On the Small Screen

Peter Aspden tried downloading a movie onto his iPhone. He wasn't impressed:

It is one of the most famous one-liners in the history of cinema, which also turned out to be an inadvertent prophecy. “I am big,” says the slighted Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950). “It’s the pictures that got small.”

She had no idea. The past half-century has seen the pictures get smaller and smaller, to the point that we wonder if they can ever be big again. From television screen, to laptop, to smartphone, the ever-shrinking movies reach a greater part of the world than ever before. But what have we lost along the way? On a recent flight, I downloaded the relatively well-received Marvel spin-off The Avengers to watch on my iPhone. It was, of course, a ridiculous venture, this squeezing of monumental themes on to a miniaturist canvas, lacking in textural detail, atmosphere, communality of experience. But it was easily accessible, convenient and cheap. Is the trade-off worth it? And how does it affect us and the art form?

"Interesting"

Rebecca Ariel Porte reviews Our Aesthetic Categories:

“Interesting” is an aesthetic judgment so mild and so commonplace that it barely seems to qualify as a judgment at all. But that’s part of Ngai’s point. If interesting is, on some level, an aesthetic judgment, then its ubiquity (especially in critical contexts) stresses the “ambiguous status of aesthetic judgments in criticism,” as they “mediat[e] feelings and concepts.” “Interesting” is our gambit, Ngai contends, when we feel something but we’re not yet sure what to think. When we say something is interesting, we are inviting conversation. We want to be asked to explain ourselves.

Apologies, Etc.

I'm taking a break from blogging until next weekend, as I'm sitting exams next week. It's not ideal to be absent during this important moment of the election season, so I just hope that in the next week or so I don't miss anything too important.

See you next week.

The Week in Review

Tuesday on the Report, we explored the question of whether or not the debates actually matter. I agreed that they mean more for Romney. I applauded California's ban on gay conversion therapy for teenagers, and we found a way to make New York women nod in unison. Kingsley Amis's legacy is all too often dominated by talk of his various eccentricities, and even being indie rock royalty doesn't pay that well. Smoking segregation is an ongoing battle and there are more invisible things than you think. The critics of reason return; so do the critics of American air travel. Soldiers in modern warfare need less muscle and more brains, so why do we continue to recruit eighteen year-old males? The recruiters have it all wrong.

On Wednesday, we found that ditching helmet rules encourages people to cycle, especially in cities like London, where the city sponsors "Boris" bikes for public use, and that the housewives of Japan are giving their husbands less pocket money. Pastors all across America protested an amendment that some on the Right have called a "muzzle on religion" by giving explicitly partisan sermons, a liberal found an unlikely pen pal in a conservative blogger named Esther, and a presidential candidate failed to start a chant. The unbearable debate about grammar rules continued, and we agreed that maybe we should give up on the rules about "whom" and "who." We looked at the Kael answer to the question of why we enjoy movies, and whether or not it matters that we enjoy them.

David Rothkopf called the election for Obama, perhaps prematurely, whose daughter is expected to show good judgement in music and like Motown. No, correlation may not imply causation, but this is no way to deflect a possibly legitimate point. We continued to ask why Americans believed in Muslim Rage, and concluded that the issue was neither political nor religious. Speaking of beliefs, how malleable are your political ones? It turns out that website pagination is evil, and male decline may not be strictly true. Counter to the prevailing logic, it just might be that the best way to help Iran in their efforts to build a nuclear bomb would be to bomb them. The specifics surrounding Paul Ryan's tax plan remain opaque, as does the reasoning behind bans on books like Alice Walker's The Colour Purple (did you know there was such a thing as Banned Books Week?). Finally, let's remind ourselves that this is not the most important election we've ever seen.

Thursday was the day of the first debate. Liveblog here. Reaction round-ups here and here. The verdict? "There was a singular commanding force on stage tonight (or this afternoon, if you're here) and it was Mitt Romney. Obama was tired, lethargic, and even appeared indifferent to the proceedings. And where Romney engaged in the fight, Obama merely endured it." Also that day, are presidential debates too civil, and has another ritual, the TED Talk, lost its spark? The mind of the libertarian is a cold and unfeeling place. Book blogs, however, are brilliant.

The Worst President Ever

The historian H.W. Brands takes a sympathetic view of Ulysses S. Grant, typically the leading contender for the title:

The standard rap on Grant is that he was a drunk who surrounded himself with spoilsmen who stole the country blind. In an era of scandals—the Crédit Mobilier’s siphoning of millions in the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the Tweed Ring’s bilking of New York in awarding city contracts, the Whiskey Ring’s dodging of the tax on booze—Grant was said to turn a blind (or drunken) eye to all manner of wrongdoing. Beyond that, the simple soldier was over his head in the White House. At a time of rapid economic change, he hadn’t a clue how to manage an increasingly sophisticated economy.

