As Atrios points out, Bush made much the same argument Dean got in such trouble for about leaving it to the judges to render verdicts against the evildoers – and not a peep of outrage from the “liberal media.”
Tag Archives: media
CNN misses the point:
For some, these men who defended a system that allowed slavery should not be memorialized on public schools where thousands of black children are educated.
What about the white students educated there? Isn’t that a problem as well?
The title of this article wouldn’t be news if papers like the Times covered and represented labor in a manner anything like the way they cover and represent business – but the article’s quite good.
This NY Times piece – “Mr. Inside Embraces Mr. Outside, and What a Surprise” is one of many analyses that will no doubt proliferate over the next few days trying to explain Gore’s endorsement.
I think Purdum is on the right track in noting Gore’s drastic shift to the left since the 2000 election, as well as his series of strident condemnations of Bush policy over the past months. These have been, by turns, gratifying and maddening, I think it’s safe to say, to those of us who were exasperated with Gore for leaving so little ideological distinction between himself and Bush during the actual campaign. Gore’s piece in the Times after the Enron scandal tying corporate malfeseance to Bush’s corporate politics made the right case – but it’s a case that, contrary to what that piece also said – Gore never made on the campaign trail. Those conservatives who think (occasionally rightly) that they can convince American voters that the main fault line in their politics is between civil and uncivil politicians have tried to use Gore’s move to the left as evidence that he’s bitter and angry at his personal loss. I think it’s much more that Gore, like Clinton and other New Democrats, recognize the appeal of Old Democrat values and so fall back on them once out of office both to bring nobility to their legacy and to convince themselves that they at least lost because they stood for something and not because they didn’t. Dean’s aggressive condemnations of the failings of this administration fit the message that Gore has claimed for himself since 2000. So it’s shouldn’t be surprising to see him endorsing someone who’s ready to carry that message forward – and to see him endorsing the candidate who’s running the kind of campaign now that many wanted him to run four years ago.
What Purdum’s analysis for the Times fails to mention, however, is what may really be the most compelling reason for Gore to endorse Dean now: he’s winning. Gore, in the same way as, say SEIU, gains power from picking late enough to choose the one who’ll win and early enough to be as formative in that victory as possible. Gore specifically, however, has the chance by endorsing Dean to merge their narratives – one populist fighter has the election narrowly stolen but four years later another arises to take it back – and drown out the alternative – the New Democrat establishment fouls up an election and it’s left to a populist outsider to ride in four years later to fix it.
Purdum asks whether this will hurt Gore’s credibility, and I think the answer is no more than Gore’s already hurt his credibility by governing and campaigning from the center and then moving to the left since. More importantly, he asks whether this will hurt Dean’s candidacy, and I don’t think it will measurably. Dean has successfully enough framed himself as an outside-the-beltway candidate, and campaigned that way long enough, that I think this will come off more as the beltway coming around to the Governor of Vermont than the other way around. More fundamentally, I think candidates can be effectively criticized, in extreme cases, for not repudiating deeply objectionable folks who endorse them, but that otherwise criticizing them for who endorses them is difficult to pull off. I think that Al Gore’s endorsement will give Dean’s critics on the left about as much ammunition as Jesse Jackson Jr.’s, Ted Rall’s, Molly Ivins’, William Greider’s, et al gave his critics on the right: not a whole lot, in the long term. Speaking as one of those critics on the left, that Dean got Gore’s endorsement says to me just that he’s an effective organizer. Gore endorsing Dean may give some added momentum and visibility to Sharpton and Kucinich’s campaigns, which could only be good for the Democratic party, but I don’t see any of the other candidates positioned at this point to use it to frame themselves as the independent choice.
