As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."
Thursday, September 03, 2009
One Ex-Nixon Staffer Installed, Two To Go
Diane Sawyer's getting tabbed for the ABC World News Tonight slot, replacing Charlie Gibson. I read nothing into Gibson's reported anger at Sawyer's choice as anything more than the usual professional infighting. But let's be clear why Gibson should be mad.
While this was decades ago, Diane Sawyer staffed for Richard Nixon and never really lost that mentality. Her performance grilling the Dixie Chicks will go down as one of the all-time low points in the history of journalism, with Sawyer acting as chief counsel for a Republican President, subjecting entertainers to a cross-examination for the crime of stating their opinion:
When Sawyer prompted the three of them to ask for forgiveness, in a gruesome moment of utterly fake primetime piety, the trio paused. You could see them struggling with their pride, their conviction, and their desire to get along; I was half-hoping they'd suggest Sawyer kiss their three asses (and I'd be surprised if the notion didn't run through their minds). Instead, Maines kept her cool and her dignity. "Accept us," she said. "Accept an apology that was made ... but to forgive us, don't forgive us for who we are." And she went on to point out, as if it needed to be said, that the practice of dissent is fundamental to democracy.
That wasn't good enough for Sawyer. She spent an hour trying to bend the Chicks with a combination of false sympathy and crass sensationalism. Time and again, she cut back to a typeset insert of Maines' original remark, as if Maines had called for the pillage of Crawford. "Ashamed?" Sawyer said, incredulously. "Ashamed?" In the tradition of a Stalinist show trial, the women were forced to affirm their patriotism and their support for the troops. At every point they—who are, after all, entertainers with no particular training in political science—were thoughtful, modest, and firm. At every point Sawyer tried to force them into a crude, Manichaen choices. "Do you feel awful about using that word about the president of the United States?" she asked at the start of the interview—in a prime example of the sort of leading question no self-respecting first year AP stringer would ask. "Well," replied Maines, carefully, " 'awful' is a really strong word." Later, when Maines was trying to apologize and clarify, Sawyer said, "I hear something not quite, what, wholehearted. …"
Well, I heard something not quite—what—honorable in Sawyer's presentation of the affair: an attempt to take a trivial matter that had blown up into an absurd controversy, and blow it up even more under the guise of simply covering the story. Essentially, she asked the women to choose between abasing themselves on national television or stirring up more hatred against themselves. It was a depressing moment in an ugly time.
For what it's worth, I have profoundly mixed feelings about the war, and if I were to sit down with Natalie Maines, I'm sure we'd have much to disagree about. But, just so you know, I'm proud that the Dixie Chicks are from Texas. What's more, I'm embarrassed that Diane Sawyer is a member of my profession.
Actually, I can think off the top of my head of a worse moment: Sawyer interviewed Al Gore about his book "The Assault On Reason," wherein Gore savaged the news media for focusing on trivialities and horse-race nonsense. And Sawyer decided to follow this up with a question about - whether Gore was running in 2008.
And so the "conversation of democracy" gets debased yet more.
The vigil last night in Los Angeles for Euna Lee and Laura Ling, the two journalists detained in North Korea and put on trial today, brought over 500 people to a neighborhood restaurant in Santa Monica, featuring the Lee and Ling families, Tia Carrere, soon to be Congresswoman Judy Chu, and a number of spoken word and musical artists. CNN carried a live interview on Anderson Cooper 360 with Lisa Ling and the husbands of the two detainees, where the families asked for dialogue and diplomacy and not to conflate this situation with the nuclear standoff between the North Koreans and the West. Even Roxana Saberi, the US journalist detained and then released in Iran, sent a letter of support.
While the story gets widespread international attention, Current TV has been absolutely silent on it—going so far as to pull user-submitted stories on the case from its own site. A search of Current.com this morning turns up only one single user-submitted Yahoo news article on the case, which had been posted less than 30 minutes ago. This, even while the story was simultaneously on the front page of NYTimes.com, and while Ling's celebrity sister is desperately trying to get publicity for her case.
Why the hell is Current so quiet about the fate of its own reporters? We emailed and asked them earlier this week, but they haven't responded to us. But a tipster tells us that Current's top management made the conscious decision to "silence" the issue, and that Current employees have been instructed not to discuss it.
