Really, It’s All About Obama III: Why Are They Tied?

The press and political world are wondering why John McCain has apparently evened up with Barack Obama, despite a week of embarrassing flubs.  How could Obama have lost ground?

But if you start from the assumption that this election is all about Obama, it’s really not surprising at all.  He said it himself:

“If you are satisfied with the way things are going now, then you should vote for John McCain,” Obama says before rattling off a list of current concerns, including rising gas prices, home foreclosures and job losses as the country fights two wars. Then, Obama promises “fundamental change.”

With the exception of Ted Kennedy, John McCain is the best-known politician in America who hasn’t been president or vice-president.  Whether he is “McSame” is a matter for debate, but one thing’s for sure.  He is who he is and you know who he is.  If he has a bad week, if he misspeaks, if he changes his mind on offshore oil drilling or tax cuts, it doesn’t alter our view of him.

The picture of Obama isn’t so clear yet.  The things he says resonate more because they add proportionally more to the sum of knowledge about him.  When Obama alters his positions, there is more of an impact on his overall reputation, because his initial set of positions represented most of what we knew about him.  He is in a real bind on Iraq, because he owes his nomination to his ability to chide Hillary Clinton for her pro-war vote in 2002.

The conventional wisdom is that he can “run to the center” without penalty, but I challenge that opinion.  You could not imagine an article like this one appearing with regard to any of the Democratic candidates since 1976, all of whom tried to position themselves as centrists after securing the nomination.  Some repositionings didn’t seem legitimate, perhaps.  But none have been portrayed as betrayal:

In the breathless weeks before the Oregon presidential primary in May, Martha Shade did what thousands of other people here did: she registered as a Democrat so she could vote for Senator Barack Obama.

Now, however, after critics have accused Mr. Obama of shifting positions on issues like the war in Iraq, the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants, gun control and the death penalty — all in what some view as a shameless play to a general election audience — Ms. Shade said she planned to switch back to the Green Party.

“I’m disgusted with him,” said Ms. Shade, an artist. “I can’t even listen to him anymore. He had such an opportunity, but all this ‘audacity of hope’ stuff, it’s blah, blah, blah. For all the independents he’s going to gain, he’s going to lose a lot of progressives.”

Later in the article, Shade allows as how she is far out of the mainstream, and the theme of the article is that Obama doesn’t really need to worry about the far left.  But it’s another clue to Obama’s situation that some in the far left thought Obama was one of them.  It’s the amplitude of surprise that impresses me.  Compare that with McCain’s situation.  The far right knows he’s not one of them.  When McCain strikes a centrist pose, they might resent it, but they expect it and have accounted for it already.  They’re surprised when he agrees with them.

It’s all about Obama.  If his statements and positions gel into a coherent whole, a graspable persona, and a philosophy, he probably wins.  But if voters are still trying to square Statement A with Statement B, voters will probably settle for McCain.

Trying to Beat Somebody with Nobody

Matt Bai’s excellent reporting on the netroots — a term he scrupulously avoids in a story that is meant to show the growing influence of the West Coast on the Democratic Party — contains the kernel of what I predict will be the movement’s ultimate frustration:

That these new progressives don’t have a West Coast politician to represent them in the Iowa caucuses is in keeping with the point of their entire movement. The progressive uprising inside the Democratic Party isn’t about trading in one group of politicians for another; it is about building a party in which politicians in general matter less. In their view, the 20th century may have been all about candidates dispersing their messages to the populace through the bullhorn of paid media ads, but the 21st century is about the populace sending its message to the politicians, thanks to the democratization of the online world. Who leads the charge at the top of the ticket hardly matters, as long as he (or she) says what the progressives want to hear.

“A party in which politicians in general matter less” is not the kind of party that can succeed in America.  We do not have a parliamentary system.  As of now, we pick our candidates, Democrat and Republican, through primaries.  There is no effective mechanism of party discipline, particularly on presidential candidates. 

If the movement Bai describes is so powerful, how is it that the Internet-based progressives’ favored candidate, John Edwards, is running a distant third to the candidate the progressives dislike most, Hillary Clinton?  (The Republicans are facing a similar quandary:  Their most popular candidate, Rudy Guiliani, only agrees with some of the GOP’s bedrock principles.  Liberal northeastern Republicanism was supposedly dying, but Guiliani might wind up as the most liberal Republican presidential candidate since Theodore Roosevelt.) 

Bai tries to demonstrate the progressive movement’s power this way:

Bold Wankers

The Iraq war is a failure. The surge is a failure. General Petraeus? Impressive man, but a failure. If we pulled our forces out now, or as soon as possible, things in Iraq would improve. Meanwhile, that would free up resources to fight terrorists, who are in a lot of other places, but not Iraq.

That’s what we’re supposed to think unless we’re part of the dwindling-yet-vast right wing conspiracy. It is no longer a position. It is an orthodoxy.

So how bold was it for two liberal think-tankers, Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, to publish this op-ed in the New York Times today? And to title it “A War We Just Might Win.”

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

Help Wanted: Democratic Candidate to Run for President that People Don’t Hate

It is said that while the right looks for converts, the left looks for heretics.  The consequences of that tendency are demonstrated in this perceptive story from the LA Times:

It is a paradox of the 2008 presidential race. By a wide margin, several polls show, voters want a Democrat to win — yet when offered head-to-head contests of leading announced candidates, many switch allegiance to the Republican.

In a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll conducted this month, this dynamic was most clearly evident with Clinton.

When registered voters were asked which party they would like to win the White House, they preferred a Democrat over a Republican by 8 percentage points. But in a race pitting Clinton against former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Republican was favored by 10 percentage points.

Clinton’s showing against Giuliani was the starkest example of how the general Democratic edge sometimes narrows or vanishes when voters are given specific candidates to choose between.

The poll also showed Clinton trailing when matched against two other Republicans, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. The deficits, however, were within the survey’s margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

These results, as well as follow-up interviews of poll respondents, reflect the array of difficulties that Clinton could face as the Democratic nominee.

Plenty of time remains for Clinton to temper resistance to her candidacy. But for now, her failure to match her party’s generic advantage underscores the primacy of personal appeal in a presidential race, regardless of political context.

“Personal appeal” is part of the problem, but I don’t think it really captures it.  Hillary, Edwards and Obama are anything but repellent personalities.  In their own ways, they can be charismatic.  The problem is the toll that being a Democratic leader takes against a candidate’s image for strength and having a core of beliefs.

The one-issue caucuses within the party, especially labor, put so much pressure on candidates to carry their water regardless of how the general public feels, regardless of what common sense and experience shows that one of two things happens.  The Democratic leader becomes unviable because the special interests exert their veto power; or they become a flip-flopping ball of confusion, totally reliant on careful parsing of words and PR spin to make their positions seem coherent and principled.

To some degree, the netroots phenomenon was supposed to overcome this.  Kos is a “just win baby” Democrat who wants the party to unite around broad principles.  But despite the good intentions, the netroots have somehow evolved into yet another single-issue constituency — the “get out of Iraq now” caucus.   Both Clinton and Obama joined a small minority of Democrats in opposing the troop funding bill, because they believed they would otherwise be crucified.  But that position is likely to come back to haunt them later.

Defining Moments (Updated)*

With the White House an open seat in 2008, you’d think the upcoming election would be about more than Gotcha!  Especially since we seem to be living in consequential times.  But if you thought that, you’d be naive.  Here’s what the most influential and most passionate netroots blogger thinks will win the election for the Democrats next year:

Videotape everything they do

by kos

Mon May 21, 2007 at 12:10:19 PM PDT

Every appearance by a top Republican official or candidate should be recorded. Every one of them.

All it takes is one “Macaca” incident to transform a race or create one where one didn’t exist. As the Montana incident blogged earlier today showed, a video can knock out prospective candidates before they even enter.

And this is no longer about finding one big blunder to put on a campaign commercial. It’s about using video and (free) technologies like YouTube to build narratives about opponents, using their own words, at their own events.

It’s never too early to start.

We’ve got a long, difficult slog ahead of us next year. The more material we amass today, the better we’ll able to use that video to support our efforts next year.

I mean, that’s fine.  And, coming from Markos Moulitsas, it’s hardly a surprise.  As he has said of himself: “They want to make me into the latest Jesse Jackson, but I’m not ideological at all.  I’m just all about winning.”

The problem with the politics of scandal, gaffes, embarassments and “macaca moments” is that, like umpire mistakes in a baseball game, candidate blunders tend to even out.  As a group, almost all politicians are weird.   Count on them to hide something that will be exposed, say something at odds with what they profess to believe, or think in their blind arrogance that they can get away with something that won’t stand the light of day.

Calling for an accumulation of “gotcha” moments is a strategy about nothing, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld.  It’s not about persuading or inspiring voters.  It merely reminds them that we are governed by two-faced narcissistic jerks.  That’s why negative campaigning’s most notable effect is to suppress voter turnout.  It doesn’t make voters say, ”Aha! Now I prefer X over Y.”  It makes them say, “I was going to vote for Y, but now, ew.” 

Kos is right. If you turn off more Republicans than Democrats, you’ve improved your chances of winning.  But no matter how much video you capture, you can’t depend on coming out ahead in the gotcha race.  It only works if the other side lets its guard down and lets you off the hook when you make your own blunders.  In the YouTube era, that’s basically an assumption that your opponents will commit professional suicide.  Good luck with that.

But beyond the strategic limits of “gotcha” politics, I also question whether “macaca moments” are what voters will be asking for in 2008.  I won’t go as far as to say voters in 2008 will find gaffes to be trivial, and ignore them. I’m not Pollyanna.  But I hope the Democratic Party only half-listens to Kos.  Tactics will matter, but I predict ideas will matter more. 

*UPDATE, 5/24/07.  Todd Ziegler of the Bivings Report raises a related concern today.

In many ways, the story of the web (particularly video) in politics the last few years has been the story of “gotcha” moments. Bad jokes. Pretty hair. Southern accents. Screaming. Terror taxis. Macaca. No strings.The humiliating videos get a lot more play than the substitutive ones (admittedly nobody has done anything that interesting with video this cycle).

Some of the moments linked to above are unforgivable. But in some cases these “gotcha” moments are examples of candidates being real.

So we’re in a situation where we want candidates to be authentic but are quick to punish them when they are. And the constant presence of voters with cameras ensures that there will be plenty of these gotcha moments.

It seems to me that instead of creating a more open election, we may be creating one where the candidate that is the most on message and the most robotic is rewarded. It can be argued that it wasn’t YouTube that defeated George Allen, but his own lack of discipline on the stump. The candidate that makes the least mistakes wins.

Note to Kos:  Of the seven links embedded in Zeigler’s post, four embarass Democrats.  You’d really have to have partisan blinders firmly in place to think “macaca-moment” politics favors one party over the other.

Like Bob Kerrey Says

I’ve just about given up trying to make the case for the Iraq war. Not because I don’t believe it was the right thing to do, because it was. Not because I mind sticking out like a sore thumb among virtually all my friends and family, because I don’t. Not even because Bush and (especially) Rumsfeld repeatedly made bad decisions and blunders that complicated what was already going to be a hard slog, because their mistakes don’t undermine the philosophical or strategic rationale.

No, I’m ready to throw in the towel because it’s obvious nobody cares anymore. I don’t think Democrats and liberals are stupid: They see the peril in ditching Iraq, and the rising tide of blood our departure would cause. They just don’t give a damn.  Republicans are starting to feel the same way.  Their insouciance is the flip side of arrogance, both of them a privilege our vast military might affords us.

I’ve worked for people whose philosophy of life is, “I’ll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.” If a power vacuum at the heart of the Middle East causes horrible problems there and here, fine. We’ll deal with them when they arise — and maybe score a few points by blaming that idiot Bush. It’s cynical, but it’s not hidden, and people seem to be buying into it.  This question has never been polled but I suspect a majority of Americans believe that if we pull out of Iraq, and that it turns out to be a mistake, well, hell, we can just roll back in.

One of my arguments — one that everybody hates and shoots down — is this: If we hadn’t invaded, and had just waited for Saddam Hussein to die or be overthrown, the warfare between Shi’ite and Sunni militias would have commenced then. And Al Queda would have tried to capitalize on it, as would have Iran. The only way that could have been avoided was if Hussein had successfully gotten a nuclear weapon. Ex-CIA director George Tenet believes that probably would have happened between now and 2009.

So, the Iraq of 2008 would have either been in a state of bloody civil war and in danger of falling into the hands of Al Queda or Iran, or Hussein’s regime would have still been in place, equipped with a nuclear weapon to sustain his rule or the rule of his sons. And we would have been forced to deal with Iraq then, from an even less advantageous position than the one we have now — including, possibly, military action.

I have been told repeatedly this is a stupid argument. And maybe it is. But at least I now have the validation of being joined in my stupid argument by former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, a Democrat, the one-time presidential candidate who is now president of the New School in New York. In Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal he restates the case for the war “from the U.S. point of view”:

The U.S. led an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein because Iraq was rightly seen as a threat following Sept. 11, 2001. For two decades we had suffered attacks by radical Islamic groups but were lulled into a false sense of complacency because all previous attacks were “over there.” It was our nation and our people who had been identified by Osama bin Laden as the “head of the snake.” But suddenly Middle Eastern radicals had demonstrated extraordinary capacity to reach our shores.

As for Saddam, he had refused to comply with numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions outlining specific requirements related to disclosure of his weapons programs. He could have complied with the Security Council resolutions with the greatest of ease. He chose not to because he was stealing and extorting billions of dollars from the U.N. Oil for Food program.

