Two decades after Tiananmen

Man vs. tanks in Tiananmen Square, 1989. This picture speaks for itself.

Contra Costa Times ignores District 10 candidate

I guess it’s never too early to write the end of a story, never mind that you don’t know what’s going to happen in the middle and don’t remember to include all the characters. At least, that’s the tack the Contra Costa Times seems to have taken with its coverage of the District 10 race for Congress.

I’m not going to get deeply into East Bay politics when my bailiwick really is San Francisco (and the Peninsula). And I’ve never endorsed or donated to any candidate for any office — I don’t even tell my wife how I vote — so I’m not going to start now. But I do know that newspapers shouldn’t be in the business of deciding which serious candidates for office they should tell readers about, which is why it’s disappointing that the Times seems to think that even though the contest to replace Democratic Rep. Ellen Tauscher is “crowded,” it’s OK to ignore the bid of Adriel Hampton, who’s mounting a grassroots campaign for the office.

Hampton doesn’t have the endorsement of Tauscher or Rep. George Miller of Martinez. He isn’t doing the traditional fundraising that goes with a campaign for Congress. He’s got his work cut out for him, and he knows it.

But he’s also smart and dedicated, fiercely passionate about good government that serves the people, and savvy at building community through good ideas and new technologies. I know this about Adriel Hampton because I used to work with him at the San Francisco Examiner, and I’ve followed his blog and his tweets about the role of government in society and the role of technology in government. So take my opinion with as many grains of salt as you think are appropriate, but I know I wouldn’t count him out of any contest.

I don’t agree with everything Hampton thinks. Take, for instance, his stand on religion and pharmacists, which is dead wrong: His platform, as posted online, says he “would not force pharmacists to violate their religious faiths to work at state hospitals.” Pharmacists should be free to follow their conscience, sure — to another line of work. Nobody forced them to be pharmacists and nobody forced them to take jobs that involve state funding. Don’t want to get involved with dispensing certain medications? Fine, you don’t have to. There is a wide variety of other careers where your religion and your job won’t be in conflict. Choose one.

But Hampton is a serious candidate and he deserves serious coverage from the media in his district. District 10 voters, for their part, deserve to hear about candidates other than just the successor anointed by the muckety-mucks of the Democratic Party.

For the record, Hampton did pitch me the idea of writing something about his campaign when he saw that the reporting on the contest wasn’t presenting all the candidates: As the San Francisco Chronicle recently noted, he is looking beyond the mainstream media to generate publicity for his District 10 bid. He’s a friend and former colleage, so I listened. If he had been off base, I would have told him so. But when he was political editor of the San Francisco Examiner, Hampton went out his way to include a broad range of candidates in the discussion because it was the right thing to do (as editor of the San Francisco Independent, the Examiner’s sister paper, I took part in the San Francisco Board of Supervisors District 6 endorsement meetings, so I remember it was a *very* broad range — Oy). He deserves the same treatment now. Report on his poll numbers, report on his platform, give an opinion, but don’t pretend he’s not even there.

Obama inauguration: a San Francisco perspective

I’m getting ready to head out for some of the public events in San Francisco related to today’s inuaguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States. In light of the historic nature of this inauguration, I’m pulling my daughter out of school for the day and bringing her with me. I hope waking her up with hot chocolate convinces her that today is as important as I’ve told her it is. Look for liveblogging here at PretePress.wordpress.com and Tweets from http://twitter.com/tomprete as much as I can manage. I’ll wrap up in a post later today.

Bad Vibes Bob washes up on Ocean Beach

This boat was washed up on San Francisco's Ocean Beach the morning of Jan. 8, 2009, at about Quintara Street. I don't know how long it had been there, or whether the spray-painted words "Bad vibes Bob" were there before it wrecked.

Bad, bad, bad, bad vibrations.

Note the DVD cover for Cheech and Chong's movie "Up in Smoke." A clue as to how the boat wrecked, perhaps? Some of the windows on the boat were smashed, an apparently dead motor was inside and the cabin interior was all smashed up and wet.

