My most recent oped over at the Washington Times concerns Barack Obama’s rapid political evolution on the issues of gun rights and the death penalty. An excerpt:

The second case, of which the Beltway population is very well aware, concerned the first decision in over a century that determines the scope of the Second Amendment´s protection for an individual right to keep and bear arms. On this matter, Sen. Obama had been equally definitive. Just this November, when asked by the Chicago Tribune about their candidate´s opinion, the campaign responded that “Sen. Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.” In the Illinois State Senate, he voted to ban gun shows, supported limiting citizen´s right to purchase guns, opposed allowing retired police officers to have the right to concealed carry, and opposed protecting homeowners who fire upon an intruder in self defense from lawsuits. To this day, he supports overriding state laws with a nationwide federal ban on concealed carry permits.

On this matter as well, Sen. Obama evolved. In this case, the word the campaign chose to use was “inartful.” “That statement was obviously an inartful attempt to explain the Senator’s consistent position,” spokesman Bill Burton told ABC News.

Barack Obama, it appears, does not know the Barack Obama who believed the DC gun ban, the most extreme in the nation, to be constitutional.

Scarlett Johansson is surprised that Barack Obama responds to her emails. As the Politico reports:

Johansson is somewhat shocked that he keeps up their back-and-forth correspondence. “You’d imagine that someone like the senator who is constantly traveling and constantly ‘on’–how can he return these personal e-mails?” she asks.

The Weekly Standard’s Vic Matus suggests there must be many other things that shock Scarlett Johansson, and offers a list. A few friends offer their own suggestions:

- She never has a problem finding poolboys to help with the tanning oil. “Everyone’s just so kind about that, even if they can’t speak English they understand!”
- She’s always had more male friends than female friends. “Guys just get along with me better - I think I must be a tomboy!”
- People always ask her to be a maid for Halloween. “Do I give off a maid vibe?”
- You have to have a private photo shoot every time you want to renew your driver’s license. “They never use all the shots!”
- Airport Security’s new nude inspection regulation. “But I suppose it’s all for our safety!”
- Charlie Sheen is a bikini inspector. “And he’s, like, ALWAYS working!!”
- Woody Allen insists on bringing her along with him, even if they’re not on set. “He bought me an ice cream cone the other day, and he insisted on staying while I ate it. Woody’s so nice!”
- Bill Clinton asked Barack Obama for her e-mail address. “Can you imagine? A president - interested in ME!”

This little icanhas-friendly banner was inspired by the announcement yesterday by the McCain campaign that you can create, for a mere $250, a banner expressing your unique satisfaction with John McCain. I’m not sure what to say to this idea, but it reminded me about how aesthetically unappealing presidential campaigns tend to become - their logos the product of hours of debate and committees populated by people who’ve never designed anything worth emailing.

If you want a sign of how conventional politics is, and how the innovation of the Obama campaign really is finally catching up a national campaign with the design trends of the ’90s, check out this collection of presidential bumper stickers, 1960-2008. I particularly love how Fred Thompson’s sticker is crowded, illegible, and the color of prune juice, as if designed for the Law & Order-watching retirement communities of Florida in which he put so much hope.

The best part of any designed branding, though, has to do with the font choice of a campaign. Ah, these are some doozies. And 2008 is no exception - as one of my favorite typography blogs Ask H&FJ recently pointed out. The originators of the Gotham font so famously used by The New Adonis, they even mocked up graphics with the Hillary and McCain fonts in their proper place:

Nor were these designers alone in their fascination with these choices. The New York Times hosted a roundtable on McCain’s font, the overused 90s relic Optima (which nonetheless still has some gravitas, since it’s the font displaying the names of so many heroes on the Vietnam Memorial). The descriptions can get a little silly, but there’s truth in this ridiculousness:

While it is not the most robust sans serif ever designed, it is not entirely neutral either. It embodies and signifies a certain spirit and attitude. And if a typeface is not just an empty vessel for meaning, but a signifier that underscores personality, then it is useful in understanding what the candidates’ respective typefaces are saying about them and their campaigns.

