White House Historical Association Spanks Hardworking Staff

Posted on February 15, 2015 by Campaign Outsider

As you splendid readers might remember, yesterday the hardworking staff posted the first of what we hope will be an ongoing series: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Ads in the New York Times.

It read, in part:

The New York Times is repository for all manner of inexplicable advertising (see our Civilians Who Run Full-Page Ads in the New York Times series for representative samples), so the hardworking staff was not surprised to see this in yesterday’s edition.

 

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The White House Historical Association describes itself this way:

The White House Historical Association is a nonprofit educational association founded in 1961 for the purpose of enhancing the understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of the Executive Mansion. All proceeds from the sale of the association’s books and products are used to fund the whha-logo acquisition of whha-logohistoric furnishings and art work for the permanent White House collection, assist in the preservation of public rooms, and further its educational mission.

In 1961, when the National Park Service suggested that such an association be formed, the idea received First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s ready approval. In July 1962, The White House: An Historic Guide was delivered to a public that had already ordered 10,000 copies. The guide is now in its 23rd edition.

Full disclosure: We’re not sure this outfit is associated with the actual White House, but then again, we’re not sure it matters.

We then included a swell video about the Association, along with a bit of this ‘n’ that about Calvin Coolidge.

(Campaign Outsider sidebar: Our favorite quote from Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain: “They can’t make a fool out of me. They can’t make a laughingstock out of Lina Lamont. What do they think I am, dumb or something? Why, I make more money…than Calvin Coolidge…put together!”)

Anyway, imagine our surprise when this note from Lara M. Kline, Vice President for Marketing and Communications at The White House Historical Association, poured into the Campaign Outsider emailbag:

Dear Professor Carroll,
Good evening. I had the opportunity to read your blog post this evening on the announcement of the 2015 Official White House Christmas Ornament. I am writing to clarify for you the White House Historical Association’s relationship with the White House. We are the private partner to the White House in the supporting the preservation of the public and state rooms, acquisitions for the White House permanent collection, and in educating the public on the history of the White House.

Had your Google search extended beyond our “About Us” page on our admittedly limited website, you would have found many sources to validate our relationship with the White House, including . . .

Followed by links to any number of reputable websites.

Then there was this from Ms. Kline:

As an Edward R. Murrow award recipient, I am hopeful that you will endeavor to find the facts in the future, rather than simply cast out disparaging remarks for clicks on a blog post.

Dangling modifier aside, that’s a bit of a headscratcher since 1) we cast out up to zero disparaging remarks about the White House Historical Association, and 2) we helpfully reproduced the WHHA’s own material.

(We’re guessing Ms. Kline is upset that we referred to her organization as “this outfit.” From Merriam-Webster: outfit: a group of people working together in the same activity.)

Anyway, we wish Ms. Kline – and the WHHA – all the best in their efforts to mainstream Calvin Coolidge. He was, after all, governor of Massachusetts for all of two years. And Campaign Outsider is nothing if not an outfit that roots for the Bay State.

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Ads in the New York Times

Posted on February 14, 2015 by Campaign Outsider

First in what we hope will be a long-running series

The New York Times is repository for all manner of inexplicable advertising (see our Civilians Who Run Full-Page Ads in the New York Times series for representative samples), so the hardworking staff was not surprised to see this in yesterday’s edition.

 

Screen Shot 2015-02-14 at 1.13.02 AM

 

The White House Historical Association describes itself this way:

The White House Historical Association is a nonprofit educational association founded in 1961 for the purpose of enhancing the understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of the Executive Mansion. All proceeds from the sale of the association’s books and products are used to fund the whha-logoacquisition of historic furnishings and art work for the permanent White House collection, assist in the preservation of public rooms, and further its educational mission.

In 1961, when the National Park Service suggested that such an association be formed, the idea received First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s ready approval. In July 1962, The White House: An Historic Guide was delivered to a public that had already ordered 10,000 copies. The guide is now in its 23rd edition.

Full disclosure: We’re not sure this outfit is associated with the actual White House, but then again, we’re not sure it matters.