S.F. Fire Department truck scores triple block

On Friday I saw a San Francisco Fire Department pickup truck simultaneously block a crosswalk, a wheelchair ramp and a fire hydrant. I’ve seen many city vehicles block one of these, but to see one score all three at once is pretty remarkable. The truck also had boxed in a silver pickup truck parked behind it.

There was a funeral for a police officer or firefighter at the church half a block away, and I’m sure that if there had been a fire requiring the hydrant, someone would have moved the truck without delay. But the truck was in the intersection of 40th Avenue and Ulloa Street, and the surrounding neighborhood has some of the most abundant parking in the whole city of San Francisco. Even when the church’s school is in session and there is an event at the church, it’s usually easy to find parking within two blocks.

There were no license plates on the truck, but I did get the VIN.

SFFD pickup blocking crosswalk, wheelchair ramp and hydrant

SF Fire pickup blocking crosswalk

Observations on San Francisco’s November 2008 election, part 1

On Wednesday I attended the post-election analysis SPUR hosts after each San Francisco election, and as usual I picked up a couple of interesting pieces of information. Some of them are items that are transitory and likely to change as early as Friday, when San Francisco election officials are scheduled to do their first re-ordering of votes for local offices under the city’s ranked-choice voting system. Nevertheless, I think you’ll find many of them interesting and useful. This is only a taste — more to come in a later post.

It ain’t over ’til it’s over. As of lunchtime Wednesday, the San Francisco Department of Elections still had about 100,000 votes left to count. Even divided by SF’s 11 districts, that’s enough that it could still affect some outcomes, particularly in close district contests where the total number of votes cast is somewhere around 15,000 to 18,000.

Patriotic hipsters? Gabriel Metcalf, director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, summed up the unique quality that the Barack Obama candidacy for president brought to the entire November election season: “Never did I think I would be walking down Valencia Street and hear hipsters singing the national anthem.”

It’s just a jump to the left. According to David Latterman of Fall Line Analytics, some San Francisco supervisor districts have experienced a significant shift, becoming more liberal. Latterman, along with Prof. Richard DeLeon of San Francisco State University, produces the Progressive Voter Index, a measurement on a scale of 0 to 100 of how “progressive” — or liberal — parts of San Francisco are. The PVI is relative only to other neighborhoods in the city and doesn’t measure how progressive areas are in comparison with any areas outside of San Francisco. Latterman says that some neighborhoods, including District 1 and, most notably, District 11, have become significantly more progressive than they were two years ago.

Dems halt slide. According to Latterman, the Democratic Party increased the number of voters registered under its banner by about 2 percent this year. That’s a pretty good bump for the Dems, particularly in light of the fact that they had been steadily losing voters over the past few elections, as more and more people registered as “decline to state” voters.

GOP registration down again. While the Democrats added voters this time, San Francisco Republicans (yes, they do exist) continued to lose registered voters.

Making sense of San Francisco’s Nov. 2008 election

If your head’s in a spin trying to take in the results of yesterday’s election and you live in San Francisco, take a long lunch this afternoon and pop over to SPUR’s post-election analysis. Expert political numbers man David Latterman and the witty and astute Alex Clemens will explain what happened at the polls yesterday — and how it fits into the context of local electoral politics.

The focus of SPUR’s election analyses usually is on San Francisco, but this time it’s certain to include discussions of the state and federal elections as well.

This regular event has grown over the years into a required piece of post-election analysis for everyone interested in San Francisco elections, so expect a crowded room along with unique insights.

It starts at 12:30 p.m. and runs to 2 p.m., tacking on an additional 30 minutes this time to handle the huge ballot. Five bucks for non-members and free for all SPUR members. San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, 312 Sutter St. at Grant Avenue (an easy walk from BART or the Muni Metro, with limited bike parking right out front). Note that this event takes place not in SPUR’s offices, but rather on the second-floor meeting room of the World Affairs Council.

