What a difference 12 hours makes. This morning, Candy Crowley was downplaying the significance of the NAFTA story. Now, 12 hours later, she’s talking about the “incoming” that Obama is getting, and they’re playing video of a very hostile “press avail” held by the Candidate this afternoon.

In the worst single day of his campaign—a day on which all the goodwill toward him in the media simply vanished—whoooosh!—Obama was raked over the coals all day long on CNN—I saw it on the 8 o’clock hour with Campbell Brown; then on the 9 o’clock hour with Larry King. The Obama supporters who only a few days ago had proudly been flying their colors looked shell-shocked. Now the melancholy tune continues on Anderson Cooper’s show.

Transcripts aren’t yet available, but the reporters or anchors have now mentioned every negative thing bubbling under the surface about Obama—some of which should have been expected (Rezko, Farrakhan, Wright, non-oversight of Senate committee); some of which the Obama team never should have allowed to develop (Canada/NAFTA, Farrakhan); and some of the downright creepy stuff that’s out there (is Obama a Muslim?—the CNN crew is obsessed with showing a piece from 60 Minutes where Steve Croft insistently asks Clinton the question a second time: are you sure he’s not a Muslim? is what he implies).

Earlier today, I see from the available transcripts, Wolf Blitzer pulled no punches in his language:

BLITZER: What do you make of this embarrassment, this memo that has now been released from the Canadian Consulate in Chicago to the Canadian government in Ottawa, saying they did meet with a top economic adviser to Obama who basically said to them, don’t pay attention to what Barack Obama tells the voters in Ohio on NAFTA, he really doesn’t mean it, it’s only politics? This is potentially a significant embarrassment to your candidate.

Now, as I write, hours later, Cooper is conducting a segment on “media bias.” He says he takes the subject very seriously.

He’s so sincere-sounding that I almost believe him.

Until I hear him invoke “the best political team on television.”

Which reminds me: read Christopher Hitchens on the vast emptiness of our discourse.

Take “Yes We Can,” for example. It’s the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training uptake.

Wait! That’s not all!

Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps 10 keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together. Fishing exclusively from this tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions, it ought to be possible to drive all thinking people away from the arena and leave matters in the gnarled but capable hands of the professional wordsmiths and manipulators.

I said earlier that when the CNN transcript of this morning’s show was available, I’d post it. Here it is:

In Which CNN’s Candy Crowley Tries to Soft-Pedal a Horribly Negative Story about Saint Barack and John Roberts Rides to the Rescue:

ROBERTS: Well, a bombshell story has emerged this morning that could have a dramatic affect on the Obama campaign in Ohio. Our senior political correspondent Candy Crowley is covering the race from Ohio. She joins us from Cleveland. She’s outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

So Candy, just lay the groundwork for us about what this argument has been about regarding NAFTA and what Barack Obama would actually do on NAFTA?

CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SENIOR BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Well, first of all, we should tell you that here in Ohio, NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement is a dirty word. People believe in Ohio that that trade agreement has sucked jobs from the state. So with that as a basis, both candidates, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have said, yes I would renegotiate NAFTA if need be, because it really has hurt the economy.

OK. A week ago, about a week ago, a Canadian television station ran a story saying that a top official on the Obama campaign had told Canadian officials that they should kind of look at his position on NAFTA more as political positioning, given all the anxiety in the Midwest about NAFTA, and less about policy. It was denied by the Obama campaign. It was denied by the Canadian embassy. So the story kind of laid there.

Now the “Associated Press” has obtained a memo from the Canadian Consulate in Chicago showing that a meeting did take place between a high-level adviser to Barack Obama, and some Canadian officials in the consulate in Chicago. Now, the summation of that meeting written by somebody in the Canadian Consulate says that this Barack Obama official told them that they really should look at NAFTA in light of the sort of protectionism that has emerged particularly from the Midwest and not so much as policy.

