Paul Waldman

Blogging

2007-06-11T13:44:00.001-05:00

This site now serves as an archive of my columns; I now blog at the American Prospect's TAPPED.

Unthinkable? To You, Maybe

2007-06-06T12:35:00.000-05:00

At last night's debate, when Rudy Giuliani was asked whether the Iraq war was a mistake, he said, "It's unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror." This is an almost Romneyesque level of ignorance that I think demands examination.

So what Giuliani is saying is that though there was no relationship between Saddam's government and Al Qaeda, and no meaningful terrorist presence in Iraq, had the invasion never occurred, we would today be utterly unable to combat terrorism. We'd be stymied. Impotent. Left quivering in a fetal position while terrorists destroyed our country piece by piece.

This is the man whom the media tell us over and over has unimpeachable credentials on the issue of terrorism, or as Chris Matthews put it, "Everyone agrees that Rudy has street cred on that issue. He can protect us. That's the image he conveys."

I would hope that Democrats would consider putting aside the "me too" approach to national security that has been so ineffective for them in recent elections, and instead of saying that they'll be tough, attack the Republicans directly. The thought of an ignoramus like Mitt Romney formulating our terrorism policy is pretty frightening, and it seems that Rudy Giuliani, Mr. 9/11, doesn't have much of a clue either. This isn't so much an argument about what specific policies we should employ going forward as about whether the different candidates have even the barest grasp on the issue.

The last thing I would argue for is a Kerry-style, "My ten-point plan is superior to your ten-point plan" approach. But my god - is it too much to ask that the people who want to hold the most powerful office in the world display some minimum level of understanding on an issue as important as this one? And can't the next reporter who interviews Romney or Giuliani press them on what they actually know about terrorism? For instance, how is Al Qaeda different today from what it was six years ago? Where are their sources of support? What effect has the Iraq war had on them? What sorts of actions have proven successful against them so far in places other than Iraq? How do the different governments in the Middle East feel about Al Qaeda, and what sorts of different approaches might be useful in getting cooperation from them in combating terrorism? Have you even thought about these kinds of questions? Well, have you?

Too Cool?

2007-05-30T16:50:00.000-05:00

I couldn't help but notice this, from Walter Shapiro's piece on Barack Obama in today's Salon:

A little later in the questioning, a man announced that his son was a paratrooper headed to Iraq and denounced the congressional Democrats for backing down on a timetable for withdrawal. (Obama, like all his Democratic rivals in Congress, save Joe Biden, were part of the minority opposing continued unrestricted funding of the war.) In his lengthy response, Obama talked about how he "struggled" with his Senate vote and understood why "my colleagues had a hard time with it." But Obama, the only leading Democratic presidential contender to oppose launching the Iraq war, went on to say, "I couldn't in good conscience continue on a course that wasn't working."

There was only one thing that was surprising about Obama's answer -- he never once acknowledged that he was talking to the father of a soldier headed into a brutal war zone, a parent who feared that his son might die in a conflict that has lost any rationale or larger meaning.

It's been said that Obama has a "cool" style on the stump - restrained, thoughtful, even a little remote. And no one's asking him to run over and give the man a hug if that's not what he's feeling. But a big part of campaigning is allowing people to see you making human connections with the people you encounter. I've been told that Obama has an ability to charm people one-on-one that is near-Clintonian. But you have to be able to let people see you doing the same thing.

Speaking of the empathizer-in-chief, it's instructive to remember the moment where, to my mind, he won the presidency. You might remember that during the second debate, President Bush had trouble answering a woman from the audience who asked about how the national debt had personally affected the candidates. Taking her question literally, Bush struggled to come up with a coherent answer, eventually saying defensively, "Are you suggesting that if somebody has means that the national debt doesn't affect them?" But when Clinton's turn came, he left his chair, walked over as close as he could get to the woman, looked in her eyes, and said, "Tell me how it's affected you."

This may seem gimmicky, but by seeing Clinton establishing a connection with this one person, Americans were convinced that he cared about them. If Obama is thinking that doing that sort of thing is artificial, well, the entire exercise of campaigning is fundamentally artificial. There's nothing natural about it. Obama is an extremely talented campaigner, but if this one vignette is representative (and I haven't watched him on the stump enough to say), then he may have some work to do.

Does Liveblogging Suck?

2007-05-16T14:43:00.000-05:00

Is it just me, or does liveblogging really, really suck?

I appreciate the value of up-to-the-minute information as much as anyone. But I can't ever recall reading a liveblog of anything and coming away feeling like I learned something. I mean no offense to my colleagues who have liveblogged at one time or another, but I have to question whether the activity has any value at all.

There are two types of events that can be liveblogged. The first is something like a speech or a conference that the readers are not attending. The second is something like a presidential debate, which the readers are presumably watching with their laptops open, following the liveblog while they watch the event.

In the former case, it is undoubtedly better for the blogger to take some notes, then write something coherent up when it's all over. The resulting product will inevitably be more edifying than what he or she can produce frantically typing while trying to listen out of one ear for whatever's coming next. The added value to the reader of learning about the event in "real time," as opposed to an hour or two later, is almost nil, and certainly outweighed by the added perspective the blogger will offer after seeing the whole thing.

As for the latter case, the principle is basically the same. Most liveblogging seems to consist mostly of relating what's going on. "Guiliani just said he'd personally bite off Khalid Sheik Mohammed's fingers...McCain is sweating...Romney looks like a phony..." OK, but either I'm watching it myself, in which case it isn't all that helpful, or I'm not and I'll read about it later, in which case the play-by-play ends up reading as so spotty that it doesn't add up to much. I want to know what the various brilliant bloggers thought about the last debate, but having them post their thoughts before it's over doesn't really add anything.

I'm not saying there could never, ever be a case of useful liveblogging. But doing it on something like a presidential debate? I can't see why one would bother.

So just what is the value of liveblogging? Is it possible that people do it simply because they can? That it's so NewMedia, and the kind of thing that's expected of the Masters of the Intertubes? That our great-grandparents, waiting for the latest word from the Continent to come over by steamship, could never have imagined such a fantastically futuristic form of news delivery? Those don't seem like very good reasons.

So can someone out there offer a defense of liveblogging?

One Teeny Weeny Falwell Note

2007-05-15T16:24:00.000-05:00

For the complete review of Falwell's record, see Steve Benen's wrap-up. But I have to say this:

Tinky-Winky is totally gay. Steeped in gayness, in the words of George Costanza.

If you've seen Teletubbies, a program so insipid that even 2-year-olds know it's lame, you know what I mean. Falwell was right about virtually nothing, but that character had to be designed with the purpose of driving people like him crazy. I'm just saying.

Props to the P.O.

2007-05-14T16:02:00.001-05:00

As you may have heard, the post office has raised the rate for sending a first-class letter to 41 cents. This might be an opportune time to spend a moment thinking about our mail service.

For a lot of people, the post office is the symbol of inefficient government bureaucracy, the butt of jokes and scorn. When conservatives were fighting the Clinton health care plan in 1993, they used to say it would "combine the efficiency of the post office with the compassion of the IRS." Har, har! But let's step back and consider the service the post office actually performs.

Let's say you live in New York, and you want to send a note to your Aunt Millie in California. You can take your letter and drop it in a box on the corner - or if that's not quite convenient enough for you, you can just leave it jutting out of your door. The post office will pick it up there at your house, transport it 3,000 miles, and personally hand it to Aunt Millie, all within the space of a few days.

And what do they charge for this service? Fifty dollars? A hundred dollars? Forty-one cents. And not only that, they do it 700 million times a day (not counting Sundays and the 11 federally mandated holidays).

