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Sunday, July 9. 2006Leaving On a Jet Plane
James may have some closing thoughts, but my flight out of Aspen is leaving shortly - and naturally, the last of my altitude sickness has just cleared up - so this will probably be my last dispatch. I think that (sudden illnesses aside) the experiment went pretty well, and I hope our readers have enjoyed it. And I'd especially like to thank all my co-bloggers - not only because they're my superiors at the Atlantic, but because they wrote more, in less time, than I ever could have hoped for.
Same time next year (but with more altitude-sickness pills next time) . . . Old Karl Rove
I'll second what Jim said, and go one step further: I actually think Rove out-Clintoned Clinton today, not by outcharming the ex-President, but by doing more successfully than Clinton did on Friday what Clinton has always done so well, which is drown out difficult questions in waves of policy detail. Rove was easy-going, articulate, engaged, charming, moderate-seeming on many questions and toeing a stricter line on the big ones - Iraq, in particular, where we got a smoother version of the usual "as the Iraqis stand up we will stand down" line. But even when he wasn't playing to the more-centrist sympathies of his audience, he managed to act Clintonian, smoothing out the rough edges of the administration's positions and casting them in a moderate light. On the question of stem cells, for instance, I agree with Jim that he fumbled a bit over the pointed question of "when does life begin," but I think that his fumbling was almost deliberate. Consider: How do you sell restrictions on stem-cell research to a wavering, uncertain mainstream? You do what Rove did today. You don't say "we know an embryo is fully human, and has all the same rights of an adult." You play the err-on-the-side-of-caution card, and say well, we aren't sure when life starts, but that's all the more reason not do something "ethically troubling" (Rove's phrase) in the pursuit of ends that may be achievable by other means. It's the flip side of what Clinton did on abortion during his Presidency: he didn't say "abortion is good, let's have more of them"; instead, he rhetorically conceded part of the other side's argument and called for abortion to be "rare," but then used that very concession to build support for keeping the practice legal.
Continue reading "Old Karl Rove" Instant Analysis: Karl Rove
As noted at the very end of this report, yesterday, on Bill Clinton’s appearance, Richard Land thought anyone interested in politics would willingly pay $100 to see Bill Clinton and Karl Rove go head-to-head.
The Rev. Land is a piker. Having come from watching nearly 90 minutes of Rove on stage with Walter Isaacson, I’m sure anyone who really cares about politics would find a way to pay $500 for a Clinton-v-Rove freeform heavyweight debate. Rove may lack the retail-level political charm and instinct of Clinton. But in his way he is as broadly informed and fluent and nuanced-sounding. There were exactly two moments when Rove lost his otherwise perfect fluency and notably stuttered while trying to answer a question. One was when Isaacson presented him with a version of Bill Clinton’s suggested question from two days ago: wouldn’t he be leading the Republicans in full-throated attack, if Clinton’s own Karl Rove (ie, Rahm Emanuel) had been involved in outing a CIA agent? The other was when Gwen Ifill, from the floor, noted that Rove had said (in a discussion about stem cells) that he “didn’t know when life began.” After all, Ifill noted, many evangelicals did know when life began. How would he explain his view to them? (With some difficulty, seemed to be the answer.) Most impressive answer, combining details and philosophy: a long and very nuanced discussion of the politics, the practicalities, and the philosophy of dealing with immigration. Least impressive (tie): (a) An impassioned speech on behalf of eliminating the estate tax, which rested on the plight of the small farmer or small businessman, like Rove’s own grandfather the knife-salesman. (Unimpressive because: Any such small estate can obviously be protected by raising the tax-exempt level for estates – to $5 million? to $10 million? – rather than eliminating it altogether.) (b) His explanation of why there was nothing at all to regret in the Administration’s approach to Valerie Plame. His case, essentially, was that after a long investigation the prosecutor had decided NOT to file criminal charges against him. That not only was not the question that Walter Isaacson (and Bill Clinton) had raised – which concerned the politics of the situation, not the state of a criminal prosecution. (A few minutes later, Rove admitted as much saying, “If you think I dodged that last question, wait till you see this one!”) It also avoided what is now an uncontested fact, but which would have been shocking when the whole story first broke: that Rove did discuss Plame’s identity with Matt Cooper of Time magazine. The “if it’s not illegal it’s fine” defense is a stance they didn’t admire when it came from the Clintonites. One tonal surprise: in his remarks about Rove, Clinton had made clear that he considered him a fellow joyful-reveler in the operational skills of politics. Probably because his team is still in office, Rove couldn’t let quite as much of the pure-practitioner player’s enjoyment show. Main theme again: this was quite a virtuoso performance. One wonders what version of this kind of brio Rove displays in in-house discussions in the White House. Saturday, July 8. 2006A Visit With Bill Clinton
As several of my colleagues have already noted, last night I had the assignment – mainly enjoyable, somewhat intimidating – of sitting next to Bill Clinton for an hour and trying to guide the direction his conversation would take. The experience gave me some sympathy for the Army Corps of Engineers technicians as they tried to channel the mighty Mississippi – there is only so much you can do, and at some points you simply have to bow to (and marvel at) a force of nature.
