Mr. President, I heard you didn’t care for the news about Merrill Lynch chief John Thain’s profligate decorating. Neither did millions of us.
What would be wrong with placing random unscheduled phone calls to some of the Wall Street bankers once in a while? Start off with “So, tell me a little about how you’re spending our tax money.” Use the silence. Let them spin, but follow up with specific questions. Depose them in a pleasant way. (Depose in the verbal examination sense—not remove them from office!)
Convention says you “can’t” do this, but we’ve come to expect that you’ll pull off some unconventional and unexpected feats. In fact we’re counting on it.
Update: Excellent! On Monday Citigroup was stonewalling on the planned purchase of a $47 million corporate jet using some of my money. Then a U.S. treasury official ”reached out” to the bank. Now Citgroup says it won’t take delivery. Nice one.
I was struck by a remark on Chris Matthews’s syndicated show yesterday. Katty Kay, a Brit reporting on U.S. politics for the BBC, talked about the positive world opinion of Barack Obama and how his background and understanding of other cultures is viewed as such a welcome break from recent history. It made me feel warm and proud of what we did in electing this guy.
Then I tried to put myself in the shoes and mindset of a typical Fox News watcher listening to the comment and realized that this big-picture way of operating and thinking breeds suspicion and fear among that set. I imagine they’ve been conditioned to reason that if foreigners think it’s a good thing, Americans need to be wary. Isn’t that a rotten shame? God forbid we should look at things from anybody else’s point of view.
The good news is that reason defeated the narrowminded crowd this time; about time. Can the factions get closer on this score? I’m not sure. I mean, it’s not a thing you can compromise about—either you operate in a spirit of being open to possibilities or you don’t. Would we wish for this smart cool new president to meet the closedminded halfway? Maybe the best we can wish for is that, in a new political climate, rigid neo-con views gradually will be viewed by moderates as out of touch and old-fashioned.
I think that’s already happening. When you hear GOP leadership hopefuls talk in generalities about the future, it’s all about opening up, not about closing ranks. What I hear between the lines is “Not what Sarah Palin represents—if your only solid base is the white south, that’s not enough to be a national party.”
As you might know, I’ve been obsessed with widgetmaking. The inauguration countdown widget that I put in the wild back in December 2007—when the idea of tomorrow’s transfer of power to Obama was wishful thinking—has been converted to a countup widget celebrating a new day. I love seeing it displayed with pride on African-American social networks and on blogs like Sicily Scene written by a woman from Wales living in Sicily.
Hey world, we’ve returned to the international community. It feels good to be back. Want to grab a cup of coffee?
I’m half watching Dick Cheney being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer, and you know, I find I can’t believe a word he says.
You should read Matt Taibbi‘s The Great Derangement. I thought the account of his infiltration of John Hagee’s church would be the part I’d relish most, but it’s all really good. How is it related to this blunt assessment of Cheney’s credibility? Taibbi, after meeting with 9/11 truthers, after ridiculing them in print, comes to a conclusion that it’s only natural after being spun so often and so violently that we’re falling-on-the-floor dizzy. We start making up our own truth.
I often feel like making something on holidays (you know, like something besides pies). It seemed like a good time to give my Obama countdown widget a new look.
When Barack Obama sent a thank-you text message to supporters—on his way to the victory speech—saying he couldn’t have done it without us, I thought that was nice to address us first. I replied “You’re welcome, buddy. Keep us involved.”
Wired Obama supporters have been thinking a lot about how the power of his online communities might be harnessed to do some good beyond getting him elected.
What would you think about bringing public hearings into the online world? It wouldn’t have to be exactly like Capitol Hill hearings. Hearings have taken to the road for a long time, but they tend to keep to the same formal rules.
A different kind of supplementary input might be put in place so that testimony could be given via one of the live video services, in shorter chunks, and by a different class of witnesses—more ordinary citizens, more front-line experts, fewer heads of agencies and heads of interest groups. (The higher you climb on the title ladder, the less you learn about what’s happening and the more you learn about what the establishment wants you to think is happening.) It would be less formal than hearings held in Washington, but more official than a town hall.
Live commentary on the testimony could be mined not just for reaction to the testimony but also for ideas. It could shape the direction of the hearings in real time.
I don’t believe anybody thinks Joe citizen should vote to decide things like how to fix the economy. But swarms do one thing very well: they ferret out the important, consequential bits of an issue, situation or conversation. When this happens in real time, we’re saying “Yes, more of that, please. Now.” We’re like players in a game of hide the thimble, telling the hunter if she’s hot or cold, closer or further away from the prize, or the essence of a thing.
If our representatives in government take the trouble to listen, and if they are canny about it, they’ll use that power to navigate the issue terrain.
Later: Brian Solis pens a good roundup of Obama’s use of social media during the campaign and and floats ideas for using it for governing. The stat that popped out at me:
YouTube also swayed towards Obama with a network of 358,000 to 191,000, with the Obama camp posting over 1,800 videos compared to McCain’s 330. These videos accounted for 110 million views.
While the ratio of Obama-to-McCain subscribers was about 2:1, the video posting ratio was more like 5:1. So, it’s not just that the McCain campaign was stuck in the 20th century in terms of thinking of the electorate as an audience; McCain supporters thought of themselves as the audience.
