Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 19 May 2004
Did another live radio interview at the end of the workday. Performed over the phone from my office at the college for David Gold on his Dallas-based afternoon AM talk radio show. He's fairly conservative, and in his forceful presentation of his ideas, I got sucked up into harsher statements than I normally deliver. I'm a bit of a chameleon like that, as the 8th of nine kids I learned early in life to please through subtle imitation, or making myself more like whomever I'm dealing with. That's a neat skill in terms of working with media people in general, but you have to watch yourself.
With David Gold, I found myself having to almost step out of character now and then and remind the audience of some key points. For example, Gold wants to go on and on about the liberal media bashing Bush, and I make the comparison to how the right-wing media (and frankly, much of the military itself) went overboard in its blind hatred of Clinton. Also, Gold goes a bit overboard about how bad our enemy is, painting a rather broad brush across Islam as a whole, forcing me, at the end of the interview, to remind people not to view Islam as the real enemy, but the disconnectedness that too many in the region suffer in terms of broadband economic and social connectivity to the world at large.
All in all, a good reminder for me. Gold is clearly a stem-winder, which is his call. But I'm not. There are no Republican-only answers for the questions posed in this Global War on Terrorism. A real grand strategy appeals to both sides of the political spectrum, or it's no grand strategy at all.
So, some chameleon is good, but you have to remember who you are at the end of the day. He's David Gold and I'm Tom Barnett. He's got a conservative talk radio show and I have a vision of a future worth creating not just for America, but for the world.
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