John McQuaid

President Obama and the Republican House caucus had a go at each other today at a GOP retreat in Baltimore. For 90 minutes Obama fielded questions from House members, and the result was very interesting, even inspiring (in a civics textbook kind of way). The two sides, which appear to exist in distinct and non-overlapping political universes, were actually engaging each other.

The blogosphere and Twitter lit up: wouldn’t it be great if we could to this regularly, and have an American version of “Question Time,” the U.K. custom of open debate between the prime minister, his government and the opposition?

But don’t set your TiVo to C-Span just yet. There are several perhaps insurmountable hurdles to a U.S. version of Question Time.

One obvious problem is, Obama is too good at this, and the Republicans too maladroit. Obama’s command of policy and the details of legislation, and his ability to frame the political debate about them in a forum like this, are formidable. Republicans know this, which may be why some aides were reportedly regretting the decision to televise the forum afterward.

More broadly, though, the situation is inherently asymmetrical: When a president faces mostly-obscure members of Congress, the story ends up being all about the president. That’s usually good for a president, assuming he knows what he’s doing. It can also be bad (think George W. Bush, who bristled at hostile questioning, or Bill Clinton during Monicagate). But in any case, if it’s just another presidential drama – as so much of our politics is, or perceived to be – that’s not something the opposition will want to participate in on a regular basis. What’s in it for them?

There are also fundamental, probably irreconcilable differences between the British style of parliamentary debate and our own. The Prime Minister is an MP debating other MPs – not the head of state and a separate branch of government. Question Time debates are brutal and raucus arguments, in which insult and contempt flow freely (it would be something to watch Sarah Palin try to bluff her way through one of those). What we call “debates” in America are generally just politicians giving speeches and reciting talking points, trying to frame things favorably for their side – usually without being called on it.

That said, if Obama and the GOP managed to inject a tiny bit of “Question Time” DNA into the body politic, that’s to the good. Our politics is so noxious in part because of etiquette: a mixture of excessive decorousness and fake political correctness. Just look at the silly debate over the appropriateness of Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court and Justice Alito’s reaction. Our political leaders need to mix it up more, not less.

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

You probably haven’t noticed this. But for some time now President Obama has been touting a Kennedyesque catchphrase for his programs: the “New Foundation.” He unveiled this last year, to some modest praise and derision. The phrase has yet to capture the imagination of the public or media, but it was back this week – tentatively – in the State of the Union address: “The only way to move to full employment is to lay a new foundation for long-term economic growth, and finally address the problems that America’s families have confronted for years.”

Peggy Noonan picked up on this, and is skeptical:

They’ve chosen a phrase for the president’s program. They call it the “New Foundation.” They sneaked it in rather tentatively, probably not sure it would take off. It won’t. Such labels work when they clearly capture something that is already clear. “The New Deal” captured FDR’s historic shift to an increased governmental presence in individual American lives. It was a new deal. “The New Frontier”—we are a young and vibrant nation still, and adventures await us in space and elsewhere. It was a mood, not a program, but a mood well captured.

“The New Foundation” is solid and workmanlike, but it attempts to put form and order to a governing philosophy that is still too herky-jerky to be summed up.

I agree. Even the most formidable political branding operation in American history can’t force a lame catchphrase on the American people – thank God. Forty years from now, when that era’s version of “Mad Men” about the Obama years is a big hit, “New Foundation” might show up as the phrase that Future Don Draper dismisses contemptuously before sending his minions back to the drawing board.

Whether old or new, foundations are of course essential. It’s nice to know they’re there. But let’s face it: they’re built in the dirt. And once they’re finished, you don’t have to think about them again. Unless there’s a disaster of some kind that cracks the foundation. In which case the builders are in for it.

But the biggest problem is historical, and subliminal: Jimmy Carter used the same catchphrase in the 1979 SOTU. Apparently the invention of speechwriter Hendrik Hertzberg, now of New Yorker fame, “New Foundation” was repeated 13 times in the speech, then abandoned a few days later. I’m sticking to my original suggestion to the White House speechwriting staff: please Google all inspirational catchphrases.

