Outraged by the media (short form version)

In exit polls in New Hampshire, conducted jointly by the major media outlets, was this outrageous question: "Regardless of how you voted today, do you think that Howard Dean has the temperment to be President?" Curiously, there were no similarly specific questions about any other candidates. Columbia Journalism Review takes incredible exception to this question, and takes to task the lame excuse that since it was exit polling, it couldn't have affected the election results. Which, as CJR points out, would be true if there weren't voters in 48 other states who haven't had a chance to vote in primaries yet. [link]

And remember Howard Dean's "scream heard 'round the world"? After more carefully reviewing it, Diane Sawyer now realizes that in fact, the media may have misplayed the whole story and that Dean's scream may not have even been heard 'round the room. Turns out, Dean was shouting to be heard over the crowd, but was shouting into a handheld microphone, which happened to be the audio feed that the networks used.

Here's what Sawyer had to say [link]:

"After my interview with Dean and his wife in which I played the tape again -- in fact played it to them -- I noticed that on that tape he's holding a hand-held microphone. One designed to filter out the background noise [...]

So, we collected some other tapes from Dean's speech including one from a documentary filmmaker, tapes that do carry the sound of the crowd, not just the microphone he held on stage[...]

Dean's boisterous countdown of the upcoming primaries as we all heard it on TV was isolated, when in fact he was shouting over the roaring crowd. And what about the scream as we all heard it? In the room, the so-called scream couldn't really be heard at all. Again, he was yelling along with the crowd."

Then she asked the other major networks to comment. Here's what they had to say:

CBS News: "Individually we may feel okay about our network, but the cumulative effect for viewers with 24-hour cable coverage is -- it may have been overplayed and, in fact, a disservice to Dean and the viewers." -- Andrew Heyward, President - CBS News

ABC News: "It's always a danger that we'll use good video too much." -- David Westin, President - ABC News

CNN: "We've all been wrestling with this. If we had it to do over again, we'd probably pull ourselves back." -- Princell Hair, General Manager - CNN

Fox News: "It got overplayed a bit, and the public clearly thought that, too, and kept him alive for another round." -- Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO - Fox News

So I ask, where's to wall-to-wall coverage of the media's latest major-league screw-up? Or the public apologies from Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS?

I mean, really, despite Roger Ailes's claim of no-harm no-foul, after the media orgy, Dean was barely breathing, and has been struggling to recover ever since. Between that and the NH exit-polling question, is it really unfair to accuse the media of having a bias against Dean? I don't think it is.

Debating with My Father

I had a long discussion with my father last night about the future of Howard Dean's campaign. We agreed on certain fundamental principles:

* Four more years of George W. Bush and John Ashcroft will be disastrous for this country economically and socially;
* It is imperative for a Democrat to win not because he will promote this or that program but because the composition of the Supreme Court will be up for grabs in the next four years, and the composition of the federal judiciary will be up for grabs as well. Judicial appointments are for life, so we had better get a less ideologically conservative person into the office that appoints the judges lest we have a conversative judiciary for the next 25 years;
* The place where much legislating gets done in this country is, surprisingly, in the executive branch, which annually issues thousands of pages of regulations on every subject under the sun. We had better have a Democratically led executive branch if we want to preserve our rights and freedoms and not have them eroded by rule-making that takes place out of the public eye.

My father's view is that if we are not out there actively supporting whomever is the Democratic nominee, we are, in essence, capitulating to the reelection of George W. Bush, and are, by our inaction, bringing about the result that is opposite of what we desperately want. As he sees it, therefore, whatever I think of John Kerry or John Edwards (I am a supporter of Howard Dean), if one of them is the nominee and Dean is not, fealty to my democratic ideals (and my Democratic ones as well) requires that I devote the same energy to them that I would devote if Dean were the nominee.

As background, he shared with me his experience in 1968, when he, and many other idealistic Democrats like him, refused to support Hubert Humphrey because he would not break with President Johnson over the Vietnam war. Because they deemed Humphrey "not ideologically pure" (as it were), they didn't support him until it was too late. The price they paid was six years of Richard Nixon. Even their attempts to expiate their guilt -- fervant support of McGovern in 1972 -- wasn't enough to reverse the mistake.