I did not approach the experience entirely unprepared. Six or seven times in the last fifteen years I’ve been able to interview Clinton at length – either in private, for articles in the Atlantic, or before an audience. In the summer of 1992, when Clinton was running hard against the first George Bush and it was not obvious he would win, a group of Atlantic staff members went to Little Rock, home of our then-editor, William Whitworth, and sat with Clinton for ninety minutes at the governor’s mansion. The result was this “Visit With Bill Clinton,” published a month before the election. (We asked for an interview with George H.W. Bush and were turned down.) In 1996, when Clinton was running for re-election, we visited him in the White House for about an hour, as reported in in “A Talk with Bill Clinton,” published in October of that year. (We asked Bob Dole; he said no.) And in the fall of 2002, while Clinton was working hard on his book and raising money for his foundation, I spoke with him for about an hour in Fayetteville, where he had gone to dedicate a building that honored one of his mentors, Sen. J. William Fulbright. This led to the article “Post-President for Life,” with a mordant counterpoint, “The Bill Show,” by P.J. O’Rourke. A few other times I have interviewed him live on stage. What do you notice close up? A few details: Continue reading "A Visit With Bill Clinton" Sons and Art Lovers
In a conversation today on “High Culture in America,” Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, said that only three art forms were registering increases in audience. They were opera, because, he suspected, of the addition of subtitles; jazz, perhaps because of the Ken Burns’ documentaries; and musicals, most likely because of Disney’s extravaganzas. Other forms were declining fast, particularly among the young, with dance registering a 50 percent drop in recent years (he did not say how he measured this). He faulted education and the news media, which, he said, did not cover the arts. Could young people name a single living playwright, poet or composer?
Continue reading "Sons and Art Lovers" Landscape and the Lens
Some kind of disclaimer seems called for at the start of this post, but since blogging is mainly about self-indulgence (or did I get that from the MSM?) I'll just keep going.
At 6.30am we glided out of Aspen in a fleet of silent shining limos (furnished by Lexus, one of the meeting's sponsors: I could get used to it). Our destination was the Maroon Bells Amphitheatre; our purpose, breakfast at one of the most stunning viewpoints in the United States, and a talk on landscape photography given by...well, given by me, much to my surprise. Let me say, I do consider myself qualified. This has been an obsession of several decades, and I have taken enough bad landscape pictures over those years to have learned a thing or two about taking good ones. But it was a new experience. I haven't lectured on this subject before. Strictly speaking, I haven't lectured on any subject before, though I suppose it depends on what you mean by "lecture". Elizabeth Baker Keffer, a colleague of mine at Atlantic Media, and one of the guiding forces behind the Ideas Festival, ambushed me with a "suggestion" that I do this several months ago (the dear woman has some of my pictures on her wall), and before I had stopped saying "er", the venue was secured. Elizabeth achieves a great deal through means such as this. She is an inspiration to me. So I gave my students the benefit of my wisdom on the subject. It was wonderful to talk against that magnificent backdrop. It was novel and lovely to have an audience that was avid to hear my views--and had no thought of questioning them, or my motives for advancing them. As Brian Greene is to string theory, it occurred to me, I am to exposure compensation and depth of focus. I did not crouch or spring, but I moved, a little, and it felt good. My students were grateful, and I would have stayed to sign autographs, but my Lexus was waiting. Point-Counterpoint
Yesterday we heard about the perils of zero - or less-than-zero - population growth; today we heard about the benefits. Edward O. Wilson, charming and avuncular, gave a talk entitled "Saving the Creation: A Meeting of Science and Religion," though the science-and-religion part only took up the first few minutes. Wilson read an open letter he'd written to a hypothetical evangelical minister, in which he argued that "the defense of living nature is a universal value," and that "religion and science, combined together, can save the natural world." Then he launched into a longer presentation on species diversity and the threats it faces - chief among them being overpopulation and overconsumption. In the process, he ran through some of the same data that Bob Bennett ran through yesterday - specifically, the plunging birth rate in Western Europe, which is dropping past the "break point" of 2.1 children per couple, as parents focus on "quality" rather than quantity. But this time, of course, it was good news.
