In an era of instant, mass communication, the image will be, indeed already has been, circulated widely and will gradually lose whatever “ironic” edge it once had. That the image derived from a New Yorker cover and was intended for an audience of high-information, predominantly left-leaning voters who already support Obama will be irrelevant or will add to the “credibility” of what the image conveys. Then the word will go forth in forwarded emails everywhere: “Even The New Yorker thinks Obama is a secret Muslim, etc…”If, after a torrent of publicity over "People won't get the joke", there truly are some people who don't get the joke... Well, that brand of "true believer" wasn't going to vote for Obama in the first place.
When you combine McCain's individual war chest with his party's bankroll, it turns out the Republican nominee has about $90 million currently burning a hole in his pocket, while Obama and the DNC weigh in at a relatively paltry $47 million, or half as much. And even though McCain has agreed to an $84.1 spending limit by accepting public funds - a decision he likes to portray as a principled stand against the corrupting influence of money on politics - at least double that sum will be dropped on his behalf before Election Day thanks to loopholes in the law that allow outside groups to effectively skirt such limits with largely unregulated "soft money" contributions.This is defended as "the only way the Arizonan can stay competitive" with Obama's fund-raising from "his network of 1.5 (mostly small-sum) donors", but by the same token it was Obama's decision to reject public financing that enables him to compete with these fund-raising techniques - and you're deluding yourself if you think McCain would have stopped this third party activity had Obama accepted public funds.
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Meanwhile, McCain campaign is stepping around federal spending limits by funneling cash through the state and national party machinery--and potentially benefiting from donations to a non-RNC organization that could boost his chances in key states. As the Wall Street Journal reported last Thursday, the Republican Governors' Association, a GOP group unrestrained by federal spending limits because it's designed to elect governors, is now "marketing itself as a home for contributions of unlimited size to help Sen. McCain."
Two months ago, Google held a series of secret focus groups with employees who have children in Google’s day care facilities. The purpose was to gauge their reaction to the company’s plan to raise the amount it charged for in-house day care by 75 percent.The back story? A Google executive and champion of on-site daycare, Susan Wojcicki (who also happens to be Sergey Brin's sister-in-law, and the daughter of the woman who rented them garage space for their start-up days), decided that the services of an outside contractor, C.C.L.C., didn't follow her preferred educational philosophy, resulting in Google's opening its own cutting edge facility at a much higher cost per child.
Parents who had been paying $1,425 a month for infant care would see their costs rise to nearly $2,500 — well above the market rate. For parents with toddlers and preschoolers, who were charged less, the price increases were equally eye-popping. Under the new plan, parents with two kids in Google day care would most likely see their annual day care bill grow to more than $57,000 from around $33,000.
According to Google, there were numerous complains about C.C.L.C., but the Google parents I spoke to disagree. They say that at the Kinderplex, child-teacher ratios were low, teachers were first-rate, the facility was clean and upbeat, and the food - organic, naturally - was terrific.Google ended up with 200 daycare spots, and a 700 person waiting list, with waits of up to two years for a child care spot.
But at least one parent wasn’t happy: Ms. Wojcicki. She is a proponent of a preschool philosophy called Reggio Emilia, the hot kiddie philosophy of the moment, which stresses even small children’s ability to chart their own learning paths.
Meanwhile, someone at Google woke up one day and realized that the company was subsidizing each child to the tune of $37,000 a year — which nobody had noticed up until then — compared with the $12,000-a-year average subsidy of other big Silicon Valley companies like Cisco Systems and Oracle. Faced with this dilemma, Google decided that the way to solve the dual problems of a too-long wait list and a too-large subsidy was - are you sitting down for this? - to get rid of C.C.L.C. and make the Kinderplex more like the Woods! (Google says it was always planning to replace C.C.L.C.) Given that decision, the only possible way to reduce the subsidy was to raise prices through the roof.The New York Tmes sees Google's actions this way:
If you are shaking your head at this point, that’s because you lack the proper understanding of Google’s culture. Having conquered the Internet, Google’s executives tend to believe that they can do pretty much everything better than everybody else — even day care. When I spoke to Laszlo Bock, the company’s vice president for “people operations” (a k a human relations), he told me that “what is really driving the cost is eliminating the two-year wait list while focusing on providing really high quality.”The Times suggests that under Google's corporate culture it has to have the greatest daycare on earth, whatever the cost, and that the high cost of the new program was seen as ending the "inequitable" waiting list. They also recite an allegation from parents, denied by Google, that Sergey Brin described the daycare situation as "a supply-and-demand issue" to be resolved by charging what the market would bear. The Times concludes,
Google may be providing the greatest day care ever, but so what? It doesn’t matter how good the day care is if only its wealthiest employees can afford to use it. If Google had really wanted to do something path-breaking about its day care crisis, it would have spent less time creating elitist day care centers and more time figuring out how to “scale” day care for everybody no matter what their salaries.I suspect that something a bit different was going on. To reduce the subsidy, Google could have offered "mere" excellent daycare, and probably could have expanded its program to eliminate the waiting list. The problem is that if you eliminate "excellent" child care in favor of "the best in the world", you either have to continue the extraordinary subsidies or price most employees out of the program. But if you give employees a choice, you risk that they will sign up for the merely "excellent" care and that you won't have sufficient enrollment in "the best daycare in the world" to keep that program economically viable - you might get back to a mere $12,000 (or lower) annual subsidy for most employees, but you might see the subsidy for your "best in the world" program increase as people choose the cheaper program. The choice becomes, coddle the executives and millionaires, or serve the larger population of employees.
