Shots in the Dark

(Hey, it’s not just politics here.)

Daniel Akst, writing in the LA Times, thinks so.

Apple will accomplish what Kindle et al have begun, Akst argues, because Apple will do an e-reader so much better than everything that has come before.

These new tablets will give ink on paper a powerful nudge into history’s wastebasket, helping to remake not just books but newspapers, magazines and other material we’ve traditionally consumed in print.

Akst posits some consequences, most of which bum me out.

1) Ubiquitous tablets will make books cheaper and more readily available, even as physical bookstores follow Tower Records into oblivion. Lending libraries will have to figure out a new mission; the time is not far off when the typical 10-year-old will have the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria in her backpack.

Let’s hope isn’t true, and I’m not so sure the analogy holds. Tower Records-es were awful stores, a cold, impersonal experience. Bookstores (the good ones, anyway) are just the opposite.

2) Shorter is always better on screen, and so expect shorter books. Many nonfiction works are too long anyway — think of all those cinder-block-sized biographies — in part because right now there’s no mechanism for bringing to market anything between a magazine article (perhaps 5,000 words) and a short book (perhaps 70,000). Tablets will allow the length of works to be tailored more closely to the need.

Maybe. But I could also see books getting longer because there are no printing costs, and because there won’t be any editors telling writers it’s time to shut up.

3) More important, an Apple tablet will offer not just text but also sound, images and video — which will all be commonplace in books someday, in a balance we can’t yet foresee. This may undermine the primacy of text, but the text in most books today is far from sacred, and a little multimedia can do a world of good in most genres — in how-to books, for example.

I think this is probably true, but I wonder if it won’t undermine people’s ability to read anything of any length, or to use their own imaginations. (Will you think about the white whale—or just click on a hyperlink to a picture of one?)

Brace yourself, readers. Looks like January 27th is the Apple table release date.

Frank Rich has a smart, tough column today on where Obama has gone wrong—and what he can do to get back on track.

Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.

That’s no place for any politician of any party or ideology to be.

Rich, who’s always shown an interdisciplinary streak, brings in the anti-NBC sentiment that’s been pervading late-night TV as an example of our anti-big corporation mood. It’s a smart linkage, and I think it helps explain why that anti-NBC sentiment has really caught on, because that whole thing has been deeply weird to watch and otherwise hard to explain.

Obama has also been too deferential to Congress, Rich argues, and failed to communicate to the American people the essential parameters of his health care bill. This too seems exactly right. One can understand why Obama took this tack—the Joe Liebermans of the world have something to do with it, and it would be politically damaging to say “we must have a public option” or whatever and then have Lieberman oppose it just to get attention and be forced to capitulate—but there are no giants in this Congress; these legislators (Harry Reid? Nancy Pelosi? Sigh.) diminish what they touch.

Since most voters are understandably confused about what the bills contain, the opponents have been able to attribute any evil they want to Obamacare, from death panels to the death of Medicare, without fear of contradiction.

Sad, but true—and Obama has been slow to address this lacuna. As Ken Auletta’s New Yorker piece on Obama and the press details, it took the White House something like four days to respond to Sarah Palin’s “death panels” charge, largely because they didn’t think anyone would actually take it seriously. But Palin and Fox News filled the vacuum they had failed to fill.

The greatest Obama failing, in my and Rich’s opinion, has to do with the sense that he is too close to Wall Street and too far from Main Street. The blame here really lies with his reliance upon the Goldman-Rubin-Summers-Geithner team.

[Obama] has stepped up the populist rhetoric lately — and markedly after political disaster struck last week — but few find this serene Harvard-trained lawyer credible when slinging populist rhetoric at “fat-cat” bankers. His two principal economic policy makers are useless, if not counterproductive, surrogates. Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, was probably fatally compromised from the moment his tax lapses surfaced; now he is stalked by the pileup of unanswered questions about the still-not-transparent machinations at the New York Fed when he was knee-deep in the A.I.G. bailout. Lawrence Summers, the top administration economic guru, is a symbol of the Clinton-era deregulatory orgy that helped fuel the bubble.

This is where, also, the $8 million Summers earned from hedge fund D.E. Shaw and from popping in for lunch at various investment banks in 2008 really hurts. If you want to say or believe that Summers is too close to Wall Street, all you have to do is point to his pocket and the $8 million dollars fat cats shoved into it. And the fact is, you’d be right.

The White House clearly knows this duo is a political albatross. After the news broke that 85,000 more jobs had been lost in December despite some economists’ more optimistic predictions, Christina Romer, a more user-friendly (though still academic) economic hand, was dispatched to the Sunday shows.