So the next time somebody makes a crack about the post office, stand up for it! Yeah, if you show up at the post office at 11 pm on April 15, there's going to be a long line. But given the magnitude of the task they have to accomplish, they do a damn fine job.

RUDY 2.0

2007-05-10T16:34:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at TAPPED.

Following on Scott's post on Rudy Giuliani's bold coming out as pro-choice, part of what this reveals is just how amateurish an effort the Giuliani campaign has been so far. Abortion was the key stumbling block to his getting the nomination, and to hear him talk about it over the last couple of weeks, including in the debate, one would have thought he hadn't really given much thought to what he would say when he got asked about it. Hearing him say "I hate abortion" over and over reminded me of John Kerry talking about how he'd "kill the terrorists" - something that somebody thought was a good way to convey the right image, but felt really uncomfortable. And now, after a few embarrassing weeks trying to thread an impossibly tiny needle, the Giuliani campaign seems to have said, "Well, that didn't work. What's plan B?" And plan B, apparently, is an effort to put his pro-choice views right there on the table, and hope nobody bothers to talk about it anymore. I wonder what plan C is.

TThe thing is, as a Republican primary issue, abortion isn't an end in itself. It's a stand-in for a larger worldview, one that says sex is dirty, women ought to know their place, and sinners need to be punished. Now when it comes to punishing people, nobody can hold a candle to Rudy Giuliani. But his biggest problem is that he's from New York. Even a New York conservative has a cosmopolitanism that signals to GOP primary voters that at a fundamental level, Giuliani is not one of them. And there are few things Republican voters care more about than that a candidate is one of them. There are a hundred different dog-whistle ways candidates have to communicate this, and Rudy seems to understand almost none of them. For instance, when he responded to a question about Roe v. Wade by saying it would be OK with him if a "strict constructionist judge" upheld it, it just made no sense to his intended audience. To Republicans "strict constructionist" means opposed to Roe, no ifs ands or buts.

To be "one of us," a Republican candidate has to show he's right with God, that gay people make his skin crawl, and that he has "[insert home state here] values." The fact of that construction (which admittedly is often also used by Democrats in the South and Midwest) indicates that its targets are thinking tribally: you're one of us or not, you have our values or you have alien values. But people from places like where Rudy's from don't think this way or respond to that kind of appeal. Even in New York, nobody talks about "New York values." I doubt any New Yorkers would be able to define them if you asked. I grew up in New Jersey, and I can't recall ever hearing anything about "New Jersey values." (Side note: A few years back, the Garden State held a contest to pick its new advertising slogan. My entry was, "New Jersey: F**k me? No, f**k you." If you're not from there, you wouldn't understand.)

The point is, as Rudy will soon find out, he just isn't one of them. There's no question that he's the most interesting of the Republican candidates (and mostly not in a good way). I'll miss him when he's gone, which will be long before the Republican convention.

Radioactive Man

2007-05-04T16:32:00.000-05:00

Everyone has noticed how the Republican presidential candidates treat George W. Bush as though he were radioactive. And it's no surprise, given that two-thirds of the public thinks the President stinks at his job. (As a side note, should Rudy become the nominee, look for TV ads with him saying at the 2004 GOP convention, "Thank God George Bush is our president.")

But here's my question. Let's assume that Bush will leave office pretty much as unpopular as he is now. Will he be speaking at the 2008 Republican convention?

Just wondering.

Blogs and the sort-of-MSM

2007-05-02T14:20:00.000-05:00

Chris Hayes, as usual wise beyond his tender years, makes an excellent point with regard to the Jon Chait article everyone is talking about:

That said, what's interesting to me is the different reaction this piece is getting, in which it is Topic A on a whole host of blogs, and the reaction to a somewhat similar cover story my colleague Lakshmi Chaudhry wrote for In These Times last year. While Chait's piece offers an analysis of someone situated just inside the mainstream, beltway, pundit establishment, Lakshmi's piece was an analysis (and in places a critique) of the netroots from the perspecitve of the activist, progressive left. The piece was exhaustively reported and, I thought, really spot on in picking out some of the vanguardism, cliquishness, and meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-bossism of the emerging netroots. (Qualifier to be distributed throughout this post: generalizations about the netroots can be a fool's game and it is a remarkably unwieldy phenomenon, so anything anyone says about "the netroots" is going to necessarily incomplete or partially inaccurate.)

It's not like Lasshmi's piece was ignored, it certainly sparked some discussion, including a single sentence dismissive swipe by Kos, but it didn't become the kind of central topic of the liberal blogs in the way Chait's piece has. And I think the reason is this: Chait's published was in the The New Republic and Lakshmi's piece was published in In These Times. On the surface you might think the netroots would be more interested in a critique from one of their own than from a magazine that’s been more or less waging war against them for years. But that's the opposite of the truth. The strange thing about the netroots, and something that was made very clear to me at YearlyKos, is that the prominent members of the blogosphere have a real deep complex about their relationship to the "mainstream" Their feelings (again, generalizing) towards the mainstream pundits, TNR, Joe Klein, Tim Russert et al, is similar to the way a pimply, awkward 14-year-old-boy might feel about the hot, mean girl in his class. He judges her harshly, thinks she's vapid and cruel, and desperately wants her attention.

From the perspective of power politics, I can understand this obsession with the MSM. A publication like TNR, dwindling circulation and all, has influence, and In These Times doesn't. But that's something of a self-perpetuating state of affairs now isn't it? Exactly the sort of cycle of elite self-confirmation that the netroots is best situated to disrupt.

True, true.

On the Republican Aristocrats

2007-05-01T13:45:00.000-05:00

Rick Perlstein tells us that the emperor is wearing a monocle:

President Bush was explainnig why we need an immigration plan that "recognizes that people are doing work here that Americans are not doing." He illustrated his argument with an impromptu tale he probably thought, in his heart of hearts, was as "folksy" they came:

"If you've got a chicken factory, a chicken-plucking factory, or whatever you call them, you know what I'm talking about."

A small slip, but a stunningly revelatory one, really. "If you've got a chicken factory": so casual. Instictively, it's easier for the President of the United States to empathize call to mind someone - to empathize with someone - who owns a factory than someone who works in one.

Allow me to add my favorite example of how distant America's #1 down-home good-ole-boy is from the struggles of ordinary Americans. In February of 2005, Bush was doing a town-hall meeting in Omaha when a woman got up and told him that she was a single mother, and she was working three jobs. How did he respond? Here's what he might have said: "My god, your life must be so hard. You're already doing the incredibly difficult job of being a single parent, and your economic situation is so desperate you need to work three jobs to get by? That's awful. What can I do to help? Can I raise the minimum wage so maybe one or two of those jobs might be enough? Can I make sure you and everyone like you has health insurance? Can I increase the Earned Income Tax Credit to put a few more dollars in your pocket? I'm so sorry that in the wealthiest country on earth, hard-working people like you have such a load to carry."

But no, that's not what Bush said. This is what he said:

"Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that."

Yes indeed. A single mother working three jobs? An inspiring story of can-do American spirit.

I'm not arguing that rich people shouldn't be leaders, or that even if you're rich you must have experienced poverty to be a good president. Nor do I think it's useful to quiz candidates on what the price of a gallon of milk is. That kind of minutia isn't the point. But those with power should at least have a clue about what regular people go through.

Republicans and the Spiral of Silence

2007-04-29T20:26:00.000-05:00

Kevin Drum notes an L.A. Times article reporting that among the desperate straits of the GOP is the fact that Republicans in New Hampshire Republicans are so ashamed they won't even participate in surveys.

