Breaking: Big News Org Says Rudy Might Not Have Advantage On Terrorism!
(December 29, 2007 -- 8:04 AM EDT // link // )

Updated below.

Michael Cooper, the New York Times reporter who wrote that epic front-page fact check of Rudy's multiple falsehoods, has done it again.

In a piece today on Rudy's use of 9/11 on the campaign trail, Coop refuses to parrot the mindless conventional wisdom holding that Rudy has an "advantage on terror," something that you hear from pundits and reporters again and again. Instead, Coop does something downright heretical: He refers to actual polling on the question. To wit:

Some polls suggest that Mr. Giuliani may not have a decisive advantage on the issue of terrorism. In a New York Times/CBS News poll in September, Mr. Giuliani’s supporters were asked if they thought he would do a better job fighting terrorism compared with the other candidates running for the Republican nomination. A quarter of them said they thought Mr. Giuliani would do a better job than his opponents, but the large majority — 61 percent — said they would expect Mr. Giuliani to be about the same as the other candidates when it came to fighting terrorism.

This is such an easy thing to do, and yet it's almost never done.

One side note on this. The other day, I posted some video here of MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asserting barely minutes after the Bhutto assassination that the killing would rain political gold down on Rudy's presidential candidacy. In the post I ranted a bit about Scarborough's presumption that Rudy would benefit from Bhutto's death. In response I got an angry email from someone asserting that, yes, Rudy really does have an advantage on terror if you look at multiple polls.

But here's the point about this. The issue here is larger than the question of whether Rudy has an "advantage on terror" in this or that poll. Rather, the problem is the set of assumptions underlying the claim of Scarborough and others that the Bhutto killing will automatically benefit Rudy. Those assumptions are that in response to the assassination:

(1) Voters will simplistically gravitate towards the candidate who they deem "better on terror," ignoring any other criteria; and

(2) Voters will reflexively favor whichever candidate is seen as the "most willing to use force," to use one of the most loathsome phrases the pundit lexicon has to offer.

But in reality, voters' responses to violent and tumultuous international events are complex, varied, and ultimately unpredictable. There's no earthly reason to decide in advance that the electorate as a whole is uniformly incapable of having at least a somewhat nuanced reaction to global events or that voters will never respond by evaluating the candidates' actual foreign policy ideas, rather than by automatically ranking them according to who's deemed to have an "advantage on terror" or who's deemed to be "more willing to use force."

The point is, the "advantage on terror" or "who's more willing to use force" spectrum that pundits like Scarborough insist on using to predict voter reaction to such events is basically a construct, a device that cartoonishly oversimplifies the complexity of public opinion. Nonetheless, it continues to inform and define much of our political analysis and discourse to an extraordinary degree. That's the problem here.

Update: I meant Joe Scarborough, not Chuck. Apologies -- the above has been corrected.

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Best Example Of War Hawk Narcissim Yet: Christopher Hitchens' Brave And Heroic Iraq Confession
(December 28, 2007 -- 12:24 PM EDT // link // )

Okay, everyone, let's give a hearty round of applause to Christopher Hitchens for the long piece he's now published in Vanity Fair. War-supporter Hitchens did a very brave and heroic thing: He admitted that he feels really, really bad about the death of a soldier in Iraq -- and devoted an entire magazine article to his own feelings about it.

Now, most people go about their lives enduring their most painful burdens in private. Not Hitchens. He fearlessly went public with it in paragraph after paragraph, and even courageously admitted that his guilt places him in the same class of great writers like William Butler Yeats and George Orwell, who also confessed to such feelings. This must have been very, very difficult for Hitchens to admit indeed.

Really, we should immediately put Hitchens' essay into the time capsule as the most perfect expression that we've seen yet of the narcissism and extraordinary delusions of historical grandeur that our war hawks keep revealing themselves capable of.

Hitchens' piece is all about a young soldier named Mark Daily, who had initial misgivings on the war but was turned in favor of the war by Hitchens' writings and was subsequently killed in Iraq. Upon learning this, Hitchens confesses in his article, he felt dismayed, asking himself if it was "possible that I had helped persuade someone I had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D."

Hitchens then recounts in great detail the horrific emotional journey he then endured.

Continue reading "Best Example Of War Hawk Narcissim Yet: Christopher Hitchens' Brave And Heroic Iraq Confession"

Hardball Gang Talks ... And Talks ... And Talks ... About Hillary's Voice
(December 27, 2007 -- 5:06 PM EDT // link // )

Okay, I'm going to do something that's admittedly a bit of a cheap shot. But desperate times, desperate measures, and all that.

In light of today's news about the Bhutto assassination, which reminds us how profoundly important the decision voters are about to make in choosing the next President, I'm posting a discussion from last night on Hardball in which some of the on-air talent gathered there perhaps didn't treat this question with quite the gravity it deserves:

As you can see, the Hardball gang spent precious airtime talking about how grating Hillary's voice is. The assembled pundits pretty much stated as outright fact that the Hillary campaign didn't use her voice in its latest ad because of internal campaign recognition of this fact. First we had the cackle. Then we had the wrinkles. And now we've got the voice.

