The first thing many people heard about John and Elizabeth Edwards’ dramatic press conference yesterday was a raft of “breaking news” bulletins suggesting that the former senator was going to suspend his campaign, or perhaps even drop out entirely, because his wife had been diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer. Turns out the whole wave of “reports” was based on a single blog post on the site of the new “insider” publication, The Politico, which in turn was based on a single source.Within about forty-five minutes of the “Edwards To Suspend Campaign” reports, the press conference happened, and it became clear John Edwards was going to keep campaigning full speed, with his wife keeping up her own fairly rigorous campaign schedule. So: no harm, no foul, right?Maybe not. What would have otherwise been a press conference disclosing and contextualizing a health condition not known to the public instead became a “surprise” announcement that the Edwards campaign would go on, exposing the candidate to accusations of insufficient concern for his wife’s health, and/or to the suspicion that a suspension or abandonment of his campaign might come later. In other words, the Politico story was grossly unfair to John and Elizabeth Edwards.Leave it to Rush Limbaugh to pile on, first fatuously suggesting that the Edwards campaign leaked the suspension story to create a buzz, and then offensively attacking both John and Elizabeth Edwards for calling the press conference instead of “turning to God.”Methinks it’s Limbaugh who ought to “turn to God” and ask for forgiveness for this latest high-profile act of pure hatefulness.
Month: March 2007
Zack Exley’s Alternet article “What Lessons Can Progressives Learn from Evangelicals?” (also posted at In These Times) provides an interesting update on the growth of the progressive evangelicals and insights about how they may influence evangelical Christians as a whole. Exley notes, for example:
…this movement is still barely aware of its own existence, and has not chosen a label for itself. George Barna, who studies trends among Christians for clients such as the Billy Graham Evangelical Association and Focus on the Family, calls it simply “The Revolution” and its adherents “Revolutionaries.”
“The media are oblivious to it,” Barna wrote in his 2006 book Revolution: Finding Vibrant Faith Beyond the Walls of the Sanctuary. “Scholars are clueless about it. The government caught a glimpse of it in the 2004 presidential election but has mostly misinterpreted its nature and motivations.” According to his research, there are more than 20 million Revolutionaries in America, differentiated from mainstream evangelicals by a greater likelihood of serving their community and the poor and oppressed within it…
Credible statistics are scarce. Generally evangelical progressives agree more with Democrats about most economic and social justice issues, but a sizeable portion may prefer the GOP’s positions on abortion and gay rights. And there is also a struggle going on for the soul of the evangelical movement between “prosperity Gospel” advocates and “Social Gospel” adherents. The article suggests that the trendline may be in the Dems’ favor.
But the real benefit of evangelical progressives to Dems may be less how they vote as a sub-group and more about how they influence the much larger constituency of evangelical Christians. If, for example, they generate more discussion about the economics of Jesus among mainstream evangelicals, it could lead to substantial party-switching among evangelicals favoring Dems. In any event, there is more of interest in Exley’s article and the comments that follow it, and it is recommended to Dems interested in building support among religious communities.
Zack Exley’s Alternet article “What Lessons Can Progressives Learn from Evangelicals?” (also posted at In These Times) provides an interesting update on the growth of the progressive evangelicals and insights about how they may influence evangelical Christians as a whole. Exley notes, for example:
…this movement is still barely aware of its own existence, and has not chosen a label for itself. George Barna, who studies trends among Christians for clients such as the Billy Graham Evangelical Association and Focus on the Family, calls it simply “The Revolution” and its adherents “Revolutionaries.”
“The media are oblivious to it,” Barna wrote in his 2006 book Revolution: Finding Vibrant Faith Beyond the Walls of the Sanctuary. “Scholars are clueless about it. The government caught a glimpse of it in the 2004 presidential election but has mostly misinterpreted its nature and motivations.” According to his research, there are more than 20 million Revolutionaries in America, differentiated from mainstream evangelicals by a greater likelihood of serving their community and the poor and oppressed within it…
Credible statistics are scarce. Generally evangelical progressives agree more with Democrats about most economic and social justice issues, but a sizeable portion may prefer the GOP’s positions on abortion and gay rights. And there is also a struggle going on for the soul of the evangelical movement between “prosperity Gospel” advocates and “Social Gospel” adherents. The article suggests that the trendline may be in the Dems’ favor.
