Politics and Press

As The General Speaks His Mind, Journalists Lose Theirs

“[McCain] hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn’t a wartime squadron. I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”

Retired General Wesley Clark set off a brief firestorm over the weekend with the above quote and Senator McCain and the press immediately went nuts. Now, it is easy to understand that McCain would be a little upset since having been shot down and suffered imprisonment seems to be one of his most salient features, but what the hell is wrong with the press?

One can parse Clark’s quote a thousand times and still not come to the conclusion that he was saying anything other than what he said – that “…getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is [not] a qualification to become president.” But the print and TV press went bozo over it, implying that to have said that was to criticize McCain’s service to the country, thereby implying that getting in a plane getting shot down actually IS a presidential qualification.

Having gone through a long, tedious primary season we now look forward to the familiar process of the press avoiding analysis of issues and focusing on the “horse race” via the meaningless minutia that the press deems worthy of blowing up into something superficially serious.

It will most likely be ugly, nasty, and stupid. And come next January we will have a new president who will most likely have been elected without benefit of a smart, sophisticated, analytical press.

Obama speaks at Wesleyan as Belichick joins Hall of Fame - Sports and Politics, part 3

Just when it seemed that the US Democratic primary campaign was going to sink into the quicksand of complete disinterest, Barack Obama has made a deft move that is sure to focus attention on more interesting topics than the exact delegate vote not including Michigan, American Samoa, the Virgins Islands and Florida. My brother and I, lost in the snows of the tundra, haven’t been able to grasp the nuances of that mathematical formula. What we have figured out is that Middletown, Connecticut will be the centre of world attention this afternoon as Obama steps in in relief of his stricken brother-in-arms Ted Kennedy, who will be sitting in the first row as his stepdaughter graduates from one of the premier US East coast elite liberal Arts universities and his son celebrates the 15th anniversary of his graduation. But Wesleyan is also probably the premier elite small university in another area: sports, and my brother Doug thinks that Obama is hoping to gain stature by being in the presence of some of the heroic figures who are already in the Wesleyan Hall of Fame as Bill Belichick joins it along with legendary marathon runner Bill Rodgers.

But it is not only Rogers and Belichick, the winner of four Super Bowls with the New England Patriots and the most successful football coach in recent NFL history, who will be present, but also former Wesleyan student and current arch Belichick nemesis Coach Eric Mangini of NFL’s New York Jets, who will be there for his fifteenth reunion. For Wesleyan is the only university to have produced two current NFL coaches, and Doug and many scouts feel that Wesleyan’s combination of intellectual depth and athletic grace has led to the development of a number of quarterbacks wearing the red and black, who would surely have dominated the football fields of America if they hadn’t gone into more scholarly pursuits.

So give credit where it is due. Obama has made a very smart political move by moving into this territory. He will surely deliver an excellent commencement address, and do his friend Ted a favour while doing it, even if his own elite university background is limited to mainstream Harvard. But with any luck, the sports journalists will also be there to keep watch over Belichick and Mangini, and to see how Rodgers is running along these days. Obama can relax in the afterglow of some heavy hitters from the world of sports, whose chumminess would be most helpful to his popularity among the blue collar working folk.

Campaign ’08: The Other Edwards Speaks Out

Sunday’s NY Times carried an Op Ed piece by Elizabeth Edwards (Bowling 1, Health Care 0) on the role of the press in the campaign and it is a dandy. It is no secret that she is a smart and honorable woman who is widely admired by people on both sides of the political aisle but the skill and grace with which she skewers the press is remarkable.

She suggests that we are getting a kind of “Cliffs Notes of the news”, and that the press’s group decision to ignore serious candidates like Senators Biden, Dodd and Brownback simply eliminated them from serious consideration leaving the press to its search for various personality cults. As she says:

The decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate. Articles purporting to be news spent thousands upon thousands of words contemplating whether he would enter the race, to the point that before he even entered, he was running second in the national polls for the Republican nomination. …

…Watching the campaign unfold, I saw how the press gravitated toward a narrative template for the campaign, searching out characters as if for a novel: on one side, a self-described 9/11 hero with a colorful personal life, a former senator who had played a president in the movies, a genuine war hero with a stunning wife and an intriguing temperament, and a handsome governor with a beautiful family and a high school sweetheart as his bride. And on the other side, a senator who had been first lady, a young African-American senator with an Ivy League diploma, a Hispanic governor with a self-deprecating sense of humor and even a former senator from the South standing loyally beside his ill wife. Issues that could make a difference in the lives of Americans didn’t fit into the narrative template and, therefore, took a back seat to these superficialities.

