Blah blah blah

Reading The Washington Post op-eds today is like wading into an alternative universe. Aside from the always conscientious E.J. Dionne Jr. and Harold Meyerson, both of whom attempt to dig beneath what have become the cliched and conventional narratives being offered by TV talking heads, the colmnists offering analysis of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary show little imagination — and even less interest in the fact that the campaign is not a horserace.

David Broder, for instance, often called the dean of Washington columnists (but who might be better referred to as the dean of conventional blathering), offers this bit of nonsense:

The lesson of New Hampshire can be summarized in two simple words: Character counts.

He then goes on to describe the New Hampshire contest as if it were the late innings of a playoff baseball game, Hillary Clinton and John McCain playing the roles of clutch hitters like Kirk Gibson and Derek Jeter.

Then there is this bit of empty bloviation from Robert Novak:
Had the turnout of women there, which constituted an unprecedented 57 percent of the Democratic vote, been plugged in to exit results, a two-percentage-point Clinton victory would have been forecast. The unexpected female support in turn can be attributed to the Clinton style, which may not be pretty but is effective. Hillary Clinton‘s tears evoked sympathy for her, and Bill Clinton‘s sneers generated contempt for Obama.

Novak can’t resist going to the standard anti-Hillary well — “only the naive can believe Clinton was not artfully playing for sympathy from her sisters” when she teared up on Monday, he writes — as he tries to use the Clinton win as an excuse to prop up McCain’s candidacy. McCain, he says, maybe best “equipped to withstand the battering he would receive from the Clintons and to respond in kind.”

Novak’s lesson?

The lesson of New Hampshire for Obama’s campaign should be that rock-star popularity is not sufficient to take on the Clintons, who for a decade have given no quarter to their political foes. When it seemed that Obama would win in New Hampshire, the Clinton camp prepared an attack strategy against him. Since Obama is favored in the next big primary test, in South Carolina on Jan. 26, he can expect more of the same ahead.

This, of course, qualifies as a “no-duh.” The Clintons will go on the attack? Brilliant observation — isn’t that the normal course of politics, for the perceived underdog to try and tear down the frontrunner? Hasn’t this been the approach used in American politics since the advent of polling?

Richard Cohen is convinced that it was the tear, and Barack Obama’s supposedly snarky response during Saturdays Democratic debate — what he calls “patronizing dismissal of Clinton” (it came during an exchange over likeability — a question that, given Bush’s likeability during 2000, should have been consigned to the scrap heap).

George Will plays Capt. Obvious in his column, reminding us that it is a marathon and that a marathon is a good thing.

A marathon would reveal almost everything relevant about the candidates. If, afterward, either party suffers buyers’ remorse, the buyers will have no one to blame.

This would be true, of course, if people like Will, Cohen, Novak and Broder wrote about the important stuff. Alas, given teh sorry state of presidential press coverage, the buyers — meaning you and I — are on their own.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Whither Iraq? The missing issueis the 800-pound gorilla

The biggest issue facing the nation right now is Iraq, plain and simple. The simmering war continues to cost us lives and money, continues to kill Iraqis and continues to erode our credibility in the Muslim world.

It makes it nearly impossible to deal with Iran or the crisis in Pakistan. And it is bankrupting the budget, making it difficult to meet other priorities.

And yet, the chattering class has consigned Iraq to the second tier — at best.

But, as Tom Hayden points out, “the number of Iraqis in prison doubled in 2007, the number of US air strikes increased seven-fold, and the segregation of Iraqis into sectarian fiefs increased” and the “number of Americans killed last year was nearly 1,000, but that news went largely unreported.”

“Someone needs to restore Iraq to the center of the Democratic debate,” he writes, rather than leaving it up to prowar Republicans to bring it back to the table on their terms.