But the real benefit of evangelical progressives to Dems may be less how they vote as a sub-group and more about how they influence the much larger constituency of evangelical Christians. If, for example, they generate more discussion about the economics of Jesus among mainstream evangelicals, it could lead to substantial party-switching among evangelicals favoring Dems. In any event, there is more of interest in Exley’s article, and it is recommended to Dems interested in building support among religious communities.
Well, I guess I’ll lose my blogger license if I don’t join the rest of the hep world and do a post on the YouTube pseudo-spot, “Vote Different.” In case you somehow missed it, this is a short video produced by some so-far-anonymous Barack Obama fan appropriating images from an apparently legendary 1984 Apple ad introducing the Mac, and identifying Hillary Clinton with the Big Brother of the Orwell classic. When I finally looked at the thing earlier today, it had already obtained well over a million hits, having gone “viral” several days ago.But the buzz over the spot, which is spilling over into the MSM, is what’s really big, with some commentators suggesting that this kind of political non-ad ad content may be the defining development of 2008, building on the infamous Swift Boat ads of 2004, which started with a modest buy and then went viral over the internet and other secondary media.It’s obviously a blow for truth, justice and the American way if some obscure schmo can show up the Media Consultancy in this way; maybe it will even drive down the cost of political campaigns.There’s only one problem: “Vote Different,” for all its striking images, doesn’t really provide much in the way of actual content. Some excited viewers seem to think it provides a brilliant intergenerational commentary on Obama’s Too Cool For Details challenge to the boring, establishment HRC. But I can’t see anyone changing their minds about either candidate based on staring at this spot: if you don’t already pretty much hate Hillary, you’re as likely as not to be annoyed by her depiction as Big Brother, entrancing an army of slaves with soporific talk.Indeed, I’m a bit amused that all the lefty bloggers who are praising “Vote Different” don’t stop to note that the video arguably trades in the standard Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy “meme” about HRC as a dangerous totalitarian figure–a Red Queen who wants to take away our freedoms.As someone who likes both Clinton and Obama, I hope this sort of metaphorical differentiation between the two candidates is not the shape of things to come.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey
One of the Dems’ biggest challenges in struggling against the most incompetent and corrupt Administration in U.S. history is that there is so much scandal, mess and outrage du jour that it’s hard to get any coverage for their pro-active solutions to America’s most critical problems. What should be the Dems’ strongest card, a unified front supporting policies for energy independence gets hardly any buzz at all.
As a key to addressing huge problems, like middle east entanglement, rising gas prices, air pollution, out -of-control military spending and global warming, energy independence is a highly popular goal, according to the most recent polls. A poll released last year by Foreign Affairs magazine found nearly 90 percent of respondents agreed that “the lack of energy independence jeopardizes national security.” The poll indicated that 48 percent say “the United States deserves a “D” or “F” for its efforts on energy dependence.”
Most of the Democratic presidential candidates have similar positions on this issue, nicely encapsulated in non-candidate (thus far) Wesley Clark’s web page as one of the three most important issues:
We must put a policy in place to lead us to energy independence and away from the volatile and conflict-ridden regions where, today, the “geostrategic risk premium” is adding billions of dollars to the costs imposed on the American people. Our reliance on oil also impacts global climate change. As I have stated before, global warming has serious national security risks: stretching our military resources to deal with catastrophes (like Katrina) and increasing the potential for conflicts due to the displacement of people, competition for scarce resources, and adverse effects on agriculture
Because most Dems are in general agreement about measures to promote energy independence, there is an enormous opportunity for the candidates to get behind a unified statement that will define Dems as the Party of hope, in stark contrast to the GOP’s lack of a credible policy for energy independence.
