Entries for November 2008

By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

This is why I love the New York Times.

Last week, as its stock dipped toward the price of a Sunday paper and the company slashed its dividend, it was reported that Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, 28, the son of the publisher, was returning to New York to go to work at the mother ship.

It was noteworthy news. What was especially revealing was where young Sulzberger was returning from.

One might think that, in these days when the newspaper industry is in a crisis, bleeding jobs and folding print editions, the Times would be grooming its future leaders by placing them with Google or Apple or Netflix—you know, some company that knows how to make money online.

Not the Times. Young Sulzberger will be leaving Portland, Ore., where he spent the last two or three years working at the Oregonian, a wonderful, quirky little newspaper known for its belief in the majesty of the lyrically written word.

It was important to the Sulzbergers not that Arthur be grounded in the manipulation of hedge funds or sales of consumer appliances but in journalism: in the hard, sacred work of bringing news to the world in honest and well-crafted dispatches, without fear or favor.

There will be turkey tomorrow, brought in under fire by helicopter, if necessary, and served with sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce and gravy. The military does Thanksgiving well.

There will be phone calls home; a lot of messages sent on the Internet; much loneliness, some fear.

Back here in the states, in the neighborhoods that surround the big military bases in Texas or California or Georgia—or anyplace where a guard unit has been deployed—there will be parents showing kids a photograph of a foreign landscape, with mom or dad, in uniform, maybe in Kevlar, maybe with a weapon.

In other homes, it will be a holiday of piercing sadness. The empty space at dinner will belong to one of the 5,000 who never made it home.

They have been at it for seven years now, and there is no immediate end in sight. And, so far, we have not forgotten their bravery. They are beloved, and honored, by the folks they protect, and serve.

And if our efforts to welcome them home, to heal their wounds and comfort them, are yet imperfect, let's resolve, tomorrow, that we will keep on trying to make it better. And never to take their sacrifice for granted.

Geez. Who would have thought that the first black president of the United States was going to be so...boring.

A sensible cost-effective way. Budget reform is not an option; it's a necessity. This isn't about big government or small government; it's about building a smarter government.

And today's typically excellent, well-qualified, smart-as-a-whip appointee: Peter Orszag of Brookings, Princeton, and the London School of Economics to be the White House budget director.

It looks like the president-elect knows what he's doing. He has certainly got the presidential podium thing down. He had some moments today, and it was great, earlier in the month, when he called himself a mutt. That was pretty funny.

And I suppose, in these troubled times, that smart and boring can be good.

It's not like I miss Sarah Palin.

Well, OK, maybe a little.

I'm gonna give President-elect Obama an A+ for the prose of governing, and a C- for the poetry.

Who would have thought that the guy who's been criticized for the past two years as naught but a sweet-talking celebrity would perform so well in the governing process, and come up so short on the inspirational rhetoric?

By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

Preparing for the coming big debate about taxes, conservatives are scheming to redefine President-elect Barack Obama's proposed tax cuts as...welfare!

The murmur began toward the end of the 2008 campaign, when John McCain's supporters started whispering that Obama's tax plan was nothing but a big government giveaway to the loafing masses because it included refundable tax credits.

Now Newt Gingrich has picked up the charge, in a column in today's Wall Street Journal. Refundable income tax credits are naught but a federal dole in disguise, he says:

I had a visit from my dead yesterday.

It is, perhaps, an occupational hazard for biographers. The dead come by and haunt you.

You show up at an archive, open a box of documents and meet them, in the graceful, hopeful handwriting of their youth; follow them through the tempests of their love affairs and their personal and professional triumphs, and meet their end with them, as they recount, in shaky scrawls, the terrors of old age and onrushing death.

Then you pack up their letters and crumbling photographs, send the box back to storage, and try to get back to your life. And most days you can. And some days you can't. Some days the dead won't go.

Yesterday it was Mary Field, a young woman who, in the earliest years of the 20th century, left a stifling, dull Midwestern home and a tyrannical father and went to Chicago to work as a social activist and join the ranks of early feminists. They called themselves "new women." She fell in love with Clarence Darrow, had an affair, broke it off, married another man, ruined her daughter's life, and died, well into my lifetime, old and lonely and terrified, calling Darrow's name.

Mary was in my thoughts yesterday, conveying the chill of mortality.

I fled work and hiked some miles in the last hours of daylight.

Tom Friedman's thoughts on Hillary Clinton's prospective appointment as Barack Obama's secretary of state are typically provocative.

And, in other times, I might agree with him. There is no denying the benefits of a close partnership between a president and a secretary of state, nor the dangers of a flawed or distant relationship.

But these are not other times. Obama is inheriting one stupendous mess, and an American government—from State to Homeland Security to FEMA to Interior to Social Security to Energy and on and on down the list—in dire need of reform.

Obama doesn't need a team of rivals in his cabinet so that, with Machiavellian guile, he can keep his enemies close.

What he needs is a team of political and corporate superstars who, whatever their status—rivals, friends, or strangers—can immediately start fixing stuff.