By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Jul 26, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
 I waste so much time browsing in technology stores –and then not buying anything–that I am considering charging Office Depot, Staples, and Best Buy a “browsing fee” of $4.50 every half-hour I browse.
I am valuable to them even though I rarely purchase anything because I make them look busy with an extra customer.
 And I bring the added benefit of occassionally seeing someone who I know and tbey may think, “I know John is a busy guy and if he is browsing today at Office Depot maybe I should find the time too.”
That is until this friend remembers seeing me last week browsing at Staples and the week before that seeing me browsing at Best Buy.
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Jul 25, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET  Seeing the first sign or symptom of moving into a new phase in life can take our breath away, fill us with fear and anxiety, and send us into the dark abyss of internet searches to diagnose ourselves.
Sometimes the first sign is barely noticeable but other times it can be painfully and even shockingly apparent to everyone around the person going through a life transition. Except, of course, the person himself.
Tonight I ran out to Walmart to pick up some household items and while waiting in the checkout line saw this magazine with a feature story about Matthew Perry tossed into my pile of purchases.
Shocked, I looked around to see who was the culprit.
It was me.
This is scary and good mean a range of possible life transitions. Some of them socially fatal.
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Jul 24, 2013 at 2:00 PM ET  I’d like to wish a very happy 46th birthday to my dear friend Jonathan Miller.
Our paths first crossed over 18 years ago when I was a mere 31 years old and running for secretary of state. I was in need of a campaign manager willing to work for cheap. Preferably nothing. And no one seemed interested until our mutual friend David Hale introduced Jonathan and me.
Jonathan was a Lexingtonian who was a super high achiever who had graduated from Harvard and Harvard law and was working at a top DC law firm but pining to move back to his home state of Kentucky to settle down. He had also caught the political bug and just finished working in a congressional campaign in TN and was looking for something to do next in politics. Helping my campaign seemed like a good excuse to get back to Kentucky and satisfy his political itch.
David introduced us by phone and Jonathan and I talked for 45 minutes. I hoped I had impressed him. A few days later Jonathan sent me transcripts for two TV commercials and then helped make them and served as my campaign manager. He never charged me a penny. And I will never forget that life changing gesture.
Here are the two ads he created that helped me win.
And the picture on top of this post is of us on election night. Much younger than 50 and 46. I’m guessing if my math is correct, 31 and 27.
 We served in statewide office together over the next decade and now are having fun trying our hand at writing with Jonathan’s blog The Recovering Politician. Here’s his recent book and mine.
We aren’t as competitive as we once were but I’d like to point out that my book (at 366 pages) is bigger than his book (at 206) pages. And that when it comes to book length, I believe size still matters.
He’s a good man and friend and I hope he has 46 more of these, at least. And hope I am around to wish him happy birthday for each. And Lord knows what new idea he’ll be pitching for me to work on him with next decade. Although I can already see him creating a national shuffleboard league during our 80s in which Jonathan creates an international shuffleboard tournament in Boca Raton and gives half the proceeds to develop new houses powered by solar energy on planet Jupiter and transforms the first Jupiter house into a satellite office he dedicates to No Labels.org and promotes both announcements on his Recovering Politician blog.
Because although that will be 35 years from now, Jonathan will never completely recover from politics and the political bug. And I’m grateful for that.
Happy birthday, youngster.
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Jul 24, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET The difference between Louisville, KY and New York City…
In Haircuts .
NYC:
A guy named Louie, a rough 60 year old Italian man who has been cutting hair for 32 years, shampoos, cuts and dries your hair. He doesn’t ask you how you want your hair cut but tells you what you need to have done. And then cuts it the way he wants even after you tell him you want your haircut a different way. But you like it better.
You think of the show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and wish you could have been on it as a guest but that no one ever found out about it because it never aired–but you could have gotten some good clothing, style and haircut tips. You see another guy getting his haircut checking you out and take it as a compliment. Louie is finished with everything in 14 minutes and 45 seconds and charges $27.50. And you feel it is a bargain. And tip him $5 even though he doesn’t speak to you the entire time.
He successfully upsells you gel that you later throw away because you never use gel but didn’t want to admit that to Louie. There is no follow up appointment because Louie knows that next month you are going to be back in Kentucky and he’ll never see you again. And he also knows you’ll probably throw away the gel. But you won’t forget him or his name.
Louisville:
A young lady named Kera, a cute 23 year old woman from Louisville who finished cosmetology school last fall, shampoos, cuts and dries your hair. She asks you how you want it cut and you tell her and she tries to follow your instructions and does.
