Friday, February 26, 2010

“Jimmy Carter: How Not to Defend Your Legacy - YAHOO!” plus 3 more

“Jimmy Carter: How Not to Defend Your Legacy - YAHOO!” plus 3 more

Jimmy Carter: How Not to Defend Your Legacy - YAHOO!

Posted: 26 Feb 2010 06:07 AM PST

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A recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine features two full body images of our 39th and 44th presidents, both walking toward the camera. Barack Obama is in full color; Jimmy Carter, in a very seventies-looking suit, in black and white. There is an equals sign between them (so Obama = Carter) with the caveat, "Well, maybe."

The article, by historian Walter Russell Mead, titled "The Carter Syndrome," was an analysis of various schools of American foreign policy and how they influence presidential decision making. It touched on Carter's legacy but didn't land many body blows. The title, and the end of the first paragraph – which warned that "the conflicting impulses that influence how this young leader thinks about the world threaten to tear his presidency apart" and quite possibly "turn him into a new Jimmy Carter" – were likely tacked on by the editors who needed to sex up the manuscript.

Carter's response was a textbook example for current and future ex-presidents of how not to manage your reputation. Normally, when a piece appears in a major media outlet that riles up a former U.S. president, he calls a few former aides, advisers, and sympathetic academics. They launch a coordinated attack on his behalf without ever quite admitting that they were put up to it. This creates the illusion of a groundswell of support for a venerable public figure and it allows the one time commander-in-chief to appear above the fray. Reporters will ask him about it and he can quote the experts who came to his defense.

That could have been the case here. Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a response to Foreign Policy asserting that Carter's overall record was chalk full of undeniable "geopolitical accomplishments." (Though Brzezinski admits that one of those "accomplishments," the Salt II arms limitation treaty, had to be withdrawn from the Senate when the U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan.) It could have been joined by four or five other old foreign policy hands and Democratic eminences to bolster Carter's desired reputation for having made hard but good choices that ultimately worked to the country's benefit.

Instead, Carter decided to take matters into own hands. The results are not good. From first sentence to last, his letter demonstrates paper thin skin, arrogance, and the flawed judgment that turned him into a one-term president. He begins by stating that although he had "refrained from responding to gratuitous and incorrect analyses of my foreign policy" in the past, he now feels "compelled to comment" on a story "which the editors apparently accepted without checking the author's facts or giving me a chance to comment." Me-ow.

Carter promises to limit the scope of his response. He won't, for instance, "criticize or correct [Mead's] cute and erroneous oversimplistic distortions of presidential biographies and history except when he refers specifically to me." That doesn't stand in the way of his making grandiose or petty statements about his presidency that fail to convince or even pass the laugh test.

Take China. What president was responsible for opening up U.S.-China relations, driving a wedge between Communist China and Communist Russia? If you thought the answer was Richard Nixon, then Jimmy Carter has got news for you. "Following 30 years of diplomatic relations with Taiwan as 'the One China,'" he writes, "I negotiated persistently...and was successful in reaching agreement in December 1978. This led to full relations with the People's Republic of China... This was a strategic turning point in U.S.-China relations that my predecessors had not been willing or able to consummate."

Or take Iran. Some of the Iranian Islamic militants that Carter had allowed to take power seized the U.S. embassy in November, 1979 and held the Americans there hostage for 444 days, destroying Carter's presidency. Maybe, in retrospect, not backing Iran's strongman shah was a bad idea? Carter insists that his "policy in Iran was to make it possible for the shah to retain his leadership by urging him to adopt political reforms while preventing fanatical extremists from seizing power." When that didn't work and the reformists took U.S. hostages, he made the wise decision "to refrain from military action -- unless they harmed a hostage."

After all, he "could have ordered massive destruction in Iran with our mighty military power," but this would have killed "thousands of innocent Iranians" and the lives of the hostages would likely have been forfeit. Instead, Carter negotiated "around the clock for the last three days I was in office, while President-elect Ronald Reagan and his advisors chose not to be involved or even informed about progress." Carter complains that "they were finally permitted to depart immediately after I was no longer in office," but doesn't really understand why that happened. He thinks it was a result of his tireless efforts rather than the Ayatollahs' fear of what Reagan might do.

He never mentions a third option between negotiation and bombardment, probably because it would reflect badly on him. Carter actually approved a special forces mission to rescue the hostages. But insisted it be so small that technical difficulties forced would-be rescuers to return home empty handed.