What this represents is an extraordinary opportunity for progressives and Democrats. There's a theory in communication research called the Spiral of Silence, devised by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, a German professor and longtime advisor to the Christian Democratic Party. The theory is about how political minorities can become smaller and smaller if the majority is vocal enough. In a nutshell, the majority is more vocal, and the minority fears social isolation, so it won't speak up. The majority keeps persuading people, and the minority gets smaller and smaller, and less and less willing to stand up for itself.

Let's set aside the theoretical basis for the Spiral of Silence (some tendentious readings of earlier research on the fear of social isolation), and the less-than-unanimous support for it among communication researchers. But there is at least some there there. The relation to our current situation is this: conservatives are on the run. If there was ever a time to make them feel ashamed of who they are and what they believe, it's now. Send them into the Spiral of Silence.

Bonus fun fact: Noelle-Neumann has been accused of having a Nazi past. Without going into the details, which I don't remember well enough to discuss with authority, she claims she didn’t really believe the stuff she said and wrote during the 1940s. The question of her Nazi sympathies was the subject of the tensest academic conference panel I ever attended, in which Noelle-Neumann faced off against the young, untenured assistant professor who had written an extraordinary j'accuse of an article that had appeared in the Journal of Communication, the most important journal in the field. No blood was shed, but all the thirty or so people in the room kept looking at each other with "Can you believe this is happening?" expressions on their faces. I had to admire the young professor, who risked his entire career to accuse one of the field’s most respected members of basically being a Nazi. (If you have an interest in this kind of stuff, he has a page withe some of the documents on which he based his attack on Noelle-Neumann.

Dunkalicious

2007-04-27T15:22:00.000-05:00

Now that George Tenet is coming out with his tell-all (or thereabouts), he's trying to justify the notorious "slam dunk" remark. But here's my question: why was it a big deal at all?

Here's how the story goes:

As the war planning progressed, on December 21, 2002, Tenet and his top deputy, John McLaughlin, went to the White House to brief Bush and Cheney on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Woodward reports.

The president, unimpressed by the presentation of satellite photographs and intercepts, pressed Tenet and McLaughlin, saying their information would not "convince Joe Public" and asking Tenet, "This is the best we've got?" Woodward reports.

According to Woodward, Tenet reassured the president that "it's a slam dunk case" that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

So we're supposed to believe that Bush was skeptical, but then Tenet leaped up and said the magic words "slam dunk," and that was all Bush needed to be convinced. Uh-huh.

The fact is, Bush wanted this war from the moment he took office. Tenet could have said it was a slam dunk, a hail mary, an infield fly, or a dipsy-doodle, and it wouldn't have mattered one way or the other. He could have gotten down on his knees and begged Bush not to go to war, and it wouldn't have mattered. It was going to happen no matter what Tenet said.

What Republicans Understand and Democrats Don't, Episode 8,659

2007-04-25T15:54:00.000-05:00

You've no doubt heard about Rudy Giuliani's repellent yet unsurprising remarks that if a Democrat gets elected president, we can expect another 9/11. The responses from the Democrats showed yet again that they just can't quite get how this game is played. Here's Barack Obama's statement:

"Rudy Giuliani today has taken the politics of fear to a new low and I believe Americans are ready to reject those kind of politics," Obama said in a statement. "America's mayor should know that when it comes to 9-11 and fighting terrorists, America is united. We know we can win this war based on shared purpose, not the same divisive politics that question your patriotism if you dare to question failed policies that have made us less secure."

Hillary Clinton said something similar. What neither one of them seem to get is that, as I never tire of saying, politics isn't about issues, it's about identity. In this case, what that means is that they shouldn't be criticizing what Giuliani said, they should be criticizing Giuliani himself.

Let's not even address the fact that Obama's press release calls Giuliani "America's mayor." But what Obama, and every other Democrat, ought to do is turn this into an attack on Giuliani himself, not on his statement. Something like this:

"Today, Rudy Giuliani showed once again just why the public is so disgusted with Republicans. The man who has spent the last five years milking September 11 for financial gain now presents himself as the candidate of fear. Giuliani obviously has nothing but contempt for the American people. And his unequivocal support of the Bush administration's disastrous policies shows that Giuliani doesn't understand foreign policy and doesn't understand national security. Just how stupid does he think the American public is?"

Or something like that - but it has to be about the other guy - who he is, what he represents, and why we should reject him.

Bernard Shaw and the Sorry State of Political Journalism

2007-04-23T14:49:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at TAPPED

Over at the Politico, Roger Simon takes us on a little trip down memory lane back to 1988, when Bernard Shaw dealt a crushing blow to the Dukakis candidacy by asking the Massachusetts governor, with the opening question of his final debate with George H. W. Bush, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for her killer?” Simon paints Shaw’s question as evidence that Shaw succeeded in his self-proclaimed goal to be the Edward R. Murrow of his time. “Bernard Shaw was one tough customer,” Simon tells us. “‘As reporters, we were not doing our jobs if we don't ask the toughest question possible,’ Shaw said.” What a crock.

In case you’re too young to remember, Dukakis was savaged in the press for the way he answered Shaw’s question. With a heavy sigh (Bush had been pummeling him over his opposition to the death penalty), Dukakis explained all the reasons why he opposed the death penalty. He did not raise his fists to sky and scream, “Kitty!!! No!!!” Nor did he say, “Well, now that you put it that way, I guess I’ll discard the principle I’ve held my entire time in public life. Fry the bastard!” Nor did he punch Shaw in the mouth, though he certainly would have been justified. Instead, he answered the question in a manner appropriate to someone who wanted to be president of the United States. Simon tells us what happened next:

In the press room, the murmurs over Shaw's question now turned to mutters over Dukakis' answer. “He's through.” “That's all she wrote.” “Get the hook!”

The reporters sensed it instantly. Even though the 90-minute debate was only seconds old, they felt it was already over for Dukakis. He had not been warm. He had not been likable. He had not shown emotion. He had merely shown principle.

Afterwards, his aides would try explain that he had been sick. He had seen two doctors before the debate. He had a fever, a virus. He wasn't himself.

But while he may have been sick, he was himself. That was the problem.

Journalists then proceeded to say to the public, guess what – just as we’ve been saying for months, Dukakis is too cold-blooded and passionless to be president. We were right all along. “A man who shows not the flicker of shock or anger at a truly brutal question about the hypothetical rape and murder of his wife,” wrote David Broder at the time, “is not a man who can convey the feelings he undoubtedly has about flag, country, or creator.”

But Shaw wasn’t trying to tease out the reasons Dukakis opposed the death penalty. His question was the worst kind of “gotcha,” something with no policy content whatsoever. Its goal, and what it achieved so spectacularly, was to provide the “decisive moment” that would cast into sharp relief the character flaw that reporters had already decided was Dukakis’ Achilles heel.

But according to Simon, here’s how Shaw described it afterward: “I was just doing my job, asking that question…I thought of Murrow taking on McCarthy. That was the essence of what I wanted to be: Fearless, not afraid of the scorching bite of public criticism. I'm not afraid of being disliked. I'm not afraid of being criticized. In that debate, I did the right thing. I know I did. I know it.”

Let’s clarify something. Edward R. Murrow took on powerful people who were doing wrong. Bernard Shaw came up with a zinger question to put a candidate in an uncomfortable position, one tiny step above “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Shaw wasn’t some kind of modern-day Murrow, he was a hack, the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with how presidential campaigns are covered.

There’s an unbroken line between Shaw, and Kit Seelye and Ceci Connolly making up lies Al Gore never told, and Jodi Wilgoren musing on John Kerry’s windsurfing, and Maureen Dowd writing about John Edwards’ haircut, and on and on and on into this campaign and the next and the next. It’s not about substance, and it isn’t even about “character.” It’s about finding what reporters think is the worst thing about a candidate, and picking and picking at it until their evident belief that it should disqualify him from the presidency becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s nothing to be proud of, and if Bernard Shaw thinks there’s some parallel between his brand of questioning and what Edward R. Murrow did, he’s truly deluded.

