Obama in Botswana II
I tried to listen to the inauguration live on my radio – the cheap-plastic, $5 thing that only receives one station and then only when it's tilted at a very precise angle. I tried. Unfortunately, despite the inauguration coverage, there was an incredibly loud broadcast of dance music that drowned it out, no matter where I moved the antenna, no matter how carefully I adjusted the tuning. Defeated, I went to bed. The next morning I had the bright idea to try streaming video over the internet (god bless that wireless tower) and lo and behold, CNN managed to stumble through. With 100% success on the thrilling audio, and about 50% on the equally thrilling video, I stared at the frozen but jubilant crowd, imagining friends and relatives out there, some having come all the way from the west coast to be there. Yes, I cried.
I'm going to take this opportunity to actually BLOG a couple of things for once:
1.Change Has Come to the White House. The three headings on this page: Communication, Transparency, Participation. Reading the little blurb on this page, I felt like – even if I had nothing to do with the United States, even if I didn't have family and friends living there, even if I hadn't lived there myself – I would want to follow the workings of this government. I would be fascinated, excited, madly curious to see what happens when a government puts everything out there, constantly asks its citizens for advice, and lets people know what their government is doing, and why. Of course, who knows if they'll really be as transparent and as responsive as they promise – and yes, we do elect a government to make decisions for us, we trust them to do what's best when we can't make those decisions ourselves. I don't look for miracles. But it's a tremendously hopeful time! And, to swipe a quote from the article I'm about to recommend, the contrast between this and the Bush administration is marked: “There’s this West Texas thing in him [Bush], which is the—you know: Bad people are comin’ to town. Everybody go back to their house. I’ll take the burden on. Which, you know, may work in a Western town, but doesn’t work for a country that wants to be part of that conversation.” Let's be part of the conversation....
2.Which brings me to An Oral History of the Bush White House, a collection of interview snippets from various important people from the entire run of the Bush presidency. It's a fascinating trip back through the past eight years. Just in case you DON'T click that link, here are some choice bits:
David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: I went to a communications meeting the day after Jeffords switched. I remember feeling like I was looking at people who had won a reality-game ticket to head up the White House. There was this remarkable combination of hubris, excitement, and staggering ignorance.
[Note from me: I found the ubiquity of celebrities during all stages of the inauguration to be, frankly, weird. One of the speakers at my graduation from Princeton was Bradley Whitford – his was a speech fraught with problems, but that's another story – and one of the things he said was, “the reason Kerry didn't win was that he didn't look good on television. To succeed in American politics today, the secret is that you must look good on television.” Whatever else he may have done, Obama has certainly mastered the fine art of looking good on television. The seemingly endless parade of celebrities that graced the coverage of the inaugural week looked pretty damn good, too. I mean, I agree it was a wonderful thing to see Denzel Washington up there speaking, but to me it says that the American people have developed a dependence on entertainment. There were any number of people that are probably better-qualified to make that speech, but they're not recognizable, they're not Hollywood. They don't look good on television. The American president is the most fantastic celebrity, the most obsessively-followed personality, the best fodder for tabloids, television, newspapers, magazines. Politics is entertainment, and entertainment politics... And I'm not going to turn this into an essay, but I'm not particularly happy about that.]
Richard Clarke, chief White House counterterrorism adviser: “The contrast with having briefed his father and Clinton and Gore was so marked. And to be told, frankly, early in the administration, by Condi Rice and [her deputy] Steve Hadley, you know, Don’t give the president a lot of long memos, he’s not a big reader—well, shit. I mean, the president of the United States is not a big reader?”
September 27, 2001 At O’Hare International Airport, Bush advises Americans on what they can do to respond to the trauma of September 11: “Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”
Matthew Dowd: “He was given a great, great window of opportunity where everybody wanted to be called to some shared sense of purpose and sacrifice and all that, and Bush never did it. And not for lack of people suggesting various things from bonds to, you know, some sort of national service. Bush decided to say that the best thing is: Everybody go about their life, and I’ll handle it.
There’s this West Texas thing in him, which is the—you know: Bad people are comin’ to town. Everybody go back to their house. I’ll take the burden on. Which, you know, may work in a Western town, but doesn’t work for a country that wants to be part of that conversation. “
Richard Clarke, chief White House counterterrorism adviser: : That night, on 9/11, Rumsfeld came over and the others, and the president finally got back, and we had a meeting. And Rumsfeld said, You know, we’ve got to do Iraq, and everyone looked at him—at least I looked at him and Powell looked at him—like, What the hell are you talking about? And he said—I’ll never forget this—There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks.
