MoDo has her panties all up in a bunch. In “The Ungrateful President” she hisses that presidents who don’t need people are the loneliest presidents in the world, especially come election time. To quote the comment that is currently the first one showing, from Rajiv in Palo Alto: “This article is such crap. I don’t need my President to kiss some billionaire’s butt. I need him to care enough to make things better for all of us.” The Moustache of Wisdom has a question in “Average is Over: Part II:” What’s preventing Americans from taking our education challenge seriously? Here’s MoDo’s POS:
At a fund-raiser for the president at his Westport, Conn., estate Monday night, Harvey Weinstein spoke in a softly lit room shimmering with pink dahlias, gold Oscars, silvery celebrities and black American Express cards.
“You can make the case,” Weinstein said of Barack Obama, “that he’s the Paul Newman of American presidents.”
I interviewed Paul Newman. I knew Paul Newman. Paul Newman was an acquaintance of mine. Mr. President, except for the eyes, you are sort of like Paul Newman.
“I’ve been accused of being aloof,” Newman told me. “I’m not. I’m just wary.”
The star scorned the hoops he was expected to jump through in his profession and did not like feeling beholden. He said he dealt with fame by developing “selective insensitivities.”
“With film critics and fans, you have to be selectively insensitive to their insensitivities,” he told me. “If people start treating you like a piece of meat or a long-lost friend or feel they can become cuddly for the price of a $5 movie ticket, then you shut them out.”
Just so, the president does not think people should expect too much in return for paying $35,800 for an hour of his time, as they did at the Weinstein affair, or in return for other favors.
Obama smashed through all the barriers and dysfunction in his life to become a self-made, self-narrating president. His brash 2008 campaign invented a new blueprint to upend the Democratic establishment. So it’s understandable if Obama, with his Shaker aesthetic, is not inclined to play by the rococo rules of politics. Yet, as the president struggles to stay ahead of Moneybags Romney, his selective insensitivities may be hurting him.
Stories abound of big donors who stopped giving as much or working as hard because Obama never reached out, either with a Clinton-esque warm bath of attention or Romney-esque weekend love fests and Israeli-style jaunts; of celebrities who gave concerts for his campaigns and never received thank-you notes or even his full attention during the performance; of public servants upset because they knocked themselves out at the president’s request and never got a pat on the back; of V.I.P.’s disappointed to get pictures of themselves with the president with the customary signature withheld; of politicians disaffected by the president’s penchant for not letting members of Congress or local pols stand on stage with him when he’s speaking in their state (they often watch from the audience and sometimes have to lobby just to get a shout-out); of power brokers, local and national, who felt that the president insulted them by never seeking their advice or asking them to come to the White House or ride along in the limo for a schmooze.
Care and feeding has been outsourced to Joe Biden, who loves it, but it doesn’t build the same kind of loyalty as when the president does it.
“He comes from the neediest profession of all, except for acting, but he is not needy and he doesn’t fully understand the neediness of others; it’s an abstraction to him,” says Jonathan Alter, who wrote “The Promise” about Obama’s first year in office and is working on a sequel. “He’s not an ungracious person, but he can be guilty of ingratitude. It’s not a politically smart way for him to operate.”
Newman wanted to be an actor, not a movie star. Obama wants to be a policy maker, not a glad-handing pol. Sometimes after political events, even small meetings, he requires decompression time. Unlike Harry Truman or George Bush senior, he prefers not to mix relaxing with networking. He sticks mostly to golf with his male aides.
“Needy politicians, like Bill Clinton, recharge at political events,” says Alter. “But, for Obama, they deplete rather than create energy.”
Richard Wolffe, the author of Obama portraits, “Renegade” and “Revival,” agreed: “The very source of his strength as an individual, that he willed himself into being, that he’s a solitary figure who doesn’t need many people, is also clearly a weakness. There are people who’ve worked with him for years who don’t understand why he gives so little back.”
From the first time Obama made a splash with an anti-apartheid speech at Occidental College, says David Maraniss, author of “Barack Obama: The Story,” he has been ambivalent, even perverse.
“He realized that he could stir crowds while also thinking to himself that it was all a game and posturing,” the biographer said. “He is always removed and participating at the same time, self-conscious and without the visceral need or love of transactional politics that would characterize Bill Clinton or L.B.J. or even W., in a way.”
What will save him, Maraniss believes, is his fierce competitive will. “His is cool and Clinton’s is hot, but they burn at the same temperature inside,” he said. “So he does some of what he finds distasteful, but not all of it, and not all of it very well.”
One thing, though: Paul Newman sent thank-you notes.
I wonder if Mittens sends thank-you notes, or whether he has one of his staff take care of such mundane matters… What crap. Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:
A big mismatch exists today between how U.S. C.E.O.’s look at the world and how many American politicians and parents look at the world — and it may be preventing us from taking our education challenge as seriously as we must.
For many politicians, “outsourcing” is a four-letter word because it involves jobs leaving “here” and going “there.” But for many C.E.O.’s, outsourcing is over. In today’s seamlessly connected world, there is no “out” and no “in” anymore. There is only the “good,” “better” and “best” places to get work done, and if they don’t tap into the best, most cost-efficient venue wherever that is, their competition will.
For politicians, it’s all about “made in America,” but, for C.E.O.’s, it is increasingly about “made in the world” — a world where more and more products are now imagined everywhere, designed everywhere, manufactured everywhere in global supply chains and sold everywhere. American politicians are still citizens of our states and cities, while C.E.O.’s are increasingly citizens of the world, with mixed loyalties. For politicians, all their customers are here; for C.E.O.’s, 90 percent of their new customers are abroad. The credo of the politician today is: “Why are you not hiring more people here?” The credo of the C.E.O. today is: “You only hire someone — anywhere — if you absolutely have to,” if a smarter machine, robot or computer program is not available.
