Tag: WGBH News

Why NH’s ban on ballot selfies threatens free expression

Illustration by Brendan Lynch for WGBHNews.org.
Illustration by Brendan Lynch for WGBHNews.org.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

The more absurd the law, the more difficult it can be to drive a wooden stake through its heart—all the more so when that law clashes with our First Amendment right to free expression.

And so it is with a New Hampshire statute that prohibits so-called ballot selfies, a self-indulgent genre that arose from our self-indulgent age. The idea is to vote, take a picture of yourself with your marked ballot, and then post it to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or any other social network of your choosing. Do it in the Granite State and you could be fined $1,000.

Last summer I bestowed a WGBH News Muzzle Award upon State Representative Timothy Horrigan, a Durham Democrat, for foisting this new form of digital harassment upon the public. I can’t stay I took it all that seriously. Mainly I thought it would make for a fun item to wedge in between more serious examples of censorship. And I certainly wasn’t surprised when, a month later, the law wasstruck down by a federal judge on First Amendment grounds.

But the selfie ban won’t die. New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner is now appealing it, and the matter is before the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals—which means that if he wins, a similar ban in Massachusetts would continue to stand as well. So it’s time to take a closer look at why a law against taking pictures of ourselves and our ballots is a violation of our constitutional rights.

The New England First Amendment Coalition has filed an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief laying out the case against the selfie ban. Filed in conjunction with the Keene Sentinel and prepared by the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, it is a humdinger. Over the course of 34 pages, the brief ranges from a John Oliver comedy routine to show that concerns about voter fraud (the alleged reason for the ban) are vastly overblown to the social impact of images depicting civil-rights demonstrators being attacked in Selma, Ala.

The heart of the brief, though, is a forceful argument that ballot selfies are a form of political speech and therefore deserve the highest level of constitutional protection. “Political speech is a ‘core’ concern of the First Amendment,” the amici write, “and protection of speech is never stronger than when the speaker is addressing political or governmental issues.”

So what could go wrong? In fact, it is not difficult to imagine how ballot selfies might be abused. If someone wants to buy your vote, it stands to reason that he’s going to want proof of purchase. “We have prosecutions for vote buying every year, and many of them involve absentee ballots, where it is possible to see how someone voted and collect and mail their ballot,” writes University of California Irvine law professor Richard L. Hasen in defending the ban.

Yet there is to date no evidence that ballot selfies have been used to enable such schemes—and, according to opponents of the ban, theoretical threats simply can’t be used to defend a law that has the effect of squelching political expression. In a paper published by the Science and Technology Law Review at Southern Methodist University, Nashville lawyer Daniel A. Horwitz says that Hasen is wrong—that vote buying is “statistically non-existent.” Moreover, Horwitz writes, the law would be ineffective in any case because the ballot could be altered after the photo is taken, “rendering the entire premise behind such laws baseless.”

Yes, ballot selfies can be annoying. So can watching the person at the next table take an Instagram of her shrimp scampi. That doesn’t mean either activity should be illegal.

In defending the selfie ban, New Hampshire’s Gardner last year told NPR that breaching the privacy of the ballot booth was a serious threat to democracy. “I have a copy of the last ballot that was used when Saddam Hussein was elected, and that ballot identified who the person was,” he was quoted as saying. “Hitler did the same thing in Austria.”

That’s exactly the sort of wild overstatement that ought to make us suspicious. In fact, the ban prevents us from exercising our free-speech rights today in the name of preventing theoretical evils that can be dealt with when—and if—they arise.

The Globe’s Trump parody: Genius, juvenile—or both?

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

So what are we to make of the Boston Globe’s parody of a possible Donald Trump presidency? Is it inspired or sophomoric? A responsible exercise of a newspaper’s role in shaping public opinion or self-indulgent clickbait? And does the form that it takes—the entire front of the Sunday Ideas section, designed to look like page one of the Globe—deceive readers and thus undermine public trust in the paper?

I’m posing these questions because as I write this on late Sunday afternoon, a day after the Globe’s anti-Trump package was unveiled, I’m still not sure what to make of it. Not to wimp out, but I think both the defenders and the detractors have good arguments.

Jim Roberts, formerly of the New York Times, recently laid off from his job as Mashable’s top editor, tweeted on Sunday, “Boston Globe front page brilliantly envisions a Trump presidency.” To which Politico media columnist Jack Shafer replied, “This is the first time you’ve ever been wrong, Jim.”

Now, take a look at Roberts’s wording. Because, in fact, he inadvertently puts his finger on one legitimate complaint about the parody—he refers to it as the Globe’s “front page.” It wasn’t, and folks who saw the Sunday edition in print understood that it was the front of the Ideas section, produced by the paper’s opinion operation. Yet not only was that distinction unclear as the story unfolded on social media Saturday, but the Globe itself did little to alleviate that lack of clarity.

