Introducing My New Political Magazine, Zippererstrasse

One blustery fall day in 1983, the Soviet Union saw fit to shoot down a Korean passenger plane, KAL 007. That created an international crisis, and it was the talk of pretty much every news media organization, including a think weekly political magazine called The New Republic. I remember it well, because the KAL incident was the cover story of the very first issue of TNR that I ever received after a friend of the family gave me — a high school sophomore — a subscription because she knew my interest in politics.

She also got my political persuasion correct. She herself said she used to like TNR, but she had moved leftward and was more of a Progressive magazine person at that point. But TNR had me right from the start. It was waging a smart and feisty battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, arguing with Democrats, Republicans, and even its own editors and writers about the right policies. Hooked, I read TNR like scripture all the way through college.

The TNR of today is not the TNR of then. Sadly, there is a dearth of that feisty liberalism that believes it should be critiquing liberals as well as conservatives, subjecting every idea and claim to cross examination as the only way to ensure we come up with the best ideas, the best policies, the best proposals.

So my latest free digital magazine, the self-referentially named Zippererstrasse, is my experiment to try to revive that brand of liberalism. Please take a look. It's free (though you can of course throw tons of money my way should you be so inclined.)

To My Friends Who Are Bernie Beliebers

I have many friends who are supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders. I have many other friends who are supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton—as am I. I have a smaller but still nice set of friends who are supporters of various Republican candidates. The GOP candidates have been for the most part self-parodying, so I won't go into them here. But I have been troubled by the bullying, dream-fulfillment approach of some of the Sanders people. Yesterday, in an exchange on my Facebook page, I wrote the following:

For all the revolutionary talk, consider: the last progressive U.S. president to push through a big-scale change was FDR. He had help from a shattered economy (so lots of scared people) and, most important, huge majorities in the U.S. Congress. Sanders would have neither. 

Not only that, he would need to have rock-ribbed support from whatever Democrats are in the U.S. Congress, and he wouldn't have that. He hasn't even been a Democrat, fer cryin' out loud, and those congressmen and -women need to know that the president will be on the stump in their districts supporting them at re-election time, when you can bet there would be an extremely well-funded right-wing reaction that would make the tea party movement look like a bunch of marxists. 

Those congresspeople would have to know he would raise a ton of money for them to withstand the withering attacks of the right wing reaction. They would have to know that he would have a national messaging effort that could talk to the entire Democratic coalition and could reach beyond; Sanders has the hard-core left of the party, but hasn't gone beyond that. No, momentum isn't luring adults to his banner. 

I understand the thrill of thinking your candidate will lead a revolution that will change all. I wanted John Anderson in 1980 and Gary Hart in 1984. But I also know politics (as does Hillary, but y'all hold that against her), and Bernie has no more chance of (a) becoming president (sorry, the rest of the country isn't Iowa and New Hampshire) or (b) if lightning struck and he somehow got the nomination and his opponent was Ted Cruz or some other whackjob so he was able to win the general election, he wouldn't be able to put his "revolution" into effect. 

Other than that, party on, dudes. 

But also please understand that most of the vitriol that the Bernie Sanders crowd is throwing at Hillary Clinton is regurgitated lies straight out of the playbook of Karl Rove's GOP machine, and the debunkers are getting tired of debunking the stuff you all were supposed to be paying attention to all these many years.

And, serendipitously, right after I posted the above message, I happened to stumble across this article that illustrates just how unable Sanders will be to do the party support work I discuss above. In it, a longtime Vermont journalist who had many interactions with Sanders, recounts how Sanders got irate when he was asked why he didn't lend support to other progressives.

I asked about his unwillingness to endorse his fellow progressives. He said it wasn't his role. I suggested voters might expect him to weigh in. He disagreed, clearly annoyed at the persistent questioning. Finally I suggested that he had a larger moral responsibility to the progressive movement. At which point he jumped out of his seat, told me to go f*** myself and stormed out of the edit board meeting.

