Tag: Politics

Bernstein bites back

Defenders of Mitt Romney are very excited about a story by the Politico’s Mike Allen reporting that two women actually saw the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Michigan Gov. George Romney marching together in Grosse Pointe in 1963. As well they should be. “I remember it vividly,” says one alleged eyewitness. “I was only 15 or 20 feet from where both of them were.”

But memories play tricks. And David Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix, who broke this story on Wednesday, says contemporaneous news coverage makes it clear that while Romney was marching on behalf of King’s agenda in Grosse Pointe, King himself was hundreds of miles away, speaking at an AFL-CIO gathering at Rutgers University.

Bernstein is withering in his contempt for the Romney campaign’s dumping this stuff on the Politico, writing, “Those facts are indisputable, and quite frankly, the campaign must have known the women’s story would eventually be debunked — few people’s every daily movement has been as closely tracked and documented as King’s.”

This is not a small mistake for the Mittster. As Bernstein noted in his original story, Mitt Romney had claimed not just that his father and King had marched together, but that he had personally observed it. And in a devastating piece in the Boston Globe on Friday, Michael Levenson noted that Mitt had on at least one occasion gone quite a bit further, telling the Boston Herald in 1978, “My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit.”

Nor is Washington Post columnist David Broder likely to say anything helpful to Romney. Broder co-authored a George Romney biography in the ’60s in which he reported the claim that the elder Romney and King had marched together. But here’s what the Post had to say earlier today:

The Romney campaign initially cited a 1967 book co-authored by Washington Post staff writer David S. Broder, which stated that Romney “marched with Martin Luther King through the exclusive Grosse Pointe suburb of Detroit.” But the book did not provide a source for the event, and Broder told The Post that he cannot remember where he heard the information.

What an astonishing muddle the Republican presidential campaign is now in.

George Romney’s phantom march

Did George Romney ever march with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.? Romney’s son Mitt has said he did, most recently in what struck me as a pretty effective appearance on “Meet the Press” this past Sunday. But now David Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix reports there’s no evidence.

Follow-up: The Romney campaign appears to be taking the line that George Romney really did march with King, only not in the same city and not on the same day. Huh?

Catching up with the 2008 campaign

Because I no longer make my living by covering media and politics full-time, I’ve been less engaged in the 2008 presidential campaign than in any I can remember. So when I got a chance to head north on Monday to catch a Rudy Giuliani event, I leapt. My editor at the Guardian, Richard Adams, provided me with a letter in case I needed to produce credentials. And we were off.

My traveling companion was Seth Gitell, an old friend who’s covering presidential politics for the New York Sun. Gitell is probably best known for his stint as Boston Mayor Tom Menino’s spokesman, but before that he covered politics for the Boston Phoenix. He and I covered the Republican and Democratic national conventions together for the Phoenix in 2000, probably the most fun I’ve ever had in the news business.

We arrived at Goss International in Durham, N.H., where Giuliani was scheduled to speak, ridiculously early. The only evidence that we’d come to the right place was a lone campaign worker who was planting Giuliani signs in the snow. So we headed over to a coffee house near the University of New Hampshire campus to kill some time.

When we got back, the second-floor function room, next to the company cafeteria, was beginning to fill with reporters. It was a decent-size media crowd — not exactly what you’d call a horde, but respectable, especially given the consensus that Giuliani, despite leading in the national polls for months, was starting to see it slip away.

The media were kept at a distance. Giuliani was scheduled to speak at 12:45 p.m., but he didn’t arrive until about 1:15. What appeared to be several hundred Goss employees had filled the room, leading to a quip or two about whether they’d be allowed to extend their lunch break so that Rudy wouldn’t be speaking to an empty room. There were also a few jokes among reporters about the irony of covering an event at a company that manufactures printing presses, not exactly a growth industry these days.

Finally, Giuliani walked out onto the stage, wearing a black suit, a white shirt and a red striped tie — no soft tones for the Mayor of America. He made a lame joke about ink from Goss presses rubbing off on his hands, and then — moving back and forth in front of a sign that said “Tested. Ready. Now.” — spoke for about five minutes. Giuliani offered some free-market boilerplate about taxes and government regulation and, of course, revisited his favorite theme, “the terrorists’ war against us.” After that, he took questions from the employees — certainly not from the press — for about a half-hour.

Giuliani cuts an impressive figure on stage. He has a knack for coming off as conversational and informal while still managing to speak in complete sentences. Compared to the perpetually stiff John Kerry or the perpetually tongue-tied George W. Bush, he comes off well indeed. The content of what he said, though, seemed tired even to me — and I was seeing him in person for the first time. I can only imagine what it must have been like to be one of the reporters traveling with Giuliani, like Brian Mooney of the Boston Globe, who wrote a blog item on the event but nothing for the print edition.

Illegal immigration? Give legal immigrants “tamper-proof photo ID” cards. Public education? A school choice plan that would “empower parents” and, in particular, “empower poor parents.” Health insurance? “We need a private competitive market with millions of people in it, then costs will come down.” Someone even asked him to tell everyone about what 9/11 was like, a pitch so fat that you might have thought the questioner was a plant.