But you don’t like it as much as you’d hoped. You continuously scan the salon and keep hoping that the clientele who are 85% female doesn’t assume you are gay because you are getting your hair cut there instead of a barber shop—and try to look very heterosexual and uninterested in your haircut.
Kera is finished with everything in 27 minutes and it costs $17. And even though you had an interesting conversation with her about her family and where she went to high school (it is Louisville, remember, and where you went to high school is always the first question to a stranger) wish you’d asked for the other woman who’s name you can’t remember but you think starts with an “L” who cut your hair a few months ago —and you only tip Kera $3 but tell yourself it was because it was just easy to give her a $20 and be done with it and not ask for more $1 bills.
She fails to upsell you gel but then remembers you never use gel and apologizes for asking again. She successfully schedules your next appointment and reminds herself to try to upsell conditioner next time instead of gel.
Which you may buy, if it’s the woman who’s name starts with an “L.” Or maybe it’s an “M.”
By Jason Atkinson, on Wed Jul 24, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET
By Michael Steele, on Tue Jul 23, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET From Tal Kopan of Politico:
Michael Steele on Wednesday said Liz Cheney’s decision to challenge fellow Republican Sen. Mike Enzi for his Wyoming Senate seat will be disastrous and split the party.
The former Republican National Committee chairman told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner that he thinks former Sen. Alan Simpson was right to call the situation a “disaster.”
“I think he’s right, I think it’s going to open a lot of fissures in the party. I think this is an insurgent move by Cheney,” Steele said Wednesday on “Now with Alex Wagner.”
Steele criticized Cheney’s comments that Enzi has compromised too much and “gone along to get along.”
“When have people gone along to get along in Washington in the last four or five years?” Steele said. “This is clearly more of a personal opportunity to, thinking there’s an opening here, and, you know, it’s going to be tough.”
Agreeing with fellow panelist E.J. Dionne, Steele said he hopes race is a chance for rank and file Republicans to fight back against a Washington tea party.
“I hope they do. I hope the Enzi team really come prepared with a strong A game, because this could be a seminal moment for a longer conversation,” Steele said.
Click here to read full piece.
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Jul 23, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET I wonder if anyone will ever do a retrospective—a “Where are they now” — special on the Teletubbies.
Normally I don’t care much for these sorts of programs unless I really find the person fascinating.
I don’t find the Teletubbies fascinating, but couldn’t help think they were a fluke, a children’s TV sort of “one hit wonder.”
Television characters like that –after they drop off the public radar–often fall hard and aren’t heard from again. Until death or some public crises or tragedy.
I especially worried about Po.
Who seemed to “appear” happy and functional throughout the series but was masking some deep pain and seemed on a collision course with reality, despite the happy-go-lucky persona.
Po seems to have a lot of parallels with the Partridge Family’s child star Danny Bonaduce ….but as a terrycloth children’s TV character.
By Artur Davis, on Tue Jul 23, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Barack Obama’s initial banalities on the George Zimmerman trial—sympathy for the loss Trayvon Martin’s parents suffered, respect for the jury process—felt tepid and his observation today that Trayvon Martin could have been Obama 15 years ago felt cliched. Revealingly, to some of Obama’s fans, the pedestrian response was strategic given that Obama’s ventures into race during his presidency, from the flap over a black Harvard professor being arrested outside his home to his observation last year that an Obama son might have resembled Trayvon, have backfired. In the suggestion of the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, given that track record, better the power of his family’s example when they walk across the White House lawn than any risky but more textured contribution to this week’s exposed wounds on race.
Of course, cheerleading about the role model value of a black man in high places has never been a thing that black commentators have embraced for its own sake, at least not when it involves the face of a Republican or even a black Democrat who was insufficiently progressive. And to lower expectations for Obama to the point that saying little is deemed more beneficial than saying much concedes one of the central premises for why a lightly experienced politician five years from a state senate seat was elevated so quickly to the presidency. It is also another instance of a second term where Obama ranges from spectator to occasional sideline critic on the domestic priorities of his own government: on immigration reform and expanded gun background checks, on the renewal of No Child Left Behind, on second tier fights over food stamps and student loans, the formula has been standard partisan ripostes after the fact and an avoidance of any mobilizing strategy that lasts beyond a morning news cycle.
 So, in the vacuum Obama leaves, either an Attorney General with a hapless profile who is obscure to most white Americans, or a set of voices who have been punch lines for about a decade, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, have been ill-cast as the spokesmen for one view of the Florida verdict—that Martin is not atypical but a specter of myriad ways young black men are devalued—and the very staleness of their advocacy has been easy fodder for critics on the right who are too sanguine about the reality that astonishingly few blacks have confidence in the race neutrality of the legal system.