What this endorsement does, as I see it, is move a slew of voters to consider Dean – or to consider him seriously – who hadn’t before, and deflate much of the criticism from DLCers and others of Dean as unelectable or out of the mainstream. Much as Jackson’s hashkachah (certification, roughly translated) marks Dean kosher for some to his left, Gore’s will mark him kosher for some to his right. And it may mean that the Democratic establishment is learning not only the lesson of 2002 – what happens when you offer no viable alternative – but also the lesson of 1972 – what happens when the party leadership abandons the party’s candidate.
Today marks the debut of the New York Times’ Public Editor. This is a concept with which I think few “small d” democrats could take issue, and I’m curious to see how his eighteen-month term plays out. I think it’s fair, however, to express concern, given the Times’ and the rest of the media establishment’s tendency to lend much more credence to the Times’ critics on the right than to its critics on the left, with whether Okrent’s aspirations
to represent you effectively when you have a complaint about The Times’s integrity
will cover the full spectrum of the Times’ readership. Okrent’s suggestion that the media risks
…the boiling resentment toward men and women in power that can arise…
in journalism – that the media is too muckracking – suggests that the bias of a corporate media establishment too often in bed with a corporate political establishment isn’t the top one on his list.
The New York Times Magazine, in its cover story, makes an awkward, leering, occasionally illuminating, mostly misguided attempt to understand the grassroots movement that (deserved or not) has built around Howard Dean. What’s most stunning is the incredulity and confusion with which the Times confronts the prospect that politics could be built around – and create – communities, and that it could arise from and inform personal narratives in ways other than serving as a tool for the performance of privilege. Much of the article is full of accounts of bad break-ups meant to make these folks look pathetic and descriptions of personal eccentricities meant to make them look perverse:
He stripped to his underwear, lay on the floor in a fetal position and remained there for days, occasionally sipping from an old carton of orange juice. ”I was completely obliterated,” he says. ”I didn’t know something like that could actually cause physical pain.” Johnson’s friends kept calling, trying to think of something that would get him out of the house. Finally they hit on one: Howard Dean.
This paragraph, however, is perhaps more absurd:
It felt as much like a support group as a political rally. As they did at Clay Johnson’s meet-up in Atlanta, everyone went around the circle describing what drew them to Dean, usually in very personal language. Bob and Eileen Ehlers haltingly explained the problems their children, in their 20’s, have with health insurance, while Tony Evans nodded sympathetically.
That the most reputable newspaper in the US sees people choosing to get involved in campaigns based on personal experience and personal struggles as pathological is sad. That this is seen as a bleeding heart newspaper is just absurd.
There’s also Howard Dean as siren:
Long before Howard Dean was considered a plausible candidate for president, he seemed to emit some sort of secret call that made people, many of them previously apolitical, drop everything and devote themselves to his campaign.
Yet the Times also acknowledges that whatever this strategy is, it seems to be working:
By organizing its national network of Yogis, Howards, Dykes and Disney Employees for Dean, the campaign built an alternative to institutions like the D.L.C. Dean has raised $25 million, mostly through small checks — the average donation is $77 — and those checks have placed Dean at the top of the Democratic fund-raising pack. Dean’s opponents have begun to mimic the trappings of his campaign. Many of the Democratic candidates now have blogs. Even President Bush has one, though comments from the public — an essential element of Dean’s blog — are not allowed.
The article’s close suggests a glimmering, even at the New York Times Magazine, of understanding of what a grassroots campaign could be:
”What’s happening is an unusual and unprecedented correspondence between the campaign and us,” she says. It takes me a moment before I realize that when she says ”the campaign,” she doesn’t mean the people running the headquarters in Burlington. She means the people she’s going to visit in her Airstream.
I doubt I’m the only one who’s skeptical of quotes from supporters like
”But the strongest thing was that I could tell he is a good man,” Brooks says gravely. ”And if a good man were president, it would change everything in ways we can’t even imagine.”
