Clinton

In the NYTimes Sunday Magazine, a profile of Bill Clinton post-presidency. What was most interesting to me was a passage covering his ability to convert enemies to friends.



Yet if Clinton has a powerful memory for slights, he also has a remarkable capacity for reconciliation. He is likelier to find peace with people who hate him the most than with friends who betray him. He focuses his considerable charms on seducing the person in the room he finds most resistant.


...


Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire publisher who financed Ruddy’s investigations and other anti-Clinton activities, is now a contributor to the foundation. So is Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman whose Fox News was a regular thorn in Clinton’s side. Clinton over the years has also made peace with other former adversaries, like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich. The elder George Bush told me he now considers Clinton “a real friend.

Obama's Address to Congress

Obama is speaking to Congress today. I was hoping real-life slumdog millionaire (well, sort of) Bobby Jindal would be there for the talk, so that he could walk out partway through Obama's speech and Obama could say, "You can walk out on me, Governor Jindal, but you can't walk out on the American people..." or whatever it is that Jeff Bridges says in The Contender. (IMDb memorable quotes you're letting me down on this one).


In advance, I want to address those who will complain that this live stream is from Fox News: we should have a CNBC version for watching after the fact. It's the internet, speculation is cheap, but we honestly have no political agenda we're trying to push, we just shoot to obtain the best live stream possible from all available sources, and whatever network broadcasts the actual address, it's all the same during the speech anyhow.







The nanny tax

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler writes about the tax trouble of appointees Geithner, Daschle, and Killifer (sounds a bit like Santa's reindeer as referred to in Munich or something):



I am more than willing to grant that not every nominee deserves to be appointed to rule over me. But I'm also worried about the incentives we are producing by applying tougher standards. Knocking out the caught cheaters won't make all the DC people honest or virtuous. The long run effect is to select for people who have known -- from the very beginning -- that they seek power and who are willing to pay money to the taxman to keep that option alive. We are selecting for people who are very good at covering up their misdeeds. We're selecting for honest people too. There's lots of posturing on this issue, but I'm not sure whether the net effect of the crackdown is positive, once you take all these selection effects into account. There's something to be said for selecting people who are relatively bad at cover-ups.



I think Daschle and Geithner's offenses are egregious. They can afford to hire a tax guy, and if they claim to have misinterpreted the tax code they're lying. The public already believes that their Congressmen operate under a separate set of standards when it comes to taxes, and this won't help.


But for Killifer, withdrawal may be excessive. I have never heard of any person who pays taxes on their nanny, politician or otherwise. In fact, if the government wants to increase its income, they should crack down on the illegal nanny trade. Half the parents we all know would be slapped with fines, which might force some of them to downgrade their strollers from designer all-wheel drive offroad models to something more pedestrian, like the plastic-wheeled polyester-hammocked contraptions that passed for strollers when I was in diapers.



Three links

How Porsche made a killing in the financial markets by creating a short squeeze on VW stock. That is just crazy.


***


Why Obama's tax rebate may work to boost consumption where others have failed.



The key factor in these kinds of distinctions, Thaler’s work suggests, is whether people think of a windfall as wealth or as income. If they think of it as wealth, they’re more likely to save it, and if they think of it as income they’re more likely to spend it. That’s because many people tend to base their spending not on their long-term earning potential or on their assets but on what they think of as their current income, an amount best defined by what’s in their regular paycheck. When that number goes up, so does people’s spending. In Thaler’s words, “People tend to consume from income and leave perceived ‘wealth’ alone.

Yeah, we put a ring on him

I was watching an ABC interview with Beyonce last night, and she was asked about how it felt to sing "At Last" at one of the balls for Barack and Michelle's dance, and Beyonce said it was hard to answer because she was tearing up just thinking about the moment, and then she did start crying and gushing about Obama like a teenage girl, and I confess I teared up a bit because, well, damn, our awesome President is awesome.


Here's that Beyonce interview:








And here's that first dance. Watching it feels like being at the best wedding ever.









