John McQuaid

Has Drudge lost his mojo? If even Mark Halperin, once Drudge’s most devoted MSM acolyte, is turning against him, it must be a sign of some shift in the zeitgeist.

And it’s true. Drudge has been all but irrelevant this campaign season, flogging one pro-McCain story after another, each lamer than the next. The race is tightening! The B girl! Obama kicks the Washington Times off the campaign plane! His talent for the seizing on the most outrageous cable news-friendly stories — those having to do with the base urges of politicians, the darkest trenches of the culture wars and, of course, hurricanes — seems to have deserted him. Has the Drudge moment that began in 1997 with the Monica story finally passed?

We can only hope. I’ve always found Drudge interesting, but his influence over the cable news networks and political journalists is undeserved and arbitrary. They were lost in the wilderness and cowed by the success of Fox News, so they seized upon Drudge – who gave them those links and page views – as a kind of Moses to lead them to … what, exactly? The fallow point for Drudge-ism may have come in September, when the McCain campaign was dominating every news cycle with one outrageous, Drudge-tailored lie and misrepresentation after another. It became so ridiculous that media outlets, against deeply ingrained habits demanding a “both sides do it” false equivalency, began calling BS.

There are a couple of obvious reasons for Drudge’s fall from the pinnacle of MSM influence. As Eric Boehlert noted, this fall’s economic crisis instantly became the dominant political story and overall story — but it’s not a good Drudge story, despite of his fondness for tracking the Dow. Too complicated. Too policy-oriented. Drudge stories have a voyeuristic quality – you’re watching someone else’s trainwreck. But the economic crisis is everybody’s train wreck. We don’t want lurid headlines about how our 401Ks are evaporating.

The other reason is that Drudge went all-in for McCain. McCain is still running a Drudge-friendly campaign, hitting all the hot buttons it possibly can. But it is also a losing campaign, one a majority of people aren’t buying. The big story here is Obama, who’s all uplift and inspiration and cool. Also not a good Drudge story.

Bill Clinton was the best thing that ever happened to Drudge. Obama, who despite his star power cultivates a kind of strategic political blandness, could turn out to be the worst thing that ever happened to Drudge.

In a comment on the previous post about the AP and media neutrality, Harry Shearer makes an excellent point – that, in addition to the Iraq war runup and political coverage, the media also failed in its post-Katrina coverage:

Framing it as a natural disaster–as opposed to the ‘greatest engineering disaster since Chernobyl’–and further framing it as a basically black tragedy (because the black people in the Dome and Convention Center were easier to reach and tape than the white people stranded on their roofs in St. Bernard Parish–was compounded by media folks patting themselves on the back for their “ballsy’ coverage.

I agree. New Orleans’ post-Katrina trajectory could have been a lot different had the media taken a more aggressive role in reporting what actually happened (a civic/government failure to secure citizens’ safety) as opposed to the misleading shorthand version of it that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the storm (heckuva job, Brownie).

But I’d draw a distinction between the media treatment of post-Katrina New Orleans and the two other examples. Pre-Iraq reporting and campaign coverage are both examples of the successful co-optation and/or exploitation of the mainstream media’s “neutrality” by the Bush-Rove political project. That project turned out to be not just misleading, but substantively disastrous. So the media have deservedly lost credibility along with Bush. And, like Bush, many media outlets won’t acknowledge anything was or is amiss. You can’t be “neutral” if you’re living in a fantasy.

The failure to protect New Orleans is both more profound and literally more dangerous than the Iraq misadventure or the rise of Drudge-style politics. More profound because it was a breakdown at all levels of government that led to the levee failures, and those institutional problems haven’t been fixed. More dangerous because it killed a lot of people, and because more will likely die in the future – in New Orleans and elsewhere – as sea levels rise and storms likely grow more intense. But the media failure to “get” this isn’t so much an failure of neutrality undermined by ideology (though there is an element of that) as it is just general media stupidity and short-sightedness, reflecting American society’s stupidity and short-sightedness. Which is sad, and scary. But maybe some new political leadership can begin to address that problem.

Jay Newton-Small has a piece in the Washington Post arguing that the AP’s attempts to bring more “attitude” to its political coverage are strangely out of character and that the AP is surrendering its brand, that of the down-the-middle “neutral abiter”:

“I worry that their strategy is too 2004 Web and not a 2008 approach to the Web,” says Dick Keil, a former AP reporter who spent 20 years working for wire services before becoming a political consultant. “It’s like New Coke — it seems cool now, but just wait. It could bring down the whole company: They have a recognized, respected and trusted brand and identity, and they are moving in a radically new direction likely to make the vast majority of their subscribers uncomfortable.”

