- The Obama ‘08 iPhone application was truly remarkable: “Tap the top button, ‘call friends,’ and the software would take a peek at your phonebook and rearrange it in the order that the campaign was targeting states, so that friends who had, say, Colorado or Virginia area codes would appear at the top. With another tap, the Obama supporter could report back essential data for a voter canvass (‘left message,’ ‘not interested,’ ‘already voted,’ etc.). It all went into a giant database for Election Day.”
Even campaign tactics that looked to the public like elaborate publicity stunts turned out to be deadly serious strategies: When the campaign announced that Obama would announce his vice presidential selection via text message, “the point was to collect voters’ cell-phone numbers for later contact during voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts. Thanks to the promotion, the campaign’s list of cell-phone numbers increased several-fold to more than 1 million.”
Joe Trippi, the political genius behind the Dean Internet juggernaut, often said that if the Dean campaign was like the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, then Obama’s was the Apollo program. Asked about this analogy, Joe Rospars, the director of New Media for Obama, replied, “Not really—if you consider that Kitty Hawk was a successful flight, as compared to something that blew up on the fucking launchpad.”
Overall, Newsweek’s effort is an adequate first draft of history. But authors who have a little more time to reflect on these events than Thomas will surely produce much richer versions.
And if you don’t have time to digest 47,000 words, check out Steve Kroft’s remarkable sit down with Obama braintrusters David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Robert Gibbs, and Anita Dunn.
Recorded immediately after Obama claimed victory in front of hundreds of thousands of supporters at Grant Park in Chicago, and broadcast last night on 60 Minutes, the interview contains a wealth of insights.
After Kroft observes that “so many people..said ‘You’re not going to be able to elect a black man president of the United States..that had to be part of your equation in planning this campaign,” campaign manager David Plouffe replies:
No, honestly, you had to take a leap of faith in the beginning that the people would get by race. And I think the number of meetings we had about race was zero. Zero. We had to believe in the beginning that he would be a strong enough candidate that people of every background and race would be for him. The only time we got involved in a discussion of race was when people asked us about it. It was a fascination of the news media.
Axelrod recalled that when the Rev. Wright crisis exploded, the “only one who was calm was Obama.” And Plouffe identifies Obama’s speech about race as the turning point in the campaign: “It was a moment of real leadership. I think when he gave that race speech in Philadelphia, people saw a president.”
The piece ends with this summation from Axelrod:
We believed in him, and we believed in the cause. And we believed in each other. And by the end of this thing, over two years, you forge relationships. And we’re like a family. The hardest thing about this is that it’s ended now. It’s like the end of the movie M*A*S*H…The war’s over. We’re all going home. And we want to go home. But, on the other hand, it’s sort of a bit of melancholy because we’ve come to love each other and believe in each other. And we know that this will never be the same.
The same thing is true about America.
This is "media criticism"???? It reads like an advertisement for Obama about an advertisement for Obama. For ex., the author mentions that apparently editors were quite taken by Obama but doesn't critique this revelation for it's appropriateness when coming from a supposedly objective media. Please, offer us more serious media criticism in the future that is not so one-sided.
Posted by anon on Mon 10 Nov 2008 at 12:49 PM
Racism in America--conscious and otherwise--must be over because the possible candidate for Secretary of Education Joel I. Klein has created an incomprehensible mess of a racial imbalance in New York "elite" schools, a story that The New York Times continues to cover in detail but cannot understand.
Joel I. Klein is an "elite" product of Columbia and Harvard, but he obviously cannot grasp the difference between factitious Pearson tests, or Kaplan trash, and genuine learning. How is is possible that the schools in New York could be in such a clearly retrograde and racist mess without a single reporter at Newsweek or CBS being able to figure it out at all?
I would be willing to write an op/ed for cjr.org on the pathologies of New York English. How large is the study guide/SAT--ETS/College Board/Kaplan business in the city? What are the opportunity costs? How is it possible that the New York media could not grasp the implications of the ETS Europe UK marking collapse, what it meant for this wonderful American city, with the world's two best newspapers, New York Times and Wall Street Journal? How is it possible that you would have to read The Australian to find an acceptable Higher Education section in a newspaper, instead of in one of those two papers?
