President Obama said “Let’s try common sense” in the State of the Union speech Wednesday night.
Here’s the Twitter reaction. Obama fans like the idea. The Right scoffs. (If you see this seven days from now, the search link will lead to an empty results page; Twitter doesn’t keep historical searches.)
Bonus: I found this in my searches this morning—a November 2009 accounting of Governor Palin’s fondness for the phrase by Chris Kelly, a writer for Bill Maher’s show who blogs at Huffington Post.
On Saturday I pointed out the newest conservative catch phrase, “common sense,” and suggested libs should just ... take it.
I’ve been listening. It seems to be used more by politicians on the far right. More interesting, talking points aren’t just for politicians anymore. When pols speak the tested words there’s an echo on the internet. Check out this feed of tweets mentioning “common sense” by users who employ the “TCOT” (top conservatives on Twitter) hashtag to filter their remarks.
Listening to John Boehner’s weekly address response today confirmed an earlier suspicion that “common sense” must be shaping up to be the newest GOP canned buzz phrase. Maybe it’s been around and it just hasn’t pricked my ears up, but when Sarah Palin and Boehner are both currently pounding the phrase into our consciousness, you have to think it’s been tested and it’s working.
Here’s what I wonder: if the left couldn’t just appropriate it. We’re for common sense, too!
Part of the Republicans’ message must be a dog whistle thing: the lunch pail crowd likes to to believe that intellectuals necessarily don’t have common sense, it’s one or the other. You’re an egghead or you have street smarts, never both. It can’t be both or the blue collar class loses a cherished mode of self-appreciation. “Well, that boss of mine might have a diploma on his wall but he don’t have a lick of common sense [like me].” That’s why you also hear “Ivy League” sprinkled into raps about policy—a sure way to send shivers of defensive disgust up the spines of Real Americans.
I think we could disarm a lot of these culture war weapons by just using them ourselves. It would neutralize the sting, but would be entirely fair. For instance, who says I can’t tout my own sort of “family values” just because I’m very liberal?
We can be angry and populist with the best of them, too. Why cede all those lovely, universally human terms and stances?
What good is fear without some nervous window time, and what good is window time if you don’t know which one to peer from? Here’s a public service for shaky citizens who worry about the Guantanamo Bay detainees coming to Illinois.
Are you feeling let down because you’re not seeing the change you hoped for? Me too. You can stay aware that you painted your own scene on Obama’s blank canvas, but it doesn’t help.
I have a prescription: rewatch The West Wing. It still holds up, and it’s still relevant. Let yourself retreat to fantasy for a few weeks, then rejoin the fray.
But… but… but… Governor Palin says too much regulation caused the 2008 financial meltdown. And I think I need to believe her story, because… she’s just like me, and… socialism… and take our guns… and ivy league elitism… and… and… freedom!
“Palin has devoted a dismayingly prominent chunk of her book to scapegoating communications aide Nicolle Wallace for supposedly forcing her to wear designer clothes.” Nov. 17, 2009, Boston Globe editorial.
Salon’s editor, Joan Walsh, put this headline on her opinion piece yesterday: ”I have Palin fatigue already.” Me too. No, not really.
Here’s Walsh’s thought, way down at the end, that prompted me to awaken from blog hibernation.
So while I’m not worried about President Palin, I remain worried about President Obama. I’m particularly concerned that his increasingly triangulating, anti-deficit administration will do the wrong thing, morally and politically, and move to the right, without understanding that some right-wing rage could be rechanneled by acknowledging its roots: That the economic system seems rigged for the have-a-lots v. the have-a-littles, and despite their promises, the Democrats haven’t done enough to change that. Palin can’t change any of that, but Obama can. There’s still time for him to do so, but the clock is ticking.
I agree that populist sentiment on the right could be rechanneled, but I wouldn’t leave it up to the president or the Democrats in Congress to take charge of the effort.