Either way, here’s a helpful background video:

 

 

As for Calvin Coolidge’s snagging the coveted 2015 White House Christmas Ornament, there is, coincidentally, this from yesterday’s Boston Globe Capital section:

Capital quiz: Political insults edition (round 2)

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A couple weeks back, the Capital Quiz explored famous political insults. Turns out, we only scratched the surface. And so, another round! See how many you know.

Cut to:

8. Who was Harry Truman referring to when he described a presidency like this: “He sat with his feet in his desk drawer and did nothing”?

That’s right: Calvin Coolidge.

(Wait – the first National Christmas Tree Lighting in 1923 didn’t count?)

Thanks to the White House Historical Association, though, he’s done something now.

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How Many Millennials Actually Watch Jon Stewart?

Posted on February 13, 2015 by Campaign Outsider

Conventional wisdom holds that Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show on Viacom’s Comedy Central is so valuable because it’s a magnet for millennials, the magic 18-29 demographic that marketers lust after.

From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal piece about “growing concerns on Wall Street that pay-TV providers will decide they can do without [Viacom’s] bundle of channels”:

An executive at a small cable operator said after the company dropped the Viacom channels last year, “Stewart at ‘The Daily Show’ came up over and over again” in interactions with upset customers. Though Mr. Stewart’s primary audience consisted of “millennials,” the executive said, there were complaints from people in their mid-40s and mid-50s.

Handy graphic detailing the erosion of younger viewers in late night (with one notable exception):

 

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And then there’s this from the New York Times First Draft:

Politics to Suffer Demographic Shortfall Without Colbert or Stewart

Jon Stewart’s departure from “The Daily Show,” coming after the loss of “The Colbert Report,” not only creates a hole in Comedy Central’s lineup but leaves lawmakers and candidates without a critical outlet for reaching young voters.

“Clearly both ‘Daily Show’ and ‘Colbert’ have been a draw for the younger age cohorts, especially relative to your mainstream news outlets,” said Amy Mitchell of the Pew Research Center.

The median age of “Daily Show” viewers is 36, Ms. Mitchell said, and 39 percent were under 30 in 2012, the most recent data available from the Pew Center.

But wait – consider this piece by Ethan Epstein in the Weekly Standard.

As of 2013, The Daily Show was bringing in approximately 2 million nightly viewers. And according to an exhaustive Pew Survey from 2012, 39 percent of The Daily Show’s regular viewers are between the ages of 18 and 29. That means that approximately 780,000 millennials are regular Daily Show watchers. In the United States, there are 53 million people between the ages of 18 and 29. That means that a whopping 1.5 percent of millennials watch the Daily Show regularly! Let’s be generous and assume that, say, 5 million people watch The jon stewartDaily Show even occasionally. That would still mean a paltry 1.95 million out of 53 million millennials are Stewart fans.

That’s not all. According to Bill Carter, then of the New York Times, the average Daily Show viewer is 41 years old. Considering other cable shows alone, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Archer, American Horror Story, and Louie all have significantly younger audiences than does Stewart. And here’s my favorite nugget: 9 percent of the regular viewers of the nightly evening news – long derided as the news source of the geriatric set – are between the ages of 18 and 29. About 22 million people watch the nightly news. Thus, nearly 2 million millennials are regular viewers of the nightly evening news. That’s right: more than twice as many millennials watch Brian Williams, Scott Pelley, et al, than watch The Daily Show.

In other words, the great millennial following of The Daily Show is a total myth. Perhaps Stewart can “destroy” it on tonight’s broadcast.

Go figure.

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An Invitation? After FOUR Months? To Ello With That!

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Campaign Outsider

Well-o-well: Ello is officially scraping the bottom of the barrel.

As the hardworking staff has plaintively noted, we were hoping for a smile from the Prom-Queen-Turned-Mean-Girl of social media last fall and got . . . a whole lot of nothing.

Until today, when this landed in our gmailbox.

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Of course if Ello wants us at this late date then we are a product, but why get technical about it.

Then again, according to Gopal Sathe at NDTV Gadgets, Ello will take whoever it can get.

Why the Real Facebook Killer Won’t Be a Social Network

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A few months ago, the whole world seem to have finally discovered Ello, about a year after the “private” social network first launched. Like everyone else, we too got in line for an invite, and said hello to Ello. Unfortunately, the hottest new social network of 2014 eventually turned out to be pretty dull.