The designers questioned have some interesting thoughts - some like the selection, most hate it, but many concede that it’s a choice that has a good deal in common with McCain’s personality. The newest entry in the presidential stakes, Libertarian Bob Barr, has a font that seems like a solid midwestern pro-American creation, suitable for a beer can or a local sports bar - neither of which, I think, would meet the approval of the Prohibitionist candidate for President (yes, there still are those). Chuck Baldwin, the televangelist Constitution Party candidate, has a logo that looks as if it should grace a can of Play Doh or silly putty. Over at the Green Party, the colorful logo of Cynthia McKinney pits an offkilter insurgency against a staid old Nader logo that looks not unlike his original presentation more than a decade ago. It’s honest, at least - even his logo looks like dried-up ’80s-era socialism.

Asking whether this odd grabbag of out-of-touch designs are any more a sign of what lies within each candidate than Obama’s famous O logo illustrates how foolhardy this talk is: football players don’t pick their NFL team based on the logos on the helmet, or pick a sport based on whether they want to wear Nike, Reebok or adidas. All that Obama’s campaign has done is recognize that they should start abiding by the rules of a different game - not the tired old design choices of prior candidates, with the same color arcs and blocky typefaces, but with the attitude of tried and true corporate ad agencies. Sell a candidate like you’d sell a good pair of shoes, and the same people tend to listen and react.

Of course, if you want to see real font-leveraging in action, you have to go back to the good old days, when things were cool and slick. Yes, the glory days, before everything had to be grungy and worn-in: the 1980s. Watch this first. Read this second.

For a presidential candidate who has based so much of his message on an appeal to a new generation of voters thirsty for hope and change, Barack Obama said something a few weeks back which almost seemed – dare one use such an epithet – uncool.

Speaking to an audience in Indiana, Obama talked about the latest national ill he hopes to cure from the Oval Office: the scourge of video games, embodied by the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV. Admitting that he was only prompted to make the remark based only on a morning news report about how the game will “break all records and make goo-gobs of money for whoever designed it,” Obama spoke in the stilted, uncertain tone politicians tend to use when they’re describing a subject with which they have little familiarity. Here’s a hint to listening: it has the same false certainty of Republican Senator Ted Stevens when he infamously described the internet as a “series of tubes.”

“These video games are raising our kids,” Obama said. “Across the board, middle-class, upper-class, working-class kids, they’re spending a huge amount of their time not on their studies, but on entertainment.”

Obama’s remarks don’t come from out of the blue – they’re just the latest in a series of steps that set up video games as an opportunity for him to bolster his “values” street cred for a general election. In February he urged University of Texas students to “turn off the TV and stop playing GameBoy,” in another dated reference. And in 2006 Obama rather rudely returned a donation from Doug Lowenstein, then-president of the game industry’s Entertainment Software Association.

Obama isn’t alone in his dislike for gamers – during her time in the Senate, Hillary Clinton introduced the Family Entertainment Protection Act, which would’ve expanded the regulation of game sales and imposed heavy penalties on stores who accidentally sold the game to underage customers. And more than a few politicians in both parties took to the airwaves in anger in response to the release of one of Rockstar’s previous iterations of the GTA series, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and the “Hot Coffee” mini-game that could be unlocked within modified versions. But it’s clear that when it comes to video games, there are far fewer Republicans who have a problem – this is a Democratic issue.

What is it about video games that infuriate so many Democrats? What is it about these games that make them emulate ambulance chaser Jack Thompson, the ever-present clownish Florida attorney who would probably find a way to blame video games for acne and crabgrass? And why is it that these political leaders refuse to acknowledge the plain truth: that the video game industry as a whole has undergone a massive change for the better in the years since Tipper Gore’s crusade against the evils of Ice Cube?

Over the past eight years, the Federal Trade Commission has significantly stepped up their monitoring of the video game industry. The unspoken message: shape up, or we’ll start cracking down. And to their credit, the industry responded as we would hope responsible members of the marketplace would: they stepped up their support for self-regulation, they made the rules clear for gamesellers, and they made a sustained effort to educate parents on the ESRB game ratings that are now the industry-wide standard.