I argued that John Kerry (and to a lesser extent John Edwards) haven't earned my support precisely because they are part of the status quo that has failed to excite the Democratic base all along. They voted with the majority to pass the Patriot Act 99-1 in the Senate. Establishment Democrats supported the No Child Left Behind Act, and the resolution authorizing war in Iraq and the $87 billion to bail Bush out of his own lack of planning, and both tax cuts and the Medicare "reform". For the first time in many years, the Democratic establishment engineered the first mid-term election loss of Congressional seats by the party not in the White House. In short, the politics as usual in the Democratic party has been a disaster. Somehow, that message has got to get through because sooner or later, if things don't change, the party will cease to have any relevance whatsoever.

In the end, I think I might have the better argument (such is the hubris of youth) because fealty to your ideals sometimes means accepting short-term defeat in service of a longer and more lasting success. As it turned out, this morning's New York Times had an op-ed by Robert Reich directly on point (and, no gloating intended, it went my way). Here's one of the key nuggets in what Reich had to say [link]:

For so long now, everyone has assumed that recapturing the presidency depends on who triumphs in the battle between liberals and moderates within the party. Such thinking, though, is inherently flawed. The real fight is between those who want only to win back the White House and those who also want to build a new political movement — one that rivals the conservative movement that has given Republicans their dominant position in American politics.

In other words, the whole notion of "electability" is inherently flawed because it isn't about ideas, and therefore will always be a hit-or-miss proposition that depends on the personality of the candidate and the fallibility of the opponent. Reich again:

As we head into the next wave of primaries, the Democratic candidates should pay close attention to what Republicans have learned about winning elections. First, it is crucial to build a political movement that will endure after particular electoral contests. Second, in order for a presidency to be effective, it needs a movement that mobilizes Americans behind it. Finally, any political movement derives its durability from the clarity of its convictions.

In the end, I believe that the whole problem with electability might be best summed up by something I saw on Howard Dean's campaign blog today: Electability is all about trying to figure out what someone else will think instead of thinking for yourself.

So in a nutshell, here's the conundrum: on the one hand, there's a saying in politics that "where you stand depends on where you sit". This, to me, is what the electability argument rests on -- we'll stand for whatever we have to stand for because the goal has to be winning in November. On the other hand, there's also a saying in politics that "if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." And this, I think, is the crux of the movement politics argument -- we can't just concern ourselves with this November, we have to build a movement that can reliably win for many Novembers to come.

Both are compelling arguments, and they may be irreconcilable. I suspect, as Reich suggests in his op-ed, that the failure of centrism to catch hold in this primary season (uber-centrist Joe Lieberman has struggled to get traction, while Howard Dean, or more accurately, Dean's rhetoric, whether mouthed by him or Kerry or Edwards, has enjoyed comparatively more success) means that movement politics is winning out over win-at-all-costs politics, at least for now.

As is often the case, I don't have a neat summation for this post. For the moment, I will continue to support Dean, because I think that his message is important. What happens after the primaries remains to be seen. In any event, I do think that this is one of those fundamental moments in history in which what we decide now (or in the near term) will reverberate throughout the party and politics for years. In the circumstances, it behooves us all to pay attention.

About two months ago, Liz at Life as a Spectator Sport saw my blog and liked it enough to link to it on her site.

My mother long ago taught me to promptly say thank you when people compliment me, but I must not have learned too well, since it has taken me this long to post my thanks. In any event, thank you, Liz.

Go visit her site. It's good.

Repeat after me: There are No WMDs in Iraq

Apparently, there are no WMDs in Iraq (surpise), which has loosed a torrent of spin this week from the Bush administration. And while the spin isn't exactly news, in the midst of it all, I noticed that yet again, the Bush administration got a pass from the media for its fractured logic and outright unwillingness to admit the obvious.

As you may know, on Saturday, the New York Times and others reported that David Kay, the resigning head of the US search for WMDs in Iraq, said that Iraq likely did not have, and had not had for a long time, any WMDs. In other words, sanctions and inspections were actually working. This obviously makes you wonder how we got it so wrong.

In response, the Bush administration went into full spin mode -- to name but two examples, Vice President Cheney said that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were "conclusive evidence" of a WMD program and Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said that the White House believes that WMDs will be found eventually.