The Globe’s official Twitter feed referred to the parody as “the front page we hope we never have to print.” (Sorry, but “Via @GlobeOpinion” is insufficient.) In a promotional video, Ideas editor Katie Kingsbury said, “We listened to Donald Trump’s speeches, we scoured his website, we read his position papers, we considered who his advisers are, and we did what the Globe does best: we reported it out and put it on the front page for our readers to see.”

One seemingly annoyed Globe news reporter, Todd Wallack, was moved to tweet, “The satirical @bostonglobe page about Trump is the cover of today’s Ideas/Opinion section (which is overseen by the editorial board).” He followed up with a photo of the actual front page, which was nearly Trump-free. And John Robinson, the retired editor of the News & Observer in Greensboro, North Carolina,told me he had to check “Today’s Front Pages” at the Newseum before he could be sure the parody wasn’t the real page one.

So yes, the folks at the Globe could have done a better job of making sure everyone realized the parody was part of the paper’s opinion section and not the front page of the paper. Not to be a party-pooper, but I would have insisted that the Ideas header appear in its usual location at the top of the page. That would have lessened the impact a bit, it also would have lessened the confusion.

As for the content itself, I’d say it is simultaneously inspired and a bit juvenile, which is unavoidable when you’re writing fake news stories based on Trump’s ridiculous and offensive pledges to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, kill the families of ISIS terrorists, and rewrite libel laws in ways that contradict more than 50 years’ worth of First Amendment jurisprudence.

The page also includes gems like this: “Heavy spring snow closed Trump National Park for the first time since it dropped its loser name, Yellowstone, in January.” Comedic genius? Well, no. But I laughed.

The parody was accompanied by a serious editorial making the case that if Trump fails to win a majority of the delegates at the Republican National Convention this summer, then the delegates should turn to a respectable alternative like House Speaker Paul Ryan or former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. And therein lies the most significant problem with the whole exercise.

Liberal media outlets (and a few conservative ones) have been outspoken about stopping Trump. The Daily News of New York has run a wide array of entertaining front pages. Late last year, the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson tried her hand at parody well in advance of the Globe with a piece titled “Five Supreme Court Cases from the Second Trump Administration.”

The trouble, of course, is that Republicans are not seeking advice from the likes of the Daily News, the New Yorker, or the Boston Globe in how to deal with their Trump problem. And, of course, many Republicans don’t think they have a Trump problem.

In the current media environment it can be almost impossible to be heard above the noise. So the Globe deserves some credit in finding a way to draw attention to its principled if oddly presented case against Trump’s racist demagoguery and rhetorical indulgence of violence, torture, and murder.

But now the crowd will move on, the stunt will soon be forgotten—and nothing will change.

Linda Greenhouse dissects our partisan Supreme Court

Linda Greenhouse
Linda Greenhouse

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Just as Congress and the broader electorate are hopelessly divided along partisan and ideological lines, so, too, is the Supreme Court.

Before the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, there were four liberals, four conservatives, and one centrist—Anthony Kennedy. All four liberals were appointed by Democratic presidents and all four conservatives (plus Kennedy) by Republicans.

And now a partisan battle has broken out over Scalia’s replacement. Despite President Obama’s choice of a respected moderate, federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has vowed not even to take up the nomination. Instead, McConnell insists the decision should be left to the next president.

It’s a dispiriting scenario—and a historical anomaly. As the retired New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse pointed out Tuesday, we only have to look at fairly recent history to observe a very different dynamic.

After all, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren to the chief justice’s position, and Warren turned out (to Eisenhower’s chagrin) to be one of the most liberal justices in the court’s history. President John F. Kennedy appointed Byron White, who was liberal on civil rights but deeply conservative on social issues. And unlike today, when advocates expend most of their energy trying to persuade just one justice, Anthony Kennedy, years ago there were regularly three, four, or more justices who might vote either way.

“I’m deeply concerned as a citizen and as someone who cares about the court and about the consequences of the politicization of the court,” Greenhouse said. “The Roberts court is allowing the court to be used as a tool of partisan warfare.” As an example, she cited the court’s decision to rule on the legality of Obama’s executive order stopping the deportation of some undocumented immigrants—a decision that she said was accompanied by an overreaching aside questioning whether Obama’s order violated the Constitution.

Greenhouse, who currently teaches at Yale Law School and who still writes online commentaries about the court for the Times, spoke at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, part of Harvard’s Kennedy School. She offered a range of dyspeptic opinions on the political environment both inside and outside the court. To wit:

• On Justice Scalia’s legacy. “I think he degraded the discourse of the court, frankly,” Greenhouse said. “His snarky dissenting opinions were ill-advised and enabled snarkiness in others. I think his, quote, originalist understanding of constitutional interpretation goes nowhere. That died with him.” She added: “He was a very colorful figure and great at calling attention to himself. He was kind of a cult figure. But I don’t think he’ll have much lasting impact.”

