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!

Change has begun

Back in New York, waking up to the fact that it’s finally real… and that the new reality is already taking hold, with the first executive orders reversing the worse of the Bush policies.

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…

Erica Jong, not lost in translation

Note to celebs: sensational there will be sensational here. Latest case in point: Erica Jong’s pronouncement that “blood will run in the streets” if Barack Obama loses the election. She was talking to the Italian Corriere della Serra. For good measure, she talks of a “second civil war” and explains that “President Bush has recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets”. She adds that “voting machines are rigged”. For gossip value, she informs the Italian public that Jane Fonda “cried all night” from stress and that “Ken Follett and Susan Cheever are extremely worried”.

Would she have spoken in the same manner to an American media? Probably not.

It’s the pain and joy of writing for the foreign press.

The pain is, if there are no American interests at stake (a product or a treaty to sell to the overseas audience), most Americans have no interest in talking to the foreign media. There is one notable exception: the British press, often used as a conduit for material that would not be first printed in the US. Latest example: Barack Obama’s aunt Zeituni’s story. Otherwise the operating rule is, in the memorable words of an American elected official: “Why should I speak to you, your readers don’t vote for me”.

On the other hand, when they do accept to talk, there is always the latent impression that foreigners don’t know much, and thus need to be properly impressed with simplified or exaggerated statements. There is also the assumption that nobody at home will hear of those declarations, thus the liberating experience of expressing oneself in an unguarded manner. That’s the joy of it: occasionally, people will actually speak their minds without mental reservations. For better or worse.

… and then because we’re in an increasingly Internet-ed world, someone will read it, and translate it, and it will be picked up by the bloggers or the “main stream media”, and word will spread back in English, back to the sender.

Oh, Charlie “McCain” Brown…

… will you regret inviting Sarah “Lucy” Palin to play with you?

Mr. Fish captures the feeling with a wink to Charles Schultz in this cartoon, and today the New York Times publishes a poll that shows 59% of Americans do not think that the Alaska governor is ready to be vice-president, up from 50% at the beginning of the month. (Complete poll results here).

The Twitter terror

I thought the only thing one had to fear from Twitter were the compulsive texters, those who can not pass up on sharing a single movement or a single thought with the rest of us.

It turns out I should have been much, much more worried, according to a draft Army intelligence report published by the Association of concerned scientists, quoted by “Wired” (here). Twitter could be used to “coordinate terror attacks”. Like any major technology could, possibly? Never mind…

The part that caught my eye is of course the paragraph in which an astute intelligence specialist notes that “Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audience”.

I fit more than one of these categories, I’ll let your imagination wander… But so do the “others” thrown in for good measure at the end of the list. Could these “others” be the congressmen and senators who are now officially allowed to tweet away at their base? 39 of them already seized that opportunity – check here if your member of Congress or your Senator is a Twitter-er.

And there’s more political twittering coming soon, if this blogger (Allison Fine, of “A. Fine Blog”) has her way – and she definitely has a point – and if the network becomes the instant alert for problems at the polls on election day.

Why the GOP is not keen on those “new voters”

Could this explain the GOP obsession with new voter registrations?

An ABC/Washington Post poll shows that Americans who will vote for the first time this year favor Barack Obama by a huge margin (73% – as opposed to 26% for John McCain). By contrast, 50% of those who have voted in previous elections favor Barack Obama; 47%, John McCain.

John McCain ahead in three countries… none of them the US

Today’s polls show John McCain trailing Barak Obama by ten points (NBC/Wall Street Journal, as well as Gallup)…. but  all is not lost.

John McCain is ahead by eight points in Georgia.

No, not the Atlanta Georgia – the Tbilissi Georgia, the one he was ready to fight for this summer. He could get elected in the Philippines as well. Or, just barely, in Lao.

And the rest of the world, as represented by this poll? It’s voting for Barack Obama who enjoys a popularity not seen since the Clinton era. He has George Bush to thank for that.