The writer, Mickey Hirten, then goes on to highlight reporting by others about Sanders' inability to reach out and support others. Read the full article and judge for yourself.

So when you hear stories about Hillary Clinton going around and raising money for other down-ticket candidates, think twice about just concluding that she's a political machine beholden to monied interests. She's building the best support in Congress she can get, because she'll need them to stick with her when things get tough. And things always get tough for every president.

If you support Bernie Sanders, good for you. I do not dislike the man, and I do agree that he is highlighting some very important things that are wrong with our country. That does not mean I have to believe he has the best plans for dealing with it, nor does it make me conclude that he has the personal abilities to deal with it.

It'll all come out in the primaries.

Hillary Clinton on Gay Rights (Video)

She shows she's lost none of her strengths since her landmark speech in China on women's rights in the 1990s. "Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights."

Below, video of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at the U.N. today. It made Rick Perry flip out; he claimed Obama was proving himself to be further out of step with the American people; but this is just one more topic on which Perry is wrong. Americans – even young evangelicals – are increasingly with Obama and Clinton (and many Republicans) who don't want to discriminate against gays and lesbians.

Catching Up

Sorry; I haven't blogged for a week. I've been busy with numerous other projects (almost all of them good).

So let me get caught up with my news and views:

1) Even after listening to (or reading) all of the concerns about feeling good that Osama bin Laden was killed, I still feel good that Osama bin Laden was killed.

2) Let Greece exit the eurozone. Dragging this process out forever is just making everyone (markets and national voters) uncertain, which increases the costs of doing business.

3) What? Justin Bieber is called a "brat" by a co-star? Imagine that. A Johnsonville brat?

4) Jezebel reports that an ultra-religious Jewish newspaper Photoshopped U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton out of the famous situation room photo, which showed President Obama and his national security team following progress in the commando raid on bin Laden (again, I still feel good about that raid). The reason? "The religious paper never publishes pictures of women, as they could be considered 'sexually suggestive.'" Uh, right.

5) Wisconsin's right-wing governor, Scott Walker, put out a video praising public employees. Yep, the governor, whose name you know only because of his questionable efforts to strip public employees of rights and benefits, says he likes them, really likes them. He'd just like them to be poorer.

6) I should have my newest digital magazine available online by next weekend. If you like science and science fiction, you might want to check it out. I'll have more info on the weekend.

7) Still feel good about the terrorist's death. I don't care if he was behind a human shield, if he had a weapon, if he was watching American Idol.

Note to Politicians: Ignore the Young

Is it finally time to end our fascination with the youth vote?

During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, I had an ongoing friendly debate with an Obama-supporting friend. I, a Clinton supporter, argued in favor of Hillary's experience, pragmatism, and general outlook. My friend was smitten by Obama's newness and optimism.

A recurring theme in any such discussion of Obama's 2008 campaign is its strong appeal to young voters. I acknowledged that at the time, but I warned my friend that young people are fickle in their political involvement. The real test for them would not be if they could stay sober enough and put down the Wii controls long enough to head to the voting booths in November 2008, but it would come two and four years later, when their naive assumptions about how Obama would govern would be tested by the necessary compromises and inevitable defeats along the way.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I was correct. Sadly so, because I think Obama's a very fine president and I fully expect vote for him again in 2012. But young voters were one of the heavily underrepresented populations in the recent midterm elections.

So is it finally time to stop worshipping at the alter of youth? I know that's a terribly un-American thing to say, but if your campaign (and eventual re-election) is based on getting support from people who ultimately don't believe in the responsibilities of voting and representative government, then doesn't that suggest a flaw in your strategic governing approach?