It’s an amusing irony that Romer, of course, is the economist whose tenure nomination was rejected by Drew Faust in one of the biggest mistakes of Faust’s presidency.

Rich’s conclusion:

The Obama administration is so overstocked with Goldman Sachs-Robert Rubin alumni and so tainted by its back-room health care deals with pharmaceutical and insurance companies that conservative politicians, Brown included, can masquerade shamelessly as the populist alternative.

Obama’s presidency depends on how well he understands and and reacts to the popular sense that he is too elitist and has focused insufficiently on the real economic pain of working people. (And more and more often, non-working people.)

So I’m surprised to see the Administration showing signs that it’s going to fight for Ben Bernanke. The Tea Party-types are going to kill him on this one. Why is he doing it? As the Times reports, “to quell fears in the financial markets.”

Obama has from the get-go been too deferential to “fears in the financial markets.” They’ll survive. Nominate someone who isn’t in the Street’s pocket. Not Paul Krugman—too irascible. But how about Joe Stiglitz?

As we’ve seen on this blog and elsewhere, numerous people have grown disenchanted with Barack Obama because they feel that he hasn’t done enough for the economy—not realizing that the president has very little influence over economic cycles and that the stimulus package, insufficient though it was, kept the country from falling into deeper recession—and because they think the health care bill is too expensive and too radical (not realizing that it’s more conservative than the health care reform Richard Nixon once proposed and that according to the Congressional Budget Office it would save the government money, in addition to insuring some 30 million Americans who don’t have health insurance).

While the president has made mistakes, and has not communicated well those things he has done well, most of this tea party spirit is really a result of generalized anger over the economy (understandable) and ignorance (less so).

So with that in mind, I’ve decided to highlight from time to time the positive things that are happening under Obama, to remind people of just how much has changed for the better under this president and what exactly is at stake when they cast votes for a Republican—even a Republican who seems like a likable enough guy.

Here’s one example, from the new issue of Rolling Stone—a terrific article by Tim Dickinson about Obama’s EPA chief, Lisa Jackson.

With a minimum of fanfare, new EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has established herself as the agency’s most progressive chief ever — and one of the most powerful members of Obama’s Cabinet. In her first year on the job, Jackson has not only turned the page on the industry-friendly and often illegal policies of the Bush era, but has embarked on an aggressive campaign to clean up the nation’s air and drinking water. Under her leadership, the EPA has sought stricter limits on toxic pollutants like mercury, moved to scrub emissions of arsenic and heavy metals from coal-fired plants, and revoked a permit for the nation’s largest mountaintop-removal coal mine. “The American people can be outraged when we’re not living up to the P part of our name,” Jackson says. “The protection part.”

Though George Bush claimed to love nature, he almost destroyed the EPA, and we and our children will be cleaning up his environmental mess for years.

Under Obama, things are better.

Gawker reports that his wife once appeared in a music video in which she brings a tube of sunscreen to orgasm. It’s called—hilariously—”The Girl With The Curious Hand.”

(The song is execrable, so if you don’t want to listen, the, um, juicy moment is at 1:05.)

Scott’s nude, the wife is porny, the daughters are “available.” The Browns just get more and more wholesome.

He may not have the votes to get reappointed.

Could Larry Summers be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve?

The Washington Post reports on the return to influence of Paul Volcker…and the corresponding decline of Tim Geithner.

For much of last year, Paul Volcker wandered the country arguing for tougher restraints on big banks while the Obama administration pursued a more moderate regulatory agenda driven by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.

“Politics change. Conflicts in foreign lands come and go. Administrations turn over. But pizza continues.”

—Jeremy White, editor-in-chief of Pizza Today magazine, maintaining perspective.

“Heidi Montag Tries to Move Face, Can’t.”

—The Huffington Post

“I want a chastity belt on this [Scott Brown]. I want his every move watched in Washington. I don’t trust this guy. This one could end with a dead intern.”

—Radio host Glenn Beck, after Scott Brown told the nation that his two daughters were “available.”

The “intern” bit is an incredibly tasteless reference to Chandra Levy, the congressional intern who was having an affair with congressman Gary Condit but was almost certainly killed by a drifter in Washington’s Rock Creek Park.

“The American people, the people of Massachusetts, last night have rejected the arrogance. They are tired of being told by Washington how to think and what to do.”

—Congressman Eric Cantor (R-VA)

Washington has been telling us how to think and what to do?