UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

An awkward moment for John McCain.

Most newspaper websites are cluttered but utilitarian at best. Many, like my local paper, have undergone elaborate and expensive redesigns in recent years but still suck ass, if for no other reason than that they can’t really get the interface right and so are interminably tweaking it, not to mention that they allow their advertisers to shit all over the page layout with intrusive Flash overlays that jump out unexpectedly and cover what you’re reading if you let your mouse hand drift across the wrong spot on the page.

I’ve noticed in general that the British media seems to have more design sense, in that they actually seem to care about making things usable — in other words, facilitating the dissemination of information — as opposed to first and foremost making a buck, no matter how crass the means.

I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a newspaper website, though, and said, “Wow, that’s really good design!” but that all changed today when I saw the new site for the Guardian.

Maybe it’s the fact that there’s no advertising whatsoever on the home page. At least that’s a start. The layout is clean and well-organized, and doesn’t feel crowded or overwhelming, even though there are four columns and approximately 85 gazillion links on the page. Something else that helps: color coded sections. There’s risk in using a lot of different colors in a design. The page could easily end up looking like My Little Pony barfed all over it. But the nine different thematic colors are represented solely by colored type in the navigation bar at the top (no colored rectangles or obnoxious 3-D tabs) and by thin horizontal bands identifying the beginning of each section’s home page real estate.

True, on my 1280×800 display, the home page scrolls to the height of seven screens. A bit much, but the aforementioned organization keeps things manageable.

Ultimately, the designers have somehow managed to find the optimal midpoint between bland, utilitarian black-and-white monotony and retina-scorching, brain melting sensory overload. And in the land of newspaper websites, the space between the two is surprisingly small.

It’s no wonder that they won Website of the Year in the British Press Awards. Kudos!

Sorry, I spoiled the punchline. Of course, so did MSNBC’s headline. It was just too awesome. Gotta love Olbermann.

Tonight a 30-minute paid program, i.e. infomercial, will air on 3 major networks plus some Spanish-language networks and cable channels, paid for by the Obama campaign. I don’t know the content of the program yet, but I assume I’ll be watching it.

I’ve been reading some comments on news stories anticipating the “television event.” Many supporters rooting him on, the usual right-wing tirades, and a few legitimate arguments from McCain supporters challenging the idea that this was a prudent use of money as we’re plunging into a global economic crisis.

Legitimate, but misguided, I think. Sure, it would be great if the $5-7 million (my estimate) he’s spending on this could be used for more urgent matters, but it’s wrong to criticize Obama for using this money in this manner at this time. It’s campaign money, donated by supporters, with the objective and expressed intent that the money be used in the campaign to get Obama elected president. In other words, he has to spend this money, and he has to spend it on his presidential bid. It’s not like he can just say, “OK, we’ve been given more money than we need. Let’s just put the surplus into paying down the national debt” or something similar (and equally futile). The money was not given to him for that purpose, and aside from disappointing and/or angering the donors, I’m pretty sure any other use of the money would be illegal. I don’t really know what happens after an election if a campaign has a surplus of funds, but it would be foolish for a campaign not to spend money it has during the campaign season, if it finds a suitable use for the money.

Which brings me back to the matter of wasting campaign money. Sure, the mailers and robocalls and emails SLP and I received over the last month from the McCain campaign were a drop in the bucket compared to 30 minutes of national prime-time airtime, but the latter is also a drop in the bucket compared to the $700 billion bank bailout, or the $10 trillion (or whatever incomprehensible number it is now) national debt. My point is, Obama’s money isn’t being wasted on a nationally televised program that gives the country a chance to see who he is and why they should (or should not, but really they should) vote for him. The money the McCain campaign spent trying to woo members of my household was absolutely wasted and even the most minimal amount of research could have verified for the campaign that our address had no business appearing on their mailing list.

As far as tonight’s programming goes, I don’t know if it’s ultimately a plus for the Obama campaign or not. It could backfire. But I don’t think it will. Any naysayer who isn’t just vehemently, fundamentally opposed to Barack Obama could be persuaded, I think, if they just give him a chance and listen to what he has to say.

If you happen to be online during the telecast, be sure to check out the live blog on SIDEDOWN.

You’d think we were back in the middle of the Cold War, what with all of the talk of “socialism” from the McCain-Palin campaign lately. Aside from the fact that, absent the bad word itself, if you described to the average American the major tenets of socialism, you’d probably encounter little resistance, and mostly outright acceptance.

Beyond the false pejorative, you have the greater problem that, well, Barack Obama’s ideas just simply aren’t socialist, at least not any more socialist than the way things already were in this country before George W. Bush took office.

Hendrik Hertzberg has (yet again) an outstanding commentary in this week’s New Yorker, discussing the matter. Some relevant highlights:

“At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives,” McCain said the other day—thereby suggesting that the dystopia he abhors is not some North Korean-style totalitarian ant heap but, rather, the gentle social democracies across the Atlantic, where, in return for higher taxes and without any diminution of civil liberty, people buy themselves excellent public education, anxiety-free health care, and decent public transportation.

No, please! Don’t improve the schools, treat health care as a right, and make it easy for people to get around! Actually, it would seem a significant number of Republicans, of all economic classes, do seem to think this way, to which I simply have no retort. You can’t reason with the fundamentally unreasonable.

He continues, and here it’s worth repeating the entire paragraph:

The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would be under Obama’s proposal, what it was under President Clinton, and, for that matter, what it will be after 2010 if President Bush’s tax cuts expire on schedule. Obama would use some of the added revenue to give a break to pretty much everybody who nets less than a quarter of a million dollars a year. The total tax burden on the private economy would be somewhat lighter than it is now—a bit of elementary Keynesianism that renders doubly untrue the Republican claim that Obama “will raise your taxes.”

Right. Under Obama, our tax burden will soar to the unheard of rate of… well, slightly less than what they were 8 years ago.

And now, the best part. For those of you who don’t know, Alaska’s oil resources are collectively (yes, collectively) owned by the state, and oil companies are taxed for their use of the oil-rich land. Those taxes not only fund all state government activities, but provide enough of a surplus that each citizen of the state (including children) receives an annual check in the thousands of dollars. Did somebody say “redistribution of wealth”? No, no, of course not.

A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, [Sarah Palin] told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.”

Who’s the socialist again? Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Special thanks to JW for tipping me off to this article via Facebook. I would have seen it eventually anyway, of course… when my print copy arrives a week after everyone else’s, as usual.