On Saturday, the Washington Post reported that Secretary of State Powell now concedes that intelligence may have been wrong, and that Iraq indeed may not have had WMDs after all. [link] But then, the Post uncritically quoted Powell as follows:

Powell said in defense of the decision to go to war that the Bush administration was not simply troubled by the conviction that Iraq possessed unconventional weapons and development programs, but also that Hussein had refused to answer U.N. questions about his government's activities on the subject.

"We were not only saying we thought they had them," Powell said, "but we had questions that needed to be answered. What was it: 500 tons, 100 tons or zero tons? Was it so many liters of anthrax, 10 times that amount, or nothing? What we demanded of Iraq was that they account for all of this and they prove the negative of our hypothesis." (emphasis added)

Powell's statment clearly begs the question: just how would Saddam go about "proving the negative of our hypothesis"? Obviously, Iraq's statement to the UN in December 2002, saying that the country didn't have WMDS, wasn't enough, since Iraq was widely suspected of hiding the weapons program, and therefore couldn't be trusted to tell the truth.

But how about if, after the war, when none of Saddam's thugs can get in the way, when no one can stop inspectors from going wherever they want, whenever they want, no WMDs are found? Wouldn't that tend to prove the "negative of our hypothesis"? Apparently not, as Vice President Cheney's and Mr. McClellan's statements make clear.

So what if, after the fall of Iraq, senior officials of the Saddam government who had been captured or turned themselves in told the Americans that there were no WMDs? Would that prove the "negative of our hypothesis"? Alas, apparently that's not enough for the Bush administration, either.

For one example of this (and there are many, I'm sure), I turn to the Department of Defense itself. As it happened, in early April 2003, Saddam's "scientific advisor" turned himself in, but maintained that Iraq had not had WMDs. Shortly thereafter, Secretary Rumsfeld appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" and told host Tim Russert that he didn't believe the Iraqi advisor. Not resting on NBC's promotional department to get the word out, however, the DoD put out a press release. [link]

That release stated, and I'm quoting here,

Rumsfeld said he is convinced the Iraqi regime has squirreled its weapons of mass destruction around the country. He said the United States has evidence of Iraq's chemical and biological activities as well as the restart of its nuclear program.

"Iraqis have learned to live in an inspection environment -- they hid things, they've done it well, they have things underground and well dispersed," Rumsfeld observed.

He said the coalition will need help from Iraqis if it is to find all of Iraq's hidden secrets. "We won't find anything until we find people who tell us where the things are," he said.

In other words, there is nothing that can prove the "negative of our hypothesis" -- if there were WMDs, obviously that would prove the hypothesis. On the other hand, if there are no WMDs, that doesn't prove the negative because "we won't find anything until we find people who tell us where the things are". And if people affirmatively tell us that they don't exist, that's also no proof, since "Iraqis have learned to live in an inspections environment" (meaning, presumably, that they obfuscate and lie as a matter of course).

In effect, what the Bush administration is saying is that our "hypothesis" isn't a "hypothesis" at all, but a conclusion -- hypotheses, remember, are merely the questions that experimentation and investigation are supposed to answer, and may be proven or disproven by the data collected. Here, all of the data in the world won't disprove the "hypothesis".

And if that's the case, where are all of the media pundits saying that the Bush administration is mendacious?

James Taranto is an idiot

There was a point in President Bush's State of the Union address when he said that the Patriot Act was due to expire next year, and a group of Democrats applauded. Here's what James Taranto, of the Wall Street Journal, had to say:

The al Qaeda Cheering Section

The most telling moment in last night's speech came after the president noted that "key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire next year." In response, notes the New York Times, "some critics in Congress applauded enthusiastically." If Osama bin Laden watched the speech, one imagines him applauding too.

Perhaps the applauders were hoping to embarrass President Bush by provoking a Howard Dean-like outburst ("You sit down!"). Instead, the president let them clap, then turned toward the Democratic side of the chamber and addressed them directly when he read the next line of his speech: "The terrorist threat will not expire on that schedule."

When Taranto was called on it, here was what he responded:

Welch's specific complaint is about our headline, "The al Qaeda Cheering Section." But was our characterization really unfair?

Let's say you're at the stadium watching the Super Bowl. It's late in the second quarter, and the Patriots are driving toward the end zone, but time runs out before they can score. The guy sitting in front of you begins clapping and cheering wildly. What do you make of his behavior?

