Campaign e-mails (again)

I have greater and greater misgivings about the e-mails that Barack Obama's campaign is sending to supporters. The problems that I see in these messages suggest the difficulty of using a relatively new means of communication effectively. From October 18, a case in point:

Michael,

I'm leaving the Tonight Show studio and I wanted to share something.

Am I expected to believe that as Barack Obama is leaving a television studio, he has stopped to fire up a laptop and e-mail me? At 3:35 AM? Yes, this message was sent at 3:35 AM, when I suspect everyone involved in the taping had long since left the studio, Senator Obama included.

A first name followed by a comma is an at least semi-plausible greeting. Sometimes the beginning is a bit too brusque:

Michael --

Last night each of the presidential campaigns reported their third-quarter fundraising numbers.

Worse still, the Obama campaign continues to use "Hey" as a greeting. If anyone from Obama '08 is reading: "Hey" is a terrible way to address someone in an e-mail. "Hey" is what college students are told not to write when they e-mail their professors. What makes campaign strategists imagine that voters and potential contributors want to be addressed in this way?

The sign-offs can be brusque as well:

I need you to make a donation to close the gap:

https://donate.barackobama.com/closethegap

Barack

Not even a "Thanks"?

A stranger development is the use of supporters' names in follow-up messages. Thus I found a message in my inbox from Earnest Primous, "RE: Hillary's money." Earnest Primous, it turns out, is a retired postalworker who's contributed to the Obama campaign and is encouraging me to do likewise. If my son had not tipped me off, I would've deleted this message unopened as spam. The last thing most e-mail users want to do is open messages from unrecognized senders.

A further problem: the Obama campaign's use of follow-up e-mails creates some awkward complications. Consider this excerpt:

Obama is relying on you and me to make this happen. If I can give again, you can give too. Help Obama close the gap with Hillary so we can change politics:

https://donate.barackobama.com/closethegap

Thank you,

Earnest
Retired from Postal Service

----------Original message----------

From: Barack Obama
Subject: Hillary's money

Hey --

Last night each of the presidential campaigns reported their third-quarter fundraising numbers.

See what's happened? Mr. Primous, it would appear, is replying to the e-mail that I quoted at the beginning of this post. But that message addressed the recipient by name. Here it begins with "Hey." Mr. Primous' message is, of course, not a reply (in the e-mail sense) at all; it's an e-mail that quotes and makes generic some of the text of the previous Obama e-mail, with "Hey" replacing the previously personalized greeting.

I've telephoned the Obama campaign to voice three suggestions about e-mail strategy:

1. Use a consistent, recognizable sender name. "Obama '08" would be a good one.

2. Use a consistent, non-cryptic subject line. "A message from Obama '08" would be a good one.

3. Use a serious tone, neither falsely informal nor brusque.

The person I spoke with asked whether I realized that Earnest Primous is a real person (of course I did) and explained that the campaign was trying something new. But novelty in e-mailing is not a good strategy, not if one wants the recipient to open, read, and act. And the false informality of these e-mails is sadly at odds with the honest eloquence that draws people to the Obama campaign.

Related post
Campaign e-mail etiquette
Obama e-mail improvement

Obama thoughts

I got an e-mail from a friend yesterday — subject line: "You were right" — reminding me that in 2004, after hearing Barack Obama speak at a community college, I said that he'd be president one day. I'm grateful for the reminder.

I didn't think back then that it would happen in 2008. In 2004, Obama was running for the Senate. Michelle Obama came to "east-central Illinois" that June, and Elaine and I heard her speak in the back room of a local restaurant. That Michelle Obama was here was in itself extraordinary: candidates for statewide office virtually never show up here. Everyone in our family heard Barack Obama speak at a nearby community college that August. The people we met then are the same people we've seen countless times since on our screens: graceful, knowledgeable, passionate, serious, and very, very smart. Seeing a crowd of downstaters moved and inspired by a "Chicago politician," much less one who's African-American, was surprising indeed. Obama's huge victory in 2004 didn't surprise me. Nor did it surprise me that he came back to our area in 2006 to talk about what he had accomplished and hoped to accomplish in the Senate.

