By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
How stupid is this? Obama is going to be giving his convention speech in front of some faux-Greek columns, which isn’t exactly new — Bush himself did it just four years ago. And have you walked around the Statehouse lately? Or ever?
But anonymous (i.e., Clinton) Democrats claim this is more proof that Obama thinks he’s Zeus or something, the media are freaking out and the Republicans blasted out an e-mail about the “Temple of Obama.”
Could everyone please grow up?
Well, that was quite a performance by Hillary Clinton, was it not? Unlike the Mark Warners of the world, she managed to talk about herself and use that in a compelling way to transfer her personal message to Barack Obama. Also, for the first time this week the Democrats were drinking the blood of their enemies. And loving it.
I never would have imagined when Clinton first ran for the Senate eight years ago that the stilted public speaker of that campaign could grow into the accomplished, and even moving, figure that she is today.
Not to get carried away. She was not this good while she was running for president. Not even close. Like Ted Kennedy and Al Gore, to name two other examples, defeat seems to have brought out the best in her.
In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that two contrasting speeches by Michelle Obama show she understands what works in Chicago doesn’t work on the national stage. Unfortunately for Democrats, the Obamas’ efforts to reinvent themselves risk making them seem inauthentic and leave them vulnerable to Republican attack.
I just spent, oh, the last hour and a half reading Roger Simon’s dauntingly well-reported piece for the Politico on how Barack Obama managed to beat the Clinton juggernaut. (Chuck Todd was praising it on Tom Ashbrook’s show this morning. Do we really believe he had time to read it?)
Like Joshua Green’s Atlantic article on what went wrong with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, it is full of insight and nuance. And, like Green’s piece, I ultimately found it unsatisfying. Here’s the problem: No one other than a political junkie is going to read such a story. And we political junkies have been living all this in real time for many, many months.
Both Simon and Green remind us of details we might have forgotten, skillfully weave a mass of information into coherent narratives and come up with some previously unreported nuggets. (Green: Mark Penn is smarter and more awful than we thought. Simon: Obama’s brain-trusters actually believed they could knock Clinton out in the opening weeks of the primary season.) In the end, though, they don’t do much more than tell us what we already know.
If there’s one thing of value I learned from the two accounts, it’s that no one should believe the Democrats would be in better shape today if Clinton had won the nomination — especially if she had won it easily, and had not had to put her dysfunctional campaign staff to the test.
OK, two. I think it’s a pretty good bet that Simon and Green are going to write books about this historic campaign. At nearly 16,000 words, Simon’s article is already about a quarter of the way there.
Some years ago I remember reading a profile of Ron Fournier, who was then fairly new as a political reporter for the Associated Press.
It’s not likely I’m going to find a link at this late date, so I’ll have to rely on my memory. What I recall was his saying he’d never been all that interested in politics, an attitude he thought had helped him break some stories. He was a hard-news reporter, not a partisan.
Well, now. I want to follow up my post of earlier today, because I think Fournier’s “analysis” of the Joe Biden pick is remarkable enough that we shouldn’t let go of it too quickly. It’s not that Fournier’s anti-Obama bias is so obvious, though it is. It’s that his take is embarrassingly dumb and shallow. A news analysis is an odd duck; neither a news story nor an opinion piece, it is supposed to make sense of the news. Fournier’s attempt fails dismally.
Steve Stein has posted some terrific links, and I recommend the Washington Monthly item he flags. What I like about that item, written by Steve Benen, is that it gets to the heart of how lazy Fournier is to suggest that Barack Obama’s choice shows a “lack of confidence” in his reformist, outsider message. As Benen notes, you could say that about any vice-presidential pick: if Obama had chosen Hillary Clinton, it would show a “lack of confidence” that he could win the women’s vote without her. You get the idea. Benen also notes that Fournier nearly took a job with the McCain campaign in 2007.
Drilling down a little further, Eric Boehlert’s excellent overview — which gathers everything from Fournier’s inappropriately supportive e-mail to Karl Rove to his supplying McCain with his favorite donuts (ooh, sprinkles!) — links out to a Politico piece that explains Fournier’s rationale for the AP’s increasingly edgy, opinionated journalism. Michael Calderone writes:
Fournier is a main engine in a high-stakes experiment at the 162-year old wire to move from its signature neutral and detached tone to an aggressive, plain-spoken style of writing that Fournier often describes as “cutting through the clutter.”
In the stories the new boss is encouraging, first-person writing and emotive language are okay.
So is scrapping the stonefaced approach to journalism that accepts politicians’ statements at face value and offers equal treatment to all sides of an argument. Instead, reporters are encouraged to throw away the weasel words and call it like they see it when they think public officials have revealed themselves as phonies or flip-floppers.
I’m not buying it. I’m no fan of traditional objectivity and its passive reliance on official statements. But we need tough, fair, neutral reporting more than ever, and it seems to me that the AP ought to be at the forefront of providing it. With regional newspapers cutting back on their national and international coverage, this should be a chance for the AP to shine.
