Two decades after Tiananmen

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

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

Grading the first McCain-Obama debate

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

Overall grades on the debate itself:

John McCain B-minus

Barack Obama B-minus

I thought the debate was a wash, if considered on its own. Obama looked much more comfortable than McCain did, but McCain seemed more knowledgeable about foreign policy, the main topic of the evening.

I was struck by the fact that whenever McCain attacked Obama, the CNN “Approve-O-Meter” showed a noticeable plunge in approval among independent voters, much more so than when Obama attacked McCain.

What about the things I previously said the candidates would do, or ought to do?

McCain did very well. He didn’t get too deep into the economy, but conveyed the impression that he was mighty mad at somebody. He displayed his expertise and experience in foreign policy to good effect. On the other hand, while Obama usually is the one who seems to be talking down to McCain, McCain was the one who came off as a condescending ass by repeatedly saying Obama “doesn’t understand.”

Obama did a great job of getting to the point in many of his answers, even phrasing his responses as numbered lists, which people love. He gave the short answer, and only then went back to get into the details. However, I think Obama missed out by not going back to the economy for context even when the questions turned to foreign policy. He also didn’t manage to provoke McCain’s temper, but that would have been merely gravy for Obama, so I don’t think it mattered that much.

Grades on the success of the debate in the broader context of the campaign:

John McCain B-minus

Barack Obama B-plus

For John McCain, the debate capped off a spectacularly awful two weeks for his campaign. For a week and a half after Sept. 15, when Lehman Brothers went belly-up and McCain said that the fundamentals of the American economy were strong, the Arizona senator came out with a different message about the economy every day. And when he finally did take clear action, it was to “suspend” his campaign and hustle back to Washington, there to insert himself into a Wall Street bailout plan under consideration by a committee of which the senator is not a member — with questionable impact, at best. On top of that, his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, floundered embarrassingly in a one-on-one interview with Katie Couric, who’s not exactly a crushing interrogator (I can think of a number of reporters I know personally who would have eaten Palin for lunch, then picked their teeth with the cast-off bones of minor PR flunkies before retiring to the corner bar for an afternoon of dice and cocktails).

What McCain needed was either an exceptional performance on his part, or a major stumble from Obama. Instead, the mostly pretty good performance from McCain was muddied by fact that Obama held his own in spite of clearly being less expert — and less experienced — than McCain, and Obama appeared every bit as presidential as McCain did. So McCain did well, but not well enough.

Simply keeping up with McCain on foreign policy, on the other hand, was an accomplishment for Obama. It would have been a coup for him to make serious points against the senior senator in a debate centered on one of McCain’s strongest subjects. Obama didn’t do that, and he failed to turn the conversation toward the economy as aggressively as he probably should have. Nevertheless, bad news about the economy generally favors out-party candidate Obama, which gives him a better context for the debate. With this context in mind, because Obama turned in a passably presidential performance and kept his opponent from establishing a clear victory, the debate turned out better for him than for McCain.

Other views

For an interesting alternative opinion on the debate, check out the analysis by San Francisco-based communication guru Bert Decker. Decker looks at the debate from an almost purely impressionistic perspective, which is in line with his expertise is in the communication of trust. That is, Decker believes that a speaker must convey believability before a listener can even really hear what the speaker is saying.

Also interesting: Two polls taken Friday night — which means they’re imperfect empirical research because their samples included only people whom they could reach on Friday night, so take them with a little salt — put Obama significantly ahead in overall impression. Poll respondents also said they thought Obama was more in touch with the problems of their own lives than was McCain. An Associated Press story on the polls is here.

Parting Shots

CNN’s Approve-O-Meter — or whatever the network called its approval ticker that appeared at the bottom of the screen during the debate — failed for three reasons. First, it was too hard to read the legend on the left explaining that the red line signified approval from Republicans in a selected audience, the blue line stood for Democrats and the green line stood for independents. Second, it was impossible to tell whether the lines, as they emerged from the right side of the display, signified results in real time or were delayed by some unknown length of time. Third, the graph was zoomed out too far to see the separation among the three lines, so it was annoyingly difficult to see when approval ratings changed. The overall result was just dull. It would have been better to have a three-bar graph showing a zero line, and colored bars extending above or below the zero line to indicate approval or disapproval from the three groups. This not only would make it easier for viewers to detect the differences among the groups, but would better represent real-time impressions of what the candidates were saying at the moment.