By Michael Miner
“This place is far more stable today that it had been when I got here,” responds Obis, who’s staying on through the end of the year. “When I got here, employees were three weeks behind in getting paid. All those back wages have been repaid, and every employee has gotten a 33 percent salary increase. We’re current with our vendors, and there’s no crisis. Weinstein can criticize all he wants about not raising enough money. The facts are, I’m running this place a lot better, and you can ask anybody.”
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Well, yes, says Weinstein, but “the point is that we have to build up a circulation. There are only two ways to increase your income, and that’s by increasing either circulation or contributions, because advertising is never going to amount to much at a not-for-profit. He was there a year and a half, and he never did a direct mail. The reason he didn’t do it presumably was that he didn’t have the money to do it, but he didn’t do any fund-raising.”
Obis points out that while giving other employees raises he took only half his own salary. Well, yes, says Weinstein, “but we didn’t have any money in the budget for a publisher before Paul–because I was publisher. So when we told him he wouldn’t start until we raised enough money to guarantee him a couple of years’ salary, he said, ‘I’ll come in and help you raise money.’ So he came in and didn’t help us raise the money. You can draw your own conclusion.”
To run the magazine when Obis leaves, Weinstein has created a four-person committee that consists of himself, managing editor Joel Bleifuss, associate publisher Sonya Huber, and features editor Craig Aaron. A good move, says Obis: “A more collective enterprise is more appropriate here.” The staff is glad he’s leaving, and so is he. “At 47, I am in what should be the prime of my career,” Obis writes in his E-mail, “and I no longer wanted to spend my time calling people and asking them for $5,000 so I could meet payroll.”
Clinton’s biggest fans have had to work hard to look past those defects, and the nation’s conservative moralists have despised him since the day he took office. By the ’96 election they’d come to the same dark conclusion liberal moralists reached in 1972, when Richard Nixon carried 49 states as the outlines of Watergate were emerging: The public is a fickle deity, to be feared and worshiped but never trusted. Many of the congressmen who last weekend searched their consciences instead of the polls had long ago concluded that the people needed saving from themselves. That the people liked Clinton regardless of his sins merely proved how dire the crisis was.
A preacher’s son, Campbell went on with his worthy sermon long enough for me to begin to wonder. The Post-Dispatch is like the Chicago Tribune in one vital respect: plenty of people have been raised from the cradle to hate it. My mother in Saint Louis deems the Post biased and contemptible; to my less moderate late uncle, it was a Bolshevik rag he wouldn’t permit in his home. I’ve never understood why feelings ran so high. But then I wasn’t around when the Post exposed the Teapot Dome scandal, sullying the memory of that fine Republican Warren Harding, probably the most presidential-looking president of the century until Ronald Reagan. I wasn’t there when it endorsed FDR, who allowed idlers to lean on their shovels. And I must admit the Post carried internationalism to such an extreme that it assigned a reporter to the United Nations. Local conservatives have endlessly fulminated against the liberal bacilli churning through the Post’s veins. Largely out of habit, many Saint Louisans revile it still.
