"Why the Press can't report the campaign"

A very, very good post from Ezra Klein.

There's one thing I want to add to this: First, none of this, per se, is the media's fault. As Joan Didion wrote in "Insider Baseball" two decades ago, the fundamental audience for any campaign event is now television cameras. Reporters didn't ask for this to happen, but political strategists realized it was the best way to operate, so they started doing it.

So how do we fix this problem? I don't know. I think one way would be for news organizations to simply not cover the campaign as much, but that's unlikely to happen due to competitive pressures.

Obama: Protectionist or Free-Trader?

I disagree with the following summary by Dan Drezner:

My favorite part of the speech was McCain’s take on coping with the global economy. It contained his only concrete proposal (reforming unemployment insurance) while also emphasizing their different takes on the global economy (Obama: protect old industries; McCain: prepare citizens for new industries). If my vote was based only on foreign economic policy, I’d be voting for McCain and it wouldn’t be a close call.

A lot of people on the right (like Drezner) seem to think Obama is a protectionist. A lot of people on the left think he's a free-trader. Likely, he's somewhere in between - he will try to "protect old industries," but not through subsidies, but through somewhat slightly stronger labor and environmental protections in free trade agreements. Also, I feel like Obama emphasizes creating new jobs in new industries as much as McCain does.

A Suprising Truth

This one:

Of Sarah Palin I know nothing except her lack of grace. She lashed into Barack Obama after a week in which he was the only public figure to defend her against the press, or at least to excoriate those who had focused on her daughter. She might have started with a thank you.

Eastern Elite

Mitt Romney just lashed out against "Eastern Elites" - you know, the kind of people who spend part of their time in college in France, receive both law degrees and MBAs from Harvard, then become billionaires by running consultancy and investment firms, and then use the money they made to enter politics.

You know, Eastern Elites.

"Architectural Determinism"

George Will, after describing the cushy home FDR grew up in:

People who believe in architectural determinism should believe that FDR's housing must have prevented him from empathizing with common folks.

I believe that phrase is a keeper.

Andrew Sullivan

For all his professed devotion to the issues, he seems to be awfully obsessed with certain scandals. He posted way too much about both the Palin pregnancy/nonpregnancy/daughter's pregnancy and the cross in the sand story McCain told during the Rick Warren forum. I think this is partially a function of the fact that Andrew posts all the freaking time, but it still seems weird coming from him.

Discredited experts

A guess at what David Brooks means when he says this (via Matt):

There simply aren’t enough Republican experts left to staff an administration, so he will have to throw together a hodgepodge with independents and Democrats.

I'm guessing he's saying that a lot of the Republican experts have the taint of Bush on them. McCain can't hire Wolfowitz, Feith, Andy Card, etc., etc. because they are too closely tied to an incredibly unpopular president. Or, like Jack Goldsmith, they've written tell-alls and are now persona non grata to the Republican party.

Chris Beam is on a roll

After last week's great piece about Lanny Davis, he has another entertaining piece on RNC protesters.

100% True Statements

Michael Kinsley:

The whole "experience" debate is silly. Under our system of government, there is only one job that gives you both executive and foreign-policy experience, and that's the one McCain and Obama are running for. Nevertheless, it's a hardy perennial: If your opponent is a governor, you accuse him or her of lacking foreign-policy experience. If he or she is a member of Congress, you say this person has never run anything. And if, by any chance, your opponent has done both, you say that he or she is a "professional politician."

Palin

I think this from Jack Cafferty (!) via Ezra sums it up:

"Let's suppose that that phone rings at 3am in the morning and either Joe Biden or Sarah Palin has to answer it. You tell me," continued Cafferty. "After this pick, ask yourself again who has the better judgment, John McCain or Barack Obama."

Constitutionless Convention

Dahlia Lithwick laments.

Best Piece about the convention thus far is...

Chris Beam follows Lanny Davis around. Most unexpected factoid: Lanny Davis is the father of CBS/SI college basketball reporter Seth Davis.

McCain's Agenda

Andrew Sullivan:

The agenda is war and the threat of war - including what would be an end to cooperation with Russia on securing loose nuclear materials and sharing terror intelligence, in favor of a new cold war in defense of ... Moldova and Azerbaijan. I'm sure McCain would like to have his Russian cooperation, while demonizing and attacking them on the world stage, but in the actual world, he cannot. Putin and Medvedev are not agreeable figures, and I do not mean in any way to excuse their bullying. But this is global politics, guys, and these are the cold, hard choices facing American policy makers.

And in this telling op-ed Lieberman and Graham simply do not even confront them. It's all about a moral posture, with no practical grappling with the consequences. It's the mindset that gave you the Iraq war - but multiplied.

