Memo for 2048
Thu, May 8 2008 09:23 AM
Since it took 40 years after the last meaningful Presidential primary in Indiana for another to develop, I'll take the standard pundit stance of predicting it'll be 40 years before we see another political season like this one. Nevertheless, for those of us concerned with image and message, there are some lessons that should be preserved.
The Clinton campaign chased votes in every nook and cranny of the state. There should be plaques installed in band pavilions from Angola to Princeton saying, "Site of Hillary (or Bill) Clinton) rally, spring 2008." The result? Barack Obama won all the major Democratic counties – such as Marion, Lake, Monroe, Tippecanoe – and Hillary Clinton won in the smaller, more Republican counties.
Although it's easy to dismiss Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos," in which he urged Republicans to cross over and vote for Senator Clinton, a margin of one in one thousand voters could be claimed by any number of interest groups, including Rush's.
A note of praise must be included for Sen. Evan Bayh, who stayed true to his pledge of support for Sen. Clinton, sharing countless platforms with her, even introducing her on primary night. Whatever happens to her campaign, Sen. Bayh built political respect.
With Obama's campaign limping after being kneed by Jeremiah Wright and the candidate's own condescension toward blue-collar America, the Senator from Illinois was in trouble. Fortunately for him, he had the money to air TV spots aimed directly at displaced workers. He also had strategists who cut back on the big-crowd rallies, which always sounded inspirational but somewhat academic, replacing them with real-people encounters that brought out his conversational charm and connection with the average guy and looked particularly appealing in TV news reports.
While Sen. Clinton sent Bill and Chelsea to every Indiana town with a square, Obama remembered the big numbers were in North Carolina and spent his time accordingly. He didn't really need to win Indiana, as it turned out. He just needed to make it close. He did.
That brings us to Jim Schellinger, who should have won the Democratic primary for governor. For a man who has been acclaimed as a business leader, he made classic mistakes by:
- not bringing in the best leadership for his team and then trusting it.
- not anticipating the communication problem of trying to build identity amid a Presidential campaign. Battles are lost by acting too late.
With a voter dropoff of 1.3 million between "president" and "governor" on the Democratic ballot, it's fair to say neither Schellinger nor Jill Long Thompson set the state ablaze. With voters' minds closed to the race for governor, Long Thompson benefited from her many prior candidacies. Her old Congressional district, where her name was familiar, gave her the margin of victory. Turns out a career politician can have an advantage even when the voters are mad at incumbents.
Everybody's doin' it
Mon, Apr 28 2008 09:32 AM
A week or so after I complained about André Carson using his franking privilege to send out letters during the primary, I got a legislative newsletter – sent by the Indiana House of Representatives – from David Orentlicher, who is running against Carson in the Congressional primary. I guess I should not be so naive as to be disappointed.
Next I suppose I'll get one boosting Woody Myers sent out by Wellpoint.
Any way you want it, the Star says it's worth $200 a year
Tue, Apr 22 2008 02:23 PM
If you subscribe to the print version of the Indianapolis Star seven days a week, you'll pay about $200 a year. If you only read it online, you can pay zero and cope with the pop-ups and unintentional trips to the World of Entertainment at indy.com.
But if you'd like to read something like the print product but access it online, the Star now has a solution: It's called the eStar and it's a paid subscription product. If you're a print subscriber, it costs you an extra dollar a week. If you're not a print subscriber, it'll cost you about $200 a year. Just like the print product.
The issue here is not whether it's better to read from paper or from pixels. Even at my age, I'm willing to go either way. And the issue is not whether it should be free. A newspaper is a valuable product. The question, really, is whether they have the right price point. There are lots of costs associated with printing and delivering a newspaper, so why should the online version cost the same? And if you're paying for the print version, why should you have to pay another $50 to have the paper available online?
I don't know how to calculate the right price for the online paper. I don't think the Star knows, either. With Gannett's stock sinking and profits dropping, they have to do something. It'll be interesting to watch what the market value of the online Star turns out to be.
