By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
New York Times columnist David Brooks used phony numbers yesterday to raise questions about the proposed stimulus package. “A study by the Congressional Budget Office found that less than half of the money for infrastructure and discretionary programs would be spent by Oct. 1, 2010,” he wrote.
Trouble is, Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post learned that the study Brooks cites does not exist. (Via Talking Points Memo.)
In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that President Obama’s inaugural address succeeded in separating serious conservatives like David Brooks and Peggy Noonan from right-wing loons like Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin. It’s not really about getting conservative support so much as it is expanding the field on which he needs to govern.
David Brooks presumably has an idea of what his New York Times column should be about. Apparently telling us what he really thinks is not high on his list of priorities.
In the Times, Brooks has expressed — well, reservations about Sarah Palin. At a public event on Monday, he described her as “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party.” In the Times, Brooks has been skeptical about Barack Obama. On Monday, he said he’s “dazzled.”
Well, at least he’s straight with us when he’s not writing.
Good Howard Kurtz profile today of New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Though I often disagree with Brooks, I’ve always liked his work. So it was somewhat disconcerting to read that my admiration for Brooks borders on cliché: according to Kurtz, Brooks is “sometimes cast as the left’s favorite conservative.”
Fair enough. Brooks is, after all a moderate conservative whose views on cultural issues are a lot closer to mine than, say, to Mike Huckabee’s.
I thought it took a while for Brooks to find his legs as a Times columnist. His longer pieces in the Weekly Standard and the Atlantic Monthly were terrific. At the Times, though, the tyranny of having to write short and the pressure of being the token conservative seemed to lead him to write agit-prop that I doubted even he believed.
Brooks has long since found his voice, though, as evidenced by his nuanced, shifting view of Barack Obama. Of course, he may just be trying to keep his Obama-supporting wife and kids happy.
Photo (cc) by DoubleSpeak with Matthew and Peter Slutsky and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
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.
The most astute commentary I’ve seen on Mitt Romney’s religion speech is David Brooks’ column in today’s New York Times. Brooks starts out on a positive note, writing, “It is not always easy to blend an argument for religious liberty with an argument for religious assertiveness, but Romney did it well.” But then Brooks brings down the hammer:
When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.
The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious.
That’s exactly right. Indeed, on “Imus in the Morning,” CBS News analyst Jeff Greenfield noted that even President Bush has taken pains not to kiss off non-believers the way Romney did yesterday.
The normally astute Peter Canellos writes in the Boston Globe today that Romney’s speech was aimed “at all the people of the United States. With its breadth of spirit, it was the most presidential moment of the 2008 campaign.”
I have to disagree. It was a good speech, but hardly a great one. And it was deliberately divisive, aimed not at the American people as a whole but at those evangelical Christians who are thinking of voting for Mike Huckabee.
Journalist Lou Cannon, a biographer of Ronald Reagan, sets the record straight in today’s New York Times: Despite what David Brooks and James Taranto seem to think, Reagan’s appearance in Neshoba, Miss., near Philadelphia, was a huge issue in the 1980 presidential campaign. Cannon writes:
In the wake of Neshoba, Mr. Reagan’s critics pounced. President Carter’s campaign operatives portrayed Mr. Reagan as a divisive racist. At a money-raising event in Chicago, Mr. Carter told his audience: “You’ll determine whether this America will be unified, or, if I lose this election, Americans might be separated black from white, Jew from Christian, North from South, rural from urban.”
Cannon’s purpose is to absolve the charge that Reagan was a racist, or that his 1980 victory was based on racist appeals to white voters. In doing so, however, Cannon confirms that Brooks and Taranto are wrong to claim such accusations are a recent invention of liberals aimed at tarring Reagan’s memory.
Maybe after Rupe closes the deal, he’ll let Wall Street Journal commentators get LexisNexis accounts. The lack thereof is the only explanation I can think of for James Taranto’s endorsement of David Brooks’ factually deficient claim that Ronald Reagan’s speech in Philadelphia, Miss., was not a big deal during the 1980 campaign.
As I demonstrated last week, it was an enormous issue, with a number of media outlets reporting on what some saw as racial insensitivity on Reagan’s part, and with Jimmy Carter’s campaign beating the drums on several occasions.
Yet Taranto writes: “Why does Reagan’s Philadelphia speech loom so much larger in today’s liberal imagination than it did when Reagan was alive and active in politics? Because today’s liberals yearn for their elders’ moral authority.” Nice line. Too bad it depends on believing something that isn’t true. Taranto is generally one of the sharper knives in the drawer, but he’s wrong about this.
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood. Some commenters to my previous item think I’m accusing Reagan of having been a racist. I’m not, although he clearly didn’t mind playing racial politics on occasion. My interest in this item is based solely on Brooks’ factually incorrect notion that the Philadelphia speech was not a big deal until recently. In fact, it was one of the biggest issues of the 1980 campaign. I remember it as someone who lived through it, and my research shows that I’m right and Brooks is wrong.
Hat tip on this to Media Nation reader MTS.
New York Times columnist David Brooks today claims that Ronald Reagan is being retroactively tainted by a partisan liberal smear of recent vintage. He writes:
It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale.
What dastardly deed is Brooks referring to? In August 1980, Reagan’s campaign managers decided to kick off the post-convention final push by having the Gipper appear in Philadelphia, Miss., a shrine to the civil-rights movement thanks to the murder of three young activists 16 years earlier. Reagan spoke to a white crowd and endorsed “states’ rights,” code for segregation. This, Brooks fulminates, is — in some sort of latter-day re-invention — being “taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.”
But though Brooks wants you to believe that the idea of Reagan’s general-election campaign beginning with a racially insensitive act is a new one, he’s careful to add the caveat that it’s “been around for a while.” Well, yes. I followed the 1980 campaign avidly. And I distinctly remember that Reagan was accused at the time, repeatedly and vociferously, of playing to the prejudices of white southern voters.
Here’s a sampling of coverage from the 1980 campaign:
I could go on (and on), but you get the idea. The point is that, despite what Brooks would like you to believe, Reagan’s pit stop in Mississippi was one of the most controversial moments in the 1980 campaign. Liberals didn’t start attacking Reagan over that visit a few months ago — they did it repeatedly 27 years ago.
You don’t have to believe Reagan was a racist. You just have to look at the record. The truth is contained in Brooks’ caveat; the main thrust of his column is a gross distortion.