Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

What’s a political press for?

by

It seems to me that if the practitioners of campaign journalism can’t figure out a way to make it so that lying is punished, rather than amplified and rewarded, by the press then they ought to pack up their bags and go do something else.

From Matthew Yglesias. Via Jay Rosen’s Twitter feed, which I recommend for running meta-commentary on this bizarre unfolding Spectacle of the Society that our campaign has degenerated into.

I wouldn’t have said “punished”; it plays too much into the S&M imagery that Palin’s candidacy toys with. I’d have said that lying should be named, and shouted about, and hung around the neck of the candidate who is shameless about doing it.

I mean, this is a campaign that lies about the findings of Factcheck.org!

I think we’re gonna have to bottom out before things will get any better. Hoping that the ABC Palin-comium on Friday will mark the nadir, and then we can begin to gain some traction on reality again. If not, it’s going to be a rough season.

Noonan agonistes — or, journalists should write what they know and think

by

The problem with too many journalists — and especially those journalists inside the Beltway — is this: they do not write what they’re thinking. The reporters do not tell us what they know. The columnists and analysts do not tell us what they believe. Their resulting work is boring, uninformative, and manipulative.

Today at the Republican convention, Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for the first President Bush who now writes a column for the Wall Street Journal, got caught by a mike that I guess she thought wasn’t on. She was talking with Republican strategist and former McCain associate Mike Murphy. Here’s Salon’s transcription of the exchange:

Apparently referring to some of McCain’s current advisors, Murphy then says, “These guys, this is all like how you win a Texas race — you know, just run it up. And it’s not gonna work.”

Noonan can then be heard agreeing with Murphy, saying, “It’s over.” A little later, Noonan responds to a question about whether Palin was the most qualified woman McCain could have chosen. “The most qualified? No,” Noonan responds. “I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives … Every time Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and it’s not what they’re good at, they blow it.”

(You can watch the video and read a full transcript over at TPM.)

Now, if Peggy Noonan wrote a column every week that was as honest with her readers as she is here, with her colleagues, when she thinks the microphone is off, I would read it religiously. She’s part of a world that I don’t inhabit. But now I have a bright picture of the fact that she’s not writing what she knows and believes.

I know columnists are people; they have relationships to protect; they want insiders to keep talking to them. Still: virtually every journalist in DC could go a lot farther down the road of writing what they know and think. Doing so would probably earn them more respect, and more readers, and the sources and players would end up talking to them anyway.

We went through this five years ago when Laurie Garrett, a talented reporter, sent an email to her friends from Davos telling them about the big conference there in blunt, unvarnished and informative terms. Then she freaked out because this report — in which she was doing exactly what she ought to have been doing in her role as a journalist — became public and embarrassed her.

Here is some of what Noonan published today in the Journal about Palin:

Gut: The Sarah Palin choice is really going to work, or really not going to work. It’s not going to be a little successful or a little not; it’s not going to be a wash. She is either going to be magic or one of history’s accidents. She is either going to be brilliant and groundbreaking, or will soon be the target of unattributed quotes by bitter staffers shifting blame in all the Making of the President 2008 books. Of which there should be plenty, as we’ve never had a year like this, with the fabulous freak of a campaign.

So: in print, it’s up in the air. But in truth, “it’s over” and the McCain campaign got seduced by “bullshit about narratives.”

How can anyone ever read a word by Peggy Noonan again and take it seriously? (And she’s been around the block long enough not to get too much sympathy for, you know, not knowing that microphones can betray you.)

If her editors had any respect for their readers, they’d fire her.

UPDATE: Noonan says the excerpt was edited or truncated and that her “it’s over” did not refer to the McCain campaign or the Palin nomination. I don’t know if that’s true; hope we can find out. Even if it is, she still expressed herself far more directly, bluntly — and persuasively — when she thought she was off-mike. That’s really my point.

Why I’m hopeful for Obama; and what if it’s a tie?

by

Watching the gyrations of this election has been diverting, but really, the road from here is not going to change no matter what happens this week in Minnesota. All right: maybe they’ll discover Sarah Palin is a Muslim, or find old tapes of her pastor denouncing America as the modern Sodom, or some other explosive revelation will knock her from the ticket and leave the GOP in awful disarray. Barring that, this race will come down to what it has been coming down to ever since it became a clear Obama/McCain contest: A handful of swing states will tip the election to one candidate or the other.

I’ve been hopeful for an Obama victory, and friends and relatives sometimes give me that fearful-Democrat look that has become prevalent over the past decade — that frown of “I’m worried, we screwed it up so many times in the past, the Republicans will find some way yet again to squeeze out a victory.” And sure, it could happen. But here’s why I think it won’t.

