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Message of speed, but to what end?

Thursday, July 30, 2009

TOWN HALL–STYLE meetings now seem the preferred media mode to get fast results. Barack Obama still wants speedy adoption of a health reform package that he can sign, so he’s back on the campaign road again this week, just like last week.

The Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is emulating the President, too, and doing the televised town-hall thing … at a speedier presentational clip than his predecessor Alan Greenspan ever achieved, and certainly in words of fewer than four syllables (- not that the stratospheric Greenspan would ever have countenanced such a populist kind of venue).

 

While Obama may now be resigned to Congress not falling into line before its August recess, he’ll still be pushing - through such appeals directly to voters from Ohio to North Carolina and beyond - to get an agreed piece of health legislation onto his Oval Office desk as soon as is humanly possible.

 

Time is of the essence, as always. Obama's personal popularity remains buoyant, but in office his political capital has been inescapably diminishing – especially when it’s measured by voter approval for his policies and actions, not least on health care reform and on the economy in general.

 

(Slippage in support for the health reform agenda is underlined by yesterday’s National Public Radio opinion survey, conducted for non-partisanship’s sake by both Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg and Republican Glen Bolger.)

 

Obama’s inistent media onslaught shows how, even for a leader whose cultivated hallmarks are of deliberation and a measured demeanor, speed remains vital.

 

He’s certainly cranked up the throttle in other policy areas, too. In the auto-industry rescue, first Chrysler and then, even more remarkably, the much bigger and more complex General Motors empire were hustled through the bankruptcy court process in record time (actually a very biblical-sounding forty days and forty nights in GM's case).

 

Throughout, Obama has been careful to insist that government control will be short-term – and he’s expressed this in a tone of apparent frankness with the White House press corps that he may later want to reverse, saying: “I would love to get the U.S. government out of the auto business as quickly as possible”. 

   

 

I REMEMBER THAT BEING SAID by another government at another time. It arose during my very first big national story – the nation being Great Britain. The company involved was the gloriously storied Rolls Royce, which despite its upscale reputation had to be rescued by, yes, a government - and of all things a Conservative government – way back in 1972.

 

I spent weeks unearthing for television viewers the interconnected dependencies of the northern English town of Derby, where the main Rolls plant was situated, and its surrounding region. The emphasis was of course upon the community disaster that was looming. (Echoes now of the voluminous socio-economic reportage we’ve seen these past few months from Flint, Michigan and other GM manufacturing centers).

 

And the entire official intention was - if I can use Obama’s words, though the 1972 Westminster parliamentary record makes exactly the same point - to implement “the kind of restructuring that allows them [the company] to be strongly competitive in the future”.

 

Well, the Rolls Royce story – of full government engagement, but of no “strongly competitive” business performance – ran on for much longer than almost anyone wished.

 

The firm was divided, with aero-engines split off from car-manufacturing first. The aero division went back into private (and British) hands, but not until another 15 years had elapsed.  And the car-making effort stubbornly refused to make real money until it in turn was also divided up … and some thirty-seven years later, its separate parts are now run (rather successfully, it turns out, to much British chagrin) by German companies – BMW making “Rolls-Royce”s and Volkswagen producing “Bentley”s.

 

Though I am without reservation a product of Britain’s late-20th century consensus on the virtues of a mixed economy, much of my reporting experience tells me that when a government steps in to run things … the getting-out rarely goes according to plan.

  

   

 

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PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS are the stuff of much publishing nowadays. We sadly saw the death earlier this month of Frank McCourt, the writer often credited with starting the current enthusiasm for memoirs.

 

The genre’s most recent variation gets a fresh boost this week in the form of a new "graphic memoir" – graphic in the literal sense of being conveyed largely by illustration. The life-story that's told (or drawn) is the one experienced first-hand by the multi-talented Laurie Sandell, a writer and artist, of course – and a magazine editor, too.

 

Sandell reveals the bizarre and often horrifying tale of her growing up with a father who lived (and seemed to get people around him also to live) in his fantasies. The Imposter’s Daughter is an uncannily compelling piece of work, distressing and amusing by turns, and infused with an almost Brechtian sense of detachment through its subtle, light-handed (but not always light-hearted) drawings.

 

Confession time. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that my darling wife Melissa Bellinelli figures in the book's Acknowledgements, being thanked for her support to Sandell in creating the work.

 

But here’s the difference from all those familiar, run-of-the-mill authors’ thank-yous that we are used to. The “Acks Page” (to use English printers’ jargon) in this handsomely-produced volume is visual, rather than textual.

 

That’s Melissa, deftly and finely captured in her signature eye-glasses, top right.

 

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