Continue reading "Point-Counterpoint" Clinton Redux
I understand Clive’s lament, but for veteran Clinton-watchers – and there are many here – there was plenty to chew on in Jim Fallows' conversation last night with the former president. Long persuaded of his complexity, reporters who have covered him and policymakers who have worked for him – scarred obsessives all -- were comparing notes last night, parsing phrases and seeking shades of meaning with a kind of nostalgic and Talmudic delight. Here’s what some of us suspected lurked further down in his remarks:
That was a shot at Al Gore: On the subject of climate change, Clinton watchers were struck by what he said and failed to say about Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Clinton did not employ the sorts of superlatives he would have normally used for the work of an ally that reflected his own point of view. And he went on to observe that the movie would not be as compelling if oil were not at $70 a barrel (he was arguing that Democrats should make the case we may be running out of oil). Later, he digressed to present a detailed chronology of Hillary Clinton’s speechifying about climate change, to claim she had developed her own detailed position long before the movie appeared. He presented this as a complaint against the press, which he said treated her public position as an act of me-tooism to steal Gore’s thunder (to use a climatological metaphor). But press-bashing was surely not the only goal. That sounded like a hint that we went to war for Israel: When Jim asked how the Democrats should handle the Iraq war, Clinton replied in part, “We ought to be whipped, us Democrats, if we allow our differences over what to do now in Iraq to divide us” instead of sticking it to the Republicans. He segued into a discussion of Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman’s position in favor of going to war, noting how it squared with the view of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others that Saddam Hussein was such a menace he should be removed regardless of whether he had WMD. Then, out of the blue, came this: “That was also the position of every Israeli politician I knew, by the way.” Huh? Where did that come from? Continue reading "Clinton Redux" The Uses of the University
What do you do when you have a group of national university leaders in the same room, two of them (Larry Summers and Duke's Richard Brodhead) recently in the headlines for being under siege? Schedule an extraordinary panel so that they can talk about running a school, including during the times when matters peripheral to the real work of the university are in the papers every day.
All the presidents mentioned having to manage crises and scandals that hadn't been mentioned, they implied, when they interviewed for the job. "It's like being in a batter's cage, except the balls are free to come at you in every direction," said Brodhead, who found himself handling the lacrosse scandal almost immediately after starting as president of Duke. "Some will be bowling balls, some will be baseballs, some cabbages. On a good day they won't be from every direction. On a bad day they will." Continue reading "The Uses of the University" The Man From Hope
Unlike Clive, I'd never seen Clinton live before - save from a distance, during a campaign rally in the Connecticut primary way back in 1992, when my father hoisted my little sister on his shoulders to get a look at our next President. His physicality is, well, larger in person - you really get a sense of what a big man he is, even with all the weight he's lost, and you can see how he was able to command a room, even in the presence of his enemies, and convince even Newt Gingrich to buckle under. But it's not the size that made Clinton so effective at wooing the American public - it's the voice. Listening to him talk about the Republicans, caricaturing them and criticizing them in that friendly way he has, you first think - why didn't John Kerry or Al Gore talk like this? And then you realize that they did, or at least that they delivered the same kind of lines: about how the Republicans want to enrich the few and the Democrats the many, about how Democrats have "a plan" for health care, the environment, pensions, etc. (with the details kept deliberately vague); about how the GOP is just trying to demagogue on war-on-terror issues and gay marriage to scare people away from voting for the Democrats, and so on. Yet somehow when Clinton said it, it seemed plausible, believable, reasonable and above all authentic in a way that other politicians, from Gore down to Dean and Pelosi, have never been able to manage. That raspy, mellow, Southern-inflected drawl, with its mix of wonky policy talk and Arkansas locutions ("drug out," "that dog won't hunt," "ordinary walkin'-around people") - hell, we would have kept electing him till he dropped dead in the Oval Office.
Continue reading "The Man From Hope" Yesterday's Crisis, and Today's
Like Clive, I was at the "Demography as Destiny" session late yesterday afternoon, and it inspired a thought experiment. Imagine an Aspen Ideas Festival, circa 1975, with an event on demography and the fate of nations. What would have been discussed? Well, Paul Ehrlich of Population Bomb fame would have doubtless been a panelist, talking about looming famines and mass die-offs; there would be bright talk about how China's one-child policy might just get that country's overpopulation problem under control, and gloomy talk about the rest of the developing world; hopeful chatter about America’s declining birth rate and nervousness over the rising rate of immigration.