(1) Yes, it’s true that there will be more people voting against Obama because of his race than the polls are capturing. But the Obama campaign’s prodigious and effective get-out-the-vote effort, and its ability to pull in new voters among the young, will counterbalance the negative race vote, effectively canceling it out. So I’m not worried about it.

(2) The popular vote doesn’t matter. The electoral college chooses the president. So the map is really all that counts. And the map doesn’t look so bad. There are a number of combinations of states that get Obama over 270. For McCain to even have a shot, he’s got to win all of the big swing states (FL, OH, VA); then he also must either wrest something like PA or MI from the Obama column or, alternately, win in a whole bunch of smaller swing states like CO, NV, and NH. He could do it, but the stars will have to align just right for him. Obama can win without FL, OH or VA if he pulls it out in a few of those other states. He’s just got more roads to a win right now.

(3) What’s keeping me up at night is the possibility of an electoral college tie. You can see how easily this could happen from the recent electoral maps: If Obama holds all the Kerry states and in addition wins Iowa and Nevada and New Mexico but loses Colorado (or if he wins Iowa and Colorado but loses Nevada and NM) then he comes out with 269 electoral votes and so does McCain. Constitutional madness! The election goes to the House, but each state delegation casts one vote. Consensus seems to be that Obama has the edge in that scenario. But it’s a mess no matter how you play it out, and as we saw in 2000 the GOP is far more willing to play hardball in such circumstances. Still, any electoral-college tie is likely to involve Obama having the lead in the popular vote; the constitution doesn’t care about that — and it didn’t matter in 2000 — but it ought to put at least some weight in the scales with wavering congressional delegations.

“Cone of Silence” contradictions

by

During the Rick Warren/Saddleback event over the weekend — in which Obama and McCain were both asked exactly the same questions, and Obama went first — Warren, the questioner, told the audience repeatedly that McCain was “in a cone of silence” so he wouldn’t gain unfair advantage by hearing the questions in advance. It appears that McCain was in fact in his car being driven to the event, and who knows what he was listening to.

Now, this little Get Smart reference isn’t the world’s most earthshattering issue. McCain is getting “graded on a curve” (as Josh Marshall puts it) all the time anyway. But in the McCain campaign’s reaction you can get an indication of just how hypersensitive and defense it is to being criticized by the media: McCain’s people demanded an apology from NBC for even suggesting that there was anything to the “no cone of silence” story. They also insisted that it was a terrible thing to ask whether McCain might have done something wrong because he is, you know, a former POW.

So is there anything to the story? Ultimately it’s a tiny issue, but the way it is surfacing in the media certainly leaves readers scratching their heads. Take today’s New York Times: on the op-ed page,
Times columnist William Kristol writes “There’s no evidence that McCain had any such advantage.” (That’s on the Web edition of the article; my print paper this morning read: “There seems to be absolutely no basis for this charge.” I guess Kristol is now editing his text for the Web without making any note of the revision.)

Meanwhile, an article in the very same edition of the very same newspaper — one featured with a teaser on the paper’s front page — is headlined, “Despite Assurances, McCain Wasn’t in a ‘Cone of Silence.'”

Let’s see if or when the paper attempts to resolve this.

Who’s gonna win? Follow the state tallies

by

People ask, “Who’s gonna win in November,” and then they talk about national polls or national issues or national debates. All those things are absorbing. But if you want to know who’s gonna win, there’s only one thing that really matters, and that’s the state-by-state electoral vote count.

That’s why the electoral-vote.com site is such an election-year essential. (It started up in 2004.) All you need to do is look at the map as it stands, roughly, now, and you can see what the election’s faultlines are.

The first thing you may notice is that the split between blue Democratic states and red Republican states follows the greatest divide in American history. It’s Civil War time all over again. East of the Mississippi, the old Dixie states go to McCain, and Obama takes Lincoln’s Union states — with the very-close Ohio (now leaning McCain-ward) as the only break from the pattern.

Couldn’t have anything to do with this being the first credible presidential run by an African American, could it? Nah…

West of the Mississippi, the pattern’s a little less even; Obama gets the coast, McCain gets much of the heartland, but there are Democratic inroads here — in recent elections New Mexico has often voted Democratic, but Colorado’s new to the blue roster.

Much can change between now and November, of course. But if you look at the count today, you see that a lot of conventional electoral wisdom just doesn’t hold this year: Obama could lose Ohio and Florida and still win the election handily. He can even win it, closely, if he also loses Indiana, which is currently in his column on electoral-vote but is very much up for grabs (it’s been a reliable Republican state in the recent past).

There’s just a lot of fluidity in a lot of these states. Ohio could still go to the Democrats. Obama has a shot in Montana, of all places. And even Virginia might be in play. Colorado’s plainly up in the air. The Republicans might have a chance in Nevada and New Hampshire. McCain trails by 5-7 points in all the upper Midwest states (Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin), as well as in Pennsylvania and Michigan; a lot has to happen for these states to get more competitive, but it’s entirely possible.

