John McQuaid

Once again, the New York Times promises a bit more than it delivers with Sunday’s White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire. It is true that, as part of Karl Rove’s grand design to bring minority voters into the Republican fold, Bush promoted various questionable schemes to facilitate low-income homeownership. It’s also true, as the story spells out, that Bush did the finance industry plenty of favors, treated whistle-blowers capriciously, appointed incompetents to key positions, and (as many others did) ignored the potential dangers lurking in the mortgage markets.

But the headline implies some kind of grand unifying idea behind it all, and there just isn’t any. Making it easier for low-income earners to get mortgages isn’t a philosophy, it’s (in the absence of other meaningful economic policies aimed at this group) using government resources to buy political support. Doing favors for the big players in the financial system isn’t a philosophy either, it’s just patronage. Reading the article, you’re struck by just how incoherent the whole White House economic policy was; there was little guidance from the top (other than: do this group or that business a favor), and none from the Treasury Department (until Paulson arrived and demanded some authority as a condition for taking the job – and then he was slow to grasp how bad things had gotten). As a result, a lot of bad actors were free to do what they wanted; people with more responsible views were ignored.

The one time that ideology did determine decision-making it foreclosed the outcome that Bush wanted – the president opposed a viable House version of a Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac reform bill in favor of a tougher, less viable Senate version. It failed.

Again contra the headline, the article also makes clear that Bush’s “philosophy” didn’t cause our current predicament. The White House, like many other institutions, did contribute to the bubble mentality; but mainly, it sought to tap the housing market bubble for its own purposes.

After eight years of political interference, it appears that science is poised to make a comeback in the executive branch. Barack Obama”s appointments to most top energy and environmental posts – Steven Chu at Energy, John Holdren as White House science advisor, Jane Lubchenco at NOAA – are all recognized experts on climate change and articulate advocates for sensible policies.

It’s hard to underestimate the damage done over the past eight years as Bush political appointees mounted a bureaucratic trench war on government scientists, doing all they could to stifle any meaningful policy debate on climate change and a variety of other issues including endangered species and pollution. Much of this was done for the crassest of reasons – to placate various interest groups that would have taken a hit had the government acted.

This quote from Bush’s science advisor, John H. Marburger III, sums up the strange psychology of denial in the White House:

“There are stupid and foolish things that have been perpetrated by employees of the federal government in the executive branch, but it doesn’t mean that the president is anti-science,” he said. “The president is getting blamed for every little thing that happens that people don’t like in the administration.”

The statement is almost beautifully ambiguous. Is he saying that Bush appointees did “stupid and foolish things” for which Bush should not be held responsible (which doesn’t make sense – obviously Bush is responsible for what his appointees do). Or is he saying the opposite: it was stupid and foolish for civil service professionals to resist the interference of the Bush appointees?

The delay on climate change will likely be seen, in historical terms, as one of Bush’s biggest mistakes. But another striking thing about this is how the Bush administration – taking the Republican Party with it for the ride – abdicated its responsibility to seriously engage these issues. The Republican Party was once able to mount credible critiques of environmental regulations and other fixes – which are, after all, no panacea, and should be vigorously debated across party lines. Instead, the Bush administration routinely shut out scientific findings it didn’t like. Meanwhile, many Republicans in Congress and the Republican policy establishment more or less took a holiday from thinking seriously about how to approach environmental and scientific problems. Of course there were exceptions. But the GOP will have do some work to be taken seriously on the climate debate and other scientific issues of our time.

A little late to the party, today’s New York Times bemoans the mass closings of Washington news bureaus. There’s not much new here, except updated numbers. And not much insight into the underlying problems afflicting Washington journalism, or speculation on what might fill the information breach left by all that vanished reportorial power.

For instance, the incoming Obama administration promises a veritable revolution in government openness, and there are already a number of organizations in place that plan to build on that. Bloggers and citizen journalists are also in this picture. What will this transparency really mean for understanding how government works? After all, government is still government. Which means it will spend a lot of time covering its a**, no matter how much raw data it puts out there. There are a lot of rich questions here. Alas, the folks at the Gridiron Club are still in mourning, and probably will be for some time.

On the other hand, this response by Henry Blodget gives new meaning to the word “cavalier.” Most DC coverage is/was duplicative and thus unnecessary, he writes. In general terms, of course he’s right. But by Blodget’s standards, the McClatchy bureau’s distinctive, path-breaking coverage of Iraq and other issues — in substantive terms, not duplicative at all — clearly falls into this category, and thus belongs on the chopping block with no second thoughts.

Here’s what he says about regional/local bureaus:

One area where coverage may actually suffer is that of the Washington-based activities of state senators and Congress-people: New Yorkers may not care much about how much pork, say, Wayne Allard of Colorado is stuffing into the latest bill, but folks in Aspen might (might–although if it is really tasty pork, we expect Wayne himself will rush to tell them about it). 

Even this lament, however, is misplaced: If there is truly a need or hunger for news about the Washington-based activities of local representatives, it can and will be filled by Politico or some other organization that has some economies of scale. Then local newspapers can reprint or aggregate it.

