US Elections

The Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right over the past generation, and these recent primary battles have only accelerated that process. When Maine’s moderate Republican Olympia Snowe announced her retirement earlier this year, it signalled the collapse of the GOP’s already-tiny moderate wing. What’s alarming about the Lugar loss is that Lugar isn’t even a moderate! He’s a conservative Republican whose heresies involve a) allowing Barack Obama to move forward with Supreme Court nominations and b) agreeing with the president that we should secure and scale back nuclear stockpiles across the globe. But his willingness to work with the Democrats on anything has made him persona non grata in today’s Republican Party.

As columnist David Brooks put it a few months ago: “First they went after the Rockefeller Republicans, but I was not a Rockefeller Republican. Then they went after the compassionate conservatives, but I was not a compassionate conservative. Then they went after the mainstream conservatives, and there was no one left to speak for me.”

You told me that conservative media outlets like National Review supported the Mourdock campaign. Where does the right wing media’s allegiance lie?

In this case, right-wing media have spoken in almost one voice in support of Mourdock. There are some outliers: George Will, Peggy Noonan, David Brooks — all conservative columnists who struggled with the McCain ticket once he brought Sarah Palin on board in 2008. But this was a safe race for a magazine like National Review to come out for the more conservative, insurgent candidate. Remember, National Review lost some credibility with the base when it threw its support behind the more moderate Mitt Romney well in advance of the first 2012 primary, while there were still a number of conservative candidates in the field. Suddenly many on the right were dismissing National Review as the establishment, as fundamentally unconservative. This was a chance for the magazine to reclaim its bona fides, to stand up against an aging establishment candidate in favour of an outsider.

Some Democrats hope Lugar’s loss will give them an opportunity to pick up an unlikely victory, as they did in Delaware in 2010 after Christine O’Donnell beat Representative Mike Castle for the GOP nomination. Is this wishful thinking, or have Indiana Republicans genuinely endangered the party’s chance of hanging on to the seat?

Mourdock isn’t like the insurgents we saw in 2010 in states like Delaware and Nevada, where political neophytes knocked out incumbents in the primaries, then bungled their way to losses in the general election. Mourdock doesn’t often wander into absurdity like the 2010 candidates did. (He won’t, for instance, have to make a campaign ad professing “I am not a witch.”) That said, Lugar was well-respected in Indiana by both Republicans and Democrats, and would have easily won re-election in November. Mourdock doesn’t have the same name-recognition or cross-party appeal. And moderate Democrats like Joe Donnelly, who Mourdock will face in the general, have had some success in Indiana. Still, all things being equal, it would have to be a very good year for Democrats for Mourdock to lose in November.

When Democrats defeated Senator Joe Lieberman in a primary in 2006, Lieberman ran as an independent and won. Can Dick Lugar do this in Indiana? Is he likely to?

If Lugar were to run as an independent, he could very well win. Hoosiers like him, and he would draw enough votes from both parties to make a strong showing. That said, he won’t run. He’s getting up there in years and while the primary loss both nettled and embarrassed him, I’m not sure he has the fight in him to go it alone. As exciting as a three-way race would be (remember Crist and Rubio and Meek all duking it out for the Florida senate seat in 2010?), this fall it will be a head-to-head match-up between Mourdock and Donnelly, and Indiana will be seating a brand-new senator.

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In actuality, however, Politifact seems to have been trying to do exactly what the New York Times's Public Editor was asking whether journalists should do: police truth. The problem is twofold: yes, Politifact is doing an increasingly poor job of policing truth, but truth is never the cut-and-dried thing we imagine it to be. Fact-checking websites try to claim credibility by setting themselves up as impartial observers, but in politics, there are so many shades of grey that even a disinterested fact checker should be assumed to be just one more voice in the fray — potentially a highly credible voice, but certainly no kind of godlike figure.