Of the U.S.S.R.'s invasion of Afghanistan, Carter insists he "had no hesitation in providing weapons to the Afghan resistance after the Soviet invasion in December 1979." True but watch the movie Charlie Wilson's War. Under Carter, U.S. policy in Afghanistan was not to repel the Soviet Union but to give the communists their very own Vietnam. Actually rolling back communist advances was a project that was undertaken by conservative Democrats in Congress and a conservative Republican in the White House.

The facts are clear enough in all of these cases. It's surprising that Carter would revisit the controversies now. Mead, in the article and response, took it easy on the ex-president -- who he confessed to having voted for in 1980. It's a good bet that other critics will not be so restrained.

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Is Self-Branding Too Much of a Distraction? - New York Times

Posted: 26 Feb 2010 05:38 AM PST

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CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — For Benjamin Franklin, it was "early to bed and early to rise." For Dale Carnegie, it was the dictate "to do and dare." For Stephen Covey, it was seven simple habits.

The gospel of self-improvement has taken varied forms throughout history and is perhaps America's most successful export. But in the digital age, the idea of improving yourself is under siege by a similar-seeming but utterly different gospel: that of self-branding.

The Internet-connected class worldwide faces growing pressure to cultivate a personal brand. Ordinary people are now told to acquire what once only companies and celebrities required: online "findability," thousands of Google hits and Twitter followers, a niche of their own, a virtual network of patrons, a personal Wikipedia page and dot-com domain.

"The Internet has forced everyone in the world to become a marketer," said Dan Schawbel, a personal-branding guru and the author of "Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success." (Mr. Schawbel, 26, has more than 100,000 Google listings for his name, 70,000 Twitter followers and a self-styled niche as the "personal branding expert for Gen-Y.")

The rise of the personal brand reflects changing economic structures, as secure lifetime employment gives way to a churning market in tasks. It suggests a new unscriptedness in institutions as we evolve from the broadcast age to the age of retweets. It augurs a future in which we all function like one-person conglomerates, calculating how every action affects our positioning.

The personal-branding field traces its origins to the 1997 essay "The Brand Called You," by the management expert Tom Peters. But only with the rise of easy-to-use social-media tools has one-person brand management become practical. Columbia University and other institutions now teach it; training firms peddle it in India and China; Microsoft has sought to bring its precepts to the poor; PricewaterhouseCoopers this week announced a Personal Brand Week, providing free online tips for college students.

What distinguishes personal branding from other self-cultivation is its emphasis on reputation over talent, on "explicit self-packaging," as the scholars Daniel Lair, Katie Sullivan and George Cheney have observed: "Here, success is not determined by individuals' internal sets of skills, motivations, and interests but, rather, by how effectively they are arranged, crystallized, and labeled."

As personal-branding experts see it, they are merely responding to new economic realities. It is no longer enough, they say, to join an organization and ride its brand for decades. Companies are outsourcing aggressively; globalization is creating and destroying industries more rapidly than before; the Web is fostering job-hopping; the recession is throwing millions on the street.

In this new world, personal branders argue, self-packaging rules.

Employees are told to run permanent marketing campaigns to build an audience that follows their tweets and maintains ambient Facebook-level awareness of what they are doing. This audience belongs to you, not your organization, branders say; it will follow you and attract employers to you.

Strenuous personal branding is now seen among unelected politicians who speak daily (often via assistants who do the typing) to massive audiences through social media. Corporate employees build reputations online without spokespeople supervising them. Journalists, too, blog, tweet and Facebook about their reporting, instead of simply reporting.

But among the more remarkable places to watch the spread of off-message personal branding is in the very message-conscious world of diplomacy.

In the United States, for example, the State Department has allowed tech-savvy senior officials like Jared Cohen, Alec Ross and Katie Stanton to maintain robust personal brands. On Twitter, they report on affairs of state and encourage giving to Haiti, while also offering lighter fare, from daily minutiae ("best diplomacy training is coaching my 7 y/o's basketball team") to film reviews ("Soderbergh's 'The Informant' was pretty mediocre").

Mr. Ross and Mr. Cohen have Twitter fan bases of around 300,000 each, while the State Department's official channel has about 14,000.

Recognizing this disparity, the State Department sent an unconventional delegation to Moscow last week with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the actor (and feverish tweeter) Ashton Kutcher and the tech-savvy Mr. Cohen as models of what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calls "21st-century statecraft." Some at the State Department worry about security risks and misstatements by diplomat-tweeters. But Ms. Stanton, who once worked at Google, said that personal brands — her Twitter biography is "Mom. Public Servant. Cupcake Connoisseur" — might convince skeptical foreigners to give the United States another look.