In February 2007, we cheered Obama's announcement of his presidential candidacy from our cozy living room. Hillary Clinton seemed the inevitable nominee, but our hopes were with Obama. As the campaign developed, we found ourselves with an ever growing stake in the outcome. Elaine and I made calls before the Iowa primary. We signed up for e-mail messages. We began making small donations and soon lost track of how many we had made. Little windfalls — publishing royalties and such — went straight to the Obama campaign. I called the national office to explain why the campaign needed to rethink its e-mail etiquette. (It seems to have worked — I know at least that my suggestions were bumped upward.) Our son Ben volunteered with the campaign during the summer. Elaine and I knocked on doors in Illinois and Indiana. For every voter who closed the door ("I don't need that shit," one told us), there were others who not only supported Obama but were eager to talk with us — at length — about him. Their human variety undid any assumptions I might have had about midwesterners.

This election marks the first time I've ever done anything for a candidate beyond casting a vote. And I've realized over the past few days that the last two years have been my immersion course in the political life of my country. My daily online reading now includes at least a half-dozen or so sources for political news and commentary. The blue and red projection map at FiveThirtyEight.com is tattooed on my brain. I know details of House and Senate races across the country. I have followed (with disappointment) the apparent success of Proposition 8 in California. I understand the significance of "bellwether counties" and am slightly dizzied to know that I went canvassing in one. And I've come to feel that I can comment with some intelligence on a small subset of matters relevant to political life, particularly those concerning ready-made phrases and sinks.

For me, the history that happened yesterday is still sinking in. The "first black president," yes, but also, as Colin Powell says, a president who "also happens to be black." I think that Obama's election is also historic in putting to rest, at least for a while, the absurdly swaggering, masculinist version of a leader that for so long has been compelling in American culture. (I still remember the idiotic chant from Reagan–Mondale, 1984: "Fritz is a wimp.") Obama is brainy, skinny (as he jokes), a member of Hyde Park's Seminary Co-op Bookstore. And he's a wonderful example for young people — of any color — of what a man might be: a gentle, loving husband and father and grandson.

When our family met Barack Obama in 2004 — yes, reader, we each shook his hand — my daughter Rachel told him that she was too young to vote. "I'll have to give you another chance," he said. I am very happy that this election gave my daughter and my son their first chance to vote for a president.

Lend me your ears passages

From Wikipedia, items in an odd and funny series: “Meredith McIver is a staff writer for The Trump Organization, author, former ballerina, and registered Democrat.” And now she has taken responsibility for the appearance of words from a Michelle Obama speech in Melania Trump’s Monday night speech. From Ms. McIver’s statement:

In working with Melania on her recent First Lady speech, we discussed many people who inspired her and messages she wanted to share with the American people. A person she has always liked is Michelle Obama. Over the phone, she read me some passages from Mrs. Obama’s speech as examples. I wrote them down and later included some of the phrasing in the draft that ultimately became the final speech. I did not check Mrs. Obama’s speeches. This was my mistake and I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps as well as to Mrs. Obama. No harm was meant.

This explanation leaves an important question unanswered: did Ms. Trump make clear that she was reading passages from Ms. Obama’s speech? That these passages were from Ms. Obama’s speech doesn’t mean that Ms. McIver knew that at the time . Either way, it’s plagiarism, but it’s not clear to me who really bears greater responsibility for passing off Ms. Obama’s words as Ms. Trump’s own.

“In working with Melania . . . , we discussed,” “First Lady speech,” “the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps as well as to Mrs. Obama”: I think Ms. McIver could use some help with her own writing. Here is the text of her statement.

A related post
It’s plagiarism

[It feels odd to me to write “Ms. Obama” and “Ms. Trump.” But since the surnames alone suggest Barack and Donald, I have done so. To me, Ms. Obama is “Michelle.” I met her, back in 2004, here in downstate Illinois. Too bad she won’t run for Senate.]

Campaign e-mail etiquette

I'm a strong supporter of Barack Obama, but I'm dismayed to receive a campaign e-mail message in his name with the subject line "Hey." Even worse is the subject line on a follow-up e-mail bearing Michelle Obama's name: "RE: Hey." There are at least three good reasons to abandon "Hey":

1. A message with the subject line "Hey" is easily mistaken for spam. That the "Hey" purports to come from a well-known figure makes it look, to my eyes, even more like spam.

