Well, it’s an eyebrow-raiser if nothing else:

President Barack Obama has praised health industry groups for coming forward with an offer to reduce the growth of spending by $2 trillion a year to overhaul the system.
Obama appeared at the White House with an array of industry figures, including union representatives, and called it the occasion “historic.”
Industry figures pledged that they would voluntarily slow their rate increases over the next 10 years.
Obama said the step the industry took Monday must be carried out as part of “a broader effort” to change the health care system, keep costs under control and provide health insurance for the some 46 million Americans who do not now have it.

In an acute analysis of this event, Jonathan Cohn of TNR’s The Treatment blog suggests that it may represent a sea change in health industry strategy for coping with pressure for health care reform:

[T]he industry groups aren’t promising to control costs as an alternative to reform. They’re promising to control costs as part of reform. In fact, some of the efficiency steps they are proposing wouldn’t even be possible without the sorts of changes now under discussion in Washington, because they require changes in legislation.

That’s important, because it creates an opening wedge against what happened in 1994: a combined health industry/Republican campaign to attack universal health care as worse than the status quo. As a hand-wringing Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week by Kimberly Strassel conceded, a status quo-oriented attack on Obama’s health reform proposals probably won’t work in any event:

One of the hardiest of conservative attack lines on progressives is that they are elitists who dislike middle-class values and lifestyles, and seek political power to change them. In the most lurid versions of this fantasy, progressives are part of some international or even supernatural conspiracy to destroy the Great American Middle Class (listening to such rants, you would think that there’s no middle class in, say, Europe, or that Democratic voting behavior is unknown outside the upper or lower economic classes).
Laughable as this talk may seem to be to progressives, it keeps recurring, most strikingly in a recent column by the political-analyst-turned-right-wing-pundit Michael Barone that singles out gun policy and climate change as examples of “elitist” contempt and hostility towards the wretched middle class:

For liberal elites, belief in gun control and global warming has taken on the character of religious faith. We have sinned (by hoarding guns or driving SUVs); we must atone (by turning in our guns or recycling); we must repent (by supporting gun control or cap and trade schemes). You may notice that the “we” in question is usually the great mass of ordinary American citizens.
The liberal elite is less interested in giving up its luxuries (Al Gore purchases carbon offsets to compensate for his huge mansion and private jet travel) than in changing the lifestyle of the masses, who selfishly insist on living in suburbs and keeping guns for recreation or protection. Ordinary Americans are seen not as responsible fellow citizens building stable communities but as greedy masses, who must be disciplined to live according to the elite’s religious dogmas.

This is an amazing passage, eh? It asserts without evidence that the “liberal elite’s” attitudes on these two issues are not only universal, but have the character of religious faith–i.e., they are not based on empirical factors or values shared with “ordinary Americans”–and then suggests that they are motivated not by a desire to achieve any public policy goals (such as lower crime or a non-catastrophic economic future) but by a lust for control of the “sinful.”
By attributing these motives to the “liberal elite,” Barone creates a closed loop of dogma that can’t be refuted, and that makes any debate impossible. On firearms, the real goal of the liberal elite–“usually unstated,” Barone conveniently says–is to ban handgun possesion. Never mind that no leading “liberal,” much less all “liberals,” have actually proposed a total handgun ban. Never mind that the last two Democratic platforms have flatly pledged support for the “constitutional right to bear arms,” or that the most radical gun control measure ever proposed by a Democratic presidential candidate (Al Gore in 2000) was to license gun owners.
Worse yet, on climate change, the introduction of the religious metaphor for support for a cap-and-trade system detracts attention from the more fundamental issue of whether man-made-global-warming does or does not threaten to create a calamity–economic as well as ecological–that we would be wise to avoid. This is a factual question, not one of values or attitudes, and the most reliable scientific authorities on the subject conclude almost unanimously that climate change is real, potentially catastrophic, and increasingly difficult to mitigate. If the experts are right, then anyone who cared exclusively about the ability of Americans to maintain a traditional middle-class, suburban lifestyle, would be more agitated than an “elitist” who is fine with a radically scaled-back way of living.
Insofar as resistance to climate change legislation happens to be consistent with the interests not of “ordinary Americans,” but of a handful of industries whose share of the energy economy would be reduced by a shift towards non-fossil-fuel sources, not to mention the introduction of efficiency measures, Barone’s efforts to stir up middle-class hatred of the “liberal elite” is a classic example of the elitist demagoguery that Tom Frank so eloquently outlined several years ago in What’s the Matter With Kansas? Since few “ordinary Americans” have much reason to read Michael Barone, you don’t have to do much armchair psychology of the sort that Barone himself so confidently engages in towards the “liberal elite” to guess that his main object is to give malefactors of great wealth the warm glow of feeling an unearned solidarity with the masses.

