One of Glenn Reynolds’s emailers describes Obama-swooners as your typical fans—wrestling fans, that is [e.a.]:
I am in medical school now, but I remember when I used to watch the WWF (WWE as it is called now) about 10 years ago and I have to say Obama’s victory/campaign speech tonight in Virginia is utterly reminiscent of any “face” (good guy) speech as he arrived in the ring in a new town.
“My it’s good to be back to (insert city/state)…I’ll tell you you guys have the best (insert sports team/governor)…” the speech then goes on about being an underdog and more importantly winning against the odds et cetera, et cetera. The best part about it is that the crowd in both instances, fake wrestling and politics, always screams and applauds in the same spots and eventually breaks into chanting the hero’s name. I understand this isn’t a speech meant to unveil any type of policy specifics (when are his speeches ever about that really?) but the similarities were striking for about five minutes.
Just a friendly reminder that depression usually follows mania.
“I certainly don’t know what he believes in. The only foreign policy thing I remember he said was he’s going to attack Pakistan and embrace Ahmadinejad,” Bush said.
“Of course President Bush would attack the one candidate in this race who opposed his disastrous war in Iraq from the start. But Barack Obama doesn’t need any foreign policy advice from the architect of the worst foreign policy decision in a generation,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.
He’ll need something better than Kos and Pelosi talking points, though.
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.
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.
Ohio and Texas voted to keep us on the edge of our seats for another few months.
I’m pretty excited about having picked up early on the fact that the Obama campaign was stalling. (On March 2, I noted that Obama was having a bad couple of days; on the morning of March 3, I noted the bursting of the Obama-mania bubble after NAFTA-gate broke; on February 28, I reprinted the results of a Pew poll which showed that voters had concerns about Obama’s inexperience.)
In retrospect, it seems obvious that the Clinton team read the same Pew poll and chose that moment to pounce with the red-phone-at-3 a.m. ad (which was so roundly derided in the leftosphere).
And yet Kit Seelye of the Times is suggesting this morning that a subtle shift in media coverage—specifically, the media wringing its hands over whether it is being unfair to Hillary—was the game changer.
I think a lot of other factors have to be taken into consideration, simply because many voters have only a glancing familiarity with what the media is broadcasting (or, more precisely, narrowcasting—since there’s no guaranteed mass audience for anything anymore) at any given time. More about this later, I hope.
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***.)
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.
Students of infotainment were unusually well served by the New York Times yesterday. These days, the best Monday-morning quarterbacking gets done not in the sports section of the “newspaper of record” but in the business section, when the culture and media reporters dissect the political theater of the past week.
Yesterday, reporter Katharine Seelye broached the subject of the relationship between the White House and the press corps. Trying to get a handle on the recent anti-Bush, anti-administration outbursts from the White House briefing room, Seelye delved way back in time to the “Monica-mania” of 1998, when then-White House spokesman Mike McCurry, conceded to allow his daily press briefings to be carried live on TV after (McCurry says) he was told “We [CNN] get 100,000 more households when [we're] on the air.”
[Okay, so McCurry decided to open the door to CNN. Why? Did he think the news for Clinton would be better if 100,000 more people sitting at home were now privy to his misdeeds? But never mind. ---ed.]
Eight years later, Seelye writes:
Ever since ["Monica-mania"], the White House briefings have played out in real time against the daytime dramas, giving the world a glimpse into the daily push-me, pull-you in a democracy of making news (or not) and trying to report it. Now, with cable channels, reality television, talk-back live and blogging on the spot, with viewers and readers hip to stagecraft and expecting to be taken behind the scenes, there seems no turning back.”
Much of what Seelye writes is “meta”: traditionally, it isn’t the role of the media to analyze its own reporting of the “news.”
Seelye’s straying off the reservation is invaluable to the infotainment dissector, however. More on this at a later date.
What worries me about Obama’s campaign is that it’s increasingly a movement about a man. If you support his opponent, you’re against hope itself. The “Yes We Can” ditty that’s sweeping across the Web and mesmerizing two-year-olds (I know one) is a theme song of messianism. If he fails to win the nomination, the song could easily, swiftly change to “We Don’t Think We Want To.” Obama’s crusade is preparing the ground for a massive display of Democratic pique in the form of Party suicide.
There’s a more earthbound Clinton version of messianism-the arrogance of power. Some in her circle speak of Obama with an open contempt that only reveals their shallowness. There are a lot of reasons to like Obama and his message. And, at the moment, it doesn’t seem as if his campaign will need to prepare its mass following for disappointment: Obama’s long, slow burn is now exploding into a prairie fire. But I’d feel better if he stopped offering himself as the personal embodiment of hope. After all, if hope is defeated, what you get is despair.
Mrs. Clinton, of New York, basked in cheers from crowds during a campaign swing through Texas, whose March 4 primary has become increasingly vital to her candidacy. She also contrasted what she called her “solutions” for voters’ financial struggles with what she termed the “rhetoric” of Mr. Obama, her rival for the Democratic nomination.
And half a continent away at a news conference in Washington, Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, said Mr. Obama’s speeches had been “singularly lacking in specifics.”
And the blows landed:
Mr. Obama seemed to allude to the criticism of his rivals who suggest that he excels at rhetoric, but falls short on details, by saying at the outset of his remarks that he was going to “take it down a notch” by giving a speech that he said would be “a little more detailed, a little longer, with not as many applause lines.”
Yes, it’s hard to score points against political rivals when you’re spending your time seducing the public.
Obama is a quick study. He will adapt. But it feels like the perception of a sweep for Obama—the perception of momentum—has been stalled somewhat. Hillary looks stronger today than she did yesterday, although the suggestion that her campaign is willing to go to war with Obama over the Michigan and Florida delegates will keep the Hillary Hate flowing.
But the very surprising Romney endorsement means that the Republicans are starting to come to terms with McCain. That leaves battling Democrats at a disadvantage against (possibly) unifying Republicans.
What an incredible campaign season!
————-
*** On February 8, I referred to the “mania” surrounding Obama, and wrote:
Just a friendly reminder that depression usually follows mania.
Why is the Obama campaign like the Seinfeld show? Because it’s about NOTHING!
Don’t tell me we can’t do something. Yes, we can! . . . yada yada yada . . . Let’s be the generation that ends poverty in America . . . yada yada yada . . . We know what to do with health care . . . yada yada yada . . . We’ve got to get beyond small politics . . .yada yada yada. . .We can do better than that. . . yada yada yada. . . We need to come together. . . yada yada yada . . . We’ve got to return to the spirt that built America . . . yada yada yada . . . It’s time for us to step up and meet these challenges . . . yada yada yada . . . This is not a campaign about me, it’s about you . . .yada yada yada. . .
“How do you rate Obama’s speech? Excellent, good, fair, or poor?”
30% Excellent
21% Good
26% Fair
21% Poor
1% Not sure
Althouse [e.a.]:
The important break in the numbers is between “excellent” and the rest, and 70% said the speech fell short of “excellent.” This is, I think, disastrous for Obama. …
Asked whether the speech was “racially divisive, unifying, or neither,” only 30% — 30% again — thought the speech was “unifying,” which is what Obama intended it and his entire campaign to be.