And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld in the least.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It really didn’t, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq. I just found it a little disgusting that they were talking about it while the bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center.
I'm going to take this opportunity to actually BLOG a couple of things for once:
1.Change Has Come to the White House. The three headings on this page: Communication, Transparency, Participation. Reading the little blurb on this page, I felt like – even if I had nothing to do with the United States, even if I didn't have family and friends living there, even if I hadn't lived there myself – I would want to follow the workings of this government. I would be fascinated, excited, madly curious to see what happens when a government puts everything out there, constantly asks its citizens for advice, and lets people know what their government is doing, and why. Of course, who knows if they'll really be as transparent and as responsive as they promise – and yes, we do elect a government to make decisions for us, we trust them to do what's best when we can't make those decisions ourselves. I don't look for miracles. But it's a tremendously hopeful time! And, to swipe a quote from the article I'm about to recommend, the contrast between this and the Bush administration is marked: “There’s this West Texas thing in him [Bush], which is the—you know: Bad people are comin’ to town. Everybody go back to their house. I’ll take the burden on. Which, you know, may work in a Western town, but doesn’t work for a country that wants to be part of that conversation.” Let's be part of the conversation....
2.Which brings me to An Oral History of the Bush White House, a collection of interview snippets from various important people from the entire run of the Bush presidency. It's a fascinating trip back through the past eight years. Just in case you DON'T click that link, here are some choice bits:
David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: I went to a communications meeting the day after Jeffords switched. I remember feeling like I was looking at people who had won a reality-game ticket to head up the White House. There was this remarkable combination of hubris, excitement, and staggering ignorance.
[Note from me: I found the ubiquity of celebrities during all stages of the inauguration to be, frankly, weird. One of the speakers at my graduation from Princeton was Bradley Whitford – his was a speech fraught with problems, but that's another story – and one of the things he said was, “the reason Kerry didn't win was that he didn't look good on television. To succeed in American politics today, the secret is that you must look good on television.” Whatever else he may have done, Obama has certainly mastered the fine art of looking good on television. The seemingly endless parade of celebrities that graced the coverage of the inaugural week looked pretty damn good, too. I mean, I agree it was a wonderful thing to see Denzel Washington up there speaking, but to me it says that the American people have developed a dependence on entertainment. There were any number of people that are probably better-qualified to make that speech, but they're not recognizable, they're not Hollywood. They don't look good on television. The American president is the most fantastic celebrity, the most obsessively-followed personality, the best fodder for tabloids, television, newspapers, magazines. Politics is entertainment, and entertainment politics... And I'm not going to turn this into an essay, but I'm not particularly happy about that.]
Richard Clarke, chief White House counterterrorism adviser: “The contrast with having briefed his father and Clinton and Gore was so marked. And to be told, frankly, early in the administration, by Condi Rice and [her deputy] Steve Hadley, you know, Don’t give the president a lot of long memos, he’s not a big reader—well, shit. I mean, the president of the United States is not a big reader?”
September 27, 2001 At O’Hare International Airport, Bush advises Americans on what they can do to respond to the trauma of September 11: “Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”
Matthew Dowd: “He was given a great, great window of opportunity where everybody wanted to be called to some shared sense of purpose and sacrifice and all that, and Bush never did it. And not for lack of people suggesting various things from bonds to, you know, some sort of national service. Bush decided to say that the best thing is: Everybody go about their life, and I’ll handle it.
There’s this West Texas thing in him, which is the—you know: Bad people are comin’ to town. Everybody go back to their house. I’ll take the burden on. Which, you know, may work in a Western town, but doesn’t work for a country that wants to be part of that conversation. “
Richard Clarke, chief White House counterterrorism adviser: : That night, on 9/11, Rumsfeld came over and the others, and the president finally got back, and we had a meeting. And Rumsfeld said, You know, we’ve got to do Iraq, and everyone looked at him—at least I looked at him and Powell looked at him—like, What the hell are you talking about? And he said—I’ll never forget this—There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks.
And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld in the least.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It really didn’t, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq. I just found it a little disgusting that they were talking about it while the bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center.
posted by Jenn at
6:20 PM
1 Comments:
just a quick check-in jenn... loved 'obama in botswana 2' reminded me a bit of struther. made it to the bottom of your politico blog. couldn't help but to reflect on our students' need for entertainment in the classroom... 'the medium IS the message'. looking forward to reading more. missing you baba.
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