What happened in last night’s Democratic debate in Cleveland between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama? Obama aced it with a brilliantly simple rhetorical trick. In the middle of the accusations and counter-accusations flying around about their healthcare plans, Obama suddenly went over Clinton’s head, appealing directly to the viewers:

The question is, are we going to make sure that it is affordable for everybody? And that’s my goal when I’m president of the United States.

After some more criticisms from Clinton, he managed to wrap up that whole thematic segment by saying:

And that’s what I intend to provide as president of the United States.

And then, once they got onto talking about NAFTA, he said:

And as president of the United States, I intend to make certain that every agreement that we sign has the labor standards, the environmental standards and the safety standards that are going to protect not just workers, but also consumers.

Bam-bam-bam. That’s three times Obama managed to position himself, unopposed, as the future “president of the United States”. continued »

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I wrote this a few months ago for the Guardian. They didn’t find space for it.

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Today’s Big Changes
by Mark J Penn with E Kinney Zalesne (Allen Lane)

Numbers don’t lie, do they? “The simple truth,” this book announces, “is that most of the time we can’t see the true patterns of people’s lives, except through statistics.” Hard data should be our guide to what is actually going on in society. The picture is apparently one of innumerable “Microtrends”, defined as activities pursued by at least one per cent of the population. This zingy survey offers thumbnail sketches of 75 such microtrends allegedly at work in the world today, from “Internet Marrieds” to “Women Who Date Younger Men”, “High School Moguls” and “Chinese Picassos”. Could you be part of one?

As befits the head of a large US polling company who is a close adviser to Hillary Clinton, Mark J Penn has taken an enviably efficient CEO approach to book-writing, working with not only credited co-author Zalesne but also a “senior research analyst” and an “intern”, who are thanked in the Acknowledgments for “gathering all the numbers” and “ferreting out [...] arcane data”. Presumably, then, Penn himself is to be judged on what he infers from all the data ferreted out by his subordinates. continued »

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Like many readers, no doubt, I have been enjoying the increasingly bitchy catfight, in the TLS letters pages, between David Wootton and Brian Vickers.¹ This week’s issue contains my constructive contribution:

Sir, —
Brian Vickers (Letters, February 8) perceives an “ideological bias towards the theatrical” in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor’s editing of Shakespeare’s plays. In the same spirit, might I take this opportunity to lament the ideological bias towards the novelistic displayed by scholars of Proust, as well as the irritating obsession with the poetical among students of Wallace Stevens?

Happy Valentine’s Day, readers!

1. The exchange started here; unfortunately, the tiny Bantustan that the Times website contemptuously allots to the TLS has not yet updated with the Letters of February 8, to which I responded. ↩

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Today the White House announced that waterboarding forced partial drowning is legal. As a measure to combat cognitive dissonance, they will presumably be derogating from the UN Convention against Torture in short order, since that treaty, as long as the US remains a signatory, is “the supreme law of the land” in America. The LA Times reports:

in remarks that were greeted with disbelief by some members of Congress and human rights groups, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said that waterboarding was a legal technique that could be employed again “under certain circumstances.”

Which circumstances might those be? continued »

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