Obama’s popularity has been built on unifying us and transcending race. If only 30% of us heard unification in that speech, then the speech and the connection to Wright have been massively destructive to what is the chief substance of his reputation.
But Althouse gets the last word, because she’s got the best metaphor:
Obama told white people to feel guilty about race just when they’d been so happy thinking that loving him, just him, was the answer to racial problems. When we saw him consorting with someone who seemed to hate us, we needed reassurance that Obama loves us, and loving Obama was enough. But he didn’t say that, and now we’re confused. Our boyfriend was telling us he needs to see other people, and we don’t understand the relationship anymore.
I think we can safely declare that Obama-mania is over.
I was sifting through some piles of paper and came across this February 2006 NYT article by Kit Seelye, which was also the subject of one of my first blog posts. Seelye noted both the evolving pace of news-making and the evolving prominence of political newsmakers (in relationship to other public personalities, like, say, sports stars, daytime hosts, and various kinds of opinion-mongers in many different media) [e.a.]:
[I]n 1998, Monica-mania struck.
”I told CNN there was no reason to take this briefing live,” Mr. McCurry recalled. ”But they said, ‘We get 100,000 more households when you’re on the air.’ ”
Ever since, the White House briefings have played out in real time against the daytime dramas, giving the world a glimpse into the daily push-me, pull-you in a democracy of making news (or not) and trying to report it. Now, with cable channels, reality television, talk-back live and blogging on the spot, with viewers and readers hip to stagecraft and expecting to be taken behind the scenes, there seems no turning back.
Mr. McClellan, for one, said he wouldn’t dream of trying to unplug the briefings.
”We have no intention of not broadcasting them,” he said. ”They serve a purpose for both the White House and reporters.”
That was a wise decision on McClellan’s part (back when he was still loyal to GWB), for the reasons he stated. And he was backed up both by a Republican predecessor and a Democratic predecessor [e.a.]:
Mr. Fleischer recalled a virulent period with the media (and Democrats) in May 2002 after a New York Post headline proclaimed that ”Bush Knew” in advance about the Sept. 11 attacks.
”That was a vicious explosion that lasted a week,” he said. ”But the president calculated the press would go too far, and they went so far in their accusations that the country was far more inclined to believe the president than the press.” Several polls at the time showed President Bush maintaining his high approval ratings of 75 percent throughout the episode.
”The public perceives the press not as watchdogs but as attack dogs,” Mr. Fleischer said.
Mr. McCurry saw the same dynamic.
”The public hates the people in that room,” he said. ”My standing up there and getting pelted with rotten tomatoes during Monica probably helped Bill Clinton because people say, ‘What is wrong with the people in this room?’ ”
In her acceptance speech, Hillary said she’d found her own voice. Interesting. I wonder what that will sound like. (Terry McAuliffe is already spreading the meme.)
I have several reasons for being pleased with the results of tonight’s Democratic primary:
Hillary Clinton’s victory felt to me an awful lot like a repudiation of the mainstream pundits who spent the entire weekend first dumping all over her and then playing the “Hillary in tears” tape on practically a continuous loop yesterday.
Yep, that’s a good one. Here’s an even better one:
Hillary’s victory should amp up Andrew Sullivan into even greater feats of CDS hysterics than we’ve seen so far. If that’s possible. In any case, he seems to thrive on a state of constant agitation and stomach-churning nausea, so I figure Hillary’s victory is probably good for him.
Best of all, this is a win for America (I mean that all of it—including the highly contested and jam-packed campaign, the many debates, the incessant infotainment-heavy media coverage), because people are showing an increased interest in the political process.
And that, dear readers, is why I think that Infotainment Rules! (It grabs your attention—sometimes even in the public interest and to the benefit of our vibrant democracy.)
Politico editor John Harris frames his story about the power of the blue pencil as a cautionary tale—he confesses*** to having coined the devastating term “slow bleed” to describe John Murtha’s losing strategy for forcing Bush to withdraw troops from Iraq:
With a mixture of pride and remorse, I have a confession: I am the author of the Democratic Party’s “slow-bleed strategy” for ending the war in Iraq.
I had nothing to do with the details of the plan that Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) floated two weeks ago. … In retrospect, it probably has already occurred to Murtha and his supporters that from a public relations perspective, “slow-bleed” was not the most winning description. How could they have been so stupid?
That’s where I come in. “Slow bleed” is my phrase.
Read it and weep if you’re in favor of forcing President Bush to withdraw troops from Iraq. On the other hand, nothing could be more illustrative of the ferocious viral power of le mot juste (or injuste) in the Feiler Faster world:
If you Google “slow bleed” and “Murtha,” you get nearly 200,000 hits. Nexis recorded more than a hundred stories in the days after Bresnahan’s article that used the phrase “slow bleed.”
“Slow bleed” was featured on CNN and on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. My former newspaper, The Washington Post, used the phrase the other day as if it were an established part of Washington lexicon, needing neither attribution nor explanation. “Slow bleed” also played a starring role in a parade of House floor speeches by Republicans denouncing Democrats, and in a fundraising letter from Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan. “Slow-bleed is exactly the right name for this incredibly irresponsible and dangerous strategy,” he wrote.
Harris, full of remorse about what he considers a faux pas, details exactly how the sausage was made [e.a.].
As happens all the time in journalism, this was a decision — made on the fly and under deadline — that I would have taken back in the morning. It is Murtha’s job to defend his own policies. But I’d prefer not to hand his opponents ammunition in the form of evocative but loaded language.
Yes, it’s Murtha’s job to sell and/or defend his policies.
And it’s a damn shame that the media and the Republicans ran with Harris’s phrase “slow bleed” as if it had been planted by the devil Frank Luntz himself (see Luntz’s new book, Words That Work—this example is the proof of his pudding, even if he didn’t whip up this particular concoction).
However: why apologize if you are Harris?
The Mea Culpa Mania(TM) sweeping the land is bad enough when it comes to political candidates and celebrities behaving badly. Are writers, editors, journalists, pundits, and bloggers all going to have to watch and scrutinize and second-guess every word they use, too?
Self-censorship is only a shade different from censorship—and in a free country, it could be argued (and I will), it is even worse.
———
*** Tart thoughts about confessions—the dernier cri—here, from Eli Lake.
Regular readers know that I recently took a little detour away from my usual subject matter to post some pictures of Lower Manhattan. (I’ve got a lot more, by the way, but I have to clean up my startup disk to make room for them on iPhoto. Nightmare.)
Meanwhile, you can read all about the transformation of Lower Manhattan here, in the New York Sun:
Luxury Seems To Be Set For the Lower East Side
Ultra-luxury five-star hotels, the largest supermarket in the Northeast, apartments renting for $80 a square foot, condominiums selling for $1,500 a square foot, top-flight restaurants, a hip nightlife scene, and high-end boutiques: It’s not TriBeCa, the meatpacking district, or the High Line area I’m talking about — it’s the Bowery and the Lower East Side.
“Once a few new projects that were initially viewed as trailblazing succeed and take hold, it makes it easier for other projects to prosper and the gap between the lower end and the high end of the market and condo prices diminishes. That’s precisely what is happening to the Lower East Side,” Mr. Ivanhoe continued. “Once the area is viewed as acceptable for people to live in safely and some entertainment, shopping, and services fill in, the foundation is in place for a strong, stable area for years to come.”