OK, let’s let Politico handle it. Problem solved!

Seriously, the relationship between citizens and government has been sorely strained over the past eight years, and most of the real business of government goes on at precisely this regional or local level, below the radar of the Politico or the Washington Post. Blodget obviously doubts it, but I do think there is “truly a need or hunger” for this type of information that must be satisfied somehow, by organizations that a) exist and/or b) have real plans to pursue it.

Looking over the media’s political coverage of the past week,  a casual observer might think s/he was back in the 1990s. There’s a big scandal  involving the Democratic governor of Illinois trying to sell the president-elect’s senate seat. Will it hurt the party? The incoming administration? Caroline Kennedy wants to be the next junior senator from New York. Are the Democrats embracing dynastic politics? The president-elect gives a press conference announcing the new secretary of education – in which he dodges questions and bores reporters present – just like his obfuscating predecessors!

I sympathize with the media. The fact is, there isn’t much political news right now, though there’s a great hunger for it. Obama is not yet president. He’s making appointments, but those people aren’t actually doing anything yet. Bush is making dog videos. And Congress has adjourned after deadlocking on the auto bailout.

But what we see here is more than just an attempt to fill space. The media is falling back into old habits perfected during the vaporous Clinton scandals of the 1990s. The not-so-subliminal message in this coverage: You thought things would be different with Obama. But they’re not. Politics as usual. Scandals. Spin. Coverups! And, if we’re lucky, a feeding frenzy!

Drill down a little, and most of these questions turn out to be off-base. Take Dana Milbank’s piece on Obama’s press conference. Is it reasonable to expect a press conference announcing the new education secretary to be anything but deadly dull? Is it reasonable to expect Obama to step into the state-level political tempest over how to choose his replacement in the Senate? Or to opine on an investigation in which he is at best very tangentially involved? When Clinton or Bush “dodged questions” about investigations, they (or their subordinates) were the ones being investigated.

Enormous changes are brewing in the country and in government itself. Big Government is back – and it may be the only thing that can save us. This has tremendous implications for American politics.  The political media, however, doesn’t seem to get this. It’s bad at covering the actual workings of government, the nexus of politics and policy. In a pinch, it always returns to a set of commonly-held tropes and cliches forged during the Clinton scandals of the 1990s. Proven cable chat-generators, these focus heavily on the habitual hypocrisy of politicians, the always-disjointed relationship between their words and actions – but not on the substance of the actions themselves.

This is both predictable and comforting – all the more reason we’re seeing it now, when no one knows what the hell is going to happen. But not promising.

The Times-Picayune’s Angus Lind has a great column recapping the career of Walt Philbin, the TP’s talented and endlessly colorful cops reporter, who just retired. When I went to work for the TP in the 1980s, Walt – who was in his early 40s at the time and had only been there about a decade – looked like something out of an earlier era, or, more precisely, one man’s cockeyed interpretation of the way things had been 30 or 40 years earlier. In a newsroom with more than its share of eccentrics, he stood out for his sense of style (rumpled, yes, but inimitable) his gentleness and sense of humor, and his uncanny talent at working sources at the most appalling crime scenes imaginable. If you went anywhere with Walt, his beeper – on the loudest possible setting – was constantly going off, and he’d whip it off his belt in a near-frenzy. Sometimes it was a source. But two thirds of the time, it was one of his relatives checking in.

Lind recalls an iconic Philbin anecdote, a deadline situation with editor Billy Rainey:

On one infamous occasion, Philbin came back into the newsroom very animated after covering some story andRainey asked him, “Whatcha got, Walt?” Philbin pulled out a notebook, looked down at his illegible chicken scratch, began to stammer and stutter and was running all the facts together in his inimitable stream-of-consciousness, free-flow, out-of-order sequence.

So Rainey, ever resourceful, took a drag on his cigarette and shouted at him: “Philbin, go back to your desk and pick up the phone!”

“No,” Walt continued, “but you know, and then, but after, but before, I mean, this is what happened, and then they . . .”

“Philbin, dammit, get back to your desk and pick up the (bleeping) phone!” Rainey shouted.

Philbin dutifully headed back to his desk, mumbling and muttering the whole way. When he got to his desk, he picked up the phone.

Rainey shouted across the newsroom, “Now call me!”

Which is what Philbin did. Back then, we were all much more comfortable dictating from the field, and he was much better on the phone. The words flowed, he had his facts, the best rewrite guy put it into a story, and the two miraculously met another tough deadline amid a loud, raucous and sometimes tense newsroom — where people smoked cigars and cigarettes, cussed and yelled, and laughed and drank together after work . . . and sometimes during.

By the time Walt Philbin started out, this world was already fading, and now it’s long gone, the stuff of old movies. But for some reason, he never seemed out of place as journalism changed around him.

