Fresh Loaf

I’ve watched the debates, followed the race closely and read position papers. To me, the choice is obvious.

Both Democrats are good candidates. But one was wrong when it came to the most momentous decision of her public life. And Hillary Clinton continues to compound her poor judgment on Iraq by pretending her vote wasn’t what everyone knows it was: political cover.

It’s the dissembling that bothers me. Clinton reminds me too often of the gamesmanship that diminished her husband’s presidency. Take last week’s CNN debate. When asked about Bill Clinton’s role in her campaign, she guffawed loudly. She said something like, “Well, we all have spouses.”

But behind the laugh was someone avoiding legitimate questions: What exactly is the former president’s role in her campaign, and what will it be in the White House? Do we really want a high minister who’s unaccountable and unimpeachable? Do we want the same family to control the Democratic Party for more than two decades?

And when it comes to the election, do Democrats really want to cede to Republicans the most salient message that voters are sending this year — that they yearn for change, for leaders who’ll do things differently? Do Democrats want to be tagged as the status quo party (when it in fact is the party that’s been out of power) in an election year that features neither peace nor prosperity? Do they really want to bank this election on the only couple that’s sure to unite and motivate a dispirited opposition?

The rap on Obama is that he’s unproven. True enough. But it shouldn’t disqualify him. When you stop and think about it, he’s handled almost every challenge thrown at him in a way that inspires confidence.

It’s he, not Hillary, whose campaign is outperforming expectations. It’s he, not the Clintons, who has consistently taken the high road. And it’s he who not only opposed the war from the start, but also avoided sinking into simplistic sloganeering when he’s called for a withdrawal.

At times, Obama has waffled more than I’d like. When he tells voters in Idaho he won’t push hard for gun control or when he compromises with power companies on nuclear-plant safety, I wonder how fast he’ll hold to his principles once he’s president. But, by and large, Obama is a remarkably straight shooter. While both he and Hillary are legit policy wonks, it’s Barack who articulates nuanced positions that don’t necessarily conform to orthodoxy.

Since the 1950s, liberals have pinned their hopes on a parade of similarly straight-talking, brainy reformers. Adlai Stevenson. Eugene McCarthy. Paul Tsongas. Bill Bradley. All in vain.

Obama’s in that mold, but with a built-in advantage: He has the charisma and background to add millions of black, young, and never-before voters to a base of latte-drinking progressives.

Two presidents come to mind who also were labeled as inexperienced dreamers but managed to broaden their base beyond the idealistic intellectuals of their eras. One, of course, was John F. Kennedy. The other was Lincoln. That’s pretty good company.

Your thoughts?

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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You may have noticed our print cover this week: A Jack Russell terrier named Roux is digging her teeth deep into a Michael Vick jersey.

No. 7. Get it? 2007? Well, I thought it was a witty idea.

Roux, who’s owned and trained by my friend Melissa Nunnink, actually was Staff Photographer Joeff Davis’ second model for the cover shoot. The first was Bella, a pit bull whose time was volunteered by former CL staffer Noah Gardenswartz.

Here’s the layout we gussied up for Bella. We liked both shots, but I wanted to show folks Bella to let you decide whether we picked the right photo. And also, well, because she’s kinda cute — doncha think? And, looking into Bella’s noble pose … doesn’t it make you even more sick that Michael Vick would pick on pit bulls?

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Friday was a rough day at the Loaf, perhaps even rougher at our new brethren papers in Washington and Chicago.

In Atlanta, we laid off four sales people, a marketing assistant, a sales assistant and our wonderful assistant distribution manager — seven employees total. No Edit staff member was among those cuts, but that’s partly because we have a couple of open positions right now.

The edit departments at the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper – altweeklies that Creative Loafing Inc. bought last August — were hit a bit harder. Reader Editor Alison True had to lay off John Conroy and three other highly respected, longtime staff writers on Friday. City Paper editor Erik Wemple laid off four writers and an editorial assistant. (Even though he mocked us as “unfortunately named,” NYT media columnist David Carr, who happens to be a former City Paper editor, had an interesting take on the Chicago and D.C. layoffs.)

Why is this happening? Did CL overextend when it purchased City Paper and the Reader?

Not according to CL CEO Ben Eason. Eason’s always argued that small players such as Creative Loafing Inc., which he runs out of our Tampa headquarters, will only be able to compete in today’s highly competitive media environment by becoming effective platforms for national advertisers, in addition to the local advertisers who traditionally provide the bulk of the revenue for altweeklies. In his view, he had little choice but to seek out the financing to expand. And the merger gave CL a presence in three of the country’s top 10 markets.