According to the FTC’s 2007 report on their “mystery shopper” monitoring program, the area of greatest improvement over the past eight years has by far been the video game sector. In 2000, 85% of underage customers teens were able to purchase Mature-rated games – today, that number has been more than cut in half, down to 42%. By comparison, 39% of underage customers were able to buy an R-rated movie ticket – and that’s comparing a purchasing system with a stagnant model that has been in place for more than thirty years to one that has expanded drastically, rocketing to $18.8 billion in sales in 2007.

It’s not just the industry that’s matured, either. Gamers themselves are growing up – according to research by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, over 35% of parents American play video games, and 93% of their children, numbers that will only increase in the future. Engaging systems like the Nintendo Wii and the vast arena of online play have taken video games from a pursuit for teens alone to a cross-generational platform for group entertainment. And as Harvard psychiatrists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson find in their new book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Video Games, the overwhelming majority of young players use games not to play out violent fantasies, but to relieve stress and relax.

Obama’s tired anti-gamer rhetoric about slacking and laziness starts to sound particularly silly when you consider the creativity, ingenuity, and strong social conscience at the heart of the grown-up gamer community. For an example, one need look no further than Child’s Play, a charity founded in 2003 by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of the webcomic Penny Arcade, which has given over two million dollars in donations from video gamers of toys, games, books and money delivered to more than 40 children’s hospitals worldwide. Not bad work for a bunch of underachievers.

If Barack Obama wants to take on video games as his latest straw man for America’s manifold problems, that’s his business. But he should be smart enough to recognize that gamers can’t be caricatured anymore: too many people have played these games without being inspired to do violence and mayhem. Gamers look increasingly like America as a whole, and they want to take responsibility for the upbringing of their own children. The same Hart study found that 85 percent of voting parents say that they – not government, retailers or game creators – are responsible for monitoring their children’s exposure to games. Sorry, Clinton and Obama – that’s one less area where voters want the government to play daddy.

Let’s give the Illinois Senator a pass on this one, though. It could be he’s just stressed out from the campaign trail. If he wants a break, he might consider a trip to Liberty City to blow off some steam. At least it’ll take his mind off of whatever Rev. Wright is up to today.

originally published at Right Side Politics

Bill Clinton’s recent trip to Puerto Rico wasn’t just an excuse to tempt the recalcitrant would-be First Husband away from the mainland cameras with the island’s famous combination of dancing, music and Caribbean cuisine — politicking there being a far more enjoyable pursuit than in the craggy frigidity of the Keystone State in April. There was a real point to the ex-president’s visit, and that point is: this time, Puerto Rico matters.

The outcome in Pennsylvania will determine how large a role the island will play. While recent polls have shown movement toward Barack Obama — bolstered by an ad campaign of historic proportions — the likelihood is still that Hillary Clinton will carry the state by a firm margin. Obama knows that a loss in the state would end the slim hopes for a Clinton comeback, which is why he’s currently spending $2.2 million a week. As Democrat media consultant Neil Oxman recently told the Boston Globe’s website “Nobody has ever spent 2.2 million in this state: not Rendell, not Specter, not Casey, not Santorum, not Bush, not Kerry.” But Obama’s dollars are still up against Ed Rendell’s impressive machine, endorsements from several key political figures, and the desperation that comes from the expectation game. In such a scenario, as hard as the past few weeks were for them, it’s hard to see the Clinton campaign doing poorly.

A win in Pennsylvania and an expected loss in North Carolina would make Puerto Rico the last remaining opportunity for Clinton to make up significant ground in the popular vote — which she can still theoretically win, and could significantly bolster her argument for nomination in Denver.

It is the first time in American history that Puerto Rico has experienced a serious presidential campaign. Their June 1 Primary has no history with the political media, sending beltway reporters scrambling in search of connections and good contacts on the island in case it becomes the location for the last great smackdown of the 2008 primary season.

