White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Showtime in the East Room

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There should be a morning-after pill for journalists. As access to White House insiders has decreased over the decades, journalism has obsessed over the rare lifting of the curtain—particularly press conferences with the president.

This week has been no exception. The Tuesday evening press conference in the East Room, which I attended, has been analyzed, dissected, examined, scrutinized; deconstructed and reconstructed, praised and excoriated. I heard Fox’s Bill O’Reilly call in his body language expert so that his viewers would know not only what Barack Obama said but also what he was thinking when he said it. There’s alchemy in the no-spin zone!

Forget O’Reilly, though. For sheer perspicacity, the prize goes to a commentator on CNN who said that the press conference, held on the 64th day of Obama’s presidency, revealed that he would be a one-term president. This sort of fantasy in the name of analysis deserves a Hall of Fame of its own.

The media does the morning-after thing for good and sufficient reason: Over the years the White House, under both parties, has become more and more impenetrable to reporters. We don’t roam the place as we once did in the days of Johnson and Nixon. In those days, reporters could walk the West Wing freely and could interview staffers without the intrusion of the press office, and the numbing effect of trying to conduct an interview in the presence of a press office minder.

No news will be broken when the minder is there, presumably to keep tabs on both the journalist and the official. Also, as I have often said, the press office presence cuts the White House off from a valuable source of information that is hard for presidential aides to get except from journalists.

In the days when you could get to senior White House players without a minder, interviews would invariably end with, “What have you heard​?” And sometimes,“What do you think?”

Can you imagine any senior official asking those questions in the presence of a de facto double agent from the press office? I can tell you it doesn’t happen and it won’t happen.

As the White House press corps has swelled in numbers, it has lost in access. It is less effective and more completely controlled by the White House press office. With each successive president, the manipulation of the media becomes more pervasive and more obvious.

Take this latest press conference, referred to on the White House address system as “the program.” Twice this happened after the 360-plus journalists and photographers filed into the East Room.

The anonymous voice on the public address system was anything but a press conference in the old sense of the word. It was, indeed, a program. Only 13 reporters were called upon to ask questions. And clearly, the selection of these had nothing to do with their skills as interrogators. Pointedly, no major newspapers were called upon and few reporters, who was not backed by a television network, had any hope of getting the nod. Radio was completely shunned.

How one longed for a real press conference: a forest of hands and a multitude voices crying out, “Mr. President.” That system was ragged but in its way fair. The small radio station could compete with the mighty TV network.

Obama may be an egalitarian at heart but his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, is anything but. He is an elitist with a penchant for a fistful of TV reporters. The rest of us have the morning-after blues–and no medication.

 

Fatigue as the Ultimate Healer

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I first encountered the healthy corrective of fatigue when I was a young writer for a television news service in London. I was chronically late. Every interview I did started with an apology. Every day when I showed up for work, I was late. My supervisor would look at me and at the clock and sigh.

 

One day, I decided that the price of being late was too high: If you have to start with an apology, you never get a decent interview and the long face of my supervisor was painfully reproving. I was tired of my self-imposed misery. I was fatigued with my own sloth. Since that time, I have been fairly punctual.

 

Fatigue, it seems to me, can be motivator in governance and foreign policy. Take the three great revolutions of our time: accommodation in Northern Ireland, the collapse of apartheid in South Africa and the end of the Soviet Union. I submit that in all of these, fatigue played a critical if not seminal role.

 

I have been in and out of South Africa all of my life. Sure sanctions and international pressure played a role in bringing about change. But there was something else at work: fatigue. The people of South Africa were very tired of their own creation. Driving across South Africa in the 1970s with an African relief driver, I ran into what used to be called “petty apartheid”: segregated places to eat. As a result, we took out food and ate it in the car. But at two roadside eateries (they were few and far between), the owners apologized to me for the offensive law. The weight of the injustice was getting to them.

 

That was the first time I saw a sufficient glimmer of hope that peaceful change would come, as it did.