Senate Democrats are supporting a modest “Clean Energy Development for a Growing Economy (EDGE) Initiative” a package to reduce U.S. petroleum consumption by 6 million barrels a day in 2020—or 40 percent of America’s projected imports (See here for more about the plan). Not a bad start, but voters might be more receptive to a speedier timetable, perhaps a more dramatic “Manhattan project” style crash-program.
It shouldn’t be all that hard for Dem candidates to unite around a common agenda that includes tougher CAFE standards, more investment in mass rail transit, increased tax credits for hybrid cars, alternative energy development — an energy independence package that benefits Dem candidates and strengthens the party’s image.
E.J. Dionne’s Washington Post column today takes stock of the effect of the Iraq disaster on the general drift of U.S. foreign policy:
To understand how much the Iraq war has transformed the way most Americans think about foreign policy, consider what passed for shrewd analysis four years ago.
The words on the “in” list included “unilateral,” “bold,” “robust,” “transformative” and “sole remaining superpower.” The words on the “out” list included “multilateral,” “nuance,” “patience,” “diplomacy,” “allies,” “history” and “prudence.”Today, the “in” and “out” lists would be almost exactly reversed. The new “out” list includes such additions as “reckless,” “arrogant” and “incompetent.”
That’s all true, and salutory, but it just scratches the surface of the reevaluation that will ultimately play out as the Iraq engagement winds down. And that reevaluation will go well beyond the long-running debate (mainly on the Left but increasingly on the Right) as to whether the Iraq War was fundamentally and inherently misbegotten, or a theoretically justifiable action that was misplanned and misexecuted to an epic degree. Within the “inherently misbegotten” camp, there are those who stress the irrelevance of Iraq to the real security threats posed by Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks, and those who consider the Iraq invasion a reflection of the hubristic and imperial mentality that suffuses the whole idea of the war on terror. A good if somewhat extreme example of the latter tendency appeared in the Outlook section of the Post on March 11, in a piece by Tony Smith of Tufts University that lumped together liberal internationalists and neocons as indistinguishable imperialists, while less forthrightly forging an alliance with conservative “realists” who argue for restraint in foreign policy commitments while rejecting trifles like human rights concerns or collective security arrangements.Smith’s article caught my attention because it fingered Will Marshall and the Progressive Policy Institute as Ground Zero for the “neoliberal” foreign policy thinking he luridly describes as identical to neoconservatism, and as dominating the Democratic Party. I found his breathless and alarmed revelation that many Democrats are “Wilsonians” in foreign policy a bit hilarious. And Smith’s dismissal of the vast differences between neocons and “neoliberals” on such small subjects as the significance of international organizations, the equality of nations, civil liberties, and the self-imposition of common rules of behavior by the United States, is simply disingenuous. But Smith does illustrate the kind of broader questions that we must all get used to when this dreadful war finally ends, and should get used to right now.
A writer with the handle ‘its simple IF you ignore the complexity’ has a thought-provoking post over at the Daily Kos, addressing one of the lessons of MLK’s example for conducting political discourse. ‘It’s simple..’ explains it this way in one part of the essay:
I don’t think anyone could seriously make the argument that Dr. King was a sellout…Nay, he stood strong – continuously willing to speak out and when necessary suffer for his beliefs. Expecting not exceptions, but real change in the laws and attitudes he challenged, realizing that neither would come lightly.
Yet, significantly Dr. King managed to do something that we too often overlook. He disagreed – strongly. He challenged injustice – but he did not divide.
He drew lines not to exclude others but to demand change. Recognizing change would not come instantly, he still refused to fall into the trap of hating and demeaning his adversaries.
This should not be considered a call to kumbaya for political writers. Their job is to illuminate truth, and tough analysis of personal character is fair game, provided it’s honest and well-measured.
But the way MLK derived credibilty from criticising policies, while refusing to demonize his adversaries is something campaign workers and candidates should ponder. They have a lot to lose by falling into the trap of ad hominem attacks. Name-calling and personal insults, for example, diminish the dignity of the perp more than the target. Voters want their leaders to be articulate enough to sharply criticize policies, and yet be above what Rev. Jesse Jackson called the “rat-a-tat-tat” of snarky political discourse.
