The Georgia Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson party last night was a blast, especially with Presidential hopeful, pretty boy John Edwards offering rock star, red carpet glitz to the evening. (And yes, he is adorable in person, but Jon Flack is right, the hair is overrated.)
Heck, Edwards’ had TWO drum lines to give him that big ‘ole ATL welcome. And 1,700 gushing fans crushing on him, quite literally, to get the money shot with their camera phones. Working the crowds, Edwards’ charming, tanned face would reveal a flicker of tiredness, then in the blink of an eye, it was gone. You wondered if you’d just imagined such a thing.
Edwards worked the crowd like the champion show-jumper of a lawyer he is. He’s no Bill Clinton; he’s just “too white” to get on that one-of-a-kind wavelength, but Edwards is quite charismatic in his own right, and a beautiful, engaging orator.
Besides Edwards, the entire evening was a Georgia politico and media Who’s Who. I was at the dinner table alongside Jim Galloway of AJC’s Political Insider; bless their hearts, they were live blogging! (Guess I can’t call ‘em old farts now.) Galloway was a seasoned journalist on a mission… to unearth just WHO produced that anti-Whitehead YouTube offering! Blogger Jon Flack of the new Tondee’s Tavern blog sat next to Galloway and fed him tantalizing tidbits, but no names, all night long.
I shot loads of great video myself, asked a question at Edwards’ presser alongside the Big Broadcasting TV guys, and hope to package some of the DV goodies over the weekend for you folks.
My personal highlight? Interviewing Vernon Jones about blogging! Heck, Vernon had more signage there than Edwards. All in all, a fabulous time was had by many Georgia Dems, despite the icky, remora fish lobbyista swarmin’ over the place too. Lordy, do they EVER go away?
Look for good things to come all around with GDP, especially with Martin Matheny running some new communications operations and strategies for them. Their website is really heating-up under his guidance, with blogging too!
Showing posts with label Edwards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Edwards. Show all posts
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Monday, April 23, 2007
The YouTubed Campaign
Here's Joe Trippi, who's now joined the Edwards' campaign, on how YouTube will impact politics and political campaigning. This vid-politics stuff is my crack! Check out PrezVid for more enabling "product." (Full disclosure: I've started the YouTube initiative for the James Marlow for Congress campaign.)
Jeff Jarvis of PrezVid interviews Joe Tripp at the Radio Television News Directors Association/National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas.
Labels:
Edwards,
Georgia politics,
James Marlow,
PrezVid,
Video,
YouTube
Monday, March 26, 2007
Mr. Edwards' Matter
I can't stop thinking about John Edwards' decision to continue his campaign for President with a sick wife to worry about and care for. Warning: I am not going to sugar-coat this blog entry.
I don't know who Edwards thinks he is. Superman I guess. And Elizabeth too. They strike me as people in total denial of the jagged edge of a crossroad they have come to. And maybe their money and the media and wealth and power and fame and burning ambition will carry them through to the end, bitter or otherwise. I just wonder how long anyone can keep up such a super-human facade. Its lifespan is relatively short too, as is a person with cancer in their bones, I'd imagine.
I look at my friend, the one who's always going to be the guy who's wife has cancer, and I just see a lot of anguish in his eyes. Tiredness. He's so burnt right now. Yesterday he had to take his wife back to the hospital. She's not doing so great with her cancer right now. He was hoping to get a nap in yesterday, after his youngest's soccer game, where he looked tired and and tired and more tired. I wanted to put an arm around him at the game to let him know I care so much about him. I really do.
But all the other soccer moms and dads were there watching me, watching everyone, every kid, every parent, like the hawks they are. It wouldn't have "looked right" for the only divorcee around, the single mom in a crowd of such "strong marriages", since we're not exactly a shining star of marital stability, more like a source of marital suspicion, to be making any kinda physical gesture towards the husband of the cancer victim though. So I did nothing. I told him nothing. Against my natural impulse, I withheld affection.
