In my previous post on Obama I focused on how he compares to Clinton, and the question of his experience (on that point, I recently found another post from Hilzoy that delves further into his record, and will leave you scratching your head at the “Obama has no substance” meme). What I didn’t get into was the question of his ability to withstand the vicious character assaults that we know will come in the general election campaign. Clinton has hammered away at this point - that she has been on the receiving end of all kinds of character assassination attempts, and has survived, and that Obama just isn’t ready for it.
Glenn Greenwald has been following this for the past couple of weeks, and has made some key observations:
Over the last week, we learned that: (a) Obama is a closet socialist as evidenced by the Che Guevara picture a volunteer posted on a campaign office wall; (b) Obama’s wife, Michelle, is both self-absorbed and subversive, as she secretly hates the U.S. and will only believe it’s a good country if her husband becomes President; (c) Obama is a thief and a plagiarist; and,
(d) in one of the most repulsive screeds in memory, courtesy of National Review’s Lisa Schiffren, former Dan Quayle aide, the fact that Obama’s parents are a mixed-race couple strongly suggests they were probably Communists, because who else, besides Communists, would marry outside of their own race? …
So the question isn’t whether Obama will be relentlessly pelted by the sprawling appendages of the Right-wing edifice and its media allies with the most grotesque, bottom-feeding, substance-free, personality-based attacks. Of course he will be — ones as ugly as, if not uglier than, anything we’ve seen yet…
The real question is whether Obama, as he did this week, will be able to render these attacks impotent, even cause them to backfire, because they and their propagators will appear to be so ugly and small and irrelevant in light of the type of candidate he is, the rhetoric he produces, the vision to which he aspires. I have no idea whether Obama’s transcendent charisma or the historically demonstrated efficacy of low-life right-wing attacks will be more potent — I think it’s a much more difficult challenge than many Obama supporters (by virtue of understandable desire, rather than objective assessment) have convinced themselves it will be — but there probably aren’t very many priorities more important than cleansing our political process of this type of dirt and petty distraction.
What our political establishment relies on more than anything else is keeping Americans distracted away from what they are really doing and focused instead on how Mike Dukakis looks in a helmet and whether he’d want to murder his wife’s rapist; on blue dresses and penile spots; on the inspiration for Love Story and who invented the Internet; on how John Kerry looks in windsurfing tights, on how manly George Bush’s brush-clearing is, and whether Nancy Pelosi’s scarf-wearing means she loves the Terrorists. That’s how our Beltway culture remains indescribably broken and corrupt without much protest or backlash.
Rendering irrelevant these sorts of stupid, malicious, small-minded distractions could produce real substantive value…
This, to me, is one of the most appealing aspects of Obama. While cheap character attacks have always had their place in politics, they have sunk to new lows over the past 15 years or so. I see the Clinton campaign accepting that landscape as a given, and that this Fall we would see a general election campaign that would plumb the depths of the sewers like never before if Clinton were the nominee. I’m not suggesting Obama will be treated more gently - I’m suggesting that he has the capacity to expose those tactics for what they are - to make them backfire on their perpetrators - in a way that Clinton does not.
Since Greenwald wrote the above piece, not even a week ago, we’ve already seen more absurd attacks thrown at Obama, and another example of his capacity to respond effectively:
…nothing was more predictable than watching the “Obamas-are-unpatriotic-subversives” slur travel in the blink of an eye from the Jack Kingstons, Fox News adolescent McCarthyites, and Bill Kristols of the world to AP, MSNBC, and CNN….
Far more notable is Barack Obama’s response to these depressingly familiar attacks. In response, he’s not scurrying around slapping flags all over himself or belting out the National Anthem, nor is he apologizing for not wearing lapels, nor is he defensively trying to prove that — just like his Republican accusers — he, too, is a patriot, honestly. He’s not on the defensive at all. Instead, he’s swatting away these slurs with the dismissive contempt they deserve, and then eagerly and aggressively engaging the debate on offense because he’s confident, rather than insecure, about his position:
About not wearing an American flag lapel pin, Obama said Republicans have no lock on patriotism.
“A party that presided over a war in which our troops did not get the body armor they needed, or were sending troops over who were untrained because of poor planning, or are not fulfilling the veterans’ benefits that these troops need when they come home, or are undermining our Constitution with warrantless wiretaps that are unnecessary?
“That is a debate I am very happy to have. We’ll see what the American people think is the true definition of patriotism.”
Ever since 2002 — at least — most national Democrats have quivered with fear the moment Republicans utter words like “patriotism” and “national security.” Traumatized by the 2002 mid-term elections, George Bush’s 70% approval ratings, and the media’s lock-step adoration of the Commander-in-Chief, to this day they become frozen the moment such attacks are even suggested and desperately and defensively try to comply with whatever demands are made of them. Like many trauma victims, they can never break free of the terror from their past, and still live perpetually in 2002, whereby George Bush’s invocation of the words “patriotism” and “terrorism” can send them into spasms of fear and submission.
Perhaps (in part) because he wasn’t in Washington in 2002, Obama’s response here is the opposite of all of that. He’s not the slightest bit defensive. To the contrary, he went out of his way to raise numerous examples of why it is the flag-waving Republicans whose “patriotism” ought to be in doubt, if anyone’s should be. Without having to do so, Obama even went and raised the issue which Republicans currently think is their big, bad weapon — warrantless spying on Americans — and used it against them, to argue that spying on Americans is a profound violation of core American political principles, a far more substantive test of “patriotism” than what pretty accessories one wears with one’s clothes.
I don’t see a compelling argument that Clinton would be more adroit at dealing with these kinds of attacks. If anything, I think she would be a weaker general election candidate. Anonymous Liberal has a good summary of the arguments in Obama’s favor:
1) In every contest that’s been held so far, Obama has done much better than Clinton among independent and Republican voters, a strong indication that he has more cross-over appeal.
2) Obama has MUCH better favorable/unfavorable ratings than Clinton.
3) Democratic members of Congress from red states and red districts are overwhelmingly choosing to endorse Obama over Clinton and are arguing that he will do better than Clinton in their states/districts.
4) Obama is a fresh-face who many Americans have not yet formed an opinion of and are willing to give a chance. By contrast, virtually every American has long ago formed an opinion of Hillary Clinton and–whether fair or not–for many that opinion is negative. Many otherwise persuadable folk will simply tune her out. If you doubt this, ask any disgruntled Republican you know whether he/she would ever consider voting for Hillary. Ask the same about Obama. Notice the different reaction.
5) Obama is–by leaps and bounds–a better orator and a more charismatic and likable figure than Clinton. Close you eyes and imagine them each delivering their keynote address at the Democratic Convention. Who do you imagine would be better able to inspire the electorate and win new converts to the progressive cause?
6) Obama has done much better than Clinton at attracting new people into the political process. Which candidate do you think will do a better job increasing Democratic turnout in November?
7) Obama matches up much better against John McCain than Hillary does. McCain is beloved by the media. Clinton is despised. But the media likes Obama and would root for his historical candidacy to succeed. Furthermore, Obama provides a much better contrast with McCain on foreign policy. If Clinton is the nominee, it will be 2004 all over again with Clinton constantly being accused of flip-floppery on the war and being forced to explain her initial vote for it. If Obama is the nominee, he can present a much clearer and more consistent critique of the war and McCain’s foreign policy generally. Obama’s youth and vitality will also contrast well with McCain’s age.
A point I would add is the skill and competency of Obama’s campaign compared to Clinton’s. In Nevada and South Carolina he had to build his own organizations from scratch to compete with Clinton’s early dominance of the party machinery, and he did so quite successfully. In general he has run a tight ship - few gaffes, little turnover in staff, and good strategy. In contrast, Clinton led with a glass jaw “inevitability” strategy (an approach where it’s hard to make a convincing second pitch when you turn out not be inevitable), picked the wrong people to run her campaign (that’s according to none other than Leon Panetta - Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff), and according to The Economist, her campaign has been plagued by infighting:
Mrs Clinton’s campaign has been riven by faction-fights between the “white boys” who are close to her husband and “the Hillary girls” who are close to her. It has also been hobbled by the reluctance of her advisers to bring the boss bad news. Mrs Solis Doyle’s departure was reportedly precipitated by her failure to tell Mrs Clinton that her campaign was running out of money. Mrs Clinton, it seems, had to lend the campaign $5m of her own cash.
Surprisingly, her team has had trouble with the basic mechanics of the campaign, from not being aware of the delegate rules in Texas until it was too late to adjust their strategy accordingly to not even filing a full slate of delegates in Pennsylvania, which could cause complications for her if she wins in Pennsylvania. While running a campaign is not the same as running the executive branch, running a large, complex national campaign is a test of essential managerial skill.