Inaugural Addresses through the years

Maybe 2008 is the tipping point in my ability to maintain a regular posting schedule here. Hulu and rehabbing my Achilles and the little bits of free time here and the cup runneth over.


Still, some of this may just be inertia. My first few times out to run since being cleared by the doctor have been painful and slow--run a few minutes, then stop to stretch out the Achilles, then run a few minutes, then vomit, then pass out, then regain consciousness, then run a few minutes, then flag down a taxi to take me home, or to the hospital, or some variant thereof--but as someone once said, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (or is it a good travel agent?).


We posted inaugural addresses from years past at Hulu today. Here's the one from George W. Bush.


Okay, I jest. We have those Dubya masterpieces, too, but here's one from JFK.







Or maybe, since Obama is taking office in similarly troubled times, we should hearken back to the first Inaugural Address by FDR, who also took office with an economy in shambles. You can bet Obama and his speechwriters have listened to this one a few times ("...the only thing we have to fear...").








Miscellany

Sportswriter Jim Murray once wrote about Rickey Henderson, whose excessive batting crouch helped him to draw lots of walks:



Rickey Henderson's strike zone is smaller than Hitler's heart.



***


A recent New Yorker article in the Food Issue examined the knife-making industry and profiled Kramer Knives of Seattle. Bob Kramer is one of a select group of Master Bladesmiths in America (as credentialed by the American Bladesmith Society); there are only about a hundred. To pass the test, one's knife must undergo a grueling series of tests, from rope cutting to wood chopping to shaving hair.


There is a multi-year waitlist to buy one of Kramer's knives, used by the likes of super chefs like Thomas Keller (I myself am on that waiting list). He has collaborated on a more widely available series of knives that are sold exclusively by Sur La Table. The Chef's Knife from that series is a beauty (if you're looking for a last-minute gift idea that will just dazzle a loved one who loves to cook, that's a great way to go, though my mother always shunned giving knives as gifts because of the Chinese superstition that giving such a gift foretold the severing of that relationship).



Upgrading the dull chef's knife is one of the best investments a home cook can make. Dull knives make cooking a lot of work and leads to injuries when a knife slips. Proper knife technique is the other simple lesson a chef should learn. To properly capitalize on your knife's edge, the blade should be moving horizontally across the food being cut. Too many people just press down, and that's not how a knife is designed to work. Doing so exerts a lot of needless effort and is slow. Think of your arm and knife moving in a continuous elliptical motion, like the horizontal metallic bar on the outside of a train engine car's wheels.


***


I don't recall what things were like four years ago, but it feels to me like there are many more "letters to the President-Elect" in the media this time around, on topics from bailouts and reviving the economy to drugs, food policy, and education. I suspect this is the consequence of having a President we regard as well-read and thoughtful.


***


An old article from The Morning News, as seen back on Reddit today: How do you know if a girl loves you?



If you’re Gael Garcia Bernal: She loves you.




My favorite Sarah Silverman joke from her show tonight


So, we have a new President. Yes, isn't it great? I got to attend a fundraiser recently, and afterwards, I went over to talk to him, and I wanted to ask him a question, but I didn't want to look stupid, so I said, "Senator Obama, when you were at school at Harvard, did you encounter any racism?"


He took a long look at me, and then he said, "I'm Kanye West."



There's more, and it's darker, and I'm too much of a prude to print it here.



John Ziegler

Here's a transcript of an interview between Nate Silver and right wing kook John Ziegler about a Zogby poll that Ziegler commissioned. Ziegler uses a lot of foul language, a lot of it daring Silver to post the transcript. So Silver did.


Ziegler was the subject of a David Foster Wallace essay that ran in The Atlantic and that was anthologized in Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays. On hearing that DFW had committed suicide, Ziegler posted an entry at his website that confirms the sunny personality that comes through in the Silver transcript.