This is the stuff Obama’s strategists are poring over right now. They did a superb job during primary season in managing a tough, long campaign across 50 states in sequence. Now they’ve got to do the same thing all at once.

McCain’s pass on adultery: the real double standard

by

There’s a lot of fingers pointing today about double standards in the media because of the mainstream outlets’ unwillingness to follow the National Enquirer’s lead on the Edwards adultery story. But there are other, more important double standards that have to do with candidates who are still in the race.

This — from Electoral-vote.com, a site that was of great value in 2004 and promises to be so once more this year, given the electoral-vote teeter-totter — is worth the virtual ink to re-blog, I think:

It will be interesting to see if any enterprising reporter asks John McCain point blank: “Have you ever committed adultery?” It is a germane question because (1) Edwards adultery is big news and (2) McCain has made “moral character” the main issue of his campaign.

McCain may not be too keen to answer yes or no because the truth won’t please the family values crowd. While he was a P.O.W. in Vietnam, his first wife, model Carol Shepp, was seriously injured in a horrific traffic accident in which she was thrown through the windshield. She didn’t mention this in her letters to him in Vietnam to keep his morale up. When he got back and saw her 4 inches shorter, seriously overweight, and on crutches, he began having affairs. One piece of indisputable evidence is the fact that he obtained a license to marry wealthy beer heiress Cindy Hensley on March 6, 1980, while still legally married to Carol. Here is the L.A. Times story but if you type: McCain adultery to Google, you’ll get 500,000 hits. Journalistic standards ought to require that if Edwards cheating on his sick wife is an indication of a deep moral flaw, then McCain cheating on his sick wife ought to be the same thing. And McCain is a candidate for President; Edwards is not.

Here’s a permalink to that post at electoral-vote.com. This story is neither new nor a secret, yet it never seems to have weighed in the scales against McCain. Like George W. Bush’s drinking and drug use, the GOP campaign has successfully transformed these past transgressions into non-issues, and the political press seems largely OK with that.

ABC should reveal anthrax-Saddam connection sources

by

In Salon, Glenn Greenwald spent the weekend doggedly pursuing a series of disturbing questions — old but terribly pertinent once more — about ABC News’ coverage of the anthrax attacks in Oct. 2001. Specifically, the network promoted reports that linked the anthrax letters to Saddam Hussein — reports that (a) we now know had zero basis in fact and (b) were based on confidential sourcing. The identity of those sources (whom we can today judge as manipulative liars) could tell us a lot about the deceptions that led us into Iraq and the many unanswered questions still swirling around the anthrax incidents.

ABC has essentially stonewalled on the whole matter. Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor and Dan Kennedy have picked up on Greenwald’s work and pushed for answers.

The key thing about protecting anonymous sources is: it’s all about protecting whistleblowers from retribution. If you’re a reporter and you discover that your sources demanded anonymity because they were manipulating you or lying, you’re no longer under any obligation to protect them. (See Greenwald on all this here.) In fact, the public good probably demands that you expose them. Which is what Greenwald, and Rosen, and Gillmor, and what I hope will be a growing number of respected voices are all pushing for in the case of ABC and anthrax.

McCain’s celeb ad, Obama’s premature presidentiality

by

It was just about four years ago that the Swift Boat campaign kicked into high gear and knocked the Kerry campaign back on its heels. Kerry’s failure to deal with the attack quickly and decisively probably cost him the election. Here it is, four years later, and pretty much the same team of GOP attack dogs are pulling the same set of tricks.

The day kicked off with a front-page NY Times story talking about the new McCain campaign ad juxtaposing images of Barack Obama with those of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. The ad struck some observers as an underhanded subliminal attack, and reminded a lot of Democrats of how the GOP took down Harold Ford, the black Tennessee senatorial candidate in 2006, with suggestive ads featuring a white woman talking about meeting the black candidate at “a Playboy party” and concluding with her cooing, “Harold — call me!”

The McCain team says The Britney-‘n’-Paris ad is innocent: all they’re trying to say is that Obama has become too much of a celebrity, and we need someone with more substance. To which one can only say: C’mon! Whatever you think of Obama, the “airhead” charge seems bizarre and so remote from reality as to be laughable. But then it all starts to make sense when you remember that rule number one in the Karl Rove playbook is, attack your opponent where he’s strongest. Running against a genuine war hero? Smear his heroism. Running against a gifted orator and charismatic leader? Call him a fluffball.