So far I’ve seen Obama be successful beyond the party base in a way that Clinton hasn’t. I’ve seen him respond forcefully and persuasively to the attacks that have been launched against him. And I’ve seen him run a primary campaign that’s superior to Clinton’s in several key aspects. For Clinton to turn things around, she’ll have to accomplish at least two of the following three tasks: 1. have really big wins in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, 2. get a majority of the superdelegates, and 3. manage to get the Florida and Michigan delegations seated at the convention, on terms favorable to her. The prospects for at least two of these to go her way are growing increasingly dim by the day, as Obama has closed the gap in the Ohio and Texas polls, he’s catching up in superdelegates, and it’s anybody’s guess at this stage what will happen with the Florida and Michigan delegations.
I’ve become a fan of definition lists as a layout tool. Here’s a snippet of HTML, using them to markup a form. You can make the input element label the definition term (dt) and the input element itself the definition data (dd), like so:
<dl>
<dt><label for="first_name">First Name<label></dt>
<dd><input type="text" name="first_name" id="first_name" size="20" /></dd>
<dt><label for="last_name">Last Name<label></dt>
<dd><input type="text" name="last_name" id="last_name" size="20" /></dd>
etc...
</dl>
What makes this better than using an HTML table is that with CSS you can specify whatever layout you want: you can style it so the dt is above, below, to the right, or to the left of its dd partner. This is particularly helpful when you’re writing re-usable code that might be needed in situations where you can’t predict the layout needs.
But tonight I discovered the limit of this approach, which is when you can’t predict whether the vertical height of the dt’s content will exceed the height of the dd’s. I’ve been working on the next version of Shashin, and what’s been driving the effort is the Boxing Dragons art gallery site, which I just finished working on. I’m using Shashin to display a list of albums (in this case artists) with the description of the album alongside the cover image of the album. For the next release of Shashin, I was originally planning to do this markup with definition lists (with the album cover as the dt and the description as the dd), giving users the flexibility to layout their album and description pairs any way they want, via CSS.
This approach to styling definition lists is fairly tidy, and works fine when the height of the dd is the same or greater than the dt. And in Firefox it also works when the height of the dt is greater, but not so in IE6 (I’ve been resisting upgrading so I haven’t tested with IE7). In IE6 the content of a dd will “flow up” into any available space above it, pushing a dd’s content higher than the position of its dt partner.
The clearfix solution for positioning floating divs doesn’t help here (believe me, I tried). I found several threads of people discussing this problem (or something quite similar to it) but no reliable solutions. The best I found was this admirable effort, but it entails about 70 lines of CSS code as well as some goofy markup. It’s also quite fragile - as soon as I started tweaking things like margins even slightly, it would start to fall apart. Although I probably could have gotten the layout I wanted if I kept at it, the CSS would have been so complex it would have defeated the purpose: to make it fairly easy for Shashin users to alter the stylesheet to get the layout they want.
So, at least for now, I’ve given up on using a definition list and have retreated to using a table. The upside is the markup and the CSS are straightforward and cross-browser compatible. The downside for Shashin is that there’s no flexibility: the album covers have to stay on the left, and the descriptions on the right.
In my announcement of Shashin 1.2 the other day, I said I didn’t have as much time for testing as I would have liked, for the sake of getting out a version that works with WordPress 2.3.3. Sure enough, there were several bugs in Shashin 1.2. Get the fixes in version 1.2.3 from wordpress.org.
It may fix the problem some people were reporting with adding and syncing albums (a problem I haven’t been able to reproduce, so I can’t say for sure). If you had this problem, please let me know if the new version fixes it for you.
I also took the opportunity to rewrite the algorithm for displaying random photos, and it works much more nicely now, so give it a try.
I believe I may have also found why some, but not all, Shashin users were having trouble with multibyte (e.g. Chinese) characters, so this upgrade may help with that as well.
If you have any questions or problems, please post a comment on this post.
I blog about several totally unrelated topics, so it’s fun when there is the occasional random connection between them. From behind the Nikkei subscription wall:
A small city on the Sea of Japan coast, seemingly far removed from the intense U.S. presidential race across the Pacific, is enthusiastically rooting for Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama.
Its motive is not political. Residents here simply want a U.S. president who happens to share a name with their hometown, and in turn to see their city become internationally known — and perhaps get a boost to its tourism.
