Meet the Press – Page 2

Stephen Kotkin reviews Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot Flat, and Crowded, for the business section of the New York Times today. Friedman himself has a bi-weekly column in the opinion section of the Times, which makes Kotkin’s review all the more pleasurable. Kotkin captures the formula Friedman inevitably uses to write his columns – and his books:

The content and method will be familiar to Mr. Friedman’s legions of readers: source, anecdote, pop metaphor. Repeat point. In italics. The unfamiliar reader should prepare for hyperbole, neologisms and aphorisms. “Affluenza.” “Code Green.” “The new Energy Climate Era (E.C.E.).” “We’ve already hit the iceberg.” We’re “the proverbial frog in the pail on the stove” (boiled to death after failing to jump out because the temperature rose only incrementally). “We are the flood, we are the asteroid. We had better learn how to be the ark.”

I have to admit that I have a bit of a soft spot for Friedman. I generally read his column and have read several of his books. I read them with the same attention I give to reading a Grisham thriller – as both authors take big ideas and make them entertaining. (Grisham is a far superior entertainer however.) I find that reading Friedman forces me to think – because he describes great changes that are going on and then attempts to explain and solve them by using simple, salesmen’s terms: “The World Is Flat!” or “Obama-Cheny 08!” He takes interesting ideas and then trivializes them before their gravity sinks in. The New Republic, in an article written in 2004 or 2005, criticized Friedman for being a salesman for globalization rather than an analyst of it’s effects. And while Friedman certainly is enamored with globalization, I think the real issue with Friedman’s work is how he so crassly simplies every issue. However, it is probably this skill that has made his work so palatable and popular to those who shy away from serious writing on economic and foreign policy issues.

For all my criticism of him, I have to give Friedman credit for having been consistently pushing – for the past dozen years – what has become the obvious next step to achieve a greater measure of national security, to drain the funding of our strategic adversaries around the world, to stop climate change, and to establish America as a leader in a new worldwide industry. Again, from Kotkin’s review:

Mr. Friedman has an unabashedly American-centric solution: the United States can regain its national purpose and save the world via green innovation. This can happen, he says, if Americans recognize — in the words of John Gardner, founder of Common Cause — “a series of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.”

Friedman told the story on Meet the Press this morning of what he says to young Chinese who justify China’s increasing pollution:

Friedman: You know, I was just in China a week or 10 days ago, Tom, and you know, young Chinese, you know, whenever I go here, they say to me, you know, “Mr. Friedman, you guys got to grow dirty for 150 years, now it’s our turn.” To which I always say to them, “You know what, you’re right. It is your turn. Take your time. Grow as dirty as you want. Because I think we just need five years to invent all the clean power technologies you’re going to need before you choke to death and then we’re going to come over and we’re going to sell them to you and we’re going to clean your clock in the next great global industry.” That’s when I see the headsets of the translators adjusting, “What is he saying?”

Clearly, Friedman has become a salesmen for green technology. He’s not analyzing – he’s advocating. Even if his presentation rankles, it’s worth listening to – and hopefully, he’s changing some minds.

[Photo by joshp over at Flickr]

[reddit-me]Terry McAuliffe of the Clinton campaign on Meet the Press this morning described Barack Obama’s campaign as one of “gaming the system” which is something he says Senator Hillary Clinton would never stoop to:

Listen, we have played hard and we didn’t want to game the system.

The statement is one that doesn’t ring true on several levels and is certainly an odd way to describe the Obama campaign – and an odd way to excuse the total lack of preparation or foresight that has characterized the Clinton campaign. I don’t mean to use the phrases “lack of preparation” and “lack of foresight” as weapons here – but as objective descriptions of the campaign. Her campaign simply assumed she was going to sweep the early primaries and even now still lags behind the Obama campaign in organization in the remaining states, months after the nature of this campaign became clear.

Yet McAuliffe used the phrase “gaming the system” to describe the Obama campaign winning by every available measure – the popular vote count, the number of contests won, and especially the delegate count.

Gaming the system has been defined as “using the rules, policies and procedures of a system against itself for purposes outside what these rules were intended for.” By implication, Obama – by playing by the rules, and winning – is using the rules against the Democratic party itself.

This whole reading makes sense, of course, only if the Clintons are the Democratic party.

McAuliffe’s comments also called to mind the Susan Faludi piece in the New York Times a few days ago in which she described the appeal of Ms. Clinton’s campaign:

…our first major female presidential candidate isn’t doing what men always accuse women of doing. She’s not summoning the rules committee over every infraction. (Her attempt to rewrite the rules for Michigan and Florida are less a timeout than rough play.) Not once has she demanded that the umpire stop the fight. Indeed, she’s asking for more unregulated action…

Faludi insightfully, and perhaps even accurately, described the gender and competition-related stereotypes at play – and how these stereotypes which were once used against Ms. Clinton are now working in her favor:

Maybe the white male electorate just can’t abide strong women whom they suspect of being of a certain sort. To adopt a particularly lamentable white male construct, the sports metaphor, political strength comes in two varieties: the power of the umpire, who controls the game by application of the rules but who never gets hit; and the power of the participant, who has no rules except to hit hard, not complain, bounce back and endeavor to prevail in the end.

For virtually all of American political history, the strong female contestant has been cast not as the player but the rules keeper, the purse-lipped killjoy who passes strait-laced judgment on feral boy fun. The animosity toward the rules keeper is fueled by the suspicion that she (and in American life, the regulator is inevitably coded feminine, whatever his or her sex) is the agent of people so privileged that they don’t need to fight, people who can dominate more decisively when the rules are decorous. American political misogyny is inflamed by anger at this clucking overclass: who are they to do battle by imposing rectitude instead of by actually doing battle?

The specter of the prissy hall monitor is, in part, the legacy of the great female reformers of Victorian America….While the populace might concede the merits of the female reformers’ cause, it found them repellent on a more glandular level. In that visceral subbasement of the national imagination — the one that underlies all the blood-and-guts sports imagery our culture holds so dear — the laurels go to the slugger who ignores the censors, the outrider who navigates the frontier without a chaperone.

I think this helps explain why the figure of “Hillary the bare-knuckle brawler” is so much more attractive than “Hillary, the inevitable”, or indeed, many of the other “Hillary Clintons”. It helps her to play against type – including certain elements of her own reputation.