“Its not just condo mania, it’s a confluence of everything coming together in the Lower East Side,” a principal of Columbia Street Developers, Marshall Sohne, said. “From working in the neighborhood, I got to see some of the forces at work. The Bowery was the commercial kitchen district. Now just look at Bond Street between Lafayette and the Bowery where people want a location that they are paying real numbers for lofts without any services. These are ‘hip’ artistic types with big dollars, willing to pay the type of prices that were paid by the tycoons living in the Time Warner Center, but these people prefer to be on Bond Street.”
Read the whole thing if you dare. Here’s a sampling of what a neighborhood in transition looks like.
the old Bond Street, up close
Bond Street, looking east from Broadway
Bond Street, looking west toward Broadway, where it ends in a T
Bond Street construction, seen from a Bleecker Street rooftop
the new 23-story hotel going up on the Bowery
The 23-story hotel is being built around the building where Hettie Jones, ex-wife of Amiri Baraka (ne LeRoi Jones), lives. You can read all about it here. (I snuck onto the building site and took a lot of up-close-and-personal shots like this before getting chased away by a guard. Exciting!)
In the backyard of the new Bowery Hotel
Across the street from the new Bowery Hotel. Just what you want to see after you’ve paid $600 a night for your room, right?
Simon Dumenco isn’t all that excited about the economic meltdown, and he points a finger at—who else?—the media for its hysterical trumpeting of the “crisis” now that it’s upon us and its failure over the years to report on the hazards of high finance and Wall Street.
Really, you could argue that Wall Street, during the subprime boom, was simply doing its job: getting away with what it could get away with. (Hey, if regulators were willing to turn a blind eye to the dubious profiteering and financial smoke-and-mirrors … well, if the government says it’s OK, it’s OK, right?) But you can’t say the same for much of the press, which spent a lot of time over the past few years celebrating the feats of financial “wizards” — and not enough time peeking behind the curtains and questioning the too-good-to-be-true magic.
Granted, there’s been increased sensitivity in the past couple weeks among some media in regard to, at least, semantics. For instance, in The New York Times last week in a piece titled, “Amid Market Turmoil, Some Journalists Try to Tone Down Emotion,” Richard Pérez-Peña noted that some reporters are steering clear of terms such as “meltdown” and “panic” to avoid further inflaming an already-twitchy market.
Don’t get me wrong: Politely tip-toeing through the apocalypse after the fact is a nice gesture! But it hardly makes up for the fact that few financial journalists really questioned the meaning and ramifications of toxic Wall Street voodoo such as “credit-default swaps” and such until it was way, way too late.
No one has been covered in glory since this meltdown began to show its ugly face—least of all our elected representatives, beginning with Bush, who is clearly out of his depth and “out of juice,” according to David Brooks, who is being way too kind.
I certainly agree with Dumenco that the MSM comes in for a lot of the blame, but irrational exuberance is a widely known human weakness.
In early January, as Obama was ascending, I wrote:
Despite its prominence in Barnum lore, historians agree that he probably never said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” What he said was less cynical and more astute: “The people like to be humbugged.”
The Times piece from which I took the quote above goes on to note:
Barnum humbugged the highbrow as well as the low. In 1850 he brought the opera diva Jenny Lind, “the Swedish Nightingale,” to Manhattan for the start of an American tour. Neither he nor anyone else in America had heard her sing a note.
“Jenny Lind’s story is perhaps Barnum’s single most extraordinary accomplishment,” Ms. Maher said, “because he took something that was absolutely nothing in American society and created a frenzy, a mania, very much equivalent to today’s rock stars.” [e.a.]
People with their feet on the ground should always know how to protect their interests, even in times of irrational exuberance. Maybe that’s what we have to teach both our children and the nation’s “journalists”—how to reason. Now that we’re enmeshed in a world of 24/7 deceptive and/or ignorant “news” and marketing and advertising, this seems more important than ever
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.
Is anyone surprised that the Reverend Wright has struck a blow against his favorite son Barack Obama? (I’m not, as anyone who has been reading myblog knows.)
In the week before the media frenzy over Wright, Obama and McCain were essentially tied in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll. Less than a week later, and two days after Obama’s speech, McCain had opened a seven-point lead over Obama. Significantly, by Thursday’s polling, McCain had pulled slightly ahead of Obama among unaffiliated voters. McCain also enjoys unified support from Republican voters while Obama only attracts 65% of Democratic votes at this time.
Obama’s favorable ratings have also fallen below the 50% mark since the world learned of his former Pastor. This can be seen as part of a larger trend that began shortly after Obama’s victories in the Wisconsin Primaries. At that time, just before Hillary Clinton began raising questions about her competitor, Obama was viewed favorably by 56% of voters nationwide. That had slipped to 52% just before Pastor Wright’s views became big news and to 47% just before Obama’s speech. Two days after the speech, Obama’s favorables remain at 48%.
As Rasmussen notes, all eyes—particularly the superdelegates’—will be on the electorate.
Note that all eyes will not be on the media, which is what I’m focusing on here on this blog.
Rasmussen doesn’t say it, but I will: after his much-lauded speech, the MSM gave Obama an assist in attempting to put the Rev. Wright behind himself.
I predicted thaton March 16; (it wasn’t hard to do, considering the history of Obama-mania):
Well, we’re at the point now where the PR-concocted images and ugly reality keep colliding. And Obama is bound to keep “disappointing” us (or those of us who believed that Obama really is the “transcendent character” that David Axelrod created for our benefit from the exotic strands of Obama’s life).
From now on, Obama and his advocates and surrogates will have to work really hard (though they’ll have the help of a favorably disposed media) to get us to keep our minds off the things that make us doubt him.
Now, with on-the-ground results in stark contrast to the rosy optimism on offer from most MSM outlets (which claimed that with the Speech, Obama had put the Rev. Wright controversy behind him) the MSM is once again exposed as trying to lead (and mold) the electorate’s opinion*** rather than reporting on what it finds and presenting a snapshot of it.
————-*** More specifically, the cable “news” channels are leading the electorate—trying to influence public opinion—via pseudo-events created by the Obama campaign: the Philly speech; the Chicago Tribune interview in which he answered Rezko questions; the interviews he granted PBS and CNN[this from a candidate known to keep his distance from the press] after his Philly speech—to cite just the examples I know of without doing further research, although a cursory spin on Google News provides evidence that he went further into damage control mode. I see he did an interview with ABC, too. And with WITN.
And those are only a few instances of damage control that he’s preoccupied with this week. He first went into overdrive last week, as ETP’s Rachel Sklar reported.
Hillary Clinton and John McCain were all but missing from this week’s news, except as they related to Our Hero, Barack, the protagonist whose quest for the White House is presumed to be the cable “news” audience’s favorite story of the year. We shall see!