I'll tell you why they're so silent. They're RESPONSIBLE. They put these young journalists in dangerous situations without any concern, clearly, for their well-being, and when it blows up in their face they would rather ignore the issue that admit fault. It's been a consistent pattern of airlifting young journalists into war zones and basically giving them a sharp stick and telling them to poke a bear.
I'm sure the State Department has told them to keep quiet. But I'm sure they told the family to keep quiet too, and they didn't. It's a really disgusting display, or lack thereof, by Current, and Al Gore should be ashamed of himself.
Yesterday, Al Gore testified on Capitol Hill about the climate crisis. Even though it was COLD! In January! I don't know how he worked up the courage to show his face.
Anyway, here's some of what he had to say.
We have arrived at a moment of decision. Our home - Earth - is in grave danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, of course, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings [...]
We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change.
For years our efforts to address the growing climate crisis have been undermined by the idea that we must choose between our planet and our way of life; between our moral duty and our economic well being. These are false choices. In fact, the solutions to the climate crisis are the very same solutions that will address our economic and national security crises as well.
In order to repower our economy, restore American economic and moral leadership in the world and regain control of our destiny, we must take bold action now.
I want to tell you that I wish we would just talk about a carbon tax, 100 percent of which would be returned to the American people. So there's no net dollars that would come out of the American people's pockets.
Gore agreed with Corker. But this is a scheme to slow down progress on the climate, a divide and conquer strategy. Dave Roberts explains.
The 111th U.S. Congress is not going to pass a carbon tax. Calls for a carbon tax, to the extent they have any effect, will complicate and possibly derail passage of carbon legislation.
It's possible that a carbon tax (and/or cap-and-dividend) bill will be introduced. One or both might even make it to a full vote, though I doubt it. But they won't pass. If you want carbon pricing out of this Congress, cap-and-trade is what you're getting. It follows that your energies are best spent ensuring that cap-and-trade legislation is as strong as possible [...]
Perhaps, if we slept through the last decade, we might believe that. Having been awake (and watching in horror), we understand that it's a poison pill. It's a way to avoid legislation at all if possible and secure the weakest possible bill if not. It's a way to exploit disagreements within the climate coalition and derail momentum. That's what they do. As usual, they're fighting a knife fight and the left is holding a grad school seminar.
Now, Roberts strongly favors cap and trade, so take that with a grain of salt. But he's not wrong and we've seen this movie before. Hell, John Dingell proposed this a couple years ago, taunting environmentalists that he was doing so "just to sort of see how people really feel about this.” One goal is to associate mitigating climate change with a tax, and making sure the conservative base knows that's the only way any progress can be made (even though in one iteration, that tax would be paid by carbon producers and refunded to the people). Another is simply to drive a wedge on the left to blunt consensus.
Whether it's a carbon tax or cap and trade, the environmental movement should pick a side and go with it. They're going to need to be unified against near-universal Republican opposition. Kevin Drum has more.
President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden met with former Vice President Al Gore today, to discuss the climate crisis. Interestingly enough, Obama's energy picks are set to come out tomorrow, which means that he at least ran those picks by Gore, not for approval, perhaps, but in a somewhat formal way. In the small press availability, Obama said that "all three of us are in agreement that the time for delay is over, the time for denial is over... this is a matter of urgency and national security, and it has to be dealt with in a serious way."
This shows the importance of having a power broker outside of the government with the ability and willingness to push the President and the Congress in their direction. Al Gore could have run for President, or taken a job inside the Administration. But it would have diluted his cause, lessened his credibility, and cut him off from his grassroots movement. Gore did the exact right thing to stay separate. He still can get high-level meetings with powerful officials, and he still can deploy resources to change minds in the court of public opinion. Gore is very important to the future of the progressive movement, and a good lesson in how to partake in a post-political life.
Wow, when I wrote this brief yesterday about the dangers of clean coal, I honestly had no idea that an entire campaign was being readied by Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, the Sierra Club, The League of Conservation Voters, the NRDC and several other enviro groups, in a coalition they call The Reality Campaign. Their first TV ad is sharp and to the point.
"The reality is that there's not a single home or business in America today powered by clean coal," said Brian Hardwick of the Alliance for Climate Protection. "If coal really wants to be part of America's energy future, the industry can start by making a real commitment to eliminating their pollution that is a leading cause of global warming."
