Huffington (Issue #12-13)

THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION

THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE

How the Outsider Became the Insider

SEPTEMBER 2-9, 2012

Contents HUFFINGTON 09.09.12

DOUBLE ISSUE

Enter POINTERS: Bachmann Returns, Awful Rape Analogy, Circumcision Guidelines Change MOVING IMAGE DATA: Why We Buy Guns Q&A: Hanna Rosin

AP PHOTO/NATI HARNIK (OBAMA); WENDY GEORGE (BOOKS); EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (ROMNEY)

Voices

INSIDE MAN

BY RYAN GRIM AND SAM STEIN

JAY STERLING SILVER: Todd Akin’s Remarks: The Broader Meaning LAWRENCE SCHALL: Why We Cheat MICHAEL SIGMAN: Whither Alt Weeklies?

A Reality Check QUOTED

RANT OR RAVE

BY MICHAEL CALDERONE

Exit BOOKS: Zadie Smith’s Welcome Return THEATER: Becoming Chaplin EWISE: Evite from Mom, Work Gets Personal GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK: Megan D’Arcy: Leapfrogging Past Tragedy

FOOD FIGHT!

BY ALICE HINES

TFU FROM THE EDITOR: A Polarizing President and Polarizing Books ON THE COVER: Illustration

for Huffington by Tsevis.

The cover image of Pres. Obama is a collage of over 300 photographs. Swipe down for a closer look.

MAIN PHOTO: ALLAN TANNENBAUM-POOL/ GETTY IMAGES ALL CREDITS TAP HERE.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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A Polarizing President and Polarizing Books HIS WEEK’S DOUBLE issue of Huffington arrives in the brief lull between the Republican and Democratic conventions. It is, of course, all about the November election. In a sweeping overview of President Obama’s first term, Ryan Grim and Sam Stein describe Obama, just three months before Election Day, suffering from an “engagement gap,” an almost unthinkable predicament for the man who stirred such passion four years ago.

The reason, Ryan and Sam write, is that “Obama has come to resemble the creature of Washington he campaigned against”—not the transformational leader his supporters were

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expecting. In mapping the journey from Campaigning Obama to Governing Obama—including a compelling re-telling of the legislative jostling around the stimulus bill— Ryan and Sam portray a president who entered office embodying the hopes of millions, now bracing for an election that is likely to be a lot tougher than anyone would have predicted. “How,” they ask, “did a candidate who drew two million individuals to his inauguration and retained a 13 million-member email list lose that magic?”

And at a time when the polarization of our political discourse is seen as a given, Michael Calderone examines its effects on one of

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

the newest and most robust cottage industries of our time: the Obama biography. Examining the spectrum of Obama treatments—from Edward Klein’s The Amateur, which tags Obama as “a narcissist” and “a bungler-in-chief,” to David Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story, a deeply-reported chronicle of the president’s family history stretching back generations—Michael finds that the political book industry reflects the wider national trend of polarization. According to a recent Pew study, Americans’ “values and basic beliefs are more polarized along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years.” As Jodi Kantor, a New York Times reporter and author of The Obamas, explains, the atmosphere of polarization greatly influenced the way her book was received: there was “confusion about whether this was on the left or right, a Fox book or an MSNBC book.”

Elsewhere in the issue, Alice Hines reports on one of the more colorful pieces of political stagecraft: what the candidates eat. The tradition of public food consumption in American politics goes back to the barbecues thrown by South-

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ern politicians, rowdy affairs with roasted pigs and free whisky and rum. Today, it’s photo-ops at greasy spoon diners, roadside bakeries and ice cream parlors. Alice even catalogues President Obama’s intake in a 48-hour period last month, mercifully without a calorie count: “Bacon, eggs, grits, buffalo wings, ribs, sausage, pepperoni pizza, iced tea and Miller Lite were only the start.

At a farm, the President purchased fresh peaches, strawberries, sweet corn and cherries; at a bakery, it was a dozen chocolate chip cookies and an entire apple pie. At one café, Kozy Corners in the village of Oak Harbor, he was photographed sharing strawberry pie and whipped cream with a young boy.” And then there are musings on candidates’ indulgences—President Obama’s fondness for beer, and Mitt Romney’s weakness for coffee-flavored ice cream, made even more notable because of his no-caffeine Mormonism. So, for the undecided voters still mulling it over, there’s always the beer vs. ice cream tiebreaker.

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NEW CIRCUMCISION GUIDELINES RELEASED

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For the first time since 1999, the leading U.S. pediatric group has revised its circumcision guidelines—posing an obstacle for anti-circumcision advocates. The American Academy of Pediatrics’ new policy statement shows a shift toward favoring the procedure, describing the benefits as “sufficient to justify access to this procedure for families choosing it.” The previous guidelines stopped short of recommending routine circumcision despite its “potential” medical benefits. Circumcision rates in the U.S., meanwhile, peaked around 80 percent in the 1970s and 1980s and dropped to just to 55 percent in 2010.

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BILL NYE SOUNDS CREATIONISM WARNING

Bill Nye the Science Guy wants parents who don’t believe in evolution to stop passing their beliefs on to their children.

In a new video, called “Creationism Is Not Appropriate for Children,” Nye posits that widespread belief in creationism is holding back our country. “I say to the grownups, ‘If you want to deny evolution and live in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we’ve observed in the universe that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it,’” he said.

SCHOOL YEAR STARTS WITH ANOTHER SHOOTING

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The school year got off to a tragic start at Baltimore County’s Perry High School, where a student opened fire in the cafeteria on the first day of classes. One student was wounded before the 15-year-old suspect, Robert Gladden, was taken into custody. Gladden’s father said that his son had been bullied, and a Facebook page that has been linked to the suspect was updated with: “First day of school, last day of my life. t(~_~t), f--- the world.”

WOMAN GIVES BIRTH TO GRANDSON

A Maine woman is such a devoted mom she became a surrogate for her daughter, who has a heart condition that makes pregnancy unsafe. An embryo made from her daughter’s egg and son-in-law’s sperm was successfully implanted, and Linda Sirois, 49, gave birth to her own grandson earlier this month. “It was all pretty simple as far as I was concerned,” Sirois told the Portland Press Herald. “I just saw it as I was babysitting for a few months.”

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GOP CANDIDATE COMPARES RAPE TO WHAT?

A Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania opposes abortion in all circumstances—and when asked how he would react to a daughter getting pregnant through rape, Tom Smith said he had “lived something similar to that” in his family. He went on to clarify that his daughter, who had a baby outside of marriage, was not raped.

“But, well, put yourself in a father’s position,” he said. “Yes, I mean, it is similar.”

BACHMANN WARNS OF ‘SPIRITUAL HURRICANE’ Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) offered

6 FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/GENE J. PUSKAR; DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

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an interesting interpretation of Isaac, which delayed the start of the Republican National Convention in Tampa. “We are looking at a spiritual hurricane in our land,” she said at a conservative rally on Sunday. “And it is time for each one of us to show up and suit up and stand up and realize that in this time and in this day we pour it out for Him.” As a presidential hopeful last year, Bachmann described Hurricane Irene as a warning to politicians from God.

THAT’S VIRAL 100-YEAR-OLD NORWEGIAN PACKAGE FINALLY OPENED

A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories.

HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES

THESE ARE THE 10 SMARTEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD

PAUL RYAN CALLS RAPE A “FORM OF CONCEPTION” IN LITTLE-SEEN INTERVIEW

THESE AREN’T PHOTOS

THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS ASTRONAUT PASSES

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JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

Electioneering As Republicans pack their bags in Tampa and Democrats get ready to descend on Charlotte, a tough, divisive campaign season enters its final stretch. As this portfolio of photographs shows, it’s been many miles getting there, from Richmond to Reno and all the stops between.

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Mitt Romney stands on a chair as campaign staff member Garrett Jackson holds it steady during an event at Music Man Square in Mason City, Iowa, last December.

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Obama supporters hold placards as the president delivers remarks during a campaign event at Canyon Springs High School in Las Vegas.

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Supporters rally around Mitt Romney as he speaks at a campaign event at Tom’s Ice Cream Bowl in Zanesville, Ohio.

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A campaign volunteer watches as President Obama speaks at an event at Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada.

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A Romney advocate waits to hear Sen. Rick Santorum speak during a campaign stop in Missouri last March.

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Obama is embraced after speaking at a campaign event at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, in August.

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Romney sits in a 1961 Rambler with the car’s owner, Michael Scheib, during a campaign event at K’s Hamburger in Troy, Ohio, this past June.

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President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden during a campaign rally at Cleveland State University.

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Romney is greeted by Paul Ryan before speaking to supporters during his primary night gathering at The Grain Exchange on April 3, 2012 in Wisconsin.

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Audrey Britt, a volunteer, makes calls for the Obama re-election campaign in Richmond, Va. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

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Annie Lin, a Romney supporter, at a campaign event at the Carter Machinery Company in Salem, Va. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

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DATA

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Why We Buy Guns

*FBI background checks are required every time a federally licensed gun dealer makes a sale. The FBI says the data don’t represent the actual number of firearms sold “based on varying state laws and purchase scenarios.”

Nevertheless, the gun industry uses the figures as a proxy for sales. The FBI, mandated by the Brady handgun-control law, launched the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, the source for this data, in November 1998.

Of the 151 million checks conducted by the system, more than 700,000 attempted gun purchases were denied, according to the FBI.

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Barack Obama has been almost as good for gun sales as the December holidays, according to FBI firearm purchase background checks. The month Obama was elected president, November 2007, background checks jumped 41 percent from the same month a year earlier. From 2008 to 2011, the annual number of checks soared 47 percent.

And 2012 is outpacing 2011 by more than 11 percent through the end of July. In December, holiday shopping traditionally boosts sales, the data show.

A gun industry analyst wrote in an April note to investors that the firearms and ammunition industry calls Obama “salesman of the year,” inspiring enthusiasts to stock up in anticipation of “a possible more restrictive environment.”

Other big events also appear to inspire Americans to buy guns. Here’s a look at the number of FBI firearm background checks on a timeline of news events.* — Kurt Heine

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Hanna Rosin Talks About a New World Order

The End of Men brings good and bad news for both men and women.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEPHEN VOSS

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Q&A

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ANNA ROSIN WANTS you to know that her 9-year-old son, Jacob, questions the title of her book, too. “He sends me notes that say ‘only bullies write books called The End of Men,” Rosin says, ruefully. She’s explained that she didn’t actually choose that title—it was coined by an editor at The Atlantic when Rosin wrote a cover story two years ago about how women are gaining on men in almost everything. But while she tried to think of an alternative when that piece grew into a book, nothing else summed up this moment of transition nearly as well.

So The End of Men and the Rise of Women is dedicated to Jacob, “with apologies.” - Lisa Belkin

Is it hard not to take this personally: as in ‘Yay for us women but ouch for our husbands and sons?’ It’s not like one team won and the other lost.

There is really great news in here for women and not so great news. On the good news front women have a growing number of opportunities in the workplace... in positions of leadership and power. The bad news is that a lot of women in America are now going it alone. At the same time, there is good news and bad news for men. It was the industries that are defined as “macho” that took the brunt of the economic downturn. But where there could be good is in the changing acceptable roles

for men, who have always been hemmed in by narrow social expectations.

Are men pleased about that? I think men are going through a transition right now. On the one hand men, and especially progres-

Rosin’s book comes out Sept. 11 from Riverhead.

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sive men, believe in the new world order. They have seen many movies where women are President. They have seen stories praising stay-at-home dads.

But they don’t have many role models. Women had Mary Tyler Moore and Murphy Brown. Men are just beginning to have examples they can look to, in real life and in media. The husband in Up All Night started out as the doltish dad, but in the later episodes the writers allowed him to occupy the parental authority in the family. It’s not a zero sum game between his manhood and his parenting. He’s a great dad and his wife still finds him sexy.

So we’re seeing a transformation of modern marriage? College-educated women and non-collegeeducated women are both pulling ahead in the workplace, but that means very different things for them at home. For collegeeducated couples, divorce rates have dropped and people describe themselves as happier. I think that’s because no one feels trapped. Either partner can be the breadwinner for awhile, then they can switch places, so everyone gets a shot—theoretically—

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Either partner can be the breadwinner for awhile, then they can switch places, so everyone gets a shot— theoretically—at satisfaction.”

at satisfaction. Non-college-educated women are increasingly choosing not to marry the men around them. They go to school, work, have children by themselves, and choose not to support a man whose prospects are not as good as their own. Men

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are becoming almost obsolete.

Everything about your book—its title, its vibrant, celebratory cover—says “women are winning.” Why doesn’t it necessarily feel like we are? Partly it’s because the latest series of recessions is a struggle for everyone. And partly it’s because we are at the tipping point, in a transitional moment. Women do so well in college, and then in their first jobs. But research shows that when they start climbing past middle management women hit that wave of suspicion. In my book I give women pretty specific advice on how to get past that reaction, how to behave around that.

And the fact that we haven’t definitively won control over our own bodies? To me that feels like a fear reaction to women pulling ahead.