Plumbing the week

This was the week of the last debate, when John McCain asserted that “the very fabric of democracy” was put in danger by ACORN’s less than perfect efforts to register new voters and hoisted “Joe the Plumber” to national fame.

On Monday, Barack Obama started the week with a 10 point advantage in the polls. “Right where we want him“, said John McCain. Oh, really?

On Tuesday, John McCain retooled his economic message, and introduced the country to Joe the Plumber and attacked Barack Obama for talking of “spreading the wealth”. The republican candidate also gave new emphasis to his guilt-by-associations attacks on Barack Obama, and insisted that a massive electoral fraud was about to be perpetrated by ACORN.

On Wednesday, John McCain had his best debate performance ever, but that was still not enough to close the gap. Reluctant to give the victory to Barack Obama as the polls had, he declared: “Joe the Plumber is the winner”.

The next day, of course, we learned that Joe the Plumber was neither a Joe nor a plumber, and that he was a republican voter. We also learned that his last name was misspelled on his electoral registration – which added a dose of irony to the Ohio republican party’s legal proceedings regarding the 200 000 names of local voters that did not seem to match the public database.

On Friday, the Supreme Court sided with the Ohio secretary of State in charge of elections, a democrat. The federal appeals court was not competent in the matter; its order was void. However, that same day, the information was leaked that the FBI had followed up on the request by several republican member of Congress to open an investigation on ACORN.

On Saturday, a lawyer for the Obama campaign also wrote Attorney General Mukasey – this time to ask that these maneuvers by the RNC be examined, and added to the task of the independent prosecutor currently looking into possible indictments after the firing of US prosecutors by the Bush administration.

On Sunday, Colin Powell made the most complete case for his choice to vote for Barack Obama… and a total indictment of John McCain: “unsure” on the economical crisis, with questionable judgment as he selected Sarah Palin “incompetent to be President” as his running mate. The centrist republican hits every note that might resonate with independent undecided voters: his anxiety regarding appointments to the Supreme Court, the tone and the divisiveness of the republican campaign. He denounced in particular the vitriolic “robocalls” that the McCain/Palin campaign had launched in swing States.

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

President Sarkozy’s visit to Camp David (with the president of the European commission) gets more play in the French press, obviously, than it does in the US. The financial summit to be organized in November, after the American presidential election, will be the ultimate lame-duck experience for President Bush, a fact not entirely lost on the vocal Europeans.

The internal investigation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s conduct at the IMF (revealed by the always zealous Wall Street Journal, when it comes to such matters) also gets a different play – if only because the notion of private and public life are markedly different in each country… or should I write “were different”, considering the increased “pipolisation” – as in “people-ization” of French politics by Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy? In this case, DSK’s wife is famous in her own right. She’s a well-known journalist; she writes a blog on which she thanked those who sent her sympathetic messages and assured them that, as far as she and her husband is concerned, this brief incident is already in the past. She hopes for swift conclusions from the investigation, a desire that can only be shared by the many that think that, in the midst of the most consequential economical crisis in recent history, the IMF has more pressing issues to consider.

Joe the plumber, vetted just as well as Sarah Palin was?

So “Joe the Plumber” is not a Joe after all… He’s at best a “Sam”, as in “Samuel J. Wulzerbacher”. And he’s not really a plumber either. And he is in no imminent danger of being hit by the tax increase Barack Obama proposes for those who earn more than $250 000 a year. Well, at least we know he’s a republican, thanks to his vote in the republican primary last March – we won’t nitpick on the fact that, while the Ohio republican party is frantic about the risks of registration fraud, he’s actually registered to vote as “Wolzerbacher”.

It just begs the question: who, in the McCain team, suggested turning “Joe the Plumber” into the star of the presidential debate (actually, its “winner”, according to John McCain) and did not do a basic check before casting the bold bald-headed unknown under the national spotlight? Ah, must be that same person who thought it would be fine to check Sarah Palin’s possible liabilities after she would have been announced as McCain’s running mate.