Yesterday, a year to the day from the historic presidential election that swept Barack Obama to the White House on a wave of hope and expectation, we hit the streets to ask some New Yorkers how they think the president is doing and what they remember about Election Day, 2008. Here’s what they had to say:

White House: Democratic Losses Not a Reflection on Obama

“Whatever’s driving these voters, it wasn’t attitudes toward the president.”

-White House senior advisor David Axelrod, questioning the analysis that Republican electoral wins in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday are signs of sagging confidence in President Obama’s leadership. The outcomes, he said, are attributed to local issues. (The Washington Post)

*Related Title: The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe

Democrats Win Special Election in New York Despite Strong Conservative Push

“This race was a very tough race. We stood up against two major parties that had a lot of money, but we got this far on determination, and we got this far with a grassroots campaign that got many volunteers out.”

-Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate in a special election to fill a vacant New York seat in the House, after narrowly losing to Democrat Bill Owens. Hoffman’s bid had been trumpeted by national conservative figures who rejected the Republican candidate as too liberal. A Democrat will represent the district for the first time in more than a century. (Politico)

*Related Title: Republican Gomorrah by Max Blumenthal

British Soldiers Killed by Rogue Afghan Police Officer

“He first fired on the commander of the police and his deputy then on the British soldiers. He escaped on a motorbike.”

-Abdul Ahad Helmandwal, head councilman in the Nad Ali district in Afghanistan, where a local police officer opened machine gun fire on British troops manning a checkpoint there. Five soldiers were killed along with two Afghan officers. (Times Online UK)

*Related Title: The Limits of Power by Andrew J. Bacevich

Remember searching the web before Google? No, me neither — at least I try not to. The company that today shapes our online lives more than any other got its start, back in 1998, by building a search engine that was smarter, faster, better than the rest. The knowing words on everyone’s lips at the time, as I recall, were “OK, great. But how’s it going to make money?” Well, now we know — Google would make money by expanding beyond search to “own” the information space in the information age. In Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, Ken Auletta tells how the company that became a verb came to be: how (and how!) it grew: what its rise and dominance means for traditional media companies (nothing good); and where it’s headed next (in short, everywhere). Here’s an excerpt:

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

By Ken Auletta

Preface

The world has been Googled. We don’t search for information, we “Google” it. Type a question in the Google search box, as do more than 70 percent of all searchers worldwide, and in about a half second answers appear. Want to find an episode of Charlie Rose you missed, or a funny video made by some guy of his three-year-old daughter’s brilliant ninety-second synopsis of Star Wars: Episode IV? Google’s YouTube, with ninety million unique visitors in March 2009—two-thirds of all Web video traffic—has it. Want to place an online ad? Google’s DoubleClick is the foremost digital advertising services company. Google’s advertising revenues—more than twenty billion dollars a year—account for 40 percent of all the advertising dollars spent online. In turn, Google pumps ad dollars into tens of thousands of Web sites, bringing both traffic and commerce to them. Want to read a newspaper or magazine story from anywhere in the world? Google News aggregates twenty-five thousand news sites daily. Looking for an out-of-print book or a scholarly journal? Google is seeking to make almost every book ever published available in digitized form. Schools in impoverished nations that are without textbooks can now retrieve knowledge for free. “The Internet,” said Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, “makes information available. Google makes information accessible.”

Google’s uncorporate slogan—“Don’t be evil”—appeals to Americans who embrace underdogs like Apple that stand up to giants like Microsoft. Google’s is one of the world’s most trusted corporate brands. Among traditional media companies—from newspapers and magazines to book publishers, television, Hollywood studios, advertising agencies, telephone companies, and Microsoft—no company inspires more awe, or more fear. There are sound reasons for traditional media to fear Google. Today, Google’s software initiatives encroach on every media industry, from telephone to television to advertising to newspapers to magazines to book publishers to Hollywood studios to digital companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, or eBay. For companies built on owning and selling or distributing that information, Google can be perceived as the new “Evil Empire.”