It’s no secret that City Paper and the Reader already were struggling before the purchase. Neither is it a mystery that our existing papers — Atlanta, Tampa, Charlotte and Sarasota — face a lot more competition than we have in the past both in print and online.

We’re not alone. CL’s going through the same sort of difficult transition that’s hitting other media companies. For the last few years, ad dollars have been moving at an accelerated pace to the Web. Classified ads, which must now compete with free online sites such as Craigslist, are in the toilet. Now the economy’s soft (to put it politely), which has particularly hit real-estate advertising.

You hear a lot more about such struggles at the dailies — because, well, they’re much, much bigger, so they make bigger news. The AJC’s print circ keeps dropping and despite pretty strong online numbers, it’s been forced to undergo some drastic restructuring. As CL’s Scott Henry reported, AJC Editor Julia Wallace cut her staff by around 80 people last spring.

The real question for me, and I suspect for most readers, is how we can do as good or better a job under such circumstances at giving Atlanta the great journalism it deserves — whether that’s in the form of investigative stories, local news coverage, great criticism or basic listings. And tied to that: Will all the effort we’re putting into blogs, podcasts, reader-submitted columns and other Web-only content help us serve our readers even better?

From an audience-building perspective, I’ve seen some encouraging numbers recently: Our October page views jumped 58.6 percent over last October’s numbers, and November’s year-over-year growth topped 90 percent. How that audience growth translates into ad dollars is the business question that Ben and the folks on the sales side of our business are going to have to grapple with for a long time — and continuously.

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Check out former Gov. Roy Barnes’ eloquent column in this week’s Creative Loafing “Secession” cover package, lamenting the not-too-distant past when:

The Atlanta region and the state were long and deep in leadership, and it paid off with huge dividends. Cigar-chomping Tom Murphy could laugh about Atlanta folks, but he was shrewd enough to understand that multimillion-dollar investments had to be made by the state in such facilities as the World Congress Center. In the ebb and flow of politics and reality, everyone cussed Atlanta but understood that for Georgia to prosper, and produce extra money to spend out in the state, Atlanta had to prosper.

Barnes’ criticism of the current “petty politics of petty politicians” can be taken as sour grapes. Fair enough. It’s gotta be difficult to watch Sonny Perdue petulantly misgovern Georgia after having lost an election to him.

But I’m impressed by Barnes’ honesty and optimism. The former reminds me that he’s vowed never to run for public office again; the latter makes me think he’s one of the few people who could pull the state out of it’s current rut.

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(Photo by Joeff Davis)

Influential talk-radio host Neal Boortz was shocked this morning — shocked, I tell you —as he blasted Barack Obama for failing to wear an American flag lapel pin in Iowa campaigning.

“Barack Obama will no longer wear a flag on his lapel because he says it is a symbol of supporting the war in Iraq,” Boortz said, in the midst of his incredulity and outrage over Obama’s near-treasonous wardrobe admission.

Never mind that Obama never actually said the lapel omission had anything to do with Iraq. Or that it’s pitiful to try to turn lapel flags into a litmus test for presidential candidates. Surely, I thought, Boortz must brandish the flag on his chest wherever he goes out in public! Then, Andisheh pointed out that Boortz (left) didn’t appear to be wearing a flag at an event CL photographer Joeff Davis shot last week. Neither did the ever-patriotic Newt Gingrich (center). Nor überpatriot Sean Hannity. Strange. Perhaps, they were wearing patriotic underwear.

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Kudos to Jeffry Scott at the AJC for catching the dissonance between the record-setting drought and Stone Mountain’s plans to waste 106,138 showers’ worth of water on “Coca-Cola Snow Mountain.”

I received a press release yesterday from the private company that manages Stone Mountain Park trumpeting the planned “winter wonderland.” Apparently oblivious to the drought, the release proclaimed: “Atlantans and other southerners will get the chance to play in two feet of snow the size of three football fields, slide down ten tubing lanes, and make igloos, snow balls and snow angels in a 32,000 square foot snow play area.”

It’ll be interesting to see if Stone Mountain and Coke back off of what seems an obvious violation on the state’s drought restrictions. What was missing from the story was whether DeKalb County or the state would put the big “nyet” on this particular piece of wetness (maybe our own Thomas Wheatley could find out … eh, eh, Thomas?)

