In my latest for the Guardian, I take the temperature of the commentariat and find that President Obama’s Oval Office speech on the oil gusher had something for everyone to loathe, regardless of ideology.
Category: Politics
A political speech that fell short
I wasn’t sure why President Obama decided to deliver his first Oval Office speech on the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. I’m even less sure now. If he had been in the habit of giving regular White House news conferences, this would have been an ideal occasion for him to make a 10-minute statement and take questions. Instead, he raised expectations and failed to meet them. It was an entirely political speech, driven by perceived political need.
Understand that I’m talking about rhetoric, not reality. In fact, I don’t have a huge problem with the way the federal government has responded for two simple reasons: It didn’t cause the explosion, and it can’t stop the gusher. Those are the facts. Everything else pales in importance.
I’ll be rounding up media reaction for the Guardian tomorrow morning. No doubt the right will hammer him. Based on the initial reaction of Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman on MSNBC, it looks like liberals are going to hammer him as well. It’s going to be an interesting morning.
Go Celtics!
Drip, drip, drip, drip
Boston Globe reporter Donovan Slack ferrets out more details about how Cape Cod congressional candidate Jeff Perry handled a child-molesting police officer under his command two decades ago.
The key takeaway involves then-Wareham police officer Scott Flanagan’s strip-search of a 14-year-old girl near a cranberry bog in 1991. Perry, then a sergeant on the force, was on the scene. (Flanagan also strip-searched a 16-year-old girl on a different occasion. Perry was not present, but accompanied Flanagan on a controversial visit to the girl’s parents’ home later that night.)
Last month, Donovan notes, Perry said he saw nothing with respect to the 14-year-old: “It did not occur in my presence.” Yet that contradicts what Perry said at the time, according to Donovan, who writes:
But in sworn testimony in a deposition for civil suits filed by the two girls’ families, Perry said he was in a position to have seen and heard everything and that it did not happen, according to a law enforcement specialist, Lou Reiter, who reviewed Perry’s deposition, wrote a report, and testified for one of the plaintiffs.
Flanagan later confessed that he had strip-searched both girls, pleading guilty to criminal charges. The contradictory statements — Perry saying nothing happened, and Flanagan later admitting it did — led Reiter to conclude that Perry was “not being truthful.’’
Perry, a Republican state representative from Sandwich, is hoping to succeed Democratic congressman Bill Delahunt, who’s retiring. But who’s that knocking at the door? Why, it’s former state treasurer Joe Malone, who’s running against Perry in the Republican primary.
Drip, drip, drip
George Brennan of the Cape Cod Times reports that Cape Cod congressional candidate Jeff Perry’s version of what he did as a Wareham police sergeant following the strip-search of a 16-year-old girl on New Year’s Eve 1992 does not match up with what he claimed he did when questioned about it last month.
And now a retired Wareham police captain is speaking out. “It was a big secret. We knew nothing about it,” Paul Cardalino tells Brennan.
Perry, a Republican state representative from Sandwich, hopes to succeed retiring congressman Bill Delahunt, a Democrat. At issue is Perry’s supervision of Scott Flanagan, a police officer who went to prison for illegally strip-searching a 16-year-old and a 14-year-old in two separate incidents.
I first took note of the story last month, when Donovan Slack and Frank Phillips of the Boston Globe and Brennan filed their initial reports. Perry was not found liable in either of the civil suits filed in connection with the strip-searches, and he has denied his subsequent departure from the police force was related to his supervision of Perry. And there the matter seemed to rest.
Yet it looks like information is continuing to drip out. So kudos to the Globe, the Times and Cape Cod Today, a website that has been hammering away at Perry for weeks.
Gradations of stupid
See if you can follow the logic here. Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr whacks U.S. Sen. John Kerry’s “breathtaking smugness” for saying that voters are too stupid to understand what President Obama and the Democratic Congress have accomplished. Carr then turns around and criticizes Massachusetts voters for being too stupid to understand they shouldn’t have sent Kerry to the Senate five times.
Is Howie even trying to make sense anymore?
Hoyt eschews the “holier-than-thou approach”
New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt isn’t as flashy as Dan Okrent, the first person to hold that job. But to my mind he’s been a solid in-house critic of Times journalism, and a considerable improvement over his plodding predecessor, Byron Calame.
So I enjoyed this profile of Hoyt that appeared in an alumni publication, Columbia College Today, written by David McKay Wilson, a Northeastern classmate of mine in the 1970s. Hoyt explains his philosophy thusly:
I want to talk about how something happened so we could learn from it, instead of wagging a finger and taking a holier-than-thou approach. You also have to make sure you talk about the work, not the person. The New York Times is a great newspaper and it produces great journalism every day, under very trying circumstances. In certain cases, it doesn’t live up to those standards.
