For the most part, I have been unmoved by the breathless concerns of pundits about the growing dispute between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Nobody could have expected that the race for the Democratic nomination would stay positive from beginning to end. We are dealing with preternaturally ambitious people here, both of whom have the chance to fulfill their greatest personal dream. Within reason, we should expect them to do whatever it takes to win. If that means getting personal, making veiled accusations of corruption, or malfeasance, or incompetence, then those charges will be leveled. If it requires dancing dangerously close to the exposed wire of race in America, then dance they shall. As I mentioned previously, if nothing else, this is good preparation for the war that awaits when the Republican hit machine starts firing up later this year.
But there are limits, and Senator Obama may have crossed one yesterday. Speaking to a reporter from CBN (Pat Robertson's "network"), the senator argued that he, and not Clinton, was the safest choice for the Democratic nomination. The reason, he said, was that his supporters might not back his rival if she defeats him:
"I have no doubt that once the nomination contest is over, I will get the people who voted for her. Now the question is can she get the people who voted for me?"
At one level, of course, this simply restates the argument that Obama has made throughout his campaign, that he can mobilize people who would not otherwise go to the polls. The more obviously egocentric phrasing, then, might come out something like this: a lot of folks who are turning out now will stay home in November if charismatic, inspiring Barack loses out to dull, prosaic Hillary. One could, therefore, interpret Obama's comment as little more than a continuation of the themes he has been pushing since he entered the race.
But that's not exactly what he said. He could have said, "Can she get the people who voted for me to come out to the polls on Election Day?" He did not. Indeed, it takes only a slight leap of paranoia to wonder whether the comments were intended as a veiled threat. One way, after all, to help ensure that Obama's supporters would vote for Hillary Clinton in November would be for the senator himself to hit the campaign trail in full force on her behalf. His statement to CBN provides no promise that he would do so.
Many Democrats today still blame Ted Kennedy for undermining Jimmy Carter's bid for re-election in 1980. For the most part, this is a specious claim. By the end of that year, Carter's presidency had been judged such a comprehensive failure that his defeat was nearly inevitable (indeed, it was only fears about Ronald Reagan's supposed extremism that kept the polls close until the final week). In any event, to the extent Kennedy hurt Carter, it was not by running against him; the case against the president was already clear and Kennedy did little to add to it. Rather, the damage came post-convention when the vanquished Massachusetts senator largely ignored the incumbent's pleas for a full-voiced show of Democratic unity.
Voters' memories are often short. What is said in January tends to stay in January. There are occasional exceptions, of course: George H.W. Bush's charge in 1980 that Reagan was dabbling in "voodoo economics" stung and stuck, but it did not prevent the Gipper from winning the White House. But so far, at least, nothing has been said between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama that threatens to enter into the Republicans' general election talking points, let alone make it into Bartlett's Book of Quotations. Indeed, the only reason we are hearing about the Dems' war of words rather than the equally heated Republican food fight is because all the star power resides on the Democratic side: Bill and Hillary and Barack vs. John and Rudy and Mitt is simply a charisma mismatch.
The key, however, is for the Democrats to emerge from their convention unified in their struggle against the Republicans. This requires at least token efforts on all sides to generate a strong vote for the potential winner. Should Obama win, it will be necessary for Hillary Clinton to reassure women that they weren't robbed of the chance to see a female president in their lifetime. If Clinton gets the nod, Obama must assist in allaying any disappointment that might be felt by young people and African Americans. This is the minimum and unspoken agreement that all contenders make when they compete for votes within their party. Further, regardless of their towering personal concerns, both Obama and Clinton have to realize the enormous stakes involved in the 2008 election.
In the end, of course, there will likely be no replay of Ted Kennedy's petulant act from 1980. Hillary Clinton will almost certainly campaign for Barack Obama if he wins the Democratic nomination, although perhaps sparsely and without great enthusiasm. More important, Bill Clinton, as the only popular living ex-president from his party, will almost certainly throw himself fully into the battle both because that's his job and because he seems to love being on the trail.
Obama, too, will come around in the event of a Clinton victory. Indeed, he will do so with all the vigor of a relatively young man who knows that he can run again and, if necessary, again. Another two-term Clinton presidency would conclude with Obama, at 54, fully eighteen years younger than John McCain is today. Deep in his ambitious heart, the senator might hope for Hillary's defeat, but he will make darn sure that nobody will blame him should that occur. (This all assumes that Clinton would not tap Obama to be her running mate. My guess is that she wouldn't. The Clintons are cautious and may be worried about the risks of making history on both ends of the ticket.)
Still, Obama's statement to Pat Robertson's network was not helpful. First, it sends a signal to his followers that may persist, if only slightly, even after he endorses Hillary Clinton this summer, assuming she wins. Second, in the racially charged atmosphere that has largely been concocted and stoked by our pathetic, substance-free news media, Obama has to understand that his words might be taken as a suggestion that African American voters will reject Clinton after what she and Bill have said and done during the campaign. Finally, given all the discussion of race over the past few weeks, we seem to have all but forgotten that this campaign also means a lot to many American women. The implication that Obama's supporters might not be energized by the prospect of electing the country's first female chief executive will not sit well with a lot of voters.
In the end, we should not make more of this than it is. The campaign is long and things get said, and not all of them will be well thought out or helpful. Bill Clinton, for example, probably wishes by now that he had conjured up a better image for Obama's candidacy than that of a "fairy tale". Nevertheless, the potential for permanent damage does exist and candidates must stay on the right side of that electrified fence. Negative campaigning is not only inevitable in a race of ideological soul-mates, it's also quite healthy preparation for the road ahead. But that shouldn't provide anyone with a license to go nuclear.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
2004 Redux?
To listen to the cable TV pundits, you would think that John McCain's comeback from several months of electoral oblivion represents the greatest turnaround in American political history. In fact, this sort of thing happens all the time. Immediately, of course, we think of Harry Truman and his defeat of Thomas Dewey in 1948, an upset memorialized in that famously mistaken Chicago Tribune headline ("Dewey Defeats Truman") from the morning after his victory.
In fact, McCain's accomplishment comes nowhere close to rivaling that of Truman, a man who held the underdog label from the start of the campaign until the very last vote was counted. McCain, by contrast, actually enjoyed frontrunner status during the early months of 2007. In that sense, his return from the dead most closely parallels the fate of John Kerry four years ago.
Like McCain, Kerry was the clubhouse leader whose inaugural voyage into presidential waters went poorly. His early campaign was so unimpressive that, by December of 2003, Kerry even trailed Al Sharpton in at least one of the horserace polls. Dissatisfied Democrats sampled a variety of alternatives including Wesley Clark, Dick Gephardt, and Joe Lieberman. As the calendar turned to 2004, they had seemingly settled on Howard Dean, the previously unknown former governor of Vermont. Ultimately, however, Democratic voters rejected the frenetic Dean as unelectable, flirted briefly with John Edwards, then returned, finally and reluctantly, to their previous frontrunner. Rather than capturing the hearts and minds of his fellow Democrats, Kerry became the party's standard bearer almost by process of elimination.
It is risky to draw analogies between different years and different parties, but it is also, in this case, irresistible. If McCain is Kerry, then Dean's role is filled by Mike Huckabee, the candidate who inspires the grassroots true believers, but whose fervor and unpredictability worry the party bosses, who care only about winning elections. The part of Edwards can be played by Mitt Romney, the unnaturally attractive but untested newcomer (yeah, I know, this one is kind of a stretch; Edwards never had to reboot his entire ideological hard drive). Rudy Giuliani is Joe Lierberman, the virulent warhawk admired by the media, but wholly unappealing to the electorate. Finally, Fred Thompson can serve as this year's Wes Clark, the supposed "X" factor who was expected to stir up the race in unexpected ways, but ended up making barely a ripple.
OK, this is fun, but the comparisons are obviously imperfect. For one thing, I really have nobody to fill in for Dick Gerphardt, the veteran warhorse back for his last hurrah. I guess if Dan Quayle or Steve Forbes had chosen to take one more dip into the pool, our set would be complete, but no such luck. Anyhow, my point is not simply that the 2008 GOP race resembles the 2004 march of the Dems. Rather, it is to demonstrate that McCain's Lazarus act is fairly ordinary, having just occurred four winters ago.
But more than that, I think there may be a cautionary note here for the Republican Party. After Democrats swallowed hard, abandoned their December crushes, and handed their nomination to Senator Kerry, they painfully relearned precisely why they had rejected him in the first place. We'll never know for certain whether Kerry truly was more electable than Howard Dean or John Edwards, but we do know that he was not elected and that his campaign was often listless and phlegmatic. Say what you want about Dean, but when the Swift Board Liars came a-callin', the Great Screamer would have called them out with a vengeance. Kerry, on the other hand, responded cautiously, in a careful and timid manner that actually lent credence to their vile slander.