 

In Northern Ireland it appeared that the sectarian violence, which emerged in 1963, would go on forever. Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in barbarous ways and terrorism was spreading into Britain. Over the 15 years I participated in a think tank in Ireland, I heard endless speeches from both sides about the hopelessness of the situation in which the Irish Republican Army, the right-wing Protestant “hard men” and the British Army fought a triangular terrorist war.

 

On a summer’s morning in 1982, there were two terrorist attacks in the center of London. A car bomb was detonated as 16 members of the Queen’s Household Cavalry trotted along a Hyde Park’s South Carriage Drive; and less than two miles away, in Regent’s Park, a military bandstand was blown up. Toll for the day: 10 soldiers killed, 55 injured. The I.R.A. claimed responsibility for the strikes. All of Britain was on a terrorist footing, but that did not stop an attack on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Brighton, England two years later.

 

By the 1990s, you could sense a change in Ireland: People were tired of the killing and living in fear. Without that fatigue, that revolution, the Good Friday agreement of 1998 and power-sharing, would not have happened.

 

Likewise by the late 1980s, the Soviet Union–the edifice of communism with its incompetence, its privations and its paranoia–had lost the loyalty of the people and the terror apparatus of the state was failing. Russians were tired of it and Poland was in near revolt. Mikhail Gorbachov loosened the reins and things hurtled forward.

 

Alas fatigue is not a policy, not even a strategy. It is just a reality; a factor in protracted disputes, oppressive governance and pervasive injustice.

 

When, then, will fatigue set in between combatants in the Middle East, the oppressed of North Korea or the misgoverned of Africa? According to my theory of fatigue, these things are overdue. But it is easier to fix your own timekeeping than history’s.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Pickens and Obama Energy Plans: How Smart Are They?

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The billionaire T. Boone Pickens and President Barack Obama have something in common: a plan for saving us from imported energy. In doing so they hope to reduce air pollution, create jobs and head the country towards a more sustainable energy future.

But Pickens and Obama do not have the same plan. In fact, Pickens has been critical of Obama’s plan; and Obama has been silent on Pickens’ plan.

Where both plans converge is on the billions of tax dollars that will be needed to upgrade the now ramshackle transmission system. This is often called the grid. The fact is it is not a grid at all, but a series of local grids that are sometimes interconnected. Texas is not connected to the rest of the U.S. system, for example.

The first problem with the two plans is that they are aimed specifically at foreign oil but deal with electricity, which we import in small quantities from Canada. Electric imports are not a problem. Both have ideas about how a greener, smarter electric grid will help toward cutting the astonishing amount of oil–20 million barrels a day–we consume in the U.S., 70 percent of it from overseas.

The Pickens plan is fairly straightforward. He wants to build wind farms up the spine of the United States, from Texas to Canada–hundreds of thousands of windmills in the best wind belt in the country. This electricity will be transported from the relatively underpopulated Intermountain West to the heavily populated coastal cities of the East and West.

This electricity would be moved on the new smart grid that everyone is sure is desirable, and on the way if the government foots the bill and there is enough use of eminent domain to force the new lines across private property. One of the reasons the grid is not larger and more flexible today is that it often takes as long as 20 years to overcome the local protest and litigation. Even the abusive use of eminent domain does not block lawsuits over issues like the health effects of large power lines.

To Pickens, this electricity will make it possible to back out the 30 percent of natural gas now being used to generate electricity; and that resource will substitute for oil in large trucks and eventually domestic autos, after the new filling stations are built.

Neat, huh? Maybe in 25 years?

Obama’s plan is more ambitious, but less specific. It seeks a huge increase in wind generation; the use of solar panels in cities; and, of course, the building of a really smart grid, which will give consumers the option to turn off their appliances when electricity is expensive and back on when it is cheap, mostly late at night and early in the morning–midnight suppers and 3 a.m. showers. The relief from imported oil comes in the use of electric cars, hybrid cars and possibly the electrification of some rail lines, where high-speed trains are envisaged.