McCain has been a major figure in American public life for quite a while. And yet his campaign has made him seem somehow smaller. Obama is a first-term senator with no legislative achievements to speak of. His campaign has helped him seem bigger, more presidential.There are two obvious potential explanations for this, and they're not mutually exclusive:
McCain's campaign has lessened him. His eagerness to win has resulted in his moving away from a lot of the positions that once attracted people to him.
Obama is "bigger" and more presidential than McCain.
Even Obama’s adjustments for the general election — his flip-flops — have served in an odd way to enhance his stature. Some of them suggest, after all, that he is at least trying to think seriously about what he would do if he were actually president. So Obama has achieved the important feat, as the campaign has moved on, of seeming an increasingly plausible president. McCain seems a less plausible president today than he did when he clinched the nomination.This is where McCain is hoist on his own petard. He can do little to directly attack Obama as "flip-flopping" as he has done at least as much (to my eye, far more) flip-flopping himself, including on issues that previously defined him (e.g., campaign finance reform, immigration, balanced budgets). When he chooses to mischaracterize Obama as having abandoned prior positions (e.g., his timetable for ending the Iraq War) and that Obama's positions are becoming indistinguishable from his own, that doesn't come across as "straight talk."
The current McCain campaign is chock full of G.O.P. establishment types, many of whom aren’t great fans of the irreverent [GOP strategist Mike] Murphy. Murphy’s also made no secret of his low opinion of the Bush-Rove political machine that has produced many of these operatives.And that's a real problem. When you load up your campaign with people whose stock and trade is a type of campaigning you claimed to deplore in 2000 and 2004, you're going to end up with a campaign that is inconsistent with your professed values. And if you decide your ship is sinking, you're going to trigger enormous ripples through your entire campaign if you try to shift it into a new direction that is just as anathematic to the scores of Bush-Rove "do anything to win" types you previously hired.
The McCain campaign this year desperately needs a message and a narrative that is both appropriate for the candidate and for the times. Thinking such a complex challenge through, and executing it, is Murphy’s strength.Wait a minute - isn't McCain's message, "I'm the outsider on the inside; the maverick who stands up to my own party, can bridge the center, and can transform Washington"? If that message has failed, what sort of rebranding could resuscitate McCain's Campaign?
"First, he broke his promise to try to keep both major parties within public-financing limits for the general election." - except, of course, that wasn't his promise. The promise he broke was to work with his opponent to stay within the public financing limits, and it's fair to criticize him on that - but where's the piece lambasting McCain for walking away from everything he supposedly believes in, in relation to campaign finance reform, lying about his commitment to public financing during the primary campaign, and possibly breaking the law in his hasty retreat from that promise?
"The new Barack Obama has abandoned his vow to filibuster an electronic wiretapping bill if it includes an immunity clause for telecommunications companies that amounts to a sanctioned cover-up of Mr. Bush’s unlawful eavesdropping after 9/11." - I think that's a fair criticism, particularly given the New York Times' consistent advocacy against an immunity provision. But why is it that the Constitution is seen as something Democrats must defend but that Republicans are free to ignore? I can't help but wonder, if major newspapers held some Republican feet to the fire over their disdain for civil liberties, this dispute would have ended a long time ago in favor of the Constitution. The "he said, she said" framing of issues by the media also contributes to the problem. "Democrats say important freedoms are at stake. Republicans say that the only freedoms the Democrats want to protect are those of terrorists, that Democrats agree that not closing FISA loopholes poses a danger to this country, and all they are trying to do is to prevent trial lawyers from bringing frivolous lawsuits against companies that were acting in good faith and trying to help protect the nation from terrorism. You decide."
"The Barack Obama of the primary season used to brag that he would stand before interest groups and tell them tough truths. The new Mr. Obama tells evangelical Christians that he wants to expand President Bush’s policy of funneling public money for social spending to religious-based organizations - a policy that violates the separation of church and state and turns a government function into a charitable donation." - As I understand the proposal, Obama is proposing rolling back some of Bush's excesses, and expanding upon the approach to funding religious charities that existed even before Bush took office. Further, there is no contradiction between "stand[ing] before interest groups and tell[ing] them tough truths" and recognizing that religious charities can offer a significant contribution to the public welfare. McCain seems to be all for continuing Bush's existing policies - again, why are only Democrats supposed to oppose positions that, in the Times' words, "violate[] the separation of church and state"?
"Mr. Obama endorsed the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the District of Columbia’s gun-control law. We knew he ascribed to the anti-gun-control groups’ misreading of the Constitution as implying an individual right to bear arms. But it was distressing to see him declare that the court provided a guide to 'reasonable regulations enacted by local communities to keep their streets safe.'" - So here there's no actual contradiction, but the Times takes the position that the Heller decision was wrongly decided, and that Obama shouldn't support an opinion that could restrict "handguns, or requiring that firearms be stored in ways that do not present a mortal threat to children". I think it's very much an overstatement to suggest that Heller provides a guide to what type of regulation is reasonable, but this is neither a flip-flop, nor is it sensible for Obama to try to turn this into a major issue by reversing his stance on individual rights and implicitly promising to appoint justices who will reverse or limit Heller.
"We were equally distressed by Mr. Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court’s barring the death penalty for crimes that do not involve murder." - That's fair also, particularly in contrast to his embrace of Heller - what's his standard for picking and choosing which Supreme Court decisions to support or decry? But again, what's the distinction here from McCain? Why, if this is such an important civil rights issue, does McCain get a free ride?
We are not shocked when a candidate moves to the center for the general election. But Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games.McCain has made similar representations about himself -a maverick, independent, able to work across the aisle. So where's the similar analysis of his flip-flops and contradictions, even if not a similar attack on his disdain for civil rights and liberties?