Devotees of opinion polling had a really delightful time last week. They had front-row seats for a heavyweight match between two really major contenders – Democracy Corps and the newly founded Resurgent Republic.
The match started when Stan Greenberg called out Whit Ayers, the pollster behind Resurgent Republic, on two issues – the way Resurgent calculated partisan identification and the phrasing of their questions. (Greenberg’s initial statement can be found here)
Ayers replied (here) and then Jon McHenry of Resurgent and Andrew Baumann of Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner Research – which does D-Corps surveys — took up the party ID question here — with Nate Silver jumping in as well.
For polling methodology fans, as the saying goes, “it don’t get much better than this.” But for non-methodology buffs, the second issue — of question phrasing — was really more engaging. Stan sharply questioned the language of one question – on equality vs. opportunity — and also made the following observation on Resurgent Republics’ questions about Obama’s budget.

Your Republican leaders would have been well served had you asked first whether voters favor or oppose the budget, without describing it – as Democracy Corps does routinely. That would have shown a majority or large plurality in favor of the budget, as in all other polls. Instead, your survey begins with this stunningly biased description: “President Obama has proposed a budget for next year that would spend three point six trillion dollars and have a deficit of one point four trillion dollars.”
That would be okay if you think that is all voters will learn from the media and Democrats about the budget. I suspect they are already hearing about inherited deficits from Bush, the funding for the jobs recovery plan, health care reform, education and energy independence, and about deficits cut in half – all aspects of the budget. Don’t you think the leaders and groups you are advising deserve to know how this might really play out?

Ayers replied:

We followed the initial question about the budget with a series of left versus right arguments. We say, for example, “Candidate A says that investments to address unmet needs in education, energy, and health care are necessary to bring the country out of recession.” We think that is a fair statement of one of the arguments made on behalf of the budget. While we can quibble about a phrase here or there, I am confident that a fair-minded person who reads the entire series of arguments will conclude that we have done an honest job capturing the perspective of the left on the budget.

Well, OK – I’ll bite. I’m a fair-minded kinda guy. Let’s go and take a look at those other questions.
To start with, here’s the full text of the question that Ayers cites above:

Q.22. Candidate A says that investments to address unmet needs in education, energy, and health care are necessary to bring the country out of recession.
Candidate B says that the Obama Administration is taking advantage of the recession to make massive increases in government spending that will hurt our economy in the future by nearly tripling the national debt in ten years.

Hmmm, this really doesn’t seem particularly unfair to anyone. It reasonably poses a Democratic “investment in unmet needs” perspective against a Republican “spending and debt” focus.
But, inconveniently for Republicans, on this question the Democratic position wins hands down 51% to 43% – a net plus of 8%
Conclusion? The question seems fair and the Democrats solidly win.
But now let’s look at the other questions in the same series about the budget. In fact, two things start to happen – the questions themselves get more and more favorable to the Republican position and – surprise, surprise – the Democratic advantage declines.
For example, when Ayers takes away the notion of “investment in unmet needs in education, energy and health care” from the Democratic position and replaces it with the much more vague and undefined “spending to stimulate the economy” here’s what happens:

Q.19. Candidate A says the proposed level of federal spending is necessary to stimulate the economy and keep us from sliding into a depression.
Candidate B says the proposed level of federal spending will make the economy worse by doubling the national debt in only five years.