The next time the NY Times is seeking a regular columnist they could do a lot worse than recruiting Ms. Edwards.

Campaign ’08: A House of Cards

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction. - Graham Greene

Watching the first segment of House of Cards, a 1990 BBC series, recently I began to think that I had seen it already, but with an American cast. In the British version Ian Richardson plays Francis Urquhart (“F.U.” in the headlines) a tough, cynically self-serving Member of Parliament bent on gathering as much personal power as possible regardless of the cost to other politicians or his country.

I was particularly struck with the portrayal of a young, ambitious reporter who unwittingly becomes one of F.U.’s tools in destroying his political enemies. Urquhart simply provides her with “off-the-record” information that she then uses to beat up on whomever is next on Urquhart’s list. It is all easy work for her and effective politics for Urquhart.

And a lesson for all journalists covering today’s political campaigns in America: do what it takes to get “access” to the players, jump on anything smacking of scandal, pump it up and by furthering the interests of your “player”, enhance your own career. House of Cards has become a playbook for many of today’s American politicians and their friends in the press but it is a helluva lot more entertaining as fiction.

Sports and Politics, Cont.

As outlined by Jeff in a number of perceptive articles, the US primary system has fallen on hard times, if it is meant to display to the world the wonders of democracy. Not only have the so-called debates been at high-school level, most observers agree that the actual candidates might have something useful to say, if only asked or allowed to do so. Instead two intelligent and informed people are treated by questioners as fools, and do a pretty good job of confirming that with their answers. At the same time one of the areas of potential dramatic interest in US politics is sorely missing - sports. In this field Big George W. could finally show his prowess, and actually knew what he was talking about when baseball or football came up. But in the spring there is really nothing going on down below the border, and audiences can only be treated with ancient shots of Barack playing high school basketball and then promising to build a basketball court in the White House. So far we haven’t even seen Hillary in her field hockey duds, though she must have played it, or something, at some point or other.

This is Canada’s season and governments are wary of calling an election up north while the Stanley Cup playoffs are on, since the whole country can switch allegiances in a flash depending on which team(s) are still in the hunt. This year only one Canadian team has made it into the quarter final, but lots of sports lovers, like New Yorker star writer Adam Gopnik, would be glad to tell you it’s the grandest team of them all - the Montréal Canadiens - and the surprising march of them towards the Stanley Cup has any Quebec separatiste begging for no election in the next weeks. For as Gopnik (joining the late lamented Mordecai Richler) has argued convincingly, les habs are as good a force as there is for explaining why Canada functions so well despite all its apparent contradictions. (John Ibbitson’s recent statement that, without anybody paying much attention, Canada has suddenly become the most successful country on earth, fits nicely into this framework).

Playing out of the second-largest French-speaking city in the world, les canadiéns ice a team with a larger percentage of French-speaking players, and of course coaches, than anyone else, have a name which sticks in the gut of Quebec separatistes, who tried with no success to get it changed, and have hired several key Russian players this year who have flourished in North America’s most European city. They also have no hesitation to replace a French player with a better Anglo one if it will help the team. At a crucial moment in this year’s race they shipped their French goalie to Washington, gave the job to Carey Price, a 20 year old kid from Anahim Lake, British Columbia whose mother is the chief of a remote First Nations band on the edge of the spectacular true wild west Chilcotin Plateau, and ended up winning the race in the east. It’s that kind of mixture which makes the separatistes head for cover, because there isn’t anyone in Montréal wh o is not cheering for the native kid who had to fly with his bush pilot father to the metropolis of Williams Lake, 300 kilometers away, to play hockey. And there’s no Canadian who wasn’t cheering for the Habs as they opened their series today against Philadelphia. This is awful news for the enemies of Canadian federalism and they will lay low for the next months.

Oh yes, the Canadians were losing tonight 3-2 with 45 seconds to go, when one of the Russians scored, sending the game into overtime. They won it 28 seconds into the overtime period when another Russian scored. The crowd from Tuktayuktuk to Newfoundland went into a frenzy.