"It's easier to trust individuals than institutions," she said.

For those who bemoan the scriptedness of public officials or the brainwashing of corporate advertising, personal brands can be deliverance. If broadcast television over decades encouraged institutions to funnel their message into one voice, the rise of social media is restoring multiplicity. Institutions are going off-message again.

But Shashi Tharoor, the deputy foreign minister of India and a diplomat-Twitterer with more than 650,000 followers, told me that off-message communication can, by personalizing officials, "strengthen the acceptability of the official message."

"Ministers in India are generally seen as unknowable and unapproachable by the average citizen," he said. "Sharing my thoughts, and details of my work, my life and preoccupations, is partly an effort to show the public that their leaders are people they can relate to." Old-guard politicians are less enthused about Mr. Tharoor's tweets, however, and he has attracted criticism for defying protocol.

Companies, too, are wrestling with personal brands. Jonny Bentwood, the head of analyst relations for the public-relations firm Edelman, told me that many clients were torn between the view that multiple voices cheapen a brand and an emergent sense that attracting talent requires tolerating brands-within-a-brand.

In a much-blogged-about episode, Forrester Research, a market-research firm, this month moved to prohibit star analysts from publishing analysis on personal blogs. The move was widely interpreted as a backlash against personal brands.

Personal branding will, of course, change not just big institutions but also the lives of brandable individuals. Will it improve job security or simply increase our anxiety? Will it divert power and influence from the well-educated to the merely well-branded? Will brand-building distract us?

There is great pressure from personal audiences to say hello from Beijing, to speed-review "Avatar," to broadcast the meeting's latest insight.

But is the society always better off with the undigested utterance, the instantaneous attempt at positioning? And in marketing ourselves, will we neglect the pursuit of actually improving?

E-MAIL pagetwo@iht.com

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Dallas-Fort Worth area news briefs for Feb. 26 - Dallas Morning News

Posted: 26 Feb 2010 05:52 AM PST

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ARLINGTON

Woman arrested in

stabbing of boyfriend

Arlington police are investigating what they believe is the city's first homicide of 2010.

Gary T. Hill, 26, died Wednesday afternoon from a stab wound. Investigators said his girlfriend, Tonicita Henderson, confessed after first concocting a story that Hill had gotten into a fight at an apartment complex.

Henderson drove the wounded man to Arlington Memorial Hospital, said Tiara Ellis Richard, Arlington police spokeswoman.

When first questioned, Henderson told police her boyfriend was wounded during an altercation at an apartment complex in the 1500 block of Summer Bay Circle. She said Hill called her and asked her to pick him up.

However, under further questioning, Henderson confessed to stabbing Hill, Richard said. Richard did not disclose a motive.

Henderson was being held in the Arlington jail.

Bruce Tomaso

DALLAS

Police officer fired for

extra-work infractions

Police Chief David Kunkle fired a 19-year-veteran officer after internal investigators concluded that, among other things, he had worked two off-duty security jobs at the same time.

Senior Cpl. Scott Towns, 51, told investigators that on several occasions he couldn't find someone to work a shift so he was forced to "cover two jobs at once, overlapping hours between part-time jobs."

"It was not my intent to take money I did not earn," he wrote in a statement to investigators. "In hindsight, my judgment was in error, but my intent was to keep the jobs covered and running smoothly."

An internal investigation found that Towns exceeded the number of hours that officers are allowed to work off-duty security work per week on 115 occasions; that on nine occasions he worked an off-duty security job at an apartment complex after calling in sick to work; that on 25 occasions he was paid to work two off-duty security jobs at the same time; and that he violated the department's off-duty employment policy.

Towns, who was hired in 1980, can appeal his firing.

Tanya Eiserer

DALLAS

3 new trustees join

Paul Quinn board

Three new trustees have joined the Paul Quinn College Board: Bob Weiss, William Brewer and Matthew Hildreth.

Weiss was named chairman of the board.

Weiss is the vice president for administration for The Meadows Foundation and previously was the founding executive director of The Center for Nonprofit Management in Dallas.

Brewer co-founded a law firm, Bickel & Brewer, in 1984 and established the Bickel & Brewer Future Leaders Program, which provides a pathway to college for Dallas ISD students.

