flights

Edward Tufte famously declared that PowerPoint is evil, and in my life as a consultant, I’ve witnessed quite a bit of love and hate directed at the ol’ ppt. OK, maybe not love per se, but you’d think so from the application’s sheer ubiquity in all manner of pitches, strategies and summaries.

It’s a sign of confidence to present without PowerPoint, and many kudos are laid upon the rare folks who can stand in front of a room and communicate sans slides, charts, bullets or script.

Obama does this. Much is made of how eloquent he is, and it’s worth emphasizing that he often speaks without even so much as a note card. Even when he stands behind a podium, he never looks down.

But now, as we find ourselves in the thick of the presidential race, and silly talk of flag pins and tire gauges is starting to give way to headier discussions of the economy and energy policy, maybe it’s time for a little PowerPoint.

As the candidates argue about the efficacy of offshore drilling – one saying it won’t affect gas prices for a decade or two or perhaps at all, and the other saying it will bring down prices in a few months – it’s nothing but two guys arguing until someone busts out some data.

When Obama talks about the economic and national security impacts of importing so much of our oil from questionable dictators, it’s nothing but words until you actually hear factoids like…

• Enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world’s energy needs for a full year.
• We send $2 billion every 24 hours to foreign countries to buy nearly 70 percent of the oil we use every day.

Those, by the way, came from Al Gore’s recent “Generational Challenge to Repower America” speech. I use Al Gore as an example because he won a Academy Award for a PowerPoint presentation. An Academy Award. For a PowerPoint presentation.

Clearly, you can’t fault the medium for the crap that you normally see in PowerPoint.

Remember Ross Perot running for president in 1992? He produced the first-ever infomercials for a presidential campaign. He didn’t use PowerPoint, but he showed us lots of charts and graphs. He was dismissed by many as a cartoon and a crank, but he got nearly 20% of the vote. That’s nearly unheard-of for a third-party candidate.

Bottom line is, the candidates are good at spewing positions and opinions, and they may think that people have no patience for the nitty gritty. But I think they’re wrong. I believe the first candidate who can effectively illustrate his opinions, who can bolster his positions with facts and figures packaged as delicious bite-sized morsels will take a huge leap in the polls.

In a word: compromise.

Now, compromise is often a good thing. I’m all for bi-partisanship. I want a candidate and a president who’s truly willing to look at all sides of an issue and accept that the other party’s point of view might be the right one. I don’t want a candidate who simply panders to the left or the right, and I actually appreciate Obama’s willingness to buck many members of his own party with his recent vote on the FISA bill, as an example.

I’m all for having “no red states and no blue states, but only the United States.”

But then there’s compromise that just seems spineless in a particularly Democrat kind of way, and that’s what I feel like I witnessed this week.

Barack Obama recently took a few steps back from his stance against expanding offshore oil drilling, saying:

If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well-thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage – I don’t want to be so rigid that we can’t get something done.

This is a compromise that seems transparently political. Obama’s lead over McCain has all but evaporated over the last week, and polls indicate that the candidates’ opposing views on oil drilling is a key factor. Obama’s move toward the Republican position on oil drilling, therefore, seems like a calculated attempt to neutralize McCain in this one area where he seems to have shown some strength, rather than a sincere effort to reach bi-partisan consensus. It is, “the same old politics” as Obama himself might say.

The problem with this particular compromise is that Obama has professed to agree with virtually all the experts on this issue (including spokesmen from the major oil companies) who say that expanding offshore drilling will have no effect on fuel prices until at least 2017, and little effect even then. This is the truth, and Obama knows it.

So this compromise feels political. It feels like pandering.

It takes quite a bit of courage for a candidate to stand up for the truth when it means telling people what they don’t want to hear, and Obama has made himself out to be the rare Democrat who has that kind of courage. Obama should tell people the truth. He should make a vigorous, passionate case for the truth.

The Republicans have succeeded in clouding the truth on this issue, and Obama’s response should be to clear away the clouds, to shine a bright light on the truth. Instead, he has chosen to accept the clouds.

My belief is that this kind of compromise is what has killed the Democratic Party. When you compromise on everything, then you stand for everything. And when you stand for everything, you stand for nothing.

And when you stand for nothing, then you don’t really give voters an alternative to what the other party offers.

And come election time, if you don’t offer an alternative to what the other party offers, then the people who don’t want to vote for the other party will simply stay home.

RELATED: Why the Democrats will lose in ‘08 – Part 1

“Hillary can’t win, and Obama can’t beat her.”

This seems to be the bottom line in the endless slog toward choosing the Democrat who will run against McCain this fall.

Obama’s platform is “change,” so it’s ironic that nothing changed in the six weeks between Super Tuesday and the Pennsylvania primary.

The American people are certainly craving change, starving for it, so why can’t Obama close the deal? Is he offering the wrong kind of change? Too much change? Too little? Too unspecific?

I admit I’ve sort of stopped paying attention to the Democratic race because frankly the media coverage is painful (all bowling scores, flag pins and other sensationalist trivia), and the candidates themselves seem intent on wallowing in the muck. But when I was more actively following the campaigns of Obama and Clinton, my impression was consistent with the early primary results: Obama was incandescent, dynamic, something new. Clinton was pedestrian, wonky (not to mention cool, ruthless, shrewish).

Obama’s “change” has a lot to do with rejecting the politics of polarization. Obama’s message is about hope and unity (“yes WE can”). When the American people first heard his words, they resonated, and he performed well in the early races. The idea of unity (“not red states and blue states… but the UNITED States”) is powerful, and it’s what Americans want.

But it’s not enough, and that’s what Hillary recognized. That’s why she has been so effective in the last couple of months.

The last eight years have certainly been polarizing, but they have also been characterized by incompetence, arrogance, secrecy and dishonesty. Obama has got the honesty issue in the bag, and he’s effectively positioned himself as the candidate who can unify the country. But Hillary has done a much better job on the issue of competence. On openness and humility it’s probably a toss-up.

Americans want all of this, and so the two candidates – together – sum up the change Americans are craving. That’s the real reason the voters are split almost down the middle. For Hillary to have any hope of securing the nomination (and the presidency), she needs to convince America that she is honest, open and can be a unifying force (not gonna happen). For Obama to win, he needs to convince America that he is no less competent than Clinton.

I’ve just been reading some Jeff Jarvis’ recent posts about Senator Obama (like this one), and it’s a clear reminder that even a lot of smart people will ultimately cast their vote based on a general gut assessment of the candidates.

I don’t know where Jarvis sits on the political spectrum, but he dissects and parses Obama’s speech along all the same lines as the stream of other conservatives who criticized it. Jarvis makes it very clear that he doesn’t want to give Obama the benefit of the doubt – which is fair. But like the other pundits who criticized Obama’s speech, Jarvis takes some pains to manufacture the doubt.

The bottom line seems to be that people who see the world in very black and white terms (not speaking of race now) didn’t like Obama’s speech. Black and white thinkers need to push things toward one end of the spectrum or the other – a thing is either right or wrong, good or evil, us or them. These are the “J” types in Myers-Briggs. They wanted Obama to disown or denounce pastor Wright, because Wright is clearly a wrong-headed person.

Maybe conservatives tend to be “J” types, because conservatives tend to frame things this way. Tax cuts are good. Illegal immigrants are bad.  There’s an axis of evil, and these countries are part of it. Black and white thinkers don’t appreciate people who push things toward the middle, who try to highlight complexities and nuances. They think these people are weak, equivocating, slippery, untrustworthy.

Gray area thinkers are the “P” types in Myers-Briggs. We (yep, I’m a “P”) see black and white thinkers as crude, simple-minded, judgmental, prejudiced. We were exuberant in our praise of Obama’s speech because we’ve had eight years of Bush. Yes, we’ve had it. Had it with his brand of black and white thinking. It was refreshing to hear a politician talk about something in honest terms and not try to boil it down to right and wrong.

Obama loves a man who is deeply flawed. He has striven to understand the nature and origin of the man’s flaws.