Indeed, this sort of gratuitous caution, this unwillingness to risk any betrayal of honest passion was, in fact, one of the reasons that the Democratic electorate had strayed from Kerry to begin with. Not only did they see their opponent, George W. Bush, as the leader of a failed and megalomaniacal administration, but they also understood from their 2000 experience that there was no depth to which the Republicans would not sink to maintain their grip on power. They desperately searched for a champion, a warrior, before eventually settling for a man whose wartime heroism, they assumed, would compensate for his rhetorical weaknesses. In the end, of course, undecided voters found Kerry every bit as unappealing as his fellow Democrats did the previous year.
John McCain, like Kerry, has a remarkable and heroic back story, McCain's being even better than Kerry's. Nevertheless, GOP voters spent most of 2007 searching for an alternative to their leading candidate. They generally liked McCain, but they viewed him as an ineffective campaigner. The straight-shooting reputation that he had built up so carefully back in 2000 had instead given way to that of yet another guarded politician, eager to please and unwilling to offend. Further, they worried that McCain had turned from maverick to reflexive compromiser, always aiming for the path of least resistance in dealing with the Democrats. More than anything else, though, they worried that the senator would no be up for the rough and tumble of a general election campaign. When Chuck Norris blurted out the other day that McCain was too old to serve, he was only giving voice to what numerous Republican had long whispered behind closed doors.
Make no mistake: GOP disenchantment with John McCain also had a lot to do with his stands of various hot-button issues. Anti-immigration extremists have not forgiven him for his comprehensive approach to the issue. Interest groups and their supporters remain rankled by the senator's commitment to campaign finance reform. Low tax crusaders question his fealty to their agenda. Still, the initial rejection of McCain's candidacy exposed some very significant weaknesses in the Arizonan's ability to connect with and inspire voters. These weaknesses have not disappeared.
We do not know yet whether John McCain will be the Republican nominee for president. He still must cast aside Romney and Giuliani on his way to the GOP's Minneapolis convention. But like Kerry in 2004, Republicans may find that many of the same weaknesses that cooled their own ardor for their war-hero candidate may also turn off independents and weak partisans in November. The Iraq War, supposedly the senator's strongest issue, may not be enough to save his candidacy. If the Surge continues to "succeed", the war will increasingly recede as a salient issue. If casualties again begin to mount, McCain will be doubly vulnerable.
Sometimes, as the Democrats discovered four years ago, the safe choice isn't always so safe after all.
In fact, McCain's accomplishment comes nowhere close to rivaling that of Truman, a man who held the underdog label from the start of the campaign until the very last vote was counted. McCain, by contrast, actually enjoyed frontrunner status during the early months of 2007. In that sense, his return from the dead most closely parallels the fate of John Kerry four years ago.
Like McCain, Kerry was the clubhouse leader whose inaugural voyage into presidential waters went poorly. His early campaign was so unimpressive that, by December of 2003, Kerry even trailed Al Sharpton in at least one of the horserace polls. Dissatisfied Democrats sampled a variety of alternatives including Wesley Clark, Dick Gephardt, and Joe Lieberman. As the calendar turned to 2004, they had seemingly settled on Howard Dean, the previously unknown former governor of Vermont. Ultimately, however, Democratic voters rejected the frenetic Dean as unelectable, flirted briefly with John Edwards, then returned, finally and reluctantly, to their previous frontrunner. Rather than capturing the hearts and minds of his fellow Democrats, Kerry became the party's standard bearer almost by process of elimination.
It is risky to draw analogies between different years and different parties, but it is also, in this case, irresistible. If McCain is Kerry, then Dean's role is filled by Mike Huckabee, the candidate who inspires the grassroots true believers, but whose fervor and unpredictability worry the party bosses, who care only about winning elections. The part of Edwards can be played by Mitt Romney, the unnaturally attractive but untested newcomer (yeah, I know, this one is kind of a stretch; Edwards never had to reboot his entire ideological hard drive). Rudy Giuliani is Joe Lierberman, the virulent warhawk admired by the media, but wholly unappealing to the electorate. Finally, Fred Thompson can serve as this year's Wes Clark, the supposed "X" factor who was expected to stir up the race in unexpected ways, but ended up making barely a ripple.
OK, this is fun, but the comparisons are obviously imperfect. For one thing, I really have nobody to fill in for Dick Gerphardt, the veteran warhorse back for his last hurrah. I guess if Dan Quayle or Steve Forbes had chosen to take one more dip into the pool, our set would be complete, but no such luck. Anyhow, my point is not simply that the 2008 GOP race resembles the 2004 march of the Dems. Rather, it is to demonstrate that McCain's Lazarus act is fairly ordinary, having just occurred four winters ago.
But more than that, I think there may be a cautionary note here for the Republican Party. After Democrats swallowed hard, abandoned their December crushes, and handed their nomination to Senator Kerry, they painfully relearned precisely why they had rejected him in the first place. We'll never know for certain whether Kerry truly was more electable than Howard Dean or John Edwards, but we do know that he was not elected and that his campaign was often listless and phlegmatic. Say what you want about Dean, but when the Swift Board Liars came a-callin', the Great Screamer would have called them out with a vengeance. Kerry, on the other hand, responded cautiously, in a careful and timid manner that actually lent credence to their vile slander.
Indeed, this sort of gratuitous caution, this unwillingness to risk any betrayal of honest passion was, in fact, one of the reasons that the Democratic electorate had strayed from Kerry to begin with. Not only did they see their opponent, George W. Bush, as the leader of a failed and megalomaniacal administration, but they also understood from their 2000 experience that there was no depth to which the Republicans would not sink to maintain their grip on power. They desperately searched for a champion, a warrior, before eventually settling for a man whose wartime heroism, they assumed, would compensate for his rhetorical weaknesses. In the end, of course, undecided voters found Kerry every bit as unappealing as his fellow Democrats did the previous year.
John McCain, like Kerry, has a remarkable and heroic back story, McCain's being even better than Kerry's. Nevertheless, GOP voters spent most of 2007 searching for an alternative to their leading candidate. They generally liked McCain, but they viewed him as an ineffective campaigner. The straight-shooting reputation that he had built up so carefully back in 2000 had instead given way to that of yet another guarded politician, eager to please and unwilling to offend. Further, they worried that McCain had turned from maverick to reflexive compromiser, always aiming for the path of least resistance in dealing with the Democrats. More than anything else, though, they worried that the senator would no be up for the rough and tumble of a general election campaign. When Chuck Norris blurted out the other day that McCain was too old to serve, he was only giving voice to what numerous Republican had long whispered behind closed doors.
Make no mistake: GOP disenchantment with John McCain also had a lot to do with his stands of various hot-button issues. Anti-immigration extremists have not forgiven him for his comprehensive approach to the issue. Interest groups and their supporters remain rankled by the senator's commitment to campaign finance reform. Low tax crusaders question his fealty to their agenda. Still, the initial rejection of McCain's candidacy exposed some very significant weaknesses in the Arizonan's ability to connect with and inspire voters. These weaknesses have not disappeared.
We do not know yet whether John McCain will be the Republican nominee for president. He still must cast aside Romney and Giuliani on his way to the GOP's Minneapolis convention. But like Kerry in 2004, Republicans may find that many of the same weaknesses that cooled their own ardor for their war-hero candidate may also turn off independents and weak partisans in November. The Iraq War, supposedly the senator's strongest issue, may not be enough to save his candidacy. If the Surge continues to "succeed", the war will increasingly recede as a salient issue. If casualties again begin to mount, McCain will be doubly vulnerable.
Sometimes, as the Democrats discovered four years ago, the safe choice isn't always so safe after all.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Let's Get Ready to Rumble!!!
I have sometimes wondered, usually when otherwise unoccupied and holding a malt beverage, where we came up with the cliché about the gloves coming off. This phrase, of course, is generally applied by lazy political journalists to any situation in which previously friendly—or at least circumspect—opponents finally begin to level personal attacks against one another. It could be a boxing metaphor, a reference to bare-knuckled pugilism, as opposed to the use of the regulation padded handgear that scrambles men's brains more gently and gradually. Or, perhaps the source is the sport of hockey, in which every serious fight is preceded by players dropping those large, unwieldy gloves that protect critical body parts, but lend themselves poorly to fisticuffs. I suppose I could find the answer on the web, but I guess I don't really care all that much after all.
In any event, as I sampled the usual news and politics websites this morning, I wondered how long it would take me to find the first mention of this phrase in connection with last night's Democratic presidential debate in South Carolina. I didn't have to wait long; the very first site I visited (CNN.com) began its post-debate analysis by observing that "[t]he gloves came off quickly Monday night…" Perhaps concerned that the campaign would conclude without the full deployment of every available cliché, CNN also observed that the candidates "traded blows" and that "sparks fl[ew]" in this "Democratic slugfest".*
The stable of wannabe sportswriters must be quite robust down at the House that Ted Turner Built in Atlanta. One of the more irritating choices that the network has recently made has been the decision to label some of its election coverage as "Ballot Bowl '08", as though the stakes here involved a trophy and bragging rights rather than the power to bomb cities and send armies to their deaths. If we have yet seen a more blatant admission of a broadcaster's willingness to trivialize politics and elevate drama over substance, I am unaware of it. Yep, friends, in the end it's all just a big game. CNN might as well hire Chris Berman away from ESPN, so he can lend his own tiresome act to the "Most Trusted Name in News":
"Down in South Carolina, Barack of Ages Obama takes on the First Lady of Scold, Hillary Clinton. Obama is hit hard, but he won't go down, rumblin', bumblin', stumblin' toward the goal line. If he wins on Saturday, he…could…go…all…the…way! Meanwhile, the polls show John Edwards falling back-back-back-back-back, and he is gone. Whoever wins the DNC Championship will face either John McCain Mutiny, Mitt Me in St. Louie Romney, or Rudy "Don't Take Your Love to Town" Giuliani in the Supah Ballot Bowl in November."
