John McQuaid

I don’t see a problem, as some do, with the Obama campaign printing up flyers in German for his speech in Berlin. (Insert snarky comment about German being the predominant language of Germany.)

But the flyer’s design is unnerving:

The Obama campaign has the best graphic designers in the business. They have taken the fusty presidential conventions of signs and bumper stickers and elevated them to a new level, integrating typography, imagery, corporate-style branding and political message into a single streamlined whole. It’s a powerful tool to win votes.

But sometimes they go too far, crafting images that don’t merely suggest “leadership” or “change” but amount to attempted manipulation – as with that ridiculous “presidential seal” that was tried, met with derision, and quickly retired.

The Berlin poster is another misfire – with Obama’s face and its blunt, modernist diagonals, it comes off as cult-of-personality propaganda. The imagery is a cross between Obama-on-Mt.-Rushmore and 20th century totalitarian kitsch.

For example, this SS recruiting poster:

Or this, from one of Stalin’s Five Year Plans:

The point here is not that Obama is a budding totalitarian, but that the high level of orchestration and control of his image, down to the typographical level, tends to devolve into obvious propagandistic fakery. This makes Obama appear to be operating at some airy remove from the rest of us, his campaign imagery employed not for communicating ideas, but as subliminal code. There’s an alarming paternalism there – a campaign is supposed to be a two-way conversation, but this is decidedly one-way.

And the guy’s not even president yet. Imagine what happens when he has the entire machinery of the federal government available to broadcast his chosen message.

Update: John McCain’s graphic designers have decided to go Obama’s one better. Instead of Big Brother, the candidate is being graphically equated with God:

The doom and gloom here seems over-the-top, no?

When historians get around to 2008, it’s likely they will say it was the year the Los Angeles Times died. No, I don’t think the paper will fold between now and December. But I do fear the paper will be so diminished, so crippled, that the chance of saving it will have slipped away.

I agree that indiscriminately slashing the LATimes’s staff and budget will, inevitably, degrade its quality. (Though given its traditional bureaucratic loginess, cutting and reorganization are not automatically bad things.)

But like most papers, the LAT is more than a bunch of journalists and a building, it’s an institution and a brand. Those will endure in some form or another. Once Sam Zell has wrung all he can out of them, his successors will want to do something with what’s left. Los Angeles is a large metro area. It has a big industry and a vibrant cultural life for a news organization to tap into. The LAT won’t die – and it will be back in a new form, perhaps a better one. It just won’t be the 1990s-era Times. That is, indeed, dying.

Why have the media been so reluctant to acknowledge Iraqi PM Maliki’s all-but endorsement of Obama’s Iraq plans? Only today, after three days of faux-controversy, are they getting it right.

There’s the standard left-blogosphere explanation, which I think is pretty accurate: the media grant more credibility to Republicans in general and John McCain in particular on matters of foreign policy and terrorism. Obama’s margin for error on these things with the press is razor-thin. McCain, meanwhile, can get basic world geography wrong and still get a pass. (For the record, I don’t think McCain’s verbal miscues merit a feeding frenzy – nor should Obama’s.) 

This double standard iis a deeply ingrained habit. It dates in its current form back to the 1980s, but really all the way back to Nixon. In the minds of the media, the principal political legacy of Nixon and Reagan, and to a lesser extent Bush 41 (who lost due to a sour economy), is the iron linkage between Republicans, an attitude of American “strength,” a policy of interventionism abroad, and victory at the ballot box.

But during the past eight years, the practice of projecting “strength” in foreign policy changed. Instead of a single, rather amorphous feature of the president’s foreign policy, “attitude” became nearly the whole damn thing.

Meanwhile, the quality of our foreign policy as policy – that is, government decisions taken with some intelligible long-term strategy in mind, some understanding of the world – declined precipitously. Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 (and while we’re at it, Ford, Carter, and Clinton) had their failings, but all ended up conducting foreign policies that look pretty good compared with what we’ve got now.

