The News & TeleGraff

The Audacity of Hope

So an email just arrived from Hillary Clinton thanking me for all of my support: "I want to personally thank you for all you've done to support our campaign. Your continuing commitment over the past months to the values we share means so much to me."

As a special thank you gift for my undying, unending, unyielding support for All Things Hillary, she wanted to send me a Hillary for President bumper sticker.

The catch? If you go to the website, it says the bumper sticker will arrive in six to eight weeks, meaning late May or early June—or roughly three to five weeks after the North Carolina primary, which is widely seen as a possible end to the primary season. I guess she's planning on winning the nomination—or sending out a lot of bumper stickers a couple of weeks after losing.

Two Newspaper Family

So I'm the exact reverse of the media trend right now: I just signed up for my second hard-copy dead-tree newspaper. I subscribed last week to the Wall Street Journal, which I've been reading more and more over the last year at work, and I think it's just a fantastic newspaper.

The amazing thing: It just has much more interesting articles than either the Washington Post or the New York Times, even though I don't particularly care about the paper's main industry—Wall Street. On any given day, I'll read a much higher percentage of the articles in the WSJ than even in the WaPo, which is my home town paper and covers the city that I'm supposed to cover. I think that the WSJ just has a much more interesting outlook on the world and covers more interesting stories. The A-hed, that odd quirky story in the middle of the WSJ's front page, is always interesting but I rarely read a front-page feature in the Post. That's especially true of the columnists—I read all of the "In the Lead" column yesterday on Facebook's new COO in the Journal and always read the C1 columnists like Carl Bialik ("The Numbers Guy") but I more often than not skip over the Post's columnists, except for Marc Fisher (of course).

The true pain for me? I pay something like $240 a year for the Post and am paying $99 a year for the Journal.

Take the Water(ford) out of Ireland?

News today that Waterford Crystal could "quit" Ireland if the government refused to back a new round of loans there: In a statement, Waterford said it "believes that it is desirable for Ireland to maintain Waterford Crystal in Ireland. It further believes that the commitment of its investors deserves the support of the government, which is being asked for a guarantee for a three-year period, not a loan or a grant."

I argued in Helsinki last month that the huge multinational companies will increasingly pose a challenge to national sovereignty in coming years because of the incredible economic bargaining power they'll have over countries—especially smaller countries. If Nokia, which accounts for nearly 5 percent of the GDP of Finland, decided it wanted to leave the county, can you imagine what Finland would be willing to give up to keep it there? What about Toyota leaving Japan for Korea? Or Ford deciding to move to Canada to save its health care bills?

Here's a smaller case with Waterford. I know Ohio, Pennsylvania, or any of a dozen other U.S. states or countries would bend over backwards to attract Waterford.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Will this be one of the first economic blackmail cases of the 21st Century?

Bitter

Would it be that terrible for us to admit that Barack Obama had some truth in his statements? Howard Dean ran into similar trouble in 2004 when he was talking about people in the South who wave the Confederate flag.

Why is it that every time that Democrats try to talk thoughtfully and intelligently about the challenges facing rural America (a part of the nation I proudly call home), they get called "elitist" or "condescending"? What about acknowledging that rural Americans really do have different values and, more importantly, value systems and that a not insignificant amount of that difference is accounted for by economic reasons? And that's not something that one can address simply by taking a really lame shot of whiskey.

Superdelegates and Howard Dean

One more superdelegate goes for Barack Obama. I keep saying that the superdelegates want to break in a big way for Obama. They are, by and large, the same people who backed and elected Howard Dean as chair of the Party in 2005. They're grassroots-sy and passionate about a new direction than the old, beginning-of-the-decade 17-state strategy. They're natural Barack Obama people, but just as during the DNC chair race in 2005 when there needed to be widespread support for Dean before they broke for him en masse, they're going to wait until the Clintons can't hurt them anymore. There's no love lost on either side.

I wonder if Nancy Larson is just the beginning of a wave over the next two weeks?

[And another reason why Hillary won't win.]

Books

I realized that I run in odd circles when I was packing to fly to Tampa on Thursday and filled my bag only with books that my friends have published this winter. having now read them both, I recommend both: Love Marriage, by Sugi Ganeshananthan, one of my best friends from college, and Blood Kin, by a friend's roommate.

[This post is cross-posted from my first Tumblr blog, where you can follow more of my life if so interested.]

Princeton

I've been meaning to blog about this amusing poster from my talk at the end of March at Princeton. I was talking on my cell outside the building where I was speaking when this girl came up to me and whispered, "Garrett Graff?" I nodded, not used to being recognized in public. She then whispered that she had drawn my poster and so recognized me. I had no idea what she was talking about until I went inside and saw this:

And then I knew. The challenge is that, except for the hair, I'm not sure how good of a job this does in capturing me.