The network has some different ideas like customisation and letting you to really personalise your space way more than Facebook (cover pictures are pretty much all you can do), but without losing the Ello identity on pages, which happened to MySpace. However, looking at Ello today, we’re struck by how little it has evolved.

Bottom (out) line: “Our network of friends came to Ello full of excitement, spent a few days learning the complex controls, and then retreated en masse to the safe and familiar blue embrace of Facebook.”

Vice is equally unimpressed.

[O]nce the Ello bouncer let you through the velvet rope, the newest, hottest nightclub in town turned out to be a cool space with decent music, but no liquor license or bathrooms. People joined the site, but once they were there they seemed to mostly talk about how they had joined up or wonder out loud what they were supposed to post there. It was also oddly difficult to find your friends.

Kiss. Of. Death.

There are dissenting views (see here), but it’s safe to say that Ello is not the bottle rocket many predicted at its launch.

And it’s even safer to say that we’re not signing up.

Not after waiting four months, anyway.

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NYT Gets Drop on Boston Globe Re: Ted K Institute Opening

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Campaign Outsider

The Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate is about to open in the wake of a family feud that has gone largely unnoted in the news media lately, but was all the rage two years ago.

Regardless, yesterday’s New York Times beat the Boston dailies to the preview.

In the Mold of a Senator Who Bartered

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When it opens next month in Boston, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate will be aiming to restore respect for Congress at a time when rancor and partisanship have seriously damaged its reputation.

As if to lead by example, the Kennedy family seems to have patched up its own reported differences over the $79 million institution, which with a full-scale replica of the Senate chamber will seek to educate the public about the legislative process.

The senator’s two sons, who were said to be at odds with their father’s widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, over issues of cost and control, are by all appearances now supportive of the project and Mrs. Kennedy, who leads the institute’s board.

“Like all families, we’ve had our disagreements,” said Edward M. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer. “But Vicki’s done an incredible job. We are totally united in our goal to make sure that our father’s vision is realized.”

Good for you. (The rest is pretty much Kennedy agitprop.)

But it beats the hometown team’s coverage, which lately has been this:

 

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In other words, nothing about the upcoming opening.

We’ll keep you posted on the Globe’s inevitable catch-up coverage.

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WSJ Piece Has 20-20 Heinz Sight

Posted on February 8, 2015 by Campaign Outsider

The hardworking staff is a longtime fanboy of the great W.C. Heinz – a superb WWII war correspondent and perhaps the greatest American sportswriter of the 20th Century (not to mention the co-author of M*A*S*H).

(Our WGBH Heinz obit here.)

Now comes this Nathan Ward piece from the Weekend Wall Street Journal.

‘You Find the Best Stories in the Loser’s Dressing Room’

‘I can tell you’ve been at the gym,” Betty Heinz used to tell her sportswriter husband when he came home from a day with the New York fight crowd at Stillman’s Gym. He spoke differently after a few hours absorbing their stories and cadences for his BN-GV757_edpWar_P_20150206145332writing. Bill Heinz, who died in 2008, was a master of precise talk and low-key poignancy. He once said, “You find the best stories in the loser’s dressing room.”

This year marks the centenary of Heinz’s birth (Jan. 11), and the Library of America is marking the occasion by publishing “The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W.C. Heinz, ” edited by Bill Littlefield. Read straight through, the collection shows how, as Gay Talese has noted elsewhere, “Bill Heinz set literary standards in the world of games.”

That would be Bill Littlefield of local and Only A Game fame.

Ward’s piece also mentions Heinz’s Death of a Racehorse (via Alex Belth’s Bronx Banter), which has “often been called one of the greatest sports columns ever published,” and features the classic Ernest Hemingway telegram about Heinz’s boxing novel, The Professional.

 

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Our favorite Bill Heinz quote, from an interview we were lucky enough to get with him in 2006.

[A]lthough I’m a great admirer of football and what it brings, I’m a great admirer of team sports, there’s always somebody else you can lay it off on and you can’t lay it off in a fight.