ROBERTS: In fact, in fact —

CROWLEY: Now, the Obama official —

ROBERTS: In fact, Candy, I’ve got the memo here and we’ve produced it up so that everybody can have a look at it. Basically, the argument is that Barack Obama was going to talk a tough game on NAFTA, but he wasn’t going to do anything about it. The mediate was between Austan Goolsbee who was his chief economic adviser, he’s a professor at the University of Chicago, which would make sense that this meeting would have taken place at the Canadian Consulate in Chicago.

Joseph Demora who was at that meeting wrote, “Noting anxiety among many U.S. domestic audiences about the U.S. economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged a protectionist sentiment that has emerged particularly in the Midwest during the primary campaign.” He cautioned — he, being Goolsbee, cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans. Now, Goolsbee claims, “I certainly did not use that phrase in any way” according to this “AP” story. But certainly, if not a smoking gun, this seems to be some evidence that the Obama campaign is going to have a difficult time refuting?

CROWLEY: Well, you know, there’s a couple of problems. There’s the policy question. Here in Ohio, with NAFTA being so unpopular, the question then is well, what does he feel about NAFTA?

You mean, he supports it? Now, the Obama campaign says, listen, we need to enforce those labor provisions, those environmental provisions in NAFTA. There was nothing in this meeting that said anything other than that.

But at a whole other level, this is Obama, the Obama campaign. Barack Obama has gone around the country saying we need to do different kind of business in Washington. We need to tell people what we think. We need to really get down to what’s important. So at another level, it also hurts the Obama campaign. That sort of straight shooting message that he’s been putting out there.

So it will be interesting to see how they talk about it. They never denied the meeting took place. They just denied that in fact the conversation was about how this was all political talk and shouldn’t be taken seriously.

ROBERTS: Well, I suspect that his advisers are going to be scrambling this morning, trying to figure out how to respond to this.

As of 5:30 p.m., they haven’t done a very good job.

I have my differences with Andrew Sullivan, but he made me laugh my ass off today:

Uh-Oh

Medvedev is 5′ 4″.

hint: You need to be a little bit more informed than the typical American Ivy League Leage student to get it.

As a blogger who flies under the radar, I don’t expect to get credit for this, but I’m not above a little chest-thumping.

It was at around 10:15 this morning that I posted my suggestion that the Obama bubble was finally going to burst, due to the flap over his campaign telling Canadian officials to ignore his NAFTA rhetoric as political positioning (my characterization), which CNN reporter Candy Crowley was reluctant even to clarify this morning on CNN. (Earlier today, I promised to reprint from the transcript when it became available; see below***.)

Here’s the evidence from my Wordpress dashboard:

2008-03-03 10:14:58 am mania balloon punctured?

Then Noam Scheiber at TNR weighed in at around 12:30:

I still don’t think it’s substantively a big deal, but between hearing CNN’s reports from Ohio this morning, and listening in on a Clinton conference call just now (and hearing reporters’ questions on the subject), I think they’re getting some significant traction with this story today.

Well of course it’s not a big deal substantively. But this is not a campaign about substance. The Obama campaign has been about Nothing.

That’s precisely the point that those of us who’ve been screaming bloody murder have been making—that there’s no there there.

And the reason there’s been no there there is that Barack Obama has been deliberately vague about his positions, the better to deceive gullible people into voting for him—although they have no idea what he stands for, or against.

If this is the “new” politics, color me deeply unimpressed.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

Writing in the WaPo, Linda Hirshman analyzes the unexpected lack of loyalty to Hillary Clinton among women voters:

And there we have one of the most puzzling conundrums of the 2008 Democratic contests. Black voters of all socioeconomic classes are voting for the black candidate. Men are voting for the male candidate regardless of race or class. But even though this is also a year with the first major female presidential candidate, women are split every way they can be. They’re the only voting bloc not voting their bloc.

Well, I never would have expected women to vote for Hillary as a bloc. That’s Hirshman’s—and the Clinton campaign’s—first mistake: believing all the nonsense about female solidarity. (Check out a non-scholarly work explaining why there is no solidarity among women: we’re evil bitches, and we start young!)

