UPDATE: I'm in as press after all. Love to the bloggers.
There's still tickets for Jimmy Carter tonight, but things will be tight:
On Tuesday, the UI announced security measures for the lecture, which will include admitting only members of the media with proper credentials, requiring audience members to have tickets, and prohibiting backpacks, cameras, or audio/video recording devices into the arena. In addition, if admitted audience members leave, they will not be re-admitted.
I have an inquiry in about the laptop but no reply yet so I may be covering this on delayed reaction, pen and paper style. That style worked for me with Obama at the Harkin steak fry so maybe I'll live. In any case I'll be in the cheap seats and not the press gallery; it wasn't till I saw this in print - the day before the event! - that I thought about getting credentialed. Was told the media gallery was full up so I can't tell whether the "proper credentials" is an anti-blogger thing or not.
Call me Johnny come lately - but I'm used to the standards of the 2008 campaign trail: I show up, I say "I'm a blogger," the staffers show me much love, and I get lanyarded with credentials like so many Mardi Gras beads.
I know, I know, former POTUS and all that. But things were way looser with Clinton 42 at J-J last fall. And even on the one campaign that at this point has any Secret Service presence, Clinton 44. I strolled right in with my bulging laptop bag without doing more than showing a driver's license and signing in. (For the closed-door event at a second site I didn't even do that; some staffer said "Hi, John," and in I went.)
Clinton 44 is not a prediction. I'm just trying that construct out to annoy Republicans. But as I think more over the first cup of coffee... she's almost certainly the American politician with the most haters and the most vehement haters, yet her event was pretty much stroll right in. Jimmy Carter is nearly 30 years removed from power, has an image that's part Habitat hammer and part Nobel Peace Prize, yet thre's this intense security bubble.
Maybe, uh, it's something to do with the subject matter? The DI takes that angle:
Published in November 2006, the book has received criticism from such organizations as the Anti-Defamation League, specifically because of the word "apartheid" in the title. Carter has defined the term as the "forced segregation of two peoples living within the same land, one dominating and persecuting the other," according to statements.
But Hillel Director Jerry Sorokin said he believed Carter used that word, which he called offensive to the Jewish population, in his book title to stir up controversy.
Sunday night James Zogby noted the danger of self-proclaimed advocates speaking for "the Jewish population" which, he notes, is deeply divided both in Israel and the US on Israel's policies toward the occupied territories.
Darrell Yeaney has a guest piece in the P-C today that touches on this angle:
It comes as no surprise, then, to find a thoughtful critic and longtime friend of the state of Israel --former President Jimmy Carter -- coming under sharp and caustic attack for his critical effort to expose the counter-productive policies of the Israeli government to secure its own future at the expense of the native Palestinian people.
Those of us who identify with any political establishment, be it nation or political party, sometime lose our ability to distinguish between who are our friends and who are our enemies. The vitriolic attacks on Carter as "anti-Semitic" and "anti-Israel" suggest this kind of perhaps intended or unintended blindness...
I guess a Nobel Peace prize isn't enough to keep folks from hating you: Just ask Martin Luther King and Yitzhak Rabin.
Anyway. Some kind of coverage today and tonight but I'm not exactly sure when or what format.
