I just finished reading your book (The Argument) and wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed it. It was really interesting to make the parallels between the emerging influence of the "blogosphere" on the 2004-2006 elections with the way things played out during the 2008 Presidential election, particularly Obama's campaign. Any plans to write a follow up?
- Amy
Thanks, Amy. I do have plans to write another book, but not a follow-up. This one will be about the boomer era in American politics and how it went off track. Please order your copy in 2011.
- Matt Bai
on August 31, 2009
OK, so that was a great piece. I think more evidence of his sense of humor can be seen in the White House correspondent's dinner, as he can barely keep a straight face and keep from laughing as he delivers his lines, particularly, the one about Rep. Boehner's tan. My friends accuse me of drinking the Obama kool aid, but this presidency continues to be a breath of fresh air for me. Thanks for your clear and insightful pieces.
- Christine Brennan
And thank you for reading them, Christine. That's very kind.
- Matt Bai
on August 11, 2009
Thanks for the great "Funny How?" article about the pitfalls of presidential humor.
I wanted to note, politely, that you've repeated a common falsehood about Barack Obama's Special Olympics joke in March. He did NOT say that his bad bowling "belonged in the Special Olympics."
His actual joke was that Jay Leno's *lavish praise for his low score* was like the praise given to all competitors, by tradition, in the Special Olympics. This is quite clear in the video and transcript of the show, which Who2 has compiled here:
http://www.who2.com/blog/2009/08/barack-obama-didnt-insult-special.html
It's still a dumb joke and he would deservedly have been in hot water no matter what. But there's a huge difference between the cruelty of saying "I bowled like a handicapped kid" and the joke the president actually made.
This has been consistently misreported -- Peter Baker made the same error in The Times just last week -- and we've made it a little crusade of ours to get it corrected. Thanks for your consideration.
- Fritz Holznagel
Fritz, I appreciate the very collegial tone of your email, and I'm the first guy who volunteers to correct the record when something like this gets repeated out of its proper context and takes on a life of its own. That said, I think you're flat out wrong about this one. For whatever reason, you seem to want to read into this exchange an entire other meaning from what the president actually said. It's a perfect example to me of how blogs sometimes criticize the media because they don't like the reality that's being reported.
We'll have to agree to disagree, but in order to let other readers in this forum judge for themselves, here is the exchange between President Obama and Jay Leno, as supplied by your site:
Jay Leno: “[Has the White House bowling alley yet been] burned and closed down?”
Barack Obama: “No, no. I have been practicing . . . I bowled a 129.”
Jay Leno: “That’s very good, Mr. President.”
Barack Obama: “It’s like — it was like Special Olympics, or something.”
Hard to see how you get from that transcript to your portrayal of it, Fritz. Bu I do appreciate your reading and taking the time to get in touch.
- Matt Bai
on August 11, 2009
Dude, you kick ass...
- Paige Yannone
F**k yeah! Thank you, Paige. Direct and to the point.
- Matt Bai
on August 10, 2009
I just want to compliment you on the clarity of your writing and the insight you offer into the ever increasing weirdness of political life in America. I look forward to your articles and am grateful to the Times for having writers like you.
- Carol Gerson
Very kind, Carol, thank you. It's nice when people notice and take the time to say so.
- Matt Bai
on August 10, 2009
Below is a portion of an interview with Andrew Bacevich from August of last year. It seems like Carter's speech was rejected by the voters. Do you think it was simply Carter's presentation that was at fault or the voters? I think it was the latter, your review leans toward's the former. Perhaps i'm wrong. It was a short review. (By the way, I loved 'The Argument'). Neither Obama nor McCain, he says, realizes the seriousness of this problem of "limitless consumption." I asked whether any president in recent history had.
"Jimmy Carter," he replies. "His famous ‘malaise' speech in 1979 was enormously prescient in warning about the consequences of ever-increasing debt and dependency. Carter's argument was that energy independence provided a vehicle for us to assert control of our destiny, and to reassess what we meant by freedom: is it something more than simply consumerism? "But that speech was greeted with howls of derision. Ronald Reagan said we could have anything we wanted. There were no limits. Then we the people rejected Carter's warning and embraced Reagan's promise of never-ending abundance. That was a fateful choice."
- Hagdu Hagdu
Hagdu is referring to this book review: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/books/review/Bai-t.html?scp=1&sq=matt%....
