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With one hundred days before the election, New York Times Columnist Frank Rich has declared Democratic nominee Barack Obama the "Acting President" of the United States, based, apparently on the candidate's ability to assemble large crowd and amass television ratings. But as he basks in the glory of his European adventure, is it possible that Barack Obama has peaked too soon?
In the world of college football, coaches have to remind their players and alumni boosters that championships aren't won in September, they're won in January. The same is true of electoral politics. An "acting president" in July must still win in November.
Unfortunately for Obama, the headiness of his European coronation may turn against him in the next fourteen weeks.
The greatest risk for any public figure is to offend the media, it's main pipeline - yes, even in these days for Facebook, IM and blogs - to voters. When Bill Clinton wagged his finger to the press corps in 1998, and was later proven to be a liar, the press turned - really turned - against him for the first time in his administration.
Heretofore, Barack Obama has enjoyed an amiable relationship with the media, and in some cases, journalists' conduct could be considered lewd, which has led both of his rivals, Clinton and McCain, to cry foul. But the campaign's treatment of the press during Obama's whirlwind tour of the middle East and Europe seems to have soured them on the candidate.
Even before his feet hit the ground in the Middle East, Barack Obama's relationship with his press entourage when Der Spiegel took a quote from the Iraqi president out of context and interpreted it as an endorsement of Obama and his policies. Having the American press root for you is one thing - that's just us, kids - but having the foreign press manipulate world leaders on your behalf is not likely to win many votes on this side of the Atlantic.
This unique turn of events continued. On the first stop of Obama's whirlwind tour, when in Afghanistan, he had no official press pool, no reporters and no press conference on the ground. NBC's Andrea Mitchell broke ranks with her network colleagues and actually criticized the candidate for conducting what she called, "fake interviews."
Later on the trip, reporters complained that at Obama press conferences, only the candidate was given a microphone, so only the candidate could be heard but not the reporters' potentially hostile questioning.
By the time Obama arrived in Berlin to give his Victory Column speech, the mood of the press had turned on the candidate. In the coverage I saw his remarks played second fiddle to the setting and its place in history which were steadily compared to Berlin speeches by presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Substantively, Obama's speech did not measure up.
I must admit that I was busy celebrating my birthday, in grand style, over the weeklong Obama trip, but I do not once recall hearing Barack Obama's voice until his appearance on Meet the Press Sunday morning. His arrogance in not responding to legitimate questions from Tom Brokaw was off-putting, not only to me, but, I suspect, also to the media.
The press has gotten a taste of the "Acting President" Barack Obama administration, and I don't think they like it. With fourteen weeks to go, Obama's greatest risk is told in the Greek tragedy of Icarus, who soared on wings made of wax, and ignored the warnings not to fly to high. Drunk with the power of flight, he flew too close to the sun and the wings melted, there was no one there to catch him. If Obama continues to run his campaign like a presidential administration - with tightly-choreographed events and restricted access to the candidate - his alleged allies in the media may no longer be there should he start to fall.
Thirteen years ago, when I moved to Los Angeles, the city had just lost its two professional football teams. Then the Rams packed up for St. Louis and the Raiders went home to Oakland, leaving a gaping hole in the City of Angels' civic pride. Los Angeles was no longer a big-league pro-football City.
Last week, there was a bloodbath on First Street home of the Los Angeles Times, which announced that two hundred and fifty jobs, including 150 reporters would be cut. The newspaper that once aimed to be the West Coast's answer to the New York Times and its Manhattan elitism has become, overnight a shadow of itself and its ambitions.
The question I found myself asking was not whether the Times was dead - it has been dying for awhile - but whether Los Angeles will miss it in a decade, or, as with professional football, will we hardly know we miss it.
The day after the layoffs at the paper were announced, I found myself about fifteen minutes behind schedule for my morning gym routine. This can be dangerous, because the Precor cardio machines which perfectly cradle a newspaper and have no moving parts fill up quickly within the first hour that the gym is open.
To my dismay, that extra fifteen minutes of sleep meant that indeed, I was relegated to some other cardio machine, so I chose the one next to my friend Ron, who had forgotten his iPod that morning.
"Luckily," I told Ron, "there's no longer thirty minutes worth of reading in the paper any more! It's gotten so bad, I have to bring a pen to work on the Sudoku puzzle just so I can make it through a workout."
