Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

Blog

Michaelle Jean makes a visit to France

By

My brother and I are afraid that our headline may not mean much to our wide readership outside of Canada and Bavaria. Therefore some background information. Michaelle Jean is the splendidly photogenic Governor-General of Canada, whom the separatist Parti Quebecois likes to identify as “the Queen of England’s representative in Canada”. But Michaelle Jean is no easy target for that once revolutionary party that is beginning to look more than a little frumpy and is losing support because of it. She is currently representing Canada in Paris at celebrations jointly celebrating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec City, the end of the Second World War and France’s national Day on Saturday marking the end of slavery in 1848. Michaelle Jean causes the separatistes great problems. She is an immigrant from Haiti, speaks French natively and English with Gaulic charm, and she is a very articulate and intelligent commentator in both national languages on cultural matters. In a luncheon speech before the French Senate, given of course in French, she identified herself in a way that few (no?) other western leaders could do: “The great-great-granddaughter of slaves, I cannot remain indifferent to the legacy of racism and intolerance left behind by decades of slavery and that continues to be felt in our communities, at times openly, at times more insidiously.” Eat your heart out, Senator Obama.

She also happens to be the best-looking First Lady in the world, a fair distance ahead of the second-place French First Lady, something that seems to have stunned the French so deeply that photos prove that Nicolas Sarkozy could not have bent over more deeply while kissing her hand. Le Monde wrote that Canada’s titular head of state was “La presque reine du Canada” – “the enlightened face of humanity, intelligence and beauty’. Holy moley! Michaelle Jean has done more to foster French/Canada relations in one week of public appearances than decades of those boring old kind of Canuck politicians, including the endlessly whining separatisten that France used to love to coddle. As for M. Sarkozy, he not only accompanied Mme Jean to the Normandy D-Day landing sites, but also asked if he could join her at the Canadian military cemetery at Beny-Riviers near Juno Beach where 2000 Canadians died in the D-Day invasion. When was the last time that a French prime Minister knew it was good politics to be seen with the Governor-General of Canada? A word of advice to M. Obama. As far as Canadians can tell, he has only made one reference to Canada in his career as a politician, saying that he would love to meet the (non-existent) President of Canada when he becomes President of the US. This was taken as a bad omen for the future of US foreign policy given the last 8 years, but perhaps Obama can do a little research about his neighbours in the next months. If he doesn’t he is in for a monumental surprise when he meets the Governor-General of stodgy old Canada.

Campaign ’08: The Other Edwards Speaks Out

By

Sunday’s NY Times carried an Op Ed piece by Elizabeth Edwards (Bowling 1, Health Care 0) on the role of the press in the campaign and it is a dandy. It is no secret that she is a smart and honorable woman who is widely admired by people on both sides of the political aisle but the skill and grace with which she skewers the press is remarkable.

She suggests that we are getting a kind of “Cliffs Notes of the news”, and that the press’s group decision to ignore serious candidates like Senators Biden, Dodd and Brownback simply eliminated them from serious consideration leaving the press to its search for various personality cults. As she says:

The decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate. Articles purporting to be news spent thousands upon thousands of words contemplating whether he would enter the race, to the point that before he even entered, he was running second in the national polls for the Republican nomination. …

…Watching the campaign unfold, I saw how the press gravitated toward a narrative template for the campaign, searching out characters as if for a novel: on one side, a self-described 9/11 hero with a colorful personal life, a former senator who had played a president in the movies, a genuine war hero with a stunning wife and an intriguing temperament, and a handsome governor with a beautiful family and a high school sweetheart as his bride. And on the other side, a senator who had been first lady, a young African-American senator with an Ivy League diploma, a Hispanic governor with a self-deprecating sense of humor and even a former senator from the South standing loyally beside his ill wife. Issues that could make a difference in the lives of Americans didn’t fit into the narrative template and, therefore, took a back seat to these superficialities.

The next time the NY Times is seeking a regular columnist they could do a lot worse than recruiting Ms. Edwards.