No matter how incompetent the Bush administration and no matter how poorly they chose their words to describe themselves and their political opponents, Iraq was a larger national security risk after Sept. 11 than it was before. And no matter how much we might want to turn the clock back and either avoid the invasion itself or the blunders that followed, we cannot. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is over. What remains is a war to overthrow the government of Iraq.

Okay, so far, all this does is put Kerrey in the same “wanker” category where netroots bloggers put Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman due to his robust support for the war. But then, Kerrey continues with this:

Some who have been critical of this effort from the beginning have consistently based their opposition on their preference for a dictator we can control or contain at a much lower cost. From the start they said the price tag for creating an environment where democracy could take root in Iraq would be high. Those critics can go to sleep at night knowing they were right.

The critics who bother me the most are those who ordinarily would not be on the side of supporting dictatorships, who are arguing today that only military intervention can prevent the genocide of Darfur, or who argued yesterday for military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda to ease the sectarian violence that was tearing those places apart.

Suppose we had not invaded Iraq and Hussein had been overthrown by Shiite and Kurdish insurgents. Suppose al Qaeda then undermined their new democracy and inflamed sectarian tensions to the same level of violence we are seeing today. Wouldn’t you expect the same people who are urging a unilateral and immediate withdrawal to be urging military intervention to end this carnage? I would.

American liberals need to face these truths: The demand for self-government was and remains strong in Iraq despite all our mistakes and the violent efforts of al Qaeda, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to disrupt it. Al Qaeda in particular has targeted for abduction and murder those who are essential to a functioning democracy: school teachers, aid workers, private contractors working to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, police officers and anyone who cooperates with the Iraqi government. Much of Iraq’s middle class has fled the country in fear.

With these facts on the scales, what does your conscience tell you to do? If the answer is nothing, that it is not our responsibility or that this is all about oil, then no wonder today we Democrats are not trusted with the reins of power. American lawmakers who are watching public opinion tell them to move away from Iraq as quickly as possible should remember this: Concessions will not work with either al Qaeda or other foreign fighters who will not rest until they have killed or driven into exile the last remaining Iraqi who favors democracy.

He closes by saying that a U.S. withdrawal would hand Bin Laden an immense “psychological victory,” and carries his argument one step further with an insight I’ve not read anywhere else — a powerful refutation of those who say our invasion “created terrorists.”

Those who argue that radical Islamic terrorism has arrived in Iraq because of the U.S.-led invasion are right. But they are right because radical Islam opposes democracy in Iraq. If our purpose had been to substitute a dictator who was more cooperative and supportive of the West, these groups wouldn’t have lasted a week.

Right.  The presence of democracy, and its desperate struggle to root itself in Iraqi soil:  That’s what’s drawn the brigades of poisonous wasps that are Islamists into Iraq.  Contrary to Rep. John Murtha’s assertions, if we leave, they won’t leave; not until they can kill secular-based self-government once and for all.  Optimally, they want an Islamist fundamentalist government.  But if that can’t be achieved, then any other option is better than a functioning democracy with a functioning civil society, because that’s a threat to the Islamist movement’s growth, worldwide.

The US is no longer in the business of installing friendly dictators — let’s hope. We’ve chosen a much harder path. It would have been nice if we’d taken that path without all the well-documented mistakes, but we should be proud we took it, and we need to stick to it.

Oh, hell, now I’m back in this debate again.

David Broder, Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’

If you read the left-wing blogs, you quickly learn there is no journalist or commentator more despised than David S. Broder, the “Dean” of Washington columnists.  In recent writings, Broder has been less than thrilled with the performance of the new Democratic Congress and its leadership.  To the netroots, it’s still the honeymoon phase; but here’s this old guy, an uncle you sort of have to listen to, standing at the back of the reception saying “You stink!”

What they despise about Broder is his reputation as a liberal, which derives in part from his position at the Washington Post.   The netroots disagree that the Post is actually all that liberal, or that Broder is “one of them,” and it really steams them that Broder’s critical comments about the Democratic party are seen as coming from a sympathetic corner.  

Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter leave no mark; they’re dismissed easily as right-wing crackpots.  But Broder disrupts what the netroots repeatedly call “the narrative.”  When a liberal says what conservatives say, the conservatives’ viewpoints are legitimized.  The netroots don’t really enjoy debating conservatives; they’d rather dismiss them from the debate entirely. It’s harder to do that when they can cite liberals like David Broder as agreeing with them. 

I’m beginning to think David Broder likes provoking the netroots.  What else would explain today’s column, in which he compares Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to…omigod!… Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez!  

The column was prompted by Reid’s much-criticized comment last week that “this war is lost.”

…Reid’s verbal wanderings on the war in Iraq are consequential — not just for his party and the Senate but for the more important question of what happens to U.S. policy in that violent country and to the men and women whose lives are at stake.

Given the way the Constitution divides warmaking power between the president, as commander in chief, and Congress, as sole source of funds to support the armed services, it is essential that at some point Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi be able to negotiate with the White House to determine the course America will follow until a new president takes office.

To say that Reid has sent conflicting signals about his readiness for such discussions is an understatement. It has been impossible for his own members, let alone the White House, to sort out for more than 24 hours at a time what ground Reid is prepared to defend.

Instead of reinforcing the important proposition — defined by the Iraq Study Group– that a military strategy for Iraq is necessary but not sufficient to solve the myriad political problems of that country, Reid has mistakenly argued that the military effort is lost but a diplomatic-political strategy can still succeed.

The Democrats deserve better, and the country needs more, than Harry Reid has offered as Senate majority leader.

Broder’s comparison with Gonzalez is, in fact, quite apt.  The problem with Sen. Reid is that he is an incompetent Senate Majority Leader.  As Michael Dukakis said, “It’s not about ideology. It’s about competence.”  The AG is manifestly unfit for his job, and so is Reid.  Reid can’t manage his own mouth; how can he be expected to manage the U.S. Senate? Vice President Cheney’s stinging retort to Reid drew blood because he mostly just quoted Reid’s own incredibly contradictory pattern of statements about the war over the past few months.

But to the netroots, even pointing out obvious incompetence screws up ”the narrative.”  Here’s what diarist mcjoan says on Daily Kos regarding Broder’s column:

It’s just so sad, so disconnected from anything even remotely resembling reality. We had ample warning that it was coming, but maybe somehow didn’t think it could really, really be as bad as expected. It is. You can go read it, if you like. But there’s really hardly any point any more.

I do have to give this to the Dean. He is somehow adroit enough to hammer the final nail into the coffin that holds all that was left of his ability to reasonably comment on current events. What more is there to say?

And here is what Greg Sargent, a TPM Cafe blogger, says:

Boy, oh, boy. Will Broder really argue that Reid is as inept as Gonzales, despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that Reid has refused to back down on Iraq while simultaneously maintaining public approval of his approach? He’s also maintained a respectable 46% approval rating — far higher than Bush, who Broder says is on the verge of a comeback. What is it that’s so profoundly threatening about Reid’s success to the Broders of the world?

In the respective comment threads, the “blogswarm” goes on a Broder-bashing spree.  Kos himself weighs in:

 What more is there left to say? (22+ / 0-)

That finally it’s clear as day that Broder is simply another run-of-the-mill beltway partisan hack. Once upon a time, he convinced everyone in DC that he was a non-partisan arbiter of conventional wisdom. That fiction is now blown apart. Broder is no better or different than Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly. An inglorious conclusion to a career in hackdom.

by kos on Wed Apr 25, 2007 at 10:56:27 PM PDT

Here’s one from Sargent’s thread:

Its time for the blogshere to do some investigative reporting on Broder and the like.

It’s pretty clear that the Bushies/necons will do anything to advance their cause, protect themselves and manipulate public opinion.

Why has Broder nor Wapo disclosed Broder’s close relationship with Rove?

Broder is either being paid off financially or blackmailed. Cayman Island bank accounts, junkets, or compromising personal information. All of the above?

Posted by:erict
Date: April 25, 2007 08:26 PM

And how about this one from the Washington Post’s own comment thread:

Take the package, Mr. Broder. Retire now before you shred what reputation you have left any further. Old windbag. If the war is so great, why arent your kids and grandkids there? Harry Reid is right. The war is lost. Its time to come home and stop playing cowboy with American lives, which is just making everything in Iraq worse. Bush is the worst disaster in the history of the United States, and Broder was one of his sycophantic cheerleaders after nine one one. The emperor never had any clothes.

By snoopydc | Apr 26, 2007 12:32:42 AM |

Throughout the comments you find the view expressed that Reid’s “war is lost” comment is true, and that polls show the public agrees with it.  What they are overlooking is the American public doesn’t prefer to lose this war.   Reid seems to be egging on that result, especially when he says things like this:

“We’re going to pick up Senate seats as a result of this war. Senator Schumer has shown me numbers that are compelling and astounding.”

Broder isn’t a hack, and he isn’t on the take.  He has a memory.  Memory curses dreams like the netroots’.  

Here’s an inconvenient analysis that draws on my own memories.

At the end of the Vietnam War, the Democrats facilitated the final defeat, denying President Ford’s request for funds to fulfil the promises the U.S. made after we pulled out. In 1975, the politics of that move looked pretty good; the public was sick of Vietnam.  In 1976, Carter beat Ford — but it should have been a landslide because of Watergate, and instead it was a squeaker.  Why?   In 1978, Republicans reversed most of the gains the Democrats had made in Congress in 1974.  In 1980, Reagan clobbered Carter, and the Republicans took the Senate. 

I believe the atrocities that followed the ignominious end to the Vietnam War, and the U.S.’ impotence to stop mass genocide and annihilation of our former supporters fueled those Democratic setbacks.  For the first time in decades, Republicans started talking about an aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union, and after the horrors of postwar Southeast Asia, the message resonated.

Losing Iraq would be another bloody business. It’s not hard to imagine.  Suicide bombings would increase. Civil war would widen. Any Iraqi individual or institution committed to democracy would be targeted for murder. Al Queda could well end up effectively in charge of parts of Iraq. 

And Harry Reid thinks this will help the Democrats win elections?  It’s absurd.  And he’s incompetent for thinking so, much less saying so.

Looking Like You’re Doing Something Important*

The successful campaign to get the Nevada Democratic Party to pull out of a debate sponsored by the most successful cable news network represents the essence of vanity politics.  I hate to break it to MoveOn.org and other Democratic activists, but, at least as of this writing, people who watch Fox News are still, surprisingly, allowed to vote.   By shunning their network of choice, aren’t you shunning them as well? 

This editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal was a bit sarcastic, but apt:

Hard-core liberals can’t stand the Fox News Channel. Passing a television that’s tuned to the conservative favorite forces many of them to close their eyes, cover their ears and scream, “La la la la la la la la la!” Then they dash to their computers and fire off 2,500 e-mails condemning the outlet, none of which are ever read.

But liberals’ aversion to Fox News has finally gone over the top. The Nevada Democratic Party had agreed to let the right-tilting network co-sponsor, of all things, an August debate in Reno between Democratic presidential candidates. Party officials were serious about drawing national attention to the state’s January presidential caucus, the country’s second in the 2008 nominating process. What better way for the party to reach conservative and “values” voters who might consider changing allegiances?

But the socialist, Web-addicted wing of the Democratic Party was apoplectic. The prospect of having to watch Fox News to see their own candidates would have been torture in itself. So they set the blogosphere aflame with efforts to kill the broadcast arrangement, or at least have all the candidates pull out of the event. Before Friday, the opportunistic John Edwards was the only candidate to jump on that bandwagon.

You’d think the deal called for having Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter mock the candidates between comments. No, even unfiltered, unedited, live debate between loyal Democrats couldn’t be entrusted to Fox News.

The approach of outfits such as MoveOn.org is so juvenile it’s laughable. Imagine if every political organization created litmus tests for news organizations before agreeing to appear on their programming. Republicans would have boycotted PBS, CBS, NBC, ABC, National Public Radio and The Associated Press decades ago.

So how did the state party, which voluntarily agreed to this debate, get out of it?  By accusing Roger Ailes, Fox News President, of being insensitive to Barack Obama by making the following joke at a radio/TV correspondents’ dinner:

“It’s true that Barack Obama is on the move,” Ailes said, deliberately confusing the Illinois senator’s name with that of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. “I don’t know if it’s true President Bush called [Pakistan President Pervez] Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’ “

Say what?  This is a joke at President Bush’s expense, not Obama’s.  Get it?  See, what Ailes was trying to say was that Skippy the Bush Chimp Hitler is soooo dumb, he doesn’t know the difference between… oh, never mind.  I forgot.  You never laugh at any jokes that don’t have the words “wanker” or “fucktard” in them.

I realize it’s easy enough to write an e-mail or a blog post, so perhaps you can’t argue that this campaign to impose reverse censorship on Fox News didn’t cost the blogging left a whole lot of time.  But, isn’t there something else going on the Democrats should be focusing on? 

*Update, 3/11/07.  In a column about Gov. Bill Richardson’s Nevada strategy, the Review Journal’s Eric Neff subtly shows why this was such a self-sabotaging move by the Democrats.

Richardson, the New Mexico governor with the best resume to be president, knows the West. Democrats rightly believe the path to the White House in 2008 runs through the West, where voters like their guns and open space almost as much as they dislike taxes and government intrusion.

Nevada has done nothing politically to suggest it doesn’t fit that mold. Voters have declared the state pro-choice and approved medical marijuana at the same time they have sought to restrain taxes and have elected fiscal conservatives statewide.

But unless Democrats reach out to Republicans and independents in Elko and Esmeralda counties, you can forget about Nevada going blue. And unless Democrats reach out to all voters nationally, the White House isn’t going to change parties.