Campaign ’08:It’s the Press Stupid - And Vice Versa

Last week’s debacle that barely passed for a debate on ABC is one more piece of evidence that we are stuck with a press and media that are committed to the avoidance of intelligent discussion of serious issues. The ingredients that are inexorably moving this election into a kind of fantasy-land of mind-numbing trivialities are all in place: lazy reporters playing off candidates’ criticisms of their opponents; the media’s willingness – no, eagerness - to pump up meaningless side issues like lapel pins and nutty ministers; endless hours of so-called analysts on cable TV pimping for their own candidates; an over-reliance on vapid man-in-the-street interviews and apparently an almost total unwillingness to explore serious issues in depth.

Senator Clinton’s campaign has mismanaged itself into a Rovian corner from which it is reduced to calling her opponent schoolyard names, hinting at character flaws in Obama (then denying she did any such thing) and feeding the lazy but hungry press with tiny little issues that they can then blow up into earth-shattering issues. That the Clinton campaign is deficient in honesty and seriousness is of course no surprise – it informed their earlier incarnation and for the most part people do not change. The Obama campaign has been caught in the position of having to defend the Senator on trivial issues, has not done a good job at it, and has become increasingly and obviously frustrated which simply feeds the beast.

But the really discouraging part of the situation is the complicity of the press in directing the interest of the voters towards meaningless issues while helping them avoid doing the hard work of thinking about real issues. This is old news but given the state of the country we need more and better not the same old crap. Now it is on to Indiana, another state where flag pins, nutty ministers, bin Laden and the over-rated threat of Iran can be used to pump up the volume and drown out serous discussion of serious issues.

Campaign 2008: Riding the Road of Trivialities

As the interminable Democratic campaign for president drags its weary ass along the Trivialities Turnpike it is worth asking how the hell we got on this road to begin with? Serious issues abound – the failed Iraq War, a looming failure in Afghanistan, a weakened NATO unwilling to push the fight in Afghanistan, a weakened American military, a dollar in the proverbial toilet, an enormous budget deficit, a looming or actual recession, shortfalls in Medicare and Social Security, rampant international distrust of the United States, a non-existent Middle East policy – and the list goes on.

And what are we being fed by the media? John McCain’s barbecue menu and the great spitball fight between Senators Clinton and Obama. The press moves from spitball to spitball, manufacturing intensity on fundamentally trivial issues. They capture the public’s interest and create temporary shifts in polls that then feed the horse race mentality of a press unable to focus on the real issues that determine the state of the world and of America’s declining quality of life. Do we really care all that much that Geraldine Ferraro thinks Senator Obama is “lucky to be black?” Or that Senator Obama’s former Pastor has said some stupid things mixed in with a justifiable rage over much of what America has done to blacks for over 200 years? Or whether Bill Clinton plays his typical cheap tricks? Are those the only kind of issues that can capture the American peoples’ attention? Are we really so ignorant of the world or so lazy that we cannot put the effort into thinking about serious issues and identifying trivialities for what they are? Or have we simply turned it all over to a shallow, irresponsible press?

For a lengthier and stronger look at these concerns see Matt Taibbi’s latest piece on his website: The Smirking Chimp – here is a taste:

We can’t focus for more than ten seconds on anything at all and we’re constantly exercised about stupid media-generated non-scandals, guilt-by-association raps, accidental dumb utterances of various campaign aides and other nonsense — while at the same time we have no energy at all left to wonder about the mass burgling of the national budget for phony military contracts, the war, the billion dollars or so in campaign contributions to be spent this year that will be buying a small mountain of favors for the next four years. – Matt Taibbi

Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Senator McCain

Recent and ongoing events in Pakistan and Afghanistan highlight in new ways the disastrous effects of the United States’ misguided Iraq invasion and the delusionary nature of Senator McCain’s commitment to continuing a bankrupt policy in Iraq.

The War in Afghanistan is not going well. The Taliban is back in force, the poppy fields are again feeding America’s cocaine habit, America’s allies are beginning to question their willingness to continue in Afghanistan, violence against civilians is on the increase and the U.S. cannot bring enough force to bear because its military is bogged down in Iraq.

