Erik Emery Hanberg

Michael Medved had an interesting presentation last night at Theatre on the Square. He recently wrote about "The 10 Big Lies About America" and during the presentation he covered three of the lies he covered in his book.

One--that America is in an irreversible state of moral decline I've long believed to be false, and I'm glad Medved argued against it as passionately as he did.

The second--that America is "uniquely" responsible for slavery and that slavery in the US was worse than anywhere else in the world ... I found to be a bit of a strawman's argument. I don't think I've really heard anyone say that the US is "uniquely" responsible for slavery in a way that other nations with slaves were not. And a passing knowledge of what was done to slaves in South America, for example, would disprove that slavery in the US was the most cruel form of it, horrific as it was. In short, this is a lie, yes, but not a lie I've heard a whole lot of people espouse.

And finally--Medved did make me re-think Ranked Choice Voting, though that wasn't his goal. The "lie," he said, is that America needs a third-party in order to challenge the stranglehold the Democrats and Republicans have on the country/politics/etc. I've never believed that, but a lot of my support for RCV comes from a notion that it's a good thing to make third-party candidates more viable. Medved threw at me some food for thought on whether that's true, and whether it's not better to have those activists fight to get their voice heard within their parties instead of in an ideologically pure third-party. I'll be thinking on that one for a bit, but I'm tending to agree.

Anyway, I certainly did not support many (most?) of Medved's arguments or positions. But he was smart as a tack, funny, and a good speaker. And, as you can see above with RCV, gave me something to chew on later. So I'd call that a pretty successful event, though having 130 people show up, including lots of new faces to City Club, certainly help me call it a success as well. :)

Thanks to so many people who showed up!

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I posted my thoughts this morning without looking at any other reaction, except for a few very funny twitters. The most interesting I've read so far is James Fallows.

He refers to a post he made about Al Gore's nomination two years ago which, I agree, is more relevant now.

He also dissects Obama's speech this morning. I'll quote at length, because I think it's an interesting point and it gets past the actual winning of the award:

That all said, I still think it was odd. I've read several people now who think it's prescriptive. As in, "This will make it harder for him to do un-Nobel Peace Prize like things." Which, as I said below, is not necessarily a good thing.

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I think I would be remiss in not posting about the oddest piece of news I've heard in a long time.

My first reaction was that the Peace Prize was given to Obama for simply not being George W. Bush.

Despite my criticism below that Obama hasn't accomplished much in office, he has made foreign policy and diplomacy a focus and I think he's done it well. This is one area where a President's "tone" and speeches are actually meaningful, and I think Obama's performance has been great. But even so--has he accomplished enough to win a Nobel Peace Prize?

It just feels premature--at best.

Do I think it's cool? Yes. I think it's good that the President of my country is being seen as someone who is working for peace.

Do I think it's almost Onion-worthy in how it plays into a stereotype of an all-hype President who gets accolades for barely doing anything? Unfortunately, yes.

And: is this going to be a huge liability for Obama later? Yes, most absolutely. First, we have two very large wars going on right now, and Obama is commander-in-chief of the armed forces as they execute those wars. He will need to authorize some very un-Nobel Peace Prize-like things.

In addition, a President needs to have every option on the table when dealing with someone like Ahmadinejad. Is it harder to back his into a corner with the threat of force if you're not seen as being willing to use that force because you're a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this in the future.

UPDATE: Perhaps I've lingered too much on the bad side. I think Obama has shown himself to be a foreign policy realist. He doesn't seem to believe in "peace at any cost." During the campaign, and in the short instances we've seen so far, I think he's made it clear he's very willing to use force. He has soundly beaten political opponents who underestimate him and his willingness to hit back (or hit first)--maybe a Peace Prize will cause other world leaders to underestimate him and his willingness to use force as well.

(Of course, that has its advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes it allows you to play your opponents, as I feel Obama's doing--or trying to do--with Ahmadinejad. On the other hand, Khrushchev thought Kennedy was a weak President who wouldn't react to missiles in Cuba and voila, we get the missile crisis. So clearly it goes both ways.)

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So while the Luzon discussion was happening this past week, I happened to be reading City Club's 2003 Community Study that evaluates the council-manager government system, and I have to say ... it got me thinking.

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The first half of this is a discussion about Obama's school speech, which is why I watched it.

The second half caught my eye because there's some good stuff there about online identity, which is the topic of my presentation Wednesday night at Pecha Kucha. Thomas Friedman is scared:

MR. FRIEDMAN: Tell your kids, OK, tell your kids, OK, be careful.  Every move they make is now a digital footprint.  You are on "Candid Camera." And unfortunately, the real message to young people, from all of these incidents, OK, and I'm not here defending anything anyone said, but from all of these incidents, is you know, really keep yourself tight, don't say anything controversial, don't think anything--don't put anything in print.  You know, whatever you do, just kind of smooth out all the edges, and maybe you too--you know, when you get nominated to be ambassador to Burkina Faso, you'll be able to get through the hearing.

I don't think there is reason to be this scared. But he brings up one of my first points of my presentation--"You are not in control of your online identity."

Come to the Robert Daniel Gallery Wednesday night. 5:30 start. For those who don't know, Pecha Kucha gives each presenter 20 slides, at 20 seconds per slide. So we'll each be presenting for 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

I'm going to try to record my presentation and post it here, but I won't get all the other presenters, so you should still come to see them, too! Topics include: architectural identity, online identity, gender identity, branding identity, identity theft, cultural identity, "place, name, & identity," jewelry & identity, and graffiti identity.

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The Survivor, by John Harris, has been one of the best of the presidential biographies I've read. I read recently that it was considered one of the most accurate books about what it felt like and what happened inside the Clinton White House by by some of his insiders.

The book re-shaped many of my views of Clinton, with some wild swings in both directions. The Survivor is not like Woodward's "tick-tock" accounts (a phrase I learned in the book to describe the precisely chronological storytelling. Rather, it tackles topics by chapter, with the timeline roughly in place but with many chapters overlapping. It's a technique that works very well.

For me, I was blown away by how bad Clinton was as a manager of his own White House in the first two years of his presidency. The details of his affair with Monica Lewinsky were pretty shocking, too--not in any graphic sort of way, but in the absolute stupidity and arrogance. In the same way Democrats were upset with John Edwards when his affair was made public, asking, "What if he had our nomination right now?" the games Clinton was playing--once in public at a fundraiser--were just as unsettling.

I was also surprised that for all his reputation as a master politician how poor Clinton was at gauging the wind sometimes. He didn't foresee any potential controversy with his stance in 1992 (this was before Don't Ask Don't Tell) that gays should be able to serve in the military. On the flip side of that note, the book made it pretty clear that he was not always a slave to polls as he's often painted. What he was good at, was getting out of situations he'd gotten himself in to (hence, the title of the book).

In the policy arena, my respect for Clinton went up. NAFTA, his fiscal responsibility (however unwilling at times), and his foreign policy during his 2nd term all are noteworthy.

I came away from the book with a much better understanding of Clinton and his presidency, which is exactly what I've been looking for in my presidential biographies.

Now that I've finished the most recent three presidents, I'm going to jump back to the front of the line and read His Excellency, George Washington, which I'm treating as a follow-up to 1776, one of the best pieces of non-fiction I've read. After that, probably McCullough's John Adams. I watched the mini-series last year and now will read the book. After those two, I think I'll bounce forward again and tackle Herbert Walker Bush.

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