Under the Obama plan and with his grid, your house will be monitored 24 hours a day for energy usage and it will get helpful directions on energy conservation. Ergo if you are growing plants in the basement, you might not want to sign up. Privacy is an issue. Also, will we go smart? Those who cannot program their VCR might want to dodge the smart grid.

There will be winners and losers. The winners will be the equipment manufacturers (lines, poles, meters, wire, insulators, turbines), civil engineers and, of course, lawyers and consultants. The losers? If the scheme collapses under its own grandeur, it will be taxpayers; job-seekers and ultimately the environment, if the utilities keep burning coal for more than half of their production. If the windmills are built under either scheme, birds and bats will get it. Both species are already slaughtered by the tens of thousands by flying into wind turbine blades.

While gasoline is cheap, the lights are on and the thermostat is set either too low or too high, it is going to be hard to tell people they have to change–and pay for it.

The Tricks of Limbaugh’s Trade

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The formula is quite simple really; and it was known many years before Rush Limbaugh ever breathed on a microphone.

It is this: Know your audience’s prejudices. When you know these, blow on them, give them oxygen. Know the frustrations of the audience and articulate them.

British tabloid newspapers have done this for decades. They published editorials that were shrill and polemical, often on the front page. Sometimes the whole paper became the polemic as when, on Nov. 1, 1990, the London Sun blared in its largest type on Page One, “Up Yours Delors,” in response European Commission President Jacques Delors’ supposed attempts to force the Maastricht Treaty upon the United Kingdom. A far leap from the magisterial analysis of most American editorial pages.

However, the restraint of our newspapers is made up for by the abandon of our broadcasters. Hence, Rush Limbaugh and the absurd spectacle of the conservative talk show radio host challenging President Barack Obama to a debate, as though he were really the leader of the opposition. Preposterous, yet entertaining.

Less entertaining, though, for Michael Steele, the newly elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, who had to apologize to Limbaugh for calling him an entertainer and “ugly.” How humiliating for Steele: the sovereign apologizing to the jester.

How discomforting to serious journalist-philosophers of the right, like George Will, Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks. What are they to make of the crude philosophy of Limbaugh, and his sway over the party they have husbanded since the bleak days before Ronald Reagan? Ironically, the best political writers and thinkers of the last 40 years have tended to be from the right rather than the left.

It is unlikely that the philosophical powerhouses of Republicanism will be silenced for long. But they will have to grip with the central weakness of their party. Its appeal is limited to a certain strata of the political body politic: traditional white voters in the upper reaches of the middle class.

To counter this, the Republican Party, indeed the conservative movement, is forever in need of alliances with other groups that can be co-opted for an election or two. These have included the white working-class and the Christian right. And these are, from the conservative point of view, what might be called half-believers—they are on board for some, but not all of the conservative canon.

The white workers feel they are an endangered species, trapped between immigrants and the underclass–to them, loosely, the welfare class. They are scared to look down for fear they will sink and depressed if they look up to a world that requires skills they do not have. Broadcasters like Bill O’Reilly and Limbaugh mine their fears, pump up their jingoism and tell them that they are not alone they have to fight the political Antichrist: socialism. These broadcasters are ready to say it is European evil, planning to take away honest people’s guns and take away freedom.

The appeal to the religious right centers on the abortion issue more than any other. To conservative Christians, it is central to their faith. But is it central to conservatism? This is the fault line between social conservatives and the affluent stalwarts of the party, and those it cultivates with the aid of sympathetic broadcasters like Limbaugh, who keep the faithful faithful.

It is great fun for liberals to see Republicans groveling to an absurd figure like Limbaugh and to savor Steele’s humiliation. But they should be wary of Limbaugh’s strength. While it lasts, it is to punish errant Republicans, like Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, making bipartisanship in the Senate hard to come by. For now, Limbaugh is a force to be reckoned with on both sides of the aisle.

 


How To Succeed in Business While Doing Something Else

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There are academics who think you can teach people to be entrepreneurial. The Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, Mo., gives away money to encourage entrepreneurship. If you read the advertisements in the back of The Economist, you would think that wealth is only a business degree away. Hundreds of business schools around the world want to set you on the path to riches.