Campaign ’08: A House of Cards

By

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction. – Graham Greene

Watching the first segment of House of Cards, a 1990 BBC series, recently I began to think that I had seen it already, but with an American cast. In the British version Ian Richardson plays Francis Urquhart (“F.U.” in the headlines) a tough, cynically self-serving Member of Parliament bent on gathering as much personal power as possible regardless of the cost to other politicians or his country.

I was particularly struck with the portrayal of a young, ambitious reporter who unwittingly becomes one of F.U.’s tools in destroying his political enemies. Urquhart simply provides her with “off-the-record” information that she then uses to beat up on whomever is next on Urquhart’s list. It is all easy work for her and effective politics for Urquhart.

And a lesson for all journalists covering today’s political campaigns in America: do what it takes to get “access” to the players, jump on anything smacking of scandal, pump it up and by furthering the interests of your “player”, enhance your own career. House of Cards has become a playbook for many of today’s American politicians and their friends in the press but it is a helluva lot more entertaining as fiction.

Sports and Politics, Cont.

By

As outlined by Jeff in a number of perceptive articles, the US primary system has fallen on hard times, if it is meant to display to the world the wonders of democracy. Not only have the so-called debates been at high-school level, most observers agree that the actual candidates might have something useful to say, if only asked or allowed to do so. Instead two intelligent and informed people are treated by questioners as fools, and do a pretty good job of confirming that with their answers. At the same time one of the areas of potential dramatic interest in US politics is sorely missing – sports. In this field Big George W. could finally show his prowess, and actually knew what he was talking about when baseball or football came up. But in the spring there is really nothing going on down below the border, and audiences can only be treated with ancient shots of Barack playing high school basketball and then promising to build a basketball court in the White House. So far we haven’t even seen Hillary in her field hockey duds, though she must have played it, or something, at some point or other.

This is Canada’s season and governments are wary of calling an election up north while the Stanley Cup playoffs are on, since the whole country can switch allegiances in a flash depending on which team(s) are still in the hunt. This year only one Canadian team has made it into the quarter final, but lots of sports lovers, like New Yorker star writer Adam Gopnik, would be glad to tell you it’s the grandest team of them all – the Montréal Canadiens – and the surprising march of them towards the Stanley Cup has any Quebec separatiste begging for no election in the next weeks. For as Gopnik (joining the late lamented Mordecai Richler) has argued convincingly, les habs are as good a force as there is for explaining why Canada functions so well despite all its apparent contradictions. (John Ibbitson’s recent statement that, without anybody paying much attention, Canada has suddenly become the most successful country on earth, fits nicely into this framework).

Playing out of the second-largest French-speaking city in the world, les canadiéns ice a team with a larger percentage of French-speaking players, and of course coaches, than anyone else, have a name which sticks in the gut of Quebec separatistes, who tried with no success to get it changed, and have hired several key Russian players this year who have flourished in North America’s most European city. They also have no hesitation to replace a French player with a better Anglo one if it will help the team. At a crucial moment in this year’s race they shipped their French goalie to Washington, gave the job to Carey Price, a 20 year old kid from Anahim Lake, British Columbia whose mother is the chief of a remote First Nations band on the edge of the spectacular true wild west Chilcotin Plateau, and ended up winning the race in the east. It’s that kind of mixture which makes the separatistes head for cover, because there isn’t anyone in Montréal wh o is not cheering for the native kid who had to fly with his bush pilot father to the metropolis of Williams Lake, 300 kilometers away, to play hockey. And there’s no Canadian who wasn’t cheering for the Habs as they opened their series today against Philadelphia. This is awful news for the enemies of Canadian federalism and they will lay low for the next months.

Oh yes, the Canadians were losing tonight 3-2 with 45 seconds to go, when one of the Russians scored, sending the game into overtime. They won it 28 seconds into the overtime period when another Russian scored. The crowd from Tuktayuktuk to Newfoundland went into a frenzy.

