Strategic Negativity (or, Why the “Latte Salute” Fizzled)

October 1, 2014October 1, 2014 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Moral outrage is the greatest motivating force in politics, according to my former boss Morton Blackwell. When you can stoke passionate disapproval over something your opponent does, you’re on your way to winning an issue.

The problem is that people don’t get mad as hell over everything, so shooting for moral outrage can make you look silly. Last week served up an excellent example of just that when the White House thought it was a good idea to drop a video of President Barack Obama absent-mindedly saluting Marines without putting his coffee cup down.

Military supporters were understandably upset, and conservative commentators decried the President’s seeming indifference to the troops. Their shrill and immediate protests backfired; Jon Stewart and MSNBC mocked the response to such a trivial matter. The story went away within two days. And if you are part of the majority of America that is not steeped in the tradition and customs of the military, you might also wonder why conservatives’ panties were bunched so.

In this case, moral outrage didn’t catch on with the general public. But outrage isn’t the only way to score points against an opponent. Ridicule works, too.

Jokes about President Obama having mentally checked out from his second term a couple years early are becoming a staple of late night monologues. Left alone, the Latte Salute would have given them another punchline to the same joke. Instead of wringing hands over the President’s salute being disrespectful, why not make fun of him for looking like a guy whose weekend starts at 2 p.m. on a Friday afternoon?

The foundation for the current disapproval of the President stems from issues which do deserve outrage. For starters, people are losing their health insurance or being forced to pay more for less; policies meant to elevate the poor are perpetuating poverty; and our foreign policy is indecisive and poorly informed. It would be easier to mobilize voter unrest on those issues if people have an image of a detached President. Smart jokes about Obama’s careless, tone-deaf salute could have helped paint that picture.

Robin Williams’s death gets a White House statement. Where’s the one for Maj. Gen. Harold Greene?

August 12, 2014August 12, 2014 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Hours after the news of Robin Williams’s death broke, the White House issued a heartfelt and sincere statement.

Major General Harold Green was killed in action several days ago, in Afghanistan. The White House was slow to respond to the death of a high-ranking servicemember, and has not yet posted a statement on the White House website.

Most people don’t know Gen. Greene’s name, while just about everyone knew Williams’s. He was so adept at shifting among adult-themed comedy, serious acting, and family-oriented silliness that most people have a favorite Robin Williams movie or appearance.

The Facebook and Twitter tributes back that up: Williams’s death is a trending topic. And the Obama White House has a keen sense of zeitgeist (one that makes their apparent, frequent tone deafness tough to understand). The White House statement on Williams passing will make it into news feeds and be retweeted, so speaking out on his death – and doing so quickly – becomes a priority.

Treating death this way is unfair – not only to Maj. Gen. Greene, but to Williams, who deserves to be more than social media fodder for a politician.

CDN: Political Ads Face Brave New (On-Demand) World

March 26, 2014 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Nobody likes commercials, so viewers are finding ways around them – through DVRs and subscription-based on-demand programming. That will make things tough for political advertisers – but certainly not impossible. My latest column at Communities Digital News explores how political video advertising will have to adjust. And they will have to – because video remains the best way to tell a story.

New Journalism and too many white dudes

March 12, 2014March 12, 2014 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Emily Bell notices a trend among the teams Nate Silver and Ezra Klein are putting together for their new, future-of-journalism companies: There are an awful lot of white guys:

Well, [Klein’s] project X may now be called Vox, but the great VC-backed media blitz of 2014 is staffed up and soft-launching, and it looks a lot more like Projects XY. Indeed, it’s impossible not to notice that in the Bitcoin rush to revolutionize journalism, the protagonists are almost exclusively – and increasingly – male and white.

Bell recoils from Silver’s comments that he hired partially based on “clubhouse chemistry”: “A clubhouse. Do we really still have to have one of those?” Silver probably does, since he works at ESPN. Since it’s a sports network, ESPN predominantly caters to men.

Yet Bell writes this from the authority of her dual posts at Guardian and Columbia University. This is not, apparently, the opening manifesto of her own journalism site. Her screed is merely a complaint from these established beachheads, pointing out that the do-ers aren’t doing enough.

She’s probably right: There might be room for newer, more diverse voices in the marketplace the Kleins and Silvers are trying to occupy. It’s just a shame she’s passing up such a great business opportunity.

The right to discriminate

February 18, 2014February 18, 2014 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Kansas says that if you own a restaurant, your property is your property, even if you refuse to serve gay and lesbian couples. Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern feels that’s an “abomination,” and Salon’s Matt Breunig calls out conservatives and libertarians who believe that discrimination carries its own consequences.