This is a point Kevin Drum recently made:  

There are, among lefties, a smallish number of issues where we believe that conservatives routinely peddle flagrant factual falsehoods that ought to be refuted immediately. Climate change is the obvious one, and there are a few others. But the truth is that misstatements of plain facts are fairly rare. That's just not how most political debate works. I think that federal stimulus would be good for the economy. Republicans claim otherwise. Is this a fact? No: it's an argument. That kind of thing makes up about 99 percent of all political discourse. It's just not fact-checkable in the usual sense.

See also Communication Studies professor Matthew McGlone telling the New York Times that politicians get away with lying because truth is difficult to define:

Despite centuries of scholarly inquiry into the enigmatic nature of “truth,” in most cultures a simplistic notion of a dichotomy persists: statements are either true or not, and speakers who knowingly produce the former are being honest and those who knowingly produce the latter are lying. There are situations in which this formulation works, but countless more in which we pretend the line is clear — even when we know otherwise.

In particular, we know that many political messages are passed off as truths, although a little inspection reveals the statements have only some degree of truth. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed that “all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.”

This is the unsolvable problem of political media: we long for someone to hold disingenuous politicians to account, but cannot accept that doing so requires a definition of truth that doesn't exist. Of course, the alternative, in which partisans flee to figures who repeat their preferred definition of truth as if it were gospel is not particularly desirable either. 

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Ms Guertin, 66, a retired postal worker, remembers Ms Dunham as ''quite charming'' but says she did not really get to know her.

Ah. But can the Herald wring anything more from this stillborn story?

She remembers she had plans to travel to Australia and speculated it was for more than a holiday, given her degree.

''So she probably wanted to go work on a dig or study there. She would be interested in the Aborigines, I'm sure.''

Probably. I'm sure.

In fact, apart from a clarification that the reported conversation occured as the White Australia policy was being dismantled, Nicholls doesn't even delve into the most interesting part of the story: Whether, within many Australians' living memory, a white American woman would have had trouble getting an Australian visa if she an African American child.

The shoddiness is a shame, because the same edition of the Herald had a smart preview of the 2012 election — now fewer than 365 days away. 

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I expect also that we'll hear more about the "special relationship" over the next week and a half, and with no mention that the phrase was coined by Winston Churchill to describe the United Kingdom's feelings about the US. Browse the archives of the New York Times for the term, and you'll find a raft of references to Great Britain and occasional attempts to reconfigure it to the US's attitude to Germany, India, Israel, or France. Here, in an opinion piece by Philip Bowring, is one of the rare occasions on which the term is used in reference to Australia:

It is easy enough to understand why President George W. Bush wanted war with Iraq, whether or not it will harm broader U.S. interests. But what is it that has made Britain and Australia so keen to sign up for an uncertain agenda of "regime change" that may remake the map of the Middle East?

Both countries have long labored under the belief that they have a special relationship with the United States, although that has seldom been reciprocated.

In an earlier article, the same author used the phrase in regard to the US's view on China.

Of course, Australia and the United States have a valuable and fruitful alliance, underpinned by the ANZUS treaty. But Australians should not mistake it for more than it is, and not misunderstand the flattering comments of visiting leaders or dignitaries as evidence of anything unique.

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The ombudsmen, Patrick B. Pexton, is not being cute with these coy allusions. In fact, compared to usual American practice, he's being rather bold. I've too often struggled to read through the lines when a a reporter announces the scandalous conduct of some public figure who referred to someone else using "an offensive epithet." Well may I be used to the more rough-and-tumble standards of Australian journalism (I can think of just one expletive I've not seen in print in an Australian broadsheet), but for mine this is just bad reporting. Propriety be darned; the first thing I learned as a journalism undergrad was the worth of direct quotes, and I don't believe that advice should change just because the language is a bit salty. News organisations should communicate truth as simply as possible, and with as much detail as needed. And if they can't do that, they should at least learn the value of the censorious asterisk.

To be fair to the Post, Pexton lists two examples in which the paper did allow some nasty language to slip through:

Brauchli notes that, in a recent piece on the breakdown of comity in the D.C. City Council, two swear words were published because they were essential to the story, and that The Post published Vice President Cheney’s infamous epithet hurled at Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) in 2004. “But in truth,” Brauchli continued, “I’m not sure we couldn’t have conveyed even those episodes without printing the obscenities.” 

The linked examples uphold the strong tradition of American journalism. Too bad they're notable only as exceptions.

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That's the possibility that Murdoch scion James could face prosecution in the United States. The Sydney Morning Herald explains:

The US Foreign Corrupt Practices (FCP) Act makes it a crime for US companies to offer corrupt payments to foreign officials. If the allegations of payments to police officers totalling more than £100,000 ($149,000) are proven, Mr Murdoch might face a US prosecution and the News Corp empire might face a bill of more than $90 million.

Liberal activists in particular are eager to see the Justice Department investigate News. It would be in no one's interest to politicise a criminal investigation of this kind, but Murdoch and his news outlets have been a thorn in the side of the left for so long, I guess some folks get a touch overeager. Nonetheless, it would certainly be remarkable if the singular British media environment found itself entangled in wrongdoing so great that the US got caught up in the mess. This situation is one to keep an eye on.

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When ordinary citizens have a chance to pose questions to political leaders, they rarely ask about the game of politics. They want to know how the reality of politics will affect them — through taxes, programs, scholarship funds, wars. Journalists justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are the public's representatives, asking the questions their fellow citizens would ask if they had the privilege of meeting with Presidents and senators.

In fact they ask questions that only their fellow political professionals care about. And they often do so — as at the typical White House news conference — with a discourtesy and rancor that represent the public's views much less than they reflect the modern journalist's belief that being independent boils down to acting hostile.

I can understand why political journalists behave as they do. Political journalists, by definition, tend to be knowledgeable individuals who pay close attention to politics. Politicians tend to state their views on policy matters over and over again, and also tend to come from parties who, as internally varied as they may be, are organised on an ideological basis, and push policies consistent with that ideology. Journalists hear the same policies over and over again, and don't think they're discovering anything new by asking about them. Considering those policies are based on the broad ideological underpinning defining the politician's party, those journalists likely know why a politician favours a policy even if they don't ask. Further, journalists are ideologically neutral for a different reason to the public: journalists pursue neutrality for reasons of professionalism, while the ideologically neutral members of the public tend to be low-information voters. It makes sense that a low-information neutral voter would seek more policy information, but a highly informed neutral journalist would think that unimportant.

This is a mistake, of course. The political journalist's job is to help inform the public and help it hold the government accountable. That's why the First Amendment to the US consitution recognises freedom of the press as distinct from freedom of speech. If journalists are failing to find out the things the public wants to know from its representatives, it's failing at its job. The worst failure of this kind is when the presse engages in the recursive loop of navel-gazing, when it tries to discern — or even predict — how the media will respond to some superficial aspect of a political event, as if their response were not part of the very response they are discussing. The New York Times article I linked to at the top of this post apparently considered the main point of Obama's Town Hall to not be the answers he gave, but the length of them. "It took a while," snarked the writer, Michael D. Shear, on the president's answer to a question about the debt ceiling, as if more information was somehow undesirable.

I'm a politics geek, so I like the horse race stuff. There is a place for that kind of thing in journalism, but it should be on politics-focused blogs, and as an analytical supplement to bread-and-butter issues voters want to know about. It should not be the primary focus for political reporting. I will, however, make one defence of the journalistic obsession with process.

In 1994, when President Richard Nixon died, the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson wrote an obituary for the president in Rolling Stone. In it, he said:

It was the built-in blind spots of the objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Lord knows Thompson should never be held up as a model for political journalism, as great a writer as he was. And as far as political devious goes, Nixon was worse than most. But Thompson has a point. Politicians know how to get out of answering the kind of fact-based questions the public wants answers to. Ask the Republicans or the Democrats about health care, and politicians from both parties will tell you they want to save Medicare, while their opponents want to destroy it. Some clever questioning and a lot of time will allow a good journalist to straighten out some of the spin, but most reporters aren't that clever, and nor do they have that much access. "Tough" questions end up being the faux-confrontational type Conor Friedersdorf criticises here.

