Author: Dan Kennedy

Mitt Romney and the truth

Reporters don’t like to call politicians liars, even when they lie. We tend to use euphemisms — “at odds with the facts” being a favorite. But Mitt Romney is a liar — a flagrant repeat offender. Everyone knows it, and the press doesn’t quite know what to do about it.

Yesterday, Associated Press reporter Glen Johnson couldn’t take it anymore, interrupting Romney when he said, “I don’t have lobbyists running my campaign. I don’t have lobbyists that are tied to my —”

“That’s not true,” Johnson interjected. “Ron Kaufman’s a lobbyist.” Kaufman, a longtime Massachusetts politico and a lobbyist, has been heavily involved in Romney’s campaign.

If you watch the video, you’ll see that Romney tries to hang his argument on a technicality, saying that Kaufman isn’t “running” his campaign. But it is simply a matter of objective fact that Kaufman is “tied” to Romney’s campaign (as Romney started to say), and at a very high level.

I know Johnson a bit. He’s a professional. Perhaps he shouldn’t have leaped in quite as aggressively as he did yesterday, but how much of this garbage can he be expected to listen to? And do watch the video all the way to the end. You don’t want to miss Romney and his spokesman, Eric Ferhnstrom, trying to intimidate Johnson for doing his job.

Just two prominent other examples of Romney’s lies that you probably already know about:

  • At a televised debate in New Hampshire, John McCain complained that Romney had described his illegal-immigration proposal as “amnesty” in a television commercial. Romney’s response: “I don’t describe your plan as amnesty in my ad. I don’t call it amnesty.” Well, yes he did.
  • As David Bernstein recently revealed in the Boston Phoenix, Romney’s oft-repeated claim that his father, George Romney, had marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is not true. Some Romney defenders, including Jay Severin of WTKK (96.9 FM), continue to insist that Romney only meant it metaphorically. But the Romney campaign knew better, producing two eyewitnesses who claimed — falsely — that they had seen the elder Romney and King walking side by side in Grosse Pointe, Mich., in 1963. And this 1978 quote from the Mittster would seem to be beyond parsing: “My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit.”

Of course, the entire reason that Romney has suddenly reassumed his former persona as a skilled business executive is that Republicans found his late embrace of right-wing social issues to be utterly unbelievable, as the Globe’s Scot Lehigh notes today.

Even as a liberal media critic, I don’t like calling Romney a liar. But Romney is proving to be something of an ethical test for journalists. When a candidate lies repeatedly, as Romney has, should a journalist maintain objectivity and refrain from saying the obvious? Or does he or she have an ethical obligation to point out that the liar is lying again? I’d argue the latter.

Scott Allen Miller, who saved me the trouble of tracking down the video, weighs in usefully.

More lobbyists: Bernstein’s got ’em. (Via the Outraged Liberal.)

Something happened (II)

No one will ever confuse Media Nation with Patriots Country. I am the most casual of football fans. They’re playing sometime this weekend, right? Uh … the Chargers? OK. I’ll watch the second half. If I’m around. I mean, I want them to win, but this isn’t baseball.

So it’s not fevered fandom that leads me to say the anti-violence group Jane Doe Inc. is all wrong in calling for the Patriots to bench Randy Moss, as Jessica Van Sack reports in today’s Herald. Yes, of course, he’s innocent unless proven guilty. That goes without saying.

But this goes beyond that. The situation involving Moss is truly ambiguous. We have no idea of what really happened, of course. But the version being put out by Moss’ lawyers (Globe coverage here; Herald here) is not implausible. We need to let this play out. And to let Moss play.

Something happened

In the Globe, Christopher Gasper writes that Patriots star receiver Randy Moss says it was “an accident.” In the Herald, Karen Guregian has a little more, reporting that Moss told her his female friend had suffered a “slight injury.” Both papers report Moss’ assertion that he did nothing wrong.

But there’s an allegation of violence against a woman, a restraining order and the certainty that we’re going to learn much more in the days and weeks ahead. Ugh.

Ron Paul’s ghostwriter

Julian Sanchez and David Weigel, writing at Reason Online, say the identity of the person who authored racist, homophobic screeds in Ron Paul’s newsletters is an open secret. They identify him as Llewellyn Rockwell Jr., Paul’s former congressional chief of staff, who promoted a strategy aimed at fusing the libertarian right with paleoconservatives.

