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Joe!

Car & Driver:

C/D: Any cars recently zing you?
JB: My brother has one of those 556-hp [CTS-V] Cadillacs with a manual. He brought it down for me to eat my heart out. So I got in. I have a driveway that’s about 1700 feet long. I knew the Secret Service wouldn’t let me drive it outside. So I jumped on that sucker and laid rubber. ?A great feeling. That thing could probably beat my Corvette.
C/D: Sadly, we must ask about the Onion story. While shirtless, have you ever washed a 1981 Pontiac Trans Am in your driveway?
JB: [Laughing] You think I’d drive a Trans Am? I have been in my bathing suit in my driveway and not only washed my Goodwood-green 1967 Corvette but also simonized it. ?At least the Onion should have had me washing a Trans Am convertible. I love convertibles.

JB = Our VP, Joe Biden, car guy.

I love convertibles, too.

A Sort of Homecoming

I'm much less of a U2 fan than I once was, but on a whim I bought the remastered version of "The Unforgettable Fire" last night. I bought it on cassette, back in prehistoric times, and lost interest in the band before CDs came out. So, I've never heard it on anything but crappy tape through a long series of crappy tape decks.

"Bad" just popped up on the iPod, and it's truly an amazing difference from what I remember. There are all kinds of sounds in there that I have no recollection of hearing: various seagull guitar sounds, a tambourine occasionally shaking throughout the verses, a high-pitched tinkling sound on the strings in the second verse, a strange stereo echo on a ride cymbal in the second half, etc.. I had to check to make sure it wasn't a remix of some kind. Sounds great, even in MP3. Most impressive. Makes me wonder about the "Boy" and "Under A Blood Red Sky" remasters... I still won't touch anything after "Rattle And Hum", but it's nice to hear the old stuff again...

Cassettes really were shit, weren't they?

A fancy word for betrayal

The Economist Nov, 2010:

LOOKING back, the rout seemed inevitable. As the president himself has conceded: “All the voters knew was that they didn’t yet feel more prosperous or more secure; there was too much fighting in Washington and we were in charge; and the Democrats were for big government.” Another lesson: “You can have good policy without good politics, but you can’t give people good government without both.” And another: “Because I had been preoccupied with the work of the presidency, I hadn’t organised, financed and forced the Democrats to adopt an effective national counter-message”. And another: henceforth, in mid-terms, “the side without a national message would sustain unnecessary losses”.

So said Bill Clinton in his memoirs when discussing the mid-term rout of the Democrats in 1994. Bill and Hillary were in fact much more shaken up than this. In her account of the story ("For Love of Politics", Random House), Sally Bedell Smith says they reacted to the 1994 results "with a combination of bewilderment, self-pity, recrimination, anger, rationalisation and denial". Bill summoned the political guru Dick Morris for advice, and Morris found Bill to be "surprisingly sullen and withdrawn from the staff that he bitterly referrred to as 'the children who helped me get elected'". Morris then worked secretly with the president, under the code name "Charlie", planning the strategy that came to be known as triangulation that was eventually to get the better of the Republicans and secure Bill's re-election two years later.

I rehearse this ancient history only to put into perspective the current spate of commentary on whether Barack Obama has it within him to react to his own mid-term setback by doing his own version of triangulation. Bill Clinton grabbed the Republicans' most moderate policies and recast them as his own: a balanced budget, welfare reform, smaller and more efficient government, deregulation. That has fed an exaggerated perception that Mr Clinton was an opportunist willing to discard his values and turn on a dime. Haley Barbour said at the time that the president "shares with the hummingbird the amazing ability to turn 180 degrees in a wink". George Stephanopoulos called triangulation "a fancy word for betrayal". And yet history records that Clinton went on to achieve many things once he had won his duel with Newt Gingrich's Republican House.

Pulpit Fail

Throughout the 1960s, public opinion polls indicated that 45 to 60 percent of Americans felt that the government was spending too much money on space exploration. Even after Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind,” only a lukewarm 53 percent of the public believed that the historic event had been worth the cost.