February 28, 2008
a woman's touch
Dowd on the presidential campaign: "By threatening to throw the kitchen sink at Obama, the Clinton campaign simply confirmed the fact that they might be going down the drain."
February 24, 2008
socksenfreude zwei
As much as I'm for Obama and believe he's what's needed, not President H. R. Clinton, I continue to be amazed and a little saddened by the cultural glee in Hillary's decline. Sad because the people who say that sexism is behind her troubles are not wrong, even if that's not the whole story. Sad because the media's unacknowledged self-fulfilling group-think is a part of the problem. Witness the pretzel-logic, don't-look-behind-the-curtain of today's NYT article:
Some [in the HRC campaign] have grown depressed, be it over Mr. Obama’s momentum, the attacks on the campaign’s management from outside critics or their view that the news media has been much rougher on Mrs. Clinton than on Mr. Obama.Oh won't that media ever learn?!? If only they had a friend in the media they could call up and discuss this odd phenomenon with. ...
Frank Rich piles on with his own gleeful extended metaphor comparing the Hillary campaign to her biggest albatross, the Iraq war:
The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan.And I think he's touching on something even bigger. I think that people have elided the war, the Bushes and the Clintons in one big pile of fatigue, if not outright resentment. And that was only exacerbated by the politics as usual of what Rich calls Bill Clinton's "trash-talking about Mr. Obama and raising the specter of a co-presidency."
I think the Clintons can't see past the tactics that undercut and hamstrung them so many times from 1992 through 2000. Like a child of abuse, they've inculcated an old tacky playbook as the best way to win. That's not the whole story either, but it's too bad that they've allowed themselves to get cast as the "anti-Hope" realists.
Still. It remains a bigger sin in our society's conscience to drag a black man down than a white woman. Hillary is getting unfair treatment for being a not-traditionally-warm, not-traditionally-passive ambitious woman.
Jen Baumgardner writes in the Huffington Post that Clinton "has endured the attacks and derision we all know happens when women step out of line."
She is becoming a sort of martyr-feminist, putting herself out there at great personal cost to put some reality behind our 'free to be...you and me' rhetoric. ... Here we are: several generations raised with the mantra that a 'woman' could be president, and learning that we don't mean any woman who actually exists.
(Also check out the blog Baumgardner links to chronicling blantantly sexist incidents during the campaign so far.)
I think there's some sort of national rite of passage going on. Maybe Hillary is the perfect candidate for this moment. Maybe we need someone we're ambivalent about to take all this shit so that next time we can have a less baggage-laden discourse.
My mom thinks that after this, there won't be another woman as qualified or as electable for a long time to come, and assuming Hillary doesn't get nominated we'll all be set back. I disagree. The cracks she's made in the glass ceiling aren't going to seal up and disappear.
(WEEKEND) UPDATE: Tina Fey, guest host of SNL: "Bitches get stuff done. ... Bitch is the new black!"
February 20, 2008
"pebbles"
Such a nice metaphor from Japan, cited by Ethan Zuckerman in an entry about a vanished blog on Nigeria:
The Japanese call dead blogs “ishikoro” - pebbles. A missing blog is something else, a hole, like a dropped stitch in a row of knitting.While you're there, check out the account of Nigeria that's the point of the post too. And for more on Nigeria and oil, see this presentation from photographer Ed Kashi.
February 19, 2008
"-gates" and jobs
Noam Cohen in NYT talks with designers about the Hillary site and the Obama site, making the perhaps facile analogy that Barack is more Mac and HRC more PC:
... Mr. Obama’s site is more harmonious, with plenty of white space and a soft blue palette. ... It signals in myriad ways that it was designed with a younger, more tech-savvy audience in mind. ...Like I said, a little facile, but not totally false. Hillary's site is louder and could use some more white space.In contrast to barackobama.com, Mrs. Clinton’s site uses a more traditional color scheme of dark blue, has sharper lines dividing content and employs cookie-cutter icons next to its buttons for volunteering, and the like.
While Apple’s ad campaign maligns the PC by using an annoying man in a plain suit as its personification, it is not clear that aligning with the trendy Mac aesthetic is good politics. The iPod may be a dominant music player, but the Mac is still a niche computer. PC, no doubt, would win the Electoral College by historic proportions (with Mac perhaps carrying Vermont).I can't imagine a web designer saying "Sure, I'll make it loud and busy to be more like Hillary." To me it looks more like they went with a more orthodox 2004/2005 template, while the Obama people deviated further. But that's a similar point I guess.While Mr. Santa Maria praised barackobama.com for having “this welcoming quality,” he added that it was “ethereal, vaporous and someone could construe it as nebulous.” He said there was a bit of the “Lifetime channel effect, you know, vasoline on the lens” to create a softer effect on the viewer. The “hectic” site that the Clinton campaign is offering could actually be quite strategic, exactly in step with her branding.
My favorite little touch on the Obama site is the spoofing of the "Powered by" slogan that lives at the bottom of various sites:
February 11, 2008
greetings from Senegal
From Gorée Island, just off of Dakar. More photos here ...