Considering the current state of the American economy, this last charge might now be the most damning, if true. But it’s not true. And Grant’s surprisingly sophisticated handling of economics, especially in the wake of the Panic of 1873, suggests that he deserves better from the historians than he has been getting.

Ruth Graham is less kind:

When the Panic of 1873 hit -- one major Philadelphia financial firm crumbled, pulling down other top firms and dozens of banks, and prompting mass layoffs by factories and railroads -- there was no reason to think that President Grant, a Civil War hero and a failed businessman, would be equipped to handle the first country’s first national depression. Brands admits it’s hard to know how much Grant’s decisions had to do with the country’s eventual recovery, but in his agonized decision to veto a bill that would have pumped quick cash into the economy to boost inflation, he sees evidence of “a more subtle thinker than he was deemed by contemporaries and most historians since.”

Issues Obama and Romney Avoid

Noam Chomsky can think of a couple.

Romney's Sick Joke

Paul Krugman is pissed about dishonest claims by Mitt Romney about what is and isn't covered under his healthcare plan:

What Mr. Romney did in the debate, in other words, was, at best, to play a word game with voters, pretending to offer something substantive for the uninsured while actually offering nothing. For all practical purposes, he simply lied about what his policy proposals would do.

Marxism Lite

Benjamin Kunkel reviews Slavoj Žižek's strange critique of capitalism.

American Democracy for Sale

Lewis Lapham, learned and eloquent as always, takes on everything that's wrong with American democracy and America itself ("a republic," as Benjamin Franklin said, "if you can keep it"). Money quote:

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney hold each other responsible for stirring up class warfare between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent; each of them can be counted upon to mourn the passing of America's once-upon-a-time egalitarian state of grace. They deliver the message to fund-raising dinners that charge up to $40,000 for the poached salmon, but the only thing worth noting in the ballroom or the hospitality tent is the absence among the invited bank accounts (prospective donor, showcase celebrity, attending journalist) of anybody intimately acquainted with - seriously angry about, other than rhetorically interested in - the fact of being poor.

For obvious reasons, Sheldon Adelson comes to mind a lot while reading such essays.

The Blog as Gravestone

Consider it:

Culture, as Clifford Geertz said, is the web on which we human animals live, and increasingly that web is, for many of us, also the Web. One of the things culture does is to mediate, through ritual and mystification, those parts of life that are too potent or terrible to face directly, particularly sex and death. Sex, or something having to do with sex, has already certainly made its presence felt on the Internet. Commemoration of the dead is just beginning, in turn, to take place online. Though I have said already that it is most foolhardy to make predictions of this sort, I anticipate that soon the Internet will become the primary site of such commemoration, that pixels will replace marble in conferring whatever bit of immortality there is to be had.

Tragedy's Decline and Fall

In tragic Greek theatre, the thing every protagonist has in common is social status. Since the genre depends on the notion of a fall, it's typically better that this fall occurs from a great height. It was one of the requirements Aristotle specified for tragic drama, "that its suffering subject be a person of worldly importance." Like many, Jenny Diski sees a connection between tragic drama and postmodern celebrity:

Maybe with gossip we have settled for Schadenfreude in place of catharsis: thank heavens the pointlessly fortunate Kim [Kardashian] has cellulite, and that we can watch her more-than-human status crumble on her thighs. Yet, on the other hand, there is a case to be made for such domestically scaled disasters – as being a commonplace version of tragedy writ small, and more suitable for the home-based intimacy of television, newspapers, magazines and internet-linked iPads on the breakfast table, rather than the grander scale of the Theatre of Dionysus. The loss of youth and beauty, from whichever social stratum you view it, is a universal experience, pointing to entropy and our common end. Just being young and becoming old was not tragic enough in itself for the Greeks, but death was, and in observing the decaying body that is what we must at some level become aware of. In present, less reverential times, when we can look at the great and the good and imagine ourselves more directly, perhaps we understand better the power and implications of apparently smaller sadnesses more generally suffered. 

Why We'll Never Stop Talking About Steve Jobs

One year on from Steve Jobs's death, Mat Honan examines his enduring significance in how we talk about technology:

We are actually in the early cycles of Talking About Steve. The next phase is analyzing how things have changed since he died. We’ll trot out his corpse and ask it if it would have released iOS 6 or approved of the iPad Mini, or why Messages keeps sending chats to my phone when I want them on my desktop. That’s already happening, but it is going to accelerate as we get further and further away from his leadership, and with every misstep that Apple makes. It is a lazy and inevitable argument that’s going to be made again and again. The contrarian takes won’t stop, either — the Steve Jobs-wasn’t-so-great stories, every word of which, and every ad sold on every page carrying that message, will reinforce the fact that, yes, he was. Otherwise, why are you still jabbering on about him?