2. The too-casual "Hey" is likely to strike younger voters as lame.

3. The too-casual "Hey" is likely to strike older voters as saucy, pert, and less than presidential. (Do older people still complain about sauciness and pertness?)

I will add that I've met both Barack and Michelle Obama, and my sense is that neither would address a reader/voter in this way.

A better choice for a subject line might be "A message from Obama '08," "A message from Barack Obama," or "A message from Michelle Obama." Not very original: novelty in subject lines is not necessarily a good thing.

David Plouffe, if you're listening, please drop the "Hey."

Related posts

Campaign e-mails (again)
Obama e-mail improvement

Barack Obama on facts
Barack Obama on race
Ideology v. values
The kitchen shink

Barack Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize

Remember the spin in the wake of Rio’s Olympic victory? “WORLD REJECTS OBAMA,” yelled the Drudge Report. But Norway has gone rogue. From the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s press release:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

Yes, this award seems to be as much about the forty-third president as about the forty-fourth. But if the world (or even one rogue nation) is seeing the United States in a different way now, that’s something to celebrate. Congratulations, President Obama.

Mark Penn, “senior strategist”

Oh New York Times , you can be so decorous:

During the 2008 Democratic contest, Mrs. Clinton’s senior strategist at one point pondered, in an internal memo that was later leaked, the ways in which Mr. Obama’s personal background differed from many Americans’. But contrary to Mr. Trump’s assertion, neither Mrs. Clinton nor her campaign ever publicly questioned Mr. Obama’s citizenship or birthplace, in Hawaii.

Credit where it’s due: the unnamed “senior strategist” was Mark Penn. And Penn didn’t merely ponder ways in which Barack Obama’s background “differed.” (Doesn’t everyone’s?) In a memo to Hillary Clinton (March 19, 2007), Penn wrote about what he called “a very strong weakness” for Obama, his “lack of American roots”:

his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.

True, nothing in those sentences questions Barack Obama’s birthplace. But the charge is clear: according to Penn, Obama was “not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

I loathe Mark Penn. I loathe too the Times ’s unwillingless to acknowledge facts that are awkward and embarrassing for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

[How did I get to that memo so quickly? I made a post about it in 2008. And if there’s any doubt: I loathe Donald Trump.]

Three passages from Michelle Obama

From The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times (New York: Crown, 2022).

On navigating the world as someone “different”:

You learn, as my family did, to be watchful. You figure out how to guard your energy, to count every step. And at the heart of this lies a head-spinning paradox: Being different conditions you toward cautiousness, even as it demands that you be bold.

On putting something small, like knitting, alongside big things:

Any time your circumstances start to feel all-consuming, I suggest you try going in the other direction — toward the small. Look for something that'll help you rearrange your thoughts, a pocket of contentedness where you can live for a while. And by this I don't mean sitting passively in front of your television or scrolling through your phone. Find something that’s active, something that asks for your mind but uses your body as well. Immerse yourself in the process. And forgive yourself for temporarily ducking out of the storm.

On seing children growing up. When the Obamas visit Malia and Sasha, who are sharing an apartment in Los Angeles, Malia produces a charcuterie board. And then:

Sasha attempted to fix us a couple of weak martinis — Wait, you know how to make martinis? — and served them in water glasses, first laying down a couple of newly purchased coasters so that we wouldn’t mark up their brand-new coffee table with our drinks.

I watched all this with some astonishment. It’s not that I’m surprised that our kids have grown up, exactly, but somehow the whole scene — the coasters, in particular — signaled a different sort of landmark, the type of thing every parent spends years scanning for, which is evidence of common sense.

As Sasha set down our drinks that night, I thought about all the coasters she and her sister hadn’t bothered to use when they were under our care, all the times over the years I’d tried to get watermarks out of various tables, including at the White House.

But the dynamics had changed. We were at their table now. They owned it, and they were protecting it. Clearly they had learned.