"I know this sounds like a small point," Newsweek's Howard Fineman observed, in a fine moment of unintentional self-parody, "but it grates on a lot of people."

Now, I don't have any idea why Camp Hillary decided not to use her voice in the ad, though I wouldn't suggest that I did if I didn't have direct knowledge of it, the way these guys did here. Either way, Hillary's voice is a pretty inane topic to waste valuable airtime on, considering that we're talking about who to put in control of the most powerful military on the planet at a moment as critical as this one. Maybe today's news will drive this home to some folks.

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Joe Scarborough: Bhutto Assassination Helps Rudy And Hillary
(December 27, 2007 -- 11:11 AM EDT // link // )

It's the predictability of this stuff that can sometimes get to you. Here's NBC's Joe Scarborough saying -- already! -- that Bhutto's assassination helps Rudy and Hillary:

As Atrios says, the logic is very tortured here indeed. But it's actually worse than that. This rank bit of punditry serves as yet another reminder of just how gullible the pundit corps in general has been about Rudy's candidacy, on two levels: First, the near wholesale acceptance of the idea that Rudy's mayoralty counts as counter-terrorism experience; and second, the presumption that he automatically has a political advantage on terrorism over his rivals.

The most recent polling on terrorism in the GOP primary that I can find suggests there's no reason to presume Rudy has an advantage on it:

33. Compared to the other candidates running for the Republican party's nomination, do you think Rudy Giuliani would do a better job fighting terrorism, a worse job, or about the same job fighting terrorism as the other Republican candidates?

Better 26%

Worse 3%

About same 61%

It's also worth considering Scarborough's claim that the Bhutto assassination automatically benefits Hillary. Whatever you think of Hillary, he is obviously basing this diagnosis on the presumption that voters automatically look to presumed hawkish candidates in times of peril and confusion. According to this reading, voters will automatically conclude in such situations that they want the candidate who is imagined to be "more willing to use force," whatever that means. There's no chance that voters could be actually evaluating each candidate's foreign policy ideas.

But there's no earthly reason, as Ben Smith notes, to discount the possibility that the assassination could make people more receptive to Obama's argument that "the Clinton/Bush status quo has produced disaster after disaster, and it's time for a change."

Look, I don't have any idea who will benefit politically from Bhutto's assassination. But the point is, neither does Scarborough -- yet he goes right ahead and tells us that it's Rudy and Hillary, anyway. This is just punditry on auto-pilot, the reflexive serving up of diagnoses based on the same old flawed assumptions that have under-girded establishment punditry for well over a decade now, unchanged by external events or all evidence to the contrary. And we'll undoubtedly be hearing lots more of this in the days ahead.

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Study: Bill Clinton Was Kinda Right, Media Is Obsessed With Horse-Race And Is Toughest On Hillary
(December 26, 2007 -- 3:57 PM EDT // link // )

In recent weeks Bill Clinton has made headlines by making a handful of pronouncements about media coverage of Campaign 2008. On Charlie Rose's show, for instance, he suggested that Hillary was getting a tougher ride from the press than her rivals. And at a campaign stop he complained that the press was obsessed with horse-race coverage at the expense of issues.

Both these assertions were met by pundits with the sort of mockery that might have greeted Bill if he'd predicted that a fleet of spaceships from Mars would be shipping in thousands of alien voters to put her over the top in Iowa. MSNBC's Steve Adubato chortled that in fact Hillary had been a "major media darling" throughout the race. Chris Matthews suggested Bill was delusional and hit him for denying "the undeniable." Tucker lampooned Bill for hypocrisy.

Well, now a new study has come out that concludes that in both cases, Bill was at least party right.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., took a look at 481 news stories on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX from October 1 through December 15, 2007. It concluded that the media hits Hillary the hardest:

TV election news has been hardest on Hillary Clinton this fall, while Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee have been the biggest media favorites, according to a new study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University...

On-air evaluations of Hillary Clinton were nearly 3 to 2 negative (42% positive vs. 58% negative comments), while evaluations of her closest competitor Barack Obama was better than 3 to 2 positive (61% positive vs. 39% negative). John Edwards attracted much less coverage, but his evaluations were 2 to 1 positive (67% positive vs. 33% negative). Sen. Clinton was evaluated more often than all her Democratic opponents combined.

Meanwhile, check out these numbers from the study on the proportion of stories that was done on the political, as opposed to policy, dimensions of Hillary's candidacy:

Clinton campaign's strategy and tactics, 47 stories;

Her electability, 18 stories;

Her alleged policy flip-flops, 14 stories;

Her honesty/integrity, 12 stories

Obviously one needs to be cautious about reaching overall conclusions based on this sort of stuff. The pool of news orgs and the time period selected here both feel somewhat arbitrary and are of course tiny compared to the overall roar of campaign coverage. The designation of stories as "positive" or "negative" doesn't feel all that scientific, either. What's more, Bill obviously has his own political reasons for making these criticisms at this particular moment.

Still, there's at least a bit of statistical evidence here that Bill's claims aren't all that wild-eyed after all and just may have at least some basis in reality.