The Atlantic collects tributes to Jobs, including the video published to Apple's homepage yesterday. Here's the post I wrote a year ago on this blog.

(Image: Simon Lutrin, via Wired)

Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up? Ctd

John Dickerson, like most of us, has something on his mind. And it's about Mitt Romney. Should he win in November, which Romney will show up on the first day in the Oval Office? Will it be Moderate Mitt from Massachusetts, or the heartless conservative? Willard has multiple ideological personality disorder, so it's kind of hard to tell:

"Unbelievable"

President Obama was, as you know, given some much-needed assistance, thanks to an encouraging jobs report showing that 114,000 jobs were created by American employers in September. The headline number: 7.8 percent unemployment. The numbers clearly support the positive recovery narrative the Obama campaign is presenting, and helps reassure Americans that, indeed, the Obama-led economy is heading in the right direction. But since this doesn't conform with the Republican narrative, the new number represents something of an inconvenient truth. And nowhere was conservative incredulity more evident than in the newborn "Unemployment-Rate Truther" movement, spearheaded by former GE CEO Jack Welch, who tweeted, "Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers."

Others joined in, too — even Allen West (not that anyone's particularly surprised about that). Joe Scarborough was a little bit confused on Morning Joe, but Ed Morrissey says he was merely 'expressing scepticism'. Eliot Spitzer says people like Welch are just in the first stage of grief: denial. Ezra Klein tries to knock some sense into the truthers.

Flip the Bird

Michele Malkin finds her rationale for supporting PBS subsidy cuts in the familiar realm of the liberal conspiracy:

Under the Obama administration, Elmo has lobbied for the FCC’s national broadband plan and the first lady’s Big Nanny nutrition bill. Investigative journalist James O’Keefe caught former NPR exec Ron Schiller on tape trashing the Tea Party as “racist” and “Islamophobic.” And the official PBS Twitter account sent a special shout-out to radical leftist group Move On last year for leading the government media rescue charge. Moreover, as I’ve previously reported, NPR and PBS have no problem raising money from corporations and left-wing philanthropists, including billionaire George Soros, whose Open Society Institute gave $1.8 million to pay for at least 100 journalists at NPR member radio stations in all 50 states over the next three years.

She also cites the "roughly 10 Solyndras" the government could save over the next ten years. Those who claim to be supporting this idea under the guise of fiscal responsibility really ought to consider that there are places where cuts should be made first. But that's not going to happen, though. Because this isn't about being fiscally responsible; this is about ideology.

More Boy Scout Problems

The organisation's long history of deplorable gay rights abuses is added to yet again:

The "Poshlost" of Instagram

Teju Cole, whose points are pretentious but embarrassingly true, takes on everything most people find offensive about popular photography:

[T]he problem with the new social photography isn’t merely about post-processing: after all, photographers have always manipulated their images in the darkroom. The filters that Hipstamatic and Instagram provide, the argument goes, are simply modern day alternatives to the dodging and burning that have always been integral to making photographs. This argument is in part true. But the rise of social photography means that we are now seeing images all the time, millions of them, billions, many of which are manipulated with the same easy algorithms, the same tiresome vignetting, the same dank green wash. So the problem is not that images are being altered—I remember the thrill I felt the first few times I saw Hipstamatic images, and I shot a few myself buoyed by that thrill—it’s that they’re all being altered in the same way: high contrasts, dewy focus, over-saturation, a skewing of the RGB curve in fairly predictable ways. Correspondingly, the range of subjects is also peculiarly narrow: pets, pretty girlfriends, sunsets, lunch. In other words, the photographic function, which should properly be the domain of the eye and the mind, is being outsourced to the camera and to an algorithm.

Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up? Ctd

Steve Kornacki isn't buying the "moderate Mitt" idea. According to him, not much has changed:

Romney has long been aware that he can’t actually run on the ideas that his party has generated these past few years, but he’s been further constrained by the right’s deep suspicion of his own ideological credentials. Thus, Romney has spent most of the general election campaign awkwardly switching between vague, broad-stroke pronouncements aimed at swing voters and gestures that mesh with the radicalized, Obama-phobic spirit of today’s GOP base.

What’s changed in the last week or so is the balance: Romney is now primarily pitching his message at non-GOP base voters – people who are likely to recoil at the implications of the policy ideas that the national Republican Party has embraced – and skipping the red meat.

And, because it amuses me, the New Yorker's take on the debate, in the form of a cover.

Facebook Is Like a Chair

Yes, a chair. When I posted this video on Facebook, along with "a chair on which a billion people now sit," one of the wittier people among my 'friends' (in the FB parlance) commented, "More of a settee then?" I was amused. But in all seriousness, a billion people:

The social network hit the one-billion mark on Sept. 14, the company said. But the news was not released until an orchestrated announcement Thursday morning, when Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, appeared in interviews with “The Today Show” on NBC and with Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. Mr. Zuckerberg also posted a brief announcement on Facebook.

“Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life,” it read. “I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.”

But reaction to new advertising features is mixed, as Josh Constine writes of Promoted Posts:

Facebook is becoming a critical one-to-many communication medium for people. Often we’re just sharing fun things that we don’t desperately need eyeballs on, but other times a better news feed position could really help. If I’m trying to sell all my possessions before moving to Thailand, Promoted Posts could be a cost-effective way of making sure more friends know about my garage sale. Raising money for charity or looking for bone marrow donors are some other clearly positive applications.

On the ad above, David Haglund thinks it's disingenuous, and the vague analogies only serve to amplify the message that Facebook is the furniture of your life:

Is Mapping the Mind of a Worm Worth It?

The headline caught my eye, but that was about all I understood. See if you can do better.

To Name a Storm

This week, without any consultation with anyone else in the meteorological community, the Weather Channel announced that it would be naming winter storms and hurricanes on its own accord. Now a small battle has ensued over who has the right to name storms and what they should be named in the first place.

Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up? Ctd

Dave Weigel invites us to meet the new-and-improved liberal Mitt Romney:

Same Love

This is a tiny bit saccharine, but I think you'll agree that Macklemore/Ryan Lewis's new marriage equality video is very endearing:



Alyssa Rosenberg certainly thought it endearing:

Part of what’s fascinating and politically effective about the video is that the images are much more subtle than the lyrics themselves, which are a blunt call for equality. The couple in the film confront implied homophobia from their teenaged peers, from a couple on the street, but they also get to experience normal milestones, from teenaged fights with their parents, to public kisses, to introducing each other to their families, to an anxious proposal, to a joyous wedding. Homophobia, both internalized and external, is a factor in their relationship, but it’s far from the sum of it, and it doesn’t consume them and end in a cliche spasm of violence, as was the case for Murs’ “Animal Style” video. They just get to live, and love, and we can focus on the beauty and tremulousness and steadfastness of their relationship, above all else.

The End of Baathism

Paul Berman pens an obituary for the ideology, the last bastion of which is Damascus:

The political and cultural landscape of the Middle East, post-Baath, will be pockmarked by blighted zones that might otherwise have been a prosperous Iraq and Syria, if only the Baathist doctrine had not destroyed those countries. A cloud of intellectual bafflement and paranoia will hover overhead, consisting of the confused thoughts of everyone across the region who, in the past, talked themselves into supposing that Baathism was a good idea.

Why Do America's Rich Feel Victimised by Obama?

On the idea of higher taxes for the rich:

Nick Hanauer is a Seattle entrepreneur and venture capitalist who was one of the first investors in Amazon. In a book published this year, he argues that since the Reagan era American capitalists have enjoyed a uniquely supportive set of ideological, political, and economic conditions. Their personal enrichment came to be seen as a precondition for the enrichment of everyone else. Lower taxes for them were a social good, rather than a selfish perk. “If you are a job creator, your fifteen-per-cent tax rate is righteous. If you aren’t, it is a con job,” Hanauer told me. “The idea that the rich deserve to be rich is a very comforting idea if you are rich.” Referring to Obama’s “You didn’t build that” remark, at a rally in Virginia in July, which became a flashpoint with the right, Hanauer said that “the notion that you built it yourself is what you need to believe to feel comfortable with yourself and your desire not to pay too much in taxes.”

Unlike the moneyed gentry of earlier generations, these are people who have been raised in a society that believes itself to be truly meritocratic. It's through the arrogance of believing that you — and you alone — are in the driving seat and that only you can determine the extent of your success and failure that this kind of silliness arises. The rich feel victimised by Obama for reasons other than his policy. His policy has actually been very kind to the super-rich, as the article notes. They see his questioning of their apparently unquestionable right to claim sole responsibility for success as an affront to the idea of success itself.

Long Lectures Are Ineffective

The digital education impresario Salman Khan says students simply don't have the attentions span:

[A 1976 study] detailed the ebbs and flows of students’ focus during a typical class period. Breaking the session down minute-by-minute, the study’s authors determined that students needed a three- to five-minute period of settling down, which would be followed by 10 to 18 minutes of optimal focus. Then — no matter how good the teacher or how compelling the subject matter — there would come a lapse. In the vernacular, the students would “lose it.”

New York's Fading Allure

Fran Lebowitz in conversation with The Awl. She was asked, "If you were a teenage kid right now looking for some place to move, do you think it would still be New York City?" Her response:

Romney Loves Big Bird, Hates Paying for Him

Romney said at the debate last night, "I'm sorry, Jim, I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS, I love Big Bird. Actually like you, too. But I'm not going to—I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for. That’s number one."