I still find it difficult to believe that Elaine and I had the good fortune to meet both Michelle and Barack Obama in 2004, during Barack Obama’s Senate campaign. And I still find it difficult to believe that our country went from eight years of an Obama presidency to — what? Michelle Obama, too, finds that difficult to believe.

Also by Michelle Obama
From Becoming

Obama and inflation

Time considers inflation:

How out of touch is Barack Obama? He's so out of touch that he suggested that if all Americans inflated their tires properly and took their cars for regular tune-ups, they could save as much oil as new offshore drilling would produce. Gleeful Republicans have made this their daily talking point; Rush Limbaugh is having a field day; and the Republican National Committee is sending tire gauges labeled "Barack Obama's Energy Plan" to Washington reporters.

But who's really out of touch? The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030. We use about 20 million bbl. per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now. Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. In other words: Obama is right.

In fact, Obama's actual energy plan is much more than a tire gauge. But that's not what's so pernicious about the tire-gauge attacks. Politics ain't beanbag, and Obama has defended himself against worse smears. The real problem with the attacks on his tire-gauge plan is that efforts to improve conservation and efficiency happen to be the best approaches to dealing with the energy crisis — the cheapest, cleanest, quickest and easiest ways to ease our addiction to oil, reduce our pain at the pump and address global warming. It's a pretty simple concept: if our use of fossil fuels is increasing our reliance on Middle Eastern dictators while destroying the planet, maybe we ought to use less.

Marian Robinson (1937–2024)

Marian Robinson, mother of Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson, has died at the age of eighty-six. From the New York Times obituary:

Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Ms. Robinson was known as a loving, down-to-earth matriarch who became an emotional ballast for her daughter and granddaughters, Malia and Sasha, but also for Mr. Obama, who had rocketed to political superstardom and whose family, at times, had to scramble to keep up.

When Mr. Obama became the first Black man to win the presidency in November 2008, he sat and watched the returns alongside his mother-in-law. Their hands were clutched together as they watched their family’s future change alongside the course of American history.

Elaine and I met Michelle Obama when Barack Obama was running for the United States Senate. And our whole family met Barack Obama later in that campaign. I wish we could have met Marian Robinson too.

Infinite Jest and Mike Huckabee

Hal Incandenza is working out a taxonomy of liars:

“Then there are what I might call your Kamikaze-style liars. These’ll tell you a surreal and fundamentally incredible lie, and then pretend a crisis of conscience and retract the original lie, and then offer you the lie they really want you to buy instead, so the real lie’ll appear as some kind of concession, a settlement with truth. That type’s mercifully easy to see through.”

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

Hal’s observations might help one to understand Mike Huckabee’s statements earlier this week about Barack Obama’s childhood. Huckabee began with the claim that Obama grew up in Kenya:

“And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American. . . . But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.“

And later:

“In my answer, I simply misspoke when I alluded to President Obama growing up in Kenya and meant to say Indonesia.”

And later:

“I do think he [Obama] has a different world view, and I think it is, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.”

See? Not Kenya. Indonesia. And madrassas. Obama did not attend a madrassa, and he spent most of his childhood in Hawaii. Scouting and Rotary, by the way, are alive and well there, as they are in Indonesia and Kenya. Mercifully easy to see through? I hope so.

As Andrew Sullivan observes, Huckabee is “Palin without the figure.”

Related reading
Huckabee’s “Kenya” clarification (Washington Post)
Huckabee: Obama Was Raised in Kenya (Mother Jones)
Gerakan Pramuka Indonesia (Scouting in Indonesia)
Kenya Scouts Association
Pramuka Indonesia (Wikipedia)
Rotary Clubs vs Madrassas (The Daily Dish)
Rotary Clubs vs Madrassas, Ctd (The Daily Dish)
Rotary Clubs vs Madrassas, Ctd (The Daily Dish)
Rotary in Indonesia (Rotary First 100)
Rotary in Kenya (Rotary District 9200)

The kitchen shink¹

The July 2 New Yorker has a poetry item in its "Talk of the Town": Rebecca Mead's account of Harold Bloom's response to Barack Obama's undergraduate poetry poems "Pop" and "Underground," published in 1981 in the Occidental College literary magazine Feast. Here is a curious excerpt:

Of the two Obama poems, Bloom said, "Pop" was "not bad — a good enough folk poem with some pathos and humor and affection." He went on, "It is not wholly unlike Langston Hughes, who tended to imitate Carl Sandburg." Bloom was fascinated by Obama's use of an unusual verb, "shink" ("He . . . Stands, shouts, and asks / For a hug, as I shink, my / Arms barely reaching around / His thick, oily neck"), a word that does not appear in any of the dictionaries that Bloom consulted but which is defined in an online slang dictionary as "an evasive sinking maneuver."²

"It undoubtedly was a word that was in common usage, having to do with feeling very strong emotion, in this case a very strong need for comfort," Bloom said.

I think that Bloom and Mead have missed a better and simpler explanation: shink, I would suggest, is very likely a typo for shrink, a word that fits the context, with the poet's arms "barely reaching around" Pop's neck. Twelve lines earlier, the poet laughs as Pop "grows small, / A spot in my brain": now, it's the poet's turn to shrink. (How could Bloom, immersed in Freud, overlook shrink?)

The poems, I'd say, lie somewhere between "not bad" and "pretty good." You can find them, and Bloom's encounter with them, by following the links:

Barack Obama: Two Poems (New Yorker)
Obama, Poet (New Yorker)

Related posts (Three excerpts from The Audacity of Hope)
On ideology v. values
On facts
On race

¹ Yes, the title of this post contains a typo.

² The online slang dictionary is Urban Dictionary, which hosts a variety of fanciful and vulgar definitions for shink and other words. The contributor who proferred the definition of shink cited in the New Yorker added a second definition: "aggressive facial expression of dwarf child stars."

Obama in Illinois

Barack Obama, speaking at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this morning, describing the present moment: “It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause.”

*

And: “It’s not conservative. It sure isn’t normal. It’s radical.”

And: “What happened to the Republican Party?”

And: “Better is always worth fighting for.”

And: “Vote.”

Sad to say, I’m not sure there’s anyone in view for 2020 who can make the case against the Republican Party as succinctly and powerfully as Obama is making it this morning.

*

Here’s a “rush transcript” of Obama’s speech.

[I’m thrilled to see that Obama us speaking in Foellinger Hall, where Rachel and Ben had their graduation ceremonies.]

The New Yorker endorses Obama

The editors of the New Yorker have endorsed Barack Obama. An excerpt:

The reëlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romney — a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obama’s America — one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equality — represents the future that this country deserves.

Watching last night’s debate (or most of it — I had to miss the first twenty minutes) confirmed for me that Mitt Romney is the political version of Infinite Jest’s Orin Incandenza, the pick-up artist who says, “Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I’ll affect the demeanor of that man.” I am hoping that American voters won’t get fooled.

[Notice the New Yorker umlaut dieresis: reëlection.]

Drudge Report reportage

The Drudge Report is making merry with an offhand, joking comment that Michelle Obama made in an interview with NPR’s Cokie Roberts. Drudge links to this article, which quotes Mrs. Obama on life in the White House: “‘There are some prison elements to it,’ she joked. ‘But it’s a really nice prison.’”

See? It’s a joke.

The context, as given in the above article: “Roberts noted that Martha Washington, the first First Lady, also described living in the role as akin to being a state prisoner.” So the current First Lady wasn’t complaining: she was offering mild agreement, followed by a reminder that to live in the White House is to enjoy great privilege.

Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, seems to have agree with Martha Washington, calling the White House “that dull and stately prison in which the sounds of mirth are seldom heard.” Harry Truman wrote of the White House that “This great white jail is a hell of a place in which to be alone.” There is nothing new about occupants of the White House thinking of the building as a prison — and with far greater seriousness than Mrs. Obama’s comment allows. You’d never know any of that from the Drudge Report, whose sole purpose is to suggest (as Drudge headlines often do) that Michelle Obama is an unhappy and ungrateful camper, or perhaps an Angry Black Woman.

[I still marvel that I got to meet Barack and Michelle Obama, back in 2004.]

