November 6, 2008

Oh-Bama!

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I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the incipient Obama administration going forward. In the meantime, a side note about newspapers. It was a banner day for the traditionalists: Many papers had to do midday press runs because their dead-tree editions sold out. (I was lucky to find a non-empty Washington Post box near my gym and picked up a copy. Now I have to keep it forever?)

One observation: historic newspaper headlines announcing an election result or other event were straight declarations. Think: NIXON RESIGNS, MEN WALK ON MOON, et al. This is what made them, well, historic. They concisely described the moment.

But today it’s different. Most people picking up a paper the day after something big happens already know all about it. When I got my paper, I had already watched election results the night before on TV, read news websites and political blogs. So the hard news headline is no longer needed. Meanwhile, newspaper design is also becoming flashier, more photo-heavy, the headlines bigger – and shorter.

So instead of the declaration of history — OBAMA ELECTED PRESIDENT — today’s headlines were impressionistic:

* • “Yes We Can.” (The Record of Stockton, Calif.)
* • “Change Comes to America.” (Canada’s The Hamilton Spectator)
* • “Change of Course.” (Athens (Ga.) Banner-Herald)
* • “Face of Change.” (Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald)
* • “A New Hope.” (Iowa City Press-Citizen)
* • “In Our Lifetime,” declared The Anniston (Ala.) Star.
* • “Obama Overcomes,” said The Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News.
* • “Race is History,” The Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise offered.
* • “Obama Reaches The Mountaintop,” said The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.
* • “Obama!” (The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa.)
* • “Oh-Bama! (The Orange County (Calif.) Register
* • “Mr. President.” (The Chicago Sun-Times)
* • “It’s Obama.” (La Tribune of Paris, France)

What does this mean, other than that today’s newspapers are like yesterday’s magazines? It’s sort of paradoxical. People seek commemorative editions because they are, of course, physical objects, and they distill something of the day that a web page, changing every 15 minutes, can’t. At the same time, though, because papers no longer have a monopoly on information and are desperate to grab attention any way they can, the headlines (and in many papers, much of the content as well) are softer, less matter-of-fact, less “serious.” When we look back on these headlines in 40 years, it’s hard not to think they’ll show more about the steady fading away of the paper edition than the historic event they record.

 

November 4, 2008

A vote that matters

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I first covered national politics in 1988, the year that George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis with a classic culture war campaign that focused on Willie Horton and the Pledge of Allegiance. In late October of that year, I spent a day knocking on doors in working class Ohio, asking people who they were voting for and how they viewed the stakes in the election. And I was struck by how disengaged people were. Many weren’t paying attention at all.

But this year the feeling at the polls — in my own polling place and, reports indicate, around the nation — was palpably different than it was in 1988, and, well, than in every election in between. At my local elementary school just outside Washington, DC (an area where Obama has overwhelming support) the line was about 100 yards long. It took about 50 minutes to work my way past the bake sale table to the voting booth. My fellow voters were both patient and cheerful; the act of voting was, for once, deeply satisfying.

It’s not hard to see why. This year, the vote matters. It is a referendum on the Bush years, and an opportunity to pronounce on the future at a time when all seems terribly uncertain. Americans have been through about a half-century’s worth of history in eight years. We’ve seen a bare-knuckle fight over a presidential election results that called the functioning of our democracy into question. We’ve seen a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil, a pointless and very long war in Iraq, and torture adopted as official U.S. policy. We’ve seen an American city nearly destroyed and the effects of global warming grow ever more pronounced. And we watched our leadership retreat from many of the problems we face (as well as the ones it created) while dismissing the very idea of accountability. As it happens, the one mechanism of accountability Bush has acknowledged (in 2004) is a presidential election.

