It's baptism by fire for Obama

Lisa Van Dusen |Monday, 12 January, 2009

There must be mornings these days when Barack Obama looks out his window at the Hay Adams, across Lafayette Park to the White House, and thinks, "I should have gone to Disney World."

At a news conference at his transition headquarters Wednesday, where the president-elect unveiled his chief performance officer, the post-announcement Q&A started with an ironic, "Welcome to Washington," from a reporter. Obama responded with an equally ironic, "It's great to be here."

Obama's not entirely new to Washington, but being the change behemoth with the 82-per-cent approval rating draws a whole new kind of welcome wagon. Already, it was that kind of week.

It started with the withdrawal of Bill Richardson as Commerce secretary nominee over a grand jury investigation, segued into the public slamming of former Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta as nominee for CIA director by fellow Democrats. Meanwhile, embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was all over everywhere on Capitol Hill without ever leaving home in the form of Roland Burris, his legally appointed senator and human shield.

Anyone who thought winning the toughest nomination campaign and then the toughest election campaign in memory would be the hard part, must be slapping themselves now. There's a very good reason why one of the symptoms of transitionitis is campaign nostalgia: Some days, pre-governing, like governing, truly sucks.

When you come down to earth after a successful election and thud into to the entrenched guerrilla warfare of a government town, there aren't too many days when that schedule blocked out in 15-minute increments stays intact past noon.

As tough as Chicago may be, Washington is arguably tougher in its own way because the stakes are so much higher and the currency of power gets traded in ways that aren't always obvious.

During the nomination and election campaigns, there was always the question of whether Obama, if he won, would be able to govern by the same rules that applied on the road and that generally prevailed from the top of his organization to the street-level volunteers whereby winning wasn't worth it if it meant resorting to old-style tactics.

If there was any doubt, last week proved that not only is he not in Kansas anymore, he's not even in Chicago.

Along with the Burris soap opera, the Panetta panning (the Obama team neglected to inform Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, incoming chairperson of the Senate intelligence committee, of the appointment, which may or may not have helped . . . likely not) and the Richardson implosion, there was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, another Democrat, saying, with a breathtaking dose of denial, "If Obama steps over the bounds, I will tell him . . . I do not work for Barack Obama." Maybe it's more like Dodge City.

By noon on Wednesday, it must have seemed like excellent timing for a chinwag with the four other living presidents at the White House; an opportunity to commiserate with an exclusive support group of fellow survivors.

The media avail that preceded the lunch may not have been the most awkward Oval Office photo op on record but it was right up there in the top five with Richard Nixon shaking hands with Elvis.

Jimmy Carter was hovering almost out of the shot, looking like he was being timed out, which maybe he was. Then the lights went out just as the president-elect was starting to talk. Thankfully, Bill Clinton broke the tension by observing, apropos of the first floor covering, "I just love that rug." Maybe it's more like a waking nightmare where you can hear late Ronald Reagan-era image guru Mike Deaver laughing from photo-op heaven.

By Thursday, the unveiling of his economic stimulus package held out the brief premise of a substantive diversion, until members of the Senate finance committee, again, notably the Democrats, started picking apart the tax cuts in the plan.

This happens in every transition and the only way to avoid a weekis horribilis would be to anticipate every possible exploitable downside or unintended consequence to every major appointment, policy announcement, family decision and public pronouncement, which is impossible in practice but ideal in theory.

Can you even aim for the level of preemptive paranoia required for a zero tolerance policy on unforced errors and still be the guy who eschews the old-style tactics?

Welcome to Washington, Mr. President-elect, where even when it's more like a big high school, hazing runs its course.

"hope and faith are more powerful than bombs and bullets"

Dalai Lama leads a better protest
By LISA VAN DUSEN

Saturday, 29 November, 2008

The carnage in Mumbai, no matter which group was responsible, was a bloody, unnecessary reminder of the lengths to which some non-state actors will go to try to force new political realities or destabilize existing ones.

