08 Jul 2007 02:53 pm
POSTED BY
Ross Douthat
bio
Bill Clinton looked better than last year - tan and almost radiant up close, with Chelsea by his side as he worked the crowd afterward - but offered even less substance for Clinton-watchers to chew over. (Maybe the burden of having a wife running for President made him circumspect, though as James points out, he didn't exactly go out of his way to woo the crowd to her side.) Karl Rove, on the other hand, who spoke here this morning, was at least as smooth as he was last year, and maybe more so; I suggested that he out-Clintoned Clinton at the last Festival, and I think he managed it again this time. There was a succession of jokey anecdotes to kick things off, about how everyone in this liberal slice of Colorado wants to punch him in the face, and then he drowned the crowd in policy detail, complete with a series of powerpoint slides (!) on immigration and global warming.
Continue reading "Clinton vs. Rove" »
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08 Jul 2007 01:58 am
POSTED BY
James Bennet
bio
There were no headlines out of Bill Clinton's appearance here Saturday. But there were two surprises that had Aspen attendees in general and avid Clinton watchers in particular speculating late into the night. They were: a) how he went out of his way to punish Elizabeth Drew and b) how he failed to go out of his way to promote his wife.
As for (a): Bill Clinton has weathered more political attacks than probably anyone alive, George W. Bush included. As president, and in public, he managed almost always to keep his famous temper in check -- an extraordinary accomplishment, really, given the magnitude of his temper and the amplitude of the attacks. He appeared today before a friendly audience, and the questions almost without exception played to his strengths. But Elizabeth Drew, no great friend of the Bush administration, did venture to challenge him: She noted that Republicans had criticized him as not doing more while he was president to combat terrorism; she asked why he had not made more of a priority out of getting Osama bin Laden.
Continue reading "Bill Clinton's Two Surprises" »
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07 Jul 2007 08:02 pm
POSTED BY
James Fallows
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A year ago, I had the chance to interview Bill Clinton on stage at the Aspen Ideas festival. (Description of the oddity of the whole situation here; video archive here.) This year Rick Stengel of Time magazine ably played that role. During the time for audience questions, I queued up to ask Clinton about something he had said. But as the clock ticked down at the end of the session, Stengel announced that there was time for one more question -- and the turn belong to a woman just ahead of me (and, to be fair about it, I'd already had more than my chance to pose questions to Clinton).
Here is what I wanted to ask. Sometime I would love to hear an answer:
Continue reading "What I wanted to ask Bill Clinton" »
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07 Jul 2007 05:08 pm
POSTED BY
Ross Douthat
bio
The (unintentionally) funniest moment in today's Bill Clinton appearance: Describing global interdependence, he said, very seriously, that the best way to understand it is that "divorce is not an option." A titter ran through the crowd, growing into laughter as he plowed on: "Really, you can't get out of it."
The second funniest line, this one intentional: In response to the question of whether he would prefer to be called the "First Man" or the "First Gentleman" should Hillary win the White House, he replied that "my Scottish friends say I should be called the First Laddie."
Insta-analysis to follow later on ...
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07 Jul 2007 01:07 pm
POSTED BY
Ross Douthat
bio
This morning I went to hear Robert Smith, the Vikings running back who shocked the football world by retiring in 2000 at the peak of his career; he was interviewed by ESPN's Jeremy Schaap and HBO's Jon Frankel. Smith was exactly what you would expect from someone who sat out a year at Ohio State to focus on his studies (which didn't make him many friends in the Buckeye State) - cerebral and analytical, engaged with the world of professional sports but detached from it at the same time, appreciative of fandom but also bemused by its excesses. (As a player, he was famous for his impatience with reporters' questions; "it became a badge of honor to see who could engage him in conversation the longest without inducing his eyes to glaze over," a sportswriter wrote later.)
At one point, Schaap asked Smith if he was a sports fan. He paused for a long moment, and then said "in a sense," adding "I enjoy a lot of sports." It sounded close enough to a "no" to remind me of the moment when I first realized that athletes weren't all just grown-up versions of my ten-year-old self, for whom it was possible to imagine no greater glory than playing second base for the Boston Red Sox. I was reading an essay about the 1968 Red Sox season - the inevitably disappointing year after the Impossible Dream - and the author (I've forgotten who wrote it, but it's in this book) went to a hotel room to interview Joe Foy, the Sox third baseman. Foy was lying in his underwear watching a war movie, if I remember the anecdote correctly, and he started talking about how baseball was just a job (!); how he didn't understand the fans (!!); and how if he weren't playing baseball he'd never pay to watch a game (!!!!).
I'm older and (a little) wiser now, and I have a little more appreciation for how something that seems like pure joy to an amateur can turn into, well, a job for a professional. (Writing for a living will do that to you.) And I have nothing but respect for a Smith, or a Barry Sanders, or more recently a Tiki Barber, who decides that they don't want to take the punishment of pro football for as long as someone will pay them to play it.
On the other hand, I'd still give up an arm and leg to play second base for the Red Sox.
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07 Jul 2007 11:06 am
POSTED BY
Ross Douthat
bio
Yesterday I went to see Jim Lehrer interview - though it was more of a conversation - Tobias Wolff on the subject of memoir-writing. Inevitably, the conversation revolved around questions of truthfulness, embellishment and fabrication, and where to draw the line that separates a memoir from a work of fiction. Wolff laid down a standard - as a writer of memoir, you should never "introduce things into a narrative that you know to be untrue" - and then set about qualifying it: Yes, you can change names; yes, you need to collapse time; yes, you must partially invent dialogue; yes, there's always "an element of imagination woven into memory," and so forth. Having written a kind of memoir myself, I liked Wolff's standard, and liked his qualifications: Writing my own book, I changed names and combined characters and fiddled with the timeline in several instances and - of course - "reconstructed" dialogue, which is another way of saying that I invented the specific words based on my general memory of conversations. I thought, and still think, that all of this was acceptable so long as I didn't cross the line of inventing events that never happened. (Though even knowing, having done it myself, that most nonfiction writers play with the past in this fashions, it's always faintly disappointing to learn that, say, an travel writer's trip across Africa really happened in two parts, with a sojourn in Europe in between, rather than the single slog that makes its way into the book.)
On the other side of this line you'll find James Frey, whose Million Little Pieces Wolff dismissed as a bad novel that only became interesting when he pretended the events were all true; you'll also find David Sedaris, who said of his Naked that "all the situations were true," which is rather different from saying that all the events were true, which they definitely weren't. Sedaris has escaped censure because he's a humorist, which is perhaps different from a memoirist; I'm not sure what I think about that, and I don't much care for Sedaris' writing, so I may be inclined to be too censorious in his case. On the other hand, I'm inclined to be very uncensorious where past writers are concerned, giving breaks to Truman Capote and Joseph Mitchell and others like them that I wouldn't give to a phony memoirist today. I feel like there's some standard out there that would let me damn James Frey without damning Capote - maybe having something to do with the standard of truth-telling being more stringent when you write about yourself? - but I haven't quite figured out what it is, and perhaps it doesn't exist; perhaps I'm just inclined to forgive fabricators when they write great works, and dismiss them as frauds when they don't.
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07 Jul 2007 10:29 am
POSTED BY
Corby Kummer
bio
"I couldn't help noticing you have The Phone," a fellow across the aisle on the last shuttle to town from the Meadows remarked to a passenger who had boarded with a yellow folding bicycle. (Bicycling, the PC mode of transport at the Festival, is hazardous without the moon as guide. As an illustration of the city’s light-pollution ordinances, the driver turned off the headlights for an alarming moment to show us just how dark the residential area is at night. The few amply lit exceptions seemed to be newest houses, which were conspicuous by day for being built seemingly flush with the property line on four sides.) Everyone understood that my seatmate was referring to the iPhone--the third one, he said, he'd seen so far.
