Articles
G4
Here's my debut on G4's "Attack of the Show" from last night, talking about YouTube and the 2008 election:
Hunter Allen
I found out this week that one of my colleagues from Dean for America passed away. Hunter and I worked really closely together during my first months at the campaign before he shipped out to Iowa. He'd come to the campaign from LA because he really believed in it and Howard Dean and he was always energetic and lots of fun.
The only team photo we ever took on the campaign was when Peter Jennings came to visit the headquarters:
One of my funniest memories of Hunter was that during the campaign Friendster was really big and he didn't want any ambiguity about his photo—so he had me take this one in front of the restroom:
Anyway, we'll miss you Hunter. I'm sorry that I'll miss the memorial service on Saturday.
The Audacity of Hope
So an email just arrived from Hillary Clinton thanking me for all of my support: "I want to personally thank you for all you've done to support our campaign. Your continuing commitment over the past months to the values we share means so much to me."
As a special thank you gift for my undying, unending, unyielding support for All Things Hillary, she wanted to send me a Hillary for President bumper sticker.
The catch? If you go to the website, it says the bumper sticker will arrive in six to eight weeks, meaning late May or early June—or roughly three to five weeks after the North Carolina primary, which is widely seen as a possible end to the primary season. I guess she's planning on winning the nomination—or sending out a lot of bumper stickers a couple of weeks after losing.
Two Newspaper Family
So I'm the exact reverse of the media trend right now: I just signed up for my second hard-copy dead-tree newspaper. I subscribed last week to the Wall Street Journal, which I've been reading more and more over the last year at work, and I think it's just a fantastic newspaper.
The amazing thing: It just has much more interesting articles than either the Washington Post or the New York Times, even though I don't particularly care about the paper's main industry—Wall Street. On any given day, I'll read a much higher percentage of the articles in the WSJ than even in the WaPo, which is my home town paper and covers the city that I'm supposed to cover. I think that the WSJ just has a much more interesting outlook on the world and covers more interesting stories. The A-hed, that odd quirky story in the middle of the WSJ's front page, is always interesting but I rarely read a front-page feature in the Post. That's especially true of the columnists—I read all of the "In the Lead" column yesterday on Facebook's new COO in the Journal and always read the C1 columnists like Carl Bialik ("The Numbers Guy") but I more often than not skip over the Post's columnists, except for Marc Fisher (of course).
The true pain for me? I pay something like $240 a year for the Post and am paying $99 a year for the Journal.
Take the Water(ford) out of Ireland?
News today that Waterford Crystal could "quit" Ireland if the government refused to back a new round of loans there: In a statement, Waterford said it "believes that it is desirable for Ireland to maintain Waterford Crystal in Ireland. It further believes that the commitment of its investors deserves the support of the government, which is being asked for a guarantee for a three-year period, not a loan or a grant."
I argued in Helsinki last month that the huge multinational companies will increasingly pose a challenge to national sovereignty in coming years because of the incredible economic bargaining power they'll have over countries—especially smaller countries. If Nokia, which accounts for nearly 5 percent of the GDP of Finland, decided it wanted to leave the county, can you imagine what Finland would be willing to give up to keep it there? What about Toyota leaving Japan for Korea? Or Ford deciding to move to Canada to save its health care bills?
Here's a smaller case with Waterford. I know Ohio, Pennsylvania, or any of a dozen other U.S. states or countries would bend over backwards to attract Waterford.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Will this be one of the first economic blackmail cases of the 21st Century?
Bitter
Would it be that terrible for us to admit that Barack Obama had some truth in his statements? Howard Dean ran into similar trouble in 2004 when he was talking about people in the South who wave the Confederate flag.
Why is it that every time that Democrats try to talk thoughtfully and intelligently about the challenges facing rural America (a part of the nation I proudly call home), they get called "elitist" or "condescending"? What about acknowledging that rural Americans really do have different values and, more importantly, value systems and that a not insignificant amount of that difference is accounted for by economic reasons? And that's not something that one can address simply by taking a really lame shot of whiskey.
Superdelegates and Howard Dean
One more superdelegate goes for Barack Obama. I keep saying that the superdelegates want to break in a big way for Obama. They are, by and large, the same people who backed and elected Howard Dean as chair of the Party in 2005. They're grassroots-sy and passionate about a new direction than the old, beginning-of-the-decade 17-state strategy. They're natural Barack Obama people, but just as during the DNC chair race in 2005 when there needed to be widespread support for Dean before they broke for him en masse, they're going to wait until the Clintons can't hurt them anymore. There's no love lost on either side.