There is a lovely moment in an occasionaly re-televised clip of MLK on the Mike Douglas Show back in the sixties. Douglas is interviewing MLK, and another guest chimes in, questioning one of King’s positions. King calmly, respectfully and eloquently answers the question without the barest hint of hostility. The lovely moment comes at the end of the clip as King sits there with luminous dignity, Douglas and his other guest, not only persuaded, but clearly awestruck by King’s spirit.
We can’t expect our politicians to measure up to MLK, but they have a lot to gain by emulating his way of winning hearts and minds.
A writer with the handle ‘its simple IF you ignore the complexity’ has a thought-provoking post over at the Daily Kos, addressing one of the lessons of MLK’s example for conducting political discourse. ‘It’s simple..’ explains it this way in one part of the essay:
I don’t think anyone could seriously make the argument that Dr. King was a sellout…Nay, he stood strong – continuously willing to speak out and when necessary suffer for his beliefs. Expecting not exceptions, but real change in the laws and attitudes he challenged, realizing that neither would come lightly.
Yet, significantly Dr. King managed to do something that we too often overlook. He disagreed – strongly. He challenged injustice – but he did not divide.
He drew lines not to exclude others but to demand change. Recognizing change would not come instantly, he still refused to fall into the trap of hating and demeaning his adversaries.
This should not be considered a call to kumbaya for political writers. Their job is to illuminate truth, and tough analysis of personal character is fair game, provided it’s honest and well-measured.
But the way MLK derived credibilty from criticising policies, while refusing to demonize his adversaries is something campaign workers and candidates should ponder. They have a lot to lose by falling into the trap of ad hominem attacks. Name-calling and personal insults, for example, diminish the dignity of the perp more than the target. Voters want their leaders to be articulate enough to sharply criticize policies, and yet be above what Rev. Jesse Jackson called the “rat-a-tat-tat” of snarky political discourse.
There is a lovely moment in an occasionaly re-televised clip of MLK on the Mike Douglas Show back in the sixties. Douglas is interviewing MLK, and another guest chimes in, questioning one of King’s positions. King calmly, respectfully and eloquently answers the question without the barest hint of hostility. The lovely moment comes at the end of the clip as King sits there with luminous dignity, Douglas and his other guest, not only persuaded, but clearly awestruck by King’s spirit.
We can’t expect our politicians to measure up to MLK, but they have a lot to gain by emulating his way of winning hearts and minds.
When California formally enacted legislation last week moving its 2008 presidential primary to February 5, it took a big step towards making that day not only by far the earliest and most massive Super Tuesday in history, but perhaps a de facto national primary that would almost certainly end the nominating process for both parties.Today’s New York Times has a handy-dandy chart listing the 8 states already scheduled for a February 5 (AL, AR, AZ, CA, DE, MO, OK and UT), the 8 additional states considered likely to go there next (FL, IL, KS, NJ, NM, NY, NC, and TX), and 6 more that are thinking seriously about it (CO, GA, MI, MT, RI and TN). On the Democratic side, if all 22 states went on February 5, they would award 59% of all 2008 delegates, nearly double the prize for the end-it-all 2004 Super Tuesday, and also nearly a month earlier.This, folks, is simply crazy. February 5 is nine months before the general election, and roughly six months before the nominating conventions. The heavily front-loaded 2004 schedule was rationalized by some Democrats as necessary to give the nominee time to take on an incumbent; there’s no such excuse for the far more front-loaded 2008 calendar. It virtually guarantees that three factors—money, name ID, and success in the earliest states, especially Iowa—will determine the outcome. And it may well snuff any serious chance for the lower-tier candidates in both parties, who must now somehow simultaneously combine relentless campaigning in Iowa with the massive fundraising necessary to compete in the incredibly expensive February 5 landscape.Most importantly, the emerging calendar will provide zero opportunity for second thoughts after the early rush has anointed nominees. It could be a very long spring, summer and autumn if a nominee commits some major blunder, or some disabling skeleton jumps out of a closet.For Democrats, the only silver lining is that their top-tier candidates are probably closer to being bullet-proof than those on the other side. Giuliani and McCain are very weak front-runners at this point, but with no one else appearing in position to catch fire rapidly, GOPers may get stuck with one of them in much the same way that they