Hardwick continued: "It is high time for the coal industry to come clean and admit to the American people that today clean coal is not a reality. No matter how much they say it in their advertising, coal can't truly be clean until the plants can capture global warming pollution. With so much at stake, we can't afford to hang our hats on an illusion."
While the single-issue enviro groups haven't been entirely effective, on coal they have started to get it, with the Sierra Club's legal team winning a major recent ruling at the EPA making it virtually impossible for them to approve new coal-fired power plants. This ad campaign goes after the court of public opinion, and pushes back on the pervasive use of "clean coal." The coal industry sponsored every single debate on CNN this election season. We can no longer allow these poisonous, PR-friendly phrases to be injected into the discourse without serious pushback.
You can sign up to help The Reality Campaign at their website.
If you want to know why Al Gore hasn't run for President since 2000, it's because he thinks he has a better chance to enact an agenda he cares about from the outside instead of from the inside. And here's how he's going about it:
Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection has some environmental advice for the incoming Obama administration: focus on energy efficiency and renewable resources, and create a unified U.S. power grid.
On Thursday, the group Gore founded rolled out a new media campaign to push for immediate investments in three energy areas it maintains would help meet Gore's previously announced challenge to produce 100 percent clean electricity in the United States in a decade [...]
The plan advocates immediate investment in energy efficiency, renewable power generation -- including public investment in wind, solar and geothermal technology -- and the creation of a unified national smart grid.
"Modernize transmission infrastructure so that clean electricity generated anywhere in America can power homes and businesses across the nation," the alliance said in a statement.
The alliance favors "national electricity 'interstates' that move power quickly and cheaply to where it needs to be (and) local smart grids that buy and sell power from households and support clean plug-in cars."
This is the lasting infrastructure that can be a part of the upcoming stimulus package. Modernizing the energy grid is one of the most important things we can do right now. Generating all this wind and solar and geothermal power doesn't do much good unless it can be transmitted nationwide. We actually lose billions in productivity from power outages and loss of electricity on the existing grid, which is crumbling, so this investment will pay off fairly quickly. This is the kind of common sense move that I think will be a hallmark of an Obama Administration.
Gore is also planning to use social media to press the advantage, though he didn't really elaborate on that.
If Gore tried to ram this through as a President or "energy czar" I truly think it would have less impact. His independence is an asset.
If A Nose Grows In A Forest, And No One Is There To Hear It...
Last night, John McCain, he of the Pinocchioproblem, retold the story for the Saddleback Church congregants about his time in the Hanoi Hilton (John McCain is very reluctant to talk about his POW experience), when a guard loosened his ropes and, later, on Christmas, drew a cross in the sand, in solidarity with McCain the prisoner, a simple expression of faith. The crowd loved it.
McCain has been telling this story since at least 1999, in his book "Faith of Our Fathers." In 2000 he told the story and it involved the guard drawing the cross with a sandal. I guess the stick was better for the visual of the ad that ran this year:
Now there's the revelation that the story of the cross is remarkably similar to a possibly apocryphal story attributed to the late Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. There are a number of Christian books that tell a similar tale about Solzhenitsyn's redemptive moment with a drawn cross. Here's one from 1997:
Along with other prisoners, he worked in the fields day after day, in rain and sun, during summer and winter. His life appeared to be nothing more than backbreaking labor and slow starvation. The intense suffering reduced him to a state of despair.
On one particular day, the hopelessness of his situation became too much for him. He saw no reason to continue his struggle, no reason to keep on living. His life made no difference in the world. So he gave up.
Leaving his shovel on the ground, he slowly walked to a crude bench and sat down. He knew that at any moment a guard would order him to stand up, and when he failed to respond, the guard would beat him to death, probably with his own shovel. He had seen it happen to other prisoners.
As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.
As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible.
Solzhenitsyn slowly rose to his feet, picked up his shovel, and went back to work. Outwardly, nothing had changed. Inside, he had received hope.
[From Luke Veronis, "The Sign of the Cross"; Communion, issue 8, Pascha 1997.]
Here's the same story in a 2002 book. And here's another from a book in 1994, which could be the original source. It seems to have spread like an email forward, and most authors source it to Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago, though it's unclear whether the story actually appears there. But it was mentioned a number of times following Solzhenitsyn's death this month. I can't find McCain referring to this story before 1999's Faith of Our Fathers, not even in this incredibly detailed account of his POW experience for US News and World Report published in May 1973.