I'm not big on blaming voters for things, Hagdu. It's their democracy--if you can't do a good enough job of persuading them to follow your lead, then that's kind of your problem. We get the country we deserve--no more, no less--and that's as it should be. Perhaps there's a valid point to be made here about the evils of consumerism, but I don't think it's a president's job to moralize. If you want people to make sacrifices, then put forward a plan and convince them that it's the right thing to do. If you believe, as Carter put it in his speech, that "all the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America," then you're entitled to your point of view, but you probably shouldn't be running the government. So in my view, Carter's speech was courageous and candid but utterly wrong in its interpretation of presidential leadership.
Thanks for reading the Argument and for taking the time to write.
- Matt Bai
on August 5, 2009
I read your pieces regularly in the NYTimes and always enjoy them but was moved to write about your "Shuffle" essay, as I did and surprise, surprise my letter was printed in the magazine this morning. Just came across your nonblog here and am curious to hear your reaction to my point of view. Don't we want a president who is willing and able to tackle this mess?
- Christine Brennan
Hey Christine, congrats on getting a letter published--that's no easy feat. (As opposed to getting a letter published here, which kind of is.) Here's the link, so others can read it: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02Letters-t-001-002.html.
I don't feel that I was quite as hard on the president as you think I was. But that aside, while I basically agree with what you're saying, I think it's the job of a president--and especially one as personally galvanizing as this president is--to make these connections for us. My objection isn't really that he's doing so many things at once, as some people argue. My objection would be that if you're going to achieve all these things simultaneously, then you really have to explain to a skeptical public how they're interconnected and why they're all part of a unified strategy. I think that's entirely do-able in this case, but I do not think he's come close to doing it, and I'm baffled as to why. Thanks for continuing to read.
- Matt Bai
on August 2, 2009
Where are you? I'm starting a campaign to force you on twitter. When I signed up your name was 1 of first I looked for . . . you luddite. Your name is getting mentioned, u getting quoted, etc. Get with the program, dude, youre too young to be that out of it. Seriously, stake your ground now. There are a lot of people with a lot less brains than you, taking up an awful lot of air and space. Screw principles, you gotta pay the bills. You think Cronkite wanted to go to tv?
- Jay Paterson
This is funny, Jay. I do appreciate the sentiment. And maybe some day I'll wake up with some desire to tweet. But you know, the way I look at it, the world is getting more than enough of my great deep thoughts; I hardly think anyone needs my haiku-style observations on whatever happens every two hours in the life of the nation. And if I'm already being mentioned and quoted, then why do I need to be there? As for people with less brains than me taking up air space, well, people with less brains than a garden hedge have been doing that on cable TV for 10 years, and the world seems to still be spinning.
Seriously, if there comes a time when I have something important to achieve on twitter, I hope I'll be up to the task, but I'm more a writer than a political prognosticator, and right now it seems to me that a little digital distance is good for the soul.
- Matt Bai
on August 2, 2009
I have long been a reader of your columns in the Times Magazine and
appreciate your work. I write to you today about your most recent piece in
this Sunday's issue.
You touch on, I think, a crucial and largely under-appreciated
epiphenomenon of the ever-advancing digital "revolution." This "shuffle," this unwavering focus on more tasks than can be reasonably managed, the compulsion for constant background narrative, attention paid to only those subjects of immediate interest to each, the self-initiated divorce from chronology have all fostered our inborn desire to, and granted a dull constant buzz of reassurance to us that we are right to want - and are able - to be in control at every instant. When such a widespread social self-delusion is manifest only in our popular culture, it is lamentable,but not particularly pernicious. When it has infected our politics, it can be outright deleterious to national interests. I am sure you know this.
That said, I hope you would agree that this is a subject worthy of more attention than could be given to it in the space you were allotted for this piece. I wish to ask, quite simply, do you have any plans to write more expansively on the subject? I realize that you are largely a commentator on Democratic Party issues, and this is a problem that concerns the wider society, but perhaps it might be of enough interest to spur you to consider.
In any event, I would like to hear what you have to say on the subject.
- Peter Marino
Thanks. (Peter is referring to my column on the "shuffle president," which you can read in the archives section of the site, of course.) I have to say, I am not chiefly an observer of the Democratic Party! That was one book--I write on politics generally, and other things occasionally. That said, I doubt I'll explore this in much more detail, since it's more an academic field of study than a magazine piece. Here's what I will do, though: defy the trend, stand in the way of history's locomotive, and write character-driven, sequential stories and books for as long as people will let me. I'm not built for a shuffling world.
- Matt Bai
on July 20, 2009
Some technical problems
If you're looking at my archives on this site, you might notice that I seem to have written my latest pieces in December of 1969. This would be quite a feat, since I was only 1 at the time. Actually, I've recently had to do a software update and some things are going haywire. So please excuse our appearance while renovations are completed, as they say....thanks.
