Brad Warthen's Blog

DeMint gets face time

Here's an irony for you:

The story today on the stimulus bill is about how such Senate moderates as Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Republican Susan Collins of Maine are reshaping the legislation. And yet who's getting his picture in the papers? Jim DeMint, who is nobody's notion of a moderate.

He appeared, looming large, on Page 3 of The Wall Street Journal with a story headlined "GOP Wields More Influence Over the Stimulus Bill." That's the picture above. Which sort of makes you think Jim DeMint is one of those "wielding more influence." In fact, his image is being used on the promo for "top stories" on the paper's Web site. But... he's not mentioned in the story. So the picture, apparently, gives a false impression.

I haven't looked at the print version of The New York Times today, but I saw this story on the Web, headlined "Centrists in Senate Push to Cut Billions From Stimulus." Guess whose picture adorns it (along with others; it's a group shot)? Yep -- non-centrist Jim DeMint. Then guess who is NOT mentioned in the story? You got it.

Hey, fellas -- you want to try coordinating with the guys in photo next time, so that your art actually GOES WITH the story?

In case you wondered how this happened: Well, it's a story with a lot of moving parts, and different media folk are following different parts of it. Those photos are from The Associated Press. The running AP story on the stimulus DOES mention DeMint -- as having played a leading role in an unsuccessful effort...

Despite bipartisan concerns about the cost, Republicans failed in a series of attempts on Wednesday to cut back the bill's size.

The most sweeping proposal, advanced by Sen. Jim DeMint, a Republican, would have eliminated all the spending and replaced it with a series of tax cuts. It was defeated 61-36.

... which means he's no longer a part of the story of the developing bill. But the picture remains.

This marks one of those rare occasions when our junior senator steals a march on our senior one, mediawise. Our senior senator was at the same press conference as DeMint (see below). But he wasn't in either of the pictures chosen by the two aforementioned papers. Nor was he mentioned in either of their stories, or the AP story.

So much for Lindsey Graham, media hog extraordinaire.

Just an interesting little irony that I noticed in all my reading on the subject, and thought I'd share...

How can you tell who that is with the bong?

One thing I'll say for Michael Phelps -- he had plausible deniability on the bong photo, which I didn't actually look at until today, and which you can see here. If he hadn't admitted that was him, I wouldn't know.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about that...

... except this: The Brit tabloid said, "THIS is the astonishing picture which could destroy the career of the greatest competitor in Olympic history."

Which made ME think: Hasn't he sort of already had his career as a "competitor in Olympic history"? I mean, he won the 8 medals, right? Did we think he was going to win 8 gold medals again, or what? Are we then talking NOT about his career as a competitor in the Olympics, but rather his career as what? An endorser? What?

I don't know. The whole getting-excited-about-people-as-celebrities thing is something I don't get anyway. The News of the World, judging by its Web site, probably knows way more about that stuff than I do.

Everything's up to date in Pelosi city

Obama finally has his genuine, official presidential seal to speak from behind, but when I saw what Nancy Pelosi did yesterday, the president's trappings looked oh so last century.

Nancy's hep. She's with it. She's on the information superhighway. She's a Cyberspeaker.

Kidding aside, it's smart. You might only get a few seconds on the evening news, but it you can get somebody to go to your Web site, you can unload a truckload of your worldview on 'em. Which she does.

The presidential seal, like a royal coat of arms, communicates traditional authority. A URL communicates information, all you want...

What would happen if Ben Bernanke shaved?

We are often unmindful of the pictures that other people carry around in their heads of us. For instance, I'm always running into people who say, "You shaved your beard!" when I haven't worn won in a year or more. A lot of Republicans, for instance, think of me that way because they saw me lot at the GOP convention in New York four years ago, and I had a beard that week (as in the shot of Jeff Miller and me on this post).

Separate from that, two people have said it in the last couple of weeks. One of them was Kathleen Parker (at this event), and the other one I forget.

The fact that people will, however belatedly, notice something like that about ME got me to thinking over the weekend.... We all know how skittish markets are. Whatever you think about what Phil Gramm said, the fact is that the health of our economy is largely a phenomenon of mass psychology (which is why I posted the FDR picture). If we believe stocks have value, they have value. If enough of us believe the economy is healthy, it will generally be healthy. (This is why I don't like dealing with the economy; so much of everything, right down to the value of money and gold themselves, are a smoke-and-mirrors thing that only works if you close your eyes and BELIEVE. Except of course for the land, Katy Scarlett...)

And you know how the merest word or smallest gesture on the part of a chairman of the Federal Reserve can have, even in good times: The chairman said "irrational exuberance"! We're exuberant, but is it irrational? Could he be right? Next thing you know, the dot.com bubble bursts. Sure, those stocks were overvalued, but the bubble lasted as long as we were able to fool ourselves otherwise.

So it occurs to me that, with everything so precarious on the Street, and Paulson and Bernanke speaking to Congress in such hushed whisper of awe and fear and the pending collapse of our credit markets...

What if Ben Bernanke shaved off his beard?

Why, Wall Street would go berserk! But would it be good berserk, or bad berserk? Could this be the bold stroke that is needed to jolt the economy back to where it should be? Or would we find ourselves living in the Stone Age before he could get a Don Johnson stubble going again?

It's probably not worth the risk. If I see Ben Bernanke even LOOKING at the Schick Xtreme 3s in a checkout line, I'm going home and stuff all my baseball cards into a mattress.

I've probably made enough trouble even suggesting the possibility. For that reason, I won't even go into the fact that...

