All posts by Steve Stern
San Francisco Flower and Garden Show
When I was a kid – say about 10 – the San Mateo County Products & Floral Fiesta was a big deal, only we – we being everybody I knew in about 1950 – called it The Fiesta. Our parents would leave us alone in a temporary mini-midway, five dollars worth of coupons in hand, to go on the sleazy rides and eat all the bad food we could while they went next door to the Bay Meadows Race Track to watch, and bet on – I guess – the horses. At the end of the day, rejoined by our parents, we might even wander into the buildings where the local farmers showed their flowers, or bushels of fruits and vegetables, or prized animals.
As an aside – On one wander into a county products building, I even saw a mother pig give birth to a bunch of piglets – on a, now unknown but vaguely remembered, bedding covered concrete floor – in a pool of amniotic fluid, as I stood, fascinated, next to my equally fascinated but horrified mother. End aside.
Now the Race Track is gone and the Fiesta grounds are called the San Mateo Event Center. Then San Mateo County seemed more rural than suburban with a population of 235,659 (205,748 Native White, 24,453 Foreign- born White, and 1,110 Chinese according to the Census – now the population is 718,451 with 383,535 White and 178,118 Asian). It is obviously a much more interesting place to live.
For some reason, the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show is now held thirty five miles south of San Francisco at the Event Center, so, for the first time in over 50 years, I went back. There was no midway and there are no pigs and we never got to the flower section, but there were lots of temporary gardens. The picture above is one of the winning gardens and is a little – a lot? – idealized: when we walked in, my first imprssion was of a dark barn with dim tungsten lighting. Sort of like this:
(the camera compensated for the exposure and I went back and corrected the white balance in the first picture.)
We went with Eileen and Aston Pereira who are definitely garden aficionados and had actually got there early to get in more face time with all the displays (such as the Dahlia bulb emporium and the hanging succulent garden seller).
They had saved the gardens to tour last when we got there. The theme was something around small spaces which worked perfectly for the venue. Aston didn’t think the gardens were as good as last year, but I thought a couple were at least very good, one was bizarre but interesting, the rest were above average, and some of the plants were spectacular.
All in all, it was a great way to tour gardens on a crummy, rainy, day.
Romney, Bain Capital, and the amorality of business verses Santorum, righteousness, and the immorality of being certain
Following the Republican primary has been both fascinating and scary. Fascinating because the players seem flawed to the point that the race sometimes seems like fiction. Scary because one of these guys could be the next president of the United States; unlikely, in my opinion, but possible. Of the two main players, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, Romney seems like the best bet because – as the conventional wisdom has it – he is probably just bullshitting and would be more moderate than he is pretending to be now. Maybe….I guess.
Romney is a businessman and business is, usually, amoral. Not immoral, just amoral as in morality is not really a factor. There are exceptions when the founder has a vision of a product or service that he or she wants to get into the marketplace, but I have never heard of a business that was founded to provide jobs. A business has to make money to survive and business, done right, becomes about making money. Even Apple, under Steve Jobs, which was one of the most Vision driven companies in the marketplace, moved its production to China to make more money. It is axiomatic; the better the business is run, the more money it makes.
A business that invests or takes over other companies doesn’t even have a product, it is only about making money. A couple of months ago, The New Yorker had an article about the Stella D’oro Biscuit Company, a Bronx bakery that was bought by a private-equity firm like Bain Capital in 2006. It makes for fascinating reading and I suggest you follow the link, but the gist of the article is that a company that had taken great pride in its product and the way it treated its workers was destroyed after it was bought out by a company that did not share that vision.
The private equity firm, Bain Capital, founded by Mitt Romney was founded to make money. Not to hire people, not to produce a great product, only to make money. They go where they think they can make the most money like surveillance cameras when the Chinese government spends multibillions in an effort to blanket the country with devises to watch their citizens. Bain has bought in because they think they will make a profit. The morality of China spying on its people is not a factor, the profit is. Jobs is not a factor, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, 22 percent of the companies in which Bain invested wound up either in bankruptcy or shutting their doors entirely. But Romney made money from them; apparently he is very good at making money.
I suspect that Romney would be pretty pragmatic as president. I wouldn’t like his appointments to the Supreme Court1, I wouldn’t like his Secretary of the Interior, but I doubt that he would be another George Bush the Younger attacking random countries. Maybe a Nixon foreign or Clinton foreign policy and Bush the Elder domestic2 policy.
Rick Santorum, on the other hand, seems like a True Believer. 3 Somebody who would rather be right than President and, to misquote a former Speaker of the House, Thomas Reed, hopefully for the country, he will never be either. Unfortunately for the country, he is and, seemingly, will be an influence. To see what kind of influence, check out this latest ad fro Santorum. Notice the subliminal flashing of Obama with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at about the 40 second mark. The Santorum ad does its best to dehumanize Obama and when we dehumanize the other, the deranged take their cues. I think he is very scary.
1. Which is probably an understatement.
2. Or do I have to say heartland, now?
3. The True Believer is a book by San Francisco’s own Eric Hoffer on fanaticism.
How do they do it?
Frame of Mind from Steven Alan on Vimeo.
The Obama I expected and didn’t get until now
When Michele and I started working on the Obama Campaign in 2007, I was drawn to Obama by his message of change. The idea of change that he represented and promoted. During the primary, he said We can’t change the way Washington works unless we first change how Congress works. and It’s not just enough to change the players. We’ve gotta change the game.
In December of 2007 in Des Moines, he said We can’t afford to be so worried about losing the next election that we lose the battles we owe to the next generation. The real gamble in this election is playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expecting a different result. And that’s a risk we can’t take. Then he got elected and chose the same Washington players and pretty much got the same results.
But yesterday, Barack Obama nominated Dartmouth College president Jim Yong Kim to be head of the World Bank. He is Change we can believe In. Way to go Obama. And, if you have any doubts, check out his resume and video below (starting at about 2:00 for the impatient).