I wonder if Nancy Larson is just the beginning of a wave over the next two weeks?
[And another reason why Hillary won't win.]
Books
I realized that I run in odd circles when I was packing to fly to Tampa on Thursday and filled my bag only with books that my friends have published this winter. having now read them both, I recommend both: Love Marriage, by Sugi Ganeshananthan, one of my best friends from college, and Blood Kin, by a friend's roommate.
[This post is cross-posted from my first Tumblr blog, where you can follow more of my life if so interested.]
Princeton
I've been meaning to blog about this amusing poster from my talk at the end of March at Princeton. I was talking on my cell outside the building where I was speaking when this girl came up to me and whispered, "Garrett Graff?" I nodded, not used to being recognized in public. She then whispered that she had drawn my poster and so recognized me. I had no idea what she was talking about until I went inside and saw this:
And then I knew. The challenge is that, except for the hair, I'm not sure how good of a job this does in capturing me.
Take Me Out to the Ballgame!
Thanks to the father of a friend, who had seasons tickets, I got to go to the opening of the Washington nationals new stadium last night. It was certainly one of the more enjoyable baseball games I've ever attended -- even though the temperature last night reminded me of the early spring games at Fenway and I used to go to in college.
President Bush was on hand to throw out the ceremonial first pitch, but rather than a celebratory moment, it was sad all around. The president was vigorously booed at every mention; he must've said a land speed record in throwing out the first pitch—a total of 59 seconds on the field. Here's the video:
Overall I thought the stadium was great—the seats were comfortable; the sight lines for good; and there were even cupholders. The only complaint from everyone around us was just how long the lines were for food—something that seems like it will be fixed with time and certainly when there are fewer people at the games. Even the Metro ran rather smoothly in both directions.
Here's the complete set of photos from the ballpark.
Freedom of the Press
I got a sneak preview of the museum this weekend, which opens to the public officially in mid-April. In one corner there's a giant world map demonstrating the degrees of freedom of the press around the world. Green means a mostly free press. Yellow means a restricted press. The color red means a country where the press is in no way free.
I thought that it's sad that the two countries that the U.S. is currently occupying—Iraq and Afghanistan—show up on the map in red. Perhaps more than anything that measurement shows the failure of our efforts to rebuild the countries: Five years and we can't even paint them yellow.
Orange and Black
I'm off in the morning to Princeton, the first time I've ever visited there. I'll speaking at the Center for Information Technology Policy so I'm up late tonight putting the finishing touches on my speech. It's always a little bit harder and a little bit more nerve-racking to be speaking to an audience that knows what you're talking about.
My light reading for the train: "Here Comes Everybody" by Clay Shirky. Why can't I ever manage just to bring a good detective mystery when I travel?
Sputnik Moments
One of my favorite concepts from researching "The First Campaign," was this idea from Andy Stern of "Sputnik moments"—that is, teachable moments that made everyone sit up and pay attention. Given the tunnel vision of American society, "Sputnik moments" basically means moments so ripe with symbolism or simply too huge to ignore—September 11 was certainly a Sputnik moment for our interactions with the Muslim world.
While I was working on the book, Britain experienced one in regards to India in October 2006 when the Tata Group, the Indian-founded conglomerate that is becoming an increasing world presence, bought Corus, the company that had once been British Steel in an US$8 billion deal. Prior to the deal, Tata was much smaller than Corus—it was ranked 56th in the world for steel production—but the rising Indian star found no shortage of global financial lenders to back the deal who were ready to gamble that the future of business lay in the east. Between the combined outputs of Corus (then the ninth largest world steel producer) and Tata, the new company produces more steel than once-proud giant US Steel. The British papers were, all at once, proud, troubled, and curious over the deal—the largest foreign takeover ever by a company from Britain’s former colony.
At the time Ed Luce, the former South Asia bureau chief for the Financial Times, told me that it was only a matter of time before the US and India had a Sputnik moment to call their own too.