It is not hard to imagine what Obama might have done this week. He certainly could have lamented the most overlooked aspect of the trial, that Zimmerman and Martin very likely profiled each other, that each saw a threat and affront magnified by the other’s color, and that the ugliness of that kind of mutual recrimination too regularly spills over into every facet of black and white interaction. At the same time, there has been a need this week for the African American community to self-examine the sizable inconsistency between the elevation of a child killed by a white man into a cause célèbre and the national anonymity of, say, Hadiya Pendleton, the black majorette killed by a stray gang bullet a week after performing in Obama’s inaugural parade: couldn’t Obama have made that point more powerfully than, say, a conservative commentator like Rich Lowry, or Zimmerman’s brother on CNN, if the president’s vision of his leadership had only led him to try?
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: Obama’s Inadequacies on Race
By RP Staff, on Mon Jul 22, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET From Charles Mahtesian of National Public Radio:
 Another day, another political dynasty.
This latest one is taking shape in Wyoming, where Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, announced Tuesday that she’s challenging incumbent Sen. Mike Enzi in the 2014 Republican primary.
Her announcement is a fitting prelude to the next four years, when voters will witness America’s political royalty in its full glory.
Cheney is just one of a gaggle of legacy candidates running for the Senate next year. In the South, Sens. Mary Landrieu, daughter of the former New Orleans mayor and sister to the current mayor; and Mark Pryor, the son of former Arkansas Sen. David Pryor, are both seeking re-election. Out west, Alaska Sen. Mark Begich and Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, both sons of congressmen, are also vying for another term. So is Udall’s cousin, Tom, who is New Mexico’s senator and himself the son of a congressman.
In fact, pick any place on the map and you’re likely to find dynasty politics in full bloom. In Texas, George P. Bush, son of the ex-Florida governor and grandson of a president, is running for the statewide office of land commissioner. In Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee, a senator’s son, is running for his second term as governor.
And that’s just a sampling.
The scope will become even broader as the 2016 presidential race kicks off. Consider the current top prospects: the son and brother of a former president (Jeb Bush); the wife of a former president (Hillary Clinton); the son of a governor who was once a presidential contender (Andrew Cuomo); and the son of a congressman who ran for president three times (Rand Paul).
Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Until Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, every winning ticket since 1980 featured a son of a United States senator or president.
“Americans were born in rebellion, but they crave connection and familiarity. The temptation of dynastic politics may be a contradictory note in our national character, but it’s perfectly explicable in human nature,” says Rick Wilson, a Florida-based GOP political consultant. “People look for signifiers that give them a quick shorthand to a candidate’s views and character, and because candidates are known generally more by who they are than what they advocate, a famous family name becomes a cornerstone of political branding.”
The practice of political inheritance is as old as the nation. In his book America’s Political Dynasties, scholar Stephen Hess counted at least 700 families in which two or more members had served in Congress since 1774 — and that was back in 1966, when the book was first published.
One of the most famous American political houses, the Kennedys,counts six politicians with service in the House or Senate, including current House freshman Joe Kennedy III.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with dynasty politics. If anything, it underscores the deep commitment of some of the nation’s most prominent families to public service.
But it comes at a cost. There’s no denying that political scions often have an advantage over candidates of lesser lineage.
“They begin with near universal name identification. They begin with a huge rolodex. They begin with a huge understanding of how politics works,” says former Missouri state Sen. Jeff Smith, whose long-shot 2004 campaign for Congress against a scion of a prominent political family was the subject of an award-winning documentary film. “Are any of these skills necessary to become a great public servant? No, but if you understand the game, you may end up spending less time banging your head against the wall learning how things work.”
Sometimes, congressional seats end up in the same family’s hands for decades — even when the talent and charisma skips a generation.
“My experience coming from a state with lots of prominent political families is that in many of these cases, the political talent and policy depth so evident in the first generation isn’t always present in the second generation, in part because it’s not as necessary to fuel the rise,” says Smith, who’s now a professor of politics and advocacy at The New School in New York.
Click here for the full story.
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Jul 22, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET Today’s affirmation.
“Today I will remind myself that we all can’t look like Fabio on the outside.
But we can still feel like Fabio on the inside.
And when I imagine myself today, from the inside that is, I will imagine myself with long flowing hair, a strong Roman nose, and an undisturbed inner confidence..
People may think they are talking to John Brown but they will “feel” like they have been talking to Fabio Lanzoni, but not understand why.
It is because of today’s Fabio Affirmation.
And only I need to know that.
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I waste so much time browsing in technology stores –and then not buying anything–that I am considering charging Office Depot, Staples, and Best Buy a “browsing fee” of $4.50 every half-hour I browse.
