Via TAPPED, I find that the Columbia Journalism Review has started a blog of sorts called “Campaign Desk” to try to fact check some of the lies and misinformation that get into the bloodstream of the body politic during the campaign.
One of the minor rituals of American presidential politics is the post-election self-examination (or perhaps I should say self-flagellation) by the press. Quadrennially, we regret having pursued some lines of inquiry while ignoring others, or having gotten caught up in momentary feeding frenzies over unimportant things, or having been too susceptible to spin — and then we resolve to do a better job next time. But now we have a new tool. In 2004, the Web makes it possible to analyze and criticize press coverage in real time, so that suggestions for improved coverage might actually be heeded, and incorporated into campaign coverage, while the campaign is still under way.
Thanks to generous funding from foundations — mainly the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Revson Foundation, and the Open Society Institute — we have set up a campaign press criticism “war room” here at the Journalism School, with the beginnings of a full-time professional staff of seven that will monitor as much of the campaign coverage as possible, and write about it here. The managing editor of CampaignDesk.org, Steve Lovelady, is already on board, and he and Mike Hoyt, the editor of CJR, are well into the hiring process. Steve is a veteran journalist who earlier served as a deputy page-one editor at the Wall Street Journal; then, as part of Gene Roberts’s dream team at the Philadelphia Inquirer, helped supervise eleven Pulitzer Prize-winning works of journalism over twenty years; and, more recently, was an editor-at-large at Time Inc. Bryan Keefer, assistant managing editor, was one of the co-founders of the website Spinsanity.org. CampaignDesk.org will be updating the site several times daily, with particular emphasis on speed when the staff feels it can get inside the news cycle and try to improve coverage as it’s being formed.
They are already doing a fine job in my estimation. They’ve taken on the lazy lurid non-story of yesterday about Dean’s “trooper” beating his wife and have debunked today’s breathless Drudge exclusive in which he butchers Wes Clarks testimony before the televised House Armed Services Committee on Iraq.
The hope, I think, is that journalists will turn to this site to get information on the latest spin and misinformation so that they will not be reporting it blind. I have my doubts as to whether many of them give a damn, but there must be at least a few who didn’t become reporters purely for the social acceptance of their peers.
Likewise, might I hope that people do not spam this site with abusive e-mails when it doesn’t conform to their point of view? It seems like one place where we should try to make reasoned arguments and present evidence rather than vent our spleen. They might actually have an effect on the way the campaign is covered if it works and it would be helpful if it could be a flame-free zone.
Kleiman, Drum and Marshall have all weighed in on this strange column by Chris Suellentrop in Slate. According to Suellentrop he was making an ironic statement about how Fox news would treat Clark if they treated him the same way they treat Dean. Or something.
It seems that his technique needs some work because huge numbers of people wrote in to ask him what the hell he was talking about, since the headlines bear no relationship to what Clark actually said and his article is not written in such a way that anyone would assume that he is being ironic.
Sadly, his delightful little piece has made the rounds of the wing-nuts, who are irony impaired at the best of times, and they have now taken Suellentrop’s unamusing drivel as gospel. Kleiman points out in his post that Andrew Sullivan gleefully took the bait, but there are more. *sigh*
I have not complained about campaign tactics and wrung my hands about the unfairness of attacks and you won’t see me doing that in the primary. (I reserve my right to whine profusely in the general election.) However, I am going to complain about the press’ treatment of Clark all I want. I expect that the other candidates’ supporters will do the same for them.
For whatever reason, Suellentop decided to write an opaque little piece that was easily misinterpreted about Wesley Clark and which he clearly stated later was written in tongue in cheek fashion to show that Howard Dean has been getting unfair coverage. That doesn’t seem quite right to me. If I were a paranoid type I might even think that it’s downright biased.
It’s certainly fair for Suellentrop to write a piece about the unfair coverage he feels that Dean is getting, but it doesn’t quite add up to me that in order to do that he had to write a false and misleading “humor” piece about Clark that is now being widely circulated and is feeding a meme that will undoubtedly serve Dean, not by showing that he’s gotten unfair press coverage (perfectly legitimate complaint) but by circulating nasty innuendo about his rival. That is the sort of thing I expect from campaigns, not from journalists.
Here’s just a little taste of the fallout from Suellentrop’s ironic pratfall:
(Links not included. If you want to read the full-on wing nut reaction you can google it.)