Campaign ’08:It’s the Press Stupid – And Vice Versa

By

Last week’s debacle that barely passed for a debate on ABC is one more piece of evidence that we are stuck with a press and media that are committed to the avoidance of intelligent discussion of serious issues. The ingredients that are inexorably moving this election into a kind of fantasy-land of mind-numbing trivialities are all in place: lazy reporters playing off candidates’ criticisms of their opponents; the media’s willingness – no, eagerness – to pump up meaningless side issues like lapel pins and nutty ministers; endless hours of so-called analysts on cable TV pimping for their own candidates; an over-reliance on vapid man-in-the-street interviews and apparently an almost total unwillingness to explore serious issues in depth.

Senator Clinton’s campaign has mismanaged itself into a Rovian corner from which it is reduced to calling her opponent schoolyard names, hinting at character flaws in Obama (then denying she did any such thing) and feeding the lazy but hungry press with tiny little issues that they can then blow up into earth-shattering issues. That the Clinton campaign is deficient in honesty and seriousness is of course no surprise – it informed their earlier incarnation and for the most part people do not change. The Obama campaign has been caught in the position of having to defend the Senator on trivial issues, has not done a good job at it, and has become increasingly and obviously frustrated which simply feeds the beast.

But the really discouraging part of the situation is the complicity of the press in directing the interest of the voters towards meaningless issues while helping them avoid doing the hard work of thinking about real issues. This is old news but given the state of the country we need more and better not the same old crap. Now it is on to Indiana, another state where flag pins, nutty ministers, bin Laden and the over-rated threat of Iran can be used to pump up the volume and drown out serous discussion of serious issues.

What’s right about Bavaria

By

My bother and I recently returned from a lengthy stay in Germany’s most engaging city, Munich, and decided it was time to admit that the citizens of Bavaria have made a wise decision. They have decided to go along with the tourist ploy that Berlin is the city to visit if you are going to make a brief sojourn into that nasty country that only one generation ago came close to wiping out European civilization. For European cities that become apples of tourist organizers’ eyes pay a heavy, sometimes fatal, price for paving their streets with the gold left behind by the hordes. For 8 months of the year, Florence and Venice, surely two of the world’s most splendid cities, cease to exist under the conditions that once made them so splendid, as they are overwhelmed with tourists anxious to have their pictures taken in front of nude David or a yodeling gondolier or two. Really big cities, like New York, Paris or London, not to mention gigantic ones like Shanghai or Tokyo, and even somewhat isolated cities like Stockholm, Vancouver and Helsinki, can brush aside the potential carnage by offering more space than the tourists can fill. But middle size cities like Munich, full of the cultural monuments that tourists crave and sitting right on the main road of the grand tour, run the danger of sinking like Venice.

And so Munich and Bavaria, the beautiful “free state” of which it is the capital, have made a deal that convinces the rest of the world to come in once a year for a couple of weeks in late September and early October and spend its money like drunken sailors, in fact spend their weeks like that as well, and then depart deliriously happy having had a time they can hardly remember. The coffers of Munich bulge at the seams, the countryside round about counts up the spillage from the overflow, and the local citizenry returns to going about its business, having limited the damage to the 17 days of the Oktoberfest, which most of them never visit unless it’s on business, while suggesting that Berlin would be a better place to visit the rest of the year. And off they go. Meanwhile we Münchners and our Upper- and Lower-Bavarian relatives and friends spend the splendid spring, summer and autumn evenings in beer gardens and quiet corners that other places can only dream about, quaffing a liter of Augustiner, Spatenbräu or Paulaner that other breweries , content to spend their money on marketing some kind of liquid that one could not give way under the chestnut trees of Bavaria, cannot even begin to try to copy. So pass the word – be sure to visit Europe’s most wonderful city, but be sure to do it during the Oktoberfest and don’t bother visiting the Hirschgarten, Taxisgarten, or even the Hofbräuhausgarten am Wiener Platz – the other one am Platzl you should definitely visit – because all you’ll find there are boring locals.