In this situation, by a fortunate coincidence, my own family has a stake in the game: my cousin Francisco Domenech, the Director of the Office of Legislative Services for the Puerto Rico Legislative Assembly and a leading member of the Democratic Party, happens to be a superdelegate for Hillary Clinton. He recently shared some of his insights into the political prognosis for the island’s role in this nomination cycle.

“It’s an amazing time for Puerto Rico,” Francisco told me. “We’ve participated, but we really haven’t mattered in the primary period — it’s been more symbolic than anything. It’s exciting, it’s historic — we’re witnessing history.”

“After Pennsylvania and North Carolina, we’re the biggest prize in terms of delegates. We have 4 million American citizens. That’s a big chunk of popular votes, and Puerto Rico can put Hillary Clinton over the top.” In Francisco’s Democratic view, Puerto Ricans will almost certainly decide who the next President will be, notwithstanding the fact that due to their territorial status, they will be unable to vote in November.

As a superdelegate and as a Puerto Rican, Francisco feels that it’s the whole resume that will matter for a candidate, not just their style. While Barack Obama may be a more moving figure on the campaign trail, that stylistic ability won’t be enough to win.

“Although Chicago has a huge population of Puerto Ricans, the third most of any mainland city, Senator Obama’s never cared or paid attention to our needs until he looked at the electoral calendar. The Clintons know us — they pay attention to us, they care about us, they know our issues,” Francisco says, particularly the divisive issues of determining Puerto Rico’s ultimate political status. “But when it comes to Puerto Rico, Obama is all talk. We know where Hillary has been, and where Obama has not.”

“We routinely have over 80% turnout for elections in Puerto Rico. We are a highly educated electorate - people understand politics down here. We understand that we pay 100% into Medicare and we get back 70%. We’re about getting things done. We understand who has paid attention to Puerto Rico, and we understand who has not. If Obama thinks he’s just going to get away with talk in Puerto Rico, it’s not going to happen.”

In terms of the issues that matter, just as on the mainland, the economy will be of great significance for Puerto Rican voters. The old maxim was that “when the mainland sneezes, we get a cold.” But now, Puerto Ricans are facing their first true island-born recession in a generation: tourism is underperforming, citizens are experiencing huge costs from the island’s government-owned utilities, and federal tax incentives have been very limited since the 936 phaseout in the 1990s. The recent passage of a 7% Sales Tax only hurt the Puerto Rican economy more, as the burden of a heavy income tax and the stacked sales taxes pushed more people into the thriving underground economy. To top it off, the Puerto Rican government is still running a $500 million deficit, without lowering income tax rates for anyone or any significant spending cuts.

Many of the problems the island faces are systemic in nature, and involve more fundamental changes than either Democratic candidate is likely to endorse. The Puerto Rican government accounts for nearly 1/3rd of all jobs — a gargantuan number for any economy. There are no short-term fixes for such things, and if any group of citizens needed leadership from a get-things-done business-minded technocrat who understands the power of the free market as an agent for change, Puerto Rico does. They are unlikely to find such perspective in the 2008 versions of Clinton or Obama, who respond to most economic questions by playing class warfare instead of advocating real solutions.

The Democratic Puerto Rican political base feels that Bill Clinton’s visit was a good start. They expect he’ll visit again, and anticipate Hillary Clinton will come down in the last two weeks of May. They are gearing up for a real battle as the campaigns navigate unfamiliar political territory and deal with the complex alliances and entanglements of a place where status is the defining issue. And ultimately, these voters expect to speak with a strong voice, aimed squarely at the decisions made by superdelegates in Denver. But what if Clinton underperforms, and her backers are forced to make difficult choices?

“Barack Obama may have a 100 delegate lead by the convention. But that’s nothing going into Denver when you haven’t proven you can win the important states in November,” Francisco says. “Kerry lost in 2004 in Ohio. Gore lost in 2000 in Florida. Hillary Clinton has won by such wide margins in so many critical states, and we have to gamble on the possibility of Obama winning in Ohio, in Florida, and in Pennsylvania – as a Democrat, I just don’t feel safe about that.”

