Category: Current Affairs

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Bobby Fischer

I don’t play chess. Heck, I don’t really understand chess. Still: Bobby Fischer. What a wonderful, strange, tangled, disturbing story. The New York Times obit is a gem, weaving back and forth between the story of the prodigy and overpowering force on one side and the tale of the anti-Semitic whack job on the other. You can’t blame them for not knowing exactly how to play it; the protagonist would take volumes to unravel if you wanted to fight your way through to something like the truth of him. Worth reading if you have a little time: a 1985 Sports Illustrated piece by a writer who went on an obsessive years-long hunt for Fischer. In a sort of wistful denouement, he finds his man.

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Exit Poll: Undeclared Candidate

CNN on Tuesday night published results of its Democratic exit polling in New Hampshire. In addition to posing the standard demographic questions–showing younger voters tended to vote for Obama, older ones for Clinton, for instance–the pollsters asked the following: If Bill Clinton had been running, who would you have voted for–him or your candidate? (It’s the fourth question listed; the results table doesn’t give the exact wording.)

Overall, the response seems to have been that people would have stuck with their candidates by a large majority: 61 percent said they’d vote for that candidate, 37 percent said they’d vote for Bill Clinton. Of those who said they’d stick with their candidate, 47 percent voted for Obama yesterday and 27 percent chose Hillary Clinton. Of those who said they’d vote for Bill Clinton instead, 58 percent voted for Hillary Clinton yesterday and 24 percent voted for Obama.

In other words, a majority of Hillary Clinton voters in this New Hampshire sample–note all the qualifications there–would vote for her husband instead if given the chance.

How big a majority? That’s a little hard to quantify exactly, since I’m not sure how percentages were rounded up or down and I can’t find a place right now to pose questions to CNN, but let’s try: The reported sample population is 1,955. Assuming every member of the group answered this question, 1,193 people said they’d vote for their candidate instead of Bill Clinton; 723 said they’d vote for Bill over whoever they voted for yesterday; and 39 apparently didn’t answer.

Among the 1,193 voters in the “I like my candidate better than Bill” group, 27 percent, or 322, voted for Hillary Clinton; among the 723 people in the “I like Bill better than whoever” group, 58 percent, or 419, voted for Hillary Clinton. (For comparison: 561 Obama voters said they’d stick with him, 173 said they’d vote for Bill instead.)

If I’ve got those numbers right — and if is the operative word here — 56.5 percent of the Hillary Clinton group said they’d vote for Bill Clinton if he was on the ballot. I find that shocking. Maybe the result is meaningless, a quirk. But maybe it shows that Hillary Clinton’s voters, to some extent, view her as a surrogate for the ex-president (and saying that, I’m shocked again: It flies in the face of one of her main appeals, which is, as Gloria Steinem reminded us yesterday, that she’s a history-making woman). It may also show that the former president is still a powerful draw for Democrats

In any case, I’d love to see the results if the same question were posed in the primaries to come. Go read the poll yourself and tell me whether I’ve got it right.

[Later: MSNBC, which published the same poll, focused on this finding last night. They report the full question as, “If Bill Clinton were eligible to run for a third term and had been on the ballot today, who would you have voted for?”]

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New Hampshire

With all the attention on the putative front-runners in both parties, the Main Stream Media (MSM) short-shrifted some of the candidates further down the New Hampshire results list. As usual. Who, for instance, bothered to cover the vote in the hotly disputed Kucinich-Thompson beauty contest? Who even thought of analyzing what the outcome could mean to the country?

No one.

Don’t go scrambling for your Daily Cyberbugle, I’ve got the numbers right here:

Kucinich: 3,845

Thompson: 2,808.

That’s with 96 percent of precincts reporting, but I think it’s safe for Kucinich to cut loose and douse his Secret Service detail with biodynamic sparkling apple juice. He won. He took down big, sleepy Fred. Kicked his behind, really, winning 57.2 percent of the votes cast in the race.*

One might be tempted to scoff and say, “Well, Mr. Pundit, they didn’t really run against each other — they’re in different parties for heaven’s sake.”

That point must be conceded, and I’m pondering what it means. For now, I just want to bask in Kucinich’s victory. And Thompson’s defeat, which isn’t the same thing.

