Monthly Archives: October 2012

Apple and America: Don’t Look Back

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A friend mentioned a recent column by Joe Nocera of The New York Times analyzing the “unmitigated disaster” of the iPhone5’s new map application.  I am not into technology so it took me a week or so to get around to Nocera’s column – which was not about the iPhone5 as much as about the moment when companies reach an inflection point in their history that causes them to decline.  The same thing happens to the human mind as it ages and, of course, to whole nations.

I am going to abbreviate much of Nocera’s column verbatim and ask readers to consider whether his analysis of Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and Blackberry applies to the cases the Supreme Court is deciding badly on voting rights, affirmative action, political redistricting and anti-immigrant laws.  Jumping from the map app disaster, Nocera wrote: “Though Apple will remain a highly profitable company for years to come, I would be surprised if it ever gives us another product as transformative as the iPhone or the iPad.   Part of the reason is obvious: (Steve) Jobs isn’t there anymore… Apple’s current executive team is no doubt trying to maintain the same demanding, innovative culture, but…there is also a less obvious — yet possibly more important — reason that Apple’s best days may soon be behind it…

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Go Hard Now at the HispanicLatino Vote

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So much has been made of the debate on Wednesday.  With good reason.  President Obama did not do so well.   But my mind goes to the HispanicLatino couple driving off in separate cars to work this morning two days after the debacle in Denver.  What should the couple look for now having heard two years of anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric from the Republican party and, two months before the election, having been told by its candidate for President that they are part of the 47 percent of the country that does not matter?

Before the debate, the couple and perhaps their kids already might have been a part of the 70 percent of the HispanicLatino electorate that wanted Obama re-elected.  A news report the day before the debate had HispanicLatino support for Obama surpassing 70 percent in some polls.  That would be historic, approaching Kennedy-Johnson 1960 and Johnson-Humphrey territory in 1964.

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Not about Sulzberger’s Times, so much as Our Times

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Arthur Ochs Sulzberger was a name that almost any journalist who does not work for Fox News would recognize.  Most HispanicLatinos never heard of him.  The former publisher of The New York Times died Saturday.  As soon as family members announced his death, they started receiving the usual praise that accompanies most men at the time of their deaths.  By almost any measure of those who knew him, Sulzberger merited the honors that made their way to his family.  This posting is not about Sulzberger.  It is more about the importance of the period in journalism in which he lived his life and that his family’s newspaper nurtured.  It would be interesting in a few years from now to see what is written about Rupert Murdoch, another influential publisher and Sulzberger’s contemporary.

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So, Archbishop, You’re Going to Tell Me How to Vote?

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That line could have come from King George VI played by Colin Firth in The King’s Speech.  The archbishop thought he was going to tell the king how to run his business, in this case using a speech therapist without proper credentials to help him prepare for his coronation.   The king with the speech defect put the archbishop in his place.  So comes now Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles who wants Catholics to “let their faith form their political decisions” before they vote this year.  Gomez plans to write a series of essays on the principles that should guide Catholics in this year’s elections.  “We have important obligations as citizens. But we have to carry out those obligations always in light of our duty to God,” the archbishop directed.  Of course, Gomez gets to define that duty.

Almost simultaneously, the Pew Center reported that support among Catholics for President Obama’s re-election has ballooned to at least 54 percent compared to 39 percent for Mitt Romney.  Obama’s rise among Catholic voters came even though Romney picked Paul Ryan, a Catholic with movie star looks, as his running mate.  Since almost 70 percent of HispanicLatinos support Obama, it would seem that as many or more HispanicLatino Catholics support Obama.  HispanicLatinos and the rest of the Catholic electorate will help hand Obama and Catholic Vice President Joe Biden score a one-sided victory in California in November.

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