Dana Blankenhorn

Piece Work

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 46 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Here is the difference between a political campaign and running an American government.

In a campaign you have a platform. That platform includes many different parts. They are an integrated whole.

But once you start governing you have to separate the pieces. Anything requiring Congressional action must be passed separately. Thus Presidents are told to concentrate on doing just one big thing.

A great economic plan, jammed through Congress by a narrow majority, has been the instrument of choice for a generation now. Reagan used it, Clinton used it, Bush used it. This set the table for everything else they did, or tried to do.

This was not possible with President Obama. There were just too many things that have to be done. His stimulus plan, while massive, only turned the nose of the airplane up and kept it from crashing to the ground. It was not what he was about, not what we voted him in for.

The actual Obama program consists of two other pieces of legislation. Call them the labor bill and the jobs bill.

The Stupidest Man in the World

The history of business is littered with the bones of men and companies that ignored progress.

Usually this ignorance appears after the founder's death. The fate of Polaroid was not sealed until years after the death of Edwin Land. Toyota did not overtake GM until decades after Alfred P. Sloan was a-moldering in his grave. 

But sometimes, in a few tragic cases, the fall comes in the lifetime of the founder. This is increasingly common in the era of Moore's Law. Thus we had the tragedies of men such as Ken Olsen, An Wang and Seymour Cray. New solutions change the game, the Great Man refuses to play, and he is crushed on the wheels of history.

This had not happened in media in quite a long time. True, the Linotype crushed many small papers under the heel of Hearst and Pulitzer. But radio did not kill the newspaper, and many TV licenses were given directly to radio companies, even newspaper magnates.

Thus the industry was completely unprepared for the Internet. I well remember an event at the Atlanta Press Club in 1995, where Cox Enterprises chairman James Cox Kennedy confidently predicted the Internet would be an enormous boon to newspapers, enabling him to "repurpose" his content and get paid multiple times for the same story. I just shook my head. The man was clueless, and history has shown that to be true.

But Kennedy was a genius next to Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch, feared as perhaps no press baron ever just a few years ago, now stands  as the Stupidest Man in the World.

The reason is on the cover of Michael Wolff's 2008 book about Murdoch. "The Man Who Owns the News."

The Stupak Opportunity

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 45 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

The Stupak Amendment, which analysts are calling the worst thing ever for the women's movement -- it prohibits coverage for abortions even in private contracts written on the health exchange -- may in fact be an enormous opportunity.

And that opportunity holds big lessons for other political movements as well.

First, want to know why the AARP is  so powerful? Cash flow. 

Thanks to a deal with UnitedHealth, AARP draws millions of dollars per year in insurance kickbacks from its members. Thus it's not just an interest group, but an institution. The AARP's endorsement of the House measure went a long way toward assuring its passage last night.

Planned Parenthood, by contrast, is financially weak. It has been burdened with the call of "choice" for a generation, against the stronger frame of "life." It is constantly on the defensive, where if it looked at history and changed its frame to working "against slavery" (a woman's independent life can today be ended by any guy's sperm, and even a rapist's baby brought to the world at the point of a gun, according to the other side) things can be turned around.

But this post is not just about politics. It's about money.