Dana Blankenhorn

Rove's Target

Karl Rove's target for victory is to get married white, low-information voters to save his ass through outlandish charges their husbands will reinforce for them.

A great example of how this is working is Tennessee, which I'm covering for Voic.Us. With the Republican candidate, the scandal-ridden Bob Corker, sinking out of sight, Rove had his campaign team gutted, and put in a California ad man he favored. The first result was a flyer that darkened Ford like Time once did O.J. Simpson.

The big result was the Call Me ad,  which has turned the race around.

The ad calls Democrat Harold Ford Jr. a libertine, living the lie of a church-goer while actually attending Playboy parties. But it's more clever than that.  The tag line is a buxom white woman saying, "Harold, call me." Ford is black. By insinuating (with humor) the image of a "sex-hungry nigger buck after yo' white wimmin," Rove hopes to overturn Ford's carefully-crafted image of church-going moderation.

This Week's Clue: Accelerating Change

See what happens when you don't subscribe? You get your Clues late.

The following is the current week's essay in A-Clue.Com, my free weekly e-mail newsletter. You can still subscribe by clicking this link.

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A few years ago I was invited to speak at a conference called Accelerating Change, at Stanford University.

I offered a talk on The World of Always On. Use the wireless router as a platform for applications which live in the air, I said. Sensors and motes can measure the condition of your heart and blood, can measure the condition of your lawn, can monitor your perimeter, can find your stuff. A PC board can calculate when alerts must be sounded, or can respond to your verbal commands. This can let millions age in place safely.

Nothing happened. I'm not a programmer. I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm a journalist. I was speaking of what I expected to see, it was pure advocacy. I had no power to make it so.

But I was right about the trend. The World of Always-On is starting to happen. In China.

It was the failure of Always-On to happen here which led to my current obsession with politics. What I have been looking for are policies that will accelerate change. In normal times, throughout the 20th century, America had the very best environment for accelerating change. We had the schools, we had the laws, we had the freedom to fail. Something, I concluded, had gone horribly wrong.

Smalley's Dream Realized?

Over 20 years ago, when scientists at Rice (my alma mater) first discovered what they called Buckyballs, no one knew where it would lead.

One dream of eventual Nobel-winner Richard Smalley was that they would find uses in medicine. He was working in that area when he died, last year, of leukemia.

So it is gratifying to read that another Rice scientist has taken us pretty far down that road.

Physorg reports that chemistry professor Lon Wilson and his team have found a way to ionize very short carbon nanotubes, giving them a negative charge, and then loaded drugs or imaging agents on them. (And, no I can't hide the snark. See, guys at Rice can do good work, too.)

By giving them a charge, the team separated the tubes, meaning they could be worked on (and tracked) individually once they entered the bloodstream. Anti-cancer drugs could be targeted directly at tumors. Images could be taken of tumors with extraordinary accuracy, and even individual cancer cells would become visible.

Oh, the charged tubes also dissolve more readily in water than uncharged nanotubes.

Washington Threatens the Blogosphere

One hallmark of a generational crisis is that a new medium rises to power. In the 1960s' crisis, this was television. In the 1930s' crisis it was two media, radio and the movies. In the 1890s' crisis, it was the mass market newspaper.

As each of these media emerged, the existing order fought the medium as strongly as the old political order fought the new. The difference between the fights was that the journalists did it unconsciously, pretending (always) to being impartial and fair, while displaying their biases.

In the 1960s, given the complete collapse of radio as a political medium,  this fight was mainly carried on by newspapers. (I say mainly, because the anti-TV in politics movies of the 1960s -- from The Best Man through Redford's The Candidate -- is a course of its own.)  Readers and viewers were told, in no uncertain terms, that the new medium was dangerous, that the candidates it created were caricatures, that it was open to manipulation. As though the older medium were not.

Yet in time, we know, each medium had its day. TV became deregulated under  Reagan's conservative regime, which did away with the old Fairness Doctrine. Franklin Roosevelt embraced radio, as he embraced Hollywood, using them as propaganda vehicles to enormous effect. The role of newspapers in creating the Spanish-American war is well known.

The 1966 Game: Who's Lieberman Then?

You may remember our 1966 Game, where I tried  to identify similarities between people from the cusp of the last generational crisis and today.

