May 24, 2007
Laughing and Crying
I feel like I've had a lot of "pinch me" moments this spring, but few of them topped opening the New York Times yesterday to see Thomas Friedman quote me in his column "Laughing and Crying" on American competitiveness. He and I have struck up a friendship of sorts after I wrote a lengthy profile of him last year in the Washingtonian and we've exchanged a bunch of emails since then as I've been working on my book. We had breakfast earlier this week because I wanted to bounce some book ideas off of him and we ended up talking a lot about the column he was mulling over—after having spent so much time last year researching how he thinks and works it was quite impressive to see it all come together in front of me.
This week's column dealt with competitiveness, immigration, and how the country isn't focusing on the "right" issues because of how Iraq has swallowed the sun in political debate. Here's where Friedman turned to me:
Here’s the sad truth: 9/11, and the failing Iraq war, have sucked up almost all the oxygen in this country — oxygen needed to discuss seriously education, health care, climate change and competitiveness, notes Garrett Graff, an editor at Washingtonian Magazine and author of the upcoming book “The First Campaign,” which deals with this theme. So right now, it’s mostly governors talking about these issues, noted Mr. Graff, but there is only so much they can do
without Washington being focused and leading.
Jack Shafer over at Slate took issue with the premise, and Wonkette took a cheap swipe at me today, but hey his column, perhaps not surprisingly, actually sold some of my books on Amazon.com this week, which is pretty good considering because well, um, it's not even done yet.
UPDATE: Here's Friedman's full column.
