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If you ask the average American, their belief in the economy is shaky at best, with consumer confidence in May at its lowest point since October 1992 - when the United States was coming out of recession. But I'm not joining that parade. I see little silver linings on the economic cloud just around every corner.
There's sound economic theory for my hopefulness. From September to February, the U.S. Federal Reserve engaged in an aggressive series of interest rate cuts in order to fight off a coming economic slowdown. In theory, the liquidity injected into the markets should take about six months to cycle through and result in economic benefits. Meaning, we should start seeing the economy turn over the summer. And I think we are.
My first indication that the economy was improving came a few weeks back when in my email inbox I received an unsolicited job offer from New York City. Apparently the company was looking to expand and could not find enough qualified local employees.
Since then, I have received two similar emails from recruiters trolling the message boards of CareerBuilder.com and contacting me - through a profile that had not been updated in three years. Either my late-20's skill sets are now in hot demand for jobs ranging from Internet marketing to energy lobbying, or businesses are expanding and desperately seeking skilled workers. Being the humble person that I am, my bet is on the latter.
I see signs of an improving economy when I looked at Los Angeles over the Memorial Day weekend. From what the media told us, high gas prices and a slow economy meant that travel over the holiday was going to slow down. But look around Sunset and Santa Monica boulevards over the Holiday and you'd have thought it was a ghost town - locals packed up and left in large numbers.
Looking at my Facebook friends, I can tell you that, unscientifically, they're not hurting economically, either. They are traveling to Minneapolis, New York, London, Chicago, Ireland, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Florence, Manchester and Cairo - and that is just from the first two pages of their status updates. Maybe that says more about the Facebook "friends" I choose, but it tells me something about the state of the economy, too.
And despite the weak dollar and allegedly weak American economy, I sure saw a lot of Americans as I did a tour of major European airports traveling to and from Paris, France before the holiday weekend. Security lines at London Heathrow, Frankfurt-am-Main and Zurich's Kloten airports were congesting with octogenarians with fanny packs and white socks - the usual tell-tale signs of the American tourist abroad.
Compared to a 4.20 Euro Caffe Latte at Starbucks in Paris - that's $6.40 in George Bush Pesos - food inflation in America is de minimus. When American tourists return home to see that gasoline still costs about half of what the Europeans are paying and that food is but a fraction of what it costs abroad, the idea of inflation seems relative.
Sure, the cost of gas and food and airfares are going up. But these prices can only be supported if people are able to pay them. And each time an airline announces a new price hike or fee increase they do so only because they believe people will be willing - and able - to pay. That does not sound like a recession to me.
In a few months time, you can accuse me of wearing rose-colored glasses. But I am betting you won't. In economic theory, the liquidity injection - that's extra cash - started when the Federal Reserve began cutting interest rates last fall should be kicking in just about now.
Indeed, everywhere I turn, there's reason to be an economic optimist.
Today, the California Supreme Court has decided that, on equal protection grounds, the State cannot discriminate on gender when it comes to marriage. That's a great victory for equality. While opponents will decry the changes such a decision will have on the institution of marriage, few have pondered what such a decision will mean for gay and lesbian culture.
I think we'll see two changes, one's a fad - gays are good at that - the other, a true shift in gay culture.
Between June 15 and November 3, 2008 it will be possible for anyone, regardless of their sexual orientation, to get married in California. This summer, gays and lesbians will be coming to California to gain legal recognition of their relationships just as they did on Valentine's weekend 2004 when San Francisco issued same-sex marriage licenses. And like that romantic weekend get-away, they had better make plans fast.
With a November 3rd Constitutional Amendment looming, the joy felt today will soon be replaced with a sense of urgency. On election day, the state's voters will consider a ballot measure to rescind that right. Previous rulings in Hawaii and Massachusetts have not fared well once they're out of the courthouse and in the political discourse.
