Covering new presidents: the media's double standard

Eric Boehlert, who did fine reporting for Salon.com for many years has an excellent new piece over at Media Matters. Picking up on the emerging conventional wisdom about press relations with new administrations, he offers a well-grounded reminder of those relations with the previous two presidents. It's a cautionary tale of shifting standards, well worth reading as a reminder of recent history:

In anticipation of the new administration, Beltway media insiders are busy laying the groundwork for how reporters and pundits will treat the new team on Pennsylvania Avenue.

'Once a president takes office ... an adversarial relationship usually flourishes, at least with beat reporters,' wrote Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post. And former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, discussing the press corps on Fox News, agreed: 'They are inevitably going to turn on him, as all -- this happened to every administration. I don't see why we should be surprised. It is the natural turn of events.'

The conventional wisdom is quite clear: The press always turns skeptical and becomes combative when new presidents come to town.

Except, of course, when the press does not.

Tom Friedman hits the panic button

The N.Y. Times Op-Ed Columnist is hitting the panic button on our economic situation and worries that the lame duck period of the Bush presidency is going to last too long. After opining that it would be good to quickly amend the Constitution so Obama could be inaugurated immediately, he suggests that Bush fire Hank Paulson and appoint Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary forthwith.

This is the real “Code Red.” As one banker remarked to me: “We finally found the W.M.D.” They were buried in our own backyard — subprime mortgages and all the derivatives attached to them.

Yet, it is obvious that President Bush can’t mobilize the tools to defuse them — a massive stimulus program to improve infrastructure and create jobs, a broad-based homeowner initiative to limit foreclosures and stabilize housing prices, and therefore mortgage assets, more capital for bank balance sheets and, most importantly, a huge injection of optimism and confidence that we can and will pull out of this with a new economic team at the helm.

The last point is something only a new President Obama can inject. What ails us right now is as much a loss of confidence — in our financial system and our leadership — as anything else. I have no illusions that Obama’s arrival on the scene will be a magic wand, but it would help.

Right now there is something deeply dysfunctional, bordering on scandalously irresponsible, in the fractious way our political elite are behaving — with business as usual in the most unusual economic moment of our lifetimes. They don’t seem to understand: Our financial system is imperiled.

I can only being to imagine how panic-stricken Friedman would have been in late November of 1932, knowing there was over three months of lame duck Hoover to go. Here's hoping, for all our sakes, that Friedman's panic attack is an overreaction.

Weekly radio address: President-Elect Obama

Recent days have provided a number of indications that Barack Obama isn't buying the argument that he needs to go slow, focus on deficit-reduction, etc. Earlier in the week, his soon-to-be chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, spoke to a business group assembled by the Wall Street Journal and talked about "going deep" (not, one hopes, a 'Hail Mary pass') in responding to the economic crisis. This week's radio address/YouTube video from the President-Elect doesn't make the specifics clear, but it does make clear that he is going to seek an ambitious economic package that includes government-created jobs rebuilding our infrastructure, crumbling schools, and so on. Combined with his reference in his "60 Minutes" interview to the two books he's currently reading on FDR, the signal is pretty clear that he isn't going to be seeking modest programs. He continues, however, to emphasize that he's going to need bipartisan support and that he will reach out for it. If he convinces the public that he is doing so sincerely, it will put the onus on congressional Republicans if they maneuver to block his initiatives or if they seek party-line votes. The appointments leaking out from the transition team have been stirring some unrest among the netroots, but they also will make it harder for the GOP to claim that he's governing as a wild-eyed lefty.