No one says the word "victim", but it lurks out there around every association with this "cancer family" now. You can sense the unspoken pity. I sense it because I feel it within me. I sense all kinds of guilty weirdness, because truth be told, I like him better than her, the one with the actual disease. While wildly unique and fascinating, she isn't exactly the nicest person on the planet, and having cancer certainly hasn't made her any nicer to me. She was kinda mean and bossy and domineering and rude before, when she wasn't busy being totally hospitable and welcoming and fun. Cancer has made her a victim, not poof, suddenly a better person.
But then his wife was in a lot of pain from an infection setting in at the biopsy point, so there goes his one chance for a nap in weeks yesterday; he had to take her back to the hospital, where she'll likely be for another coupla days. And he has to be back up at the crack of dawn for rounds. Sometimes he sees up to 60 kids a day at his practice. He's a pediatrician, and it's exhausting work whether there's cancer or no cancer in the family.
And he comes home now to a sick wife, or from one hospital to another, and home to two very needy, very active youngsters if there is no one to keep them. Luckily for him, there are grandparents and neighbors to call on in such times. But all children are soooo relentlessly needy, mostly needy of their parents' time and love and unwavering devotion and discipline.
I see the neighborhood women practically elbow each other to compete for a "helpful" piece of this neighborly cancer pie, another unspoken phase of expected behaviors associated with cancer, this almost competitive bid to "help out" the family, providing meals and childcare and laundry assistance, etc. Thanks God such impulses do exist, in some people though. Those kind of people in this neighborhood helped me get through my child's horrible injury last year. The most helpful of all was the woman who now has cancer. I simply could not have gotten through the sheer physical demands of a serious injury recovery process without her. It's a rather schizo relationship we have, I admit.
The impulse to help others doesn't really exist in my family. Their defeatism and ineffectualness causes them to feel great feelings, wring hands, gnash teeth with the best of 'em, but to expend actual energy only in disassociating themselves from other people's unpleasant circumstances. None of them, other than my hopelessly ineffectual yet annoyingly loving father, bothered to show up to help me or Ava through that time last year. His idea of helping is to bait me with his racist politics. I struggle daily with the bitter bitter residuals of their glaring absence.
I see the men in the neighborhood do nothing to reach out to the husband of the wife with cancer. Maybe I've missed something, but they do nothing, they organize nothing; they seem to have faded into their jobs, where they all seem to fade away most of the week anyways, or they fade off to their own backyards. Men just... well, fade away in a crisis.
I think of my ex-husband in the hospital after I gave birth to our child, about 10pm the same evening, after having been woken at 2am earlier in the day by me as I commenced a short, efficient, to-the-point labor of only 10 hours, saying to me, "I'm really tired and exhausted. I need to get some sleep! I'll be back in the morning." And off he went to a nice, hospital-free night's sleep, never noticing a thing about me ever again. When I had a miscarriage about a year later, with complications, he never said a word to me, for me or about me, but I could tell he was relieved there would be no more children that his wife would have to get up and feed in the middle of the night, rousting him from his precious sleep and simplistic routine. I couldn't divorce him fast enough.
The men folk (you're more than welcome to cluck at this point and say "Why bless their heart" but not me) merely occasionally, lamely, inquire with stock questions of the women folk, "How are things are going for the family?" I feel like yelling in their mule-ish, dumb faces, "Fuck if I know! Why don't you go ask the dad? He can likely tell you to your socially-retarded face how he's doing. I don't know. But I doubt he's doing really great right now. As if you were able to even express any kind of male-to-male utterance of care and concern for one another. You men just hang about like lumps and do nothing for one another. Oughta ship you all off to Iraq and let you do something useful there."
Cancer in the 'hood hasn't exactly brought out the best in anyone -- yet. It certainly hasn't brought much good to the surface for me. I'm still trying to swim out of an ocean of my own personal anger, polluted with bitterness and self-pity right now. I know I will. I can do this, but the last thing I've felt is strong or courageous or up to supporting anyone's run for the Presidency. And I don't even have the stupid, evil cancer.