John McCain is making it quite clear what his foreign policy will be like: tilting sharply away from the greater realism of Bush's second term toward the abstract moralism, fear-mongering and aggression of the first. Not just four more years - but four more years like Bush's first term. If the Democrats cannot adequately warn Americans of the dangers of a hotheaded temperament and uber-neo-con mindset in the White House for another four years, they deserve to lose. If Americans decide they want a president who will be more aggressive and less diplomatic than the current one, then they should at least brace for the consequences - for their economy and their security.

Newspapers vs. TV

Matt Yglesias reminds me of a point I want to make when he says this:

But that assumes that the cable networks are making some kind of good-faith attempt to inform their viewers and falling short, an assumption that I don’t think holds much water.

This is in contrast to newspapers, which (with the exception of tabloids like the New York Post, etc.) do make good-faith attempts to inform their readers and occasionally fall short. But too often, both liberals and conservatives group all TV networks and all newspapers together, when, really, each media organization should be considered separately.

Furthermore, it's important to remember that, at this point, TV networks drive news. The New York Times probably would have mentioned the Jeremiah Wright tapes twice (once in a story, once in a news analysis) if MSNBC/CNN/Fox hadn't been replaying the videos again and again and again. This is in contrast to the pre-CNN days, where newspapers (and the NYT and WaPo more specifically) drove news. Basically, a story would appear in the NYT in the morning and the nightly newscasts would follow up on it that night. However, today, this dynamic only exists locally, where newspapers break most of the news and then TV stations simply echo their reporting.

UPDATE: See Ezra Klein make this mistake. See TV. See newspaper. Also, see nifty internet.

+1 to David Brooks

I was going to quote David Brooks' column today, but then I realized my quote was going to be everything but the first paragraph. So read the whole thing. It's the best version of the "Goodbye to All That" thesis about Obama I've read.

The American Wanderer

Just wanted to spotlight this good piece on Obama and rootlessness from the New York Times. An interesting snippet:

But many presidents are shallow-rooted trees, even if they’re rarely perceived as drifters; far more often, “transplant,” with its connotation of re-rooting, is the unthreatening label they take on.

Ronald Reagan grew up in Tampico, Ill., wandered to Iowa and fell in as an announcer with the Chicago Cubs before heading to California. There he built one of the more enduring political personas of the 20th century. George W. Bush, Texas twang though he boasts, attended a blue-blood prep school in Massachusetts and summered in Maine, where the waters are chilly and the culture tight-lipped. Dwight Eisenhower was born in Texas, moved to Kansas and came to call Pennsylvania home. Herbert Hoover spent his 20s laboring in the outback of Australia and then China. Teddy Roosevelt strapped on a six-shooter and moved to the Dakotas, the better to fashion an image as the “cowboy” president, even though he was as New York as they come. Abraham Lincoln, the prototypical Illinoisan, was born in Kentucky and grew up impoverished in Indiana. He moved often as an adult, a loner before fate set him right.

A failure of Hillary's

From one of Mark Penn's memos leaked to The Atlantic:

Organize on college campuses. We may not be number 1 there, but we have a lot of fans—more than enough to sustain an organization in every college.

This turned out not to be true. I don't remember Hillary having much a presence at the large state university I went to, which did have active groups in support of Obama and Ron Paul. While I don't have polling or anything to back this up, I feel like she defintely would have been behind Obama, Paul, Edwards, and McCain in support and maybe behind Huckabee as well. And of course, Obama destroyed her on college campuses overall. Or perhaps this was a failure of the organizers and Penn was right.

Obama and Race

I've done a lot of reading on the subject in the past few hours. I don't know how much it will affect his electoral prospects (although it certainly will) or how it will affect his presidency. I feel like a lot of people haven't thought about that second question, which Matt Bai muses on in the NYT:

Should they win in November, Obama and these new advisers will confront an unfamiliar conundrum in American politics, which is how to be president of the United States and, by default, the most powerful voice in black America at the same time. Several black operatives and politicians with whom I spoke worried, eloquently, that an Obama presidency might actually leave black Americans less well represented in Washington rather than more so — that, in fact, the end of black politics, if that is what we are witnessing, might also mean the precipitous decline of black influence.

The argument here is that a President Obama, closely watched for signs of parochialism or racial resentment, would have less maneuvering room to champion spending on the urban poor, say, or to challenge racial injustice.

The entire article is interesting and paints a nice series of portraits of various black politicians. However, like Ta-Nehisi Coates says, the title (Is Obama the end of black politics?) is stupid. I don't buy the Freudian stuff, though.

