Happy Anniversaries

[This blog is usually impersonal, but today it’s all about me. Enjoy. Or skip it. Whatever.]

I celebrate two anniversaries today.

First, and infinitely more important, is my wedding anniversary. 17 years, baby. Couple of kids and a dog. There's even a white fence.

I don’t know if Tolstoy was right – that happy families are all alike and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. It's one of those quotes that sound wise but upon closer examination doesn’t hold up. It’s natural for a novelist to subscribe to the time-honored literary notion that bourgeois happiness is boring. Unhappy families, after all, have much more interesting plots.

All I know is that ours is a happy family. Whether we’re happy in the same way as other happy families is unknowable. But I can share with you, free of charge, Keatang’s Keys to a Happy Marriage:

1. Marry someone who makes you laugh. Mrs. Keatang has a subtle, sneaky sense of humor that she doesn’t show to everyone. But after all these years, she still cracks me up.

2. Marry someone who shares your television tastes. This is an underrated component of the modern American happy marriage, even more important than a shared thermostat philosophy. The fact that we love the same shows – Dexter is our current favorite – means we spend our evenings together, rather than in separate rooms. (Except during the playoffs.)

3. Marry someone who keeps her head when times get tough. Thanks for last year, honey. You really came through.

I also recommend marrying a beauty.

But November 29 is not just my wedding anniversary. It is also, coincidentally, the one year anniversary of FreeTime.

A Look Back

A few weeks back, I saw an arresting definition of good writing: “Making what is completely obvious only to you completely obvious to everyone else. With words.”

That’s what I aspire to here, although I would change “words” to “words and facts”. As John Adams said (and I’ve quoted dozens of times), “Facts are stubborn things”, and I believe the most powerful facts come from history and statistics. If it’s just words, it might be bullshit. Ask any lawyer.

So here are some words and facts about the first year of FreeTime.

The Good Kind of Traffic
On the roads, traffic is a terrible thing (an issue I addressed in one of my weaker blog posts). In music, it’s a question of taste. But out here in the blogosphere, it is something to be sought after and cherished. So you might be interested in what kind of traffic we get here at FreeTime.

Short answer: it’s not the Van Wyck but it’s not a country road at 3AM either. Considering I don’t market this thing, don’t deploy the latest search optimization techniques, don’t post very often, don’t write about anything specific, and aren’t part of a large network of bloggers – I get a decent amount of traffic.

FreeTime gets a little over a hundred unique visitors each week, more when I post and less when I don’t, but it’s been remarkably stable over the last few months. I seem to have a steady group that checks in regularly, some of whom are people I know from my professional and personal lives, many of whom have stumbled upon the site and come back. At least a few international readers are on every week – and from all over, too – Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, South America, Australia.

All told, since I started measuring less than a year ago I’ve had a total of 8,400 unique visits and almost 11,000 page views. So that’s the story on traffic.

* All the data about traffic comes from SiteMeter. Anyone can click on the SiteMeter icon and see all the data yourself. I find it most interesting to click on "By Location" on the right-hand nav bar. That's where you see the most recent visitors and where they came from. Someone from Latvia was on earlier today...

Greatest Hits Package
I've written 87 pieces, some of them just throwaways but many are fully-written articles. For what it’s worth, these are the ten pieces that in my (not particularly) humble opinion hold up the best. (in reverse chronological order)

One of Us
Whatever you think of Sarah Palin, she made a quite a splashy entrance and a was a muse to the whole blogosphere. This piece looks at how Americans claim to want candidates who are just like us...but not really.

Dad vs. Robin

An attempt at a Dave Barry-type piece. And as Dave might say, I did not make this story up.

A Soldier's Reading List
Not sure how to characterize this one. But it grew out of of some volunteer work I do with an organization called Operation Paperback.

From Left to Right
The playwright David Mamet's conversion from liberal to conservative inspired this piece on what, exactly, it means to have a political ideology.

Monolingual Americans

Very few Americans speak foreign languages. And for good reason. This piece has been the 2nd most widely read piece, after....

The Last Movie Star

This piece on George Clooney was picked up by the influential blogger Jason Kottke and a few others, causing a huge spike in traffic. Since I wrote it Clooney has released two more bombs - and not the kind of bombs that will get Oscar love.

In Defense of Divisiveness

Do we really want our politicians to get along?

Barack Obama and the Activist's Dilemma

I wrote plenty about the President-elect this year. This was one.

Eli Vs. Phil

This wasn't necessarily a great piece - but was rendered great by Super Bowl XVII

The Dubious Value of Experience

Probably the piece I referenced the most this year - it's a look at how many of our best Presidents had little experience, and many of our worst had plenty.