The 1966 election was a watershed much as this year's election will be. In that election Republicans gained 47 House seats. They also gained three Senate seats. Despite this success, they remained an impotent minority in the next Congress -- the Johnson landslide had been that big.

Today's Democrats are much closer to real power than those Republicans were. With a change of just 15 House seats they will gain control of that chamber. The Senate's 6 is tougher to see, but in a "wave" election like we're about to have, all the close races go one way -- even something absurd (like 8) is possible. (Wave elections, as I've said before, always have a result which at the time seems ludicrous.)

What separates our time from that time is one man, Joe Lieberman. Or so it seems. Perhaps no man is more hated by Netroots Democrats, the people I consider heirs to the Goldwater movement conservatives of that time.  I have considered him to be most like Jacob Javits, the bete noir of the New York Conservative Party. But Javits did not lose a Republican primary until 1980, and that was down as much to his (then admitted) ALS as anything else. (He then ran as a Liberal and helped elect Al D'Amato.)

In conventional terms there seems little with which to compare this Lieberman-hate. The wildest point made in its defense (so far) is a piece at MyDD comparing Lieberman's statements about Iraq to Nixon's about Vietnam. That's interesting because, when Nixon made his statements his view was in the ascendent (as the last 40 years of history have proven), while Lieberman is embracing the falling star of Bush-ism.

What the Copyright Wars Are Really About

Every market has two sides, buyers and sellers.

Most markets also have intermediaries, and folks standing in for one side or the other of a transaction.

All these people in the middle are threatened by the Internet. But few have the power and money to fight back.

The music business does have this power and money. That had the power to get the DMCA through Congress, to get the WIPO treaty passed, and thus to get DMCA-like laws passed around the world. They constantly harp on the idea that they're in it to "stop illegal downloading," in other words, to represent the interests of the seller of product against the buyer.

But this is simply not true. They are, in fact, trying to retain their power as an intermediary, in behalf of the seller, and prevent that seller from going direct to the market.

Every once in a while we get wind of another artist who breaks through the noise and does exactly this. Usually it's a previously-unknown artist who did a lot of their own technical and marketing work, and who is thrilled that (thanks to their success) a publisher has stepped in to hand them an advance check.

This week, however, we have an established artist with almost no technical background using the medium music publishers wish to destroy to reach the audience and find great success.

CATPCHA

We've been hit bad by comment spam the last few weeks.

Each time we get a good discussion thread going, it seems the comment spam bots flood in. I usually try to erase these when I find them, but we were losing a lot of good discussion.

So I've taken action. I've implemented CAPTCHA on the comments here. That's a "Turing test" which requires you to type a random set of letters, which are displayed in a funky way.

I don't like CAPTCHA. I do piss-and-moan about it when I find it on other blogs. But I now know it's necessary, and I apologize to all for that.

America: The Next Generation

I made a point earlier about the pattern of life – youth, aging, and death.

It's an important point, because I just read the piece to my own 15 year old son, and then had him read the link to Nixon's own Farewell Address. (I wasn't torturing him. John's in his school's debate club and the farewell speech was extemporaneous, making it an important learning tool.)

John enjoyed the Nixon speech, but felt I read my own lines poorly.

The point is that John, at 15, is a little older than I was when my generational election came. In 1968 (for those doing the math) I was 13. Assuming the election of 2008 defines his future, John will be 8 months short of voting age.

Yet we are all – all of us – products of our time. There are skeptics of my theory who claim that “we all live in 435 micro-climates” so our weather has no generational pattern.

The Seventh Crisis in Context

The United States has had, by my reckoning, six generational crises in its history. This is the seventh.

The previous crises  are, in order:

1. 1800, the first truly competitive election, in which the idea of sedition as a crime was rejected and Thomas Jefferson created the early form of the Democratic Party based on the ideal of rural life.
2. 1828, when Andrew Jackson created the modern Democratic Party based on a balance of regional interests and the Myth of the West.
3. 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected and the nation exploded into Civil War.
4. The 1890s, the birth of Populism and Progressivism, resulting in the rise to power of Theodore Roosevelt.
5. 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt was chosen to fight the Depression and the idea of affirmative government was born.
6. 1968, when Richard Nixon brought the Thesis of Conflict, anti-communist, and anti-elite, into power.

I'm Not Afraid

It may be too late for this, but if you know someone with a camera and some contacts, here's an ad for Democratic candidates nationwide I'd like to see.