Of course, there are some who would make that claim even if he retained Dubya's current Cabinet and appointed Mitt Romney as domestic policy adviser (you know, the same one's who are calling this the Obama Recession and hawking investment advice to survive the crippling effects that Obama already has had on our economy (here, for example; and Human Events is filled with declarations of the disastrous effects Obama already has had on the economy, and sends numerous emails to its readers, offering up the financial services of right-wing financial gurus who will protect them from further Obama-created losses). These same folks are also trying to gin up a controversy over Obama's plans to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine (eliminated by Rappin' Ronnie Reagan), thereby wiping out right-wing talk radio and the fair and balanced folks at Fox News. The absence of any evidence that Obama has any sch plans hasn't slowed down the hysteria (which is being used in fundraising emails), nor do any of them seem to notice the contradiction between the ludicrous claim that Fox News is fair and balanced and the assertion that the return of the Fairness Doctrine (which called for broadcasters to provide equal time on controversial issues) would have a negative impact on the network of Hannity, Beck, and O'Reilly. Let's hope that such knee-jerk ideological idiocy becomes increasingly irrelevant in the coming years.

Robert Reich asks why we're rescuing Wall Street and not the auto industry: Citigroup Versus General Motors

He's not sure we should be rescuing either, and makes the case at TPMCafe that there may be a better case for helping out the auto industry (with lots of conditions) than bailing out the bankers.

The 2008 Presidential Campaign, Part II

No sooner had the news networks declared Obama the victor in the 2008 presidential election than the second part of the campaign began. Part II is the campaign to define the meaning of the election results. Trapped (happily) in the crowd in Grant Park without a remote control, I was forced to watch and listen to Bill Bennett, former Reagan Cabinet member and oft-decorated cultural warrior, as he repeatedly argued that (1) the U.S. is a center-right nation, (2) the 63+ million Obama voters were casting a vote for center-right governance, and (3) the first order of business for President-Elect Obama had to be to move to the right and reach out to Republicans, to demonstrate that he wanted to include them and to govern in a manner amenable to them.

Bennett may have been the first to make such an argument, but he certainly wasn't the last. Nor has the argument been made solely by Reagan Republicans (though they have made the argument en masse). A similar argument has been made by numerous DLC Democrats, warning that the Democrats have gotten into trouble in the past by overreaching with liberal policies for which the American public has no appetite (see Carter, Clinton pre-triangulation). The answer, they argue, is to govern in the middle and reach for small, often symbolic victories.

This position also has received support from a wide range of pundits and mainstream journalists, further buttressed by an argument that began appearing during the pre-election portion of the campaign. One notable example was the repeated effort by Bob Schieffer, during the final debate, to get both candidates to list those campaign promises they would have to break because of rising deficits. Schieffer was by no means the first, and certainly not the last, to press the assumption that, while we might be able to manage a trillion dollar deficit, we certainly cannot allow it to get any higher and, in fact, need to do whatever we can to avert reaching that figure. It is, the reasoning goes, simply unrealistic to believe that the federal deficit can go any higher than that already projected in the Bush budget plus the added costs of the bailouts of financial institutions. Given that assumption, there is no money available for anything that Obama has listed among his priorities, unless they can be accomplished without significant expense. So, some have argued that the middle class tax cut will need to wait; others have argued, somewhat paradoxically, that increases in taxes on the wealthy and on corporations (in reality, the termination of the Bush tax cuts) must be postponed because of the recession; and the nearly unanimous 'conventional wisdom' seems to be that there is no way that Obama can do anything significant on health care in the near future.

So, whether it is justified by a claim about the ideological identity of the American public or by the necessities of holding the line on deficit spending (presented as a non-ideological, realist position), many of the forces of conventional wisdom are aligning to argue against the Obama Administration doing anything that would represent significant changes in domestic policy.

On the other side are those who argue that the election results mark a significant change in public opinion, a rejection of the verities of Reaganomics, culture wars, and the Bush Doctrine. This camp argues that 2008 was a change election, much as the 1932 and 1980 elections were. This point of view even has some surprising (to me, at least) advocates, like Chris Matthews. Matthews has been arguing with guests espousing the first interpretation of the election, asserting that Obama is in a position to do what FDR and Reagan before him had done: they won the election and then proceeded to move national policy and popular opinion further in the direction of their campaign by moving quickly to pass an ambitious legislative agenda. (Matthews also is fond of noting that George W. Bush did something similar, even after requiring a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court to be elected.) This camp argues that voters will become disillusioned if Obama seems to be pursuing policies that make only small changes, that they will feel that this is not the change they were promised and will then punish Obama and the Democrats at their next opportunity.