It would wreck many American families to go back to a time when most women could not really work because they had no access to birth control and were home raising children fulltime. I think that the resurgence of the debate is a longing for when it was simpler and a way that will never be again.

Is the fact that there are still so few female Fortune 500 CEOs or members of Congress also a misplaced nostalgia? Give it time. It’s a 40or 50-year-old phenomenon and men have been in power for 40,000 years. This is a generational shift. We’re not there yet.

Rosin at her home in Washington, D.C.

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JAY STERLING SILVER

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Todd Akin’s Remarks: The Broader Meaning REPUBLICAN SENATE CANDIDATE Todd Akin’s vile remarks about “legitimate rape” and women’s natural resistance to pregnancy from forcible intercourse disturbingly parallel the views of many in law enforcement and recall the sorry history of the crime of rape in American jurisprudence.

The notion of “legitimate rape”— or “real rape,” as police often refer to it—is bandied about by police officers and even some prosecutors to distinguish four loosely defined classifications of rape accusations.

In descending order of “legitimacy,” they are: “real” rapes in which de-

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praved perpetrators spring from bushes or climb through bedroom windows to victimize wives and sisters; “date rape” in which the alleged victim assumed the risk by consenting to the date; “deserved” rape, as in “she-got-what-wascoming-to-her,” for dressing provocatively, traversing a dangerous street or being flirtatious; and utterly false accusations of rape conjured up for personal reasons.

While police departments have improved in handling rape accusations over the last few decades, the tendency to blame the victims or

Jay Sterling Silver is a law professor at St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami Gardens, Fla.

Voices turn a blind eye to violence against women persists within these bastions of machismo and, as Akin’s remarks attest, within our society.

While the bizarre myth of a biological defense against pregnancy from rape has not entered the discussion of the crime of rape, similarly outrageous claims have masqueraded as medical fact in the evolution of the elements of the offense in American jurisprudence.

Marching in lockstep with the proponents of Freud who posited a tendency of women to fantasize rape, predominantly male legislatures have adopted the requirement that a rape victim’s testimony be independently corroborated by other evidence. That requirement, nearly nonexistent outside of a crime usually committed by men against women, ensures that a man cannot be convicted of a crime as serious as rape solely on the testimony of a victim. A corroboration requirement for any other heinous offense, be it kidnapping or arson or armed robbery, would be an unthinkable affront to the victims.

Akin’s sponsorship, along with that of Paul Ryan, of a bill to limit the definition of rape—intrinsically a crime of force and violence—to in-

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stances of “forcible rape” is reminiscent of another unfortunate chapter in the evolution of the offense. The requirement that the victim of a rape, despite the attendant dangers, must have “resisted to the utmost” discounted the credibility of women. If the victim didn’t fight back, the act wasn’t sufficiently forcible in the eyes of the law. The “promptoutcry” requirement—the rule that the victim of rape must report the crime within a relatively Akin is brief period of time— not the real was yet another indigproblem, so nity aimed at women. his exit from As with the medithe national eval belief that divine intervention would as- scene is not the solution.” sure justice in trial by battle and ordeal, Akin and his ilk proclaim a natural defense against pregnancy from rape that assures an absolute ban on abortion is just.

Akin, however, is not the real problem, so his seemingly inevitable exit from the national scene is not the solution. Indeed, his “misspoken” remarks are another sore reminder of the distance we have yet to travel in confronting insensitivity to violence against women.

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LAWRENCE SCHALL

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Why We Cheat DON’T PRETEND TO have the answer to the age-old question of why people cheat, but in light of the recent news coming from the Emory University campus, located just a few miles from my university, I’d like to at least weigh in. For about a decade a few individuals who were responsible for collecting and reporting admissions data at Emory intentionally lied about things like SAT scores and class rank.

These folks didn’t tell crazy lies; instead, they modestly inflated the numbers so that no one would be the wiser. U.S. News and World Report has apparently indicated Emory’s ranking would not even have changed if accurate data had been used, possibly the most interesting part of the whole story.

Emory is a terrific institution and President Jim Wagner, whom I know reasonably well, is not only a great president, but also a good person—thoughtful, ethical and kind—and he ILLUSTRATION BY LINCOLN AGNEW

Dr. Lawrence M. Schall is President of Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, GA.

Voices has not been implicated at all in these misrepresentations. The news organizations will kick Emory around for a week or so and then move on to something else.

It’s certainly a sad day for this great university, but it will recover quickly, and it has done the right thing by coming forward.

But back to my central question. Why in the world would highly respected and well-trained professionals do something like this? Just a couple years ago, Atlantans asked themselves the same question about the “cheating scandal” in the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) that cost the Superintendent, as well as hundreds of others in the system, their jobs. I know the Superintendent well, along with many other administrators who were also forced out. The ones I knew best are all good people.

I still do not believe there was an organized, system-wide conspiracy that directed employees to cheat on statewide tests. I have seen no evidence of that, even three years later. Some teachers were just plain cheating. Some principals did the same. There were examples of absolutely outrageous behavior that deserved

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the harshest punishment. The behavior of many others who have been accused, though, fell short of what I would label cheating.

Those details aside, what I believe did happen was that a lot of people, including leadership, became focused on reaching a set of numbers that in the end have far less meaning than we ascribe to them. Rewards were based on achieving those numbers, and severe federal and state punishments descended upon A lot of APS for failing to people became hit those numbers. focused on When so much is at reaching a set stake and the wrong of numbers things are being that in the end measured, even good have far less people will begin to meaning than bend the truth. we ascribe Misaligned incento them.” tives can bring down any institution. Consider all the criminal activity that’s occurred in the financial industry over the last decade. It’s easy to say that all these folks were just crooks, but I think the bigger problem lies with the system. And this is harder to tackle.

An industry that used to reward people for long-term results ben-

Voices efiting many people has morphed to one where whoever makes the biggest, fastest buck for a few privileged individuals gets rewarded to an obscene degree. And when the bubble collapsed, those folks all kept their money and stayed out of jail.

So back to Emory and the handful of other schools in the last few years where cheating on test scores has been discovered.

What’s at stake here and what is being measured? My institution, Oglethorpe University, is not jockeying for a top twenty ranking position, and we are not consumed with the whole ranking game. We do end up in most books or ranking systems that list the country’s best colleges and universities and that’s always a nice thing. But whether we are 157 or 196 really means little to us or our students.

Instead, we are concerned every day with providing the most rigorous, relevant, and affordable education we can.

Could what happened at Emory happen at Oglethorpe? I’d like to think not because I know the people here who are responsible for reporting this same data, but no one should ever be so smug.

Would it have benefited us as an

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institution to add forty points to our median SAT scores? I guess so, but only in a very small way.

It looks like it didn’t help Emory all that much either. Would it have made the individuals responsible for recruiting students look better? For sure. Would it have made me as president look better? The answer there must be yes, as well.

In the end, institutions are just people working within a culture.

People will make bad It is the decisions from time responsibility to time. It is the reof the culture of sponsibility of the the institution culture of the instito reward tution to encourage ethical decisionand reward ethical making based decision-making on things that based on things that really matter.” really matter. When the culture and the system fail to prevent individual excesses, self-correction is the only alternative.

That’s what Emory is doing now. I hope someday the system in which higher education rankings are tallied, which rewards numbers over learning outcomes, will change for the better. I am not holding my breath.

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MICHAEL SIGMAN

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Whither Alt Weeklies?

A Reality Check THE LATEST WAVE of layoffs at the Village Voice and its sister Village Voice Media (VVM) papers LA Weekly, OC Weekly and Minneapolis City Pages has sparked renewed talk of impending doom for the Voice and a flurry of “whither alt weekly?” commentary.

The themes run the gamut: “How Management Killed The Village Voice,” “The End of Alternative Media,” “Are Alternative Weeklies Toast?” and “Village Voice Is Not Dead Yet.”

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The troubles at VVM echo the dire straits of such other leading alt weeklies as the Chicago Reader, which was sold three months ago for a song to the owner of the daily Chicago Sun-Times; the Boston Phoenix, which is being replaced by a glossy magazine called The Phoenix; and the Atlanta-based Creative Loafing chain, which

Michael Sigman is a writer/ editor, media consultant and the president of the music publishing company Major Songs

Voices filed for bankruptcy in 2008.

I claim no special insight about where alt weeklies are headed.

(It’s worth noting than many papers in smaller markets are doing much better than their big-city brethren.) But, as long-time publisher of LA Weekly (1984-2002) and short-time executive vice president of VVM (2000-2002), I can offer a reality check on some of the nuttier notions as to how we got here.

Former Voice staffer Rosie Gray wrote a piece for Buzzfeed that suffers from historical laziness and business naïveté, beginning with the wrongheaded notion that the Voice’s “slide began in earnest” when the paper dropped its $1 cover price and went free.

When Village Voice owner Leonard Stern bought LA Weekly in 1994, the Voice was in the throes of a sharp decline in paid circulation. Drops in circulation generally lead to drops in the price a publication can command for advertising. Leonard and Voice CEO David Schneiderman saw the potential for growth in taking the Voice free and made the move.

The Voice made huge profits for at least the next decade.

In fact, alt weeklies were pio-

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neers in making money by providing “free” information to their readers. As New York Times media critic David Carr—formerly an outstanding alt weekly editor in Washington D.C. and Minneapolis—writes, “Alt weeklies were onto the whole model of giving away content for free long before there was a consumer Web.” Gray also points to distrust of VVM owners Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey among Voice staffers.

In fact, She says, “The (Voice) alt weeklies staff assumed that were pioneers Village Voice Media in making Executive Editor Mike money by Lacey and his team providing ‘free’ were interlopers bent information to on squeezing the last their readers.” drop of juice out of the paper before leaving it to die. We had a sinking feeling that they’d be willing to hurt the Voice instead of shuttering or selling other papers in the chain.”

Some financial history: During the late ‘90s, long before Larkin and Lacey owned the Voice, Leonard Stern, no liberal himself, sold his newspaper holdings—the Voice, LA Weekly and five smaller papers—to an equity

Voices group whose chief investor was Goldman Sachs. The heavily-leveraged buyers didn’t care about the newspapers (aka “the product”) or the people (aka “the head count”). What mattered was the “exit strategy”—how many years it would take until the company could be “flipped” to maximize the return on investment.

Now, with many more papers and far less revenue, VVM faces a mountain of debt with no discernible exit strategy. They wouldn’t “hurt the Voice instead of shuttering or selling other papers” unless they could make more money by doing so—which they can’t: without the Voice they lose the country’s most important market and any hopes of selling significant national advertising.

As for trust, the famously cantankerous Voice staff has deeply distrusted management for decades, often with good reason.

Rupert Murdoch once owned the paper, for God’s sake!

There’s plenty to criticize about Larkin/Lacey’s handling of the decline at their papers, including the Backpage.com fiasco. But Carr gets it right when he says that whatever one thinks of Lacey and Larkin, their bottom-line busi-

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ness failure was making “a big bet at the wrong moment.” Like millions of American homebuyers, they couldn’t see the end to endlessly rising publication values— or could but were convinced they could successfully navigate the leap between old and new media.

It’s painfully true that we in management at VVM pre-2002 hadn’t a clue about how to adapt to the digital revolution. Our owners were hardly helpful: they paid a small fortune to a consultNow, with ing firm for a “plan” many more that amounted to the papers and far functional equivalent less revenue, of the magic word VVM faces a given to Dustin Hoffmountain of man in The Graduate. debt with no Instead of “plastics,” discernable the mantra was “Inexit strategy.” ternet radio.”

Another canard is that the downfall of the Voice began when Stern leveraged his assets to buy other papers during the ‘90s. The truth is that Leonard never borrowed a dime to purchase these papers, virtually all of which continued to be highly profitable until Stern sold them in 1999 at the top of the market.

And then came Craigslist.

Voices

QUOTED “If somebody can design an app that keeps my 16 year old from staring at her phone 12 hours a day, I’ll buy it.”

— HuffPost commenter Rickter

SHUTTERSTOCK (PHONE, SIGN); INDIGO/GETTY IMAGES (PRINCE HARRY)

on Facebook’s updated iPhone app

“ It just seems funny that the first joke he ever told in his life was about Obama’s birth certificate.”

—Chris Matthews

on Morning Joe, accusing RNC chairman Reince Priebus of playing the race card

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“He has a full-time job and he is a full-time serving member of the armed forces. They all need to let their hair down.”

— Rosa Monckton,

a close friend of Prince Harry’s late mother, Princess Diana, after nude pictures were leaked of the Prince in Las Vegas

“Nude beaches just don’t live up to the hype. You hope for The Blue Lagoon and the reality is more like Cocoon.”

—HuffPost commenter crankyCrackPot

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MATTHEW STOCKMAN/GETTY IMAGES; JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES; FREDERICK M. BROWN/GETTY IMAGES; BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTYIMAGES

Voices

QUOTED

What bothered me most was that I was representing my religion.

I just felt like anyone who knew I was a Witness was stumbled.

—Serena Williams

to NYT magazine on her outburst over a foot-fault call during the 2009 U.S. Open

“ Poor Mitt, upstaged by a bigger bag of wind.”