The election is a chance to correct that sense of helplessness that so many of us have felt as the country has drifted, and to wrestle with real issues that, in the past, had been supplanted by “issues” such as the Pledge of Allegiance. Economists often say that voting makes no sense, inasmuch as the material impact of any one vote is nearly zero. But today, the communal feeling of consequence at the polling place was unmistakable, as was the sense that we’re about to embark on something not just new, but different.

 

November 4, 2008

Why I’m voting for Obama

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If you haven’t been able to figure it out by reading earlier posts, I’ll come right out and say it: I am voting for Obama. In general, I don’t like making partisan statements. I don’t put signs in my yard or bumper stickers on my car. One reason for this is habit. I used to be a newspaper reporter, and with the exception of opinion writers, newspapers prohibit their employees from openly supporting candidates or taking public stances on issues. But part of it is I don’t like boiling down my thoughts on politics to slogans or yes-or-no propositions.

But of course that’s exactly what an election is – a binary choice. And for me, and the country, I think the choice has been clear for some time. For me, George W. Bush’s biggest failing was that, with only a couple of exceptions, he simply didn’t care about governance. Bush (with Rove and Cheney) treated problems the country faced primarily as opportunities either to expand the support of the Republican Party or the power of the presidency. And as bigger, ever-more complex problems loomed, the Bush approach remained constant. Only over the past year, with its once-mighty political project in total collapse, has a semblance of pragmatism returned to the White House.

Barack Obama offers a return to reality-based government, in which problems will be examined empirically and policies devised to respond to them, and in which making government work will be a high priority. It’s really that simple. This is, of course, second grade-level civics. It’s amazing how far we strayed from it these past eight years. There are a lot of problems – climate change, the global financial meltdown, health care – that require some major governmental re-engineering, and require some fights with the Republican-allied business lobbyists that will like them the least. With his obvious political and managerial talents, Obama is obviously the man for this job.

Like many others, I didn’t much care for John McCain’s campaign. It summoned up many of the worst elements of the culture wars. The socialism charges were both divisive and ridiculous. It set new standards for blatant dishonesty. But unlike many others, I didn’t find any of this particularly surprising or “dishonorable” or the worst ever. It was just politics, and it wasn’t effective, and it will probably be even less effective the next time around. What was more disappointing about McCain’s effort was its slavish attachment to eye-catching, empty symbolism, from the choice of Sarah Palin to the September “suspension” of the campaign.

The symbolism masked a serious substance deficit. McCain’s policy proposals were mostly tired, off-the-shelf Republican ideas that poorly fit our current reality. He seemed to have no political priorities beyond stopping Obama. It was impossible to discern what he’d do as president. This isn’t that surprising either; if you’re behind, you’re going to be tearing down the other guy. But it still left a void. I expect a President McCain would likely be far more pragmatic than Bush, simply by virtue of facing solid Democratic majorities in Congress. But he would be whipsawed by Pelosi-Reid on the one side and the remaining Republican power structure of lobbyists and neocons on the other. Not a recipe for success.

So, I’m off to vote at Sligo Creek Elementary School.

 

November 2, 2008

The ombudsman’s lament

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Is there any job in American journalism hurtling toward obsolescence faster than that of the ombudsman, the “readers’ representative” who mediates between the myriad comments/complaints/suggestions of readers and the management of the paper?

With the collapse of the newspaper business model, many papers have eliminated this position. That’s probably a good thing. Not long ago, I felt differently: newspapers are traditionally opaque institutions that call other people to account, but are reluctant to acknowledge their own mistakes. Good to have an in-house critic who could get answers from the publisher, from editors and reporters. But with the rise of countless online sources of media criticism and the migration of newspapers online, the ombudsman’s function is becoming redundant. Newspapers are starting to open up and join the conversation; those who go into a defensive crouch when they make a mistake do themselves no favors.