When Tata announced the bid in October 2006, already that month Tata had bought the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston as well as a 30 percent stake in Joekels, the South African tea company, adding to its expanding drink portfolio, which included Tetley Tea. Earlier in 2006, it had bought two major U.S. brands: Eight O’Clock Coffee and Glaceau’s line of flavored waters. So far Tata’s international expansion and the implications of the supersized growth of Indian firms has stayed mostly off the political radar in the U.S. Don’t expect that to continue, Luce said. "At some point soon, we’re going to see the same thing in the U.S." Luce told me as we were sitting in an Italian restaurant in Dupont. "ICICI Bank will buy Citigroup or Wipro will buy IBM and then there’ll be this rush to understand India. Right now, it’s not urgent—it’s just pressing."
Today may just be a Sputnik moment, a small one granted, but one nonetheless: Tata Motors just this morning bought two luxury brands away from the struggling Ford Motors, Jaguar and Land Rover. Now I'll grant that most Americans probably didn't even know that these two European luxury brands were owned by Ford, but what does it say about the future of the world's economy that already this year Tata seems poised to become a top player in the automobile industry? Earlier this year it announced a $2500 automobile and now it's buying two of the most respected automobile brands in the world.
From this morning's article from AFP:
"We would have much preferred Ford to keep the companies in the family, so to speak, especially with Land Rover being so profitable," said British labor leader Tony Woodley, whose union had supported India's top vehicle maker in its bid. "But with the commitments Tata have given to the future of Jaguar-Land Rover and the long-term supply agreements for components, especially engines from Bridgend and Dagenham [Ford sites in Britain], we're obviously pleased."
Let's see how much coverage this sale ends up getting in the States over the coming days—in the long run, GM, the longtime leading automaker which finished last year as the world's largest by what amounted to a rounding error, may have more to fear from Tata than from Toyota.
Bush's War
I stumbled last night into watching Frontline's documentary, "Bush's War," which was as captivating and fascinating to watch as New York magazine promised it would be: "If you’ll watch only one television program on the catastrophe in Iraq, make it this one."
More:
Like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and Freud’s return of the repressed, the war in Iraq keeps on coming back to bite us in the pineal gland. We do our best to distract ourselves with the collapse of the American economy or the rehab of pop tarts, but then another suicide bomb explodes in Baghdad and we are made to wonder once again—$3 trillion for exactly what? Bush’s War can’t tell us exactly “what,” except for a fiasco, but this two-night, four-and-a-half-hour Frontline special is the best audiovisual history of who, why, when, and how available to date.
The second half airs tonight. Watch it.
Spam and laws
When I asked Larry Lessig why geeks don't think of the law as a possible solution to their challenges, he told an interesting story:
He says he first realized the depth of the tech/politics disconnect after attending some of the first anti-spam conferences. At the conferences, geek after geek rose to discuss how to get another 5% improvement in filtering here, 3% incremental improvement in blocking there, or 5% by doing X or 10% by doing Y—but universally they were interested in software solutions, either new code or new protocols or new firewalls or the like. No one suggested getting government involved. Lessig suggested that new government regulation or enforcement could make a significant difference—maybe as much as 20% or 30% with game-changing legislation—and the reaction he was met with, he recalled, was that "it was so irrational to think about the law as a solution."
Technologists, he explains, lives in an idyllic environment: they get to spend their days developing and solving problems in logical, straightforward ways that are governed by strict rules and protocols. Code makes sense. Coding makes sense. The whole series of interlocking protocols online, from CSS to TCP/IP to FTP and HTPP, all ensure smooth operation in exchange for strict adherence to the rules.
By contrast, "Washington politics is torture," Lessig said. The process doesn't make sense; it can be changed at any time by rules that someone else makes up; "super users" (lobbyists, senior staff, bureaucrats, and committee chairmen) can hijack anything at any time; and, to top it all off, it's incredibly slow—most legislation or regulation takes five years or longer to work its way through Congress or a goverment agency—or the equivalent of more than three flips of Moore's Law. Well, yea, when you phrase it that way it doesn't sound very fun either.
I wonder whether we have made law too complicated? I'm reminded of a conversation I had a few weeks ago with Charles Overby, the head of the new Newseum. We were discussing the First Amendment, which reaches five protections into 45 words, and is carved in marble 74 feet high on the front of the Newseum. He laughed and said Congress today couldn't get even a single one of those five rights into 45 words. I couldn't agree more—I can envision a law passed today guaranteeing freedom of speech running to several hundred pages at least. And don't even try to guess how long the the 27-word Second Amendment would be if written today....