—HuffPost commenter Targetdog

on Tropical Storm Issac compressing the RNC schedule

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“I’m surprised Mexico isn’t building a fence of their own... to be sure Brewer stays out.”

—HuffPost commenter nonethewyzzer

on Arizona lawmakers’ push to start construction of a new fence along the Mexico border

“Rihanna confessed to Oprah Winfrey that she still loves Chris Brown. Idiot!

Now it’s MY turn to slap her.”

- Joan Rivers on Twitter

Features DOUBLE ISSUE PHOTOGRAPH BY JEREMY LANGE

INSIDE MAN RANT OR RAVE FOOD FIGHT!

THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION

HUFFINGTON 09.09.12

BY RYAN GRIM AND SAM STEIN ILLUSTRATION BY JEFFREY DECOSTER

IN THE DAYS following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson was left to pursue his predecessor’s unfinished legislative agenda. White House insiders considered the task nearly impossible.

The civil rights bill was bottled up in the House Rules Committee, where its chairman was intent on running out the clock

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PROMISED A NEW KIND OF POLITICS. INSTEAD HE PLAYED THE SAME OLD GAME.

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INSIDE MAN OBAMA

The result was a tax cut that is largely credited with ushering in an era of high growth and, of course, the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Had Johnson stuck to inside baseball, he would have struck out twice.

Barack Obama could have learned something from LBJ. As a candidate Obama promised to change the way Washington works and he rode a wave of global support into the White House. His first two years in office have repeatedly been compared to the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Society under Johnson, with historic achievements on health care, Wall Street reform and other domestic priorities.

But Obama’s first term has also left many of his supporters won-

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until the election the next year. A critical tax cut, meanwhile, was bogged down in the Senate, where the Finance Committee chairman was holding it hostage.

Johnson surveyed the legislative landscape and knew he had to shake things up.

Rather than negotiate with Congress, Johnson turned the goodwill of the nation into a force with which to bludgeon the GOP and expand what was politically possible.

He took his case to the American people, reminding them that the GOP was the “Party of Lincoln,” and flooded Washington with religious leaders who lobbied Congress.

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MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

President Obama speaks during a daily economic meeting in 2009 in the Cabinet Room of the White House.

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cent of the respondents thought he would bring the “right kind of change” in his second term. Although Democrats tend to like the president more than Republicans like Mitt Romney, his re-election is far from assured.

How did a candidate who drew two million individuals to his inauguration and retained a 13 millionmember email list lose that magic?

According to campaign officials, White House aides, members of Congress, top party strategists, labor leaders and progressive advocates, the main reason is that Obama has come to resemble the creature of Washington he campaigned against.

Whereas FDR and LBJ marshalled the American people as weapons in legislative combat, BHO came to Washington and tried to play the game like an old hand.

A president, by definition, is an inside player, tasked with executing difficult rounds of political negotiations. But without the energy of the campaign, Obama found himself with far less power than expected. “They got to Washington and they became of the place, and assumed that by virtue of having an email come that has ‘WH’ on it, that everyone will go, ‘Oh, OK,’” said Michael Steele, the

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dering whether those accomplishments could have been bigger in size, scope and impact. The health care reform legislation was built largely off a conservative model, with millions of people shuttled into the private market. The financial regulatory reform bill contained carve-outs for the private sector and is widely regarded as not farreaching enough to curb some of the banking industry’s worst practices. The White House made little effort to push labor priorities like the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have granted workers more avenues to form unions.

The Iraq war may have ended, but the war in Afghanistan heated up, with lingering confusion as to why troops remain there.

Now, just a few months before the election, Obama is suffering from an engagement gap. According to a late July Gallup poll, only 39 percent of Democrats said they were “more enthusiastic” than usual about voting. That number was 61 percent at a similar time in 2008. Republicans, meanwhile, are more fired up now (51 percent) than they were in 2008 (35 percent). Obama is no longer regarded by the majority of voters as a constructive reformer. An August 21 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed that only 37 per-

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JASON REED/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

former head of the Republican National Committee.

Van Jones, a former White House official whose background in grassroots organizing gave him a different perspective from those of officials who’d come from the Clinton administration, summed up the consternation felt by many Obama supporters.

“Who killed the hope?” Jones wondered. “And what happened?”

“OUT-MARCHED

BY THE RIGHT”

Once in office, the soaring rhetoric of the election quickly gave way to legislative realities. Obama, as his top adviser David Axelrod noted in an interview, had pledged to “find

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Obama, pictured with Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, endorses his health care initiative during a joint session of Congress in 2009.

and form coalitions” as president.

Not doing so once in office would constitute a broken promise in its own right. But promising to pursue an era of post-partisanship and actually getting lawmakers to buy into the concept were two very different things.

“It is sometimes blithely said, ‘You had the White House and the House and after [Arlen] Specter [switched parties] you had a filibuster-proof majority [in the Senate]. Why didn’t you go more visionary?’” said Jared Bernstein, Vice President Biden’s former top economic adviser. “That’s an extremely un-nuanced view of the reality. There were numerous Democrats whose vision was far from aligned with ours.”

Addressing the challenges brought about by the recession also

—HARRY REID

Advisers, Christina Romer, suggested that $1.8 trillion was needed to fill the hole in the economy, Obama’s top economic adviser, Larry Summers, rebuffed her, calling the figure impractical.

According to Noam Scheiber of The New Republic, Romer pared her proposal down to $1.2 trillion, but Summers still considered it too heavy a lift to get through Congress. The memo Summers finally presented to the president listed $800 billion as the top figure.

A top White House official told Huffington that larger proposals were still debated. But by then, the official said, the president’s Hill team had been warned that moderate Democrats wouldn’t go for anything over $800 billion. They chose to operate within those political constraints rather than try to expand them.

Obama’s team worked hand-in-

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“ OBAMA KNOWS HOW TO SWIM. HE’S NOT AN OLYMPIC SWIMMER, BUT HE KNOWS HOW TO SWIM.”

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strained Obama in the early weeks and months of his administration, demanding the quick and secretive work he had previously decried.

“Obama knows how to swim.

He’s not an Olympic swimmer, but he knows how to swim,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in a recent interview in his office on Capitol Hill. “He found himself in this huge river, the current is all running against him. The country has lost eight million jobs, and he knows he has to come up for air once in awhile, or he’s gonna drown. And he does that, he comes up for air in the very best way he can.

“For me, he was always there, even though the stream was against him. He was always able to get out of the water and help us. I think his inside game was just trying to keep the country alive.”

But if Obama was forced to play the inside game out of necessity, the president’s progressive critics note that he never really tried to see if trying the outside game could work.

During the crafting of the stimulus bill in the winter of 2008 and 2009, for example, Obama’s top economic advisers started from the premise that there were limits to what was politically possible. When the incoming head of the Council of Economic

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would actually do both, that he would play the inside game while he was building up the outside strategy of more of a global network that he could pull the trigger on, push a button and, you know, 1,300 people would respond in 10 minutes type thing,” said Steele. “I was actually, absolutely surprised.

I think they took it for granted. I think they assumed that, ‘They love me so much, they’ll always be there.’ Well, as you know, in this town, love is fleeting. It’s a very fickle thing.”

When Collins decided that the stimulus could include no money to upgrade schools, Bernstein said, the White House decided not to fight her on it. “The idea that the president would then go to Maine strikes me as a questionable strategy and one we chose not to follow,” he said.

The success of the stimulus is still being debated. Time’s Michael Grunwald’s book The New New Deal makes the case that it was a historic investment in reshaping the U.S. economy along the lines of what took place under FDR. But economists have also documented how insufficient the Recovery Act was in filling the hole the recession created. And for many Democrats, the failure to fight on the ground for a policy

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hand with congressional leaders to develop the actual language of the bill. The president did venture outside the Beltway to sell the stimulus, making a trip to Florida to stand alongside one of the few supportive Republican lawmakers, then-Gov. Charlie Crist. But he did not travel to Maine to convince the moderate Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe — who, unlike Crist, actually had a vote — to back the measure, as progressives urged him to do. The infrequent use of his campaign arm, Organizing for America, was also criticized.

“We did put pressure on them.

We did go out and campaign. We went down to Florida and stood with Charlie Crist and he was almost never heard from again,” said Axelrod. “We made the case that we needed to intervene [to save the economy]. But as a political matter there was an upward limit for what was sellable.”

As the White House negotiated, Republicans stole a page from the Democratic playbook and took their arguments to the American people.

“We used their model, and what surprised me was they stopped using their model,” Steele told Huffington.

“I always thought that Obama

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REUTERS/JASON REED

that met the direness of the situation remains a fatal error.

“The one thing that I learned when I was at the White House was that we thought we had everything we needed to govern: Obama, Pelosi — best Speaker ever — 60 votes in the Senate [Specter would switch parties after the stimulus passed],” said Van Jones, who, since leaving the White House, has become active in outside progressive organizations.

“Turns out we had a third of what we needed. You need media on your side — for-real media, like [Republicans] have with Fox. And you need a movement in the streets like they have with the Tea Party. It turns out if you don’t have the me-

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Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) shakes hands with Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) after the Senate Finance Committee passed the Democratic healthcare reform bill with a 14-9 vote.

dia or the movement, you’ll get beat to butter on the government level.”

Jones told Huffington he was stunned to see conservatives out-organize the White House.

“How was it that for two years the right wing in America had a monopoly on both the ground war, street protests, and the idea war?

That’s almost unprecedented,” he said. “I mean, how are we going to get out-marched by the right in an economic catastrophe?”

BACK-ROOM DEALS

The mad dash to pass a stimulus may have forced the White House to not let the perfect be an enemy of the good. But the health care bill it began pursuing soon thereafter made clear the extent to which the president was willing to engage in

HUFFINGTON 09.09.12

that in ‘94, Clinton didn’t spend a lot of time dealing with all the stakeholders, and they all came out against it. Because they didn’t feel brought into the process,” explained a top administration official shortly after health care passed, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the deliberations. “So we brought them all in.”

At first, openness meant hosting public forums where groups ranging from the unions to private insurance companies could voice their visions for reform, from the need for preventative services to the pitfalls of fee-for-service care.

Behind the scenes, however, the White House went out of its way to ensure that any group or lawmaker with relevance to the bill wasn’t alienated by the negotiations. According to Democratic officials close to the situation, the administration decided not to enlist its massive email list to fight for the public option — a government agency to provide insurance coverage — because they worried that the measure would inevitably be traded away, disappointing those who fought for it.

“He was husbanding them for the political battles to come instead of releasing them to go nuts,” said a former top Senate leadership

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transactional politics.

The decision to tackle health care reform itself was born from an un-inspirational premise. While Obama had talked frequently during the campaign about the moral obligation to expand access to the uninsured, it was basic accounting that convinced him to move forward in the spring of 2009.

Rising health care costs are one of the biggest drivers of the national debt, and curbing the rate of growth was not just a policy objective, but a governing necessity.

“He was persuaded to do health care, I believe, by Peter Orszag [the budget director], not Ted Kennedy [health care reform’s righteous champion],” explained one top ally in the fall of 2010, who requested anonymity in order to speak frankly.

Having reached this conclusion, Obama and his advisers made a set of strategic decisions that would define the subsequent health care reform process. The first was that everything had to be paid for.

There was little appetite for more deficit spending after the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the stimulus and the auto bailout. The second was to grant Congress a huge say over the legislative process.

“There was a view — and I don’t know how accurate the view is —

MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (ICT) speaks to reporters about the health care reform bill as Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) looks on.

HUFFINGTON 09.09.12

10 years towards health care reform (a figure they lowered to $80 billion) in exchange for an expanded pool of customers. The administration also promised not to use its purchasing power to lower prescription drug prices, and to oppose the re-importation of cheaper drugs from Canada and elsewhere, key PhRMA priorities.

Emails obtained by GOP investigators on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and provided to Huffington show just how closely the White House and PhRMA were working together. In August 2009, after The Huffington Post obtained a memo detailing the bargain on health care, officials at

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aide. “He had built up this vaunted [grassroots machine], they had spent years building this thing, and it wasn’t released on health care, for instance, his top priority.”

Meanwhile, the White House cut deals with some of health care reform’s traditional opponents in order to try to buy their support — or at least dull their criticisms.

They assured private insurers that the final reform bill would have a large private-sector component.

In exchange, AHIP, the insurance industry’s lobbying arm, kept their reservations quiet, albeit while secretly funnelling money to the Chamber of Commerce for its antihealth care reform ad campaign.

PhRMA, the lobbying group of the pharmaceutical industry, agreed to chip in $100 billion over

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on the campaign trail.

“We did not come here just to clean up crises. We came here to build a future,” he said. “So tonight, I return to speak to all of you about an issue that is central to that future — and that is the issue of health care. I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”

He chastised lawmakers for using the health care debate to score political points and declared that the “time for bickering” was over.

But when it came down to actually securing votes, Obama and his allies continued to employ a carrotcentric approach.