Henry Paulson looks disturbingly like Daddy Warbucks!

From our political family album

Searching the AP Archives (a dangerous thing to let me do, given that I'm the World's Most Easily Distracted Man) for a suitable picture of Fritz Hollings for the Sunday op-ed page (which in the end I didn't use; Robert volunteered a caricature instead), I ran across the one above, which has the following caption:

State Sen. Edgar Brown, D-Barnwell, left, Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, D-S.C., center, and Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., leave the Darlington Presbyterian Church, Sept. 20, 1972, after paying their final repects to the late state Sen. James P. Mozingo. (AP Photo/Lou Krasky)

Note the hats -- evidently, Strom and Sen. Brown had still not received the JFK memo.

Riffing on that as I am wont to do, just out of curiosity to see what an Edgar Brown search would turn up, I found the one below. I like it as a sort of alternative moment from the convention for which Abbie Hoffman and Richard Daley pere are better remembered. The caption:

South Carolina Gov. Robert McNair, right, listens as he and Sen. Edgar Brown, left, and Gov. John West hold a private conference on the fire escape of their Chicago Hotel on Monday, Aug.26,1968 in Chicago. The three men are part of the South Carolina delegation to the Democratic National Convention which gets underway Monday. (AP Photo)

No, this post doesn't have any point; I'm just sharing...

So THAT'S who that arrogant-looking so-and-so was...

For months now, I've been seeing this one photograph of this one guy, over and over, in The Wall Street Journal -- almost always with stories I was uninterested in reading, so the picture just sort of registered in the background.

It was the sort of picture that no sane company publicist would ever have distributed, unless it wanted its CEO to be hated. And you knew this was a CEO; the picture just radiated, "I'm the kind of guy who thinks he's really hot stuff because I'm so absurdly overcompensated." And you know, I seldom think that when I look at people. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt (something that drives some of y'all crazy, because you're always wanting me to join you in despising somebody, and I just don't feel like it -- not necessarily because I'm a nice guy; I just don't feel like it). But this picture INSISTED that you not like the guy. If a psychologist included this photo in a Thematic Apperception Test, I suspect there would be a surprising uniformity in the stories the subjects would tell.

Well, we've all been paying more attention than usual to Lehman Brothers the last few days. For tomorrow's op-ed page, I happened to choose this Nicholas Kristof column, which in a nutshell is about a guy named Richard Fuld who got paid the equivalent of $17,000 an hour while he was running that company into the ground.

Needing art for the page, I searched AP photos for "Richard Fuld." And lo and behold, what should pop up but that very same picture that's been half-registering on my mind the last few months. That's it above and to the right. It was taken by Kevin Wolf at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington on Jan. 22, 2007. I especially like the way Mr. Wolf thought to include the satellite image of the Earth in the frame, just in case we missed the whole "master of the universe" thing going on.

And apparently, to the extent that this guy Fuld will be publicly remembered, he'll be remembered looking like this.

Well, I feel so much smarter for knowing that now. But not nearly as smart as he apparently thought HE was.

And for you Democrats...

Yes, I know that before Sarahmania there was Obamania, and for those of you who still fondly remember those days before the Alaskan Invasion (the way some clung bitterly to Elvis after the Beatles came along -- which I guess would make McCainiacs like Sinatra devotees), here's a picture to warm your hearts.

It's not as visually interesting or evocative as some of the other pics I've shared, such as the T-shirt guy, but it's a nice photo, with a nice composition -- or at least, well cropped. You'll notice it also has a little of that halo thing going on. I had saved it when I saw it after the acceptance speech for use later, and since I sensed Dems getting antsy over the last couple of posts, I share it now.

Enjoy.

Sarahmania

Continuing on the subject of interesting pics, and shamelessly willing to post whatever it takes to drive traffic (within limits), here's one I just ran across that encapsulates Sarahmania more than any other I've seen. It's from the same rally as the shot in the previous post, by the way.

Perhaps irrelevantly, doesn't her smile in this one look a little like that of the nice, attractive girl whose Mom made her go out with the geeky guy, and he's having an AWESOME time, and she's gamely trying to see it through, all the while thinking, "Can I plead a headache yet? Would he believe me if I said my father wanted me home by 7:30?"

Speaking of Sarah, I think the coolest shot of her since she came on the scene is the one below that I put on the Monday letters page. It's emblematic of someone young and new and fresh being sprung on the world. She looks kind of like a smart kid in a spelling bee, standing on the stage, hands at her sides, waiting for the next word with no fear, no fear at all. Botticelli put Venus on the half-shell; a Republican artist would present Sarah Palin to the world this way.

Art for art's sake, GOP edition

Remember when I shared the photo of the Obama supporter with the T-shirt outside the stadium, just because I liked the picture?

Well, here is its perfect Republican complement. Beyond the fact that I like the picture, there is something about it that invokes the essence of support for the McCain-Palin ticket in the same way that the hip, youthful, stylized image of the Obama supporter did that ticket.

Do you agree?

Anyway, I actually managed to get this one into the paper -- a black-and-white version of it, anyway. It will be on tomorrow's op-ed page, with a Kathleen Parker column that it didn't exactly go with, but sort of did.

Obama and McCain: The Halo Effect

After the Democratic Convention, I grabbed the above picture of Barack Obama, thinking I had not yet seen a more perfect photographic invocation of the notion that Sen. Obama was The One.

I didn't think Republican lighting engineers could top that, and they didn't, but they certainly tried. Note the photo below from Sen. McCain's Thursday night address. Now you see why he has made some long-delayed inroads among his evangelical base.