Part 2 of Obama's Style: Technology

Note: This is the second in a series analyzing the unique Presidential style of Obama. Today's thoughts focus on Obama's use of technology.



On election night, shortly after Obama's acceptance speech, Tom Brokaw on NBC remarked that Barack Obama is the first truly postmodern President. Because the term "postmodern" can mean so many things, it's important to place Brokaw's statement in context. He really meant that Obama was the first truly global President, with an African father and an American mother and a childhood spent in Indonesia. Yet the label "postmodern" can extend beyond Obama's global upbringing, and can most certainly include Obama's use of technology. Many are noticing Obama's unique use (or at least new to the Presidency) of technology:



1) Many noted the hullaballoo over Obama's insistence that he keep his blackberry. The Guardian's comments about the concerns of keeping his blackberry:

But the main concerns are often more about political responsibility than
personal safety, as a result of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which requires that documents retained by the White House must be released to the public... However loopholes in the system could mean that Obama - who has said "transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency" – would be able to continue using the device for personal messages that did not impact the presidency.

2) Obama relies too much on teleprompters and the mainstream media is mostly mum about it. For as much as George W. Bush got ridiculed for being a poor public speaker, it seems the only difference between he and Obama is that Obama can read a teleprompter with more spirit. A recent example of his incoherence when the teleprompter goes out:

For more of the many examples of Obama's flubs when the teleprompter goes out, go here

3) All Obama all the time on the television. This part has many facets and so I have to resort to outline form.

A) Obama was the first sitting President to go on Leno. Here is just one of thousands of links. I was tempted to post the video, but you can find it so easily on youtube. In sum, this was a disaster. But his it wasn't his comments that bothered me as much as it was the fact that a sitting President was answering questions while the person in authority was behind the desk. There's a reason sitting Presidents don't do this.

B) He has given several primetime television news conferences.

C) He showed up on 60 Minutes and while many thought he was grilled by Steve Croft, I still thought Croft lobbed up a bunch of softballs. With Obama's lightheartedness, Croft was led to ask "Are you punch drunk?"

D) He has appeared several times to media outlets in the Middle East (more on this tomorrow).



He has appeared so much on television that the media critic at Time, James Poniewozik, is wondering if he's doing too much tv. Poniewozik isn't convinced that he is, but he most certainly is. When you are so repetitively misunderstood, it's best to lay off the video appearances.



4) Obama is interacting with the American people via internet.

US President Barack Obama has answered questions submitted to the White
House website by members of the public. The "Internet Town Hall" was
streamed live on the website. More than 100,000 questions, on subjects
ranging from the economy to the legalisation of marijuana, were sent in for
consideration. The event is the latest in a series of recent public appearances made by Mr Obama as he seeks to promote his plans to kick-start the US economy.

Someone forget to tell me how the legalization of marijuana will help kick-start the economy. But one could go on the same rant about healthcare and numerous other elements in Obama's projected budget.



Conclusion: With that exhaustive list, Obama is clearly establishing himself in a new era of the Presidency. While using these various communication media he is communicating to the masses and acting like "one of us," he is also contributing to the erosion of the value of communication and meaning in language (as I discussed yesterday). As long as he looks the way he is trying to project, it doesn't matter as much what he says. So much of his efforts seem to endorse his image while it seems that little communicative effort is being made to promote the justness of his positions (or the perceived justness of his positions- of course not all Americans agree with his policies). How else does it happen that people disagree with his policies but approve of him? (See my earlier post on this subject).



Obama's overuse of technology, in sum, calls his judgment into question. He's not being judicious with words, influence, or complex issues of public policy.

Part 1 of Obama's Style: Just Words?

Update: This post is the first in a series of 3 that will analyze aspects of the new President, Barack Obama, that are marked elements of his Presidential style. Because this blog seeks to think thoughtfully about the news, and because President Obama is the most prominent international news figure, it stands to reason that I should think more thoughtfully and comprehensively about different aspects of Obama's young presidency. So this first post is about how Obama uses words and how he plays the political game.

I had a conversation with a woman last year about meaningful things. We were sharing ideas about truth and God and religion. In the middle of that conversation, she said something utterly curious and totally incoherent:

All language is a metaphor, so it doesn't matter if you tell me that Jesus is God.

Well, she's wrong of course. Her statement, after all, was not in fact a metaphor. She made a propositional statement, and if all language is a metaphor then her statement must suffer by the same standard. Therefore, it is false. The emphasis of her statement, however, is plaguing our culture on many fronts.

Words are going without meaning. The increase of moving images on the internet and television erode the place of the written and spoken word. There's little care for argument and reason in our public and political discourse. The untruth of postmodernity is affecting our very language. And, sad to say, our President (and many politicians including Republicans) contributes to this erosion. According to this article, Obama deftly gets to change definitions of words to suit his political purposes.

But last night, Obama adopted a different meaning for the word [recovery]. Suddenly, "recovery" did not just mean an end to the immediate recession. "The budget I submitted to Congress will build our economic recovery on a stronger foundation so that we don't face another crisis like this 10 or 20 years from now," he said in a sentence so difficult to unpack that it reads as if it had been written by
lawyers. (Does he mean build upon the recovery? Or build under the recovery?)
Later, he completed the transformation with this line: "That's why this budget
is inseparable from this recovery: because it is what lays the foundation for a
secure and lasting prosperity."...

In other words, back then [in a Presidential debate] Obama was pointing out--correctly--that short-term stimulus spending to prompt an economic "recovery" was not the same as a normal budget debate. The rules were different. Spending was the whole point. Now, when it serves Obama's political interests, Obama seems to have changed his mind. Deficits five or more years away are, he now claims, are about "recovery" as well. And all he did was change the meaning of a single word.

Language does have and should have fixed points. We should demand this of friends and colleagues as well as our Presidents.

Capitalism and Africa

In college I had to read a book called How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney for a comparative studies course on the sociology of the African and the African-American experience. The basic premise of the book is that capitalism got its roots by the exploitation of the continent of Africa. Europe exploited Africa's people for slaves and its natural resources for wealth in the New World. The book is critical of capitalism, and (to the degree that my memory serves me) offers socialist answers to the problems of capitalist exploitation.

How ironic, then, that capitalism might be the answer to help Africa prosper. Dambisa Moyo's new book called Dead Aid asserts that Western aid to Africa (in attempts for absolution?) has actually hurt the continent's development. (Read Gilbert Cruz' book review here.) Through microfinancing, agricultural trade, and direct infrastructure development, the West can profit from Africa and Africa can prosper too. While the dark underside of capitalism is exploitation, I don't think it should surprise anyone that trade and finance help make both partners wealthy. I think people forget that the opening treatise on capitalism was called The Wealth of Nations.

Adam Smith didn't believe the argument that we always exist in a zero sum economy with limited resources to be shared by all. He believed that wealth could grow. The essence of capitalism is that wealth grows, while the essence of socialism is that wealth is redistributed or shared (this is the reason that I think free trade is far superior to any kind of protectionism proffered by Democrats). It's important to maintain that neither economic system is inherently a moral one, but if capitalism is shared with a culture that maintains a moral consensus (read: a Judeo-Christian ethic) then it is by far the superior system. Moyo's book affirms the merits of capitalism. It might seem ironic, but the most moral thing we could do for Africa is to do business with them. It is far superior to free aid.

For the best defense of the virtues of capitalism, read Michael Novak's classic, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.

Forecasted Buyer's Remorse

Caveat: The intention of this post is not necessarily to opine but to state matters of fact. I'm not evaluating the merits of certain liberal positions, but merely showing how many non-liberals seem to have voted for a liberal for President. The full intention of this post is designed to track what I thought was a foreseeable phenomenon 4-5 months ago.

There is a problem when people do not think about issues in Presidential campaigns. An honest elder of mine asked me on election day last November, "So do you think the country has become that much more liberal? Do you see a trend in a liberal direction?" I had to confess that I didn't. I said, "Obama won because he was better on tv and because he had more money, and so I don't think this has anything to do with the policies of Obama." I wanted to say more. I wanted to say that many Americans had fooled themselves into thinking they voted for the guy that agreed with them on political issues when the truth is that many Americans had not done so (and if Americans wanted a moderate that was truly bi-partisan, they should have voted for McCain). Here's my proof, as columnist John Warren lays out:

On one issue after another, from bail-outs to the environment, Medicare,
life issues, foreign policy, the polls now tend to confirm what this pundit and
a few other incorrigible reactionaries knew from the outset: that a plurality of
American voters had embraced Mr. Obama not because of, but despite the policies
he was signalling. They most certainly liked the man and his "temperament," and
they most certainly wanted the Republicans out. But it did not follow that they
wanted their government to lurch to the left.