Amen.

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Jill Stein to Run for President on Groan Party Ticket

Posted on February 7, 2015 by Campaign Outsider

Dr. Jill Stein, the woman who took the green out of the Green Party in 2002, wants another shot at the presidency of the United States.

From her press release yesterday:

Dr. Jill Stein Announces Formation of Exploratory Committee For 2016 Presidential Bid Declaring “It’s Time For A New Society, A New Economy, A New Way Forward.”

At a Press Conference this morning, Dr. Jill Stein told the assembled media, guests, and a live TV audience tuning into C-Span that she is “testing the waters” and forming an exploratory committee to seek the Green Party nomination for President of the United States. More information about the exploratory committee can be found at Jill2016.com.

The declaration came just hours after Dr. Stein’s exclusive interview with ABC News made a splash on the Yahoo News homepage. (Watch the full ABC News video here.)

And here she is yesterday at the National Press Club.

 

 

Stein, a sort of five-and-dime Ralph Nader, has been around third-party politics for over a decade. Most memorably in Massachusetts, she was one of the gubernatorial candidates in the 2002 Big Love election, which featured Mitt Romney versus Stein, Democrat Shannon O’Brien, Libertarian Carla Howell, and Independent Barbara Johnson, whose most compelling recommendation for public office was her chain-smoking.

Stein could have been a real player in that race if she had garnered Clean Elections public funding (which Warren Tolman received in the Democratic primary). But as Seth Gitell noted in Jewish World Review at the time:

[T]he Green Party in Massachusetts bungled its application for Clean Elections funding by failing to garner the mandatory 6000 $5 to $100 contributions . . . (Stein attributes the Clean Elections-funding snafu to “technicalities which we thought were unjust.” Under the Clean Elections Law, candidates must not only take in contributions, but must also collect detail-intensive cards along with each donation. Stein claims local town halls arbitrarily rejected the paperwork or, in some cases, wrongly applied the same strict rules as those guiding nominating-petition signatures.)

Whatever. The results (via uselectionatlas.org):

 

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And that was Stein’s best effort. (In the 2010 Massachusetts gubernatorial race, she got all of 1%.)

As for her 2012 presidential stroll, it’s best described by Slate’s David Weigel:

The Pathetic Failure of Green Party Candidate Jill Stein

For the first time since 1992—seriously, it had been that long!—Ralph Nader opted out of the presidential campaign. The anti-Obama left-wing vote would be sought by Jill Stein, a sometime Green Party candidate in Massachusetts, who got some free press attention for 1) having previously run against Mitt Romney and 2) getting arrested when protesting her noninclusion in debates. Democrats didn’t worry about her too much, but she polled as high as 2 percent in some surveys, and it wasn’t hard to find the occasional Salon or TruthOut jeremiad demanding that the left punish Obama for his drone warfare ways.

How’d Stein do? Terribly! There’s a hefty vote left to count in the West and in provisional ballots in states where Republicans played Parcheesi with polling places, but right now, Stein’s won fewer than 400,000 votes nationwide. That’s barely more than one-third as much as Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico who left the GOP in a huff and ran an anti-war, pro-drug legalization Libertarian campaign.

Even worse: “In Massachusetts, Stein ran fourth, with fewer than 20,000 votes, even though every Democrat in the state realized he could cast a spoiler vote if he wanted to.”

So . . . memo to Dr. Jill Stein:

Please, put us out of your misery.

Please.

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Quote o’ the Day (George McGovern Hearts Louise Day Hicks Edition)

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Campaign Outsider

Well the hardworking staff was doing some homework today when we came across this exchange between Hunter S. Thompson and his editor in the 1973 Rolling Stone piece, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in ’72:

HST: [T]here was a whole series of things that hurt [McGovern] all across the board: that trip to the LBJ Ranch, the sucking up to Mayor Daley, the endorsement of Ed Hanrahan, state’s attorney in Chicago – who was indicted for the murder of Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader…

Ed: McGovern endorsed Hanrahan?

HST: Yeah. He also endorsed Louise Day Hicks in Boston.

Ed: Oh, no!

HST: The racist woman, who was running for Congress…

Ed: Did she win?