I'm bringing this up for a reason. As regular readers know, this blog has done a lot of hitting back at bogus media coverage of Closet Muslim Barack Obama and Haircut-Hypocrite John Edwards. But inevitably there have been more posts here about Hillary than the others. The reason for this isn't sneaking pro-Hillary bias. It simply reflects the apparent reality that overall there's just more media nonsense directed Hillary's way. This study provides a bit more evidence that this is the case.

At any rate, no doubt Chris Matthews and Tucker will be all over this study any day now.

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Washington Post Takes Cues From Drudge, Runs Awful Photo Of Hillary's Wrinkles
(December 26, 2007 -- 10:39 AM EDT // link // )

Looks like Matt Drudge has gotten himself a new gig -- he's just been signed up as an assignment editor for The Washington Post.

So it seems, anyway. Let me explain: Early last week I noted here that Drudge and Rush Limbaugh were having a grand old time making fun of Hillary's wrinkles after Drudge posted an exceptionally unflattering pic of Hillary looking, shall we say, not at her best. Drudge left the photo up for days.

Now today's Washington Post has gone and run the photo. The paper's justification for doing this was to accompany it with an article that purports to discuss the journalistically "difficult issues" raised by the question of whether to run such an image, which WaPo calls a "hangdog shot." First, the writer of the piece, Philip Kennicott, acknowledges that the pic is just plain awful:

The popular Drudge Report Web site recently ran a particularly notorious picture of Hillary Clinton, showing her face riven with deep furrows and wrinkles. She looked so awful that even some conservative commentators noted the unfairness of using such a manifestly unflattering image.

But then, even though his own paper ran the very same pic, Kennicott tried to argue that traditional news orgs like WaPo approach the question of whether to run it so much more responsibly than the new media rabble do:

In the partisan media (much of the blogosphere, the tabloids and several cable channels), these images are used freely and gleefully. In media that strive for objectivity, the hangdog shot raises difficult issues. In an earlier age of newspapering, sorting through the archives for an image that confirmed your headline was acceptable practice. Today, serious newspapers try to use images from the most recent campaign events rather than something a few months old, even if it fits the story line better.

So, for "serious" news orgs, pics like these raise "difficult issues" that the "partisan" new media won't entertain, eh? Not difficult enough to prevent the paper from making the despicable decision to run the pic anyway, even though the photo wasn't at all from "the most recent campaign events"; rather, the pic is more than 10 days old.

So why did WaPo run the pic at all? Easy -- it decided to take its editorial cues from Drudge and let him set their editorial agenda. And in exchange for legitimizing Drudge's "news judgment" in this fashion, the paper's editors today got the Drudge link they obviously craved, which means they'll fall asleep tonight with smiles on their faces. It's yet another reminder that Mark Halperin was only half-right when he said, "Matt Drudge rules our world." Rather, for too many people at the big news orgs, the operative slogan is actually:

Matt Drudge rules our world -- because we'll happily prostrate ourselves at his feet and kiss his toes in exchange for a link!

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Broder Versus Dowd: Real Reporter Versus Over-The-Hill Stand-Up Comic
(December 23, 2007 -- 10:44 AM EDT // link // )

If you have a minute to do this, it really is instructive to compare David Broder and Maureen Dowd's columns today. Both columns are very much from the "politics as theater or entertainment" category.

Yet one of these columns is the work of a real reporter, and as such shows that there can at times be real value in this sort of approach. The other reveals how useless this approach is when it's based on mere "riffing" -- that euphemism that's often used to justify columns that have nothing in them in the way of real reporting or analysis.

Broder's column today -- rather than delivering another sermon about empty centrism -- tells you something that many readers are likely not to know: What it's like to watch Barack Obama deliver a speech in the closing days of the Iowa and New Hampshire races. Yes, Broder focused largely on style and rhetoric -- on theatrics. But because Broder did some actual reporting -- because he watched multiple speeches, then conveyed in clear and vivid English what it's like to be on the scene -- the column will be useful to many readers. Broder reminds us that this sort of political writing definitely has its place.

Dowd, by contrast, devotes yet another whole column to the "psycodrama" that is the Clinton marriage. Worse than that, she actually blames the Clintons, rather than her own obsession, for the fact that she's returning to the topic yet again:

Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama.

Right, right, right. The Clintons pulled her back to the subject. Because Dowd has proven so resistant to addressing it in the past. Because she just can't bear to address it again. She has no choice. The Clintons made her do it.

Just to be clear, the Clintons' marriage is in some ways a valid topic, and some of Bill's antics in recent days are certainly worthy of treatment by a political columnist. The problem here, though, is that if you obsessively "riff" about this topic in often inane and trivial ways for years and years, as Dowd has, no one is going to take you seriously if you weigh in at a time when such a discussion might be warranted or even useful.

Anyway, here you have a very useful contrast. Broder shows us what can be accomplished with the politics as theater approach -- telling readers something new and conveying a real sense of the candidates and the crowds to readers who don't have any other way of getting one. Dowd, meanwhile, gives us this genre -- again -- at its most useless and vacuous.

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