A workforce for today and tomorrow
posted 1-15-2009 3:03 a.m.

 
President Obama is saying all the right things about rebuilding not just the physical infrastructure of the nation, but also the workforce infrastructure, in that he thinks there's plenty of opportunity to create new jobs by encouraging the proliferation of newer, greener industries. He's right, as far as that goes — but who's going to be the innovators of those industries if not scientists and engineers, those folks we need but don't have enough of? Not only do we not respect those people we call geeks, we don't graduate enough of them for this future workforce.

Mr. Obama's got to do a lot of fast talking and faster planning to solve this situation before he can convince Congress — because Congress is way behind on this issue. And the Republicans don't even want to discuss it, because of what the funding consequences have to be in order to bring about the goal of more scientists and engineers. Better science and math education in grade and high schools is barely a start: it's college programs that really make the difference and will produce results sooner.

On the democratization (or not) of the mass media
posted 3-18-2008 5:25 pm

 
An item posted yesterday on CNet News at News.com was brought to my attention by a friend:

Were we wrong about tech and the democratization of media?
By Charles Cooper

Cooper's blog commentary refers to a huge 2008 report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism titled "The State of the News Media 2008: An Annual Report on American Journalism," which is so big — more than 180,000 words long — that it can be found on its own separate Web site rather than on the PEJ site.

Barack, Hillary, supermajorities, and keeping up with the primaries
posted 2-21-2008
amended 2-28-2008

 
My, but things move quickly in primary politics these days; blame it on SuperTuesday. Unless Hillary pulls off a miracle in Texas and Ohio (I'm not betting on that), she likely won't be a significant factor anymore, even with that many delegates. Not even the most faithful of superdelegates wants to be associated with a perceived loser. So it may be moot for her by next week. We'll see.

There are those who say that Sen. Barack Obama is at least not promising much of anything, compared to other candidates, and therefore he’s somehow more realistic. It may also mean he has a dearth of ideas other than some vague notion of change. But these same partisans point out that he’s had less experience and less clout than Sen. Hillary Clinton and imply that he must be somehow more clever than she for him to be so much more ‘realistic’ in not making promises. Nonsense.

Getting the health care discussion wrong
posted 2-8-2008 10:14 a.m.

 
Have you noticed that ever since the media — mainstream and new media alike — began marginalizing Dennis Kucinich during the presidential primary campaign, the conversation about health care reform began drifting away from any real reform?

What was a public dialog about national health insurance and universal coverage suddenly began to slide into one about whose plan would cover more people. That was a real change in conversation, and it amounts to an unchallenged bait and switch.

Now, nobody seems to have noticed that the discussion is no longer about universal coverage — because, of course, universal literally means everyone would be covered. And neither Sen. Clinton’s proposal, nor the less ambitious (read: superficial) plans proffered by Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain, let alone Gov. Huckabee, was ever intended to cover everyone. And though much has been made of Tom Daschle's book on health reform, there really isn't anything in there that will truly cover everyone, either. If voters think that any of these proposals would cover everyone, or almost everyone, they’re sadly mistaken. Remarkably, the press hasn’t pointed this out yet, probably because it didn't notice, either.

Things I noticed over a long weekend …
posted 2-4-2008 8:14 p.m.
amended 2-7-2008 5:55 p.m.

 
… while down with a cold and ignoring the Super Bowl:

• George W. Bush is still stubbornly hallucinating about what’s going on in the world.

The country is finally restless with the current regime (at last! How long did they have to wait?), that's clear enough. How many ways can you take a 71 percent disapproval rating other than to admit that 71 percent of the populace hates you? Thus the sullen monotone delivery of the State of the Union address. And yet, beneath that depressed and depressing delivery was still the old, blindly stubborn pugnaciousness that is the flip side of the thin, shallow nice-guy routine that got W. Bush close enough to a win the second time around to steal it (the first time, he had to rely on The Supremes to steal it for him and on Gore's sense of honor not to pursue the matter further; what a waste *that* was).

Read the text of last Monday's State of the Union address, or even listen carefully to the words, and you hear that determined, knee-jerk rewriting of history in light of his own fantasy that is Shrub's trademark. He thinks if he tells a lie often enough, most people will believe it. More to the point, if he lies to himself often enough that he believes it, he expects us to believe it, too. Some will, sure — but the evidence of his incompetence is simply too great, the economy too badgered and the needless deaths too many to allow that now.

Getting rid of Barbie for President
posted 12-19-2007 8:14 p.m.

 
In today’s Washington Post, political columnist Dana Milbank writes:

... even these private reflections of the candidate frequently centered on public policy: "Senator Clinton was one of the first people to realize that the air was toxic. . . . She wants a good education for everybody. . . . She helped set up the system to provide services to indigent clients." Even the candidate's mother, Dorothy Rodham, noted how "she's been very active with social justice causes."

Maybe, then, The Hillary They Know isn't so different from the Hillary everybody else knows: She's a public-policy savant whose idea of a good time is reading white papers into the wee hours. ...

On confusing the marketing with the message: Pushing for better campaign coverage
revised and reposted 10-29-2007 2:42 p.m.
original post 10-21-2007 1:15 p.m.

 
Maureen Dowd's columns usually make me raise an eyebrow or two, smile, or even laugh out loud. They often provoke me to think harder about a given topic, which is good. This, despite the fact that I don't always agree with her. My eyebrows went up for a different reason, however, when I read this morning's New York Times column (Sunday, October 21, 2007) entitled Cougars, Archers, Snipers.

I'm glad to know — but not really surprised — that Hillary Clinton's campaign is supposedly making use of a pollster who has broken down the electorate into categories and written a book about those categories. Pollsters, marketers and sociologists have been doing that for years. The public doesn't automatically reject those labels, either, nor does the press (remember when you first heard or read the term 'yuppies'? It sounded strange — but we all know how to recognize one now, don't we? One only hopes that the obnoxious term 'cougars' doesn't stick).

