US Elections

• A trailer for the Sarah Palin documentary The Undefeated is out. The movie will open in American theatres on July 15.

• David G. Savage of the Los Angeles Times profiles Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas:

And [Thomas's] most provocative opinions have been solo dissents. Among them, he has declared that the Constitution gives states a right to establish an official religion. Prisoners, he wrote, have no constitutional right to be protected from beatings by guards. Teenagers and students have no free-speech rights at all, he said in an opinion Monday, because in the 18th century, when the Constitution was written, parents had "absolute authority" over their children.

• Can you balance the budget for Wilmington, NC? Pick which services to cut and which to save and try to close a $7 million hole. Fun for the whole family!

• Mike Barthel criticises the rhetoric used to talk about budgets:

Unless we’re willing to be honest about the political motivations driving different sides in this debate, we’re never going to get anywhere. “Real” conservatives don’t want to find a way to balance the budget while keeping services at a steady level; they want to cut everything, including services. And that’s fine! But it’s not a worried husband pacing the floor at night, trying to figure out how to pay his bills. It’s an angry old man canceling cable, internet, water, and power because he thinks he can live off the grid.

• Tim Pawlenty reveals his favourite Lady Gaga song. 

• Will Wilkinson praises the less-celebrated founders who fought to eradicate slavery, like John Jay and Governeur Morris:

The really odd thing about this is that she is not altogether wrong, but she can't seem to get the right part right. Plenty of founders did fight hard to end slavery, but Ms Bachmann doesn't seem to know who they were. Part of the problem may be that conservatives' favourite founders, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, held large numbers of human beings as slaves and did less than a lot about it. The really good guys on the slavery issue—which is to say on the human freedom issue—were not the Virginia plantation masters but the less-venerated "big government" Yankee founders who sped the abolition of slavery in the north.

• Alexander Heffner says Washington should erect a memorial for John Adams:

Where is John Adams, our feisty second president and lifelong American patriot? If George Washington was the sword of the revolution and Thomas Jefferson the pen, why have we neglected the voice of our nation’s independence?

• Jonathan Bernstein says the Constitution can't be blamed for pushing the GOP to extremes:

It is true that House Republicans can risk crashing the economy through a debt limit crisis, or by fighting for an economy-crippling austerity program, secure in the knowledge that Obama would probably pay the price is the economy tanks. But I think the evidence is strong that what's driving Republicans on these policies is that they either truly believe in them (and don't forget, the Conservative Party in Britain is pursuing austerity), or that they are frightened of primary voters and organized groups within the party who really believe in them. In other words, I strongly suspect that President Bachmann, Speaker Ryan and Majority Leader Paul might well be implementing the same policies they're advocating today.

• Song of the week is by former teen R&B star JoJo, who returns all grown up with a remix of Drake's "Marvin's Room." Probably my favourite song of 2011 thus far.

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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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So many presidents have tried.  Johnson was the last to succeed, but since, it's been failure after failure.  Ford, Nixon, Carter, Clinton- all tried, all failed.  Certainly, the Bush administration passed Medicare Part D (which deserves countless posts on its own), but comprehensive health care reform hasn't happened in the last 40 years.

It was remarkably fun to follow the action live: watching the debate, and reading the responses people around the United States, and around the world, were having to the occasion.  Twitter went crazy, with comments from people on both sides of the aisle.  #HCR, the official health care reform hash tag, was one of the most popular topics of the day.

In the cacophony of voices discussing the bill, some stood out.  Pundits who knew the legislation inside and out were able to offer expert commentary, explaining developments as the debate progressed.  Personally, reading the insights of noted health care reform bloggers like Jon Cohn of The New Republic and Ezra Klein of the Washington Post was invaluable.  They made the experience both more understandable, and more enjoyable.

Plus some of the snarky comments were just plain funny.

It was a communal experience.  Across the globe, we were able to witness the debate, then the vote, and participate in a conversation about it.  We could share our thoughts, excitement, outrage, concerns.  When the final vote was cast, some of the Americans I follow on Twitter spoke of toasting with their drinks, late on a Saturday night.  I toasted with my early-afternoon coffee.

It was an historic day, not merely because this was the first major health care reform to pass in 40 years, but also because we could experience it in new, digital ways.

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