Editor's Note

November 10, 2008

"Who are the people of America?" InSight America began with this question on the eve of elections, with the urgent understanding that this was going to be one of the most historic votes in the history of the United States. It would decisively affect the futures not only the people of this land but of those throughout the world. Magnum's photographers journeyed throughout the country, exploring cities and rural communities to discern what people were thinking and what was happening to them. They ended up documenting those foreclosed upon in Florida, the rival McCain and Obama camps in Ohio, immigrants in Los Angeles, military families in Virginia, political life in Washington, DC, the rust belt and Wall Street, as well as the political products sprouting on the Web. InSight America had contributors from the Green Zone in Baghdad, from Obama, Japan, Mexico City and Pnomh Penh, tying the impact of the political campaign in the United States to farflung regions of the planet. And the daily statistical "InFact" by Anne Cronin was a graphic reminder of the many extraordinary facets to this country and its political season.

Now that the election has been decided and the United States has turned a significant corner, InSight America is taking a short break as we gear up to document how this country will evolve. We will concentrate on the open wounds and painful legacies of the last number of years, on how the developing policies of the new Obama administration will affect the people of this country and, by extension, those in many parts of the world, and on the new strategies springing up in communities nationwide to move society forward and to keep the call for change alive.

We thank you for visiting the site, for commenting on the various projects that we put online, and invite you back in the future. If you would like, please join our mailing list for updates. Good luck to all of us!

October 30, 2008

The Obama campaign says they’re not measuring the drapes in the Oval Office just yet, but they are planning a very large party in Chicago on Election Night.

Obama will greet his supporters outdoors in Grant Park, along Lake Michigan. Before he learned that admission to the rally would by ticket only, Mayor Richard M. Daley predicted that a million people could be there.

No matter the size of the crowd, a mass of united Democrats could bury the memory of a fragmented party, and how its members fought a battle at Grant Park, under another Mayor Daley.

In August 1968, as a divided Democratic Party met in Chicago to nominate their presidential candidate, anti-war protesters gathered in the city, vowing to shut the convention down. On August 28, at a rally of 10,000 in Grant Park, a boy lowered the American flag; police charged in and beat him. The subsequent riot between police, National Guards troops and protesters spread into the city, in a cloud of tear gas and mace, to the front of the Hilton Hotel, where uniformed forces beat young people while protesters chanted “the whole world is watching.”

Inside the convention hall, Connecticut Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff used his nominating speech for George McGovern to tell the conventioneers about the violence taking place outside, even as Mayor Richard J. Daley (the current mayor’s father) shouted him down. Hubert H. Humphrey won the nomination, but the split within the Democratic Party was wide enough to drive a Nixon-driven truck through.

Raymond Depardon was at Grant Park in 1968, capturing the growing storm.

Harold Meyerson has a great piece in The Washington Post about what the 1968 Convention did to the Democrats.

October 23, 2008

Republicans and Democrats view the world differently. How do we know this? Through their remote controls.

Nielsen IAG has just released data showing the cable shows that are the most “engaging” to self-identified Republicans and Democrats. Nielsen tests engagement by asking viewers questions about shows they’ve seen; if the viewers remember lots of detail s about a show, Nielsen deems them “engaged” by it.

One of the most engaging cable show for Republicans? Comedy Central’s “South Park,” featuring bigoted, manipulative antihero Eric Cartman and his posse of more reasonable friends. Other G.O.P. favorites include “The Bill Engvall Show” and “Cash Cab.”

And for Democrats? “The Colbert Report,” another Comedy Central offering, which, on its very first episode in 2005, coined the term “truthiness” – “the quality by which one purports to know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to evidence or intellectual examination.” Other shows that engage Democrats are “Ax Men” and “Deadliest Catch.” Can Republicans and Democrats come together? Nielsen’s data suggests that they can, through radical rehab.

“The Cleaner” is a cable show with high bipartisan engagement. As A&E says on the show’s Web site, it “stars Benjamin Bratt as William ‘The Cleaner’ Banks, who, after hitting rock-bottom from his own addictions after the birth of his daughter, strikes a tentative deal with God. Now along with his unconventional team, he helps people get away from their addictions by any means necessary.” The complete list of engaging shows is available here.

October 15, 2008

As news media focus on the latest surveys of attitudes of American voters for the coming election, now only three weeks away, it is easy to forget that much of the world has a stake in this election as well. The ongoing global economic crisis provoked by failures in the United States have cost other countries dearly: Russia has lost a trillion dollars alone; Nicaragua's president Daniel Ortega said that "God is punishing the United States" for its imposition of flawed economic policies on developing countries; one of our staff observed Mexicans watching the U.S. Presidential debate and cheering for Obama as if it were a soccer match. Thomas Dworzak, one of our photographers who was following the president of Georgia as he made the rounds recently in New York City, was amazed that, at press conferences, the first question to the Georgian president was usually "Who is she?" referring to Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Why is the American press asking a foreign president about Palin when he only shook hands with her briefly?

Then there are the Venetian gondoliers singing, in English, hoping to convince Americans to vote for Obama from the Grand Canal. The Iranian government is said to be afraid of an Obama victory, because then they would have no reason not to negotiate with the United States. These are, in a sense, global elections that will be decided, as always, by a small minority of American adults – only 28.7 percent were responsible for George W. Bush's election in 2004.