Radio Australia Today Editorial
Archive for January, 2009
Barack Obama has his first media circus
22 January 2009
Did you see the papers today? No surprise that the new U.S. Prez featured heavily in them. I don’t remember what kind of coverage George W. got at his two swearings-in, but I’m betting that it is nothing like the wall-to-wall plastering that we’re seeing this morning across the world.
Just look at what the journalists have been doing here in Australia, and you’ll get an idea. The two major Melbourne dailies show the Obamas dancing at one of the inaugural balls. One headlines them a New Dawn. The other says: A New Spirit. The national daily, the Australian, headlines with A Nation Reborn.
Pretty tame stuff. Obviously they’re hoping these carefully constructed fronts will be kept for posterity. So they thought solemnity was called for.
It is left to Brisbane’s Courier Mail to take a lighter approach to the dancing Obamas. It’s front page proclaims in a headline next to the waltzing duo: Do You Mind If I Lead?
The papers, of course, do capture THAT moment in great detail. The moment I write of is the stumbling by both Obama and the Chief Justice during the administration of the Oath of Office. The impassive face of the incoming president betrays nothing, but get a look at his wife Michelle Obama. Now there is a face that could be saying any one of twenty things. Check it out:
Is that a smile for the clumsiness of men. Is that a rueful expression that says: You had ONE thing to do. Or is it simply pride at that most historic moment. We’ll have to wait for her memoirs to find out.
Of course one of the great images of the inauguration belongs to the out-going vice-president Dick Cheney. Wheelchair-bound in temperatures of minus-something, he is caught by a photographer for all time, glancing at his watch. He most probably wanted to be somewhere warm, rather than freezing his posterior off watching his political opponents take his job.
In all, a fun coda to a special day.
Now the serious stuff begins.
– Phil
Barack Obama has his Moment of Silence
21 January 2009
After all the political factioning, wooing, nominating, debating, voting and choosing, the day has arrived. Barack Hussein Obama has taken the oath of office to become the 44th President of the United States.
By now he would’ve experienced that moment that we in broadcasting have all experienced. The moment of silence. It is when we first host a major TV or radio program. The introductions and fanfare have happened, and the world goes quiet waiting for your first words. In your head you know that it is for you to mess up or to succeed. There is no-one else to help. I remember my first moment of silence. It surprised me. I had done all the preparation for my first major radio program, but I didn’t see the moment of silence coming. I remember the hiss of the headphones as the listeners, the wife, the boss waited for me to start. It was only a moment, but it has lasted across the years for me. Since then I have been in television and have done live TV crosses from location, and no moment of silence has been as great, or as daunting as that first one.
Yes, I wonder what went through Barack Obama’s head as he sat in the Oval Office and took in his moment of silence before making his first snappy decisions of office. Shock, would be my guess. He fought for four years to get to this place. It was a tough series of battles to get to the White House. First he had to get the favour of his party, then fight off a tough and experienced Clinton team. Then to overcome prejudice and John McCain. He overcame. He is a political warrior.
But being a president is not about being a warrior. It is about leading his country into a changed world. Being a warrior has nothing to do with improving a seriously flawed health system, a growing line of poverty-stricken, a deficit in the trillions, failing manufacturing industries, a rising atmospheric temperature.
It rests on his shoulders that every decision he will make will create jobs and destroy jobs. Many of the decisions he will make will save lives or end lives. Too many presidents have made decisions too quickly and have trusted their advisors just a little too much, and the results have sometimes been disastrous.
For a president disaster walks in hand with success. Barack Obama will make mistakes. Perhaps he already has. His every word carries weight. It is his actions that will prove whether he is capable enough of making deeds that match his warrior rhetoric.
These are the things that would have shot through his mind in his moment of silence.
– Phil
One day to go. Barack Obama’s Weight Grows
20 January 2009
Not his actual weight. His girth is fine. Even a little too slim maybe.
But the weight of expectation. Watching the faces of the crowd in Chicago on election night last November, it was as if a new messiah had been revealed.
Two messages were clearly being mixed in that very charged time. The message that an African-American had finally achieved his land’s highest office, was entwined in the belief that this particular African-American would be able to fix America’s financial woes, and straighten his country’s foreign affairs.
Barack Obama will make mistakes. He must be expected to make mistakes. There will also be things that he will unreasonably be blamed for. When unemployment or inflation rises; when another big company goes under, Obama will be criticised. But however right or wrong this blame, the gloss will come off him. It is inevitable.
Yesterday I wrote about another great hope, Australia’s Gough Whitlam, who was a great hope for Australia. He was finished off by a few rising prices and closing factories, a victim of a world recession not of his making. Going back even further, again in Australia, and James Scullin came to power in October 1929. In a case of shocking timing, the Wall Street crash happened two days later, sparking the Great Depression. Scullin was turfed from office after just one short term. All the wishes of all the King’s horses could not save his shining and hopeful image. He was overtaken.