I used to think working class voters had conservative values because they were bitter about their economic circumstances–welfare and immigrants were “scapegoats,” part of the false consciousness that would disappear when everyone was guaranteed a good job at good wages. Then I left college. …
Because Obama’s comments are clearly a Category II Kinsley Gaffe–in which the candidate accidentally says what he really thinks–it will be hard for Obama to explain away. [He could say he was tired and it was late at night?--ed But he was similarly condescending in his big, heartfelt, well-prepared "race speech" when he explained white anger over welfare and affirmative action as a displacement of the bitterness that comes when whites
are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition ...
Maybe I missed something, but the “Change” poster behind Barack Obama seems to have, well, changed. (There’s
that word again.) The words “We Can Believe In” have been added to the bottom, for the first time acknowledging, pace Orwell, that not all changes are equal. … Nazi Germany, for an example, was a change. So was Stalinism (although less of change from Leninism). …
So far Obama is doing a brilliant job of being vague about what “change” he is referring to. “We Can Believe In” is a masterpiece of obfuscation. He has some good writers.
If there is one thing we learned from tonight’s debates on ABC, it is that the word “change” – formerly so useful – must now be banned from the English language. … [T]he poor parole has been put been in disgrace and rendered meaningless by a collection of nitwit politicians and pundits, so sayonara to “change.” It’s been nice knowing you. We give you your gold watch – bye bye.
Droll. But Obama is a good salesman, and mundus vult decipi. (You could look it up.)
Despite its prominence in Barnum lore, historians agree that he probably never said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” What he said was less cynical and more astute: “The people like to be humbugged.”
The Times piece from which I took the quote above goes on to note:
Barnum humbugged the highbrow as well as the low. In 1850 he brought the opera diva Jenny Lind, “the Swedish Nightingale,” to Manhattan for the start of an American tour. Neither he nor anyone else in America had heard her sing a note.
“Jenny Lind’s story is perhaps Barnum’s single most extraordinary accomplishment,” Ms. Maher said, “because he took something that was absolutely nothing in American society and created a frenzy, a mania, very much equivalent to today’s rock stars.” [e.a.]
The way Barack Obama is being covered by the media and the blogosphere, he’s not a political candidate anymore—he’s a celebrity. He doesn’t have political followers—he’s got fans. He doesn’t have a political platform—he’s got a one-word slogan—”change” [which works, 'cause "change is good," just like Nissan says, right?]. He makes narcissists feel so good about themselves.
Andrew Sullivan’s Obama Blogorama—all Barack all the time, except when he’s dancing onHillary’sgrave—is exhibit number one. Not enough Obama links for you from Sullivan? Here’s another one, about Obama’s “Sweet Spot.” (Contrast Mickey Kaus’s reaction to this nauseatingly “pompous” [scroll up] post from Ezra Klein about Obama.)
As I understand it, Sullivan used to be a conservative Republican and a devout Catholic. Now he worships “change,” as you can see in this exchange of questions and answers:
[Bainbridge]: What specific changes in law, society, or polity, if any, that Obama supports do you also support?
[Sullivan]: I support a fresh start in foreign policy, a willingness to negotiate where necessary, a new outreach to allies, and prudent, expeditious withdrawal from Iraq. I favor an end to poisonous partisan polarization. I favor strong measures to innovate new energy sources. I favor a restoration of the Geneva Conventions.
Why are those changes “necessary”?
Because the war is draining massive resources, and, despite recent tactical success, is clearly a historic mistake. Because the U.S. is extremely isolated and needs more support in the world, and especially a new appeal to moderate Muslims worldwide. Because the red-blue divide has poisoned our polity to the detriment of practical problem-solving. Because dependence on foreign oil is both environmentally fatal and dangerous for our future security. Because torture gives bad intelligence and is un-American.
What evidence is there, if any, that Obama would be prudent in effecting such changes?
Obama’s legislative record, speeches, and the way he has run his campaign reveal, I think, a very even temperament, a very sound judgment, and an intelligent pragmatism. Prudence is a word that is not inappropriate to him.
No, because Obama is Sullivan’s American Idol: the God of Change.
Look: I like Obama, from the little I know of him. But so far he’s mostly a mirage.
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.
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.
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?
But others understand that it’s no joke to be jailed in China,
I think this is awesome and courageous.
Really? Tiananmen Square was awesome and courageous. This is just self-aggrandizing and pointless.
Really? Going to prison in China is no joke. It gets a message out there for people to see and that is important. Would you do it?
how is this self-aggrandizing, exactly? He’s in prison, and I’m sitting on my ass in a (somewhat) comfy office chair reading about thinking “shit, I feel bad for the Muslims and non-Kool aid drinking Chinese when the Olympics are finished
There’s a lot of other reporting about this worrisome incident too, as you can see at this Google News link. But there’s nothing about this incident on Memeorandum.
Why is that? I thought the blogosphere is supposed to be much more informative than the TV newsbiz. The internet and TV are sharing news-viewer eyeballs, according to Pew.
I was hoping that the internet would be an improvement on the MSM. Right now, it’s Moe at Gawker—yep, Gawker—who’s reporting news that people should be aware of (because it’s a head-on collision between Western political culture [and freedom of expression] and Chinese “authoritarian” political culture [no freedom of expression].
Not that, say, the New York Times isn’t trying to cover China soberly–it most certainly seems to be.
[T]he Beijing police still sentenced the two women [in their 70s] to an
extrajudicial term of “re-education through labor” this week for
applying to hold a legal protest in a designated area in Beijing, where
officials promised that Chinese could hold demonstrations during the
Olympic Games.
Then the NYT goes and ruins its coverage with an almost incomprehensible level of naivete about the Chinese regime [e.a.]:
It is unclear why the police have detained people who sought permission to protest. [Really? Which part of the maniacally controlling Chinese government's motives is unclear? Huh? ---ed.]
Some political analysts say the police may be refusing to enforce the government’s order, announced last month, to allow protest zones. Chinese lawyers and human rights advocates also suggested a more cynical motivation — that the authorities were using the possibility of legal demonstrations as a ploy to lure restive citizens into declaring their intention to protest, allowing the police to take action against them. [You don't say! Fancy that! ---ed.]
When it comes to a Communist (or formerly Communist) or an “authoritarian” regime, there’s no use in wondering why it does what it does. It does it (whatever outrage “it” is) because it can, because it holds total power over the people it rules. Once upon a time, the people who wrote for the New York Times assumed that their readers knew this. Now it’s unclear whether even the journalists writing these stories know these things or if they’re just playing dumb. Oh well!
But even if the NYT were to give it to us straight up, the paper just doesn’t have a big enough megaphone among those wholive online. Which, these days, is a lot of us. And the appetite for news doesn’t seem to be too large either.
In spite of the increasing variety of ways to get the news, the
proportion of young people getting no news on a typical day has
increased substantially over the past decade. About a third of those
younger than 25 (34%) say they get no news on a typical day, up from
25% in 1998.
A slim majority of Americans (51%) now say they check in on the
news from time to time during the day, rather than get the news at
regular times. This marks the first time since the question was first
asked in 2002 that most Americans consider themselves “news grazers.”
Social networking sites are very popular with young people, but
they have not become a major source of news. Just 10% of those with
social networking profiles say they regularly get news from these sites.