*The Kucinich-Thompson race.

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Urgent Message from Voice-a-Roni!

If you get close enough to Silicon Valley and its associated industries and companies to meet someone in the tech public-relations game, you’ll hear at some point about how much better and smarter PR is now that we have email and social networking and other electronic magic wands with which to communicate a marketing message.

Uh huh.

About three years ago, I contributed to a blog focused on IP telecommunications. I had done some reporting on VOIP — voice over Internet Protocol, the technology behind Vonage and other Net phone companies — and a friend who had started the blog offered to pay me pretty well for posting. But the gig didn’t last long. What did last is the appearance of my name on the blog, along with one of my email accounts.

After I stopped posting altogether, a trickle of email pitches and press releases started to arrive; the trickle turned to a stream and the stream into a torrent. The messages, with subject lines like “Symmetricom Technologist Featured Speaker at SCTE’s Conference on Emerging Technology”* and featuring companies with names like Voice-a-Roni UltraCom**, just keep coming. The people behind them, like Tammy Snook and Lindsay Whent and Julie Nicholson (to name three who are in my trash right now) don’t seem at all discouraged that I’ve never ever responded to their messages.

Not that they would be discouraged. I am loaded into an email address list with hundreds of other people who have made the mistake of showing the faintest tremor of interest in a topic and talking about it publicly. All of us get spammed on the slim, slim chance that someone, somewhere might write about Symettricom or Voice-a-Roni.

In the grand panoply of events, it’s a minor annoyance. But it illustrates one of my gripes about the way technology is used. PR people are famous for asking journalists about how they like to have stories pitched. They usually mean: would you like to get our news release by fax, phone or email? But that’s beside the point. What no decent journalist wants is some boilerplate message blindly shotgunned into the void. What each good journalist wants, if they’re open to a pitch at all, is a pitch from someone who knows what the journalist is interested in and what the journalist has written on the subject. That takes research and social skill and real interest in the recipient of one’s message. Without that thought and interest, email and the other “tools” are just dumb and robotic.

*Actual subject line

**Not a real company

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Message

Left on our phone the other night:

“Obama!

“Hey, it’s E____. I had to call you guys and share my happiness about Obama winning at least the first caucus, because we were all sitting there in pain about Gore back in 2000, and finally I have an election that I have a little bit of hope that the person I want may win. Anyway, I just had to say that and I hope you guys have a good night. Bye.”

That was a fun call to get. And E____ and I are in the same camp. Although as I told a John Edwards canvasser, I can’t spell out logically while I’m leaning this way. And after years and years and years of looking for the rationale for my votes and often coming up short, I’ve given myself permission to just go with my instinct on this one.

(One of the best pieces I’ve read about Obama recently came from David Brooks, the New York Times columnist who has played the role of centrist/conservative (the paper recently hired a real conservative for the op-ed page). Brooks argues for Obama on the basis of his personal experience, temperament and intellect:

Moreover, he has a worldview that precedes political positions. Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. Though Tom DeLay couldn’t deliver much for Republicans and Nancy Pelosi, so far, hasn’t been able to deliver much for Democrats, these warriors believe that what’s needed is more partisanship, more toughness and eventual conquest for their side.

But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual.

Obama did not respond to his fatherlessness or his racial predicament with anger and rage, but as questions for investigation, conversation and synthesis. He approaches politics the same way. In her outstanding New Yorker profile, Larissa MacFarquhar notes that Obama does not perceive politics as a series of battles but as a series of systemic problems to be addressed. He pursues liberal ends in gradualist, temperamentally conservative ways.

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No Right to Be Tired

If you were only to read The New York Times one day out of the year, I’d nominate the last Sunday of December as the day to go out and pick up a copy. That’s the day the Times Magazine publishes its “The Lives They Lived Issue,” which marks the passing of notable and remarkable persons over the last year.

The final piece in today’s issue is titled, “The Combatant.” It’s a short remembrance of David Halberstam by Neil Sheehan, who was, like his subject, one of the great journalists of the Vietnam War. And by that I mean: they were among those who fought hardest to penetrate the veil of misinformation, myths and outright lies that were standard issue from the Pentagon and White House to explain what we were doing in Vietnam during the war’s early years.