This is pretty obvious, and more an objective truth than any presumed correlation between bluster and winning elections. The public has recognized it: we’re in a ditch. But in covering Obama and McCain, the media still behave as if the various strategic blunders of past eight years never happened. This requires making a value judgment, which the media can’t, and won’t, do. So it’s very hard for them to credit Obama for foreign policy insight, even when – especially when – events align rather well with his policies.

The other driver here is fear. Political journalism is basically 25 percent facts and 75 percent interpretation and speculation. (Which is why it’s stupid.) There is a great premium placed on seeming “out in front” of the pack in interpreting events – but not too far out, in case the pack starts moving in a different direction. And in terms of crowd dynamics, traditional media outlets revere nothing more than their sometime foes in the conservative media. Drudge, Fox, Rush Limbaugh and the rest have the ability to spontaneously (or not-so spontaneously) align on a particular topic, creating the illusion of a populist wave. The MSM bought the Karl Rove view, mistaking this narrow intensity for broad, popular sentiment. They envy it. Consciously or not, they hew to its conventions. To give Obama too much credit on foreign policy risks a mocking, pseudo-popular backlash from the conservative media – based on some minor Obama gaffe, say (as Jon Stewart so artfully lampooned last night) – that spills over into the mainstream.

It’s all the stranger because what’s coming out of Iraq is great news not just for Obama, but for the United States. Look at the Bush administration’s ridiculous fumbling over Maliki’s statements. Take Obama out of the picture: from the standpoint of U.S. Iraq policy, this is a very positive development. Things are stabilizing to the point where we can talk about withdrawal. Bush did something right! Holy crap! But the White House is so heavily invested in … making Obama look bad? Military bases forever? … that it cannot acknowledge even its own apparent success. In other words, the stated aims of U.S. policy and the actual aims are not the same, and the contradiction is tying us in knots. Alas, the media haven’t noticed this obvious tension either.

What is the point, exactly, of HBO’s Generation Kill? The first two episodes were certainly watchable, sometimes mordantly funny, sometimes outright riveting. But I’m still not sure why we’re watching this now, or what its broader point is about the Iraq war, or for that matter war in general.

When HBO commits to a seven-part miniseries, and brings in David Simon and Ed Burns of The Wire to do it, expectations are automatically (and probably unfairly) raised very high. The Wire achieved a sweeping dramatic complexity while also providing trenchant commentary on American urban life and modern life in general, with its focus on the various corrupted systems that we all participate in, and consciously or unconsciously must bow down before – the crappy bureaucracy, the tyrannical market.

So when Simon and Burns take on the Iraq war, we expect something that sets that conflict in a broader context, and shows us something new about it. There’s no shortage of literary, high modernist material that fits the Wire sensibility: American hubris and ignorance of the world – not just of other cultures, but of geopolitics and war itself. The blood-for-oil factor. The missing WMDs and the media’s credulousness. Rumsfeld’s determination to use Iraq as a lab for his ideas about a lighter, nimbler – and non-nation-building – military.

All those things have been hashed over in books and movies and are still fuel for the flames of punditry, of course, but HBO, Simon and Burns had an opportunity to get beyond all that and explore the whys about what went wrong here, the vintage 21st century American absurdity of the whole enterprise. Maybe we’re not ready for this. Maybe no one would want to watch it. But boy, wouldn’t it be something.

Instead, Simon and Burns take a narrow, documentarian’s approach. We spend all our time with a single unit of Marines in the heady days and weeks of the initial invasion. Watching it and knowing what subsequently happened in Iraq, you do get some sense of the innate ridiculousness of the mission. You also see the idiocy and arbitrariness of the chain of command – which, we now know, went all the way to the very top. The unit commander makes a wrong turn against the advice of a subordinate, then blames the subordinate for the mistake once it’s discovered. The battalion commander decides the Marines must push through a hail of gunfire in a town in their lightly-armored Humvees rather than taking the safe way round – solely to show the Iraqis how tough Americans are. Afterward a lot of Iraqis are dead and the Marines feel fucking great.