The way reporters compensate for media-savvy politicians who have an interest in denying the public useful information is to get meta. Discuss the process, analyse the way rhetoric changes, debate ephemeral but out of the ordinary events. If you spend enough time watching a game, you begin to understand why the players do the things they do, even if they would deny it.

The problem is that political journalists forget the point of going meta. I'm all in favour of pointing out that politicians from a certain party have changed their rhetoric on an issue, but only if you subsequently explain how that affects the stance on an issue. Horse-race coverage is a tool, not a means to an end. Treating process analysis as an endpoint in itself isn't political journalism, it's just bad journalism.

(And, yes, like most efforts at media analysis, this is a hypocritical post. I'm analysing the media reaction to an event rather than the event itself. In my defence, i'm not a part of the White House press pool. Analysis is my job.)

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It's also a celebration of the way Politico has shaken up American political reporting, though even this has its detractors. Matt Yglesias critiques the Allen model as valuing short-term scoops over in depth reporting (Ian Shapira does likewise), while the White House, according to the Times, sees Politico as "shorthand for everything the administration claims to dislike about Washington — Beltway myopia, politics as daily sport."

But while everyone claims to despise the "horse race" nature of American political coverage, which treats government as a battle of opposing interests rather than the pursuit of policy, D.C. essentially demands it be covered in this way. The Times goes on:

 Yet most of the president’s top aides are as steeped in this culture as anyone else — and work hard to manipulate it. “What’s notable about this administration is how ostentatiously its people proclaim to be uninterested in things they are plainly interested in,” Harris, Politico’s editor in chief, told me in an e-mail message.

Folks mightn't like it, but often politics is a horse race, and its little surprise that the media outlets willing to be racetrack callers end up doing well.

And as for D.C.? Well, as I've alluded to before, it's important to remember that it isn't only a political town, but that doesn't mean it isn't apolitical town, one that delights in receiving updates as to which couple the rest of us have never heard of has just had a baby. And though I was only a part of this specific aspect of the town long enough to at best be considered on its periphery, I did delight in one example the Allen article claimed was an example of Politico's obsession with minutiae:

Politico’s comprehensive aims can make it goofy and unapologetically trivial at times. A recent item by a Congressional blogger for the site consisted of the following: “Lights are out throughout much of the Longworth House Office Building, a denizen tells me. UPDATE: They are back on.”

The lights at Longworth were off? What was the story behind that? Many of the Congressional officers are there, and I had friends who worked there. This was big news, as far as I was concerned.

And that's the nature of D.C. It's the kind of place where you can report that a building has temporarily gone dark, and some people will be interested. Multiply that by scores of little tidbits a day, and you see why Politico is such a success and why Playbook is being written up in the Times. It's a small, small town.

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But the rest of the media shouldn't have the luxury of conducting long-term thought experiments that a blog specifically devoted to the business of political prediction does, and yet somehow newspapers and TV programs across America are wasting their time speculating on an election that won't be held until after the next summer Olympics. Do you remember the last Olympics? They were pretty recent!

I'm going to look pretty foolish if the USSC announces tomorrow the launch of Election Watch 2012, but I don't think we're going to get quite so ahead of ourselves as folks like, say, former G.W. Bush-strategist Matthew Dowd, who argues at the Washington Post that Palin has a shot at making Obama a one-termer. He's not alone; Kevin Drum is considering how seriously Democrats should take Palin as a threat, David Greenberg at Slate feels confident enough to declare her out of contention, while Gideon Rachman was prepared to declare, way back in July, that she was in with a shot. A trailblazing Newt Gingrich was saying the same back in February, not even two weeks after Obama was inaugurated!