Rockwell denied the allegation when contacted by The New Republic, and he refused to talk with Reason. But Sanchez and Weigel have gathered a lot of material. And as they say, Paul’s “new supporters, many of whom are first encountering libertarian ideas through the Ron Paul Revolution, deserve a far more frank explanation than the campaign has as yet provided of how their candidate’s name ended up atop so many ugly words.”

Big changes at Bay Windows

Bay Windows editor and FOMN (Friend of Media Nation) Susan Ryan-Vollmar is leaving the weekly newspaper and taking a top communications job with the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation.

Susan, with whom I had the pleasure to work at the Boston Phoenix for a number of years, will be succeeded by Laura Kiritsy. Like Susan, Kiritsy will edit both Bay Windows, which covers the gay-and-lesbian community in Greater Boston, and an affiliated neighborhood weekly, the South End News.

Here is the press release:

Bay Windows and South End News co-publishers Sue O’Connell and Jeff Coakley are pleased to announce that Laura Kiritsy has been named editor-in-chief for both newspapers. Former editor Susan Ryan-Vollmar will formally step down next week to take a position with the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation.

Kiritsy has been with the company since 2000. In 2002 she was named Associate Editor. Kiritsy’s tenure has been distinguished with important coverage of Beacon Hill politics. During the 2004 Constitutional Convention — the first of many to deal with the issue of civil marriage rights — Kiritsy broke the news of state Rep. Cheryl Coakley-Rivera’s decision to come out publicly. She also broke the news of state Rep. Gene O’Flaherty and state Rep. John Rogers’s decisions to oppose any attempts to amend the state constitution to ban the marriages of same-sex couples. Her ongoing coverage of the New Hampshire presidential primary received national attention.

In 2004 she was awarded the Sarah Petit Memorial Award for Excellence in LGBT Media by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. She also holds three awards for excellence in coverage of social issues and general news from the New England Press Association.

“Laura is uniquely qualified to edit both of our newspapers,” said co-publisher Jeff Coakley. “Her work is a critical component of what we do, and we’re looking forward to what she will accomplish with both papers and their websites.”

“Her weekly column on politics is a must-read for local activists and political insiders,” said co-publisher Sue O’Connell, who added that Kiritsy planned to continue writing the column.

Kiritsy said she was “honored” to be named editor-in-chief of Bay Windows and South End News. “I look forward to continuing the tradition of commitment to quality community journalism that has long distinguished both papers.”

Ryan-Vollmar was editor-in-chief of both papers for three years. During that time Bay Windows and South End News won 14 editorial awards from the New England Press Association including a special award for Bay Windows’s extensive coverage of the civil marriage rights debate.

“Susan Ryan-Vollmar raised the bar on what could be accomplished by a small, independently-owned publication covering a crucial local issue — gay marriage — that also held national importance,” said O’Connell. “Her work on the historic same-sex marriage battle was the best in the country.”

Bay Windows is New England’s largest weekly newspaper serving the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. South End News is a general-interest newspaper serving the South End neighborhood in Boston.

At the Phoenix, Susan was instrumental in overseeing Kristen Lombardi’s groundbreaking coverage of Cardinal Bernard Law’s involvement in the pedophile-priest scandal, as well as the Phoenix’s own coverage of same-sex marriage.

She also excelled in finding my ledes, usually buried about three-quarters of the way into a 3,000-word piece.

Susan’s move is a huge loss to the local media scene, but also a great opportunity for Laura, whom I do not know well, but who’s clearly accomplished a lot in the past few years.

Not mutually exclusive

Dean Barnett writes in today’s New York Times:

The Mitt Romney I got to know was warm and likable. He had an electric intelligence. He was unfailingly decent. He was totally committed to his family. He treated everyone with respect and kindness.

If you’re like most politically attuned Americans, you probably don’t agree with my description of Mr. Romney. You may consider him to be the personification of political ambition. You possibly believe he will say anything to get elected president. You might even consider him one of the least honorable politicians in the country.

I’m not sure why Barnett thinks that these two propositions are mutually exclusive. I’ve never thought Romney was anything other than a smart, good person with a terrific family. He’d make a great neighbor. Sure, he has these weird delusions that he and his father marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., but those are harmless.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a presidential candidate as eager to reinvent himself on every issue in order to pander for a few more votes. The latest: his ridiculous promises to reinvent the auto industry in Michigan, which just so happens to be holding a primary today.