If you feel the urge to enroll in a business school, you might first read “Call Me Ted,” the autobiography of Ted Turner: a swashbuckler and an unorthodox entrepreneur. A husband of Jane Fonda, father of five, winner of the America’s Cup yacht race, Turner is everything you have heard about and more. The man who comes through in this book, coauthored with Turner Broadcasting veteran Bill Burke, first published last year, is a force in nature: a roiling lightning storm of a man with seemingly inexhaustible energy and never a hint of self-doubt.

What Turner’s memoir does not do is dish the dirt about his wives or his opponents in Major League Baseball, who treated him appallingly because of his crowd-pleasing antics. Although he was very bitter about being frozen out at Time Warner, after he sold his broadcast properties to the company, Turner barely raises a lip when writing about Jerry Levin, the man who finally drove Turner to leave the vice chairmanship of the company and sell his stock. As you read his story, you come to realize that despite all the larger-than-life aspects of Turner, he is also a Southern gentleman.

He writes with passion and real understanding about the sea and his life-threatening experiences; one when he was an inexperienced captain, and another when disastrous storms hit the Fastnet race across the Irish Sea. Some 19 sailors on other boats died in that race, and Turner and his collaborator do a wonderful job of invoking the horror of a killer storm. Turner is equally good in describing his tacking duels in the America’s Cup.

Fascinating is Turner’s confession that he had no interest in news whatsoever when he started CNN. He was fascinated with satellite technology and had used it successfully to turn his Atlanta UHF station into a national or superstation.

It was the second time Turner had exploited a new technology. The first was in using microwave line-of-sight technology to spread his Atlanta station into new markets.

But his big hit was with CNN. And with it, the no-interest-in-news entrepreneur revolutionized television news for all time.

In his book, Turner uses an odd but endearing technique: He has some of the players write their version of events. This means we get some graphic examples of Turner in action. One player, Sumner Redstone, believes Turner stood on his desk during a presentation. Another, John Malone, describes Turner crawling around the floor during a meeting, shouting, “Whose shoes do I have to kiss?”

No wonder Turner did not fit in, unless he owned the company. He did not fit in at Brown University, where he failed to graduate. He did not fit in as the owner of the Atlanta Braves and constantly faced fines and suspensions for violating the other owners’ sense of propriety. He did not always fit in at the New York Yacht Club with the social sailors.

Turner found the time to race yachts partly because the baseball commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, had suspended him for acting as the Braves’ manager. Of course, Turner showed up at the America’s Cup victor’s press conference dead drunk and slid under the table looking for his bottle.

While racing with the best on earth, he was also putting together CNN and jumping over hurdles set up by Federal Communications Commission for the cable operators.

Turner had something of a start, but it was modest: He inherited an outdoor advertising company from his father. He was 24 at the time. He went from there to radio, to television and into history.

This kind of entrepreneurism cannot be taught. It takes a wild man with a gleam in his eye, and a preparedness to bet the company over and over.

Sam Donaldson Moves Out of Focus

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Sam Donaldson has retired from ABC News after 41 tumultuous years. His going–without an official send-off or even a press release–was the way he wanted it. A loud man, Donaldson elected to go quietly. We all should miss him. He was good for his audience and a tonic for his colleagues.

 

As controversial as he was competent, Donaldson is not so much remembered for his reporting around the world as for his years as ABC’s chief White House correspondent–and for his antics in that role.

 

Sam covered Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. But, he told me when I interviewed him on my television program, “White House Chronicle,” that Reagan was his favorite. Donaldson famously shouted questions at Reagan, who clearly enjoyed the repartee–sometimes breaking away from his staff to answer one of the questions Donaldson shouted from behind the rope line.

 

The public–and maybe some of the suits at Disney, which owns ABC—thought Donaldson rude. Clearly, Reagan did not. Two fine actors were enjoying their roles, feeding off each other.

 

And that is the thing about Donaldson; he is always on. The energy he showed in bawling at presidents was the same energy that invigorated the White House press corps.