shrugged and unenthusiastically nominated Bob Dole in 1996.But there’s no doubt that this crazy early national primary represents a failure of national Democratic leadership. A revolt against the Iowa/New Hampshire duopoly that emerged right after the 2004 elections led to a weak and ultimately counter-productive “solution”: allowing one state (NV) to move between IA and NH, and another (SC) to move up to right after NH. This had the effect of honking off NH, which could produce an even greater calamity by moving its primary ahead of IA (probably spurring an insane competition that could move the whole process into this year), while luring half the country into moving up to the “window” right after SC. Meanwhile, IA’s more important than ever.You can’t really blame the individual states for this happening; it’s a classic apes-on-a-treadmill situation. What could have happened, and what should happen before the next go-around, is a truly national approach. Whether it’s a lottery, or a carefully matched series of states around the country, or regional primaries, or just the kind of spread-out process that prevailed until recently, it could be imposed by the DNC through a combination of (a) strict rules against seating of delegates chosen outside the calendar guidelines, and (b) an aggressive effort to recruit all candidates in advance to support the decision, with ejection from DNC-sponsored debates, or if necessary, a ban on speaking opportunities at the Convention, being the stick.But if we don’t get seriously angry about this abomination right now, we’re going to find ourselves in the same situation four and eight years from now.
Journalists and everyone interested in the political power of the internet have a must-read to clip over at the L.A. Times, Terry McDermott’s “Blogs Can Top the Presses.” McDermott’s article is part tribute to Josh Marshall’s cutting-edge political reporting and part meditation on the ways bloggers are transforming political journalism.
From McDermott’s profile of Marshall’s shop:
It’s 20 or so blocks up town to the heart of the media establishment, the Midtown towers that house the big newspaper, magazine and book publishers. And yet it was here in a neighborhood of bodegas and floral wholesalers that, over the last two months, one of the biggest news stories in the country — the Bush administration’s firing of a group of U.S. attorneys — was pieced together by the reporters of the blog Talking Points Memo.
The bloggers used the usual tools of good journalists everywhere — determination, insight, ingenuity — plus a powerful new force that was not available to reporters until blogging came along: the ability to communicate almost instantaneously with readers via the Internet and to deputize those readers as editorial researchers, in effect multiplying the reporting power by an order of magnitude.
In December, Josh Marshall, who owns and runs TPM , posted a short item linking to a news report in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about the firing of the U.S. attorney for that state. Marshall later followed up, adding that several U.S. attorneys were apparently being replaced and asked his 100,000 or so daily readers to write in if they knew anything about U.S. attorneys being fired in their areas.
For the two months that followed, Talking Points Memo and one of its sister sites, TPM Muckraker, accumulated evidence from around the country on who the axed prosecutors were, and why politics might be behind the firings. The cause was taken up among Democrats in Congress. One senior Justice Department official has resigned, and Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales is now in the media crosshairs.
This isn’t the first time Marshall and Talking Points have led coverage on national issues. In 2002, the site was the first to devote more than just passing mention to then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s claim that the country would have been better off had the segregationist 1948 presidential campaign of Sen. Strom Thurmond succeeded. The subsequent furor cost Lott his leadership position.
Similarly, the TPM sites were leaders in chronicling the various scandals associated with Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
And the punch line:
All of this from an enterprise whose annual budget probably wouldn’t cover the janitorial costs incurred by a metropolitan daily newspaper.
Kind of ironic that such an eloquent tribute to the power of a political blogger would appear in a newspaper, but there it is. Regretfully, nominees for Pulitzer Prizes for reporting excellence, which will be awarded in a month, must be newspaper employees under current rules. In a more just contest, Marshall and TPM would be a slam dunk for their influential reportage. It’s way past time for the Pulitzer Board to create a new category that reflects 21st century journalism.
There are more quotable insights about political blogging and related issues in McDermott’s excellent piece, but we’ve already excerpted a lot, so read the whole thing.