Just as the 'go slow, think small' party makes a key assumption about the economy and deficits, so too does the 'act quickly, big change' party. Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate economist and liberal gadfly, is one of those making the case for the need to engage in an ambitious program of government spending as a means of ameliorating the deep recession into which we appear to be sliding. In a column written before the latest bad news, a record drop in consumer spending, worse even than that after 9/11, Krugman argues that many of the usual remedies for fighting a recession are not available for fighting this one. Most notable among these is cutting the federal funds rate -- it has been as low as 0.3% in recent days, so there's nothing left to cut. What is the answer, then, if we are to stave off a depression?

To pull us out of this downward spiral, the federal government will have to provide economic stimulus in the form of higher spending and greater aid to those in distress — and the stimulus plan won’t come soon enough or be strong enough unless politicians and economic officials are able to transcend several conventional prejudices.

One of these prejudices is the fear of red ink. In normal times, it’s good to worry about the budget deficit — and fiscal responsibility is a virtue we’ll need to relearn as soon as this crisis is past. When depression economics prevails, however, this virtue becomes a vice. F.D.R.’s premature attempt to balance the budget in 1937 almost destroyed the New Deal.

Another prejudice is the belief that policy should move cautiously. In normal times, this makes sense: you shouldn’t make big changes in policy until it’s clear they’re needed. Under current conditions, however, caution is risky, because big changes for the worse are already happening, and any delay in acting raises the chance of a deeper economic disaster. The policy response should be as well-crafted as possible, but time is of the essence.

Finally, in normal times modesty and prudence in policy goals are good things. Under current conditions, however, it’s much better to err on the side of doing too much than on the side of doing too little. The risk, if the stimulus plan turns out to be more than needed, is that the economy might overheat, leading to inflation — but the Federal Reserve can always head off that threat by raising interest rates. On the other hand, if the stimulus plan is too small there’s nothing the Fed can do to make up for the shortfall. So when depression economics prevails, prudence is folly.

This second campaign will be nearly as consequential as the first one. We can only watch and wait to see which side of the argument Barack Obama comes down on, and how successful he is in persuading the public that his side is the right one.

[Note: As time permits, I'll update this post with links to representative arguments.]

Tubeside Chats

The Washington Post reports that, as President, Barack Obama will record his weekly radio address as a video, too, and that the videos will be posted on YouTube. The practice will be instituted beginning this week:

Today, President-elect Obama will record the weekly Democratic address not just on radio but also on video -- a first. The address, typically four minutes long, will be turned into a YouTube video and posted on Obama's transition site, Change.gov, once the radio address is made public on Saturday morning.

The address will be taped at the transition office in Chicago today.

"This is just one of many ways that he will communicate directly with the American people and make the White House and the political process more transparent," spokeswoman Jen Psaki told us last night.

In addition to regularly videotaping the radio address, officials at the transition office say the Obama White House will also conduct online Q&As and video interviews. The goal, officials say, is to put a face on government. In the following weeks, for example, senior members of the transition team, various policy experts and choices for the Cabinet, among others, will record videos for Change.gov.

Guillotine! Guillotine!

The Madame DeFarge of the GOP illiterati, Ann Coulter has been taking names, and now she's going to kick some asses:

After showing nearly superhuman restraint throughout this campaign, which was lost the night McCain won the California primary, I am now liberated to announce that all I care about is hunting down and punishing every Republican who voted for McCain in the primaries. I have a list and am prepared to produce the names of every person who told me he was voting for McCain to the proper authorities.

We'll start with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. Then we shall march through the states of New Hampshire and South Carolina -- states that must never, ever be allowed to hold early Republican primaries again.

