One year on: Obama’s anniversary challenges

Much of the focus on President Obama’s one-year anniversary in the White House, on Wednesday, centered on retrospective views timed to the day he took office on Jan. 20, 2009. It’s a ritual of the calendar and the media: the customary polls assessing his performance in office; the ritual scorecards of “promises kept” and “promises broken”; the pat “report cards”; the hierophants in the punditburo about Obama’s future prospects and those of the Democrats in this election year.

The real events that both mark his first year in office and offer a forecast to the three years remaining didn’t dovetail with the anniversary. One occurred the day before, the other one a few days later. Both of these Richter-scale events underscore the unpredictable nature of our politics. Both could be bellwethers for Democratic prospects in 2010, Obama’s presidential prospects in 2012, and other campaigns into the indefinite future.

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The first happened on Tuesday, when Scott Brown, a little-known Massachusetts Republican state senator, defeated his Democratic challenger, state Attorney General Martha Coakley, to deliver unto the Republicans the seat in the United States Senate occupied for 47 years by the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy, moral conscience of the Senate.

Besides being a response to Coakley as a candidate — one who by all assessments ran a feckless, half-hearted campaign — the Brown win was seen as a message to the White House that the GOP could penetrate an historically reliable Democratic stronghold.

Brown tapped into public anger about the bank bailouts, proposed changes in U.S. health care, and a generalized fear about the size of the federal government and its role in everyday American lives. With a populist campaign that featured Brown sprinting from town to town driving a truck and wearing blue jeans and a barn coat instead of a suit and tie, Brown successfully adopted the grassroots outsider meme that Obama himself used to great effect in the 2008 presidential run (right down to a slight variation of the font Obama used in his campaign logos and branding all of 2008).

The result is a likely challenge to the Obama health-care agenda that’s hanging on by a thread in Congress, and a certain revival of Republican swagger and confidence in that party’s prospects for 2010 and beyond.

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The second and more serious pushback against the Obama agenda happened on Thursday. In a decision that threatens to permanently transform the ground game of American politics, the United States Supreme Court, 5-4, ruled that corporations, like individual American citizens, could make unlimited contributions to political campaigns in order to influence politicians.

In its decision, the Court purported to hew to the free-speech principles enshrined in the First Amendment. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority: “The First Amendment protects speech and speaker, and the ideas that flow from each.”

Justices Roberts and Alito wrote, in a concurrence: “The First Amendment protects more than just the individual on a soapbox and the lonely pamphleteer.”

The decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, effectively overturned 103 years of settled law, and was a direct indicator that the court meant to put citizens and corporations on equal existential footing.

It sent the signal that the battle between Wall Street and Main Street — between the interests of deep-pocketed corporation and those of everyday people — has been fully joined by the most toweringly dangerous, thunderously insensitive Supreme Court ruling since Dred Scott.

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Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the dissenters, framed the stakes of the decision: “In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. ...

“The Court’s blinkered and aphoristic approach to the First Amendment may well promote corporate power at the cost of the individual and collective self-expression the Amendment was meant to serve. It will undoubtedly cripple the ability of ordinary citizens, Congress, and the States to adopt even limited measures to protect against corporate domination of the electoral process. Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the Court has advanced the cause of self-government today.“

MLK, Selma and Dennis Hopper 1965

On Monday we got the ritual observances we’ve come to expect on MLK Day: the pictures of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., at the March on Washington in 1963; the fragments of the “I Have a Dream” speech that most of us have cemented in our memories, if not our everyday practices; the majesty of King accepting the Nobel Peace Prize; the fiery power of his last speech, in Memphis, the night before the world changed on April 4, 1968.

But we can’t forget Alabama in 1965, and the arduous journey that took King and thousands of his supporters from Selma to Montgomery on a march that subjected them to the American South at its worst, a region in the height of Jim Crow rage.

Over days in late March 1965, coping with chilling rain, police harassment and the wide range of physical challenges that befall any group of people marching 57 miles in open country, the civil rights marchers made their way on a journey that remains, in many ways, the distilling symbolic experience of the civil rights era.