But back to campaign ‘08. Hirshman suggests that there’s a class struggle involved in the Democratic breakdown pro- and anti-Hillary, and that elite educated women are going for Obama partly because they relate to Michelle Obama, with her Jimmy Choos, as a role model.

Maybe. But Hirshman also suggests that women who would have voted Hillary before have been running into the warm embrace of the Obama camp, and here’s why [e.a.]:

When faced with a “movement,” resistance is costly. And for weeks now, online and on cable news channels, almost anyone who expresses criticism of Obama or support for Clinton has elicited a firestorm of disapproval. Obama’s scores of defenders — “Obamabots,” they’re called — immediately recite the anti-Clinton litany: Billary, Monica Lewinsky, Hillary’s Iraq war vote, identity politics. Well-regarded activists such as Planned Parenthood’s Feldt or successful writers such as Tina Fey who support Clinton are excoriated as worthless pieces of nonsense. After Steinem wrote an op-ed on Clinton’s behalf in the New York Times, the New Republic published an article titled “Gloria Steinem’s Awful Op Ed.” Not wrong. Not misguided. But “awful.”

Has this rhetorical firestorm had an effect on the political decisions of college-educated white women? I don’t know. But I do know that many of these women have succeeded by meeting or exceeding society’s expectations. And the movement quality of the Obama campaign has certainly raised expectations of commitment to its candidate well beyond those of a normal political campaign. This has to be generating powerful peer pressure.

The commentary can feel like something close to intimidation, a gantlet of verbal punishment meted out to anyone who dares to disagree. It’s well established social science that women on the whole are much more averse to political conflict than men are, so it’s fair to speculate that avoiding that gantlet may be one more reason women are tilting toward Obama.

This makes some sense to me. Peer pressure is a powerful force. Especially when you’ve got people urging you to “come to Obama.”

And that’s the armchair sociology of the day.

Four British news outlets, including Reuters, which triggered the incident, catastrophically mistranslated the remarks of an Israeli official:

Reuters: Israel minister warns Palestinians of “shoah”
The BBC: Israel warns of Gaza ‘holocaust’
The Guardian: Israeli minister warns of Palestinian ‘holocaust’
The Times (of London): Israel threatens to unleash ‘holocaust’ in Gaza

In fact Vilnai said this morning in off-the-cuff remarks made on Israel Radio that: “The more the Qassam rocket fire [on Israeli civilians] intensifies and increases its range, the Palestinians are bringing upon themselves a bigger disaster because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”

Vilnai used the word “shoah” (meaning disaster), which Reuters mistranslated as “Holocaust,” which is “HaShoah” in Hebrew. It is like confusing a “white house” with “The White House.”

Just sayin’. It’s only one tiny demonstration of the phenomenon that Nick Davies describes in his book Flat Earth News, according to a review by John Lanchester:

The British news media are crushed by commercial pressure, squeezed by the need for speed, corrupted by PR, indifferent to their own best traditions of independence, recklessly indifferent to the central functions of reporting and checking facts, systematically lied to by commercial interests and governments, and in far too many respects, simply indifferent to the truth. There is a growing, industry-wide failure to be sufficiently interested in reality. I would add a couple of details to the indictment, to do with the way in which the papers have succumbed to their own internal celebrity culture of columnists, most of whom make no attempt to report on the world, in favour of sermonising about it.

I note that Davies’s book has no American publisher yet. Here’s the first chapter. 

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who has detected the stirrings—at long, long last—of a press that has been scandalously reluctant to exercise skepticism when it comes to Barack Obama.

Jeff Jarvis, who has also been on the case, adds a few logs to the fire today.

Mickey Kaus wrote about a category he called “undernews”—stuff that’s out there that doesn’t “bubble up” into the mainstream news. (I will reprint the entire post below***; it’s well worth reading.) In mid-January, Kaus addressed (not for the first time) some (a fraction) of the undernews then available about Obama:

Undernews Alert: It’s hard to believe that Obama’s Afrocentric church–with its troubling attack on “the pursuit of middeclassness”–isn’t going to be an issue in the campaign, soon. There are already wild, inflammatory emails circulating, apparently. … Update: Here is the offical Obama response page. Excerpt:

“There is information on the Black Values System in the new member packet provided at Trinity, and the new member classes put the Black Values System in the historical context of the civil rights movement.”

