Not all of my writing is virtual…

Not all of my writing is virtual...

Some of my (incomplete) work is now in book form, spanning the “Bush to Bush” era that shaped the United States that Barack Obama now leads. A look back, from the hopes of the end of the cold war, the promises of the Clinton years, to the three catastrophies (9/11, the invasion of Iraq and Katrina) that define the fourty-third president’s legacy and set the scene for the most unlikely candidate to emerge as the savior of the American dream.

Find out more here

and yes, by all means, buy the book!

Since I last wrote…

…Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States and the explosion of joy in downtown Manhattan felt like a liberation, the end of a long war.

The party was over, for the president-elect, as early as November, 6, when he received his first PDB – “presidential daily brief”, the state of the world as described by intelligence services. (Later, Al Qaeda’s perplexity, faced with a black man named Barack Hussein Obama succeeding George Bush, became perfectly clear).

Soon enough, Barack Obama was holding regular press conferences, announcing his cabinet and the priorities. Rahm Emanuel was the first major figure to be designated, soon followed by Obama and Clinton loyalists, and of course Hillary herself at the State Department.The economy quickly became the top priority, with record job losses and the debate about a bailout for Detroit’s “Big 3″.

In line with the new approach of the campaign, the transition team put itself on-line. “Chicago” and the less than stellar tradition of Illinois politics came back with a vengeance, though, with the arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, accused by the FBI of a “pay to play” scheme involving the appointment of Barack Obama’s successor in the Senate (but not involving the president-elect or his team, the prosecutor quickly pointed out).

And yes, there was a new song - and speaking of songs, one of the reasons this blog was once again lost in the shuffle is that, besides preparing a book (in French, and no, I have no intention to translate-blog it!) and trying to keep up the French-language “Americana” blog, I volunteer for a cause I believe in: the creation of an Innovative Arts Center in downtown Manhattan. Yes, we need it – creation and imagination is more crucial than ever in tough times – and yes, we can! And yes, there is a Gala Fundraiser this Monday, at the Orensanz Center. Good cause, good art, good party…

An answer to that “what don’t you know?” question

Remember that question with “a certain zen-like quality” that Tom Brokaw choose to close the presidential debate: “What don’t you know, and how will you learn it?”

Here’s my contribution, by way of an excellent piece, good to the last gulp, by Steve Coll: – here.

There is much we don’t know, it appears, about the “shadow banking system” and the size of “a global private market whose products, combined, have a nominal value roughly equal to the size of the world economy’s output in a year”.

At the rate things are going, it’s going to be some Halloween…

McCain, Ayers and the mob: the missing question

I just watched John McCain’s interview on ABC News – here, if you missed it.

“This is a tough campaign”, he says. Tough indeed, when the crowds at his rallies are whipped into shouting “kill him!”, or “terrorist!” as a speaker makes a reference to Barack Obama. Does this make John McCain uncomfortable? Does it give him pause enough that he might ask his surrogates and his running mate to lower the rhetoric? Would he consider warning his supporters publicly that this sort of language and behavior is “unacceptable”, to use this season’s most overused word? Or does he actually think it’s part of what’s fair in the blood sport of politics?

We’ll never know, or at least we will not know tonight. Charles Gibson never asked.

The ABC newsman dutifully asked the questions one expected on a day when the Dow plunged again – on the economy, on McCain’s plan to buy 300 billion dollars worth of bad mortgages. Then the anchorman moved to the other topic of the day: Bill Ayers. Yes, once again, since after signaling they might drop the issue, the republican ticket actually embraced it with a new vengeance. Check the Internet ad – here.

John McCain asserts that Hillary Clinton said the relationship between Ayers and Obama “should be” brought up; she actually said it  “would” – and her spokesperson proceeded to tear into McCain for manipulating a choice selection of Hillary’s words. – here.

But this is certainly not the end of the story – nor of the crowds frenzy.

The bailout week

This was bailout week, with only a bit of light entertainment: the vice-presidential debate, Thursday night.

On Monday, the bailout was re-branded the “buy-in”. It had inflated from 3 to 110 pages. Nobody seemed to like the plan, yet the leadership of the House (as well as both presidential candidates and the Bush administration) thought it would pass. John McCain was so hopeful that he took credit for it Monday morning.

Then it all crashed. The plan was voted down. The blame game started quickly, with republicans pointing to the House Speaker’s partisan speech. Barney Frank, chairman of the Finance Committee, fired back: republicans were refusing to rescue the nation’s economy “because their feelings were hurt?” At the end of the day, the markets had sunk with historical velocity. 12 missing votes translated to 777 points vanishing from the Dow. Barack Obama pleaded for calm; John McCain blamed the day’s fiasco on Barack Obama… for blaming him.

Tuesday, George Bush appealed to the nation: the situation is grave. Talks would be on-going between his administration and Congress.

Wednesday, both presidential candidates toned down their rhetoric. It also became quickly apparent that Barack Obama was benefiting from the crisis. The economy has become the paramount worry amongst Americans, and, on that issue, they trust him more than they do John McCain. The first elements of a new version of the plan started to emerge. A vote was scheduled Thursday evening. Both candidates told their supporters why they would support this bitter pill of a bill, and talked about restoring the national economy – acting “for you”, in McCain’s case; “with you”, in Obama’s case. Briefly back in Washington, both senators (and Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden) approved the plan that passed the Senate 75 votes to 24. By now, it was a 450 page document, loaded with an extra 150 billions dose of sweeteners.

Thursday, as the House came back to work, the attention shifted to the vice-presidential debate. The usual expectations game was played; some conservative attacked the referee, the debate’s host Gwenn Ifill. They just discovered she was writing a book about the new African-American leaders “in the age of Obama”. The debate turned into an exercise in parallel reality in which a somewhat restrained Joe Biden answered the moderator’s questions while a petulant Sarah Palin decided to cheerfully ignore them. In the end, the public liked Sarah Palin’s TV-friendly performance but trusted Joe Biden much more to be “a heartbeat away from the presidency”.

Friday, the House passed the economic rescue plan, and George Bush signed it immediately. The markets were not as exuberant as one might have thought. Another number casts a dark pall on the national economy: 159 000 jobs lost in September, bringing the total after 9 months of consistently bad news to 750 000 jobs lost since the beginning of the year. The approval trend for John McCain kept edging lower as Americans worried about their future.

By the weekend, with polls indicating a steady improvement for Barack Obama, the McCain team had already given up in the battleground state of Michigan. That retreat was not to be confused with a lack of fighting spirit; the republican candidate had declared he would “take off the gloves” (not that anyone noticed that he was being particularly delicate). Sarah Palin made good on his promise. She accused Barack Obama of “palling with terrorists”, a clear distortion of the examination of the future senator’s real but tenuous relation with William Ayers, a Weatherman in the sixties, now a University of Illinois professor.

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READ THIS WEEK: (a little extra from the French viewpoints)

1. Obama’s planned negociations with Russia? Vincent Jauvert, on his blog, speculates on the possibility of the US and Russia concluding an arms reduction and arms control agreement in 2009. He quotes a Russian affairs adviser to the Obama campaign, on his way to Moscow.

2. What’s the impact of the financial crisis on Hollywood? Françoise Benhamou weighs the dangers of the current financial crisis for the American movie industry (finding financing on their domestic market was already challenging; it will be worse) and the potential effect of the $ 470 million dollars sweetener inserted in the final version of the Paulson plan (it will support “small” productions and help preserve local employment).