The Democratic advantage slips to 2% — 48 for candidate A vs. 46 % for candidate B
Well, from a Republican point of view that’s a whole lot better, but it’s still not good enough. As the saying goes, “they ain’t goin’ for the draw, they’re goin’ for the win”. So what would happen if we pushed the matter even further – by focusing a question just on the issue of increasing government debt alone — and also by throwing in an ad hominem attack on Obama — and also by changing the subject in the middle of the question – all at the same time.

Q. 21. Candidate A says that increasing the debt is a necessary step in fighting a serious recession.
Candidate B says that President Obama is being hypocritical by adding more than nine trillion dollars to the debt after attacking Republicans for growing it by two trillion dollars.

In this case, the result is no better –a two point Democratic advantage still remains – 48 to 46%. Dang, those pesky Democrats are just damn stubborn.
OK, that does it. It’s time to take off the gloves and really get to work. Let’s see what happens if we use extremely cold, abstract and uninvolving words for the Democratic alternative and then sharp, punchy, TV sound-bite language for the Republican alternative:

Q. 18. Candidate A says the proposed budget is a reasonable response to a serious recession and collapse of the financial markets.
Candidate B says the proposed budget spends too much, taxes too much, and borrows too much.

Mmmm,– we get an 8 point Republican advantage on this one – 43% for candidate A (who sounds an awful lot like Mike Dukakis at his most wonky) and 51% for candidate B (who sounds a lot like Newt Gingrich when the cameras are rolling and 15 microphones are stuck in his face). Now that’s more like it.
But, hey, since we’re trying out stuff here, let’s see what happens when we go for the “full Limbaugh” – on the Democratic side a flat, post-lobotomy monotone and on the other a veritable kitchen sink of slogans – “squandering money” “pork barrel projects” “bailouts” “big spending” “few jobs”

Q. 25. Candidate A says the federal government has to do more during times of economic crisis, and spending by the government stimulates the economy and creates jobs.
Candidate B says the federal government is squandering money on pork-barrel projects, bailouts, and big spending programs that create few private sector jobs.

Whoa, now that’s some really big roundhouse punches getting thrown here. But confound it; we seem to have hit a wall. This question only produces the same 8 point Republican advantage as the last one. 43% for candidate A, 51% for candidate B.
Oh well, it doesn’t look like there’s much more tinkering we can do with these budget questions without throwing in the well-known (at least on the rightroots internet) facts that Obama is a wanted international Moslem terrorist and also Joe Stalin’s illegitimate Black grandson.
OK, now I admit I’m being a good deal more than slightly tongue in cheek here, but the point is serious. When Ayers says “I am confident that a fair-minded person who reads the entire series of arguments will conclude that we have done an honest job capturing the perspective of the left on the budget,” anyone who doesn’t burst out laughing like a hyena simply has to be getting a paycheck from the RNC.
But Ayers is not foolish or wasting his clients money. These questions are useful. They essentially represent message research to determine just what “works” and what doesn’t and how far the Republican message has to be favored to outpoll the Dems. When Resurgent Republic drafted these questions they had a pretty good idea of how they would poll. But by trying out a variety of question wordings side by side, they provide a more precise idea of just how much changes in rhetoric and language can actually influence the debate.
But as for their larger political significance, I’ll leave the final word to Stan Greenberg in his message to Ayers:

For years, James Carville and I pushed Democrats and liberal groups to examine inherited positions in new times, but you are at risk of doing the opposite – urging Republicans to stay the course on key arguments with self-deluding results.
In some cases, you prove competitive or you win the argument by presenting the Democratic argument as flat but the Republican, full of emotive terms. In Democracy Corps, we always try to use the language actually used by our opponents.
Nothing is more self-defeating than attributing to the Democratic argument the language and themes Republicans use to attack Democrats rather than the language Democrats use themselves. In effect, your survey has you winning an argument with yourself.