Then, New York has a very good package on Obama and Race, starting with this Patricia Williams piece. It basically argues that the national conversation about race is stunted and awkward because blacks and whites don't see the conversation starting in the same places. Money quote:

[B]lacks and whites tend to differ in their very definition of racism. Some years ago, researchers conducting a study for the Diversity Project, at UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Social Change, asked black and white college students about their perceptions of racism on a given campus. White students tended to say there was none, but blacks and Native Americans said it was everywhere. In fact, the study documented an interesting phenomenon: As Diversity Project sociologist Troy Duster put it, “White students see diversity as a potential source of ‘individual enhancement,’ ” while African-American students were more likely to see the goal as “institutional change.”

When the white students were asked to give illustrations that substantiated their positions, they spoke of their own experiences and of personal intentions. “Last night, I had dinner with a black friend,” they might offer. Or, “I have a black roommate, and we get along”; “I play basketball with a couple of black guys”; “I’ve never used a racist epithet”; “I treat everyone the same.”

The black students cited instances of relative privilege, things that were more structural, institutional, atmospheric. “The campus police are always stopping us”; “I get followed around in stores”; “Most of the white students don’t have to think twice about how much it costs to take prep classes for the LSAT or to spend spring break skiing in Aspen or partying in Cancún.”

They follow this up with a piece on the "Obama Kids," and one on the politics of Obama's marriage, which contains this absurdity:

Outside a Subway in Atlanta, a bunch of white kids parse Obama’s lineage, at least the fanciful one that they learned about on the Internet. “It’s such a crock that Obama keeps saying he’s going to be the first black president,” says one of them. “He’s half-white, first of all, plus 44 percent Muslim, and only 6 percent African.”

What. The. Fuck.

Meanwhile, John Heilemann continues his election-long hot streak with a piece on race preventing Obama from doing better in the polls. He is able to state the obvious:

Obama, after all, isn’t having trouble with African-American voters or Hispanic voters or young voters. Where he’s lagging is among white voters, and with older ones in particular. Call me crazy, but isn’t it possible, just possible, that Obama’s lead is being inhibited by the fact that he is, you know, black?

It also contains this nugget, which is probably bad news for Obama:

In October, Obama’s former pastor, Wright, will publish a new book and hit the road to promote it, an occasion that might well place the topic of Obama’s blackness (along with his patriotism and his candor about what he heard in the pews in all those years at Trinity Church) squarely at the center of the national debate. How Obama handles that moment may determine whether he becomes the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This thought also makes sense, unfortunately for Obama:

For many Democrats, Obama’s eventual residence there has long seemed a foregone conclusion. But cast your mind forward twenty years and imagine looking back on this election. Would it really seem strange from that vantage point if the first black major-party nominee—a guy with a thin résumé, no foreign-policy credentials in an era scarred by terrorism, a background alien to much of Wonder Bread America, and the full name Barack Hussein Obama—lost? No, it would seem inevitable.

The Right and Anti-Hippieism

This is very, very true:

It’s hard to overestimate the role the old hippie-loathing, and the anti-ideal of youth rebellion in general, still play in the social thought of the modern intellectual Right. (In a recent review of The Wackness, for example, John Podhoretz described The Catcher in the Rye as a “pernicious book,” pernicious because it enshrined the pose of disaffection as the model for thoughtful youth.)

That's from Matt Feeney at The American Scene.

The loathing of certain aspects of youth culture is what creates, in my opinion, the vast majority of teenage conservatives* - particularly the nerdier ones. These kids are generally so frustrated by what they see as the sheer stupidity of the people around them - Don't they know smoking (cigarettes or weed) is bad for them? Don't they see that their anti-intellectualism (expressed by not doing basic homework assignments) will doom them?

Of course, other people simply have a boundless hatred of hippies, which causes them to become conservatives (generally with a libertarian streak). Their philosophy is best summed up by Matt Stone:

I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals.

At this point, I feel like it's important to note that the "South Park Republican/Conservative" label was retarded if only because the people who embrace it (along with Matt and Trey) just seem to hate anyone who is actually trying to make a positive change in the world.

*The one other thing that might create a lot is religion. But I think recent polling has shown a lot of religiously devout teenagers are liberal or apolitical.

People who don't need political advisers

Angelina Jolie is one of them. From the WaPo:

As the Democrats and Republicans gear up for their nominating conventions, one voter still hasn't made up her mind: Angelina Jolie.

"I have not decided on a candidate," Jolie told Variety's Wilshire & Washington column, in a statement provided by her political adviser, Trevor Neilson. "I am waiting to see the commitments they will make on issues like international justice, refugees and how to address the needs of children in crisis around the world."