UPDATE: Via email, DavidNYC of Swing State Project reminds me of the relationship of this story to the Ed Muskie tears-in-the-snow incident. In 1972, Ed Muskie was the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. He came under vicious attack from the far-right Manchester Union-Leader, up to and including an attack on his wife. Muskie went to Manchester and held a press conference outside the paper's offices denouncing them. As it was written, Muskie became so emotional during the press conference that tears began to run down his face. For his part, Muskie denied that he had cried, asserting instead that the snowfall was landing on his face and melting.

Whether there were tears or not, reporters took the incident as proof that Muskie was not quite right in the head, and couldn't be trusted with his finger on the nuclear trigger. His campaign was soon over.

But there's a back-story to this, one that some of the principal players involved later admitted. Let's remember that in 1972 the group of reporters who decided which candidates lived and died was even smaller and more insular than it is today (and, by the way, all male and all white). Allow me to offer an excerpt from The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories that Shape the Political World, a book I wrote way back in 2003 with Kathleen Hall Jamieson:

Why was Muskie's emotional response to an attack on his wife given such attention and an unflattering and cautionary interpretation? David Broder later explained: "All of us suspected that under the calm, placid, reflective face that Muskie liked to show the world, there was a volcano waiting to erupt. And so we treated Manchester as a political Mt. St. Helens explosion, and, in our perception, an event that would permanently alter the shape of 'Mt. Muskie.'" In his book Behind the Front Page, Broder quoted reporter Lou Cannon, relating how after playing poker with Ed Muskie he concluded that the Senator was "a little temperamental to be President of the United States." "What does a political reporter do with this kind of insight?" asked Cannon. "As in this instance, it is rarely written as a hard news story the first time the thought arises...What we reporters tend to do is to store away in our minds such incidents and then use them to interpret - to set a context - for major incidents when the occur."

In other words, Cannon, Broder, and the rest of the Kewl Kids of the day had decided that Muskie was unfit to be president, so they waited until they had a chance to take some event that was in truth rather unimportant, and blow it up into something that allegedly revealed the twisted core of the candidate, the monster lurking within Muskie.

Was their belief about Muskie accurate? I can't say - I was but a wee pup at the time. But one thing's for sure. They - not the voters, the reporters - decided that Muskie would make a bad president, and they made damn sure he wouldn't get the chance.

The Dowd Manifesto

2007-04-21T09:25:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at TAPPED.

John Edwards, you're on notice: Maureen Dowd has proclaimed her intention to do everything in her power to destroy your candidacy.

No one should be surprised that Dowd would be all over the story of Edwards' $400 haircuts. After all, she is the least substantive of columnists, the most eager to grab on to some sartorial or personal grooming tidbit about a candidate and present it as not just a symbol of some larger deficiency of character, but as the very essence of the man or woman in question, the reason we should all sneer at the candidate in disgust.

And there's nothing Dowd loves more than calling prominent politicians sissies. So this was how her Saturday column (available here to snooty elitist subscribers to Times Select) began:

Whether or not the country is ready to elect a woman president or a black president, it's definitely not ready for a metrosexual in chief.

So Dowd will make it her personal mission to ensure that everyone within reach of her keyboard will be sure to know that John Edwards is just such a man, and therefore unworthy of the presidency. Let's take another taste of Dowd’s delectable truffle of contempt:

Following his star turn primping his hair for two minutes on a YouTube video to the tune of "I Feel Pretty," Mr. Edwards this week had to pay back the $800 charged to his campaign for two shearings at Torrenueva Hair Designs in Beverly Hills. He seems intent of proving that he is a Breck Girl – and a Material Boy.

"Breck Girl," huh? Where have we heard that before? Oh yes – from the Republican National Committee! They’re the ones who invented the slur, which they first shared with Adam Nagourney and Richard Stevenson of the Times, who put their juicy scoop into an article the paper ran in April 2003. No one much noticed, until six weeks later Dowd dropped it into her column, when she said, "the Breck Girl, as the Bushies call John Edwards, merely musters limp trash talk." ("Limp" – get it? Ha ha!)

Since then, Dowd has called John Edwards "Breck Girl" in five separate columns.

The idea that the Democrat is weak, effeminate, and just plain girly is more than just the attack the Republicans will use against Edwards, it's the attack they have used against every Democratic presidential candidate since 1968. It is the essence of Republican presidential politics, the plea to white men that if they vote Democratic, people might think they’re light in the loafers. And it works because of the enthusiastic cooperation of commentators like Maureen Dowd, queen of the Heathers, casting her lighting bolts of snide psycho-sexual humiliation down on anyone who fails to win her favor. Quite worthy of the Times op-ed page, the most valuable piece of real estate in the pundit universe, don't you think?

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2007-04-17T10:35:00.000-05:00

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It Takes a Varmint

2007-04-17T08:12:00.000-05:00

Not everyone agreed with my Varmint-Gate post below, but this story from the Associated Press shows what I'm talking about when it comes to Mitt Romney:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, also a candidate for president, is wrong when she says "it takes a village" to raise a child.

"I think it's time for us to recognize every child deserves a mother and a father," Romney said during a speech to New Hampshire Republicans this weekend in Newbury.

The statement, however, runs counter to what The Boston Globe quoted him as saying in 1998:

"Hillary Clinton is very much right, it does take a village, and we are a village and we need to work together in a non-skeptical, no-finger-pointing way..."

Romney's problem is that a lot of people in the press seem to have decided that he's a phony. I previously made the comparison to the way reporters decided in 2000 that Al Gore was a liar. The difference here, of course, is that Gore was not, in fact, a liar, while Romney is, in fact, a huge phony. But his problem now is that whenever he says something like, Hillary is wrong when she says it takes a village, the immediate response from at least some reporters will be, "Huh. I wonder if he ever said anything about that in the past?" And minutes later, through the magic of Lexis/Nexis, a story about yet another opportunistic Romney flip-flop - complete with an obligatory reference to Varmint-Gate - will be in the works.

And this guy is blowing his Republican colleagues out of the water in the money race. Anyone wonder why Republicans are nervous about 2008?

Is Obama a Mushy Centrist?

2007-04-16T14:10:00.000-05:00

Let me second what Matt Yglesias says here:

Concern that Obama's been imprecise about his policy vision is fair game. I think, however, that liberals will be making a huge tactical and strategic error if we simply equate political figures who seek to portray themselves as "beyond conventional categories" as squishy moderates. Being perceieved as beyond conventional categories is, simply put, a useful quality in a politician. Similarly, I know a lot of liberals who are put off by Obama's complaints about "the smallness of our politics" -- viewing them as Broderish complaints about partisaship. The line, however, is perfectly consistent with Kuttnerish complaints about a certain kind of narrow technocracy standing in lieu of forcefully advocating change.

Indeed. It remains to be seen whether Barack Obama is, indeed, squishy. But as I wrote some time ago, Obama's "let's move beyond the old categories" message is about a kind of national reconciliation, one in which the hippies and the squares stop sniping at each other. But it is not a political reconciliation, some Broder-esque, centrist, split-the-difference-between- Democrats-and-Republicans, that Obama is offering. When he talks about this stuff, it is when he's offering the grand, sweeping rhetoric about our national political identity - not when he's answering a question about whether we should raise the minimum wage or not, or what we should do about health care, or when we should get out of Iraq. Because of this, he can still offer progressive policies without seeming hypocritical.

But will he? We'll see.

Varmint-Gate!