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) was granted the infamous “cornhusker kickback,” in which Nebraska would be granted 100-percent matching federal funds for the Medicaid expansion to be required under the law. When the deal engendered howls of outrage, Nelson had to ask that it be taken out of the final legislative language.

Then-Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) was offered a provision that benefited medical device manufacturers, who have heavy influence in his state.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) was given millions in Medicaid money for her state.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (IConn.), who had promised the

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the two agencies swapped ideas on how best to deny the allegations.

“Clearly, someone is trying to short circuit our efforts to try and make health care reform a reality this year,” wrote Ken Johnson, a top lobbyist for PhRMA, in an email to the White House’s top health care communications official, Linda Douglass.

“Excellent. Thanks Ken,” replied Douglass.

The White House also denied the memo’s accuracy, but the final bill by the Senate Finance Committee produced followed the agreement almost precisely.

On the Hill, the chair of that committee, Sen. Max Baucus (DMont.) had been granted a huge leash to negotiate with Republicans. The negotiations dragged on for months as the public — with a heavy assist from congressional Republicans — soured on reform.

Throughout the summer of 2009, angry crowds at town hall meetings berated Democratic lawmakers on everything from government overreach to death panels.

By the fall, with Democrats acting skittish, the president chose to go big, delivering a speech to a joint session of Congress laying out the virtues of large-scale reform. In it, he returned to the lofty rhetoric that he had featured

“ I THINK THEY MADE PRETTY NAIVE MISTAKES.” —AFL-CIO PRESIDENT

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RICHARD TRUMKA

in provision known, then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a notorious political knee-capper, kept his cool.

“Find a way to get to yes,” he told the senator during a meeting in Reid’s office.

The final bill expanded Medicaid eligibility, improved access to health insurance by allowing children up to age 26 stay on their parent’s plan, and banned discrimination against patients with preexisting conditions. It capped the amount of money insurance companies could spend on non-health care functions, helped seniors with their prescription drug coverage, and promoted preventative care.

But it did not include a public option — with could have saved tens of millions of dollars, according to the Congressional Budget Office — or the Medicare buy-in provision. And the administration had limited the ability of the government to negotiate directly with drug companies.

“I think they made pretty na-

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Democratic leadership that he wouldn’t be a nuisance on domestic policy in exchange for keeping his post as chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, ended up being just that. When he objected to the public option, he was offered a provision he previously supported: a Medicare buy-in, allowing consumers from the ages of 55-65 to pay a premium for the coverage.

When he rejected that too, Reid was apoplectic.

“He just wasn’t honest with me,” Reid muttered at one point.

But nobody pressured Lieberman to drop his pledge to uphold a filibuster of the bill. Asked by The Huffington Post at the time whether he was willing to give up his gavel in the fight over health care, Lieberman said “Oh, God no.

Nobody’s asking me that.”

In fact, when Obama addressed the Democratic caucus at the height of the debate, as the public option and Medicare buy-in were teetering on the brink, Lieberman said the president told him simply to work it out.

“When he came to the caucus he said, ‘Just try to work this out as you get to the end here.’ And I said, ‘OK,’” explained Lieberman.

And when Lieberman made his objections to the Medicare buy-

USING THE BULLY PULPIT

For the president and his defenders, there is a ready rejoinder to complaints about the inside game he played. In the end, the stimulus was passed and the economy was saved. Health care reform got done and tens of millions of people were granted access to health insurance. Obama, unlike any of his predecessors, notched that historic achievement.

“Knowing him, my suspicion is that he was a very smart, intuitive man who was looking towards

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dure. Not just on substance. They wouldn’t even give him a vote just to close down filibusters... I’m sure he was frustrated. He thought he was going to be bringing Democrats and Republicans together, not just Democrats together.”

Among Obama’s advisers, Axelrod was perhaps the most aware of this dynamic. At a caucus meeting in early February 2010, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) laced into him and others for not showing enough spine and leadership.

“The fact is, when you have a party that expands from Ben Nelson to Bernie Sanders that is a lot of territory,” Axelrod conceded in an interview.

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ive mistakes, trying to cut a deal with PhRMA. They gave PhRMA too much in the process,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told The Huffington Post in the spring of 2010, shortly after the Affordable Care Act passed. “They didn’t talk to us about it. They made that deal off the record.”

“And then when he started talking about jettisoning the public option, that’s when we started saying ‘This is ridiculous.’ It’s almost like they didn’t know how to negotiate,” Trumka added. “[Obama would] say ‘It’s not important.’

And anybody who’s been around a negotiating table knows, if they say it’s not important, consider it gone. You don’t even concern yourself with it. But if he was going to give it away he should’ve gotten something major in return for it.

He got nothing.”

Politically, moreover, the president’s brand had been damaged by his own party.

“I think part of the sad commentary that is unusual for Obama is that he had overwhelming Democratic majorities and was still having to play an overly inside game,” said Andy Stern, the former head of the Service Employees International Union. “He should not have been having to play an inside game with his own team. Even on proce-

—FORMER SEIU PRESIDENT ANDY STERN

Congress. Pundits across town thought the whole enterprise was dead. It was the outside game that revived it.

The only possibility was to use a process known as reconciliation, a controversial legislative maneuver which requires only a majority vote. Pingree and Polis urged Reid to use reconciliation and put the public option on the floor.

But instead of lobbying Reid alone, the freshmen partnered with outside progressive groups who ran national petitions and lobbied other members to sign.

Hundreds of thousands of people signed the petition, along with scores of Democratic members of Congress. Each time a new senator signed on, momentum grew. Eventually, more than 50 senators were

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“ WE WERE WATCHING THE ADMINISTRATION LOSE, AND THAT’S WHEN I THINK PEOPLE BEGAN TO APPROPRIATELY ASK: ‘WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE WE DOING HERE?’ ”

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what the best deal he could get would be for those issues,” said Steve Hildebrand, who served as deputy national campaign director for Obama’s 2008 campaign but has been critical of the president on legislative matters. “And he sort of moved beyond some of the aspects that he just didn’t think would ever be able to pass. I think there is some sense that having served with these relatively crazy people in Congress that he had a pretty good understanding of what was going to be acceptable and what wouldn’t fly.”

But that only raises the question of what Obama might have gotten had he done more to drum up support for his proposals outside Washington.

Long after Obama and Democratic leaders on the Hill had given up on the public option, progressive groups, working with two freshmen on the House side — Maine’s Chellie Pingree and Colorado’s Jared Polis — brought it back to life.

Democrats lost their 60-vote majority in the Senate in January 2010 when Scott Brown won a special election in Massachusetts to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s seat.

Emanuel urged the president to whittle down the bill into small pieces that could pass through

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JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES

Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) addresses a crowd at a health care reform demonstration in 2009 in Thornton, Colorado.

on record supporting the public option through reconciliation.

Responding to the pressure, a Reid spokesman issued a statement saying that if the caucus wanted a vote, he would consider moving forward on it. It was a direct challenge to the White House, which had little desire to reignite what they thought was a hopeless debate.

A few hours after Reid’s office put out the statement, Emanuel met senior Reid aide Jim Manley and a few reporters from The Washington Post and The New York Times for dinner and drinks

at Lola’s, a Capitol Hill bar and grill. Seeing Manley at the table, Emanuel, who was desperately just trying to get a bill through Congress, offered a response to Reid’s gesture with one of his own: a double-bird, an eerie sight given his half-severed right finger.

The public option never got a vote. But the outside game changed the fortunes of the seemingly dead health care bill.

Obama himself, with his signature effort on the brink, broke with the inside game playbook and used his bully pulpit in one of the most effective ways a president ever has.

His aides demanded that cameras record his appearance before the House Republican Caucus retreat

question: Could it have been more helpful, earlier?

THE LINCOLN FACTOR

The outside game also helped progressives achieve other legislative victories that might have otherwise eluded them.

With health care complete, the Senate moved to finish Wall Street reform in the spring of 2010. The White House and its allies were still calling it “finreg” at the time — a bit of insider jargon short for “financial regulation” that typified the approach to that point. The House version of the bill was the handiwork of a master legislator, Financial Services Chair Barney Frank (DMass.), who worked hand in hand with senior White House and Treasury officials. As such, it was

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“ AS A POLITICAL MATTER THERE WAS AN UPWARD LIMIT FOR WHAT WAS SELLABLE.” —DAVID AXELROD

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in Baltimore, during which he publicly called those lawmakers out for knee-jerk opposition and intellectual dishonesty. A month later, he held open meetings at the Blair House, debating congressional Republicans on the merits and shortcomings of their pieces of reform.

The Blair House summit was deemed a draw by the Capitol Hill press, but what the media missed was that Obama had redirected the nation’s attention to health care and away from the Brown victory. The momentum shifted. The party decided to move forward with reconciliation. Democrats had the space and capital they needed to get the Affordable Care Act passed.

The renewed push for the public option, though ultimately unsuccessful, helped save the bill, according to Democrats on the Hill.

“It helped a whole lot,” said Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the man then charge of whipping votes, of the Pingree-Polis letter. “The base getting fired up helped a whole lot.

We could feel it out there.”

In an interview in his office the week the House passed the final piece of reform, then-Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said he agreed. “It added energy to the effort to get to where we wanted to get,” he said, leaving open the

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he’s raised questions about whether or not we can actually go forward, and I’ve had to convince him that I thought we could go ahead and get the bill, but it was right to ask the question,” Dodd told The Huffington Post at the time. “A couple of times on financial reform, when they thought maybe we just ought to go on to something else, when we had so many cloture votes on it, but I and others were able to convince him that no, that we thought we could win the issue and we ought to keep it up.”

With White House backing, Senate Democrats kept it up. Every attempt by Republicans or bankfriendly Democrats to rip out or water down Warren’s brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, was met with fierce resistance. “My first choice is a strong consumer agency,” the Harvard law professor told The Huffington Post in March 2010. “My second choice is no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.”

Meanwhile, in Arkansas, online liberal activists teamed with Big Labor to challenge Sen. Blanche Lincoln in a Democratic primary. Lincoln had long been one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress, and as chair of the Agriculture Committee, she was charged with writ-

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shot through with carve-outs and loopholes for the banks.

A strange thing began happening in the Senate, however. With consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren and a coalition of progressive and labor groups taking the fight to the public, the bill got stronger in the upper chamber.

The White House, for its part, seized on a major Goldman Sachs scandal, as the bank was charged in April by the Securities and Exchange Commission with defrauding investors. Republicans and bank lobbyists found the timing of the announcement suspicious, but it worked to reignite public outrage at Wall Street. Rechristened “Wall Street reform” — much catchier than “finreg” — the bill started steamrolling.

Democrats saw a chance for a political win-win: Harry Reid took financial regulatory reform to the floor, knowing it didn’t have 60 votes, but daring Republicans to brave the headlines that would come from defending Wall Street.

As cloture vote after cloture vote (the 60-member threshold vote needed to end debate) failed, Reid grew impatient. He wanted to pull the bill off the floor and move on, said Chris Dodd, then chairman of the Banking Committee.

“There have been times when

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MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

ing the piece of Wall Street reform that dealt with derivatives.

She shocked K Street and the Washington establishment when, six weeks before her primary, she released tough legislation that tightly regulated the derivatives market. The move sapped her progressive challenger, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, of momentum.

Lincoln beat back most efforts to weaken her language.

The night of Lincoln’s victory in June 2010, a senior White House official got in touch with POLITICO reporter Ben Smith to snipe. “Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members’ money down the toilet on a pointless exercise,” the official said. “If even half that total had

been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November.”

Labor may have lost that specific vote to oust Lincoln, but by taking the fight outside, it won legislative language that strictly regulated trillions of dollars of financial transactions. Considering the end result, the price tag was cheap.

A LOSING STRATEGY

Voters delivered a firm rebuke to the president in the November 2010 midterm elections. Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives, and the president’s health care law proved to be a rallying point for Republican voters. Obama’s top advisers concluded that they needed to demonstrate the appropriate humility.

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D-CT), speak to the media after the Wall St. Reform bill passed.

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sional Democrats were prepared to offer, according to multiple sources involved in negotiations.

“Our intent was to avoid the shutdown of the government,” Daley told Huffington. “The president was committed to getting spending under control, and that’s why we agreed to the deal that ended up passing.”

Privately, the administration had determined that the president would be hurt badly if the government shut down. Bill Clinton had won that battle in the mid-1990s.

But he had benefitted from having a tempestuous Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, as his political bete noir. “[House Speaker John] Boehner was not going to become the enemy,” said one top Obama aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss those internal deliberations. “He was not going to be the guy who people emoted anger towards.”

The two sides eventually reached an 11th-hour agreement to keep the government open. But the White House’s hope that these types of deficit-reduction negotiations could produce a detente on other items was quickly dashed.

House Republicans began plotting how to use a historically mundane vote to raise the debt ceiling as

THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION

This attitude only bogged the White House down further within the inside game. The lame duck session saw major victories on a nuclear non-proliferation treaty and an end to “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the longstanding military policy that prohibited gay members from openly serving. But even with the public in favor of letting tax cuts expire on high-end income brackets, the administration bowed to concerns from within their own party and negotiated a deal with Republicans to extend all the Bush tax cuts for two more years.