It's entirely possible that this type of scene happened at a prison camp more than once, and there are differences between the two stories (in McCain's telling, the drawing is performed by a guard; in Solzhenitsyn's, it's a fellow prisoner). The similarities could be entirely coincidental. This is not something you can prove or disprove.
That didn't matter in 2000. Al Gore said he invented the Internet and that he found Love Canal and that he and Tipper were the inspiration for Love Story. That's what happened and there was no shaking anyone in the media off of that, and they were going to use those and other nuggets to build a story about Gore's serial exaggerations, and make that character issue far more important than any policy or point of difference between him and George W. Bush.
Here's my point. I don't actually care about stuff like this. I find it much more relevant and vital that McCain was quicker to begin the invasion of Iraq after 9-11 than even Bush and Cheney, or that he believes in his personal grandiosity so much that he imagines skirmishes on the Russo-Georgian border to be world-historical events that demand action, or that his health care plan would literally cover about 5% of those currently uninsured, or that he wants to continue Bush's policies of inequality by cutting taxes massively for the rich, or that he thinks anyone who makes less than $5 million a year isn't rich, and on and on. Stories about politicians embellishing parts of their personal biography for dramatic effect are fairly routine and show little more than that they're... ambitious politicians, looking to connect emotionally with voters to gain an advantage. Remember how Ronald Reagan convinced himself that he served in World War II? Hillary Clinton's "sniper fire" in Tuzla? Barack Obama's book actually admits that characters are invented and time compressed. So this is nothing new. And I wish ALL of it were ignored, because the thin strand connecting these gaffes and exaggerations to the actual character of the nominee is tenuous at best.
But the media goes ga-ga for this kind of stuff and offers little else, for the most part. I'm pleased that CBS is going to do 35 long segments on every aspect of the candidates' policies this fall, but let's face it, that isn't going to drive the debate of the chattering class. They are uniformly uninterested in the issues, and they would much rather obsess over minutiae and speculate about character, whether the candidates "look Presidential" or "have what it takes" to win. In the LA Times today, there are two articles that speak to this. One is a critical review of broadcast news by media critic Mary McNamara:
SO MUCH has been said about the media's handling of this campaign that it's almost embarrassing to address the topic. But after watching hours, days, weeks of it on television, the cry of anguish cannot be suppressed: For the love of all that is holy, how did one of the most important presidential races in history, between two men who embody such disparate political possibilities, wind up looking like a montage sequence in a Will Ferrell movie?
"Bias" has been the watchword, but watching the nightly news loops, it seems less like bias than just plain old fear. Fear of missing the moment, of boring the viewers, of relying on the old-model thinking -- who, what, when, why, where -- while everyone yawns and returns their collective attention to their new iPhones.
"No, no, wait," news outlets seem to shout like desperate screenwriters in a rapidly deteriorating pitch meeting. Nevermind those boring old proposed policies or the contradictory voting records or any of that stuff, look at this, you're going to love it, it's The Big Reveal.
Indeed, this is a major component of how the news media covers modern campaigns. The other way is through horse-race discussion, taking those gaffes and nuggets and bits of character effluvia and judging how they will "play" with core constituencies. The latest practitioner is Chuck Todd, and he comes out and admits that he's a sportscaster:
Less than an hour later, Todd sat in a third-floor studio for his only practice run anchoring on MSNBC before the conventions. It was his first time behind the desk, and he anxiously checked with the floor director throughout the hour to make sure he was getting his cues right. "This is big-boy TV now," he said.
The Miami native wasn't looking for a television career when he first arrived in this city as a student at George Washington University, already fascinated with politics. "I thought I wanted to manage a presidential campaign," he said. But after working on a few races, including Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin's 1992 presidential bid, he decided "it was more interesting to do it as a sport than trying to be a hired gun."
Here's the thing, though - in the case of the Village, it's more like a home-team sportscaster. The guy who is paid the Raiders to cover the game, and he hates every other team and has no problem shaping the story to benefit his guys. The refs are always against his team and the other guys are always cheating. Their draft pick is forever the savior of the franchise and the free agent they let go was a bum anyway. They give you the "inside story" without ever being critical of the guys who write the paychecks.
