Croke-a-Cola

Posted on October 5, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

On Saturday, the New York Times ran a story about the end of bake sales in city schools:

The change is part of a new wellness policy that also limits what can be sold in vending machines and student-run stores, which use profits to help finance activities like pep rallies and proms. The elaborate rules were outlined in a three-page memo issued at the end of June, but in the new school year, principals and parents are just beginning to, well, digest them.

So is the sugar-industrial complex – most notably The Coca-Cola Company – which the next day ran a full-page ad in the Times with the plaintive headline:

“The world is changing and we are too.”

The ad directs readers to the Internet microsite livepositively.com, which features such bromides as, “If you’ve had a Coke in the last 4 years, you’ve had a hand in helping us with our efforts to protect the environment.”

Oh yeah – I feel better already.

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Bloomberg Minus Zero: No Limits

Posted on October 5, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

In the wake of a New York Times report about the obscene amount of money Mayor Michael Bloomberg will spend on running for a third term (an estimated $117 million), now comes a Times piece saying Bloomberg’s strong-arming of the City Council to repeal the Big Town’s term limits law (approved twice by voters) might wind up biting him in the, you’ll excuse the expression, political ass.

From Sunday’s Times:

With five weeks remaining until Election Day, little seems uncertain in the contest between the colossally advantaged incumbent, Mr. Bloomberg, and his lesser-known rival,William C. Thompson Jr.

But interviews with both campaigns and dozens of voters reveal that anger over a single issue still simmers, seemingly immune to a flood of television commercials and glossy brochures. That bedevils Bloomberg advisers and gives hope to his underfunded challenger.

That single issue is the term-limits termination, as one Bloombergnik told the Times:

“The Bloomberg campaign can’t convince voters to not be upset about this. It won’t work,” said John H. Mollenkopf, a professor of political science at City University who has informally advised the Bloomberg campaign.

“If you ask New Yorkers what they did not like over the last eight years,” he added, “[the repeal of] term limits is the major negative.”

Actually, the major negative is starting to look like Michael Bloomberg, the Best Mayor Money Can Buy.

And the major question is: Can money buy New York voters for a third time?

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Michael Bloomberg’$ Reelection Effort

Posted on October 4, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Thoroughly depressing New York Times piece on Saturday about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s pricey run for reelection:

To hold on to his job as mayor this year, he has spent $65 million of his own money, according to his latest financial disclosure report, released on Friday.

Even for a man whose vast financial advantages have redefined New York City elections — and smothered his lesser-financed opponents — the amount of spending is, by any measure, staggering.

Mr. Bloomberg has spent about 40 percent more than he had at the same point in his 2005 campaign, and twice what he had spent by this point in his first run for office in 2001. Each of those races was, at the time, the most expensive municipal campaign in United States history.

The mayor has spent 16 times as much as his Democratic rival, William C. Thompson Jr., who is still scrambling to raise money from donors. And at his current pace, Mr. Bloomberg is on track to easily spend more than $100 million by Election Day on Nov. 3.

I don’t care how good a mayor Bloomberg has been. That’s flat-out obscene.

(P.S. I don’t even wanna talk about Bloomberg’s rigging the system to end-run term limits in The Big Town. That’s exponentially more obscene.)

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Roman Nolanski

Posted on October 4, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

The Boston Herald’s Margery Eagan and the Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout got it exactly right:

Roman Polanski is a rapist.

Despite what his Hollywood posse might want to think is a “so-called crime” (thank you, despicable Harvey Weinstein), Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl in 1977.

And he should pay the price for what he did.

Period.

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Audiobook Interference?

Posted on October 4, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

From Campaign Outsider’s Late-To-The-Party bureau:

The piece on DWT (Driving While Talking/Texting) in Thursday’s New York Times presented a harrowing picture of what’s called distracted driving:

Studies show that someone who talks on the phone while driving is four times more likely to crash, even using a hands-free headset, than someone who is simply driving. The risks are even greater when sending text messages.

Hands-free, hands-on – talk however you want on a cellphone, your risk factor is equal to drunk-driving. Worse yet, you’re not even doing a good job of multitasking, according to research cited by the Times:

According to that research, a person focused on a single task remembers what he has learned using the hippocampus, a part of the brain critical to storing and recalling information.

But when that person multitasks — like trying to learn something new while driving — the brain relies more on the striatum, a part of the brain used more for learning motor skills.

The researchers concluded, “Don’t multitask while you are trying to learn something new you hope to remember.”

“The brain is fundamentally built to unitask,” said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford, where he is also a co-director of a new automotive research laboratory.

Nowhere in the Times piece, however, was there any mention of audiobooks. But wait a second – aren’t they as distracting as a phone conversation? Don’t they qualify as “trying to learn something new while driving”?