Google is run by engineers, and engineers are people who ask why: Why must we do things the way they’ve always been done? Why shouldn’t all the books ever published be digitized? Why shouldn’t we be able to read any newspaper or magazine online? Why can’t we watch television for free on our computers? Why can’t we make copies of our music or DVDs and share them with friends? Why can’t advertising be targeted and sold without paying fat fees to the media middleman? Why can’t we make phone calls more cheaply? Google’s leaders are not cold businessmen; they are cold engineers. They are scientists, always seeking new answers. They seek a construct, a formula, an algorithm that both graphs and predicts behavior. They naively believe that most mysteries, including the mysteries of human behavior, are unlocked with data. Of course, Wall Street’s faith in such mathematical models for derivatives helped cripple the American economy. Naivete and passion make a potent mix; combine the two with power and you have an extraordinary force, one that can effect great change for good or for ill. Google fervently believes it has a mission. “Our goal is to change the world,” Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, told me. Making money, he continued, “is a technology to pay for it.” Read More

New York City is the greenest community in the United States, according to David Owen, whose recent book Green Metropolis entertainingly explains the straightforward logic behind what seems an outlandish claim. In short, he argues–quite convincingly–New York is a model of sustainable development because New Yorkers…

Live Smaller

• High population density also necessitates smaller living spaces, which consume less electricity than larger houses in non-urban areas.

Live Closer

• Moving people closer together (as in cities) allows for more open, unadulterated nature. Conversely, suburban sprawl leads to lower population densities and less untouched land.
• Tall, multi-story buildings that share walls with adjacent structures save heat. Less wall and rood area is exposed to the sun, which reduces summer air-conditioning loads.
• High population density means that city dwellers live in closer proximity to each other and to other destinations, which makes it less likely that residents will choose a car as a means of transportation.

Drive Less

• Traffic congestion in highly dense, geographically compact cities provides a further enticement for residents to use public transportation instead of opting for a car or a taxi.
• The extensive cultural and social establishments of cities—including museums, movie theaters, and other artistic organizations—allow for urban residents to enjoy entertainment without driving long distances.
• Extensive public transportation provides for a lighter carbon footprint than that of an area where most people drive cars.

In his acclaimed Strength in What Remains, author Tracy Kidder writes,

He [Deo] didn’t yet have an organization that would finance and construct and staff the clinic he imagined. In fact, he was still trying to decide on a name. He would come up with one, declare emphatically this was it, and then for one reason or another reject it. In the bar, he finally settled on “Village Health Works.”

Village Health Works is a not-for-profit organization based in the U.S. and founded by Deogratias Niyizonkiza. VHW’s mission is bringing high quality healthcare to the people of Burundi by working with community members to build and operate a model expandable health center in the rural village of Kigutu. The Kigutu Health Center opened for patients on November 7, 2007.

By the summer of 2008 “the clinic was seeing an average of forty-seven patients a day, and sometimes as many as ninety—about sixty thousand individual patients in its first eight months of operation.”

Vision

To create a patient-centered team dedicated to providing quality health care for the people we serve. The vision of Village Health Works is based on the principle that all people, including the most oppressed and impoverished, are entitled to the highest standards of health care in their pursuit of happy and productive lives.

Community empowerment:
“Through education and practical training, community members are empowered not only to participate in VHW projects but also to organize and manage them.”

Community partnership in VHW projects
“We believe integrating community members at every phase of VHW projects is crucial to creating the lasting partnership that is needed for people to improve their health and lives.”

Mission

“To provide compassionate, culturally sensitive and excellent quality care to our patients in a safe and dignified environment.”

Programs

• Women’s Health
  • Obstetrics and Prenatal Care
  • Gynecology Care
• Pediatric Care
• HIV Program
• Tuberculosis Program
• Malaria Program
• Nutrition Program
• Mental Health Care Initiative
• Community Development and Public Health

Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis

By Al Gore

Rodale, 2009

Reviewed by Bill McKibben

There’s been a certain amount of debate about whether Barack Obama deserved his Nobel Prize. About Al Gore there is no argument. He singlehandedly managed to wrest the topic of global warming on to center stage around the world. And frankly, he deserved his Oscar just as much, for figuring out a way to dramatize the sometimes complicated science of global warming. He did for climate what Mandela did for apartheid or Gandhi for colonialism—made it an inescapable part of our global political debate.

But if there was a single knock on An Inconvenient Truth, it was that it didn’t offer enough in the way of solutions—that the section on What To Do ran hard into the closing credits, and that most of the ideas—lightbulb stuff—didn’t rise to the challenge that had just been set out so vividly. That criticism always strikes me as a little dumb—diagnosis and prescription are different skills. But Gore, who is nothing if not dogged, took the criticism seriously, and convened a series of “Solutions Summits” in his Nashville home and elsewhere around the world. To judge from the acknowledgements in his new book, Our Choice, everyone who has ever had an idle thought about the question of how we’ll solve the planet’s greatest problem came to one of these sessions (me included). Simply the thought of sitting through them makes my rear end ache. But this book shows the effort was worth it. It’s the grand compendium of all that we know about how to undertake this most difficult of transitions, from an economy that burns fossil fuels to an economy that lives mostly on the incoming power of the sun in its many forms.