But more important to me than whether Howard Dean is a good man is whether he’s a good organizer – and so far, he’s outpaced every one else by a long shot. Reading this piece reminded me of a recent essay in which Sam Smith wrote:
Come with me for a moment to the time of when politics was so much a part of New York City that Tammany Hall had to rent Madison Square Gardens for its meetings of committeemen – all 32,000 of them. . In contrast, when the Democratic National Committee decided to send a mailing to its workers some years back, it found that no one had kept a list. The party had come to care only about its donors.
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.
…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. Yet like so much in our national life, we are only going through the motions, paying ritualistic obeisance to a faith we no longer follow. In fact, we have lost our way home. We must not only make politics a part of our culture but make our culture a part of our politics.
I share much of Sam Smith’s – and others’ – skepticism both about what Dean’s record portends for working people and about the depth of his commitment to a new new American politics that would include much of the strengths of the old one. But at least he’s a good enough organizer, and an innovative enough politician, to merit incredulous, confused pieces in the New York Times Magazine.
Just watched an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy last night. My sense has been, and still is, that those who are arguing that the show symbolizes a crude minstrelesque stereotyping of gay folks and those who are arguing that the show symbolizes a new prominence and acceptance of gay folks are both right. The most powerful argument of the former camp, I think, is that after performing stereotypical queer labor for heteros, the “Fab Five,” leave the heteros alone and go back into their queer home to watch from a distance as the people they’ve served experience romance. The fact that they’re drinking martinis doesn’t diminish the resemblance to servant quarters. The powerful argument of the latter camp, I think, is that queer folks are being brought into heteros’ homes not only to joke, advise, and support them but specifically to facilitate the development of healthier monogomous, faithful, loving relationships.
What struck me most strongly on watching the show last night, however, was the class-typing which pervades it. I think that the “positive stereotypes” associated with the “Fab Five,” while they share some of the problematic nature and potential utility in social progress as, say, the idea that Blacks beat Whites as Basketball, are comparatively noteworthy in that they’re almost totally inaccesible to a large swathe of the homosexual community. What are gay teenagers gorwing up in urban ghettos – especially those of color – to make of a queer icon distinguished by his inpeccable fashion who in a recent episode found an unacceptable shirt in a hetero man’s closet and asked him, “What are you, poor?”
There’s a compelling argument that the recent media buzz over “metrosexuals” – basically, hetero men who follow homosexual stereotypes – represents a reification of the claim that homosexuality and the expressions associated with it – warmth, compassion, fashion – both other you and make you less of a man. There’s a compelling argument to be made that the buzz over “metrosexuals” represents a problematization of constructs of gender and sexuality, and a growing comfort with the idea that multiple masculinities are available to heterosexual and homosexual guys alike. But what both of these arguments gloss over is that “metrosexuality” further weds sexuality and class by implying that northeastern urban wealthy trendy heterosexual men can perform homosexual stereotypes too.
It shouldn’t be surprising that the internet parodies of this show – some quite hateful – which have risen up have also been pervaded with class-typing: regular, blue-collar, beer-guzzling, poorly-dressed men converting effete trendy queers. But perhaps it should be concerning. Just as it should be concerning how many of the official and unofficial spokespeople of the political gay rights movement are white, upper-middle class folks (some of whom have a great deal of vested interest in divorcing the movement from class- and race- based justice movements). What’s needed is more voices, and diverse ones. Let a thousand queer TV shows bloom – but please, let them depict more than the type of gay folks in the Fab Five.
Faced with a compelling narrative Tuesday – students come together in a broad and diverse coalition to demand that Yale cease redlining Fair Haven, and the head of ONHSA shows up to announce a dramatic change in University policy after years of organizing in the community for change, the YDN and the Reigister found a peculiar way of covering it: The YDN wrote a story about the student demand which downplayed the concession by the administration, and the Register wrote a story about the change in University policy which downplays the students’ demand for it…This is one of those cases where you would need at a minimum to read both stories to begin to get a sense of what’s going on here.