WaPo‘s Dan Eggen has an article today about the launching of the GOP’s ad campaign to stop health care reform. Eggen reports that the ads

feature horror stories from Canada and the United Kingdom: Patients who allegedly suffered long waits for surgeries, couldn’t get the drugs they needed, or had to come to the United States for treatment.

As if there are no long waits in private sector health care and Americans don’t spend many millions on cheaper drugs from Canada.
The ad campaign is being coordinated by CRC Public Relations, the firm most famous for its “Swift Boat’ attack campaign to discredit 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry. Rick Scott, a leader and spokesmen for the campaign and former partner with W in the Texas Rangers, is also a former hospital chief executive who Eggen reports was ousted from the helm of the Columbia/HCA health-care company during a fraud investigation in the 1990s. “The firm eventually pleaded guilty to charges that it overbilled state and federal health plans, paying a record $1.7 billion in fines,” explains Eggen.
The good news is that the ads are already being challenged, as Eggen reports:

In an ad broadcast in the Washington area and in Scott’s home town of Naples, Fla., last week, a group called Health Care for America Now says of Scott: “He and his insurance-company friends make millions from the broken system we have now.”
The group’s national campaign manager, Richard Kirsch, said: “Those attacking reform are really looking to protect their own profits, and he’s a perfect messenger for that. His history of making a fortune by destroying quality in the health-care system and ripping off the government is a great example of what’s really going on.”

The Scott/CRC ads are in line with the strategy suggested by GOP pollster Frank Luntz, whose paper on stopping President Obama’s health care refom initiative I discussed at TDS last week.
Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) says, via HuffPo, that the Luntz strategy is “intended to prolong the broken system we have today” and he describes it thusly:

So expect a massive misinformation campaign coming to a health care debate near you. Opponents using Dr. Luntz’s doublespeak will argue for a “balanced, common sense approach” to health care but what they really want is to keep the system the way it is. They’ll say that a public plan will not be “patient centered,” but their real goal is to block accessible health care for every American. They’ll say reform will deny Americans “choice” even when every American will be allowed to keep their health insurance and their doctor. They’ll claim that the “quality of care will go down,” while callously ignoring the fact that millions of Americans have no health care at all and millions more are denied the medications and procedures they need.

Also at HuffPo, Chris Weigant offers some good strategy pointers in his post “Countering the Luntz Playbook on Health Care,” including:

…We’ve got an easier job than Republicans in convincing the people, because they already agree with the most basic Democratic premises on health care — every family has a health insurance horror story. Meaning “the system is broken” is not something we have to convince people of. The Republicans, meanwhile, have only fear. Which brings us to our first talking point.

And when a Republican Senator/member of congress starts railing against government involvement in health care as a form of socialism, Weigant has a response:

“Excuse me, Senator, but I can’t help but pointing out that the health care you receive from the American taxpayers could be called ‘socialized medicine’ as well. And yet, I notice that you accept this health care — which is paid for straight out of the American taxpayer’s wallet. Are you over 65? Have you refused all Medicare benefits, since you are so adamant about the evils of ‘socialized medicine’? If you are trying to limit American citizens from getting the health care you yourself enjoy, which is incidentally paid for by those very same taxpayers, why should anyone listen to what you have to say? You are saying ‘I’ve got mine’ and at the same time ‘nobody else should get to choose what I’ve got’ even though they’re paying for yours. I will start to listen to you on the evils and dangers of government health care when you voluntarily give up your own government health care and go out and buy insurance on the open market. By doing so, you might begin to understand the crisis as the average Americans see it… but until you do, I have to say you’re being somewhat of a hypocrite, Senator.”

