Dana Blankenhorn

Obama Will Get the Edwards People

I don't play pundit on TV, and I don't really like to play one here.

But the handwriting is on the wall.

Obama is going to get the Edwards people.

Since John Edwards dropped out all the major Netroots organizations have fallen in line behind Obama. I just finished analyzing the blogs in all three Southern states which will hold primaries on Tuesday, and in every case the feeling among bloggers for Obama is palpable.

Perhaps even more telling is the feeling of those Democratic bloggers who don't support Obama. A good example is Tennessee Guerilla Women, who is now making what I can only call desperate, and sometimes even  contradictory, attacks on Obama. She's doing that because she's surrounded, by people she once thought were friends, and it's a little frightening to her.

That's the genuine feeling of impending defeat. On the TV you will never see it. On the Internet it's right there.

Tennessee is filled with rumors about quiet endorsements for Obama. In Georgia, Obama has the polling lead and the support of everyone outside the party establishment, which was practically obliterated by the rise of Republicans. Even in Alabama, Obamamania seems to have given the state party a pulse, with even non-Republicans singing his praises.  The win by a black Democrat in a legislative by-election, in a Republican district, is also helping.

Again, Clinton leads narrowly in the polls. But Obama has the momentum, and late momentum is a killer.

How to Really Succeed in Business

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 5 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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As a door prize for covering a software conference this week, Rick Chapman of SoftLetter gave me a copy of his book.

In Search of Stupidity was, for me, a ton of fun. It tells the history of the PC business, that part of the business I lived through and covered. Sort of a memoir of my time. And it's well-written -- funny, breezy, and conversational. While most business books are dry tomes filled with charts and buzzwords, Rick's book is a bedtime chuckle filled with stories and anecdotes.

His theme is that you can succeed in business if you just avoid being stupid. Most companies fail due to easily foreseen, really stupid mistakes, he writes, and he cites endless examples, many of which I personally covered or lived through.

In a way it's much like this newsletter.  Since launching A-Clue.Com in 1997 I focused on finding those who had a Clue, who seemed to know what was coming, and those whom I deemed Clueless.  Smart and stupid, clued-in and clueless. It's pretty similar.

But there's more to it than that.

Hawaii's Small Ambitions

The state of Hawaii has an ambition, to get 70% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.

Pfaw! (This, and other moving images of Hawaii from back in the day, are to be found at JaneResture.com.)

When it comes to renewable energy potential, Hawaii is Kuwait. As our most-southerly state Hawaii has the most intense sunshine in America. Its volcanos and trade winds mean the west side of islands like Hawaii itself are literally desert, perfect for solar energy collection.

Then there are the volcanoes themselves. Geothermal energy so close to the ground you can taste it. And those trade winds, both reliable and often fierce. And those ocean currents.

Hawaii is a laboratory we can use to create energy exports, not just sustain a tourist economy.

Over the Rainbow

My guy's out. The above is for John and his lovely wife Elizabeth. Thank you, God bless you.

But that's OK. Because I have another contribution to make, to the candidate I prefer now. (Regular readers can guess who that is.)

Above is the classic version, with Judy Garland. It was written for her, by Harold Arlen. It also became, along with White Christmas, one of the signature tunes Americans sang during World War II. So there's that connection.

But there's more. A lot more.

The Wizard of Oz was written as an answer to European stories like Alice in Wonderland. Frank Baum wanted a purely American fairy story, and it was so popular at the turn of the century that it begat a whole series of Oz adventures, and product tie-ins. So the song is deeply rooted in American myth, business and history.

But there's more.

There's E.Y. Harburg's lyric, which sounds like it's about heaven but can easily be seen as being about America, or our dream of it, the dream stolen by the Bush Junta.

Somewhere over the rainbow way up high
There's a land that I've heard of once in a lullaby
Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true

If that isn't the immigrant dream of America I don't know what is. Pushing a song whose lyric is an immigrant's dream makes a wonderful contrast to the Republican bashing of immigrants. A song about idealism is a great contrast to the Republican drumbeat for constant war. That, right there, is your difference between hope and fear. Jesse Jackson will like it, too, with its literary allusion to his Rainbow Coalition, and its call to rise even higher than that.

But there's more.

Transform, Transact, Transcend

One thing I've learned from my studies of American political history is that, while all elections matter, some matter more than others.