THAT, more or less seems to be the reaction from slabs of the European press, notably in the Francophone world, to the astonishing military operation that rescued Ms Betancourt and 14 other hostages from the FARC guerrillas in Colombia.
The grudging reactions come from left and right in France, where successive governments had pushed the Colombian government hard to accept demands made by the FARC, and negotiate the release of Ms Betancourt, a politician from a small ecological party with dual Colombian and French nationality. French leaders, including Nicolas Sarkozy, had also put much faith in the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, as a negotiator with the FARC. Instead, in the end, it was the Colombian army under the tough right-wing president, Álvaro Uribe, that rescued the hostages in a daring undercover operation.
The French Senate gave an emotional standing ovation to the 46-year-old politician and magazines and television were still saturated by the image of what Paris Match called “the new global icon”.
But dissent surrounding Ms Betancourt, who was freed last week from the Colombian jungle after six years in captivity, has now spread from the internet to mainstream opinion, with some saying that France has overdosed on “Ingridmania”.
“It is irritating,” said Dominique Dhombres, a television columnist for Le Monde newspaper. “It’s a beautiful story about a beautiful woman, but she has been turned into the Madonna of modern times . . . Everything else has been forgotten and it suits Sarkozy fine,” he told The Times.
Here’s your chance to listen to the new musical oeuvre from Carla Bruni. In a marketing build-up worthy of Madonna or a Stones release, Mrs Sarkozy’s record company has put Comme si de rien n’était (As if nothing happened) on the internet for free listening.
This must be the first time that the presidency of a leading nation has promoted a pop album. The Elysée Palace has been working closely with Naive records to maximise the launch of breathy love songs by the first lady. The repercussions have even gone as far as Japan, which was miffed by Bruni’s decision not to join the other spouses at this week’s G8 summit. She decided to stay in Paris to advance the release date. Today, she was on France-Inter radio doing the first of a series of promotional interviews which culminate with a long live session on TF1 television news — the most watched show — on Friday evening.
The sultry first lady of France is peddling love songs written for her husband!
Think about it!
—————
*** pipolisation is probably akin to Bush Derangement Syndrome, but, as with all things French, it is more clearly defined (specifically, as a mental illnes):
“Serge Hefez, a practicing psychiatrist, has identified a new mental illness among the French: obsessive Sarkosis, an unhealthy fascination with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
As I listened to my patients during consultations, many of them mentioned Sarkozy by name,” Dr. Hefez said. “He’s penetrated some of their deepest fantasies. I noticed all this passion in people speaking of him, and I thought there is something particular about this man — he’s like a reflection of us in the mirror.”
The French project themselves onto Mr. Sarkozy, too, Dr. Hefez said.
“He’s the incarnation of the postmodern man, obsessed with himself, turned toward pleasure, autonomous and narcissistic,” the psychiatrist said. “And he exhibits his joys and sorrows, all his private life, his sentimental doubts and pleasures. He represents the individualism of the society to the extreme, that it’s the individual who counts, not the society.”…
Television covers Mr. Sarkozy’s every gesture, in both homage and mockery, itself an effort to create distance from the phenomenon that it perpetuates and magnifies. It is all part of what the French have come to call the “pipolisation” of political life, a term, presumably derived from People magazine, that refers to the idolatry of celebrities and soap opera. Dr. Hefez considers the trend an example of “democracy turning against itself, as Tocqueville foresaw.”…
[updated with a link, and with a repeated sentence cut]
I’m beginning to see a future where we poor consumers of the entertainment nation will no longer be flooded with quite as much shit as we’re seeing now.
First, the NYT’s David Carr reports what we all know, because there are no goddamn movies that are worth seeing—namely, that indies are no longer king:
Why are there no independent movies worth seeing? As Yogi Berra might say, there are just too many of them.
At least, that’s the view of one veteran independent film executive, Mark Gill. In a speech he gave at the Los Angeles Film Festival a little over a week ago (a speech that set tongues to wagging after it was published by IndieWire, a Web site devoted to independent film), he pointed out that the number of films submitted to Sundance, the Valhalla of the indie film industry, has multiplied by 10 in the last 15 years to a total of 5,000. But that embarrassment of riches is really just an embarrassment.
“Most of the films are flat-out awful,” said Mr. Gill, the head of the independent company The Film Department. “Trust me, I have had to sit through tons of them over the years. Let me put it another way: the digital revolution is here,” he said, and boy, is it underwhelming.
Meanwhile, veteran publisher Jonathan Karp, fessing up that he has “sinned” too, notes that what’s coming out of book publishers’ warehouses is also mostly dreck:
Visit your neighborhood superstore, and you will be overwhelmed with ephemera: self-aggrandizing memoirs by recovering addicts; poignant portraits of heroic pets; hyperbolic ideological tracts by insufferable cable TV pundits; guides to staying wrinkle- and toxin-free; odes to Warren Buffett and Jesus Christ; manifestos for fixing America in 12 easy steps; manly accounts of the best athlete/season/team ever; and glittery novels about British royalty, love-starved shoppers, mournful cops and ingenious serial killers. (There are more novels about serial killers than there are actual serial killers.)
I can’t be sure, of course, but he may have been thinking of books like the one being celebrated here. Okay, cheap shot.
Karp digs deeper to analyze the phenomenon:
Popular formulas repeat themselves for a reason: They have visceral, even mythic, appeal. A talented author can bring new vision to the most tired subject, so there’s nothing wrong with trying. Nor is there anything new about the syndrome. But what does seem more pronounced today is the relentless, indiscriminate proliferation of these books — and the underlying cynicism of the people acquiring, publishing and selling them.
That’s when he cops to having sinned:
I am, of course, mindful that people who work in glass publishing houses should not throw stones. I too have sinned. In weaker moments, I’ve been seduced by tales of celebrity, money, gossip and scandal.
Then Karp gets to the heart of the matter [e.a.]:
Books of this ilk have always existed. But in the past, they’ve been balanced by substantive books, crafted by monomaniacal authors who devoted years to the work. I can’t prove it empirically, but when I talk to literary agents and fellow publishers, they acknowledge an unarticulated truth about our business: Fewer authors are devoting more than two years to their projects. The system demands more, faster. Conventional wisdom holds that popular novelists should deliver one or two books per year. Nonfiction authors often aren’t paid enough to work full-time on a book for more than a year or two.
His prescription? Publishers should leave timeliness and buzziness to the newsbiz and focus on quality and longevity and posterity.
In any event, Karp writes, with the barriers to entry in the publishing biz lowered to the point where anyone can join in, publishers soon won’t have much of a choice if they want to survive. So they should protect their natural preserve [e.a.]:
There are thousands of independent publishers and even more self-publishers. These players will soon have the same access to readers as major publishers do, once digital distribution and print-on-demand technology enter the mainstream. When that happens, publishers will lose their greatest competitive advantage: the ability to distribute books widely and effectively. Those who publish generic books for expedient purposes will face new competitors. Like the music companies, some of those publishers may shrink or die.
Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction will die off, and the next generation will have so many different entertainment options that it’s hard to envision the same level of loyalty to brand-name formula fiction coming off the conveyor belt every year. The novelists who are truly novel will thrive; the rest will struggle.
