Obama: Averse to Leadership and a Crappy Politician to Boot
02/10/10 03:40 PM
They called Karl Rove
Bush’s Brain, largely because while the man himself
was full of conviction, he was notoriously light in
the attic. Full of conviction, but no genius was
George. Obama, on the other hand, has been touted
for his smarts. Even when he began making patently
foolish political/policy moves, clearly listening
to voices who had been consistently wrong in their
areas of expertise (economics for one, warfare for
another), it was assumed he was playing a game so
deep, so intricate, mounting a strategy so
multi-dimensional that the rest of us mortals
should simply sit back and sigh in awe.
So much for multi-dimensionality. I’m beginning to miss conviction.
Obama has taken a huge mandate and enormous capital and squandered it as shamelessly as Pamela Anderson does her self-respect. He ignored voices warning of a jobless recovery and the need for a robust stimulus; now the jobless recovery is here and threatens Democratic prospects in the mid-term. He ignored voices warning that the American people reward politicians for making things better, not for keeping them from getting worse.
He showed a constitutional aversion to leadership on healthcare and grossly fumbled the politics. . He ignored those who suggested that it was fool’s politics to strip health care reform of its most popular and understandable aspects, like Medicare expansion for those 50 and over and a public option to compete with private insurers. He has proven tone deaf to messaging and has allowed Republicans, a group that helped drive the country to the verge of financial collapse and whose political cynicism and opportunism currently show a breathtaking contempt for the American… he took this bedraggled group and served them the upper hand as if he were their valet.
He has mired us in an Afghanistan expansion that has all the earmarks of a quagmire. He has alienated his most ardent supporters, enabled his most rabid critics, and lost the youth vote that helped put him in office. And he recently announced a Hooverite spending-freeze-amidst-downturn and tried to sell it as a route to Keynesian stimulus, making himself look both personally weak and politically dimwitted simultaneously. The Multi-Dimensional Man has accomplished this in just one year. Maybe it does take a sort of genius.
As a politician, Obama fails to realize that the American people want a captain at the helm. They want to believe that the ship of state is being steered… somewhere, anywhere, but steered. At least they know the Republicans will steer the ship. It will probably be toward the rocky shoals, but we Americans have are incapable of long-term thinking and crave momentum. We don’t think about where we’ll end up. We simply sigh with relief at the sensation of movement.
Obama is akin to the Captain on a ship under attack who turns to the crew, bloodied bodies all around, and tells them to do what they think best.
It’s time for the verdict. Obama ran a great campaign, but he is no leader, and he’s an abominable politician. During the primary, he was fortunate in Hillary Clinton’s bloated walrus of campaign and in the general election, fortunate in the fact that John McCain is, well, insane. But Obama made good moves throughout. Now that he’s in charge, he’s proving himself incapable of the political equivalent of simultaneous walking and spitting. You have to wonder who was responsible for his nimble campaign moves. David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s 2008 White House campaign, is the obvious candidate.
One sure indicator is Plouffe’s resurrection in the face of Obama and his fellow Spinelesscrats turning the slight setback of Scott Brown’s Massachusetts win into a self-inflicted bloodbath of the mind. Plouffe was called in to staunch the pearl clutching and convince Democrats that there was, once more, a political brain inside the body for the upcoming election cycle.
His first order of business was to insist on the importance of passing the health care reform bill, which Democrats seemed perfectly happy to abandon and thus prove themselves weak, ineffectual and proud of both. We now have barely audible murmurings of pushing the bill through via reconciliation. Score one for the brain.
But has Obama so desiccated his political body that the reintroduction of the brain won’t matter? His populist rantings ring hollow in light of his demonstrated fondness for the Big Money Boys. He condemnation of huge Wall Street CEO bonuses rang so thinly that his later statement that he did not “begrudge” such bonuses as “part of the free market system” was taken as de facto endorsement and appropriately attacked. Real hopey changey there. Again, Obama demonstrates the political inability to walk and spit simultaneously.
The tragedy is that this was foreseeable. The Democratic primary electorate bought Obama’s bullshit about “changing the way Washington works,” and “bridging divides” in this country. It was either political snake oil, or painful naivete, but we heard soothing words from a black face (with a comfortingly white mother) and heard Pavlovian choruses humming “Kumbaya” as images of the ruthlessly sanitized Martin Luther King danced in our heads. Clinton was “mean.” We didn’t want “mean.” She had a “political machine.” We hated that. We were above it. Mark Penn was a bad man. Icky ick. We wanted purity.
Well, we now know that purity does not beget winning politics. In fact, the opposite is true. If we want policies that improve our lives, we have to be willing to sully our self-image for them. Maybe we’ll have learned that lesson by 2012.
So much for multi-dimensionality. I’m beginning to miss conviction.
Obama has taken a huge mandate and enormous capital and squandered it as shamelessly as Pamela Anderson does her self-respect. He ignored voices warning of a jobless recovery and the need for a robust stimulus; now the jobless recovery is here and threatens Democratic prospects in the mid-term. He ignored voices warning that the American people reward politicians for making things better, not for keeping them from getting worse.