Sure, it's possible that there's some complicated explanation. Maybe he's a devotee of the Patriots who thinks the team's clock-management strategy is disastrous, and he's applauding the Pats' failure because he believes it will spur the team to shape up in the second half. Or perhaps he doesn't like football at all and is clapping in anticipation of the halftime show.

But a normal person would assume he's simply rooting for the other team. Now, again, maybe the reason he's doing so isn't entirely straightforward. Possibly he doesn't care one way or the other about the Panthers but is a Dolphins or Bills fan and is cheering the bad fortune of a divisional rival. (Blogger Steve Sturm suggests--righly, we'd say--that this is the best explanation for the behavior of the cheering Dems.)

I suppose, in the bipolar world that the Wall Street Journal's editorial page editors live in, it really is the case that either you're with us or you're against us. But out here, in America, it's a bit more complex than that. The flawed thinking is epitomized in the choice of analogy. A football game is indeed all about two mutually exclusive results, so that if you cheer for one team's failure, chances are good that you are in fact rooting for the other team. Taranto's absurdist alternative explanations (you're a Bills fan, you're upset with the team's strategy for managing the clock) are straw men that he knocks down in a triumph of anti-intellectualism over logic.

The fact is, the Patriot Act isn't about mutually exclusive results; it's entirely possible (or, dare I say, patriotic) to approve of the ultimate goal of the Patriot Act -- preventing new terrorist attacks -- but disagree with the way in which the administration has settled on to achieve that goal because the costs are too high. To use a less simplistic sports analogy, imagine the Pats are down by two with a minute thirty left in the game and are in field goal range. Instead of going for the sure but vulnerable 1 point lead, they decide to fake the kick and try for a touchdown. Now, it's not a bipolar result anymore -- a cheering fan might indeed be rooting for the other team (since faked kicks are rarely successful, and his team is leading by 2), but he also might be rooting for the Patriots to achieve their ultimate goal, which is to win the game.

Actually, the more apt analogy for the impact of the Patriot Act might be Bentre, the Vietnamese village that inspired an Army spokesman to say "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."

In any event, if I cheer because the Patriot Act is set to expire, it's because I don't think its necessary to destroy the Constitution and everything it stands for in order to save it. I imagine that the Democrats who applauded on Tuesday would tell you the same thing.

The Flaming Wreckage of Rome

Dear Friends,

Many of you know that I am a supporter of Howard Dean's campaign to be President. Like many of you, I watched with some amount of concern when Howard Dean addressed his supporters in Iowa; his performance was, to put it charitably, a bit enthusiastic. On Tuesday, I was discouraged by the news coverage, but figured that his performance was a one-day story at best.

On Tuesday night, I watched the State of the Union address, and listened incredulously as President Bush ignored fundamental issues -- no mention of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Congress's plofligate spending, the increased threat level in the U.S. lately, or myriad other national problems, while practically breaking his arm to pat himself and his administration on the back, and proposing nothing of substance. But incredibly, on Wednesday, no one seemed to be saying what seems obvious -- this President is hopelessly and frighteningly out of touch with what our country needs right now.

By today, I was disgusted because the front page story is still a stupid speech to a group of people in Iowa.

Look, I don't how to state it any more bluntly:

Rome is burning.

30+ million Americans, including a lot of children, don't have healthcare. We say that we can't afford to pay for them to have healthcare, but the fact is that we already do -- since emergency rooms are the only place to get healthcare for many people who can't pay and don't have insurance, that's where they go. But it costs, on average, more than twice as much to treat someone in an emergency room than elsewhere, and guess who's paying for that -- you and I, in the form of higher insurance premium and reduced coverage. And what healthcare they do get in emergency rooms is sporadic and inferior to regular care.

Millions of kids go to schools that don't have art programs, and don't have music and don't have much of anything but curricula designed to help them beat the standardized tests. Most of all, they don't have money, because even though the federal government mandated a whole lot of new standards in the "No Child Left Behind" Act, it left out any money for schools to pay to meet these standards.

Our environmental policies are a mess. Our national forests are being sold to the highest bidder for clear cutting and logging, under a program that is cynically called the "Healthy Forests" initiative. Meanwhile, the Bush administration's oil connections are lobbying hard to drill in, and likely despoil, the last untouched wilderness in the U.S. -- the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge -- in order to eventually produce, over an entire a year, the amount of oil we consume in this country every day. At the same time, gas mileage standards have been eroded, smog standards have been loosened and so many environmental laws have been under attack that the administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency resigned in disgust.