• On McConnell’s refusal to consider Obama’s appointment of Judge Garland to the court. “It’s truly unprecedented. … It’s totally cynical. It’s totally playing to the base,” Greenhouse said. She also disagreed with an observation by Shorenstein Center interim director Tom Patterson that Obama should have chosen a woman or a member of a minority group who would be more appealing to Democratic voters. “The brilliance of this nomination,” she said, is that the Garland choice will make Republicans “squirm” because he is exactly the sort of moderate they had earlier said they would confirm.

• On the Supreme Court’s order that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reconsider the state’s ban on stun guns. By custom, Greenhouse said, the Supreme Court would make such a decision without comment. But Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas added a caustic opinion suggesting the SJC had put a woman’s safety at risk. “Something’s not right here,” she said. “The idea is you don’t wash your dirty linen in public. … They thought they had to enlighten us with this 10-page screed.”

Greenhouse said that one way to make the court less politicized would be to put more (as in any) politicians on it. At one time during the Warren era, she said, not a single member of the court had served as a federal judge. Warren himself had been governor of California. More recently, Sandra Day O’Connor had served as an elected official in Arizona before entering the judiciary.

“I think a diversity of characteristics on the Supreme Court is very helpful,” she said.

Given that many Supreme Court decisions can go either way (after all, Greenhouse added, the reason most cases are before the court in the first place is because federal appeals courts in different jurisdictions reached opposite conclusions), a politician’s willingness to seek compromise might sometimes be superior than the certainty with which judges with legal backgrounds often act.

WGBH News contributor Dan Kennedy is a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Makers of Spotlight settle with BC spokesman Jack Dunn

As you may have heard, the makers of the Oscar-winning movie Spotlight have reached a settlement with Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn about his claim that the film depicts him in an unfavorable manner regarding the cover-up of the pedophile-priest scandal.

Spotlight tells the story of The Boston Globe‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation that revealed that Cardinal Bernard Law, then the archbishop, was directly involved in reassigning priests who’d been accused of sexual abuse. The Dunn character is seen taking part in a meeting about a pedophile priest at Boston College High School.

The Associated Press reports on the settlement here; The New York Times covers it here; the Globe here; and the Boston Herald here.

As part of the settlement, the filmmakers acknowledge that the lines attributed to Dunn were “fabricated,” which is kind of odd when you think about it. Spotlight, of course, is a work of fiction, though based on true events. In that sense, every line in Spotlight is fabricated. The question is whether Dunn was portrayed in a manner that is fundamentally false.

The filmmakers have contended from the time Dunn went public with his complaints in a Globe column by Kevin Cullen that Dunn is not portrayed in a negative light—rather, that he comes across “as an alumnus and public-relations professional from an affiliated institution, was concerned about the reputation of BC High, and acted in concert with his affiliation and professional training,” as the filmmakers put it in a letter reported by the Globe last November. In the settlement, the filmmakers say:

As is the case with most movies based on historical events, ‘Spotlight’ contains fictionalized dialogue that was attributed to Mr. Dunn for dramatic effect. We acknowledge that Mr. Dunn was not part of the Archdiocesan cover-up.

From what I can tell, there’s nothing in the settlement that contradicts what the filmmakers said last November, or that calls into question the recollections of Globe reporters Walter Robinson and Sacha Pfeiffer, who were at the BC High meeting.

At the time that this controversy broke, I wrote a piece for WGBH News about the hazards of true-life movies that freely mix fact and fiction. I certainly don’t question the pain that Dunn says he experienced. From the beginning the dispute has struck me as a genuine disagreement between him and the filmmakers over how he comes across in the movie.

That said, I’ve only seen Spotlight once, and I’d like to see that scene again.

Media notes: Marco’s meltdown, Trump’s triumph, and more

The late Hunter Thompson exercising his Second Amendment Rights. Photo (cc) by Gustavo Medde.
The late Hunter Thompson exercising his Second Amendment rights. Photo (cc) by Gustavo Medde.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

ROSSLYN, Virginia—I am writing this in a Best Western, wondering how I’m going to get to downtown Washington later today given that the Metro—shut down lest it burst into flames yet again—makes the MBTA look like a model of competence and efficiency.

Hunter Thompson used to grab the Gideons Bible at moments like this and try to find something appropriately apocalyptic he could quote from the Book of Revelations. But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.

I’ve got Gideons propping up the back of my laptop. A different kind of apocalypse was playing out Tuesday night on television, as racist demagogue Donald Trump all but wrapped up the Republican nomination. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton won big while Bernie Sanders’s increasingly implausible campaign reached the end of the line, though he’ll trudge on.