The above selections are heavy on politics, and light on sports and music. I think that's because, reading through the old pieces, the sports stuff is pretty good but too time-sensitive (does anyone care anymore whether Goose Gossage deserved Cooperstown?) and the music pieces...well, they kinda sucked.

I thank those of you have come to the site - especially those that have gone out of your way to let me know you like it. I have great confidence my marriage will last till death do us part. Hopefully FreeTime will have a decent run, too.

A Sea Change Election?

Probably not

[I know. The day after the election I said I’d write a post titled “10 (or so) Reasons Conservatives Shouldn’t Move to Australia”. But as Luther said to the parking garage attendant in 48 Hours, “I Been Busy!” In the meantime, I’ll write this, yet another post demonstrating how people say all kinds of stupid things when they are unfamiliar with history…]


There has been much commentary these past few weeks about how the 2008 election may represent a political realignment – meaning, the Democrats have assembled a coalition of voters that could make for a sustainable majority. Among Democrats there is hopeful rejoicing while Republicans gnash their teeth and rent their garments*.

* to whom? Libertarians?

But we’ve been here before, haven’t we? In 2004, Bush won a relatively comfortable victory (at least compared to 2000) and a library’s worth of articles poured praise on Karl Rove, who had seemingly discovered the key to lasting Republican dominance: a passionate organized base. But only four years later, the Republicans are in disarray. So much for lasting Republican dominance.

In 1992 Bill Clinton supposedly changed the game. A sax-playing Southern baby boomer who could name all four Beatles beat an old Washington hand who’d fought in WWII, ending 12 straight years of Republicans in the White House. A new era had begun! But by the time a quite tainted but still-popular Clinton left office, the Republicans had taken the House, the Senate, the White House, and the majority of governorships. So much for new eras.

Even the Reagan Revolution wasn’t quite as revolutionary as it’s made to seem. Yes, he won a 49 state landslide in 1984. But remember, Nixon won by similar margins in 1972, and Reagan’s own Veep couldn’t win reelection 4 years after the Gipper left office. So much for revolutions.

True Game-Changers
Only 3 elections in American history have been truly game changing, in the sense that the victory represented a political realignment that was sustained for decades after. Two of them, Lincoln in 1860 and FDR in 1932, I talked about here.

The other – the first, in fact, was Thomas Jefferson in 1800.

Now that was a messy election. First of all, as brilliant as the Founders were, they hadn’t quite figured out all this electoral college stuff yet, so when Jefferson’s running mate Aaron Burr technically had as many electoral college votes as Jefferson, he made a play for the White House. It took a while to sort out, but Jefferson eventually took the oath and went on to create a sustainable majority that lasted for decades.

(VP Burr went on to shoot the former Treasury Secretary, attempt to crown himself emperor of Mexico, and get arrested for treason, all while in office. And people think Cheney is a pushy bastard.)

Jefferson’s Republicans (not the same as today’s) had so thoroughly destroyed its political competition, the Federalists, that his hand-picked successors (Madison and Monroe) took the White House for 16 more years, and by the time John Quincy Adams, the son of the last Federalist President, took office, even he was a Republican. The Federalist Party was dead.

That was a sea change election.

Is Obama’s Win Sustainable?

Have the Democrats won that kind of election? I don’t think so, and here’s why.

When analyzing whether an election has created genuine political realignment, you need to see if the conditions are easy to duplicate. It’s fair to say, I think, that two conditions existed in 2008 that will be nearly impossible to duplicate in future elections.

The first is Obama’s charismatic hold on the electorate. People went absolutely wild for this guy. Not for his ideas, not because of his experience – but something about him personally moved a big part of the electorate.

Can Joe Biden duplicate that in 2016? Hillary Clinton? If you’re thinking Al Gore, remember that while he may be the world’s most improbable movie star and the winner of the increasingly ridiculous Nobel Peace Prize, he’s already failed in the role of filling the shoes of a charismatic predecessor.

That kind of star power comes along very rarely. Reagan had it. Kennedy had it. Its a wonderful thing for a particular candidate to possess, but it is not a quality to build a sustainable majority on.

The second thing the Dems can’t duplicate is the stunning unpopularity of George W. Bush. John McCain may have been the Republican nominee for President, but Barack Obama made it very clear that he was running against some guy named Bush Cheney. Bush Cheney is not running again, together or alone, so that dog can’t hunt again.

So, what will it take for Barack Obama’s election to be the beginning of a great electoral run? Well, success. Obama’s campaign was built on personality and opposition, but it will have to govern with ideas and performance.

And all but the most partisan Republicans hope he succeeds.

Obama Magnus?

What Qualities do Great Presidents Share?



It's finally over. The end of what some have called the longest (certainly), most entertaining (arguably), and most historic (unlikely) Presidential campaign ever.

