Tag: Joe Biden

Obama, Palin and experience

For several days now, I’ve been thinking about the notion that Sarah Palin is just as experienced as Barack Obama — or, for that matter, more experienced, since she’s got executive experience and he doesn’t. I find it ludicrous, so it took me a while to wrap my arms around it.

Though “experience” and “qualifications” are being treated in this campaign as though they are the same thing, they are not. Experience is one of the things you look at — an important thing — in deciding whether someone is qualified. But there are other factors, too.

Let’s stipulate that Obama is less experienced than would be ideal, though I would argue that his years in the legislature of a large industrial state is vastly more relevant than Palin’s time running a tiny town, followed by her cup of coffee as governor. Despite Obama’s lack of experience at the national level, few people in public life today have done more serious reading, thinking and speaking about the wide array of national and international issues that will face the next president.

Thus the question with Obama is whether his deep knowledge of the issues, much of it theoretical and academic, will hold up once he gets slapped in the face by reality. It’s a legitimate concern. Ideally Obama would have run in 2012 or 2016. But politics is never ideal, and he took the risk — a smart risk, in my view — that it was better to run before he was as experienced as he ought to be than become just one of the Washington crowd.

Obama’s qualifications are his experience, his knowledge and his judgment. Voters have been probing those three elements for many months now and have gotten to know quite a lot about him.

Then there is Palin, who was thrust upon the nation less than a week ago. Most of Palin’s experience is virtually identical to chairing the board of selectmen in a small New England town. Sorry, but Obama’s years as a community organizer and as a state legislator, and his short time in the U.S. Senate, are vastly more relevant than Palin’s years as mayor and her brief stint as the governor of state with the population of Boston — a state awash in so much oil money that the only question is how to spend it.

So what about the rest of her qualifications? Her knowledge and her judgment? That’s what we’re all trying to find out now. I’ve made it clear that I think she comes up short on both fronts. There is no evidence that she’s ever given more than superficial thought to any national or international issue other than energy, and I’m not sure how her ideas differ from Obama’s except that she wants to drill, drill, drill. And why not? She thinks the views of the vast majority of the world’s atmospheric scientists — that humans are contributing to global warming — are mere opinions with which she is free to agree or disagree. And she disagrees.

Jon Keller, in his commentary on WBZ Radio (AM 1030) this morning, argued that experience is overrated, and that both Palin and Obama have enough. I don’t quite agree, but I agree with him that that’s not how voters will ultimately make up their minds.

People will vote for the Obama-Biden team or the McCain-Palin team on the basis of issues, values and party identification. In the end, experience is just something to talk about.

The Joe and Beau show

Maybe I’m speech’d out, but I wasn’t hugely taken with Joe Biden’s address. He was good, and he certainly did what he needed to do. But there was a ragged, stop-and-start feel to it. Clinton and Kerry were better.

Beau Biden, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more moving. Judging from what I saw on television, there wasn’t a dry eye in the convention hall.

Funny, but I thought Bruce Springsteen was going to come out when it was announced that there would be a “special guest.”

More on Fournier and the AP

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.

Spinning the obvious

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.”

Biden his time

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.