Sorry, I got a bit carried away there.
As for the debate itself, CNN determined that "the only clear winner in the Democratic slugfest is Republican John McCain". Evidently, a little bickering between candidates in January is somehow supposed to aid the Republican cause in November. It's funny how often this sort of thing is alleged, and how rarely it is empirically demonstrated. Indeed, the last two times we had a non-incumbent presidential election—1988 and 2000—the side with the nastiest primary contest won the presidency. The brutal battle between Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush toughened up the latter and probably helped him defeat Michael Dukakis, who emerged from a much friendlier Democratic contest. Twelve years later, the GOP race between George W. Bush and John McCain set new standards for nastiness, and yet Bush (sort of) won the presidency over Al Gore, whose primary season battle with Bill Bradley lacked fireworks.
One hesitates to generalize from a sample size of two, but I think it makes sense that a candidate who is tested at the beginning of the year will be better prepared for the pummeling he or she will take after Labor Day. (Pummeling! Now they've got me doing it.) As I suggested in an earlier post, one of the problems with John Kerry's 2004 primary campaign may have been that it ended too quickly, before Democratic voters could see how Kerry might actually stand up to a full-bore negative advertising campaign. Had Democrats known how ineffectively Kerry would respond to the Swift Boat Liars later that year, they would almost certainly have reconsidered their choice.
For my money, then, this was the best Democratic debate so far. Personal attacks remain as much a feature of contested campaigns as bumper stickers and lapel buttons. Clinton and Obama didn't say anything about one another that the Republicans won't be saying in nine months. If anything, airing the dirty laundry in January will give it the feel of old news by the time McCain or Romney raises these issues after the conventions. And in case nobody has been paying attention, the gloves, as it were, have been off on the GOP side for weeks.
In one respect, the big winner of the debate was Barack Obama. He simply must prove himself capable of operating not just at the level of ideas, but at the visceral level of personal, take-no-prisoners politics. His shot at Senator Clinton for serving on the WalMart board of directors was a good one, perhaps the best attack he has made to date. Obama still does not seem entirely comfortable with negative campaigning, but at least it's a start. More debates are on the way, and they will become more pointed as the race increasingly turns into a two-person battle (indeed, John Edwards, who otherwise did well last night, has already started to sound a bit like a third wheel).
These are not nice people that the Democrats will be facing in November. To get the first Bush elected, they shamelessly exploited racial tensions and played to the most vulgar stereotypes of African American men as predators. To clear the way for the second Bush, they smeared John McCain through his adopted daughter, and then slandered John Kerry, a genuine war hero, as a coward and traitor. Hillary Clinton, if she is the nominee, can look forward to a rehash of all the greatest scandal-mongering hits of the 1990s, with a few more lies added to the mix. Barack Obama, for his part, can expect to endure an autumn of whispers about his Kenyan father, his mixed-race heritage, and, of course, whether or not he spent time in fundamentalist Islamic schools.
If we must use boxing metaphors, then let's regard Senators Clinton and Obama as sparring partners. One of them will ultimately fight for the Heavyweight Championship of the World against someone who will pull no punches, and will probably hit below the belt. Unless they use this training to hone their technique, whichever Democrat advances will enter the ring unprepared. If they go easy on each other, they could face the same fate as Kid Kerry in the last title bout in 2004. So I say to Hillary and Barack, "A-let's get ready to ruuuuuummmmbbbbllleee!"
I can't decide now whether I need to take a shower or simply type up my application for employment at CNN.
* The CNN website changes their content fairly regularly, and their story on last night's debate has already been altered. Thus, no link.
In any event, as I sampled the usual news and politics websites this morning, I wondered how long it would take me to find the first mention of this phrase in connection with last night's Democratic presidential debate in South Carolina. I didn't have to wait long; the very first site I visited (CNN.com) began its post-debate analysis by observing that "[t]he gloves came off quickly Monday night…" Perhaps concerned that the campaign would conclude without the full deployment of every available cliché, CNN also observed that the candidates "traded blows" and that "sparks fl[ew]" in this "Democratic slugfest".*
The stable of wannabe sportswriters must be quite robust down at the House that Ted Turner Built in Atlanta. One of the more irritating choices that the network has recently made has been the decision to label some of its election coverage as "Ballot Bowl '08", as though the stakes here involved a trophy and bragging rights rather than the power to bomb cities and send armies to their deaths. If we have yet seen a more blatant admission of a broadcaster's willingness to trivialize politics and elevate drama over substance, I am unaware of it. Yep, friends, in the end it's all just a big game. CNN might as well hire Chris Berman away from ESPN, so he can lend his own tiresome act to the "Most Trusted Name in News":
"Down in South Carolina, Barack of Ages Obama takes on the First Lady of Scold, Hillary Clinton. Obama is hit hard, but he won't go down, rumblin', bumblin', stumblin' toward the goal line. If he wins on Saturday, he…could…go…all…the…way! Meanwhile, the polls show John Edwards falling back-back-back-back-back, and he is gone. Whoever wins the DNC Championship will face either John McCain Mutiny, Mitt Me in St. Louie Romney, or Rudy "Don't Take Your Love to Town" Giuliani in the Supah Ballot Bowl in November."
Sorry, I got a bit carried away there.
As for the debate itself, CNN determined that "the only clear winner in the Democratic slugfest is Republican John McCain". Evidently, a little bickering between candidates in January is somehow supposed to aid the Republican cause in November. It's funny how often this sort of thing is alleged, and how rarely it is empirically demonstrated. Indeed, the last two times we had a non-incumbent presidential election—1988 and 2000—the side with the nastiest primary contest won the presidency. The brutal battle between Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush toughened up the latter and probably helped him defeat Michael Dukakis, who emerged from a much friendlier Democratic contest. Twelve years later, the GOP race between George W. Bush and John McCain set new standards for nastiness, and yet Bush (sort of) won the presidency over Al Gore, whose primary season battle with Bill Bradley lacked fireworks.
One hesitates to generalize from a sample size of two, but I think it makes sense that a candidate who is tested at the beginning of the year will be better prepared for the pummeling he or she will take after Labor Day. (Pummeling! Now they've got me doing it.) As I suggested in an earlier post, one of the problems with John Kerry's 2004 primary campaign may have been that it ended too quickly, before Democratic voters could see how Kerry might actually stand up to a full-bore negative advertising campaign. Had Democrats known how ineffectively Kerry would respond to the Swift Boat Liars later that year, they would almost certainly have reconsidered their choice.
For my money, then, this was the best Democratic debate so far. Personal attacks remain as much a feature of contested campaigns as bumper stickers and lapel buttons. Clinton and Obama didn't say anything about one another that the Republicans won't be saying in nine months. If anything, airing the dirty laundry in January will give it the feel of old news by the time McCain or Romney raises these issues after the conventions. And in case nobody has been paying attention, the gloves, as it were, have been off on the GOP side for weeks.
In one respect, the big winner of the debate was Barack Obama. He simply must prove himself capable of operating not just at the level of ideas, but at the visceral level of personal, take-no-prisoners politics. His shot at Senator Clinton for serving on the WalMart board of directors was a good one, perhaps the best attack he has made to date. Obama still does not seem entirely comfortable with negative campaigning, but at least it's a start. More debates are on the way, and they will become more pointed as the race increasingly turns into a two-person battle (indeed, John Edwards, who otherwise did well last night, has already started to sound a bit like a third wheel).
These are not nice people that the Democrats will be facing in November. To get the first Bush elected, they shamelessly exploited racial tensions and played to the most vulgar stereotypes of African American men as predators. To clear the way for the second Bush, they smeared John McCain through his adopted daughter, and then slandered John Kerry, a genuine war hero, as a coward and traitor. Hillary Clinton, if she is the nominee, can look forward to a rehash of all the greatest scandal-mongering hits of the 1990s, with a few more lies added to the mix. Barack Obama, for his part, can expect to endure an autumn of whispers about his Kenyan father, his mixed-race heritage, and, of course, whether or not he spent time in fundamentalist Islamic schools.
If we must use boxing metaphors, then let's regard Senators Clinton and Obama as sparring partners. One of them will ultimately fight for the Heavyweight Championship of the World against someone who will pull no punches, and will probably hit below the belt. Unless they use this training to hone their technique, whichever Democrat advances will enter the ring unprepared. If they go easy on each other, they could face the same fate as Kid Kerry in the last title bout in 2004. So I say to Hillary and Barack, "A-let's get ready to ruuuuuummmmbbbbllleee!"