If there was an even spread from the media of damaging stories or unfavorable narratives on both sides of the political divide that'd be one thing. But the idea of John McCain as a serial exaggerator in the way that they painted Al Gore would be unthinkable, despite the fact that the evidence is the same, and actually even more so in the case of McCain. So we get media types arguing that infidelity like that of John Edwards disqualifies someone for higher political office without applying that to McCain or indeed several of the GOP field this year. We get them defending Republican military veterans from attacks they deem scurrilous and baseless yet not Democrats of the same rank. We get the same paint-by-numbers narratives of Democrats as weak and feminine and Republicans as strong and patriarchal year after year no matter who the candidate, no matter what the policy, no matter what.
I'm focusing on this gross double-standard in the comparison between Gore and McCain because I think it's the most salient example and it shows to what extent their thumbs are on the scale. The influence is deeply felt by those who watch politics, especially those who see it more occasionally. And when there was a perception on the other side of the aisle that the media was too liberal, they mounted an effort to relentlessly criticize them to make sure their perspective was represented. I don't necessarily want a perspective represented; I'd like to see campaigns covered with a reliance on facts and not fiction, substance and not style. But if continuous, vigilant criticism is what's warranted, well... have laptop, will travel.
(incidentally, this is the third instance that I can remember of McCain possibly fudging his POW record, which he of course is extremely reluctant to talk about. The more extreme Rovian in me wonders whether or not McCain's handlers are just trolling for a response from the opposition, so they can freak out about people denigrating his military service. Hmm...)
If Ceci Connolly has a spare moment from whatever she's doing right now, she could certainly write up this and start an enduring narrative that lasts until November.
This week, 16 months into his campaign, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) released his first policy paper on technology. Over at the Wonk Room, former Clinton administration privacy counselor Peter Swire notes that the paper gives McCain credit for "creating” the “Do Not Call” list. But the Federal Trade Commission chairman announced the list two years earlier:
McCAIN: 2003 – McCain led in creating the FTC’s ‘Do-Not-Call’ telemarketing registry to allow consumers to opt out of receiving telemarketing calls. And, when the law was challenged in court, McCain led the effort to ensure that it was upheld.
REALITY: FTC Chairman Tim Muris announced in October 2001 that the FTC was going to do the Do Not Call list. Yet somehow McCain magically caused the Do Not Call list in 2003. And, given the independent agency status of the FTC, it is a stretch to say that ‘McCain led the effort to ensure that it was upheld.
Not quite as sexy as "inventing the Internet," but the difference here is McCain actually put this down in writing, eliminating the need to misinterpret a quote.
This isn't even the first of these exaggerations TODAY.
My friends, we have reached a crisis, the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War. This is an act of aggression.
First serious crisis, ay? If I didn't know better, I'd say that McCain had forgotten the lessons of 9/11.
Obviously, this newfound meme of McCain's consistent exaggerations will hit a nerve with the chattering class. George Stephanopoulos will hold a roundtable on Sunday to discuss "McCain's honesty problem." Cokie Roberts will lament that "McCain isn't straight enough," and investigative reporters will be dispatched throughout the country to look into every one of McCain's prior statements. Children at area high schools where McCain has spoken will be grilled about their recollections. David Broder will use the word "Pinocchio," and that'll just open the floodgates. Howard Kurtz will opine on whether the media is being too lenient in the face of these obvious falsehoods. Chris Matthews will shout, "I mean, isn't this getting ridiculous?... Isn't it getting to be delusionary?" McCain will patiently try to clarify his comments but the media will have none of it. The soundbites will be clipped to make McCain look even worse. The pundits will snicker and former rivals like Mike Huckabee will say "I don't know why he feels that he has to exaggerate and make some of this stuff up." Newspaper editorials will openly wonder whether McCain is deliberately trying to sabotage his own campaign. The New York Times will flat-out call him "crazy."
This is part of my new book, "Election on Bizarro Earth." It am not good!
Nobody on Earth actually believes that increased drilling on the OCS would lower gas prices by more than 3 cents, and not for 10 years besides. And most people paying attention know that oil executives are not the go-to source for lowering your gas prices. Blaming Obama for this is dumbed-down and completely off-topic. Which, of course, is why it appears to be working.
On the other hand, Al Gore made an impassioned challenge to commit to receiving 100% of our electricity from renewables in 10 years, which is completely negated by the fact that he sometimes flies on planes and eats meat. Loser! Fat! The MTP interview, by the way, is instructive and remarkably light on the juvenile conversations that usually define this kind of thing. Digby thinks it's a revolution in insider journalism, but I think the seriousness of Gore's project, with its marshaling of evidence and appeals to reason, has forced the media to play on his field. Also, the enormity of the climate crisis rejects the cynical, easy answers.