Hmm. It must be understood in “the historical context.” That’ll reassure nervous white voters! The Obama camp would seem to be severely underestimating its vulnerability on the church issue if it thinks lecturing people on the civil rights movement will solve this problem for them in the long run. … 1:18 A.M.

Here’s some fallout from just a fraction of the Obama undernews, reported in today’s New York Post. (I alluded to it the other day as Obama’s Jewish problem.)

Hikind, a Democrat who has yet to endorse a candidate for president, said Obama had not satisfactorily distanced himself from Wright, his Chicago-based personal pastor, noting, “This is a man who thinks Farrakhan is a great guy and God’s gift to the world.”

Hikind went on, “Obama has said that you can be a supporter of Israel even if you’re for giving up land to the Arabs, which is true - but for a guy running for president to take a position like this in advance of getting into office, combined with everything else going on in the Middle East, that scares the hell out of me.

“There are a hell of a lot of Jews who are concerned about these issues, and they go way beyond Hasidic and Orthodox Jews, people I describe as conservative Reagan/Giuliani Democrats,” said Hikind, who backed Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns in 1980 and 1984.

Hikind’s warning about Jewish concerns over Obama are being widely but privately voiced among top New York Democrats.

“There is anxiety, there is concern, on the part of a lot of important Jewish Democrats in New York,” one of the state’s most influential Democratic activists told The Post.

Upshot: There’s trouble in River City.

————–
*** Here’s Mickey Kaus, in December 2007, on the “undernews”:

update: This reprint does not contain the original boldface, italics, or links provided by Kaus. To get those, you’ll have to visit his site—which you should do anyway.

Friday, December 21, 2007

The Matrix: Room Eight’s Jerry Skurnick has suggested that the electoarate is splitting into two diverging parts–people who follow politics and people who don’t–with the people who follow politics much better informed than they were before (thanks to cable, web, etc.) and the people who don’t follow politics less well informed (they used to get at least some information from Walter Cronkite). That certainly rings true to me. And it may, as Skurnick claims, explain some of the new volatility in polling–e.g., when the uninformed majority suddenly discovers, say, that Rudy Giuliani has been married three times.

But there’s a second way to divide the electorate that asks how the voters inform themselves. Do they rely on the traditional Mainstream Media (MSM), or do they get their political information from the Web, from cable news, from the tabloids, etc. This division may have once seemed unimportant, but it doesn’t anymore–its seriousness is suggested by the MSM’s impressive resistance to stories bubbling up from the blogs and the tabs that don’t meet MSM standards (putting aside whether you regard those standards as high or merely idiosyncratic). “Rielle Hunter”–the woman whom the National Enquirer alleges was John Edwards’ mistress–was the top-searched name on the MSN site at one point Thursday, I’m told. Meanwhile, in the traditional mainstream press, ‘Rielle Hunter” was mentioned only … well, zero times.

Of the two ways to divide the electorate, the second is arguably more important. After all, even those who don’t follow politics, will eventually inform themselves before the election.** But if the MSM/Web barrier remains as robust as it’s been, those who inform themselves from the MSM will find out something different, when they finally tune in, than those who go to the Web and learn both the news and what might be called the “undernews.” *** If you’re thinking of voting as a Democrat in Iowa or New Hampshire, you might watch NBC and never know about this messy Rielle Hunter business. Or you might read DailyKos know the whole allegation plus the arguments against it plus seven theories about how it came to light. That knowledge might cause voters to vote against Edwards or to vote for him–but either way first they have to find out.

Likewise, TNR’s Noam Scheiber suggests that the egghead sector ( “urban, college-educated liberals”) of the Democratic party–which used to be less partisan and combative than the blue-collar/labor sector–is now more partisan and combative, because its eggy heads are wrapped up in Kos and other anti-Bush sites, where they absorb the latest undernews about the machinations of Karl Rove and Tom DeLay. Scheiber argues this is a good development for Obama, who surprisingly doesn’t have to become more partisan then he actually is in order to win over non-egghead (labor) Dems.