When you reach out to people who don’t know you — whether on Fox News or in Carlin — you’re more likely to open people’s minds. The true believers won’t budge, but there are plenty who will.

But MoveOn.org apparently doesn’t want Democratic candidates to get moderate or independent votes.  Instead of winning elections, they apparently would rather exhibit their disdain for Fox News.  Well, hope that works out for you guys.  

Green Topsy Turvy

You will find this post from Treehugger.com startling, especially in light of the fresh round of attacks on Al Gore’s lifestyle. 

(Didn’t I warn people that the disconnect between Gore’s preachings and Gore’s sense of entitlement might blow up? Now environmentalists who live nothing like Gore are defending his energy gluttony with the same craven language that Communist sympathizers used 40 years ago to justify the palaces of the nomenklatura.) 

Anyway, back to Treehugger, a site about “mak(ing) sustainability mainstream”…

…is it possible that George Bush is a secret Green? Evidently his Crawford Winter White House has 25,000 gallons of rainwater storage, gray water collection from sinks and showers for irrigation, passive solar, geothermal heating and cooling.

And you will find the comments a riot of invective coming from both sides.  Like this one here:

Oh come on PEOPLE!!! What, do you think GWB chose the stone, geothermal system, rainwater harvesting system, and insisted on the southern orientation of the main windows? PUHLEASE!!! He happened to have a halfway enlightened architect who designed a house that pleased him aesthetically and happened to also have these features as a side note. This is what celebs and people of stature do: hire those who can make them look good in one way or another.

GWB doesn’t have a friggin clue, other than he can tell his friends how green ONE of his homes is.

Followed by this one:

Why does he need a clue? He hired someone who did. That counts too.

All I can say is, bring on more news like this!  (Or like this!)  

The left-right blogosphere divide is so 2006.  I want everyone who believes all that is good resides on their side and all that is evil and dishonest on the other to experience sudden and repeated attacks of vertigo that call their worldview into question. Today’s as good a day to start as any.

Environmentalists shouldn’t worry about any of this.  It’s a sign, maybe, that more people are taking environmentalism and global warming seriously.  Americans are not ideologues by nature.  They are questioners.  The embrace of environmental consciousness will mean many smart people of good faith will come to different conclusions as to what constitutes sustainability or good policy.  It won’t be dictated from above.

Do People Still Read Kurt Vonnegut?

I think they do.  This column from Philly.com’s Sandy Bauers is a sort of reminisence of reading Kurt Vonnegut, the humorist/science fiction/political novelist and essayist.  Bauer’s hook is the release of some new audio versions of Vonnegut’s work, but the writer nicely recaptures the pleasure of reading him back in the day. 

Until I read Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, no novel made me laugh harder than Breakfast of Champions.  Reading Slaughterhouse-Five at age 14 influenced my attitudes just as much as the Kinks, the Beatles or R. Crumb.

Vonnegut’s politics put him squarely in the progressive protest camp, but with a sense of irony, skepticism and empathy totally lacking in today’s desperately bitter progressive “netroots.”  Vonnegut is never embittered by his adversaries; he’s more amused by them, even when they hold the power to destroy the world (and in some of his novels, do so).  And, as Bauers illustrates in this byte, Vonnegut is a bit shy about making utopian pronouncements of what would happen if, perchance, he were to win the day:

In Breakfast of Champions, which Stanley Tucci reads with delicious cunning, the obscure author Kilgore Trout visits a Midwest arts festival.

“Oh, Mr. Trout,” the hotel clerk gushes. “Teach us to sing and dance and laugh and cry. We’ve tried to survive so long on money and sex and envy and real estate and football and basketball and automobiles and television and alcohol and sawdust and broken glass.”

Trout, disheveled, the pockets of his oversized and threadbare tuxedo bulging with mothballs, is incredulous. “Open your eyes,” he says. “Would a man nourished by beauty look like this? You have nothing but desolation and desperation here.”

“I see exactly what I expect to see,” the clerk retorts. “I see a man who is terribly wounded because he has dared to pass through the fires of truth to the other side.”

I also recall an exchange from Slaughterhouse-Five where Vonnegut depicts himself telling someone he is writing an anti-war novel.   ”Why don’t you write an anti-glacier novel instead?”  This was at the height of the Vietnam War protests, and sure, they were plenty angry.  But Vonnegut’s gentle fatalism about humanity was part of the scene, in a way you never see now.  

Imagine Kos or Atrios or their commenters having Vonnegut’s humility and sense of humor.  You can’t.  The netroots is a field where no irony grows.  But without that leavening ability to see the ridiculousness on all sides, they are left preaching to their increasingly rabid choir and with zero influence outside of it.

John Edwards’ Blog Lesson*

If you know this blog, you know I tend to stay away from the stuff that other bloggers go on and on about.  The bigger the meme, the more room I give it to roll on through. But the story of John Edwards and the two bloggers he hired and then had to let resign (or whatever), is so mysterious, it’s been nagging at me, so I have to discuss it.

I don’t think Amanda Marcotte is a bigot.  On her site, Pandagon, she says she is “pro-sex, pro-feminist, pro-freedom,” which is like motherhood and apple pie, baseball, hot dogs and Chevrolet as far as I’m concerned.  She’s got a mean streak, no question, and she lets fly with harsh and graphic sarcasm particularly in response to organizations like the Catholic church that, in her view, repress women. 

She’s not the first feminist to feel rage like this against the Catholic church.  Remember Madonna, dancing in front of a burning cross?  Or Sinead O’Connor, ripping up a picture of the Pope?  I’m a guy, so I don’t feel this rage, but I’m hardly in a position to begrudge her the feelings she has. But anyway, it’s not like she’s obsessed with the topic.  She can be a charming and perceptive writer, and she’s energetic in her approach to blogging.

Melissa McEwan also seems like a bright young writer with a progressive bent, for whom the “anti-Catholic” charge was a bad rap.  However, she is also a fierce feminist who refers to herself as “Queen Cunt of Fuck Mountain,” and to the religious right as “Christofascists.” 

If you read a lot of blogs, especially on the progressive side, this kind of language is fairly typical.  It is not aimed solely at religious people; it’s aimed at conservatives, Republicans, DLC Democrats, Joe Lieberman Democrats, the media especially Fox News… It’s how they express themselves. 

If asked, I would tell all these progressive bloggers that words like “fucktard” and “Bushitler” are getting tired.  They aren’t persuasive, they’re alienating.  But it’s the language they seem to enjoy, and the Internet was made for this kind of thing.

Amanda was supposed to be the blogmaster for candidate Edwards, and Melissa was supposed to serve as a liaison to the extensive blogger network of progressives.  They had both settled in North Carolina to assume their new jobs.  But then Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League released a statement demanding they both be fired.  Edwards didn’t fire them, but he publicly disassociated himself from the things they’d said in their blogs, and, inevitably, both resigned within days.  

Marcotte and McEwan had done nothing new to warrant Edwards’ scolding statement, nor the termination of their political careers, between the time of their hiring and the time the controversy surfaced.  If the campaign had done minimal due diligence, they would have known the kind of electronic paper trail these bloggers had left behind.  They must have done this. So why did Edwards hire them? 

Presumably, the campaign knew that anytime a journalist or commentator is hired by a politician — never mind if they use a blog as their medium — their past words will be thrown in their face.  Pat Buchanan is the most famous columnist to serve stints on the White House communications staff, and there was no shortage of adversaries who tried to hang intemperate words he wrote as a journalist around the presidents he served.  Sidney Blumenthal had the same experience when he worked for Clinton.  (His response was to become even more outrageous as a political aide than he’d ever been as a writer.)

The most recent example before Marcotte and McEwan is White House Press Secretary Tony Snow. ThinkProgress, a progressive site, had a ton of fun finding critical things Snow had said about his new boss, President Bush — calling Bush “an embarassment” and “impotent.”  For some reason, Bush looked past this record and hired Snow anyway, and any controversy about it died quickly.  But Bush is a lame-duck president.  Edwards is a candidate, a dark horse, running for the nomination of a party where big-city Catholics are important.

Lots of Catholics will vote for a pro-choice candidate.  They’ll vote for Democrats, knowing that among their elites are many who disdain their faith.  But they’ll have a hard time swallowing a candidate who embraces people who seem to have no reverance for their beliefs whatsoever.  To quote Donohue:

“Writing on the Pandagon blogsite, December 26, 2006, Amanda Marcotte wrote that ‘the Catholic church is not about to let something like compassion for girls get in the way of using the state as an instrument to force women to bear more tithing Catholics.’ On October 9, 2006, she said that ‘the Pope’s gotta tell women who give birth to stillborns that their babies are cast into Satan’s maw.’ On the same day she wrote that ‘it’s going to be bad PR for the church, so you can sort of see why the Pope is dragging ass.’ And on June 14, 2006, she offered the following Q&A: ‘What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit,’ to which she replied, ‘You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.’ 

This kind of colorful talk — which goes way beyond commenting on the church’s anti-choice stance – is something no mainstream campaign could tolerate.  Edwards’ people should have found it, and it should have stopped them in their tracks.  Forget the Catholic League.  Edwards’ political rivals would have hauled this stuff out.  It’s often forgotten that the first candidate to attack Michael Dukakis for releasing rapist-murderer Willie Horton on a weekend prison furlough was not George H.W. Bush, but Al Gore.  Gore didn’t put the racial twist on the story that Bush did; but he looked for the weak spot, found it, used it, and then left it for the Republicans to pick up in due course.

You think Hilary Clinton would do any different?  But say she didn’t.  Say the Marcotte/McEwan writings had gone unexposed until the November campaign — perhaps against GOP nominee and (pro-choice) Catholic Rudy Guiliani.  You think Guiliani’s campaign would have been able to resist grandstanding to the faithful about these ‘blasphemous’ campaign aides?

The rules of politics haven’t changed just because of the Internet.  If anything, they’ve been reinforced and accelerated.  Hard-core, wild-west, shit-stirring bloggers have no more place on a political campaign than slash-and-burn op-ed columnists did; and it was unprofessional of the Edwards campaign to think otherwise. 

I don’t feel bad for Marcotte and McEwan.  In the short run, their lives are disrupted, but this controversy could end up making their careers in the field where they are best qualified — as writers. 

But I keep thinking about Edwards, who made his zillions as a plaintiff’s lawyer suing doctors and hospitals.  Litigators like him know the “gotcha” game better than anyone on the planet.  One stray word that strengthens their case, and they will hammer the defendent with it until they’ve reduced them to bloody pulp.  How could people working in his name not have seen what was inevitably coming?

*UPDATE:  Happened to run across a post by Dan Gerstein in The Politico.  Gerstein, was communications director for Sen. Lieberman’s general election campaign win over netroots’ crush Ned Lamont.  He assails the liberal blogosphere for its unquestioning defense of Marcotte and McEwan:

But the reality is, as I experienced over and over again in the Lamont-Lieberman race, this is the liberal blogosphere’s standard-less operating procedure. They have decided that the best way to fight the “right-wing smear machine” that they so despise is to create an even more venomous, boundary-less, and destructive counterpart and fight ire with more ire.

It also goes to show just how deeply most liberal bloggers believe that Republicans and conservative are morally illegitimate, and as such, any criticism or argument made by the other side is on its face corrupt and dismissible. If it is said by Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who has a history of controversial statements himself, it automatically becomes invalid, no matter the inherent integrity of the underlying proposition.

What these liberal bloggers fail to appreciate is that this petty, polarizing approach is not how you ultimately win in politics – especially in an era when most average voters outside the ideological extremes are fed up with the shrill, reflexive partisanship that dominates Washington, and when the fastest growing party in America is no party.

The blogger bomb-throwing may be good for inflaming the activist base, and, as they demonstrated in the 2006 Lieberman-Lamont Senate primary race in Connecticut, for occasionally blowing up the opposition. It’s not bad for bullying your friends, either, as the liberal blogosphere did last week in pressuring Edwards to not fire the two bloggers who penned the offensive anti-religious posts.

But the typical blog mix of insults and incitements is just not an effective strategy for persuading people outside of your circle of belief – be they moderate Democrats, moderate Republicans, or the swelling number of independents – to join your cause. In fact, it’s far more likely to alienate than propagate them. 

*ANOTHER UPDATE:  Thinking about this issue, I remembered another unlikely combination between a politician and an out-of-control writer:  Jimmy Carter and Hunter S. Thompson.  But Thompson was never more than an “unofficial advisor” to the future president.  This post is a Thompson bio that includes the story of his visits to Plains, Ga.

What’s the Point of Electing Republicans?

“What’s the point of electing Republicans?” the party’s base voters must be asking in the wake of the Foley scandal.   Family-values voters, who think gays are a bigger threat than Al Queda, now learn that the GOP leadership was, at minimum, aware that one of its caucus’ members was writing inappropriate notes with a romantic subtext to a youth of the same sex.

Whatever fog is coming from Hastert and Boehner to explain their actions, the signals should have been sufficient to prompt action to protect the other pages.  The fact that these leaders were so uncurious should outrage every American, but will have a particular effect on the homophobic “base” that Karl Rove has worked so hard to bring to the polls.

I would think the leadership’s lassitude would also upset the kind of GOP voters who see Republicans as more business-like managers.  It sounds like Hastert and Boehner were just hoping the problem would go away — the kind of magical thinking that CEOs and military commanders cannot afford to indulge in.