And the ombudsmen still on the job seem increasingly caught betwixt the giant forces grinding down and transforming newspapers and the conventions still holding them back. In today’s New York Times, for example, public editor Clark Hoyt goes to great lengths trying to wave reporters off prematurely calling the election for Obama:

There are only two days left until the next president is elected. I think The Times would be wise, in the words of my former colleague Tom Fiedler, dean of the College of Communication at Boston University, to “forgo the temptation of the horse race” and focus on issues and what the candidates are saying. That is just what the paper did Thursday, with articles on their positions on student loans and summarizing their final stump speeches.

He’s right that it’s silly to write articles saying “it’s over” before it’s over. And I’m no fan of horse race coverage, with its endless focus on what might happen weeks or months in advance. But it’s different now: The horses are very close to the finish line. It would be ridiculous for reporters to ignore that one of them is ahead by a length. That reality shapes everything, from campaign decisions to voter behavior itself. In making the most predictable of all ombudsmanic pronouncements – cover the issues – Hoyt dispenses the strangest kind of journalistic advice: Cover your eyes! Ignore the facts!

And let’s face it: Obama is very likely to win. The odds of an election-night shocker are quite small. If you want an example, look at the indispensable 538.com, which runs 10,000 computer simulations every day incorporating the latest polling results, taking into account polls and election results going back to 1952. As of tonight, 538 gives McCain a 6.3 percent chance of victory. That’s not zero, of course, and the vote could turn out to be a black swan – that totally unanticipated outcome. But that must be weighed appropriately against the preponderance of the evidence.

Moreover, the cautionary examples Hoyt uses – the recent Rams upset of the Redskins and Hillary Clinton’s surprise victory in the New Hampshire primary – are weak analogies to a national election. A football game is not an election at all. And the New Hampshire primary had a small and volatile pool of voters. It’s a bobbing cork compared to the aircraft carrier of a national election campaign that, in spite of its drama, has not been close for weeks.

Update: 538.com crunched the numbers again overnight and now gives McCain a 3.7 percent chance of winning.

 

October 28, 2008

The media’s epic Katrina fail

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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.

 

October 27, 2008

McCain-Derrida 2008

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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.”

 

October 26, 2008

McCain’s narrative problem

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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.

 

October 22, 2008

The Palin wardrobe malfunction

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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.

 

October 16, 2008

Bankrupt

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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.

 

October 6, 2008

21st century government

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James Fallows notes that we are at an historic pass:

In the short term, a worldwide financial panic and crisis. Just beyond that, the real economic and social problems that come when large numbers of people lose their jobs, their businesses, their investments, their homes, and even larger numbers become fearful about what might happen to them. And then, when we get a minute to think, profound global energy and environmental challenges, security concerns that range from loose nukes to terrorist organizations, plus a couple of ongoing wars and ever-rising medical costs. Just as starters. The United States is still incredibly rich, powerful, and productive. But the current situation is no joke, for America or the world.

Fallows is critiquing John McCain’s choosing this moment to focus on Barack Obama’s past associations with William Ayers. And I have to say, for someone who sees himself as a man of history, it’s sad and ridiculous for McCain to ignore the world-changing events going on around us all in favor of these threadbare character attacks. It can be seen as a legacy of the Bush/Rove attempts to manipulate perceptions even as reality came crashing down around them. Except that McCain isn’t directly responsible for the banking crisis, his history of backing deregulation notwithstanding. He could have put some of the best minds together and come up with something, instead of just ceding the whole issue – and the election – to Obama. I guess he really isn’t a man of history after all. At least, not for this moment in history.

What this does mean, though, is that if he wins, Obama will have giant challenges ahead of him. And I think there will be an opportunity to recast the sluggish 20st century institutions that have gotten us into such trouble over the past eight years (partly through the mismatch of their capacities to emerging problems such as global finance or climate change, partly through misuse and abuse by the Bush White House). Government institutions need to be nimbler, more pro-active, and more transparent, so they can recognize potential catastrophes before things go downhill, effectively communicate the risks to the public, and act effectively without getting bogged down in special interest hell. Not easy. But we’re reaching a point where we really have no choice.

 

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