Hunter S. Thompson

James O’Keefe, the filmmaker/journalist arrested for allegedly attempting to tap or tamper with Senator Mary Landrieu’s office telephones, is obviously foolish and irresponsible. But foolish and irresponsible can get you pretty far these days.

O’Keefe and his fellow-perpetrators are being roundly mocked. Republicans are “distancing” themselves. But the way our media culture works, I’m betting on a quick rehabilitation. This could go the way of the balloon-boy hoax, which left its authors disgraced and exiled from the reality TV world they coveted access to. But I don’t think so. O’Keefe is a commodity, especially in right-wing media circles, and by doing crazy-ass shit he enhances his value. He’ll end up on TV sooner or later, telling us what “really” happened and what his motivations were.

All this is to say, O’Keefe is not a journalist. He’s not even a gonzo journalist (let’s not insult Hunter S. Thompson with the comparison). He is a publicity-seeking ideologically-motivated provocateur. It’s an important distinction. Because what he did in exposing the apparent idiocy and lawbreaking tendencies of ACORN employees was trumpeted at the time as a great achievement not just for the cause of conservatism, or even for conservative journalism, but for journalism itself. Even Jon Stewart was wondering why traditional media outlets didn’t get that story.

But what was that whole ACORN thing about, anyway? I’m still not sure. (more…)

Photo by Logan Abassi/UN

At The New Republic, Noam Schieber argues the blanket media coverage of the Haitian earthquake aftermath is just too much. It’s redundant, it’s interfering with aid operations, it’s a waste of resources. His solution: pool coverage. Just as the president is followed around by a rotating pool of reporters, maybe Haiti and other natural disasters should be too:

Just like they do for White House coverage, the major (and some not so major) news organizations could draw up an agreement to send a contingent of print, radio, and television reporters to wherever the next global disaster strikes. The participating news organizations could then use the raw material transmitted back to them to fashion their own reports. The pool correspondents could even be available to conduct on-air interviews with different television organizations, depending on their editorial needs. The arrangement would obviously be less than ideal for the outlets with the biggest budgets. But, collectively, the media would have the peace of mind of knowing it’s not exacerbating the same problems it’s trying to alleviate.

I yield to no one in my contempt for the crass, sensationalistic conventions of TV news (which, given technical demands and the quest for ratings, has by far the biggest footprint of any media). And the coverage of natural disasters employs most of those conventions, notably the faintly ridiculous notion of journalist-as-globetrotting-hero.

But do we really need less coverage of Haiti? (more…)

What should President Obama do now? Most of the advice he’s getting in the mediasphere, needless to say, is bad – so I’m not going to add to it. But Scott Brown’s win in the Massachusetts Senate race does raise a bigger question: is the system broken? I fear the answer is yes.

Thanks to a combination of arbitrary Senate rules, political polarization, and the Republican Party’s near-total disengagement from substantive policy debate, it’s now impossible to pass ambitious legislation of any kind – even if there is a unambiguous public support for it.

Is that necessarily bad? There’s a legitimate argument that divided government does less damage, and that its persistence reflects the temperamental conservatism of the American public. But I don’t think this idea stands up well given recent history. Democrats and Republicans, at each other’s throats, getting nothing done – that’s America! Well, that was America for most of the past 20 years. Look where it got us. And now, I’d argue that we’ve entered a particularly dangerous and uncertain phase in our history. We need a political system that can respond to it.

Our problems are very big, and a gridlocked system guarantees that they get even bigger – and, in some cases, blow up in our faces. (more…)

When disaster strikes, it’s invariably followed by a rush of memes and metaphors about What It All Means. In the aftermath of the disaster in Haiti, one of the ideas circulating is particularly facile and wrong-headed: likening the Haitian quake and Hurricane Katrina.

There is a superficial comparison to be made, of course: impoverished city, its residents overwhelmingly of African descent, chronically neglected by richer, whiter centers of power. So reporters who covered both disasters are freely comparing the two: “Several times in the continuing cable news coverage, [Anderson] Cooper and other reporters drew comparisons to the scenes they witnessed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The CNN correspondent Gary Tuchman said: ‘Roll back the clock four and a half years ago. What déjà vu.’”