2007-04-06T10:23:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at TAPPED

Mitt Romney is entering a danger zone. Let's call it varmint-gate:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is taking a second shot at describing his hunting experience.

The former Massachusetts governor has called himself a lifelong hunter, yet his campaign acknowledged that he has been on just two hunting trips one when he was 15 and the other just last year.

Campaigning in Indianapolis on Thursday, Romney said he has hunted small game since his youth.

"I’m not a big-game hunter. I’ve made that very clear," he said. "I’ve always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will. I began when I was 15 or so and I have hunted those kinds of varmints since then. More than two times."

More than two times? What does that mean - three times?

This is all beginning to sound a lot like 2000. Let’s take a brief moment and recall what happened to Al Gore. Before the 2000 campaign, members of the press felt that Gore was a great big phony. If asked they might have been able to point to something specific, but mostly it was just a feeling, an impression that created the filter through which they saw everything Gore said or did until election day. The result was that Gore became the victim, and George W. Bush the beneficiary, of what may have been the most outrageous double standard in the history of campaign coverage. Bush could lie about matters large and small, and reporters would brush it off, because Bush was a reg’lar guy, and besides he wasn’t too smart. So if he said something that wasn’t true, it must have just been a mistake. They viewed Gore, on the other hand, as both smart and dishonest, so if anything he said could be interpreted as inaccurate, it was portrayed as a willful lie. He said in a debate, based on a newspaper article, that a girl in Sarasota has to stand in school because her class was overcrowded; the press immediately investigated, and when it was found that by the time the debate occurred, she had obtained a chair, Gore was accused of dissembling. Speaking before a union audience, he made a joke about hearing "Look for the Union Label" as a lullaby; though it was obviously a joke, and the audience laughed, the press swung into action and discovered that the song was written after Gore was an adult – another strike against him. And that’s not to mention the “invented the internet” brouhaha, which TAPPED readers know well Gore never said.

We could go on, of course (and if you’re interested, read Eric Boehlert’s definitive piece on the subject). But the point is that once reporters got locked in to the belief that Gore was a liar, he was screwed. Nothing he did could convince them otherwise, and everything that came out of his mouth was inspected with a fine tooth comb for signs of deception.

What varmint-gate does is offer reporters a vivid, somewhat amusing example they can use to drop into not-yet-written stories about how Romney is a phony. And those stories are coming. First, you have the simple fact that within the last couple of years, coincidentally right around the time he began preparing to run for president, Romney underwent a total transformation of his views on social issues, every element of which brought him in line with the conservative base. So he was already viewed with suspicion, his sincerity one of the factors reporters are primed to bring up in discussions of his "character." Then you have the lengths he’s going to convince voters that the transformation was real. It’s one thing to become a "life member" of the NRA after being a gun control supporter – that led to some chuckles. But his claim to have hunted all his life was not just silly and insincere, it was factually wrong, and absurdly so.

This is going to come back to haunt him. If he says anything else that sounds like a lie to ingratiate himself with the base, reporters are going to pounce. Once it reaches the point that Leno and Letterman are making jokes about it ("George W. Bush says the surge is working. Yeah – and Mitt Romney is a hunter!"), he’s in real trouble. Story after story is going to mention varmint-gate. That’s not to say Romney is doomed, not by a long shot. But this was always his biggest potential weakness, and he just made it much worse.

Here's Your Family Values Party

2007-04-03T15:41:00.000-05:00

I'm sure many people have seen the video below, since it was on the Orange Behemoth, but if you haven't, watch it:

Some people might look at this and say, "Isn't that nice, a boy happy to see his dad." But you'll notice that the boy doesn't smile. He's bursting with all the emotions he's felt over the seven months since he last saw his father, and "happy" isn't one of them. It isn't as though his dad was away on a business trip, and now he's back, and he brought him a teddy bear. Brian Williams doesn't say how long it took the boy to stop crying, but I'll bet it was quite a while. And they weren't "tears of joy" - kids don't cry when they're happy. He's crying because finally seeing his father brings up all the pain he's been feeling.

At age six, children are beginning to have an understanding of what death means. Every night, this boy's mother has put him to bed, when he wished his father could be there, too. Chances are she's pretty stressed out, having to take care of her kids by herself while dealing with the fear that her husband will be coming home maimed, or racked with PTSD, or in a body bag. Every day this boy thinks about his father, and about the chance that he might never see him again. He's holding on to his father's neck with all the strength he can muster, in the vain hope that if he holds on tight enough, maybe his dad won't have to leave him again. But he will, and the boy probably knows that, too.

This anguish is felt by thousands upon thousands of American families, all brought to you courtesy of the people who say they "support the troops." If that doesn't make you want to scream, you have no soul.

In Defense of Newt. No, Really.

2007-04-03T14:54:00.000-05:00

So Newt Gingrich has gotten in trouble for saying that we need to get rid of bilingual education so immigrants learn English, and not "the language of living in a ghetto." Understandably, people are criticizing him for basically saying that Spanish is a ghetto language.

Newt defended himself by saying he meant "ghetto" as in a place where people of one ethnicity congregate, not "ghetto" as in, say, a place where there are a lot of poor people and where white people are afraid to go (he didn't say that specifically - I'm just giving his comments a little more color). He even said, to much ridicule, "ghetto, historically had referred as a Jewish reference originally."

Now don't get me wrong - Newt Gingrich is a truly awful character, repellent in just about every way. But I do think here he's getting a bad rap. In fact, "ghetto" does historically refer to Jews. My parents both grew up in Jewish ghettos, right here in Norte America. And even the repository of all human knowledge, i.e. Wikipedia, says so:

A ghetto is an area where people from a specific racial or ethnic background are united in a given culture or religion live as a group, voluntarily or involuntarily, in milder or stricter seclusion. The word historically referred specifically to the Venetian Ghetto in Venice, Italy, where Jews were required to live. It was later applied to neighborhoods in other cities where Jews were required to live.

So let's let Newt off the hook on this one. Don't worry, he'll say plenty of offensive things in the days to come.

They're Good

2007-04-02T09:28:00.001-05:00

If we think back four years ago, Howard Dean was in some ways what Barack Obama is now – the new thing, waging a campaign that seemed unique, and attracting enormous crowds, much larger than anyone else running. But the Dean campaign was a fundamentally amateurish affair, in ways that contributed greatly to its ultimate demise. Remember those thousands of orange-hatted kids running around Iowa? In the end, they were defeated by John Kerry’s much smaller but far more skilled team. Many of the top leadership on the Dean campaign were people who had precious little experience in presidential politics, and for all their enthusiasm, they ultimately weren’t up to the task. This isn’t to say it was all the staff’s fault; every campaign rises and falls on its candidate.

What’s notable about Obama is that his campaign is, first, staffed by people who know what they’re doing. They’re not the older Shrumian generation that has lost untold numbers of campaigns; they’re a little younger, but very smart and plenty experienced. And this week shows it.

All the other candidates released their fundraising totals yesterday; today we have stories about how Clinton raised $26 million, breaking all the records; Edwards raised $14 million, extremely solid and enough to keep him in the top tier; and everyone else is way down below. So what did the Obama campaign do? They decided to wait a day or two to release their numbers. So if he’s anywhere over $20 million, he’ll get a whole round of news coverage all to himself, about how he’s raised an extraordinary amount of money and is poised to take down Clinton. Had they released their numbers when everyone else did, they’d be one part of a much larger story in which Clinton was the star.

When you combine this with how they’ve reacted to a number of the other issues that have come up – aggressively shooting down the madrassa smear, including threatening Fox News over it, or the whole David Geffen dust-up, which made Clinton look over-sensitive and signaled Obama’s willingness to play hardball – the Obama campaign is clearly making the right moves at this early stage. Of course, Clinton’s team is even more battle-hardened, and Edwards has positioned himself as well as he could given the star power of the other two, all of which means this is the most interesting Democratic race in a couple of generations. But at the moment it’s hard to envision the Obama campaign imploding like other flavors of the month have in the past.