Consequently, publishers will be forced to invest in works of quality to maintain their niche. These books will be the one product that only they can deliver better than anyone else. Those same corporate executives who dictate annual returns may begin to proclaim the virtues of research and development, the great engine of growth for business. For publishers, R&D means giving authors the resources to write the best books — works that will last, because the lasting books will, ultimately, be where the money is.
This is an important essay—a warning—from an important New York City publisher, just as Mark Gill’s observations are an important warning from a veteran film producer.
We’ll see what happens. (For the record, I predict no earthquakes.)
Last week, Barack Obama unveiled a new campaign seal — and not the kind that swims, barks and balances balls on the end of its nose. Rather, it was the kind that has a big old eagle on it and some Latin (Vero possumus, which translates very loosely to “Yes we can”). It’s also a seal that combined elements of Richard Nixon’s White House police uniforms and George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished.” And it went over about as well. Andrew Malcolm at the L.A. Times had some fun with it. And Mickey Kaus predicted it would be disappeared over the weekend. His exact words were: “But unless David Axelrod is insane, the thing will never be seen again.” Kaus was right.
The biggest Obama-maniacs are not among his fans; they’re right inside his campaign.
[[ updated and corrected: In the comments, Kit Seelye clarifies when her piece appeared, in what form, and who did the editing. I've updated this post accordingly. Deletions and inserts are in brown. ---ed.]]
A couple of years ago, just after I started blogging,I saluted the NYT’s Kit Seelye for the first time (for “going off the reservation” to comment on the making of the news from withinin the news pages of the paper). Her perspective on the changing nature of newsmaking and newsgathering was refreshingly candid and honest.
Here’s what Seelye wrote (in 2006)—she noted that the “news” on TV has been a devolving enterprise—competing with the fictional programming—for a long time.
Ever since [”Monica-mania”], the White House briefings have played out in real time against the daytime dramas, giving the world a glimpse into the daily push-me, pull-you in a democracy of making news (or not) and trying to report it. Now, with cable channels, reality television, talk-back live and blogging on the spot, with viewers and readers hip to stagecraft and expecting to be taken behind the scenes, there seems no turning back.
If you’ve been reading my blog, which is about that very subject, you’ll understand that I always read Seelye’s work with interest—she’s attuned to the evolution of media, and she takes the time to provide NYT readers with the context they need for understanding the reports they read or hear or see in that constantly evolving media.
Sometimes that gets her into trouble with her Times overlords, who thenseem to edit her after the fact, different versions of her stories appear online and in the dead-tree paper, sparking my suspicions of nefarious editorial monkeying around at the Times. (It has been known to happen. —ed.) I last noted this on January 1, when Seelye covered Mike Huckabee’s initial surge in popularity with the media.
Now the Times has done it to Seelye again , my suspicions were aroused again, by a piece that originated on the paper’s Caucus blog and then appeared in the dead-tree version on Wednesday, and then migrated over to the hybrid (I guess) “online.” [I'm all for "online"; I would, however, like to understand how it works in terms of corrections and glaringly obvious post-facto edits. Is there a policy? ---ed.] I can only link you to one version, because that’s the only one that exists. (As it made the journey from the Web to the paper [the piece on the Web is the original, published on April 14], it was Silently Edited for Excessive Eliteness, to remove edited down for length to fit in the paper and to add a reference to Arianna Huffington’s exact whereabouts at the time she was quoted for Seelye’s piece; info about Jay Rosen was added too.)
But before you jump to the [Arianna] gossip, it’s worth reading Seelye’s piece.
In a nutshell, the Obama campaign invited one Mayhill Fowler, a 61-year-old reporter for Off the Bus, the Jay Rosen/Arianna Huffington’s consumer-driven campaign press corps, to attend an Obama fundraiser in California supposedly as a contributor. It was at this closed-to-the-media event where the mostly inspiring candidate dissed all gun-loving, religious types living in pivotal Pennsylvania.
Ms. Fowler, wearing her journalist hat and armed with her digital recorder, struggled with whether to report the ill-timed and ill-conceived remarks by her candidate-of-choice. Four days later she did, and all hell broke loose.
Since this is a PR blog, I found it especially intriguing, in an age of the Internet-driven political campaign, how the Senator’s handlers thought they could keep the media lid on what was ostensibly a public event. Ms. Fowler gained a “credential,” (i.e., access) as a supporter, not as a reporter, but she believed otherwise:
“We had a fundamental misunderstanding of my priorities,” Ms. Fowler told me. “Mine were as a reporter, not as a supporter. They thought I would put the role of supporter first.”
He concludes with the wisdom of today’s PR professional (and what every person in public—or even semi-demi-public—life should know [e.a.]):
Today, most of the smart PR set acknowledges that everyone and anyone can be a journalist, nothing is off-the-record, and that total command over a client’s public portrayal is a thing of the past.
His postscript leads to the long-promised (by me) gossip:
BTW – I did get a kick seeing Obama-supporter Ms. Huffington’s quoted in the newspaper this morning:
I’m a longtime aficionado of what Steven R. Weisman (of the New York Times) calls New York Times humor. … I think this qualifies. It’s the penultimate sentence of Katharine Q. Seelye’s backgrounder about how the Huffington Post got its big Obama/cling/bitter scoop, from page A17 of today’s [April 16 ---ed.] paper:
“We are a news site,” said Ms. Huffington, who cleared the post by cellphone while aboard David Geffen’s yacht in Tahiti. “We have opinions, points of view, but we’ll post whatever is newsworthy.”
No word on whether La Arianna was wearing pajamas.
Ouch. I have my differences with Ms. Huffington, but she didn’t deserve that hit from Hertzberg at all.
On the other hand, what exactly is Arianna trying to hide, and why? What a juicy morsel that is about Arianna in Tahiti! Of course she’s allowed to take cruises on David Geffen’s yacht.Who cares how elitist it makes her look?—especially since her judgment on the Fowler stories was correct: that they were news. No matter how uncomfortable those stories were for her (and Geffen’s) preferred candidate, she’s now in the reporting business and she knows it, and she acted accordingly.
I think Seelye also deserves kudos for her extremely nuanced and detailed reporting of the (excruciatingly nuanced) backstory of how “Bittergate” came to be: through the work of a “citizen journalist.” And I am totally impressed by the responsible, thoughtful performance of all the players behind the scenes at OffTheBus, not least Mayhill Fowler (and Arianna Huffington).
This post is long enough, but I’d be ignoring my subject matter if I failed to mention that even as we’re debating the proper role of the citizen in journalism, we don’t yet know the ramifications (and may never know for sure) of this “incident” on Obama’s campaign—that is a) on his securing the nomination of his party and b) on his chances of winning the general election if he does secure the nomination.
What we do know, however, is really interesting—and that’s the fact that the fallout from this “incident,” which in fact was a pseudo-event—has caused (or catalyzed) changes in the real world (Obama was supposedly “bad news-proof”; now he’s on the defensive). More about that another time.