In strategy sessions, the president and his advisers looked at ways to move various agenda items, from immigration reform to additional stimulus, through a divided Congress. Top officials believed that if they could earn the public’s trust on the deficit and remove that issue from the table, Republicans would join them on other items.

And so, in the spring of 2011, as congressional Republicans threatened to shut down the government unless Democrats agreed to steep spending cuts, the White House looked for middle ground. Without prior warning, then-White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley offered House GOP leadership a higher level of cuts than what congres-

THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION

CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

a means of extracting even more from the administration.

For months, the administration believed that the debt ceiling fight would ultimately be resolved with only moderate drama. For all the talk of a frosty relationship between the president and Boehner, top White House aides considered the Ohio Republican a reasonable individual amidst a caucus of crazy.

On June 24, 2011, the staffs to the president and the speaker held the first in a series of secret meetings to hammer out a grand bargain.

With barely any input from fellow Democrats, Obama placed sacred cow after sacred cow on the block: massive cuts to discretion-

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Obama points to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) after signing the financial reform bill into law.

ary spending ($1.2 trillion over 10 years), gradual changes to the retirement age for Medicare, changes the premium structure for Medicare Part B and D and changes to the way Social Security benefits were paid starting in 2015. In exchange, the White House demanded $800 billion in revenue increases.

As negotiations continued in private, pitfalls emerged on the Hill. A group of senators known as the Gang of Six began reviving their own debt-reduction formula.

It had similar features to the deal Obama and Boehner were laying out, but also called for roughly $1.2 trillion more in revenues.

Those Democrats who were bound to have been angered with the president’s proposal, would be apoplectic now, knowing how

AN ENGAGEMENT GAP

After the debt-ceiling debacle, the White House’s approach changed.

The administration concluded that legislative negotiations with House Republicans would forever be an act of frustration unless they shaped the public debate first.

“You don’t want to date these people,” one exasperated top administration official told reporters on July 22, 2011, the night that the Boehner-Obama deal imploded.

“I think it was obvious by the end of the summer 2011 that the leadership in the House was not going to go anywhere further than the minimum amount needed to avoid fiscal calamity,” explained Daley, who left the White House in early 2012.

Led by economic adviser Gene Sperling and with a push from Axelrod as well, the president

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people began to appropriately ask: ‘What in the world are we doing here?’” said Stern, before listing his examples. “The public option, the lack of a plan about deficit reduction, the Republicans’ willingness to take the country over the cliff, and the president trying to cut a back door deal with Boehner as if he was going to be different than the rest of the extremists.”

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bad a deal he had struck. The grand bargain was effectively dead.

Obama went to Boehner looking for more revenues, but the speaker walked away.

The president had narrowed an inside-game strategy even further, in the hope that direct one-on-one negotiations might be more fruitful. It had nearly worked. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), now the presumptive Republican vice presidential nominee, reportedly warned Boehner that a deal wasn’t just bad policy but would have effectively guaranteed Obama’s re-election.

And Obama got credit for his willingness to reach out to Republicans, who, in turn, took a hit in the polls. But his own party was alarmed by what he was willing to give up in the process.

For progressives, the White House’s inability to see the unbending recalcitrance of congressional Republicans remains the biggest, most inexplicable shortcoming of the president’s first term in office. The problem, as Andy Stern, the former SEIU president, put it, was not just that Obama attempted to play the inside game.

It’s that he did so time and time again without recognizing the utter pointlessness of the endeavor.

“We were watching the administration lose, and that’s when I think

—MICHAEL STEELE

the cost. It was the type of victory that had escaped the White House for months, if not years.

“I think [the debt ceiling debate] was a watershed event, because it was clear that ... these matters weren’t going to be easily resolved within the four walls of the cabinet room, or the conference room on Capitol Hill,” Axelrod said. “There’s no doubt that the lesson of that was that more, rather than less, public engagement was absolutely essential.”

Suddenly, the image of a president making progress began to emerge. And it was furthered along when he announced his support for same-sex marriage and a new administration policy that would end the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had advanced de-

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“ THEY GOT TO WASHINGTON AND THEY BECAME OF THE PLACE, AND ASSUMED THAT

BY VIRTUE OF HAVING AN EMAIL COME THAT HAS ‘WH’ ON IT, THAT EVERYONE WILL GO, ‘OH, OK.’ ’’

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turned his focus from debt reduction to job creation. He put together a package of proposals — targeted tax cuts, infrastructure investments, money for teacher retention and first responder hiring, to name a few — and barnstormed the country to build up support.

The administration launched a “We Can’t Wait” campaign highlighting the executive actions the president was taking to stimulate the economy on his own.

“I need your help,” Obama told an audience in Denver in October last year. “Some of these folks in Washington still aren’t getting the message. I need your voices heard. I especially need you young people, I need you guys involved.

I need you active. I need you communicating to Congress. I need you to get the word out. … Tell them, ‘Do your job.’”

While the efforts did little to dissolve GOP opposition — only a minor chunk of the president’s jobs bill ended up being passed — the outside game achieved its desired results. Congressional Republicans were left defensive and battered as the president assailed them to pass a year-long extension of his payroll tax cut. Boehner eventually folded his cards, agreeing to extend the rates without requiring spending cuts to offset

LUKE SHARRETT/THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (RGa.) during a session of the Senate Agriculture Committee in April 2010.

Markell, who has served as a business-savvy surrogate for the president’s re-election campaign: “This is a less romantic time, a less romantic campaign.”

“Maybe [Obama]’s had to do some more things you would term traditional,” Markell added. “But there’s no question his vision is more along the lines of where most Americans are in the terms of a strong middle class. He’s laid out a specific plan to get there, and you see it already, people really feel like he will fight for them more than Mitt Romney would.”

That may be true. Certainly,

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grees or performed military service.

But for all that, the engagement gap facing the Obama campaign persists. Much of it is a product of a stagnant economy, which has sapped voters of the political energy they had in 2008. But even Obama’s defenders admit that his time spent governing as an insider has altered the perception of him as a change-agent.

“What you have is an incumbent president who naturally grew into the role of the presidency, away from a fire and brimstone candidate,” said Obama’s old deputy campaign manager Hildebrand, explaining the difference between 2012 and 2008.

Added Delaware Gov. Jack

fortable with that type of politics.

Explaining this spring how he would manage to enact his agenda in a second term, Obama was still looking forward to sitting down and cutting deals. This time, he said, Republicans would be nicer because he’s not running for re-election.

“I believe that if we’re successful in this election, when we’re successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that,” he said. “My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again.”

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polls indicate that the public is aligned with Obama on the majority of issues, from Medicare to taxes to foreign policy.

Playing the outside game, however, requires enjoying the fight. As Jared Bernstein said, it means going to someone’s backyard and telling them to their face that they’re wrong. It means using political force to win with a bare majority rather than reaching consensus.

It means letting go of the illusion that the Republican Party is looking to work with you.

For Obama, whose brand remains very much tied to the idea that partisanship can be overcome, it remains unclear whether he’s com-

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CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

House Speaker John Boehner holds a news conference at the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center in Washington, D.C.

AP PHOTO/CAROLYN KASTER

RANT OR RAVE With Political Books, It’s All About the Media Sell

BY MICHAEL CALDERONE

O

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On a long flight to Los Angeles in early August, Rupert Murdoch cracked open Edward Klein’s The Amateur, a scathing indictment of President Barack Obama and a summer New York Times best seller. ¶The book had already been heavily promoted by the media mogul’s New York Post, Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network. Murdoch, like some of the hosts he employs on Fox, clearly enjoyed the book and later told his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers that “every voter should read” it.

Well, maybe not every voter.

The Amateur is more likely to appeal to voters predisposed to seeing Obama described as a “thin-skinned,” “a narcissist,” and a “bungler-in-chief” —someone who pushes “far-left policies,” suffers from “extreme haughtiness and excessive pride,” “lacks faith in the goodness of American leadership,” and is the “most divisive president in recent American history.” Or voters, who like Klein, have ever wondered: “Will Americans finally come to recognize the dark side of Barack Obama in the presidential election of 2012?”

In today’s polarized media, where partisan divisions become more apparent as the 2012 election draws near, one cable network or website’s must-read is another’s ignored screed. They say you’re

not entitled to your own facts, but that isn’t always clear on cable news, where viewers can seemingly be watching two very different elections at the same time.

As a result, books on Obama and his administration—or individual scenes from them—can be heavily promoted on one network, while receiving very different play, or none at all, on another.

“In cable television, Fox’s and MSNBC’s coverage of the candidates’ character themes are mirror images of each other,” according to Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study on Aug. 23. While “Fox has offered a mixed view of Romney, its assessments of Obama’s record and character have run negative by a measure of 6 to 1.”

Conversely, it found, “the numbers are almost identical, in reverse, for MSNBC.”

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Edward Klein’s The Amateur spent 14 weeks on the Times best-seller’s list.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the organization, said in the report that “the American news media in its coverage of the candidates appears increasingly to be a conduit of partisan rhetoric and less a source than it once was of independent reporting.”

Does increased partisanship in the media create greater divisions in the public or are outlets serving up increasingly partisan fare to meet market demands? Hard to say, but what’s clear is that the gap between the views of Republicans and Democrats has only widened in recent years. Americans’ “values and basic beliefs are more polarized along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years,” or when the organization began tracking such views, a June Pew Research Center study found.

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION PHOTOGRAPHS

BY WENDYCREDIT GEORGE TK

Since Obama’s election, several more right-leaning outlets have launched and expanded, including Breitbart’s “Big” sites and The Daily Caller, showing the increased level of interest in taking on the Democrat in the White House. Conversely, the liberal Nation magazine saw its circulation double during the presidency of George W. Bush.

The publishing marketplace, like cable news and the Internet, often rewards the most extreme assessments of Obama; a book’s allegations or arguments are amplified to millions of like-minded consumers of news and opinion. Long gone are the days when network newscasts dominated and voters had a shared sense of the day’s news. And the heightened polarization can make it tough for authors of non-polemical books on the president

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to compete while agenda-laden cable news or talk radio often reduce several hundred pages to a few magnified or distorted details.

‘NONSENSE’ OR PUBLISHING GOLD?

Klein has effectively used the conservative media apparatus to sell a lot of books in recent years. The Amateur has outsold—by 7 to 1—David Maraniss’ Barack Obama: The Story, 155,000 to 22,000, according to Nielsen BookScan. While it also has outsold other political nonfiction books, spending 14 consecutive weeks on the Times best-seller list, it hasn’t topped several works of fiction.

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, published June 5, has sold 268,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan. James Patterson’s latest, The 11th Hour, which was published a week before The Amateur, has currently sold 188,000 copies.

In writing his exhaustively detailed book, Maraniss spent years tracing several generations of Obama’s family history through Honolulu, Jakarta, Topeka, Chicago, New York City and Western Kenya. James Fallows, called it in the New York Times Book Review, a “revelatory book, which anyone interested in modern politics will want to read, and which will certainly shape our understanding of President Obama’s strengths, weaknesses and inscrutabilities.”

Since June, Maraniss has gotten a lot of media love, including interviews on CNN, NPR and NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Maraniss’ complex look at Obama has received much media attention.

He turned down an appearance on “The Daily Show” for a segment focusing on Obama’s high school pot smoking as a member of “The Choom Gang.” Maraniss got one interview request from Fox News, which he accepted, but specifically for a segment on factual discrepancies between his book and Obama’s memoir.

Klein has yet to receive an invite to discuss his book from CNN, MSNBC or other networks, but his claims led the Drudge Report website, a conservative aggregation juggernaut, and were given oxygen throughout Murdoch’s media empire even before The Amateur hit shelves May 15.

Two days earlier, the New York Post de-

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“ I sort of knew from the start of this book that it would be thrown in the maw of this bitterly divided and ideological political culture. I can’t pretend to be naïve about it. I figured that would happen, but it is still unpleasant that it has.”

– David Maraniss voted its cover to Klein’s claims of a rift between first lady Michelle Obama and media mogul Oprah Winfrey. Over the next week, Klein sat down with both Fox News host Sean Hannity and Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs, who called The Amateur an “explosive new book pulling back the curtain on the Obama White House [and] painting a picture of amateurish leadership.”

The reason most networks aren’t calling may not be Klein’s rightward drift, as some conservatives claim, but rather his off-the-wall claims in several books over the last few years. Most notably, Klein suggested in his 2005 book, The Truth About Hillary, that Chelsea Clinton was conceived after former President Bill Clinton raped Hillary Clinton, a claim that prompted Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines to tell The Washington Post that the book is “full of blatant and vicious

fabrications.” Five years later, Klein cowrote a novel, The Obama Identity: A Novel (Or Is It?), using debunked conspiracy theories, like Obama being born outside the United States, as plotlines.

In reviewing Klein’s latest book, the New York Times’ Janet Maslin described Klein, who, in a previous journalistic life, edited the New York Times Magazine from 1977 to 1987, as an “inept, arrogant ideologue who maintains an absurdly high opinion of his own talents even as he blatantly fails to achieve his goals.”