The incorrectness of productivity
Mon, Apr 21 2008 10:12 AM
Apparently, Jill Long Thompson believes it's inappropriate for a political candidate to be an architect. Or at least a successful one. The former member of Congress and former bureaucrat in the U.S. Department of Agriculture has attacked Jim Schellinger, her opponent in the Democratic primary for governor, for winning contracts to build schools because new schools increase property taxes.
From a person who is advertised as a business expert, this is perplexing. Do only bad people build schools? Do school boards spend tens of millions of dollars only because an architect lobbies them? This is the kind of thought that dooms Democrats to futility and, sometimes, silliness. The Clintons' books and Bill Clinton's speeches have brought in $100 million? Woody Myers has made millions as a health systems expert? That's not shameful. It's admirable.
When a candidate is attacked simply for succeeding – in a productive profession – in our economic system, it's time for us to revise our litmus tests. The best candidates do not always come from the ranks of lawyers and career bureaucrats.
Talkback scores!
Wed, Apr 16 2008 10:02 AM
The Indianapolis Star is grappling with the best way to moderate the opportunity technology has provided for its audience to respond immediately to news. The problem has been to minimize the effect of what one editor of mine called the "klondikes," people who have no knowledge and less social grace.
The Star is working on that issue for the same reason that family-provided obituaries often are more rewarding reading than the staff-produced obits of the past: some folks out there write well.
Today's proof of that point is the instant wit shown by readers when a story from Harrison County hit the website this morning. The iconic 12-foot statute of Julius Caesar that has been the signature of the Caesars Indiana Casino for years is coming down today, making way for the resort's new identity as a Horseshoe casino. If the 750-pound statue survives its toppling, one of the Harrison County commissioners plans to store it on his farm.
That was the story until a Star reader who goes by the name Bosephus5000 wrote: "We have come to carry Caesar, not raze him."
Made my morning.
Frankly, André, I can do without
Wed, Apr 16 2008 09:36 AM
The Saturday mail brought three letters to us for which we paid the postage. Our new member of Congress, André Carson, used his Congressional franking privilege to tell each of us that he is greatly concerned about the the alarming rise in crime sweeping the nation and Indianapolis. He let us know that he plans to work closely with those who actually are fighting crime. He also sent me a letter explaining how the Economic Stimulus Package payments work. This letter provided just about the same information that the IRS sent me a couple of weeks ago.
Usually, the use of free postage for House members is suspended for 90 days prior to a primary. I'm assuming André got an exception because his first election (March 11) was less than 60 days before the primary. So I'm assuming he didn't break any rules.
Nonetheless, André took unfair advantage of the franking privilege. The letter on crime read much like campaign literature, but without reference to the primary. The Economic Stimulus Package letter was less offensive but entirely superfluous.
Let's play fair.
Words we cannot use
Mon, Apr 14 2008 01:16 PM
When I came to Indianapolis from New York in 1984, I already knew that no politician ever survived talking about changes to Social Security. For people in cities with subways, that subject was called "the third rail of politics" because if you touched it, you died.
When I went to work for Gov. Evan Bayh, I learned to add "guns" to that list because in Indiana political lore the "Saturday Night Special" law was blamed partially for Sen. Birch Bayh's loss to Dan Quayle in the 1980 election.
This year, Barack Obama should have learned by now to use the word "religion" only in reference to himself. Conventional wisdom says there's no way he should ever have described small-town voters as clinging to religion in hard times when politicians fail to deliver on their promises.
The problem is that Social Security will need changes. The problem is that guns seem to kill people almost indiscriminately. The problem is that the hard times for small towns do survive the promises to fix them and that faith can become a substitute for action.
Someone needs to talk about these things without fear of having their intentions, or their perspective, questioned. Some of us had hoped that time had come.
On top of things
Tue, Apr 8 2008 08:41 AM
Matt Tully is a great asset to The Indianapolis Star. As a political columnist, he consistently avoids two major traps that have sometimes led political writers astray: scrunching facts so they fit into personal theory (Hi, E.J.!) and adopting the spin of the last person you interviewed. Matt tends to interpret what he actually sees and, increasingly, feels the confidence to state his views without equivocation.
