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Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Gingrich blows whistle on partisanship?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When the hyperpartisan Newt Gingrich says you’ve gone too far, you’ve really gone too far.
Gingrich has written a letter to the Republican National Committee condemning an RNC attack ad that tries to link Barack Obama to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Gingrich insists the ad be pulled.
“I was saddened to learn that at a time of national trial, when a president-elect is preparing to take office in the midst of the worst financial crisis in over 70 years, that the Republican National Committee is engaged in the sort of negative attack politics that the voters rejected in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles,” Gingrich writes.
Gingrich calls the ad a “destructive distraction,” advising that “in a time when America is facing real challenges, Republicans should be working to help the incoming president succeed in meeting them, regardless of his party.”
“This ad is a terrible signal to be sending about both the goals of the Republican Party in the midst of the nation’s troubled economic times and about whether we have actually learned anything from the defeats of 2006 and 2008,” the former speaker concludes. “The RNC should pull the ad down immediately.”
I’ve covered Gingrich long enough to know that he is not a statesman, although he does occasionally try to play one on TV. He can, however, be a very astute political analyst, particularly when his own interests are not directly involved. Unlike the tone-deaf RNC, he understands that a campaign-style attack ad, based on flimsy or no evidence, launched against a president-elect with a 76 percent approval rating at a time when the country badly wants and needs that president-elect to succeed … well, it’s political suicide.
Most likely, the attack ad represents an effort by RNC Chairman Mike Duncan to curry favor with the party’s base and thus win re-election to his post. And if by appealing to the base he happens to alienate everybody else in America, well, that’s well within the GOP tradition.
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The future of newspapers ….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Posted without comment, from a piece in The New Yorker by James Surowiecki:
“The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: If newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product.
Does that mean newspapers are doomed? Not necessarily. There are many possible futures one can imagine for them, from becoming foundation-run nonprofits to relying on reader donations to that old standby the deep-pocketed patron. It’s even possible that a few papers will be able to earn enough money online to make the traditional ad-supported strategy work.
But it would not be shocking if, sometime soon, there were big American cities that had no local newspaper; more important, we’re almost sure to see a sharp decline in the volume and variety of content that newspapers collectively produce. For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime — intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on — and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.”
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Life in Bernie Madoff’s economy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Time magazine has a short first-person account by someone who lost everything to Bernie Madoff and his $50 billion investment scam. Here’s how the story starts:
“The call came at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 11. I had been waiting for it for five years. When the call finally arrived, it was my wife Sarah who answered. What the person said on the other end of the phone was both simple and devastating: we were financially wiped out.”
The most interesting thing about the piece, as reflected in the lead paragraph, is the writer’s admission that he had long sensed there was something amiss, that the money was coming too easily to last.
“I think everyone knew the call would come one day,” he writes. “We all hoped, but we knew deep down it was too good to be true, right?”
I think a lot of Americans have had that nagging thought in recent years, not about Madoff but about the economy in general. On the surface you saw the excesses, the easy money and financial froth, and beneath it you saw the negative savings rates, the flow of wealth and jobs outside the country, and you wondered how long the disconnect could last.
But as the guy says, “We all hoped, but we knew deep down it was too good to be true, right?”
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