Barack Obama has brought glamour back to American politics--to his obvious political advantage. But glamour of all sorts is a beautiful illusion. As I write in an article for The Atlantic's website, however, Obama's glamour "also poses special problems for the candidate and, if he succeeds, for the country."
Though he never uses the word glamour, Jonathan Rauch has a thoughtful take on the same phenomenon.
And in a pre-Oscar story, the WaPost's Robin Givhan did a masterful job of separating glamour from other celebrity attributes. She concluded the piece with a look at political glamour, including more than a hint of her own susceptibility to Obama's spell:
In the political world, Barack Obama has glamour. Bill Clinton has charisma. And Hillary Clinton has an admirable work ethic. Bill Clinton could convince voters that he felt their pain. Hillary Clinton reminds them detail by detail of how she would alleviate it. Glamour has a way of temporarily making you forget about the pain and just think the world is a beautiful place of endless possibilities.
Ronald Reagan evoked glamour. His white-tie inaugural balls and morning-coat swearing-in were purposefully organized to bring a twinkle back to the American psyche. George W. Bush has charisma, a.k.a. the likability factor, although it does not appear to be helping his approval rating now. Still, he remains a back-slapper and bestower of nicknames.
Charisma is personal. Glamour taps into a universal fairy tale. It's unconcerned with the nitty-gritty. Instead, it celebrates the surface gloss. And sometimes, a little shimmer can be hard to resist.
I wrote about glamour vs. charisma here.
Finally, I highly recommend Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father
. It's well-written, wasn't conceived as a campaign book, and provides unusual insights into the Obama's psychology and view of the world.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 03, 2008 • Comments
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 20, 2008 • Comments
It's not so great. From Aiming for Grace, the blog I quoted in my Atlantic column.
The more I think about the sorry state of health care aesthetics, the more I think part of the problem is that we have an "acute care" model of medicine in a world where chronic diseases are increasingly the rule. If you only go to the doctor occasionally, you won't care nearly as much about how things look as you will if you're spending a large part of your life in clinics of various sorts. The same is true of medical devices. A diabetic who uses a pump all the time for life will benefit far more from something that looks good than someone who has a one-time, or even short-term, encounter with some kind of medical gizmo.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 20, 2008 • Comments
Drew Carey's latest Reason.tv video makes the case for allowing markets in kidneys. It also reveals what yours truly looks like in a wig.
The video is excellent, even though all of us look pretty awful. The only thing I'd fault it for is not making the point that--I cannot say this often enough--EVEN IF EVERY SINGLE ELIGIBLE CADAVER KIDNEY WERE DONATED, THERE WOULD NOT BE ENOUGH. This shortage cannot be fixed by changing the law to override families' wishes and turning everyone who hasn't explicitly said no into a deceased donor. All that would do is sow further mistrust of the organ transplant system, particularly among (calling Barack Obama) already-suspicious African Americans. (Even if you don't care about individual rights, Michele Goodwin's book Black Markets is extremely convincing on this point.)
If the 1984 law criminalizing organ sales were simply repealed, here's what I think would happen. In the short term, neither public (Medicare, Medicaid) nor private insurers would cover the cost of paying vendors. Many hospitals would not accept them either, just as many until recently would not accept donors who learned about their recipients from media accounts or sites like MatchingDonors.com. But some transplant centers would accept vendors, assuming they passed other medical and psychological tests. Recipients would have to pay out of their own pockets or perhaps with the help of charitable institutions or community fund-raising drives. This short-term situation would indeed benefit affluent kidney patients the most. But by taking these patients off the waiting list for cadaver kidneys, it would also help poorer people, just not as much.
Over the long run, however, we could expect payments for kidneys (and possibly liver lobes) to become as much a part of the normal transplant process as payments for surgery, anesthesia, or immunosuppressant drugs. Instead of making a deal with an individual patient, someone who wanted to sell a kidney would contract with a transplant center, which would screen vendors and match them with recipients. (Since screening is expensive, one proposal is to have a national or regional standard for "qualified vendors," so that someone who didn't pass muster couldn't just go from hospital to hospital.) Insurers, whether private or governmental, would establish the prices they were willing to pay, with, I would hope, a strong desire to find the market-clearing price that would eliminate the waiting list. In the video, I make the point that since the federal government already pays for everyone's dialysis, even a price of $90,000 a kidney would save the taxpayers money.
In the meantime, the best hope for kidney patients is a much stronger emphasis on living donors, including better matching systems to take advantage of "paired donation." One such effort is the National Kidney Registry, which was founded by the father of a young kidney recipient after he and other family members proved incompatible as donors to his daughter. The National Kidney Registry seeks to facilitate living donation by creating "donor chains" and covering some of living donors' expenses. The registry's goal: "Every living donor in the world will pass through a common registry to be matched with the most compatible recipient, providing over 90 percent of the world's kidney recipients with well-matched kidneys, extending the functioning life of these transplanted kidneys by an average of ten or more years over the current average while simultaneously reducing the deceased donor waiting lists."
Here's an inspiring story from a kidney donor.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 19, 2008 • Comments
My latest Atlantic column was actually proposed long before my cancer diagnosis, inspired in part by this old blog post. But I took advantage of my personal experience in writing it.