Here's more confirmation of a similar phenomenon:

In the new National Public Radio poll conducted by the Democratic polling
company Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and its Republican counterpart, Public Opinion Strategies, 42 percent of the 800 likely voters surveyed March 10 to 14 said that if the next congressional election were held today they would vote for
the Republican candidate; an identical percentage of respondents said they would
vote for the Democratic one. For several years, Democrats held a substantial
lead on this question.

You see, Americans tend to support image over substance, sound bites over discourse, and slogans over reasoned argument. Those simplicities could favor either party at various times, but this time it favored Obama. We wanted Bush out, and we liked the way this guy talked. But oh man, we have some buyer's remorse with the way Obama is pushing far-left policy. Don't believe me? Writer and radio personality Garrison Keillor wholeheartedly endorsed Obama in February 2008 on the promise of "hope" and "change," but now he seems nothing short of irate at Obama's and other Democrats' policies in his most recent column. Some highlights:

I wish that the politicians lining up to drop cherry bombs in our toilets
could meet the AIG family....

It’s painful for me to
leave AIG, but I am not comfortable with the government owning 80 percent of our company.

Call me old-fashioned, but that is just plain socialism to me, and this latest frenzy of plain old class warfare fomented by an anti-business administration has convinced me that it’s time to move on.

To Keillor and many other embittered Americans, I say: what on earth were you expecting! This guy had a very liberal voting record and no executive experience. You got what you voted for. And now we all have to endure these ____ policies [insert your own adjective].

Prophecy of the Ages

A tale of two prophecies:

1) One prophecy is an old one. It says that in humanity's attempt to create a better and more secure society, the idea of human or civil rights will slowly subside. No one can condemn the state because the state is good. No one can fight back, because fighting back would be an endangerment of other people's security. And that state can monitor all sedition and overwhelm the dissident. This prophecy is best illustrated in George Orwell's book, 1984.

2) The other prophecy is a new one. It says that the true nature of humanity, human touch, and human relationality will slowly erode because of our laziness and obsession with the moving image: television, internet, and movies. We will all be so tempted and taken in by screens that it becomes our whole life. We define self by social networking sites that counterintuitively do the opposite of what they were created to do. We may be networked, but we're more lonely. We spend hours in front of boxes that satiate our most base desires. This is a new prophecy, and it is best illustrated in the movie Wall E.

And the prophecies meet each other slowly. Video becomes the way we do most interaction. Nothing is sacred anymore. All is televised, put on video, and loaded to the internet on youtube for all to see. And eventually, we all become Big Brother, monitoring video of others, taking away privacy (See my post on "sexting" last week). Our culture is headed down a dangerous road.

Don't believe me? Then check out this BBC news piece. Street cameras are being installed in 25 UK cities for live public consumption. Big brother and a video-dominated culture are not that far away. And sadly, I don't see a way of stopping it from heading further down the tracks. So in sadness I say: be warned.

Image Obsession

Earlier in the week, I referenced Time Magazine's cover articles about 10 ideas changing the world. The idea that was most appalling is what Catherine Mayer coined "amortality." Amortality is the basic idea that life could span indefinately. I'm not sure how that's different from immortality (the author doesn't say so either), but I think it isn't just the idea of living forever but the idea of looking young and living forever. The ideas posited in this article are almost laughable that I'm surprised anyone could actually believe it. Here's an example:

It is "bleeding obvious," [Aubrey de Grey] adds, "that it is possible to
extend the human life span indefinitely. "Most people take the view that aging
is this natural thing that is going on independently of disease. That's
nonsense. The fact is that age-related diseases are age-related diseases because
they're the later stages of aging."

This de Grey fellow cannot be serious. I would really like to challenge this guy to a bet. Last I checked, humans have a 100% mortality rate and billions of people to prove it. The odds are on my side, and Ben Franklin agrees (ie death and taxes are guarantees after all).

But de Grey (and others) wishlist is really a product of our image-obsessed culture. We want to be young forever. We want to wear hip clothes forever. We want to be vigorous forever. Some spend hundreds of dollars on gym memberships and use them while many spend hundreds of dollars and don't use them. We watch television, are obsessed with youtube, and cannot keep moving images away from our face. We only elect people that are good on tv. We are obsessed with image.

We aren't obsessed with old truths like these:
1) All humans were made by a Creator and weren't supposed to die.
2) But humans screwed up and so now everyone is subject to death.
3) But God entered into human existence to remedy this problem by dying in humanity's place.
4) And God came back to life, conquering death.
5) Now God extends that same possibility for all: resurrected life, both physical and spiritual.

