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[SPEED]
On Midwest Bus Trip, President Obama Charms, Hugs and Swigs
[TIME 1]
On the campaign trail, it’s good to be President–and not just because your bus gets to run red lights and has all the equipment you need to watch Wimbledon or run a war. It’s good because Americans respond, almost instinctively, to the importane of your office. “I’ve been coming here my whole life,” said Julia Konieczny, a 19-year-old sitting at a corner table at the Kozy Corners diner in Oak Harbor, Ohio, on Thursday. “But this is the coolest thing that has ever happened—ever.”
She was talking about the fact that Barack Obama was about to walk in—“Everybody just pretend like I’m not here,” he joked–and sit down to eat a cheeseburger and fries. After meeting the president, Konieczny wiped her eyes. She said her grandmother, who co-owned the diner, had started to cry across the room. “I think my grandfather is having a hard time too,” she added.
Even the local press feels the charge. A few feet away, Andy Ouriel, a reporter with the local Sandusky Register, a 22,000-circulation paper, talked about how he wrote personal letters to Obama, and columns in his paper, requesting the presidential visit that was about to happen. No President had come to Sandusky since Harry Truman on a whistle-stop tour in 1948, and Obama was going be distributing ice cream downtown. “Is that [White House Press Secretary] Jay Carney?” Konieczny asked her friend, pointing to a man who has just entered a side door. It was. “Told you it was Jay Carney,” she continued, “because he has adorable glasses.”
Obama, who long ago learned the charms of celebrity, knows how to parlay this attention. Over a two-day bus tour through Ohio and Pennsylvania, which brought him to two diners, a bakery, a fruit stand and a bar, he charmed, hugged, chatted, swigged, chewed, posed and quipped with the locals, hoping the transform the excitement about his office into votes for his reelection.
[324 WORDS]
[TIME 2]
For dozens of miles, locals came out of their homes, in stifling heat, often without shirts on, women in just their bathing suits, to line the state roads and wave to his motorcade. When he met elderly couples, he would ask how long they had been together, ask for their secret, delivering his own punch line: “Just do whatever she tells you to.” When he saw groups of locals sitting together, he would call them “troublemakers.” When encountering teenage boys, he asked what sport they played.
He asked hundreds of adults their names, and dozens of children their ages. “It’s nice to meet you,” he would say, over and over. “Hi, how are you?” He squeezed the thigh of a baby, signed the sketchbook of a young girl with the message “Dream Big Dreams,” and attempted to buy peaches and cookies for his traveling press corps. (The offers were declined.) “Let me tell you, first of all, I love nurses,” Obama said, after meeting one. “Can I tell you? You look great. This is a good looking woman.”
In Sandusky, Ohio, a weeping woman, Stephanie Miller, whose sister had died of cancer after being denied insurance, hugged him on the rope line. “I thanked him for the getting the Affordable Health Act passed,” she said later.
The trip was the first of many expected summer tours of swing states, where Obama will attempt to reintroduce himself to voters as a likable everyman, who connects with the hopes and agony of the country in ways that his rival Mitt Romney does not. While Romney vacationed with his family, a boat and a jet ski at his New Hampshire estate, the president told of his childhood vacations “on Greyhound buses,” when the ice machine at the Howard Johnsons “was like a big deal.”
[301 WORDS]
[TIME 3]
Just as the effects of his charm was evident, the challenge ahead for Obama was easy to find in the crowds. Raymond Millard, a warehouse manager, was nursing a Bud Light at Ziggy’s bar in Amherst, Ohio, when the President showed up. He said his vote was up for grabs in November. “I’m a lifelong Democrat,” he said, “but I don’t know.”
The problem was not the President as much as the ungovernable city he had failed to return to order. “It’s all about just fighting each other,” Millard said of Washington, D.C. political culture. “I’m not disappointed in him particularly, just the way things are. It seems like there is a lot of fighting and everybody is for their side.”
A few stools away, Sabrina Schaeffer, 6, was eating dinner with her siblings. “This is the first time I’m going to meet someone important,” she proudly informed a reporter. Her brother Shane, 11, said he planned to ask the President if he had seen the YouTube video of Obama singing Call Me Maybe, a pop song of the moment, through the magic of editing. “You just go to YouTube and you look up ‘Barack Obama singing Call Me Maybe,’ ” he explained to a reporter, unaware of the footage.
Art Davis, the children’s stepfather and a disabled veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, sat with them, saying he was undecided about the upcoming election, despite the urgings of Sabrina to vote Obama. “I am a supporter of Barack Obama, but right now I am a veteran and I am kind of concerned with one of the issues going on,” he said.
Minutes later, the President was at their table, asking his children’s names and ages. (Shane never did ask the President about the YouTube video.) But Davis did raise his concern about veterans issues, and the two men spoke for several minutes. Davis explained that a group he belonged to, Iraq And Afghanistan Veterans of America had been trying without success to get a meeting with Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs Eric Shinseki to discuss the backlog in disability claims.