HST: No, I think she lost. And Hanrahan lost, despite the McGovern endorsement… all that hurt McGovern and also having his own so-called campaign director, Larry O’Brien, denounce him just before Labor Day. O’Brien denounced the whole McGovern campaign as a can of worms, a rolling ball of madness… incompetence, a bunch of ego freaks running around in circles with nobody in charge. That kind of thing couldn’t possibly have helped.

Thompson was right – Hicks did lose her 1972 bid for reelection to the House of Representatives.

Though she easily won the Democratic primary, she lost narrowly in a four–way general election to Joe Moakley, who ran this time on the Independent–Conservative ticket. Moakley edged Hicks out with 70,571 to 67,143 votes (43 percent to 41 percent of the total vote).

Of course when he endorsed Hicks, McGovern lost even more.

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Dead Blogging ‘Bedlam’s Saint Joan’ at Central Square Theater

Posted on February 1, 2015 by Campaign Outsider

Well the Missus and I trundled over to Cambridge yesterday to catch the Underground Railway Theater production of Bedlam’s Saint Joan and say, it was swell.

For starters, the cast was flat out fabulous.

 

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The actors who were not Joan shifted characters (23 in all) wonderfully – with a gesture, a posture, a vocal inflection. By contrast, Andrus Nichols was a stunningly consistent Joan and stunning throughout.

The multi-faceted Eric Tucker also directed the production, whose bare-bones, ingenious staging includes a moveable audience. From the theater’s website:

While we will be using the same seating configuration as you have experienced attending Arabian Nights, at each intermission, patrons in some these seats will move to different parts of the theater. The area where their seats were will become new playing spaces for the actors. The result: An immersive experience that offers different perspectives on the action.

The Missus and I were among the moved, in more ways than one.

The trailer:

 

 

You have one more week to see this remarkable production.

Do yourself a favor and do so.

(Tip o’ the pixel to George Bernard Shaw)

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The Ruins of Paul Rudolph’s Architecture

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Campaign Outsider

The hardworking staff has long admired the architectural work of Paul Rudolph, especially his Blue Cross Blue Shield building at 133 Federal Street in Boston. (Our 2008 WGBH commentary here.)

But not everyone does.

So we read with interest in the current New York Review of Books Martin Filler’s piece about Rudolph’s shattered legacy.

Among the most acclaimed mid-twentieth- century American architects, none experienced a more precipitous reversal of fortune than Paul Rudolph.

That reversal was caused mostly by Rudolph’s inflexibility and extreme eccentricity (see Yale’s Art & Architecture Building for further details), as Filler chronicled in his review of these two books:

The Architecture of Paul Rudolph
by Timothy M. Rohan
Yale University Press, 290 pp., $65.00

After You Left/They Took It Apart (Demolished Paul Rudolph Homes)
by Chris Mottalini
Columbia College Chicago Press, 71 pp., $50.00

We especially noted this Boston connection in Filler’s review:

The press lauded Rudolph’s increasingly bombastic institutional schemes, epitomized by his eerily cavernous, crushingly heavy Government Service Center in Boston of 1962–1971—a fortress-like complex with a swirling, multilevel interior that brings to mind the inner ear of some Brobdingnagian creature. The lack of critical analysis such overbearing works received at the time is doubtless attributable to the friendships Rudolph cultivated with editors and critics.

Doubtless.

Said fortress-like complex:

 

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Later in his piece, Filler laments one omission in Timothy Rohan’s otherwise “excellent new monograph.”

I was very sorry to find missing from The Architecture of Paul Rudolph what I consider to be his finest work, the Tuskegee University Chapel of 1960–1969 at the historically black college in Tuskegee, Alabama. Rohan says he omitted it for reasons of space, although I can think of no better evidence in support of higher regard for his subject.

Said chapel:

 

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As for the hardworking staff, we were very sorry to find missing from Martin Filler’s piece what we consider to be one of Rudolph’s most appealing works, 133 Federal Street.

 

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Regardless, Paul Rudolph left a legacy in concrete that we demolish to our own detriment. At least for now, it looks like 133 Federal will survive, as long as developer Steve Belkin keeps his word.

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