Obama on the Titanic

Barack Obama spoke in Springfield, Illinois, today. Addressing the Illinois General Assembly, he spoke eloquently of the need for “a better politics”:

“When I hear voices in either party boast of their refusal to compromise as an accomplishment in and of itself, I’m not impressed,” Obama said. “All that does is prevent what most Americans would consider actual accomplishments, like fixing roads, educating kids, passing budgets, cleaning our environment, making our streets safe.”

I waited for some overt discussion of my state’s budget impasse and its catastrophic consequences for social services and public higher education. But as with Bruce Rauner’s State of the State address, the subject of the budget was barely there. Obama’s reference came only in passing, as the ship continues to sink. I had high, and perhaps foolish, hopes about this trip to Springfield. And now I am deeply disappointed.

You can watch and listen to the speech at YouTube. The reference to the budget comes at the 49:41 mark, thirty-three minutes into a nearly hour-long speech.

A related post
Illinois’s higher-ed crisis

[Yes, Obama, too, was dropping -g s.]

Obama pens

In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani interviews Barack Obama about reading and writing. We know from an excerpt from his first volume of memoir that Obama writes his drafts in longhand on legal pads. In this Times piece, he opens up about pens:

He says he is “very particular” about his pens, always using black Uni-ball Vision Elite rollerball pens with a micro-point, and adds that he tends to do his best writing between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.: “I find that the world narrows, and that is good for my imagination. It’s almost as if there is a darkness all around and there’s a metaphorical beam of light down on the desk, onto the page.”

“With a micro-point”: the anti-Sharpie.

Related reading
All OCA Barack Obama posts (Pinboard) : Obama revisions

The Springfield Daily Gazette

7:30 a.m. Leave the house. Buy water, an extra umbrella, fruit and oatmeal bars.

8:00 a.m. Drive to Springfield. Get lost (briefly) — a back road is involved. There is no simple and direct route to Springfield.

10:00 a.m. Arrive in Springfield. An instant parking space in a downtown lot! It's open to the public today, courtesy of Horace Mann Insurance. Why are there easy-to-find spaces? Where are all the people?

10:05 a.m. An answer to the first question never materializes, but the people — many, many people — are already waiting in line, an astonishing line that already wraps around a city block and snakes back and down several other streets. (NPR later reports a crowd of 35,000.)

10:05 a.m.–11:00 a.m. Elaine and I stand in line. We talk with people around us, some from Chicago, some from Springfield. One of our cohort is a blues fan from way back. He and I begin to talk about Canned Heat and the Incident at Kickapoo Creek. The line is getting longer and longer. It moves a little now and then, into and away from shade. Vendors move past selling buttons, shirts, and towels (towels?) with Obama's likeness. None of these items are official campaign merchandise, which is available at a handful of white tents. (Hint: look for the union label.)

11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Things move more quickly. We round two corners, cross a street, walk another block or so, and present ourselves for security checks. No bottles, umbrellas, or folding chairs. We are glad that we left our umbrellas in the car. We sip a little water before surrendering our bottles. Everything comes out of pockets for inspection. My compact Zebra pen arouses some interest. "It's a pen," I say, and demonstrate by uncapping it. It's okay.

[Things abandoned on the way to the security check. Why an Altoids tin? Click for a larger view, though doing so won't answer the question.]

12:00 p.m.–1:40 p.m. Waiting outside the Old State Capitol, in the street beyond the Capitol grounds. We talk to people around us, with pauses to endure the sun now and then. National Guardsman on rooftops watch the crowd through binoculars. A woman from St. Louis wonders whether Bruce Springsteen will be a surprise guest (he's playing in St. Louis tonight). We decide that his presence would add too great an entertainment element and undercut Joe Biden. A student who worked for Biden during the primaries is especially happy to be here. Elaine and I talk at length with a lovely couple from Bogotá, Colombia. They came to Springfield in the 1950s, planning to stay for a year, and never left. They offer remarkable stories about the city's history, its better days and worse.