Mary Elizabeth Williams thinks Romney is missing the point:

What Romney, in his adorably out-of-touch way, failed to grasp with that statement is that practically every American under the age of 50 has a powerful childhood association with that goofy oversize lug. An entire generation can trace its first understanding of death to the moment that Big Bird let it sink in that “Mr. Hooper’s not coming back.” And another generation learned about loss and community and resilience after 9/11 when “Sesame Street” had Big Bird’s own nest destroyed in a storm. (The show aired Big Bird’s odyssey again after Katrina.) And I defy even a robotic millionaire to get through Big Bird’s choked-up rendition of “It’s Not Easy Being Green” at Jim Henson’s memorial service and not completely lose it when he says, “Thank you, Kermit.”

Republicans in Congress have tried to cut PBS funding before. They found it wasn't popular:

A 2011 poll found 69 percent of voters opposed to defunding PBS. People like Big Bird. And that's even though another 2011 poll found that PBS gets more of the federal budget than it does. Much more: 30 percent of people thought PBS gets 5 percent or more of the federal budget, and another 40 percent believed it gets between 1 percent and 5 percent.

Besides, cutting off PBS wouldn't make much difference in cutting the deficit anyway, as it only accounts for 0.00014% of the budget. This isn't about fiscal responsibility. This is about ideological preconceptions about the role of government. As Neil deGrasse Tyson tweets, "Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) to help balance the Federal budget is like deleting text files to make room on your 500Gig hard drive."

Chances Obama Missed

Amy Davidson gives a rundown. One of seven:

Where was Warren Buffet’s secretary? Where were Romney’s tax returns, or his tax rates? Tax fairness came up, but they didn’t (nor did Bain), and Obama did not really control that line of argument. Nor did he draw a connection between Romney’s secret budget plan and his unseen tax returns. As it was, Obama was strongest on the bad math. But Romney got away with a tautological rebuttal—“So there’s no economist can say Mitt Romney’s tax plan adds five trillion if I say I will not add to the deficit with my tax plan”—that, when you parse it, just doesn’t make sense.

Meanwhile, John Dickerson accurately characterises last night's debate as Mitt Romney's best moment so far, and wonders if he can sustain the momentum; Politico's Martin and Harris say that although he's managed to chase away the "aroma of terminal illness," it's up to him now to keep it away.

China Bashing

Kissinger thinks it's deplorable. (Especially from people like Donald Trump, who, you'll recall, got a mention last night. He's not totally irrelevant to the national dialogue after all!)

Why We Enjoy Movies, Ctd

David Thomson examines the numbing power of the big screen:

At first, the magic was overwhelming: in 1895, the first audiences for the Lumière brothers' films feared that an approaching steam engine was going to come out of the screen and hit them. That gullibility passed off like morning mist, though observing the shower in Psycho (1960) we still seem to feel the impact of the knife. That scene is very frightening, but we know we're not supposed to get up and rescue Janet Leigh. In a similar way, we can watch the surreal imagery of the devastation at Fukushima, or wherever, and whisper to ourselves that it's terrible and tragic, but not happening to us.

How large a step is it from that denial of our full selfhood to the wry passivity with which we observe global warming, economic collapse and a new freelance nuclear age as portents of an end to a world that is beyond us? Pioneers of film, such as D W Griffith, Chaplin and Abel Gance, hoped that the movie would make a single population in the world angry or moved enough to share liberty and opportunity and end war and intolerance. But perhaps it has made for a society of voyeurs who associate their own hiding in the dark with the safe futility of dealing with the screen's frenzy. So the world is chaotic and nearing ruin, but not for us – not yet. And so we talk of democracy still in a scheme that is intent on us purchasing anything and overlooking everything else.

Quote of the Day

"I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney. But it couldn't of been Mitt Romney because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year, promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy. The fellow on stage last night said he didn't know anything about that. The real Mitt Romney said we don't need any more teachers in our classrooms....But the fellow on stage last night, he loves teachers; can't get enough of them.

"The Mitt Romney we all know invested in companies that were called "pioneers of outsourcing jobs to other countries." But the guy on stage last night, he said that he doesn't even know that there are such laws that encourage outsourcing....So you see the man on stage last night, he does not want to be held accountable for the real Mitt Romney's decisions and what he's been saying for the last year. And that's because he knows full well that we don't want what he's been selling for the last year," — Barack Obama, speaking in Denver.

The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After

Richard Beck echoes Elizabeth Kantor, who made the link between Austen and the self-help genre:

Austen doesn’t do much out-and-out moralising—certainly not as much as Dickens or Eliot. Her irony leaves a lot of room for argument about a particular character’s habits and actions. But the necessity of making the judgements, of thinking and talking them through, could not be more explicit, nor more timely. Our cultural climate is dominated, in part, by two forms of entertainment which only make sense in the context of constant social judgement. One is the self-help book, which asks readers to judge themselves. The other is reality television, where the viewing pleasure comes from judging the people on screen. Jane Austen could not be a better fit.

Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up?

Jonathan Chait heralds the return of Massachusetts Mitt, the moderate:

Tonight’s debate saw the return of the Mitt Romney who ran for office in Massachusetts in 1994 and 2002. He was obsessive about portraying himself as a moderate, using every possible opening or ambiguity — and, when necessary, making them up — to shove his way to the center. Why he did not attempt to restore this pose earlier, I cannot say. Maybe he can only do it in debates. Or maybe conservatives had to reach a point of absolute desperation over his prospects before they would give him the ideological space. In any case, he dodged almost every point in the right wing canon in a way that seemed to catch Obama off guard.

Ezra Klein, like Chait, saw Mitt Romney the Moderate at last night's debate:

Early in the campaign, Team Obama made a crucial decision: They weren’t going to run against “multiple-choice Mitt.” Rather, of the various Romneys on offer to them — the Massachusetts moderate, the tea party conservative — they were simply going to choose one and stick with it. 

According to Yglesias, "The problem with all of this is exactly what you'd expect the problem to be with an Etch a Sketch move—it's inconsistent with things he's committed himself to previously." Take Romney's comments about Simpson-Bowles. In the universe the rest of us inhabit, Obama proposed a "grand bargain", but Paul Ryan vetoed it and made sure it never got a congressional vote; in fact, Ryan advised GOP leaders not to work with Obama to reduce the deficit because it would be better for his re-election prospects. Then Romney makes Obama's delay and unwillingness to embrace the plan on his own the lede of his argument. Because he was operating in the itinerant Moderate Romney universe, was able to say that Obama and Pelosi and everyone else had little capacity for bipartisan cooperation. In the real world, however, the history of obstructionism within the GOP is well documented.

Romney has his nod to the GOP base in Paul Ryan. Now he's prepared to play a different game, or at least change the rules to suit himself. Did you hear the Etch-A-Sketch shaking?

(Image via Daily News)

Obama's Worst Moment

This was a pretty awful night for the President. And the reason his performance came of as being so disgracefully bad was because he didn't seem the slightest bit presidential. There was a singular commanding force on stage tonight (or this afternoon, if you're here) and it was Mitt Romney. Obama was tired, lethargic, and even appeared indifferent to the proceedings. And where Romney engaged in the fight, Obama merely endured it. He presented none of his major arguments, made no obvious effort to combat the obvious distortions of the other side, and allowed his opponent to walk right over him. I have no idea who said it (someone on Twitter, if I recall correctly), but this made me think that Obama really does have a teleprompter dependency. What happened?

I don't expect Obama to simply tear into Romney, or to engage in verbal assault, or become argumentative — that's not his style. But one would expect him to correct, even capitalise on, Romney's attempt to construct an alternative reality and have us seeing through his lens. The problem was that tonight, because of the president's weakness in debate, Romney succeeded. He got away with it. And he shouldn't have.

Tonight we saw a smart Mitt Romney, but a deceptive one. The Etch-A-Sketch on full display. In the true style of a talented politician, and a true orator, he persuaded the viewer to believe in his version of the truth. He governed the stage, and appeared in control. He was in control even over the Lehrer, whose moderation was completely lame, and whose insight was far from penetrating. It was as though he just sat back and asked them rather wetly what they thought was different about the other guy. (If PBS's funding gets cut, we'll blame Lehrer. At least it's not Big Bird's fault.) Romney didn't look down for the entire time, and wasn't compromised by the split screen format of the debate's broadcast; he appeared in control, and in a crucial move for the challenger made a sitting president look weak.

He was able to get away with elementary factual distortions. He turned around tonight and became a moderate from Massachusetts. Drop everything, find a new persona. Nobody saw it coming.

Especially not Obama.

The First Debate: Reaction Round-Up II

A less dramatic view of events:

Well, I don't know that this debate was quite as bad for Obama as the general consensus. He did get some core points across: that Romney's tax math doesn't add up, and that he's hiding the ball with regard to deductions; that a balanced approach, i.e. with new taxes, is a better approach to deficit reduction than cuts only; that Romneycare and Obamacare are structurally almost identical, and that Romney has no plan to cover the uninsured; that Romney proposes to voucherize Medicare.

Will Wilkinson:

Romney won decisively. Obama clearly approached the debate with a mainly defensive strategy, hoping to come away without having done anything to rock his very comfortable boat. But the boat did rock. Obama was flummoxed by Romney's superior preparation, intensity, and execution, and tonight's truly dismal performance from the president has put the sustainability of his lead in question, if not actually in peril.