In a July Washington Post profile of Klein, the White House dismissed The Amateur as “nonsense” while Reines dismissed the author as “a congenital liar.” On Aug. 17, Obama campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt pushed back against Klein’s latest post-publication claim that the White House put out feelers about replacing Vice President Joe

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WILLIAM B. PLOWMAN/NBC/NBC NEWSWIRE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Maraniss with Doris Kearns Goodwin, presidential, historianon on ‘Meet the Press.’

Biden on the ticket with Hillary Clinton.

“That information is about as credible as Mr. Klein’s book,” LaBolt said, during an interview on Fox News. “You know, [in] Mr. Klein’s latest book, he’s invented an entirely fictional dialogue that President Clinton and Secretary Clinton had in their home in Chappaqua where he wasn’t present. Everyone [has] denied the substance of that book.”

But Klein fashions himself as a truthteller, offering the real story about how the elite media covers for its ideological allies in the Obama administration.

While he suggested in an interview that there’s a mainstream media conspiracy to not cover his book, he declined to discuss it with Huffington. But to sell a lot books Klein doesn’t have to speak to this publication, or any other that won’t simply reinforce his views.

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

There’s plenty that will.

WRITING FOR HISTORY

Author David Maraniss doesn’t think much of Klein’s book, which he describes as a “diatribe.” He acknowledges that Klein did some original reporting, but says the interviews were conducted “with an ideological perspective before he started.”

Maraniss admits to having his own ideology and biases, but, “that’s not what drives me as a journalist.” His job is to explain Obama and let the readers decide what they think about the man, he says.

Indeed, readers can walk away learning a lot more about Obama’s early life, since the book—which is likely to be followed by another volume—ends in 1988, when the future president enters Harvard Law School. Establishment me-

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“ The whole point of the book is complexity. If you wanted to say something simple about Obama, you’d write a tweet.”

– Jodi Kantor dia may focus more on this sweeping, multi-generation narrative, but some in conservative media have specifically zeroed in on parts that paint the Obama in a more negative light: details of youthful drug use and factual discrepancies with the president’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.

When Maraniss was writing his 1995 biography of former President Bill Clinton, First in his Class, he recalls getting anonymous faxes from Clinton haters sent to his hotel in Little Rock, Ark., where he was staying at the time. Nowadays, criticism comes in the form of anonymous comments on, or blasts from, conservative news and opinion sites. In June, Breitbart editor-at-large John Nolte called Maraniss “a shill” who is “deter-

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mined to downplay Obama’s lying.”

“I’m not in this to defend Obama,” Maraniss says. “I have my own questions about some of the ways he compressed and used composites in his book. I’m not defending that, but I’m trying to defend common sense.”

“He was writing a book from the lens of race. It shouldn’t be taken as rigorous factual autobiography.”

But although Obama’s memoir mentions the use of composites in the introduction, Politico treated Maraniss’ casual reference to Obama’s use of composite characters from an early excerpt in Vanity Fair as a headline-grabbing revelation.

Drudge gave big play to the Politico item, thus starting a right-wing meme of the president being a fabricator. Although Politico later added a lengthy editor’s note to its post, the notion that the president lied in his memoir had spread.

“I sort of knew from the start of this book that it would be thrown in the maw of this bitterly divided and ideological political culture,” he says. “I can’t pretend to be naïve about it. I figured that would happen, but it is still unpleasant that it has.”

Even the Drudge-fueled conservative blogosphere reaction didn’t surprise him.

“I knew the right wing would simultaneously dismiss the book as hagiography and then cherry-pick every negative thing they can from it,” he says.

Journalists are quick to praise his work even if it’s not atop the best-seller

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Grunwald’s The New New Deal came out August 14.

list. Slate’s David Weigel, who recently compared Klein’s bigger sales with Maraniss’, concluded that the “number of people who want their bitter views of Obama reinforced vastly outpaces the number who like Obama and want to understand him better.”

While Maraniss acknowledges that he has an ego like any writer, he says he’s not bothered by sales that are slower than Klein’s and other recent conservative books on the president, like David Limbaugh’s The Great Destroyer, which came out the same month as Maraniss’ and has racked up over three times as many sales, according to Nielsen BookScan.

He points out that his Clinton biography is still read by those trying to understand the former president. “I’m trying to write for history,” Maraniss says. “I’m not trying to write for the moment.”

HOW TO SELL A MILLION

Time senior national correspondent Michael Grunwald hopes to influence the current election year conversation on Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, providing more information about a piece of legislation derided by Republicans, barely discussed by Democrats this election year, and largely framed by the media as a boondoggle.

Of course, Grunwald would like to sell books, too, but tells Huffington that he doesn’t expect an overnight hit with a stimulus book, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era. Grunwald joked that he could have written a more inflammatory and sensational book called Porkulus, but that would only serve certain readers’ negative views on the government.

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“I could’ve written a book with no reporting that would have been utter bullshit and would have sold a million copies,” he says.

Before Grunwald’s book hit shelves Aug. 14, the author heard from his publisher, Simon & Schuster, that the best promotion in today’s marketplace is an on-air plaudit. He had never met MSNBC host Chris Hayes prior to appearing on his show Aug. 19, so the glowing introduction he received was a pleasant surprise.

The book is “fantastic” and “an absolute must-read,” Hayes told viewers. “All of you watching, right now, go to Amazon, go to Powell’s [a bookstore and website based in Oregon], go to [website] IndieBound, order it,” Hayes said.

Grunwald tells Huffington he’d be happy to go on Fox News—but that’s unlikely. While Grunwald’s book is no love letter to Obama, the Time reporter thoroughly investigates the impact of the stimulus package and argues that the much-maligned legislation produced meaningful change in clean energy, education reform, taxes, transportation and health care, while also helping to save the free-falling U.S. economy.

But even without a rave from conservative Hannity, which would be unlikely anyhow, the recommendation from Hayes got the word out and The New New Deal jumped nearly 200 spots— from 223 to 38—on Amazon before the credits rolled on the MSNBC weekend morning show.

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‘HAGIOGRAPHY OR TAKEDOWN’

On Aug. 21, Amazon rolled out its Election Heat Map 2012, which allows users to see which books, both political “red” or “blue,” are the hottest sellers stateby-state. The map shows what’s been apparent for several years: Conservative books, especially those chock full of inflammatory rants against president, the Democratic establishment or the dreaded mainstream media, sell better than books catering to the left.

The following day, the Kindle edition of The Amateur held the top spot among “red” books, with the hardcover version ranking fifth. Leading from Behind, an anti-Obama book released Aug. 21 by conservative writer and former Washington Times editorial page editor Richard Miniter—and featuring a similar cover to The Amateur, complete with glum looking Obama against a black background—ranked sixth. The top 10 “red” books also included recently published anti-Obama books, Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream, by Dinesh D’Souza (Aug. 13) and Fool Me Twice: Obama’s Shocking Plans for the Next Four Years Exposed, by Aaron Klein and Brenda Elliot (Aug. 7).

It’s unlikely any single anti-Democratic or anti-Republican book can tip the election in November, but at least one book published during the summer heat of a national campaign—and driven by the media—arguably had some impact on perceptions of a presidential candi-

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“ I could’ve written a book with no reporting that would have been utter bullshit and would have sold a million copies.”

–Michael Grunwald date. In August 2004, Regnery published Unfit for Command, by John O’Neill and Jerome Corsi, a book that was propelled by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group trying to undermine Democratic candidate John Kerry’s military record.

Corsi returned in Aug. 2008 with The Obama Nation, which prompted the Obama campaign to issue a 40-page rebuttal, calling into question numerous salacious claims.

Even as the campaign and independent fact-checkers debunked claims, the book kept selling.

Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review, says that “prolonged or intensive cable ex-

posure sells books.” Tanenhaus pointed out that former Fox News host Glenn Beck helped propel various thrillers up the best-seller list, along with Frederik Hayek’s classic The Road to Serfdom and R.J. Pestritto’s Woodrow Wilson and American Progressivism.

While the New York Times was criticized for downplaying Klein’s book—columnist Cal Thomas claimed “ideological apartheid” on Fox News—the newspaper actually did review the book in the daily paper although not in the Sunday supplement, because the editors never received a galley of the book in advance of publication, Regnery confirms.

Tanenhaus says editors “always [make]

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judgment calls, and partisanship plays no role” in what makes it into the Review. He pointed out that The New New Deal also hasn’t been reviewed.

New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor, whose book on the first family, The Obamas, was published in paperback in recent weeks, says that in this highly charged political atmosphere, books are often pigeonholed. With The Obamas, Kantor says there was “confusion about whether this was on the left or right, a Fox book or an MSNBC book.”

“One thing I learned is that people try to put your book in a box,” Kantor says.

“It’s almost as if people expect either hagiography or takedown. And if you write something that’s neither, it can be hard to be heard.”

She didn’t write The Obamas to settle a partisan score or appeal only to readers on the left or the right, she says.

“I wanted to write my book because I thought the Obamas were changing before our eyes,” says Kantor, who interviewed them for the New York Times but didn’t score a sit-down for the actual book.

The White House pushed back aggressively on certain details of the book that immediately got the media’s attention—such as reported tensions between Michelle Obama and both the president’s campaign adviser Robert Gibbs and former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel—even though Kantor’s portrayal of the first family is largely flattering.

The first lady responded that Kan-

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tor’s description of her treatment of White House aides paints her as “some kind of angry black woman.” Obama, who early on is portrayed as uncomfortable in the White House, becomes more confident in her role as first lady as the book progresses. But the book also characterizes the couple’s marriage as strained by life in the White House, and Obama as so isolated that aides called the East Wing where her office was located “Guam--pleasant but powerless.”

The media, especially right-leaning outlets, seized on revelations in the book of an Alice in Wonderland-theme ball at the White House on Halloween 2009, thrown by actor Johnny Depp and director Tim Burton. The New York Post photoshopped Obama as the Mad Hatter, complete with front-page headline “Tweedle Dumb: Obama’s held secret ‘Wonderland’ party during recession,” while The Drudge Report and talk radio host Rush Limbaugh fired on all cylinders.

But Kantor says picking apart single scenes or quotes in the book on air rather than reading through the narrative may give a false impression of the story.

If a particular quote were tweeted, then blogged, then hashed out on cable news, it could give a very skewed perception of what the book’s about.

“The whole point of the book is complexity,” Kantor says. “If you wanted to say something simple about Obama, you’d write a tweet.”

FIGHT!

CAN A CHEESEBURGER TRANSFORM A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE?

BY ALICE HINES

ILLUSTRATION BY JESSE LENZ IN A SINGLE 48-hour period in Ohio last month, Barack Obama made a show of ordering or accepting a staggering array of American comfort food and drink.

Bacon, eggs, grits, buffalo wings, ribs, sausage, pepperoni pizza, iced tea and Miller Lite were only the start. At a farm, the President purchased fresh peaches, strawberries, corn and cherries; at a bakery, it was a dozen chocolate chip cookies and an entire apple pie. At one café, Kozy

Corners in the village of Oak Harbor, he was photographed sharing strawberry pie and whipped cream with a young boy.

“People have been commenting I need to gain some weight,” Obama quipped at a campaign event in Poland, Ohio the next day. “I’m skinny but I’m tough.”

The bus tours of Mitt Romney have so far been decidedly less Dionysian, but the Republican candidate, too, has turned up at suburban Chipotle’s and been seen spooning his fair share of sundaes at family ice cream parlors in the American heartland. Of course, with so many of these meals pro-

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OPENER: SARA D. DAVIS/GETTY IMAGES (ROMNEY); YURI GRIPAS/AFP/GETTYIMAGES (OBAMA); BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/GETTY IMAGES (BIDEN); STEVE POPE/GETTY IMAGES (GINGRICH); BILL PUGLIANO/GETTY IMAGES (RYAN); SHUTTERSTOCK; THIS PAGE: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/GETTY IMAGES . THIS PAGE: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/GETTY IMAGES

FOOD FIGHT!

cured on-the-go, it’s impossible to know how much of it is actually consumed—or by whom.

Not that it matters. Both candidates have diligently availed themselves of greasy diners, hamburger joints and bakeries, each stop a set in the meticulously scripted theater of a modern presidential campaign. Providing more than mere sustenance, such venues—along with their home-

spun, stick-in-your-gut victuals —can drip palatable flavor onto candidates otherwise known for bleached teeth and teleprompted wit. Food can help candidates emphasize talking points, appeal to specific groups of voters or simply appear human.

More efficiently than any speech or handshake, a cheeseburger, you might say, has the power to transform elite jet-setters and millionaire presidential hopefuls into ordinary Joes—if it’s done right.

“I don’t want to see politicians

The cashier at Five Guys rings up lunch for the president.

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FOOD FIGHT!

drink French wine by the glass or go to a tapas bar I can’t afford,” said Kris Lefler, 31, at a recent Romney rally in High Point, N.C. “Looking like a caveman while eating barbecue isn’t acceptable either,” she said.