If there is a failure in Afghanistan – which appears possible, if not likely – the blame can go directly to the Bush decision to commit to an unnecessary war in Iraq. By not committing the needed forces to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan in favor of invading Iraq, Bush allowed the Taliban to withdraw into Pakistan and form a new commitment to take Afghanistan back. This in turn led to a stronger terrorist structure in Pakistan which has destabilized much of that country and which runs the risk of leading to the loss of major portions of Pakistan to the Taliban and its Al Queda allies. This is doubly worrisome given Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Afghanistan was a major training ground for Al Quada and the opportunity to eliminate that from happening again now seems lost.

Which brings us to Senator McCain’s delusions. His campaign is based largely on his belief that the so-called surge has worked and that victory is in sight. While those are extremely questionable opinions, it is clear that even were they true any such victory would come at terrible cost – in human life, American treasure, diminished American influence in the world, increased Iranian influence in the region, a destabilized Pakistan and in all probability a failed state of Afghanistan.

The U.S. president has enormous powers in foreign affairs – reviewing the disastrous impact of President Bush’s foreign policy reminds us of that. And it reminds us that choosing the next president can send the United States further into decline if it sends into office a man (or woman) unable to understand the difference between genuine American national interest, and jingoistic political slogans. Senator McCain clearly is determined to wage a campaign aimed at continuing the failed Bush policies in Iraq and the voters will need to decide whether it wants what would amount to a third Bush term.

Willard Mitt Romney: Sewer Rat

“Because I love America, in this time of war, I feel I have to stand aside for our party and our country… If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror” Willard Romney, 2/7/08

Mitt Romney has spent $40 million to provide an opportunity for the vast majority of Americans – including the majority of republicans – to learn to despise him. He could have saved his money – all he really had to do was crawl out of the sewer and open his mouth in public. His ever-shifting stands on issues indicated his lack of character and judgment but the pious, self-serving slanders quoted above seal the verdict.

The people of Massachusetts learned their lesson the hard way but Romney is indeed doing the right thing to stand down “for the good of our country”.  Not even Schadenfreude over his failed campaign can compensate for having to listen to his self-indulgent, mealy-mouthed, pious bullshit.

A Mormon friend had the following to say to me months ago and he nailed it.

“I really detest this Romney guy. There is something sickening about him besides arrogance and his shameful bragging about success. …The bastard has lived off others his whole life….he is a hollow version of himself. It is hard for me to believe that anyone who makes an honest living won’t be revolted by the bastard….He has a long history of parasitic success. He has no track record of running anything or risking like a true capitalist. He has always had the inside track behind closed doors. Warren Buffett nailed him in a NYT piece that discusses how he made millions on commissions. Buffett hates fees and commissions because they drain share holder profits and don’t add to the economy. And by the way in that NYT article they hit him on how many people lost their livelihood when he bought and sold companies, several ended up in bankruptcy and he still made a ton of money while others lost their jobs, pensions and benefits. Romney actually said, “I wish I had paid more attention to how these deals affected employees”.
He is living off blood money.

All he did in his campaign was show us how insecure he is.”

PBS GOES ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

It is easy to despair over Fox News and less easy but still readily possible to despair over CBS, NBC and ABC news. But there has always been this sense that PBS would raise the bar – would be serious and discuss real issues. Sorry – that is no longer the case. Witness the Lehrer Report.

Tonight Judy Woodruff covered – for an endless and painful twenty minutes – the South Carolina Democratic primary. Having sat through that - whatever it was - I can say with some authority that issues in the South Carolina Democratic primary do not exist. I would have thought that there were issues around Iraq, the economy, education, and health care, but no. The issues are first of all, are more people going out to hear Bill Clinton prostitute himself in support of loyal wife and next-in-line in the dynasty, or going to Southern Baptist churches to sing and clap for the candidates.

And how does the Lehrer Report analyze this primary? Why the cheapest and safest way possible – the tried and true man/woman in the street approach. “Why, Ahh believe that Bill Clinton is the first black president” or “Obama will bring us all together”. Good lord – what is this all about? Why would any sane person contribute to PBS to give us this mindless puff (as compared to the good work of Bill Moyers)? Woodruff interviewed what seemed like a thousand citizens of S. Carolina, almost none of them interested in discussing a serious issue. And we end up with a kind of horse race with Woodruff as the track tout babbling about something neither she nor we know anything more about tonight then we did before PBS went into boredom mode.