Is there one reporter in America--John Barry is certainly not that reporter--who can see how a real grammar or dictionary is superior to an SAT manual? Is there one reporter who can grasp that tests such as the Pearson "elite schools racial separation instrument" in New York and the SAT could not possibly be of any value because any good they could possibly do would be far more than canceled out by the opportunity costs?
For example, if students were to study for years the only two great teaching grammars of English, the Murdoch-owned COBUILD Intermediate English and English grammars, they would be able to integrate their knowledge of patterns such as counterfactual conditions with the wealth of instances in Dickens's "Great Expectations."
In journalism schools in New York, do we have official books such as the COBUILD grammars, Longman Advanced American Dictionary, and Longman Language Activator, with a determined effort to crack into such texts as "Terror and Consent," or a pathetic reliance on such trash as TOEFL?
Do we have any targets in America? Do we have graduated curricula? In his slight New York Times review of "Terror and Consent," Niall Ferguson effectively ignored the pervasive role of counterfactual reasoning in Bobbitt's book, even though (under Parmenides' Fallacy) we will find Bobbitt speculating on how matters would have been different today if we had not invaded Iraq, as opposed to how history might have turned out for us now in other circumstances.
In a graduated curriculum to teach counterfactual logic, you start with COBUILD grammars, work intensively on "Great Expectations," and aim towards "Terror and Consent." You end up with skills that you elicit formally on exams. How would history have been different today if George Bush had been able to read?
The American study guide tradition locks into various programmed intellectual collapses. If we compare the intelligence collapse culminating in 9/11, the Wall Street financial disorders, and the involution in teaching and testing represented by ETS, we note that there is nobody home to perform the analysis of symptoms. Just as reporters often have slovenly English, Economics departments rely on TOEFL and the GRE to sort admissions candidates.
The question I have for Niall Ferguson about his review of Philip Bobbitt's remarkable "Terror and Consent" is, did you read the book? Did any reporters such as John Barry ask you if you had done so? The evidence of your review is that you skimmed it. If you had read it in depth, you would have commented on some of its most important recommendations, such as intelligence schools. You would have observed the importance Bobbitt attributed to Parmenides' Fallacy in political reasoning.
CJR should abandon its language corner, if it exists--it seems a figment of someone's imagination-- and The New York Times should ask William Safire to step down. "On Language" is trivial junk. Language Log should close. American commentary on language is just too atrocious and mindless. If you can't think about English, you should not be creating entangled messes in the New York school system or thinking perhaps of being Secretary of Education so as to create an appalling mess on a national scale.
Is there a psychoanalytic institute in New York that could study the nature of involuted systems? Why do we have such a huge factitious economy? Why is Newsweek in such a state of sleep? Maybe the answer is in "After Apple-Picking."
Posted by Clayton Burns on Mon 10 Nov 2008 at 04:36 PM
Charles Kaiser, I am pleased that you liked the "60 Minutes" sit down. Perhaps you could ask around at The Journalism School at Columbia University for a consensus about the material on "60 Minutes" in "The Brotherhoods," by Guy Lawson and William Oldham, a powerful book, for certain. It seems curious to me that what the authors said about the "newsmagazine on the air" has not been fully resolved, as far as I am aware. What is in "The Brotherhoods" about "60 Minutes" would be an excellent case study for journalism schools. Has it been done, to your knowledge?
My first question is about pp. 433, 471. Who was the "60 Minutes" junior producer Oldham called, and have more details emerged as to why Casso's description of killing Hydell was excluded from his interview with "60 Minutes"?
Have the circumstances pp. 563-64 become clearer on how "60 Minutes" would run footage of the press conference after the arrest of Caracappa and Eppolito, including the fact that reporter Lesley Stahl showed up at Tommy Dades's house?
What is the "60 Minutes" analysis now of pp. 569-71 on the Ed Bradley review of the case and his interview with Dades?
What is your assessment of the "60 Minutes" interview with Stephen Caracappa depicted in "The Brotherhoods," pp. 601-05? Of Oldham's statement that "Ed Bradley wasn't going to ask Caracappa any of the hard questions"? How could Bradley have inserted the name "Caracappa" into the Casso interview, in response to "Cappa--" (602)? Should Bradley have known about and asked about the Caracappa disguise of the name Nicky Guido in a cluster of names (603)?
Posted by Clayton Burns on Mon 10 Nov 2008 at 06:07 PM