George Lakoff, along with colleagues Glenn W. Smith and Eric Haas, have a list of ten principles of health care reform messaging, also at HuffPo. Among the nuggets mined by Lakoff, Smith and Haas:

Why do HMO’s have a high administrative cost – 15 to 20 percent or more? They spend money to justify denying you the care you need and all too often delaying care so much that you are harmed by the delay…
The American Plan is there to provide you care, not deny or delay it. Its administrative costs would be low, about 3 percent….HMO’s are big spenders, not on your health, but on administrative costs, commercials to tout their plans, and profits to investors. As much as 20 to 30% of what you pay does not go to your care. In The American Plan, 97% of what you pay goes for your care. It’s a better deal for you and for our country.

The authors also emphasize the importance of stating that “Health care is a moral issue” and underscoring the “central principle of empathy.” While it is important to affirm the moral case for comprehensive health care reform, I would also emphasize that it is a compelling national security priority, when we have one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world, nearly 50 million citizens have zero health insurance, when tens of millions of Americans are in immediate danger of economic ruin in the event of a catastrophic illness and many more millions simply don’t know how much their insurance will cover —- until they get the bill.

Dorothy Samuels challenges Democrats to rethink a destructive misconception in her New York Times opinion piece, “The Deadly Myth of Gun Control in Electoral Politics.” Samuels argues, in essence, that an election 15 years ago has all but paralyzed today’s Democrats from addressing one of the most important public safety issues.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Obama tossed cold water a few weeks back on Attorney General Eric Holder’s well-founded enthusiasm for reviving the assault weapons ban that Congress and the Bush White House let expire in 2004. I was struck by a common thread in the responses I heard:Enactment of the original 1994 assault weapons ban cost Democrats control of Congress.
…The notion that gun control was responsible for the Democrats’ debacle 15 years ago was floated by Richard Gephardt, the former Democratic House leader, and other pols and commentators after the ’94 election. But it was Bill Clinton who gave it current credence. “The N.R.A. could rightly claim to have made Gingrich the House speaker,” Mr. Clinton wrote in his 2004 autobiography, pumping up the gun lobby and, not incidentally, himself by attributing the body blow to his party to his principled leadership on guns.

Samuels argues that “other major factors in the Democrats’ 1994 loss, starting with perceived Democratic arrogance and corruption” had more to do with the Dems being routed in that year. She points out that Bill Nelson, a strong gun control advocate was elected to the Senate in FL, despite NRA support for his opponent. She also cites,

…voter unhappiness with Mr. Clinton’s budget, his health care fiasco, the Republican Party’s success in recruiting appealing candidates, and that ingenious Republican vehicle for nationalizing the elections known as the “Contract With America.” The contract, by the way, did not mention guns.

Samuels points out that Clinton did well enough in 1996, trumpeting “his role in enacting the assault weapons ban and the ’93 Brady law requiring background checks for gun buyers” and she notes also the prime time speaking slots for James and Sarah Brady at the Democratic Convention in that year She also cites “the stunning defeat four years later, in 2000, of prominent Republican senators running with strong N.R.A. backing” (John Ashcroft in MO, Spencer Abraham in MI, Slade Gorton in WA), noted in Dennis Henigan’s book, “Lethal Logic.” She concludes:

Today, there’s ample reassurance for the Democratic Congress and White House in the N.R.A.’s unsuccessful crusade against Barack Obama in 2008, and the poor showing of its favored House and Senate candidates against hopefuls running with backing from the pro-gun-control Brady Campaign. Yet, the gun lobby’s exaggerated ’94 triumph continues to haunt the nation’s capital, inflating the N.R.A.’s clout and Democratic cowardice on gun violence.

Samuels makes a pretty good case that a 15-year old myth has empowered the gun lobby beyond all reason. Democratic Leadership Council President Bruce Reed has argued in an interesting Slate article that the key to passing meaningful gun control reforms is to link it to crime control:

The political case for not running for cover on guns is equally straightforward. Unlike most politicians, voters are not ideological about crime. They don’t care what it takes, they just want it to go down. The Brady Bill and the clip ban passed because the most influential gun owners in America—police officers and sheriffs—were tired of being outgunned by drug lords, madmen, and thugs.
When Democrats ignore the gun issue, they think about the political bullet they’re dodging but not about the opportunity they’ll miss. In the 1980s, Republicans talked tough on crime and ran ads about Willie Horton but sat on their hands while the crime rate went up. When Bill Clinton promised to try everything to fight crime—with more police officers on the street, and fewer guns—police organizations dropped their support for the GOP and stood behind him instead.