This front-page story in the YDN focuses on the committee formed in Local 35 which will consider fines – along with other approaches, like new organizing approaches – as a response to the 1 to 2 percent of the membership that continued working during the strike. It’s quite similar to a story the YDN ran a couple weeks back on the same topic, also as a top story. What’s missing is a conversation with any of the hundreds of members who’ve pushed for a response; their absence contributes to the sense that setting up a committee is some kind of autocratic punitive stratagem by Bob Proto. That sense, and the erasure of workers from the narrative, are furthered by the absence of any mention of Bob Proto’s uncontested re-election as President of Local 35 yesterday, or of the race for Chief Steward.
Also misleading is this front-page analysis which continues the YDN’s narrative of GESO of late: GESO sinned by organizing and was punished by losing the referendum last spring, and has since redeemed itself by pushing issues instead. While this account has meant some less openly nasty coverage of GESO by the YDN of late, it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the labor movement works, one shared by too many students. Unions don’t choose between pushing issues to make members happy or organizing to make their leaders happy. Unions organize by bringing workers together through common experience and interest and shared issues, and unions bring change on issues through the power of their organizing. GESO has, as the YDN acknowledges, been responsible for substantive change in the benefits and resources Yale makes available to its graduate students. But only through the power of its organizing, and the threat of unionization. So while it’s true, and admirable, and GESO has conducted an exciting series of surveys, produced damning and enlightening reports, and generated its first unified platform over the past months, pushing for change on the issues which affect graduate students is not a new development – and organizing and fighting for recognition are not only old news.
The most telling part of this piece in today’s Times is the end:
And even some who oppose the union drive acknowledge that both sides bear responsibility for the current climate.
James Terry, president of At What Cost?, a campus group opposed to the union, said that the university had grown increasingly inflexible on labor issues and that he was among many on campus who have been alienated by the stubbornness and language of union organizers.
“They have some intrusive recruitment tactics,” Mr. Terry said, adding that a graduate student he knows was approached by organizers about membership nine times after she initially refused. “I don’t think that Yale is treating us so bad that we need to compare ourselves to Birmingham in 1963,” he said, “and that’s what GESO will do, and I find that personally offensive.”
Still, even union opponents like Mr. Terry see some cause for alarm in the suggestion that some students, rightly or wrongly, feel threatened if they speak out. “There is reason to be concerned,” he said. “The academy runs on different precepts. Differences of opinion have to be respected. If even one of these cases should be true, that’s something people at all universities should be concerned about.”
Terry’s first comment sets forth the tired dichotomies that GESO opponents of all backgrounds have relied on: between a historical epoch in which real injustice existed and a modern period of mere political differences; between poor sympathetic workers who have the right to organize and wealthy sheltered ones who don’t. But his more interesting contribution, following At What Cost’s line before the Academic Labor Board, is his politically smart refusal to defend the intimidation tactics of Yale’s administration. AWC has also declined to endorse Yale’s stonewalling through refusal to meet with GESO and refusal to agree to acknowledge even the results of an NLRB election. As long as AWC wants to frame itself as a grassroots operation interested solely in democratic deliberation (a difficult mantle to take on, even if all the charges nationally of faculty members making illegal contributions to such groups are true, simply because AWC is benefiting in fighting GESO from the pressure power of the entire University apparatus), it saves face better this way. But it leaves the Yale administration, in its most aggregious violations of its own principles – intimidation of students and refusal of the right to a vote – without any semblance of student support.
Paul Krugman gives the argument – advanced most recently by his newest fellow columnist – that the problem with political discourse today is the rudeness and meanness of the left exactly the response it deserves:
But there’s more going on than a simple attempt to impose a double standard. All this fuss about the rudeness of the Bush administration’s critics is an attempt to preclude serious discussion of that administration’s policies. For there is no way to be both honest and polite about what has happened in these past three years.
The problem with political discourse in this country, as far as I’m concerned, has everything to do with what issues are and are not on the radar screen, who gets a voice in the discourse, and what the assumptions are which undergird the discourse – and nothing to do with the civility of the diction.
Josh Eidelson 