Now flash-forward to the present. Continue reading "Yesterday's Crisis, and Today's" Friday, July 7. 2006The Main Event
Today's big pre-dinner event, and the intended highlight of Ideasfest, was Bill Clinton, in conversation with our own Jim Fallows--who immediately put the great man on his guard by telling him that he (Clinton) was the most popular man in the world. I've seen him speak many times. I always go in skeptical, and he never fails to impress. It's a commonplace, but I'll say it anyway: The man is a consummate politician. Forgive me, Aspen, for adding that nothing he said seemed, on review, especially wise or original or penetrating (and, by the way, what he said about Britain's economy thriving because of adopting the Kyoto Protocol was complete nonsense). But while he was saying it I believed almost every word. Except when the conversation turned to Karl Rove, he struck a centrist, consensual tone, even though much of the audience was longing for a bared-teeth attack on the administration--and the audience, a little chastened by this I thought, admired his spirit of accommodation. That is his special gift. He lifts the spirits; you feel optimism, purpose and moral ambition (get that) infusing the room. I don't know if he is the most popular man in the world. I'm quite sure that he's the most popular man in Aspen.
Concerning Two Inconvenient Truths
Senator Bob Bennett talked a crowded auditorium through his Powerpoint presentation on "Demography as Destiny: How the World Will Age in the Next 50 Years". His message: Climate change is not the only inconvenient truth we need to confront. None of the senator's numbers was new to me, nor, I suspect, to much of the audience, but the cumulative force of the statistics he piled up was scary nonetheless. In the next few decades we and our children will experience sharply increasing demographic stress: many more old people, far too few young ones (that is, of working age). The United States is certainly going feel this pressure--just watch the Medicare budget explode--but in fact is much less at risk than almost anywhere else you can think of. America's birth-rate is still pretty high, close to replacement, and, up to now at least, the country has stayed relatively open to immigration. Europe's demographic outlook is much, much bleaker. This comparison drew some of the sting from Bennett's argument. But one of his main points--that immigration is part of the answer to America's demographic transition--needs to be noticed, and underlined, by many more politicians and commentators.
In a session on "Renewable Fuels: Boom or Boondoggle?", Steven Koonin returned to the other inconvenient truth, and explored the scope for greater use of energy from biomass. The main advantage of biofuels is obvious: crops such as corn (or sugarcane in Brazil) draw carbon dioxide from the air as they are grown; when they are burned as ethanol, CO2 is released back into the atmosphere, but the net effect is lower greenhouse-gas emissions than burning gasoline. Making this work at scale is difficult and expensive, however. The conventional fuel-distribution system is hyper-efficient because it has been optimized over decades for the supply of gasoline and diesel; ditto the agricultural system for the supply of crops. To make biofuels a meaningful part of America's energy future, the two systems will have to be integrated and jointly reoptimised at every stage. It can be done, and the prize in terms of enhanced security and climate-change mitigation is too big to ignore, Koonin argued--but it will be a bigger undertaking than I, for one, had imagined. (Koonin is BP's chief scientist; the session was sponsored by Chevron. So much for Big Oil's resisting such innovation.) Don't Go Away . . .
It's Friday evening now, and I know that blog readership usually plummets once quitting time and the weekend roll around. Even so, you should definitely check back in here on Saturday and Sunday, because tonight the Festival plays host to Bill Clinton and on Sunday morning to Karl Rove, and we'll be around all weekend to tell you what they have to say.
Rights-Talk in the Afternoon
Some of the more interesting moments from the just-concluded discussion of "Human Rights in the Information Age," with Samantha Power, Michael Posner, and R. James Woolsey:
Continue reading "Rights-Talk in the Afternoon" |
What is this?All week long, a group of Atlantic writers and editors are filing dispatches from this year's Aspen Ideas Festival, a "summer university" featuring discussions, seminars, and tutorials with some the most provocative thinkers, writers, artists, businesspeople, and leaders from around the world.   
Articles related to Aspen events: "Why Americans Hate the Media" by James Fallows "Can We Still Afford to Be a Nation of Immigrants?" by David M. Kennedy "Jihad vs. McWorld " by Benjamin R. Barber "Would Shakespeare Get Into Swarthmore?" by John Katzman, Andy Lutz and Erik Olson "Can Poetry Matter? " by Dana Gioia QuicksearchCategoriesSyndicate This Blog |