I can't decide now whether I need to take a shower or simply type up my application for employment at CNN.
* The CNN website changes their content fairly regularly, and their story on last night's debate has already been altered. Thus, no link.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Happy MLK Day!
Through the twisted logic of Monday holidays, we celebrate Dr. King's birthday today, nearly a week after he would have turned 79. I have no idea how the Reverend might have felt about this, but I'd like to think he would have approved. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a great advocate of working class Americans; indeed, he was in Memphis on that terrible April day in 1968 to express his support for a strike by local sanitation workers. I suspect that the benefits of a three-day weekend for those who labor would appeal to him.
This morning's headline on CNN.com suggests that the "popular view of MLK [is] losing complexity". I haven't read the article, but the point is well taken. On the one hand, of course, this is to be expected. Transcendent historical figures are nearly always reduced, to some extent, to the sum of their most popular traits. Thus, Abraham Lincoln is the Great Emancipator, ignoring the man's clearly stated ambivalence about issues of race and slavery. Harry Truman arrives in the 21st Century as a paragon of straight-talking honesty; few remember that he owed his political career to a corrupt Kansas City political machine. We are aware, of course, of the fact that half of the men whose faces are carved into Mt. Rushmore once owned other human beings are property, but we minimize the offense with stories of kind treatment and eventual freedom.
And so it is with Dr. King. To many Americans, his life can be reduced to three historical events: the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington in 1963, and his martyrdom five years later. Young people may be forgiven if they believe that Dr. King was controversial during his lifetime only among the vilest and most ignorant (and usually southern) racists. The Dr. King who annually appears on our television screens in January is a benign and unchallenging figure, a man who seemingly rose above the politics of his day.
In reality, MLK was, for most of his life, a very unpopular figure among white Americans from California to Maine. It may be hard for anyone born after 1960 to believe, but civil rights laws were fought by dozens of mainstream politicians outside of the Deep South. Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for president in 1964, opposed federal interference in "state's rights" and voted against most major civil rights legislation. He was joined by a young Congressman from Texas named George Herbert Walker Bush. The idea that the national government could impose its will on Alabama and Mississippi, even in the cause of basic human dignity, was sharply debated among people who were otherwise considered unprejudiced, at least by the standards of the 1960s.
Further, there was never a moment in Dr. King's life in which he desired to be above the politics of his time. His life was spent in the political arena and his struggle did not end with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. His thirst for social justice extended to broader social, economic, and even foreign policies. Eventually, Dr. King became a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, viewing it as another violation of poor and working class people, the draftees who made up such a disproportionate share of the soldiers fighting and dying unnecessarily.
His stand on Vietnam earned him mostly contempt from white America and its leading news organizations. Dr. King, they said, without precisely using the words, had overstepped his bounds. He no longer knew his place. Read the patronizing thoughts of the "liberal" Washington Post in 1967:
"Dr. Martin Luther King's Vietnam speech was not a sober and responsible comment on the war but a reflection of his disappointment at the slow progress of civil rights and the war on poverty. It was filled with bitter and damaging allegations and inferences that he did not and could not document."
Or this guest editorial from the Chicago Tribune that same year:
"The unctuous Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has been something of a hindrance to the civil rights movement since he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize. Since the award, he has specialized in speaking in Olympian tones, rather than addressing himself to the practicalities of the civil rights movement."
By the time of his death, Dr. King was very clearly associated with the political left in America, though it is unclear that he ever thought of himself in that way. The fight for African American equality was not simply an ideological fight; some conservatives of the day, notably Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, laudably supported the end of apartheid in the United States. But in his support for workers' rights, economic justice, and peace in Southeast Asia, Dr. King's worldview increasingly came to overlap with that of such celebrated liberals as Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy.
It is difficult to say whether the current embrace of Dr. King's words by some American conservatives is disingenuous or simply ignorant. Perhaps the most offensive abuse of MLK's memory is the pulling of one of his most famous quotes entirely out of context. In his speech on the Capital Mall, Dr. King spoke of a dream in which "my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Almost forty-five years later, this ringing eloquence has taken on a sadder second life as a right-wing justification for ending most programs designed to redress the racial imbalances that still exist in educational and employment opportunities. Affirmative action, conservatives howl, judges people by the color of their skin rather than their character. So does institutionalized racism, of course, but that fact is conveniently elided by those conservatives who fancy MLK as their ally.
But Dr. King was the sworn enemy of inequality, and it borders on ridiculous to assume that he would view the situation today as the final culmination of his dream. He may or may not have supported specific plans or policies, but it strains credulity to suggest that he would advocate legal colorblindness in a society in which color still has so many ramifications for life chances, life goals, and even life expectancy. One day, he said, he hoped his children would live in a nation in which they would be judged solely on their character. Though we have made enormous progress since 1963, that glorious day remains in our future.
How will we know we have reached that day? Certainly, we will find evidence in the statistical record, with income and educational gaps disappearing and infant mortality finally uncorrelated with skin color. We will know when white Americans stop referring to calls for social justice as "playing the race card". We will know when African Americans no longer tense up at the sight of a police cruiser in their rear view mirror.
Perhaps as much as anything else, we will know when all Americans embrace Martin Luther King's birthday as their holiday, and regard Dr. King as the full peer of those men whose faces look down from that granite mountain in South Dakota.
This morning's headline on CNN.com suggests that the "popular view of MLK [is] losing complexity". I haven't read the article, but the point is well taken. On the one hand, of course, this is to be expected. Transcendent historical figures are nearly always reduced, to some extent, to the sum of their most popular traits. Thus, Abraham Lincoln is the Great Emancipator, ignoring the man's clearly stated ambivalence about issues of race and slavery. Harry Truman arrives in the 21st Century as a paragon of straight-talking honesty; few remember that he owed his political career to a corrupt Kansas City political machine. We are aware, of course, of the fact that half of the men whose faces are carved into Mt. Rushmore once owned other human beings are property, but we minimize the offense with stories of kind treatment and eventual freedom.
And so it is with Dr. King. To many Americans, his life can be reduced to three historical events: the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington in 1963, and his martyrdom five years later. Young people may be forgiven if they believe that Dr. King was controversial during his lifetime only among the vilest and most ignorant (and usually southern) racists. The Dr. King who annually appears on our television screens in January is a benign and unchallenging figure, a man who seemingly rose above the politics of his day.
In reality, MLK was, for most of his life, a very unpopular figure among white Americans from California to Maine. It may be hard for anyone born after 1960 to believe, but civil rights laws were fought by dozens of mainstream politicians outside of the Deep South. Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for president in 1964, opposed federal interference in "state's rights" and voted against most major civil rights legislation. He was joined by a young Congressman from Texas named George Herbert Walker Bush. The idea that the national government could impose its will on Alabama and Mississippi, even in the cause of basic human dignity, was sharply debated among people who were otherwise considered unprejudiced, at least by the standards of the 1960s.
Further, there was never a moment in Dr. King's life in which he desired to be above the politics of his time. His life was spent in the political arena and his struggle did not end with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. His thirst for social justice extended to broader social, economic, and even foreign policies. Eventually, Dr. King became a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, viewing it as another violation of poor and working class people, the draftees who made up such a disproportionate share of the soldiers fighting and dying unnecessarily.
His stand on Vietnam earned him mostly contempt from white America and its leading news organizations. Dr. King, they said, without precisely using the words, had overstepped his bounds. He no longer knew his place. Read the patronizing thoughts of the "liberal" Washington Post in 1967:
"Dr. Martin Luther King's Vietnam speech was not a sober and responsible comment on the war but a reflection of his disappointment at the slow progress of civil rights and the war on poverty. It was filled with bitter and damaging allegations and inferences that he did not and could not document."
Or this guest editorial from the Chicago Tribune that same year:
"The unctuous Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has been something of a hindrance to the civil rights movement since he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize. Since the award, he has specialized in speaking in Olympian tones, rather than addressing himself to the practicalities of the civil rights movement."
By the time of his death, Dr. King was very clearly associated with the political left in America, though it is unclear that he ever thought of himself in that way. The fight for African American equality was not simply an ideological fight; some conservatives of the day, notably Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, laudably supported the end of apartheid in the United States. But in his support for workers' rights, economic justice, and peace in Southeast Asia, Dr. King's worldview increasingly came to overlap with that of such celebrated liberals as Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy.
It is difficult to say whether the current embrace of Dr. King's words by some American conservatives is disingenuous or simply ignorant. Perhaps the most offensive abuse of MLK's memory is the pulling of one of his most famous quotes entirely out of context. In his speech on the Capital Mall, Dr. King spoke of a dream in which "my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Almost forty-five years later, this ringing eloquence has taken on a sadder second life as a right-wing justification for ending most programs designed to redress the racial imbalances that still exist in educational and employment opportunities. Affirmative action, conservatives howl, judges people by the color of their skin rather than their character. So does institutionalized racism, of course, but that fact is conveniently elided by those conservatives who fancy MLK as their ally.