Wes Clark – Foot in Mouth Disease From: Go Dubya! Tue, 13 Jan 2004 12:45:50 CST
Slate.com has a great collection of Wesley Clark’s ridiculous statements from the New Hampshire campaign trail. My favorite is: Young men in an Islamic culture cannot get married until they can support a family. No job, no marriage. No marriage,…
Wes Clark’s Big Mouth From: Deinonychus antirrhopus Tue, 13 Jan 2004 12:36:25 CST
Looks like Gen. Wesley Clark also has a tendency to open his mouth and insert foot. Does Islam need an…
Foot Planted Firmly In Mouth From: Internet Ronin Tue, 13 Jan 2004 11:51:41 CST
Wesley Clark has been saying some very interesting things in recent days. Chris Suellentrop has a round-up of the retired…
CHRIS SUELLENTROP writes in Slate that Wesley Clar From: Instapundit.com Tue, 13 Jan 2004 11:00:43 CST
CHRIS SUELLENTROP writes in Slate that Wesley Clark is saying some pretty odd things. The trouble with the Internet, where candidates are concerned, is that when they say odd things, word tends to get out. UPDATE: The Loonatic Left blog is defending…
WHOPPERS From: Pejmanesque Tue, 13 Jan 2004 10:07:51 CST
Chris Suellentrop has the goods on some pretty outrageous statements by Wesley Clark. For all the talk about Clark’s poise and command, he really is given to making some eye-rolling statements. Be sure to check out the article….
Five Items (1/13/04). From: Tasty Manatees Tue, 13 Jan 2004 06:32:33 CST
1. “Wesley Clark’s Loose Lips”. Oh, my. Here are six unbelievable quotes from Wesley Clark that pretty much settle the point I made earlier, which is that Clark is seriously not ready for prime time. Funny, but none of these gems have been getting play.
I realize that there can no longer be any form of political discourse that cannot fit on a bumper sticker, but this is really getting ridiculous.
Mark Kleiman sets the record straight on this nonsense today about Clark’s “inconsistencies” on the subject of whether Iraq and al Qaeda were “linked.”
But there is even more.
Clark is also on record as a military expert testifying about this very subject before the House and Senate Armed Services Committess, in full context, saying exactly what he claims to have said and believed at the very same time.
There has been no inconsistency. He said then that Saddam had no substantial ties to al Qaeda and that there was no evidence that he had been involved in 9/11. He did, however, say that it would not be unusual if there were some low level links between them.
SAXTON (R-NJ): Mr. Perle, General Clark indicated a few minutes ago that he wasn’t sure — I’m sorry, I don’t want to mischaracterize what General Clark said but something to the effect that we don’t have information that Al Qaida and the Iraqi regime are connected. Is that a fair characterization, General Clark?
CLARK: I’m saying there hasn’t been any substantiation of the linkage of the Iraqi regime to the events of 9/11 or the fact that they are giving weapons of mass destruction capability to Al Qaida, yes sir.
SAXTON: OK, now that has been a widely held view, at least in some quarters, and I suspect that one of the difficulties that we’ve had in addressing this subject comes because of the difficulty of collecting intelligence in that region of the world for all the reasons that we know.
However, yesterday the president’s national security adviser began to talk about this subject in a different light. She said we clearly know that there were in the past and have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and member of Al Qaida going back for a long time. We know too that several of the Al Qaida detainees, in particular some high-ranking detainees have said that Iraq provided some training to Al Qaida in chemical weapons development.
Now I suspect that it would be difficult for someone to say that if they didn’t have information to back it up and she also suggested that the details of the contacts would be released at a later to date and from my knowledge of intelligence work, which is sketchy, but from what I know it’s difficult sometimes to disclose details because you endanger sources.
And so, I think this is a subject that certainly there are beginning to be indications that there are — as a matter of fact, other bad guys have gone to Iraq. Abu Nidal died there recently, and when you couple all this with the notion that Saddam has been very determined to act out against his neighbors and the West and seems to stop at nothing, to draw the conclusion based on evidence that is beginning to emerge that there is no contact and no general theme of cooperation between Saddam and officials or the leadership of Al Qaida is a stretch, and I think a dangerous conclusion to come to. Richard Perle, would you give us your opinion?
