Cash for Clunkers: P.J. O'Rourke Told You So

“You are going to be amazed at the number of clunkers in this country if you’re getting cash for clunkers," prophesied P. J. O’Rourke when he spoke at The Commonwealth Club on June 11. "You think there are a lot of clunkers now? I mean, I mow my lawn and I can find three. They’re going to be coming out of the woodwork, from under every deck, from behind every barn.”

And yesterday, less than a week after the Cash for Clunkers program began, there were talks in Congress of suspending the program because it had become too popular, using up its allocated $1 billion much more quickly than expected. But the program is still going strong after the U.S. House of Representatives voted today to give an emergency $2 billion to the program.

The program offers people up to $4,500 in rebates if they trade in their gas-guzzler for a more efficient vehicle. However, the real goal behind this legislation was not to help the environment, but rather to boost the struggling auto industry. Whether the program’s allocated budget is used up in 6 days or 6 months, the goal is still reached. So it seems the focus should be less on suspending a flawed program than figuring out how to fund a successful one.

Maybe Congress could invite O’Rourke to join the discussion, since he seems to enjoy talking about the number of clunkers out there. “I’ll bet people will be smuggling clunkers across the Mexican border,” O’Rourke told The Club, “and I know they have a lot of clunkers in Mexico.”

--By Camille Koué

Kinsley On Journalism, Not The Economy

COLUMNIST HAS HARSH WORDS FOR OWNER OF CHICAGO TRIBUNE

You really could not expect two journalism lions like Michael Kinsley and Phil Bronstein to not talk about the state of newspapers, could you?

Kinsley, the purveyor of nearly every medium of journalism, spoke to The Commonwealth Club Tuesday about the demise of newspapers while finding optimism in journalism's future online, in a conversation moderated by the editor-at-large of the San Francisco Chronicle.

With fresh news that Kinsley's old boss during his stint on the editorial pages at the Los Angeles Times filed for bankruptcy, the topic was on the minds of both.

Kinsley's contentious stay at the L.A. Times occurred among infighting with the new owner, the Tribune Company, and a radical and unsuccessful idea to allow readers to make additions to editorials using technology made famous by Wikipedia. In his conversation with Bronstein, Kinsley did not mask his anger towards Zell, who purchased the Tribune media empire two years after Kinsley left the Los Angeles Times.

“I was prepared until today to think that Sam Zell wasn't totally evil,” said Kinsley before adding, “I think Zell should be taken out and shot.”

Kinsley criticized the Tribune's decision to put ownership of the company under employee stock holders, while noting many of the former employees offered buyouts are now unsecured creditors since the bankruptcy.

Some of the more thought-provoking moments of the hour-long program were Kinsley's view of the future of his craft. He does not believe that newspaper companies will die, but newspapers will, and he thinks the key to the future may be discovered by a no-name.

“It will probably be a company that nobody has heard of. Somebody is going to crack this nut,” said Kinsley. He believes whichever successful model that arises will ultimately be replicated or bought by a larger company like the New York Times.

It might be wise to heed Kinsley's advice when it comes to imagining the future of journalism and the internet; Kinsley is about the closest person to a sage of cyberspace. In 1996, he founded Slate, the web's first online news magazine. He did note that some of his ideas were a bit conventional in hindsight.

Initially, he conceived the site's content to be printed weekly similar to a magazine, even including page numbers.

“The conventions of print have been in place for centuries and to the point that you don't even think about,” said Kinsley, “The internet is starting to develop some conventions like that, so that you don't have to be Gutenberg to start a publication.”

At one point, in reference to a recent Time column where he wondered whether there were too many blogs, one audience member jokingly asked whether he was also against the printing press. He said he was not and said the piece was a bad attempt at humor and reiterated his belief in the future of blogging.

“Something like that is where this whole thing is going to end up,” said Kinsley, “It's probably going to evolve in some ways to the whole blogging world where amateurs sitting in their boxer shorts opining. It might not be so terrible.”