Those Edwards must sure be made of entirely different matter than me. So maybe he should be President.
I don't know who Edwards thinks he is. Superman I guess. And Elizabeth too. They strike me as people in total denial of the jagged edge of a crossroad they have come to. And maybe their money and the media and wealth and power and fame and burning ambition will carry them through to the end, bitter or otherwise. I just wonder how long anyone can keep up such a super-human facade. Its lifespan is relatively short too, as is a person with cancer in their bones, I'd imagine.
I look at my friend, the one who's always going to be the guy who's wife has cancer, and I just see a lot of anguish in his eyes. Tiredness. He's so burnt right now. Yesterday he had to take his wife back to the hospital. She's not doing so great with her cancer right now. He was hoping to get a nap in yesterday, after his youngest's soccer game, where he looked tired and and tired and more tired. I wanted to put an arm around him at the game to let him know I care so much about him. I really do.
But all the other soccer moms and dads were there watching me, watching everyone, every kid, every parent, like the hawks they are. It wouldn't have "looked right" for the only divorcee around, the single mom in a crowd of such "strong marriages", since we're not exactly a shining star of marital stability, more like a source of marital suspicion, to be making any kinda physical gesture towards the husband of the cancer victim though. So I did nothing. I told him nothing. Against my natural impulse, I withheld affection.
No one says the word "victim", but it lurks out there around every association with this "cancer family" now. You can sense the unspoken pity. I sense it because I feel it within me. I sense all kinds of guilty weirdness, because truth be told, I like him better than her, the one with the actual disease. While wildly unique and fascinating, she isn't exactly the nicest person on the planet, and having cancer certainly hasn't made her any nicer to me. She was kinda mean and bossy and domineering and rude before, when she wasn't busy being totally hospitable and welcoming and fun. Cancer has made her a victim, not poof, suddenly a better person.
But then his wife was in a lot of pain from an infection setting in at the biopsy point, so there goes his one chance for a nap in weeks yesterday; he had to take her back to the hospital, where she'll likely be for another coupla days. And he has to be back up at the crack of dawn for rounds. Sometimes he sees up to 60 kids a day at his practice. He's a pediatrician, and it's exhausting work whether there's cancer or no cancer in the family.
And he comes home now to a sick wife, or from one hospital to another, and home to two very needy, very active youngsters if there is no one to keep them. Luckily for him, there are grandparents and neighbors to call on in such times. But all children are soooo relentlessly needy, mostly needy of their parents' time and love and unwavering devotion and discipline.
I see the neighborhood women practically elbow each other to compete for a "helpful" piece of this neighborly cancer pie, another unspoken phase of expected behaviors associated with cancer, this almost competitive bid to "help out" the family, providing meals and childcare and laundry assistance, etc. Thanks God such impulses do exist, in some people though. Those kind of people in this neighborhood helped me get through my child's horrible injury last year. The most helpful of all was the woman who now has cancer. I simply could not have gotten through the sheer physical demands of a serious injury recovery process without her. It's a rather schizo relationship we have, I admit.
The impulse to help others doesn't really exist in my family. Their defeatism and ineffectualness causes them to feel great feelings, wring hands, gnash teeth with the best of 'em, but to expend actual energy only in disassociating themselves from other people's unpleasant circumstances. None of them, other than my hopelessly ineffectual yet annoyingly loving father, bothered to show up to help me or Ava through that time last year. His idea of helping is to bait me with his racist politics. I struggle daily with the bitter bitter residuals of their glaring absence.
I see the men in the neighborhood do nothing to reach out to the husband of the wife with cancer. Maybe I've missed something, but they do nothing, they organize nothing; they seem to have faded into their jobs, where they all seem to fade away most of the week anyways, or they fade off to their own backyards. Men just... well, fade away in a crisis.