I, too, had been observing just which gadgets people were using, one of the side pleasures of attending the Ideas Festival. I enviously noted two men, for example, sporting a Bluetooth headset called the Jawbone, with an odd black perforated metal stripe "so sexy and futuristic it's even managed a spot next to the iPhone at Apple stores," as a current product review claims. My envy was because after I conducted a small-scale iPhone-style search to buy one based on rave reviews, I left mine in an airport security machine days after I started using it. Just desserts for being extravagant, I thought, and went back to my clunky old headset. But two guys at Aspen...maybe I do need to order a new one!
Continue reading "iPhones in Aspen" »
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06 Jul 2007 07:17 pm
POSTED BY
Corby Kummer
bio
"Look at that guy asking a question," my colleague, Suzanne Clark, said to me at a media roundtable on whether "citizen journalists" will change mainstream media--or, more on the minds of many of the people on the panel and in the audience, kill mainstream media. "He's facing the audience, not the panelists. He thinks he's a speaker."
And, indeed, many of the questioners could well have been speakers, in an audience included Colin Powell and Chris de Wolfe, founder of MySpace. But given how much of the panel was concerned with who will be the guardians, the verifiers, the selectors, the gatekeepers, sifters of the factually reliable, legally sound Truth--I speak, of course, of real journalists--it was a meta-moment. Several of the people asking questions held forth as if they had in fact been allotted official time. This is an occupational hazard for any moderator, of course, but one that reflected the central questions the morning's moderator, Charles Firestone, of the Aspen Institute, was asking: Who decides who is worth hearing from? Who vouches for the information being presented?
Continue reading "Rupert Murdoch's Secret Elixir" »
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06 Jul 2007 04:48 pm
POSTED BY
James Bennet
bio
Half the people in Aspen are sick of playing cards with Bill Clinton. So I infer, at least, from a sample of four -- including me and my colleague James Fallows -- who were just chatting around one of the lunch tables here. The conversation turned to the former president, who was spotted last night headed out for a walk in town, and who is scheduled to speak here on Saturday. It turned out that on separate occasions in recent months both of our lunch-table companions had been invited very late at night to play the card game "Oh, Hell" with Clinton. One of our companions declined, preferring to go to bed. The other played until 2 a.m. before begging off and turning in -- even though it was the former president, not he, who planned to be up at 6 for round of golf. "I can't believe the guy," this man said, with smile and a shake of his head. "I can't believe the guy."
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06 Jul 2007 03:57 pm
POSTED BY
Clive Crook
bio
C.K. Prahalad is a Very Good Thing. His best-seller, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits”, alerted a lot of companies to the money to be made from selling goods and services to the world’s poor, and showed that acting on this opportunity is a key to faster economic development. I agree with almost everything he has to say on the topic, and I am a great fan. But I have to say I found his talk disappointing. Presumably tailored to his usual management audience, which probably demands it, his style was heavy on brightly colored Powerpoint slides full of arrows, boxes, and lines (some solid, some dotted), and lots of walking up and down. (Weren’t there murmurings of an anti-Powerpoint rebellion some while ago? Evidently, the revolt was put down. Shame.) He invoked the need for Imagination, Courage, Creativity, and many other good things which, so far as I am aware, nobody was ever opposed to.
Continue reading "The Bottom of the Pyramid" »
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06 Jul 2007 02:47 pm
POSTED BY
Ross Douthat
bio
One last point on Colin Powell: He may be self-serving and strategically incoherent, but he remains an eloquent and attractive figure, and a popular one. Obviously he isn't going to run for President, but if he did - well, he's pretty much the only person I could imagine winning the '08 election as a third-party candidate. I've been pretty skeptical of the Michael Bloomberg bubble, mainly because the space for a centrist, domestic-policy Mr. Fix-It is going to be pretty small in a year when the Democrats are so energized. But the space for a centrist, foreign-policy Mr. Fix-It who's also one of the most popular public figures in America (undeservedly, I think, but that doesn't matter much) is much, much bigger. He could run an Eisenhower in '52 campaign, campaigning on his personal celebrity and international experience - which is extensive enough to easily overshadow all his potential rivals - and promising (without necessarily offering specifics) to end an unpopular war. (He certainly wouldn't have any trouble raising money, whether he paired up with Bloomberg or not.) True, the Eisenhower parallel is imperfect: It's not as if Ike was in the Truman White House when the Korean War broke out, for one thing, and running Gulf War I isn't quite the same as being Supreme Allied Commander. And in the crucible of a campaign, the failures that have already tarnished Powell among the commentariat would become the stuff of national debate, knocking his approval ratings down from their current outrageous high. But as a third-party candidate, he wouldn't need an Ike-ish landslide. He need, say, 35-40 percent of the vote - and that would be within reach.
