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Monday, November 17, 2008
Obamamania gets a bit unrealistic
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I confess I hadn’t bought into the concern of those warning that Barack Obama might have become TOO popular, that the American public had unrealistic expectations of what he or anyone could accomplish under some very trying circumstances. It seemed to me that most people understood just how hard this was going to be, but maybe I was wrong ….
WASHINGTON (CNN) — At the start of a week that could see Barack Obama make his first Cabinet secretary announcements, a new national poll suggests that most Americans are confident that the president-elect will make the right decisions when it comes to picking those officials.
Forty-three percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday morning are very confident that Obama will make the right choices, with 34 percent somewhat confident and only 23 percent not confident.
“Obama is having the kind of honeymoon that no president-elect has had in at least 30 years,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “It’s no surprise that Americans have a positive view of anything Obama might do — at least until he does something controversial.”
Personally, I’d place myself among the 34 percent who are “somewhat confident.” I’ve long thought Obama was the best candidate in the field, but believing him to be the best available does not mean you banish all doubts about how he’ll perform when the time comes. Nobody comes into that job prepared; nobody knows what might be thrown at you as you walk in the door, or even how you’ll react.
Howard Kurtz at The Washington Post has a good piece on Obamamania, including this gem of a quote:
“The adjectives tumble over one another. He is not only the handsomest, the best-dressed, the most articulate, and graceful as a gazelle. He is omniscient; he swallows and digests whole books in minutes; he confounds experts with his superior knowledge of their field. He is omnipotent.”
That was James MacGregor Burns in the New Republic in 1961, writing about John F. Kennedy. And as Kurtz points out, “soon afterward, Kennedy blundered into the Bay of Pigs debacle.”
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Wow. All that in one little pill?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
According to MIT’s Technology Review:
“A pill that delivers the health benefits of diet and exercise without any of the effort is one step closer to becoming a reality.
European scientists have found that mice fed a high-fat, high-calorie diet and prevented from exercising regularly can be protected from weight gain and metabolic disorders when given a drug that targets a gene linked to longevity. The treatment even increases the animals’ running endurance…. The drug also protected the animals from the negative effects of high-calorie diets: metabolic disorders, obesity-related diseases, and insulin resistance. It even improved the mice’s cholesterol.
(David Sinclair, a biologist at Harvard Medical School) says that a cousin molecule of SRT1720, which is even more potent, is currently in human trials and will enter clinical studies for the treatment of diseases like type 2 diabetes in 2009. “We could know as early as next year if the same types of benefits we see in mice, we see in humans,” he says.
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Bill Kristol experiments with sincerity
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I don’t have much regard for columnists who write and say things they know to be untrue just to score points or defend a position. It is an act of disrespect toward their readers and toward their profession. Nor should writers use a column as a tool for acquiring or wielding personal political power. Journalists should not be politicians.
While none of us, journalist or otherwise, is given to know The Truth, we can at least try to honestly describe the small-t truth as we glimpse it from time to time. If there is any value in what we do, that’s where it comes from.
William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and columnist for The New York Times, has never subscribed to that theory. He is a manipulative Washington player and he writes like a manipulative Washington player, willing to deceive his readers if that’s what it takes to achieve what he thinks of as his larger, more important purpose.
Which brings us to today’s column. It is that rare Kristol column that rings true and honest in every single word. I’m not saying I agree with it all, because I certainly don’t. But I do think Kristol believes it all, and was honest this one time with himself as well as his readers.
Unless of course he’s fooling me….
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Obama lays out general terms for auto bailout
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In a wide-ranging interview with “60 Minutes,” President-elect Barack Obama laid out in general terms his thinking on whether to try to save the U.S. auto industry. You could describe it as “Yes, but….”
“Well, let’s see how this thing plays itself out. For the auto industry to completely collapse would be a disaster in this kind of environment, not just for individual families but the repercussions across the economy would be dire. So it’s my belief that we need to provide assistance to the auto industry. But I think that it can’t be a blank check.
So my hope is that over the course of the next week, between the White House and Congress, the discussions are shaped around providing assistance but making sure that that assistance is conditioned on labor, management, suppliers, lenders, all the stakeholders coming together with a plan — what does a sustainable U.S. auto industry look like? So that we are creating a bridge loan to somewhere as opposed to a bridge loan to nowhere. And that’s, I think, what you haven’t yet seen. That’s something that I think we’re gonna have to come up with.”
That’s a pretty general statement, but I think the tone is right. Simply handing a lot more money to failing organizations without forcing them to address their basic problems would be foolish and in the long term helps nobody.
The statement over the weekend by United Auto Workers head Ron Gettelfinger that the union would make no further concessions to save the companies didn’t help matters much. Nor did his claim that “We’re here not because of what the auto industry has done. We’re here because of what has happened to the economy.”
That’s simply untrue. Detroit was struggling badly long before the financial crunch hit, with long-simmering problems that can be traced to mistakes by both labor and management. Congress and the president, whether it’s Bush or Obama, have not just the right but the obligation to force painful changes on the industry as a condition of a bailout because without such changes, we only delay the inevitable.
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