PERLE: Yes, thank you, Mr. Saxton. I think you’ve identified an important issue and a serious problem. It is true that it is difficult to collect intelligence in these areas but the bigger problem in my view has been a stunning lack of competence among our own intelligence agencies. They’ve simply proved incompetent in this area and I’ve testified on this theme several times over the last ten or 15 years.
What we are now beginning to see is evidence that was there all along. It simply wasn’t properly assessed, and the reason why it wasn’t assessed in my view is that a point of view dominated the intelligence community, the CIA in particular and that point of view held that a secular Baathist regime like that of Saddam Hussein would not cooperate with religious fanatics like Al Qaida.
This was a theory. There was nothing to support it except the speculation of the intelligence officials who held that view, and as a result they simply didn’t look for evidence that there might be a connection. Now that we are aware of the strange ways in which terrorists cooperate all over the world, we’re beginning to find significant evidence.
There is no logical basis for the IRA cooperating with terrorists in Columbia and yet we’ve caught them red handed doing it. There’s a kind of professional trade craft involved in which people engaged in the business of terrorism work with one another for mutual convenience, sometimes for exchanges of money and the like.
So there is, in fact, evidence of relations between Saddam and Al Qaida and I believe that the more intensively we scrutinize databases of information available to us in the past, the more evidence of that we’re going to find.
CLARK: Representative Saxton, if I could just tag along on that. I think there’s no question that, even though we may not have the evidence as Richard says, that there have been such contacts. It’s normal. It’s natural. These are a lot of bad actors in the same region together. They are going to bump into each other. They are going to exchange information. They’re going to feel each other out and see whether there are opportunities to cooperate. That’s inevitable in this region, and I think it’s clear that regardless of whether or not such evidence is produced of these connections that Saddam Hussein is a threat.
So I think that, you know, the key issue is how we move from here and what do we need to do to deal with this threat? But I think what’s also clear is that the way you deal with the threat from Iraq is different than the way you deal with the threat from Al Qaida. And so, my contention has been we need to look at different means for dealing with these threats. We need to take advantage of all the resources at our disposal, not just the military.
If I could say with respect to the inspections issue, as well as the comments of my friend and colleague Richard Perle, I’m not either optimistic or pessimistic. I practiced weapons inspection. I’ve been involved in diplomacy at the United Nations, and I’ve been involved in setting up the plans for a number of post conflict situations, including Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo, so I’m only giving you the best judgment from my own perspective. I don’t label it. So, Richard, if I could just in a friendly way say if you won’t label me, I won’t label you.
You really need to read the whole transcript. You’ll be reminded just how certifiably insane Richard Perle and the GOP lackeys in congress were at the time. I think we’ve all blocked it from our memories. It was downright surreal.
Clark’s views are clear. He calls Saddam a threat, but not an imminent threat. He states that the most important thing is to get inspectors back into the country and gain the support of the international community. He rejects the notion of a preemption doctrine. He said that the use of force was to be used as diplomatic leverage, but thought that the president should be required to come back for final authority.
In both this and his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee at around the same time you see his unwillingness to jump on to what was becoming an unstoppable train. Senators, congressmen and Republican assholes of all stripes gave him tons of shit, but he kept right on saying what they didn’t want to hear.
It’s not quite as simple as “Let’s Kill The Bastards!” or “Hell No We Won’t Go” but it is the serious and thoughtful position of a man with a fine mind and years of experience who had great reservations about the way the administration was hurtling us into war. He deserves some credit for that. Indeed, one might even think that such complexity of thought would be a requirement in a president.
Jayzuz. Apparently, Kevin of Tooney Bin continues to get a ration of shit for posing a silly question to General Clark during our little wireside chat the other day. Frankly, I don’t know why he’s getting the brunt of it, because I did exactly the same thing he did, but was lucky enough to have a serious question posed as well as the light one.
We all submitted several questions. I submitted three, two of which were serious policy questions and one of which was a lighthearted personality type question about how many states he had lived in and which foreign countries he found most interesting. Kevin did the same thing. They used one of my serious questions (about electoral reform) and my silly one. In Kevin’s case they only used his silly one.
Here’s the deal. This was a chat with friendly or neutral political bloggers. It was not a Russertesque grilling situation. I am not unbiased nor do I pretend to be. I wanted to ask serious questions, but I also wanted to use my rather unique opportunity to help Clark’s candidacy if I got the chance.