[352 WORDS]
[TIME 4]
The President called over his traveling aide, Marvin Nicholson, to get Davis’s contact information, and promised that one of his aides, Darienne Page, would follow up to address his concerns. Obama also gave Davis a presidential challenge coin, a symbolic military token designed to cement their relationship.
The President moved on, talking to another undecided voter who offered to vote for Obama if the President beat him in an arm wrestling contest. “No, I’ll play basketball for your vote,” Obama responded.
Davis showed off his new coin to friends, looking impressed. Asked if Obama had won his vote, Davis smiled sheepishly. “He’s getting there,” he said.
The Fault, Dear Romney, Is Not in the Staff
The tepid June jobs report could relegate the calls for a shake-up in Team Romney to the dumpster of stupid campaign controversies, along with the candidate’s ruminations on lemonade, that 13-year-old conservative who isn’t conservative anymore and the rest of last week’s flotsam and jetsam. But now that Rupert Murdoch, Jack Welch and the Wall Street Journal editorial page have all complained that Romney needs more seasoned advisers, the ritual-sacrifice speculation will probably keep percolating throughout the fall. Which is just perverse. I think Team Romney is doing a terrific job selling an extremely flawed product.
Elections are usually decided by the facts on the ground, not by campaign strategists, and while tactics can help at the margins, top-line numbers tend to overwhelm all rational analysis. For example, John McCain lost, so the media concluded in retrospect that everything he did was dumb, but I actually think most of the risks he took made sense under the difficult circumstances. Now Romney is a few points behind a vulnerable incumbent in the polls, so it’s become fashionable to blame his staff for failing to “craft a clear message,” for bobbing and weaving about Romney’s plans and principles while trying to redirect attention to President Obama.
[320 WORDS]
[TIME 5]
Well, here’s a clear message: There is no clear message that can get Mitt Romney to the White House, except for “Obama isn’t working,” which happens to be the Romney campaign’s clear message. It would be suicidal for Eric Fehrnstrom and his team to try to articulate Romney’s plans, because the details of the Republican policy agenda of tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for everyone else is wildly unpopular. And it would be impossible for Team Romney to articulate the candidate’s principles, for reasons that should be obvious by now. If the Obamacare obfuscations out of Boston about taxes and penalties sound like word salad, that’s because word salad is the only path to victory for the father of Obamacare.
With unemployment still hovering above 8%, the President would be in deep trouble against a generic Republican like Tim Pawlenty or John Thune and would probably be unelectable against a Republican with genuine appeal to independents, like Jon Huntsman Jr. or, for that matter, John McCain circa 2008. It’s amazing that a Republican with Swiss bank accounts, a history of offshoring and a ludicrously chameleonic political persona made it out of the GOP primary. But doesn’t that suggest that maybe those “idiots” in Boston are smarter than Murdoch thinks?
Romney is in a tricky position. He can’t completely renounce all the right-wing red meat he pushed during the primary; conservatives would freak out if he flip-flopped again on repealing Obamacare or vetoing the Dream Act or advocating gay rights or Medicare cuts. But he wants independent voters to hold out hope that he’s really a reasonable guy who was just sucking up to the Tea Party for electoral purposes and would govern from the middle once he got to the White House.
[295 WORDS]
[FREE]
The Romney campaign has taken a lot of flak for its incoherent response to Obama’s support for gay marriage and for undocumented workers who came to America as kids, but there wasn’t a coherent response that would have won him any votes. His current mix of mumbo jumbo plus Obama bashing plus trying to change the subject back to the economy makes a lot of sense. Every day that the focus is on Obama and the economy is a good day for Romney.
This is not to say that Fehrnstrom and his team are political geniuses; I vaguely remember him from when we were both reporters in Boston, and nothing about his byline stood out as particularly original. Obviously, he shouldn’t have said that Etch A Sketch thing, since he’s representing an Etch A Sketch candidate. His real problem is that the candidate can’t be fired. For partisans who genuinely want Romney to win — and it’s not entirely clear if Murdoch is one of them, despite his dutiful tweet about how he wants Romney to “save us from socialism, etc.” — it’s easier to complain about the staff.
But hey, Mr. Murdoch, maybe you should worry a bit more about your own staff — or what’s left of it after the phone-hacking indictments.
[211 WORDS]
[OBSTACLE]
Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights
The Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (known also as the Barcelona Declaration) is a document signed by the International PEN Club, and several non-governmental organizations in 1996 to support linguistic rights, especially those of endangered languages. The document was adopted at the conclusion of the World Conference on Linguistic Rights held 6–9 June 1996 in Barcelona, Spain. It was also presented to the UNESCO Director General in 1996 but the Declaration has not gained formal approval from UNESCO.
Precursors
Although the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) has language as one of its categories for equal rights, it does not explicitly list and elaborate on linguistic rights. Even with declarations and rules on protecting specific languages and their rights, there was no binding document at that time that referred to all the languages or to world linguistic rights. As such, there have been attempts to fill this gap by expanding on the importance of linguistic rights in the global scene.