The city of Obama suddenly came under the spotlight after a Japanese blog mentioned that there is a Fukui Prefecture city bearing the name of the candidate.
Hoping to boost their city’s profile, a group of residents from Obama, Fukui Prefecture, have launched an “I Love Obama” campaign in support of U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Obama means “little beach town” in Japanese. Reuters had this to say:
“So far we have been unilaterally giving him ‘love calls’ as we have a close affinity with him, although we have not met him,” said Hideki Ikegami, a city official in charge of promoting tourism. “Perhaps Mr Obama has yet to know and feel the real festive mood prevailing here.”
And this from The Guardian:
As the race for the nomination heated up, the town’s tourism office received a stream of calls from locals wishing Obama well. On Super Tuesday, supporters nervously clutched photos of Obama as they watched the results come in at their makeshift headquarters in a hotel, whose lobby is currently home to a large portrait of the candidate.
Obama’s most ardent fans, who include a hotel executive and a couple of farmers, believe their campaign, like that of their hero, is gathering momentum. With his name recognition at an all-time high, they plan to produce hachimaki “victory” headbands - a common campaign accoutrement in Japan - themed lacquerware chopsticks, and manju sweet buns bearing his name and face.
Update: There were some bugs in this version, please see my post on version 1.2.3 for the latest update. Also go there for any comments or questions - I’ve turned off further comments on this post.
You can download the latest version of Shashin from wordpress.org. I had to rush this out the door, since Shashin 1.1 doesn’t work with Wordpress 2.3.3. That means I didn’t do all the testing I usually do before a release. If you have any problems, please post a comment here (note I turned off comments on the main Shashin page, as the page was just getting way too long).
The two big new features happen to be the two most requested features: displaying groups of album thumbnails, and the ability to add or sync all your Picasa albums at once. For the album thumbnails, they are displayed in a table with a number of columns you can specify, you can choose to display either only certain albums, or all your albums with your choice of sorting preference, and you can choose whether to display the album titles and locations (if you specified a location in Picasa, Shashin will include a Google Maps link as well). Syncing all your albums at once will make using Shashin easier for those who maintain a lot of Picasa albums.
Another feature I added is smarter album syncing. Now if you move a photo from one album to another in Picasa, Shashin will preserve its original photo key when it syncs the albums. Before I made this change, the old photo key would be deleted and the picture would get a new photo key, thus breaking any Shashin tags that referred to the old key. That problem won’t happen anymore.
The biggest piece of work in this release wasn’t the new features though. It was writing a parser for the Picasa feed from scratch. I got tired of Shashin breaking every time WordPress changed its RSS tools (which seems to happen with almost every new version - that’s what broke Shashin 1.1 when WordPress 2.3.3 was released). Instead of using something big like Magpie, I instead wrote a very lean XML parser - not counting comments, the whole thing is less than 60 lines of code. It uses Snoopy to load the feed, since I can’t rely on PHP functions like fopen being configured across different servers for URL fetching (Snoopy comes with WordPress, so Shashin loads it from there). I would have loved to write the parser in PHP 5, which has a great new set of tools for XML, but a lot of sites out there are still on PHP 4 (including mine), so the parser is PHP 4 friendly.
I’ve noticed my old rss-functions-mod.php file being re-used by folks in other WordPress plugins. That code doesn’t work with the new version of WordPress (I didn’t bother to investigate why, since I was done working on the new parser anyway). If you’re someone who’s used that file in your plugin, you may want to switch to the parser that’s included with Shashin 1.2. But you’ll need to make some adjustments to your plugin, as the data that comes out of the new parser is in a different structure.
Stay tuned for version 1.3, probably in a few weeks. I’m planning to include Highslide integration! 
Wordpress 2.3.3 was released about a week ago. I haven’t upgraded yet, but I just heard from a Shashin user that Shashin isn’t working with the new version. It sounds like it actually breaks the whole site - that you’ll only get a blank page until you deactivate Shashin. I will install the new Wordpress version today so I can start investigating what the problem is.
I actually have version 1.2 of Shashin almost ready. One major change is that I completely rewrote the parser for the Picasa RSS feed (so it’s no longer relying on my hacked version of the old WordPress rss-functions.php file). If I’m lucky, whatever the problem is with 1.1’s compatibility is already gone in my 1.2 code. But I’m not counting on it 
.
