Dana Blankenhorn

Honeymoon Over

No President is perfect. 

To be elected takes a broad coalition. It is going to include elements of the business community. It is going to include rich and powerful people, and interests which grassroots voters find anathema.

That said, recent actions by the Obama Administration have ended their honeymoon with me. 

1. Refusing to release the torture photos.
2. A policy that is too soft on big banks to be credible. 
3. The appointment of a Bell shill to the FCC. 
4. Justice Department support for copyright extremism. 

In the case of the first two bullet points I thought of naming this post "the playa gets played." While he ran as a firm opponent of the Iraq War, President Obama has allowed himself to be manuevered into supporting policies that contradict his promises. He has even sent up his own Bush-like war supplemental. While he ran as a skeptic over bank power, he has staffed his Administration with Wall Street favorites, who treat big banks that built casinos as "too big to fail"  and close small banks that did not take those risks.

In his defense, I know that Barack Obama is, temperamentally, an incrementalist. Like Lincoln, like FDR, he moves as cautiously as he can, waiting to be pulled into the more radical actions for which he will go down in history. I think those Bushies and proto-Bushies who are now directing policy will be overthrown if their policies don't work -- you couldn't say that in the Bush era.

There are also lobbies which are equally as adept at playing Democratic politics as Republican, which is why so many of us believe there is no real difference between the parties. Pharma companies, media companies, and phone companies have always given to both sides, raising their support for the incumbent side but never cutting the other side off. 

While Barack Obama ran a "tech" campaign, he did not run as the Netroots candidate. He never brought liberal bloggers into his tent as equals. He merely allowed them to be part of his larger coalition. 

The biggest bad  decision Obama has made was to make Rahm Emanuel (above) his chief of staff and push Howard Dean to the sidelines. 

233 Years of Torture Logic

What kind of country are we?

It seems simple enough but it's a question that has bedevilled us since the founding of the Republic. 

Are we strong because we're good or good because we're strong? Each generation has had to face that question, and the answers have varied.

Our first war was fought by Thomas Jefferson, against North African pirate city-states. In Jefferson's War, Joseph Wheelan describes this as a war chosen on the basis of a principle, that being America would not succumb to blackmail even if the Old World felt it was OK.  

That was T. Jeff all the way. A claim of moral good masking naked self-interest. We stormed along the shores of Tripoli for ourselves, not our principles. 

Since then many Presidents have wrapped wars of choice in principle and gotten away with it in American history books. 

The Mexican War was a war of choice that opened vast territories to American conquest, and brought us out of debt through the discovery of gold in California. It remains a curious footnote in our own history books, but Mexicans are taught it as it was, a naked war of aggression for territory that made permanent America's pre-eminence on this continent. The Halls of Montezuma also reflected American self-interest. Semper Fi. 

The Spanish-American War was another war of choice which brought us an empire, but Americans were told then (and are probably told now) that it was a war of liberation for Cuba, even though it was immediately followed by our first Vietnam-like conflict, against the Filipino people. 

Most of our conflicts in Latin America have been colonial wars of choice, fought because we were strong, they were weak, and we wanted to exploit their assets. Few American schoolkids are taught any of this history (my son was an exception) but when you find yourself with South American friends there are curious silences only historical tensions can explain.

Big, Rich and Ignorant

Frank Rich of The New York Times has offered a thoughtful, provocative piece about The American Press on Suicide Watch. 

There's only one thing wrong with it. 

Mr. Rich still  doesn't know how his employer's business works.

I, on the other hand, actually took a publishing course at Medill, so let me state this as clearly as I can. No one pays for their newspaper. They pay for its delivery, for the infrastructure of trucks and men who get that paper from the printing press to your door. 

Newsgathering costs have always come from advertising. Always. That's how it was in Joe Medill's day, and that's how it is a century later. 

Where newspapers screwed up was in forgetting the purpose of advertising and their business role. The purpose of advertising is to sell stuff. A publisher's job is to help the businesses he is advocating for and organizing to sell stuff. 

The ad space on any page, whether real or virtual, is just the last piece in this puzzle. The ad space is a billboard which the advertiser fills. 

Why does he fill your empty billboard? This is the question newspapers used to be very good at answering. He fills it because the medium can prove that an ad placed with it will reach his target market, and that some of the people in that market will act on the ad. 

Print newspapers, and magazines, long answered this question with surveys. Not just surveys of their readers or their advertisers, but surveys of the target market. These surveys would show, for instance, that "46% of the people who will buy a new car next year in New York read The Times," or that "you can reach 50,000 millionaires for less with The Times than with any other medium."

Ad agencies used these kinds of surveys in planning campaigns. They would say, "we have to reach X number of people who have Y characteristics Z number of times," and if their creative was right it would result in $ worth of sales. 

Newspapers, in the print era, were never just at the billboard end of the sales funnel. They actually went deeper down the funnel than that.