…[I]n a world, and a Web, full of analysis, opinion and “accountability journalism,” what’s missing is a neutral referee. Which is a bit like living in a world with a North Pole and a South Pole but no equator. If there’s no one to set the standard, how will we know when we’ve crossed the line?

I wish Keil or Newton-Small had explained what they think a “2008 approach to the web” is, because the piece offers no ideas on that front beyond the rhetorical flourish. In any case, the problem with this piece is that it follows the classic line of reasoning of Jay Rosen’s bete noir, the newsroom curmudgeon: the past was great, the present scary, and the future, potentially apocalyptic.

Of those three notions, the first is by far the most pernicious. The past just isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The piece ignores the crisis in credibility that has afflicted the media over the past generation. The idea of a media “neutral arbiter” – Walter Cronkite, the New York Times, the AP – is a fiction, harking back to a fleeting era of political consensus dating to the “Mad Men” era. This Olympian media ideal has been eroding ever since, and the erosion accelerated during the Bush years. It has hit two low points recently – the media’s credulous treatment of the Bush administration’s reasons for going to war with Iraq; and in the cable talking heads-driven, “everybody is equally at fault” approach to campaign coverage. (Though there’s finally been some pushback on the latter in response to the McCain campaign’s aggressive pushing of falsehoods.)

The AP’s attempts to bring more attitude to its political coverage, directed by Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier, have been erratic. Sometimes laziness or outright bias has taken the place of substantive argument, and Newton-Small’s piece makes it clear that some AP reporters are uncomfortable with the new approach. But at least they’re trying. The traditional “AP brand” is already dead, and just wishing we could somehow reanimate it won’t address the problems that killed it.

Expanding on the previous post: it’s interesting that John McCain has ended up presiding over a campaign that is, in its flailing attempts to construct a “narrative” about “character,” a textbook exercise in postmodern literary theory.

Here’s what the Wikipedia entry for post-structuralism says:

Post-structuralists hold that the concept of “self” as a singular and coherent entity is a fictional construct. Instead, an individual comprises conflicting tensions and knowledge claims (e.g. gender, class, profession, etc.). Therefore, to properly study a text a reader must understand how the work is related to his or her own personal concept of self. This self-perception plays a critical role in one’s interpretation of meaning. While different thinkers’ views on the self (or the subject) vary, it is often said to be constituted by discourse(s). Lacan’s account includes a psychoanalytic dimension, while Derrida stresses the effects of power on the self. This is thought to be a component of post-modernist theory.

Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis, Mark Salter and the rest of McCain’s brain trust are constantly manipulating their construct of McCain in various ways, and attempting to tie it to voters’ own collective perception of self (e.g., Joe the Plumber). The result is a set of shifting, unstable discourses in which there is no clear “meaning” or “self.”

Robert Draper’s New York Times piece on the McCain campaign skillfully maps out the strange remove from which McCain and his aides have been operating, a place that few people outside the world of politics could locate in their own experience. It is an imaginary land built entirely of literary abstractions, including “narrative,” “character,” and “true character moment.” Here is one example:

The campaign was in the throes of an identity crisis by June 24, when a number of senior strategists gathered at 9:30 a.m. in a conference room of McCain’s campaign headquarters in Arlington. As one participant said later, the meeting was convened “because we still couldn’t answer the question, ‘Why elect John McCain?’ ” Considering that the election was less than five months away, this was not a good sign.

“We had a narrative problem,” Matt McDonald recalls. “Obama had a story line: ‘Bush is the problem. I’m not going to be Bush, and McCain will be.’ Our story line, I argued, had to be that it’s not about Bush — it’s Congress, it’s Washington. And Obama would be more about partisanship, while John McCain would buck the party line and bring people together.”

The others could see McDonald’s line of reasoning — and above all, the need to separate McCain from Bush. But the message seemed antiseptic, impersonal. That was when the keeper of McCain’s biography, Mark Salter, took the floor. There’s a reason McCain bucks his party, McDonald remembers Salter arguing. It’s because he puts his country ahead of party. Then the speechwriter, who is not known for his dispassion, began to yell: “We’re talking about someone who was willing to die before losing his honor! He would die!”

