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Beneath the fuss, what substance?

Thursday, May 13, 2010

“RED-CARPET” HAS BEEN an ubiquitous media description for the new - and deliberately ostentatious - kind of hospitality that President Barack Obama’s team granted Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai (pictured left) for his visit to Washington. 

(But some variation did come, at least, with “putting out the best china”, a more homely metaphor chosen by The New York Times, as if to remind us of the paper’s own "Old Gray Lady" image.)

 

That VIP floor-covering analogy is apt, I guess, since it nowadays carries Oscar overtones of superficiality more than grandeur - and specifically conjures up a fashion catwalk, which is at least in line with the studied sartorial impact that Karzai aims for with his dramatic green cape.

In the midst of all the journalistic analysis of White House rituals that are part of any overseas head of state’s talks with a US Administration, I’d urge you to look for one hard nugget of political information, which may not be very apparent. It won’t concretely form part of any official announcement, and judging by yesterday’s over-ceremonial press conference held by the two Presidents, it will be determinedly evaded whenever it’s addressed head-on by truth-seeking reporters.

Karzai’s own approach to press relations, and the task of journalists to inquire into rulers’ policies, came earlier when alongside Secretary of State Hillary Clinton he opined a little over-revealingly: “We should do a better job of talking to the media or - if I may say - of managing the media”.

The hard-core question being avoided, of course, is … when will Karzai open talks with the Taliban? The militant movement long held (or at least for the past nine years) to be the enemy?   Oh, and it’s also the militant movement that Karzai himself, being even more erratic than usual back in early April when relations were tense between him and Washington, stunned everyone by threatening to join, yes join, if pressure from the West didn’t ease up on him.

The factual nugget to look for - within weeks rather than months, I predict, perhaps coming even while US forces are still battling it out with Taliban fighters in their southern stronghold of Kandahar - is an actual meeting between Taliban representatives (those so-called “good”, well not good maybe, but officially “reconcilable” elements of the Taliban) and Karzai’s senior people. 

There should be a special “Long War” prize for the first journalist to get wind of such an encounter – for that is the direction that the Afghanistan conflict is heading.

  

   

 

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BARELY AN HOUR HAD GONE BY, Downing Street's press office was eager to tell us, before President Obama had phoned the newly-installed Prime Minister David Cameron and invited him, too, to DC. He won’t need as much fuss as Karzai.

With Cameron, Obama was inevitably profuse in his appreciation of what he still, in obedience to tradition, felt necessary to call “the special relationship between our two countries”. We all know, however, that the super-cool President would prefer to have no special relationship with anyone. And as for Brits, he’s really much more likely to want to cultivate “BRIC"s … that constellation of fast-storming economies who now combine in their own acronym: Brazil, Russia, India and China.

But I think within all his politesse Obama showed some incisive judgment on substance during his second London phone-call.  He talked to the resigning Gordon Brown, and later told the rest of us: “I thank him for his friendship and his distinguished service as Prime Minister.  He provided strong leadership during challenging times”.

That’s a generous if condensed summation on a man who has been his own worst enemy – but a good man nonetheless.

I’m biased. I’ve always got along very well with him (but then I didn’t work for him).

I happened to the first person to put Gordon Brown on national television, back in the mid-1970s when he was a politics lecturer at Glasgow College of Technology (above center) and I was a news-broadcast producer in London. My colleagues thought I was mad to do so – but then as now I admired Brown’s sharp mind (rather than his demeanor ... a little rough around the edges then, I acknowledge) and his undoubted drive to improve the lot of the disadvantaged.

I’m convinced he’ll be one of those leaders who is much better regarded within a few years of his departure from the scene, however un-missed he might seem today.

WE SHOULDN’T EXPECT any major kerfuffle in the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan (above right). That’s in spite of all the heavy breathing throughout cable TV news, talk-radio and cyberspace’s echo-sphere over Kagan’s pretty unexceptional paper-trail on the “Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell” non-policy for gays in the military.

Much of the professional media have, largely uncritically, tossed the nomination into the “diversity” drawer. And certainly it’s welcome that Barack Obama has stayed very true to his clear announcement back when he was campaigning in 2008 that as President he’d be predisposed to nominate women to the top judicial bench. There’s still a long way to go in making the Supremes look like the nation they serve (since that nation is 51% percent female, not 33.3%).

But should we maybe push for greater diversity within the diversity already being established? If Kagan is indeed confirmed, two out of the three women on the Court, Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, will have the following in common:  both alumnae of the elite Harvard Law School … not to mention of that “elite of the elite”, the Harvard Law Review … both Jewish … and both New York-born and raised.

 

Seems like diversity here amounts to the broad span between Brooklyn and the Upper West Side.

 

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