But Dr. King was the sworn enemy of inequality, and it borders on ridiculous to assume that he would view the situation today as the final culmination of his dream. He may or may not have supported specific plans or policies, but it strains credulity to suggest that he would advocate legal colorblindness in a society in which color still has so many ramifications for life chances, life goals, and even life expectancy. One day, he said, he hoped his children would live in a nation in which they would be judged solely on their character. Though we have made enormous progress since 1963, that glorious day remains in our future.
How will we know we have reached that day? Certainly, we will find evidence in the statistical record, with income and educational gaps disappearing and infant mortality finally uncorrelated with skin color. We will know when white Americans stop referring to calls for social justice as "playing the race card". We will know when African Americans no longer tense up at the sight of a police cruiser in their rear view mirror.
Perhaps as much as anything else, we will know when all Americans embrace Martin Luther King's birthday as their holiday, and regard Dr. King as the full peer of those men whose faces look down from that granite mountain in South Dakota.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Six Down, 45 1/2 to Go
Seven things we learned yesterday from Nevada and South Carolina (the reference to 45 ½, by the way, denotes the fact that South Carolina Democrats have yet to cast their ballots):
1. On the one hand, the Democratic race for president remains a tossup. All that we learned for certain yesterday is that John Edwards' name will not be on the general election ballot in November. Not only does his third place finish in the strongly pro-union state of Nevada spell the effective conclusion of his presidential ambitions, but snow will fall in Honolulu before either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton name the former vice presidential candidate to the ticket for a second time—nobody wants to be associated, even indirectly, with John Kerry's pathetic 2004 bid for the White House. Edwards will probably hang on through next week's South Carolina primary (it's his native state), but anything other than a highly unlikely first place finish will likely have him dropping out before the Super Tuesday contests of February 5. Still a relatively young man, perhaps Edwards can hope for a cabinet position in a Democratic administration. He might also make one last attempt to restore his presidential viability by running for—and winning—the North Carolina governorship. But for 2008 at least, only two serious Democratic candidacies are left, and they are essentially tied.
2. Having said that, Barack Obama faces his first must-win contest this Saturday in South Carolina. Perhaps must-win is a bit strong—he will charge ahead to Super Tuesday regardless of the outcome in the Palmetto State—but a loss next week will effectively break the tie with Senator Clinton, leaving her the strong favorite for the nomination, going into February 5 with possibly unstoppable momentum as well as a critical aura of electability. Recent polls indicate that African American voters have surged to Obama in recent weeks and South Carolina represents the first test of that proposition. As the campaign progresses, the Illinois senator's viability will increasingly depend on receiving strong African American support. If this doesn't put him over the top in South Carolina, then it becomes much more difficult to imagine a winning strategy anywhere else.
3. For a campaign that seemingly never makes mistakes, the Obama camp made a rather big one last night. Almost as soon as the caucuses were completed, the senator's campaign manager was on television attempting to spin his man's loss as a victory. Obama, argued David Plouffe, may have lost the popular vote in Nevada, but he actually gained more convention delegates. Since delegates, and not votes, determine the Democratic nomination, Plouffe suggested that Hillary Clinton was the evening's loser. This, of course, is nonsense: the early, small-state primaries are important not because of the relatively paltry number of delegates they contribute to the candidates' ledger, but rather as barometers of each contestant's popular appeal. Senator Clinton won the Nevada caucuses regardless of whatever arcane electoral math may have given her colleague an additional, unearned delegate. To hear the campaign spin a loss like this makes Senator Obama sound like just another manipulative politician, something he promised never to be. Even worse, it gives off a whiff of both desperation and poor sportsmanship.
4. John McCain's "big win" in the South Carolina Republican primary encapsulates everything wrong with the American system of selecting presidents. McCain defeated Mike Huckabee by only about three percentage points, but is, on that basis, now the undisputed frontrunner in the race for the GOP nomination. The Arizonan's narrow victory resulted, more than anything else, from a split in the conservative Republican vote between Huckabee and Right Dead Fred Thompson. McCain still polls relatively poorly among Republicans and Christian conservatives, two constituencies he will desperately need if he comes out of the GOP convention as his party's standard bearer. After his troubling musings about the Bible and the Constitution, it is a bit of a relief to see Huckabee once again relegated to the second tier of candidates, but any fair analysis of the South Carolina results would suggest that the former Arkansas governor's performance kept him essentially tied with McCain and spotlighted the latter's remaining weaknesses among the party faithful. (Unlike Obama, however, at least Mike Huckabee didn’t try to spin his loss into some sort of accounting triumph.)
5. Mitt Romney got very lucky. Today's story should have been that the Mittster's fourth place performance down south validated fears that either his ideological flip-flopping or his Mormon faith would render him unelectable below the Mason-Dixon Line. Instead, along with Clinton and McCain, Romney is receiving equal billing as one of the three Saturday winners for his victory in the Nevada caucuses. Since he was the only serious candidate to campaign meaningfully in the Silver State, Romney's showing there should have been no more remarkable than his win a couple of weeks ago in Wyoming, an event that was all but ignored by the political media. Oddly enough, the former Massachusetts governor owes the publicity surrounding this latest victory to the Democrats. Because Clinton, Obama, and Edwards spent over a week shuttling between Las Vegas and Reno, the press showed up to report on them. Thus, Romney enjoyed spillover coverage from journalists who would not even have been in Nevada except for the closely fought Democratic race. As the saying goes, if a tree falls in an empty forest it may not make a sound. Wyoming was that empty forest; Nevada, thanks to the Dems, was not.
6. John McCain's narrow victory in South Carolina, growing wider with every retelling, has greatly reduced the possibility that either party will face a brokered convention this summer. The Democratic race has been a two-person show since New Hampshire. It now appears that the GOP contest is following suit, with McCain and Romney the only two candidates retaining significant viability. As I've noted previously, Rudy Giuliani loses badly every time John McCain wins. McCain's strengths are Giuliani's strengths, simply contained in a more appealing and less corrupt package. The fact that Rudy decided to run advertisements in Florida predictably exploiting 9/11, but this time callously including actual footage of the disaster itself, suggests that his campaign has entered desperation mode. Perhaps he can somehow carve out a victory in the Sunshine State with a combination of New York retirees and firebreathing Cuban nationalists, but the prospect seems increasingly remote. Thus, the GOP can likely expect a two-man race from here on out. And two-candidate contests, almost by definition, do not lend themselves to brokered conventions.
7. Duncan Hunter, we hardly knew ye. And we're glad.
UPDATE: Welcome to all of you who were attracted here by the Wall Street Journal link (thanks, WSJ). Please take a look around. A lot of Election 2008 posts below and in the archives. Y'all come back now, y'hear.
1. On the one hand, the Democratic race for president remains a tossup. All that we learned for certain yesterday is that John Edwards' name will not be on the general election ballot in November. Not only does his third place finish in the strongly pro-union state of Nevada spell the effective conclusion of his presidential ambitions, but snow will fall in Honolulu before either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton name the former vice presidential candidate to the ticket for a second time—nobody wants to be associated, even indirectly, with John Kerry's pathetic 2004 bid for the White House. Edwards will probably hang on through next week's South Carolina primary (it's his native state), but anything other than a highly unlikely first place finish will likely have him dropping out before the Super Tuesday contests of February 5. Still a relatively young man, perhaps Edwards can hope for a cabinet position in a Democratic administration. He might also make one last attempt to restore his presidential viability by running for—and winning—the North Carolina governorship. But for 2008 at least, only two serious Democratic candidacies are left, and they are essentially tied.
2. Having said that, Barack Obama faces his first must-win contest this Saturday in South Carolina. Perhaps must-win is a bit strong—he will charge ahead to Super Tuesday regardless of the outcome in the Palmetto State—but a loss next week will effectively break the tie with Senator Clinton, leaving her the strong favorite for the nomination, going into February 5 with possibly unstoppable momentum as well as a critical aura of electability. Recent polls indicate that African American voters have surged to Obama in recent weeks and South Carolina represents the first test of that proposition. As the campaign progresses, the Illinois senator's viability will increasingly depend on receiving strong African American support. If this doesn't put him over the top in South Carolina, then it becomes much more difficult to imagine a winning strategy anywhere else.
3. For a campaign that seemingly never makes mistakes, the Obama camp made a rather big one last night. Almost as soon as the caucuses were completed, the senator's campaign manager was on television attempting to spin his man's loss as a victory. Obama, argued David Plouffe, may have lost the popular vote in Nevada, but he actually gained more convention delegates. Since delegates, and not votes, determine the Democratic nomination, Plouffe suggested that Hillary Clinton was the evening's loser. This, of course, is nonsense: the early, small-state primaries are important not because of the relatively paltry number of delegates they contribute to the candidates' ledger, but rather as barometers of each contestant's popular appeal. Senator Clinton won the Nevada caucuses regardless of whatever arcane electoral math may have given her colleague an additional, unearned delegate. To hear the campaign spin a loss like this makes Senator Obama sound like just another manipulative politician, something he promised never to be. Even worse, it gives off a whiff of both desperation and poor sportsmanship.
