NEW YORK: THE GATES

Curtains for Christo

Was walking past Central Park last week. Saw Gates. Walked through some Gates. Didn't care. Walked out again.

This means I basically have no opinion about the big Christo project that comes down in the next couple days — except this one. The big curtains that were billed as "saffron" are actually road-cone orange. Not as evocative as was intended. It makes the whole park look like a construction zone.

February 26, 2005 | 1:00 a.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050220.php#e108

POLITICS: ATTACKING IRAN

So which is it?

President Bush's quote of the day:

"This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. Having said that, all options are on the table."

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February 22, 2005 | 2:05 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050220.php#e107

IRAQ

Interesting story of the day #3

The British newspaper The Independent reports (based on a Time magazine story):

American officials are talking to negotiators from the anti-US resistance in Iraq, whom they have denounced in the past as foreign fighters and remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime. Insurgent leaders and Pentagon officials have confirmed to Time magazine that talks have taken place for the first time in the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad. The Sunni guerrillas want a timetable for a US withdrawal, first from Iraqi cities and then from the country as a whole. American officials aim to see if they can drive a wedge between nationalist guerrillas and fanatical Islamist groups. Abu Marwan, a resistance commander, is quoted as saying that the insurgents want to "fight and negotiate". They are modelling their strategy on that of the IRA and Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland. This means creating a united political organisation with a programme opposed to the US occupation. US military commanders are now dubious about the chances of winning an outright military victory over the Sunni rebels who have a firm core of supporters among the five million-strong Sunni Muslim community. The US military has lost 1,479 dead and 10,740 wounded in Iraq since the invasion began in March 2003.

I had previously read that some Sunnis were becoming eager to participate in the incoming Iraqi government after having boycotted the election, which would be a sign of progress in itself. But this story gives, at the least, an opposite perspective on recent stories — if not an outright contradiction. Rather than "peeling off" (there's that phrase again) Sunni moderates, we may now be making accommodations to a resistance we have no hope of defeating. The election was never the answer to the basic Iraqi problem that remains — it didn't resolve the question of integrating the Sunni population into a majority-Shiite state. Maybe negotiations — never a Bush administration strong suit — are becoming too inevitable to ignore.

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February 21, 2005 | 11:50 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050220.php#e106

POLITICS: SOCIAL SECURITY

Interesting story of the day #2

	USA Next's Charles Jarvis appearing on the O'Reilly Factor.

The New York Times reports that some of the same people who took pot shots at John Kerry under the rubric Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are now organizing a campaign to similarly tarnish the AARP and pave the way for Social Security privatization. The article says:

The lobbying group, USA Next, which has poured millions of dollars into Republican policy battles, now says it plans to spend as much as $10 million on commercials and other tactics assailing AARP, the powerhouse lobby opposing the private investment accounts at the center of Mr. Bush's plan. "They are the boulder in the middle of the highway to personal savings accounts," said Charlie Jarvis, president of USA Next and former deputy under secretary of the interior in the Reagan and first Bush administrations. "We will be the dynamite that removes them."

To my mind, this tends to confirm the picture of these people as mere political hatchet men rather than principled advocates. They're trying to institutionalize themselves as unofficial commandos who do the dirty work while the above-ground Republicans wink at their existence.

And as smart as their Kerry smear campaign was in 2004, I don't think they're going to achieve much by going after Social Security and the AARP in 2005. In Kerry, they had a human target without a very well-established identity; in the AARP they're targeting a broad membership group that people are already well acquainted with and that doesn't have a single human face. What are they going to say? "The AARP wants you to think you got a motel discount in Tampa last year, but the people who were there say otherwise!"

And they have a tough job trying to undermine support for Social Security, which is also a known quantity. There isn't really a way to attack Social Security — to "drive up its negatives." People already know what they've got in the program, and it's hard to see how retirees are going to be convinced to make drastic changes in a program that puts a positive benefit in their pocket. Looking at two big overhaul efforts of the Clinton era, welfare reform passed because its constituency was narrow and most people saw it as a net loss for themselves — Social Security is the opposite. And the Clinton health proposal was undermined by advertisements making extreme claims about how bad the changes would be for regular people — but that was a campaign to defeat change. Selling change is different — it can't be done with negativity. If the message is, "Trust the president to monkey around with your monthly check," the people receiving that check are going to balk.

The story says that USA Next hopes to "peel off" 1 million members from the AARP in order to reduce that group's influence. But I doubt that people are going to leave the country's ubiquitous retirees' organization to join a little-known group that offers them less, just for political reasons. Think back to the 1980s — did people buy inferior, more expensive American cars at the height of the "Buy America" movement? No. As much as they hated to see U.S. jobs dwindle away, they kept on buying Hondas and Toyotas. As Republicans surely understand as well as anyone, business is business. The article continues:

Officials at AARP say that their organization has weathered attacks and allegations of partisanship over the years and that they were not overly concerned about the current barrage. "I don't ever want to see someone attack us, but we haven't found they had a significant impact in the past," said David Certner, the group's director of federal affairs.