Apparently not. Plug “distracted driving audiobooks” into nexis and you get . . . nothing. Plug the same into Google News and you get five results that have nothing to do with the actual topic.

I dunno – am I missing something?

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Pink Think

Posted on October 3, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Don’t miss “Sick of Pink” in Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine.

Subhead:

This month, like every October, a sea of pink ribbons washes over products from sneakers to snacks. While the effort raises research dollars, it leaves some breast cancer survivors feeling that companies are profiting from their pain.

Exhibit A:

Bloomingdale’s Little Pink Book campaign.

The retail chain pledges to donate $1 to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation  (BCRF) for every new email address it collects, and half the $12 cost of every Big Pink Umbrella it sells this month. Not to mention all of the $15 fee for a Bloomingdale’s Insider Card.

That card – as a full-page newspaper ad in the Boston Globe (and elsewhere, no doubt) says – will in turn get you a Give Pink, Get More Card worth up to $250* depending on how much dough you drop at your local Bloomingdale’s.

(Oh yes, the asterisk: “You must make at least $250 in ‘Net Purchases’ of ‘Eligible Merchandise’ to receive a GIVE PINK, GET MORE Card.”)

No indication of what – if any – percentage of pink-pumped-up “Net Purchases” might go to the fight against breast cancer.

Your guess is as good as zero.

Exhibit ?:

The Brookline Tab published this week’s edition on pink newsprint. It’s Page One explanation of “Why we’re pink:”

So what’s with the pink newspaper?

The Brookline TAB and all other GateHouse newspapers in Massachusetts are painting the town pink this week in support of the American Cancer Society and its efforts to increase awarenes during October, which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

In this issue, you will find stories about the state of research and treatment for breast cancer, as well as profiles of breast cancer survivors.

As well as a feature headlined Garden Variety profiling “longtime figures in Brookline’s art scene” Mim and Barney Berliner, whose backyard art gallery is entirely obscured by the pink newsprint.

You can bet the Berliners are sick of pink.

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Error o’ the Day Update®

Posted on October 2, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Last week the hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider reluctantly recorded this error in the Boston Globe:

Roger Williams University School of Law’s David A. Logan had an op-ed piece in Saturday’s Boston Globe about the “crazy-quilt of law” around reporter’s privilege – that is, the legal rights of journalists to protect confidential sources.

Recalling the rumpus when first-Robert-Novak-and-then-others outed CIA operative Valerie Plame (really, do you need links to all that?), Logan writes :

The jailing of Judith Miller from The New York Times and Matthew Cooper from Time underscores the risk of contempt citations and even incarceration that face reporters who rely upon confidential sources in the present legal and political environment.

Problem is, Matthew Cooper never went to jail.

(Miller, on the other hand, did 85 days in the sneezer, although not exactly “standing on her head” the way tough guys used to describe their stretches in stir.)

At post time, no correction had been appended to Logan’s Globe op-ed.

Spurred on by one of Campaign Outsider’s splendid readers, the hardworking staff sent a correction to the Globe, which was forwarded to editorial page editor Peter Cannelos.

Forwarded by Mary F Rourke/Editorial/GLOBE on 09/28/2009 12:57 PM
—–

carroll7@bu.edu
To:      comments@globe.com
09/28/2009 01:52         cc:                                                                                       
AM                       Subject: Correction                                                                       


Greetings!

Sorry to tell you that David Logan’s Saturday 9/26 op-ed column on
reporters’ privilege contained an error:

Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper never went to jail.

Regards,
John Carroll

Alas, no correction has been forthcoming.

Discuss among yourselves.

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Second City Finish First?

Posted on October 2, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

The chin-strokerati are all aquiver over Pres. Obama’s trip to Copenhagen to flack Chicago for the 2016 Olympic Games venue.

GOPniks, on the other hand, say Obama should stick to his knitting at home (see: Republican stonewalling on health care), while the wee-wee set worries about possible fallout if Chicago comes up short in the five-ring bakeoff.

(That, of course, would trigger the five-ring White House “Blame It On Rio” defense, which, as we know, never works.)

As for Obama’s Danish Dash, New York Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins nails it (as she so often does):

Truly, it is not the sort of mission you want to whine about if your party’s last chief executive spent more than one-third of his presidency hanging out at Camp David or clearing brush outside Crawford, Tex.

Then there’s the whole Chicago-As-Perennial-Second-City thing.

The great A.J. Liebling, in his 1952 book Chicago: The Second City, called the Chicago skyline “a theatre backdrop with a city painted on it.”

Beyond that, Liebling mocked the hometown Chicago Tribune’s longtime boosterism :

The Tribune in the twenties used to print daily on its editorial page a ‘Program for Chicagoland,’ of which Article 1 was ‘Make Chicago the First City of the World.’ Now it doesn’t bother.

Chicago also might want to consider the buyer’s remorse in certain quarters of London, the 2012 Olympic venue.

As the feller says, be careful what you wish for.

UPDATE: The first-round knockout of Chicago also dealt a blow to Obama. From the Wall Street Journal:

The vote for Rio rebuffed a Chicago bid that appeared flat and uninspired against Mr. da Silva’s populist approach. The rebuff was an embarrassment to the president: Mr. Obama flew to Copenhagen overnight to deliver a seven-minute speech to the IOC Friday morning. First lady Michelle Obama spent much of this week in Copenhagen lobbying IOC members. Chicago television personality Oprah Winfrey also joined the campaign.

Heading into the vote, the conventional wisdom among Olympics watchers, bookmakers, and IOC members was that this was a two-city race between Rio and Chicago. But other than the speeches from the Obamas, Chicago’s presentation left the delegates largely silent and unemotional.

And the result left Chicagoans just the opposite.

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Social Notworking?

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

The Massachusetts Senate race could be a booty call for social media in political campaigns, as all the candidates are Twittering, Facebooking, YouTubing, Flickring, etc.

Campaign officials for the four Democratic hopefuls (Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, Rep. Mike Capuano, Boston Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca, and City Year cofounder Alan Khazei) robotically remark that all types of media – paid, earned, and social – are extremely important, and that people are hungry for information, so “they’ll seek us out” in social media, as one strategist asserted.

Maybe, but that still leaves the question of who’s channeling Barack Obama and who’s simply Sam Yoon.

Regardless, social media will decidedly not decide this race. As MIT’s Henry Jenkins noted in his book Convergence Culture:

Candidates may build their base on the Internet but they need television to win elections. It’s the difference between a push media (where messages go out to the public whether they seek them or not) and a pull medium (which serves those with an active interest in seeking out information on a particular topic). The Internet reaches the hard core, television the undecided.

Odds are, there will be lots of undecideds as the December 8 primary approaches. The TV air war will then be the broadcast equivalent of the bombing of Dresden.

Good luck to all the civilians trying to escape the campaign carnage.

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Ad o’ the Day©

Posted on September 30, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

The Center for Consumer Freedom (“Promoting Personal Responsibility and Protecting Consumer Choice”) – which is a front group for restaurant, alcohol, and tobacco companies, among others – ran a full-page ad in Tuesday’s New York Times promoting the “vindicated sweetener,” high fructose corn syrup.

The estimated million-dollar advertising campaign asserts that “Sugar made from corn has the same number of calories as other types of sugar and is handled the same way by the body.”

Translation: High fructose corn syrup is exactly as bad for you as sugar. No more, no less.

That’s pretty much the entire message you’ll find at sweetscam.com, the official website of sugar-coated science supporting the high fructose corn syrup industry. The campaign is the brainchild of legend-in-his-own-mind Rick Berman, whose literal 15 minutes of fame came courtesy of a “60 Minutes” profile several years ago, which started this way:

Rick Berman takes a certain pride, even joy, in the nickname “Dr. Evil.” But the people who use it see nothing funny about it—they mean it.

His real name is Rick Berman, a Washington lobbyist and arch-enemy of other lobbyists and do-gooders who would have government control – and even ban – a myriad of products they claim are killing us, products like caffeine, salt, fast food and the oil they fry it in. He’s against Mothers Against Drunk Driving, animal rights activists, food watchdog groups and unions of every kind.

Berman believes we are fast becoming a nation of passive children ruled by the iron thumb of self-appointed “nannies” and he gets paid good money to keep all those “Mary Poppinses” at bay. And they have reserved a special place in hell for him.

In the 60 Minutes piece Berman contends that major U.S. corporations hire him to be their marketing gunsel because they “don’t find it convenient” to speak to consumers directly about controversial public policy issues.

So he does it for them.

That’s because, Berman says:

1) Under their own names, major companies won’t be perceived as honest brokers in any public-policy debate.

2) The American people should have access to both sides of any public-policy argument, and since the government and the goo-goos have the big megaphone, corporations need to level the playing field any way they can.

Translation:

1) Since the corporate world has traditionally acted in such a way that the public no longer trusts it, corporations need to trick the public to get a fair shake.

2) Government is willing to spend more money than corporations on shaping public opinion. So the corporate world needs aggressive media gambits like the SweetScam campaign to hold their own.

In conclusion:

Sweet Scam.

If that’s not the best definition of what Rick Berman does overall, it’ll do until something better comes along.

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