So how did we get here? And what comes next? A few thoughts.

1. Why Rubio lost. The smart money was with Marco Rubio from the beginning. On Tuesday, as it became clear that Rubio would be crushed in his home state of Florida, a 2013 Time magazine cover proclaiming Rubio “The Republican Savior” started making the rounds on Twitter. So did a tweet by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat from last September: “The entire commentariat is going to feel a little silly when Marco Rubio wins every Republican primary.”

The problem was that Rubio’s sunny optimism (which he abandoned at the first sign of trouble) and credibility with both the establishment and Tea Party wings of his party were out of step with the populist Trump insurgency.

“Rubio was prepared, much like Jeb Bush, for a reasonable dialogue in Washington policy language, offering positions that reflect 40 years of national security and foreign-policy experts,” former House Speaker (and former presidential candidate) Newt Gingrich said in a Washington Post article by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker. “All of that disappeared. The market didn’t care.”

But Rubio brought his own problems to the table as well. There was, of course, his robotic debate meltdown in the face of a withering assault from Chris Christie. But there is also evidence that Rubio and the people around him were so smitten with his essential Marco-ness that they became lazy and arrogant.

In National Review, an anti-Trump conservative outlet, Tim Alberta writes of Rubio: “He campaigned on the ground so infrequently for much of the campaign that even some supporters questioned how hard he was willing to work to get elected.” Eli Stokols and Shane Goldmacher pile on at Politico in a piece headlined “Inside Marco’s Hollow Campaign.” The subhead tells the story: “Rubio’s overconfident team refused to invest. Voters returned the favor.”

2. What’s next for Kasich and Sanders? Although Rubio might differ, winning your home state is not a big deal. John Kasich won Ohio, where he is governor, on Tuesday night, just as Bernie Sanders won Vermont a few weeks ago. Yet there is talk in the media today that Kasich and Ted Cruz (remember him?) might be able to stop Trump by denying him an outright majority at the Republican National Convention.

Boston Globe political reporter James Pindell notes that “Trump will need to win 59 percent of all the remaining GOP delegates to win a majority.” And Five Thirty Eight’s Nate Silver writes that Trump is still winning just 37 percent of the Republican vote. “Since primaries became widespread in 1972, only George McGovern won his party’s nomination with a smaller share of the vote—just 25.3 percent,” Silver writes.

At this point, it seems unlikely that Republicans will be any more successful at stopping Trump than Democrats were at stopping McGovern.

The case for Sanders seems considerably more desperate. John Nichols of The Nation, a left-liberal magazine that endorsed Sanders earlier this year, asserts that “Sanders has every reason to keep running a primary and caucus race where most of the delegates have yet to be chosen—and where his ability to influence the character and content of the competition remains one of that race’s most significant dynamics.”

Sanders has performed a real service for Democrats by holding Clinton to account and forcing her to clarify her positions. But his insurgency played out pretty much the way all left-wing insurgencies do.

3. Trump and the media. Earlier this week The Upshot, an analytics project that’s part of The New York Times, showed that Trump has received far more media coverage than Clinton, the runner-up, with everyone else far off the pace. The value of that free media in February: $400 million.

The Trump media dynamic will be fascinating to watch from here on out. A former reporter for the Trump-friendly site Breitbart.com said she was assaulted by Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski—and Trump gave Lewandowski a nice shout-out Tuesday night, when he also called the press “disgusting.” Certain unfriendly reporters are banned from Trump events, as Politico media reporter Hadas Gold writes.

Then, too, there’s the whole dynamic of what journalists will do given that they’ve been accused of enabling Trump by not pushing him hard enough on the Breitbart matter or at the thuggish violence directed at protesters—violence that began to be returned in kind last weekend.

As New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen observes, there is a “purposelessness” to much campaign coverage with its relentless focus on the horse race. “Campaign journalists have a system for determining who gets the most coverage,” Rosen writes. “They have no system for determining who deserves the most coverage.”

There has been plenty of harsh coverage of Trump right from the beginning, as Politico’s Jack Shafer recently observed. So it’s hard to say whether a tougher tone will make any difference.

4. Trump and the Jews. My friend and occasional collaborator Harvey Silverglate passed this on—an essay by James Kirchick in Tablet on why Jewish conservatives such as him despise Trump. It’s a long read that defies summary, but this should give you a taste: “To those Jews who contemplate making peace with a President Donald Trump: He is the candidate of the mob, and the mob always ends up turning on the Jews.”

I don’t agree with everything Kirchick writes. In fact, I think the Republicans’ neoconservative wing—which is not exclusively Jewish (ahem: Dick Cheney) despite Kirchick’s attempt to turn the term into an anti-Semitic slur—really does hate Trump in part because of his non-interventionist tendencies on foreign policy.