SPUR

David Latterman’s Fall Line Analytics

Alex Clemens’ Barbary Coast Consulting

Grading the second McCain-Obama debate

U.S. presidential candidates Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama met Tuesday for the second of three scheduled debates in the general election. Who won? Did the candidates accomplish what they needed to do?

My initial impression of this town hall-style event was that it was uncommonly dull, and I’m the sort of person who gets all worked up reading an environmental-impact report.

Barack Obama, I knew, didn’t have to wow anyone last night. Unless the world around him changes radically in the next couple of weeks, Obama’s mission is to keep stimulating voters who’ve already decided to support him and to deny McCain the ability to rest. Obama needs to be vigilant against positive poll numbers lulling him into becoming complacent, of course, but he also needs to watch against trying to push so hard against McCain that he takes unnecessary chances. Still, Obama seemed off his game Tuesday, and I think he spent too much time counterattacking McCain instead of steering perceptions in the direction he wanted.

What’s interesting to me is that I don’t think it was McCain’s debate performance at the debate that forced Obama into a reactive stance: McCain was jumpy, vague and awkward, and he didn’t effectively make a case for a McCain presidency. Instead, Obama seemed to have decided before the debate to respond to and counterattack against McCain, and it didn’t come off well.

I’ve written before that I think McCain conservatism is much better for our nation than the Bush brand, so it was with some regret that I watched McCain’s ineffective performance last night.

All right, so what grades do the candidates get?

Keep in mind that I’m grading two different things in this analysis. First, I grade the candidates on their performance in the debate, looking at it as a stand-alone contest that could be reduced to box scores like a baseball game. This tells who “won” or “lost” the debate but doesn’t get into what that means for the campaign as a whole. Second, I assess the debate not as a single night’s contest, but rather as part of the continuum of the campaign. In other words, how does the debate fit into the context of the race as a whole? The candidate who “loses” the debate doesn’t necessarily hurt his campaign, and a candidate who “wins” doesn’t necessarily help himself going forward.

Overall grades on the debate itself

John McCain C-plus

Barack Obama C-plus

The second McCain-Obama presidential debate was so boring I’m not going to spend much time on the debate itself.

As far as McCain’s performance went, he got in a number of good points and clearly won a couple of the questions, but overall he didn’t produce a memorable narrative. In the first debate he gave a good narrative of himself, but this time he couldn’t articulate a narrative of how a President McCain would turn around the American economy. There were bits here and there, but nothing that came together in a memorable way.

If all an undecided voter saw of Barack Obama was Tuesday’s debate, he would be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. He wasn’t awful: Like McCain, Obama got in some points and dominated some of the questions. He also did better according to the gut-check that CNN’s Approve-O-Meter provided — strikingly better among women. But there still was no there there.

Grades on the debate in the broader context of the campaign

John McCain F

Barack Obama C-plus

Palin-Biden vice presidential debate time is here

U.S. vice-presidential nominees Sen. Joseph Biden and Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska square off tonight in their only scheduled debate of the campaign for the White House. What do the candidates need to do? What mistakes must they avoid? What should the astute observer look for?

Palin-Biden debate strategy

It may be that for both Palin and Biden, the best thing to do is as little as possible.

If I were advising either one of the candidates, my advice would be to forget about trying to win. Losing this debate by being cautious will be far less costly to either one of the campaigns than committing a memorable, quotable, sound bite-able blunder. It’s much better for them to be conservative and take a few hits than to be drawn into a vulnerable position.

Some of the talking heads and consultants on TV may say that both candidates have to play to win, that they have to prove they could be president if called upon, but I disagree. The news cycle just won’t let this debate live long enough to matter much (again, unless one or both of the candidates commits a huge blunder). On Friday, the U.S. House of Representatives will vote on a controversial Wall Street bailout bill (now stuffed full of pork-barrel goodies by the Senate), and Friday also will bring a new batch of unemployment numbers. This all adds up to the fact that unless something spectacular comes out of tonight’s debate, the news media will be on to the next topic in just a few days, if not sooner.