We’ve spent some of this campaign talking about policy. In fact, those who say that campaigns are all style and no substance these days should relax. We ask our candidates to spell out their policy plans in excruciating detail and they mostly comply. The only thing George Washington and his immediate successors gave the electorate was a grudging admission that they were, indeed, running.

But we spend more time talking about the leadership qualities and past experiences of the candidates, wondering and debating whether each has the necessary qualities to be what our age yearns for – a great leader.

It’s an interesting conversation. But very often we are mistaken about the qualities that are - and aren’t - reliable predictors of greatness.

Common Traits of Great Leaders
It’s not experience. As I wrote a while back, we’ve had great Presidents who lacked experience and weak Presidents who had piles of it.

It’s not the power to unify. The list of our most divisive Presidents is pretty much the same as the list of our greatest Presidents. In fact, with the exception of Washington every great and near-great President has seriously pissed off huge chunks of the electorate. (See here for detail.)

It’s not IQ. George Washington certainly wasn’t dumb, but among the six men usually accorded Founder status (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin), GW probably ranked last in intellectual firepower. FDR was famously said to have a first-rate temperament and a second-rate intellect. Lincoln, the 3rd member of the Trinity of Great Presidents, is widely regarded as a genius today – but few people in the 1860’s considered this roughly-educated frontier lawyer to be exceptionally or even marginally smart.

Of our great and near-great Presidents*, only Thomas Jefferson might legitimately be called an intellectual. So while we’d prefer to not have a dunce in the White House, the ability to read and understand Aristotle’s Politics in the original Greek – or even in translated English - is an unreliable predictor of greatness.

It’s not military prowess. Washington won a war and showed courage under fire and was a great President. Grant won a war and showed courage under fire and was a terrible President. Eisenhower won a war and showed courage under fire and was neither great nor terrible.

What about the power to communicate? Ah, now we’re getting somewhere…

Words, words, words…
Winston Churchill was arguably the greatest leader of the 20th century. I’m an admirer of Churchill but read a biography and you’ll be struck by how often he was awesomely, colossally wrong. The debacle of the Dardanelles was Churchill’s gift to the First World War (if you don’t know what I’m talking about rent Gallipoli. Or ask an Australian. Or click here.). During the Second World War, Churchill infuriated American war planners with his insistence on a peripheral strategy, resulting in the quagmire of Italy.

So what made him a great leader? Words. He was right about one big thing – the scale of the Nazi threat and the necessity of destroying it – and he used words to persuade the British people they must, and more importantly could, defeat Germany. This was not obvious to anyone in May 1940, after the fall of France and the escape from Dunkirk of the British Expeditionary Force. The eloquence and force of his oratory is what gave England the courage to stand alone in 1940 and 41, until Japan invited America to the war.

Abraham Lincoln was arguably the greatest leader of the 19th century. I yield to no one in my admiration of Lincoln, but as Commander-in-Chief he got off to a very rough start. He changed generals after every battle and oversaw a war machine that was often corrupt (his first War Secretary resigned in disgrace). He had little to no control over George McClellan, his senior general in the early years of the war. So what’s so great about Lincoln?

Again, words. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln articulated for the nation the reason for war, indeed the reason for the existence of the United States. In his Second Inaugural, he spoke with great poetry about the reasons for the horrors of the previous 4 years. And in countless letters and speeches and meetings in between he used words to persuade the North that this cause was worth fighting for.

Words matter.

Obama’s Words

I bring all this up because Barack Obama's meteoric rise from state Senator to the White House was driven mostly by his oratory. Great oratory has several factors. The words themselves, of course, and for modern politicians those words are mostly written by others. But also the grace and power of the delivery.


Obama is at times a great orator, particularly when compared with the the shrill-voiced Hillary Clinton and the stilted speaking of John McCain. He certainly was last night. Further, it is clear that millions of Americans responded with fervor to his message.

This ability to connect with voters, to get the kind of fervent response we saw in this election, shows he may have the raw abilities to be a great leader.


Ah, but what if, unlike Lincoln and Churchill, he's wrong about the great issues of his day? What if his intellect and eloquence are harnessed to failed policies? If you're a fiscal conservative, you can't feel good about Obama's mission to raise corporate taxes and strengthen unions. If you're a national security conservative, you may feel queasy about Obama's plans to close Gitmo, leave Iraq, and chat up Ahmadinejad. If you're a cultural conservative, that crack about bitter Pennsylvanians clinging to guns and religion still sticks in your craw.


But relax. In a few days I'll publish my piece titled "10 (or so) Reasons that Conservatives Should Lie Back and Enjoy the Age of Obama - or at Least not Move to Australia."



* When I use the terms great and near-great, I’m not basing this on personal opinion. Numerous polls of historians have been done in recent years. For an overview of these polls, click here.