Even if they did "peel off" a few retirees — say they reduced the influx of retiree mail to Congress by 5 percent — would Washington stop listening to the AARP? Highly doubtful.

One more problem for the anti-AARP faction — they've always relied on getting a big impact from a small investment. They create some outrageously controversial ad, run it briefly, and then get it noticed by the mainstream media so that it runs for free for as long as the networks take an interest. But it's hard to see how their pitch — "quit the AARP because it's too liberal in protecting your Social Security!" — gets them that attention. They need something more outrageous than that.

The only strategy that would seem to fit these people's talents is the opposite one: "Peel off" younger people. Twenty-somethings and 30-somethings are the ones who could get riled up by negative advertising against, perhaps, "selfish senior citizens" who "don't care if there's any Social Security left when you're their age." That's a pitch that might get some results. But the intergenerational ugliness of such a campaign would probably just make these shadowy Swift Boaters look small. I don't think they really have a winning hand in this game. They're puffed up with last year's bravado, but I think this year they're setting themselves up to fizzle and fade away.

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February 21, 2005 | 10:36 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050220.php#e105

NEW YORK: NEW YORK TRAFFIC FATALITIES

Interesting story of the day #1

In today's New York Post, reporter Clemente Lisi reports on the continuing drop in New York City traffic fatalities. The paragraph that jumped out at me was this one:

Only 330 people were killed during the 2004 fiscal year, beating the previous record-low of 332 set in 1910, and representing a 10 percent drop from 2003 when there were 365 traffic-related deaths.

In other words, we had fewer road deaths last year than we did in 1911. For a moment when I edited this story last night, I felt sure this had to be a typo. But I convinced myself it could be true.

Certainly in 1911, there were far fewer cars and fewer people to get hit by them. (4.7 million — I just looked it up.) But traffic in the early years of automotion must have been positively lethal. Imagine the anarchy as the technology-happy thrill riders of the age zoomed up and down the streets without so much as a stop sign to keep them and the poor pedestrians apart.

Just found this under "Traffic" in the Encyclopedia of New York City:

In the eighteenth century carts traveling northward along the road that is now Broadway were required to give way to those traveling southward, and in the nineteenth century the constant stream of vehicles and the wet layer of horse manure in their wake made it necessary to build a pedestrian bridge across Broadway near Fulton Street. Eventually police officers were needed at street intersections to direct competing flows of traffic, and later the officers were aided by mechanical devices known as semaphores. Crude electric traffic signals borrowed from railroad technology gradually took over: the first control tower equipped with one was erected in 1919 at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, and the last semaphores were eliminated by the 1930s.

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February 21, 2005 | 10:25 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050220.php#e104

MEDIA/ADVERTISING: ACHIEVMENTS IN ADVRTISING

We hate to spell and it shows

Continuing the long tradition of Internet ads that nobody proofread before putting them up online, even at huge corporations that employ major ad firms ... here's one from Delta Airlines.

I really think Internet advertising is still an afterthought with a lot of companies, so they don't triple-check their work the way they do with print and TV ads. But the nature of the Internet is different in that mistakes on TV zip right past the viewer, while mistakes on the Internet sit there for as long as the page is open. And it's different from print because on the Internet, somebody can display your handiwork online forever.

(To see the full ad, click the thumbnail below.)

Additional pictures

February 21, 2005 | 8:21 a.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050220.php#e103

MUSIC: GRAMMY AWARDS

Scammy Grammy

Here's the routine at a newspaper on awards nights: Since they save the big, big awards for the end of the night, you have to pretty much focus on the women's dresses, embarrassing slip-ups, gauche political statements, and streakers, if any, while you're putting together the early editions of the paper. What about the actual awards? Well, by 9 or 10 o'clock they're still giving out Best Animal Act With Mimimum of Three Endangered Species, and Best Makeup on an Actor Over 70, stuff like that. So that gets big play in your early editions. Readers over 50 miles from the printing plant are going to have some pretty thin reading in the morning.

So on Grammy night we're waiting for any little scrap of news, and a co-worker mentions that Zach Braff won an award. Now, I'm happy that my man Zach (#1 on my

February 20, 2005 | 7:38 a.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050220.php#e102

NEW YORK: PORT OF AUTHORITY

A noted Authority

One way to tell New York people from New Jersey people is to ask them where to catch the Jersey buses in Manhattan. Jerseyites tend to call the building the "Port of Authority." We've got the Port of Newark and the Port of Elizabeth — why not the Port of Authority, right?

Lately I've been hearing a public announcement in English and Spanish over the Port Authority loudspeakers, and what does the Spanish voice call the building? "El Puerto de Autoridad." The Port of Authority. I'm starting to think the name above the doors is wrong and the Jerseyites are right.

February 20, 2005 | 12:45 a.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050220.php#e101