OK, then. I can appreciate as well as anyone the difficulty of crafting a consistent national message for a presidential campaign, especially a losing one taking place in a time of crisis. But like most people, I tend to think that the message flows from some basic questions any contender might ask him/herself before running: what do I want to do as president? What problems does the country face at this pass in our history? What programs and policies might I put in place to confront those problems? One perk of running for president is you get to think really, really big.

But there’s very little evidence in this piece, based on months of reporting and interviews with McCain staffers, that McCain and his advisers have done this. His campaign seems based on one idea alone: because of who he is – not what he has done as a senator, not what he wants to do as president, but who he is – John McCain should be president. It’s not like this is nothing. Who John McCain is is clearly an interesting story, and they play around with it just about every conceivable way in successive attempts to sell his candidacy. But nowhere in the piece do you get the sense that McCain is grappling with the issues of the day. Instead, his staff is shown furiously packaging and staging the candidate’s reactions to passing news events such as the Russia-Georgia skirmish, trying to fit them to one of their narratives.

This reaches its low point with the Sept. decision to suspend the campaign, which is supposed to be a “true character moment.” But as Hilzoy notes, the campaign’s response is all about staging and perception and “character,” not, well, character – the qualities a real leader employs to respond to a political crisis:

If a Presidential candidate truly wants to do the right thing in a situation like this, it seems to me that the best thing to do is not to talk about it, and not to do anything dramatic, but to work as hard as you can behind the scenes. Very few difficult policy decisions are improved by having Presidential politics injected into them, and this seemed unlikely to be one of the exceptions. McCain is not on any of the relevant committees, has no obvious expertise in finance, and, by all accounts, does not have the kind of standing in Congress that would let him rally members behind him. That means that it’s not at all clear how his returning to DC would help at all, especially since he could just as easily have tried to round up support for whatever course of action he thought best by phone.

If McCain had actually asked himself what the right thing to do was, it’s hard to see how he could have come up with the answer: suspending my campaign and heading to Washington. If he did think that that was the most helpful thing he could do under the circumstances, I’d have to seriously question both his judgment and his insight into his own capacities.

It may be that there was nothing McCain could have done to turn the tide of the election this year. But he did have an opportunity – the one taken away from him in 2000 – to put his own stamp on the Republican Party. Sure, it might have torn the party apart. But even that would have shown that McCain and his aides were actively thinking about the party and the country, rather than merely endlessly crafting perceptions.

Alan Greenspan came out yesterday and, confronted by the obvious, admitted he was wrong about the markets’ capability to police themselves:

Oct. 19, 2004: “Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.”

Yesterday: “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.”

We’re in one of those “holy cow!” moments that, in retrospect, makes you wonder not just whether Greenspan himself had a lick of common sense, but how all the politicians, public and private institutions, and collective suppositions arrayed around him for so long could have been so spectacularly off-base.

For one, it should have been obvious to Greenspan, who coined the phrase “irrational exhuberance,” that markets are not perfect information-processing systems. They’re subject to bubbles, to panics, to general craziness. That goes double in this case, when the chain of ownership of mortgage-based securities grew very opaque, often deliberately so. There simply wasn’t enough information to evaluate the financial risks, and the hard information that existed was often deliberately downplayed or obscured. When everybody’s making money, the market incentives push participants to make even more; there’s not much to be gained by sussing out out information that may bring the whole edifice down.

In some ways what’s happened is a classic “tragedy of the commons” problem. In the original scenario, outlined in Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article, cowherders share pastureland. Each one believes it’s in his own short-term interest to expand his own herd, and none has an incentive to pay attention to the long-term consequences – a pasture without grass and a lot of starving cows:

Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

In this case, the “commons” is the unregulated marketplace itself. This is a basic problem of human nature – one that Greenspan, Congress and successive presidents should have taken into account.

The RNC has spent $150,000 at Nieman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue outfitting Sarah Palin for the campaign trail. Obviously, this looks terrible – it is terrible. We’re entering what looks to be a severe recession, people are losing their jobs and homes, and the RNC’s VP candidate, who ostentatiously touts herself as a representative of small-town values, burns through 3x the median U.S. annual family income in a matter of weeks on clothing and cosmetics. Republican honchos are apparently not pleased, either – the RNC might as well have given the money directly to the Obama campaign.