Human beings have been categorizing other human beings for nearly as long as there have been human beings, if only into the simple categories of Us and Them — Them, of course, usually being people who are different from Us in some way and, therefore, to be feared, shunned, and possibly warred against on occasion. That rulers or politicians would make use of such information to stay in office (or to keep the masses from rioting for whatever reason) is unsurprising; they've been making promises to unhappy masses for as long as there have been leaders hoping to survive their terms of office. No doubt somebody promised someone something appealing like food or an animal skin or a better hunt just to keep his head when our ancestors lived in caves. Thus was born the predecessor of the campaign promise. It was a kind of survival tool.

Still, if Hillary's — or anyone else's — pollster is creating new categories for analyzing potential voters, it's useful for those voters to know about it. Fair enough. And Dowd has never really liked Hillary, and she's entitled to that opinion. That's fair, too.

But what strikes me this morning is the somewhat toxic assumption on Dowd's part that if any of the policies Hillary proposes resonates with any one of these subcategories of people, this is automatically bad, Machiavellian, not to be trusted. Haven't we had enough of presidents who really aren't responsive to what the majority of Americans — or subsets thereof who aren't among the top economic stratum or power elite — actually want from their government? Like the dork currently in office, who talks a not particularly persuasive line of guff but got let off easy by nearly everyone until invading Iraq turned out to be the disaster that those of us in the vocal minority — like Russ Feingold — warned it would be?

To point this out (or to point out that Sen. Clinton may not be perfect but would be a much better alternative than the guy currently in the White House) doesn't automatically render me a Clinton supporter or apologist — just someone who recognizes a fact when she sees one. And the fact is that Dowd treats Sen. Clinton with nearly as much contempt (yet with less sharp analysis) as she does Dubya Bush.

Is it possible that Hillary is polling first and creating policies to appeal to microsegments of society second? Sure. But we and Ms. Dowd should look at the facts first before jumping to that conclusion. Some of the issues that Hillary talks about now and proposes policies for are issues she's been interested in for 30 years or more: child welfare, families and family law, health care. That's documented. So it's also possible, and entirely more likely, that she's using poll results to figure out just how welcome some of these proposals she's been pondering for years will be with certain segments of the populace.

It's not clear to me that there's anything wrong with that as long as the policies and ideas came first — and it looks like in her case, they did on at least the aforementioned subjects. That her ideas might have evolved over that long a time is actually to be hoped for: it might indicate that she refined her views periodically in response to new information, learned more about what works out in the field as opposed to what looks good on paper to politicians and bureaucrats, and/or learned more about what it takes to get legislation passed and sensible regulations written that accurately reflect that legislation.

Did she and her husband bungle their health reform proposal during his first administration? You bet, but not for the reasons Dowd thinks — most certainly NOT because they were supposedly pandering to the health care industry, as Dowd accuses. I'm in a position to know: I was covering health care and health policy from a national perspective for the business press long before the Clintons ever made it to the White House and in much greater depth than nearly anyone at the Times, including Dowd, has before or since (the two possible exceptions were Milt Freudenheim and Robert Pear, and even then I'd been on my beat longer than Pear had been covering anything health policy related).

Any time Dowd has two or three uninterrupted hours to spare, I'll be happy to clue her in as to what the real deal was. In fact, I'd be happy to tell Hillary everything she doesn't know about health care reform — and there's still plenty — if she had presence of mind enough to ask me.

I could also tell Dowd why virtually all of the White House press corps did such an abominable, embarrassing job of covering health care reform last time. For one thing, they covered the horse race much more than the content, rarely discussing what should have been proposed instead or accurately analyzing the feasibility of what had been proposed — which they clearly didn't have the background to do anyway. But then, the White House press corps are dilettantes, most expert at covering the White House and its shenanigans and not at all expert in the actual subject matter of health care, health policy, or health care finance (all of which I'd by then already covered in detail during previous administrations). Reporters and columnists covering Congress aren't much better at it.

To have them covering health care reform was an error made by their editors and compounded by the reporters' and columnists' unfamiliarity with the subject matter and subsequent lousy performance. One can only wonder what on earth those editors were thinking in not reaching instead for reporters who were subject specialists. But I digress: my point is that I don't expect the Washington press corps to do any better this time around, given what I've seen so far. Dowd's work included.

One wishes Dowd had paid more attention to Judith Warner's blog item last week on the dearth of coverage on a policy speech of Hillary's. Surely, it would have provided Dowd with better meat for her knives and us with more helpful information:

An analysis of Clinton's policy proposals would give voters insight into what her administration might choose to accomplish, certainly more so than comments about her pollsters' market categories; yet practically nobody covered the speech or the material in it, or even remarked on it. If not for Warner's blog entry, I wouldn't have known a) about the speech even being given, and b) that nobody covered it, thus depriving me of important information. I'm thankful Warner wrote the item. But damn, Maureen, can't you and your other colleagues do a little bit more than dis Hillary's head counters? If you're going to slice and dice the senator, you could at least produce something that's a little more useful to the readers.

By taking on the Hillary marketers rather than detailing and dishing on Hillary's proposed policies during the week she made a major policy speech, Dowd took the easy, lazy way out. Try harder, babe: if nobody else is giving us that policy stuff, then you should be. If you don't want to be just another one of the press corps sheep, you ought to be looking long and digging deep for what everyone else is missing. It's work, yeah, but you might actually enjoy it.

Oh, and since Ms. Dowd has often complained about the lack of enough women on the op-ed pages, she ought to appreciate getting this response from an analytical reporter who just happens to be female.

/p>