Some great post-9/11 metaphors, there! But these are only lightly allusive, and secondary to what, underneath its irony and attitude, so far appears to be mainly a conventional war picture about soldierly camaraderie, a “Band of Brothers” for the millennials.

Another self-plug: I have a campaign piece in the latest issue of Nieman Reports, which features many interesting takes on campaigning in the Internet age. I tried to take an Olympian view of the whole thing, with the (perhaps foolish) idea of straddling the old-new media divide. But what struck me most writing it, and looking over the other pieces, is how little has changed despite the rapid evolution in technology and audience behavior, the collapse of the print media business model, and the exponential growth of alternative online voices and techniques.

In other words, the feeding frenzy still rules. In the age of Drudge and cable talkathons, the phenomenon has grown and become ever more trivial since the days of Gary Hart and Bill Clinton. And it is still at its core primarily an old-media phenomenon. It is the dream of every member of the “Gang of 500″ to set off some trivial controversy that dominates the news cycle for days. This year’s serial outrages – campaigns taking offense at anything and everything – are part of this too.

Even the new media, which is supposed to be smarter than that, tries exploit this dynamic. TPM has a story up on how John McCain was asked if he thought Obama was an extremist or a socialist (he was not asked if he thought Obama was a Muslim or when he had stopped beating his wife). McCain clearly didn’t know how to answer this, so fumbled through, tacitly buying into both the extremist and socialist ideas. I find it hard to get angry about stuff like this, not least of all because the purpose of playing this up isn’t genuine outrage, but to create tinder for a feeding frenzy that hurts McCain.

This is a perfectly understandable reaction to the conservative media’s success at hyping ridiculous, minor incidents into feeding frenzies. But ginning up more feeding frenzies in response is no solution.

I have a Guardian piece up discounting the possibility of war crimes trials for Bush & Co. in the United States. I do think, though, that a Pinochet scenario – a torture indictment by a zealous foreign prosecutor – is probable at some point from 2009 on for Bush, Cheney, or Rumsfeld, most likely the latter.

There is just too much to be gained, in terms of international opinion, political stock, and, well, justice itself, for some enterprising European civil servant not to go after those big, big fish. You might think that outrage in the United States, and the various forms of diplomatic pressure that would follow on that, would render this impossible. But once Bush leaves the White House, he will lose the symbolic cloak of office that makes him a symbol of America and still buys him a measure of respect and deference. No one of consequence will rise to his defense. Pinochet at least had Margaret Thatcher – who will speak for Bush? Most of the country will be so relieved to see Bush go they will quickly forget he ever existed, and won’t care a whit if he or his associates are indicted in absentia abroad somewhere.

There’s an interesting discussion underway on whether the current runup in oil prices – somewhat deflated this week – is a bubble. It’s a pertinent question: how many of us have asked ourselves, as gasoline prices have risen over the past year, whether this simply the way things are going to be from now on? In other words, the logistics and texture of daily life will change radically. We’ll be paying $10 or $15 or $20 per gallon, inflation will be in the double digits, petroleum-based plastic bags and Happy Meal toys will no longer exist, and I’ll be walking to the supermarket 3x a week instead of driving once. But only until that mass transit line goes in a half block from my house years ahead of schedule. There’s even a book in the er, pipeline (courtesy of Publisher’s Marketplace – subscription required):

Forbes reporter Christopher Steiner’s $20 PER GALLON, pitched as a thought experiment on the same scale as The World Without Us, looking at a very real future that’s already beginning to affect us all, exploromg how the rising cost of gas – from $6, to $8, to $14 per gallon and beyond – will radically change all aspects of our lives and culture, to Rick Wolff at Grand Central, in a good deal, for publication in Spring 2009, by David Fugate at LaunchBooks Literary Agency (World).

This may all be true: there are real-world reason oil prices are rising – demand is going up and supply is flatter than anticipated. These conditions will likely last a while, and while painful have the felicitious side-effect of changing consumer behavior, stimulating investment/innovation in alternatives and altering destructive, car-friendly public policies. If this continues for decades, the changes will be more dramatic still.

