Archive for the ‘Foreign Relations’ Category
Columbus Day
Oct10
By John Feehery
Christopher Columbus
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
That was a long time ago.
It used to be that Christopher Columbus was a big deal in America. In 1892, the worlds fare in Chicago celebrated the 400th anniversary of the Italian sailor’s “discovery” of the new world.
These days, we don’t even get Columbus day off.
There is still a connection, of course, between the two.
Columbus was born in Italy, petitioned the Spanish monarchs to get money for his trip to the new world, and competed fiercely with Portuguese explorers. He reportedly also spent some time in Ireland.
If I could somehow find a direct connection with the Greeks, we would be all set with the PIGS meme.
Columbus traveled west in hopes of finding a quicker path to to the Indies. What he discovered was that the world was a lot bigger than he initially thought. When he made landfall in the Caribbean, he wasn’t in
India at all. He still had half a world to go.
What we are discovering today is that the world is a helluva lot smaller than we initially thought. When the Greeks, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Irish go bankrupt it greater increases the chances that
we will go bankrupt.
Columbus discovered a brand new world. We are now discovering that the old world has a much bigger impact on our daily lives than we would ever know.
There is no such thing as splendid isolation anymore. Those days are over and have been for a while.
I hope whoever the next President is (and I certainly hope we have a new President) has a global world view that is both sophisticated and principled. This is not time for on the job training, nor is it time for ideological experiments.
In the meantime, we should all doff our caps to Christopher Columbus. If it weren’t for him, we might not all be here today.
Applying the Steve Jobs Lesson to Politics
Oct6
By John Feehery
We are all going to hear a lot of stories about Steve Jobs and his impact on our daily lives. How are kids can figure out the iPad before we can. How Grandma is truly hip with her new iPhone. And all of the other really cool family stories. (By the way, I am writing this on an iMac, which I love).
There are plenty of questions raised by the death of Steve Jobs:
- Why can’t we find a cure for pancreatic cancer?
- What happens now to Apple?
- Who is the next truly great American innovator?
All these questions can and will be answered by somebody else.
I want to talk briefly today about what the political class can learn from Steve Jobs.
Jobs’ central insight was that he believed that the technology had to be transformed to appeal to the mass market. He didn’t dumb down his technology and he didn’t require the public to somehow learn a bunch of new stuff so that they could use his products.
What he did do was connect cool products with average people in such a way as to elevate the lives of average Americans while still making products that were both innovative and earth-shattering.
And most importantly, he brought the world of technology to the world at large, taking it out of the domain of experts, hobbyists and techno-geeks, and bringing into the consumer world.
That needs to happen to politics.
Somehow, our political debates need to be transformed so they are not dominated by the whims of narrow ideological interests and instead brought to the attention of the vast middle of the country.
Like technology, our political system is complex and opaque, sometimes purposefully so. And unfortunately, when our political class chooses to engage the public, it usually does so by dumbing down the process, through 30-second ads and robo-calls.
What we need is a Steve Jobs figure who can spend some quality time thinking about how to demystify politics without unnecessarily dumbing it down.
Technology must play a role in this transformation of our political culture.
Whether it is through a new iPhone or Android application, a new game console by Xbox, or through Facebook and Twitter, the American people must become better informed about the choices we face as a country, about the legislative process, about the Constitution, and about the many different opinions held by our collective body politic. It wouldn’t hurt if we could all learn a few more things about the world’s economics and our strategic interests internationally.
Jobs was brilliant at bringing technology to the people. Who will be the person who will bring politics back to the people?