Others are using the two disasters to analyze Barack Obama’s presidential leadership and his political fortunes. Will he screw it up, like Bush did Katrina? What calculations are going on right now in the White House to avert Bush’s post-K, post “heckuva job” fate? A skeptical Dan Kennedy expertly parses some of these reactions. Of them, Howard Fineman offered the purest distillation of this point of view:

Elected in part out of revulsion at the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, Obama now finds himself confronting an even more devastating and complex humanitarian crisis.

And, adding irony upon irony, the racial context of New Orleans is writ large in Port-au-Prince. Katrina cost George W. Bush what little standing he had among moderates in his own party in part because the shocking images of suffering in New Orleans were so racially imbalanced.

Now the Obama administration’s competence and compassion will be tested in a similar racial context—and with a much worse infrastructure. Obama and his aides understand all of this.

This doesn’t make sense even on Fineman’s own narrow political terms. (more…)

One of the odder bits of fallout from Brit Hume’s already-odd decision to proselytize the Christian faith to Tiger Woods has been the even-odder backlash from two high-powered conservative commentators, the New York Times’s Ross Douthat and the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson. They each argue that Hume’s statements were not only appropriate, but that he has been unfairly pilloried, the result of an outmoded, politically correct decorousness about discussion of matters of faith.

This is preposterous.

Remember the circumstances here. Hume was speaking on Fox News Sunday – a political chat show in which pundits and politicians argue unproductively with each other about the events of the week. FNS and other Sunday shows are part of a larger ecosystem of TV political chat which is, to generalize, crass, superficial, flighty, and out of touch with both American public opinion and the workings of the political system it purports to analyze.

Pundits argue all the time about the role of religion in politics, a perfectly valid topic for discussion. But can we envision them expanding their portfolio to include religion itself, and the questions – cosmic, existential and deeply personal – it engages? (more…)

Is Avatar stupid? The standard rap is that James Cameron’s movie turns the complex relationships between civilization and nature into a black-and-white, heroes-and-villains battle. It caricatures corporations (and, more generally, capitalism and Western civilization) as rapacious. Nature and indigenous populations, meanwhile, are treated with dewy sentimentalism that discounts the achievements of civilization and the rapaciousness of nature itself.

David Brooks is the latest to take a shot, identifying some implicit racism in Avatar‘s plot, in which a white guy becomes the hero of blue people. (At least he’s handicapped.)

All good points! But there’s something seriously off-base about these critiques.

Here’s what I’d ask the critics: It may be cliched; it may not be even-handed. But does Avatar (in which a corporation and and its army of mercenaries attempt to kill members of an indigenous tribe and destroy their jungle home in order to mine a rare element) get the basic man vs. nature theme wrong?

(more…)

Not By MAUREEN DOWD

It was an indelible Obamamoment. Maybe even an Obamamiracle.

The president was sandwiched between Hillary and Michelle, like turkey on white and pumpernickel with a dollop of dijon, for a photo op with Hamid Karzai. It’s the kind of situation that gets all up in his grill, two strong women in a pincer movement.

This is one reason why, although he’s ballooned the deficit up to an astonishing $1.4 trillion, the perpetually svelte and self-denying Dieter-in-Chief favors egg white omelets and Tofurkey over real food: he’s so skeletal he can easily slip out of a tight spot.

Sure enough, when those quickly converging upper arms – one bare and brawny, one in pantsuit armor – brushed his, Obama turned sideways and disappeared.

Our president may be a wispy, nicotine-addicted Vulcan short an emotion chip. But he’s mastered the technique of giving his enemies the slip, apparating out of there like Harry Potter in a tight spot with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

Bill Clinton went all the way to hell and back; W never knew he was in hell; he thought it was just Crawford in August; our Barack, Arabic for “blessed,” somehow skirts the Purgatory of the skirts.

(more…)