I don’t think it can work this time, but my optimism has been cruelly disappointed in the past. And if you followed the other big campaign narrative of the last couple of days, you might get a little pessimistic, too. A Dana Milbank piece in Wednesday’s Washington Post delivered a new angle of attack on Obama: Somehow, Milbank seems to think, there is something wrong with the way Obama is projecting confidence, traveling the world, talking to leaders in politics and finance, and being protected (like all presidential candidates) by the Secret Service. Why, he has even begun doing some transition planning (a move that a recent bipartisan op-ed piece suggested is essential for national security). The candidate should not be doing these things! He is guilty of acting prematurely presidential!

It’s a pathetic, damned-either-way kind of complaint. When a presidential candidate acts un-presidential, the pundits are all over him for it — and well they should be. Now we have a guy who has some genuinely presidential characteristics, and, what — he’s supposed to keep the leadership, the dignity, and, yes, the power that comes with leading in the polls all cloaked till after Election Day?

The Milbank piece was built around a statement that Obama had purportedly made at a meeting with members of Congress:

“This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for,” adding: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

This statement turned out, upon further investigation, to be a third-hand, out-of-context misquote. What the candidate actual said was that he wished he could take credit for the big crowds and the excitement, but that “it’s not about me, it’s about America.” In other words, he wasn’t saying, egotistically, “I am a symbol”; he was saying, self-deprecatingly, “I’m just a symbol.”

None of this stopped Milbank’s misquote from sparking a cable-news feeding frenzy (you can watch a hilarious summary of it in this TPM video). The agenda item of the day was to call Obama “arrogant,” “messianic,” “presumptuous” — or, in the words of Fred Barnes, who made the “uppity Negro” undertones a little too overt for comfort, “too big for his britches.”

This kind of chattering-class duncery is laughable — until it coalesces into conventional wisdom and starts affecting the polls. The Obama campaign responded to the McCain celebrity attack quickly, with an effective counterpunch spot. The next two to three weeks will be critical in determining whether the Swift Boat technique will once again sway an election.

It’s a different year, with different issues, and Obama is a far more adroit candidate than Kerry. Still, when the slime begins to pile up like this, the floor starts to get awfully sticky.

Here’s the great TPM compilation video:

Obama gets serious

by

Laying low as I try to get some writing done. But this is irresistible. Times story today discusses why comedians are having a hard time poking fun at Obama. Partly, yeah, they’re scared of sounding racist. Partly, it seems, audiences are resisting laughing at the guy.

But mostly, apparently, the combined comic powers of our nation’s brain trust of late-night TV comedy writers can’t find anything funny about Barack Obama.

“The thing is, he’s not buffoonish in any way,” said Mike Barry, who started writing political jokes for Johnny Carson’s monologues in the waning days of the Johnson administration and has lambasted every presidential candidate since, most recently for Mr. Letterman. “He’s not a comical figure,” Mr. Barry said.

Vote for Obama! He’s not buffoonish in any way: Now there’s a campaign slogan — one that no other candidate could credibly adopt. And, you know, if you go listen to, for instance, his interview today on the PBS NewsHour, you realize, Mike Barry is totally right.

Keep saying “Phil Gramm is right” — Democrats will love it

by

Amity Shlaes, in the Post, says that Phil Gramm was right: we are a nation of whiners. There is no recession. It’s all in our minds. Suck it up, America!

Economists define recession statistically, so in the world of economic stastistics it’s possible to say “there is no recession” with a straight face because the GDP has apparently not shrunk for two consecutive quarters.

But most Americans think “recession” means hard times. With painful food and energy inflation, significant declines in the housing market, tight credit and a financial system that keeps finding new ways to break, it takes more than guts to step in front of a turned-on microphone and say that times are not hard. It takes sheer stupidity, which I think defines Gramm’s statement last week.

What I find interesting about the treatment of Gramm by the right is that the conservatives seem to have forgotten how they used to view politicians who told Americans that the fault lay in their minds. Jimmy Carter’s famous speech in 1979, during the last huge energy crisis, told voters that there was a crisis of spirit, and that they were part of the problem: “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” However right Carter was about a lot of what he said, it was a political misstep that Ronald Reagan rode into the White House — and that right-wingers have mercilessly mocked for three decades.

But now, it’s one of their own who has pointed a finger of blame at the general population — and suddenly, the conservative media is willing to give him some slack.

Watching the right squirm around on this one is sheer fun. Still, truthfully, we would be a lot better off if less media time were devoted to Gramm’s relatively trivial gaffe than to the painful fact that McCain’s chief economic adviser was one of the central figures behind the broad deregulation of the financial industry in the late ’90s — a deregulation that led directly to the multiple failures of the credit and mortgage markets that have been so ruinous over the last two years.

I would love to see a Democratic ad that simply explained this to voters, and said, “If you liked what’s been happening lately in real estate and on Wall Street, Phil Gramm is your man, and he’s shaping John McCain’s policy.”