Politics Sells

JFK: I'm a boss lolz
 Nixon: I know :P

         Fifty years ago today, something rather extraordinary happened.  Instead of watching I Love Lucy or Bonanza, legions of Americans tuned in their televisions to the first ever televised presidential debate, that of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Richard Nixon.  Historians have debated the effect of media on this election, many postulating that the new media had a positive effect on the campaign of Kennedy, who, through the medium of television, appeared young and dynamic, making his rival look old, unpleasant, and ineffectual by comparison.  Presidential elections had, to be sure, had a long history of basis in personal popularity, but the birth of the televised age has transformed the way in which politicians campaign for office.
          Televised debates were just the beginning.  Next political campaign advertising that infiltrated all of the broadcast networks and leaked on to prime-time.  And it didn't stop there.  Once the internet hit the scene, the campaign beast raged and filled up the world wide web with political ads.  By the time YouTube hit the scene, most people, even those not particularly interested in politics could at least claim familiarity with a candidate or two that they had seen in a viral video.  In the age of mass-media, politicians feel more pressure than ever to spend, spend, spend in order to get themselves re-elected.  For instance, in her campaign for governor, Meg Whitman broke all sorts of records by spending $119 million of her personal fortune on campaign ads, a record previously held by NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg.  And that's to say nothing of the massive amounts of cash that Barack Obama fundraised in his presidential campaign. Whether it is true that political hopefuls must raise gobs of cash in order to get the swing voters to cast ballots in their favor is obvious, whether it is just that it be so is doubtful.  As midterms and the California gubernatorial race approach, I can't help but be a little wistful for a day in which sitting down and watching two candidates debate the issues in front of a live audience was not only a novelty, but something important, something that must be paid attention to.  But even this little reminiscence isn't quite accurate--even then, the viewers were just as transfixed by Kennedy's youthful appearance as by his oratorical prowess.  I just hope that maybe at least some people take the time to watch the candidates verbally spar about important issues in the upcoming weeks.
        On that note, be sure to watch the Brown/Whitman debate on Tuesday.  Even if one's mind is made up, it still might be informative....
      

Five Months Later....

Grease Lightning 

        Today, almost exactly five months after the fact, the US government finally declared the exploded oil well in the Gulf of Mexico to be "dead"--completely capped and no longer hazardous.  Five months and 4.9 MILLION barrels of oil later seems like a bit too much waste to me--the impact on the local economies of the Gulf (which were highly dependent on a once-thriving tourist trade), let alone the vast destruction of the oceanic habitat, has been tremendous.  Although the well is capped, there is still much to be done before the problem is to be fixed; there is still rather a large quantity of that unfortunately slick brown stuff floating about in an ocean previously full of wildlife and successful commercial fishing businesses.
         The fact that it took five months for the government (and the company BP) to fully control the oil spill and secure the oil righ indicates (to me at least) that there is something wrong with the government's response mechanism to man-made (and natural, for that matter) disasters.  This, I suppose, is one of the cons of an expansive bureaucracy.  In one of the articles I read on the subject, an investigation on accountability for the spill passed from National Incident Command to an agency of the Department of the Interior, just because.  I know when the spill was at its most critical, there was at least as much investigation (both within and outside of the government) on the issue of accountability as there was on the much more pressing issue of how to cap the leak itself.  And the response time just wasn't what it should have been--I know I cannot fully appreciate the complexity of coming up with a solution to a problem so complex as the Deep Horizon leak, but I do know that I felt a little disappointed at the President and Congress' reticence to take more action.  Five months is far too long.

"...And we shall never forget...."