(Times-Picayune photo)

The Obama campaign was both relentless and brilliant in its branding efforts, creating not just an appealing design but a cool visual sensibility. Now Pepsi has unveiled a new design that cribs directly from the Obama logo. Yes, Pepsi has long had a circular, red-white-and-blue logo. But the clean lines and the “O” iconography are pretty obvious allusions to the Obama design, down to the small “O” (in the case of Diet Pepsi, it’s a zero) that echoes the larger symbol. It’s evidently an attempt to hitch Pepsi’s star to the “change” idea – after all, Pepsi has styled itself “the choice of a new generation” since the 1980s. Maybe it will work, who knows? But it does show how Barack Obama’s influence already extends beyond politics – he’s on his way to becoming a full-fledged cultural phenomenon.

For years, I have felt generationally orphaned – I was born in 1961, so technically I am a baby boomer (the span of the postwar baby boom is usually identified as 1946-1964). But not really – I was a small child during the upheavals of the 1960s. But I never self-identified with Generation X either, though apparently Douglas Coupland wanted me to. This past weekend, a Washington Post piece added to my non-generation’s collective angst by noting that we are, statistically speaking, not all that bright.

Now that Barack Obama (also b. 1961) is about to be president, these issues have taken on national significance. Sort of. I wrestle with them in a Guardian piece. Short version: blame disco!

The debate about the auto industry bailout hasn’t lacked for drama: Corporate jets! Out-of-touch executives who don’t realize the ground has shifted underneath them! Politicians with steam coming out of their ears! Carpooling from Detroit in hybrids! The lunch stop at Quizno’s! Groveling for dollars! The symbolism, whether it’s inadvertent or engineered, is potent. America’s prime industrial powers have been brought very low very fast, and in fact may not be salvageable. It’s shocking, though I guess among all the other shocks lately it barely stands out.

But nobody seems to know what to do about it. Giving the automakers what they want will probably amount to throwing money away, providing short-term relief but not guaranteeing the radical restructuring that’s necessary. Not giving them what they want will likely result in the collapse of one or more auto giants, massive layoffs at auto plants and in related industries – accelerating the nation’s downward economic spiral. There are no good options, only less-bad ones.

One problem here is that the carrot-and-stick approach Congress employs in this type of situation isn’t usually very effective. Members of Congress want to force the automakers to face the twin realities of the global marketplace and the energy crisis. But: the very act of giving them a boatload of cash will, in all likelihood, allow them to avoid facing those realities a little longer, no matter what conditions Congress might put on it.

The other problem is: members of Congress want to make law and policy – reform/restructure the auto industry – not just hand out money. But you can’t make policy in the midst of a raging hurricane. It’s a frakkin’ national emergency; it’s moving very fast, and government’s best and most effective tools for dealing with it are blunt instruments.

Yesterday I wrote that some magazines still occupy a revered cultural space, something that might let them survive the Internet revolution. Many “high quality” magazines lose money anyway, but somehow go on year after year, supported by family largesse, foundations, and more profitable sister publications.

The New Yorker would have to be number one on this list. However, like many dead-tree publications it still hoards its subscriber-only, print-centric exclusivity. It has been improving: more of the weekly magazine’s content is being made available online, and some of its best writers, including Hendrik Hertzberg and George Packer, now blog. Huzzah! If you want the whole New Yorker experience online, with the benefits of the Internet (such as links) you’re still out of luck. I discovered this when I tried to find a great piece by Ian Frazier in this week’s (Dec. 8 ) edition. Frazier profiles Derrick Parker, an ex-NYPD detective known as the “hip-hop cop.” For many years, he was the department’s reigning expert on the world of hip-hop. Now a security consultant, Parker is one of the great profile subjects – colorful, talkative, with an entree to a fascinating subculture.

In one vivid and hilarious scene, Frazier accompanies Parker as he vets would-be attendees at a birthday party for a rapper at an exclusive club. Now, I’d like to quote this briefly and link to it, but alas, no dice. The piece is not available to non-subscribers online. It is available to subscribers of the magazine’s “digital edition,” which is a kind of glorified pdf reader that reproduces the physical magazine on your screen. Here’s the link to the piece, if you’re a subscriber. Navigation is cumbersome, requiring zooming in and scrolling around to get through the columns/photos/pages – which, of course, are not designed for a computer screen in the first place.

Some magazines, such as the Atlantic, have embraced the Internet and leveraged their cultural cachet effectively in the new arena. The New Yorker still has a ways to go.

I don’t understand why CNN has fired its entire science/environmental team. Nor have I seen a good explanation for it – as in, what’s the thinking behind this? Obviously, these topics are only going to get more important as time goes by; it’s time to expand, not gut them.

The stated reason – science and environmental coverage is being folded into the mother ship, under the aegis of Anderson Cooper’s show – doesn’t make much sense. Having Cooper be the sole point person on these topics may well be a good idea: CNN can leverage his star power, as it already has, to dramatize these er, dramatic issues. But you’d think it would still require a certain critical mass of expertise and experience to generate the relevant content for Cooper’s show. But perhaps I’m just naive about how the cable nets operate. (And I’ll confess, it’s a little weird when your space correspondent has the same name as a Star Trek character.)