4. John McCain's "big win" in the South Carolina Republican primary encapsulates everything wrong with the American system of selecting presidents. McCain defeated Mike Huckabee by only about three percentage points, but is, on that basis, now the undisputed frontrunner in the race for the GOP nomination. The Arizonan's narrow victory resulted, more than anything else, from a split in the conservative Republican vote between Huckabee and Right Dead Fred Thompson. McCain still polls relatively poorly among Republicans and Christian conservatives, two constituencies he will desperately need if he comes out of the GOP convention as his party's standard bearer. After his troubling musings about the Bible and the Constitution, it is a bit of a relief to see Huckabee once again relegated to the second tier of candidates, but any fair analysis of the South Carolina results would suggest that the former Arkansas governor's performance kept him essentially tied with McCain and spotlighted the latter's remaining weaknesses among the party faithful. (Unlike Obama, however, at least Mike Huckabee didn’t try to spin his loss into some sort of accounting triumph.)
5. Mitt Romney got very lucky. Today's story should have been that the Mittster's fourth place performance down south validated fears that either his ideological flip-flopping or his Mormon faith would render him unelectable below the Mason-Dixon Line. Instead, along with Clinton and McCain, Romney is receiving equal billing as one of the three Saturday winners for his victory in the Nevada caucuses. Since he was the only serious candidate to campaign meaningfully in the Silver State, Romney's showing there should have been no more remarkable than his win a couple of weeks ago in Wyoming, an event that was all but ignored by the political media. Oddly enough, the former Massachusetts governor owes the publicity surrounding this latest victory to the Democrats. Because Clinton, Obama, and Edwards spent over a week shuttling between Las Vegas and Reno, the press showed up to report on them. Thus, Romney enjoyed spillover coverage from journalists who would not even have been in Nevada except for the closely fought Democratic race. As the saying goes, if a tree falls in an empty forest it may not make a sound. Wyoming was that empty forest; Nevada, thanks to the Dems, was not.
6. John McCain's narrow victory in South Carolina, growing wider with every retelling, has greatly reduced the possibility that either party will face a brokered convention this summer. The Democratic race has been a two-person show since New Hampshire. It now appears that the GOP contest is following suit, with McCain and Romney the only two candidates retaining significant viability. As I've noted previously, Rudy Giuliani loses badly every time John McCain wins. McCain's strengths are Giuliani's strengths, simply contained in a more appealing and less corrupt package. The fact that Rudy decided to run advertisements in Florida predictably exploiting 9/11, but this time callously including actual footage of the disaster itself, suggests that his campaign has entered desperation mode. Perhaps he can somehow carve out a victory in the Sunshine State with a combination of New York retirees and firebreathing Cuban nationalists, but the prospect seems increasingly remote. Thus, the GOP can likely expect a two-man race from here on out. And two-candidate contests, almost by definition, do not lend themselves to brokered conventions.
7. Duncan Hunter, we hardly knew ye. And we're glad.
UPDATE: Welcome to all of you who were attracted here by the Wall Street Journal link (thanks, WSJ). Please take a look around. A lot of Election 2008 posts below and in the archives. Y'all come back now, y'hear.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
On Media Bias
Over on the sporting pitch, controversy, as usual, envelops the announcement of the latest voting for membership in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Many of the arguments contest the qualifications of one Jim Rice, a Boston Red Sox slugger from the 1970s and 1980s. To a large extent, the debate centers around whether Rice's impressive statistics were impressive enough for enshrinement, given that a) he had a relatively short career, and b) he was a right-handed power hitter who played his home games in a ballpark that disproportionately favored righties.
But the most interesting feature of the dispute involves the alleged role of certain grudge-bearing sportswriters in denying Rice his plaque in Cooperstown. It seems that the selection of each year's class of Hall of Famers is determined primarily by a vote of members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America, at least those scribes who have belonged to that organization for at least a decade. Evidently, Mr. Rice did not possess the sweetest of dispositions during his playing days and often treated members of the press with disdain. Consequently, some argue, one of the most feared power hitters of his generation may never receive his rightful recognition because some sportswriters simply didn't like him.
Journalists are, despite their affectations, human beings just like the rest of us. As such, they have their biases and their vanities, their quirks and their obsessions. Treat them badly enough times, and maybe some of them will find a reason to keep you out of the Hall of Fame. Kiss up to them, throw them clever quotes and provide them with penetrating analyses, and perhaps your borderline record of 220 wins and your so-so 3.20 earned run average may be enough to earn you the 75% share of the vote needed to achieve baseball immortality.
If sportswriters can be so moved, what about those who report on politics for a living? Surely, they cannot be unaffected by the kindnesses shown them and insults suffered. They would—and do—argue that their professionalism provides a buffer between the ego and the journalist, and I don't doubt that for a moment. Still, no buffer is impervious and not even the most diligent professionals can entirely ward off their emotions. In my business (college teaching), many professors have taken to asking students to provide identifying numbers, rather than names, on their examinations, so all worries about potential bias can be eliminated. (Teaching, like journalism, is a very personal business, and believe me when I tell you that every instructor has students she adores unreservedly and students she detests thoroughly.)
A number of bloggers devote significant attention to the alleged biases of the political media. Quotes are isolated, often badly out of context, that supposedly prove that some reporter or another has it in for one of the presidential candidates. As you might expect, some of these claims are more persuasive than others. The treatment of Al Gore in 2000, for example, is particularly difficult to understand without arriving at the conclusion that members of the press corps absolutely despised him. Nevertheless, claims of prejudice generally have a partisan edge to them—conservatives and liberals alike see the media as biased against their side—and where you stand in this case almost certain depends, as they say, on where you sit.
I'm a bit of a hard sell on this issue because I've known and talked to plenty of reporters in my time, and I've heard them make scathing remarks about various political officeholders. In their actual copy, however, it is impossible to locate even a trace of that hostility. If I am capable of failing students that I personally like—and I am—then why should I not believe that the working press is able to do the same thing in their realm of responsibility?
Further, the sorts of biases reporters do have almost guarantee that they will seem gratuitously adversarial to supporters of any given politician. First, good political journalists see their job, in large part, as probing for weaknesses, often mercilessly. They suffer liars very poorly and react badly when smoke is blown in their faces. Second, they generally possess a belief that frontrunners deserve particularly close scrutiny, and they will often push the favorite far harder than the underdog (and, to be sure, they also have a vested interest in creating highly competitive races that generate greater public attention). Finally, just like the rest of us, a few reporters are probably just lazy, finding a story line—Hillary Clinton has high negatives!—and beating it to within a centimeter of its life.
Still, lines are being crossed today that weren't even approached in the past. One factor, for example, that separates today's media coverage from that of the Murrow-Cronkite era is the rise of the opinion journalist. Thirty years ago, there was nobody like Bill O'Reilly or Keith Olbermann in any serious news department. Network telecasts may have permitted a certain bit of commentary (Eric Severeid on CBS, Howard K. Smith on ABC), but even then blatant partisanship was studiously avoided. I know that the asinine claims of liberal media bias are rooted in this era, but that was largely the product of people who couldn't handle the truth—racism and sexism were wrong, we were losing in Vietnam, and Dick Nixon was a crook—and thus projected their anger on the messenger.
Unfortunately, when real reporters interact with opinion journalists, the result can, in fact, be detrimental to the profession. The Lou Dobbs Hour of Hate (or whatever he calls it these days) has its own stable of correspondents, but occasionally one of CNN's actual journalists appears on the show and is suddenly made to answer loaded questions about illegal "aliens" and their propensity for stealing American jobs and tax dollars. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, attempting to play along with the satirical spirit of Olbermann's "Countdown" arrives for a segment on Dick Cheney's hunting accident wearing a bright orange protective jacket, clearly ridiculing the veep (who richly deserved it, but still...). This collision of journalists and commentators has done a great deal to blur the line, in the minds of the public, between reporting and advocacy.
And, of course, we now have an entire cable news network so dedicated to biased coverage of events that it ironically styles itself "fair and balanced". Started by a Republican political consultant, Fox News has done more than any other outfit to advance the notion that all truth is relative and that no reporting can truly be honest. In particular, their employment of Brit Hume, once a respected White House correspondent for ABC news, falsely reminds viewers that it's all just a game and that it always has been.
So what am I saying? First, as long as journalists are human beings, there will be some bias in news coverage, probably based more on personal relationships than ideological predilections (I may have more to say about John McCain's cozy relationship with the media in a future post). Nevertheless, the extent of that bias is greatly exaggerated on all sides of the political spectrum; the vast majority of reporters play it straight the vast majority of the time. (This is even true of sportswriters, by the way: over 70% did, in fact, support Jim Rice's candidacy for the Hall of Fame this year despite the man's supposed obnoxiousness, and most of the ones who didn't were swayed primarily by the statistical record.)
The advent of advocacy journalism, however, and especially the unfortunate rise of Fox News, has made it more difficult for most citizens to distinguish opinion from reporting. Moreover, the appearance of "real" journalists on many of these opinion programs emphatically worsens the problem. Dana Milbank and Howard Fineman and the rest probably enjoy their newfound fame, but they ought to consider the price being paid by their profession. Let Bill and Keith, and certainly Chris Matthews and Don Imus, find guests more appropriate to the format. Give us more Rachel Maddow and less Richard Wolffe.