The “I Love Phở” tour in Australia
For my readers in Australia (who probably number somewhere between 0 and 1), check out the “I Love Phở” tour. I received this announcement from the person organizing it, and thought I’d pass it along.
I Love Phở uses Phở as a metaphor to interpret and reveal a Việt Nam whose people and history are as varied and complex as the preparation and cooking of a bowl of Phở itself. Through its own global journey, Phở is unique, flexible and versatile in borrowing, adapting, modifying, ultimately creating its own culinary experience. It challenges all notions of the hybrid, traditional and authentic where adaptation, migration and movement are common in an era of intense globalisation.
I Love Phở combines the work of seven artists; a catalogue including essays, non-fictions, recipes and poems written by well-known Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese writers; guided tours; Phở tasting and Phở cooking demonstrations. This aims to create dialogues between visual artists, local communities and broader audiences exploring issues of identity, history, culture and diaspora over a bowl of Phở. Each destination also includes the work of local artists commissioned specifically for the exhibition.
This is the first of several occasional posts I plan to write about my time in Japan last year. Although I blogged a lot about my time in Japan as it was happening, I didn’t have time to blog about everything.
Ikea in Funabashi, Japan
Ikea in Funabashi, Japan
About a week after we arrived in Japan last New Year’s Eve, I was finding it impossible to work comfortably on our rickety dining room table. We were going to be in Japan for only 6 months, so a cheap desk was in order. Where to go for one? I first tried some sayonara sales (expats headed home and selling their stuff) and some used furniture stores (called “recycle shops” in Japan), but didn’t have any luck. The next option is the same one you might think of in the US - Ikea. There are two Ikeas near Tokyo (both built within the last few years), one in Funabashi and one in Kohoku. We decided to head to the one in Funabashi since it’s very close to Tokyo Disneyland. We figured we might catch a glimpse of it as we went by on the 30 minute ride on the Keiyo Line. Eidan munched on Pocky the whole way and got chocolate all over his face, which got a pair of high school girls smiling and giggling at him for quite a while.
Ikea Funabashi is located on the grounds where the LaLaport Skidome (SSAWS) once stood (the massive indoor Skidome represented one of the last gasps of the 1980s Japanese real estate boom, and the dome proved to be financially unsustainable). All I know about Funabashi is what I could see from the train, but it struck me as quite different from other Japanese cities I’ve seen, in that it sprawled - lots of relatively low rise construction spread over a large area. Next to the Ikea is the grim Wakamatsu residential complex, which I believe is public housing. When I say grim, I mean by Japanese standards - the buildings are old and unattractive, but everything is tidy and clean. Across from the Ikea is the massive LaLaport 3 mall, which we didn’t visit, but it’s probably similar to LaLaport 2 in Toyosu (the only mall I’ve ever been to that I actually enjoyed).
What made visiting this Ikea very strange was that it was absolutely identical to the Ikeas I’ve visited in the US. It felt comforting and unnerving at the same time - comforting to be in a familiar environment, but unnerving because it felt really out of place. Visiting a Starbuck’s or a McDonald’s in Japan is just different enough that you don’t get a sensation of deja vu, but not so at this Ikea - it was exactly the same down to the tiniest details, other than the signs being in Katakana.
After an unnervingly, comfortingly familiar meal of Swedish meatballs at the Ikea cafeteria, we quickly found their cheapest desk and desk chair, but since we were so far out from Tokyo the delivery was way too expensive (more than the price of what we were buying). So we put Kai in charge of Eidan’s stroller, Maria handled the chair, and I lugged the desk all the way back on the train. The hardest part was switching lines at Tokyo station, as it’s quite a long walk through the station to the Yamanote Line. It was quite a workout, but that desk and chair served me well for the rest of our time in Tokyo.
It may not look like I’ve been blogging much recently, but actually I’ve been fixing up a bunch of my posts from our time in Japan last year. When I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, my old plugin for Coppermine stopped working, which means the pictures in my older posts weren’t showing up anymore. I’ve started moving the older pictures to Picasa, so I can put them in my posts using Shashin. I took the opportunity to punch up the layout of the pictures as well. I started with the posts from the beginning of our time in Japan and I’m working my way forwards. So, take a look back at our first month in Tokyo, last January (and more here).
Seeing all the pictures again has made me remember all the things I never had time to blog about while we were there. So you can look forward to some more posts about our time in Japan last year.