Playing Doctor in Germany

By

US-American biologist Ian Baldwin has found out the black comic way that it is not true that the Germans don’t have a sense of humour. He made the mistake of responding to German attempts to make their leading research institutes more international by recruiting experts from around the civilized world, which Baldwin undoubtedly assumed included the elite US educational system out of which he came. The German academic selection committee must have considered him to have had an appropriate academic background, since they offered him the plum position of Director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena. In fact Dr. (whoops!) Baldwin had a cv and a list of publications that made him just the right kind of internationalist to lend prestige to the faltering reputation of the German academic system on the international stage.

Imagine then his surprise when on January 9 as new Director he received a letter from the criminal inspection division of the Jena Police ordering him to appear before them for an “interrogation as an accused ” (Vornehmung als Beschuldeter), which involved a process which could only have reminded him of his undergraduate reading of Kafka’s The Trial. On Feb. 18 he was informed by the Culture Ministry of Thüringen that he had been accused of the following: “Im Rahmen Ihrer Tätigkeit führten Sie Ihren amerikanischen Hochschulgrad ‘Doctor of Philosophy’ in Form der Abkürzung ‘Ph.D’ (“In the framework of your activities you used your American (Presumably they meant US-American) title of ‘Doctor of Philosophy’ in its abbreviated form Ph.D.” But only those with Doctorates from EU countries could use such titles, not Americans. (My brother Doug failed to get a response from Thuringian cultural bureaucrats when he asked about Canadian titles.) Thus Mr. Baldwin discovered that if he had gotten his degree from a Latvian, Romanian or Bulgarian university he could call himself Doctor in Germany but not if it was from a university in Massachusetts, even if he was now the director of one of Germany’s premier academic research institutes, a position which of course demanded that he have a doctorate. And they say that you can’t write like Kafka any more. As is turned out, just as in “The Trial”, the process seems to have been initiated by a revengeful foreigner who also had a doctorate from a non-EU country and had been ordered not to use it on the basis of a law passed during Nazi time.

Fortunately for the German academic scene, Dr. Baldwin, after the intervention of German academic elite who were in a position to overrule Thuringian bureaucrats, can now once again use the title “Ph.D.”. And fortunately for them he also must have known that Kafka was also a great comic writer, even if the comedy had the potential of a dark nightmare if ever those bureaucrats came into power again. However, my brother and I still don’t know what happens to Canuck PhDs if their holders follow the lure of the Loreleis of German academia.

Campaign 2008: Riding the Road of Trivialities

By

As the interminable Democratic campaign for president drags its weary ass along the Trivialities Turnpike it is worth asking how the hell we got on this road to begin with? Serious issues abound – the failed Iraq War, a looming failure in Afghanistan, a weakened NATO unwilling to push the fight in Afghanistan, a weakened American military, a dollar in the proverbial toilet, an enormous budget deficit, a looming or actual recession, shortfalls in Medicare and Social Security, rampant international distrust of the United States, a non-existent Middle East policy – and the list goes on.

And what are we being fed by the media? John McCain’s barbecue menu and the great spitball fight between Senators Clinton and Obama. The press moves from spitball to spitball, manufacturing intensity on fundamentally trivial issues. They capture the public’s interest and create temporary shifts in polls that then feed the horse race mentality of a press unable to focus on the real issues that determine the state of the world and of America’s declining quality of life. Do we really care all that much that Geraldine Ferraro thinks Senator Obama is “lucky to be black?” Or that Senator Obama’s former Pastor has said some stupid things mixed in with a justifiable rage over much of what America has done to blacks for over 200 years? Or whether Bill Clinton plays his typical cheap tricks? Are those the only kind of issues that can capture the American peoples’ attention? Are we really so ignorant of the world or so lazy that we cannot put the effort into thinking about serious issues and identifying trivialities for what they are? Or have we simply turned it all over to a shallow, irresponsible press?