Buried under an avalanche of glowing headlines hailing Obama’s having survived his Rev. Wright problem
Obama Weathers the Wright Storm, Clinton Faces Credibility Problem
(something I doubt, but that’s a topic for another day) and buried inside the Pew report itself is this bit of bad news for Obama-maniacs:
One of the few negative trends for Obama following the Wright affair is that a larger number of conservative Republicans hold a very unfavorable opinion of him in the new poll than did so in February. The survey also finds that Obama no longer enjoys the favorable image rating advantage over McCain among independents that was apparent in previous polls.
USA Today links to a bunch of other polls that show the same trend—or, at least, which are being reported (or spun) as showing the same favorable trend for Obama. There’s also the usual caveat:
As always, we remind you that these polls are snapshots — not predictions of voter behavior in elections.
Snapshots, not predictions of behavior. I must remember that.
One of the major strains of reaction to Barack Obama’s “More Perfect Union” speech is that those who are not persuaded by it are therefore racist or at least unreasoning fools. Poisoning the well in this manner may be an effective rhetorical device but it undercuts the very message of the speech, which is that race remains a very complicated issue in American culture and that we must tolerate a wide range of expressions on the subject.
Andrew Sullivan began sewing [sic] the race seed before the speech and after it adds “some are immune to the grace and hope and civility that Reagan summoned at his best; the anger and bitterness is so palpably fueled by fear and racism it really does mark a moment of revelation to me.”
As good as Obama’s speech was, it’s naive not to also understand it as the political tool it was meant to be. And on that score, I’d say that the Obama supporters James points to are doing precisely what Obama intended: trying to take Jeremiah Wright’s incendiary comments off the table by implying that anyone who still insists on talking about them must be either a simpleton or a racist. He’s basically daring the Sean Hannitys of the world to continue demagoging Wright, and making a savvy bet that the rest of the press will line up behind him to agree that the real issue isn’t Wright, it’s racism and its complex historical legacy. And anyone who doesn’t agree is either a partisan hack or a hopeless primitive. [e.a.]
Troublesome Equivalence II [bold is Kaus's original; italic is mine]
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street ….
The most disastrous sentence in the speech. If Obama’s saying that those who fear young black men on the street are racists, the equivalents of Rev. Wright in offensiveness, then he’s just insulted a whole lof ot people. If he loses the votes of everyone who fears young black men, he loses the election. People fear black men on the street–as even Jesse Jackson once momentarily admitted–because they cause a wildly disproportionate share of street crime. Does Obama want to be the candidate who says that thought is verboten?
Swampland blogyesterday, March 18, from one of Ana Marie Cox’s emailers:
Well written, intelligent, politically clever in that way he has of ennobling his candidacy even while insulting his opponents and their supporters…But most people aren’t as tuned to insults as campaign staff — the unfair moral equivalence he implied between Wright and Ferraro or the suggestion that white men voting for McCain do so because they are trapped in old resentments.
I find it deeply troubling that Obama supporters either don’t see the insults Obama is hurling at people or think that the everyday Joe doesn’t pick up on what Leon Wieseltier (in an other context and, crucially, written before the videotapes of Wright surfaced and thus before Obama’s speech) referred to as his “hauteur”:
There is nothing about a candidate for the presidency that is not of interest, in the old politics and the new. If you want fewer questions, seek fewer powers. And there is an awful air of impeccability about Obama, with his peculiar mixture of populism and hauteur: criticism of him is not only wrong, it is also impudent. He regularly waves criticisms away as “silly.” He will talk to dictators but not to reporters.
Yes, Obama’s manner is deeply irritating, and he seems unaware of it. I see that he’ll be on CNN tonight telling Anderson Cooper that the Wright controversy has “shaken him up.” He’ll be “sharing,” Oprah-style. The MSM Obamamania is attempting to help him lift off again.
As I write, on Hardball, Chris Matthews is talking to Bill Maher, asking wistfully[I'm paraphrasing]:
Why isn’t Obama connecting with the lunch-bucket working-class guy?
Maher replies: Well, I think I get it. [Pause.} And Obama is very smart to tell those white guys that they’re right to be angry but that anger is directed at the wrong people (blacks). Their enemy is the corporation! This was the argument in What’s the Matter with Kansas? People keep voting against their own interests. They keep voting for people who want to repeal the estate tax, which just puts more money into the pockets of the richest 1% of America. That’s the challenge of the Democrats—to convince people who their real problem is. And their real problem is that corporations have taken over America.
Matthews: You’re a thoughtful guy, Bill. I agree with almost everything you say.
It’s astonishing to see the degree of delusion among Obama supporters. First, they think he can put the toxic Rev. Wright behind him by mau-mauing anyone who refuses to be silenced. Then they think he can run on a Commie-lite platform and win votes.
Right! Other than that, he’s the perfect candidate!
The Spitzer Stunner has, as expected, dominated cable “news” since the juicy scandal broke yesterday afternoon at around 2 p.m. As I write, CNN features the unfolding details of the story (alongside old video of Spitzer the Punisher of Crime and Immorality) at the top of every hour.
This sensation has knocked Campaign ‘08 off the number-one spot on the Mediathon (Frank Rich’s brilliant characterization of the Entertainment NationTM we’ve become.
The cable shows started their stories of the night with Spitzer. The could hardly wait, however, to get to The Barak and Clinton Show. Last night’s episode was told from the point of view of our scrappy hero Barack, who, after several days of insults from the Evil Clintons, finally came back with a great retort. But was it too little too late? That was the gist of things. Talking heads fretted and advised. Some applauded the Clintons’ brilliant but evil genius in throwing Obama off his message (by my count he’s been off his message for two weeks, starting with their final debate). Others (like Karl Rove, on Fox) scolded him for a tactical error. Obama should have been the one to deliver the harsh message, he said; that should have been left up to his surrogates or advocates. Dick Morris, also on Fox, disagreed. He thought Obama did great. On CNN, Gloria Borger talked about the “dangerous” implication (for Obama, should he become the nominee of the party) of Hillary’s 3 a.m. ad, and how Democrats were nervous about it. Lanny Davis tried to point out that prior to the ad, the polls had shown Obama to be weak in this area. Anderson Cooper brushed him off, saying polls don’t matter now that Obama has votes (more than Hillary).
All I could think about was how the pro-Obama camp is deluding itself. Polls do matter, somewhat—particularly polls about people’s general attitudes rather than specific party-related issues. They indicate a larger trend (or a larger picture) than the concrete vote count in Democratic primaries that have been hyped by media hysteria.
I think—and I have written—that Clinton aired the 3 a.m. ad after reading a certain Pew poll that indicated Obama’s obvious weakness in the area of national security. The Evil Clintons, being smart and evil, see past the primaries. They see that Obama will be a very, very weak candidate for the Democrats. As I have said repeatedly: I’m not a politico. But I am not blind to politics, or to reality.
What I wanted to say in this post, however, is that Obamamania has indeed been punctured. He has lost not only his momentum but also his place in the Mediathon—which is what propelled him to the top. He was able to hijack the spotlight for many weeks. It’s now over. The media has had to move on.
Not only that, but, contrary to those who think the Spitzer story will hurt Hillary Clinton, I think it’s most likely to hurt Barack Obama. It’s a sobering reminder that politicians—no matter how good they make themselves look and how good we would like them to be—are mostly lying, cheating, scheming scum.
