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Downward dips in high performance

Thursday, March 26, 2009

THE COACHES’ BENCH LOOKED PRETTY HAPPY. Lined up against the East Room wall during the primetime presidential press conference, spokesman Robert Gibbs was beaming, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was cockily akimbo, and Senior Advisor David Axelrod chewed nonchalantly. And that was before announcing the President's online "town hall" meeting for today.

I fear their ebullient confidence may be misplaced. In one area especially, their man who is “out front as much as possible” (to use Barack Obama’s self-description from the podium) showed a curiously loose grip on part of his argument – and that’s not like this President. It’s more like the early candidate.

 

I’m not referring to the now repeatedly dissected moment when he was short and brusque (maybe snarky, to boot) with CNN’s persistent Ed Henry, about why he took his time before “going public with that outrage” – Henry’s own term, not his - at AIG’s big bonus payments. Obama’s rapid-fire “Because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak – all right?” didn’t seem to me the sign of man badly rattled … just a fairly neat - and okay, not totally honest - politician’s evasion.

 

Much more serious was Obama appearing to lose his place in the play-book while discussing the projected national deficit rises, which are reckoned to come during what he called, in unhappy American corporate-speak, “a whole bunch of out-years” (that’s certainly nothing I recognize as plain English).

 

The President was clear enough in explaining the differences between his Administration’s projections and the Congressional Budget Office's - plus the underlying fact that they make different assumptions about how much economic growth to expect (he’s naturally more optimistic - by a factor of 0.4% - than the CBO). However both his team and the Congress’s agree on foreseeing that the deficit will start climbing once again from 2013 onward.

 

My own as-it-played notes during his effort to address this issue had me scribbling “seems lost here”, an observation I’ve not been prompted to record since the Rhode Island primary.

 

It won’t be enough, as the President aggressively sells his ambitious budget, to admit the deficit will inescapably re-surge four years from now but at the same time to claim that it won't really be an imposition on his daughters’ generation, simply because "it would have been worse” without the big public investments he’s currently planning. Oh, and don't worry, because there will be more budgets to address this problem, as time goes on.

 

He’ll have to argue better, with many in Congress scared of the spiking graph - Democrats as well as the inevitably resistant Republicans - and with White House correspondents newly energized by these doubts. (That’s especially the broadcast news guys – not just CNN’s Henry but CBS’s Chip Reid,  ABC’s Jake Tapper, and NBC’s Chuck Todd. An odd bunch of monosyllabic, white-bread first names, don’t you think? – and they all look somewhat similar, too. Are the Hardy Boys being cloned to fill 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue’s Press Room?)

 

But wherever the challenges come from, the coaches will need to get their man out front to polish his play.

  
 

 

** EVERY WEEK CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE.

 

  

 

THE SAME NIGHT AS OBAMA WAS center-stage, playing his rapidly expiring newcomer’s act, the curtain went up on two real veterans of public performance.

 

On Broadway, Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons (above center) opened in Impressionism – written by another veteran, Michael Jacobs, but one whose experience has largely been in television. (He’s credited with inventing no less than 15 TV series, including ABC’s 1990s success, the extended coming-of-age saga Boy Meets World – all 158 episodes of it.)

 

His play contrasts intriguingly with Thirty Three Variations (which I bemoaned lately as suffering from an over-heavy televisual touch) for it actually thrives on its hints of a TV provenance. It centers upon a single one-one-one relationship, and is paced pointedly and briskly, with almost sitcom timing, by the cast and by director Jack O’Brien (yet another veteran - in his case, of giving believable life on stage to writers’ work from Tom Stoppard to John Waters, as in Hairspray). 

 

In the main, the flow is comfortable and the dialogue easeful - except for one weird lapse into a hackneyed memory-scene that subjects us to a photojournalist (Irons) agonizing over the pain of loss (when an uncharacterized child-guide dies) during a rural African assignment.

 

Surer ground was found in the present-day, and in Manhattan. Judging by the knowing chortles among the audience around us - remarked upon by my ever-gorgeous wife Melissa Bellinelli, and joined in frequently by both of us - the playwright has acutely monitored the maturing of familiar relationships, marriage most of all, into that status that is also best described as veteran.

 

  

 

IN THE REAL AFRICA, REALLY UGLY relationships are of course commonplace. Following up on the international economic conference held in Tanzania which THE MEDIA BEAT highlighted two weeks ago, the BBC’s World Service radio took a typically more considered look than many other news organizations, and explored the strengthening economic ties between the African continent and China.

 

It’s a subject that this column frequently returns to, of course, and I was gratified to hear an academic whose work I value, Alistair Fraser of Merton College, Oxford, telling the Beeb that it’s “inaccurate” to portray the China-Africa axis as simply a series of “dictator-to-dictator” arrangements “with China developing particular corrupt relationships with particular states”. Fraser is right of course – that’s a crude oversimplification of what’s going on.

 

But all the same … kernels of truth do lie within such generalizations. While we carefully watch, for instance, for some change coming (oh God, we hope) in Zimbabwe, where the fledgling government of “national unity” might just start to climb out of the disaster that President Robert Mugabe has wrought, some small China-connected details still stand out to disturb the observer. That’s quite apart from this month’s huge and terrible shock - the new power-sharing Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai losing his wife Susan in a fatal car-crash, and himself being injured once again.

 

One of the troubling details concerns another wife - the President’s, who carries the oxymoronic name Grace Mugabe (above, far right). Closed-circuit video recently captured her punching the face of a press photographer, Richard Jones, while one of her bodyguards held him pinned helplessly. Charges of “wounding” Jones – a more serious crime than the more habitual offense “common assault”, because of lacerations caused by Mrs Mugabe’s jewel-encrusted fist – have just been dropped.

 

Why dropped? Because the attack happened within the jurisdiction of China – actually in Hong Kong, one of the First Lady’s favorite shopping locations. This week President Hu Jintao’s government in Beijing (which despite HK’s special status does control the territory’s legal system when it comes to international relations and defense issues) let it be known that Mrs Mugabe will enjoy diplomatic immunity and will not be prosecuted.

   

 

MEANWHILE IN ZIMBABWE’S neighbor South Africa, my erstwhile colleagues at the sturdy Independent Newspapers group were the first to expose a tacky government decision, and have unsurprisingly gone on to chart, through one of their many online opinion surveys, public fury over that decision. The government’s denial of a visa to the Dalai Lama, who’d been invited to attend a global peace conference related to the soccer World Cup competition being held in 2010, has resulted in an 86% condemnation of the government among online readers.

 

Why the visa denial? Another invitee to the conference, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is, as usual, very clear about the answer: "We are shamelessly succumbing to Chinese pressure”.

 

And indeed Independent reporters got a ministerial counsellor at the Chinese embassy in Pretoria to confirm that his masters had appealed to the host government to bar the Tibetan leader, warning that his visit “would harm bilateral relations”.

 

When you have China as a friend, it seems your own conduct can seriously deteriorate.
 

 

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