Still, if you’re going to read one lengthy piece on Trump this week, it should be Kirchick’s.

5. Obama’s continued relevance. Remember him? The president remains enormously popular with the Democratic base. And he’s doing everything he can to help Democrats retain the White House.

His choice of a Supreme Court nominee—which we may know by the time you read this—will almost certainly be a respected moderate, thus casting the Republicans as even more dysfunctional and obstructionist than they already are if they stick to their pledge and refuse to hold confirmation hearings.

And that is something Clinton will be able to exploit this fall.

Will Trump face an independent challenge from the right?

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Donald Trump on December 29 in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Photo (cc) by Matt Johnson.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Super Tuesday was newsworthy not so much because of what happened, but because it set the stage for what may prove to be cataclysmic events in the weeks and months ahead—especially on the Republican side.

To no one’s surprise, racist demagogue Donald Trump took another huge step toward becoming the Republican nominee, raising serious questions about the future of the party. Worcester’s own Charles P. Pierce, who writes a popular political blog for Esquire, compares the situation to the break-up of the Whig Party in the 1850s. In the Financial Times, Martin Wolf is even gloomier in a column headlined “Donald Trump embodies how great republics meet their end.”

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton hit her marks with ease. Bernie Sanders will soldier on, but as a left-wing protest candidate angling for a nice speaking slot at the party’s national convention rather than as someone who is actually running for president.

What follows is a round-up of commentary that will help you make sense of what comes next.

• The Republican crisis. Let’s start with a week-old piece whose relevance has only increased. As Conor Friedersdorf wrote in The Atlantic, fears that Trump would mount an independent candidacy if he didn’t get his way have been turned on their head. Now it’s conservative Republicans who may ask one of their own to run as an independent this fall against major-party candidates Clinton and Trump.

Such a candidate would likely come not from the Republicans’ minuscule moderate wing but from the right, the better to challenge Trump’s heterodox (and ever-shifting) views on Social Security, health care, and abortion rights. Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska has said that he won’t support for Trump and might support an independent conservative.

So here’s an idea: Why not South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley? She’s certainly conservative enough, coming to prominence several years ago on the strength of her Tea Party support. She’s non-white and struck just the right tone on the Confederate flag following the Charleston shootings last year. In other words, she’s an ideal alternative to Trump, who took a disturbingly long time to disavow the support of Ku Klux Klan figure David Duke.

If not Haley, there’s always Mitt Romney, as this Boston Globe editorial reminds us.

• Sanders faces reality. In the span of just a few weeks, Hillary Clinton has lurched from inevitable to teetering on the brink and then back to inevitable again—a media-driven phenomenon that we talked about on WGBH-TV’s Beat the Press last week.

So what went wrong with the Bernie Sanders campaign? Washington Postcolumnist Dana Milbank took a dive into the numbers and found that, though voters are angry, the anger is mainly on the Republican side. Milbank writes:

Americans overall have a dim view of where the country is headed: 36 percent think we’re on the right track, and 60 percent say we’re headed in the wrong direction, in the January Washington Post-ABC News poll. But break that down further and you find that 89 percent of Republicans think we’re on the wrong track. With Democrats, it’s reversed: Only 34 percent say we’re heading the wrong way.

Given those findings, Clinton’s decision to go all-in with her embrace of President Obama makes a lot of sense.

• A massive media fail. In Politico, Hadas Gold pulls together multiple strands in trying to explain why the media got Trump so wrong by treating him until recently as a laughingstock with no chance of winning the nomination. (Mea culpa.)

The best quote is from New Yorker editor David Remnick, who tells Gold, “The fact that so many of us, all of us, were wrong in predicting anywhere near the extent of his success so far, may be partly due to the fact we didn’t want to believe those currents could be appealed to so well and so deeply and successfully.”

• Two cheers for democracy. At National Review, the venerable conservative journal that recently devoted an entire issue to anti-Trumpism, Kevin D. Williamson writes that the two major political parties both produced better nominees before the rise of the modern primary-and-caucus system:

In our modern political discourse, we hear a great deal of lamentation about deals made in “smoke-filled rooms,” but in fact that horse-trading led to some pretty good outcomes. Vicious demagogues such as Donald Trump and loopy fanatics such as Bernie Sanders were kept from the levers of power with a surprisingly high degree of success.

• Why Rubio keeps losing. Marco Rubio finally won something—the Minnesota caucuses. But the Florida senator, a Tea Party favorite embraced by the party establishment, has consistently underperformed. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who on Super Tuesday won his home state along with Oklahoma and Alaska, now appears to be a more viable challenger to Trump than Rubio does.

