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Raise money, buy TV ads, repeat

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The latest trend in political coverage seems to be ranking the candidates based on how much money they’ve raised.

Now, I will not pretend for a second that this information isn’t vitally important to the outcome of a campaign. It is a story, no question. But more and more it seems to be treated as the story: The candidate with a lot of money is the candidate best positioned to get even more money. The candidate with even more money is in the best position to pay for the kind of advertising that will win votes. The ability to raise money is the ability to get elected. Fundraising becomes a proxy for political skill, positions on issues, get-out-the-vote passion.

Horse-race handicapping has always been the curse of political reporting, but this is a new meta-level of horse-race reporting that makes the head spin. It’s similar to what’s happened in movie coverage, where the old-fashioned opening-day question of “how good is it?” has long since been eclipsed by the meta-question of “how much did it gross on opening weekend?”

It’s bad enough that this focus crowds out coverage of the actual distinctions among the candidates as leaders, legislators and thinkers. It’s worse when you force yourself to face squarely the grotesque fact that nearly all the money that’s raised goes to TV advertising; in other words, it gets put directly in the pockets of the media corporations who pay for coverage of presidential elections — and whose coverage, more and more, is dominated by fundraising tallies.

The next time you hear a TV newsperson start telling you something like “such-and-such a candidate has raised nearly $8 million this quarter…” you can finish his sentence for him: “so that next quarter the candidate can hand it over to my bosses and help us meet our profit forecast!”

There is no conspiracy here, just the iron logic of a simple marketplace that has locked in most of the participants. There may be no way out, says the pessimist in me. But if there is, then the hope lies with unorthodox efforts like those the Dean campaign is making in its online organizing.

For now, ironically, the main value in such organizing is to enable an outsider underdog like Dean to tap some new sources of money so he can pay for the same old TV advertising everyone else is going to use. But maybe, just maybe, in the long run, the ability to build a grassroots campaign via the Net will help birth a candidate who is completely unbeholden to the existing cash/media nexus — and who can help move us forward toward a democracy where dollars don’t trump votes.

If it quacks like a quagmire…

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Back in March, on the eve of war, I quoted one knowledgeable observer’s predictions:

  In a Fresh Air interview tonight that I can only describe as “dreadful,” in the primal meaning of the word, CIA historian Thomas Powers put details on the face of these fears. He predicted, as everyone does, a swift U.S. victory in a month or so. Then a couple months of calm. Then, a gradual awareness: That this project of installing a client government in Iraq, even in the sunniest of outcomes, must last a generation or more. That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists who will have no need to hijack a plane to access their foes. That these troops will now sit on the border with another “axis of evil” enemy, Iran, which, like Saddam’s Iraq, also seeks nuclear weapons. That this war, like Bush’s larger “war on terrorism,” has no clear definition of its aims, its scope or its foes — and that such a war has no end in sight and can have no victory.

That’s pretty much the way it’s gone. This analysis from the New York Times’ Michael Gordon outlines the shape of the guerrilla war we are now locked in, in which each day’s news brings another report of an ambush or an attack, another dead American soldier, another reprisal against some Baathist holdout, another batch of Iraqis wounded or killed.

The warmongering crowd sneered at those who cautioned of this likelihood; we were lily-livered traitors whose use of the word “quagmire” was lampooned as a ludicrous artifact of the Vietnam era.

Then consider this quote which appeared in a dispatch from the Times’ Steven Lee Myers, who appears to have spent enough time with the troops he is covering to win their trust:

  “You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home,” Pfc. Matthew C. O’Dell, an infantryman in Sergeant Betancourt’s platoon, said as he stood guard on Tuesday. “Tell him to come spend a night in our building.”

Something tells me this serviceman — unlike the armchair warriors who stoked this war with bloated rhetoric and false evidence — might not find the word “quagmire” so objectionable.

Bringing up the rear
SIDE NOTE: My jaw dropped to read that word “asses” on the Times front page, given the paper’s tightlaced history. My own, now-ancient experience as a freelancer with the Times had led me to believe the paper was much more careful about such posterior references.

Back in the mid-’80s I’d interviewed Italian playwright/performer Dario Fo and written it up for the Times Arts and Leisure section. In the course of the article I needed to refer to a particular scene from Fo’s signature work, “Mistero Buffo,” a solo comic performance drawn from the iconoclastic commedia dell’arte tradition. There is a moment in which Fo plays a Pope who gets a kick to his, if you’ll pardon me, butt. I knew “butt” was out of the question for the Times, so I wrote “rear,” figuring it was sufficiently innocuous. But I got a call from the Times copy desk: “rear” didn’t pass muster. Hmm, I thought, OK; er, how about “behind” — who could possibly object to that? The copy editor sounded only partially mollified but we left it there.

When the article was published, if I remember correctly, the Pope’s bottom had become a “backside.” I could only marvel at an institution whose sense of propriety had such infinitesimal gradations.

O’Reilly vs. the ants!

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Bill O’Reilly, the Fox Network’s resident blowhard, went off on the Internet yesterday in a comical tirade. O’Reilly’s comments mostly speak for themselves. But I think anyone who has watched him bludgeon the guests on his show will be able to read what’s really on his mind, between the lines. Something like the following:

 

Sex, lies and videotape on the Internet, that’s the subject of this evening’s Talking Points Memo. Nearly everyday, there’s something written on the Internet about me that’s flat out untrue. (I know, because I ego-surf every night, to see just what lies people are posting about me.) And I’m not alone. Nearly every famous person in the country’s under siege. (As for the rest of you non-famous people, who cares?)

Today’s example comes from Web sites that picked up a false report from The San Francisco Chronicle that said a San Francisco radio station dropped The Radio Factor. If anyone had bothered to make even one phone call, they would have learned that Westwood One made a deal with another San Francisco radio station, weeks ago to move The Radio Factor. (And will someone please shut up that program director who had the nerve to say I don’t have “lightning in a bottle like Rush”?) Thus the word “dropped” is obviously inaccurate and dishonest. (True, you can no longer hear me on that radio station — but it pisses me off no end that anyone would actually report this using a good, plain word like “dropped” to describe what happened.) We’ll see if The Chronicle runs a correction, but you can bet you won’t be seeing many corrections on the net. (Thank God I’m on TV, which nobody expects to run corrections.)

The reason these net people get away with all kinds of stuff is that they work for no one. (They’re ignorant slobs without jobs. How dare they think they have a right to speak out?) They put stuff up with no restraints. (Unlike the guests on my show, who I can drown out or tell to shut up if they cross me.) This, of course, is dangerous, but it symbolizes what the Internet is becoming. (Freedom of speech — how un-American can you get?)

…The Internet has become a sewer of slander and libel, an unpatrolled polluted waterway, where just about anything goes. For example, the guy who raped and murdered a 10-year old in Massachusetts says he got the idea from the NAMBLA Web site that he accessed from the Boston public library. The ACLU’s defending NAMBLA in that civil lawsuit. (If we could just stop evildoers from reading about or talking about Bad Things, the Bad Things would go away!)

Talking Points noted with interest the hue and cry that went up from some quarters about the FCC changing the rules and allowing big corporations to own even more media properties. But big corporations are big targets. (Big corporations pay my salary, too.) If they misbehave, they can be sued for big bucks. (And they can afford big-bucks lawyers to defend themselves. And they can pay lobbyists to write the laws to suit them.) These small time hit and run operators on the net, however, can traffic in perversity and falsehoods all day long with impunity. It’s almost impossible to rein them in. (In China, on the other hand, they really know how to keep those Internet crazies in line.)

So which is the bigger threat to America? The big companies or the criminals at the computer? Interesting question. (Especially the way I just stacked it! Now, where did I put that “no-spin zone” sign?)

More fast talk on taxes

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The recent Bush tax cut offered a child-credit rebate to lots of Americans, but not to millions of low-income taxpayers. Now Congress is squabbling over attempts to restore this tax break, which attempts to spread just a handful of the billions being handed out to people who actually need it.

Tom DeLay isn’t buying it. This is his explanation, in today’s N.Y. Times: “To me, it’s a little difficult to give tax relief to people that don’t pay income tax.”

DeLay would have you believe that the Democrats and moderate Republicans who are pressing this $3.5 billion tax-cut handout — and who have suggested that the Republicans goofed in leaving it out while pushing for tax cuts for investors that cost hundreds of billions of dollars — are being illogical. What? Give tax rebates to people who don’t pay taxes at all?

But note that insertion of the little word “income.” People in the bracket under discussion — roughly $10,000 to $25,000 a year wage earners — pay plenty of taxes. But they pay it in payroll taxes, which typically swipe about 8 percent of income. The Republican tax-cut architects have always done a deceptive shuffle with the language here: Payroll taxes count as taxes when these legislators want to tally up the onerousness of the tax burden on American citizens. But the same taxes magically disappear when they want to keep low-income people off the gravy train that they are loading up for their high-income constituents and campaign contributors.

All of which is a shame — not only in the broad moral sense that helping people who are struggling on low incomes is a social good in and of itself, but also in the pragmatic sense that when you put a $400 tax credit in the pockets of low-income wage earners they are more likely to spend it and help boost the economy.

FCC no evil

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If you’ve been reading Salon for the last couple of years this new FCC decision should come as no surprise. If you haven’t been, you can catch up on our coverage of the FCC here and of “the Media Borg,” as we have been calling it for two years, here.

Trent Lott says, “I want to emphasize that there is not a partisan position here,” and indeed he is criticizing the decision along with some other Republicans in Congress. Still, you can’t seriously argue that this decision — pushed through by President Bush’s FCC chairman, who happens to be the son of Bush’s Secretary of State; supported by the three Republican members of the FCC; and opposed by the two Democratic members — does not have a big GOP rubber stamp all over it.

Bush and God, church and state

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I have never quite understood New York Times columnist Bill Keller’s take on George W. Bush. Every time Keller tries to zero in on the president — as in a long Times Magazine piece a while back, or in a column today about Bush’s God thing — he starts shuffling his feet, hedging and making apologies. He tells us that he understands important criticisms of the president, but then he finds some grounds upon which to explain that they don’t matter, or they’re not the point, or we shouldn’t worry about them.

In today’s column, Keller tries to argue that, yes, George Bush is driven by his religious belief, but that — since he does not have an overt agenda of converting the heathen or deriving specific political policies from his born-again faith — we should not worry too much. The president’s sense of divine mission? His apparent belief that every decision he makes is the right one because he is fulfilling God’s plan? No fear, says Keller — what’s wrong with self-confidence? Then he cites “John Green of the University of Akron, a scholar of religion in politics,” who “sees it as a perfectly ordinary way for a religious man to understand a task history has presented him.” “For Bush to conclude that this was God’s plan,” Green declares, “is not a whole lot different from a plumber in Akron deciding that God wants him to serve lunch to homeless people.”

Huh? I mean, I’d be delighted if Bush concluded that God wanted him to serve lunch to homeless people! The point that eludes Mr. Green is that the plumber in Akron is not making life-or-death decisions for millions of people, and devising policies that will shape the world economy for a generation. We worry when national leaders assume a mantle of divine destiny. The worry is based on history, not faith.

But the most bizarre passage in Keller’s column is his citation — with what I can only guess is approval — of a particularly ridiculous quote from the writer Gregg Easterbrook, trying to explain how Bush’s Christian faith shapes his policies: ” ‘I suspect Bush takes the view (which may prove right) that the ultimate argument will be between people who believe in something larger than themselves, and people who believe that it’s all an accident of chemistry,’ Mr. Easterbrook said.”

First, note the way Easterbrook — whom the article describes as “a liberal Christian” — stacks his language. If he’d said, “the ultimate argument will be between people who believe in supernatural mumbojumbo, and people who believe in their own powers of observation and reasoning,” we’d complain, rightly, that he’d injected a wildly unfair bias in his description of the disagreement between people of faith and nonbelievers. Instead, he’s turned that bias around and made it invisible — draping all the contradictions and difficulties of religion in the high-flying rhetoric of selfless dedication, and casually denigrating all the insights of the scientific worldview.

Easterbrook, on behalf of Bush, chooses to draw a wildly oversimplified spectrum of personal belief: There seem to be no other choices besides “belief in something larger than yourself” or belief that “it’s all an accident of chemistry.” Yet the two positions are hardly exclusive. I can forthrightly say that I have no belief in any traditional deity; put me firmly in the “accident of chemistry” camp. Yet such an accident is hardly trivial — it is itself full of beauty and wonder. It is very much “something larger than ourselves.” Indeed, there are many things “larger than ourselves” that I, despite my failure to be a “person of faith,” can and do embrace: Empathy, justice, generosity, creativity — none of these require the walls of a church, or trust in a “higher power.” Participants in institutional religions have no monopoly on the possibility of belief.

The real arrogance in Easterbrook’s stance — and one that I think also undergirds Bush’s worldview — is this implication that only people who have accepted Jesus, or Yahweh (or, Bush will add, opening the flaps of his “big tent,” Mohammed), can possibly find meaning in life. And only they can be trusted to find a moral path through life.

