What is this?

This site used to be something, but now it isn't. Maybe it will be again. But in the meantime, you can read my work in the following places:

The Washington Post

The Week

The American Prospect

Unthinkable? To You, Maybe

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?

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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It Takes a Varmint

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?

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!

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

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.