Why did Rubio never rise to the moment? There were the robotic talking points, of course, as well as his seeming lack of any sort of core as he veered wildly from sunny optimism to telling a thinly veiled joke about the size of Trump’s packageover the weekend.

In Slate, Isaac Chotiner opines about all these things and more—and reaches the conclusion that Rubio’s meltdown in the New Hampshire debate, in which he panicked under a withering assault from Chris Christie, may have done lasting harm, even though he seemed to have recovered. Chotiner writes that “it’s possible the initial conventional wisdom about his debate performance was correct,” although he adds that it’s “wishful thinking” to believe that Rubio would otherwise be the front-runner.

• Christie’s hostage video. Chris Christie’s uncomfortable appearance with Trump on Tuesday night following his endorsement provoked an outburst of mockery on Twitter. Typical was this tweet from Adam Riglian:

The Guardian and CNN.com have some amusing wrap-ups as well.

Can the media handle a Clinton-Trump contest?

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Photo (cc) 2016 by Tim Bonnemann.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

It’s been fun. But with Donald Trump increasingly looking like he might actually win the Republican presidential nomination, there are signs that voters—and the media—are ready to get serious.

First, despite a narrower victory in the Nevada caucuses than anyone would have expected a few months ago, Hillary Clinton may be poised to cruise to the Democratic nomination and leave Bernie Sanders in her rear-view mirror.

According to polling analysis conducted by Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight site, Clinton is virtually certain to win South Carolina this Saturday, as well as all seven of the 10 Super Tuesday states that the site is tracking—including Massachusetts, where Sanders is thought by some pollsters to hold a slight edge. (Among the states Five Thirty Eight is ignoring: Sanders’s home state of Vermont, where he’s a lock.)

Maybe this simply reflects the Clinton campaign’s natural strengths. But it may also represent a calculation on the part of Democratic primary voters that Clinton is more likely to beat Trump than Sanders is.

Second, the Michael Bloomberg media boomlet may be coming to an end. According to Michael Crowley of Politico, Bloomberg and the people around him believed he might stand a chance of winning as an independent against a couple of outsiders like Sanders and Trump—but that he has no stomach for running against Clinton.

“If he runs with Hillary in the race he could wind up being the guy responsible for making Donald Trump president and he doesn’t like Trump at all—I don’t think he wants to go down in history as being the guy who elected Trump,” Crowley quoted an anonymous master of the universe as saying.

So where does that leave us? With a little more than eight months to go until the November election, what we see may be what we get: a Democratic nominee whose strengths and weaknesses have been on public display for the past quarter-century versus a Republican nominee who spews hate toward Latinos and Muslims, advocates torture, and calls for the murder of terrorists’ families.

For Clinton, the risks in the months ahead are considerable, even if her nomination seems all but assured. She’s an effective fighter when cornered. But when events are moving her way, she has a tendency to let her foot off the gas and cruise, with predictably disastrous results.

It happened in 2008, when she found her voice and transformed herself into an effective presidential candidate only after Barack Obama had taken what proved to be an insurmountable lead.

It happened again last fall, when her triumphant congressional testimony on Benghazi and a strong performance in the first Democratic debate seemed to ensure an easy ride for her. Instead, she reverted to her default setting—bland, overly cautious—and let Sanders become the second biggest story of the campaign after Trump.

Why does this keep happening? My guess is that Hillary, unlike Bill, doesn’t particularly care for politics and prefers to draw into herself except when she’s facing an existential threat.

Barring something completely unforeseen (and I would never rule out such a thing), Sanders will be little more than an irritant moving forward. As that perspicacious political observer Richard Nixon put it the other day, “Sanders is no longer a wolf at Mrs. Clinton’s door. At worst he’s a dog who won’t shut up.”

But Clinton is also likely to look a lot more formidable in the afterglow of Super Tuesday next week than she is in the fall, even if Trump is her opponent. Among other things, her private email server—which, to my mind, she has never adequately explained—is liable to keep coming up as an issue. Trump will go after the Clintons with everything he’s got, something he gave us a taste of recently when he trotted out victims of Bill’s sexual harassment.

In a Washington Post opinion piece, Harvard’s Danielle Allen came very close to comparing Trump to Hitler (personally, I think Berlusconi is a more apt analogy) and urged Republicans to stop Trump before Clinton is the only person left standing in his way. Allen wrote:

Republicans, you cannot count on the Democrats to stop Trump. I believe that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, and I intend to vote for her, but it is also the case that she is a candidate with significant weaknesses, as your party knows quite well. The result of a head-to-head contest between Clinton and Trump would be unpredictable.

Whether Clinton prevails over Trump will depend at least in part on the press doing its job. The false equivalence of trying to cover the campaign from the exact midpoint between Clinton’s moderate liberalism and Trump’s dark rantings is not what our democracy needs.