As I said, he clearly isn't going to do it. But if he did, he might just win.
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06 Jul 2007 01:11 pm
POSTED BY
Ross Douthat
bio
I think that James' observation - that Powell "made it sound like he was building toward a case for withdrawing immediately," only to slide away "from committing to any clear course of action" - illustrates the point I was making yesterday. Everyone agrees that Iraq is a mess, but the logic of foreign-policy consensus - which Powell embodies, if anyone does - will keep us in Iraq deep into an Obama or Clinton or Giuliani or Thompson administration. We won't be in the way we are now, but we won't be out either.
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06 Jul 2007 11:58 am
POSTED BY
James Bennet
bio
Colin Powell was similarly frustrating on the question of what to do now about Iraq: He was firm -- at first, anyway -- that the American effort is doomed, but then tentative about what the next step should be. He said that the Iraqi civil war would be resolved only by a "test of arms," adding, "The Shias, in my view, will ultimately prevail."
"It's going to be very ugly," he said. "But I don't know any way to avoid it." He mocked what he called a series of "mystical lunar deadlines" set by the administration for assessing the effects of the surge. And he accused the administration of "strategic incoherence." All of which made it sound like he was building toward a case for withdrawing immediately. But then he just sort of slid away from committing to any clear course of action, suggesting that maybe we could keep up our efforts until early next year, in hopes that Iraqi forces will pull their act together.
In his critique, Powell repeatedly accused the administration of "wishful thinking." Asked by Jim Lehrer how so many aspects of the war could have been so mishandled, he said, "I think it begins with not wanting to see things as they are." So Powell's account yesterday, in more ways than one, confirmed what has become the common understanding of how we went to war in Iraq: we had a president who was unwilling to see reality but was eager to act, and a secretary of state who saw things as they were but was not...quite...willing to act on his own conclusions.
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06 Jul 2007 10:59 am
POSTED BY
Ross Douthat
bio
One the one hand, he wants to bask in the adulation that comes his way - particularly from a crowd like the one he appeared in front of yesterday, submitting to questions from Jim Lehrer - for being the Good Bushie, the man who didn't want to invade Iraq, the anti-Cheney and anti-Rumsfeld. But on the other hand, he doesn't want to go so far as to admit that he was wrong to, well, support the invasion of Iraq. So when Lehrer put the question to him, "couldn't you have stopped it?," he first said "I tried" (which is what the crowd wanted to hear), made it sound like he had spent the year before the war urging Bush not to invade, and explained that he couldn't have resigned in protest because that isn't his approach to government service. Which is fair enough - but then he went on to qualify that "I tried" to mean that he "tried" to work out a peaceful solution through the UN, and when that didn't work it meant that Bush's decision to invade was the right one. (Deafening silence greeted this contention.) As for what came after, well, it was a failure of planning. Whose planning? Not Colin Powell's.
Twice in the course of the interview he made the point that three weeks after the invasion, with Saddam toppled and Baghdad in our hands, the war looked like the right thing to do. This is true enough, but it was a curious emphasis, and it left me with the impression that he wanted to claim credit for that (pyrrhic) victory, use it as vindication for his support for the invasion, and wash his hands of everything that happened afterward. Maybe that's fair: Maybe had Powell won more bureaucratic battles, everything would have gone swimmingly in Iraq, and the fact that it didn't is all Donald Rumsfeld/Dick Cheney/George W. Bush's fault. But given that he was present at the creation, not just part of the government that took us to war but one of its leaders, there was something a little off-putting about his self-justifying explanation that he tried to stop it, and besides it was the right thing to do, and anyway the fact that it fell apart is somebody else's fault.
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