Finally, if reporters are going to appear on opinion shows, they ought to be made to show their cards. They should stop hiding behind their journalistic shields and let us know what they, personally, really think of the candidates. At least then, we can know where we stand. To their credit, sports reporters who get mixed up in the opinion game rarely try to pretend they are above it all. They tell you straight away that they think Jim Rice and Barry Bonds are jerks.
And, really, the stakes in November are just a little bit higher than those involving whether Jim Rice gets a seat in the Catfish Hunter/Tony Pérez wing of marginal Hall of Famers.
But the most interesting feature of the dispute involves the alleged role of certain grudge-bearing sportswriters in denying Rice his plaque in Cooperstown. It seems that the selection of each year's class of Hall of Famers is determined primarily by a vote of members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America, at least those scribes who have belonged to that organization for at least a decade. Evidently, Mr. Rice did not possess the sweetest of dispositions during his playing days and often treated members of the press with disdain. Consequently, some argue, one of the most feared power hitters of his generation may never receive his rightful recognition because some sportswriters simply didn't like him.
Journalists are, despite their affectations, human beings just like the rest of us. As such, they have their biases and their vanities, their quirks and their obsessions. Treat them badly enough times, and maybe some of them will find a reason to keep you out of the Hall of Fame. Kiss up to them, throw them clever quotes and provide them with penetrating analyses, and perhaps your borderline record of 220 wins and your so-so 3.20 earned run average may be enough to earn you the 75% share of the vote needed to achieve baseball immortality.
If sportswriters can be so moved, what about those who report on politics for a living? Surely, they cannot be unaffected by the kindnesses shown them and insults suffered. They would—and do—argue that their professionalism provides a buffer between the ego and the journalist, and I don't doubt that for a moment. Still, no buffer is impervious and not even the most diligent professionals can entirely ward off their emotions. In my business (college teaching), many professors have taken to asking students to provide identifying numbers, rather than names, on their examinations, so all worries about potential bias can be eliminated. (Teaching, like journalism, is a very personal business, and believe me when I tell you that every instructor has students she adores unreservedly and students she detests thoroughly.)
A number of bloggers devote significant attention to the alleged biases of the political media. Quotes are isolated, often badly out of context, that supposedly prove that some reporter or another has it in for one of the presidential candidates. As you might expect, some of these claims are more persuasive than others. The treatment of Al Gore in 2000, for example, is particularly difficult to understand without arriving at the conclusion that members of the press corps absolutely despised him. Nevertheless, claims of prejudice generally have a partisan edge to them—conservatives and liberals alike see the media as biased against their side—and where you stand in this case almost certain depends, as they say, on where you sit.
I'm a bit of a hard sell on this issue because I've known and talked to plenty of reporters in my time, and I've heard them make scathing remarks about various political officeholders. In their actual copy, however, it is impossible to locate even a trace of that hostility. If I am capable of failing students that I personally like—and I am—then why should I not believe that the working press is able to do the same thing in their realm of responsibility?
Further, the sorts of biases reporters do have almost guarantee that they will seem gratuitously adversarial to supporters of any given politician. First, good political journalists see their job, in large part, as probing for weaknesses, often mercilessly. They suffer liars very poorly and react badly when smoke is blown in their faces. Second, they generally possess a belief that frontrunners deserve particularly close scrutiny, and they will often push the favorite far harder than the underdog (and, to be sure, they also have a vested interest in creating highly competitive races that generate greater public attention). Finally, just like the rest of us, a few reporters are probably just lazy, finding a story line—Hillary Clinton has high negatives!—and beating it to within a centimeter of its life.
Still, lines are being crossed today that weren't even approached in the past. One factor, for example, that separates today's media coverage from that of the Murrow-Cronkite era is the rise of the opinion journalist. Thirty years ago, there was nobody like Bill O'Reilly or Keith Olbermann in any serious news department. Network telecasts may have permitted a certain bit of commentary (Eric Severeid on CBS, Howard K. Smith on ABC), but even then blatant partisanship was studiously avoided. I know that the asinine claims of liberal media bias are rooted in this era, but that was largely the product of people who couldn't handle the truth—racism and sexism were wrong, we were losing in Vietnam, and Dick Nixon was a crook—and thus projected their anger on the messenger.
Unfortunately, when real reporters interact with opinion journalists, the result can, in fact, be detrimental to the profession. The Lou Dobbs Hour of Hate (or whatever he calls it these days) has its own stable of correspondents, but occasionally one of CNN's actual journalists appears on the show and is suddenly made to answer loaded questions about illegal "aliens" and their propensity for stealing American jobs and tax dollars. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, attempting to play along with the satirical spirit of Olbermann's "Countdown" arrives for a segment on Dick Cheney's hunting accident wearing a bright orange protective jacket, clearly ridiculing the veep (who richly deserved it, but still...). This collision of journalists and commentators has done a great deal to blur the line, in the minds of the public, between reporting and advocacy.
And, of course, we now have an entire cable news network so dedicated to biased coverage of events that it ironically styles itself "fair and balanced". Started by a Republican political consultant, Fox News has done more than any other outfit to advance the notion that all truth is relative and that no reporting can truly be honest. In particular, their employment of Brit Hume, once a respected White House correspondent for ABC news, falsely reminds viewers that it's all just a game and that it always has been.
So what am I saying? First, as long as journalists are human beings, there will be some bias in news coverage, probably based more on personal relationships than ideological predilections (I may have more to say about John McCain's cozy relationship with the media in a future post). Nevertheless, the extent of that bias is greatly exaggerated on all sides of the political spectrum; the vast majority of reporters play it straight the vast majority of the time. (This is even true of sportswriters, by the way: over 70% did, in fact, support Jim Rice's candidacy for the Hall of Fame this year despite the man's supposed obnoxiousness, and most of the ones who didn't were swayed primarily by the statistical record.)
The advent of advocacy journalism, however, and especially the unfortunate rise of Fox News, has made it more difficult for most citizens to distinguish opinion from reporting. Moreover, the appearance of "real" journalists on many of these opinion programs emphatically worsens the problem. Dana Milbank and Howard Fineman and the rest probably enjoy their newfound fame, but they ought to consider the price being paid by their profession. Let Bill and Keith, and certainly Chris Matthews and Don Imus, find guests more appropriate to the format. Give us more Rachel Maddow and less Richard Wolffe.
Finally, if reporters are going to appear on opinion shows, they ought to be made to show their cards. They should stop hiding behind their journalistic shields and let us know what they, personally, really think of the candidates. At least then, we can know where we stand. To their credit, sports reporters who get mixed up in the opinion game rarely try to pretend they are above it all. They tell you straight away that they think Jim Rice and Barry Bonds are jerks.
And, really, the stakes in November are just a little bit higher than those involving whether Jim Rice gets a seat in the Catfish Hunter/Tony Pérez wing of marginal Hall of Famers.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Obama Goes Negative (Sort of)
Let's say you're the candidate who has promised to bring our country together. You've pledged to elevate the tone of American politics and to avoid the sort of bickering and mudslinging that has alienated so many citizens—especially young citizens—over the past quarter century. Not only has this position allowed you to flourish in the race for the presidency, but it also made you, at least briefly, the frontrunner for your party's nomination. But now your most serious opponent is busy scoring points against you by going negative and questioning your preparation for higher office. How do you fight back without undoing your hard-won image as the good guy, the uniter in a world of dividers?
If you're Barack Obama, you do so by praising Ronald Reagan.
Speaking to reporters in Reno, Nevada, Obama startled the Democratic faithful by asserting that the Gipper "changed the trajectory" of American politics and provided voters with the sort of leadership they craved during the 1980s. Commentators struggled to explain why a relatively liberal Democrat who had just been endorsed by Nevada's most powerful labor union would single out the conservative, union-busting Reagan as his role model. Lawrence O'Donnell, appearing on MSNBC's "Countdown", theorized that Obama was seeking the votes of independents in the upcoming California primary by lauding the state's one-time governor. Others suggested that perhaps this was an attempt by the senator to burnish his credentials as a bipartisan healer.
Relatively few observers, however, immediately recognized that this was, in fact, Obama's most stinging attack on Hillary Clinton to date. Consider what he actually said:
"I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating."
The first and most obvious swipe is the Illinois senator's suggestion that the Clinton presidency lacked historical significance. Obama knows that Bill Clinton's record in the White House represents the strongest argument in favor of Hillary's candidacy. I do not mean this in the sexist Chris Matthews sense that she owes her senate seat to sympathy over Bill's philandering. Nor am I arguing that without her fortuitous marriage she would be nothing more than a successful, but unknown, Washington lawyer; with her copious gifts, Hillary Clinton would likely have been a significant political player regardless of whose ring she wore. Nevertheless, Senator Clinton's major calling card in this presidential race happens to be her experience as a key adviser and leading participant in a highly popular and successful presidency. When she talks about experience—hers vs. her opponent's—this is what she means.