In an e-mail to Media Nation, Stephen Burgard, director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University (i.e., my chairman), writes:
I read Fournier’s “analysis” before checking your blog today and was independently appalled. Since when is choosing somebody knowledgeable in foreign affairs and the Senate Judiciary Committee, who balances a ticket as well, a sign of lack of confidence or weakness?
The suggestion that the confident move would be to bring in somebody inexperienced who represents the “politics of change” and “hope” is ludicrous; it’s something you might expect to see in a student lefty publication, not from the AP, which is supposed to understand how presidential politics works.
I can’t help remembering that the AP’s Walter Mears wrote the book on the journalistic form “news analysis.” In addition to writing good ones, he was able to explain what they were when done right. Not straight news stories. Not opinion pieces. But somehow interpretive in a way that shed an informed reporter’s light beyond just being a stenographer of events.
Perhaps Fournier thinks he was being “intrepretive.” He wasn’t. Fournier may well be in the tank for McCain, but I would feel only slightly better if he were dishing it out equally to both sides. The fact is that Fournier’s “analysis” is a piece of pure opinion, unsophisticated and uninformed.
It’s not just that it should have been better. It’s that we depend on the AP to provide us with something fundamentally different.
Photo of Fournier by Josh Hallett and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
In an “analysis” headlined “Biden pick shows lack of confidence,” Ron Fournier of the Associated Press writes:
For all his self-confidence, the 47-year-old Illinois senator worried that he couldn’t beat Republican John McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack. The Biden selection is the next logistical step in an Obama campaign that has become more negative — a strategic decision that may be necessary but threatens to run counter to his image.
That’s because, well, Obama probably can’t beat McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack.
Let me lend a hand and help Fournier with what he may be writing one week from today:
For all his self-confidence, the 72-year-old Arizona senator worried that he couldn’t beat Democrat Barack Obama without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack. The Romney selection is the next logistical step in a McCain campaign that has become more negative — a strategic decision that may be necessary but threatens to run counter to his image.
Any questions? Other than wondering how many brain cells Fournier fired up before putting fingers to keyboard?
David Brooks on Friday: “Biden’s the one. The only question is whether Obama was wise and self-aware enough to know that.”
Granted, the Olympics messed up the timing, and no one announces his running mate during the convention anymore. But why would Barack Obama tell everyone his choice is Joe Biden “in the wee hours of Saturday morning”?
If nothing else, we’ll get to see how many Sunday talk shows Biden can hit tomorrow. There are — what — five? He can do it. The man does like to talk.
Jay Rosen got an answer out of Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief, David Corn, as to why the magazine is asking the question “Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in U.S. history?”
Corn points to a speech Obama gave earlier this year in which he conjured up visions of the American Revolution, Abolition, the Depression, World War II and other patriotic touchstones in order to drive home his campaign theme of “Yes we can.” MoJo has since added that in the form of a blog post from February unsubtly titled “Barack Obama’s Messiah Complex.”
I’m not going to reproduce the Obama speech excerpts here, because you can just follow the links. But I do want to consider Rosen’s three questions:
Which comes closest to your view?
1.) Sure enough, Obama in this except “compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in U.S. history” and Mother Jones caught him at it, puncturing the Obama hype. Good for them!
2.) No, Obama does not “claim that his campaign is comparable to the great progressive movements in U.S. history.” Not even close. Mother Jones is engaging in the kind of audacious hype it claims to be opposing. Bad move.
3.) It doesn’t matter whether Obama actually said anything like that because his supporters believe his campaign is a movement of transcendent historical importance, and that’s what Mother Jones really meant, it’s just that the editors phrased it badly, attributing to the candidate claims that have been made by others about him.
Jay thinks the correct answer is #2. Strictly on a factual, non-emotional basis, I agree. But it’s more complicated than that. I think the truth is #2 plus a strong dose of #3, along with at least a slight whiff of #1.
All politicians invoke great moments in American history, as Obama did. But Obama has gone farther by explicitly drawing parallels between his candidacy and those moments. It’s understandable — the election of an African-American as president would rank as a stunning achievement for our race-benighted culture. But it’s got nothing to do with Obama personally.
The thing is, I think Obama understands that, and I think David Corn and company understand it, too. So the question becomes why journalists would compress Obama’s argument into a shallow soundbite that makes it sounds like Obama thinks of himself as a combination of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.
It’s not so much that MoJo is completely wrong; it’s that the magazine is being reductionist and stupid. Why?
By the way, I know Corn and have a lot of respect for him. We spent part of the afternoon on Election Day 2004 at a Starbucks near Copley Square, picking out John Kerry’s cabinet for him. But to the extent that he agrees with this particular editorial decision, well, I think he’s wrong.
Mother Jones magazine asks: “Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in U.S. history?”
Jay Rosen asks: “Has Obama compared his campaign to the great movements in progressive history (like civil rights?)”
Media Nation asks: Where is the evidence for Mother Jones’ premise? Perhaps Obama did say such a thing, but I don’t remember it. Let’s have the precise language.
Update: Welcome, Huffington Post and PressThink readers. Here’s my latest on the subject.
At PoliticsMA.com, “Wally Edge” wonders if the Edwards implosion means Deval Patrick’s chances of being named attorney general in an Obama administration have improved.