United We Stand

        Nine years ago yesterday, a rather hateful (and, unfortunately incredibly well organized) group of people decided it would be a good idea to crash several planes into important sites on the East Coast of the United States of America, including the Pentagon, The World Trade Center in New York and the Capitol in Washington DC (although the latter was diverted by some very brave passengers who managed to crash-land in a field somewhere in rural Pennsylvania).  This is an event that has shaped the national consciousness for the better part of the last decade, and has had an especially profound impact upon people of my generation, who had viewed the events on television as children, and who grew up in the era of the so-called "War on Terror."  As a child of seven or eight, I remember my parents reading news stories of an upsurge in anti-Muslim sentiment directly following the attacks, and I remember them telling me that the people in the stories were wrong and bigoted and that an entire group of people should not be held accountable for the actions of extremists and that I should never judge a person merely because of how he looked.  To my seven-year-old brain, this logic seemed perfectly sound, and I accepted it as fact that the attacks on the Twin Towers were the fault of a few crazy people, and that it didn't particularly matter to which deity they prayed.  As a young adult, I now see, unfortunately, that not everyone's parents instilled in them comparable values of tolerance.  The hate speech I have seen in the media these past few months contains echoes to the time of Japanese Internment that I have only read about in history books.  I just don't understand how a person can justify being so very intolerant, so bigoted.
         About a month and a half ago, while visiting cousins in New York, I actually visited the remains of the World Trade Center, now little more than a large construction site, with nary a trace of rubble.  My cousin, who was so kindly driving me around on a tour of the city, and who had known several people who had lost family members in the attacks, made a point of remarking that she acknowledged that the proposed building of the Muslim cultural center would certainly pour salt in some still-open wounds, but that she herself had no personal problem with it.  At the time I was visiting, I knew very little about the proposed center, and so was surprised to discover that it was not proposed to be right next door to the gaping structural chasm that had once been two very tall buildings, but several blocks away in a rather large building that had once housed a Burlington Coat Factory.  I am sad to say that, from my following of the story since my return, many Americans are still ignorant of the fact that the proposed cultural center will not be built upon the actual foundation of the World Trade Center and that al-Qaeda is not actually behind the building of said mosque.  Such propositions sound rather ludicrous, but people are liable to believe all sorts of untrue things, when blinded by hatred.
          And speaking of hatred, as if the outcry against the mosque (which is actually a cultural center) wasn't bad enough--seriously, this country was, well founded upon the principle of freedom of religion--a rather inflammatory pastor from Gainesville, Florida thought he would take all the anti-Muslim sentiment a bit further and actually burn the Quran on the anniversary of the attacks.  Fortunately, the volume of public outcry got the best of Mr. Terry Jones (who, I am sad to say, is not the lovable Monty Python cast member best remembered for his falsetto female impersonations).  However, the fact that such a thing would be proposed (and supported, both covertly, and overtly by a worryingly large minority of the population) disgusts me.  Politicians love to wax on quite romantically about how we live in a post-racial society, chock full of religious tolerance and devoid of bigotry, but clearly this is not the case.
          I know it's probably quite idealistic of me, but I hope that I will one day live in a society that celebrates the building of mosques (and all other houses of worship, for that matter), and does not accuse the president of being a Muslim, but accepts it. Yes, it is true, that I shall never forget the events of the eleventh of September, two thousand one, but it is equally true that I will never forget that, instead of stepping up to heal its wounds in a way that encouraged tolerance, our great nation turned its back on a minority and allowed bigotry to flourish and re-emerge even stronger nearly a decade later.
 

Wheeling Toward Midterms

Life Is a Highway...well, only if there's
decent infrastructure

          Midterms are coming up. No, not the kind that make high school and college students cringe in fear and develop nervous twitches due to too much coffee and not enough sleep.  These congressional elections will, in all probability, have a wider reaching impact on American life (through the influencing and shaping of  American policy) than a teenager's temporary sleep deprivation.  Of course, President Obama realizes the significance the outcome of these elections will have on his ability to turn his agenda into policy and as such, he has been campaigning vigorously on issues that he hopes will court the vote into his party's fold.  One such issue is the national infrastructure--from highways to railroads to airline runways.
          Probably picking this issue because it generally enjoys bipartisan support, Mr. Obama can be assumed to hope that the strengthening of the nation's infrastructure (and especially highways) will generate the kind of economic growth that was seen under Eisenhower's highway program in the nineteen fifties.  His plan, however, extends beyond that of the Interstate Highway legislation of yore; in his plan, supported by various Democrats and Republicans , Mr. Obama proposes to not only boost funding for infrastructure, but to create a specific bank, purely for the purpose of holding infrastructural funds in order to make the process more organized.  This sounds logical enough, but then again, the American people at large (and indeed the American government at well) do not usually take kindly to nationalized banks, whatever they happen to be for.  Regardless of the efficacy of the proposed plan, I believe that if Congress is able to create a bill in accordance with Mr. Obama's suggestion, I am confident that this may sway some voters (for better or for worse) to vote Democratic, purely because it will look like the Democrats are (finally, in the eyes of many of the semi-jaded and/or right-bent public) getting something useful done.  Personally, whatever the outcomes of the midterms, I hope some sort of infrastructural bill passes, because goodness knows America could use it.