However, the Democrats are not in a strong position to exploit this mess. Sexually predatory behavior focused on the young on the part of Democratic leaders has not exactly caused party leadership to leap into action in the past.  The one Democrat who was willing to condemn President Clinton for having his way with a 21-year-old intern, Sen. Joe Lieberman, had his 1998 speech criticizing Clinton thrown back in his face as an act of party disloyalty during his recent primary campaign against Ned Lamont.  If the Democrats try to make this into an issue, there are undoubtedly lots of quotes about “private behavior” that the Republican opposition-researchers can inject into the debate via friendly bloggers and talk-radio hosts.

But it’s outrageous that Hastert and Boehner did so little to protect the other pages.  Is pederasty now tolerated in Washington?  Are congressmembers so impressed with themselves and the power they wield, they now think they can behave like Roman emperors?  Perhaps the tradition of youthful pages and interns needs to be suspended until we can start electing less grandiose leaders.

Clinton as a Tragic Figure

Like most political junkies nowadays, I knew about ex-President Clinton’s appearance on Fox News Sunday from what bloggers were saying about it before I ever got to see it for myself.

I don’t have all the links at hand anymore, but suffice to say it broke down very predictably along party/ideological lines. To leftists, it was all about Clinton “smacking down” Fox . One site thought Clinton’s assault on Fox was so devastating, Fox might edit those parts out — a remarkably inept bit of paranoid speculation, given that Fox’s real objective is to make money. On TV, conflict equals ratings. “If it bleeds, it leads.”

To conservatives, Clinton’s blowup, combined with his supporters’ misguided attempt to pressure Disney/ABC to pull “The Path to 9/11″ miniseries off the air, meant it’s now open season to say what they’ve always wanted to say: The blood of 9/11 is on Clinton’s hands. Many right-wing bloggers patted themselves on the back for having held their tongues all these years (ha!), but said that the blame game is now fair game, since Clinton decided to make an issue of his culpability.

My view is a little different. When I finally saw the interview, my reaction was, “How remarkable that he’s held this inside him for so long.”

Both right and left agreed that his rant was an example of Clinton’s famous temper, his “purple-faced rage,” that aides saw frequently but the public saw rarely.

I didn’t see that much anger. I saw grief.

The key exchange, copied here from Fox’s transcript, was this:

——-

CLINTON: No, no. I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill him.

The CIA, which was run by George Tenet, that President Bush gave the Medal of Freedom to, he said, “He did a good job setting up all these counterterrorism things.”

The country never had a comprehensive anti-terror operation until I came there.

Now, if you want to criticize me for one thing, you can criticize me for this: After the Cole, I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban, and launch a full-scale attack search for bin Laden.

But we needed basing rights in Uzbekistan, which we got after 9/11.

The CIA and the FBI refused to certify that bin Laden was responsible while I was there. They refused to certify. So that meant I would’ve had to send a few hundred Special Forces in helicopters and refuel at night.

Even the 9/11 Commission didn’t do that. Now, the 9/11 Commission was a political document, too. All I’m asking is, anybody who wants to say I didn’t do enough, you read Richard Clarke’s book.

WALLACE: Do you think you did enough, sir?

CLINTON: No, because I didn’t get him.

WALLACE: Right.

CLINTON: But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.

So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke, who got demoted.

——

Some of this is incoherent. Some of this has been challenged factually. But what remains is this almost plaintive, and undeniably honest, confession: “I tried and failed.”

Now, any chief executive realizes quickly after assuming office that for most of what you try to do, failure is the most likely outcome. You can only follow so many initiatives with the degree of attention required to ensure success. You are at the mercy of events that will throw you off track. Your subordinates are not uniformly competent, and even the best ones can have egos that poison their minds and lead to time-wasting, soul-sucking turf wars.

If you’re both very good and very lucky, you will get some of the big things right. Your most important accomplishments might be invisible, even to you: The decisions that averted crises that no one could foresee. Maybe in time, someone will notice and give you credit. But by that time, you might be dead and forgotten.

Clinton was, to me, a president whose grade point average was a C, but he accomplished that by scoring a lot of A’s and a lot of F’s. (Kind of like my son.) History shows he was prescient about Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda. I believe him when he says he tried to kill Bin Laden. But what is apparently haunting him, and came out in this interview, was whether he tried hard enough.

Every office in America, there is some put-upon exec with a sign on his desk saying “How can I soar like an eagle when I’m surrounded by turkeys?” And: “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” Clinton let the bastards get him down. He envisioned the kind of threat Bin Laden posed, but he let the legalistic mind of his Justice Department, the pinhead intellectuals of the CIA and the feckless leaders of the military back him down. He didn’t quite have the courage of his convictions; and he was surrounded by unimpressive advisers like Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright who sapped his confidence.

When Clinton left office, the unfinished business with Al Queda was just one item on the list that he didn’t complete. All executives know dozens of these disappointments upon leaving office. But the polls on his presidency were high, the economy was still pretty strong, the deficit was down, Hilary was in the Senate, the impeachment battle had been won — I’m sure Clinton felt pretty good, overall. Then 9/11 happened.

From that day to this one, I’m sure he has replayed in his mind all the meetings where he got talked out of taking the next aggressive step. But, the debate was mostly inside his head. In the political world, I don’t think 9/11 damaged Clinton significantly — otherwise, why would his wife have been considered the shoo-in for the presidential nomination in 2008 until very recently? For every right-winger who said “Clinton didn’t do enough,” you had many more voices like Richard Clarke saying he did a lot more than anyone thought, and that Bush’s neglect of terrorism in the first eight months of his reign was just as decisive.

But surviving politically and surviving your own doubts are two different things.

Because Clinton is so smart, his critics see every move he makes as calculating. It’s a myth. What I saw on Sunday’s show was not Clinton the politician trying to score points. I saw Clinton the human being trying to convince himself that he really did all he could, that his attempts to stop Bin Laden were noble and his failure forgivable.

The political implications seem petty compared to the drama of a once-powerful leader stirring the ashes of his conscience. The burden he must carry now! It was an episode worthy of Shakespeare.

Going to Extremes (*updated)

I hope Brendan Nyhan is wrong when he says this:

Today, online politics has come to be dominated by two warring camps, just like offline politics. And while many critics complain about the polarization of the blogosphere and its effect on elections, how blogs will affect the economics of opinion journalism is less well understood. In particular, partisan blogs have become so popular that they are threatening the business model — and the independence — of center-left opinion magazines, which may be forced to toe the party line to ensure their survival.

He illustrates this point with his own experience. A founder of the now-defunct Spinsanity, Nyhan was invited to blog on The American Prospect’s TAPPED site. The American Prospect is a liberal publication, but like The New Republic, it was not monolithic and could be contrarian from time to time, in keeping with the open-mindedness long associated with liberals. But after Nyhan posted a couple of items criticizing other liberal bloggers, TAP’s editor asked him to limit his attacks to conservatives. This diktat caused Nyhan to quit.

Is TAPPED afraid of dissenting viewpoints? Not editorially. But according to Nyhan, it is afraid of popular left-wing bloggers’ Moses-like effect on the flow of liberal click-throughs:

One important factor shaping TAP’s decision may have been the popularity of Democratic bloggers like Atrios, who pump out a stream of pre-filtered news and commentary. Before the rise of online competition, opinion magazines had some freedom to be idiosyncratic and less partisan than their readers. The initial incarnation of the Prospect, for example, had a thoughtful, academic tone. But the availability of more points of view online (while laudable in many ways) has paradoxically increased the pressure on ideological publications to pander to readers, who have the option of seeking out exclusively partisan blogs instead.

In addition, the huge audiences of the partisan bloggers make them a key source of online traffic for opinion magazines if they supply ideologically favorable content. (At Spinsanity, we quickly learned that it was virtually impossible to get links from liberals when we criticized a liberal, and vice versa for conservatives.) Similarly, the risk of not getting links means that few commentators are willing to criticize the gatekeepers.

In some cases, the threat may be existential. Opinion magazines lose money — a lot of money — and are vulnerable to further financial losses. Atrios, Kos, and other liberal bloggers have attacked The New Republic for years, helping to undermine the center-left magazine’s lagging popularity among liberals. If TNR’s subscriber base were to shrink as a result of these attacks, the viability of the magazine could be threatened.

Nyhan points out that conservative journals of opinion were always less prone to ideological divergence, but the same syndrome exists on the right as the left. Although it does seem to me there are a number of bloggers that get called conservative but are really more libertarian, like Instapundit, Ann Althouse and The Volokh Conspiracy, who provide lots of links, but rarely to right-wing mags.

I like a battle of ideas, not a march of talking points. My advice to TAPPED and The New Republic is to take more risks, not fewer. I can’t help but think that when Bush is truly a lame duck and there is fresh soil being plowed in both political parties, the lock-steppers on both the right and the left will seem a bit marginal–dull and shrill.

For over a century, the opinion magazines have played a role as idea labs for the candidates. If all they’re doing is saluting Kos and Hugh Hewitt all day with predictable rants, that will just drive the stuff of politics, the intra-party policy debates, out of the public eye and into realms accessible only to insiders. That’s not what the Internet promised.

*UPDATE:  Here is Nyhan’s blog post about the reaction to his column.  Extremely interesting comments. although it seems as if no one got his point.  The question isn’t whether the right and left blogs enforce conformity.   Some do, some don’t.  The question is whether the right and left blogs are causing the traditional opinion journals to mute contrarian points of view or self-criticism for economic reasons — to keep the referral clicks coming from the more popular blogs.

This is really an economic issue.  A political blog starts out as a labor of love, done for free.  If it catches on, it can sell ads, but the ad revenue need only “pay for” the time the bloggers spend working on it, and the small amount of overhead needed for web hosting.

However, the New Republic and The American Prospect (and National Review, and Weekly Standard) have the enormous additional cost of maintaining a paid staff of writers, editors, graphic artists, circulation managers, ad managers, etc., plus paper, ink, postage and rent. They are hoping their web site advertising will offset some of those costs.

And, if Nyhan is correct, the editors of those sites have noticed that traffic goes up or down based on whether these sites give reliable reinforcement to their ideological fellow-travelers.  This tendency exerts pressure on editors of these magazine-based websites to enforce comformity, he believes.

So the real question on the floor is: Do we lose anything if these magazines are forced by the marketplace into becoming more orthodox?

Liberals Who Fear Liberals

Sam Harris, a liberal writer who wrote a provocative book he described as “highly critical of religion,” is now highly critical of liberals, while still trying to be one.  I am familiar with this struggle!

In the wake of my prior post describing the last years of feminist journalist Orianna Fallaci, you must read this op-ed Harris wrote for today’s LA Times.  The response he got from thousands of readers of his last book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, inspired him to panic.  Here are a few chunks of what Harris has to say:

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that “liberals are soft on terrorism.” It is, and they are.

(snip)

Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.

(snip)

The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world’s Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals.

(snip)

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

(snip)

While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren’t.

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

There is still time for liberals to find a voice in defense of civilization, but the window is shutting.  It will shut for good in 2008, when they can no longer use “Bush rage” as an excuse for their mindless opposition to waging a war that is being waged against us whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

I’m quite unhappy about a future in which liberalism, the belief system with which I’ve been affliliated for my entire adult life becomes marginalized and irrelevant, and where its adherents are considered unqualified to govern. 

I don’t like the idea of having to choose between candidates with whom I agree on 90 percent of the issues, but who fail to have a supportable position on the single most important issue, and Republicans, who are mostly wrong, but right about the one thing that matters most.

And I’m furiously angry that half-witted partisans who run the left-wing, self-described “netroots” blogs are now seen as arbiters of true liberalism.  They might be speaking for this generation’s liberals, I fear. But they don’t know what liberalism means, historically or intellectually.  They’re so in love with their aggressive tone, they haven’t bothered to notice their positions are incoherent. 

The Democratic Party should look at the liberal netroots like pre-adolescent children. You have to listen to them, because you can’t disown them, and because they’re loud and hard to ignore.  But they shouldn’t be allowed to drive until they grow up.

A Lesson for Bloggers: Don’t Go All Ga-Ga

It surely seemed like a great idea at the time:  Former President Bill Clinton inviting a group of progressive bloggers to lunch in Manhattan to talk politics and get their pictures taken with him.  The attendees who blogged about it frankly gushed.  Talk Left said it was “awesome,” and added this:

Criminal defense lawyers take note: He’s far better on our issues than we thought while he was President, from mandatory minimums, to drug courts to restoring the right to vote to former offenders. I’m totally impressed.

Americablog, meanwhile, was ecstatic:

And while the policy discussion was fascinating, for me these kind of get togethers are far more interesting on a personal than substantive level. Meaning, it’s fascinating to see someone like Clinton in person. How his brain works, what he’s like personally, and just as importantly, to meet and get to know his staff so we can all help each other in the future (we are, after all, Democratic bloggers).

My impressions? He looks a little older than I expected, though befitting someone who was president for eight years (and he was first elected 14 years ago). He’s got beautiful blue eyes (this isn’t something I normally notice, but in his case I did, and he does, and I suspect he uses it to good effect). The man is smart as hell. He knows a lot about everything, and he gets it, he gets politics, he gets people, he understands what’s going on and knows how to get things done. His political advice is no-nonsense and straight forward – he’d rather take an issue on than run from it (oh for the days of that in a Democratic politician).

Bu-u-ut… the blog commenters weren’t all as kind, as you can read below.  This is a big lesson for everyone who wants to blog with a purpose, whether it’s political or business.  It’s really not about you at all; it’s about the community you create.  And they don’t like it if it seems like you can be bought off with a cheap lunch. Even the dreaded MSM tries to maintain objectivity.