I think of my ex-husband in the hospital after I gave birth to our child, about 10pm the same evening, after having been woken at 2am earlier in the day by me as I commenced a short, efficient, to-the-point labor of only 10 hours, saying to me, "I'm really tired and exhausted. I need to get some sleep! I'll be back in the morning." And off he went to a nice, hospital-free night's sleep, never noticing a thing about me ever again. When I had a miscarriage about a year later, with complications, he never said a word to me, for me or about me, but I could tell he was relieved there would be no more children that his wife would have to get up and feed in the middle of the night, rousting him from his precious sleep and simplistic routine. I couldn't divorce him fast enough.
The men folk (you're more than welcome to cluck at this point and say "Why bless their heart" but not me) merely occasionally, lamely, inquire with stock questions of the women folk, "How are things are going for the family?" I feel like yelling in their mule-ish, dumb faces, "Fuck if I know! Why don't you go ask the dad? He can likely tell you to your socially-retarded face how he's doing. I don't know. But I doubt he's doing really great right now. As if you were able to even express any kind of male-to-male utterance of care and concern for one another. You men just hang about like lumps and do nothing for one another. Oughta ship you all off to Iraq and let you do something useful there."
Cancer in the 'hood hasn't exactly brought out the best in anyone -- yet. It certainly hasn't brought much good to the surface for me. I'm still trying to swim out of an ocean of my own personal anger, polluted with bitterness and self-pity right now. I know I will. I can do this, but the last thing I've felt is strong or courageous or up to supporting anyone's run for the Presidency. And I don't even have the stupid, evil cancer.
Those Edwards must sure be made of entirely different matter than me. So maybe he should be President.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Edwards' Campaign Goes To Find A Second Life
Bloggers in the real world getting too, uh, cheeky? Send 'em to Second Life for re-enculturization.
I once had a totally full-of-shit boss, imagine that, who made-up the word "enculturation" during yet another of his "inspiration" meetings/snicker-fests. Needless to say, we all chortled for years, sometimes even behind his back, until he finally got canned. Even upper management couldn't take stupid-stench forever.
I once had a totally full-of-shit boss, imagine that, who made-up the word "enculturation" during yet another of his "inspiration" meetings/snicker-fests. Needless to say, we all chortled for years, sometimes even behind his back, until he finally got canned. Even upper management couldn't take stupid-stench forever.
Labels:
Corporate Land,
Edwards,
Second Life
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Edwards Campaign Fires Bloggers For... Blogging
Seems some are shocked, just shocked, that bloggers hold strong opinions -- and are fond of expressing them. Of course, our Ministry of Faith and (Religion-based) Values is out there waiting to get you if you dare cross their idea of what "the line" is. And we worry about Sharia law...
As usual, the Daily Kos brings nothing but prattle-babble to the table. (Is it just me, or is that Markos Moulitsas dude the worst political writer ever?)
And Terry Moran, hon, we who often speak-up and out on matters of religious zealotry don't "hate" the sinners who impose their religious beliefs on this nation and throughout our system of government; rather, we hate the sin (of religious imposition, of course).
Quote of the day, from a senior CNN staffer who will remain anonymous: "Things are so bad here (CNN), that I'm now calling for seperation of media and religion."
Meanwhile, back at the Ivy Ranch, Harvard can't get enough of that olde-timey religion. Fine by me. They can have my share. Forty-something years of Christian Fundamentalist-driven culture, etc. is more than my fair share of the burden. I'm tired of the shit. Let someone else deal with it.
As usual, the Daily Kos brings nothing but prattle-babble to the table. (Is it just me, or is that Markos Moulitsas dude the worst political writer ever?)
And Terry Moran, hon, we who often speak-up and out on matters of religious zealotry don't "hate" the sinners who impose their religious beliefs on this nation and throughout our system of government; rather, we hate the sin (of religious imposition, of course).
Quote of the day, from a senior CNN staffer who will remain anonymous: "Things are so bad here (CNN), that I'm now calling for seperation of media and religion."
Meanwhile, back at the Ivy Ranch, Harvard can't get enough of that olde-timey religion. Fine by me. They can have my share. Forty-something years of Christian Fundamentalist-driven culture, etc. is more than my fair share of the burden. I'm tired of the shit. Let someone else deal with it.
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