Just finished a taped interview with Michele Norris of "All Things Considered." Listen for it this afternoon — maybe. At last word Michele says today’s broadcast isn’t set yet. I’m betting I don’t make it if they have anything else that’s decent at all. I’m not exactly at the top of my game today.
To give you a taste of it, here is a clip that undoubtedly represents the worst video I have ever shot. I learned two things this morning:
- It’s very easy to forget you’re holding a camera, and that it’s turned on, when you are the interviewee rather than the interviewer.
- Obviously, I talk with my hands.
Anyway, that was my third radio thing this morning — I did Andy Gobeil’s show over at ETV studios and a phone thing with a station out of Little Rock, Ark. The Arkansas station wanted to hear about Mike Huckabee. I told them they should be telling me.
I’m back at my normal job now, for the rest of the day. I’ll blog as I can. Getting a little tired, though. I’ve got a lousy cold. Here we are with this historic opportunity — with South Carolina in position to make a major difference in both parties’ nominations — and today I’m sort of wishing this were the 27th.
Oh, one last thing — Michele mentioned reading my blog when she first contacted me. So did her sound woman, Andrea Hsu, when I met her today. Once again, I’m struck by the fact that, in spite of the much-lower readership numbers (a fraction of a fraction), the blog is cited more and more by people who contact me. So maybe this thing does have an impact, and isn’t just a useless symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
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I think a lot of people found it when your paper’s endorsement of Senator McCain went up, along with its video. (That’s when I found it, anyway.)
Speaking of McCain, there’s an interesting piece in the Times (of London) about “McCain Derangement Syndrome“.
Well, I got bumped, and I don’t blame them a bit:
Actually, I had forgotten about it after my last communication with Michele late this morning. We’re having a bad day, and I’m still a long way from leaving tonight. And I feel like total crud, Ferris.
Excellent point about the blogs being a reference station for the national press. But can the national press learn and report something about the unique regional character and sensibilities of each primary and caucus contest?
Too often some in the national press corps try to gauge public opinion in one particular state under the assumption that voters throughout the country have pretty much the same concerns and are not influenced by their own local, state and regional historical legacies.
So in New Hampshire, too many in the press didn’t pay attention to the fact that the Abigail Adams legacy is no joke and no simple bit of historical trivia in New England, for the “feminism” in that part of the country is in its more general sense a sturdy, determined and thorough (Thoreau pun intended) philosophical attachment to the basic equality of women from the earliest colonial times in and around Boston. And New England’s feminism, it seems to me, crosses party lines more readily than perhaps elsewhere, connecting both liberal and conservastive threads in the patchwork of American political philosophy.
Thus a state like Maine, whose Democratic senator, Edmund Muskie, was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1968, has sent such prominent Republican women to the U.S. Senate as Margaret Chase Smith and Olympia Snowe. Thus, Hillary Clinton, as not only a former First Lady but also the junior senator from the state of New York, benefitted from a large turnout of what could be called “the Abigail Adams vote,” which is an up-to-date, viable and influential component of New England politics from New York State to Maine.
So now we should consider an important question for us who live and work in the Carolinas: is the national press corps going to take any of South Carolina’s unique political and historical insights, conditions and outlooks back to their big-city print and broadcast news outlets so the rest of the country can learn something besides who finished first and second in this weekend’s and next weekend’s Republican and Democratic primaries?
Those of us who have called Charlotte home across the Carolina line to the north are counting on our friends in the Palmetto State to let all candidates and correspondents alike know that the best-traveled avenues leading to meaningful political rallies and conferences are indeed two-way streets and not one-way expressway lanes!
Hey Brad,
You could be the head of an advertisement agency. That video clip looks like AT&T’s “shakey cam” commercial that was aired a decade ago.
This e-mail came in over the weekend: