Dear Mayor Villaraigosa:

I have always been deeply impressed by your commitment to bridging racial and ethnic divides that other public figures tend to exploit.  I've never forgotten the end of one exchange that appeared in a 1999 LA Weekly piece (see http://www.laweekly.com/...

One Yaroslavsky constituency that no one will contest is the L.A. Jewish establishment: The organized Jewish community is Zev's base of all bases. "But if Zev doesn't go," says one leader of the Valley Jewish community, "it gets very complicated. I foresee a Wachs-Soboroff-Antonio split."

"Antonio?" I ask.

"Antonio is out here all the time," he says. "Antonio is everywhere."

"Antonio is everywhere": to me, that comment perfectly symbolizes your determination to reach out to people from every background and community.

I am writing today because of upsetting parallels I see between your 2001 mayoral race and the current campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination...

Newsweek's Andrew Romano wrote an interesting critique of the Obama campaign's latest (?) TV ad, "Inspiring".  The ad and the critique can be seen at

http://my.barackobama.com/...

and

http://www.blog.newsweek.com/...

respectively.  Romano suggests that this ad does not go far enough in fleshing out the candidate as more than just a captivating speaker.  I myself am a bit worried that at this juncture in the campaign, it is not helpful for the words "First Black..." and praise from "Professor Laurence Tribe, Harvard University Law School" to be featured so prominently.  What advice would you give the Obama campaign on its TV advertising?

By way of disclosure: I am a likely Barack Obama voter in a February 5th state who nevertheless likes Hillary Clinton more every time I see her perform on TV.  However, I have a real problem with the idea of her as president because the prospect of Bill running around the West Wing diving into who-knows-what policy debates disturbs me.  Every time I receive one of his laughably uxorious fundraising emails or see him make bitter comments about Obama with the desperation of a man who sees his third term evaporating before his eyes, I want to run in the opposite direction from Hillary's campaign.

At some point, I began to wonder whether other women who followed their husbands into national office faced similar reactions from voters.  By my count, this group would include...

The Office of Technology Assessment was established in 1972 to provide committees and individual members of Congress with objective, scientifically accepted advice about complicated science and technology issues.  In 1995, after the Republican takeover of Congress, the OTA was abolished-- in part because of Speaker Gingrich's eccentric view that members should seek out scientists among their own consitutents for consultation, but mainly because objective advice wasn't useful for a party driven by corporate and socially conservative interest groups (this is documented in Chris Mooney's "The Republican War on Science").  Absent OTA, members of Congress are now less able to make and (perhaps more importantly) justify decisions about science and technology policy, leaving Congress as a whole increaingly unmoored from reality.