Although Americablog’s commenters were mostly happy for ”John in DC,” and complimentary of Clinton, most of Talk Left’s commenters weren’t happy.  Here are some excerpts of the negative comments.  

So why the f–k wasn’t he a more progressive, less reactionary, less corpoRatty prez?

his triangulation killed the liberal wing of his Party…

just askin…

And:

saying it don’t make it so… and he’s talked a good line for a long time.

i’m going to stick to judging him by his actions.

And:

I doubt I’ll ever stop thinking that Bill Clinton was the greatest,most talented president I will ever see in my lifetime, but the commenter above is right… it is awefully strange to compliment him on the opinions he *actually* holds but did not put on paper.

And:

Bill Clinton fought for Nafta and got it passed. He signed legislation that allowed media to consolidate into a handful of companies. He failed to restore the Fairness Doctrine. He left it up to the Bush Administration decide whether to pursue Osama Bin Laden, rather than launch the attacks once the evidence was in on the Cole Bombing. He has refrained from criticizing Bush even though the Bush Administration has broken all precedent by criticizing him relentlessly. He continues to support dynasticism in American politics by supporting his wife’s presidential ambitions.

Most unforgivably, he labors under the naive impression that his political opponents just differ about what’s best for the country when it has been quite clear from the beginning that they wanted to liquidate it, take possession of its assets and trample on its founding document. And I don’t believe he’s taken much of a stand on the war, but I might be wrong about that.

These are all pretty important issues to me, so I’d be just fascinated to know on what issues he’s supposed to be “better than we thought while he was president,” when, as an ealier commenter pointed out, it would have made more of a difference.

And, cruelly:

Politicians find it notoriously easy to impress intellectuals and writers in face-to-face meetings. It’s the oldest trick in the book. I hope the others in this meeting were more on their guard than the host of this blog.

Personally, if I had been invited to that lunch (ha!), I’m not sure I would have been any less thrilled.  To me, Clinton has grown in stature since 2000, and I would have been fascinated to hear his perspective on just about anything political and foreign policy especially.  But the caution remains.  There are blogs that exist primarily to generate conversation among like-minded people.  You fly in the face of their expectations at your peril. 

“Forget it Dick, It’s Chinatown”

That might have been a good final line to the ABC mini-series “The Path to 9/11.” Because John O’Neill didn’t survive, it would have had to be spoken to Richard Clarke.

Supposedly this two-part show was a right-wing smear attack on the Clinton Administration. Well, look. If you’re going to tell the story of how the government screwed up in protecting America from this attack, you’re going to feature characters who are part of the permanent government, such as the story’s hero, FBI Special Agent John P. O’Neill. As a rule, such people have contempt for politics, politicians and, above all, political appointees. (This is true at every level of government.  I saw it all the time at City Hall.  Elected officials and their appointees eventually figure out that there are two types of bureaucrats:  The smart, dedicated ones who think the political people are stupid, and the dumb, lazy ones who think the political people are stupid.)

It is part of the story to show there was tension between people like Clarke and O’Neill on one side, and presidential appointees like Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger and, later, Condi Rice on the other. Especially in the case of O’Neill, a fierce, brilliant Irish bulldog who headed the FBI’s National Security Division.

Barbara Newman, a documentary producer for A&E, interviewed O’Neill in 1997. That interview was included in a 2002 PBS Frontline episode on O’Neill called “The Man Who Knew.” On the PBS website, Newman writes:

I had covered terrorism stemming from the Middle East since 1980, when I was a producer for ABC’s 20/20. John and I shared an interest in this area and a belief that the U.S. could suffer a tremendous blow from those who espoused a hatred of us and our society. Some found his zeal shrill and annoying. I found it reassuring.

John could be utterly charming or totally devastating. He could wither with a look, suffering fools badly. He was openly contemptuous of people he didn’t think pushed the envelope or themselves. He thought so quickly he often finished my sentences. I knew when he disagreed with me by catching an amused flicker in his eyes.

John had old-fashioned values. He was patriotic. He was religious, never missing a Sunday mass. He told me that he was so poor growing up, he had done every job, including cleaning bathrooms. He went to the FBI at age 18 and became a tour guide. The Bureau was his life; they sent him to college at American University.

Behind the bluster, John was a gentle soul. He might not admit it, but I think he would rather light a candle than curse the darkness.

John and I were friends. We were able to communicate directly, without artifice. We trusted each other and knew each other’s limits. For years John had told me that Osama bin Laden was an enormous threat to the U.S. and that I should do a documentary about him. And for years I told him that Americans weren’t interested. We were both right.

Also in 2002, the New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright wrote a posthumous profile of O’Neill, in which Clarke played a prominent role. The whole piece is worth reading — Wright has a new book out about 9/11 that I am anxious to get. This excerpt is telling:

Clarke immediately spotted in O’Neill an obsessiveness about the dangers of terrorism which mirrored his own. “John had the same problems with the bureaucracy that I had,” Clarke told me. “Prior to September 11th, a lot of people who were working full time on terrorism thought it was no more than a nuisance. They didn’t understand that Al Qaeda was enormously powerful and insidious and that it was not going to stop until it really hurt us. John and some other senior officials knew that. The impatience really grew in us as we dealt with the dolts who didn’t understand.”

That’s right: Dolts. It’s obvious both Clarke and O’Neill didn’t like much of anybody in Washington, regardless of party. Maybe they were being unfair, or maybe they were right. But it wasn’t partisan.

“The Path to 9/11″ was primarily the story of these two men and their frustration in trying to protect the nation from a threat they saw clearly and — so they thought — no one else did. “No one” is inclusive of Clinton and his appointees. It would have been untrue to the characters to have them make nice comments about the Administration, or to whitewash the contempt that numerous witnesses say they felt toward them.

The activists and Democratic Party leaders who have interpreted the dramatization of these two characters as a partisan attack don’t get it. Curiously, their furious response underscores O’Neill’s view of the political types as more interested in protecting their rear ends than protecting the country.

Democrats as Censors?

I get a lot of e-mails from the Democratic party. Howard Dean, Rahm Emmanuel and a guy named Tom McMahon are frequent visitors to my in-box.  This one was from McMahon and it was called “RE: A Despicable, Irresponsible Fraud.” Here’s how it started:

Dear John,

This is it: crunch time for getting the slanderous ABC television docudrama “The Path to 9/11″ yanked off the air. The network schedule has this slanderous attack on Democrats slated to start on Sunday night, September 10, at 8 o’clock — and as long as it stays on the schedule, we have work to do. Take a minute right now and tell Disney president Robert Iger to keep this right-wing propaganda off our airwaves:

http://www.democrats.org/pathto911

Here’s the good news: the suits at ABC and the Walt Disney Company have started panicking under pressure, thanks to your ferocious response to the outrageous decision to put this irresponsible miniseries on the air. But until Disney quits defending its plan to broadcast conservative propaganda — fraudulently presented to Americans as “based on the 9/11 Commission Report” — the company should plan to keep taking every bit of heat we dish out.

I really don’t get the party’s strategy — at all. Here are the problems with it that I see:

1) They’re calling attention to something that they don’t want people to see. Which means curious people are more likely to want to see it. Human nature.

2) They’re associating the Democratic Party with censorship, e.g. boycotts and pressure to push for prior restraint of a program. Why aren’t they mindful of the precedent they’re setting? “If we don’t like it, take it off the air,” is now an official party position. I have a feeling that’s going to come back to haunt them when the right wing objects to a pending TV program that offends them. Dems are supposed to be for free speech.

3) A related point: Will the entertainment leaders so critical to the party’s fund-raising agree that such pressure tactics are appropriate? Has anyone asked Rob Reiner, or David Geffen, or Larry David how they feel about this?

4) The position they’re defending isn’t credible. Clinton turned over the White House keys to Bush in January 2001. The attack was in September 2001. It’s pretty apparent the plannng for the attack started before 2001, and was preceded by a number of Al Queda-sponsored attacks on American assets that all took place during Clinton’s tenure. So why is it out of bounds to criticize the Clinton Administration’s record on this issue? How could you review the “path to 9/11″ and avoid doing so? I don’t hear Bush people complaining about what is supposed to be some very harsh criticism aimed their way in this show. Which leads to…

5) The program is going to air. People will watch it, more than would have because of curiousity. Many will be expecting it to live up to the description: “Right-wing propaganda.” But I bet it won’t strike most viewers that way. “What are they fussing about?” will be the response, I bet. Or worse: “What were they trying to hide?”  The net effect will be to give the show more credibility than perhaps it deserves. If “The Path to 9/11″ isn’t a drooling right-wing fantasy, it will be regarded as fair, and its critics will be taken as over-sensitive.

Could be that the party is once again trying to catch up with the left-wing blogosphere, which has been hysterical on this topic, and probably has been pressuring the party to “stand tough.”  It’s fine for grassroots, independent people to be upset. But the party itself should be above this sort of thing. It should have adopted a more sober “wait and see” approach, keeping powder dry until after the show aired rather than demanding that the show be censored. Really, the Democratic Party, as an institution, should have done nothing whatsoever to call attention to it.

Am I wrong?  If you understand the point of the party’s strategy, please, enlighten me in the comment section below.

Ned Lamont and “Message Clarity”: A Winning Formula for the Democrats?

A few months ago, I complained about “Lieberman-hatred,” and my bafflement at the virulent rhetoric being aimed at a good man; but I have to admit his critics identified a personality flaw in the Connecticut senator. To paraphrase Peter Beinert: Because Bin Laden and Hussein are clearly worse than George W. Bush, Joe Lieberman believed anyone who criticized the president’s conduct of the war was helping Bin Laden and Hussein. So it was Joe Lieberman’s duty to boost Bush, despite disagreements, despite party differences, despite everything. 

To Lieberman, this was simply patriotic.  To his critics, Lieberman’s stance was craven; moreover, it implicity downgraded the patriotism of his fellow Democratic Party members.

It is probably this perception, more than his position on the war itself, that cost Lieberman the support of his state’s Democrats, and swung the primary election to Ned Lamont.  After all, Lieberman was just one of many Democratic senators and House members who had voted for the war, and have so far declined to demand an immediate pull-out –which many Democrats agree would be irresponsible. 

To the left, Lieberman became a symbol of Democratic capitulation to Bush/Cheney in the years after 9/11 because he seemed so proud of his pro-war position, and even prouder, specifically, that he was supporting this president.  That was not so wise, politically. Any Democrat who fails to speak ill of George W. Bush in 2006 is suspect in the eyes of most Democratic activists. This colorful post, from Americablog.com’s John Aravosis expresses this feeling:

So, if the media and their GOP handlers are correct that bloggers are to the far-left of the Democratic party, and we all opposed Joe Lieberman because we supposedly hate conservative Democrats who support the war on terror, then why is it that we really like Harry Reid (a pro-life, white guy, who supports the flag burning amendment), but we aren’t shedding a lot of tears over last night’s defeat of Cynthia McKinney (a black woman and flaming liberal who was highly critical of George Bush)?And why is it that other Democrats who were supporters of the war in Iraq, and have significant progressive constituencies, and who are up for re-election this year, aren’t facing serious criticism from us, and aren’t facing serious primary challengers?

If we’re all flaming liberals who hate anyone who supported the war in Iraq, then why is Lieberman the only guy we’re upset with?

Or maybe: the Republicans are lying; the media, as usual, fell for their lies hook, line and sinker; and Joe Lieberman lost because he was George Bush’s love child and the American people have had it with this administration; their incompetence; and anyone who blindly enables it.

It’s not just bloggers, by the way. The “netroots” are just a new name for a species of zealous activist that has been around a long time. I’ve been a Democrat all my voting life, and I don’t recall a time when it was ever “okay” with self-identified Democrats to say they agreed with a Republican president about anything until he was safely out of office and preferably dead.

When Democrats start saying things like “We need to be pro-jobs,” or “We’re too weak on defense,” or “We need to be tougher on crime,” that’s normal Democratic angst.  But Democrats who said out loud that Nixon, Reagan or Bush 41 were better on a core issue generally were getting ready to leave the party (except Democrats trying to hold onto a Democratic seat in a very Republican district.)  It is no different in the era of Bush 43.  Democrats don’t agree on everything, but they are united in their eloquent hatred of Republicans in power.

While observing that, I still saw some of the netroot celebrants going down a disturbing and probably self-defeating path. My DD on the “many benefits of Ned Lamont’s victory” was typical of many and more articulate than most:

With Ned Lamont’s victory, we will now see far fewer Democrats in Washington and elsewhere take the easy path to media stardom that the corporate media had provided for Democrats since the mid-1980’s: talk about liberals and/or Democrats in the same way Republicans talk about liberals and/or Democrats. No one will want to be the next Joe Lieberman, and as such this victory will change Democratic behavior. This will now make it much more difficult for Republicans to close Daou’s triangle on a variety of issues, as they quickly will find a shortage of elected Democrats willing to use anti-Democratic Republican talking points. Thus, the more partisan messaging will make it far more difficult for conservatives and Republicans to dominate the conventional wisdom narratives of our national political discourse. This will also mean fewer “Democrats divided” narratives in the media, and help us slowly begin building toward greater message clarity. Today we already have seen how Lamont’s victory this defeat freed up Senator Dodd on Iraq and Emmanuel on Bush. This is just the beginning.

Daou’s Triangle, by the way, refers to this diagram by Peter Daou, which is supposed to show how bloggers (by which he means activists) and the regular party establishment can work in concert to get the “corporate media” to repeat their messages and influence the public.  According to this meme, the Republican triangle works flawlessly — in part because apostates like Lieberman lend more credibility to their messages – but the Democratic triangle is “broken.” 

