Let's Hear It For "Calm"!
Deadlines and commitments.
This is an "in-advance" mea culpa… the date on this issue of CableFAX Daily is Monday, December 1st… this was written (if that’s the right word—everything after this and the next paragraph might be dead wrong) before Thanksgiving.
So, I’m hereby giving thanks to once again having spent a long Thanksgiving weekend in Santa Fe where the food is fantastic and the ambiance is just fine. And, by the way, the art is pretty cool. And the air is nice and cool. And I couldn’t find an Internet connection worth a damn. And I forgot and left my iPhone at the office. And my MacBook Air floated away.
And, so, who cares?
Nevertheless, here goes:
I’m now cautiously optimistic.
The President-elect seems to be making personnel decisions (the ones that truly count) in a manner that eschews simple ideological knee jerks (a process that, 8 years ago and mostly since, has led to a startlingly large number of jerks in office—some doing a heckuva job) in favor of picking something akin to intellectuals.
OMG!
So this isn’t going to be a "new" New Deal, but it is going to be Keynesian in implementation… which, whenever I’ve attended a concert at Red Rocks, I’ve noted that the CCC of the ’30s did a pretty good infrastructure job.
Bridges, post offices, roads, national parks—that’s just some of what that New Deal wrought.
Meanwhile, the Republicans shouldn’t be too torn up about the not-quite-planned continuation of Keynesian economics—they started it this round and, as the sitting Vice President once remarked, "Deficits don’t matter."
But they do… which makes me even more cautiously—but still—optimistic. The President-elect is showing he knows how to govern "from the middle"… so far.
The test will be whether or not he actually knows when to step on the accelerator an when it is best to let the car coast… too much hands-on regulation would be a true disaster. And, yes, I do know how to spell "Markey." Hence the caution.
And it sure ain’t gonna be easy… so trust your customers, maybe they’ll trust you, too. Maybe.
* Get Wirth from Turner! A wild idea… draft former Congressman and Senator Tim Wirth as the next chairman of the Federal Confusion Commission—he could single-handedly take that "Confusion" out of there. But I doubt Ted Turner would be pleased… maybe all the cable operators and networks could donate free advertising for Ted’s Montana Grills? And, just to make Ted even happier, free PSAs for the United Nations, too.
* Redstone Lament: It’s a new country song.
* Trust: I heard half the banks that’ll get bailed out this year will change their names soon: CitiTRUST, for example.
* Black Friday? Why did it get painted black? I thought the purpose of all the great sales on the day after Thanksgiving was to generate lots of "green"?
* Holiday Specials: Is this the year to do something special for your subscribers? Like a free month of service next year for sticking with you? Or a premium net (or three) or "free upgrade to digital"? With some MSOs trending below 50% of homes passed and with a trendline that continues to point down, isn’t it time to do something for your customers?