If cooler (saner?) heads don't prevail, the GOP may undergo a Cultural Revolution that will have Mao's ghost nodding his approval. Newt Gingrich has spent the past 7 or 8 months positioning himself as the guy who will have the ideas and the strategy to bring the GOP back once again. Ann and BillO seem to like Palin for that job -- or for the job of fronting the party. It would be good for the country if some grown ups took charge in the GOP and presented the country with an opposition party that had different ideas about governance rather than a strategy for winning elections. I was no fan of Goldwater, Reagan, or Bill Buckley, by they actually had a coherent set of ideas about governance -- I disagreed with many of them and objected to many of the policies they advocated, but they often (not always) made a case that wasn't just name-calling and cynicism. That said, part of me wouldn't mind if Coulter and the gang finished the job of discrediting the cultural right once and for all. I think that would make it easier to have a serious discussion about what role the nation is willing to see the federal government play in the economy and about whether we truly are engaged in a world-historical struggle (and, if we are, who the enemy actually is).

But for that to happen, we'll need to turn down the volume on rantings like Coulter's, as is apparent in that same column:

For now, we have a new president-elect. In the spirit of reaching across the aisle, we owe it to the Democrats to show their president the exact same kind of respect and loyalty that they have shown our recent Republican president.

Starting tomorrow, if not sooner.

O'Reilly and Carl Cannon debrief Sarah Palin's candidacy

Over at The Huffington Post, they've got a video clip of Bill O'Reilly grilling Carl Cannon, Fox News's senior political correspondent about reports coming out of the McCain-Palin campaign that indicate that Palin was more ill-prepared than had been previously known. Some of what the McCain staff are saying is startling, but, to my mind, nearly as startling is what the interview reveals about O'Reilly's standards for candidates (so long as they're right-wing enough).

McCain: Martyr or victim of his own ambitions?

This piece, in the aptly named SPIN CYCLE: Maverick McCain now political martyr -- Newsday.com, argues for martyr:

In the end, we got to know the meaning of 'Country First.'

First, John McCain would make sacrifices for his country as the enemy's captive in a war. Decades later his party would sacrifice him as its captive in a national election.

Considering the perils he faced against Barack Obama, the Arizona senator comes out of the election more martyr than maverick.

To me, this is the reminiscent of the many analysts who spent a considerable amount of time arguing that the lies and the nasty attacks and distortions that marked McCain's campaign -- as several fact-checking operations verify -- were not really the candidate's own doing. Sometimes they pointed to body language, and other times to their previous experience with him or the gap between his earlier statements and the conduct of his campaign. I never found those arguments convincing, mostly because of the last two words of that sentence: "his campaign." A candidate owns his or her campaign. Many may abdicate control to their money people, consultants, and party officials, but they're still making a choice. That's even more so in the case of someone who has been round for a long time -- they can't blame it on being swayed by more experienced pols or on not knowing that people working for their campaign may have their own agendas or standards.

McCain is, I think, an even more egregious case, precisely because he built his reputation on being a maverick, unafraid of going his own way and unafraid of bucking anyone who asks him to do things that violate his conscience and principles. It is beyond me how any of these pundits and reporters can not see the paradox of claiming to be a maverick and allowing others to suggest that they don't really approve of their own campaign's tactics (ignore that message added onto the commercials saying that I endorse this ad).

But you don't even need that to reject the view of McCain as martyr, running a campaign that he didn't want to run. Just look at his steady move to the right, beginning during Bush's re-election campaign, his reversals on numerous issues, and then try to make the case that he was a martyr to someone else's cause. The main hired the very people who slimed his wife and their adoptive daughter in 2000. What principle is served by that, except personal ambition? So, no, I don't believe that John McCain didn't approve of his own campaign, that he sacrificed himself to the party. But even if I did, choosing such martyrdom to one's political party would contradcit the central theme of his campaign: Country First.

The victory speech

After standing for hour after hour amid an amazing crowd -- cooperative, happy, friendly, ecstatic -- I don't have much to say right now, except that it was an experience I'll never forget. And that looking at the people surrounding me, and looking at the people in Phoenix, said much of what needs to be said about why Obama won and McCain lost.