But we’ve seen so many bubbles recently that we ought to be skeptical of any “it’ll just keep going up” scenario. Nothing “just keeps going up,” even if the historic trend line points that way – there are always peaks and valleys. There’s obviously a kind of cultural craze underway, set off by high gas prices, and the current situation certainly has some bubble-like qualities mixed in with the objective conditions:

The amount of money dedicated to commodity index trading strategies is estimated to have increased from $13 billion at the close of 2003 to about $260 billion by this past March. In theory, money should be equally-likely to go on the long (“I bet prices will go up”) as on the short (“I bet prices will go down”) sides of this speculative market, but for a lot of practical reasons it is much more likely to go to the long side. This is the most plausible argument for the mechanism by which a bubble might currently be operating, and if history is any guide, there is probably at least some of this. What nobody knows is whether this is worth $1, $10 or $100 per barrel (though it seems very unlikely to be at either of these end-points).

Wait a minute. The value of commodity index trading has increased by a factor of 20 in less than five years? The link is to Senate testimony by portfolio manager Michael Masters, who recounts that institutional investors suddenly began sinking massive amounts of money in previously-small-potatoes futures markets. Those markets went way up, drawing in still more money, which in effect locks up a portion of the actual, physical supply:

Index Speculators’ trading strategies amount to virtual hoarding via the commodities futures markets. Institutional Investors are buying up essential items that exist in limited quantities for the sole purpose of reaping speculative profits.

Think about it this way: If Wall Street concocted a scheme whereby investors bought large amounts of pharmaceutical drugs and medical devices in order to profit from the resulting increase in prices, making these essential items unaffordable to sick and dying people, society would be justly outraged.

Why is there not outrage over the fact that Americans must pay drastically more to feed their families, fuel their cars, and heat their homes?

This is another example of how our various interlocking systems – financial, energy, food – have grown ever more complex and automated, and how choices made in one system ripple across all the others – with the causes often ignored or unnoticed.

U.S. supermarkets are trying to do the right thing by imposing some standards on farmed fish:

Whole Foods plans to announce today the first comprehensive set of aquaculture guidelines by a major retailer. Wal-Mart has established standards for farmed shrimp and certified its factories with the Aquaculture Certification Council. And Wegmans worked with Environmental Defense Fund on its farmed-shrimp policy to ban antibiotics, avoid damaging sensitive habitats, treat waste water and reduce the use of wild fish to feed shrimp.

This is a good start. But it’s only a start. Aquaculture is one of those third- or fourth-tier environmental issues that are more revealing than giant problems such as climate change, because they show why various world systems – natural and manmade – are stressed to the point of breakdown right now. It’s a classic case of seemingly benign, yet perverse incentives backfiring. In this case, consumers have good motives for seeking out farmed fish. They want a better diet. They know there’s too much fishing going on. They know that some wild-caught fish contain unhealthy levels of mercury and other chemicals. In addition, the global supply of wild-caught fish leveled off some years back, driving demand for alternatives further upward. So, aquaculture production has doubled in the past 10 years.

But fish farming is itself an engine of radical environmental/ecological/social change. What happens when you quickly create an industry that has no pre-existing infrastructure, and do it mostly in remote coastal landscapes of the developing world? You get many, many problems. I’ll never forget a trip I took in the 1990s to a shrimp farming region in southern Thailand. A few years earlier, the area had been rice paddies. Then the seafood corporations and venture capitalists arrived, and boom – all the rice paddies were shrimp farms, and subsistence rice cultivators were Thailand’s newest entrepreneurs. But there was no environmental oversight. Landscape was ugly and degraded. Shrimp waste was in piles everywhere. Social problems were on the rise as the farmers spent previously-unimaginable sums of cash. Etc.