Liberal citizens could do more. We could not only rechannel populist mojo but reclaim it. What if progressives started showing up at the next round of town halls to agree with bits of the anger at the way things are going, but suggest other means to change it? To decry Wall Street dominance of the halls of power right along with our louder neighbors, but point to other ways out?
Cultural and ideological gulfs are so hard to bring oneself to bridge. Reminds me of a Therapy Sisters song. The Austin, TX-based female folk ensemble sings about how easy it is for feminists to claim identification with the suffering of third-world women, but not so easy to throw in with the bow heads (sorority members) across campus.
Leo Laporte’s talk about his mainstream-to-internet media story at the Online News Association conference is well worth your 40 minutes.
So many of the ideas he talks about—and has proven to be true—seem so basic that it’s hard to conceive of any opposing viewpoint. You just have to think that the newspaper and TV folks who make counterarguments are blinded by something other than reason—pining for the fjords, clinging to the past, incapable of seeing the world from more than one perspective.
Here is the silly Dev Null character he talks about playing on MSNBC’s The Site program 12 years ago.
ephemera: items designed to be useful or important for only a short time, esp. pamphlets, notices, tickets, etc.
I have been thinking for a while (and I’m not alone) that Twitter search has been consciously crippled for a good reason. That is, it’s good for Twitter, still publicly in search of a business model, but obviously trying models on for size. It’s not so good for users.
Here’s an example. I was interested in the inflated attendance counts for the 9/12 events and did a search on “ABC million” for Saturday and Sunday. (A FreedomWorks speaker pulled the figure of 2 million from someair, falsely or erroneously attributed it to ABC News, and word spread across Twitter like a swarm of gnats.)
So, the search proves useful, for the moment, and though the moment is what drives Twitter, you might want a record of the reaction, and your desire would be thwarted. Twitter search results go back only a week and a half at best and developers reserve the right to further limits based on traffic.
You could grab a feed of the search results, but it’s limited to the last 30 tweets. You can let the items pile up in your aggregator, but only starting at the point when you realize it’s a trend. History is important.
The ability to specify dates for a search is nice, but if it only goes back X days the utility is limited. Searching for a range of hours would be a great help, but it’s not available to users either. How would it help? Well, since Twitter is so “of the moment” the narrower the time span the more results you’ll get for a fuzzy query. Let’s say Rachel Maddow says something provocative and I’m not ambitious enough to construct a complicated query of a string of “Or’s.” If I could specify that I only want tweets tweeted from 9 until 10 p.m., most every tweet containing “Rachel” would be in reference to the show, and I’d gain the added benefit of seeing mostly viewers who are tweeting while watching.
So why don’t users have these superpowers? It could be because Twitter needs to curb features to keep from crashing, but it might be that we aren’t given the value-add precisely because it is so valuable.
Can’t you see the charts in the marketing reports? “Since the introduction of the X campaign, mentions of Product Y are up 23% over the previous month and up 67% over this month last year.” Historical trends are gold. Twitter has to be selling the data that could produce them, or they’re holding it back from us while they think about how they could sell it.
Am I an anti-business socialist? Not really, but this sort of behavior on Twitter’s part does bring to mind the traditional labor phrase, “on the backs of the workers.” Twitter users and the words we type are the Twitter product. We’re stakeholders, so if our aggregated facts, sentiments and opinions are on the block, we should get something back—not money, just utility.
So, sue me. I’m fascinated with Sarah Palin. The idea of her intrigues me in a jaw-dropping, can’t-believe-what-I’m-hearing, stun-me-again way.
As the Vanity Fair article and the resignation announcement played out and the critics weighed in, I let it all wash over me (OK, OK, I sought it out). Commentary on her debate prep was the stuff my imagination is made of. I can picture the grueling sessions now, with the aid of Todd Purdum’s nice descriptive gifts. Then up pops Mark McKinnon on the tube. He supported Obama, so he coached Palin on style points but not on policy.