The media, which has done so much to enable Trump’s rise (as that noted critic Newt Gingrich pointed out Monday), must hold him accountable for his ugly anti-American rhetoric, a business record rooted in “good old-fashioned bullying,” and his utter lack of relevant experience to be president.

If nothing else, it’s been an interesting campaign. That’s not necessarily a good thing.

New Hampshire may fuel media talk of Bloomberg, Biden

Michael Bloomberg in 2010 with possible future running mate. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Michael Bloomberg in 2010 with possible future running mate. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

It’s a little after 11 p.m. With the all-important question of whether Jeb Bush will finish third or fourth in New Hampshire still unanswered, allow me to anticipate two names we’re going to be hearing in the days ahead: Michael Bloomberg. And Joe Biden.

In fact, it’s already started. And the results of the first-in-the-nation primary guarantee that it’s only going to intensify.

Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, is the more plausible of the two names given that he’s letting it be known he’s considering an independent run. The New Hampshire results make it more likely, not less, that he’ll keep gearing up for a possible campaign.

Consider what the Democrats did to themselves. Everyone was expecting Bernie Sanders to beat Hillary Clinton. But he handed her such an unexpectedly crushing defeat that she can’t help but emerge as a damaged candidate. She’s still likely to win the nomination as the campaign moves on to states with substantial African-American populations. But she’s looking more vulnerable than ever in November, provided the Republicans manage to choose a nominee who is recognizably of the human species.

Oops. Donald Trump also won big tonight. Although he fell considerably short of a majority, he got about 35 percent of the vote, far ahead of second-place finisher John Kasich. The Iowa winner, Ted Cruz, an extremist much loathed within his own party, was running third, just ahead of Bush. Marco Rubio, who seemed to be emerging as a contender until his circuit board malfunctioned at last Saturday’s debate, faded to fifth.

So the Democrats are stuck with a diminished Hillary Clinton or, less likely, a 74-year-old left-winger who—if conventional wisdom means anything at all anymore—probably could not win a general election. And Trump, detested by a majority of the public, may be on a glide path to the Republican nomination.

Of course, the conventional wisdom also holds that an independent can’t be elected president. But if the Democrats and the Republicans both nominate candidates who are unacceptable to the broad middle of the electorate that decides elections (and yes, I realize that the broad middle is a lot smaller than it used to be), then surely there is an opening for someone like Bloomberg, a moderate with a reputation for competence. Yes, he’s dour, uncharismatic, and has a well-deserved reputation for nanny-statism. But it’s precisely those non-scary qualities that could make him a viable alternative.

And the media are stoking a Bloomberg run. The veteran media critic Jack Shafer wrote for Politico earlier today that “as Bloomberg works his way through the editorial food chain and breaks through the primary election news, I’m certain reporters will be setting themselves on fire to convince their editors to assign them to Bloomberg.”

Count me as someone who thinks Bloomberg might actually be able to defeat Sanders and Trump, if that’s what it comes to.

Which brings me to a Biden candidacy, a far less likely possibility. Unlike Bloomberg, Biden has declared pretty definitively that he wouldn’t enter the race. It’s also too late logistically for him to enter the Democratic primaries.

But Biden would make some theoretical sense if the race between Clinton and Sanders ends in a muddle, or if the email controversy in which Clinton is embroiled leads to legal trouble. In either case, so this line of thinking goes, the Democratic National Convention might turn to a respected non-candidate like Biden as the nominee.

Is this going to happen? Almost certainly not. A brokered convention is a quadrennial fantasy, but it is almost impossible under the modern primary system. Still, if you search Google News for “Biden 2016,” you’ll find that plenty of people are giving the idea some thought.

For my purposes, what matters isn’t what is going to happen. Rather, it’s what you’ll be hearing from the media as the two major parties, suffering from self-inflicted wounds, limp ahead. New Hampshire not only didn’t settle anything. It left us with a race that won’t be settled for some weeks to come.

Post-debate media mockery may doom Rubio’s campaign

Photo of Rubio in Londonderry, New Hampshire (cc) 2015 by Marc Nozell
Rubio in Londonderry, New Hampshire, last August. Photo (cc) 2015 by Marc Nozell

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

I come today not to bury Marco Rubio, but to take pulse of the media landscape to determine whether the pundits are going to bury him. And the answer is yes. Yes they are.

The establishment choice for the Republican nomination, bolstered by a better-than-expected performance in the Iowa caucuses last Monday, ran into a wrecking ball named Chris Christie at Saturday night’s presidential debate. Judging from the media reaction, Rubio’s status as a serious candidate may effectively be over.