Scenes like this have been spreading to different areas of the world, as this Greenpeace report documents (warning: pdf file). There are pernicious innovations, too, including tuna ranching, in which bluefin tuna are captured, caged and fattened – something that is driving their low numbers down further. So as the consumers at Whole Foods and Wal-Mart chowed down on their tilapia and thought they were doing themselves and the world a favor, they were subsidizing the futher fraying of the coastal ecologies around the world.

Efforts like the WWF’s certification program attempt to use those same incentives in a positive manner, by upping demand for sustainable seafood and marginalizing the bad actors. But it’s not clear this type of program will ever do the trick – what’s needed, ultimately, is a combination of actual enforcement and responsible business practices in those remote spots. Until that happens, Western consumers will still be complicit in a lot of unneccessary ecological degradation.

Barack Obama is working out a lot. And not sweating.

Not sure why I bother, but what is it about Maureen Dowd, Barack Obama, and food? Dowd has repeatedly mocked Obama’s “abstemious” tastes and how these set him apart from the great, fat, American mainstream:

July 16: He’s already in danger of seeming too prissy about food…

July 13: He looked frustrated when Sasha revealed that “my dad doesn’t like sweets” and that he preferred “minty gum” to bubble gum. She then began singsonging “Everybody should like ice cream” before pointing a finger at the person who doesn’t: “Except Daddy!”

As Margaret Carlson told Mike Barnicle on “Hardball,” in a segment called “Is Obama Too Cool?,” about whether he relates to average Americans, sometimes you just want to tell the guy, “Eat the doughnut.”

Whether Obama was irritated that he had slipped up and exposed his daughters or was annoyed that his kids were exposing more delicious details about his finicky, abstemious tastes, we’ll never know.

May 21: “Oh, you’re so witty with all your stupid rallies with 75,000 people and spending $100 million on ads to promote one puny word: Change. I’ve made sacrifices in this campaign. While you’ve been fake-eating and losing weight, I’ve had to stuff myself with all that greasy working-class junk food and chase it with Boilermakers.”

May 4: Checking out what the vets were drinking, he announced, “I’m going to have a Bud.” Then, showing he’s a smart guy who can learn and assimilate, he took big swigs from his beer can, a marked improvement on the delicate sip he took at a brewery in Bethlehem, Pa.

April 27: Hillary is not getting much sleep or exercise, and doesn’t, like the ascetic Obama, abstain from junk food and coffee and get up at dawn to work out on the road…He dutifully enthused about carbs, assuring reporters that when he had dinner as a child with his Kansas grandparents, the food “would have been very familiar to anybody here in Indiana. A lot of pot roast, potatoes and Jell-O molds.”

April 23: In the final days in Pennsylvania, he dutifully logged time at diners and force-fed himself waffles, pancakes, sausage and a Philly cheese steak. He split the pancakes with Michelle, left some of the waffle and sausage behind, and gave away the French fries that came with the cheese steak.

But this is clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites.

April 2: At the Wilbur chocolate shop in Lititz Monday, he spent most of his time skittering away from chocolate goodies, as though he were a starlet obsessing on a svelte waistline.

“Oh, now,” the woman managing the shop told him with a frown, “you don’t worry about calories in a chocolate factory.”

The Times’s Michael Powell reports that, after watching five plump, white-haired women in plastic hairnets spin the chocolate into such confections as “Phantom of the Opera” masks and pink high heels, he ventured: “Do you actually eat the chocolate or do you get sick of it?” They giggled at his silliness.

He looked even more concerned when he was offered a chocolate cake with white chocolate frosting. “Oh, man.” he said. “That’s too decadent for me.”

Of course, this is all meaningless nonsense having nothing to do with what Obama might do as president, how he might do it, or even whom he might hire as White House chef. But even on its own terms – as an attempted insight into Obama’s alleged finickiness or his supposed distance from the Applebee’s set – it doesn’t make sense. A presidential candidate is apparently attempting to eat right while having a mix of fried road food and catered campaign meals shoved at him eight times a day. He should be hailed as a role model, not damned for failing to wolf down every last fry.