As I wrote nearly one year ago, the military surge in Iraq would bolster the possibilities of a McCain (and Joe Lieberman) ticket in 2008; and it has. Gen. Petraeus has succeeded in his strategic goal of “setting back the clock” in Washington and buying time for the US occupation to survive the political debates of 2008.

If Obama wants to win, he needs to sharpen his differences with Clinton immediately, going beyond style to substance, especially on Iraq. He needs to point out the differences that everyone in the political and media worlds, and therefore the voters, are missing. Under the five-year Clinton plan, while the good news is that US combat troops would be withdrawn gradually, tens of thousands of “advisers” and counter-terrorism forces would stay in Iraq to fight a counterinsurgency war like Central America in the 1970s. That is a plan to lessen American casualties and wind down the war on television, while still authorizing a nasty low-visibility one. It is impossible to criticize the CIA’s secret torture methods and turn a blind eye to what happens every day in Iraq’s detention centers complete with their US trainers and funding. With the Clinton plan, American advisers and special forces are likely to be filling those detention centers through 2013. As one expert says, “Detain thousands more Iraqis as security threats, and the potential for violence inevitably declines.”

Obama could, if he wished, say that a plan to have Americans fighting in Iraq through the next President’s first term is not a peace plan but a five-year war plan filled with risk for American soldiers. He could make the comparisons to Central America. He could point out the impossibility of funding Iraq, Afghanistan and national health care.

The argument could be a winner, tying together all the issues that Americans have told pollsters they care about while undercutting the foolish arguments being offered by Mitt Romney, John McCain and the rest of the crew.

And, perhaps most importantly, it would keep the pressure on policy makers to actually end the deadly debacle.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Journalism is brokenand Washington is to blame

Glenn Greenwald skewers a Washington press corps that has, through its superficial coverage and attention to the unimportant and the horse-race aspect of campaigning, helped deform our political culture. As Greenwald points out, media celebrities like the ridiculous Chris Matthews are uninterested in the things that average voters care about, the issues that affect us on a day-to-day basis.

The very idea of discussing issues, examining the candidates’ positions, or even analyzing voter preferences does not and cannot even occur to Chris Matthews. That — the most elementary nuts and bolts of standard, healthy journalism — is way, way beyond the scope of what our media stars are able to do or want to do.

Instead, as anyone who has watched the painfully empty coverage of this seemingly endless campaign season knows, we get sports analogies and poll numbers. Is Hillary winning? Where does John McCain stand in the polls in relation to Mike Huckabee? These are the questions that obsess people like Joe Scarborough and Matthews. Not whether the candidates’ health care plans will extend coverage or their foreign policy will tamp down tensions around the world. To the extent that questions of policy do come up, they are addressed through the prism of polling and the horse race — an approach that leaves the voter in the dark.

I won’t pretend that I don’t enjoy the horse race — it does have its place in the larger scheme of coverage — a small place, so long as it is connected to some legitimate analysis of why candidates seem to be doing well in the polls. What are the issues to which voters are responding? What part of a candidate’s message is working and why?

But that’s not what we’re getting. What we are getting, as Greenwald points out, is bad journalism:

The endless attempts to predict the future and thus determine the outcome of the elections — to the exclusion of anything meaningful — is a completely inappropriate role for journalists to play, independent of the fact that they are chronically wrong, ill-informed, and humiliated when they do it. It would all be just as inappropriate and corrupt even if they knew what they were talking about, even if they were able to convert their wishes into outcomes.

Part of the reason why the bigfoot media outlets do this is because it is a lot easier than plowing through hundreds of pages of policy proposals or sitting down with voters and actually finding out what they have to say. But that is what needs to be done. Voters need to know whether their choices will result in a prolonged war, the further distortion of the tax code or the further erosion of their constitutional rights.

Before anyone accuses me of tossing stones from a glass house, they should consider the way my papers have handled elections over the years. We only write about issues. I do enjoy the horse race, but only as a parlor game and not as the focus of coverage. I wish my colleagues at the larger outlets approached it the same way.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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