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conflux

Salon Unsafe in any state
"Does voting for a third party contribute to "building a movement"? Claims of this sort are always made by charismatic figures. The results are never -- never -- delivered. The claim amounts to feel-good rhetoric to rationalize a heady campaign. Tomorrow never comes. It is a parochial fantasy.

Nader's claim that he's not the spoiler is bad faith. Perhaps he knows it, perhaps not. But there is a deeper force at work. What is at work in the Naderite camp, what lies behind the fantasy that the masses hanker for radical change, is a purist approach to politics. There are Nader supporters -- as well as Democrats of the left like Michigan's John Conyers -- who have urged Nader to drop his campaign in the states where he might throw the race to Gore. He's refused. He shows no inclination to deal. (Neither, unfortunately, does Gore.) But deal-making is how politics happens.

At bottom, Nader's all-or-nothing gambit is not politics, it is moral fundamentalism -- as if by venting one's anger, one were free to remake the world by willing it so, despite all those recalcitrant people who happen to live here."

NewsWatch Lights, Cameras - Reporters!
""I�ve been going to the Nader press conferences every week, and usually they�re pretty small affairs � about four reporters show up � but this is the biggest press conference since his nomination in Denver," said Recio, who has been covering all the third party candidates for the The Fort Worth Star Telegram in Texas, a Knight Ridder paper. "

"Now, of course, everything�s about to change. But perhaps it's not so much that the national media has woken up to giving Nader�s campaign its due, as that the Democratic party has suddenly found Nader a factor in the race. With Al Gore being unable to pull ahead of his Republican rival, the Green party votes now have a "spoiler" effect. The Democratic party has just launched, in the words of Wednesday�s The New York Times "aggressive campaigns" to dissuade voters in key battleground states from voting for Nader. On Tuesday evening, Senator Paul Wellstone argued with Jim Hightower on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer bout the Nader threat.

Suddenly the media want to know what Nader thinks he�s up to, how he feels about possibly playing a spoiler and whom he�d prefer to see as president."

MediaChannel.Org Sideshow Politics
"What to do about dispirited campaigns featuring candidates whose golden strategy is alternately to sloganize and muffle themselves, who, moreover, have to push against the grain even to get most citizens to pay attention to a race that is neither glamorous nor apparently urgent, at a time when there are fifty other channels to click to? The trouble goes far beyond the shallowness of debates, as it goes beyond the dirty dance of demagogues and blustery pundits. The core of the problem is intertwined, self-reinforcing: the diminished position of politics in a culture presided over by venal, wildly irresponsible entertainment organizations.

First, a bit of social query. Where are substantial candidates with the brains to recognize social needs, the political judgment to govern, and the talent to connect with the living human beings of this democracy?"

The New York Times Magazine The Age of the Mediathon
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""You read Walter Cronkite's book -- I thought he summed it up best," Simpson continued. "When he was doing the news at the beginning of his career, the news division was a source of prestige for the network. They left him alone. But by the late 70's, they saw you could make money on news. Once they saw you could make money, the promotion people took over -- he'd see promos that had nothing to do with whatever he was reporting. Once the news became a source of profit, everything changed. Who can have the most far-out story? Who can have the most provocative promo?"

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“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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