By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Nash McCabe, the Latrobe, Pa., woman who’s so disturbed about Barack Obama’s decision not to make flag pins part of his everyday wardrobe, turns out to be a known Obama-hater whom ABC News tracked down with malice aforethought.
Josh Marshall: “[I]t does reinforce my sense that the disgraceful nature of the debate wasn’t just something that came together wrong, some iffy ideas taken to[o] far, but was basically engineered to be crap from the ground up.”
George Stephanopoulos, fresh from his Stephen Colbert shtick (right), tells the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz that Barack Obama deserved to get tougher questions than Hillary Clinton at Wednesday’s debate because he’s the front-runner. Kurtz writes:
“Senator Obama is the front-runner,” said Stephanopoulos, the network’s chief Washington correspondent and a former Clinton White House aide. “Our thinking was, electability was the number one issue,” and questions about “relationships and character go to the heart of it.”
Besides, he added, “you can’t do a tougher question for Senator Clinton than ‘six out of 10 Americans don’t think you’re honest.’ “
But the problem wasn’t that the questions were unfairly tilted against Obama; it’s that they were stupid and demeaning. Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson debased the process by mouthing Colbert-like parodies of Republican talking points as though they were actual questions.
“Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?” is not a question. “I want to know if you believe in the American flag” (from a Pennsylvania woman) is not a question. For that matter, “Six out of 10 Americans don’t think you’re honest” is not a question.
Does Stephanopoulos not understand this? Perhaps he does. Perhaps he realizes that he, Gibson and the debate producers screwed up big-time Wednesday night, and he’s just talking trash to Kurtz but will nevertheless learn from his mistakes.
If not — well, please, as Media Nation reader Peter Porcupine says, bring back the League of Women Voters.
More: Jim Romenesko rounds up the critics.
Illustration by Chris Arkwright, and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Tom Shales gets it exactly right in today’s Washington Post:
When Barack Obama met Hillary Clinton for another televised Democratic candidates’ debate last night, it was more than a step forward in the 2008 presidential election. It was another step downward for network news — in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.
Indeed, it seemed like at least half the debate consisted of stupid hot-button questions that are of interest mainly to people who’ve already decided to vote Republican this fall. The bottom was reached when a voter named Nash McCabe, of Latrobe, Pa., asked by video: “Senator Obama, I have a question, and I want to know if you believe in the American flag.”
That’s a question? Who would choose to air such idiocy?
More: “This was a travesty,” Michael Tomasky writes in the Guardian. But I’m puzzled by Tomasky’s and Shales’ both saying that Stephanopoulos was off his game. I try to watch as little of Stephanopoulos as possible, so I’m not a good judge. But his performance struck me as entirely in keeping with why I generally change the channel as soon as his smug face appears.
Hillary Clinton got rid of demoted her chief strategist, Mark Penn, after it was revealed that Penn was working for a free-trade agreement with Colombia that Clinton opposed. But the larger issue, I argue in my latest for the Guardian, is the Clintons’ longstanding ties to Colombian president Álvaro Uribe and their indifference toward his miserable human-rights record.
My old Boston Phoenix colleague Al Giordano reports in the Narco News Bulletin that Colombia’s president, Álvaro Uribe, a right-wing despot with a deplorable human-rights record, is deeply worried about the possibility that Barack Obama will become president. Giordano writes:
[T]he Clinton organization has a long history of backing — politically and economically — the Colombian far right, its narco-politicians and paramilitary death squads, of whom Uribe is supreme leader. In 2000, then-US president Bill Clinton went on Colombian national TV to announce “Plan Colombia,” the multi-billion dollar US military intervention that keeps Uribe and his repressive regime in power to this day.
According to Giordano’s report, Uribe’s human-rights record is so bad that it recently attracted the attention of Human Rights Watch and a number of other religious and humanitarian organizations. Last year, Giordano notes, Al Gore decided not to attend an environmental meeting in Miami because he didn’t want to share the stage with Uribe, who has been linked to right-wing death squads.
The Clintons, on the other hand, have continued to be ardent supporters of Uribe, with the former president accepting an award from the Colombian government last year.
The Uribe matter has made it into the mainstream media, with the Associated Press running a story on Thursday. But the AP emphasizes Uribe’s displeasure over Obama’s opposition to a U.S.-Colombia free-trade agreement — never mentioning, as Giordano observes, that Hillary Clinton has said she opposes the agreement as well.
This is an important story that almost certainly won’t get the attention it deserves.
More: Ben Smith of the Politico reports that the Colombian government no longer requires the services of Clinton strategist Mark Penn.
Neal Gabler has a first-rate analysis in today’s New York Times on the media’s love affair with John McCain. He writes:
Seeming to view himself and the whole political process with a mix of amusement and bemusement, Mr. McCain is an ironist wooing a group of individuals who regard ironic detachment more highly than sincerity or seriousness. He may be the first real postmodernist candidate for the presidency — the first to turn his press relations into the basis of his candidacy.
Though McCain is hardly what you would call a staunch, steady conservative, he is, in fact, deeply conservative about most issues, including reproductive choice, same-sex marriage and, most notably, foreign policy and the war in Iraq. Yet reporters, and even liberal commentators, Gabler notes, choose not to believe him, because his view of how the world works is essentially in line with that of culturally liberal journalists.
My own sense about McCain is that though he cares deeply about foreign policy, everything else to him is just politics. I do get the feeling that, if he’s elected president, his domestic agenda will essentially be defined by expediency.
The media’s relationship with the candidates will be crucial this fall, especially if Hillary Clinton — detested by many journalists — somehow wins the Democratic nomination. Can the press fairly cover a race when it loves one candidate and loathes the other? If past performance is any indication, you would have to say “no.”
In my latest for the Guardian, I predict a renewed media assault on Hillary Clinton following revelations that she lied — not misspoke — about her 1996 trip to Bosnia.
Shameless update: I just did an interview with ABC radio in Australia about this. When’s the Australian primary, anyway? Also, I’m leading Real Clear Politics at the moment.
Barack Obama’s speech was first-rate — passionate yet subdued, easy to grasp yet complex in Obama’s implied demand that his listeners hold a number of contradictory views simultaneously. My suspicion, though, is that the controversy over his former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has left Obama with a narrower coalition.
More than anything, the events of the past week play into the argument made by Hillary Clinton — that Democrats just don’t know enough about Obama. Even though the Wright stuff has been out there for many months, it’s not blowing up until now. Who knows why?
The point is that it’s all too easy to imagine some “independent” Republican group making a devastating ad out of the Obama-Wright connection this fall.
In my latest for the Guardian, I expand on my post about former Obama adviser Samantha Power, and why she might think the Clintons’ behavior has been monstrous outside the context of the current campaign.
It’s amazing the way the media have gone from “Obama can do no wrong” to “Obama can do nothing right” following his defeats in Texas and Ohio last week.
The subject deserves a longer essay with links, but for the moment let me make a brief observation. After Super Tuesday, most political observers conceded that Clinton might lose every state until March 4, when Texas and Ohio would bail her out. That’s exactly what happened. Save for a brief, within-the-margin-of-error blip in Texas during the last week of February, she never relinquished her lead in either state.
What happened in Texas and Ohio wasn’t a reversal of fortune, a comeback, or “buyer’s remorse” on the part of Democrats having second thoughts about Obama. It was about Clinton winning two states she had always led in. (And Rhode Island made three.)
A number of observers have rightly called this the “anti-momentum” campaign. But the media, continually getting caught up in the moment, lose sight of that. Over and over.
