Politics and Press

McCain’s Leadership Deficit

One reason we have political campaigns is to test the character of candidates under the fire of a campaign that more often than not turns out to be messy, nasty, full of fraudulent claims about oneself and outright lies about the opponent. Which means that much of what gets said in a campaign can and should be dismissed as bullshit. But watching a candidate’s behavior under pressure is instructive and during the past week we have come to understand that Senator McCain speaks softly and carries a twig.

A candidate for president makes many decisions but none as important to the country as a whole than the selection of the Vice Presidential candidate. McCain had two people in mind - Senator Joe Lieberman and former Governor Tom Ridge. Regardless of one’s party affiliation it is easy to dislike Lieberman for his self-centered, blathering pomposity but it is nonetheless possible to make a case for his candidacy based on his experiences and knowledge. It is he after all who has had to correct McCain on foreign affairs issues in front of the press. And Tom Ridge has been a U.S. Representative, Governor of a large state, and Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

So how did McCain come up with Governor Palin? The answer is he didn’t come up with her – his ideological enemies in the party found her and forced him to take her at the last minute to satisfy what is aptly referred to as the “base”. As for vetting - we know pretty much how that went.  McCain made the most important decision of his campaign under pressure from political hacks and with limited information. So much for strength of character and purpose. So much for putting country before party. So much for the myth of McCain as maverick. So much for leadership.

If John McCain can be pushed around by the likes of Karl Rove what could we expect of him in the White House? Who will control him?

Desperate Act of a Desperate Man

John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin for his Vice President candidate appears to be the first paragraph of his concession speech. There is simply no good reason to consider putting someone so shallow, so ignorant of foreign affairs, and so inexperienced in the world a heartbeat away from the presidency. And while the strategy is apparent it is an affront to American women to think they will vote along gynecological lines and not recognize the difference between Hillary Clinton and a self-described “hockey Mom” whose experience reads like that of some former Christian Girl Scout who was active in the PTA and who opposes the most basic of women’s rights. Simply put, it is an insulting- even dangerous - decision that ridicules McCain’s so-called expertise in national security matters.
As for the press and media, by and large they are behaving as expected. Fox news has anointed her as a “rising star” with one of their analysts saying she was very knowledgeable about international relations because she “lives near Russia”. The NY Times headlines read: “Choice of Palin is a Bold Move by McCain, With Risks” and, “Palin, an Outsider Who Charms”. The Washington Post chimed in: “With VP Pick, McCain Reclaims Maverick image”, and “The Battle for Women Begins”. The Boston Globe went with: “McCain Surprises with VP Pick” and, “Selection is a Bold, but Risky, Political Gamble”. The stakes are too high for such weak analysis.

None of this is funny. When Palin is measured against challenges like ending the Iraq War, dealing with Iran, working toward peace in the Middle East, addressing Russian petropolitics in the Caucuses and Central Asia, developing an effective relationship with an emerging government in Pakistan, and repairing America’s reputation in the world, she becomes the punchline in a bad joke. If the quality of a candidate’s judgment is a key factor in considering competence, McCain just gave the game away.

Game over.

Conventional Journalism 101

Watching TV journalists (sic) troll the Democrat Party’s convention for news is an exercise in amazed exasperation. Even PBS has been able to puff up the smallest non-story into long-winded analyses of either the meaningless or the obvious. Watching the Lehrer Report’s Judy Woodruff search the convention floor for the odd Hillary Clinton supporter unwilling to recognize a defeat that occurred months ago is almost torture as she turns the bitterness of the few into the big melodrama of the convention. It may well be that some Clinton supporters will vote for someone other than Senator Obama – that is their right and so what? People vote according to unseen and frequently unexpressed rationales and thus it has always been and thus it will always be. But to milk the Clinton-Obama relationship for hour after hour on national TV became just another example of the desperation of a press too lazy or too simple-minded to explore real issues in a way that might actually be helpful to potential voters.

As it turns out Senator Clinton made a gracious exit speech and President Clinton gave a gracious speech in support of the Democratic ticket. Anyone who was led by the press to believe they would behave badly allowed themselves to be duped by Journalism for Dummies.

Campaign Update: The Candidate of Sarcasm

As the campaign continues its endless stroll through the backwaters of American thought, the contrasting styles of the Obama and McCain campaigns is striking. While Obama tries to discuss serious issues in a serious manner McCain has decided to release his nasty, ill-tempered psyche from the trunk of the Straight Talk Express. At every opportunity he snivels and whines about Obama’s popularity, blaming the press for Obama’s political successes and continually sneering about how wonderful the Surge has been for the Iraqi people. He does not remind us of how incredibly destructive of the U.S. national interest the war has been focusing instead on his narrow definition of success in Iraq. A success so far not experienced by most Iraqis – including especially the dead ones and the millions of Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan. Nor, apparently, does he have the sophisticated intelligence to identify the role played in Iraq by the Sadr militia’s unilateral truce and the U.S.’s bribery of Sunni tribes to fight with the U.S. troops. The question for McCain is “are we doing better now than last year?” – the Obama question is, “why the hell did we invade in the first place and was it worth wrecking the U.S. armed forces and economy?’

McCain has in recent weeks blamed Obama for the price of oil, and snidely talks about Obama’s relative youth – an issue one would think McCain might wish to avoid. He (and most of the press) touts his “experience” in foreign affairs and the press allows him to invent a non-existent Iraq-Pakistan border and discover in 2008 the country Czechoslovakia – a country that has not existed since 1992. But in the end it is his unattractive persona that turns McCain into one of the least attractive of American types: the smug, manipulating, nasty know-it-all with no real substance – only the greed to be president.

In their anger the McCain campaign’s operatives sarcastically refer to Obama as “The One”. Were I in Obama’s campaign I would have to refer to McCain as “The Zero”. It is a perfect reflection of his level of intelligence, honesty and grace. That the press is still sucking up to him is to their shame.

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.