The Personal and the Political

2007-03-27T16:29:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted on TAPPED

Anyone wondering what John Edwards thinks about religion - his own, and the country’s – would do well to read this long interview he did with Beliefnet. As a non-believer myself (and yes, more of us should be willing to say so publicly – kudos to Harold Meyerson for doing so recently), I found a good deal there to make me comfortable with Edwards. Despite his professions of a powerful faith, he declines to say that America is a Christian nation, and comes out against organized prayer in schools and posting the Ten Commandments in public buildings, two distressingly popular items on the Christian right agenda.

Amongst all the recent discussion of how much voters should consider candidates’ personal lives, there is something else to note. In the interview, Edwards says that after their son Wade was killed in a car accident in 1996, “my faith came roaring back and has stayed with me since that time.” I have no idea if I’m representative, but as a parent, I can tell you that the fact that the Edwardses endured what is without question the most awful think a human being can experience - the death of a child - and came through it with their marriage intact, and without losing their minds, fills me with an admiration that is difficult to describe. At the risk of being exclusionary to the young and childless, if you don’t have kids, you wouldn’t understand. Does it say something about what kind of president Edwards would be? I think so. I’m not saying my vote is decided, but the fact is that the presidency is a unique office, one in which personal weaknesses and strengths are far more important than they are in, say, a legislator.

A member of Congress can have all sorts of personal foibles – he can be cruel, or stupid, or eccentric - but if he isn’t corrupt, ultimately the only thing that makes much of a difference in our lives is how he votes. But a president is different. American voters don’t vote for president by a checklist of issues, and they shouldn’t. Think about our current president. What is it about him that has led to the awe-inspiring magnitude of the damage he has caused? It isn’t because he had the wrong positions on issues – you could have taken another Republican with the same basic policy goals and put him in office, and the destruction wouldn’t have been nearly as great. No, it is Bush’s character that led us here: his lack of curiosity, his delusions of destiny, his simplistic thinking, his Manichean worldview and intolerance for the possibility that he might be wrong (or for anyone who would raise that possibility). And what made FDR or Lincoln great? It wasn’t a series of position papers, it was their character that enabled them to respond to crises in admirable ways.

So while Edwards is right that no one should vote for him simply out of sympathy for his family’s struggle, there’s nothing wrong with watching how he deals with that struggle and making some reasonable conclusions about what it says about the kind of person he is. It may be an imperfect means to assess how he would deal with the unique challenges a president faces, but at least it’s something.

Bizarro America

2007-03-27T12:19:00.000-05:00

Ezra Klein notes the following over at his personal, non-TAPPED blog:

Every once in awhile, I tune into Limbaugh to hear what's being said over there, and it's like entering bizarro-America. The other day, the topic was how the Bush administration is a weak, kindly crew whose primary failing is an unwillingness to retaliate against opponents and a strangely accommodating attitude towards unreasonable Congressional demands. The difference between that characterization and my perception isn't a bridgeable argument -- we're talking about different realities.

Quite so. Recently I was on a radio show opposite Tammy Bruce, a syndicated radio host. We were talking about Iraq, and she began to argue that the problem with the Bush administration is that they're not killing enough people in Iraq. If we could just off al-Sadr and a few other bad guys, things would really turn around. This seems to be an emerging narrative in the wingnut world.

I have to admit that I lost my cool a little bit late in the interview, when Bruce argued that we went to Iraq because after 9/11, we had to defend ourselves. It was all I could do to keep from screaming, "Are you insane?!?" If you're curious, you can listen to the exchange here.

In Which I Act Like a Know-It-All, Compact Fluorescent Bulb Edition

2007-03-22T13:45:00.000-05:00

Over at the Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum wonders, among other things, whether there are any brands of compact fluorescent light bulbs that work with dimmer switches.

Having recently replaced a dimmer switch after doing a little research on the internets (let's not talk about the part where I made all the lights in half the house suddenly turn off, resulting in a call to the electrician), I can confirm that the answer is that no fluorescent bulb will work with a dimmer. The way a dimmer switch works is by turning the light on and off very rapidly, hundreds of times a second. The on-off is invisible to the human eye, which just sees the smaller net amount of light coming through.

As everyone knows, fluorescent lights take a moment to turn on once the switch is pulled. Since a dimmer switch will be turning the light off hundreds of times a second, the light won't ever get that running start it needs to turn on.

Incidentally, this is also why a light on a dimmer often emits a slight buzzing sound. The rapid delivery and cutting off of the juice makes the filament in the incandescent bulb vibrate, which creates the buzzing.

Since I discovered how dimmer switches work, I've been dying to tell somebody and show how clever I am. Thanks for the opportunity!

Ask the Republicans

2007-03-20T11:28:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at TAPPED

So now John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton have all been asked, with varying results, whether they agree with Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace’s assertion that homosexuality is “immoral.” Much ink has been spilled on their answers. But I haven’t seen that the leading Republican candidates for president have been asked the question, and I’d be interested to hear the results.

Mitt Romney would probably give a full-throated “You betcha!” -- fervor of the converted, you know. McCain, I’m guessing, would hem and haw in a pathetic and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to signal to the conservatives that he’s on their team without sounding intolerant. But what about Rudy? The guy who dresses up in drag, has plenty of gay friends, and used to march in the annual gay pride parade in New York? He’s obviously not going to say homosexuality is immoral. But if he dodges, it ought to be just as big news as it was for Hillary.

This is hardly the only uncomfortable question the Republican candidates are likely to face. I’m waiting for the day when someone stands up at one of his town meetings and asks John McCain if he is born again. For McCain -- an Episcopalian -- the answer is “no,” but in a Republican primary, that’s the wrong answer.

But back to the immorality question, the interesting dynamic here is that Democrats generally believe, correctly or not, that their candidates are all perfectly fine with homosexuality, but are too politically cautious to say so (with the exception of Edwards, who gave the right answer the first time he was asked). Republicans, on the other hand, probably aren’t quite sure what their candidates actually believe. So why doesn’t somebody ask them?

Who's Suffering?

2007-03-15T16:06:00.000-05:00

Am I the only one who thinks this is insane? Barack Obama gets in trouble for saying, “nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people”? Just who is criticizing him over it? There are certainly lots of knowing pundits talking about how this’ll hurt him with the AIPAC crowd. But is there a sane human being who would actually argue that, as a collectivity, the Israeli people are currently suffering more than the Palestinian people? Life in Gaza and much of the West Bank is one of unceasing misery, for god’s sake. This has nothing to do with whether you think Hamas is a legitimate political group, or whether you think the wall is a reasonable response to a security threat, or whether you think Arafat was a terrorist or a statesman.

Believe me, I appreciate what Israelis live with. I’ve spent plenty of time there, and members of my immediate family have shed blood fighting in Israel’s wars. But I repeat: is there anyone who would actually argue that the Israeli people are “suffering” more than the Palestinian people? If not, why is this controversial?

Even the people quoted raising objections are not objecting to Obama’s point about suffering. For instance, in this article in the Des Moines Register, we hear Paulee Lipsman, a former DNC member from Des Moines, say, “I think there's a great deal of empathy for the Palestinian people, but they need to change their government.” Fair enough. But she’s not arguing that they aren’t suffering. Yet the article’s headline said “Obama Remark Draws Fire From Jews.” Didn’t sound too much like “fire” to me.