 

Make no mistake, Donaldson has always been an invigorator, a controlled explosion of a man. When he was in the White House briefing room, it was palpably alive. When he was not there, it was as it is today: earnest, serious and subdued. The closest personality to Donaldson’s for sparking up the briefing room has now moved on: David Gregory. Without big energy, the place lacks a robust sense of itself.

 

Television and print both seek to tell the news, but they are not the same animal. Shouting out at presidents, or anyone else, will not help a print reporter. Deft cultivation of sources and a sensitive ear are the tools of great White House scribes. But for television, the getting of the story can be as much the story as what is elicited. On a TV news program, the quarry pushing away the camera is significant. It is just a frustration to a newspaperman.

 

Donaldson knew so well that a question avoided by the subject on television amounts to a question answered. In an interview with The Washington Post, Donaldson said he might have gone for a contract renewal if ABC had a program like CBS’s “60 Minutes.” Clearly, Donaldson misses the years of confrontation.

 

As a White House reporter, Donaldson’s strength was an indifference to what people thought about him. He did not care whether his antics annoyed his colleagues. And he had the good sense to ignore his peers.

 

At the end of Clinton’s visit to China in 1998, there was a full press conference in Hong Kong. That was before former President George W. Bush insisted on having a list of reporters to call on and the questioning became formulaic–something, sadly, President Barack Obama has continued to do.

 

Donaldson failed to find a front-row seat, where he could be heard. Undeterred he found a chair at the back of the room, carried it to the front, set it up with the back facing forward, and sat with his arms resting on the back. Simply, his action said: “I am Sam Donaldson, and I am here to question the president of the United States.”

It was pure chutzpah; and it worked. I doubt the preselecting of questioners by the current White House staff would have survived the Donaldson treatment.

 

He could also be considerate. In Uganda, during Clinton’s extended African trip, a large gathering of schoolchildren, local officials and, of course, the traveling press was assembled in an arena under a broiling African sun. As usual, Clinton was inconsiderately late. Everyone baked, but none more than the video crews in the “pod,” which is the structure in front of the podium from which the president is to speak. They were trapped, unable to leave in case Clinton appeared. The rest of us were given crates of life-saving ice water.

 

It was Donaldson who realized their predicament and struggled through the crowd with ice water for the crews. It was thoughtful and observant.

It was the softer side of Sam Donaldson: correspondent extraordinaire.

 

 

 

 

Changing Direction in the Drug War

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Mexico is being torn apart by drug gangs, often wrongly called cartels. Cartels are created to uphold prices. In the case of Mexico, it is law enforcement and the prohibition of drugs that upholds prices–and makes drug dealing irresistibly profitable.

 

All along the drug chain there is death, from the campesino in the jungle who runs afoul of a drug lord to the overdosed addict.

 

The libertarian solution is legalization. It was endorsed by the late conservative William F. Buckley Jr. and by The Economist magazine. This would work if not one new user were to come into the drug culture. But drugs are aggressively proselytized.

 

The British learned this the hard way. In the early 1960s, they thought they had the hard drug problem licked with a form a legalization that worked. Heroin addicts—and there were few, just 27 in London–were under the care of a doctor and they would line up at pharmacy, waiting to get their prescriptions filled. This was fairly easily managed because heroin is a legal medicine in Britain, used as a pain suppressant for the terminally ill. The British were so proud of how they handled the hard drug problem that they liked to lecture Americans on how it should be done.

 

Then it all fell apart. An addict broke into a storage unit and introduced a wide range of people to heroin. The speed at which heroin addiction spread frightened the authorities. From a little over two dozen addicts, the number in London jumped to over 250. The government was shocked by the dependence and the proselytizing effect. Additionally, immigrants were pouring into Britain and bringing with them a culture of drug use.

 

The flood gates were open. Britain is now overwhelmed with drugs and no solution to the problem is in sight.