The well-mannered crowd insists on manners. There are several outbreaks of polite chanting to get a news cameraman and several civilians to step down from the fence surrounding the Capitol grounds. These anti-social climbers are obscuring what would otherwise be splendid views of the podium. "PLEASE MOVE THE CAMERA!" And the cameraman moves on! "DOWN FROM THE FENCE — PLEASE!" This chant doesn't work so well. One guy remains on the fence for the entire time. I think his name must be Dick. Yes, he is a Dick.

It's hot, with occasional overcast skies and blessed breezes, and no sign of rain. "Is that rain? Oh — I think my body is making its own rain."

Behind us, a choreographed outburst for Candy Crowley of CNN, spotted on the press risers: "WE LOVE YOU, CANDY!" It occurs to me that I have never seen Candy Crowley in profile before this afternoon.

1:40 p.m. The event begins. The father of a serviceman killed in Iraq leads the Pledge of Allegiance. Springfield's mayor, two campaign volunteers, a minister speak. The minister's invocation reads like a lengthy to-do list for God. (Why not?)

2:00 p.m. Illinois' senior senator, Dick Durbin, introduces Barack Obama, right on schedule (I think). Obama speaks and introduces Joe Biden. Biden speaks and introduces Michelle Obama and Jill Biden. The crowd is fired up and ready to go, applauding and roaring, and cheerfully booing every reference to the worst president in history and his policies.

Not far in front of us, a young woman becomes unsteady while Joe Biden is speaking, and those around her help her sit down in the street. The call goes out in all directions for water. A bottle is passed back; a cup is passed forward. She drinks from the bottle; someone suggests pouring water on her feet; she's soon able to stand. There's a quiet round of applause.

It's odd: watching such an event on television, it's so easy to concentrate on what's being said. The speakers are in your face, so to speak. In person, it's different: there's more to pay attention to. It's like the difference between listening to a recording and attending a concert. Make that a concert at which you can only rarely see the musicians performing. So I'm looking forward to watching some of the endless replays of this afternoon's speeches on cable news. But I'm very happy to have come, and to be able to say that I was here.

[The people, yes. Click for a larger view.]

When the speeches were over (circa 3:00 p.m., I think) and the Obamas and Bidens began to greet people close to the speaking platform, Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours" came over the loudspeakers. Then some sort of rock and roll, and then the song I'd been waiting for, Jackie Wilson's "Higher and Higher." And then it was okay to leave.

[Barack and Michelle Obama and Joe and Jill Biden wave to the crowd. Click for a larger view.]

A related post
Great News from Springfield (from Elaine's blog)

How to improve writing (no. 78)

I’m reading Harold Evans’s Do I Make Myself Clear? A Practical Guide to Writing Well in the Modern Age (2017). It’s the work of a prominent journalist and editor whose prose is often graceful and witty. But there are odd lapses: missing referents, errors of fact, paragraphs and chapters that veer off in new directions. (I dare anyone to explain what happens toward the end of chapter four.) And there’s verbal clutter: “This is the laconic way he writes at the opening of an essay.” Better: “He begins laconically.” And what the hey is “the modern age”?

Perhaps most disappointing: Evans’s revisions of other people’s prose too often seem surprisingly clunky. Here is one example from the chapter “The Sentence Clinic.” The sentence in need of repair is from a 2014 Wall Street Journal article about Barack Obama:

The president, detached and defeatist when he isn’t in your face and triumphalist, let David Remnick, in the New Yorker interview people keep going back to as the second term’s Rosetta Stone, know that he himself does not expect any major legislation, with the possible exception of immigration, to get done.

Evans says that the sentence has “a hole in the middle” (unexplained), and he calls attention to the gap between David Remnick’s name and know. Here is Evans’s revision:

The president, detached and defeatist when he isn’t in your face and triumphalist, suggested, in a David Remnick interview in the New Yorker, that he does not expect any major legislation to pass, with the possible exception of immigration. People have viewed the interview as the Rosetta Stone of the second term.

Yet this revision preserves, unremarked, the gap between president and a verb (suggested) and adds a gap between suggested and that. There’s something awkward about having the participle detached and the verb suggested in close proximity. The rhyme of viewed and interview seems a distraction. And that long first sentence with parts rearranged — it’s still a clunker. Here’s my revision:

When he is not in your face and triumphalist, the president seems detached and defeated. In an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker, Obama suggested that he does does not expect any major legislation to pass, with the possible exception of immigration. Many observers see in this interview the key to understanding his second term.