During the 2008 Democratic primary season, The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier wrote a rather good short essay entitled "Forever Young." Responding to the Obama supporters' desire for newness, freshness, someone untainted by actual experience, he argued that there can be something as too young:

"False hopes?" Obama told a crowd in New Hampshire. "There's no such thing." How dare he? There is almost no more commonplace trait of human existence (and of African American existence) than false hopes. … After Bush, who is not for a fresh start? But there is something unfresh about Obama's movement for freshness. … [C]an we agree on a ground between cynicism and myth? Or must we have Camelot once more? After all, being young again is also a way of living in the past. There was something mildly farcical about the Kennedys' endorsement of Obama – of this candidacy that is alleged to signify an alternative to the dynasties, and a break with ideological antiquity; but worst of all was its brazen delight in mythologization. (Thanks to the Obama campaign, millions of Americans now hold that John Kennedy was a great president and that Lyndon Johnson was not responsible for making civil rights and voting rights into law.) I understand that no one, except perhaps Lincoln, ever ran for the presidency on a tragic sense of life; but if it is possible to be too old in spirit, it is possible also to be too young.

It's not that young people don't vote. It's that you can't talk about young people (let's just roughly define them as people from 18 to 30 years of age) without piling on the qualifiers. They don't vote much. They don't vote consistently. They aren't informed enough when they vote. They lack long-term perspective about the effects of their votes. Even if you try to qualify the qualifiers by pointing out the dreadful ignorance of most voters, it doesn't help to correct it even further and say that young people are even worse.

I don't mean to hold up Wieseltier as any great sage; I think he's gone over to the demagogic side of life in recent years, which puts the nail in the coffin of my former reverence for The New Republic (my political bible during the 1980s). But I think he puts it nicely about the deficiencies in this endless (and groundless) belief in the virtues of newness and youth. I would take that line of argument further and say there's a related problem: the American faith in the virtue of fast decisions, in fast results.

People who don't vote often and are only induced to vote when they're unnaturally angry or unnaturally inspired are also people who will not stick with the political process for their problems to be sorted out the way problems have been sorted out for centuries in civil societies: slowly, patiently, frankly conservatively, and usually the fairer for it.

Corina Casanova, the federal chancellor of Switzerland, recently compared California's love of citizen initiatives with her own country's famed use of such direct democracy. There were many similarities between the two political systems, she noted, but Switzerland is willing to invest more time in considering each initiative and trying to come up with alternatives, counter-proposals, and compromises that suit everyone. As a result, many of the initiatives are ultimately withdrawn, many more have compromises and counter-proposals debated and voted on by the government, and fewer than 10 percent win voter approval. Compare that to California's more do-it-now, don't-consider-the-alternatives system, in which one-third of initiatives are voter-approved but there is no system to work out compromise and deal with the underlying difficulties that created the citizen demand for the initiative in the first place. "The essential consequence of this cultural difference is that considerably longer periods of time are allotted in Switzerland for the handling of popular initiatives," Casanova said.

Time is a buzz-kill. You can't keep people with short attention spans interested when problems move beyond the emotional chest-beating stage and turn into committee hearings and legislative wrangling. Sooner or later, you need adults to do the hard work, and if you've only voted in people who are "forever young," then you're in trouble.

Hillary Clinton's "It Gets Better" Video

Reason #4536789 to love Hillary Clinton:



Well said.

Hillary Clinton on How to Deal with China

Addressing The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco October 15, 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton answers a question about U.S. policy toward China.

Video of Hillary Clinton Discussing the Taliban

Short (not terribly clear) video of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telling The Commonwealth Club of California on October 15, 2010, about American policy toward dealing with the Taliban in China and Afghanistan.

Hosting Hillary Clinton - A Review in PIctures

Last night, The Commonwealth Club of California hosted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in San Francisco. A sold-out crowd of at least 1,400 people attended the event, which was held at the Marriott Marquis hotel.

We had three photographers at the event (as well as radio and video people). None of the photos on this blog post here came from those photographers. We'll get their photos and disseminate them starting on Monday. But here are some photos I took on my Nexus One smartphone before, during, and after the event. If any of you have ever been involved in putting on a large public program like this – one involving hundreds of guests, a very tight security line, national and local members of the press, one of the most famous people in the world – then you'll already know what the Commonwealth Club's staff has been through in these past two weeks.