But what good is a right if you cannot exercise it? The right to marriage on paper is nice, but knowing that that right might be lost may lead people to make decisions they otherwise wouldn't. "Now we just need someone to marry!" one friend messaged me, pretty much summing up the conundrum facing gays and lesbians over the next six months.
In some respects, gay marriage in California is no different than the George Bush tax cuts. Inherit an estate in 2011, and pay nothing. A year later, your estate tax will go up to 65%, and a $3 million dollar estate becomes a $1 million inheritance. Imitating the Menendez brothers could be the cultural phenomenon of the new decade; worried about inheriting, too many folks may pull the trigger instead of waiting for nature to take its course.
Likewise, a gay or lesbian who may not be quite ready to make a commitment like marriage two weeks ago could feel that the opportunity is too good to pass up. The prospect of wasting the right to marry now must be balanced against the cold reality that the opportunity could be lost forever once the state's voters have spoken. I see a summer filled with rice-tossing and bouquet-throwing in my future as friends pair up - just for the sake of getting married. Talk about your shotgun weddings!
Still, this rush to the altar may lead to one of the largest shifts in gay culture since the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969.
Until today, there has been no archetypical relationship for gays and lesbians across America. Nothing to look at and say "That's what I want." Only in tiny Massachusetts could a gay man like me even think about getting married and then consider with whom to form that union. This lack of a model or structure for legal, recognized partnerships created the impression that promiscuity was the norm for the gay community. And, I would argue, contributed to the spread of AIDS and other plagues on the gay community.
But today, all that has changed.
There is something higher to aspire to in gay relationships, and it is real, accessible, and free to all. The discussion about partnership shifts from "Mister Tonight" to "Mister Right." It's a change that can only be good for society, gay or otherwise. At least, for another six months.
Last September 26, I broke with conventional wisdom and predicted that the economy, not the war in Iraq, would be the deciding issue in the 2008 election. I was wrong. Ironically, the issue that President Bush heralded as the most important challenge facing America before 9/11 will be the issue that determines his successor: China.
Regardless of what happens with the economy - whether we slip into a recession or narrowly avoid one - the issue will be an afterthought by August 2008. Either things will be getting better - as recent activity on Wall Street seems to indicate - or the issue will have lost its political currency as the drumbeat of recession fade to provide little more than the background rhythm to the campaign march.
Much to this political junkie's regret, it looks more and more like the two parties' conventions will provide no more drama than usual. Instead, the conventions and the campaign will be framed by what happens in the two weeks prior: the Beijing Olympics.
How we relate to China is perhaps the critical question facing America today. When he came to office, President Bush made it his top priority, engaging China in a dialectical competition of superpowers old and new. But then 9/11 happened and the world's most populous country fell our of America's consciousness, as the U.S. slowly developed a relationship with China that was more codependent than competitive.
The China Question is about much more than foreign policy and the basic question of whether we should have a competitive or a cooperative relationship with the country. Each approach is a dual-edged sword.
The chief argument for why we need a cooperative approach with China is economic. China is beginning to rival oil in its importance to America's well-being. America's ability to have growth without inflation depends on our ability to outsource manufacturing to China, while growing our science and service sectors here at home.
This trade benefits everyday Americans by keeping the products we buy affordable, and it benefits China by giving working-class jobs to millions of its inhabitants. Ours is a symbiotic relationship that, if broken, could have disastrous geopolitical consequences.
At the same time, China's economic growth comes at a cost to the environment that can be seen on our shores. As much as a quarter of the air pollution in Los Angeles comes from China, and with its smoke-belching ships coming in to port in San Pedro and Long Beach, the Chinese can probably be considered the single-largest source of pollution in California.
China can no longer get a pass on the environment like it got in the Kyoto Treaty. Unless China joins in the fight against climate change, no regulation or cap-and-trade system here at home will make a dent. If we restrict our economic activity with environmental regulation while allowing China to pollute at will, the sun will set on the American empire faster than the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Morally, pursuing a cooperative relationship with China is dubious as well. Beijing's human rights record is notorious and while its subjects are beginning to enjoy economic liberties, the concept of universal human rights is foreign to them. How can we claim to be defenders of freedom, whilst turning a blind eye on the world's great oppressors?