People who read this blog know that I believe the electorate to be moved on an emotional basis as much as anything else. The vast majority of people vote because of party ID (even if they don’t know it.) But, those who don’t, and they are the ones who it’s necessary to win over, tend to vote based on their personal impression of the man. Therefore, I thought that asking a personal question might illuminate something of the man that such people might find appealing. In addition, supporters of a candidate are often interested in such little tid-bits of information and often turn them into rituals and iconic campaign symbols among the faithful. It’s a nice bonding thing.
I also wanted to bring up the fact that Clark had lived all over the United States in his years in the military, something I don’t think many people realize. It’s not a big thing, but it’s a detail that sets him apart and perhaps gives him a bit of a national cultural identification that people might like. I asked him which foreign country he liked the most because I also thought some of the sophisticates in the Party might be interested. I was extremely pleased with the answer because it was much more colorful and interesting than I expected.
Kevin’s question was posed for laughs and designed to change the pace. Quite a few people on the Clark blog thought it was fun, just as they think it’s fun that he’s a Cheetos freak. People like this stuff. It makes their guy human. Politics is more than policy papers and polls and strategy. A campaign is an audition of sorts and the person who wins must appeal to people on a number of levels. There is a reason why the late night talk shows and Oprah are part of campaigning nowdays. Personal appeal is a big part of why people vote.
Finally, bloggers and political internet “experts” need to get some perspective. We are one of the moving parts of the modern campaign and that’s terrific. But, we aren’t that big of a deal. It is highly doubtful that any of us asked a serious question that hasn’t been posed before by one of the hundreds of journalists following the candidate all over the place or the thousands of New Hamshirites he’s appeared before at town hall meetings.
In fact, it just may be that the salad dressing question is the only one, in which case it was a major scoop.
It looks like a bunch of liberal bloggers have formed some sort of virtual street gang. I’m pretty sure that falls under the definition of the terrorism under the Patriot Act so it’s a good thing Jerralyn Merrit’s in da hood.
Oh wait. They aren’t entitled to lawyers under the Patriot Act are they?
Speaking personally, I’m a walking stereotype of a rootless cosmopolitan liberal, and I’ve been to Vermont, and I can tell you that New York City is definitely where the freak show is at and it gets a whole lot freakier than a damn latte. Just wait ’till Elliot Spitzer’s in the White House, then we’ll show ’em…
Now, wait a minute. Is he actually saying that the real left wing freak show is in New York? I beg to differ. While it is undoubtedly true that New Yorkers are more likely to read The New York Times, in every other category we here in the land of fruits and nuts are definitely the true home of the left wing freak show.
We boast of more sushi per square foot in just the west side of Los Angeles than any other city on the planet, including Tokyo. They serve it as baby food in this town.
We don’t just swill Lattes. We buy them at drive-thru Starbucks from behind the wheel of our Prius hybrid (suitably adorned with a Darwin fish and Save The Bay sticker.)
And you bet we love Hollywood. We ARE Hollywood and we really, really love ourselves. We love ourselves so much that per capita we spend more on on every form of bodily improvement including lifts, tucks, percings, tattoos, implants and extensions than all other states combined. When it comes to defilement of the human body, we are unequalled. Remember, we are not only the home of the squalid and depraved mainstream Entertainment business, we are the capitol of the multi-billion dollar pornography business, as well.
Eliot Spitzer? That’s nothing!
In California even the Republicans are sushi-eating, latte swilling, body-building, Kennedy-marrying, nude-posing, armani-wearing, sexual-harrassing, card carrying members of the left wing freak show. We not only worship empty-headed celebrities, we elect them to the highest office in the state.
Seriously Matt, while Vermonters may wear big comfortable shoes and drive big Swedish cars and New Yorkers might read the paper and watch depressing Swedish movies, isn’t it obvious that the real left wing freak show is indisputably here in Lalaland? Barbara Streisand lives here, for crying out loud.
It’s good to have MoDo back isn’t it? What with Kit Seelye being relegated to Adwatch blurbs and Ceci devoting herself to becoming the female alternative to Morton Kondrake, there has been a serious dearth of bitchy, Mean Girl coverage of the campaign. I have been at a loss as to how one should interpret the candidates’ character flaws as expressed in their clothing choices and it’s awfully difficult to know who to vote for without that important insight.