More interesting, though, are the ways this illustrates how faux the already-pretty-faux populism of the Republican Party has become, and how Palin’s candidacy so perfectly captures that evolution. Palin’s wardrobe malfunction harks back in various ways to Richard Nixon’s 1952 “Checkers” speech – and it makes Nixon’s cynical exploitation of cultural resentments look heartfelt.

In the midst of the 1952 presidential race, VP candidate Nixon was accused of receiving $18,000 in illegal campaign contributions, and there were rumblings he might be dropped from the ticket. He gave a dramatic national address defending himself – an early example of a direct campaign appeal to the public via TV. “Checkers” was the name of a cocker spaniel a supporter had given the Nixons, the one contribution Nixon admitted to receiving. But the core of the speech was a recounting of the Nixon familiy’s modest family finances: his $20,000 mortgage on a $41,000 house, $4,000 in life insurance, 1950 Oldsmobile, “no stocks and bonds of any type,” a $4,000 bank loan at 4 percent interest, a $3,500 loan from Nixon’s parents, a $500 loan on the life insurance policy:

Well, that’s about it. That’s what we have. And that’s what we owe. It isn’t very much. But Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime that we have got is honestly ours. I should say this, that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she would look good in anything.

The speech saved Nixon’s career. And it contains the palpable anger toward “elites” – with their inconvenient, reality-based rules – that has been a constant theme in Republican politics ever since. But Nixon’s anger was at least authentic, rooted as it was in his life experience. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, may sincerely resent the heck out of “elites,” but her attitude has no basis in any real kind of disadvantage. Palin and her husband are quite well-off:

The Palins’ assets seem enviable: a half-million-dollar home on a lake with a float-plane at the dock, two vacation retreats, commercial-fishing rights worth an estimated $50,000 or more and an income last year of at least $230,000. That compares to a median income of $64,333 for Alaskans and $50,740 for Americans in 2007, according to the Census Bureau.

For decades, the Republican Party has managed to ally the interests of big business with those of its base by exploiting Palin’s brand of cultural resentment. But the “culture card” seems increasingly out of tune with current economic realities. It’s also increasingly detached from people’s actual life experience. Nixon earned his resentments the hard way. For post-baby boomers like Palin, it’s mainly an inheritance, a learned set of attitudes and useful political symbols. If anything, this seems to have conferred upon the Palins a perverse sense of entitlement. Which is why there’s something essentially artificial about Sarah Palin, and why her wardrobe choices matter as much as Pat Nixon’s cloth coat did in 1952.

John McCain has been using the phrase “spread the wealth” – uttered by Barack Obama in his now-famous conversation with Joe the Plumber – to claim Obama is an advocate of socialism. This is, of course, a ridiculous way to describe Obama’s proposals to make the tax code more progressive, especially coming on the heels of the Bush years. It does show, however, just how far rightward the debate in America has lurched over the past forty years, and just how gestural the populism practiced by both parties really is. (Yes, this is a case of “they both do it.” In economic policy terms, the U.S. political debate still takes place within a very narrow band in which actual wealth redistribution is always constrained. GOP populism, such as it is, is cultural; Democratic populism is economic, but incremental.)

As a corrective, I went back and read some of Huey Long’s speeches, in which he urges people to join his “Share the Wealth Society,” whose purpose is to tax and cap the fortunes of the rich and use the money for massive public support programs:

1. The fortunes of the multimillionaires and billionaires shall be reduced so that no one persons shall own more than a few million dollars to the person. We would do this by a capital levy tax. On the first million that a man was worth, we would not impose any tax. We would say, “All right for your first million dollars, but after you get that rich you will have to start helping the balance of us.” So we would not levy and capital levy tax on the first million one owned. But on the second million a man owns, we would tax that 1 percent, so that every year the man owned the second million dollars he would be taxed $10,000. On the third million we would impose a tax of 2 percent. On the fourth million we would impose a tax of 4 percent. On the fifth million we would impose a tax of 16 percent. On the seventh million we would impose a tax of 32 percent. On the eighth million we would impose a tax of 64 percent ; and on all over the eight million we would impose a tax of 100 percent.

What this would mean is tat the annual tax would bring the biggest fortune down to $3 or $4 million to the person because no one could pay taxes very long in the higher brackets. But $3 or $4 million is enough for any one person and his children and his children’s children. We cannot allow one to have more than that because it would not leave enough for the balance to have something.

