Tag: Politics

The nothing primary

Good grief. I’ve got to write something up for the Guardian in a few hours, and, right now, it looks like Pennsylvania’s going to count for nothing. Clinton is probably going to win by a blah margin — say, six or eight points. That’s enough for her to keep going, but not enough for her to have a realistic chance of winning the nomination, or to refill her depleted campaign coffers.

Here’s a theory. It strikes me that, over the last month, increasing numbers of Democrats have decided that Clinton has a better chance than Obama does of beating McCain in the fall. Yet it’s almost certainly too late for Clinton, and no one knows what to do about it. Thus we go on and on and on, and no one can say how it will end.

Mostly I’ve been watching MSNBC. Now Tim Russert and Harold Ford are drawing a line in the sand in Indiana. If Obama wins Indiana, it’s over. Unless it isn’t, of course.

McCain’s temperament

Last week I was at a dinner with a former national political reporter who was telling stories about John McCain’s volcanic temper. It was a social occasion, and I don’t feel at liberty to repeat what I heard. But let’s just say those stories fit well with yesterday’s Washington Post piece, by Mark Leahy, in which McCain is depicted as angrily berating fellow senators and lowly aides alike.

In 1999 I wrote an article for the Boston Phoenix that focused in large measure on McCain’s temper. My reporting left me surprised by the degree to which McCain was perceived differently by the national press corps, which, if anything, loved him even more then than it does today, and the Arizona media, which had suffered his insults and silences for years over their aggressive reporting on — among other things — the Keating Five scandal and Cindy McCain’s drug problem.

As Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama tear each other to shreds, this is a story worth keeping an eye on.

More about the flag-pin lady

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.”

Stephanopoulos doesn’t get it

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.

Shales nails it

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.

The Clintons and Colombia

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.

Obama’s cringe-inducing comments

This is painful. Try not to cover your eyes as you read the top of this Ben Smith post at the Politico:

In appearance taped for airing this morning on “The View,” Senator Obama makes news by saying he might have left Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ if the Rev. Jeremiah Wright had not retired.

In a clip posted by ABC, Obama says: “Had the reverend not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country — for all its flaws — then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable staying there at the church.”

Last week, Obama staked out the position he’s going to have to live with. He delivered a fine speech on race, but never quite came to terms with Wright’s occasionally loathsome rhetoric. Now it just looks like he’s pandering.

McCain and his media admirers

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.”