But here was Barack Obama, while supposedly remarking on the Reagan years, raising the possibility that Bill Clinton's administration may have been, in the big scheme of things, a failure. President Clinton's inability to alter the national trajectory, by implication, set the stage for the ruinous reign of George W. Bush. Without saying so explicitly, Obama effectively argues that Hillary's experience does not prepare her to navigate a new course for the republic, but rather to provide another four or eight years of impotent triangulation. Oh, and just in case that didn't burn, Obama also gratuitously, if obliquely, compares Bill Clinton to that universal symbol of corruption, Richard Nixon (rather than, say, Jimmy Carter, the trajectory-challenged president whose failures actually made the Reagan Revolution possible).
But the senator wasn't done yet. After consigning Slick Willie and Tricky Dick to the same dustbin of history, he took a further shot at "the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s". True, his specific reference was to government growth and accountability, but the comment nonetheless allowed Obama to remind voters of the Clintons' association with the controversial Baby Boomer generation. The "excesses of the 1960s and 1970s", after all, went well beyond the growth of federal entitlements. Once more, Barack Obama took the opportunity to remind the electorate that the Clintons represent a controversial past while he heralds a brighter future.
As candidates go, Senator Obama rivals Mitt Romney for his careful sense of control and ability to choose his words carefully. The difference, of course, is that Obama is far more inspiring than Romney and he has not, over the course of his career, taken both sides on nearly every major issue. But make no mistake: the comments that Barack Obama made in Reno were not off-the-cuff musings. They were a well-crafted—and devastatingly negative—response to Hillary Clinton's claim that her experience qualifies her for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Still, two problems remain for the Candidate of Change. First, in attempting to go negative without appearing to do so, Obama must necessarily be subtle. Still, to be successful, even subtle attacks must leave a mark. In this case, however, the senator's main point may have been lost by pundits and voters who concentrated on the unexpected praise of Reagan rather than the embedded assault on Bill Clinton's presidency. In all likelihood, Obama hoped that his remarks would start a conversation in the media over whether Democrats should really want to settle for four more years of Clintonism. Perhaps that debate will emerge today, but it certainly did not begin on Senator Obama's cue.
Second, and even more risky, Obama must still be careful how he chooses to deliver his suggestively negative comments. In particular, he might want to avoid too many statements that appear to praise prominent conservative Republicans. At the moment, Obama's candidacy is built around three distinct constituencies, all of which he will need in order to claim victory. One of these groups, young voters, will probably not care about a reference to a president who left office before many of them were born. Another, African Americans, may not have fond memories of the Gipper, but might still be focused on what Senator Obama stands for and what he represents. The third group, however, consists of highly educated, middle class white professionals, liberals who are attracted to Obama's message of change and hope. These generally progressive Democrats see Ronald Reagan's administration as the beginning of the era of poisonous conservatism that has resulted in the current Bush administration.
Characteristically opportunistic, John Edwards immediately blasted Obama for referring to the Gipper in reverent tones. In addition to reminding voters of Reagan's hostility toward organized labor, Edwards added that the 40th president "created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day." Such attacks are, of course, common on the campaign trail, but this one is different. At some point in the foreseeable future, John Edwards is likely to drop out of the presidential race, and his voting bloc—traditional liberals and union diehards—will be up for grabs. Until yesterday, it seemed likely that Senator Obama would attract a good share of these disaffected Democrats. Yesterday, that number almost certainly dwindled, at least temporarily.
For better or worse, politics is about both hope and fear, ringing eloquence and dirty pool. Hillary Clinton will not stop attacking Barack Obama unless or until he drops from serious contention for the Democratic nomination. Obama, for his part, knows that he cannot let these broadsides go unanswered. At least for now, he is trying to disagree without sounding disagreeable. He may ultimately find, however, that the subtle approach can sometimes be more risky than the full frontal assault.
If you're Barack Obama, you do so by praising Ronald Reagan.
Speaking to reporters in Reno, Nevada, Obama startled the Democratic faithful by asserting that the Gipper "changed the trajectory" of American politics and provided voters with the sort of leadership they craved during the 1980s. Commentators struggled to explain why a relatively liberal Democrat who had just been endorsed by Nevada's most powerful labor union would single out the conservative, union-busting Reagan as his role model. Lawrence O'Donnell, appearing on MSNBC's "Countdown", theorized that Obama was seeking the votes of independents in the upcoming California primary by lauding the state's one-time governor. Others suggested that perhaps this was an attempt by the senator to burnish his credentials as a bipartisan healer.
Relatively few observers, however, immediately recognized that this was, in fact, Obama's most stinging attack on Hillary Clinton to date. Consider what he actually said:
"I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating."
The first and most obvious swipe is the Illinois senator's suggestion that the Clinton presidency lacked historical significance. Obama knows that Bill Clinton's record in the White House represents the strongest argument in favor of Hillary's candidacy. I do not mean this in the sexist Chris Matthews sense that she owes her senate seat to sympathy over Bill's philandering. Nor am I arguing that without her fortuitous marriage she would be nothing more than a successful, but unknown, Washington lawyer; with her copious gifts, Hillary Clinton would likely have been a significant political player regardless of whose ring she wore. Nevertheless, Senator Clinton's major calling card in this presidential race happens to be her experience as a key adviser and leading participant in a highly popular and successful presidency. When she talks about experience—hers vs. her opponent's—this is what she means.
But here was Barack Obama, while supposedly remarking on the Reagan years, raising the possibility that Bill Clinton's administration may have been, in the big scheme of things, a failure. President Clinton's inability to alter the national trajectory, by implication, set the stage for the ruinous reign of George W. Bush. Without saying so explicitly, Obama effectively argues that Hillary's experience does not prepare her to navigate a new course for the republic, but rather to provide another four or eight years of impotent triangulation. Oh, and just in case that didn't burn, Obama also gratuitously, if obliquely, compares Bill Clinton to that universal symbol of corruption, Richard Nixon (rather than, say, Jimmy Carter, the trajectory-challenged president whose failures actually made the Reagan Revolution possible).
But the senator wasn't done yet. After consigning Slick Willie and Tricky Dick to the same dustbin of history, he took a further shot at "the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s". True, his specific reference was to government growth and accountability, but the comment nonetheless allowed Obama to remind voters of the Clintons' association with the controversial Baby Boomer generation. The "excesses of the 1960s and 1970s", after all, went well beyond the growth of federal entitlements. Once more, Barack Obama took the opportunity to remind the electorate that the Clintons represent a controversial past while he heralds a brighter future.
As candidates go, Senator Obama rivals Mitt Romney for his careful sense of control and ability to choose his words carefully. The difference, of course, is that Obama is far more inspiring than Romney and he has not, over the course of his career, taken both sides on nearly every major issue. But make no mistake: the comments that Barack Obama made in Reno were not off-the-cuff musings. They were a well-crafted—and devastatingly negative—response to Hillary Clinton's claim that her experience qualifies her for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Still, two problems remain for the Candidate of Change. First, in attempting to go negative without appearing to do so, Obama must necessarily be subtle. Still, to be successful, even subtle attacks must leave a mark. In this case, however, the senator's main point may have been lost by pundits and voters who concentrated on the unexpected praise of Reagan rather than the embedded assault on Bill Clinton's presidency. In all likelihood, Obama hoped that his remarks would start a conversation in the media over whether Democrats should really want to settle for four more years of Clintonism. Perhaps that debate will emerge today, but it certainly did not begin on Senator Obama's cue.
Second, and even more risky, Obama must still be careful how he chooses to deliver his suggestively negative comments. In particular, he might want to avoid too many statements that appear to praise prominent conservative Republicans. At the moment, Obama's candidacy is built around three distinct constituencies, all of which he will need in order to claim victory. One of these groups, young voters, will probably not care about a reference to a president who left office before many of them were born. Another, African Americans, may not have fond memories of the Gipper, but might still be focused on what Senator Obama stands for and what he represents. The third group, however, consists of highly educated, middle class white professionals, liberals who are attracted to Obama's message of change and hope. These generally progressive Democrats see Ronald Reagan's administration as the beginning of the era of poisonous conservatism that has resulted in the current Bush administration.
Characteristically opportunistic, John Edwards immediately blasted Obama for referring to the Gipper in reverent tones. In addition to reminding voters of Reagan's hostility toward organized labor, Edwards added that the 40th president "created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day." Such attacks are, of course, common on the campaign trail, but this one is different. At some point in the foreseeable future, John Edwards is likely to drop out of the presidential race, and his voting bloc—traditional liberals and union diehards—will be up for grabs. Until yesterday, it seemed likely that Senator Obama would attract a good share of these disaffected Democrats. Yesterday, that number almost certainly dwindled, at least temporarily.
For better or worse, politics is about both hope and fear, ringing eloquence and dirty pool. Hillary Clinton will not stop attacking Barack Obama unless or until he drops from serious contention for the Democratic nomination. Obama, for his part, knows that he cannot let these broadsides go unanswered. At least for now, he is trying to disagree without sounding disagreeable. He may ultimately find, however, that the subtle approach can sometimes be more risky than the full frontal assault.
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