There are extensive, deeply documented chapters on everything you need to know to make sense of our situation: on forests and soils and how they might be made to sequester more carbon. On wind turbines and solar power and geothermal energy (which intrigues Gore) and biomass. He’s less sanguine about carbon capture from coal and about nuclear power, as much on the grounds of cost as anything else—but he’s careful not to shut the door on any option, which is appropriate considering the scale of crisis we face. Read More

One year in, is Barack Obama living up to expectations? Take our poll and let us know what you think.

Here they are:

Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis

By Al Gore

A call to action from our leading environmental advocate that answers the climate questions posed in An Inconvenient Truth.

Learn more…

OBÁMANOS! The Rise of a New Political Era

by Hendrik Hertzberg

A celebrated political analyst’s exuberant and incisive coverage of the 2008 election—the longest, costliest, most surprising, and most intense presidential campaign in American history.

Learn more…

The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory

by David Plouffe

The architect of the Obama campaign reveals how it all happened—and why its lessons are not limited to politics.

Learn more…

The Future of Faith

by Harvey Cox

A celebrated scholar argues that religious fundamentalism is dying throughout the world, and is being replaced by grassroots movements rooted in social justice and spiritual experience.

Learn more…

My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times

by Harold Evans

One of the most successful newspaper editors of his generation on the glories of his beloved industry.

Learn more…

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

by Ken Auletta

A best-selling New Yorker writer’s revealing,  a probing, forward-looking examination of Google’s outsize influence on the changing media landscape.

Learn more…

Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy

by Sidney M. Milkis

How the historic presidential election of 1912—and the values of the Progressive Party and its candidate—led to the equally historic election of Barack Obama almost a century later.

Learn more…

Outta Here: Karzai Gets New Term as Abdullah Drops Out

“I hoped there would be a better process. But it is final. I will not participate in the Nov. 7 elections.”

- Afghan presidential contender Abdullah Abdullah, who over the weekend withdrew from the scheduled runoff election. President Hamid Karzai remains president by default. Abdullah did not ask Afghans to take to the streets to protest, but he said he could not take part in a runoff that he believed would be at least as fraudulent as the first round in August. (New York Times)

* Related Title: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew J. Bacevich

Let Me Try That Again: Clinton Backs Off Praise of Israeli Settlement Offer

“As the president has said on many occasions, the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”

- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, responding to criticism from Arab nations, following her praise for Israel’s offer to restrain - but not stop - building settlements in Palestinian areas. She qualified her earlier comments by saying while Israel was moving in the right direction, its offer “falls far short” of U.S. expectations. (Washington Post)

* Related Title: Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East by Rashid Khalidi

The Fierce Urgency of Now: Republicans Offer 11th-Hour Health Reform Bill

“What we do is we try to make the current system work better.”

- House Republican Leader John Boehner, announcing that Republicans are preparing an alternative health-care bill to Democratic legislation, marking a shift in strategy as the full House is set to begin debate on the issue this week. (Wall Street Journal)

* Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform by Howard Dean with Igor Volsky and Faiz Shakir

Since the 1970s the productivity of the American worker has increased steadily and the U.S. economy has grown at an impressive rate. Yet while the already-wealthy have grown considerably wealthier in this period, most Americans are no better off than they were four decades ago. Jonathan Tasini, in his new book The Audacity of Greed, calls this phenomenon “the emptying of the wage cupboard,” and he lays out the numbers underlying what is now essentially “a two-tiered earnings system made up of the very rich and the rest of us.” Here’s a sampling:

• The top earners’ share of wages, which was stable from the mid-1940s through the 1970s, nearly doubled from 1979 through 2006, from 7.3 percent to 13.6 percent. This is the result of earnings growth of 144.4 percent for the top 1 percent of earners over the past thirty years, compared to just 15.6 percent growth for the bottom 90 percent.
• Those in the upper 0.1 percent of wage earners have hit the jackpot, as their annual earnings have grown 324 percent since 1979, to over $2.2 million in 2006. As a result, the earnings of the top 0.1 percent of Americans are now 77 times greater than the earnings of the bottom 90 percent, whereas in 1979 it was just 21 times as much.
• The share of our national income hoarded by the top one percent was, as of 2006, 22.1 percent (a rise of three percentage points from 2004.) The last time it was that high was in 1928 (23.9 percent)—just as the Great Depression was about to hit with its full fury.