Ron agreed, and commented about how on a recent Sunday, his $1.50 paper barely kept this attention through brunch.
I suppose a paper it is good for tactile people like myself to entertain ourselves while slavishly fighting a jihad on the waistline. And newspapers are good to have if your pet makes a mistake on your carpet. But beyond that, print is becoming less and less relevant.
Is there a need any longer for a Los Angeles perspective on Iraq, or would people rather turn to national news outlets? Why bother checking my stocks in the morning paper, when the markets already are open in New York? Most information is old by the time it gets in the paper and people are turning online to get the latest, fastest information.
There is a watchdog role at the local level for a print publication. They have the resources and gravitas to cover City Hall, but only if they want to. But, in concentrating its efforts on competing with the East Coast papers like New York's Times and the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times abdicated this role to its regional competitors. And it got beaten, consistently, in the local markets.
Similarly, when it comes to what's going on in Los Angeles' scores of neighborhoods, a newspaper falls short. Instead, hundreds of weblogs have cropped up covering our communities from a wide angle of perspectives. Usually there is an agenda involved, but at least these bloggers admit to having bias, unlike the paper!
Some of the best content in the Los Angeles Times is the traffic coverage of Steve Hymon. Traffic is just about the one issue that unites everyone within the Los Angeles area, rich or poor, urban or suburban. Hymon covers the issue diligently on-line with his Bottleneck blog which is edited and reprinted for the paper on a regular basis.
Hymon's efforts offers a glimpse of things to come, I think. When Pro Football left Los Angeles more than a decade ago, it did not mean the death of weekend recreation in Los Angeles. Since the NFL left, the sport enjoys high ratings in the city as people watch NFL games from other parts of the country. College football at USC and UCLA is thriving like never before. And people have discovered hiking, biking or other sports. We don't miss the NFL.
And while Los Angeles currently mourns the changes at the venerable Los Angeles Times, in a decade I doubt we will miss it. If the paper wants to keep publishing, perhaps the best model would be to cut its staff of writers even more, and hire editors. Those editors can pick from among the city's best and brightest bloggers and (with a contributor agreement) select the best of Los Angeles' online content and republish it the next morning.
It may not be "journalism" - as we know it, now - but this melding of formats would control costs, and democratize the press like never before. Make a system like that work, and we'll be glad that the Times as we knew it lives no more!
For more than a decade, with the exception of the first 100 days following Newt Gingrich taking the House Speakership and the three months immediately after George Bush's election, America has basically had a do-nothing Congress. It takes a crisis to get anything done.
And with the solvency of America's housing financing system on the brink of failure, Democrats in Congress are playing a deadly game of chicken as they stare down the White House.
Any small crisis - "Social Security is going bankrupt in twenty years" or a "we're welcoming out ten millionth illegal immigrant" doesn't prompt Congress into action. It takes a serious crisis like "some lady in Florida is about to be euthanized" before Congress acts.
For more than a year now, Congress has known that the nation's housing markets were in trouble. Credit was flowing too freely, people were acting irresponsibly, and our banks were losing money. Last fall, the issue took center stage as Congress and the President put up proposal and counter-proposal to stabilize the housing markets.
When instability in housing credit markets spilled over to Wall Street, prompting the collapse of investment bank Bear Stearns, the issue took center-stage in the Presidential election. In return there was plenty of finger pointing and little action.
In keeping with that tone - blame the other guy, a key element in any crisis - all Congress had done until last week was advance a housing bill which the President had already threatened to veto.
Late last Friday, however, the game changed, when a Reuters report suggesting that the Federal Reserve might open the discount window to mortgage backers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Fed's action implied that these two institutions may be facing a liquidity crisis similar to that which send Wall Street into a panic just four months before.
The Treasury Department and Federal Reserve worked furiously over the weekend to come up with a plan to keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac afloat, thereby protecting the mortgages of millions of Americans. On Sunday, they unveiled a plan, but it's a plan that would require action by Congress.
Uh oh. People like myself - no fans of government intervention - would prefer to leave well enough alone. If Congress is doing nothing, then they can't do nothing to screw up my life. I can do that well enough on my own, thank you very much. With Congress' approval ratings but a fraction of President Bush's - who's at historic lows - I would imagine most Americans would prefer that this Congress do nothing. Whatsoever.