Who among us is not flawed? Who among us hasn’t loved someone who is flawed? I don’t know about you “J” types out there, but we “P” folks understand that everyone is flawed.

My stepfather had a mean streak in him. He used to call me a “fag” (among other things) when he got angry, because I liked to draw and paint and cook, and because one of my high school buddies sported an earring. He pushed my mom around a couple of times. On the other hand, he taught me a lot, gave my family a lot.

He was a guy who’d had a really rough life in some ways, a guy who’d been deeply hurt and betrayed a few times. Understanding this about my stepfather helped me dismiss his verbal abuse and put it in its own box, so to speak. Should I have dismissed (or disowned) him and not just his abuse?

That’s not how love and family and friendships work. Anyone who thinks these things are black and white is kidding himself.

I didn’t see Obama’s landmark speech today, but I read the transcript. I admit I was moved by it, and although there was certainly a practical or tactical element to it – in the context of his presidential chances – I think it’s important to look past that and consider his actual words.

I wish CNN agreed. Unfortunately, the whole focus of their coverage was to discuss whether the speech would work, and by “work” they meant only whether it would put to rest questions around Obama’s association with pastor Jeremiah Wright. They used Rush Limbaugh’s response of all things, to raise doubts, as if Limbaugh’s response wasn’t determined before the speech was even made, as if Limbaugh at this point is anything more than a washed up, irrelevant joke on the outer fringes of the media, preaching to an ever-smaller choir.

They didn’t talk about whether the speech would “work” in the sense of whether it will remind us that individuals are complex, that the issue of race is complex, that none of this is black and white – in any sense of the phrase. They didn’t talk about whether the speech would “work” in the sense of whether it will help us shift our attention to more concrete and ultimately solvable issues like the economy, healthcare and the environment – where people of all races share the same concerns.

It’s bullshit cynical coverage CNN, and you will lose more and more of your young audience as long as you pollute the airwaves with this kind of crap. No amount of fancy touchscreen infographics and talk of “liveblogging” will change that fact.

File this under “random.” I’m not sure what to make of this, but as I was listening to the speeches of the various candidates after the caucus results were in, it occurred to me to count the number of times they used various pronouns.

Incidentally, I found no evidence that Fred Thompson actually spoke at all after his third place finish, so I substituted McCain – who was virtually tied with Thompson anyway.

Some things to note: I omitted instances of “you” in the numerous thank yous that started most of the speeches. McCain’s and Romney’s speeches were especially short – less than four minutes each. I believe Obama’s was the longest, although I didn’t time it. The applause he drew throughout certainly made it even longer. His 22 utterances of the second person pronoun was double Romney’s and nearly triple any of the other candidates. Clinton, perhaps not surprisingly, referred to herself quite a bit – using the first person singular more than any other candidate. Edwards – who also gave a long speech – referred to “we” and “us” more than the other candidates. It’s also worth noting that he devoted a significant part of his speech to stories about particular people (using third person pronouns for them).

For that matter, all the candidates used the third person numerous times to refer to family members and associates, to the other candidates and often in abstract references to “Americans” in general, as well as particular groups of American citizens. Initially, I was counting all the third person pronouns too, but the candidates used “they” to refer to such a wide variety of concepts that it became too muddy for my simple analysis.

Anyway, here are some key quotes from the evening:

Obama: “You said the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that’s consumed Washington.”

Edwards: “It’s our responsibility to ensure that we leave America better than we found it; that we give our children a better life than we’ve had.”

Clinton: “I am so ready for the rest of this campaign, and I am so ready to lead.”

Huckabee: “Ladies and gentlemen, I recognize that running for office, it’s not hating those who are in front of us. It’s loving those who are behind us.”

Romney: “We love you. We’re going to miss you for a few months, but we’re coming back. We’ll never forget what you’ve done for us. We love Iowa.”

McCain: “We can feel the momentum that — the same kind of momentum we felt in 2000. I’m very confident with a strong positive finish here that we’re going to win here in New Hampshire.”