“There’s no way I can describe how difficult it was to get through the day,” Giuliani began before describing, in some detail, how difficult it was to get through the day.

I don’t mean to be quite as dismissive as this sounds. Giuliani is a smart, serious candidate with proven leadership qualities and a whole lot of personal baggage. He’s as interesting a story as there is in this campaign. But these town-meeting-style gatherings, safe and innocuous, don’t exactly give people what they need to know before walking into the voting booth.

For reporters who were present, the Giuliani story of the day was very different from what the candidate was talking about in front of the Goss employees. From the beginning of the campaign, Giuliani has pursued an odd strategy of hoping to do just well enough to get by in the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire while rolling to victory later, in big states like Florida, where voters are presumably more tolerant of a thrice-married moderate Republican. In pursuing this strategy, Giuliani has seemingly ignored the first rule of momentum: A lead in the national polls and in the big states tends to disappear overnight if you get creamed in Iowa and New Hampshire.

On Monday, the press was buzzing over news that Giuliani was cutting back on his advertising in New Hampshire. So a seeming throwaway line at the end of his talk — “I’ll be spending some of my Christmas holiday here in New Hampshire” — came across as at least somewhat significant. His New Hampshire campaign chairman, Wayne Semprini, reinforced that message afterwards, telling reporters, “Rudy Giuliani is not pulling out of New Hampshire.”

We milled around for a bit afterwards. Seth is a semi-regular on New England Cable News, and he did an interview with NECN’s Brad Puffer in which he said, “They [the Giuliani campaign] are still trying to have a foothold in New Hampshire and not abandon it. When you exclusively focus on a national campaign and don’t concentrate on Iowa and New Hampshire, then you may not get to have a national campaign.” (Seth’s piece for the Sun is here.)

David Saltonstall, a Massachusetts native and alumnus of the MetroWest Daily News who’s covering Giuliani for the New York Daily News, told me, “The news going into this news cycle is that Rudy’s withdrawing his ad dollars from New Hampshire.” Saltonstall saw Giuliani’s remarks as an attempt to have it both ways: “He’s walking kind of a tightrope with voters here, I think.”

All of this has precisely nothing to do with whether Giuliani would make a good president. Yet at this stage of the campaign, that’s what the media focus on — who’s up, who’s down, the polls, the fundraising. It’s not that the press never does substantive coverage (indeed, the Globe’s Mooney did a terrific profile of Giuliani in early November). It’s just that, late in the game, when ordinary voters finally start to tune in, the journalistic instinct is to cover the campaign as though it were a sporting event.

So let me indulge. Right now, on the Republican side, it looks as though Mitt Romney and John McCain have put themselves in the best position to win, assuming Mike Huckabee fades the way everyone thinks he will. Unless Giuliani can turn it around, he’ll be remembered as the winner of 2007 in an election that won’t be held until 2008. At least that’s what I wrote for the Guardian. (I gave Fred Thompson some props, too, so I may have been hallucinating at the time.)

Then again, who knows what will happen? It’s not as though anyone has actually voted yet.

A bad week for Chris Daly

I have been watching with interest as Boston University journalism professor Christopher Daly gets raked over the coals for criticizing a Washington Post reporter who wrote a story about Barack Obama’s ties to Islam without sufficiently observing that those ties are non-existent. So, far, though, I’ve refrained from writing about it.

And I’m going to remain in the shallow end of the pool, at least for now. I’m heading up to New Hampshire to cover a Giuliani event for the Guardian, and I don’t want to make the same mistake that Daly did: committing pixels to screen without giving it quite enough thought.

Still, I am amazed at the amount of vitriol Daly has received, including a scorching note from Post executive editor Leonard Downie taking the legendary Jim Romenesko to task merely for linking to Daly’s missive. Today, the dispute makes the New York Times, which is why I’m taking note of this now.

If you’re interested, here are a few links that the Times doesn’t give you:

  • The original Post story, by Perry Bacon Jr.
  • A critical column by Post ombudsman Deborah Howell
  • A short item I posted in which I endorsed a withering critique of Bacon’s story that had been published at CJR.org
  • Daly’s critique and a follow-up he wrote in response to the attacks he received
  • Downie’s letter to Romenesko (scroll through letters for other posts, both attacking and defending Daly)
  • Two very tough anti-Daly posts by journalist Seth Mnookin (here and here)

My quick take: Bacon’s story was already under heavy attack before Daly weighed in because of the peculiar manner in which it had been constructed. Supposedly the story was about false rumors being perpetrated by fringe elements of the paranoid right that Obama’s Muslim roots are a lot deeper than he’s let on, or even that he’s some sort of secret agent for Islamist extremists.

Even though Bacon describes Obama as a church-going Christian near the top of his story, the rest of the article wallows in rumorville without quite making it clear that those rumors had been thoroughly debunked months earlier. Unfortunately, given the mainstream media’s role in sliming past Democratic presidential candidates, especially Al Gore and John Kerry, liberal bloggers were on full alert and perhaps overreacted to the flaws in Bacon’s piece.