As the Columbia Journalism Review says, the American media have a Palin-for-President Fixation. And even if the speculation were confined to the fate of Alaska's favourite daughter, I might be OK with it. Palin makes for a good story after all; people have strong opinions about her, she's just released a controversial book that's re-ignited old arguments within her party, and the prospect of her running for Presidency is, depending on your point-of-view, a disaster or a dream-come-true. If you run a story speculating about Palin for President, some of your readers think it's a fairytale, while the rest picture something along the lines of, well, 2012.

But Palin isn't the only name being mentioned. Bobby Jindal was declared in, and then out, of contention way back in February when he gave his response to the State of the Union address. There were mutters about John Ensign back in June, until he was revealed to be messing around outside his marriage... uh... also in June. Jon Hunstman was talked about until, last May, Obama appointed him the U.S. Ambassador to China. The Huffington Post speculates about Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Mike Huckabee, as if it were 2008 all over again, and Newt Gingrich, as if they'd woken up in the '90s.

As the Washington Post said back in June: "The list of prospective Republican candidates is lengthy and lacks an obvious front-runner." Perhaps that's because another three Christmases will pass before voting in the primary even begins. Yes, running a Presidential campaign is a lengthy process, and potential contenders will already be examining their chances. But no one has any idea how popular Obama will be in 2012, no one has any idea what major, paradigm-shifting events will occur between now and then, and no one has any idea what issues will be uppermost in voters' minds. Remember, we're talking about a time so far into the future that, unless European law changes, the Beatles' first album will be deemed old enough to no longer be protected under copyright. It's not quite flying cars and laser guns, but that sounds pretty futuristic to me. One year ago, the U.S. President was still George W. Bush, and while fingering rising talent is a worthy exercise, trying to predict an election not due to be held for another three years is pretty silly.

How silly? Well, outlets like Politico and the New York Times are reporting that Lou Dobbs is a possible Presidential contender. How silly? Lou Dobbs silly.

Lou Dobbs, should you not know, is the ex-CNN anchorman who quit because the station wanted him to tone down his inflammatory anti-immigration rhetoric and present objective news reports. He has a disturbing amount of sympathy for the nutty conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the U.S. and he falsely accused illegal immigrants of an outbreak of leprosy that didn't exist and reported grossly inflated figures for the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. prison system. He's loathed by Hispanics and his angry rants are exactly the sort of rancorous discourse that turns off independent voters. And respectable news outlets are reporting him as a possible Presidential contender - though they're unsure whether he'd run as a Republican or an independent. 

They're also reporting he may challenge New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, the only Hispanic in the U.S. Senate, in 2012. This is slightly more likely, true, but still far-fetched. New Jersey is a blue state with a large Hispanic population that is unlikely to have much time for an anti-immigration zealot like Dobbs. But suppose for a moment we play the game. Could Lou Dobbs be a Senator, or the next American President?

I'll defer to the line Dowd uses for Palin:

I agree that her success is not probable - it is definitely a possibility that Palin could be elected president of the United States.

Yep, Dobbs, like Palin, is constitutionally qualified to be President. They are both natural born citizens over the age of 35. And if this is the benchmark for speculation, there are millions of Americans who probably won't be but possibly could be elected President. Let's throw some names out at random: Jerry Seinfeld! Brett Favre! Richard Heene, the father of Balloon Boy! I'd call Paris Hilton a good addition to the field, considering she has form, but she won't be old enough in 2012, so we can safely scratch her off the list.

Or maybe the media should settle down and leave this kind of wild speculation until at least after the mid-terms. Keep an eye on the latest developments in health care, climate change, financial reform, and economic recovery. Or maybe, instead of being concerned about whether Sarah Palin will run in 2012, listen to what's troubling the people who are buying her book and turning out to her events. They're saying some interesting things, and, unlike the media, they're saying those interesting things about the current President.

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