Here’s how Sheehan wraps up:

“Some months into our partnership, after the Diem regime provoked the Buddhist monks into rebellion, the government began to censor so aggressively that nothing meaningful could get through the cable office. We resorted to sending our dispatches out with sympathetic pilots and flight attendants on planes passing through Saigon’s airport, with instructions to call the U.P.I. office at their next destination for a pickup. One night we were so wrung out from days of covering demonstrations, dodging police batons and choking on tear gas that we kept dozing over our typewriters. We considered giving in to our exhaustion for a few hours of sleep, but if we did we might not finish our reports in time for the first plane in the morning. “A reporter doesn’t have a right to be tired,” David finally said, ending the discussion. Our dispatches went out on the morning flight.”

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Last Images

How are news photographer’s different from the rest of us? The New York Times has a gripping and graphic account of Benazir Bhutto’s last rally from a photographer who probably shot the last images before she was attacked:

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/world/20071227_BHUTTO_FEATURE/index.html

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Still Shocking

Not to romanticize a subject of which I know little, but I think you could do worse than Benazir Bhutto if you were looking for an example of courage in public life. She returned to her country this year knowing that violent extremists, forces who wanted to harm her, were on the loose. She returned knowing the leaders of the government — that is, the leaders of the army that had overthrown her — had little reason to protect her. She stayed despite an immediate and devastating first attempt to kill her. Despite the dangers, she didn’t shrink from her battle with either the generals and the government or the assassins arrayed against her. No, she didn’t go into the street without protection — she escaped the first attempt on her life because was riding in an armored truck, and at her last rally today, plenty of security was in place to deter bombers and gunmen. She must have known that those measures wouldn’t thwart her attackers for long.

I don’t pretend to know what motivated her. I don’t think the answer is as simple as “freedom” or “democracy.” Her cause was to oppose those who had deposed and assassinated her father by judicial means; and her cause was bigger, too: Pakistan, whatever that is, so far removed from our quiet streets, busy malls and safe elections, ruled by something more than fear and force.

It’s good, I suppose, that events like this are still shocking.

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Yuletide Cleansing

No matter how much you attack it, filter it, or complain about it, spam persists. Sometimes that’s not a bad thing if you’re looking for some cheap, serendipitous entertainment. I just found an email in my inbox with the subject line, “Look great for the holidays.” The sender is “Holiday Colon Cleanse.” I can already hear that in a carol: “”…Troll we now our Yuletide cleansing/Fa la la la la, la la la la.”

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Global Cooling Unleashed

Oh so innocently, I perused SFGate.com to see tonight’s news. The first story that stopped me: Dan Fogelberg, the singer/songwriter whom I believe had a central Illinois connection, died of prostate cancer, age 56. OK, that hits kind of close to home. And there’s an AP story on the winter storm that just blew through the Midwest and on into New England: Storm Buries Northeast, Causes 3 Deaths (the headline writer, or whoever, might want to take a refresher on what states constitute the Northeast, as the story bundles news from Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan into the mix). Editorial nagging aside, I noted there are 69 reader comments appended to the story. Sixty-nine. For a weather piece.

It appears the flat-earthers, Lindburgh Baby conspiracists and folks sporting aluminum-foil headgear have turned out in force to taunt enviros and Gore-ites and Bay Area liberals (if those three categories can actually be untangled) about global warming. Their thinking is: See? Look at that drift out their! Look at the ice on the pond! Look at that icicle dangling from my nose! Where’s your climate catastrophe now, wise guys?

OK, they’re pretty funny as far as they go. One guy writes, tongue in cheek: “Bushco Nazi big oil conspiritors created this situation in order to drive up the cost of heating oil and to trick the ignorant masses back east that they need to mine coal for survival!!” Heh. Beyond the chuckle, though, it’s nothing more than the same anti-scientific perversity that makes Americans more likely to believe in Genesis than in Darwin. What a strange, strange group we are. No nation anywhere is so dependent on the fruits of science — Dan Fogelberg, and every other cancer patient, could have told you about that — and none has such a well-organized opposition and obdurate resistance to the very idea of science and research. It’s a puzzler.

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