Yes, this is a simplification, but the trend is accurate. The trend is that for more and more jobs, average is over. Thanks to the merger of, and advances in, globalization and the information technology revolution, every boss now has cheaper, easier access to more above-average software, automation, robotics, cheap labor and cheap genius than ever before. So just doing a job in an average way will not return an average lifestyle any longer. Yes, I know, that’s what they said about the Japanese “threat” in the 1980s. But Japan, alas, challenged just two American industries — cars and consumer electronics — and just one American town, Detroit. Globalization and the Internet/telecom/computing revolution together challenge every town, worker and job. There is no good job today that does not require more and better education to get it, hold it or advance in it.
Which is why it is disturbing when more studies show that American K-12 schools continue to lag behind other major industrialized countries on the international education tests. Like politicians, too many parents think if their kid’s school is doing better than the one next door, they’re fine.
Well, a dose of reality is on the way thanks to Andreas Schleicher and his team at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which coordinates the Program for International Student Assessment, known as the PISA test. Every three years, the O.E.C.D. has been giving the PISA test to a sample of 15-year-olds, now in 70 countries, to evaluate reading, math and science skills. The U.S. does not stand out. It’s just average, but many parents are sure their kid is above average. With help from several foundations in the U.S., Schleicher has just finished a pilot study of 100 American schools to enable principals, teachers and parents to see not just how America stacks up against China, but how their own school stacks up against similar schools in the best-educated countries, like Finland and Singapore.
“The entry ticket to the middle class today is a postsecondary education of some kind,” but too many kids are not coming out of K-12 prepared for that, and too many parents don’t get it, says Jon Schnur, the chairman of America Achieves, which is partnering with the O.E.C.D. on this project as part of an effort to help every American understand the connection between educational attainment at their school — for all age groups — and what will be required to perform the jobs of the future.
“Imagine, in a few years, you could sign onto a Web site and see this is how my school compares with a similar school anywhere in the world,” says Schleicher. “And then you take this information to your local superintendent and ask: ‘Why are we not doing as well as schools in China or Finland?’ ”
Schleicher’s team is assessing all their test results — and socioeconomic profiles of each school — to make sure they have a proper data set for making global comparisons. They hope to have the comparison platform available early next year.
Says Schleicher: “If parents do not know, they will not demand, as consumers, a high quality of educational service. They will just say the school my kids are going to is as good as the school I went to.” If this comparison platform can be built at this micro scale, he says, it could “lead to empowerment at the really decisive level” of parents, principals and teachers demanding something better.
“This is not about threatening schools,” he adds. It is about giving each of them “the levers to effect change” and a window into the pace of change that is possible when every stakeholder in a school has the data and can say: Look at those who have made dramatic improvements around the world. Why can’t we?
Well, Tommy, schools require funding. Public schools get that funding through TAXES. Do you think you can begin to figure out how to connect those two dots?
August 8, 2012 at 7:38 am |
Cheey i’d that our prez is above politics. I didn’t know Paul. If I met him it must have been at a pizza parlor in Clifton or Passaic. I understand he was short like John Lennon. Perhaps he came from the same crowd that bore us the egalitarian down-to-earth acutely talented Garbos, Bacall and Greenstreets. You know the ones who rode Bearcats but really understood they were not delivered from the heavens. If Clinton shook hands he also grabbed wallets and was exceptional at turning a dollar. If I’m missing the point of the article it is not that Obama can’t shake a loving handful of hard earned detergent, but that he has lost in the money claiming lottery to the rich white boy. I hear a song playing. I ain’t no senator’s son. No I doubt that what Dowd writes has truth serum sprung from the Olympiad onto her dusty iMac. I think the money the pols, all the pols get is exhorbidant. I don’t think O is lacking for funding. Weinstein may hand over the check but it’s not his to give. He is a party thrower. Much like Clinton wasn’t a president; he was a laundryman. Does that make O better or worse? His appeal is that he doesn’t steal. R we naive? Was JFK the son of a bootlegger? Was Camelot a Richard Roger’s tune? Will O win? It will be close. The polls are early and the fact that in the swing swing swing states it’s close is a very positive sign. His message this time is he’s honest. Americans get that. That will cost u thirty-five and change. The valet will get your limo.
August 8, 2012 at 9:06 am |
Tom exposes 1960 American education in a new way. He shows how irrelevant his opinion is by reminding us that when JFK exhorted Marilyn to lift him up to the moon it only “enabled” a few engineers to do so. The rest of us watched on TV. And Tom reminds us that we’re Twits because only a handful of cool nerds are building the networks and writing the programs while the bulk of American students are unemployed college grads with teaching degrees. Ooops. There’s a flaw there. I think as long as our politicians send their children to private schools we won’t see the benefits of public education. Unless the students who go to public school do something themselves. They’ll have to learn to open a book and read. They’ll have to study. They’ll compete in whatever sports their district can afford if they can hire a full time coach. They will not learn math and science if they don’t study. And speaking of evolution we have to put that church stuff out of the classroom. There’s a day a week or more if u’d like to go to your fav religious institution or meet and talk with your creator if u plz on your own time. If you can’t figure out science than become a garbage man. If u can do better than that go out and earn it. There is no time for young people to wait for the Tom Friedman’s of the world to change the 1960′s. Get out and do it yourself for yourself for your future or u will be the garbage man.