From: Flexner, Allison Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 7:46 AM To: *CNN Superdesk (TBS) Cc: Neill, Morgan; Darlington, Shasta Subject: Castro guidance
Some points on Castro – for adding to our anchor reads/reporting:
* Please say in our reporting that Castro stepped down in a letter he wrote to Granma (the communist party daily), as opposed to in a letter attributed to Fidel Castro. We have no reason to doubt he wrote his resignation letter, he has penned numerous articles over the past year and a half.
* Please note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba – namely free education and universal health care, and racial integration. in addition to being criticized for oppressing human rights and freedom of speech.
* Also the Cuban government blames a lot of Cuba’s economic problems on the US embargo, and while that has caused some difficulties, (far less so than the collapse of the Soviet Union) the bulk of Cuba’s economic problems are due to Cuba’s failed economic polices. Some analysts would say the US embargo was a benefit to Castro politically – something to blame problems on, by what the Cubans call “the imperialist,” meddling in their affairs.
* While despised by some, he is seen as a revolutionary hero, especially with leftist in Latin America, for standing up to the United States.
Any questions, please call the international desk.
Allison
I’ve got some questions: why is CNN so shy about blasting a decrepit monster who has kept his people half-starving and cut off from the rest of the world for 50 years? why must CNN be “balanced” when talking about a megalomaniac who ruined the lives of three generations (if not more) of Cubans?
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well as Morgan alluded to, look it is a desperate place for a lot of people there because it’s poor and it’s badly run if you like, in terms of people can’t afford to make ends meet. By and large, there are a lot of rationing going on in terms of food. But it’s never enough to allow them to meet their monthly requirements of food and medicine and the like.
So there’s a lot of difficulty in day-to-day living, not to mention the fact there’s plenty of political dissidents. There are journalists who are dissidents. There are people in jail just for wanting to write the truth or speak the truth or even to organize politically which they cannot.
So, that’s a fact of life in Cuba and it has been for the decades that Castro has been in power. And that offsets some of the genuine progress that he’s made in terms of education, health care. People have talked a lot about that. But day-to-day life for them is very decrepit and very hand to mouth and, obviously, they want change.
—————
*** It’s an effort I salute wholeheartedly. I come down on the side of wanting some kind of “expertise” from journos along with their journalism skills—and we might start with refresher courses in geopolitics, geography, and international relations for on-air “talent” NOW.
As for the future, every profession is becoming more specialized, and why should journalism be an exception? People will always want and need reliable, vetted up-to-the-minute information about the things that disrupt or intrude on (or threaten to) their daily lives (hard news). The news media is an extension of our (i.e., humans’) survival radar; it’s an early-warning system to alert us about those things we can’t see with our own eyes or hear with our own ears. That’s what journalism is for.
Those people who aspire to do long-form general-interest writing in periodicals like The New Yorker or The Atlantic, or who want to offer long-form commentary in political periodicals like The New Republic or The Nation, should be given a different title. It’s not that they don’t qualify as journalists. It’s that they serve a different function: Their function is to examine people or phenomena microscopically and to analyze them deeply, in the service of a reader’s long-term knowledge.
The news, by contrast, serves a different demand: up-to-the minute information, along with instant “analysis” of what it might mean for the consumer. Being a good writer is not the same thing as being a good reporter.
Obviously, expressing willingness to hold diplomatic discussions with Iran’s leaders is a political blunder whereas running around the world threatening to attack them like Rudy Giuliani is politically savvy toughness.
How bad?
Pot-kettle-black bad. Beyond-ignorant-whippersnapper bad. Blindly-striking-out-with-any-weapon-at-hand bad [e.a.]:
So I suppose that by the same token, promising to expand NATO to include Israel — thus committing the United States to the armed defense of the borders of a country that lacks internationally recognized borders — also reflects the politically savvy toughness rather than, say, a dangerous ignorance of what NATO is or how it works or international relations more broadly.
His commenters call him out:
What’s this, is Mr. Yglesias now claiming that Israel doesn’t have internationally recognized borders? If Israel doesn’t have internationally recognized borders, how can Mr. Yglesias complain about Israeli settlements? Has Mr. Yglesias finally come to recognize that the so-called green line is a cease fire line, not a border? If the green line is not a border, as Mr. Yglesias is now claiming, then the settlements East of the green line are not illegal but subject to negotiation as to the final borders.
…
There have been hints in your posts all along, but with your statement that Israel is “a country that lacks internationally recognized borders” you have fully and finally revealed yourself: as someone who basically questions Israel’s very right to exist. Instead of reacting to the NATO proposal on the merits, you dismiss the entire country as a worthless aberration…
Commenter SoCalJustice provides evidence, through links, that the movement to ease Israel into NATO has been going on for a long time (as has the metamorphosis of NATO itself):
Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino recently announced that in his opinion, the time has come to include Israel in NATO as a regular member, and he intends to raise the issue at the meeting of NATO defense ministers next week.
Ronald Asums, executive director of the German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Center in Brussels, served as deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs from 1997 to 2000
Here’s NATO’s Deputy Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs and Security Policy Dr. Patrick Hardouin calling for expanded Israel-NATO ties about a year ago:
Here’s Czech Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar calling for Israel (and Australia and Japan) to join NATO:
Well, whaddaya know? It turns out that there are people out there—people who play an active role in our national defense, foreign allies, people like that—who don’t consider Israel a liability. What a surprise, eh?
Some people need to get out more. Rudy Giuliani isn’t one of them.
In the Carter years, the United States was an international laughingstock. This was not just because of the prevalence of his ghastly kin: the beer-sodden brother Billy, doing deals with Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi, and the grisly matriarch, Miz Lillian. It was not just because of the president’s dire lectures on morality and salvation and his weird encounters with lethal rabbits and UFOs. It was not just because of the risible White House “Bible study” sessions run by Bert Lance and his other open-palmed Elmer Gantry pals from Georgia. It was because, whether in Afghanistan, Iran, or Iraq—still the source of so many of our woes—the Carter administration could not tell a friend from an enemy. His combination of naivete and cynicism—from open-mouthed shock at Leonid Brezhnev’s occupation of Afghanistan to underhanded support for Saddam in his unsleeping campaign of megalomania—had terrible consequences that are with us still. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that every administration since has had to deal with the chaotic legacy of Carter’s mind-boggling cowardice and incompetence.
How very gratifying.
Last week he was even better. Hitchens let loose about Jerry Falwell, calling him, among other things, a toad: Via: VideoSift
A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act.
The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists’ ability to probe people’s minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future.
The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way.
Abracadabra: Perhaps all those American progressives can use the technique to figure out if John Edwards was just “pandering” at that conference in Herzliya when he made it plain that all options will be on the table against Iran. Of course, some progressives already claim to know that Edwards was pandering.
What an awesome tool this will be for politics, eh?
"Even in the most civilized societies the demagogues are
always in wait, ready and testing. They are indefatigable and we will never entirely prevail over them. And that is OK.
But if we stop resisting them, they will prevail over us. And that is not OK."
the new 23-story hotel going up on the Bowery
The 23-story hotel is being built around the building where Hettie Jones, ex-wife of Amiri Baraka (ne LeRoi Jones), lives. You can read all about it 