Click on the photos to enlarge them.

Above: The view from the podium, where two hours later Clinton would deliver her opening remarks. The ballroom (actually two rooms combined to accommodate 1,400 guests) stretches before her. Though, in the darkened lighting when she gave her speech, visibility was something different. She joked that she could only see the first three rows, though she knew there were many other friends in attendance.

 Above: Part of the audience, once the crowd filed in.

Above: A view from the chair in which Clinton would soon be seated. Waaaaaay off in the distance, in what is the far side of the auditorium, you can barely make out two photographers on a low stage. The photographers needed special (rather expensive) lenses to allow them to take good photos from that distance and in the darkened lighting of the auditorium during the actual program.

 Above: The view from the podium of the chairs in which Clinton (foreground) would sit for most of the program while she answered questions from the audience, which were read to her by Climate One Director and Commonwealth Club Vice President of Special Projects Greg Dalton.

Above: Clinton (seated) looks on as Commonwealth Club President and CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy makes opening remarks from the podium.

 Above: After Duffy spoke, Dr. Mary Bitterman, the chair of the Club's Board of Governors, officially began the program and introduced the secretary of state.

Above: Clinton begins the program with a short speech from the podium, where she called on more Americans to get involved in American foreign relations.

Above: After her speech, Clinton shook hands and chatted very briefly with folks in the front rows before heading off the stage.

Above: After the program, while speaking with other Club staffers off to the left side of the escalators, I suddenly noticed Clinton and her large security detail walk through the hall and up the escalators. It took me too long to take out my phone, switch to camera mode, and aim, which is too bad; because if I had been five or ten seconds faster, I'd have had a great photo of her at the bottom of the escalator. As it is, one of the people in the photo above is her. I'm not sure which. I think that's her at top center, wearing black. Such is tangential fame.

First Distant Photo of Hillary Rodham Clinton at Commonwealth Club

It'll take a day or so for me to download and process all of the photos (none great, I am certain) and videos (none all that good, I am afraid) from my cell phone. In the meantime, here's the view from my seat at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in downtown San Francisco, where Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a fantastic speech and then took audience questions for about 40 more minutes.

Thank You, Hillary Clinton

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has publicly gone on the record criticizing Uganda's horrid proposed law that would invoke the death penalty for homosexuality and even criminalize people who don't report people who support human rights for gays and lesbians.

It is also nice to see some others publicly opposing it, such as the Vatican, Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, even right-wing senators Chuck Grassley and Tom Coburn.

Media Roundup: Starlog, Allure, Hillary, & More

The latest from the worlds of media, with a Starlog-heavy emphasis:

• On the off-chance that some of you read German, you can read the latest from Juiced.de about four new magazines that have launched, including Wir magazine.Yep, magazine launches continue.
  
• I'm happy to note that Starlog.com and Fangoria.com are no longer having any trouble loading in browsers. A Jedi's work is never done.
  
• 
• Speaking of Starlog and Fango, Starlog editor David McDonnell blogs over at Starlog.com about a short-lived magazine published by an earlier owner of Starlog and Fangoria. The magazine was a Playgirl competitor called Allure (no relation to the later women's fashion magazine of the same name). He gives some nice behind-the-scenes info on the magazine's life (which lasted less than a year), including the fact that the magazine was rather controversial in the small, multi-title company that generally focused on movies and TV. Apparently many editors and other employees had trouble with the "porno" title, which is rather funny, because there was very little actual nudity in the magazine (mind you, this was in the mid-1980s, when skin magazines still felt the need to be mostly articles, and Allure was no different), and what nudity there was was very mild. Despite the short life of the magazine, I know it was not for lack of trying; one of the publishers once told me about how much work they poured into it. But when the editor left (later becoming an editor at Playgirl, in fact), apparently sales were so weak that the publishers decided not to keep it alive, and it went "poof" into nonexistence.
• 
• In my recent posting here about the Hillary Clinton media blitz, I neglected an obvious example, the very recent Time magazine cover story by Joe Klein.
• We all know Condé Nast's had a rough year, like many other publishers. Word is that CN's looking to China to help it pull a turnaround, after a year when it closed some U.S. titles and reduced staff.
  