He showed a constitutional aversion to leadership on healthcare and grossly fumbled the politics. . He ignored those who suggested that it was fool’s politics to strip health care reform of its most popular and understandable aspects, like Medicare expansion for those 50 and over and a public option to compete with private insurers. He has proven tone deaf to messaging and has allowed Republicans, a group that helped drive the country to the verge of financial collapse and whose political cynicism and opportunism currently show a breathtaking contempt for the American… he took this bedraggled group and served them the upper hand as if he were their valet.
He has mired us in an Afghanistan expansion that has all the earmarks of a quagmire. He has alienated his most ardent supporters, enabled his most rabid critics, and lost the youth vote that helped put him in office. And he recently announced a Hooverite spending-freeze-amidst-downturn and tried to sell it as a route to Keynesian stimulus, making himself look both personally weak and politically dimwitted simultaneously. The Multi-Dimensional Man has accomplished this in just one year. Maybe it does take a sort of genius.
As a politician, Obama fails to realize that the American people want a captain at the helm. They want to believe that the ship of state is being steered… somewhere, anywhere, but steered. At least they know the Republicans will steer the ship. It will probably be toward the rocky shoals, but we Americans have are incapable of long-term thinking and crave momentum. We don’t think about where we’ll end up. We simply sigh with relief at the sensation of movement.
Obama is akin to the Captain on a ship under attack who turns to the crew, bloodied bodies all around, and tells them to do what they think best.
It’s time for the verdict. Obama ran a great campaign, but he is no leader, and he’s an abominable politician. During the primary, he was fortunate in Hillary Clinton’s bloated walrus of campaign and in the general election, fortunate in the fact that John McCain is, well, insane. But Obama made good moves throughout. Now that he’s in charge, he’s proving himself incapable of the political equivalent of simultaneous walking and spitting. You have to wonder who was responsible for his nimble campaign moves. David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s 2008 White House campaign, is the obvious candidate.
One sure indicator is Plouffe’s resurrection in the face of Obama and his fellow Spinelesscrats turning the slight setback of Scott Brown’s Massachusetts win into a self-inflicted bloodbath of the mind. Plouffe was called in to staunch the pearl clutching and convince Democrats that there was, once more, a political brain inside the body for the upcoming election cycle.
His first order of business was to insist on the importance of passing the health care reform bill, which Democrats seemed perfectly happy to abandon and thus prove themselves weak, ineffectual and proud of both. We now have barely audible murmurings of pushing the bill through via reconciliation. Score one for the brain.
But has Obama so desiccated his political body that the reintroduction of the brain won’t matter? His populist rantings ring hollow in light of his demonstrated fondness for the Big Money Boys. He condemnation of huge Wall Street CEO bonuses rang so thinly that his later statement that he did not “begrudge” such bonuses as “part of the free market system” was taken as de facto endorsement and appropriately attacked. Real hopey changey there. Again, Obama demonstrates the political inability to walk and spit simultaneously.
The tragedy is that this was foreseeable. The Democratic primary electorate bought Obama’s bullshit about “changing the way Washington works,” and “bridging divides” in this country. It was either political snake oil, or painful naivete, but we heard soothing words from a black face (with a comfortingly white mother) and heard Pavlovian choruses humming “Kumbaya” as images of the ruthlessly sanitized Martin Luther King danced in our heads. Clinton was “mean.” We didn’t want “mean.” She had a “political machine.” We hated that. We were above it. Mark Penn was a bad man. Icky ick. We wanted purity.
Well, we now know that purity does not beget winning politics. In fact, the opposite is true. If we want policies that improve our lives, we have to be willing to sully our self-image for them. Maybe we’ll have learned that lesson by 2012.
The Publishing Industry Must Change or Die
02/04/10 10:51 AM
The publishing
industry cannot survive in its present form. Just
as the recording industry was forced to adjust to
digitally altered selling environments, the
publishing industry will have do the same.
Amazon recently suspended sales of Macmillan books over a pricing dispute. Amazon wants to sell e-books at a $9.99 price point. Publishers want to sell them closer to the price of a discounted hardback, around $15. Both sides have ugly ulterior motives: Amazon wants to corner the market for e-books via Kindle; publishers want to prop up their bloated and grossly inefficient distribution/retail/brick-and-mortar model by selling e-books, (which essentially cost nothing to produce), at a price point closer to that of hardcovers. However, in this case, Amazon is right. E-books should sell for $10 or less -- mostly less.
Manned printing presses, manned distribution warehouses and manned retail stores place high fixed costs on the publishing industry. E-books eliminate almost all of those costs. But instead of reflecting the savings in reasonably priced e-books, the industry contorts itself to maintain its bloated distribution model and the attendant high prices. They fear that, threatened by cheap e-books, retailers will demand lower payments to publishers so that they can lower prices to compete.