In addition, the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (UDLR) holds regards to several policies that motivated the respect of linguistic rights. Some of the documents include:
? Declaration on the Rights of Persons belonging to National, Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities
? European Convention on Human Rights
? European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages
? Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities
? International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
? Universal Declaration of the Collective Rights of Peoples
The idea of a Declaration was first proposed in 1984, where a Brazilian by the name of Francisco Gomes de Matos introduced to the International Federation of Modern Language Teachers (FIPLV), a plea for a Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights. He listed some of the principle linguistic rights, together with its educational implications.
One of the most significant motivations stemmed from the 12th Seminar of the International Association for the Development of Intercultural Communication of 1987, held in Recife, Brazil, which also recommended the introduction of a declaration for linguistic rights. The Seminar then adopted a preliminary declaration that indexed some fundamental types of linguistic rights.
Drafting
The main objective of penning a Declaration was to define equality in linguistic rights, regardless of differences in political or territorial statuses. It serves to promote international commitment in respecting the rights of linguistic groups, especially those of historicity, as well as individuals who do not reside within their native communities.
As such, the UDLR does not distinguish among official, non-official, majority, local, regional, and minority languages. There was much complexity tied to the drafting process because it was not easy to come up with equal measures, definitions and reasons, especially since it required an international consensus. For instance, one of the most common problems lie in clarifying concepts and their terminologies. Subsequently, follow-up meetings and feedback sessions were held in Paris, Portugal and Frankfurt.
In 1990, the FIPLV drafted a working document. On August 1991, the FIPLV organised a workshop in Pécs, Hungary. It was there that they managed to consolidate an agenda on fundamental principles for a UDLR. The Declaration was also discussed in December 1993, during a session of the Translations and Linguistic Rights Commission of the International PEN.
At the beginning of 1994, a team was rooted to facilitate the process of writing the official document. About 40 experts from different countries and fields were involved in the first 12 drafts of the Declaration. Progressively, there were continuous efforts in revising and improving the Declaration as people contributed ideas to be included in it.
Adoption
It was on 6 June 1996, during the World Conference on Linguistic Rights in Barcelona, Spain, that the Declaration was acknowledged. The Conference, which was an initiative of the Translations and Linguistic Rights Commission of the International PEN Club and the CIEMEN (Escarre International Center for Ethnic Minorities and the Nations), comprised 61 NGOs, 41 PEN Centers and 40 experts. The document was signed and presented to a representative of the UNESCO Director General. However, this does not mean that the Declaration has gained approval.
In the same year, the Declaration was published in Catalan, English, French and Spanish. It was later translated into other languages, some of which include Galician, Basque, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Russian, Portuguese, Italian, Nynorsk, Sardinian.
Even so, there have been continuous efforts to bring the Declaration through as UNESCO did not officially endorse the UDLR at its General Conference in 1996. and also in subsequent years, although they morally supported it.
As a result, a Follow-up Committee of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (FCUDLR) was created by the World Conference on Linguistic Rights. The FCUDLR is also represented by the CIEMEN, which is a non-profit and non-government organisation. The main objectives of having a follow-up committee was to 1) garner support, especially from international bodies, so as to lend weight to the Declaration and see it through to UNESCO, 2) to maintain contact with UNESCO and take into account the many viewpoints of its delegates, and 3) to spread awareness of the UDLR and establish a web of support.
Consequently, the committee started a Scientific Council consisting of professionals in Linguistic Law. The duty of the Council is to update and improve the Declaration from time to time by gathering suggestions from those who are keen on the issue of linguistic rights.
Reactions
One of the comments made was on the idealistic nature of the Declaration. As the Declaration considers all languages equal, it rejects terms such as ‘official’, ‘regional’ or ‘minority’ languages and strongly advocates the full use of all historic community languages.
Drawing from the articles pertaining to the educational issues (Articles 25, 26 and 30), it is stated that the education system should fully support the development of their community languages and other languages they wish to know in schools to the point of fluency and capability to use it in all social situations. In addition, research on language and culture of language communities is to be done at the university level. It has been argued that the 'rights' stated in those articles will remain the privilege of powerful language communities. The reason is that since the Declaration requires authorities to issue sanctions in the event of violation of the proclaimed rights, doubts have arisen regarding the likelihood of any government adopting the document. Many governmental groups (other than the regional authorities in Spain such as Catalonia, Minorca and Basque) in most countries find it hard to reconcile these fundamental principles of the Declaration with their current language policies and practices. There is a need to balance between regulations imposed by governments and the protection of the rights of the people in different language communities. Considerations such as acknowledging the primary human rights of minority peoples (e.g. issues of physical survival) are, instead, regarded as more dire than an issue like linguistic rights. Linguistic rights will hence be ignored before primary human rights can be properly attended to. Furthermore, the cost involved in executing sanctions is another cause of concern. The main issue, however, is the fact that the article is not legal binding and duty-holders are never specified.
Other responses include the issue that more rights are given to ‘language communities’ in the Declaration. In the context of education, it is observed that other than language communities (equivalent to ‘national territorially based minorities'), those who do not fit under this category will have to ‘assimilate’, as having the right to education in the language of the territory does not necessarily equate to having the right to an education in one’s own language.
[1261 WORDS] |
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发表于 2012-7-8 01:02:07
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