CARNAL INSTINCTS

That potential voters are possessed of such opinions is not new, and food has long been incorporated into the signaling of American politics. As far back as the 18th century, Southern politicians threw rowdy election barbecues to “treat” voters to free rum, whisky and roasted pig in order to secure their support, according to Robert F. Moss, a food writer and author of the book Barbecue: The History of an American Institution. At the all-day outdoor parties, attended by hundreds or thousands traveling on horseback, candidates jumped on literal tree stumps to give speeches. During the mid-19th century, politicians such as Andrew Jackson used the events to curry favor with rural, uneducated farmers recently awarded suffrage.

Today, barbecue joints still sit alongside diners and ice cream parlors on the shrine of populist

“ The sheer meatiness of a BBQ feast can help create the image of someone who doesn’t mind getting their hands dirty or blanch at the sight of blood.” eateries that politicians worship.

If the 24-hour diner symbolizes working class prosperity and industriousness, the red meat of barbecue roars with carnal instinct.

Both Obama and Lyndon B. Johnson have used military barbecues to present themselves as gutsy and approachable commanders and chiefs in times of war, according to Andrew Warnes, a reader in American Studies at the University of Leeds in West Yorkshire, England. “The sheer meatiness of a barbecue feast can help create the image of someone who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty or blanch at the sight of

SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTYIMAGES

blood,” he said.

The descendants of barbecues—campaign food stops—are decidedly more sober than their pre-television antecedents. Only recently did Barack Obama begin incorporating regular beer-drinking sessions into his trips. The strategy shows he is “of a different generation than past presidents and a person who allows himself to indulge,” according to Josh King, former director of production of presidential events for Bill

Clinton, noting that neither Bush nor Clinton drank in public.

“FOUR MORE BEERS!”

At a Knoxville, Iowa, coffee shop on August 14, the President handed a local man a bottle of his own White House homebrew, revealing that he takes it with him on his campaign bus. The previous day at the Iowa state fair, Obama stopped in the Bud Lite tent and offered to buy a round as members of the crowd chanted “Four More Beers!” Like scores of other politicians—including Romney the year before—Obama also devoured one

Little Caesar’s pizza employee Marci Miller hands Romney a pizza, complete with a campaign sticker.

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FOOD FIGHT!

of the fair’s trademark pork chops on a stick.

“When he first offered to get me a beer I was thinking, ‘How many people does this guy meet every day? 1,000?’” said Brad Magerkurth, 42, the brand manager for Artisan Beer Company who Obama met at the Knoxville coffee shop. “But it’s cool he can still relate to people on a basic level ...

Beer brings people together.”

A beer routine, along with stops at greasy spoon diners and burger joints, has also arguably helped Obama quell whispers of elitism and blur memories of his comment about the price of Whole Foods arugula in 2007. While American beer comes in elegant varieties—such as the Goose Island 312 that Obama once gave British Prime Minister David Cameron—it also works as an equalizer, a form of relaxation beloved by all classes and ages. “[Beer’s] post-Prohibition status as an alternative not just to strong liquor but also to the stiff Puritanism of total abstinence is now being harnessed in interesting ways by Obama’s campaign team,” said Warnes. “They’re making insinuations not just along the lines that Mitt Romney

“ We sell cheese and smoked meats and delicious homemade turkey breast.

Nothing about that is partisan.” might be a bit aloof, but also that the Tea Party might be prim and proper and uneasy with the simple, affordable and harmless pleasures of ordinary American life.”

Of course, for some, the act of drinking a beer is less cool than it is slothly or indulgent, criticisms the President would likely want to avoid in any context. When news of the homebrew first surfaced last year, White House staff noted that the Obamas themselves—and not the American taxpayers—were footing the bill.

If Obama’s current drinking strategy taps into the classic American desire to indulge, Romney’s food habits are awakening an even-older striving towards chaste virtue. At a Father’s Day pancake breakfast Romney hosted in June in Brunswick, Ohio, he, his wife, two of their sons and a

PETE SOUZA/WHITE HOUSE PHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

few grandchildren served complementary pancakes and syrup to a crowd of 3,000 people. Having waited outside in the pouring rain all morning, many in the soggy crowd looked like they could have used a spike of whisky in their coffee. Romney held similar pancake events in Milwaukee, Wis., and Snellville, Ga., earlier this year.

Romney, a practicing Mormon, eschews coffee as he does alcohol, though he recently sampled coffee-flavored ice cream at a campaign event in Nantucket. The former Massachusetts governor’s

favorite type of restaurant stop this summer was unquestionably the ice cream parlor. Familyfriendly and harkening back to simpler times, the five ice cream parlors that Romney was photographed visiting highlighted two of his favorite talking points about himself: his five children and his marriage of 43 years.

Romney has also been more restrained in his number of restaurant stops. While both candidates have each taken two official bus tours through swing states since Romney obtained enough delegates to secure the nomination in May, Obama has appeared at 21 food-related stops—from

In this photo released by the White House, Obama shares strawberry pie with a boy at Kozy Corners restaurant in Oak Harbor, Ohio.

Romney waves to the crowd at a local restaurant called Homemades

by Suzanne, purchasing three pies during his eightminute stop.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JEREMY LANGE

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FOOD FIGHT!

local farms to sports bars—compared to Romney’s 18. Many of the President’s stops have been “off the records,” or unannounced stops at local businesses that are not open to the public. Named so because they are not included in a candidate’s official schedule, “off the records” are less scripted than rallies and speeches, though business owners that pose with candidates still are carefully selected and rigorously screened by staffers and secret service.

CORN DOGS AND FAUX PAS

But moments of unscripted interaction—and eating—are also risky, said Greg Jenkins, former director of scheduling and advance for George W. Bush. A candidate could end up asking for silverware for a slice of pizza or biting into a corn dog from an unfortunate angle, as Michele Bachmann did last year.

Today, it’s also easy for even the smallest gaffe to be caught on camera and spread over the internet.

“When you do an off the record there’s a modicum of loss of control,” said George Caudill, the former visual communications director for Clinton, of Romney’s apparent aversion to the events.

“ Nothing is more basic to people’s lives than food. It has the power to make people think your candidate understands them.”

“Anything can happen. If you want to make sure that you don’t leave anything to chance with your candidate, you don’t want to throw them out there and have them say something silly.”

Caudill noted that both Romney and Obama have tended to keep the restaurant stops they do make efficient and camera-safe, unlike Clinton, whose passion for McDonald’s fries became the stuff of legendary “Saturday Night Live” skits.

At Homemades by Suzanne in Ashland, Virginia, an announced stop on Romney’s “Stronger Middle Class” bus tour, the candidate spent just enough time to clutch a few hands and kiss owner Suzanne Wolstenholme on the cheek before rushing out to the next rally. As Romney left, he held up a stack of three plastic wrapped

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JEREMY LANGE

FOOD FIGHT!

pies—apple, chocolate chess and pecan—and waved to the crowd in front of the picturesque main street cafe.

Kimberly Mills, co-owner and manager of the restaurant, said she and some of the 2,000 others in attendance were disappointed at how short the visit was—eight minutes in total. “I would have liked to talk to him,” she said.

Still, she said she was thrilled for Ashland and sold 15 more pies in the afternoon after Romney left.

John Friedman, 48, a teacher who attended the Romney event,

offered another reason the candidate was better off with takeout pie than quiche, his own personal Homemades by Suzanne favorite. “I like quiche but it’s not a ‘real man’ food,” he said. “They’re already calling him a wimp on the cover of Newsweek.” Friedman referenced that magazine’s recent story titled “Romney: The Wimp Factor.”

THE FAST FOOD FACTOR

One thing Romney has not been afraid to eat in public is fast food, if his campaign’s Twitter accounts are any indication. In July of 2011, Romney’s own account broadcast a photo of him eating a jalapeño chicken sandwich at Carl’s Jr., the

A spread at Homemades

by Suzanne, located in Ashland, Virginia, one of the swing states courted by both presidential candidates.

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FOOD FIGHT!

California chain that is called Hardee’s on the East coast. This summer, his tweeted pictures of pit stops at Chipotle and Little Caesars.

While busy politicians have always relied on convenient fast food chains while traveling, the Romney campaign is fairly unique in publicizing these stops, according to Caudill. Clinton liked McDonald’s, and occasionally visited the restaurant during his presidency. But his staff didn’t do much to perpetuate the myth in the media, according to Caudill. “It’s rare that candidates publicly go anywhere other than a local spot,” as fast food chains tend to look bland on TV and don’t do much to woo local voters, he said.

Yet fast food chains also likely help Romney by furthering his reputation as a big business expert. Fast food restaurants not only seem like “regular guy” hangouts but show that Romney appreciates the work of corporations like CKE Restaurants, the owner of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., in creating jobs and economic growth. In his Carl’s Jr. tweet, Romney mentioned CKE CEO Andy Puzder, who also promotes Romney on his blog.

Obama’s only public fast food excursion so far has been at the

burger chain Five Guy’s in Washington, D.C., and that was in 2009.

Experts say this visit was more about showcasing a hometown company—Five Guys is headquartered in Virginia—than the fast food industry itself. Both Romney and Obama have received campaign contributions from fast food purveyors. Restaurants and bars gave a total of $456,386 to Mitt Romney and $378,568 to Obama so far this election year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that tracks campaign contributions.

One fast food stop that got a large amount of attention was the time the Romney campaign spend $498.99 at Chick-fil-A at the height of the company’s controversy over gay marriage this summer. While the campaign has spent money at Chick-fil-A every month since May, according to public disbursement reports, the choice has never inspired so much ire or support from members of the public. Experts in political stagecraft say that smart campaigns expect even their most banal consumer choices to be scrutinized, and use this to their advantage.

Certainly, it’s unlikely the scrutiny will ever lessen. According to

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FOOD FIGHT!

“ I don’t want to see politicians drink French wine by the glass or go to a tapas bar I can’t afford. Looking like a caveman while eating barbecue isn’t acceptable either.”

Darra Goldstein, editor in chief of the food journal Gastronomica, consumption has long been treated as performance in matters of politics. In the middle ages, courts would create “bystander galleries” at luxurious banquets from which commoners could observe the feast unfold. In turn, aristocrats threw carnivals for their subjects, and watched the revelry and food fighting from their balconies.

“The difference now is that politicians are expected to go out and mix with the people,” said Goldstein. “The paradox is we both want to admire those who govern us but have them not be too different from us.”

Of course, for all the operatives working to wage these tricky gastronomic campaigns successfully, there are many who wish that eating—a universal activity—weren’t so steeped in politics.

“We sell cheese and smoked meats and delicious homemade turkey breast. Nothing about that is partisan,” said Debra Krause-Mcdonnell, owner of Krause’s in Cincinnati, Ohio. Earlier this summer, an image of her storefront appeared in an Obama campaign commercial without Krause’s permission. She sent out a press release and went on national news to try to get the video taken off the air.

“I was used as a political pawn,” said Krause. “A lot of small businesses are.”

Regardless of its tactics, a good campaign food strategy can help decide whether or not someone dines regularly in the White House. Andrew Jackson won his first election in part by cloaking himself in barbecue’s rustic aroma, historians say.

“Nothing is more basic to people’s lives than food,” said Caudill.

“It has the power to make people think your candidate understands them.”

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Exit

Zadie Smith’s Welcome Return

BY MALLIKA RAO

BOOKS

HUFFINGTON 09.09.12

Exit ADIE SMITH HAS always been a gifted impressionist, sometimes to her detriment.

In her debut novel White Teeth, the breadth of accents and dialects she conjured figured heavily in reviews crowning her the next big literary star. A random stab at a page produces an education in words and phrases not found in a dictionary.

From page 155 of the Vintage International edition: “’sbit,” “fuckwit,” “’sall,” “Mangy Pandy.” From there, she’s gone on to write from the point of view of a half-Chinese, British-born, 27-year-old in The Autograph Man, as well as all highly individuated members of an American-English-Jamaican family, in her followup campus novel On Beauty. As impressive as this skill for pure transmission from ear to pen is, the result can be cacophonous on the page. It can also distract awestruck critics from giving Smith reason to nurture her considerable other gifts.

So Smith’s latest, fourth addition, NW — published this month, marking an end to her 7-yearhiatus from fiction and her entry into motherhood — is a welcome, evolved return. The shifting portrait of former residents of

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WENDY GEORGE

Z

a housing project in London’s Northwest district shows Smith to be as enthralled by human biodiversity as ever, but cannier at using her insight sparingly, and to greater effect.

The novel’s three main protagonists, all in their mid-thirties, belong to the same generation as Smith herself. The band names, television shows and fashion statements of the time are all namechecked in characteristic Smith fashion. Here lies Friends; there vintage Kinks. Stylistically though,

Smith’s fourth novel NW.

Exit NW is new territory. The sentences tend to be short on their own, and imagistic en masse. Only six words of the first paragraph are spent describing Leah Hanwell, the novel’s earliest protagonist.

“She keeps to the shade. Redheaded.” remains the bulk of what we know of Hanwell’s look: pale, red, Irish (later we learn she’s tall and thin). A chapter toward NW’s end is a line long. For Smith, whose quick, hyper-articulate sensibility can limit her to the title of comic novelist, this departure into what feels at times more like poetry than prose seems like a journey painstakingly mapped out.