But the question is:  In service of a PR objective (“fewer ’Democrats divided’ narratives,” “greater message clarity”), should Democrats who take different positions be run out of the party?  This is what he seems to be saying. It’s a peculiar stance for a Democrat, one that seems out of step with the historical nature of the party. 

There is no specific Democratic position on a large assortment of issues, except for disdain for Bush.  How do you decide which of the many Democratic positions on Iraq and the Islamist threat–not to mention Social Security, health care, education, gay marriage, the environment, gun control, etc. etc.–should be purged for the sake of “message clarity?”  ”I don’t belong to an organized party; I’m a Democrat,” Will Rogers’ famous remark, was uttered just as the party entered its period of greatest dominance.

Is it so different today?  Must the nature of what it means to be a Democrat really become so narrow in order for the party to succeed?

“Message clarity” is not a virtue unto itself.  It is a PR technique, and generally a defensive one. Straying from the “key messages” is usually seen as dangerous for a CEO or corporate spokesperson dealing with a crisis, or anticipating criticism.  It is not a confident stance, nor is it a way to foster the kind of creativity that — in my opinion — the Democratic party really needs more than anything right now. 

Obeying, I guess, the iron law of Daou’s Triangle, the left- and right-wing bloggers are now furiously, frantically spinning to claim not who “won” yesterday’s vote — clearly, that was the left — but which party gains.  Republicans say Republicans, because the election proves that left-wing wackos have taken their party down the McGovernite road. Democrats say Democrats because the election reflects dwindling support for the Iraq war that is the most prominent Republican policy.

My take is that the Lamont victory gives the Democrats an opportunity, but only an opportunity.  They’ve got the public’s attention.  They’ve done something novel, tossing out a respected party veteran — no matter what else you might think about him, Joe Lieberman is no hack — who was their VP candidate six years ago. They have, I think, captured the zeitgeist of a public that is weary of the war and wondering whether Bush has a clue what to do next. 

When you’ve got the microphone, however, you better have something to say.  ”Message clarity” won’t be good enough if the message fails to persuade or enlighten the troubled American public.      

Newt Goes Global, Hugh Goes Postal

Former Vice President Al Gore, star of the environmental blockbuster “An Inconvenient Truth,” is not the only 90s’ icon to make a strong comeback in 2006. Newt Gingrich is pursuing a similar strategy — frightening everyone about global catastrophe — to get people talking about him.

Clearly, we are being maneuvered into a Gore vs. Newt presidential election in 2008. Who do you pick? Gore fears rising seas. Gingrich fears rising hordes. Gore fears it might be too late to reverse global warming. Gingrich fears it might be too late to reverse World War III!

According to David Postman’s Seattle Times-hosted political blog:

Gingrich said in the coming days he plans to speak out publicly, and to the administration, about the need to recognize that America is in World War III.

He lists wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, this week’s bomb attacks in India, North Korean nuclear threats, terrorist arrests and investigations in Florida, Canada and Britain, and violence in Israel and Lebanon as evidence of World War III. He said Bush needs to deliver a speech to Congress and “connect all the dots” for Americans.

He said the reluctance to put those pieces together and see one global conflict is hurting America’s interests. He said people, including some in the Bush Administration, who urge a restrained response from Israel are wrong “because they haven’t crossed the bridge of realizing this is a war.”

“This is World War III,” Gingrich said. And once that’s accepted, he said calls for restraint would fall away.

Already, Hugh Hewitt is reading “appeasers” out of the blogosphere, even those conservatives who want to stop and think about this for a second before we start blasting away at Syria and Iran. World War III is the message of the week. Hewitt likes to cite the William Manchester biography of Winston Churchill, “The Last Lion,” which documents British appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s, and Churchill’s lonely, failed efforts to reverse it before the Nazi military strength grew to the point where it threatened all of Europe. I’ve read that book, and it’s great, and it has nothing to do with today.

The British appeasers thought Hitler could be Britain’s ally against the Communist Soviet Union, or if not an ally, a kind of vanguard who would do the dirty work that the deeply anti-Red British establishment didn’t want to do themselves. Also, the British establishment thought many of Hitler’s demands were quite reasonable; it was still an embarassment to Britain that it supported the draconian punishment of Germany demanded by France after WWI.

These positions look ridiculous now, and those who held them are responsible for hundreds of millions of avoidable deaths. That’s why “appeaser” is such a blood insult for Hewitt to toss around so carelessly.

But reviewing the news coverage of Israel’s fight with Hezbollah, I see virtually no sentiment out there to “appease” the terrorist group’s sponsors, Syria and Iran. There is little confusion about the hostile status of these countries with respect to Israel and the U.S. The argument is over how to deal with them, and there are many approaches being debated. The problem is legitimately complex.

Patience, Hugh! It’s still okay to have a debate in this country.

One perhaps relevant observation: The left-wing blogs haven’t really said anything much about the fighting in the Middle East, nor about the Syria/Iran aspect of the issue, and seem to want to steer the conversation back to more tried and true topics.

The most important thing Arianna Huffington found to say about the war was that Bush’s use of the word “shit” in a conversation with Tony Blair is yet more proof that Bush is blah blah blah blah. Joshua Micah Marshall doesn’t think the president’s s-bomb is such a big deal, but he does allow a guest blogger to enjoy the irony of columnist David Brooks being inconsistent because before the Iraq war he was blah blah blah blah blah. Daily Kos announced he won’t have anything to say about the war at all, and Kevin Drum has taken the same position (which prompts a comment on his site that “A political blog will be pretty lame without an opinion on an active war.”) I get the feeling that the unstated fear among this side of the blogosphere is the war might — darn the luck — help Joe Lieberman.

So I really don’t know what Hugh Hewitt is worrying about. The conservatives have the field all to themselves.

But if Newt Gingrich wants Bush to declare World War III, I sure want a debate about that first, if it’s okay with you all. I mean, sheesh. I’m pretty hawkish, but the right has gone a bit giddy! The unfolding of the Iraq war has tempered my enthusiasm. I can’t believe it hasn’t made people of Gingrich’s and Hewitt’s ilk a bit more humble about making demands for war with no debate and no restraint.

Reaping the Snark-Winds*

I was talking to serious businesspeople about the blogosphere the other day, explaining what I saw as the potential to gain credibility and respect by connecting with bloggers who have a particular expertise, or who cover a particular niche.

We were on a conference call; the participants were also on the Internet, and we were telling each other about sites we found.

One of the others on the call interrupted me to say, “I found this headline,” which was something to the effect of “Those Cocksuckers Should Die.”

“Yeah, well, there’s that element too,” I said sheepishly, feeling for a moment like I’d accidentally taken a client to lunch in a strip club.

If you are a blogger, there’s no one censoring you. At least up ’til now, the companies that host blogs don’t step in and say “mind your language,” or “that’s libel.” And if you’re really angry about, oh, George W. Bush, or Joe Lieberman, or Hillary Clinton, or Howard Dean, sometimes all you want to do is curse at them, and blogging lets you do that.

If you’re a bit more clever, perhaps you don’t just curse, you get “snarky” — a kind of mean-spirited cleverness. Some snarky sites are funny, but some of them get a little dark. Not that journalists of past eras were models of courtly behavior. But, for a lot of writers, the ability to set one’s own standards equates to no standards.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But the recent episode involving the political satire site Protein Wisdom shows how a playground without monitors can sometimes degenerate. Protein Wisdom’s Jeff Goldstein strikes many conservatives as hilarious. His politics are a little less harsh than Ann Coulter’s, but his taste for the outrageous outpaces hers by quite a bit. Some left-wingers are drawn to his site like the proverbial moths to a flame. One of them was Deborah Frisch, a college teacher out of Arizona.

Here’s a Protein Wisdom post that summarizes the fray. Basically, Ms. Frisch lost her mind, deciding to react to Goldstein’s outrageousness by posting weird, obscene and threatening remarks about Goldstein’s 2-year-old son. As a result, she is no longer teaching college in Arizona. Many conservatives rallied to Goldstein, relating to his concerns as a parent. Some (not all) leftists agreed; Hirsch was way out of line. She herself apologized, somewhat equivocally.

The sober, witty law-prof blogger Ann Althouse, though a moderate conservative, is no fan of Goldstein’s. She assesses what happened this way:

I agree Frisch has a big problem. She’s the weakling who entered a drinking match with a man who can drink you under the table. She lost control. She paid the price — a big one. Goldstein’s you-talked-about-my-child move is a strong one, but it’s a move nonetheless, made by a person who likes to play the game… hard. He’s not a victim. He’s one of the people who has advanced himself in the blogosphere by making it hostile and ugly. Like all of us, he is capable of being hurt by a genuine crazy. But why not just delete the trolls? Why rile them? Some of them really aren’t playing with a full deck. Why push weak people until they lose control? It’s an ugly game, and I think Jeff knows he plays it.

Standing back from this, what I see is a inherent feature of putting the power of publishing in individuals’ hands without barriers to entry of any kind, and combining that power with the power of social media to create conversations within and across various blogs. When the only control is self-control, in an environment like this, that’s no control at all. When a snarky blog that permits comments avoids evokes this kind of ugly incident, one might eventually see that as the exception, not the rule.

It’s no reason not to play. But it’s a reminder that the blogosphere is far from Paradise.

*Corrected, thanks to an alert reader, to get Ms. Frisch’s name right throughout, 7/12.

Go For It, Obama

Why shouldn't the 2008 Democratic Party nominee be Barack Obama (the senator from Illinois whose flirtation with a presidential run is detailed in this Washington Post story)?

The Republicans are tired and unpopular, and yet it appears that the Democratic Party is in no shape to take advantage of the opportunity. They're twisted up by the war, twisted up by the left-wing bloggers, twisted up by the cocooning effect of major media (of which the Obama story I've linked to is a perfect example, ironically.) The state of our two-party system is atrocious. Both parties need some time in the wilderness.

Nevertheless, there will be a Democratic Party nominee in 2008. As the Post story says,

The speculation is as much a commentary on the state of the party as it is on Obama. The Democrats' most prominent likely contenders — such as Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and John F. Kerry (Mass.) — are figures who have been in the public eye for many years and wear scars from earlier controversies.

No, Obama hasn't been much of a senator in his year-plus in office. He's not in the majority, and he's a rookie, so you can't set your expectations too high. No, Obama hasn't got any distinctive positions on any issues, and is afflicted with the Democratic Party's self-cancelling orthodoxy. But he's dynamic, and very smart; charming and charismatic; young and energetic. And depending on who the Republicans nominate, a candidate who'll run on the Democratic orthodoxy might not seem so bad.

There is no question that Barack Obama is fully qualified to be our president. And, as the Post story details, there is little doubt he could raise the money he would need. He's a star, the first star the party's had since Bill Clinton.

It was said just a few months ago that Hillary Clinton could take the party's left-wing base for granted, and could run as a moderate on national security and social issues, where the left-wing ideology scares away voters. That conventional wisdom is already washed-up. If Hillary runs, she will run as the moderate. Kerry and others will take the left wing vote. Hillary will be treated like Joe Lieberman.

Obama can do what Hillary cannot: Keep the left enthralled, while tacking to the center-right on national security. Obama could be Peter Beinart's dream, a new Truman.

I predict the 2006 election won't go nearly as well for the Democrats as they've been hoping. If I'm right, there will be a lot of gloom and rancor in the run-up to 2008. But Obama entering the race would change everything. Politics might seem fun again for a lot of us. He can put an easy grin on Democratic partisanship. He's not a hater or a divider.

If he runs, we'll find out more about him. Maybe Obama will melt under the kleiglights. But in politics, timing is everything, and I think the timing is exquisite for Barack Obama in 2008. Don't wait, don't let anyone trick you into paying dues you don't need to pay. Go for it, Senator Obama.

Is the Internet “Creaky?”

Former Clinton Press Secretary Mike McCurry's work for Hands off the Internet rates a story in today's LA Times. It's the standard "strange bedfellows" tale, showing McCurry taking flak from his former left-wing allies for becoming the front man for what strikes me as a strained effort by the telecommunications firms to look like defenders of the Internet.

To McCurry's foes, what the telcos want is the ability to charge customers more for certain services while offering competing services of their own. Inevitably, the telcos will be in charge of Internet content because they've got the power to squeeze out everyone else. That's the theory anyway, but McCurry thinks it's ridiculous paranoia.

This McCurry comment jumped out at me as revealing of the underlying nature of the net neutrality debate:

"On Net neutrality, I feel like screaming 'puh-leeeze,' " (McCurry) wrote on the Huffington Post, where he sometimes blogs. "The Internet is not a free public good. It is a bunch of wires and switches and connections and pipes and it is creaky."

Is the Internet really that "creaky?" Or is the issue really about the future use of the Internet to deliver video on demand?

The advocates of net neutrality, such as Save The Internet, represent Internet users of today, such as bloggers and companies like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft that make their money off unique Internet capabilities like search engines. They are defending a technology that has changed the world, because it is a medium that puts users in charge of what they read and see, and creates opportunities for conversation and collaboration.

How many people who surf the Net for information, or who post to a blog about an issue they're passionate about, would rather be using the Net to watch Jennifer Aniston's latest movie? Not many, I would wager. Some of them might have wanted advance clips from the film, which you could get, but not the whole movie.

The video-viewing experience on the net has an unspoken time limit. You might watch clips on YouTube, say, for three, five, ten minutes, but you're unlikely to sit in front of your computer to watch a 90-minute movie. Your fingers would itch. You'd be tempted to click away to check out something else. It's not like watching TV, which is essentially passive.