When the discussion turned to economic matters, of which Kinsley was expected to speak, he said “I don't think anything that has happened certainly so far really threatens capitalism. Capitalism is here to stay.”

With Congress immersed in talk of bailing out the automotive industry, Kinsley wondered why until the bankruptcy of the Tribune Company no one has called for assistance of the newspaper industry, and he ridiculed cable news talking heads (of which he was one once, as the liberal side of CNN's Crossfire) who are clueless on the financial crisis.

I think it is very funny to watch all these shows during our current financial crisis and you'll find some funny stuff there,” said Kinsley, “They don't have any idea and I don't either, and to hear them, you would think, they were masters of derivatives and how the auto industry works.”

FDR Called for the Rights of the Individual; Will Obama Do the Same?

FDR'S FAMOUS COMMONWEALTH CLUB SPEECH REVERBERATES TODAY

President-elect Barack Obama has not saved the economy yet, but his victory last month is going a long way toward saving the publishing industry.

Doris Kearns Goodwin's two-year-old book Team of Rivals has becoming a bestseller on the heels of countless references to it and Obama's desire to create the same open-ended discussion in his own cabinet. (Listen to Kearns Goodwin discuss the book at The Commonwealth Club.) Of course, newspapers and magazines around the country couldn't keep enough copies on newsstands with the visage of Obama during the days after the election.

Now, it's all about making the link between the Depression-era beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency and Obama's today.

One of the better and most specific books concerning our current period of economic upheaval and presidential transition is Jonathan Alter's The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.

Alter posits that FDR's common jibe of being a "traitor to his class" was born out of his battle with polio. This debilitating illness forced him to gain an understanding with those less fortunate. It could be said that Obama's background and his fight with race in America would allow for the same empathy.

One interesting chapter in the book details how FDR broke convention tradition by accepting the nomination the day after. Though flying by aircraft was not particularly safe in 1932, FDR flew to Chicago for the mere spectacle of such arrival. Recall how Obama, on short notice, chose to accept the nomination in an 80,000-seat football stadium instead of at the convention hall and packed nearly 100,000 into Chicago's Grant Park on election night.

But it is one of FDR's most famous speeches that reveals a plausible connection between the two leaders.

On September 23, 1932, he gave what Alter calls "a dividing line in his political evolution." during a speech at The Commonwealth Club of California. The speech ranks as one of the club's most famous moments. (Read the entire speech here.)

The address has been characterized as un-Roosevelt-like in its clarity and bluntness. Alter says this was because the speech was barely read over beforehand by FDR; therefore, the candidate was unable to "sand the edges and apply his usual caution."

The Commonwealth Club speech is now seen as the first clear rationale behind the New Deal and, more important, redefined the idea of the individual. Some of FDR's rhetoric seems pedestrian today, yet it was revolutionary to a country set in an economic free fall and wallowing in self-doubt.

Every man has a right to life; and this means that he has also a right to make a comfortable living. He may by sloth or crime decline to exercise that right; but it may not be denied him. We have no actual famine or death; our industrial and agricultural mechanism can produce enough and to spare. Our government formal and informal, political and economic, owes to every one an avenue to possess himself of a portion of that plenty sufficient for his needs, through his own work.

University of Chicago professors Jane Dailey and David Nirenberg bring the speech and the current state of our financial atmosphere into perspective in an article in Dissent magazine from last September.

As we watch (at current estimates) more than a trillion dollars in collective savings disappear into the whirlpool that was once Wall Street, we are already hearing calls for such restrictions and regulations. These calls are not misplaced, but they are not enough. We also need what Roosevelt provided three-quarters of a century ago: a politically convincing and principled way of imagining a relationship between the economic and political rights of the individual and those of the collective, which he called the “economic constitutional order.”

They go on to urge this simple bit of advice: "In order to know what we want to regulate or whom we have to bailout, we first need to know what and whom we want to protect."