I'm sitting in a mauve vinyl recliner facing a mauve laminate counter and cabinets. On the countertop are a couple of candy jars, five peacock feathers leaning around a black wall phone, a small plant that may or may not be real, three boxes of medical-exam gloves, and a radio tuned to smooth jazz. A curling five-by-seven-inch photo of the participants in a 2000 fund-raising walk hangs below a sign warning guests not to use cell phones. Someone has pinned three teddy bears to a small strip of cork on the grayish-white wall. "I'm gonna be Okay," says the slogan on the orange bear's chest. The yellow bear wears a blue scrub outfit with an 800 number and the slogan for a cancer organization. On the white bear, hot-pink embroidery declares, "Cancer sucks."
Thank God for intravenous Benadryl, which knocks me out in just a few minutes. The cancer treatment is state-of-the-art, but the decor is decidedly behind the times.
Over the past decade, most public places have gotten noticeably better looking. We've gone from a world in which Starbucks set a cutting-edge standard for mass-market design to a world in which Starbucks establishes the bare minimum. If your establishment can't come up with an original look, customers expect at least some sleek wood fixtures, nicely upholstered chairs, and faux–Murano glass pendant lights.
Unless, that is, your establishment is a doctor's office, medical clinic, or hospital. Mounting clinical evidence suggests that better design can improve patients' health—not to mention their morale. But the one-sixth of the American economy devoted to health care hasn't kept up with the rest of the economy's aesthetic imperative, leaving patients to wonder, as a diabetes blogger puts it, "why hospital clinic interiors have to feel so much like a Motel 6 from the '70s."
Read the whole thing here. Thanks to all the readers who sent in thoughts about health care design in response to my earlier post. Here are a couple of photos of the imaging waiting room mentioned later in the article. Lovely, huh?
And, from the latest issue of Healthcare Design magazine, here's an article about how a simple (non-aesthetic) design improvement can substantially improve patient well-being.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 19, 2008 • Comments
Wired.com tells you how. (I wrote about the profusion of fonts here.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 19, 2008 • Comments
In chapter five of The Substance of Style (excerpted here), I grappled with a fundamental problem of urban living: the conflict between establishing or preserving a neighborhood's look and feel and allowing individual homeowners to build to suit their own desires. There is no completely satisfactory solution. This Dallas Morning News article demonstrates the particular difficulties posed by trying to establish new rules, even in the best-case scenario where they're fairly general.
The signs, pro and con, have come down, and neighbors who didn't speak for months are reaching out to one another, trying to put the warfare over building restrictions behind them. Still, there are lingering bad feelings, tension as people pass each other on the sidewalks, and a question from both sides about whether the struggle was worth it.
"The ugliest McMansion in the world could be built, and it wouldn't rip neighborhoods apart like this process does," said Josh Doherty, who with his wife, Dawn, and others successfully fought the so-called Maplewood overlay.
Overlay is shorthand for what the city has officially dubbed a "neighborhood stabilization overlay," a zoning device that planners hoped would end unrest over new construction in established neighborhoods.
Instead of peace, overlays in many areas have sparked neighborhood civil wars.
Conceived in 2005, the idea was to give older, established neighborhoods a way to preserve their scale in places where lots have become more valuable than homes and giant new houses have sprouted up, dwarfing their neighbors.
But what resulted in many cases are knock-down, drag-out fights that land before the City Council with the nasty thud of neighbors at each other's throats. [Thanks to reader Tom McKendree for the tip.]
Meanwhile, in my own neighborhood, the folks who lobbied to have the duplexes across the street declared landmarks (discussed in this Atlantic column) are fighting to stop the owner of one of the buildings from adding on two new apartments. While the original plan to tear down three buildings and replace them with new condos did not require a zoning variance to alter setbacks--hence the resort to landmarking--this more-modest plan would. All my neighbors are signing petitions against the change and there's no argument I can make that would convince them the change is in their interest, because it isn't. Forbid any new construction and we preserve our nice view and keep the housing stock tight and our condo values inflated. But, of course, if the same rules and attitudes had prevailed in 1974, we'd have no condos to begin with.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 19, 2008 • Comments
Barack Obama's speech on race in America was remarkable: simultaneously honest and diplomatic, personal and historical. It was empathetic and sought to inspire empathy in its audience, not for Obama but for Other Americans. It also gave evidence, for the first time since Ronald Reagan, of a presidential candidate with an active mind and eloquent voice engaged with big questions. In the mountain of commentary that followed, I found Robert George's reaction most similar to my own. To Robert's comments on the speech's bravery, I'll add that it is most unusual to hear a Democratic politician recall that one of the great barriers to black advancement during Jim Crow was that "blacks were excluded from unions." (What's next, a denunciation of Woodrow Wilson?)
The speech was not just a meditation on race, however. It was also a campaign speech by a candidate with particular policy views, views that place him well to the left of the political spectrum. With lines like "this time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit," the speech offered no place in its vision of racial concord for Americans who support open markets, economic dynamism, and limited government. In a serious meditation on race, as opposed to a campaign speech, that's a problem. (Besides to "ship it overseas" is, in fact, just another way of letting "someone who doesn't look like you...take your job." Obama's public empathy doesn't extend to Chinese or Indians. Megan McArdle is very good on this.)
Finally, on a historical note, the speech made me think of another famous oration, Frederick Douglass's 1852 address What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? And it made me wish that Edith Efron had lived to hear and discuss it.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 19, 2008 • Comments
Taken at a speech in my South Carolina hometown, this photo appears in last week's issue of Newsweek, leading off a package of articles on Hillary Clinton's appeal to women. The woman in the back row is my mother. She likes Hillary and found her impressive. But she voted for Obama. [Photo: Getty Images/Win McNamee.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 19, 2008 • Comments
And The Onion has appropriate video.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 10, 2008 • Comments
