Mike Huckabee is the new master manipulator, according to two versions of the same story (both by the same writer, Kit Seelye) in the New York Times. Here’s the one that was printed in the dead-tree paper that arrived on my NYC doorstep early this morning [e.a.]:

 In a bizarre bit of political theater, Mike Huckabee told news outlets on Monday that he was not going to broadcast a negative commercial against Mitt Romney, his chief rival in the Republican presidential caucuses in Iowa. Then he showed that advertisement to the news media, which in reporting the announcement went on to give his anti-Romney message free publicity while he claimed the moral high ground.

This version—quite negative in tone, no? Note that the political theater is said to be “bizarre” and that Huckabee was “claiming” the moral high ground while rolling around in the mud—also suggests, albeit very tangentially, the author of the successful tactic (Ed Rollins, “the Brawler,” who recently signed on with the Huckabee campaign).

In the Times, Seelye notes, at the end of her piece:

There appeared to have been some dissent in the Huckabee camp over whether to attack Mr. Romney. In an interview last Wednesday, Mr. Huckabee’s longtime campaign manager, Chip Saltzman, insisted the campaign planned to maintain a positive tone until the end. But on the same day, Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican consultant and Mr. Huckabee’s new national campaign chairman, said he expected to begin firing back in a few days.

The other version of the Kit Seelye story, which you can find here (I got the link via Ann Althouse), made no specific mention of the fact that the strategy worked but made it abundantly clear that it had worked:

In an act of political jujitsu, Mike Huckabee has halted a negative ad that he was about to broadcast on television Monday against his Republican rival, Mitt Romney. But while claiming the moral high ground, he proceeded to show the ad to a roomful of reporters, photographers and television cameras who are repeating his anti-Romney message for free while Mr. Huckabee declares that his hands are clean.

The display unfolded at the Marriott Hotel here to the mirth of the journalists who watched Mr. Huckabee’s legerdemain even as they became the conduit for his attacks against Romney.

At the same time, he pointed to media cynicism as the reason he felt compelled to show the ad, saying that unless he showed it, reporters would not believe that it really existed. It criticized Mr. Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts, saying he supported gun control, allowed a co-pay for abortions in his health plan, raised taxes and ordered no executions.

This version is a lot softer in tone. For example: “political jujitsu,” like its martial-arts namesake, is an art—something to be admired rather than loathed (like a “bizarre bit of political theater”; see above).

Kinda makes me wonder what happened between these two versions of the story. In any event, however, the strategy worked. 

Huckabee made the news, and the media carried his anti-Romney message. 

In a rare moment of self-reflection from a member of the MSM,  Seelye explains (in the more negative piece) how this happens [e.a.]:

The circumstances of the commercial and the nature of free media, particularly now with YouTube, make it likely that the advertisement will be viewed far more often than if it had simply run. There is a long history of news coverage guaranteeing a commercial publicity that money could not buy.

In 1964, the “daisy” spot, which suggested that Barry Goldwater’s election would lead to nuclear war, was broadcast on television just once. And in 2004, advertisements by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked John Kerry’s military record, had a limited run in a few small markets before being widely covered in the press.

If I had one wish for 2008 (and forward), I would wish that everyone in the American media—reporters, pundits, columnists, bloggers, and news and entertainment executives—would get wise to how they always risk being played not just by political enemies at home but also by those abroad: the world’s bad political actors.

I’ve said it before, in “the new season from Al Qaeda Productions,”and I’ll say it again:

 Frank Rich (among many others) is wasting his brain cells developing new crackpot conspiracy theories to explain the behavior of Bush & Co.  … I wish these brilliant analysts would spend just a fraction of their time deconstructing the other characters populating the world stage-you know, the ones who are causing real trouble for us.

Since our media-saturated world is here to stay, it only makes sense to focus attention on the sophisticated media strategies, PR initiatives, and PRopaganda narratives of any player (whether domestic or foreign) who would make a claim on our attention (which is itself increasingly fractured by the many channels and niches available to us—but that’s a subject for another day).

Players who seek the attention of the media—including especially the world’s bad political actors— have all  learned to market themselves to us as if we were potential fans and customers, and a lot of naive but influential people fall for their act.

We Americans need to be alert to the absence of truth from much of that kind of advertising—particularly as more and more celebrities, who often have a deficit of political sophistication and also have a disproportionate influence on the public, get in on the act.

Dan Drezner recently explained what celebs are up to [e.a.]. 

It sometimes seems as though celebrities today are obsessed with trying to move the global agenda. Like Angelina Jolie. Think of how she’s changed her image since her breakup with Billy Bob Thornton. In February, she published an Op-Ed article in the Washington Post about the crisis in Darfur. …

Jolie is just one of many star activists. Madonna, Bono, Sean Penn, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney and Sheryl Crow — all have used their celebrity status to push their favored causes in an effort to affect what governments do and say. But why do they do it, and will it work?