• Most elections are transactive. They are a choice between two worldviews, followed by a negotiation of those views.
• Transformative elections happen once in a generation. They realign the political planets. They deliver a new Thesis, a new set of myths and values accepted by the majority, to power.

Transformative elections also deliver a new dominant medium to power. And after such an election people will go on, for the rest of their lives, thinking the world created by the  transformation is the world, that nothing else but its Thesis and its medium can exist or ever has existed.

This is particularly true after a Validation election. New leadership is offered, but the people ultimately go with the Thesis, validating its assumptions. That validation can't last, of course, and you later get an AntiThesis election, in which a new set of ideas, leaning against the Thesis and moderating it, take power. Once this AntiThesis runs its course comes the most curious type of election, the Excess election, in which the Thesis is reaffirmed even if everything the AntiThesis did worked.

We can see this pattern play out throughout the 20th century. The 1896, 1932 and 1968 elections were transformative, bringing a new Thesis to power. The 1908, 1948 and 1980 elections validated the Thesis, bringing it to its height of power. The 1912, 1952 and 1992 elections were AntiThesis elections, in which a set of assumptions leaning against the Thesis came to power. The last such winner, Bill Clinton, was quite explicit about this, calling his the Third Way.

Then you have these Excess elections, these curious selections where the best man loses, where evil seems to triumph because the Thesis has become obsolete. The 2000 selection was one such campaign. So was the 1960 campaign that brought John F. Kennedy to power. As was the 1920 election in which James Cox lost to Warren G. Harding.

So if you've done your math you know the 2008 election is a Transformation election, and perhaps the 2004 election should have been.

Most Americans already intuit the need for a new Thesis, a new set of myths and values which will inform power, and a new medium to carry it forward. Most see this Thesis coming from the Democratic Party -- the new Thesis usually emerges from the old AntiThesis, as Eisenhower begat Nixon and Wilson begat Roosevelt.

Most of us also understand that this medium, the Internet, will dominate the future, with TV becoming a mere application upon it.

And so we face our choice.

Why the Smart Guys are Panicky

The mood at the end of the annual Davos retreat of big moneybags was, in a word, scared. (Picture from Freakingnews.com.)
 

They're looking at the world economy the way New Orleanians looked at the TV weather shows a day before Katrina hit. They see the thing blossom before them, they're told it's headed right for them, but there are no freeways out of the money business. You gotta own something.

Why panic? The cataclysm has two components:

1. Big Shitpile, the corruption and greed which created the housing bubble; and
2. Stagflation, our dependence on oil and its suppliers' ability to manipulate the price.

History shows that whenever excess, a bubble, is found within the market, you can't turn things around until that excess is wrung completely out. Think about the dot-bomb. Some of the best companies lost half their value. Some lost 90%. Many went under completely. Now that the housing bubble is obvious that is what has to happen.

And the impact of making that happen is catastrophic. Think about it. You've got a $250,000 house. Before this is over it might be worth $125,000, it might be worth far less. Your buyer has to qualify for a fixed-rate mortgage, and put down a substantial down payment. Now how much do you owe on that house? I'd venture to say very few mortgages are half-paid off. And what happens to a loan when the value of the collateral falls below what you've borrowed? Well, on Wall Street they call that a margin call.

What we're seeing right now might be just the tip of the iceberg. Because all the excess has to be wrung out -- in home prices, in the mortgages underlying them, in the derivatives and other crap made with those mortgages.

Yet that's just half the problem.

The Transcendent Presence of 2008

There is a transcendent presence that ties Barack Obama directly to the Kennedys, to the High Thesis era of Camelot when any dream seemed possible.

Her name was Stanley.

Stanley Ann Dunham was born in Kansas in 1942. She died in Hawaii in 1995, of ovarian cancer, aged 53. The same age I am now.

Hers was a great American life. What John F. Kennedy talked about, she did. What he wanted us to believe she lived. She saw through color to character. And when her dreams took her away she had her parents live those values, and show her son the devotion she'd shown him, to teach him to dream as she did.

Her son described her as "a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism." His greatest regret was he did not make it to her death bed. He did not see her transcend life and death, after teaching him to transcend so much, and to believe in transcendence, which is the American dream.   

So what if they tell you you're black. You are descended from princes, Stanley told him. So what if we're poor? You can be whatever you want to be.

You can be President of the United States.