A new-media double play by John Keith, who writes the Boston Real Estate Blog. He’s plotted January foreclosures as recorded at the Suffolk County Registry of Deeds. (Via Universal Hub.)
Author: Dan Kennedy
McCain mishandles Times’ gift
This could have been predicted. The New York Times slimed John McCain with anonymously sourced gossip that he may have had an affair with a lobbyist named Vicki Iseman. McCain not only denied it, but went way too far, denying key elements of the legitimate part of the story regarding his efforts on behalf of Paxson Communications, a client of Iseman’s.
Now it turns out that McCain had said otherwise in a 2002 deposition. And Bud Paxson contradicts McCain’s sweeping denial as well.
Right out of the gate, McCain forgot every lesson about how to respond to a scandal — or, in this case, a non-scandal: Tell the truth. And if you’ve forgotten what actually happened, which is possible, hold your fire until you’ve refreshed your memory.
The Times handed McCain a gift on Thursday. It’s possible that McCain has handed it right back.
Torturing the law
Earlier this month, civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate had this to say on his blog at ThePhoenix.com about Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s testimony regarding waterboarding:
[A]cknowledging that the CIA’s torturers might have been acting in good faith — that they believed the lawyers when the lawyers told them certain highly coercive interrogation techniques were legal — hardly ends the inquiry. Why are these lawyers not being investigated in order to determine whether they wrote their legal opinions in good faith, or instead made up fanciful legal theories to appease the administration’s interest in taking the gloves off when it came to dealing with suspected terrorists?
And here we go, from today’s Washington Post:
An internal watchdog office at the Justice Department is investigating whether Bush administration lawyers violated professional standards by issuing legal opinions that authorized the CIA to use waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, officials confirmed yesterday.
Mukasey had a good reputation coming in, but was craven in his confirmation hearings and has been overly cautious in his subsequent congressional appearances. It looks like we’re going to learn what he’s really made of.
Robinson on McCain and the Times
My Northeastern colleague Walter Robinson, who broke the story of John McCain’s lobbying on behalf of Paxson Communications in January 2000, talks about the McCain story in a Boston.com chat. Romenesko’s got the link, as well as links to three of Robinson’s pieces on McCain’s ties to lobbyists.
Further thoughts on the McCain story
Consider this a “thinking out loud” moment in the midst of a still-unfolding story. My take at this point is not particularly coherent, and there’s still a lot we don’t know — and maybe never will. But here’s where we — and I — stand two days after the New York Times reported that John McCain had an improper relationship with a female lobbyist during the 2000 presidential campaign.
Sex shouldn’t matter. That’s my beginning point in analyzing such a story. Both McCain and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, have denied a sexual relationship, and of course their denials are important. But why is the Times snooping around in McCain’s private affairs in the first place? If McCain and Iseman really did hop into bed with each other, that’s their business, and the media ought to leave it alone.
This may sound awfully cynical, but I think it’s fair to ask, based on what we’ve learned over the past few decades, how many high-profile politicians have not strayed from their marital vows at one time or another. I suspect it’s a very short list. And before you cite Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky as an example of media excess, remember: Clinton was exploiting a young intern in the workplace; there was a perjury angle; and the entire story was being driven by a government investigation. Hardly the same thing.
Anonymous sources aren’t the issue. It’s what they said. Yes, on-the-record sources are always better than anonymous whispers. But the Times, for all its flaws, is a great paper, and the reporters who worked on this story have a stellar reputation. I take it on faith that their two sources are well-connected and were quoted accurately and in context.
But what did they say? No one said McCain and Iseman were engaged in a sexual affair. Rather, they said the two were spending so much time together that aides were afraid they might be having an affair. Look at the second paragraph of the story:
A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.
McCain adviser John Weaver confirmed, on the record, the gist of that paragraph except for the suspicions about sex. So again, anonymous sources aren’t the issue. It’s that they offered nothing other than their suspicions that McCain and Iseman were having an affair. How did the Times reach the point that it’s reporting unconfirmed suspicions about a presidential candidate on page one?
The Washington Post version kicked butt. Because the Post stayed away from sex, it put together a solid look at how McCain’s personal relationship with a lobbyist had played out in his actions as a senator.
