Forget the Oscars. As far as Washington is concerned, the real competition is for the speaking fees for the escapees from Stalag Bush. And the winner is… Colin Powell. Yes, if you want the former secretary of state to speak at your event, it will cost you $100,000, plus first-class expenses. The only other figure asking that kind of sum is former NBC-TV news anchor Tom Brokaw, who wants $60,000 for a New York event and $100,000 for travel beyond the Boston-New York-Washington corridor. Prices may fall when Dan Rather, outgoing anchor for CBS, starts giving Brokaw some competition. Meanwhile, remember the former secretary of homeland security, Tom Ridge, the twit who devised the colour-coded alert system that went through chartreuse, turquoise, teal and magnolia? He's yours for just $40,000. Former health and human services secretary Tommy Thompson is a paltry $35,000, and former commerce secretary Donald Evans is $25,000, except in China and Japan, which pay double that.
Progressive talk radio takes off
It's too late to save John Kerry, but since January three radio stations, in Washington, Detroit and Cincinnati, all owned by the mega-corporation broadcasting group Clear Channel, have switched from music to progressive talk radio. Hitherto, the right-wing blowhards like Rush Limbaugh (boasting 20m listeners a day) have had it their own way. Gabe Hobbs, vice-president of programming for Clear Channel, says that a new station format usually takes up to two years to get established in a market, but "our stations are getting there in 30 to 90 days—that's remarkable considering no one knows who most of these people are." The best known progressive channel, Al Franken's Air America, is now on 50 stations nationwide. Initially, it succeeded only in liberal areas like San Francisco and Seattle. But then KLSD in San Diego—which has a reputation of being the most conservative radio market in the country—signed up, and by the second month the station was no 1 in the market among listeners age 25-54. Michael Harrison, publisher of the industry magazine Talkers, reckons he knows why it's booming—it's because the liberal left is out of power. "Talk radio works best when it challenges authority," he said. "It works best when people feel that no one else is talking to them quite this way."
Democrats for 2008
It's started already. Senator (and former governor) Evan Bayh is hiring staff for his presidential run in 2008, signing up Kerry and Edwards campaign veterans like Paul Maslin as pollster, Linda Moore Forbes to run the staff and Steve Bouchard on the fundraising political action committee called Americans for Responsible Leadership. Note that key word "responsible"—Bayh is an elected Democrat from a strongly Republican state (Indiana), and conventional wisdom says that is what the party needs. Unfortunately, Bayh is so boring that other Democrats would ask him to be their warm-up speaker because he made them look so good. So far, the only other Dems signing staff for '08 are Hillary and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson.
Hillary's real concern these days is not campaigning for the presidency but making sure she keeps her New York senate seat in 2006. The airline crisis has just made that a lot harder. Since 1961, the New York-Washington shuttle has always guaranteed a seat. If one extra passenger showed up, they would wheel out an extra plane. "If we couldn't guarantee a seat to everyone who shows up, it just wouldn't be the shuttle," ran Eastern's 1967 ad campaign. But with Delta Air Lines losing $5bn last year, the airline has decided it costs too much to keep a plane on standby. And 9/11 didn't help. The shuttle between Washington's Ronald Reagan airport and New York's LaGuardia carried 1.2m passengers in the first ten months of 2004, down from 1.78m in 2000. On the Delta shuttle, passenger traffic has dropped more than 40 per cent over the last five years. The end of the shuttle means passengers need to book, or face getting bumped off the next flight. And for Hillary, commuting three or four times a week between votes in Washington and fundraisers in New York, this is a disaster. Her fellow senator Chuck Schumer and many big media figures feel the same way, so a rethink by Delta would be an intriguing sign of their collective clout.
Cyber-tyrant-toppling
Coming soon from the International Centre on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), which helped to topple tyrants in Serbia, Georgia and most recently Ukraine, a new video game: A Force More Powerful. It's a cross between a Pentagon war-game, a Sim City computer game and a political science class taught by Machiavelli and Mahatma Gandhi. It invites the chief of staff of a nonviolent resistance movement to try to overthrow an authoritarian regime. Ivan Marovic, the Serbian student leader who helped organise the protests that ousted Slobodan Milosevic and went on to advise similar efforts in Georgia and Ukraine, helped to devise the game. It includes an artificial intelligence feature that controls the reactions of various leaders of the targeted regime, who can be persuaded or bribed to become neutral or even defect. Although the ICNC is financially independent, thanks to co-founder Peter Ackerman's fortune, and carefully avoids connections with the US government's National Endowment for Democracy, controversy looms. The latest wave of pro-democracy activists signing up for ICNC's help are from the next land on the administration's hitlist—Iran.