The 2008 campaign will be a test of the relative strength of these various differently-informed electorates. Of those who follow politics (Skurnick’s first group) how many follow the “undernews” and how many merely watch Brian Williams? Of those who don’t follow politics (Skurnick’s second group) how many bone up in the end by madly googling the candidates, and how many just read the editorial endorsements in their local papers? The non-MSM Enquirer will be in the checkout aisles all over Iowa, but will it have an impact?

Will Obama’s momentum come to an abrupt halt because of the bad news that CNN is reporting at every opportunity this morning?

There’s no link, because none is available yet at CNN. Here’s what’s available on Google News.

Boston Globe Obama Adviser Denies Trade Remarks The Associated Press - 9 hours ago “On NAFTA, Goolsbee suggested that Obama is less about fundamentally changing the agreement and more in favour of strengthening/clarifying language on … NAFTA SHAFTA ABC News That 3 am call — hello? hello? San Francisco Chronicle Obama Adviser Says Canadian Officials Misinterpreted His NAFTA Remarks CNSNews.com Tribune Chronicle - National Review Online all 559 news articles »

On CNN this morning, Candy Crowley, the “reporter” who was supposedly telling the story, had to be interrupted by American Morning anchor John Roberts. Crowley embroidered a very complicated tale without the meat. Roberts had to insist that she make it plain that the Obama campaign had been caught in an extremely embarrassing position.

Just another example of how in-the-tank the media is for Obama. I will come back and provide the transcript when it’s available.

Meanwhile: as I said yesterday, when I noted an uptick in positive news for Hillary and a bad few days for Obama:

But we’re on Feiler Faster time. Anyone willing to predict anything about Tuesday’s upcoming primaries is a fool.

Negative coverage of Obama is also growing, if you believe Howard Kurtz, who has been relentless in saying that the media has been favoring him over Hillary.

Would Clinton have skated as easily if she were found to have visited radicals tied to violence? Or bought land from an indicted businessman, as in the Rezko case? Or if the pastor of her church had talked about “this racist United States of America,” as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who heads Obama’s church, has?

That is hard to imagine.

Kurtz backs it up with a statistic from the Center for Media and Public Affairs.:

 From Dec. 16 through Feb. 19, it says, the three network newscasts aired reports that were 84 percent positive for Obama and 53 percent positive for Clinton. She scored higher on evaluations of policy and public performance, but that amounted to only 10 percent of the coverage.

He also mentions that the Chicago newspapers have been the hardest on Obama so far. Here’s what Chicago Sun-Times writer Lynn Sweet is reporting today:

Problems back home?

And she goes on to name a list of people who will become familiar to us (as cartoon caricatures) as Obama’s campaign continues: Tony Rezko, Louis Farrakhan, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Austan Goolsbee, and William Ayers.

Based on the attempted guilt-by-association trip w/ William Ayers, I assume that a lot of this innuendo is bogus.*** Nevertheless, Obama should have been questioned about some of these things by the national press long, long, long ago.

Instead, the media has been busy building the Obama is the Messiah narrative, as Tim Noah noted in Slate back in January 2007. It was fed to them by “Obama’s Narrator,” as Ben Wallace-Wells wrote in April 2007.

Let’s see what happens! Nobody knows—and that’s what makes this the best political campaign in memory.

———–

** I won’t defend Ayers’s record in the Weather Underground; I most certainly will defend his right to his opinions, and his right to make a life for himself after paying his debt to society on the terms that society deemed appropriate.

And I unequivocally renounce, denounce, and reject the efforts to smear Obama based on his friendship with someone who is not currently plotting to overthrow the American government or to otherwise make mischief in American society.

Louis Farrakhan, on the other hand, has been dedicated to making mischief in American society for three decades, stirring up animosities between blacks and Jews by constantly promoting a poisonous anti-Semitism among his flock, preaching that blacks were deliberately targeted and persecuted by Jews.