The Times, almost embarrassed by its own reporting, sticks in an endless, familiar backgrounder on McCain’s involvement as one of the Keating Five before returning to the matter at hand. It reads like a committee effort. By contrast, the Post offers us relevant details about Iseman — who she is, whom she lobbies for, how her clients’ needs and desires were attended to by McCain.
Timing is everything. Mitt Romney’s campaign was hurt considerably by the Times’ dallying on this story between December and this week. As I noted yesterday, there have been some hints that all of this began with a dime-drop from the Romney camp. Times executive editor Bill Keller has said the story didn’t run earlier because it wasn’t ready.
Let me engage in some wanton speculation. Keller knew the story would have a huge impact on the Republican contest. Could it be that he didn’t want to deal a blow to the McCain campaign on the basis of such a thin story? If the Post’s fine but wonky effort had come out back when the Republican race was still competitive, it probably wouldn’t have caused much harm. It’s the sex that could have cost McCain the nomination. The Times promises sex, but doesn’t deliver.
The Times’ endorsement of McCain is a non-issue. I’ve heard a number of observers question how the Times could endorse McCain knowing that the Iseman story was in the works. That’s nonsensical, given that quality papers maintain a strict separation between the editorial pages and the newsgathering operation — although, as Jay Rosen notes, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. may have known about the story and could have warned off the editorial page.
Besides, the Times’ endorsement of McCain was remarkably backhanded, and was mainly an exercise in bashing former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who at that point was still in the race. Given the Times editorial page’s liberal world view, it’s safe to say that it would have endorsed the relatively moderate McCain no matter who he was or wasn’t having sex with. And that it will endorse the Democratic nominee over McCain in November.
It’s all or nothing now. It’s possible that the story will fizzle. But McCain issued a strong denial yesterday, raising the stakes much higher than he needed to. (Maybe it’s because he was telling the truth.) New York Times columnist David Brooks, a McCain cheerleader during his Weekly Standard days in 2000, has a fascinating piece on internal rifts within Camp McCain that concludes with this: “If it turns out that there is evidence of an affair and a meeting, then his presidential hopes will be over.”
Speaking of Brooks’ cheerleading, I dug up this excerpt from a story I wrote in 2000, when I spent a few days following McCain and his worshipful press throng across South Carolina:
In Brooks’s view, many of the reporters certainly have drunk the Kool-Aid, and though they ask tough questions, he notices a lack of bite and follow-up that he doesn’t see when the press questions other candidates. “Obviously he’s just the coolest guy, and people like cool guys,” Brooks says. “Reporters on his campaign enjoy being here, and they don’t enjoy being with other candidates.”
I also found some stuff I wrote about McCain’s exertions on behalf of the Paxson television network, the very issue now being dredged up again. Here’s what I wrote about my encounter with the senator in South Carolina:
On the morning of my second day with the campaign, spokesman Todd Harris told me I wasn’t going to get on the lead bus. Thus liberated from having to play nice, I hung around the elevator of the Greenville Hilton, waiting for McCain. I got between him and the bus and asked him a question I’d had on my mind for a couple of weeks: whether he was aware that 40,000 Pittsburgh residents were opposed to a television-license transfer that he had urged the Federal Communications Commission to act on and that would benefit one of his campaign contributors.
“No, what I had urged them [the FCC] was to act, not to take a specific position. And that was to order them to act after 700 days of not acting,” he replied, repeating an answer he had given many times already. I pressed him on the fact that there was considerable opposition to the transfer, but he didn’t drop a beat: “What the citizen activists wanted was an act against, some wanted an act for. I just wanted them to act, so I wasn’t in any way harming the views of those citizen-activists. I was asking them to act. Now if I had been asking them to act affirmatively, then that would have somehow been in opposition to those activists. So I don’t see how you draw the conclusion that I was in any way in opposition to them.”
I wanted to ask a follow-up. His bus was waiting. I said, “Thank you.” He said, “Thank you,” smiled, asked where I was from, and was on his way, Cindy on one side, an aide on the other.
So much for Straight Talk.
Yesterday I was convinced that this story would be Topic A for political junkies for at least a week. Today I’m not so sure. What I do know is that media analysts will be talking about the New York Times and its standards for some time to come.
And about that closing
John King of CNN said a little while ago that the Obama campaign had sent out an e-mail showing that Hillary Clinton’s closing closely paralleled a line John Edwards had used. Please note: It doesn’t matter. But the Clinton campaign never should have started down this road.