Hildreth is president and CEO of the Dallas Region of Amegy Bank and has more than 20 years of corporate finance and commercial bank experience.

Eunaka Kirby

University park

Dallas man arrested at

SMU for trespassing

A Dallas businessman who had been warned to stay off Southern Methodist University's campus after several students complained about him has been arrested on trespassing charges, officials confirmed Wednesday.

Lee William "Bill" McNutt III, a former White House official who heads a Texas arts commission, was arrested by campus police Feb. 15.

He could not be reached for comment Thursday.

SMU issued a written warning to McNutt in November 2008, instructing him not to come on campus for any reason.

University officials released a statement saying: "This action was based on SMU's receipt of multiple student complaints against Mr. McNutt alleging behavior that violates University policy, such as offering alcohol to minors."

They declined to elaborate.

SMU officials received information that McNutt had returned to campus earlier this month and he was arrested on criminal trespass charges.

In December, Gov. Rick Perry named McNutt chairman of the Texas Commission on the Arts. McNutt's biography on the commission Web site lists him a White House staffer under former presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

He is a University Park resident and is on the board of Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana.

Lori Stahl

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Retired Auxiliary Bishop Of Pittsburgh Dies - WPXI

Posted: 26 Feb 2010 05:52 AM PST

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Posted: 8:58 am EST February 26, 2010Updated: 9:21 am EST February 26, 2010

PITTSBURGH -- Retired Auxiliary Bishop John B. McDowell of Pittsburgh died on thursday at Passavant Hospital. He was 88 years old and had retired in September 1996 after 30 years as a bishop.

"Bishop McDowell was a giant of the Church," Bishop David A. Zubik said, "a national figure in Catholic education, and an influential bishop in our national conference.

The retired bishop was well known in Catholic education nationwide, and was a leader in educational matters for the Catholic Bishops. He was instrumental in drafting the 1972 landmark document of the United States bishops on catechesis, 'To Teach as Jesus Did.'"

He served the Diocese of Pittsburgh as assistant superintendent of schools, superintendent of schools and vicar for education. In recognition of his service to Catholic education, a consolidated elementary school in the South Hills area in 1995 was named the Bishop John B. McDowell Regional School.

"Bishop McDowell has made extraordinary contributions to the work of Catholic education at the diocesan and national levels," said Father Kris Stubna, diocesan secretary for education. "As superintendent of schools and vicar for education, the bishop guided a system of schools that educated more that 120,000 students, the peak of Catholic school enrollment locally."

Bishop McDowell also authored seven biographies on the past bishops of the Diocese of Pittsburgh. He completed his last, a brief biography of Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl of Washington, a month after celebrating his 84th birthday. His final book was an autobiography, completed in 2007.

Retired Pittsburgh Auxiliary Bishop William J. Winter said Bishop McDowell's most outstanding trait was that he was "always a priest."

He praised Bishop McDowell's total dedication "to the work of the church" throughout his life, regardless of whether he was serving in a parish role or overseeing Catholic education.

"He really was a true pastor," Bishop Winter said.

Born on July 17, 1921, in New Castle, Pa., the son of Bernard A. McDowell and Louise Hannon McDowell, he attended St. Lawrence O'Toole Elementary School and Central Catholic High School in Pittsburgh.

He earned a bachelor's degree from St. Vincent College, Latrobe, in 1942, and a master's degree from the same school two years later. At Catholic University of America, he earned a master's degree in administration and education in 1950 and a doctorate in education and philosophy in 1952. Duquesne University awarded him an honorary doctorate of literature in 1962.

Bishop McDowell was ordained a priest in November 1945, and served as associate pastor at St. Irenaeus Parish, Oakmont. He was named assistant superintendent of schools in 1952, superintendent of schools in 1955, and vicar for education in 1970. He also served a term as head of the National Catholic Educational Association. He was also pastor of Epiphany Church, Pittsburgh, from 1969 until his retirement.

He was appointed papal chamberlain in September 1956 and domestic prelate in February 1964.

Bishop McDowell was ordained as auxiliary bishop of Pittsburgh and titular bishop of Tamazuca in St. Paul's Cathedral on September 8, 1966.

In addition to such important diocesan assignments as his leadership role in the Parish Share Program and the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh Foundation, Bishop McDowell has served on many civic organization boards. He also was the chairperson of the diocese's 150th anniversary observance in 1992-93.

Funeral arrangements for Bishop McDowell are pending and will be announced shortly.

Copyright 2010 by WPXI.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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