That year, Dennis Hopper — yes, folks, that Dennis Hopper, the maverick actor, screenwriter, activist and (at that time) fledgling photographer — took his camera and went to Alabama to document what was happening.

Some of what he captured in March 1965 found its way into “Dennis Hopper: Signs of the Times,” a recent exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in lower Manhattan. It’s resurfaced again; the Vanity Fair Web site has republished nine of the images from the exhibition in a slideshow you’ll find at this link.

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The images from the VF slideshow bear an emotional velocity that punches through the years and into the present day:

King at the podium on what was almost certainly March 25, 1965, the day the third and final march between Selma and Montgomery was completed. Facing a thicket of microphones, speaking truth to power, King delivered the celebrated “How long? Not long” oration that still resonates.

As you can see in the photo above, Hopper allows the natural drama of the moment to dominate. There are no tricks or sleight of hand by perspective (like photographing King from below and face on, for example — a more conventional composition for depicting an imposing authority figure). There’s a welcome directionality to the composition; Hopper took the shot roughly level with the orator; he approaches King as an equal, rather than a god. Considering what was said that day, it makes great sense

A second Hopper image that seems to convey the spirit of the march — and certainly the stakes — is a shot of a young black boy, maybe seven or eight years old with eyes and a face as old as time, as old as the struggle that was in his blood and his bones before he was even born. If you want another timeless moment, look closer: He wears a cap marked FULL EMPLOYMENT, this little brother too young to be gainfully employed himself — back then.

In light of the current jobs and economic crisis, you have to wonder where he is today. How old he is now — 52? 53? In the prime of his employable years? How does that long-ago message resonate for him in today’s economy?

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What Dennis Hopper documented in those pivotal American days, what Martin Luther King said in that dangerous time, are more than just mildly interesting fragments of history. A meaningful photograph has a way of being a time machine, of marking a moment in the past that projects itself meaningfully into the future. What it documents is as important when we see it — whenever we see it — as it was the day it was taken.

Monday was MLK Day in America. We’ve only to look back at these photos, and other images that are the visual fabric of postwar America, to recall how long ago the struggle for what we take for granted was.

And how recently.

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Image credits: Photographs: © 1965, 2010 Dennis Hopper. Images from “Dennis Hopper: Signs of the Times,” courtesy Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York. Directly republished from Vanity Fair.com.

Throwing Conan from the show

Is it my imagination, or has Conan O’Brien gotten sharper, edgier, friskier — funnier — than he’s been in a long time? His current quasi-limbo as the possibly/probably exiting host of NBC’s ”The Tonight Show” has been good for him emotionally and professionally. Like a team mathematically eliminated from the playoffs but game for the game just the same, O’Brien in the last week or so has been loose, a man with nothing to lose, firing on all comedic cylinders, wielding his offbeat comedic style with an abandon and daring that’s lately pushed the envelope on why late-night programming is on late at night in the first place.

In the last week, in his monologues and with his guests as sometimes unwitting foils, O’Brien has alluded to drive-by shootings, deviant sexual practices and illegal drugs. And then he started talking about Jay Leno, his elder comedic counterpart and nemesis for control of “The Tonight Show,” the same show in the same time slot Leno held down for 17 years. His spirited jabs at Leno, and those taken on his behalf by ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel and David Letterman at CBS, have made for some of late-night’s snarkiest moments, and some of its most memorable.

None of which matters a whit to los jefes at NBC, who are reportedly at or near an agreement to give O’Brien his walking papers and 30 million other papers, called dollars. This is being done to ease the way for the return of Leno to his old perch as host of “The Tonight Show,” with Leno thus retiring his unwatched and underfunny prime-time experiment, “The Jay Leno Show.”

"By the time you see this, I'll be halfway to Rio in an NBC traffic helicopter," O’Brien said in his Friday monologue.

Having apparently thrown Conan from the show, NBC is opening the door to a challenge from a dangerous free agent, someone who knows his way around late-night comedy at least as well as Leno does. Someone who knows his way around a younger, edgier demographic of viewers better than Leno does.