One week earlier, elsewhere in India, there was an equally powerful example of how other non-state actors go about seeking change. In this case, instead of bombs and bullets they used the Internet, open dialogue and the basic tools of democracy to make a statement.

The Dalai Lama's open call for members of the Tibetan diaspora to meet Nov. 17-22 in Dharamsala, where the Tibetan government-in-exile is based, produced three results.

The first was an endorsement of the 73-year-old spiritual leader's moderate, "Middle Way" approach to dealing with China, which invaded the region in 1951 and keeps a firm lock on what it now slyly calls the Tibetan Autonomous Region.

That included backing of the Dalai Lama's decision to pull his envoys out of negotiations with Beijing, a process that has produced nothing but talk and a lot of overwrought finger-pointing about the "Dalai clique" and the "evil intent" of the benign Buddhist leader by Chinese officials.

The second was a qualifier stating, for the first time, if the approach fails to produce meaningful autonomy the international Tibetan community will launch a full-blown independence movement.

The third was a promise that the Tibetan people remain totally committed to a non-violent struggle for freedom.

In response, the government of China, which has been emboldened in its anti-Tibet stance since the economic meltdown enhanced its economic leverage over the west, cancelled an EU-China trade summit in Lyon, France, because French President Nicolas Sarkozy has a date with the spiritual leader in Poland Dec. 6. The EU's trade deficit with China was $207 billion last year, an imbalance that was to be addressed in Lyon.

China's demonization of the Dalai Lama isn't swallowed outside its own controlled propaganda environment, but it has allowed the Chinese government to pay lip service to negotiations over Tibet's political status, cultural protections and human rights because no other country has had the leverage or the courage to force legitimacy on the process.

During the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, when world attention was focused on Tibet through the Olympic torch protests and China's crackdown in Lhasa, Western leaders were unwilling or unable to leverage anything but an agreement from China to resume talks, the last round of which failed Nov. 11.

What the Dharamsala meeting showed was Tibetan exiles worldwide are getting more, not less, organized largely thanks to an active online community that is thriving despite China's efforts.

For the United States, whose influence is make or break in such conflicts, Tibet has been one of the few issues on which political leaders from both the right and the left agree.

In their farewell meeting at the APEC summit in Peru, President George W. Bush urged Chinese President Hu Jintao to resume talks with the Dalai Lama which, in the current economic context, was actually a bold diplomatic move.

The next day in Dharamsala, Karma Chophel, speaker of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile, asked in his closing remarks to the exiles meeting that the Chinese government stop "making baseless allegations against His Holiness the Dalai Lama" because it "hurts the feelings the all those people who have respect and love for His Holiness the Dalai Lama and his untiring work for world peace and universal responsibility."

Not exactly the talk of radicals.

As incoming president, Barack Obama may not have any more big-stick leverage with China but he may have an overriding interest in using softer persuasion with Beijing toward a legitimate process of establishing and protecting enough basic rights and freedoms in Tibet to counterbalance the process begun in Dharamsala.

It might also be a way to show the world that hope and faith are more powerful than bombs and bullets.

Middle East factions await new president's first move

Sunday, 16 November, 2008 | Lisa Van Dusen

Not long after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month, former Finnish president and international peace negotiator Martti Ahtisaari, whose job demands that he choose his words carefully, described the failure of the international community to resolve the Middle East conflict as a "disgrace."

More optimistically, he added that "if the political will is there, we can solve anything," and that he hoped the new president-elect of the United States would use his first year in office to reach a permanent solution to the Israeli- Palestinian problem.

Having negotiated peace agreements in Northern Ireland (as a member of the troika that included former U.S. Senate majority leader George Mitchell and Canadian General John de Chastelain), Kosovo, Indonesia and Namibia, among others, Ahtisaari, who got a bite of the Middle East on a UN fact-finding mission into a controversial siege of the Jenin refugee camp in 2002, knows something about what's missing from a room when nothing works.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair, who has spent the past 18 months as envoy for the Quartet on the Middle East (the group of four powers -- the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations -- that oversees peace efforts) also said last week it was important that the Barack Obama administration "grips this issue from day one" and makes the Middle East an urgent priority.