Today, we find out that Wes Clark’s decision to wear sweaters in New Hampshire during the past week, and his ill-fitting wardrobe in general, “intensifies the impression that he’s having a hard time adjusting to civilian life.” I didn’t know that he had the dreaded bad wardrobe, nor did I know that he was having problems adjusting to civilian life. Now I can see that his clothing choices very clearly show that he’s got serious psychological problems that can no longer be overlooked.
This is what makes MoDo a NT Yimes columnist and me an obscure blogger. When I saw Clark wearing a sweater last week, I thought it was because the temperatures in New Hampshire were breaking cold weather records and he was cold. Same thing with the duck boots. I stupidly assumed that he was wearing them because it was slippery outside and he didn’t want to fall on his ass on the sidewalk. I didn’t realize that he was sending some very important subliminal messages that only a trained journalist would be able to spot. This, my friends, is why she makes the big bucks.
I can’t believe she missed the chance to advise Clark to go on Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, though. She could have penned a “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” riff that would have had the Kewl Kidz guffawing all over their eggbeater frittatas at brunch this morning. Of course, MoDo’s thesis of the generic male Democratic Candidate is of an ungendered, ineffectual manchild, so she would have to steer clear. QEFTSG is a good natured comedy that features men of both orientations who are secure enough in their masculinity to send up their own images. MoDo cannot admit that any Democrat even knows who he is, much less that he’s sure of his masculinity.
In MoDo land, Clark is a typical sissyfied Democrat who drones on about health care and abortion rights and affirmative action and all that other boring girly-man crap. He wears snow boots in New Hampshire in January purely because somebody told him it would make him more appealing to women. He’s having trouble “adjusting.” He’s a typical liberal pussy.
I doubt very seriously that even the fact that Clark is a highly trained professional killer will be enough to dispell these new doubts about his masculinity. I should have remembered the premiere dictum of Democratic politics ever since Dukakis. Real Men have innate fashion sense.
Update: As always, I should read Atrios before I write anything. He’s always ahead of the curve.
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill likened President Bush at Cabinet meetings to “a blind man in a room full of deaf people,” according to excerpts on Friday from a CBS interview.
O’Neill, who was fired by Bush in December 2002, also said the president did not ask him a single question during their first one-on-one meeting, which lasted an hour.
“As I recall it was just a monologue,” he told CBS’ “60 Minutes,” which will broadcast the entire interview on Sunday.
In making the blind man analogy, O’Neill told CBS his ex-boss did not encourage a free flow of ideas or open debate.
“There is no discernible connection,” CBS quoted O’Neill as saying. The president’s lack of engagement left his advisers with “little more than hunches about what the president might think,” O’Neill said, according to the program.
CBS said much of O’Neill’s criticisms of Bush are included in “The Price of Loyalty,” an upcoming book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind.
It appears that what everyone thinks of as Bush loyalty is actually Bush fear. The reason they rarely fire anyone is because they know that this is the kind of thing that will likely come out.
The fragile yet plucky Ed “Victoria” Gillespie must have been called to action after being forced, once again, to endure the horrors of political hate speech like this:
“I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading,” barks a man leaving a barbershop; a woman with him completes the sentence: “… body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs.”
What, you say Her Majesty the Gillespie didn’t make the rounds of all the bloviators and take these hooligans to task for their cruel bigotry? How odd. He must have taken an extra dose of laudenum after seeing that shocking internet Hitler ad on the RNC web site, and passed out.
Stephen Moore says the Iowa ad is about “cultural elites across America who are the ones behind Dean,” who are so unlike the “middle-class families with Middle America values, as in Iowa, [who] are going to be very turned off by Dean’s economic program.”
After pointing out that the Club For Growth is run by a bunch of rich champagne-swilling libertarian Fat Cats, Conason retorts:
I wouldn’t be surprised if many Iowans and even more Vermonters wish Moore would take his right-wing freak show back to Wall Street and K Street.
Actually, the real freakshow is going to be the 527 ad war. From what I’ve seen so far, it would appear that they’re using material Jon Stewart rejected for being too broad and obvious. (But hey, in a country where a majority believe that Saddam had something to do with 9/11, you really can’t be too broad and obvious, can you?)