Month: August 2008

Tokyo, Japan, 1.29 pm

He can’t help himself:

"I am grateful for the fact that I have a wonderful life," McCain said. "I spent some years without a kitchen table, without a chair, and I know what it’s like to be blessed by the opportunities of this great nation."

Jeez. This is clinical. He’s responding to middle class economic anxiety by referring to the Hanoi Hilton?

Ken Silverstein interviews Chris Lehmann about media coverage:

The debates between the candidates could be important, but the conventions are stultifying media spectacles where no one expects anything to happen. The reason so much political coverage on cable is crap is that there is an effort to portray the campaign as this floating spectacle; it’s devoid of public interest. Not to be too conspiratorial, but there is an economic interest at stake because you want people to come back and watch the same drivel the next day, in the same way that I obsessively check the sports section to see how the Cubs did. That’s why the VP speculation is so perfect for cable; you can fill up all that airtime without any reporting. There are studies of the content of broadcast news that show that something shy of 10 percent of the coverage is original reporting. They’re constantly re-running the one time they got some hapless anchor to stand in front of a hurricane, or it’s just incessant talking head speculation.

Dave Weigel lists the three best and three worst things about Obama’s veep pick.

George Packer’s long article on Burma is also worth a read:

In Burma’s military-intelligence lockups, political detainees are given repeated beatings, placed in stress positions, and made to stand in water for days on end. In Insein, the torture takes a different form: extreme isolation, no sunlight, inedible food, no writing materials. (I was told that a political prisoner found with a pen was punished more severely than a prisoner hiding a knife.) When Myat Min was there, prisoners had to wear cotton hoods with cutout eyeholes any time they left their cell, in order to prevent communication between inmates. A friend of Myat Min’s was caught trying to teach himself Chinese characters by writing on a piece of plastic with a nail; his ankles were shackled together for two weeks.

(Photo: Chumsak Kanoknan/Getty.)

Weigel sums up Bob Barr’s mission:

The challenge for Barr and the reformers is to deliver on their promises: to score a record vote total, to grow the party’s membership, and to force the two big parties to pay attention. They need to prove that libertarians can do more than form a protest bloc in the GOP or think-tank their way into the mainstream of politics and policy.

American Express experiments with phased retirement:

Rather than retiring and leaving the company at once, participants gradually give up their day-to-day responsibilities, while replacing some of their free time with activities like mentoring and teaching master classes to their successors. In addition, they get more time out of the office doing whatever they want—be it planning for life in retirement or doing charity work. The phased retiree continues to receive a portion of his previous salary, benefits as usual, and the company in turn gets to hold on to some of its most valuable employees a year or more past traditional retirement age.

(Hat tip: Good)

Two men now offer themselves to America, as the race starts over. My take on two very American Americans in the Sunday Times:

Obama’s Americanness, however, is deep, for all the aspersions of otherness thrown at him. His DNA combines two of the more indelible American identities: heartland grit and immigrant dreams. Half his family has roots in Kansas, the heart of the heartland. His largely absent father came from a distant place, Kenya, and Obama grew up in, among other places, Indonesia. These two identities place him at the centre of a churning, yet traditionally immigrant country.

His eclectic Americanness reveals itself elsewhere as well.

He is at home in the rabble-rousing church of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright and yet he is also in his element at the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School. He plays basketball and can write like a professional novelist. He is a product of modern Chicago and premodern Indonesia – and able to note similarities in each.

It is hard to think of a man with this story existing in any other country, let alone being in a position, in his mid-forties, to become the president of it. In the context of America, though, the strangeness of Obama is not so strange. It is imbued with the possibility of self-reinvention. Nothing is more American than that.

The raw appeal of McCain as a candidate, on the other hand, is rooted in another form of Americanness.

It is an older form but just as potent. McCain draws on the Scots-Irish belligerence and sense of honour that have fuelled America for centuries. A military man through and through, his uniformed pedigree goes back generations to the war of independence. McCain represents tradition in this sense, a man whose instinctive solidarity with Britain, for example, is second nature to him.

Psychologically, he is both a passionate servant of what he regards as national honour – and yet he is also an indefatigable rebel. He has rarely met an institution that he does not want to both uphold and to undercut. He broke every rule in the Naval Academy and yet it would be hard to express the love the man obviously has for the US armed services. He is a revered senator and shrewd legislator, but almost all his Senate colleagues have been at the wrong end of a barrage of expletives at one time or other.

His Vietnam war career was undistinguished. He was involved in a dreadful accident on an aircraft carrier and then got shot down early in combat. But when he was in the worst position imaginable – captured, tortured, held for years in a hellish prison – his sense of duty never wavered.

His father, by that time, was the commander of all US forces in the Vietnam theatre and McCain could have secured early release. The single, unimpeachable act of heroism that set him apart from every other PoW was his refusal to be freed ahead of his fellow soldiers. He was all-too-human in every other way: cracking under torture, giving false confessions to serve Vietnamese propaganda and attempting suicide because of the shame he felt for submitting. But beneath his incompetence and insolence there was a character and sense of duty worth not just taking seriously, but honouring.

McCain is a far more mercurial, emotional and volatile character than Obama. Despite being a generation older – he will be 72 on Friday – he is temperamentally much younger than his rival. There is a lot of Churchill in McCain: the melodrama and the sanctimony, the mawkishness and the sincerity, the big heart and sometimes faulty judgment.