The debate may still make the news on Monday, particularly if there’s good tape from the Sunday-morning talk shows to use as follow-up material. But the next debate between Barack Obama and John McCain is Tuesday, and even without that new debate, both campaigns are capable of pushing some new story — any new story — hard enough that by Tuesday, the debate will be way down the list.

Vice presidential debate: what to watch for

In spite of my belief that it would be in the interests of both Joe Biden and Sarah Palin to take a conservative approach to the debate, this is a very highly anticipated TV event that will draw a big audience. So, what should viewers expect to see tonight?

Palin’s awkward silences, inability to answer simple questions with specificity and tendency to dodge inquiries with folksy, tail-chasing palaver — strikingly reminiscent of President George W. Bush’s well-known verbal floundering, and captured artfully by Tina Fey — have become the stuff of pop culture. If Biden can manage to just leave her alone, it would seem that Palin has plenty of rope and knows how to tie her own knots.

On the other hand, some very successful politicians (Ronald Reagan comes to mind) have made pat, easily-remembered statements their stock in trade. And as I wrote earlier regarding Palin’s speech at the Republican National Convention, the Alaska governor seems to possess a real talent for enthralling the party base this way.

The bottom line for Palin is that I will be surprised if she doesn’t stick fairly closely to a rehearsed script peppered with a couple of the kind of lines that supporters see as down-home zingers and that make detractors roll their eyes.

Biden’s tendency to ramble on is almost as well-known as Palin’s inability to give a substantive answer. On the other hand, he’s a bright guy who knows foreign policy as well as anybody in the Senate — including John McCain. And he’s no stranger to the rough-and-tumble required to get laws passed. To ask him to not go after Sarah Palin is like asking a fighting bull not to go after a cape-waving first-time matador with a gammy leg. But he can’t go after her — there’s no way for him to win a contest of public perception, even if he gets her on the facts. If he attacks anyone, it has to be John McCain.

I expect Biden to be polite to Palin, but not overly deferential. If she says something stupid, he might quickly say that he’s not sure what she meant, but then he’ll quickly move on to his own answer, which will be more succinct than usual.

I would be really surprised if the Obama people let Biden go out on stage without knowing more or less what he was going to say, so I don’t expect him to come out with any wild statements on policy. However, his tendency to improvise the filler material around policy statements, such as when he said that FDR addressed the nation on TV after the 1929 stock market crash, may still produce some interesting moments.

The Padin-Biden vice-presidential debate time is set for 9 p.m. EDT, 6 p.m. PDT.

(Almost) everything you know about television and politics is wrong

Most of us think we know where televised debates fit into a campaign for elected office. They can remake a failing campaign or break a glass house. They provide iconic moments by which history remembers the participants. They show us just how shallow our political process has become. Right? Wrong.

Or, at least, largely wrong, according to Bruce Carlson’s podcast My History Can Beat Up Your Politics.

After watching Friday’s debate between U.S. presidential candidates Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain, I listened to an episode of the fascinating My History podcast covering the impact of television, including televised debates, on the American political process. According to Carlson, TV hasn’t cheapened modern politics, in part because earlier media accomplished that task already. And as for debates making or breaking candidates? Seldom true, Carlson says. All in all, it’s a fascinating listen that may help put the next few weeks of the presidential campaign in a historical context

Click here for the MHCBUYP episode on television, politics and debates.

Click here to go to My History Can Beat Up Your Politics on iTunes.

I should say that I’m not really clear on who Carlson is, exactly — or what makes him an expert in either history or politics. Below is how Carlson replied when I asked him about how he knows the things he says he does. His podcast and opinions undoubtedly are fascinating, and I listen to his podcast regularly, but make up your own mind about how reliable you think his facts are.

“I work outside of politics and history, and my college degree was in literature. I have no training but a lifetime of spending bizzare amounts of time in the public libraries reading old books on history and politics. I suppose. My observations then, must stand on their own.”

– Bruce Carlson