“That’s why I tell my superdelegate colleagues and fellow citizens: when its’ time for us to cast our votes, we should be looking at a lot more than just a small pledged delegate lead. We should be looking to win in November.”

In a cycle where so many pieces of conventional wisdom have gone out the window, it’s only fitting that Puerto Rico should play a decisive role.

originally published at human events

“Fame,” Rilke wrote, “is the sum total of all the misunderstandings that can gather around a new name.”

I bet Barack Obama can quote Rilke when he’s in front of the right audience. He had a good line or two about bitterness. Smart people like to quote Rilke.

Read on.

Do you remember the first professor who made an impression on you? The cool one. You’re thinking about him now. Freshman semester. He was maybe the first cool adult you met in college, or maybe ever. He knew stuff, stuff that mattered. He had it in his gigantic brain. He made the boring parts interesting. And every day, he would share a bit more of that nougaty goodness for everyone in class to lap up excitedly. You never slept through any classes. He quoted people who you hadn’t heard of. He quoted the French in French. He was divorced, but with a hilarious mountain of self-deprecating stories drawn from the experience. He watched the shows you watched, but didn’t pretend to like your music. After hours, you’d see him not at the sketchy hardwood-and-lascivious-old-man faculty bar, but the student deli, where he would say things like Richard Dawkins would say if he was cool. He’d bum a cigarette off you without any hesitation. He’d invite whole classes to play cards or just hang out at his pad and talk about things that were important, which was sweet. He was a fantastic cook. He knew the best bars. He was awesome.

In sophomore year, you’d hear about how he slept with a couple of your friends, one per semester, that blonde from the dorm near his house and that redhead from downstairs. But he didn’t talk to them any more, and he wasn’t all that interested in you. If you saw him around, he was sitting at different tables now. He had moved on to the next year’s crop.

The girls all had the same reaction: yuck. Sometimes jealousy-tinged yuck, but: yuck. The guys all had the same reaction, too, whether they admitted it or not: cool.

I care for you deeply, my misguided liberal friends. I concede it was beautiful while it lasted. Yeah, it was. But this is what it feels like to wake up from the dream. Say goodbye to “I am the Adonis who turns winter into spring.” Say hello to the honest truth.

Barack Obama is Your Coolest Professor.

”There is this Obama-mania, where these young men get glassy eyes and start spitting out vague things about how Barack Obama is going to save humanity. Really, have you seen their eyes? It’s this faraway look. It’s scary.”

“I was confused by the saucer-eyed, unquestioning devotion shown by my formerly cynical cohorts” to Obama

“One of my closest girlfriends, an Obama voter, told me of a drink she’d had with a politically progressive man who made a series of legitimate complaints about Clinton’s policies before adding that when he hears the senator’s voice, he’s overcome by an urge to punch her in the face.”

“some described the suspicion that their politically progressive partners were actually uncomfortable with powerful women.”

“You already see this idealistic longing projected on Obama,” Bruch said. “People talk about him as a secular messiah who will bring us political salvation. There’s no sense of what is plausible.”

“The whole ‘Hillary Clinton is a monster’ theme is so virulent.”

“I spoke to a guy friend who said, ‘You’re being ridiculous. I’m not not voting for her because she’s a woman; I’m not voting for her because she’s a bitch!’

“Obama loyalty, like white masculinity itself, has become normative -– if you’re not for him, you’d best be prepared to explain your deviation.”

“Why don’t you like the Prof?” you’d ask your friends. “What’s your problem with him? You say he’s manipulative, anti-woman, living out some Professor of Desire fantasy? Nah, nah – you don’t get it! He’s the coolest guy around. He teaches you, he guides you, he’s changing the world one student at a time. He’s not like our parents.”

“Plus I once heard he totally has this phenomenal bong at his house, you should try it some time. He’ll expand your mind. He’ll make your whole world wide open up. Just think of the possibilities.”

It can change your whole way of viewing things, this new man with a new name. He’ll tell you about the corporations.