2. We propose to limit the amount any one man can earn in one year or inherit to $1 million to the person.

3. Now, by limiting the size of the fortunes and incomes of the big men, we will throw into the government Treasury the money and property from which we will care for the millions of people who have nothing; and with this money we ill provide a home and the comforts of home, with such common conveniences as radio and automobile, for every family in America, free of debt.

Now that’s populism. But it’s worth noting that this is not socialism, precisely, either. Exactly what the government does besides playing Robin Hood is not clear. In any case, if it didn’t catch on in 1935, it’s not going to catch on now (though the top marginal tax rate went from 24 percent in 1929 to 63 percent by 1935, then to 94 percent during World War II).

One thing leaped out at me in Wednesday night’s debate (aside from John McCain’s blinking and aggressively jumpy mien in those split screens): McCain is attempting to sell a set of default Republican policy proposals – tax cuts, spending cuts, health savings accounts – as the solution to our current woes. And this just isn’t credible. The first and most obvious reason is that, no matter how you package them, McCain’s proposals don’t address the financial crisis or the looming recession. Their Reagan-era provenance shows badly. Tax cuts for the wealthy won’t rescue the economy. Tax breaks for the middle class may help, but modestly at best. With the economy in the tank, we’re going to need more spending, not less. And introducing cracks into the employer-based health system is going to create more insecurity, not less. As Joe Klein notes:

I thought McCain was near-incomprehensible when talking about policy, locked in the coffin of conservative thinking and punditry. He spoke in Reagan-era shorthand. He thought that merely invoking the magic words “spread the wealth” and “class warfare” he could neutralize Obama. But those words and phrases seem anachronistic, almost vestigial now. Indeed, they have become every bit as toxic as Democratic social activist proposals–government-regulated and subsidized health care, for example–used to be. We have had 30 years of class warfare, in which the wealthy strip-mined the middle class. The wealth has been “spread” upward.

Part of this can be laid upon McCain’s disengagement from domestic policy. You get the sense his advisers just took all this stuff off the shelf of policies already pre-approved by all the Republican interest groups, tweaked it a bit, and voila.

But a better question is, why were these the only things on the shelf?

Being in power made Republicans complacent on the policy front. When you dominate the political scene, there’s not much need for new policies to expand your coalition. (And, in the case of the Rove project, you don’t believe you need to expand it at all.) But a more profound problem came in the disenagement of Bush himself, as well as the GOP congressional leadership, from pragmatic problem-solving. Normally, dealing with real-world problems is a good way to develop popular policies. The Bush administration, with its disdain for policy details and expertise itself, simply gave up on any meaningful, workable domestic policy innovation after the Medicare drug benefit passed. Bush’s one later attempt, the partial privatization of Social Security via stock market investments, was a disaster – and in retrospect, spectacularly off-base.

I read this Ross Douthat Washington Post piece on my cell phone while stuck in a traffic jam. That may have affected my response to it, but basically, the point seems to be that if ol’ man Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life” had been running the banking industry this past decade, we’d all be a lot better off now. Two points: If Potter were around today, does anyone think he wouldn’t have been all over those unreliable financial instruments that have put us all in such hot water? And Dick Cheney, the closest real-life equivalent to Potter in public life today, has already been functionally in charge of the country for nearly eight years now.

Seriously, the piece is an interesting if not quite coherent elegy for and condemnation of American suburbia. The problem with it is that it links together disparate trends whose only common thread is their unsustainability – and to the degree they are connected, misidentifies the culprit.

Are unsustainable lending policies somehow equivalent to ecologically unsustainable land use policies? Suburbia has been on an ever-expanding arc for the past 60 years, with an ever-expanding carbon and ecological footprint, a trend driven by market forces most economists would consider unremarkable. And for most of that time, the mortgage industry has functioned reasonably well. In other words, when the market “worked” it led us down an unsustainable ecological path. In the mortgage meltdown the markets obviously “didn’t work,” but the ecological damage was already done.

The piece also locates the seeds of the lending crisis in George Bailey’s modest efforts to get people out of tenements and into tract housing in Bedford Falls. But having a reasonable policy that promotes homeownership need not inevitably lead to the wild profligacy of the recent bubble. This type of post-hoc reasoning can be used to condemn, or justify, just about anything.

Douthat is looking to blame government policies encouraging homeownership for various disastrous consequences of suburbanization. But the real problem is in the fetishization of free markets, which don’t account for environmental consequences and are prone to bubbles.

In other words, Potter’s slums might have been more ecologically sustainable than Bailey Park, but I don’t think that’s the message we should take away from our current troubles.