Barack Obama too is not coming to office in good times. His presidency will be defined by a difficult legacy left by his predecessor. His own legacy will be based on how he dealt with these times.
History will be hard. Even if Obama drags his country back to prosperity, he will be remembered just as much for how he dealt with climate change, perhaps even more than for his health reforms and foreign policies. He only has four, and possibly eight years to do it. It’s a brief time. Every decision will count.
In eight years or less we’ll know if he was the man for the times, or just a man who knew how to make a killer speech.
– Phil
We Had Our Own Barack Obama first.
19 January 2009
Just a few minutes ago Barack Obama stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to speak to the thousands of people already in the zone for his upcoming inauguration. He had a hard act to follow: Bono and U2 warmed up the freezing crowd, and what a job they did.
It was nothing compared to the speech Obama gave when he hit the dias. It was as inspired as any inauguration speech by a Kennedy, Roosevelt or Clinton. It was full of quotes that will undoubtedly be outdone by the real inauguration speech in two days’ time.
On the weekend I finished reading the latest biography of a man who could be called Australia’s Barack Obama.
This was a man who was equally loved and hated; just as powerful with words; just as bright with ideas, and who also campaigned into office on a theme of change.
I’m talking here about the only Australian prime minister to have been sacked from office. He too entered office as the world entered into recession.
His name is Gough Whitlam.
Whitlam was a transformational leader. When he was elected in 1972, Australia was a rather staid country with virtually no film industry, a stagnant immigration policy and a foreign view that was enmeshed in cold war fears.
In the first six months of office, Whitlam swept all this away. He stopped conscription, recognised mainland China, made tertiary education free. He also cut tariffs and went on to make big infrastructure spends.
Unfortunately for him, all this happened as the world recession hit. Unemployment shot up, inflation went into double digits, and growth slowed.
Whitlam was blamed for a lot of this because of his big-spending ways. He remains to this day, a divisive figure.
But reading his words, and having interviewed him, I can tell you that there is a certain grandeur about the man (in fact ‘A Certain Grandeur” was the name of his biography). Watching Obama speak this morning I saw that same certain grandeur on display.
Of course grandeur does not guarantee a great leader. Barack Obama is yet to be tested by office. Gough Whitlam, after years of stretching for the grand prize, found the prime ministership a hard slog. He was dragged to two early elections by an Opposition that challenged his every move. His big fault was that he didn’t always take the Australia people with him on his reformist route. After decades of ‘steady-as-she-goes’ the population just wasn’t ready for quite so much change in such a short time.
Bill Clinton found that out too with his failed health system reforms.
Barack Obama won office promising change. He should also know that he can’t let the pace of reform scoot ahead of the expectations of the people. He will need to communicate the needs for the changes at every step.
If anyone has the communication skills to pull it off and to succceed where Whitlam failed, it is Barack Obama.
– Phil
iPod or Zune. Barack Obama gets a pasting.
16 January 2009
He is not even the president of the United States yet, but Barack Obama has become embroiled in a scandal, one of those scandals that has the appendage “-gate” attached to it.
The scandal, which has been doing the rounds on tech-blogs, started when a tech writer alleged that he saw the in-coming president using a Zune!
The Zune, for those of you who are not aware of it, is Microsoft’s answer to the iPod. It’s a music player that is a direct competitor to Apple’s pod family, although sales figures suggest that the race is pretty one-sided. Zune has less than ten percent of the market, while the iPods have more than sixty.
The thing that interested me in the Obama story is the shock and horror that seemed to come out after the Obama revelation. A person, president or not, chooses a product that is not the number one seller, and it becomes a scandal (now called Zunegate).
Even more weird is the fact that Obama’s office issued a denial, insisting that the president-elect uses an iPod.
Now I’m sure that the denial was quite informal and not done with the intent of denigrating the Microsoft product, but the denial has continued the story. The man who first said he saw Obama in a gym using a Zune, retorted to the denial, insisting that Obama was using a Zune. Sorta. He says ” It had a dark case protecting it and from what I saw, he was using a Zune.”
“From what I saw”. Doesn’t sound definitive to me.
But who cares if the president-elect is using a Zune, iPod or cassette player?
No-one but for a few Zunesters and iPodders. That is, until the denial was issued.
Let’s hope this is a lesson to the new adminsteration. Peoples’ jobs could be at risk by such silly carryings-on. Zune is having trouble getting real traction in the marketplace. Being so obviously labelled as uncool isn’t going to help.
And at the end of all this mess, it is just another way of playing the same music. So chill out dudes.
– Phil
