as Virginia's voters don't get in his way.

Barack Obama, A Free-Market Loving, Big-Spending, Fiscally Conservative Wealth Redistributionist

This was the age of Taurus, the bull. The cow was sacred to everyone in the age of Taurus. This prohibition upon the slaughter of cattle came out of necessity. A farmer would have his cow, and in times of crop disease or drought, he may out of desperation butcher his cow to feed his family. Next year, he would have no cow to work his fields or to butcher, and thus his family would starve. However, the philosophy of Taurus was not sustainable with the temporary population growth it enabled. This civilization that spawned in the fertile crescent eventually left vast deserts as its legacy, the direct result of this aggressive agrarian expansion. In response came rigid hierarchies, lack of upward mobility, prostitution and slavery.

So Moses saw the long-term destructive nature of the cow worshippers and came down from the mountain to kill them all, blowing the Ram's horn. Thus came the age of Aries, the age of the trader slash herder, the age of the Jews, and the dominant philosophy (pantheistic animal totemism) disappears everywhere but India, where unique environmental conditions (monsoons, heavy phosphorus deposits) make the old agrarian philosophy sustainable. What else can you do in a vast desert for food, except herd? So after the massive killing spree spurred by Moses, the population of civilization explodes yet again to strain its limits, causing prostitution, slavery, famine and chaos. Along comes Jesus, with yet another moral basis for humanity to live on. The dominant philosophy (Judaism) loses most of its market share to Christianity. So what was the solution to this resource crisis? What's the astrological sign you see Christians advertising on the backs of their cars?

That's right, the nordic invention of the fishing net saved humanity from the wrath of the apocalypse. Thus came the age of Pisces.

So we're at a new resource shortage. Global peak phosphorus happened in 1989. Phosphorus can be recovered though, so it isn't too critical, but it is definitely bad for growing grain. We consistently as a planet consume more grain every year than we produce. Eventually those fat stockpiles are gonna hit bottom, and then shit hits the fan. We have already seen tortilla riots in Mexico, and commodities shortages and export controls in nearly half the world. Oil is going to become a little scarcer, but isn't going to run out anytime soon. The Saudi fields have peaked and Kuwait's are about to do so, but it doesn't matter. There was a strategic decision to bleed the middle east dry of oil long ago. We still have plenty of shit we can drill elsewhere. America's deserts have plenty of light sweet crude, I assure you.

So what resource are we going to run out of? There's a very important one, one that is required to grow things. One that is required for human beings to survive. T Boone Pickens just put 200mil of his own money into securing rights to this resource. The first ETF for this resource appeared a couple years ago, and Sydney is opening the first futures market for this resource. My hedge fund heavily speculates in this resource.

What resource is this? What age are we coming into? Fill in the blank!

[weev loves you]

Since blogs and social network profiles traffic in banality, it's hardly revealing that most trollish shenanigans are motivated by same. One tells the author he was molested by his grandfather and tears up when he thinks of how he's helping his family by hurting everyone else. Those to whom evil is done do evil in return, or at least that's the going press release.

It's an admirable piece on the whole, though I think Schwartz is too dismissive of how technology erodes whatever thin layer of decency keeps offline human behavior — at least in normal social conditions — in check:

[W]hile technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well.

Not many feel the urge to phone up a stranger and threaten her with rape, but even with the guarantee of anonymity and impunity, fewer still would attempt it. The Internet is a playground for sociopaths; the worst it ever does to those with consciences is make them seem feverish or silly (yeah, I'm looking at you, Dushkufan3000).

But not for nothing did Alexander Herzen say that his worst nightmare was Genghis Khan with a telegraph. Are we really surprised to discover that many trolls are racist and anti-Semitic?

I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny’s house. “I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money,” he boasted. “I make people afraid for their lives.” On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny’s. “Trolling is basically Internet eugenics,” he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. “I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!”

I listened for a few more minutes as Weev held forth on the Federal Reserve and about Jews. Unlike Fortuny, he made no attempt to reconcile his trolling with conventional social norms. Two days later, I flew to Los Angeles and met Weev at a train station in Fullerton, a sleepy bungalow town folded into the vast Orange County grid. He is in his early 20s with full lips, darting eyes and a nest of hair falling back from his temples. He has a way of leaning in as he makes a point, inviting you to share what might or might not be a joke.

Weev told me about his day — he’d lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed — and summarized his philosophy of “global ruin.” “We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?” He seemed excited to have said this aloud.

It's like a bad parody of Don DeLillo dialogue.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to prepare for waking up tomorrow with Pareene's social security number and one of my kidneys missing.

[NYTM]

“If your team isn’t in it, you root for the team you hate less. That’s McCain.”

“[Obama]’s a liberal. I oppose liberals. That’s all that’s involved here.”

Hard-hitting. I guess malaise is the price you pay for being halfway to billionaire. The old Rush would've at least worked in a crack about Obama fathering a black child in wedlock.

It's no surprise that, apart from the vaguely Soprano-ish cover, the Magazine's taken to bland, shore-hugging stuff like this. Long gone are the Days of Moss. The new editor Gerry Marzorati is stretched thin with keeping tabs on T, the NYT's new fashion magazine, and his idea of risk-taking cover stories is, well, you know.

UPDATE: The Times has posted the profile online this afternoon. Choice nuggets:

“ANTICIPATING A QUESTION,” Limbaugh said when we pulled into the garage of his secluded beachfront mansion in Palm Beach, “why do I have so many cars?”

I hadn’t actually been wondering that. Very rich people tend not to stint on transportation.

Unlike many right-wing talk-show hosts, Limbaugh does not view France with hostility. On the contrary, he is a Francophile. His salon, he told me, is meant to suggest Versailles. His main guest suite, which I did not personally inspect, was designed as an exact replica of the presidential suite of the George V Hotel in Paris.

LIMBAUGH WAS A FAILURE almost as long as he has been a success. And although he is now an apostle of sunshine (“having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have,” he crows on his show), he spent many years trying to convince his family — and himself — that he wasn’t wasting his life.

Like the great black singers of his generation, Limbaugh took the familiar pieties and ambient sounds of his time and place and used them to create a genre of entertainment, full of humor, passion and commercial possibility. There are many ways to look at Rush Limbaugh III: one is that he is the first white, Goldwater Republican soul shouter.

[The Radio Equalizer]
[Drudge]

[New York Times Magazine]