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Listen … you can hear the execs’ hungry drool dripping onto the Berber carpet at Fox right now. And count on it: Once Conan has ambled up to the NBC’s cashier’s window for the last time, Fox will be first to step up to the plate and offer him … a new cashier. The Fox television empire has lately been in something of a reinvention mode. You’ve gotta believe if Fox ponied up X dollars for a relatively untried presence like Sarah Palin, they’ll leap at the chance to lock up the talents of an innovator and a known quantity in late-night television.

Fox would be exhibiting a demographic shrewdness that Jay Leno can’t top: Conan appeals to the 18-to-49 demographic coveted by advertisers, a cohort used to set advertising rates and to define and sharpen their perceptions about the buying public.

Look at the populist support that’s been generated by viewers eager to see O’Brien prevail. At one recent taping, members of the audience wore TEAM CONAN T-shirts. Someone generated an I’m With Coco” image that recalls a campaign poster from the 1930’s. It’s not just grassroots, it’s viral grassroots. Leno’s audience skews older; it’s more to the liking of people with hair as gray as Leno’s is. Like it or not, that matters to advertisers. And to the viewer ratings the network lives and dies by.

And ratings are a funny thing. They have a way of vanishing or showing up at the most inopportune time. Irony of ironies: The O’Brien deathwatch has garnered ratings that are better than they’ve been in a while. “With his jabs at NBC network executives apparently resonating in a country filled with the unemployed, viewership has soared,” The Associated Press reported Sunday.

“’Tonight" ratings Friday were 50 percent higher than they've been this season, and O'Brien beat CBS' Letterman, according to a preliminary Nielsen Co. estimate based on large markets,” The AP said. “In the 18-to-49-year-old demographic that NBC relies on to set advertising prices, O'Brien even beat Leno's prime-time show.”

It all points to how, apparently, patience is not a virtue for NBC. Writing on Digg, C010rb1lndusa understood the missed opportunity: “The worst part about the situation is that the NBC executives fail to remember history. Conan's original late night show struggled to gain an audience early in its production. But when viewers got used to his unconventional humor, he was a big hit, and at 12:30 at night no less. Yet they don't even give Conan a year to get comfortable with mainstream America.”

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It went underreported in the heat of the LenoBrien War, but in a news story related to the upcoming Vancouver Olympic Games, Jeff Immelt, the chairman of General Electric (NBC’s parent company), said recently that — before the torch even shows up in Vancouver, before viewer one tunes in to watch the luge run — NBC already expects to lose “a couple hundred million bucks” on the Games it paid more than $800 million to broadcast over “the networks of NBC.”

Soft ad sales were blamed, as well as the still-recovering economy. But whatever the reasoning for that forecast, it can’t inspire confidence when a company announces it plans to lose money on producing its shiny new product before that shiny new product is even out the factory door.

Thus sayeth the suits at NBC. That prediction may be evidence of a misstep at the Peacock. We will be witnesses to another one when Conan O’Brien turns in his key to the studio soundstage and drives off the NBC lot, probably bound for Foxier pastures.

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Image credits: O'Brien: © 2009 NBC/Conaco. Leno: © 2009 NBC/Big Dog Productions. Coco image: Via HuffPost.

Proposed: A Marshall Plan for Haiti

When the seismic catastrophe long predicted for the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden strike-slip fault zone finally occurred at 4:53 p.m. on Jan. 12, the earthquake that followed immediately and the devastation that’s still unfolding revealed other fissures, other fault lines that were almost as long and as old as the deforested ground of Haiti.

Courtesy of the 24/7 professional and social media, we’re discovering the powerfully destructive forces that have been at work in the country for decades now, mostly a crushing poverty that’s made Haiti the most impoverished nation in the Western hemisphere — and a relative indifference to that poverty on the part of neighbors big and small, notably the United States.

Now the deal’s gone down. Horribly. Initial casualty estimates of 50,000 people killed by the direct temblor or its numerous aftershocks have exploded; at this writing the Haitian government in extremis has estimated the death toll is, conservatively, at least 200,000 — a tally that would make this seismic event one of the worst in history.



It’s one of those tragically available guesstimates, as likely to be right as wrong. But from what we’ve seen on YouTube and the news (and for many following the events in Port-au-Prince right now, YouTube is the news), the scope of the damage, its Brueghel panorama suggest even that estimate may yet be shockingly conservative.