Belatedly, Bruce's Halloween video

A spooky Robert Johnson-esque tale of the Jersey Devil, stalking the Pine Barrens:

New song by Bruce

Performed at Obama rally with Patti

Vrdolyak pleads guilty in kickback scheme - Chicago Breaking News

Ed Vrdolyak once was one of the most powerful people in Chicago. Along with Ald. Burke and a few others, Fast Eddie led the majority of Chicago aldermen in tying up everything Harold Washington wanted to do in his first term as mayor, irate that the voters had picked someone other than them to run the city. Voters returned Washington for a second term, and gave him enough like-minded members of City Council to be able to govern, though sadly he died before completing it. Chicago quickly returned to being a Daley family fiefdom (albeit with some changes from King Richard I's reign). In any event, the following sentence will evoke feelings of schadenfreude among many Chicagoans: "Former Chicago alderman and power broker Edward Vrdolyak pleaded guilty this morning to a kickback scheme involving the sale of a medical school building."

Dang!

I've been wasting my time:

An article of faith among conservative critics of American universities has been that liberal professors politically indoctrinate their students. This conviction not only fueled the culture wars but has also led state lawmakers to consider requiring colleges to submit reports to the government detailing their progress in ensuring 'intellectual diversity,' prompted universities to establish faculty positions devoted to conservatism and spurred the creation of a network of volunteer watchdogs to monitor 'political correctness' on campuses.

But three sets of researchers recently concluded that professors have virtually no impact on the political views and ideology of their students.

Guess I'll have to go back to teaching instead of brainwashing.

Obama leads McCain by 6 points in Reuters/C-SPAN-Zogby poll

Grim news for those hoping for a McCain comeback:

Democrat Barack Obama's lead over Republican rival John McCain firmed marginally to 6 points with support for both candidates steady before Tuesday's U.S. presidential election, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Sunday.

Obama leads McCain by 50 percent to 44 percent among likely voters in the three-day national tracking poll, up from a 5-point advantage on Saturday. The telephone poll has a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.

'There are two full days to go before Election Day and obviously anything can happen, but it is hard to see where McCain goes from here,' pollster John Zogby said.

The Zogby polls have been pretty consistently providing the most optimistic view of McCain's chances, if one rules out some of the partisan-funded polls, regularly showing smaller margins than many of the others. This has led many McCain-friendly bloggers (like Matt Drudge) to promote Zogby results over those from Gallup and other polling outfits. But six points nationally with two days to go is a pretty big margin, and the state-level polls don't offer a lot of hope either. One measure of the daunting landscape is that it is relatively easy to find ways that Obama could get to 270 even if he were to lose Pennsylvania; it's almost impossible to find paths to 270 for McCain should he lose there. If Obama wins in three western states where he has been leading consistently -- Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico -- he can lose Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania and still get 270 by winning Virginia. While I suspect Florida may still go to McCain, Ohio has been polling for Obama for weeks now, and the final Columbus Dispatch poll shows Obama up by 6 with a 2.0 margin of error. Could PA, OH, and FL swing back to McCain? Sure, but it seems less likely when the national polling is showing a slight widening of Obama's lead.

But in a little more than 48 hours, we can stop speculating and start watching actual returns. What a relief.

Implausible deniability?

John McCain declared long ago that he regarded the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons to be out of bounds for his campaign. That hasn't stopped his running mate from making passing references to it, and now the Pennsylvania GOP is airing this ad:



Will McCain condemn it? Will he publicly call for them to take it down? Will he plead powerlessness -- I can't control what they do, they aren't part of my campaign -- to do anything about it? Will he be asked about it? We'll see. Since his running mate is on record that it is a legitimate issue to raise (remember, she's worried about the press denying candidates their First Amendment rights to launch attacks without being criticized), I'm betting McCain will opt for implausible deniability.

Obama rapid response

I've commented previously (as have numerous others) on the Obama campaign's great rapid response team -- they have new ads out in a flash, seizing one opportunity after another to hammer home their message. They've done it again, picking up on Dick Cheney's endorsement of McCain yesterday. First, Obama added references to it to his stump speech, and today there's this ad, contrasting some of Obama's endorsements with Cheney's latest:

Tom the Dancing Bug takes on the commies who inspired Obama

Shocking revelations here.