I’m also wondering if the widespread use of the catch-all term “gun control” is a big part of the problem. The American public clearly supports specific measures like a ban on the sale of assault weapons, reasonable waiting periods before gun purchase etc. Polls taken as recently as April indicate that a healthy majority of respondents favor a ban on the sale of assault weapons and tougher restrictions on handgun sales. But the majority shrinks, when the term “stricter gun control laws” is used. Why use the adversary’s terminology in debates, and call it “gun control”? Dems should always challenge the use of such a broad term to obscure specific reforms, and call out the gun lobby for their distortions.
“Gun control” has often been called the “third rail” of American politics in recent years. Certainly, Samuels is right that a 15-year old myth should not be allowed to prevent life-saving reforms — and safer communities for all Americans.

As we await the President’s announcement of a Supreme Court nominee, there’s already lots of anticipatory threats by conservatives absorbed with this sort of thing to make life hell for any red-state Democrats who vote with the President for some godless liberal activist, which of course means anyone Obama names. These threats are in turn the sum and substance of conservative claims that they could actually win a confirmation fight.
But as Terence Samuel points out today in The American Prospect,
the political landscape for the 2010 elections doesn’t offer up too many ripe targets for conservative threats:

Only two Senate Democrats — Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota — will seek re-election in 2010 in states lost by Obama, and both currently have solid re-elect numbers and plenty of money to suppress any serious challenges. Among the 16 Democratic Senate seats up next year, the issue may potentially cause trouble for only two — Harry Reid the majority leader from Nevada and, now, Arlen Specter, whose changeling tendencies can make enemies in surprising places. But both of those guys are people who know how to finesse and fight back.
With so few strategic options available to them, Republicans will have no choice but to make this Court fight as controversial as possible, simply as a way to remind people of their existence.

That sounds about right. The upcoming confirmation fight will be largely an intra-Republican affair aimed at keeping their own senators in line, and in demonstrating the GOP’s continuing fidelity to what has often been called a “marriage” with the Cultural Right, which treats Supreme Court nominations as vastly more important than mere trifles like economic policy.

I don’t quite know what’s going on among Republicans in my home state of Georgia. First you had Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine conspicuously endorsing a crazy state senate resolution that asserts the right of states to nullify federal laws they don’t like (maybe Oxendine will officially change his name to John C. Calhoun Oxendine). Now Secretary of State Karen Handel has issued a fiery demand for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And these are the two supposed moderates in the GOP gubernatorial race next year.
Handel’s tirade (for the text, see the link above) is confusing, or perhaps reflects some confusion. She seems to be calling for a repeal of the entire Voting Rights Act, although her main ire is aimed at Section 5, which requires “preclearance” of election or districting changes in certain states, mainly in the South. She refers to the VRA as a “vestige of Reconstruction,” which is about a century off.
Most interesting, though, is Handel’s claim that the sole purpose of the VRA these days is to give Democrats an advantage in elections; it is, she says, “pure politics in its worst form.” That insight would have probably come as a surprise to the 192 Republican U.S. House members and 53 Republican Senators who voted for the VRA extension in 2006. The Senate vote, in fact, was unanimous, and boosters of this terrible partisan scam included both of Georgia’s Republican senators.
More relevant, probably, is the fact that as election administrator in Georgia, Handel’s only real avenue for appealing to hard-right conservatives is to tout her championship of the God-given right to rule of the perpetually persecuted white Republicans of the South, who are oppressed by Washington bureaucrats and elitist judges who want to let hordes of shiftless black people and illegal immigrants vote. She’s a big-time stalwart in the battle against the phantom of “voter fraud.” So why not raise the specter of a an African-American Democratic president manipulating the VRA to help his supporters help him? So what if that notorious big-spending liberal George W. Bush, whose sell-out moderate ways righteous Republicans are now struggling to exorcise, supported the VRA extension when he was president!
The bigger picture here is that Georgia Republican candidates are behaving as though the only election that matters is their primary, so there’s no downside to moving to the right of Jimmy Dean Sausage. If that attitude persists, Democrats in Georgia will have an opportunity to pull a surprise next year.