Mitt Romney: Nice guy, pandering pol. Not the first, but more blatant than most.

Fake outrage over a non-issue (II)

A New York Times/CBS News national poll of Democrats and Republicans shows that the constant drumbeat over illegal immigration simply isn’t registering.

According to the underlying data (PDF), just 5 percent believe that immigration is the most important problem facing the country — well behind war and Iraq (a cumulative 22 percent) and the economy (20 percent), and slightly behind health care (7 percent).

When asked what kind of change they most want to see the next president bring about, reducing illegal immigration (4 percent of respondents) was again well down on the list, behind improving the economy (20 percent), dealing with the war in Iraq (14 percent), improving health care (6 percent) and helping the middle class (5 percent).

Just to reinforce the point, John McCain — perceived as taking the least draconian stand on illegal immigration of any Republican presidential candidate — now gets the highest favorability ratings.

As Globe columnist Joan Vennochi points out, even though Gov. Deval Patrick is taking a political risk with his not-quite-proposal to extend in-state tuition rates to illegal immigrants, Patrick is well aware that immigrant-bashing has proved to be a loser of an issue.

Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis makes the same observation, writing:

Do you think Gov. Deval Patrick would be floating the idea of lowering state college tuition rates for illegal immigrants at this moment if Mitt Romney’s $40 million “illegal alien” screed had carried him to victory in Iowa and New Hampshire?

I don’t think so. Deval may be a moonbat, but he did manage to graduate from the same law school as Willard.

Gelzinis also notes that Patrick’s Republican opponent for the governorship in 2006, Kerry Healey, made a huge deal of illegal immigration. Healey, of course, became the first Republican candidate to lose a governor’s race in Massachusetts since 1986.

Politicians make a huge mistake when they confuse what they hear on talk radio with what most average Americans have on their minds.

Original sin and the Big Dig

The importance of Sean Murphy’s story in yesterday’s Globe is that it reinforces a gnawing fear many of us experience every time we drive through the O’Neill Tunnel — that today may be the day all hell breaks loose, and that we’ll be buried alive under tons of water-logged dirt.

Am I being overly dramatic? Perhaps. Officials whom Murphy interviewed seek to assure us that the ongoing mini-flood inside the tunnel is no threat to safety. But when we learn that “state officials acknowledged there is already surface rusting on 10 percent of the massive steel girders in the ceiling,” it’s hard to believe those reassurances.

The picture I take away from this is that of government officials knowing they have a potential catastrophe on their hands and having absolutely no idea of what to do about it. Even if you could close it and start over — and think about the incredible disruption to the region’s economy — where would you ever find the money?

The original sin was revealed in this 2004 story, by then-Globe reporter Raphael Lewis with an assist from Murphy. A watertight tunnel required a proven, two-layer approach — a tube within a tube, essentially. But once the tunnel designers realized they didn’t have room to do it right, they decided to do it wrong, and to brag about how smart and innovative they were. Thus we have a single tube, leaking from the sides and the top.

Moving forward, the incentives are all wrong. Especially during these early years of the Big Dig, the odds of catastrophic failure are no doubt pretty long. Officialdom has every reason to kick the can down the road, reasonably secure in the knowledge that we can get by for now. If Gov. Deval Patrick were to take drastic, disruptive action without a compelling reason, he’d be excoriated for creating a one-man recession.

Yet who knows what the truth is? It’s likely that even those studying the tunnel most closely don’t know whether it will last 25 years, the timeline in Murphy’s story, or 25 months. (And how do you like that 25-year figure? If it had opened in 1982, which doesn’t seem that long ago to me, we’d be looking at replacing it now.)

Even though the problem was unrelated to the leaks, we’ve all known since Melina Del Valle was crushed to death that something had gone horribly wrong with the Big Dig. In the absence of any good ideas for fixing it, we’ll all be playing Massachusetts Roulette every time we drive through it.

There may come a time, if it hasn’t already arrived, that the Big Dig will be viewed as the most blatant example of government incompetence in our history. And before you start sharpening your ideological swords, it’s unclear whether the problem was too much government or not enough. Certainly there should have been far more oversight of Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, the private partnership given carte blanche to design and build the project.

What a disaster.

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