The first comment on the AJC story was the most pertinent. It suggested letting Stone Mountain and Coke know what you think of them Bogarting the hose. They’d be fools not to cancel this thing.

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This’ll just, uhmm, make you proud.

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A quiet warrior for smart growth is leaving Atlanta’s sprawl, pollution and increasingly hot climate behind for the Far North. I wonder whether a scary spiral is underway around here: forward-thinking people leaving because they see problems on the horizon.

Jim Chapman shamed the rest of us with his selfless lifestyle and forward thinking. He biked around this town since 1992 while he studied transportation at Georgia Tech and worked in a job advocating saner planning. When I first met him, he was executive director of an organization before its time: Georgians for Alternative Transportation.

Now he’s a planner and researcher for Lawrence Frank and Co., which is run by one of North America’s leading experts on sprawl’s hidden subsidies and costs. Frank is himself an Atlanta refugee: In 2003, he moved from Georgia Tech to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he’s now a professor.

Chapman, his wife Jennifer and their kids are moving back to the couple’s hometown: Rochester, N.Y., on the relatively cool shores of Lake Ontario, where the economy’s been suffering for years. People move all the time. The Chapmans are moving to be close to family, and Genesee Cream Ale. Whatever the reason, Atlanta didn’t have what it took to hold on to a smart guy who’s helped make this community richer.

There was plenty of joking about fleeing north as Atlanta gets hotter at a going-away party for Chapman on Saturday. But the joking reminded me of my growing unease that the region’s increasing heat, severe droughts, special-interest-toting politicians, dependence on coal and pesky mosquitoes are going to turn our metro area into a depressed hell-hole. I’m wondering how widespread the concern is.

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Our new investigative reporter just joined the staff and has decided to live in Grant Park. Zoo Atlanta reports that its newest resident primate Dumadi, an 8-month-old male orangutan, “is adjusting well to his new surroundings.”

Actually, the orphaned infant arrived at the zoo June 20. According to a press release, “On Wednesday, he was introduced to 25-year-old orangutan Madu who is expected to serve as his surrogate mother. The pair spent their first night together last night. At the request of keepers, Madu woke Dumadi this morning to receive his first feeding of the day.”

I just wanted an excuse to publish this picture of the little fella.

As Dumadi adjusts to his new surrogate mother and surroundings, he has also begun to take notice of some of the other orangutans. For the surrogate introduction to be deemed a complete success, animal management staff will await signs of increased contact between Madu and Dumadi. Considering Madu’s past success in serving as a surrogate, staff is optimistic about the success of this introduction. The pair is expected to join its group and be visible to Zoo visitors within the next couple of weeks.

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U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson of DeKalb County has joined 10 other members of Congress in co-sponsoring a bill to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney, Atlanta Progressive News reported today.

“I have certainly been displeased with the operations of the Executive Branch, particularly with regard to the secrecy, the incompetence, and the lack of cooperation that is coming out of the Vice President’s Office,” Johnson said in a statement to the online news service.

Signing on to the bill ought to shore up the first-term Democrat’s reputation among local lefties, who weren’t too happy after he beat firebrand incumbent Cynthia McKinney in last year’s Democratic primary.

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U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., endorsing the Senate immigration-reform compromise bill at its May 17 unveiling. He added that his legislative “language” already was in the bill:

The way you make good laws is to have people on both sides of the aisle come together on a bill that none of us would think would be perfect but a bill that is perfect for the American people. … Thanks to the leadership of Sen. Kennedy … and others, I think we’ve seen a bill that is truly good for the American people. … It’s not in the interest of Republicans or Democrats. It is in the interest of the American people.

Chambliss, on Thursday after voting against the bill that he was for before he was against it:

Senator Isakson and I participated in the process early on because we wanted to ensure that our views and concerns were expressed and that, first and foremost, the border security triggers were included in the bill. I believe our contribution to the process was critical in strengthening key components of the legislation. While it wasn’t incumbent that everybody agree with the overall bill presented to the American people, it was important that we have a meeting of the minds to allow a full and fair debate on this critical issue. … I will continue fighting for border security and I will continue to oppose amnesty for those who have broken our laws. Georgians demand no less than our fullest commitment to this critical issue.