 

Here is a modest proposal: legalize marijuana. It is widely available and is used at every stratum of society. The economy of Mendocino County in

California is dependent on it and the Florida Keys are awash in smuggled pot. The Royal Canadian Mounted police told me they believe there are more than 10,000 grow houses around Toronto. They cannot compete with the growers.

 

The horticulture of marijuana is improving–the latest advance is cold light and hydroponic tanks. More the active ingredient, THC, is getting stronger and plant yields are way up.

 

The war on marijuana cannot be won because society does not take the consumption seriously. I have seen it smoked everywhere by journalists, musicians, a publisher and a Wall Street analyst. Sometimes, you can smell it in the park across from the White House.

 

I never fancied it myself. I tried it but I did not get high or develop the munchies. A stronger drug, alcohol, has been my downfall. I would have got in less trouble with pot.

 

Stabilized, taxed and supervised marijuana would be an advance on today’s hodge podge of tolerance and intolerance. Federal law is intolerant and state law can be quite lenient. Some states tolerate personal use but cultivation is frowned on. This prohibition is expensive, ineffective and contributes to the woes in Mexico.

 

Pot has been legal in Amsterdam for decades. The Dutch prefer those seeking a changed state to smoke a joint rather than use a hard drug or get falling-down drunk.

 

We also can do something about hard drugs. Considering the British experience, it has to be done with care. However, there is a road map. The French banned absinthe, a liquor distilled from wormwood, because it caused such damage to drinkers—the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec comes to mind. But rather than driving the fierce spirit underground, they introduced a substitute, Pernod. No underground bootleg trade resulted.

 

Therefore, we ought to throw science at the two big imported tropical drugs, heroin and cocaine, with a view to neutering them. If you cannot, as you cannot, end the human desire for changed states, make drug use safe—that is non-addictive but enjoyable.

 

So there are two possibilities for winning the war on drugs: unbundle them, and take marijuana out of the mix, and throw science at the dangerous drugs. There are other wars to be fought and won. Winable wars.

The Last Boulevardier

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When the great actor David Garrick died in 1779, Samuel Johnson said of his friend and pupil, “I am disappointed by that stroke of death that has eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.”

When Winston Churchill died in 1965, William Connor, the great columnist for The Daily Mirror, wrote that “a petal has fallen from the English rose.”

Both great evocations of loss come to my mind as I mourn the recent death of my great friend and collaborator Grant Stockdale. He was an adventurer, an artist, a boulevardier, a businessman, a comedian, a musician, a novelist, a sailor and an intense family man. Together we raged around the world on and off for more than 30 years. We partied in Washington, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, London, Paris, Helsinki and Doha.

You did not meet Grant. He burst into your life. They say his line with women, by whom he was adored, was “You haven’t met me yet.”

I first became aware of Grant’s talents when he followed me across Dupont Circle in Washington, making me laugh so hard I had to sit on a bench, which gave him a further chance to press the case he wished to make: I should hire him. I refused to do so.

The next morning, as I walked to my office in the National Press Building, Grant was lying in wait at the circle and we went through the same routine. I had just started an energy newsletter, but Grant was not a reporter. He had worked as salesman and had moved from his native Miami, via Hollywood, to Washington. I do not remember how such a charismatic and entertaining a figure as Grant had settled on Washington: a company town, if ever there was one. Happily, on fourth day, I succumbed.

Grant looked like no one else I have ever met. Enormously attractive, he had a round face and a compelling smile. He was in his mid-twenties and his hair was bright white; it looked as though it had been stripped of its color, but it had always been white.

Grant’s sister, Susan, said that when he was a teenager, it was “cool” to hang out with him. I thought it was pretty cool for 35 years. He was the best company.

And Grant was so funny; funny as a raconteur, funny as a mimic and sometimes wordlessly funny. One day, in the lounge of a club, he started wrestling with his tie as though it were a bewitched, unruly serpent. He mimed for minutes. A crowd gathered. People asked me whether he was a professional. No. Just a funny man.

His way with words was funny, too. Dawn, a friend of mine from South Africa, instantly became “Daybreak.” A Cuba Libre made with Diet Coke was a “thin Cuban,” a Manhattan was a “skyscraper.” Champagne was the “French friend,” Bordeaux was the “French tribute.”