James Joyner:

I say this as someone who thought Al Gore and John Kerry easily won all the debates in 2000 and 2004–and certainly thought Obama beat McCain in 2008. I don’t think it’s likely to radically change the dynamics of the race in the key battleground states. But Romney was cogent and prepared while Obama seemed as if he had been up all night and then told he had a surprise debate.

James Fallows watched the body language and facial expressions:

If you had the sound turned off, Romney looked calm and affable through more of the debate than Obama did, and the incumbent president more often looked peeved. Romney's default expression, whether genuine or forced, was a kind of smile; Obama's, a kind of scowl. I can understand why Obama would feel exasperated by these claims and arguments. Every president is exasperated by what he considers facile claims about what he knows to be impossibly knotty problems. But he let it show.

Alex Massie:

Will it shift the dynamics of the election? Perhaps not. The best Obama’s supporters could say last night is that the President avoided the kind of blunder that might hand Romney an obvious advantage. Maybe so but that kind of defensive mindset seemed somehow to have seeped into Obama last night. He seemed sluggish, even lethargic, hesitant, distracted and oddly unable to land any heavy punches on Romney. Much of the time he was pictured on the split-screen with his head down. Doubtless he was scribbling notes but it had the effect of making him look weary and disheartened. Defeated or despondent, even.

Josh Marshall:

I remember noting one thing about the 2004 debates, especially the first one. George Bush seemed not to like being criticized by a guy up there on the stage with him. President’s just don’t have that happen. They get criticized but not often to their face. Bush showed that in spades. And I feel like I’ve seen some of that from Obama tonight. A lot of grimacing.

The First Debate: Reaction Round-Up

That wasn't a debate so much as Mitt Romney just took Obama for a cross country drive strapped to the roof of his car.
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) October 4, 2012

Bill Kristol gives his take:

President Obama was right in his closing statement: “This was a terrific debate.” So it was. For Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney stood and delivered the best debate performance by a Republican presidential candidate in more than two decades. Romney spoke crisply about the next four years as well as the last four years, was detailed in clarifying the choice of paths ahead, and seemed more comfortable, more energetic—and even more presidential—than the incumbent.

Jonathan Tobin puts it in perspective:

It should be stipulated that one debate doesn’t decide an election. Obama’s advantages with the media and his historic status as the first African-American president are still crucial. And it’s likely he’ll do better in subsequent debates. But a time when many were counting Romney out, he didn’t just win the debate but may have also debunked the notion that he couldn’t win the election. We’ll have to see how much of a bounce the Republican gets in the polls this week. It will also be interesting to see whether on the heels of this terrible night, the next monthly jobs report has a bigger impact on public opinion on the race than the September report. But no matter what lies ahead, Romney has energized his base, discouraged Democrats and showed for the first time in months that Barack Obama has feet of clay. This election is up for grabs.

Andrew Sullivan:

Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no crisp statements of passion or argument; he wasn’t there. He was entirely defensive, which may have been the strategy. But it was the wrong strategy. At the wrong moment. The person with authority on that stage was Romney – offered it by one of the lamest moderators ever, and seized with relish. This was Romney the salesman. And my gut tells me he sold a few voters on a change tonight. It’s beyond depressing. But it’s true.

Instapundit:

When you've lost Andrew Sullivan...

Joe Klein:

Did the President send out his body double tonight? Because if that was the actual Barack Obama out there, I’m not sure he can communicate well enough to be an effective President in a time of trouble, to say nothing of winning a second term.

Kevin Drum:

All the talk on CNN seems to be about how Obama "looked like he didn't want to be there." I didn't really see that myself. Obama certainly wasn't crisp, which I find a little inexplicable, but that's about the worst I saw.

Did Romney come armed with "loads of details"? Not even close. He certainly made an endless number of points, but there weren't really many facts and figures there. Just a flurry of words. And that old Romney weirdness made a few appearances too. For example, this bit about what he'd cut from the budget: "I’m sorry, Jim, I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. Actually I like you, too."

John Hinderaker:

I’ve been watching presidential debates for quite a few years, but I have never seen one like this. It wasn’t a TKO, it was a knockout. Mitt Romney was in control from the beginning. He was the alpha male, while Barack Obama was weak, hesitant, stuttering, often apologetic. The visuals were great for Romney and awful for Obama. Obama looked small, tired, defeated after four years of failure, out of ammo. One small point among many: Obama doesn’t even know how to stand at a podium, as he continually lifted up one leg. He would be below average as a high school debater.

Taegan Goddard:

Mitt Romney did considerably better and was more aggressive but never really landed a big punch. He hit Obama regularly but the president played rope-a-dope and just waited for the bell to ring. Romney's major misstep in this debate -- and in this campaign -- was being factually untrue about his plans and denying his own record. But Obama didn't push back very hard at all.

More coming...

