Back in 2008, when Barack Obama was running for President, he took a politically unpopular stand on the gas tax. Both John McCain and Hillary Clinton were calling for a gas-tax “holiday” to stimulate the economy. Obama took the side of most economists (not to mention our very own Justin Fox) in saying that a lower gas tax might play well …
Barack Obama
4 smart things Barack Obama said about job creation
I’ve been pretty critical of a lot of the ideas coming out of Washington about how to encourage job creation, so I thought I’d take a breather and do a more glass-half-full post. As it turns out, I’ve been out in America this week doing some reporting on the topic, speaking with a lot of small-business owners, start-up CEOs and …
Obama to Wall Street: Keep your naughtiness in check. Please
The President went to Wall Street today and said … well, nothing new, really. The substance of his speech was that Congress ought to pass all those financial reforms the Treasury Department proposed a few months back. Actually he said near the end of the speech that the reforms “will pass.” Want to put some money on that?
The Big …
Fair pay comes up in last night’s debate
With the economy bottoming out, it’s a given that working women are going to get slammed extra hard, what with our piddling 77 cents earned to every dollar for a man. But it seemed to me that equal pay had taken a back seat in this increasingly feisty presidential campaign. So when Barack Obama mentioned Lilly Ledbetter last night, I hooted.
Need to ace that job interview? Pop a pill
Somehow, in my seemingly endless naivete, I long assumed that performance-enhancing drugs were confined to the rarified worlds of, I don’t know, performance. Professional baseball; Olympic gymnastics; Project Runway designers just before Bryant Park. (I’m kidding; I have no way of knowing if designers pop pills. But if they don’t, …
Power to the Halfricans (and other halves)
We called ourselves halves.
Where I grew up, we were the majority—we children of mixed race, usually Asian and something else. My international community in Kobe, Japan, was lousy with us. So was our frequent vacation spot, Hawaii, where I was recently told that two out of three babies born of late are of mixed heritage.
It was only …
It’s not enough that I succeed…
…others around me must fail.
Admit it: that’s how many of us feel. And I’m not just talking to you, Barack and Hillary.
You know that feeling when you land that highly sought project—but then you learn your colleague nabbed one that’s even better? Or when you publish an important article—just as your long-struggling college buddy …
Obama: biracial like me. Only not.
Growing up in an international community made up of dozens of nationalities, I developed a keen ear for accents. I could not only differentiate the Swiss from the German, but also discern the Chinese by way of Taiwan by way of California.
Maybe that’s why it jarred me to hear Barack Obama speak to a church audience before the primaries …
I just got recruited through LinkedIn
I very rarely get recruited. So rarely that sometimes I wonder what I’m doing wrong. When my colleagues were getting picked off by that new Condé Nast magazine Portfolio–all right, all of two TIME writers defected–I got nary a phone call. Not that I would have gone. If I had, I probably would have regretted it, considering all the …
Lessons from the Democratic debate, courtesy of Hillary
Case Study A on how working women can publicly and skillfully sing their own praises: I submit to you Sen. Hillary Clinton’s performance in last night’s CNN/YouTube debate among Democratic presidential candidates.
Time after time, she managed to pepper her responses with phrases like, “I have done tremendous work on this…” “This is …