I wonder how Phoebe feels about being described in a front-page caption in today’s YDN as “a girl.” Strikes me as demeaning, and doubly unfortunate given that the event was about empowerment…Doesn’t the YDN have policies about these things?
Tag Archives: media
Beth, like me, is excited by this piece in the Times on the resurgence of grassroots organizing this election season. As she writes:
That’s great for democracy.
It’s also great for Democrats.
It’s always nice when the interests of the big-D and small-d (D/d)emocrats converge…
Beth argues, inter alia, that door-to-door campaigning makes it possible to customize the candidate for the voter. To which I would say, yes, with a caveat. Yes in the sense that politics in perhaps its best sense is about communities and about the harnessing of political institutions to effect tangible change in individual lives, and when Democrats fail to articulate a vision which speaks to individuals’ and communities’ circumstances and issues, they lose. As Sam Smith argued in a tremendous essay oft-cited on this site:
We got rid machines like Tammany because we came to believe in something called good government. But in throwing out the machines we also tossed out a culture and an art of politics. It is as though, in seeking to destroy the Mafia, we had determined that family values and personal loyalty were somehow by association criminal as well.
One Tammany politician, George Washington Plunkitt, claimed to know every person in his district…In the world of Plunkitt, politics was not something handed down to the people through such intermediaries as Larry King or George Will. What defined politics was an unbroken chain of human experience, memory and gratitude.
So the first non-logical but necessary thing we must do to reclaim democratic politics is to bring it back into our communities, into our hearts to bring it back home. True politics, in imitation of baseball, the great American metaphor, is also about going home.
Back in December, I chided the Times for an article in its magazine about the Dean organizing strategy which portrayed the belief of regular people that their political involvement, rather than a technocratic project, could be a natural outgrowth of concerns borne out of their personal lives as some sort of leery veureristic parallel to an Alchoholics Anonymous meeting. I’m glad to see the Times get it better this time around, and am hopeful that the rest of the Democrats are beginning to as well.
My caveat would be that crossing the line from customizing the emphasis to customizing the policy tends not to work out so well either. The one thing I’ll say for TV is that it holds candidates accountable nationally for the messages they put forward locally, and helps to curb excesses of “customization” like Lincoln’s two speeches in favor of and against racial equality while stumping on the same day. One political scientist like to compare the nationalization of political campaigns and soft drinks. Apparently, back when my parents were walking to school in the snow (uphill both ways, no doubt), patrons at individual establishments could manually set the ratios of syrup, sugar, water, and whatever the hell else goes into their cola. Once Coke became a product that was the same everywhere, it was necessary to choose a formula that would appeal to the most folks national wide. The same has happened for campaigns, as it’s no longer feasible to customize the message for each district once much of the campaign happens on national television.
The good news here is that it means candidates are responsible in one part of the country for what they tell another and so my gloss on Beth’s point would be a warning that what Kerry can’t do is spin himself on one side of the issue in California and the other in Oregon.
The bad news about the shift away from the grassroots is something I’ve railed against to no end here, but the corollary to this particular piece of good news is the bad news that Democratic candidates have responded to the nationalization of the campaign by whoring themselves out to an illusory median voter rather than bringing new voters into the process by articulating strong progressive visions for the country from New York to Arizona to Pennsylvania to Florida and beyond.
Guess who wasn’t invited to Yale’s Sixth Annual Teaching Forum and Innovation Fair, focusing on teaching section?
That’s right: the people who teach section.
The Yale Daily News write-up, of course, didn’t talk to any of them either.
To the editor:
Shame on the editorial board of the Inquirer for once again painting organized labor as an inconvenient obstacle to economic progress in Philadelphia (“So close to a new reality,” March 18). Like their less subtle counterparts who wrote letters calling unions “a cancer in the livelihood of our city” which “just cost many people their jobs,” they make an ill-advised attempt to spin Bunim/Murray Productions’ obstinate refusal to negotiate with local unions. As your paper reported, (“‘Real world’ maker calls decision final,” March 18) despite repeated attempts by the Carpenters, Teamsters, and Electricians’ unions to make deals with the Real World producers, the Producers told the head of the Greater Philadelphia Film Office that “they were nonunion everywhere, and they did not want any deals with the unions.” For the Real World, whose website brags that no cost was spared to ensure that the current San Diego cast “got the hook-up in the house department,” to refuse to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement to justly compensate the hardworking men and women whose labor builds the house in which next season’s “four hot girls and three suave guys” will strut about and make out is the height of corporate hypocrisy. For the Inquirer to blame the unions for Bunim/Murray’s stonewalling is an offense against all the union workers whose decades of work off-camera built the American cities showcased on reality television. This is one of many members of the coveted 18-to-24 year-old demographic that won’t be tuning in to the Real World wherever its producers’ flight from accountability to organized labor may lead.