In all the talk about the possibility of a good Republican year in 2010 once President Obama and the Democratic Congress start being held accountable for a sluggish economy, it’s often forgotten that there are 50 different incumbents who could be held accountable for the horrid fiscal situation the recession has helped produce in the states.
Nate Silver has taken a comprehensive look at approval rating trends for 14 governors whose popularity has been measured by Survey USA. Only three (Tim Kaine of VA, Jay Nixon of MO, and Bob Riley of AL) currently have approval ratings of 50% or higher. Of the twelve for whom data is available from a year ago, eleven, unsurprisingly, have lower approval ratings now (the exception is Steve Beshear of KY). Sarah Palin isn’t in this batch of surveys, but as Ed Kilgore noted yesterday, her approval ratings have crashed as well.
Of the 36 governorships that will be up in 2010 (19 held by Democrats, and 17 by Republicans), 16 involve term-limited or retiring incumbents (8 for each party), which could mitigate the anti-incumbency factor in some of these states. But in assessing the impact of voters angry at the state of things, remember that they won’t just be voting on the status quo in Washington, but a lot closer to home.

As some of you may know, Sen. John Kerry held a hearing yesterday about the future of newspapers, and it became something of a debate between traditional print journalists and online news aggregators (Arianne Huffington being there as the big symbol of the latter).
By all accounts, Kerry tried to hold a fair hearing, even though he was clearly motivated by the continuing near-death experiences of his hometown paper, the Boston Globe.
But probably the most interesting moment occurred when David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who is credited as being the creator of HBO’s show “The Wire,” sardonically observed:

The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day that I will be confident that we have actually reached some sort of balance.

Simon’s quip reflects the oft-repeated suggestion that online journalism can’t possibly replicate the essential role played by newspapers in covering and policing state and local governments.
This argument was best expressed in a wonderfully-lucid article by Paul Starr that appeared in The New Republic in March. In Starr’s account, robust coverage of state and local politics and government by major newspapers was a luxury made possible by their monopoly positions and huge profits:

Insofar as newspapers have upheld a public-service vision, they have been engaged in cross-subsidy, using their profitable lines of business, such as the classifieds, to pay for news coverage that probably would have been hard to justify on a narrower view of return on investment. Especially in recent decades, when newspapers were cash cows, their owners could afford to pursue public-service journalism, and some of them did (others just milked their papers for all they were worth).