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I didn’t manage to squeeze too much out of do-good developer Charles Brewer in an e-mail exchange this week about his latest smart-growth project — a beach resort in Costa Rica. Except that he’s very focused on it and very excited about it. He wrote:

It is so much fun. We are designing and figuring out how we get our water, electricity, things like that.

Our land is full on great, there is a strong market down there, and in a resort town we are to a pretty large extent freed up from some of the normal constraints on great place making - the work-a-day demands of cars, parking ratios, etc. I feel like we have the opportunity to do something really, really special.

In smart-growth circles, zoning rules and other such regulations often are viewed as environmentally negative handcuffs because they can restrict the planner’s ability to build a village-like project that’s friendlier to pedestrians and that mixes housing, shops and other uses.

The first real-estate project by the MindSpring-founder-turned-green-developer was, of course, Glenwood Park, the niftily planned, granola-crunchy neighborhood in southwest Atlanta. In a September 2006 article in a Costa Rican paper, Brewer said of the Costa Rican development: “Certainly it will be resort-like, tourist town, but a real town non-the-less.”

The article in Beach Times said Brewer led a group of more than 20 investors who spent $27 million on the 1,100-acre property, which it described as “one of the last great undeveloped tracts of titled beach front land” along the Pacific coast.

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If this year’s drought doesn’t convince Georgia’s leaders to do a better job conserving water, we’ve got a bit of advice for thirsty people: Move.

Last week, the city of Atlanta laid the heaviest outdoor watering restrictions ever on metro homeowners — midnight to 10 a.m., just one day each week. And it’s not even summer yet.

Don’t blame the city, though. The real culprit — beyond the record-setting drought — is the state, whose pro-sprawl policies drain millions of gallons more each year out of the Chattahoochee and other North Georgia rivers. At this rate, the metro area’s tap could run dry in as little as six years, according to the Metropolitan North Georgia Water District.

“The kinds of things we’re doing now are the kinds of things we should have been doing 8 to 10 years ago,” says Sally Bethea, executive director of the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper. “Today, we need to do a lot more.”

While some modest conservation measures have been put in place, the water district, which is a state-chartered agency, has failed to implement conservation measures it had committed to and even backed away from effective ideas at the behest of the real-estate industry. The most notorious example: In 2006, the district ditched its plan to require many resold homes to be retrofitted with more efficient plumbing.

The district doesn’t seem at all on track to meet one of its big goals — to knock metro water use down by 11 percent from projected level by the year 2030. And, notes Shana Udvardi, water program manager for the Georgia Conservancy, “there are a lot of other cities that have had more aggressive conservation goals.”

As if on cue, the state Environmental Protection Division seems to be working on a proposal that might edge toward real conservation. It delivers a draft of a Statewide Comprehensive Management Plan to a council of state agency heads and politicians June 28; the council, in turn, is supposed to send the final plan to the General Assembly in January.

One key question is whether the state plan will bank on expensive ideas — like shuffling millions of gallons between basins and draining rivers of the water they need for wildlife – instead of focusing on reducing demand, which would be far less costly tools. For example, why not require utilities to charge water wasters higher rates than water savers?

Another question is whether the EPD, and then the council, will have the guts to press lawmakers for legislation and funding that would be necessary for any serious solutions.
“It seems like wishful thinking not to have that,” Bethea says. “We need to have teeth in this so that we know the job will be done.”

The bad news: Those agency heads on the council are beholden to Gov. Sonny Perdue, who’s not exactly been a friend of sound environmental planning.

The good news — sort of: This year’s drought looks to be so bad it could pressure Perdue and other politicians to cater to developers just a little bit less than usual.

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It’s not even summer and the city of Atlanta just announced some of the toughest water restrictions I’ve ever heard of. A press release I just received says:

The Department of Watershed Management is instituting new service-area-wide restrictions on watering. City of Atlanta customers may only water outdoors on Saturdays and Sundays between midnight and 10 a.m.; even-numbered addresses on Saturday and odd-numbered addresses on Sunday. No outdoor watering is allowed Monday through Friday until further notice. This service area includes the City of Atlanta, Sandy Springs and unincorporated South Fulton County.

With population growth projected to send the metro area toward 10 million people (see John Sugg’s column in this week’s Loaf) and global warming expected to turn much of the state into savanna, does anyone doubt that the region’s long-awaited water crisis is here already? And what punishment should the people of Georgia extract from politicians who’ve refused to pass tough water-use restrictions at the behest of their development-industry sponsors?

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