An American Lion

I have to say, up front, what the hell?

It’s all well and good that the President is bringing back a campaign worker. I wonder if anyone has bothered to point out to the President that governing is different from campaigning, though:

President Obamais reconstituting the team that helped him win the White House to counter Republican challenges in the midterm elections and recalibrate after political setbacks that have narrowed his legislative ambitions.

Mr. Obama has asked his former campaign manager, David Plouffe, to oversee House, Senate and governor’s races to stave off a hemorrhage of seats in the fall. The president ordered a review of the Democratic political operation — from the White House to party committees — after last week’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, aides said.

In addition to Mr. Plouffe, who will primarily work from the Democratic National Committeein consultation with the White House, several top operatives from the Obama campaign will be dispatched across the country to advise major races as part of the president’s attempt to take greater control over the midterm elections, aides said.

“We are turning the corner to a much more political season,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser, who confirmed Mr. Plouffe’s role. “We are going to evaluate what we need to do to get timely intelligence and early warnings so we don’t face situations like we did in Massachusetts.”

If Mr. Plouffe is the new Obama man at the DNC, then who, praytell, is former Virginia governor Tim Kaine? Is he now window dressing? Tim Kaine does not have the charisma to be considered window dressing. They might as well admit that Kaine is out, Plouffe is in, because I don’t know how the President can send such a high level advisor to the DNC and not have him be in charge.

As Mr. Obama prepares to deliver his State of the Union address on Wednesday and lay out his initiatives for the second year of his presidency, his decision to take greater control of the party’s politics signals a new approach. The White House is searching for ways to respond to panic among Democrats over the possible demise of his health care bill and a political landscape being reshaped by a wave of populism.

Improving tactical operations addresses only part of his challenge. A more complicated discussion under way, advisers said, is how to sharpen the president’s message and leadership style.

That’s entirely the wrong thing to do. The President does not need to “sharpen” message or style; he needs substantive policies and clearly stated goals. He needs to make things happen by Executive Order when possible and he needs a way of pushing his agenda through Congress. That’s a structural relationship that is failing him right now. He needs, in other words, a man or a woman coordinating legislative goals with the House and Senate in a more effective way to get things happening. One way to do this is to push through legislation that deals with short term issues, and with job creation. He needs legislation that is not going to get bogged down and held up by a threatened filibuster. If you can’t make things happen with up or down votes, then you have to horse trade. And the American people cannot criticize the President if he’s horse trading in order to bring them some good government. The same old fraud, waste and abuse has to end. The collapse of American society because of economic desperation becomes more possible by the day.

I don’t understand how President Bush was able to get most, if not everything, that he wanted out of a nearly evenly-divided Congress and how this President gets virtually nothing when his party is firmly in control of both houses.

Without making structural changes, everything you see them doing is a cosmetic fix designed to keep in place the status quo as it now stands. After a disastrous year, heads should have rolled. The only way to get fired in the Obama Administration is to either not get hired at all—over a hundred positions still go unfilled—or to cross Rahm Emmanuel. If 2010 is anything like 2009, this President will lose the Congress and he will have to fire Emmanuel if he wants to be re-elected.

How is it, at the height of the Obama Presidency, Air America goes off the air:

Air America, the liberal talk-radio network that helped boost the careers of Al Franken and Rachel Maddow, said Thursday that it was declaring bankruptcy and going off the air.

The company, founded in 2004 and based in New York, strove to provide left-leaning commentary and call-in programs as an alternative to such popular conservative radio talkers as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage.

It was troubled almost from the start. The company had difficulty lining up affiliates and attracting a sizable audience. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy-court protection just 30 months after its inception and was resold to an investor group in early 2007 for $4.25 million.

Charlie Kireker, one of Air America’s principal owners and its chairman, said in a memo to employees Thursday that the company was done in by “a perfect storm” of plunging ad revenues, intense competition, high debt and poor prospects for new financing. A search for new investors, he said, has been fruitless. The company declined further comment.