That reliance on personal observation (something you should try, Bode) requires a lot of legwork. Sometimes just jumping over a weekend can leave you behind. That's what I think happened to Matt's column on Monday, in which he credited Jill Long Thompson with running a much better campaign than Jim Schellinger for the Democratic nomination for governor.
My view is Tully might have been right last week and wrong this week. In a very short time, Schellinger has gone from bland to focused, with a message that has started picking on the some of the vulnerabilities of Gov. Mitch Daniels. In doing so, he has exposed Long Thompson's campaign – which had been attracting attention almost by default – as trading in tired ideas and weak in policy development.
Schellinger's workforce plan was easy to understand and, while modest, hit important targets. His new ads are more alive.
The awakening of the Schellinger campaign could be too late, but I believe Long Thompson has failed to capitalize on the opportunity she had.
Of course, this could change next week. And this time, Tully will probably be on top of it.
No candor allowed
Mon, Apr 7 2008 12:06 PM
The Clinton campaign's obsession with spin reached an absurd low Sunday with the announcement that Mark Penn "asked to give up his role of chief strategist."
Why couldn't Maggie Williams, Sen. Clinton's campaign manager, just say Penn had become too controversial for the Senator's comfort? Of course, I know that no one is ever fired or demoted or disciplined any more. In this case, however, stating the clear fact that Penn had become a liability and that those who disliked him in the campaign had finally won over Sen. Clinton would have been helpful to her campaign. It's just not the way they do things.
A brief recap: Mark Penn has been a close adviser to both Hillary and Bill for years, back to when Bill was a chief proponent of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Penn's public affairs firm, Burson-Marsteller, has had a contract for the past year to help the Columbian government win a free-trade agreement with the U.S. Now, of course, winning the Pennsylvania and Indiana Democratic Presidential primaries means you have to be a critic of NAFTA.
So when it was reported in the Wall Street Journal that Penn met with his firm's Columbian clients about that project, he suddenly became the bad apple in the barrel. His company's representation of Columbia was not new or news. His repeated clashes with other leaders of the Clinton campaign was not new or news. His responsibility for the failures of the Clinton campaign strategy was not new or news. So why not say he was fired?
Of course, that would have meant that being a member of the team for decade or more was not as important as pretending no one around the Senator likes NAFTA or free trade, at least until the primaries are done. It's true, but it's not the way they do things.
My intro to reality
Fri, Apr 4 2008 10:19 AM
Forty years ago tonight, I sat alone in the basement studio of WUVA-AM radio at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, playing records on the carrier-current station. As a first-year disc jockey, I had the Thursday night shift at WUVA. At the top and bottom of the hour, among cuts from the Animals, the Kinks and Jimi Hendrix, I ripped the newsprint off the Associated Press printer and read the headline news.
Early in the evening came the bulletin that Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis. In 1968, we had not gotten past President John Kennedy's murder and it was clear even to a 19-year-old that this was a major tragedy for the country. At the time, civil rights at the University were not a daily issue. The few African-American students at UVa were invisible and their cause ranked below that of women, who had not yet achieved full access to the college.
My parents had taught me the standard phrases of colorblind equality, even though I knew my father believed African-Americans couldn't be entrusted with political responsibility and that my mother's respect for the rights of people of color was predicated on their ability to sustain their best behavior. Some schools in the Charlottesville area had been segregated only a few years earlier and one county in Virginia closed its public schools from 1960 to 1964 to avoid integration. As a product of Catholic elementary and secondary schools, I was insulated from those issues.
After the news of Dr. King's death, the bulletins accelerated. Rioting in New York. In Baltimore. In Chicago. In Washington.
Alone in the basement, the feeling grew inside me that this was a fire sweeping across the country that would leave us all scorched. The story of how Robert Kennedy averted violence in Indianapolis through his personal courage and credibility would not reach me until much later.
I could read what was happening off the wire, but as close to the center of injustice I sat I had no real understanding of why it was happening. That was, until I ended my shift and went back to my dorm, where the poker game had been superseded by a discussion of the assassination. We had a student on the hall who came from Tennessee. His reaction: "See? We know how to keep 'em down." That short, evil phrase knocked some off of the insulation I wore and made me understand something of what was going on. Welcome to reality.