That Day 1 exhortation holds a caution not to repeat the mistake of the past administration's hands-off approach.

There are three weeks between the inauguration on Jan. 20 and election day in Israel on Feb. 10. Elections on either side are always about the peace process, whether it's moribund, alive and well or on life support.

While Obama will be warned not to touch the tinderbox until after the vote or risk being accused of interference, players on both sides will be watching for a sign as to whether he'll be more like George W. Bush, Bill Clinton or something in between.

Polls show Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who took over the Kadima party when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resigned amid corruption allegations, in a dead heat with former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing Likud party, who has made a career of selling security over peace.

Both leaders have nuanced their positions in the past week, with Livni, who as chief Israeli negotiator supports the Annapolis process begun last year, hardening her line by warning Thursday that Israel doesn't need any "dramatic" interventions in the peace process from Obama when he takes office in January.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, has softened his position that the Annapolis process should be shelved in favour of rebuilding the Palestinian economy, saying after meeting with Blair last week that he would continue peace talks with the Palestinians as well.

That was one day after Netanyahu's spokesperson said following a meeting of Israeli, Palestinian and international negotiators at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt that there would be "no point" in continuing with Annapolis.

The Palestinians, meanwhile, are still on board. At least Fatah, which controls the West Bank, is. Palestinian President and Fatah Leader Mahmoud Abbas said at Yasser Arafat's memorial service last week that he won't agree to a peace deal without a massive release of Palestinian prisoners even as Hamas was accusing Abbas of rounding up their own usual suspects in the West Bank to force them back to bilateral Palestinian talks in Cairo.

With everything else a president-elect has on his plate, it's easy to see how the Israel-Palestinian file can be a slippery slope to that sad pantheon of former presidents, prime ministers, envoys, negotiators and chairpersons who've come and gone while the same issues sit unresolved on the table.

What Obama brings to that table, aside from enormous leverage and possibly that political will Ahtisaari called for, is a mandate for change, a fresh pair of eyes and the common sense to see the craziness.

There's also a line from his campaign speech that works well for this puzzle: "The real gamble is having the same old folks doing the same old things again and expecting a different result."

A nation falls in love, once more

by Lisa Van Dusen | Wednesday, 29 October, 2008

A friend sent me a link the other night to a video called Bridges for Obama, a montage of Obama supporters on different bridges around the world, set to an R&B anthem written for the candidate.

Watching these people in Cairo and Cambridge and Vancouver, it was hard not to feel for John McCain, ending his career as this guy's opponent; a fate that could actually wear worse on him if he somehow squeaks out an upset than if he loses.

As the campaign careens through its final week of crackpot Marxist slurs and last-minute handgun hoarding, one of the topics of premature post-game analysis is pro-Obama media bias.

(My disclosure: I volunteered for the Obama campaign before starting this column.)

For civilians, there are politicians you vote for and there are politicians you 'fall in love with' (in American terms, both John and Robert Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan).

Given the right, rare confluence of talent, ability and history, journalists aren't immune to those distinctions.

Falling in political love isn't like falling in the other kind, though they can both represent a triumph of hope over experience; a process even more discombobulating for people who start out necessarily cynical and hard to impress.

In Thurston Clarke's book about Bobby Kennedy's fateful bid for the Democratic nomination in 1968, The Last Campaign, Tom Wicker of the New York Times called Kennedy, 'an easy man to fall in love with, and too many people did.'

Richard Harwood of the Washington Post asked to be taken off the Kennedy campaign because, he told his editors, "I'm falling in love with the guy" and could no longer be objective.

Political reporters develop a herculean tolerance for BS based on prolonged exposure. Otherwise, they couldn't do the job.

But once in a very long while, someone takes the stage (that's the polit-love version of a Barry Manilow opening) who jerks us out of that blah-blah-blah reverie, to quote John McCain.