Despite the capture of Saddam Hussein, American soldiers continue to die at least every other day in Iraq, and thousands more have been injured. Flight schedules bringing home the caskets of dead soldiers have been dishonorably arranged so that they arrive in the middle of the night; that way, there are no pesky news cameras to broadcast the return. Terrorist threats continue to plague us -- during Christmas, after Saddam was captured, we went to the second highest alert status nationwide, some flights were cancelled and others were escorted, over American soil, by fighter jets. Yet cities and states have received virtually no assistance in paying for the increased costs of keeping so-called first-responders (that's police, fire and rescue to you and me) on heightened alert, and there has been virtually no attention paid to policing the millions of shipping containers that daily enter ports in some of the most populated cities in the country.

2.3 million jobs disappeared between 2001 and now. Yes, the economy appears to be expanding recently, but there have been very few new jobs created, and the jobs that have been created have tended to be low-wage, low skill jobs that don't come close to replacing the higher-skill, higher wage jobs that we have lost. Meanwhile, the federal government cynically refused to extend unemployment benefits that were set to expire just before Christmas, so that people who have had trouble finding jobs would be able get by just a little longer.

Right now, two American citizens -- American citizens! -- are locked up in jail, and have been locked up for almost two years, without ANY charges being filed and without any opportunity to challenge their confinement. They have been locked up because the President and Attorney General determined, without any review, that the prisoners were "enemy combatants". Meanwhile, we are holding hundreds more in illegal detention around the world, in violation of the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of prisoners of war, and in contravention of hundreds of years of well-recognized international law. Some of the detained prisoners are as young as 13 years old.

The President of the United States stood before the country last year, and lied about weapons of mass destruction. He told us that if we didn't stop Saddam Hussein, we might be facing a nuclear strike at any moment. No, there was no "the only thing to fear is fear itself" for this President -- he practically shouted "Look out, here they come!" to justify attacking Iraq. And yet, during his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, when he had the prime-time ear of four broadcast networks and at least five cable networks, he chose not to call for a moment of silence to remember the 500 dead so far, didn't thank the husbands and wives and children and parents and friends of 500 heroes who died because of his lies for their sacrifices, and didn't apologize for lying in the first place. Instead, he chose to devote some of the most valuable verbal real estate ever given to a single human being to calling on a ban on performance-enhancing drugs by a handful of professional athletes.

The President and the Republican leadership have played viscious and callous politics with people's lives just because they had the temerity to disagree with the Republican position. The list is embarrasingly long, but includes Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame, a Republican congressional staffer and former aide to Gen. Clark who was fired for saying hello to his old boss when he visited Capital Hill, and the former Treasury Secretary who, within hours of criticizing the Bush administration, became the target of an investigation into how a "confidential" document was shown on national television.

And I haven't even touched on President Bush's illogical push to "privatize Social Security" or the call to make tax cuts permanent or to renew the Patriot Act, or the marginalization of the United Nations in the name of "defending" it or the cutting of veterans' benefits, or any one of subjects where we're on the wrong track.

Friends, Rome is burning. Please tell me it's not true that the most important story we can muster indignation over is an overly exuberant speech to a group of supporters in Iowa. I'm disgusted.

I have often said, you get the government that you deserve. Well, I deserve better, and I still think, screaming exuberance or not, that Howard Dean is the best candidate to help us get there. The fact is, he's gotten healthcare for every child in Vermont. He brought high-value white-collar businesses to Vermont that didn't destroy the environment, he preserved wetlands, he implemented an early-childhood intervention program that helps kids who are born into poverty to get a leg up on getting out of poverty, and he balanced the budget (despite no legal obligation to do so) so well that when times got bad and lots of state budgets went into the red, Vermont continued to operate in the black. Will somebody please tell me how this guy is less qualified to be President than President Bush, or anyone else who's running for the Democratic nomination?

Anyway, that's my pitch. In the end, whoever gets the Democratic nomination will get my vote. But it's not true that they'll get my heart.

Back to the salt mines...

As you might have noticed, Now Entering Laboville took an impromptu hiatus to deal with things off-line, like the Christmas holidays, a trial (it's my job), and family obligations involving travel.

But the coffee break's over, and it's back to work. Watch this space for more regular straight talk, media analysis and just plain common sense.