Breunig specifically calls out one of the most consistently pro-liberty voices on the right, Tim Carney:

This fact is important to remember as the state of Kansas considers enshrining into its law the right of public accommodations like hotels, movie theaters and restaurants to discriminate against couples in same-sex marriages. Under this law, a manager who spotted a same-sex marriage party dining at his restaurant is empowered to refuse them service and demand that they leave.

In his never-ending quest to be on the wrong side of history on all things LGBT civil rights, Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner took to Twitter to defend this legislation, perhaps hoping that he will get a mention in future documentaries about the bigotry of this period.

…

Suppose a gay wedding party goes into a restaurant, sits down, and prepares to order. The restaurant manager comes over and tells them that they must leave because they are gay. Angered by this bigotry, the patrons refuse to leave. Now ask yourself: What happens next?

Here’s what happens: The police are called, and the trespassers are removed from the premises. Then, the incident gets a write-up in the local paper, and people stop eating at that restaurant because they would call the police to kick out a gay wedding party that was otherwise well-behaved. The restaurant closes down, and the restaurant owner who called the cops either changes his mind or he goes broke and starves to death.

The idea that anti-discriminatory values have to be enforced is absurd. If you’re a store owner that doesn’t like black people, go ahead and ban them from your store and see how that works out for you. Don’t want Hispanic shoppers? Hang a sign out front that says “No vendemos a clientes Latinos.” Go for it. I dare you.

No business owner in their right mind would do that. And if they did, the people who shopped there would get funny looks wherever else they went. Laws that tell us how we should live can mask social problems, but letting people figure it out for themselves non-violently tends to actually solve them.

The False Dichotomy of Science vs. Religion

February 5, 2014February 5, 2014 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Kudos to Science Guy (and Newhart nemesis) Bill Nye and Creation Museum founder Ken Ham. Many of those who disagree on the question of how the Earth was made don’t talk to each other. These guys went the other way. (And they got into it, too, the video at that link is almost three hours long.) At the very least, that shows that both are sincere in their science-based approach to problem solving.

But there is a problem when this type of debate is played out. Folks like Ham says the Earth is just 6,000 years old. Folks like Nye says our world couldn’t have been constructed in six days. Interlopers like to say this is science versus religion.

So what’s a year, and what’s a day? Those are pretty relative terms, since they are based on a single astronomical relationship: the Earth’s motions around the Sun. Days are shorter on Saturn, and years are longer on Venus. For a God who created the universe, these are small measurements.

We do know that there are laws of physics. When the crap hit the fan during the Apollo 13 mission, NASA was able to calculate a plan to use the gravitational forces of the moon to slingshot the spacecraft home. The moon’s forces, though not completely understood, behaved in a predictable way. The busted tin can with three astronauts on board reacted to those forces in a predictable way. Astrophysicists call that science, but if you sit back and think about it, it’s a miracle. (And not just because they math they got right was really, REALLY hard.)

We know that moons orbit planets, and planets orbit stars, and stars orbit giant mysterious centers of galaxies. We know those galaxies stretch out over incomprehensibly vast expanses of the cosmos, yet form patterns as well.

How miraculous is it that those forces and reactions are intelligible? How amazing is it that out of the black emptiness of space came the forces of gravity and dark energy that created suns, planets, galaxies, moons, asteroids, quasars, black holes and a bunch of stuff we haven’t even figured out yet?

Read the first passages of the Book of Genesis, then read a scientific account of how planets are formed. It’s great that Ham and Nye had a civil and good-natured, discussion about the origins of the universe. But did they really have anything to disagree about?

Mitt, we hardly knew ye

January 30, 2014January 28, 2014 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Mitt Romney is letting his perfect hair down to promote the Netflix documentary chronicling his White House run. Predictably, without the pressures and influence of a campaign, people are a bit more receptive to him.

(Bob Dole had a similar tour after losing in 1996, trading jokes with David Letterman and quipping that he didn’t “have anything else to do” but write jokes.)

More than one Republican has bemoaned the fact that, had voters seen such a touching look at the Romney family, the 2012 election may have ended differently. “If only voters had seen THIS Mitt Romney, Obama would have lost!” they tend to exclaim. Not always in exactly those words, but you get the picture.

And come to think of it, it’s a good point. One wonders why the documentary had to come out over a year after all the votes were counted. If the image of Romney presented in the documentary would have swayed the election, Team Romney have only themselves to blame.