Josh Eidelson
Bala Cynwyd, PA
Perhaps the most interest feature of the Times’ write-up of today’s debate is the short shrift given to half the candidates, who in the earlier draft were mentioned only as “other candidates” until the last paragraph which noted that Kucinich “has no chance” and that Sharpton “complained” about being ignored. The longer version up now is slightly, although not significantly better on this count. Kucinich and Sharpton at least made it into the photo – given that Sharpton was sitting right between Kerry and Edwards, it would have been hard to find any other way to take it.
Over at the New York Times (quasi-)blog, Matt Bai is trying to take a bold stance against conventional wisdom by arguing that Howard Dean’s campaign did not, in fact, leave any lasting legacy for American politics:
Dr. Dean can hardly claim to have laid the rails for some powerful engine of change. His campaign, as he never tired of reminding us, was about “taking the country back,” which seemed another way of saying it was basically about winning.
It’s a nice try, but in this case the conventional wisdom (if that’s what it is – I thought the conventional wisdom, at least over at the Times, was that Dean was an unstable fanatic leading hordes of dateless college kids) is right. Bai’s basic argument, it seems, is that Dean didn’t run on a signature issue and therefore was only creative tactically but not ideologically. I think he’s wrong on two counts. First, as Dean himself has argued, the seeming unanimity among the Democratic candidates now obscures the fact that a year ago few were arguing that blasting Bush’s broken promises in Iraq, in public schools, and in the workplace was the Democrats’ route to success. Healthcare in particular was an issue that, while urgently important to millions of Americans for decades, Howard Dean put back on the map for a party largely convinced that because a zealous corporate lobby was able to tank a half-hearted moderate healthcare reform ten years ago it was relatively hopeless to try to cover most Americans.
Second, Bai is wrong to argue that Howard Dean’s tactics amounted to nothing more than really wanting to win. The significance of what Dean embarked on is demonstrated, as I argued at the time, by the incredulity of the New York Times magazine in trying to report what was driving his campaign. “Ordinary Americans convinced that there could be a connection between a broken political system and the challenges they’re confronting in their own lives? Must be like of some kind of Alchoholics Anonymous meeting. Why are they talking so much about themselves? Don’t they know only people who run for office are important?” An organizing model, like universal healthcare, is not a new idea. But what they have in common is that the Democratic party of the past couple decades has in large part left them to rust. And Howard Dean, for all his mistakes – like relying on Northeastern college students to canvass in Iowa rather than cultivating a stronger core of organizers from the state – helped bring them back to life.
There’s been a lot of talk recently among Democrats, particularly those committed to John Kerry, about how Howard Dean “brought people into the party.” That’s true, but it’s only half of the story, and in that sense is wishful thinking by those who want the Democratic party to stay the course of the past decade. Howard Dean, despite a conservative record of his own, chose that he could get farthest by being a vessel for a popular movement that existed before him and will continue after him – and in so doing, he took an important step towards bring the Democratic party back to the people.
The Wall Street Journal is closer to the truth than the New York Times on this one: “the most consequential loser since Barry Goldwater.”
Another unfortunate YDN staff editorial:
As great an activist as he may be, we are beginning to tire of Jackson’s seemingly endless campaign against the so-called evils of Yale…Yale should be mindful of the power its successful investment office wields, and how its practices can and do affect the world around it. But for Jesse Jackson to dictate how Yale manages its own assets is entirely inappropriate.
In other words, it’s OK for Yale to do the right thing, just as long as it doesn’t have to appearance to being a response to demands from New Haveners, students, or any other uppity interlopers. Which is pretty much the message of the Yale Office of Public Affairs as well.
Michael Moore defends his description, while endorsing Wesley Clark, of Bush as a deserter. My sense is that technically speaking, Bush was guilty either of desertion or of going AWOL – funny, that one has a pretty negative conotation too. Getting an explanation from Peter Jennings of why he called on Clark to refute Moore’s charge of absurd is about as likely as getting an explanation from Moore of how to reconcile his condemnation of the Kosovo campaign with his praise of the man who led it.