It started even before the debate ended, when the venerable journalist James Fallows of The Atlantic took to Twitter and called Rubio’s meltdown the “most self-destructive debate performance since Quayle ’88 and Stockdale ’92.”

https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/696176435854229504?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

It continued on CNN, where conservative commentator Matt Lewis called Chris Christie’s devastatingly effective takedown of Rubio “a murder-suicide.”

And it carried over to Talking Points Memo, with liberal analyst Josh Marshall opining that Rubio’s “flailing will be a key subject of discussion for the next two days. And that’s a terrible way to close. It’s hard to overcome an echo chamber effect in a febrile news environment over 48 hours.”

In case you missed it (and if you had something better to do on a Saturday night, I salute you), Christie went into full New Jersey bully mode and mocked Rubio’s inexperience, sneering that Rubio was unable to speak in anything other than “a memorized 25-second speech.”

Rubio got flustered, challenged Christie to little effect—and then, incredibly, came back with one of his memorized lines not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times. To wit: “This notion that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing is just not true. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

The lead debate stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and, I’m sure, numerous other papers this morning referred prominently to Rubio’s self-destruction. Worse, the Florida senator became a viral sensation—and not in a good way.

A parody Twitter account, @RubioGlitch, made its debut, with each tweet ending, “He knows exactly what he’s doing.” On both sides of the Atlantic, commentators compared Rubio’s performance to a famous scene from The Stepford Wives. “Like Paula Prentiss, he got stuck in malfunction mode,” wrote my Northeastern colleague Alan Schroeder, a presidential debate historian, at The Huffington Post.Added Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian: “It looked like that sequence from the 1970s thriller The Stepford Wives, when a software glitch reveals that a human-like character is in fact a robot.”

Several commentators have pointed out that the Rubio-Christie exchange came early, and that Rubio regained his composure after that. But ABC inflicted three hours of debate-related TV on us (the actual debate was closer to two and a half hours), and I’ve got to believe that the first hour drew by far the most viewers. Besides, whatever lasting impressions people form will come from after-the-fact media coverage.

The one note of caution I could find was from Nate Silver of Five Thirty Eight, who wrote that, bad as Rubio looked, voters may not agree with the pundits:

Political reporters are in the “fog of war” phase of the campaign where our reactions aren’t necessarily good matches for those of voters at home. Some of the reason we reporters thought Rubio’s answer was so awful is because it confirmed some of our gossip about Rubio, namely that he tends to give pat, repetitive answers. But we tend to be more sensitive about that stuff, because we watch every debate from start to finish, and then we see lots of the candidates’ stump speeches and town halls on top of it. There’s a fine line between a candidate who seems stilted and repetitive and one who seems “on message” instead.

Rubio was by far the biggest story coming out of Saturday’s debate, but there were other stories as well. John Kasich turned in a fine performance, and for once post-debate commentary was swinging his way. He was ebullient during a CNN interview in the spin room. (Of course, he’s always ebullient.)

As conservative as Kasich is, the Republican Party has moved so far to the right that he is regularly dismissed as a RINO (a Republican in Name Only). But Kasich may be perfectly positioned to do well in New Hampshire, as independents who are turned off by Hillary Clinton and wary of Bernie Sanders may choose a Republican ballot instead. It’s hard to see Kasich doing well after New Hampshire, but Tuesday could be a good day for him.

I’ve made it to the 750th word of this piece without mentioning Donald Trump, the frontrunner. I thought he got away unscathed. Yes, I’m appalled at his full-throated endorsement of torture (“I would bring back waterboarding and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”), and I’m even more appalled that no one seemed to care. But the other candidates, other than Jeb Bush, didn’t challenge him all that much.

And when Bush went after Trump on eminent domain, Bush won on substance but Trump won on style, attacking the “donors and special interests” he claimed had packed the debate hall and were booing him. “The move was classic pro-wrestling—like Vince McMahon baiting the crowd,” said Jonathan Last of The Weekly Standard. “And it was so crazy that it kind of worked.”

As for Ted Cruz, he may have won Iowa, but it seems unlikely that he’ll do as well with New Hampshire voters, who have not been kind to evangelical candidates in the past. In response to the dirty tricks his campaign engaged in to sway Ben Carson’s supporters in Iowa, Cruz has settled on a characteristically cynical tactic: apologize for his campaign’s claims that Carson was dropping out of the race while claiming that they really believed it to be true. Cruz had to misrepresent CNN’s reporting in order to pull it off, but whatever.

The downfall of Marco Rubio is what we’ll be talking about this week. A candidate can survive many things, but mockery is not one of them. The next few days are going to be telling, but I really think it may be over for him. Which means that what’s left of the Republican establishment is going to have to come up with another alternative lest it get stuck with Trump or Cruz.

I recently predicted that Bush would win the nomination based on nothing other than the process of elimination. On Saturday, Rubio may have gotten himself eliminated.