My previous media roundup.

Hillary Clinton's Media Move

The U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is in the news in a big way, featured in magazines and newspapers and web sites.

The new issue of Vogue (pictured) includes a very long feature story about Clinton.

The New York Times has a long article on Clinton's high-stakes role as the Obama administration's point person for trying to get Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, to reform his government. That was apparently the news hook of the week, because BBC News features much the same storyline. (But the World Socialist Web Site didn't like her performance in Kabul. If World Socialism -- whatever the heck that is -- is against you, shouldn't the rightwingers like you more?)

This and other coverage will probably go a way to muting the people who've said Clinton's been too low-key since taking the State Department role. (It doesn't hurt that she's helping to take some of the limelight from former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.) So if the pro-Clinton Daily Beast (or at least Tina Brown) and the quite anti-Clinton Huffington Post can both be caught up in this, it's something worth watching.

Clinton Hits All the Right Notes in Berlin Wall Anniversary Speech

Great speech by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in Berlin for the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall. The UK newspaper Telegraph quotes her as saying, "We owe it to ourselves and to those who yearn for the same freedoms that are enjoyed and even taken for granted in Berlin today.... And we need to form an even stronger partnership to bring down the walls of the 21st century and to confront those who hide behind them: the suicide bombers, those who murder and maim girls whose only wish is to go to school.... In place of these new walls, we must renew the trans-Atlantic alliance as a cornerstone of a global architecture of co-operation." Best of all, she cited German Chancellor Angela Merkel's wonderful speech before a joint session of the U.S. Congress last week, which didn't get nearly as much attention as it deserved. A very good political move. (Also, check out the Time magazine cover story on Clinton.)

 For more on the Berlin Wall anniversary celebrations, see Deutsche Welle's comprehensive reporting. (See short DW German-language report.) For German-readers, Der Spiegel has a great report (as usual). And any subscribers to the German edition of Playboy should check out its report on Mikhail Gorbachov, the somewhat tragic figure of this whole enterprise.

And the always-disturbing Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is nostalgic for the former GDR. By now, we all know that UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was about 45 years behind the times with her bitter opposition to German reunification, but, as The New York Times reports, most of the naysayers were brought around. They realized that Germany in 1989 (or 2009) was not Germany of 1933 or 1945.

Happy anniversary.

Arianna Huffington on Politics and the Media

More Huffington, this time on one of her favorite (or least favorite?) topics: The role the media plays in setting or warping the political dialogue in this country.
She also has a few nice things to say about Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately, I only got a bit of that part in this tape (too slow on the "on" button), but you can read her blog on the topic here.

The Call's Coming from Inside the House!!!

So critics are calling Hillary Clinton's new ad, which warns about Obama's inexperience in a crisis, her "Daisy ad," referring to the famous LBJ ad in which he implied that Goldwater would cause a nuclear war. Personally, I don't think the Daisy ad was out of bounds, and I see nothing wrong with Clinton's ad. Both tell people to look at the consequences of the choice they will make.

Nevada Caucus

Nice. But watch how the" populer vote vs. delegate count" is being spun.

New Hampshire Primary Night

Hooray.

Iowa Caucus Night

Ugh.

Dennis Kucinich on Gay Marriage

Kucinich, speaking at The Commonwealth Club of California today, gave a press conference after his speech. In this clip, he discusses gay marriage (and takes aim at my personal favorite candidate, Hillary Clinton; nonetheless, I appreciate his support and passion on the subject).