My predictions for tomorrow:
Kerry comes in first, simply because Dean hasn’t had enough time to catch up after recovering from whatever combination of his combative stance in Iowa/ his overly-apologetic response to his combative stance in Iowa/ his insufficiently apologetic response to his combative stance in Iowa/ media harping on an imagined combative stance in Iowa/ some combination of the above one may choose to blame for the beating he took in the polls in the past week. Dean comes in second and he and Kerry both pitch themselves as comeback kids; Kerry as usual finds the media more credulous than Dean. Dean comes in closer to Kerry than to the Edwards, who comes in third behind him, lacking the committed and organized constituencies Kerry and Dean have mobilized. Clark does not much, if any, better than he’s been expected to the past few days, and likely even worse – in any case drastically worse than he was expected to a few weeks ago before Kerry stole his part as the anointed “Anti-Dean” and his campaign fumbled and failed to advance a coherent vision or take advantage of what could have been a real head start to build a machine in New Hampshire. If Clark does particularly badly, he strikes me as more likely than any of the other candidates to drop out shortly after, thus ending further embarassment and leaving his Presidential run as a whimsical coda on what many see as an accomplished career as a military public servant. Lieberman does worse than Clark, claims that he exceeded expectations, and argues that Kerry and Dean are both soft on defense and that only he represents a real choice between extremists. Kucinich does much better than Sharpton.
Timothy Noah argues that Howard Dean has nothing to apologize for. She’s right. Well, there’s plenty for him to apologize for – but getting worked up isn’t it. Was yelling in the way he did a poor tactical move in that it was inevitable to be interpreted by some not as a rallying cry he learned from the Farmworkers but as a the cry of blood-thirsty banshee? Sure. But the odds that you’ll turn on TV news and see Howard Dean yelling as supposed to the odds that the 30-second clip will be, say, George Bush flirting in the State of the Union with writing bigotry into the US Constitution are disgraceful. As Garance Franke-Rutka observes:
I — and others — could scarcely hear what Dean was saying on the stage from the press section in the back of the room because several thousand Deaniacs were making so much noise (Dean wasn’t the only one screaming) and the acoustics in the room weren’t very good. From inside the room, it seemed that he was feeding off the energy of a crowd that was cheering him on, and that they got louder and louder in concert with each other.
There’s a great deal going on in this country about which we should be hollering bloody murder right now, and the more time spent fixating on whether getting worked up is “presidential,” the farther we are from doing something about it. As Russ Baker writes:
Basically, at a pep rally, he yelled like a football coach. This is described as being “unpresidential.” But says who? Besides, what’s the definition of ‘presidential?’ Isn’t giving insulting nicknames to world leaders unpresidential? Isn’t sending hundreds of American soldiers to die for uncertain and misrepresented ends in Iraq unpresidential – or worth considering as such? Isn’t having an incredibly poor grasp of essential world facts and an aversion to detail and active decision-making unpresidential?
A couple thoughts on the Iowa caucuses, a topic on which much ink (real and virtual) has and no doubt and will be spilled:
As someone who, despite significant reservations, believes Dean would be the best of the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination, I was disappointed to see him come in third. As someone who believes with great conviction in the organizing model that Dean has employed, I was disappointed to see that it was not enough to win him the Caucus. That does little to take away from the tremendous progress the Dean campaign has made and the ways it which it’s destabilized some of the unfortunate Clintonian paradigms of building power in the Democratic party. I’d also argue that losing Iowa does less than many think to hurt Dean’s chances of seizing the endorsement. One of the ways the press has hurt Dean over the past months, besides applying a level of cynicism and scrutiny to him denied in coverage of, say, the sitting President, is by raising the bar for his importance impossibly high. It’ll be interesting to see whether Dean is as effective as Clinton at seizing on and drawing momentum from underdog status. Some have argued that losing Iowa is better for Dean because it leaves several “anti-Dean” candidates in the running going into New Hampshire and stymies efforts to coalesce behind one Dean alternative – I guess we’ll see how that plays out as well.
It’ll be interesting to see what Kerry makes of the new attention and the new media narrative offered to him. Specifically, I wonder to what he and his staff attribute his late surge. The role he takes over the next weeks may hint at who it is they he thinks is propelling his rebirth as a candidate.
Looks like the zenith of Dick Gephardt’s political career has passed. The interesting story here may be his failure to marshall stronger support from the labor movement – instead of garnering the endorsement by the AFL-CIO as a body some expected, he saw the two largest unions in the body go to Dean. I think the Cold War AFL-CIO (there’s a reason they used to call it the AFL-CIA) model suggested to some by his support for the war in Iraq, and the tension it created, speaks to shifts in the American labor movement.
Has the press treated Dean worse than the rest of the Democratic field? The Center for Media and Public Affairs argues convincingly that it has. Dean, meanwhile, is back in the lead in Iowa polling, albeit a statistically insignificant one. I say he’ll win on Monday because his campaign is the one most effectively organizing voters not only to show support but to do the shlepping it takes to caucus.
Josh Eidelson 