Drezner’s focus is on the effectiveness of celebrities’ advocacy on policy decisions (mixed at best, since results—if any—take a long time to show up; change happens slowly in the real world). I’m more interested in their ability to influence public opinion. Drezner explains how they exert their influence—through us, their fans:

[T]he power of soft news has given stars new leverage. Their rising clout has as much to do with how we consume information as it does with the celebrities themselves. Cable television, talk radio and weblogs have radically diversified the news sources available to Americans. The more competitive marketplace for news and entertainment affects how public opinion on foreign policy is formed.

In Drezner’s formulation, cable TV (which is almost all views and no news), talk radio, and blogs are now news sources. I disagree: they’re spreaders of racy, juicy, dramatic, sensational headlines that provoke strong emotion. They are, in other words, infotainment. But I digress.

My point is that celebrities—because we fall in love with them so easily and can hardly ever fall out of love with them, because it’s their job to seduce us—have an outsize influence in this new universe  of infotainment-masquerading-as-news. We should all be more circumspect about our indiscriminate fandom.

Maybe in the new year I’ll have time to explore this topic some more.

There’s a fascinating (but very poorly edited) piece in the Science section of today’s New York Times, about the treacherous habit of self-examination after the fact: “The New Year’s Cocktail: Regret with a Dash of Bitters”:

Over the past decade and a half, psychologists have studied how regrets - large and small, recent and distant - affect people’s mental well-being. They have shown, convincingly though not surprisingly, that ruminating on paths not taken is an emotionally corrosive exercise. The common wisdom about regret - that what hurts the most is not what you did but what you didn’t do - also appears to be true, at least in the long run.

Yet it is partly from studies of lost possible selves that psychologists have come to a more complete understanding of how regret molds personality. These studies, in people recently divorced and those caring for a sick child, among others, suggest that it is possible to entertain idealized versions of oneself without being mocked or shamed. And they suggest that doing so may serve an important psychological purpose.

What the author, Benedict Carey, is trying to say here (but what he makes unnecessarily confusing by inserting shame into the equation) is that not blaming yourself (exclusively) for whatever went wrong helps you move on. He does describe—very gingerly—various coping strategies that people adopt for dealing with the past:

Researchers find that people think about past foul-ups or missed opportunities in several ways. Some tend to fixate and are at an elevated risk for mood problems. Others have learned to ignore regrets and seem to live more lighthearted, if less-examined, lives. In between are those who walk carefully through the minefield of past choices, gamely digging up traps and doing what they can to defuse the live ones.

Finally, he gently suggests that time heals all such wounds, if you allow time to do its thing:

With age, people apparently detoxified their regrets by reframing them as shared misunderstandings, a retrospective touching-up that in many cases might have been more accurate.

As for me, one of the best decisions I ever made was to bail on grad school. Every time I read stuff like this, I’m reminded of the fact that I have absolutely no regrets about my decision.

The Modern Language Association frequently helps out its critics with provocative session titles and left-leaning political stands offered by its members. …[I]n moves that infuriated the MLA’s Radical Caucus, the association’s Delegate Assembly refused to pass those resolutions and instead adopted much narrower measures. The [MLA] acknowledged tensions over the Middle East on campus, but in a resolution that did not single out pro-Israel groups for criticism. And the association criticized the University of Colorado for the way it started its investigation of Ward Churchill, but took no stand on whether the outcome (his firing) was appropriate.

Imagine that: in the name of academic freedom, academics who consider themselves “progressive” demand the right to promote one one point of view and to single out only one group for criticism.

The resolution as [Grover Furr] wrote it said that some who criticize Zionism and Israel have been “denied tenure, disinvited to speak … [or] fraudulently called ‘anti-Semitic.’” The resolution called this a “serious danger to academic study and discussion in the USA today” and then resolved that “the MLA defend the academic freedom and the freedom of speech of faculty and invited speakers to criticize Zionism and Israel.” The resolution made no mention of the right of others on campus to embrace Zionism or Israel or to hold middle-of-the-road views or any views other than being critical of Israel and Zionism.

The substitute resolution, adopted by a vote of 63-30 said:

“Middle East is a subject of intense debate,” ….[and that] it was “essential that colleges and universities protect faculty rights to speak forthrightly on all sides of the issue,” and urged colleges to “resist” pressure from outside groups about tenure reviews and speakers and to instead uphold academic freedom. Nelson’s resolution did not identify one side or the other as victim or villain in the campus debates over the Middle East and said that academic freedom must apply to people “to address the issue of the Middle East in the manner they choose.”

This was considered too even-handed by critics. But supporters from the health majority of MLA members who voted have got the right idea:

[T]hey argued that the MLA shouldn’t be picking sides, and that the principles behind defending Israel’s critics should apply to its supporters as well. One professor said: “Academic freedom is meaningless unless it applies to all points of view.” Another said that even if 95 percent of disputes over academic freedom and the Middle East relate to one side of the argument, the principle of academic freedom should be paramount, not helping those 95 percent over the 5 percent. [e.a.]

Really? Ya think? 

That the painfully obvious bottom line about freedom of speech (that it’s for me and for thee) needs to be spelled out to 33% of the members in good standing of the MLA is a sad commentary on the American academy.

The good news is that the hard-core ideologues on college campuses are finally being challenged.