Who wrote Clinton’s attack line?
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both turned in strong performances tonight, and Clinton’s closing statement was moving. But she may have really blown it when she leaned too hard on Obama’s use of a few lines from Deval Patrick — who, as a prominent Obama supporter, basically qualifies as an unpaid speechwriter.
“That’s not change you can count on, it’s change you can Xerox,” she said. Question: Who wrote that line for her? And, assuming she didn’t write it herself, how does that make her any different from Obama — or any other politician?
The feeding frenzy is under way
The John McCain story has led to the media-ethics feeding frenzy of 2008. We’re going to know a lot more in a few days. Right now, we should just hang on. Still, I can’t resist posting a few tidbits.
The New Republic’s backgrounder, by Gabriel Sherman, is a must-read. It seems possible — even probable — that it was Sherman’s nosing-around that finally led the New York Times into running what it had. Bill Keller sounds really steamed. I’d love to hear a recording of him sarcastically spitting out the phrase “special correspondent.” Except that it was in an e-mail.
I and others have already speculated how miffed Mitt Romney must be that the Times waited until after McCain had all but wrapped up the nomination before dropping its bombshell. Well, Charles Kaiser of Radar now says one of the Times’ tipsters was former congressman Vin Weber, who just so happened to have been an official with the Romney campaign. Weber has denied it, but Kaiser’s not taking it back. So who knows?
Adam Reilly points out that the Boston Globe chose to run the Washington Post’s version rather than the Times’ more incendiary (i.e., sex rumors included played up) story, even though the Globe is owned by the New York Times Co. Interesting. But last night, I noticed that there was a link to the Times story featured prominently on the home page of the Globe’s Boston.com site.
Finally, no offense to Ryan Lizza, but I don’t think I’m going to get around to reading his New Yorker article on whether McCain can remake the Republican Party. Talk about bad timing.
File photo of Cindy and John McCain (cc) by Chris Dunn and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Making sense of the McCain story
Josh Marshall, fresh off his Polk Award, does a good job of putting into perspective today’s New York Times story on John McCain, which suggests, without quite saying out loud, that he may have had an affair with a lobbyist for whom he did favors during his 2000 “straight talk” campaign.
Word is that the McCain campaign tried to spike this story back in December. At Salon, Alex Koppelman recalls that it made a brief appearance on Drudge around that time, then went underground. Is it a legitimate story? Marshall thinks so, but hedges his bets:
I find it very difficult to believe that the Times would have put their chin so far out on this story if they didn’t know a lot more than they felt they could put in the article, at least on the first go. But in a decade of doing this, I’ve learned not to give any benefits of the doubt, even to the most esteemed institutions.
If this has legs, Mitt Romney clearly has plenty to howl about. It would have been the story of the campaign. Then again, Romney has merely “suspended” his campaign, hasn’t he?
Not that this can be compared to the Times’ mind-blowing decision to hold its story on the Bush administration’s no-warrant wiretapping program for more than a year, until after the 2004 presidential election. That still stands as some sort of record.
More: The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz offers some context.
Still more: Adam Reilly notes that Sam Stein hit the Romney angle last night. OK, let me try for something else original: Is this bad news for Hillary Clinton or what? For her to have any chance of staging a comeback in Texas and Ohio, she’s got to (a) get the media to subject Barack Obama to a raking-over of epic proportions and then (b) hope something turns up. Right now, thanks to the Times, (a) looks pretty unlikely.
Browser blues
The last few days, it seems that certain sites take forever to load in Firefox 2 for the Mac — especially the Boston Globe. Firefox freezes up once a day or so, too. So I played around with Safari 3 and found the Globe and the New York Times to be much zippier. But Safari quits whenever I try to load the Boston Herald. Safari is also incompatible with Blogger.
I see that Safari 3 is still in beta, which used to mean that it wasn’t quite ready for public release. Increasingly, though, beta is Greek for “we take no responsibility for our product.” I mean, Gmail and Google Calendar are still in beta, and I use them dozens of times a day.
I’ll be glad when this Internet fad blows over.
Update: I’m trying Camino 1.5.5 for the first time in a couple of years. It’s a Mac-only, open-source browser from Mozilla, and I’m pretty sure it uses the same underlying technology as Safari. I’m living dangerously by posting this from Blogger, but so far, so good.