We should be obsessed with that instead.

The Biblical Stimulus Plan

New Testament scholar and professor Craig Blomberg makes an excellent case for the removal of both personal and national debt on his blog. Some highlights (it's lengthy but too good not to repeat much of it on the whole):

I was amazed during the waning weeks of the Bush administration how little
protest I heard from evangelicals of the $700,000,000,000 + bailout plan. I am
amazed how much complaint I hear now of the only slightly bigger bailout plan of
the Obama administration, and especially how rarely the critique is based on
biblical principles...

I'm reminded, too, of the dramatic
contrast between the national response to the Great Depression as it led into
World War II--the calls first to save and then to give--and the Bush appeal a
few years ago to spend money, thereby fueling the economy, as an act of
patriotism! Again, I can only imagine how a Democratic president saying such a
thing would have come in for scorn and outrage from the very evangelicals who
were silent while a Republican president was saying it...
If it is inevitable that living within our means, spending only that which we have, and saving frugally while continuing to give generously ruins the recovery, then so
be it. It is biblical stewardship. Worshiping at the shrines of materialism and
instant gratification played a large role in getting us into the economic mess
we are in, so it can scarcely be the answer to getting us out!

Dr. Blomberg is right on here. But just to show that he's not the only one, I'm an equal opportunity critic of faulty financial plans that aren't in biblical accord. For proof that I thought Bush's plan was foolish, see An American Parable, the Common Sense Fix, and Thinking Long-Term in chronological order. Blomberg grounds his biblical foundations in Romans, but I appeal mostly to Proverbs.

Time Magazine is Deprave According to Calvin...

... and so is everyone else. Time's cover story this week is about 10 ideas changing the world. One of those ideas apparently changing the world is New Calvinism.

Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin's 16th century reply
to medieval Catholicism's buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is
Evangelicalism's latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and
micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination's logical
consequence, predestination: the belief that before time's dawn, God decided
whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or
decision.

I know Time isn't really a religious news juggernaut, and I appreciate that they are covering religious ideas because they are indeed the most powerful of all, but I have two thoughts.

1) If Calvinism is back, where did it come from? Many Presbyterians, Reformed, Baptists, and others might be surprised to learn it was ever gone.

2) What is decidedly new about this form of Calvinism? Even as Time described it, this isn't a new form of something so much as a maintainence of orthodox doctrine while others are going adrift doctrinally.

Like the Calvinists, more moderate Evangelicals are exploring cures for the
movement's doctrinal drift, but can't offer the same blanket assurance.

So it's not new, it's old and that's why it's sticking around. To give Time a break, they aren't the first to term it "New Calvinism." I'm not sure who did, but Christianity Today did a story on it a few years ago. There's really nothing new under the sun in human enterprise anyhow (see Ecclesiastes). Great songs truly affirm this about the Gospel: "I heard an old, old story....."

Even More.....

Steve Chapman lays out the stem-cell debate further.

Harold Varmus, co-chairman of the president's scientific advisory council,
said it showed the president would rely on "sound scientific practice ...
instead of dogma in developing federal policy." But one person's dogma is
another one's ethical imperative or moral principle. Science can tell us
how to build a nuclear weapon. But science can't tell us whether we should use it. Just because research may be useful in combating disease doesn't
mean it's ethically acceptable. The infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment -- in
which the federal Public Health Service secretly withheld treatment from
infected black men to learn more about the disease -- might have yielded
valuable data. But no scientific discovery could possibly have justified
it. [emphasis mine]

That's precisely what I say here and here.

More on Stem-Cells

For all the weird looks or patronizing sentiments I get for continuing to take a stand on "life" issues, the Wall St. journal has an article that agrees with me.

Yesterday President Barack Obama issued an executive order that authorizes
expanded federal funding for research using stem cells produced by destroying
human embryos. The announcement was classic Obama: advancing radical policies while seeming calm and moderate, and preaching the gospel of civility while accusing those who disagree with the policies of being "divisive" and even
"politicizing science."....

Second and more fundamentally, the claim about taking politics out of science is in the deepest sense antidemocratic. The question of whether to destroy human embryos for research purposes is not fundamentally a scientific question; it is a moral and civic question about the proper uses, ambitions and limits of science. It is a question about how we will treat members of the human family at the very dawn of life; about our willingness to seek alternative paths to medical progress that
respect human dignity.