As far as I can tell, Daly’s principal mistake was to whack Bacon for being 27 years old. If an experienced editor had run Bacon’s story through the mill for just another 15 minutes, the result probably would have been a piece that no one could complain about. Reporters deserve no less, regardless of whether they’re 27 or 51, an age I (ahem) do not pull out of a hat.

Postscript: Politicians in general spend more time being seen going to church than ministers, especially just before an election. So why would the Associated Press assert that Obama’s decision to go to church yesterday was “a rejoinder to the e-mailed rumors that he is a Muslim and poses a threat to the security of the United States”? Obama attended a Congregationalist church. He is a Congregationalist. Hello?

Brooks captures Romney perfectly

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.

Taking Romney on faith

A few quick observations on Mitt Romney’s just-concluded speech on religious freedom:

1. The atmospherics. It was well-written and well-delivered. No surprise. But it’s interesting to ponder how much more compelling Romney seems giving a speech than he does participating in debates with 57 other candidates, a format that somehow diminishes him. The same could be said of Barack Obama.

2. Hypocrisy watch. Romney argues for the right of Mormons to be full partners in the political process, but he has no problem throwing non-believers over the side of the boat:

And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me. And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: we do not insist on a single strain of religion — rather, we welcome our nation’s symphony of faith.

Govenor, I’m not an atheist, and I don’t mind seeing crèches on public property. But, on a more substantive level, freedom of religion also means freedom from religion.

Of course, we’re also still awaiting word on whether Romney actually said he would not name a Muslim to his Cabinet if he’s elected president.

3. Will it work? Romney’s speech has been endlessly compared to John Kennedy’s 1960 address to Protestant ministers in Houston. Kennedy, though, had a far easier task — persuading the public that a Catholic politician could embrace the separation of church and state.

Romney’s goal was to persuade the evangelical Christians who vote disproportionately in Republican primaries that a Mormon is enough like them that they should support him rather than waste their vote on a longshot candidate like Mike Huckabee. The problem is that many of these people will not vote for a candidate who isn’t a Christian. And — sorry, Governor — Mormonism differs sufficiently from the central tenets of Christianity that you could make a very respectable case that Mormons are not Christians.

Romney’s been running away from Massachusetts ever since he decided he wanted to be president. He may be about to learn that Blue America, where we truly don’t care what your religious beliefs are (as long as they don’t run up against point #4), is far more hospitable to a Mormon than are the red-state Christians with whom he is trying to make common cause.

4. The real issue. Romney said repeatedly that there should be no religious prerequisite for public office. Indeed, the Constitution says that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” But all that means is that Congress can’t pass a law banning a member of a particular religion from running for office.

In fact, there is a perfectly legitimate religious test, and the voters will apply that test. I’ll summarize it as follows: Are a candidate’s religious views compatible with the office of president as defined by the Constitution?

Personally, I can think of a few examples where that would not be the case.

We know, for instance, that there are some very extreme Christians who favor environmental collapse, or even world war, because they think such a calamity would bring on the Apocalypse predicted in the Book of Revelations. A candidate who held such views could not be disqualified by law, but he could certainly be disqualified by the voters on Election Day.

Romney himself took a few moments this morning to bash “radical Islamists.” Obviously the embrace of violent jihad would be completely incompatible with running for the presidency.

Finally, in January of this year, The New Republic ran an essay (PDF) arguing that Mormonism’s core beliefs — especially as they relate to the United States’ special status in the divine plan — are worrisome enough with respect to how a Mormon president might govern that we shouldn’t shy away from asking some tough questions.

I’m not sure I agree with that proposition, but I do know this: Romney’s speech today was designed to prevent such questions from being asked. The next few weeks will tell us how well it worked.

Buenos días, Mitt!

The Boston Globe’s hit on Mitt Romney today for continuing to use a landscaping company that hires illegal immigrants is both unfair and fair.

It’s unfair because the story suggests that Romney should be held to a ridiculous standard. If you hire a private contractor to work at your home, you don’t take steps to make sure the contractor’s employees have legal status. Romney says he made it clear to the contractor a year ago that he’d have to clean up his act. And, frankly, that’s as far as any homeowner should have to go.

But it’s also fair, because Romney has been so flagrantly hypocritical on this issue, taking an interest only after his presidential campaign had begun. There is virtually no evidence out there that, prior to last year, Romney’s thought process on illegal immigration ever went much deeper than greeting the folks who mowed his lawn with a cheery “buenos días.”

“Not since Gary Hart told reporters to ‘follow me around’ has a presidential candidate displayed such an amazing degree of arrogance, indifference and abject stupidity,” writes the Outraged Liberal today.

Well, I’m not sure I’d go that far, but Mr. O.L.’s entire outraged post is worth reading.

There’s no doubt that Romney is going to take a pounding in the days and weeks ahead. It’s unfair. But given his nasty rhetoric about illegal immigrants — rhetoric that I’m not even sure he believes — he deserves what’s coming to him.