For a lengthier and stronger look at these concerns see Matt Taibbi’s latest piece on his website: The Smirking Chimp – here is a taste:

We can’t focus for more than ten seconds on anything at all and we’re constantly exercised about stupid media-generated non-scandals, guilt-by-association raps, accidental dumb utterances of various campaign aides and other nonsense — while at the same time we have no energy at all left to wonder about the mass burgling of the national budget for phony military contracts, the war, the billion dollars or so in campaign contributions to be spent this year that will be buying a small mountain of favors for the next four years. – Matt Taibbi

Canada and Kosovo

By

It took Canada more than a month to recognize Kosovo as an independent state, a clear display of reluctance to follow the lead taken by its closest NATO allies, Germany, France, the UK and the Unites States, almost immediately upon Kosovo’s declaration of independence. Canada is not the only significant power to not follow this lead with any enthusiasm, and the list of those who have declared they will not do so is long and daunting – Russia, China, India, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Indonesia, Israel, Mexico, Cuba, both Koreas, almost all of Africa, Central Asia and most of Kosovo’s neighbours – Serbia, of course, but also Bosnia-Herzogovina, Greece, Macedonia, and Cyprus. Croatia, Hungary and Bulgaria all took longer than Canada to decide and near-neighbours Slovakia, Czech Republic and Ukraine have not recognized Kosovo. Albania, on the other hand, was the first to recognize and remains one of only 3 countries to actually establish an embassy in Pristina, the others being the UK and Germany.
Canada’s reluctance to recognize Kosovo as an independent state is closely related to the absolute refusal of Russia, China, Spain, India, Mexico and Indonesia to do so, a group of politically completely unrelated countries that make up the majority of the world’s population. They have one thing in common; they all have minority ethnic or religious populations striving for independent status. Most dramatically this is now playing out in China, but all these countries have separatist movements which often use violence as a political weapon. As long as there are Basques in Spain, Sikhs in india and Uigurs in China, Spain, India and China will not be recognizing unilaterally-declared separatist states. Quebec was Canada’s problem in this context and, as predictably as the sun will rise, the separatist Bloc Quebecois immediately congratulated the Ottawa federal government for recognizing Kosovo, saying that it had given a separatist government in Quebec the precedent it needed to do something similar. China, India and Spain will not be following that lead.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Senator McCain

By

Recent and ongoing events in Pakistan and Afghanistan highlight in new ways the disastrous effects of the United States’ misguided Iraq invasion and the delusionary nature of Senator McCain’s commitment to continuing a bankrupt policy in Iraq.

The War in Afghanistan is not going well. The Taliban is back in force, the poppy fields are again feeding America’s cocaine habit, America’s allies are beginning to question their willingness to continue in Afghanistan, violence against civilians is on the increase and the U.S. cannot bring enough force to bear because its military is bogged down in Iraq.

If there is a failure in Afghanistan – which appears possible, if not likely – the blame can go directly to the Bush decision to commit to an unnecessary war in Iraq. By not committing the needed forces to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan in favor of invading Iraq, Bush allowed the Taliban to withdraw into Pakistan and form a new commitment to take Afghanistan back. This in turn led to a stronger terrorist structure in Pakistan which has destabilized much of that country and which runs the risk of leading to the loss of major portions of Pakistan to the Taliban and its Al Queda allies. This is doubly worrisome given Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Afghanistan was a major training ground for Al Quada and the opportunity to eliminate that from happening again now seems lost.

Which brings us to Senator McCain’s delusions. His campaign is based largely on his belief that the so-called surge has worked and that victory is in sight. While those are extremely questionable opinions, it is clear that even were they true any such victory would come at terrible cost – in human life, American treasure, diminished American influence in the world, increased Iranian influence in the region, a destabilized Pakistan and in all probability a failed state of Afghanistan.

The U.S. president has enormous powers in foreign affairs – reviewing the disastrous impact of President Bush’s foreign policy reminds us of that. And it reminds us that choosing the next president can send the United States further into decline if it sends into office a man (or woman) unable to understand the difference between genuine American national interest, and jingoistic political slogans. Senator McCain clearly is determined to wage a campaign aimed at continuing the failed Bush policies in Iraq and the voters will need to decide whether it wants what would amount to a third Bush term.