But it’s great fun to follow. Many of the characters bear the names of Smith heroes past (Hanwell, Iqbal, Irie), and in some ways the novel feels like a greatest hits compilation playing out in an alternate universe. Once the action gets going, we’re off in a dreamy, layered land where dialogue functions as signals. Each time the words “bruv” and “blatantly” come out of the mouth of Felix Cooper, the cheery, reformed drug dealer whose POV makes up an interlude between sections on Hanwell and her oldest friend Keisha Blake, Smith is signaling, not riffing. Coo-

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HUFFINGTON 09.09.12

per’s fondness for standard nicknames (“bruv,” “blud”), and by extension, stylized intimacy, turns out to be his downfall. “Blatantly,” as well as “literally,” which punctuates a later section of the novel, act as markers on a shifting timeline. “That was the year people began saying ‘literally,’” Smith’s omniscient narrator explains.

This magic sustains until the novel’s end, when the wrap-it-up

This departure into what feels at times more like poetry than prose seems like a journey painstakingly mapped out. But it’s great fun to follow.” feel of an awards ceremony speech takes hold, and the varying plots’ loose ends are slicked together as if by necessity. Without giving away any surprises, the occurrence that finally links Hanwell, Blake and Cooper in a way presumably unique to their shared geography, feels contrived, inserted for reasons of “seriousness” rather than narrative propulsion.

But then, the telling of the event is done with such agility, it’s hard to be bothered.

Exit

THEATER

HUFFINGTON 09.09.12

Chaplin is set to open on Broadway’s Barrymore Theater on Sept. 10th.

Becoming Chaplin

BY MALLIKA RAO

t’s fair to assume anyone playing Charlie Chaplin in a musical has an army of proud dance teachers to thank. Chaplin charmed audiences through movement, so much so that the humorist W.C. Fields insisted he wasn’t an actor at all but a “goddamn ballet dancer.” Even wearing the baggy pants and bowler hat of his iconic creation, the Tramp, his every shrug and

I

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOAN MARCUS

Exit

kick broadcasts as clearly as a series of pirouettes. But excepting a stint with a touring clog troupe as a child, Chaplin never formally trained his body. His expertise came mostly by way of auto-didacticism.

It’s fitting then, that Rob McClure, star of the Broadway musical Chaplin, opening September 10, is a leading man transformed by crash courses. “I put myself in the ‘move well’ category,” the 30-year-old New Jersey native told Huffington, a reference to industry parlance for agile actors or actresses who aren’t dancers.

“Move well” types are commonly pushed to tap on beat, or slide across a stage.

THEATER

It’s rare they find themselves roller skating backwards while tipping a hat, however, as McClure does in a particularly memorable Chaplin number.

To ready himself for a season of roller skating, tightrope walking, and circumnavigating a spinning table on the Barrymore Theater’s stage, McClure became the willing student of what he and director Warren Carlyle call a “Chaplin bootcamp.”

“The first day they had me running on that table, I was terrified,” McClure said in a phone interview. “It’s a spinning table that’s a foot and a half away from the edge of the stage. All I was thinking was, ‘Really, how do I do this without killing myself? And how do I make it look easy?’”

McClure and his two under-

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McClure brings Chaplin back to life, iconic hat and cane included, in this Broadway musical.

Exit studies followed a cross-borough regimen — “tightrope three times a week in Brooklyn, jump rope three times a week in Manhattan, and roller skating three nights a week after rehearsal,” Carlyle said.

A photograph of Chaplin learning to walk a tightrope for the first time, on the same day he shot his famous highwire scene in The Circus, is now a totem for McClure.

He hasn’t said “no” to a challenge, according to Carlyle.

Still, certain stunts are out of McClure’s ken, due to Chaplin’s genius for special effect. In Chaplin’s first act, McClure rolls actual footage of the movie Pay Day to show his half-brother Sydney (played by Wayne Alan Wilcox) how running the tape backwards makes him appear to be catching bricks with ease rather than throwing them. The moment doubles as a demonstration for the audience, of what the production is up against in translating film to the stage. “Chaplin could throw his hat on the back of his chair, and do it once, and that’s a take,” McClure said. “We had to come up with tricks that are impressive but that I can do eight times a week.”

Working together in the same

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configuration, McClure and Carlyle originated the musical in 2010, under the title Limelight at the La Jolla Playhouse in California. For its Broadway incarnation, Carlyle aimed to cover Chaplin’s life from birth to death by filtering the story’s biographical passages through homages to Chaplin’s films.

Intercutting the drama with hoops for McClure to jump through was Carlyle’s strategy

All I was thinking was, ‘Really, how do I do this without killing myself? And how do I make it look easy?’ for casting a spell over audience members who hold Chaplin in the highest regard as a performer.

Once dazzled, they might believe McClure’s character throughout.

“In the scene where Rob becomes the Little Tramp, the final piece of that puzzle is a cane tossed from the side, and as he looks to catch it, a bright light is shining in his face,” Carlyle said.

“It’s a series of impossible tasks, but when you add them up, you’ve created someone who’s extraordinary.”

Exit

eWISE

BY KATY HALL

I recently received an Evite from my mother requesting that I attend a family reunion. We do live in separate states, quite a few miles apart, and we do email and text frequently.

But wouldn’t a phone call have been more in keeping with the occasion? Am I wrong to feel slightly insulted by the Evite? Should I simply click “Yes, I will attend,” and put the matter behind me? —Laura, Boston

Q

Yes. Evites are as much for the guests to see who’s attending as they are for the hosts, and you wouldn’t want to deprive your mom of having her lovely daughter in the “yes” column. And everyone included is family, right? There’s no reason to leave you off. If the Evite was the first you’d heard of the reunion,

A

ILLUSTRATION BY JASON SCHNEIDER

HUFFINGTON 09.09.12

that’s a little strange, especially if you will need to request time off work or book travel arrangements. In any case, the reunion will bring other things to argue about, and maybe your mom just wanted to wow you with her tech skills. Feel free to congratulate her in your response—and next time you talk you can teach her how to use Paperless Post.

Exit

eWISE

My supervisor recently sent a company-wide email praising a project that I worked on and cc’d me. I appreciated the recognition, but he used my personal email address rather than my work one. I have no doubt that the mix-up was was an accident, but I don’t want my personal email address to pop up in another widely distributed thread.

Is there a nice way to tell him to save my work address only in his contacts? — Keeping things separate, New York

TOP TO BOTTOM: JAY WEST/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; AP PHOTO/RICHARD DREW; SHUTTERSTOCK; JOE ROBBINS/GETTY IMAGES

Q

Just respond to him from your work address and thank him for his kind words. He may realize his error and he may not.

If you start critiquing people’s compliments, you may find you start receiving fewer of them.

You should be glad if any of your coworkers read the email before deleting it, not worried that they will start using your personal address for work or anything else unwelcome. It’s better not to email your supervisor from a personal address in the first place, unless it’s something urgent when you can’t access work email. You never know when auto-fill will lead you to send him something that should have never crossed the work-life boundary.

A

Have a question about electronic etiquette?

Email ewise@huffingtonpost.com.

ENOUGH ALREADY

totally over.

Things we’re

Passion Pit Geraldo Coconut Water Restaurants that serve both Chinese and Japanese cuisine People casually using the word ‘vagina’ Lance Armstrong Overpriced food trucks Chris Christie Sympathy for Mark Sanchez

HUFFINGTON 09.09.12

Despite tragedy you can still be happy and triumph over it.”

Exit

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

Megan D’Arcy

Leapfrogging Past Family Tragedy

BY EMMA DIAB

AGE THIRTEEN IS a precarious year for many, and the trials of adolescence are often scribbled out on the lines of a journal. But when Megan D’Arcy stared down the pages of her own diary, she was facing an unimaginable situation, one her friends could not relate to, and one she was having trouble dealing with herself.

Luckily for Megan, she was introPHOTOGRAPH BY MARVIN SHAOUNI

HUFFINGTON 09.09.12

Exit duced to the sage advice of the Queen of the Frogs from within the pages of her diary.

Now 18, the Rochester, Michigan resident is the author of the children’s book Be Happy, the same story Megan wrote when she was thirteen-years-old and dealing with the aftermath of her father’s death in a plane crash on New Year’s Eve, 2006.

The story is about two frog princesses who fear forgetting their father, the Frog King. Their mother assuages their worry with the guidance that as long as they keep him in their memory, he will never be forgotten.

“It’s a question and answer type of book to explain that you’re not going to forget your parent if you think about them every day,” says Megan. “And that you’re going to go on and have a successful life, do everything and accomplish your dreams.”

WENDY GEORGE

MORE THAN JUST A STORYBOOK Propelled by the reality of life without her father, Megan understands what losing a parent could entail for other children. She is thankful her family’s living situation stayed relatively normal and that they were able to keep their

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

house, but Megan also knows that some children are not so fortunate.

So when she saw an article about a foundation that aids children who have lost one or both of their parents, Megan realized the wise Frog Queen’s advice could be of service.

“Unfortunately, I hear so many stories about children who have lost their parents and are put in a tight financial situation while dealing with the grief,” she says.

“I realize I see a position to also give back and help others who have gone through similar experiences.”

Megan approached Yatooma’s Foundation for the Kids with her

HUFFINGTON 09.09.12

Megan’s book, Be Happy, was published by Momentum Books in November 2011.

Exit idea. She relates very much to the experience of the founder, Norman Yatooma, as his own father was killed trying to stop a car jacking when Norman was 20.

Working together, they were able to have the book finally published

by Momentum Books, a publishing house catered to local Michigan writers. All the proceeds go to Yatooma’s foundation.

AN UNFORGETTABLE NIGHT On New Year’s Eve 2006, Michael D’Arcy crashed his plane two miles from the Romeo Airport while piloting Megan’s sister, Katie, and her friends back from their cottage in Sutton Bay. He died on impact, while Katie fractured “pretty much every bone in her body.”

She was pronounced dead on the scene but a moan alerted rescuers that she was still alive, and Katie was quickly taken to the hospital.

She’d miss a semester of school and have to learn to walk again.

“Our relationship is stronger because now I think about what life would be like without her and I’m just thankful she’s here and that she can walk again,” Megan says.

Megan’s mother, Kelly, took upon the task of trying to make sure Megan’s life retained some

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

HUFFINGTON 09.09.12

stability, which, given the circumstances, was a trying feat.

“My mom was definitely the rock,” says Megan, recalling how her mother hardly ever left the hospital after her sister was admitted.

Finally getting back to school after the accident is an experience Megan described as “one of the worst days of my life” — walking through the hallway amidst a torrent of whispers,

I hear so many stories about children who have lost their parents and are put in a tight financial situation while dealing with the grief.

I see a position to give back” knowing that a barrage of journalists awaited her on her front lawn when she got home.

In response to such pressure, Megan hit the books.

SUCCESS IN THE MAKING Megan, who graduated high school last spring, is currently packing and saying her goodbyes ahead of her journey to Cambridge, MA, where she will be attending Harvard University on a full scholarship.

Exit

Since the accident, Megan threw herself into academic work and extracurricular activities. Besides knowing from a young age about her desire to pursue medicine, and the distraction school offered from the reality of her situation, Megan wanted to honor her father’s memory.

“He was really smart,” she said of her father, an anesthesiologist who spoke numerous languages enjoyed recreational flying. “I wanted to make him proud and focus on school and be successful.”

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

After two consecutive years interning, first at a hospital and then at U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow’s office, four years on student council, being president of the varsity tennis team, and an active in volunteer with her former high school’s Key Club, Megan looks forward to new experiences and at Harvard. While pursuing her majors in biology and human evolution, she hopes to continue volunteering, maybe play some intramural tennis, and join the PreMedical Society.

“Despite tragedy you can still be happy and triumph over it.”

HUFFINGTON 09.09.12

Megan and her late father, Michael, smile for the camera.

01

TFU

Exit

HUFFINGTON 09.09.12

AP PHOTO/NBC, TRAE PATTON (THE NEW NORMAL); AP PHOTO/HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE (BASSO); SHUTTERSTOCK (FIST); AP PHOTO/CHARLES SYKES (SNOOKIE); KRIS CONNOR/GETTY IMAGES (MANDEL)

Utah NBC Affiliate Yanks Upcoming Show About Gay Men

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Florida Man Calls 911, Asks For Sex With Female Cops

3

WOMAN FOUND GUILTY OF PUNCHING 70-YEAROLD FEMALE WALMART CASHIER

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Maryland Burger Joint Serves Up “Snooki Burger”

05

Tea Party Candidate Calls Ohio Senator “Un-American”

Exit

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Taliban Beheads 17 Afghans For Dancing At A Party

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RNC Chair: Chris Matthews Should “Go Take A Jump In The Lake”

TFU

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08 Two Words: Waffle Vodka

Elvis’ Dirty Underwear Up For Auction

09

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TEACHER: I HELPED STUDENTS CHEAT BECAUSE THEY’RE “DUMB AS HELL”

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