That is what should happen. Currently, with list prices hitting $27, hardback books are grossly overpriced. I read 30 to 50 books a year and cannot remember having paid list price for a hardcover book. Only twice in the past year have I purchased a book at a first-run retail outlet, and those were paperbacks. I buy books at Alibris or other second-hand retailers, even brick-and-mortar ones. I never pay more than $10 for a book. I won't. To do so is to be robbed. Since I can buy any book I want for $7 to $10, why should I pay more than $10 for an e-book?
The entire publishing pricing model is insane. I published a slim, 169-page noir thriller on which the publisher stamped a $24.95 list price. Such pricing contravened every conceivable business and marketing principle. You don't sell tickets to a 30-minute film at the price folks pay to see "Avatar." You don't sell a 1,200-square-foot house for the same price as a 3,000-square-foot house. But the publishing industry will sell a 170-page book for the same price it sells a 400-page book. It will sell a first novel from an unknown for the same price as a sequel in the Harry Potter franchise.
A new generation is reaching adulthood with little adherence to first-run brick-and-mortar buying patterns and accustomed to the savings that electronic downloads offer. They pay $9.99 for an album full of music that they can enjoy anywhere and anytime, forever. It costs much more to produce that album of music than it does for an author to produce 270 pages of text. Yet, the publishing industry wants to charge almost twice the price for a product that is much cheaper to produce. This makes no sense. The audience will not stand for it. They will not buy.
Authors and book consumers should applaud the changes on the horizon. Authors should demand reasonable, affordable prices on their products in order to sell more of them. E-books could help engage a new generation of readers. The benefit to consumers is obvious.
Publishing industry practices are famously antediluvian. Only recently have the majority of publishers accepted electronic submissions. That's right. They insisted on five pounds of paper being schlepped around Manhattan. Only in the past few years have agents routinely responded to e-mail queries. They insisted on snail mail. The industry has a very narrow comfort zone, and is desperately fortifying its walls to maintain its insularity. Unfortunately the forces at work are far stronger. The publishing industry can remove the barricades, or see their house implode. The choice is theirs.
Amazon recently suspended sales of Macmillan books over a pricing dispute. Amazon wants to sell e-books at a $9.99 price point. Publishers want to sell them closer to the price of a discounted hardback, around $15. Both sides have ugly ulterior motives: Amazon wants to corner the market for e-books via Kindle; publishers want to prop up their bloated and grossly inefficient distribution/retail/brick-and-mortar model by selling e-books, (which essentially cost nothing to produce), at a price point closer to that of hardcovers. However, in this case, Amazon is right. E-books should sell for $10 or less -- mostly less.
Manned printing presses, manned distribution warehouses and manned retail stores place high fixed costs on the publishing industry. E-books eliminate almost all of those costs. But instead of reflecting the savings in reasonably priced e-books, the industry contorts itself to maintain its bloated distribution model and the attendant high prices. They fear that, threatened by cheap e-books, retailers will demand lower payments to publishers so that they can lower prices to compete.
That is what should happen. Currently, with list prices hitting $27, hardback books are grossly overpriced. I read 30 to 50 books a year and cannot remember having paid list price for a hardcover book. Only twice in the past year have I purchased a book at a first-run retail outlet, and those were paperbacks. I buy books at Alibris or other second-hand retailers, even brick-and-mortar ones. I never pay more than $10 for a book. I won't. To do so is to be robbed. Since I can buy any book I want for $7 to $10, why should I pay more than $10 for an e-book?
The entire publishing pricing model is insane. I published a slim, 169-page noir thriller on which the publisher stamped a $24.95 list price. Such pricing contravened every conceivable business and marketing principle. You don't sell tickets to a 30-minute film at the price folks pay to see "Avatar." You don't sell a 1,200-square-foot house for the same price as a 3,000-square-foot house. But the publishing industry will sell a 170-page book for the same price it sells a 400-page book. It will sell a first novel from an unknown for the same price as a sequel in the Harry Potter franchise.
A new generation is reaching adulthood with little adherence to first-run brick-and-mortar buying patterns and accustomed to the savings that electronic downloads offer. They pay $9.99 for an album full of music that they can enjoy anywhere and anytime, forever. It costs much more to produce that album of music than it does for an author to produce 270 pages of text. Yet, the publishing industry wants to charge almost twice the price for a product that is much cheaper to produce. This makes no sense. The audience will not stand for it. They will not buy.
Authors and book consumers should applaud the changes on the horizon. Authors should demand reasonable, affordable prices on their products in order to sell more of them. E-books could help engage a new generation of readers. The benefit to consumers is obvious.
Publishing industry practices are famously antediluvian. Only recently have the majority of publishers accepted electronic submissions. That's right. They insisted on five pounds of paper being schlepped around Manhattan. Only in the past few years have agents routinely responded to e-mail queries. They insisted on snail mail. The industry has a very narrow comfort zone, and is desperately fortifying its walls to maintain its insularity. Unfortunately the forces at work are far stronger. The publishing industry can remove the barricades, or see their house implode. The choice is theirs.