I know that it is considered bad form, or worse, to speak ill of the newly dead, but to me all bets are off when one commits suicide, especially when that person is a husband and a father (speaking of bad form, when did the news media change their rule about not reporting extensively on the suicides of marginally famous people?). I strongly believe that a large ingredient of the toxic mix that ended up forming Wallace’s self-inflicted poison was the pressure he felt of living up to the hype surrounding his writing and the guilt he must have felt for not really having the true talent to back up his formidable reputation.


While I have absolutely no evidence to back up this assertion, I also think it is quite possible that he knew that killing himself in his “prime

Let bygones be bygones

The Guardian reports that Hillary Clinton will accept Obama's offer for her to be the Secretary of State.


Nate Silver doesn't think it makes sense for Clinton to accept if she wants to use it as a stepping stone to the Presidency. The important question to me is whether she's make a good Secretary of State.


Obama's surrounded himself with an intriguing staff. It is said of him that he likes to surround himself with varied and often dissenting thinkers, so as to help him clarify his thinking on issues. It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall at his staff meetings.



The sacrifices of office

One casualty of Obama's victory in the Election: e-mail and his Blackberry.



But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.


For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. Mr. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.



How crazy is it that the most important leader in the country can't use e-mail?



West Wing, the real world edition

In the TV show The West Wing, Leo McGarry, an old friend of Josh Lyman, asks Josh to go listen to a man speak. McGarry wants Lyman to help this man run for the Presidency. Lyman is skeptical, but he treks out to a VFW hall in New Hampshire and listens to this candidate speaking to a hostile crowd. And when he hears the man speak, this man named Jed Bartlet, he is converted.


From Chapter 1 of Newsweek's Secrets of the 2008 Campaign:



Barack Obama had a gift, and he knew it. He had a way of making very smart, very accomplished people feel virtuous just by wanting to help Barack Obama. It had happened at Harvard Law School in the mid-1980s, at a time when the school was embroiled in fights over political correctness. He had won one of the truly plum prizes of overachievement at Harvard: he had been voted president of the law review, the first African-American ever so honored. Though his politics were conventionally (if not stridently) liberal, even the conservatives voted for him. Obama was a good listener, attentive and empathetic, and his powerful mind could turn disjointed screeds into reasoned consensus, but his appeal lay in something deeper. He was a black man who had moved beyond racial politics and narrowly defined interest groups. He seemed indifferent to, if not scornful of, the politics of identity and grievance. He showed no sense of entitlement or resentment. Obama had a way of transcending ambition, though he himself was ambitious as hell. In the grasping race for status and achievement—a competition that can seem like blood lust at a place like Harvard—Obama could make hypersuccessful meritocrats pause and remember a time (part mythical perhaps, but still beckoning) when service to others was more important than serving oneself.


Gregory Craig, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., was one of those Americans who wanted to believe again. Craig was not exactly an ordinary citizen—he had served and worked with the powerful all his life, as an aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy in the 1980s, as chief of policy planning at the State Department in the Clinton administration and as a lawyer hired to represent President Clinton at his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate in 1999. He had seen the imperfections of the mighty, up close and personal, and by and large accepted human frailty. But, like a lot of Americans, he was tired of partisan bickering and yearned for someone who could rise above politics as usual. A 63-year-old baby boomer, Craig wanted to recapture the youthful idealism that he had experienced as a student at Harvard in the 1960s and later at Yale Law School, where his friends included Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham. In the late fall of 2003, he was invited to hear a young state senator from Illinois who was running for the U.S. Senate. Craig was immediately taken with Barack Obama. "He spoke 20 to 30 minutes, and I found him to be funny, smart and very knowledgeable for a state senator," Craig recalled. Craig was so visibly impressed that his host that evening, the longtime Washington mover and shaker Vernon Jordan, teased him, saying, "Greg has just fallen in love."



Josh joins the campaign, Jed Bartlet becomes President of the United States, and Josh is appointed deputy chief of staff.



The Royal Emanuels

Tennenbaums for the real world: Rahm, Zeke, and Ari Emanuel are one intriguing set of brothers.