What lays before the United States and any number of ambitious, visionary world partners is to take this profound crisis and forge something like an opportunity. What’s called for is nothing less than a Marshall Plan for the restoration of Haiti.

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Students of the American statecraft preceding that of Colin Powell know the name of George C. Marshall, for many the best U.S. Secretary of State in the 20th century.

Witnessing the stagnation of Western Europe in the first years after the end of World War II, Marshall undertook the European Recovery Program, a broad and sweeping initiative meant to help the economies of 17 European countries with a variety of forms of material and financial assistance. Simply put, the plan that came to bear his name helped put postwar Europe on its feet.

We tend to remember the Marshall Plan mostly because of its almost surgical efficacy, its direct way of channeling relief to the people who needed it most. We tend to remember the Marshall Plan mostly because of its most dramatic and emotionally powerful manifestation: the Berlin airlift, a British-American campaign during which 2.3 million tons of food were ferried into West Berlin by air over 278,000 flights, in defiance of a Russian blockade of land and water routes to that sector of the city divided by the Allies in 1945.

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That kind of direct intervention seems to have become a thing of the past, if there’s no direct provocation for its use. This is the time and place to bring it back. A Marshall-style plan for the recovery of Haiti and its people is precisely the kind of global forward thinking needed today for several reasons.



First, it helps to solidify the cultural and social affinities that already exist between Haiti and the United States. There are more than 2 million Haitian Americans, and longstanding ties of music, style and cuisine make this country a natural partner in reconstruction.

It also gives the United States the opportunity for a necessary nation building in its own backyard. There’s already been a long-established network of NGOs, charities and other grassroots organizations working there for decades. Those groups form the informational infrastructure needed by the United States and its partners to begin the process of building Haitian economic self-sufficiency.

And a concerted effort to help the Haitians help themselves fills the current vacuum: a nation whose police force is scattered, if not dead; whose government is greviously damaged; whose president was left literally homeless by the events of Tuesday afternoon. A country with no functioning government soon discovers any number of bad actors and militant freelancers more than willing to fill that role. With two wars going on on the other side of the planet, at a rough cost of $370 million a day, that’s a vacuum at our doorstep we don’t need.

HuffParody

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, parody is, well, something else again. The Huffington Post, the "Internet Newspaper" co-founded by socialite author Arianna Huffington, has been a daily guilty pleasure since it was started in May 2005.

It recently achieved the distinction of being a target of someone besides the conservative politicians it skewers with regularity, when the Web site Comedy.com created a deft parody of the Web site's breathless, over-the-top news and headline style, and its reliably progressive editorial leanings.

HuffPost thus joins The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times as a subject of benign ridicule, finally high up enough on the media food chain for this kind of comeuppance.

Hey, turnabout's always fair play. Sometimes, it's fun when the kid laughing at the emperor's new clothes gets slapped upside the head. I'm just sayin'.

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Image credit: Comedy.com.

Job #1: Saving Haiti

In an instant, the world changed on Tuesday.



That afternoon a cataclysm was visited on the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, a disaster whose scope is undefined, and will be for months or years to come.



What's obviously a gut-check time for the United States (as the only global power that can take the lead in rescuing Haiti, its neighbor just 600 miles away) is also a time for the individual to step up to the plate, sit down at the computer and send the assistance relief agencies need now: MONEY. NOW.

Drop some coin on CARE.

Send those twos and fews to the International Rescue Committee.

A little cheddar, please, to Oxfam. And Doctors Without Borders, while you're at it. And don't get suckered by telephone solicitations; the scam artists are already out in force. Go straight to the sites themselves to be sure your money goes straight where it needs to go.



Doesn't matter what your political or racial or religious persuasion is. This transcends all of that shit. This is nothing less than a time that confirms our primal capacity for empathy, for a recognition of the truly global impact of this event, and what our recognition of that fact, or our failure to recognize it, says about us as human beings.

The people of Haiti need change they can believe in. Our small change can make a big difference.

MONEY. Ora. Ahora. الآن Maintenant. Jetzt. עכשיו اوس 今

NOW.