As profits have declined, so has coverage of state and local governments, and so far, says Starr, the internet has not supplied a substitute in the way that is has for other areas of reduced investment, like national and international news. Thus, the argument goes, we may be in for an era of increased corruption as governors, legislators, mayors and county commissioners evade journalistic scrutiny.
That all makes good sense, but the problem with this “watchdog” idea about traditional big-city regional papers is that many of the dogs have long been asleep. As Starr himself notes, some newspaper barons felt a civic obligation to cover state and local affairs, while others didn’t. Moreover, the corporate media chains that have bought up so many of the regional papers have rarely made good state and local coverage a priority, even as they inculcated a footloose attitude among their best reporters who moved “up the chain.” I’d have to say that in my home town of Atlanta, there have been long stretches of time over the last few decades, and long before the advent of online journalism, when coverage of state and local government by that city’s monopoly newspaper was so bad that it was arguably worse than nothing. Indeed, some regional papers have, ironically, improved their state-local coverage, or at least the quantity of it, in online editions because of their greater flexibility of the format.
None of these ruminations are intended to deny the genuine dilemma of how to finance journalism in the internet age beyond a handful of national newspapers. There may well be, as Starr implies, a built-in demand-side problem in that nobody’s willing to pay what state and local coverage actually costs. It’s a shame we can’t replicate the apparently successful business model of Politico, wherein a vast online readership is subsidized by crazy ads rates charged for access to a tiny but extremely influential print edition, but that’s a unique product of that unique city, Washington, DC.
But in looking clearly at the difficult future for journalism, we shouldn’t nourish too many myths about newspapers, or at least those that have never done a competent job of covering state and local matters. For one thing, the crisis in regional papers hasn’t necessarily afflicted the small suburban newspapers that hit millions of driveways every week, and that often provide strong local government coverage.
And as Matt Compton pointed out in a post here in March, the nonprofit model of financing online journalism is already showing some promise, as in the Center for Independent Media, which is supporting not only the up-and-coming Washington Independent, but online sites in five states. And there are all sorts of freelance folk around the country playing the state-and-local watchdog role, albeit on a shoestring and sometimes without respecting canons of High Journalism. I will assert that online journalists and bloggers (including the AJC’s excellent Jim Galloway) are probably providing better coverage of Georgia politics and government than anything I recall reading in the salad days of the Atlanta papers’ monopoly print edition.
So there’s certainly enough hope out there, and in many cities, enough of a longstanding vacuum, to avoid the conclusion that state and local politicians are going to get any more of a free ride from journalists than they’ve ever had.

Right after expressing contempt towards Kellyanne Conway’s pity party for poor, persecuted Sarah Palin, I ran across an article by the Boston Globe‘s Joan Vennochi that comes at the supposed victimization of the Alaska governor from a different angle. Palin’s getting attention, she suggests, because everybody loves to make fun of her, even though they know she has no national political future:

The Alaska governor is everyone’s favorite foil, from the left-wing Huffington Post to the ever-posturing Mitt Romney. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee who cynically chose her as his running mate, now snubs her with relish.
They all act like she has a real chance to win the White House, when they all know the truth. When it comes to be taken seriously by the general electorate as a potential president, it’s as over for her as it was for Dan Quayle.
Quayle was doomed even after he served four years as vice president. He was the proverbial heartbeat away from the first President Bush, but could never overcome the perception that he lacked gravitas.
Palin only ran for vice president; she never made it from Wasilla to Washington. And her political problem is bigger than Quayle’s, because it extends to her family.

I realize that early critics of Palin’s gaffes often made the facile Quayle comparison. But aside from the obvious vast differences in background and bearing (whether you consider Palin’s “class background” a handicap, or, as I do, an asset, it’s nothing like that of the classic Son of Privilege from Indiana), Palin has a real and abiding political base, and Quayle never did. As Vennochi herself acknowledges after treating Quayle as a once-hot political commodity comparable to Palin, the Alaskan remains the darling of the Cultural Right, and had the lead in an early sounding of Republican sentiment about the 2012 presidential nomination.
Quayle had a brief moment of conservative approbation after his famous “Murphy Brown” remarks criticizing single motherhood, but when he ran for president in 2000, he was toast from the very beginning, finishing eighth–eighth!–in the quadrennial Ames Straw Poll of Iowa Republicans that serves as the first test of candidate viability. Long before then, of course, the entire conservative movement, including both its Washington and right-wing-cultural-populist elements, had lined up behind George W. Bush as its champion against the dangerously independent-sounding John McCain.
Maybe Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee or Bobby Jindal or somebody we’re not thinking about can wrest the movement-conservative baton away from Palin between now and 2012, but all of the above-named worthies have their own problems, and Palin’s displacement ain’t happened yet.
At present, Palin’s biggest political problem isn’t media mockery or a Quayle-like deficit in “gravitas,” but the fact that her approval rating among the people she governs in Alaska is dropping like a rock. I don’t think we can blame that on elitist media or Tina Fey.
Meanwhile, the persistent treatment of Palin as some sort of brave and suffering St. Joan of the Tundra by conservative and some mainstream media probably builds a floor under her national appeal to Republicans. So long as they love her, the rest of us have every reason to take her as seriously as she takes herself.