Obama bandies about the word "ideology" so much it's as if he doesn't have one. He does. It's called liberalism. And it's his dominating worldview. My predominant worldview is called Christianity. It isn't conservatism, or libertarianism. It's the Christian worldview. And if Obama claims that he is a Christian, then he is bound by the biblical worldview as well. We all have ideologies, and we need to use the reason of those ideologies to determine truth in moral reasoning. Obama should stop chastising me for claiming truth. But because he does so, he's no political moderate (but I actually am).

"Sexting"

Nancy Gibbs is typically a favorite columnist of mine because she chooses non-traditional topics or has unique spins on familiar ones. This week in Time she discusses the phenomenon of "sexting"- illicit pictures that teens send over their cell phones. May it also be noted that this phenomenon is occurring on social networking sites. Here's a quote from the article:

[A] study released last December found that one in five teens had sent or
posted a naked picture of themselves, and a third had received such a picture or
video by text message or e-mail. One school principal suspects that a random
ransacking of the phones in his school would find indecent pictures on half to
two-thirds of them. Three out of four teens say posting suggestive stuff "can
have serious negative consequences," which means they know it's dumb--and they
do it anyway.

Whoa. This should make us very sad. Let us remember that technology isn't inherently good or bad, but it isn't neutral either. Technology is a social force and shapes how we view the world, and not just what we view of the world. In this context then, we need to remind ourselves that the trace of internet information is never fully erased. An illicit picture posted on the internet or sent to another phone never really goes away. A mistake in childhood will last every time a child-turned-adult wants a job, desires intimacy in marriage, or wants to forget the mistakes of the past.

Unfortunately, the rapid transimission of information is rendering newspapers obsolete, and apparently it's creating an illicit sexual underworld in teen culture. These are not good things, but I have no idea how we stem the tide. Any thoughts?

No New News on Religion

NBC Nightly news didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know, but these types of reports are important to keep tabs on.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Embryonic Stem-Cell Research

President Obama issues an executive order to lift the ban on federal funding for ebryonic stem call research.

Mr. Obama called his decision a "difficult and delicate balance," an understatement of the intense emotions generated on both sides of the long, contentious debate. He said he came down on the side of the "majority of Americans" who support increased federal funding for the research, both because strict oversight would prevent problems and because of the great and lifesaving potential it holds.

Let's get some facts straight:
1) President Bush never banned embryonic stem call research; he banned the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
2) Embryonic stem cell research isn't the only kind of stem cell research; there are forms of adult stem cell manipulation that have flourished in the last few years. (This should be pursued more vigorously).
3) Thus, the statement that conservatives want to constrain science and the healing of many diseased people is fallacious. Science always operates better when unconstrained by the civil authorities, yet scientists clamor for grants like they're candy. In sum, science wants the government out of its institutions and rule-making, but it does want the government's money. Obama is okay with that. There's a double-standard here with non-profit faith-based organizations and government aid, but I won't get too into that right now (ie if an organization wants money to feed the poor, it has to operate by the government's rules like inter-faith hiring policies).
4) The quote above illustrates Obama's moral compass. Since when does majority rule ever determine what's right or wrong? This is a logical fallacy called the bandwagon- "Everyone thinks it so it must be right." The principle here is that an embryo is a growing human life. Some say it's "potential human life" and that it isn't real life until placed in a woman's embryo. I'm not so sure that it's that gray, and I don't think the government should allow such morally hazy (or downright obstructive) practices to resume on its dime. The destruction of human embryos might be murder (I think it probably is), but in the very least we are dealing with another Mexico City policy in that the government shouldn't fund this stuff. Endangered species are more protected legally than the unborn.

Here are some morally comparable areas to what is going on:
1) Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. Due to the starvation, poverty, and overpopulation in Great Britain in the 19th century, we should take to eating babies. It would a) decrease the population and b) eradicate the problem of a lack of food. Swift provides an overtly ridiculous satire, but is the justification for government funding of embryonic stem cell research any different?

2) Social Darwinism. Humanity is on an ever-increasing track of improvement. If we want to eradicate most communicable diseases from humanity, why don't we just kill all the people that have them so we can alleviate human suffering? The Nazi's did it, why can't we? We could rid the world of AIDS, Malaria, and other major world-killers.

Here's the point: whenever the destruction of one life is used for the propagation of another, we haven't acted justly. The blind adherence to alleviating human suffering should not be achieved by any means necessary.