This is more complex, and probably more dangerous, than simple religious chauvinism of the “my god is better than your god” brand. Rather, it reflects a wistful desire, if not an active campaign, to turn back the clock to an era when being a non-believer actively disqualified one from participation in civic life. Of course Bush isn’t about to propose religious belief as a qualification for public office; but if we believe former speechwriter David Frum’s statement (repeated by Keller) that, in Bush’s White House, “attendance at Bible study was, if not compulsory, not quite uncompulsory,” then it’s also hard not to believe that Bush would be happy to impose such a requirement if he thought it had any chance of passing constitutional muster.

Keller, of course, is way too muddled to point out the final absurdity in the Easterbrook argument: its dichotomy plainly puts George Bush on the same team as the Sept. 11 killers. Warped and vicious they undoubtedly were; but who can question that they committed their suicidal act on behalf of “something larger than themselves”? No, Mohammed Atta and his crew did not see human life as an “accident of chemistry.” They believed in Allah. Their belief may have been a perversion of mainstream Islam. But belief it was, nonetheless.

So, pace Keller, I’ll continue to put my moral antennae on alert any time a leader starts using his or her own religious faith as a touchstone of civic virtue. It’s not always and inevitably a bad thing — the obvious and legitimate counterargument is the Rev. Martin Luther King. But it’s usually a sign to watch out.

Put the “public” back in the public domain

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Lawrence Lessig is looking for a few good congressmen:

  The idea is a simple one: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner must pay a $1 maintenance fee. If the copyright owner pays the fee, then the copyright continues. If the owner fails to pay the fee, the work passes into the public domain. Based on historical precedent, we expect 98% of copyrighted works would pass into the public domain after just 50 years. They could keep Mickey for as long as Congress lets them. But we would get a public domain.

It seems that there was one member of congress willing to introduce this bill, but the lobbyists got to him/her. So Prof. Lessig is calling on people to write their representatives and ask them to do something relatively small and achievable to redress the copyright imbalance that prevails today.

  Stanford’s library, for example, has announced a digitization project to digitize books. They have technology that can scan 1,000 pages an hour. They are chafing for the opportunity to scan books that are no longer commercially available, but that under current law remain under copyright. If this proposal passed, 98% of books just 50 years old could be scanned and posted for free on the Internet.

This, it seems to me, is a good fight, worth giving some long-haul energy.

For a war that wasn’t about oil…

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I imagine the planners in Washington consider the looting that has wrecked Iraqi cultural edifices, including the legendary National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad, in the wake of the U.S. “liberation” to be so much minor “collateral damage” — eggs that have to be broken to make the omelette, that sort of thing. “Regrettable,” you know. “Can we move on to the next question?”

But I can’t help thinking about this: While U.S. forces were unable to protect museums in Baghdad (or Mosul, as Salon’s Phillip Robertson reported) from looting crowds destroying millennia-old artifacts, it seemed to have plenty of troops available to protect the Iraqi oil ministry in Baghdad. (See this picture.) And of course seizing and protecting the oil fields in both southern and northern Iraq was not beyond the capacity of our forces. Priorities are priorities!

The Washington Post had a good piece Sunday on all this.

Gimme a W! Gimme an M! Gimme a D! What’s that spell?

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As the statues of Saddam fall and waves of euphoria swell through Fox-News-land, unchecked by cautions from Bush and Rumsfeld, one little issue haunts the war effort: The reason we went to war in the first place remains strangely elusive.

The imminence of the Iraqi threat that the Bush administration identified as its reason for invading Iraq now, rather than wait for further U.N. inspections to do their work, was a matter of “weapons of mass destruction.” Iraq, we were led to believe, was a teeming arsenal of chemical poisons and biological weapons, and was on the verge of developing nuclear capabilities. At any moment Saddam might hand over such weapons to terrorists so they could wreak havoc on the homeland. There was no time to waste.

So far, however, the war in Iraq has been remarkably free of usage, or even sightings, of “WMD.”

There are many possible explanations: Maybe Saddam hid everything really well. Maybe he didn’t want to use these weapons because he knew that would convict him in the court of world opinion. Maybe he simply didn’t have such weapons on nearly the scale the U.S. charged.

We may never know the full story, but we will learn a lot more as the U.S. tightens its grip on Baghdad and the countryside and begins a more systematic search. Sooner or later, we will have a pretty clear idea whether Iraq was or was not teeming with WMD. A lot hangs on this. And if it turns out that the Bush administration’s claims in this area were inflated or wrong, it will be very interesting to see how the issue gets spun.