So I construct this even more vivid picture of desperate, futile coaching and it feels like something I’ve seen before but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Then, finally, just now it hit me. She’s Lina Lamont, in Singin’ in the Rain, who will not achieve round tones in this lifetime, or at least not within a reasonable enough period of time to endure further coaching.
As Purdum describes in the article, the campaign team members “worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be.”
The “might never be” part is what spooked Lina’s handlers in the movie. Having little time to bring out the Dancing Cavalier as a talkie with Lina’s annoying voice, they bailed on the voice, dubbing in the competent speaking and singing voice of the Debbie Reynolds character.
I’m so lucky my Dad is still around and getting ready to mark his 80th birthday next month.
Let me tell you just a couple of things about him.
He worked in the same bank from a time before I was born until after I became a parent, but I think he’d rather have been a woodworker. He’s so careful with his carpentry projects that you’d think he was making each piece for royalty, and sometimes it’s just a house for a sparrow family. I think he loves every second of the process while he’s working; he doesn’t just love the satisfaction of having made something.
He can make anything. When I was eight or nine he made me a tiny kite of balsa wood and tissue paper, not bigger than an index card. We had to fly it with thread instead of string, and I remember him explaining to me that the tail had to be made of quarter-inch strips of cloth, everything in scale. The idea of balance among parts of a thing really struck me, and stuck with me. It was beautiful. It flew in almost no wind.
Daddy’s always reading, always had a great library. I read Huxley’s The Doors of Perception as a teenager, and Jane Eyre as a pre-teen because they were in his library. I was able to take the Pygmalion script to My Fair Lady when I was 10 because it was on the shelf at home. I’ve liked literary adaptations ever since.
He’s funny, and a horrible tease.
He’s realistic, and I think he tried to teach me to be. I’m not sure it worked. When I was maybe six or seven I asked him if a family could be so hungry that one person would start to chew a piece of meat, then pass it along to another family member while there was still some flavor in it. Daddy informed me that if the first chewer were that hungry, there would be no passing along.
I went off on a ramble about pretending a few weeks ago in commenting on Bill Moyer’s interview with David Simon.
The Holocaust Museum shooting this week made me think about pretending from a different angle—from the vantage point of conservatives who deny the evidence of systemic failures all around us. A thread runs through the thinking of a lot of political conservatives:
- The angry lone nut shooter isn’t influenced by the angry right mob
- Bernie Madoff is a bad apple; there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Wall Street
- Abu Ghraib minders were just bad apples
Systems failure is way too scary to contemplate. If patterns seem to emerge, the safest course of action is to look away so you can pretend it isn’t there.
The Tea Partiers aren’t revolutionaries. Everything is just fine, or it would be if we could cycle back to 80s Reagan ideas, and deal with those pesky bad apples one on one.
David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, who continues to organize and try to raise money, popped into my inbox this morning to ask for $25 to fight the healthcare swiftboaters:
We knew healthcare reform would face fierce opposition—and it’s begun. As we speak, the same people behind the notorious “swiftboat” ads of 2004 are already pumping millions of dollars into deceptive television ads. Their plan is simple: torpedo healthcare reform before it sees the light of day by scaring the public and distorting the President’s approach.
He doesn’t come right out and name the “same people”, though, and it reminds me of something I’ve been wanting to explore. Public discourse of special interests usually is very vague. Politicians are chickenshits about it—all but the most liberal. So are the media—all but the most liberal.
As an example of a media outlet that won’t come right out and say who’s working behind the scenes, take MSNBC. It’s playing to the current leftward mood in the air, and making some interesting choices for new programs, ramping up the rhetoric as the clock approaches midnight, like a pop radio station that rocks harder after 7 p.m. But you know what MSNBC could never afford to do? My pet pipedream format for telling what forces are really operating in the public sphere.
My pipedream format
I see it as a TV news program, but it could be a blog or a magazine or a comic book or an on- or offline radio program. It’s organized around issues and interests and it tells the truth about businesses and other organizations who lobby for issues on all sides (sometimes there are more than two sides, contrary to all popular wisdom).