But wherever you do find someone criticizing Obama directly, they seem to be saying that it’s other Jews who are going to be really mad. “Awarding first place in the suffering matrix is odious and infelicitous,” one Rabbi tells the New York Times. “I think a lot of Americans would find that comment offensive, too.” Would they? Allow me to engage in a little hyperbole here and state that nearly anyone who’s crazed enough to “find that comment offensive” has already decamped for Kiryat Arba or Ma’ale Adumim, where, in a monstrous act of fanaticism and selfishness, they’ve put their own children in the line of fire because the Moshiach will be arriving any day now.

So this seem seems to me like little more than an opportunity for reporters to write stories about how Barack Obama isn’t quite ready for prime time.

Damn Right, We're Angry

2007-03-14T14:36:00.000-05:00

My new column is up at TomPaine.com. Here's an excerpt:

We can’t deny it any longer. There’s no point in hiding it, no point in trying to explain it away. Yes, it’s true: We progressives are angry. And we no longer care if the centrist, moderate guardians of the establishment scold us for it.

Our anger is not just some vague feeling whose source we can’t put our finger on. It isn’t based on absurd conspiracy theories and it isn’t illogical.

We’re angry because of what has happened to our country, because of how we’ve been treated, and because of the innumerable crimes the conservatives have committed. We’re angry at the president, we’re angry at the Congress, we’re angry at the news media. And we have every right to be.

Yes, we’re angry at George W. Bush. We’re not angry at him because of who he sleeps with, and we’re not angry at him because we think he represents some socio-cultural movement we didn’t like 40 years ago, or because he hung out with a different crowd than we did in high school. We’re angry at him because of what he’s done.

It goes on to list every last thing we're angry about. Read the whole thing here.

Article Title of the Week

2007-03-13T12:58:00.000-05:00

My good buddy Sarah Posner has an article over at the American Prospect on the terrifying Reverend John Hagee, and his appearance at the recent AIPAC meeting. The article has a super cool title: "The Goy Who Cried Wolf." Now that's headline writing!

Newt '08?

2007-03-07T17:00:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at TAPPED.

Newt Gingrich has seen his opening. And you can’t blame him – given that all three of the leading GOP ’08 contenders have their problems with the base, there seems to be a gap somebody like him could fill.

How do we know he’s leaning toward throwing his visionary, forward-looking, world-transforming hat into the ring? this press release, from Focus on the Family:

Gingrich Tells Dobson He’s ‘Sought God’s Forgiveness’
Former House speaker admits moral failings, discusses threat of radical Islam

Former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich tells Dr. James C. Dobson he has “gotten on my knees and sought God’s forgiveness” for his personal moral failings in a two-part installment of Dobson’s international radio program airing Thursday and Friday.

Take heart, religious right! Your savior is saddling up his white horse!

Lately, Newt has been quietly preparing to make himself the candidate of the religious right. He put out a quickie book called Rediscovering God in America: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation’s History and Future and hosted a Fox News special on religion in America. He doesn’t just want to be a philosopher-king, he wants to be a philosopher-historian-futurist-theologian-king.

Newt has said he’s going to wait until the fall to make a decision about running for president, and if the race still looks open, he might get in. It seems as though he wants to be president, he just doesn’t particularly want to run for president, to paraphrase something John McCain used to say. But the scenario actually seems pretty reasonable: once voters in, say, South Carolina start getting flyers in their mailboxes with photos of Giuliani marching in gay pride parades (or in a dress), he tanks. Meanwhile, hard-core religious conservatives can’t bring themselves to trust so recent a convert as Mitt Romney. For his part, McCain gives up trying to woo them and, figuring that they’ll remain fractured, goes back to making himself the candidate of moderates and independents. If all that were to happen, it’d be Gingrich Time.

Of course, Newt has some of the same problems Giuliani does; in fact, he may be the only candidate with a personal history displaying more sadism toward his former wives than Rudy. We all know the stories – served his first wife with divorce papers while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery, had an affair with a young aide (now his third wife) while married to the second wife. But as we know, that stuff doesn’t matter much – what’s more important is whether you can assure conservatives that you’re on the right team when it comes to the culture wars (see Limbaugh, Rush; Bennett, Bill; etc.). And nobody does hippie-bashing with more gusto than Newt.

So if you want to get a taste of what Newt is offering, at his web site, you can download “iNewts,” and listen to his wisdom while you’re on the stairmaster. That’s right, iNewts. But hold on - shouldn't they be "NewtCasts"? Which you would play on your iNewt? Oh well.

Not to Harp On This, But...

2007-03-05T16:12:00.000-05:00

This weekend, the New York Times told us that Rudy Giuliani isn't getting along so great with his kids:

Andrew Giuliani has been at his father’s side in campaign commercials and inaugurations since he was a toddler, famously bounding across the stage in a rambunctious manner and mimicking his father’s rhetorical flourishes during Mr. Giuliani’s 1994 mayoral inauguration.

But Mr. Giuliani’s relationship with Andrew has grown strained and distant since his very public and bitter divorce from Andrew’s mother, Donna Hanover, and his marriage to Judith Nathan, according to Andrew and others familiar with the relationship.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Andrew, a sophomore and member of the golf team at Duke University, acknowledged having had difficulties with Ms. Nathan, and said that he and his father had recently tried to reconcile after not speaking “for a decent amount of time.”

“There’s obviously a little problem that exists between me and his wife,” the younger Mr. Giuliani said. “And we’re trying to figure that out. But as of right now it’s not working as well as we would like.”

And now, Giuliani offers his explanation:

“My wife, Judith, is a very loving and caring and good mother and grandmother, good mother and stepmother,” Mr. Giuliani said in response to a a barrage of questions from dozens of journalists about his relationship with his children. “She has done everything she can. The responsibility is mine. And I believe that these problems with blended families are challenges. Sometimes they are. And the challenges are best worked on privately. In other words, the more privacy I can have for my family, the better we are going to be able to deal with all these difficulties. And the best way to kind of handle that is to make as little comment about this as possible.”

An aide then interjected “Last question!” though Mr. Giuliani had only answered one. The next one, too, was about his son’s comments.

America's Mayor, getting tough questions from reporters? Shocking!

The point is, if I was Andrew Giuliani, I'd be pretty pissed at my dad, too. Let's not forget just what Rudy did to Andrew's mother. While Donna Hanover was back in Gracie Mansion, Rudy paraded down a Manhattan street in front of photographers with his mistress, so all the world could see he was cheating on his wife. He then informed her that he was leaving her via that most tender and understanding means, the press conference. Yes, a press conference. I'm guessing Andrew thought that was kind of a cruel thing to do. Who knows, maybe Andrew was sitting with his mom watching television when they heard the news. And let's remember that at the time Rudy was acting out this little opera of sadism, Andrew was 14 years old.

Wasted? Yes.

2007-03-02T10:33:00.000-05:00

John McCain has now been forced to sort-of-apologize for saying American lives had been "wasted" in Iraq, just as Barack Obama did a few weeks ago (of course, Obama's statement got much more news coverage, given the responsiveness of the media to the right's apparatus of outrage). In truth, it was far more offensive for McCain to say than Obama - he is, after all a supporter of the war, yet he somehow thinks American lives are being wasted (and now he wants to send more).

The reason both of them had to apologize is because we've come to a place where the men and women serving in the military have become like religious icons. Any word that could possibly be interpreted as putting them or their service in anything but the most noble and heroic light is now treated as blasphemy that must be instantly condemned, disavowed, and apologized for. Or more properly, the religious icon is not those men and women as individuals, but as a collectivity, "the troops," who must be treated like fragile little children in need of a program of perpetual self-esteem building. Don't criticize the mission, or their morale might be hurt! As Chris Hayes recently asked, "Can we please, please, please stop pretending that we currently have 160,000 saints with guns patrolling the streets in Iraq? Can we please stop justifying the war in terms of it somehow being waged on the soldier’s behalf?"