A 2016 Presidential candidate could grant access to a friendly but independent documentary filmmaker and create a Netflix or YouTube miniseries. The film would not be subject to any campaign approval, which would make the vetting process important. But it would soften the candidate’s image, and possibly help voters relate to the candidate. It would humanize a talking head voters see on TV.

Gov. Chris Christie could use such a medium to rebound from scandal. Sen. Rand Paul could use it to articulate how his small-government ideas will help most Americans. Sen. Ted Cruz could show that he isn’t as much of an ideologue as the media and Democrats suggest. The one who needs it the most is Hillary Clinton, who is more a creature of Washington, D.C. than any other prospective candidate in the field.

There is a caveat: this strategy only works if the candidate is genuine. If the public persona doesn’t match private conversations, then it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

For Romney, a running documentary series could have answered the image of the ruthless CEO with one of the consummate family man. Even though it probably wouldn’t have pushed him over the hump, those who will chase the White House in 2016 should pay attention.

Redefining marriage and the Grammys

January 28, 2014January 28, 2014 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The social media dust has settled, and the most “shocking” part of the Grammys was the 33-couple mass wedding – which wasn’t really shocking at all. The event has generally been interpreted as a nod to the same sex marriage movement. In terms of public statements, supporting same-sex marriage at an entertainment industry event is about as non-controversial as you can be. (Way to go out on a limb, Grammys.)

It does show the disconnect between what marriage used to be and what it is now. The push to accept legal same-sex marriage is less about the “who” of marriage and more about the “what.”

The ceremony was a cheap, attention-grabbing display. Mass marriages are the stuff of cults. Having Queen Latifah perform the ceremony seems several steps below an Elvis impersonator running the show. And imagine hiring Madonna to play your reception and not having her play “Like a Virgin” or even old standards like “Material Girl.” It’s like going to a Journey concert and the band refusing to play “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Unacceptable.

No matter how you define marriage, that whole scene was ridiculous, right?

Yet it’s not much different from the cavalier attitude entertainers display toward the institution of marriage, regardless of the genders of the participants. Multiple marriages and divorces seem to have been common in Hollywood since before the big sign went up. “Til death do us part” gave way early to, “Maybe we can get a good ten years in.”

Marriage used to be about starting a family – the foundation from which life was propagated. Now it’s a legally recognized promise two people make to share their lives with one another for the term of the open-ended agreement. That subtle semantic difference is a tremendous re-orientation. The focus has moved from the products of marriage – the children – to the participants.

If the latter is the way you understand the concept of marriage, recognizing same-sex marriage makes a lot more sense. Of course it would be unfair to legally recognize some couplings and not others. (Incidentally, that’s a big reason a growing number of conservative and libertarian thinkers are in favor of getting the government out of marriage completely – it allows people the freedom of conscience to define their relationships without needing consecration from some government.)

Looking at marriage this way, you can see where the sanctimony of so many pro-same sex marriage groups and people comes from – an attitude which often manifests itself in reflexive hatred and derision for tradition marriage opponents. Few of the in-person witnesses of the Grammy mass wedding understand the more traditional definition of marriage – and unfortunately, they don’t seem to care to do so. That’s a pity, because if there was mutual respect and open-mindedness, there could be a pretty healthy discussion.

Is a cold-weather Super Bowl the worst thing ever?

January 26, 2014January 25, 2014 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

You’d think so, if you listen to sports media. ESPN’s Gene Wojciechowski hates it (and did even before it was cool), ESPN radio hosts like Colin Cowherd have weighed in against it as well. Fox’s Terry Bradshaw isn’t a fan, either.

Why are the protests against a cold-weather Super Bowl so loud? Despite what they may say about the weather affecting the game itself or the fans at MetLife Stadium, these folks have a personal reason: They’re covering the game, and spending a week in New Jersey in the winter sucks. Of course they want the Super Bowl in a warm weather city; spending a week in Miami in January and getting paid for it is good work if you can get it.

But the audience that has made the Super Bowl a cultural event – and not just a game – is the Super Bowl Party audience, the people who treat the game as a reason to gorge on buffalo wings with friends while discussing the commercials. The weather wouldn’t matter beyond possibly making the game entertaining. The NFL knows where it’s bread is buttered.

Incidentally, Hampton Stevens of the Atlantic thinks it’s a great idea, evoking memories of the “Ice Bowl.” Stevens probably won’t be at the game.

The weather media says it’s probably going to be nasty out there.