Rahm Emanuel is Obama's new Chief of Staff and said to be part inspiration for Bradley Whitford's Josh Lyman on The West Wing.


Ari Emanuel is a Hollywood agent that inspired Jeremy Piven's Ari Gold on Entourage.


Zeke Emanuel is the chair of the department of bioethics at the NIH, an oncologist with a Master's degree from Oxford, an MD from Harvard, and a PhD in political philosophy from Harvard. Yeah, I know, what a loser.


This can be found in a profile in the Washingtonian.


Here's a profile in the NYTimes. In it is this legendary story:



The best Rahm Emanuel story is not the one about the decomposing two-and-a-half-foot fish he sent to a pollster who displeased him. It is not about the time - the many times - that he hung up on political contributors in a Chicago mayor's race, saying he was embarrassed to accept their $5,000 checks because they were $25,000 kind of guys. No, the definitive Rahm Emanuel story takes place in Little Rock, Ark., in the heady days after Bill Clinton was first elected President.


It was there that Emanuel, then Clinton's chief fund-raiser, repaired with George Stephanopoulos, Mandy Grunwald and other aides to Doe's, the campaign hangout. Revenge was heavy in the air as the group discussed the enemies - Democrats, Republicans, members of the press - who wronged them during the 1992 campaign. Clifford Jackson, the ex-friend of the President and peddler of the Clinton draft-dodging stories, was high on the list. So was William Donald Schaefer, then the Governor of Maryland and a Democrat who endorsed George Bush. Nathan Landow, the fund-raiser who backed the candidacy of Paul Tsongas, made it, too.


Suddenly Emanuel grabbed his steak knife and, as those who were there remeber it, shouted out the name of another enemy, lifted the knife, then brought it down with full force into the table.


''Dead!'' he screamed.


The group immediately joined in the cathartic release: ''Nat Landow! Dead! Cliff Jackson! Dead! Bill Schaefer! Dead!''



Here they are on Charlie Rose.



Airing the dirty laundry

Just a day after the Election was decided, McCain campaign aides have come out and admitted that they had little faith in Palin's preparation to be VP (whether or not stories like not knowing the countries in NAFTA or that Africa was a continent are true, a lot of the public had already decided based on the Gibson and Couric interviews that she deserved a No Hire). They basically hid the truth from the public to try to avoid admitting they'd made a mistake not vetting her. They were willing to put an unqualified candidate one heart attack from the most powerful position in the world simply in the name of party unity.


If true, a truly irresponsible act. Country first, huh?


If not true, and it's just scapegoating, it's still sad, though on a smaller scale. Playing the blame game via anonymous leaks to the press are the appropriate capstone to this unsuccessful campaign.



In Nate Silver we trust

In his spare time, just as a hobby, Nate Silver launched FiveThirtyEight.com, built a model to predict the election, and just absolutely nailed it. He missed only on Indiana, which Obama won by a just .9% of votes. Just about everywhere else, he was spot on, including the popular vote, and so far, the Senate Prediction. His model for the Election was even more accurate than his PECOTA model for baseball, and I used that to win a fantasy baseball league this year.


Mendoza Baseball


I hope newspapers and professional journalism don't die as they invest the time in long-lead, high-investment pieces that the web doesn't seem to devote enough attention to. But the web has absolutely accelerated the speed with which smart people like Silver can come to national prominence, and that is a beautiful thing. If Silver had had to fight his way up some newspaper hierarchy for a spot on the front page of the politics coverage, he would've been waiting a long time.


Incidentally, Silver analyzes the data and finds a correlation between Obama's contact rate advantage in key battleground states and his outperformance of polls in those states. He estimates "each marginal 10-point advantage in contact rate translated into a marginal 3-point gain in the popular vote in that state."


The state where had the greatest contact rate advantage? Nevada, where he had an advantage of 21%, 50% to 29%.


So those of you who made your way out to Nevada on your own dime, some driving down from distant cities like San Francisco, to go knock on doors and rally, you made a difference.