Pulling out of China, economically, would be exponentially worse than pulling out of Iraq militarily, but maintaining the relationship without action on the environmental and human rights front will also place us in peril.
The China Question has everything: the economy, the environment, human rights and geopolitics. But it does not have partisanship, yet. Neither ideology espoused by John McCain, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton provides a logically consistent answer to the many issues it raises.
This voter wants to know how our would-be Presidents would approach this tangled web with China, and after the world focuses on Beijing this summer, many others will be asking the same question: Is China friend or foe, or is our relationship status summed up with, "It's Complicated"?
Although I am a registered Republican, I am first and foremost a capitalist. So much of the last ten weeks of my life has been developing and managing an online outreach campaign on behalf of one of the Democratic presidential candidates.
While I have learned a lot about the internal divides within the Democratic Party - and at times wondered how we Republicans ever lose elections to these people - I have also gotten an insight into the American voter on a state-by-state basis. I've come to one conclusion: a good number of Americans still don't know who Hillary Clinton is.
In purchasing Google Adwords, I have gotten a behind-the-scenes look at what people are searching for, and the numbers are staggering. In Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, more than two-thousand people per day misspelled Hillary Clinton's name; In Indiana and North Carolina, one out of six searches for Hillary Clinton have just one "L" in her first name. Another five percent are looking for Hillary Rodman Clinton, who apparently served eight years First Lady of the NBA Bad Boys Club.
It's not as if Hillary Rodham Clinton weren't First Lady of the United States for eight years, or that her first name were not printed on her campaign materials - the signs and placards at all her events let you know which Clinton is running: Hillary! Yet people who own computers and are researching the candidates still don't seem to know her yet.
Unfortunately for those people who do not yet know who Hillary Clinton is, Googling her isn't going to tell you much. The first page of results yields her official campaign website, her Senate website, the White House website and her MySpace profile, all of which will tell you what she wants you to hear. The rest of the links - CNN, Washington Post and the New York Times, for example - only give information on the candidate from a media-filtered perspective. The only "independent" source is Wikipedia, and I imagine the Kossacks will get to that page at some point.
Perhaps more interesting from my perspective is who advertises to the Googling masses for each candidate. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have made a point of "owning" their search pages. Search for either candidate and their own website is the sponsored link that returns - at a cost of somewhere near $3 each time someone clicks on the link, a fortune in click-through ad rates. Go try it and come back, while the folks in Mountain View ring the cash register. Somewhere there is GOP experiment that might be called "Spend Obama's Money Experiment" waiting to happen.
When I Google Clinton, an ad for Time Magazine shows up, and when I Google Obama, I get the Chicago Tribune, along with an ad saying Obama gets an "A+" on Middle Class Issues, but when I click on it, he really has an 80% rating, with 50% absences. That website must be grading on a curve!
The role of the Internet in politics continues to evolve. While the blogs were all the rage back in the 2004 campaign, segmentation and specialization in readership and editorial has made them little more than an echo-chamber for preaching to the choir.
With contextual advertising - buying ad depending on what the reader has called up on the page - it is possible to do some very elegant micro-targeting. Look up the MySpace profile of a veteran of the Marine Corps, as I did a few weeks back, and see an ad from John McCain, targeted directly towards service members and vets. But this is also a risky strategy because such ads could also end up on less-than desirable websites using similar keywords - "service" and "men" in their contexts. For my editor's sake I won't link to them here, you will have to use your imagination.
With search marketing, there is the prospect of reaching persuadable voters, who for whatever reasons are going online to look for information about the candidates. And right now, a well placed search-marketing ad campaign can be done efficiently if targeted to the right search terms and geography.
But as more political consultants and interest groups realize that they, too, can end up on Hillary Clinton's search results - and get a decent click-through rate - it may be that the real winner in this primary and future elections is neither Clinton nor Obama. It's Google.