We adored the movie “Becket” and its stars, Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. We went often to Downey’s Steak House in New York in the hope of watching the two great thespians drink together. They were never there when we were there, so we did the drinking for them. One night, this was going so well for us, reciting Shakespeare and parts of “Becket” to one another and many bystanders, that I turned to Grant and said, “Have you booked the bridal suite at The Plaza?” “Twenty minutes ago,” he replied.

So he had. In the morning I awoke to find a large man, Grant, lying in bed beside me. I protested. Grant opened one eye and gave me a look that might have passed for disdain. “I think you forgot that bridal suites only have one bed,” he said.

In the 1970s, we played hard and worked even harder. We sold newsletter subscriptions, held conferences and tried many things, which were not always successful.

Grant started many businesses of his own. Always the ideas were wonderful, but they required too much capital. One was The Sergeant’s Program, a physical fitness business that he sold; another was Ocean Television, in which remote cameras watched interesting oceans, producing a kind of white noise for the eyes. There was a fashion publication for which he would photograph well-dressed, ordinary women, walking in parks or boarding buses and would list what they were wearing, where they had bought their clothes and how much they had paid for them. His final business venture was the online EnergyPolicyTV, a kind of C-SPAN for energy.

Maybe Grant was too much of a multi-talent to succeed at just one thing.

He worked with President Clinton to make it possible for District of Columbia children to go to college and benefit from in-state tuition rates at universities across the country. The program compensates for the restricted choices for students in Washington. They met at the Sidwell Friends School, where Grant’s children and Chelsea Clinton were students.

Grant shared a gift with Clinton. He would find and comfort those hurting. He was the best friend in adversity; the big shoulders thrown back, the big smile holding fear at bay.

His last e-mail to me, shortly before colon cancer carried him away at 61, said, “Damnit, I miss you.” Aye.

 

Politicians and Small Business—just Lip Service

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It’s right up there with Mom and apple pie in the political lexicon: small business.

Everyone knows that small business creates jobs and it creates them quickly. Ergo, politicians are constantly proclaiming their adoration for small businesses. However, their idea of how to foster new businesses seldom extends beyond tax cuts.

Politicians believe small business carries a heavy burden of tax. By implication, the only impediment to the success of small business is tax. In reality, tax is a minor ache in the small business body. To pay taxes, small businesses must show profit. Most are in profit intermittently. So a bill proposed by newly elected U.S. Rep. Betsy Markey (D-Colo.), which extends the period over which income can be averaged from two to five years, should bring some relief.

In the decades since the end of World War II, the owners of small businesses—from restaurants to light manufacturing—have been pushed to the wall by government action at the local, state and federal levels; all of which have favored the growth not of small business but of big business. At the state level, the big lobby and the small are voiceless. At the federal level, big businesses are on the congressional doorstep with campaign contributions, while small business is an abstraction.

In particular, the kindly treatment of chain retailers in local planning has pummeled and even destroyed small businesses. The arrival of a Home Depot in my semi-rural neighborhood meant summary execution of about 25 hardware stores.

Lower prices and some convenience sucked the customers out of the locally owned hardware stores. But it was a dubious bargain. After the initial enthusiasm, indifferent service and total ignorance of the stock reminded those customers that they had traded away expertise and service for a few cents of initial savings.

The big box stores–some of which are now going out of business–not only crush their small retail competitors, but they also crush their American suppliers by demanding prices that compete with those of cheap-labor competitors in other countries.

Got a great idea for a new type of oven mitt? OK, you will have to try and get your product on the shelves of the big retail stores. There are not enough other outlets. Gird your loins because you are about to go into a bruising negotiation with these retailers. To them, you are no more than a sharecropper. They want low prices and you, the small business manufacturer, are going to deliver them or perish–or, maybe, deliver and perish anyway.