The format is really simple: This is the issue; these lobbies are for it because x; these lobbies are against it because y; these groups are silent because z. I think such a structure would tend to tease out truth.
It would be so refreshing. When have you ever known an interviewer to ask “Who’s lobbying you for this, and why do they say they want it, and why do you think they really want it?” Never happens. Is there a gentleman’s agreement that it would be just too gauche? I think there must be. You didn’t see Dick Durbin getting complimented on his courage when he said banking interests own the Senate. Rather the opposite; I sensed commentators looking the other way, nervously, as though Durbin had a tail of toilet paper spilling out from the back of his pants.
If the issue is energy, the oil companies don’t get to come on or send their surrogates to tell about their commitment to wind power, because they’re not very committed to it. That’s why MSNBC would never make this show. The network depends on energy and pharma advertisers with their messages calculated to persuade me how much they care about saving the planet and about people who can’t afford their prescriptions.
Instead of a format like my pipedream, we get vagueness all around. We’re fed an illusion of the inside story with tales of the maneuvers of elected officials and their staffs, but rarely hear details about the influence of special interests, only amorphous generalities. I’m hungry for some blunt talk. I’d watch or read, and so would others who’d like to know what actually happens in Washington and other centers of power.
(I wonder if many Obama supporters are still responding to donation pleas. I was moved to give my little bits during the campaign, but feel slightly put off by the appeals now.)
What a story: AIG is dragging its feet on medical insurance payments for injured Iraq war contractors.
I listened to the interviews about it on the Democracy Now podcast during a morning commute this week. (Don’t you just love taking in your news on podcasts? You can stop them and let certain bits sink in, form your own thoughts, and dip back in for more.)
Two impressions formed as I was barreling up I-355:
First, why in hell isn’t this all over the place? It’s got everything: an already-disgraced bailout recipient; wounded personnel from Iraq, the contractors’ corollary to the Walter Reed scandal; a real human-lives consequence of the healthcare crisis. Heck, the contracting company, KBR, is even a former subsidiary of Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s old firm. Why isn’t this one of the handful of stories cable news is running over and over?
Second, I was interested in the provenance of the investigative journalism. There’s been a partnership between the website ProPublica and ABC’s 20/20 program to cover the story.
It could be that I’m uninformed or naive—always a very real possibility with me —but I couldn’t recall another such partnership. Pairing public interest internet outlets with mainstream media on certain big stories could be one answer to the big whining question that always arises out of discussions about the decline of newspapers: “Who’s going to do the important, time-consuming investigative legwork? [snort!] Bloggers?”
Well, yeah. Maybe. Remember that Talking Points Memo took the lead on the story of the U.S. attorneys who were fired for their politics. One of TPM’s sites is even named ”Muckraker.”
Doesn’t it make sense? A public interest blog has the will to dig, while a partnering MSM outlet lends its credibility imprimatur. A grassroots outfit can mobilize its volunteer following to paw through government documents, saving on expense, and it has a unique ability to whip up a fuss to make things happen.
You don’t always need a big budget or lawyers to make things happen. I’ve heard Carol Marin, a local Chicago TV journalist, argue in a couple different forums that only big media have been able to afford the lawyers it takes to shepherd through FOIA requests. She uses it as a counterargument against future reliance on internet journalism. I don’t buy it. Everything in news is going to change when newspapers go down; it’s already starting. We’ll find ways to get government documents for free—probably by raising a huge squawk about it—just as easily as we can now do live video remotes for free.
Maybe I’ll propose that Dave Winer and Jay Rosen kick this around on their Rebooting the News podcast. (By the way, happy birthday, Dave. Welcome to fiftyfourhood. Fiftyfournia? Fiftyfouratopia?)
—but I couldn’t recall another such partnership. Pairing public interest internet outlets with mainstream media on certain big stories could be one answer to the big whining question that always arises out of discussions about the decline of newspapers: “Who’s going to do the important, time-consuming investigative legwork? [snort!] Bloggers?”