It helps to actually understand the radio business before you attempt to go into it. No one at Air America understood the radio business. First and foremost, you hire professional radio talent. Then, you develop that talent. If people are buying your ideas and if they’re accepting what your talent has to say, it’s gravy from then on. All they would have had to do is copy—copy—the way successful broadcasters do business. They survive based on their talent. Can they hold the interest of someone listening? Can they speak a common language that the listeners can understand? Can they interview a guest? Can they talk about a subject with some degree of knowledge?

If not, they will fail. There are more Democrats than Republicans in this country, but no one was buying what they were selling. No one on Air America was so compelling to listen to that people would do whatever they could to hear what they had to say. Their stable of talent—God bless them—went on to do things like MSNBC and the United States Senate. At least, that’s what two of them did. Where’d the rest of them go? I have no idea. And neither does anyone else. That’s because they were nobodies, sir. Nobodies.

I hate to say this, but,  by going with amateurs, half-assed celebrities, and unhinged personalities, they wrote their own obituary long before today.

And I’ll say this until I am blue in the face: if you have nothing but contempt for middle America, guns, hunting, fishing, sports, country music, and just plain old corn pone, then that’s exactly the kind of audience you’re going to have. You’re going to attract three or four people who have nothing but contempt for a good number of Americans who listen to the radio. And, if you can’t get the people who listen to radio to listen to you because your talent can’t do anything except talk down to people and act like high and mighty jackasses, watch your business collapse into a damp heap of nothing.

Oh, and this will kick your ass, too:

In October 2006, ABC Radio Networks, then under Disney’s ABC, told its stations to black out all ads from about 90 companies that did not want to have their ads on radio stations that carried Air America Radio. The internal memo from ABC Radio Networks to its affiliates was headlined “Air America Blackout” and was addressed to the Traffic Director who handles advertising for the affiliates. The memo states, “Please be advised that Hewlett Packard has purchased schedules with ABC Radio Networks between October 30th and December 24th, 2006. Please make sure you blackout this advertiser on your station, as they do not wish it to air on any Air America affiliate.”

The memo then goes on to say, “Please see below for a complete list of all advertisers requesting that NONE of their commercials air within Air America programming.” The list includes large corporations such as Wal-Mart, General Electric, Exxon Mobil, Microsoft, Bank of America, Fed-Ex, Visa, Allstate, McDonald’s, Sony, and Johnson & Johnson. Also on the list of advertisers that did not want their commercials to be on Air America Radio were the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Postal Service.

The complete list follows:

Allstate | American Heart Association | Aventis | Avon | Bank of America | Bayer | BMW Motorcycles | Chattem products such as Capzasin penetrating rub, Gold Bond for skin care, and Gold Bond Foot Spray | Cigna | Cingular (now AT&T Mobility) | Clorox | Coke | Coty | Dean’s Morningstar Food’s | Dell | Denny’s | Discovery Channel | Eharmony.com | Epson | Expedia.com | Exxon Mobil | Farmers Insurance | FedEx | Foot Action (under Foot Locker) | Frito-Lay (under PepsiCo) | General Electric | Gillette Venus (under Procter & Gamble) | Goodyear | Heineken/Amstel Light | Hershey | Hewlett Packard | Home Depot | Hormel | Hyatt | Interstate Batteries | J. C. Penney | Johnson & Johnson | Kohl’s | Levi’s | Masterfoods USA (under Mars) | McDonald’s | Men’s Frontline | MGM | Michelin | Microsoft | Morningstar | National Cattleman’s Beef | Nestle | Nissan | NYSE | Office Depot | Outdoor Life Network | Procter & Gamble products Bounty, Charmin, Febreeze, Iams Dog/Cat Foods, and Pepto-Bismol | Paramount (under Viacom) | Pepsi | Philip Morris | Pier 1 Imports | Red Lobster (Darden Restaurants) | Re/Max | REI Sporting Goods | Rent-way | Robert Half | Schering-Plough | Sherwin Williams | Sony | State Farm | Toys R Us | Travelocity.com | True Value | United Healthcare | U.S. Navy | USPS (U.S. Postal Service) | Visa | Walgreens| Wal-Mart | Welch’s | Wrigley | Wyeth

Whoops. I forgot that. If you can’t get the United States Navy to advertise on your radio network, brother, you’re not long for this industry.

Anyway, wow. Goodbye, Air America.