What McCurry's group wants is to be able to finance, through user fees, an expansion of bandwidth that would allow distribution of long-form, high-definition video via the Internet. But does the Internet really need to be used for that purpose?  Are today's Internet users asking for it? 

If I want to watch a movie, I already have video-on-demand options via my cable operator, and if I'm willing to plan ahead just a little, I have even more options. In terms of video, the neat thing about the Internet is to be able to see user-generated content, which costs the user almost nothing to produce and distribute. If I wanted to watch a Hollywood production that cost tens of millions of dollars, I know where to find that — on TV, on Netflix, at a movie theater. But where else could I find a four minute clip of two Chinese college students lip-syncing to a bad song, except the Internet?

More seriously, if I want to search quickly for information about a consumer product, a health symptom, or a bill going through Congress, the Internet is the only thing that lets me do that. Before the Internet, this kind of research required a trip to the library — if it could be done at all. (That's the point of the "Google 1960" joke, reproduced on the right.)

So, is it possible that the net neutrality debate is really a struggle about which media the existing and future bandwidth should be dedicated to? (Sorry for the lousy grammar.) Users or moviegoers? Or maybe this comes closer: Grassroots content providers vs. big-budget content providers. There's room for both in the world, but is there room for both on the Internet?

Sure, I might be lacking in vision. Maybe there are high-bandwidth applications other than transmission of movies that will liberate us as much as the Internet has done.

But if that's the case, McCurry needs to do more than slag the Internet as "creaky." He needs to outline his organization's vision of this future. Don't expect us to take the telcos word for it that they want to give us something "better" without describing what "better" is. Because what we've got today is effecting a revolution in communications, and I'm not sure that revolution is finished yet.

Another PR Tactic About to Bite the Dust

Global warming is a good metaphor for how the changing communications climate is affecting the array of PR tactics that hundreds of PR agencies offer their clients. Glaciers are melting, seas are rising, once-fertile forests turn to desert, and giant flies have begun to attack — but some species are too slow to move, and will die right where they stand.

It was not so long ago that my staff and I would draft "sample" letters to the editor, and distribute them, on a small scale, to average Dick and Janes to send to their local newspapers as if the letters were their own. We justified it thusly: The words might be ours, but the decision to sign and send was voluntary on the sender's part. The sender also is free to change our words as much as they want. Our drafts are merely suggestions. We'd never see the final product unless and until it ran. However, to be honest, when it did run, it usually looked just like our "sample."

I was never in charge of a campaign that did a nationwide letter-to-the-editor campaign, but the tactic is the same, and is based on the same intellectual premise: That your campaign represents all that is true and good, and is thus widely supported, but without being prompted your supporters might not state the case as eloquently as you, Mr. or Ms. PR Professional, would do.

By helping them, you could make extra sure that your supporters repeated your carefully-crafted "key messages," which you have told your client will carry the day. You are also helping to overcome your supporters' inertia, which might prevent them from taking a public stand on their own. After all, unlike you, these supporters aren't billing a client, so they can't be expected to go about their PR duties so diligently, right? They might not write at all. They might get distracted by, you know, life.

Well, attention all polar bears — the ice is almost gone, and you're about to fall into the Arctic Ocean to be nibbled to death by guppies.

David Mastio of InOpinion, a blog that promotes his newpaper op-ed consulting business, has made it a personal cause to expose AstroTurf letter-to-the editor scams, and protect our nation's editorial pages from running what are essentially unpaid political ads.

Check out the state-of-the-art letter-to-the-editor generators — an increasingly common tactic of the right and the left, as well as corporate-sponsored campaigns — from Hands off the Internet to Focus on the Family to MoveOn.org to advocates of The American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act.

If you click on this link, or this one, you can see how it works. On the net neutrality site, you're given a choice of six pre-written paragraphs containing all the key messages. On the anti-gay marriage site, you've got 20 to pick from. You pick the ones you like, in the order you like, and then with a couple more clicks, a letter over your signature is sent automatically to your local newspapers, based on the geographic information you provide.

Figuring out if a letter to the editor is AstroTurf-generated is easy to do nowadays. If you see a letter to the editor that looks suspiciously PR-ish in its use of phrases, all you need to do is highlight a distinctive sentence, and run it through a Google search. If you've guessed right, you'll find published letters to the editor with nearly identical text but different authors, running in newspapers all over America.

Prompted by one of Mastio's links, I copied this phrase into Google: "Although we don’t eat horses, we slaughtered 88,000 last year for export to countries that do." This is a talking point for advocates of the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act. Based on the search, I found this precise phrase in 138 citations of letters to the editor, from newspapers from Tucson to Boise to Miami to Chicago. The context for the letter is the unfortunate breakdown of Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro, so all of these letters were sent in the days immediately after the May 20th Preakness race when it occured. There is no web site I can find where this draft letter was offered, so I'm assuming the letter senders were prompted by e-mails from an animal rights organization.

Mastio's anti-AstroTurf letters-to-the-editor campaign has been noticed by some of A-list bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, Ed Driscoll and the PR-industry-focused Holmes Report Blog, which is what brought my attention to it. Mastio's linked to a couple of places where supporters of the groups he's busted defend the tactic. For example, Gary Schneeberger of Focus on the Family wrote this to the Seattle Times:

Calling it "willful deception" for groups like ours to help readers write letters to the editor is ludicrous; all we offer readers like Elisa Baggenstos is the assistance of a professional communicator to put what is in their hearts into publishable form.

If it's unethical for someone to sign his or her name to a letter largely written and/or edited by someone who writes and/or edits for a living, then where's the outrage over commentaries that appear on this page under the name of a congressman or senator? Certainly, Mr. Pluckhahn is aware those pieces aren't written by the congressman or senator him/herself, but by a staff member who helps compile the lawmaker's convictions into a well-written whole.

But Schneeberger and other campaign organizers who agree with him miss the point. Nobody would mind if Elisa Baggenstos asked a professional communicator to put what is in her heart into publishable form. The problem comes when hundreds of other people use the same professional communicator's exact phrases, but sign their own names to them. It's a form of trickery and deceit on the part of the respective campaigns, who are trying to create an illusion of grassroots support by fooling newspaper editors into believing these letters are a spontaneous response to an issue of concern among the paper's readers.

It is also, by the way, cynical and patronizing to assume, as Schneeberger does, that Focus on the Family's supporters are too inarticulate to express their heart-felt opinions in their own words.

The practice seems to be growing but I predict its swift demise, because it is so easily detected and foiled. Newspaper editors should be able to sniff out a suspected AstroTurf letter, and can confirm their suspicions with a Google search like the one I did about the 88,000 slaughtered horses. I assume they would not knowingly publish a letter that has already appeared in another newspaper over a different signature.

If the newspaper editors won't do the detective work, I'm sure the adversaries to the campaigns using AstroTurf letters will. This is exactly how the left-wing bloggers busted Ben Domenech, the conservative writer who had been handed a blog by the Washington Post — proving his plagiarism with just a few clicks. As Schneeberger's unfortunate statement demonstrates, AstroTurf letters to the editor are a tactic that, once exposed, cannot be defended without damaging your cause.

Blogging as Lobbying*

Remember how you'd cringe when Greg on The Brady Bunch would talk about a "groovy chick?" I have a feeling a lot of people will have flashbacks like that if they delve into the "Net Neutrality" debate. Because both sides are supplementing the usual battery of PR and lobbying tactics with blogging! Cool, daddio!

First, and most painfully, we get this soporific blog entry attributed to former Clinton spokesman and now Washington communications consultant Mike McCurry and attorney Chris Wolf, who run the telecommunication industry-backed "Hands off the Internet":

We need the freedom to figure out the answers to numerous questions: Who will pay for the pipes that will deliver the next generation Internet? What is the best way to ensure packets of information get across the Internet in the most efficient manner possible? How will traffic be managed when 100 million movies are being downloaded at any given moment?

These are complex questions, and over the coming months, we will do our level best to explain not just why the Save The Internet crowd is wrong, but where their online supporters have their wires (or these days, their wireless) crossed. And that’s why we’ve set up shop here in the blogosphere.

We’ll drop in from time to time, but for now we’ll turn this over to the Hands Off the Internet team, who will keep this blog updated and alive, hopefully even lively.

I'm not holding my breath. In "About Us," they describe those krazy "Hands off the Internet" kids as "a nationwide coalition of Internet users united together in the belief that the Net's phenomenal growth over the past decade stems from the ability of entrepreneurs to expand consumer choices and opportunities without worrying about government regulation."

In other words, this is a coalition of executives at ISPs who need to maintain high shareholder value, and are bored with the money they're already making from all of us who pay them for high-speed access.

Corporations are about growth. Shareholders don't want to be told, "The cable modem/DSL market is nearly saturated and we're going to be fighting an expensive fight simply to retain the customers we've got." For the stock price to rise, the ISPs need to charge more, and apparently figure they should have the unfettered ability to offer new services to justify premium prices. Content providers are free to create content that opens up new streams of advertiser or subscriber revenue — why not the ISPs?

This ISP hunger makes the content providers — big players like Google and Microsoft, but also entrepreneurial netizens who have faith that the next killer app is a gleam in their eye — nervous.

The ISPs control the pipes. What if they decide they want to make money off of searches, or user-generated wacky videos? Couldn't an ISP somehow disfavor Google or YouTube in favor of similar providers they control? What if you had a great new idea? Doesn't this give ISPs leverage to extract payment or even co-ownership in return for access to their customers?

Hence, "Save the Internet." Actually the net neutrality advocates are somewhat less centrally-directed, I think because a constituency exists that is motivated by actual beliefs, not just corporate prompting. Some have started their own activist sites, but "Save the Internet" seems to be where the big money is being directed. But, unlike "Hands…", "Save the Internet's" blogroll includes lots and lots of real bloggers, from bigfeet like Instapundit and Atrios, to dozens of obscure local bloggers, to "Charmed" star Alyssa Milano.

Of course, they've got a blog, too — one that basically repurposes the press releases posted in the press section. Blog entries announce Moby's support, the Christian Coalition's support, an endorsement from the San Jose Mercury News, and lots of long statements by someone called "tkarr" who does not otherwise identify himself. (Presumably, it's Timothy Karr, a Net activist who runs Free Press, but his name never appears anywhere on the "Save…" site.)

Here's how a recent "tkarr" post begins:

The telco cartel wants to gut the Internet and portion it off to the companies that pay their broadband tolls. Companies like AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth seek to get rid of Net Neutrality so they can muscle aside the real online revolutionaries — the small-guy innovators who historically have made the Internet a beacon for democracy, economic growth and new ideas.

In the words of Internet architect Vint Cerf, the Internet is “innovation without permission.” That is the genius of the network that has proven to be a wonderland for new entrepreneurs and ideas, with all the intelligence residing with the end users and not those who control the pipes.

Now, large phone companies like AT&T have unleashed a million-dollar-a-week spending spree to influence Washington decision-makers, pass telco-friendly regulations and change the Internet forever. They want to control online content by placing gateways on the on-ramps and exits to the information superhighway. This is why people on the right and left have joined with every major consumer group, Internet rights advocacy and public interest organization to fight AT&T and their lobbyists.

I mean…it's mostly not a blog. A good blog for "Save the Internet" might be something actually written by a lobbyist. A diary that documents the political warfare as it happens, rather than a compendium of talking points and press releases. Their frontline PR person could contribute to it, too, with accounts (even transcripts) of their discussions with the press.

Don't just lecture us, engage us. The net community is more than just a constituency that will write e-mails and sign petitions. They want a conversation.

I'd give the same advice to the "Hands off the Internet" folks. Right now, they look like a classic AstroTurf campaign, dressed in netizen drag. They are campaigning in exactly the manner you'd expect from a "telco cartel." But lots of people would enjoy reading a blog written by a personable guy like Mike McCurry. He shouldn't hand it off to the "team" (i.e. the underpaid, anonymous flacks responsible for regurgitating the talking points). Write the darn thing yourself!

For a reasonably balanced and comprehensive summary of this issue, I can recommend this piece on Wikipedia. I'm pondering where I stand. I know which side I'm leaning toward, but I want to read more.

My one request to both sides: No blogs from Harry and Louise. Please?

*(Post edited and expanded 5/24, 8 a.m.)

(UPDATE:  The Wall Street Journal posts a debate between McCurry and Craig Newmark that is well worth reading.  What's interesting is both sides claim they are only working to preserve the status quo.  They can't both be right.)    

Political Consultants in a Gilded Cage

I've already written about political writer Joe Klein's plea to rid politics of consultants who, he claims, have hijacked the quadrennial national dialogue that our presidential campaigns are supposed to be, and made them into bland, pointless and unspontaneous exercises that fail to engage voters.

Reviews of his book, Politics Lost, have been mixed. Some reviewers have said Klein is merely stating what everyone already knows, while others say he's wrong to blame the consultants and should instead blame the weak-willed candidates who listen to them. In his Washington Post review, Peter Beinart (a next-generation Joe Klein type who edits The New Republic) suggests that the consultant problem is just a mask for the Democratic Party's larger confusion:

Klein rightly flays Gore and Kerry for not being true to themselves. But he is also harshly critical of the old liberal orthodoxies that Democratic political consultants devote so much time to camouflaging. All of which raises a large and difficult question that he never quite answers: How can contemporary Democratic candidates be personally secure in their beliefs when their party is not? Even if Democrats could liberate themselves from the intellectually and morally stifling grip of consultants like Shrum, would they have any coherent ideology to espouse?