So I got a sinking feeling in my stomach Monday morning when CNBC reported that Congress would consider amending its Housing Bill to include the proposals developed by the Fed and Treasury. The showdown over one piece of legislation had taken on a new intensity. In exchange for the solvency of the nation's housing markets, President Bush would have to give in to Congress and sign legislation he would have otherwise vetoed. That's what I - and pretty much anyone looking at this situation - might describe as a blatant effort to hold the nation hostage to one's own partisan demands.
Luckily some folks in Congress are getting the point that now is not the time to play political hardball with the nation's financial markets. Senate Banking Committee Chair Chris Dodd has signaled his willingness to take out the provisions of the housing bill that President Bush finds most objectionable.
I have no specific objection to what Congress is considering to address the housing crisis in part because I, like most Americans, have no ides of what exactly is in the bill. But if this action is worth taking now - if it would help the nation's housing markets - then shouldn't they have acted sooner?
If Congress believes that their housing bill might have helped avert the current liquidity crisis in the housing markets, then they shouldn't have been dragging their feet to score political points. The message is pretty clear: If Congress isn't willing to step up and admit some culpability, then they're tacitly saying that the legislation that they had done nothing on for months, would in fact do nothing to help the housing markets.
It's "Jobs Week" in the John McCain for President campaign, focusing on policies that will help create jobs in the American economy. Keep taxes low, balance the Federal budget, making health care more affordable and establishing energy independence will help create jobs, according to the GOP Presidential contender.
But the bad feelings between McCain campaign and the Republican party's more conservative supporters over the nominees outspoken moderation on immigration is clouding the discussion. At the heart of the jobs debate, is the question of immigration. Unlike during past recessions, when immigrants were blamed for coming here and stealing American jobs few people are making that argument. Instead, the consensus seems to be that the immigrants who are here are working jobs in America, but they aren't necessarily taking American jobs.
In fact, the first question any uninterested observer should ask about the American economy is, why create jobs if we are importing labor? Because we are doing just that. America is importing labor when we outsource jobs to India or China. We import labor when we hire illegal immigrants to cook our food and clean our toilets. These are all jobs Americans could do, but even with unemployment increasing by the tens-of-thousands, we're not.
Before my brother and his family stayed in my apartment a couple weeks ago, I tried hiring some help to clean the place up. I asked many of my friends for referrals, and they extolled the virtues of Google Language Tools when dealing with their maids. But when one question came up - does he or she have the right to legally work in the United States? - the silence was deafening.
I went the safe route and hired a service, so they would have all the employer liability, but even then, only one of the three team members spoke English. Clearly the 6.8% of California workers on the unemployment list have not been looking for work cleaning toilets in West Hollywood.
But as John McCain revises his position on immigration as quickly as Barack Obama decides to look at the facts on the ground into consideration when he decides what to do in Iraq, one angle to the immigration debate gets left out. More than securing our borders and offering amnesty to undocumented immigrants, the best way to solve the problems at America's southern border is to create jobs...Mexican jobs.
While it is unadvisable to make sweeping statements about millions of people at once, it seems clear that the reason for the large numbers of undocumented workers in America is for better economic opportunities. And when "economic opportunity" means being a dishwasher or line cook, you know that things must be bad back home. And if they hated their families enough to get away from them by heading north, then why keep sending money back?
Unfortunately, on the campaign trail, the position of creating jobs in Mexico is not much of a winner if you're running for President of the United States. Instead, it is being danced around, referred to as part of more general discussions of trade issues and the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Senator McCain is an ardent supporter of NAFTA and all free trade. Conversely, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama caused a stir back in February when he said that NAFTA, "ships jobs overseas and force parents to compete with teenagers for minimum wage at Wal-Mart," and that he wanted to renegotiate the 1993 deal. .
Closing America's border to free trade, however, would probably create a giant sucking sound of immigrants coming north as lost jobs in maquiladoras make the perceived economic opportunity of minimum wage jobs in America even greater, especially if President Obama increases the minimum wage, to boot!
On the other hand, Republican John McCain has gone out on a limb and embraced free trade with the same fervor that he has embraced the equally popular Iraq War. It's dangerous politically, but smart as a policy. Keeping free trade with Mexico creates jobs south of the border producing everything from tomatoes to Volkswagens.
Only if the opportunity gap between Mexico and the United States can be closed will illegal immigration cease to be an issue. We can close that gap by tearing down America's economy, or by helping build Mexico's economy and creating Mexican jobs. I'd hope we can all agree on the latter.