The most recent case, of course, is the paper’s botched reporting on Connecticut Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal’s exaggerations regarding his military service. Hoyt, admirably, dove right in — too early, as it turned out. Now that the story is fading away, I hope he’ll take another, more considered look.
Before the Globe, there was CommonWealth
The Boston Globe Spotlight series on the state Patronage Department — ah, I mean Probation Department — is public-interest journalism at its best.
Commissioner Jack O’Brien has been suspended. There’s a chance for genuine reform. And the absurd gubernatorial candidacy of hacked-up state treasurer Tim Cahill has been brought to a merciful end, even if he doesn’t know it yet.
But credit should also go to CommonWealth Magazine and its blog, CW Unbound, which has been beating the drums about the Probation Department for months. CommonWealth, published by the nonpartisan Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth (MassINC), has put together a compilation of stories it’s posted on the Probation Department mess. (Disclosure: I used to be a regular contributor to CommonWealth, and I’m still listed on the masthead.)
On May 3, for example, CommonWealth reporter Jack Sullivan wrote about a court case involving Stephen Anzalone, who was challenging his rejection as a probation officer even though he would have been the seventh member of his family to draw a paycheck from the agency.
And on April 14, editor Bruce Mohl interviewed House Ways and Means Committee chairman Charles Murphy on why he opposed a plan by Gov. Deval Patrick to bring the out-of-control agency under the executive branch’s wing.
The Globe, as the region’s largest and most influential news organization, is doing what it does best: driving the agenda and forcing public officials to do what they should have done a long time ago. And CommonWealth, like other smaller players, is performing its role admirably as well: by keeping the story simmering until it was ready to come to a boil.
The Times and the attorney general
In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that the New York Times was on to a legitimate story about Connecticut Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal’s idiotic distortions* about his military service — but that it so botched the job that the paper can no longer be considered a reliable guide on what Blumenthal has and hasn’t claimed about himself.
Three for Monday
I’m up to my neck in other work, so three quick observations for a Monday morning:
1. The Boston Globe’s Spotlight series on the state’s patronage-riddled Probation Department should be the last nail in the coffin for state treasurer Tim Cahill’s independent gubernatorial campaign. The clueless Cahill doesn’t help matters today. While Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick and Republican challenger Charlie Baker squabble over how best to disinfect the agency, Cahill — a key player in the patronage game — criticizes Baker’s campaign for trying “to politicize issues for their own benefit without having a full understanding of the matters at hand.”
2. The New York Times’ Brian Stelter reports that news organizations are cutting back on covering presidential trips, citing an “exorbitant” cost in 2009 of $18 million. Frankly, I don’t think the shrinkage is a big deal. How many reporters need to follow the president around the world? But given that Katie Couric’s $15 million salary comes to almost the entire annual cost, it’s hard to take this lament seriously.
3. Make sure you read Charles Pierce’s excellent profile of Terry Francona, the greatest baseball manager in the known universe. It appeared Sunday in the Boston Globe Magazine.
How’s it going for Blumenthal? Swimmingly.
Yesterday I thought New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt had gotten his paper’s Richard Blumenthal reporting just about right.
Hoyt concluded that the paper had indeed exposed Connecticut’s attorney general, a Democratic Senate candidate, as being untruthful about his non-service in Vietnam. But Hoyt added that the Times should have revealed Blumenthal had also described his military service accurately earlier in the smoking video.
Now I’m just about ready to throw the Times’ reporting on Blumenthal into the swimming pool. Because it turns out that the one, weird little detail that helped bolster the larger point — that Blumenthal had lied about being on the Harvard swim team, of all things — was wrong.
Media Nation commenter Duke Briscoe recommended a Daily Howler report that, in turn, led me back to a Hartford Courant item about a series of photos posted on Facebook showing that Blumenthal had indeed been a team member. So it seems to me that we now have three major problems with the Times report:
- The Times failed to report that Blumenthal accurately described his Marine Corps service just several minutes before he then wrongly said he had served in Vietnam.
- One of the Times’ principal sources, Jean Risley, who chairs the Connecticut Vietnam Veterans Memorial, says she was misquoted.
- The confirming detail about Blumenthal’s having lied about being on the Harvard swim team turns out not to be the case at all.
Personally, I still think Blumenthal wrongly gave the impression in that recorded speech that he had actually served in Vietnam. But the Times apparently botched this story so thoroughly it now seems likely that Blumenthal will benefit from an anti-media backlash. And unless there are more, unambiguous examples, then he probably should benefit.
I think Hoyt ought to wait for the dust to settle, then weigh in again.