Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

Election 2008

The Press Goes to the Races

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Watching the press deal with the Palin nomination has certainly had its moments. The McCain camp has backed much of the press into a corner as they try to figure out whether they are allowed to ask tough questions of a woman who presents herself as not yet tough enough to be left alone with the press until she has an opportunity to learn what it is that Vice Presidents actually do all day.

There is a lot going wrong with the McCain campaign with a chief economist for the campaign commenting that neither Palin nor McCain are competent enough to be a CEO of a major corporation and another one suggesting that computerphobic McCain invented the Blackberry, but when it comes to managing the press, they have learned a lot from McCain’s newly admitted mentor, George W. Bush.

Much of the “working press” really doesn’t work all that hard, finding it much easier to write about the horse race than any of the difficult and complex issues that they seem to understand no better than Palin understands them. So the focus remains on an issue like whether Palin will drain women voters from Obama – rather than on whether her views on religion, women and sex might actually be those of a conservative right wing extremist. Or they focus on her experience as mayor of a real but very small town and ignore her ignorance of the real very large world. When chastised for being too tough toward poor little Palin many back off and write about shooting moose and her eyeglasses, leather boots and manly hubby.  And when the good ones dig around and learn the truth about Palin they are characterized as being ungracious, unfair, or even worse – “liberal”.

There are many examples of this kind of stuff and it will get worse. The so-called Republican “base” screams at the media whenever they ask a tough question or suggest that Sarah Palin might be in over her head or that McCain might be a tad too old for the job. But they are just fine with the lies and fabrications thrown at the opponents. These are our religious Christian voters???

In case anyone actually believed that the media is “liberal” witness the move at MSNBC to remove Keith Olbermann and Chris Mathews from leadership positions in their campaign coverage in response to anger from the right over their strong liberal views on issues and candidates. In fact, in the great wasteland that is cable TV, they provided a healthy antidote to CNN’s tedious, pompous Wolf Blitzer and Fox News’ virulent right-wing analysis led by the likes of Karl Rove.  At least they remain on air however and available to those in need of relief. And Maureen Dowd is regaining her mojo and there will be reporters actually committing journalism out there. You just need to search them out and that takes work and time and a willingness and interest to do so. We can hope that enough voters will make that effort.

In other news, Governor Palin has anointed Katie Couric to be interviewer number two as she moves toward becoming a heartbeat away from the presidency, following Palin’s new best friend “Charlie” Gibson. That the press would allow themselves to be treated this way is a sad commentary on a media that once included the likes of Edward R. Murrow. They have redefined “groveling”.

There’s an election in Canada, too

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The US presidential election with its seemingly endless foreplay followed by a curve ball from left field was bound to catch any gambler or sport fan’s attention, and the Canadian one, taking place almost simultaneously, is designed to go unnoticed in the great wide world. But it was announced last week for Oct. 14 by the governing Conservative Party, and its very shortness underlines both the strengths and weaknesses of the parliamentary versus the set-date systems of voting. On the one hand the US system has turned into such an expensive and long campaign as candidates jostle for media attention for the whole year preceding the set early November date that only the super-rich or those with super-rich friends can take a run. On the other hand, the voters do have a chance to find out everything and more that they want to know about the candidates, or at least they would if the press played an intelligent probing role. In this area, the sudden and completely unexpected appearance of a total outsider from Alaska as a vice-presidential candidate who had spent no money was surely a breath of fresh air even for her skeptics.

In the parliamentary system, in which the ruling party gets to announce the election date with only 6 weeks notice, there is by comparison very little money spent, but time does fly and instead of intelligent discussion and probing much of that time is spent by the press chasing down trivial events and meaningless mini-scandals and in the end the public hasn’t learned much about anything except the manipulated public persona of the party leader, who in not who you are voting for. You are voting only for the local representative who belongs to the caucus which will choose that leader. Thus the ruling Conservative Party spends its money on tv ads meant to show that the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is really a warmer and fuzzier man than he seems to be, and the challenging Liberal party does the same in an attempt to show that their leader, Stéphane Dion, is a better communicator than he seems to be. In private, M Dion, who once spent time with my brother and me in Iceland, is a charming, very intelligent man, who would obviously be an excellent Prime Minister. Those who know Mr. Harper well would undoubtedly say the same, but the actual election campaign does very little to actually show any of this.

So take your pick. My brother and i actually prefer the German system, but that’s another story.

West to Alaska – the Globe looks at Gov. Palin

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With 100% credit to the Toronto Globe and Mail’s resident poet John Allemang

PALIN COUNTRY

Please call us rednecks, ’cause we’re proud
To be so rough and rude and loud,
And act in ways elitists think
Proves that we’ve had too much to drink
In some dead-end Alaska dive
When, dude, it just shows we’re alive.
We love our church, our kids, our beer,
Can tell you right down to the year
That God put Man upon the Earth,
Know life starts well ahead of birth,
Don’t give a damn about the arts
And stay away from foreign parts
Until the moment that we’re sent
As John McCain’s vice-president

The great thing, when your neck is red?
Nobody cares what’s in your head –
The voters seem to like ’em dumb,
So why not play a hockey mom
Who hunts and prays and procreates
To govern these Unites States?
If you can drive a snowmobile,
The people, bless them, think you’re real,
And in the end who needs a brain?
Just tell your kids they must abstain,
Pretend that when your rule’s ignored
It’s some great gift sent by the Lord,
And prove you’ll go to any length
To make such redneck fault a strength.

McCain’s Leadership Deficit

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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

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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

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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

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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

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“[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

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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

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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.