But I’ll say it: the lives of those who died in Iraq were wasted. They could have grown up, had productive lives, fallen in love, raised families, held their grandchildren in their arms, seen the world evolve and change. But instead they died, for nothing other than George W. Bush’s ungodly nightmare of a war.

That doesn't mean they weren’t brave, and it doesn't mean they weren’t trying to do the right thing as best they could. They thought they'd be defending their country when they enlisted in the military. They were given orders and they followed them. But now they're dead, and unless you’re one of the deluded few who still believe this war was a good idea, you can’t come to any other conclusion but that their lives were wasted.

For some that may not be the case in a more narrow sense – some, for instance, died performing an act that saved others. But most just died, killed by a roadside bomb or a sniper. Nothing but misery and suffering came of their deaths, and it's people like John McCain – who pushed for this war as relentlessly as anyone before it began, and who has been unwavering in his belief that it was the right thing to do - who bear the responsibility.

I can barely describe the rage that wells up within me when I see Republican congressmen and administration flacks and blowhard right-wing pundits bleating on about how anyone who wants to end this madness must not be "supporting the troops." They, who sent those soldiers off to be killed and maimed, they, who unleashed the chaos that has come and will come because of this war, they, who couldn't give a rat's ass about what happens to those soldiers when they come home missing limbs and parts of their minds and racked with nightmares as they try to piece their lives back together, they, whose ignorance and stupidity and immorality brought us to the hellish place we find ourselves, they have the gall to accuse us, the majority of Americans who want to end the war and know what a terrible mistake it was, of not "supporting the troops."

I'm sure that if I was one of those parents who had lost a child in this war, I'd want to think that his or her death meant that our country was safe and democracy was saved, that it wasn't a waste in the end. Perhaps feeling that way helps to lessen the unspeakable agony of losing a child; I don't know. But it does no disservice to those troops to acknowledge that most of those lives were wasted.

In a just world, George Bush and Dick Cheney and Bill Kristol and John McCain and all the rest of them would be sentenced to spend the rest of their lives visiting one family after another who lost a son or daughter, one soldier after another who came back wounded in body or mind or spirit. They would be forced to look them in the eye, see their pain, then get down on their goddamn knees and beg for forgiveness.

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy

2007-02-28T17:24:00.000-05:00

As promised, my column on Rudy Giuliani is now up at TomPaine.com. Here's an excerpt:

At some point, someone—probably an “independent” 527 group acting in support of one of the other candidates—is going to start passing out flyers with pictures of Giuliani in drag. You could argue that it takes a real man to be secure enough in his sexuality to put on a dress. But Rudy’s heterosexuality is not in question. The point won’t be to convince anyone that he’s gay, it will be to convince conservative white men that Rudy is too comfortable with gay people, and too comfortable having fun by playing around with sexual identity.

The flyers targeting Giuliani will probably say something about “New York values.” In other words, Rudy comes from a place populated with The Other, full of gays and Jews and blacks and who knows what else. That’s where he comes from, they’ll say, and that’s who he is—The Other. That attack will be devastating, and all the ads about 9/11 that the Giuliani campaign can buy will not enable him to recover.

Looking at Giuliani’s current standing in the polls, one might be tempted to think otherwise. But one must remember that no one has gone after him since that image was formed on 9/11. He hasn’t been criticized by prominent figures, he hasn’t been subject to attack ads, he hasn’t had smart and experienced political strategists plotting and executing a careful strategy to destroy him. But he will.

Read the whole thing here.

"Brand Romney"

2007-02-27T16:26:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at TAPPED

As Ezra notes, questions about Mitt Romney's religion could be getting too much attention, given the fact that it is Romney as an individual people will either be voting for or against. But the Romney campaign is obviously acutely aware of the question of whether conservatives will consider Romney "one of us" or not. Today's Boston Globe has an article on that most delicious of campaign stories, the leaked strategy Powerpoint:

The plan, for instance, indicates that Romney will define himself in part by focusing on and highlighting enemies and adversaries, such common political targets as "jihadism," the "Washington establishment," and taxes, but also Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, "European-style socialism," and, specifically, France. Even Massachusetts, where Romney has lived for almost 40 years, is listed as one of those "bogeymen," alongside liberalism and Hollywood values.

Indeed, a page titled "Primal Code for Brand Romney" said that Romney should define himself as a foil to Bay State Democrats such as Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John Kerry and former governor Michael Dukakis.

"Primal" is right. Romney's campaign already has an early-1980s feel to it; his first ad proclaimed, "I believe the American people are overtaxed and the government is overfed." But his chief advisor Alex Castellanos, who has made a career out of defining his clients' opponents as dark, threatening representatives of The Other, knows just what he's doing. In order to convince conservatives that he's one of them, Romney will have to show them he has the right enemies; in other words, he hates the people they hate. That's how you define tribal borders: by identifying and demonizing the enemy.

Rick Perlstein recently argued that Romney's decision to announce his candidacy at a museum honoring noted xenophobic anti-Semite Henry Ford was a calculated piece of tribal signaling, akin to Ronald Reagan's 1980 announcement speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. With all three of the leading Republican candidates facing questions about their conservative bona fides, the race on the GOP side is likely to go through a couple of stages. First, each one will work to convince voters that he really, really can't stand gay family-destroyers, decadent Hollywood pornography-mongers, and anyone else who gets conservatives' blood pumping (Romney will certainly be taking a bold stand when he goes after the French). Then they'll turn their guns on each other, arguing that the other guys are the ones who embody all the values conservatives hate. It should be surpassingly ugly, and fun to watch.

Ha! Ha! Ha, I Said!

2007-02-26T15:22:00.000-05:00

I actually caught a few minutes of Fox News' supposed answer to the Daily Show, the "1/2 Hour Comedy Hour" (you can see clips here). First off, as you can tell, it's incredibly not funny. So far from funny that funny isn't even in sight. Even conservatives, apparently, are trashing it.

Now you might say, well Paul, you're just a soft-headed liberal, so you wouldn't laugh at conservative humor no matter how good it was. Maybe. But I think even Fox knows how unfunny it is. How do I know? The laugh track.

The laugh track on "The 1/2 Hour Comedy Hour" is about as in-your-face as it gets, so ridiculously over the top that it's almost the only thing about the show that is funny. As far as the laugh track is concerned, every joke on the show, no matter how lame, is just about the funniest thing it's ever heard.

But why would you need a laugh track at all? The Daily Show doesn't need one - they have a studio audience who laughs at the jokes. But "The 1/2 Hour Comedy Hour" has a studio audience, too. If they were laughing, you wouldn't need a laugh track. But they obviously aren't.

Rudy's Real Problem

2007-02-25T15:28:00.000-05:00

My TomPaine column on Wednesday is going to be about why Rudy Giuliani will never be the Republican nominee for president. Here's a hint - it's not because of his history of marital infidelity. Abortion? Well, kind of. Gay rights? Getting warmer. But it's got something to do with this:

Stay tuned.

Just How Old Do You Think the Earth Is, Senator?

2007-02-23T16:26:00.000-05:00

I have an op-ed in the Boston Globe on the question of candidates talking about their religion. Here's an excerpt:

Today, candidates for the White House feel compelled to do the opposite of what Kennedy did: convince voters not that their religion will be irrelevant, but that their faith will guide them each and every day.

Yet paradoxically, we've moved further and further from any substantive discussion of what it means to be led in office by religious faith.

Listen to candidates talk about religion and they seem to be following two rules:

1) Profess that nothing is more important to you than your religion.

2) Be as vague as possible about your religion.

Read the whole thing here.