The Kerry-fication of Mitt Romney

While David Carr thinks the Romney campaign's protestations about the perceived liberal bias within the mainstream media are a waste of time, John Cook takes the other side, and says he's getting a hard time, and that the press is doing to him was done to John Kerry:

When Romney tried to get a crowd at a rally in Ohio add his running mate's name to a chant they had started—"Romney! Ryan!" instead of "Romney! Romney!"—even nominal Republican Joe Scarborough stubbornly misinterpreted it as a hamfisted attempt to change the chant from Ryan's name to his own. This is not because Joe Scarborough supports the candidacy of Barack Obama. It is because he supports the primacy of the Romney-is-a-Loser narrative, and wanted to hold up another shining example of that loser-dom for the rest of the political press to giggle at. Which they did, even though it was obviously based on a falsehood to anyone who took time to listen to the audio.

The video in question here.

Liveblogging the First Presidential Debate

10:31 pm — "I'm concerned about America," says Romney the Moderate. Perhaps what he failed to mention was the 47 percent of it he wrote off in a statement that Obama has sensibly decided not to mention, but in any case, it's a nice sentiment. Romney's making a direct appeal to the camera in what seems to me, sitting at home in New Zealand, like a desperate attempt simply to seem like a human being. He's just making this up as he goes along. The Etch-A-Sketch is back, ladies and gentlemen. Back in force.

10:27 pm — Obama is kind of calling Romney out on the bipartisan thing. And he needs to, because that was really awful. Time for closing statements. "My faith and confidence in the American future is undiminished...and the reason is because of its people." Romney has this awful, insidious little smirk on his face the entire time. Obama is picking things up right now, during his closing statement. I was beginning to think that he had lost it. He has stopped stuttering, and that's something. "I have kept that promise, and if you vote for me, then I promise that I'll fight just as hard in a second term."

10:22 pm — God! Lehrer is dreadful at controlling this thing. He's basically handed control over to Romney. Tweet of the night on the subject:

I don't know, I think Lehrer has a real shot of winning this thing.
— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) October 4, 2012

10:17 pm — The first mention of religious freedom. And the military. God and guns, please. That's what freedom looks like.

10:13 pm — "Do you believe there is a fundamental between the two of you as to how you view the mission of the federal government." According to Obama, the first rule is to keep the American people safe. "As Lincoln understood, there are some things we do better together." Even on this topic, which he knows so well, and he understands so acutely, he is lacking the fluency of his earlier arguments. Obama is an excellent orator, but it isn't coming through here. Invoking Lincoln was a good idea. Obama has said earlier that Lincoln is, in fact, his favourite president.

10:10 pm — And the non-specificity card gets played.

10:02 pm — It's awfully funny to hear Romney talk about an Obama/Democratic unwillingness to come together and be bipartisan. You can't blame Obama for Republican obstructionism. The GOP, from the very beginning, was determined to oppose Obama at every turn. Obama should be able to walk all over this, and yet he's stumbling and staggering. I simply cannot believe for a moment that the lack of bipartisan cooperation is Obama's fault, or that Romney is in any way a better team player.

9:59 pm — I'm not a rabid Democrat, and I know it's not his style, but I really want Obama to tear into Romney at the moment. I just can't knock the feeling that he's letting this slip. As Frum observes, "Romney consistently looks at Obama when Obama speaks. Obama looks down when ROmney speaks. Not alpha dog behaviour."

9:57 pm — Obama's taking on the regulation point at the moment, but he's doing a terrible job. Romney is coming off as the moderate here! Incredibly. His Dodd-Frank rhetoric is actually making sense and coming across as reasonable. Obama: "Is there anyone out there who thinks we have too much oversight and regulation on Wall Street? If so, Romney is your candidate." Lehrer says we've achieved a clear difference. Not really.

9:54 pm — "Regulation can become excessive." And apparently you have to have regulation. I don't think Romney's conservative friends are going to buy this, or at least not the current Republican Party. On the other hand, it's nice to know that Romney's kind of restricted regulation is there to guard us from the panoply of garage banks that would undoubtedly appear in its absence.

9:51 pm — I'm feeling for Jim Lehrer at the moment.

9:46 pm — This is a concerning episode for those of us who like Obama. The truth is that he's rambling. He's being dreadfully abstract, and needs to focus if he's going to count this one as a victory. That said, these debates don't really mean that much in determining the outcome of the election. They're just circuses for us to gawk at while we wait for November. That said, though, this is probably one of the most substantiative debates we've seen during this election cycle. We're getting into gritty specifics. You never saw this during the GOP debates. But Romney's clarity is really too good. Obama needs to lift it.

9:38 pm — Just tuned in on CNN. Hoping to provide updates throughout.

(Image via Politico)

For Want of a Better TED

A new ideas conference hopes to re-inject the spark TED has apparently lost. We've been very unkind to TED in the past, as you can see.