1/ From Michelle Cottle’s “External Flame,” at The New Republic this week:
[T]his alliance may be an even shrewder move for [Caroline] Kennedy Schlossberg than for [Barack] Obama. It’s been 45 years since the fall of Camelot, and the family brand has begun to fade. A growing portion of the electorate was born after the deaths of John and Bobby and has a tough time relating to the Kennedy fixation of its elders. Under such conditions, what’s a committed custodian of the family legacy to do? Hitch her clan’s wagon to the hottest political star in decades. With a little luck, even as that old Camelot magic rubs off on Obama, the candidate’s energy and relevance will help sustain the Kennedy brand for a little longer.
2/ From my February Chicago Tribune article (PDF) on the Kennedy Obama endorsements:
The Kennedy name is the gold standard in Democratic politics, and it will remain so as long as John Kennedy’s assassination is a part of living memory. But the youngest people to vote for him in 1960 are 68 today, and seven out of eight Americans are too young to remember him as anything more than a historical figure, no more or less real than Roosevelt, Lincoln or Jefferson.
Edward Kennedy himself is 75. Besides his son, no third-generation Kennedy holds national office.
And thus, when Kennedy said Obama would not be trapped by the patterns of the past, it might not be because he was comically or tragically unaware of his own or his family’s position. It might be exactly the opposite: Perhaps he was too aware of that position. If that’s the case, then last week’s endorsements should be seen as an acknowledgment of just how fragile the patterns of the past can be.
By midnight Tuesday [i.e. February 5], after more than 20 states have weighed in on the Obama-Clinton race, we’ll have a better sense of how the Kennedy calculus affects the election in the
short run….But in the long run, I wouldn’t be surprised if the endorsements do as much to help the Kennedys as they do to help Obama. Casting Obama in the Kennedy mold offers him authority, but it also offers the Kennedys a future, a way to keep the mystique alive.
QUICK UPDATE (7/1): Don’t worry, the irony is not lost on me.
Lured by the opening reference to Leo Strauss, I uncharacteristically managed to make it through William Kristol’s extraordinary Times column this morning. Here’s how it begins:
Half a century ago the philosopher Leo Strauss remarked that the passage in which the Declaration of Independence proclaims its self-evident truths “has frequently been quoted, but, by its weight and its elevation, it is made immune to the degrading effects of the excessive familiarity which breeds contempt and of misuse which breeds disgust.”
What’s extraordinary about the column is that Kristol doesn’t misuse Strauss. Most people who cite that quotation from Natural Right and History cite it as evidence of Strauss’s goodwill toward American democracy. But of course it’s nothing of the kind; in fact it’s the opening salvo in a long, dense, and often deceptive attack on the philosophical and political justifications of democracy itself.
Which is why I found it fairly amazing to see Kristol follow the Straussian line through to its nasty anti-democratic end, right there in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times:
You’ve got to appreciate this little spot of self-aware meta-narcissism in Michael Powell’s NYT profile of Barack Obama today, a nice example of the straight-faced Times humor that Hendrik Hertzberg called out a few weeks back:
One of the curiosities about Mr. Obama is his professed lack of interest in the writers who pore over that life, trying to deconstruct his fractured family and geography. He claims not to read profiles that pile high in his plane.
The complete absence of country music on the whiplashing summer-music chart New York put together last week is even less surprising than the New York Times’s similar sin of omission a few weeks ago. And yet if New York is really, as I suggested to a friend the other day, the People magazine for people like us, you’d think they might try to imagine an “us” with a little less constricted sense of what counts as summer sonic fun.
There’s something to Jane Dark’s suggestion that these blind spots are all about class, but I don’t know if that fully explains it. I mean, hell, in every respect save disposable income and zip code, I’m at the demographic heart of the class their ads are gunning for, right down to Dr. Hakimi’s Art of Oral Harmony. But there I go again, listening to—and, shh, even liking!–country music.
Not that I’m too worried; we all, somehow, find our own ways to survive the diktats of glossy-magazine taste. But still you have to wonder what it’s going to take to make country music safe for the architects of mediated cool, when even the high-profile defections of Jack White, Robert Plant, Jewel, Jessica Simpson, and Jon Bon Jovi couldn’t do it.
You have to wonder, that is, until it hits you: Hootie!
Darius Rucker will save us all.
From Laura Bush’s profile of Khaled Hosseini for Time:
Bush, an activist on behalf of Afghan women, is First Lady of the U.S.
There’s a pretty surprising mistake in today’s NYT story about yesterday’s interest-rate cut. The offending sentence comes in the second paragraph of Steven R. Weisman’s article:
The Fed’s action brought the federal funds rate — the rate it charges banks for overnight loans — to 2 percent, from 2.25 percent, the lowest level since November 2004.
The problem is that clause between em-dashes. The “rate [the Fed] charges banks for overnight loans” is not the federal funds rate, it’s the discount rate. The federal funds rate is the rate that banks charge each other for overnight loans, which rate the Fed is able to control through open-market operations.
As the headline of this post indicates, I was about to put this down to a brief slip of editorial attention, but looking back through the NYT archive, it looks like a fairly common error on the paper’s part. Here’s a similar sentence from an article Weisman wrote a few days ago:
The committee also lowered the federal funds rate, the rate it charges banks for overnight loans, by three-quarters of a point, to the current 2.25 percent.
And here’s another from an article in March, this one written by Edmund L. Andrews:
The central bank lowered its federal funds rate — the rate it charges banks for overnight loans — by three-quarters of a percentage point, to 2.25 percent, and left the door open to additional rate cuts in the months ahead.
In case you don’t trust me on this, here’s how Reuters (correctly) described the federal funds rate in a story about yesterday’s cut:
The central bank’s action takes the bellwether federal funds rate target, which banks charge each other for overnight loans, to 2 percent — the lowest since December 2004.
And for good measure, here’s the AP’s version:
The latest Fed move brought the federal funds rate — the interest that banks charge each other — down to 2.25 percent, the lowest since late 2004.
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