It could be that some of the best journalists in the United States at the time fell in love with Bobby Kennedy because his role in the Shakespearean tightrope act of fulfilling his brother's destiny without repeating it, defied objectivity in the same way Obama's promise as the first African-American and first post 9/11 president does now.

Maybe he also had more in common with reporters than Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey.

Obama, too, seems like a guy who might have been a journalist if he hadn't been so smart.

In Clarke's account of that last campaign, he quotes Life magazine columnist Loudon Wainwright describing a more visceral source of bias on the Kennedy bus: Protectiveness.

The reporters, wrote Wainwright, were 'concerned to the point of anxiety about his safety.'

If one gut check for bias is being too invested in an outcome, you can see how stakes like those might shift the calculus.

Obama's run has shifted the usual protocols to the point where Republicans are now scrambling to endorse him.

In fact, in a different scenario, it wouldn't be hard to imagine McCain, the anti-Republican Republican, doing the same.

Starbucks tanking; walk an extra block

by Lisa Van Dusen

NEW YORK CITY - Not only am I not an economist, I've never even been a business reporter, not withstanding many long, deep-vein-thrombosis-inducing hours covering International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization meetings.

But I am a Starbucks junkie, which has gotta count for something in the world of coffee punditry.

The recent announcement of 600 closures by the loved and hated Seattle-based java-monger has been lumped in with the death of the Chrysler minivan, the Fannie and Freddie crisis and all the other signs of economic apocalypse that have made "It's the f---ing economy, stupid" this U.S. election's revamped slogan.

But Starbucks was headed for trouble long before it started madly whipping pushpins out of its worldwide coffee domination map.

Anyone who's walked into a Starbucks in the past couple of years and felt -- instead of reassuring familiarity and anticipation at the thought of the same skinny venti half-caf caramel macchiato or whatever your poison is -- an inner groan at the Groundhog Day predictability of it all, knows there was a flaw in the business plan.

Starbucks, like Barnes & Noble, Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel and other U.S. store chains that specialize in drawing customers who first go to Starbucks to get a $5 coffee to nurse while trolling their wares, all sell a certain lifestyle.

They deal in a cultural cachet based on the aspirational appeal of fitting a certain profile: Highly educated, smart, hip, politically aware, esthetically refined, internationalist, sensualist, sophisticated . . . a mix of attributes absolutely un-achievable for any human with a full-time job.

That's why it's aspirational.

Inherent in that appeal were both a sense of exclusivity and a pretence to cool, two things that have, by definition, a limited shelf-life in a world where there's always the next find and, it seems, all trends are global.

The idea that people spend money to enhance their social standing has been around at least since Thorstein Veblen coined the term "conspicuous consumption" a century ago and is still the operating premise behind any business plan based on cool and exclusivity.

But unless it includes a cyclical Madonna-like reinvention, the plan has to foresee its own demise.

Veblen also came up with the scarcity theory of value, a.k.a. the Tickle Me Elmo effect, or the economics version of the old why-buy-the-cow-if-you-can-get-the-milk-for-free bugaboo about premarital sex: The less available something is, the greater its value.

Starbucks had a problem long before the U.S. economy started tanking because it was caught at the crossroads of squandered exclusivity based on overexpansion and expired cool based on the lack of a plan B when the concept got stale.

In February, 2007, CEO Howard Schultz admitted as much in a leaked memo, regretting the "watering down of the Starbucks experience" and "commoditization of our brand," saying one of the results was "stores that no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores versus the warm feeling of a neighbourhood store."

Schultz telegraphed the current closings by more than a year.

In a world in which the focus of those same customers is increasingly on authenticity as a commodity and on local rather than global, it might be hard for Starbucks to reinvent itself in the image of the very neighbourhood stores it replaced.

Having said that, I walked out of my hotel yesterday morning to my old Starbucks on Columbus Avenue and was pretty peeved when it was closed for renovations.

It was a five-block walk to the next one.