How about the predicament of the travel agencies? Like bookstores, there was something genteel and very appealing about operating a travel agency. It was a lot of work for a small income, but travel agencies provided an independent living for tens of thousands of individual operators, and sometimes families. With deregulation the airlines took against the agents, refusing to pay commissions. This parsimony has not saved the airlines, but it has greatly undermined the travel agents and the service they provided.

It is not just the entrepreneurial class that has suffered from chains. We all have. Just look at their natural habitat: the shopping center. From Miami to Seattle, shopping centers are offensive in their sterility and their replicated chain-store banality. Is this the American Dream? Architecturally challenged, bland, homogenized, remotely owned shopping centers. They are not American Main Street replacements.

A thrill goes through me when I find a strip mall showing its age. There I know I will find small businesses with a fist full of employees booking cruises, repairing televisions and vacuums, and selling things from crystal to to yarn. In old industrial parks, small companies make everything from custom chimney pots to industrial fasteners.

This is where American dreamers have found self-employment and have the sense of possibility and the certain knowledge that they are small enough to fail. It is also where the jobs are, my political friends. Small business is driven as much by romance as profit. It offers the individual a chance. It also hires quickly.

 

Tribulations of a Press Secretary

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Sportsmen spend hours studying tapes of opposing teams or players. Presidential press secretaries, however, tend to prefer learning on the job. It is early, and scant on charity, to attack President Barack Obama’s man Robert Gibbs. But he has had a rocky start.

Gibbs seems to be unsure of his game in the White House press briefing room. The crush of journalists overwhelming the small room during his briefings is not there to lead a cheering session for the president. Nor are they an operatic claque come to embarrass the tenor. They want to find out what is going on and tell their viewers, listeners and readers all about it as fast as their skill and electrons can carry it.

Gibbs must know that the White House press corps takes no prisoners. But in these early days of the Obama administration, he still seems to be in campaign form—even treating reporters as though they are his friends, and by extension sympathetic to the president.

This is an easy mistake to make, and Gibbs is not the first to make it. On the campaign trail, there is a practical necessity for reporters to be cordial, or downright cozy, with the campaign staff.  With the election, any campaign bonhomie evaporates and some remembered slights are exposed.

Gibbs, one hopes, is too smart to believe the right-wing ranters bark that the media is “in the tank” with Obama. In fact, the political press fears plans to continue the arms-length strategy of his presidential campaign in the White House.

Four recent press secretaries set a good example of how to do the job.  They are Marlin Fitzwater, George H.W. Bush’s press secretary; Clinton’s Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart; and George W. Bush’s Tony Snow and Dana Perino. All did the job with aplomb, defended their employer with skill, and tried hard to answer questions without attacking the questioner.

Poor press secretaries include Clinton’s Dee Dee Myers, and George W. Bush’s Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan. They did not appear to have the access to the president that is vital for the job, and often attacked the questioner by denigrating a question as “hypothetical.” Questioning often requires hypothesis. The press secretary who is not in the president’s confidence and his inner circle will fail with the press. He or she, not knowing the answer, will fall back on the hated evasion: “I refer you to . . .” This does not help someone on deadline.

Gibbs got into this dangerous territory early on. He refused to answer any questions about an unmanned aerial strike on terror suspects inside Pakistan. The question was obvious: Did the president authorize the strike and what were the policy implications going forward? The briefer clearly had not been briefed about something that would come up.

Then there was Gibbs’s problem with lobbyists. Gibbs appeared blindsided when asked why President Obama had signed an order limiting the role of lobbyists day ago and now was nominating Raytheon’s top lobbyist, William Lynn III, to be deputy secretary of defense. Gibbs tried to punt but could not connect with the ball.

No doubt many of Gibbs’s problems had to do with transition difficulties that included an incomplete press list, a total collapse of White House e-mail, and a staff which had never seen the White House press corps after its quarry.

Gibbs is not new to Washington, and has worked on Capitol Hill, but there is no preparation for carrying the message of the president to the world except by learning on the job. The press secretary has to learn that every gesture and gaffe will be dissected globally. Even the variety of his neckties has already drawn attention in, of all places, The Christian Science Monitor.