Beinart and Klein both point out that the successful Republican candidates of the past 30 years have not been so in thrall to their consultants. The GOP treats consultants like hired hands — professionals who produce and place the ads, write the press releases, put message points in the hands of surrogates and organize get-out-the-vote campaigns, but who wouldn't dare tell the candidates to say things they don't believe in. So, it would appear, the consultant affliction is something Democrats will have to address. If they do, Klein suggests, they might find their lost souls.

However: Left-wing blogger Markos Moulitsas (Daily KOS) has been writing in Slate this week about Klein's book in a epistolary debate with Republican media guru Stuart Stevens. In yesterday's entry, Moulitsas suggests Democratic candidates are helpless against the power of party-approved consultants:

(C)onsultants run the Democratic Party bureaucracy. Party officials dole out contracts to well-connected consultants, knowing full well that the happy beneficiaries will be running the show themselves in the next cycle, similarly handing out contracts to those who took care of them during the previous election. So, when Democratic candidates go to the party looking for financial help, that party money comes with a very big string attached: They can get the millions they need, but only if they hire the party's chosen consultants as well.

We can kvetch about the politicians and their penchant for hiring these consultants all we want, but for the average candidate, there isn't much of a choice. Our party establishment foists these losers on their campaigns. And this dynamic is just as true in 2006 as it was in 2004 and earlier. This system isn't going to change anytime soon, unfortunately.

So, according to Moulitsas, John Kerry was given no choice but to listen to Robert Shrum's ill-conceived advice. It was part of the deal that got him the nomination. Kerry rival Howard Dean was done in by the same consultant mob, not because he was a bad candidate, but because he threatened their stranglehold on the party.

Klein wants the next Democratic candidate to be someone who ignores focus groups and polls, takes at least one unpopular position and is willing to be himself. Moulitsas suggests that such a candidate has no hope of prevailing "anytime soon" — due to the greed of consultants who both control the inflow of campaign funds, and insist on their cut of the money raised. Hmm, what to do, what to do?

I know: The next Democratic candidate who will really earn not just the nomination but the White House will be the one who agrees to hire all the consultants — and then ignores them! If all Shrum and co. really want is their payday, let them have it. To a consultant, the commission on an advertising message heavily tenderized by focus-group is the same as the commission on an ad that the candidate him-or-herself writes. It's a perfect solution: Hire the consultants, then trap them in a gilded cage!

Wouldn't they grumble to the press? Don't these consultants have friends at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times that they could whisper to? Sure. In fact, my dream candidate would encourage them to leak like this. Get a story placed on how the candidate is ignoring his consultants, and the whining consultant gets another million dollars in media-buy money to play with. The public would be thrilled, the press would be amazed, when the next Democratic candidate tells the conventioneers, "I spent $25 million on the top-priced political consultants our party has to offer–and I didn't listen to a word they said!"

If You Really Want to Punish Michael Hiltzik…

…give him back his blog, and turn on the comments.

Michael Hiltzik is the LA Times columnist and blogger who was busted by Patterico for using pseudonyms to praise himself and zing his foes. Patterico did Hiltzik’s readers a real service, in a couple of ways. First, obviously, he caught Hiltzik in the act of trying to create a false impression of support for his viewpoints. The comments attributed to Hiltzik’s alter-egos tended toward vapid ad hominem attacks on bloggers who don’t like him (e.g. Cathy Seipp, Hugh Hewitt, Patterico himself), which further showed Hiltzik up as a kind of Internet graffiti artist.

Patterico’s discovery prompted Hiltzik to write an appallingly disingenous self-defense, in which he characterizes his nemesis’ detective work as an attack on pseudonyms! It is very revealing of how Hiltzik’s mind apparently works:

Of course, (Patterico’s) real goal isn’t to make all his commenters disclose their real names or to delve into the ethical and moral dimensions of Internet anonymity. It’s to quash debate on his blog. His sensitivity to criticism has been evident ever since he was first confronted with it—in a pair of postings here this year in which I serially demolished his supposed proofs of the Times’s supposed bias. One of the most easily-goaded bloggers on the right, he’s never recovered from the shock of being challenged.

The Patterico comment threads are generally filled with quacking lunatics agreeing with each other, punctuated by the occasional voice of reason. Now those few dissenting voices will disappear, because Frey has signaled a new policy on anonymity: that it’s granted, but only if you toe the Patterico Party Line. Why should anybody subject themselves to his selective exposure?

I have a sidebar link to Michael Hiltzik’s column, and it will stay there, because I think Michael Hiltzik is one of the Times’ best prose artists. I often disagree with him, and I think he stacks the deck against the targets of his screeds by mischaracterizing their positions. However, he’s never boring, and can be powerfully persuasive. The discovery of Hiltzik’s craven need to demonstrate that his audience approves of him by pretending to be one of them certainly diminishes my respect for him; but lots of writers much better than Hiltzik have done things far more disgraceful than this.

I violently disagree, however, with how the Times has chosen to react: Suspending Hiltzik’s blog, which the editors announced, and switching off all future comments, which they did without telling anyone.

No: Leave Micheal Hiltzik right where he is. Make him try to redeem himself by letting him write, not by silencing him. Let his friends and foes write too. Patterico has long suspected Hiltzik blocks some critical comments on his blog. Don’t permit him to do that anymore. He should take his lumps. If he wants to portray himself as a victim, let’s see him try. If he’s ready to be contrite, let him put it out there, but on his own timetable and in his own words, not via a forced confession dictated by Tribune Company flacks.

Hiltzik’s got a big fat target on his back now. The right is after him. The Times-bashers are after him. Even some embarassed liberal bloggers are after him. It’s an existential moment. His betrayed readers deserve the chance to see him work his way through it. If he’s not tough enough to take the heat, let it be his choice to withdraw. But corporate muzzling is cheesy, tin-eared behavior by the Times.

UPDATE (5/1/06): Well, the Times did the cheesy thing and took away Hiltzik’s blog and his business-section column. But they didn’t fire him, and they handed him an interesting new beat, “sports investigations.” Perhaps they’re envious of the kudos the San Francisco Chronicle’s been getting for its BALCO scoops. It’s a compliment to Hiltzik’s strong writing and reporting skills that they’re keeping him around. But it still sticks in my craw that the Times believes it’s appropriate to “take away” his blog. The whole point of a blog is that it is individual free expression, not a “product” like a sports or news column.

My link to Hiltzik’s blog will remain until the Times removes the content. So far, they haven’t.

Just People Talking

Jeff Jarvis' Buzz Machine continues to impress me. Jarvis is a blog-evangelist, without question, and his focus is always on the future. But he's not overly impressed with himself, nor does he pump up the blog phenomenon to be more than it really is. In a post yesterday, he reports that some of the early, innovative bloggers he admires have become disappointed in the form.

Specifically, Matt Welch, an early and much-admired blogger who now works on the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times, might have set his expectations a bit too high when he started his blog shortly after 9/11 — which started a genre that was called "warblogging." Jarvis quotes Welch from a recent Reason essay:

“What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not?” I enthused. “I’d say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s…a readiness to admit error [and] a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review.”

Man, was I wrong….

To which Jarvis replies:

I think the problem starts when people get big enough to think that they speak for others… just like newspaper editorial pages. The real blogger speaks only for himself or herself. It’s just people talking.

It's hard not to get excited when you're at the forefront of a new communications media, as Jarvis and Welch both were. But while bloggers serve as sources of news and opinion for their readers, what makes this media truly unique is the way communities form around them–communities of people talking.

That's why I don't understand bloggers who refuse to allow comments on their posts. Too many of the most popular bloggers, especially those associated with the right, apparently are repulsed by the inane and obscene chatter that fills up comment areas on left-wing blogs, and fear that the left-wingers will clog their sites with the same angry bleats.

So? Make rules.

My favorite site, DodgerThoughts, has rules. Jon Weisman won't tolerate any four-letter words, and if one commenter attacks another personally, the comments are removed. If you want to post, just play by those rules.

The site flourishes. On Easter Sunday, about 600 comments were posted before, during and after the day's game. The comments Jon gets are disproportionately witty, informed and interesting –and some of them are stupid. But I think a reverse Gresham's Law works on his site and others like it — the good comments drive out the bad. People like their online community, and work with the site's owner to protect the conversation space they've created. Commenters will state a certain comment is out of line even before Jon notices it. What's really fun to see is when some of the regulars gang up on a nasty interloper, and drive them into submission through clever mockery–like Cyrano de Bergerac.

Jarvis says the blog-conversation takes place across different blogs, and that's certainly true too. Some of the comment-less blogs do a lot of linking, and respond to what's been said about their own posts. Fair enough, but not a good reason to block comments. A blog without comments is an incomplete experience — like a movie without music.

The Mystery of Plagiarism

Whenever the topic of plagiarism rears its head in the media, I scratch my head. People write because they want to express themselves and gain recognition. Where's the psychic satisfaction in letting the world think someone else's words are yours? The potential for material gain provides little incentive. For intelligent people like writers, there are usually better choices available if their objective is to make money.

To steal language from someone else's movie review squib, as now-disgraced Washington Post blogger Ben Domenech admits to have done, is somewhat like a bank employee getting caught for embezzling pens. What could Domenech have gotten paid by National Review Online for those movie reviews? $200? Why bother? And it's not like the prose he ripped off was all that scintillating.

Are plagiarists just too busy to do their own writing? I suppose that what motivates college term paper plagiarists. Too many classes, too much partying, oh hell I'll just buy a paper on the Internet. And maybe that was Domenech's excuse. He was a young man in a hurry, perhaps, and needed to see his name ubiquitiously in print. But this kid is 24. He barely remembers a time before e-mail. He should know how easy it is to put a complete sentence or paragraph in a search engine and find its match if one exists. He risked, and lost his reputation for nothing, committing a transgression so easily detected.

Domenech's apologists talk about his selflessness for the cause of conservatism. The blog from whence he came, RedState, initially defended him against the left-wingers who discovered his plagiarism, but then had to backtrack:

If you, as many have done, dedicate thousands of man-hours to scrutinizing of (Domenech's) life's work, you'll find two things: First, you'll find several instances of this behavior, some attributable to youth, and some not. Second, you'll find an amazingly talented writer, a man of principle, and an earnest young activist seeking not to advance himself — though advance he did — but the things he believed in.

Certainly it may seem strange today to describe him as a "man of principle." But those who know Ben — and all of us on the RS leadership team do — know that he is passionate in his beliefs. They also know that he is human. It was ignoring this humanity that led to our earlier posts about the situation. It is fitting then, that he chose “Augustine” as his nom de plume here at RedState – for who could serve as a better reminder of the full potential of fallibility and sin – and yet existing within that peril – real hope of forgiveness.

So let me get this straight. Domenech's copycat reviews of mediocre movies served the holy conservative cause because it allowed Domenech to gain greater fame, such that the Washington Post would sponsor his blog, and thereby bring the good word into the temple of the liberal media? Something like that. How oddly expedient, for a movement that regards itself as the house of principle.

(I guess the right-wing blogosphere does not believe the old media is dead or irrelevant. In their heart of hearts, they want to convert the Washington Post, not kill it. Certainly, even before Domenech's perfidy was exposed, there was uproar on the left about his blog, one that clearly exposed the left's primary foible — a titanic level of intolerance for differing viewpoints. Just ask Sen. Joe Lieberman, he of the Americans for Democratic Action liberal rating of between 85-95, what happens when you vary from the orthodoxy.)

A couple of notable historians have been caught for plagiarism, like Doris Kearns Goodwin. According to Atlantic Monthly, she has never appeared on PBS since she admitted lifting phrases from a Kennedy book for her own. Her plagiarism seems more like an accident. Biographers assemble their work over the course of years from thousands of three-by-five cards (or the digital equivalent) with bits and pieces of information on them along with bibliographic information. When writing the book in question, perhaps Goodwin expropriated the prose on the notecard, unaware that it wasn't her notes at all, but direct quotes. I accept her excuse, even if Jim Lehrer doesn't, especially because she now seems sincerely ashamed at the error.

I would feel differently if it turned out Goodwin did it on purpose. But it would also strike me as mysterious. She obviously loves history and the people she writes about. She's already enjoyed a high level of success. Everyone's bank account could be a little bigger, but I doubt the difference between a house in Tahiti and one in New Jersey came down to a copying a few paragraphs from a writer far more obscure than she.

My attitude toward plagiarism comes from my mother. That I'm a writer at all is due to her insistence that I never copy prose from the encyclopedia for my school assignments. I'm sure every other fourth-grader who had to write about salamanders or Gen. Lafayette took sentences straight from the Brittanica, but my mother wouldn't allow it. So I had to rephrase everything, but it had to be just as good as my source. I spent many hours trying to do this, and emerged from the experience as a writer.

Then, of couse, I went into a profession — PR — that not only condones plagiarism, but ofttimes insists on it. Once your client has settled on "key messages," you're supposed to insert them in all the copy that flows from them. In media training, you tell your clients to "bridge" back to those key messages during interviews, e.g. "That's not the real question, Katie. The real question is, how are we going to (insert key message here.)"

The mind-numbing repetition of the same handful of sentences is supposed to help the client's message to "break through." That's one of those PR magic spells I'm beginning to think has worn off. Nobody watches politicians on the news interview shows anymore, according to the ratings. And why? Because all they do is repeat themselves and they don't answer actual questions. Does repeating the same answer over and over again work if no one's listening? When I hear someone talk, I want to be surprised by the originality of their thoughts and the way they express them. A heavily media-trained interview subject is a guaranteed bore. When were you ever persuaded by a bore?

Whether you're a writer or a speaker, plagiarism is malpractice for writers and speakers. That goes equally for self-plagiarism and plagiarizing your own PR people.