Stan: Hello, we are selling magazine subscriptions for our community youth program. Would you like to help young people like us by purchasing a subscription of your choice?

Hippie 1: Oh wow, you guys shouldn’t be doing that. Don’t you know what you’re doing to the world?

Kyle: Wha- whataya mean?

Hippie 2: You’re playing into the corporate game! See, the corporations are trying to turn you into little Eichmanns so that they can make money.

Stan: Who are the corporations?

Hippie 3: The corporations run the entire world. And now they fooled you into working for them.

Stan: Are you serious?? We never heard that.

Hippie 1: We just spent our first semester at college. Our professors opened our eyes. The government is using its corporate ties to make you sell magazines so they can get rich.

Kyle: Ugh! Those dirty liars!

Hippie 3: This is a really nice town you have here. That’s why the corporations are trying to use you to take it down.

Stan: Well… Well what do we do?

Hippie 1: Just hang with us for a bit. We’ll fill you in on everything you haven’t been told.

The funny thing about the coolest professor is that, as you get older, most people outgrow him. They realize what his shtick was all along. Or they go back for a 10th anniversary reunion and see that same prof, a little older, a little slower, but still drooling for the youngsters who don’t realize his message is as deep as a drainage puddle. It has a way of shocking you straight.

But some people don’t. Michael Barone’s Academics vs. Jacksonians thesis shows us that Obama’s support comes exactly from the people who never outgrow his personality type - in fact, many of them try to adopt it:

Academics’ adulation of Obama and Jacksonians’ disdain for him comes out vividly from the election data starting back in January. Why do academics love Obama while Jacksonians reject him? Probably for the same reasons. Because Obama is not at all a warrior and is something of an academic. He is all college campus and not at all boot camp. Indeed, his campaign has claimed he was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, while he was actually just a senior lecturer; but all the evidence is that he was very much at home there and indeed was offered a tenure-track professorship. He grew up in a state—Hawaii—with a large military presence, but like most men with his academic aptitude, he seems never to have seriously considered military service. He has campaigned consistently as an opponent of military action in Iraq (though, as Peter Wehner has shown, his record is rather more complicated than that). His standard campaign statements on Iraq seem to suggest that all honor should go to the opponents of the war and none to the brave men and women who have waged it. His latest statements about leaving a “strike force” in Iraq suggest a certain insouciance or even indifference about what happens in a theater in which 4,000 Americans have died. He clearly lacks the military expertise of John McCain or Hillary Clinton, both diligent members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Like another eloquent little-known Illinois politician who emerged suddenly as an attractive presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, he seems more comfortable with the language of diplomacy and negotiation than with the words of war. Like Stevenson, he speaks fluently and often eloquently but does not exude a sense of command. He is an interlocutor, not a fighter.

Later in the Salon article, Jessica Valenti of Feministing (bet you didn’t know about that blog, you damn patriarchs) laments “the Oppression Olympics,”and that it just makes everyone look bad to pit racism vs. sexism (FTW!). Yeah, I agree, that just ain’t sporting. But don’t worry. It’ll be over soon.

Sharpen your pencils. The cool new Professor of Desire – chock full of all our hopes and dreams – is teaching class. He’s going to make it all better. He’ll sit back on his desk, roll up his sleeves, and share his wonderful, fluid, detail-free wisdom, and you will believe it.

You want him to like you. Forget what those silly girls are saying. They’re just jealous of his latest freshman muse, the brunette with the boots. Yeah. He’s the coolest guy ever.

You don’t want to be like him. You want to be him.

crossposted at redstate

>> I think this VDH post does the best job of summarizing everything that’s wrong with Barack Obama’s latest gaffe: saying these kind of things to the San Francisco Democrats is just part of the same thread that started when he complained about the cost of arugula at Whole Foods in Iowa, a state that has no Whole Foods stores - and when Mrs. Obama got in touch with the middle class by complaining how it cost $10,000 for dance and music lessons these days (that’s an Eliot Spitzer inflation rate, for crying out loud).  How are they going to use the old “Out of Touch” attack on John McCain when Obama is imitating John F. Kerry?