First, a statement. Second, evidence to support that statement. Third, a comment on the importance of the evidence. I omitted the Rosetta Stone metaphor, as it suggests the deciphering of a mystery, not at all what’s involved in reading an interview. But I’d like to take greater liberties with the WSJ ’s prose and revise like so:

When he is not in your face and triumphalist, the president seems detached and defeated. In a New Yorker interview that many observers see as the key to understanding his second term, Obama suggested that he does not expect any major legislation to pass, with the possible exception of immigration.

Or better still:

When he is not in your face and triumphalist, the president seems detached and defeated. In a New Yorker interview that many observers see as the key to understanding his second term, Obama suggested that with the possible exception of immigration, he does not expect any major legislation to pass.

In The Elements of Style, the derided but still sometimes useful William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White have advice that’s helpful in approaching the WSJ sentence:

When you become hopelessly mired in a sentence, it is best to start fresh; do not try to fight your way through against the terrible odds of syntax. Usually what is wrong is that the construction has become too involved at some point; the sentence needs to be broken apart and replaced by two or more shorter sentences.

In this case, three sentences. Or, with the reference to David Remnick removed, two.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)

[DuckDuckGo tells me that the original sentence is by Peggy Noonan. I’m on page 141 of Do I Make Myself Clear?, with 293 pages to go. The passage from The Elements of Style is by E.B. White. This post is no. 78 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Barack Obama on race

One more passage from Barack Obama:

To say that we are one people is not to suggest that race no longer matters -- that the fight for equality has been won, or that the problems that minorities face in this country today are largely self-inflicted. We know the statistics: On almost every single socioeconomic indicator, from infant mortality to life expectancy to employment to home ownership, black and Latino Americans in particular continue to lag far behind their white counterparts. In corporate boardrooms across America, minorities are grossly underrepresented; in the United States Senate, there are only three Latinos and two Asian members (both from Hawaii), and as I write today I am the chamber's sole African American. To suggest that our racial attitudes play no part in these disparities is to turn a blind eye to both our history and our experience -- and to relieve ourselves of the responsibility to make things right.

Moreover, while my own upbringing hardly typifies the African American experience -- and although, largely through luck and circumstance, I now occupy a position that insulates me from most of the bumps and bruises that the average black man must endure -- I can recite the usual litany of petty slights that during my forty-five years have been directed my way: security guards tailing me as I shop in department stores, white couples who toss me their car keys as I stand outside a restaurant waiting for the valet, police cars pulling me over for no apparent reason. I know what it's like to have people tell me I can't do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of swallowed-back anger. I know as well that Michelle and I must be continually vigilant against some of the debilitating story lines that our daughters may absorb -- from TV and music and friends and the streets -- about who the world thinks they are, and what the world imagines they should be.

To think clearly about race, then, requires us to see the world on a split screen -- to maintain in our sights the kind of America that we want while looking squarely at America as it is, to acknowledge the sins of our past and the challenges of the present without becoming trapped in cynicism or despair.

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (NY: Crown, 2006), 232-33

Related posts
Barack Obama on facts
Ideology v. values

An Obama thought

From a New York Times editorial:

It is disheartening that a man whose historic candidacy was premised on a moral examination of politics now joins almost every modern president in cashing in. And it shows surprising tone deafness, more likely to be expected from the billionaires the Obamas have vacationed with these past months than from a president keenly attuned to the worries and resentments of the 99 percent.

If I were Barack Obama, I would have skipped the $400,000 speech and sought an opportunity to speak at an Illinois state university’s commencement. Not at the state’s flagship institution: at a second-tier (“regional”) school, any second-tier school. I would have used the occasion to speak about higher education as a public good, as something deserving of strong support from the state’s governor, legislature, and people. I would have done it for no fee. I would have paid for the cost of security myself. But I’m not Barack Obama. And neither, in some ways, is he.

Related reading
All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)
Obama on the Titanic (In Springfield)

[Illinois has gone nearly two years without a full state budget.]