What's amazing is that Gore hadn't been on Meet the Press in EIGHT YEARS. We've wasted a lot of time in this country but I think we're finally coming around to the scope of the crisis. And Gore's call ought to be heeded. Pointedly, Speaker Pelosi did not quite endorse it at Netroots Nation. We need to keep pushing. Pelosi is an ally on rejecting the false choice of drilling to lower gas prices, so that's a start.
...UPDATE: Bruce Miller at The Blue Voice just reminded me that in his taped message to Netroots Nation attendees, which hardly anyone saw because it was on Saturday night and everyone was burned out, Obama referred specifically to ending "the tyranny of oil." Not foreign oil, but oil. That's significant. I think we're going to fight our way out of this one.
...UPDATE II: Well, everything has ended, because Bill O'Reilly has now cemented that Al Gore is done.
O’REILLY: Al Gore now is done. He’s done. Ok. He is not a man of respect, he doesn’t have any judgment. The fact that he went to this thing is the same as if he stepped into the Klan gathering. It’s the same. No difference. None. K, he loses all credibility with me. All credibility.
If he thinks Gore stepped into a Klan rally, what must he think of Van Jones? What kind of judgment can a black man have for mixing with us metaphorical supremacists?
"The idea of drilling our way out of our energy crisis is ridiculous, if not abhorrent. There used to be an old remedy for hangovers called 'hair of the dog that bit you,' where you go back the next morning and take another drink. That's sort of what this reminds me of. Have a fossil fuel crisis? Let's go back for a bit more!"
Al Gore endorsed Barack Obama yesterday, and in his remarks he was fairly subtle in stressing the need for a Democratic President to solve the climate crisis and mitigate the worst effects of global warming. In fact, he gave muted praise to John McCain on this front:
...as Senator Barack Obama has said, John McCain is deserving of that respect. He has demonstrated bravery in war and as a prisoner of war, and has served in the House of Representatives and in the Senate for many years. Moreover, he has demonstrated a willingness to debate some critical issues, including the climate crisis, that many Republicans have refused to discuss at all.
But even as we acknowledge his long experience, we must and we will make our case that America simply cannot afford to continue the policies of the last eight years for another four.
This kind of statement in stuck in the mindset of the 1990s, when just "speaking out" about the environment, regardless of your policy proposals, is as important as any meaningful action. And it's what McCain himself is hoping to capitalize on in November. He's clearly picked climate change as the issue where he can show distance from President Bush, where he can burnish those moderate credentials that he's already starting to lose amongst the voters.
(Notice the new McCain slogan of "Reform. Prosperity. Peace." I so called it.)
Sounds and looks powerful and clear-cut. Of course, McCain would have more credibility on this issue if he knew what a cap and trade system was.
Also from John McCain's press conference this morning, the senator from Arizona once again makes it clear that he doesn't really understand cap-and-trade:
QUESTION: The European Union has set mandatory targets on renewable energy. Is that something you would consider in a McCain administration? [...]
MCCAIN: Sure. I believe in the cap-and-trade system, as you know. I would not at this time make those -- impose a mandatory cap at this time. But I do believe that we have to establish targets for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions over time, and I think those can be met.
Which is, of course, completely out of line with his own proposal for a cap-and-trade scheme, both the plan he proposed with Joe Lieberman last year and his own presidential plan, released last month. They both would, by nature, be mandatory -- hence the "cap" in the name. This isn't the first time McCain has misunderstood his own policy on cap-and-trade. In the Republican debate in Florida in January, he also denied that his cap-and-trade program included a mandatory cap on carbon.
McCain has claimed that he was confused by the question, which means he's confused by his own proposal. That's because he's trying to please two classes of voters at the same time. On the one hand he wants to prove his commitment to doing something about climate change. On the other, he has to keep the global warming denialists in his base, who have called him a "liberal Democrat" just for talking about the issue, at bay. So he calls a mandatory cap "voluntary," suggesting that he has no interest in the policy whatsoever. And he's paradoxically called for an end to the offshore drilling ban in coastal waters, a signal to the hard right that in the end, he values the oil companies over breathable air and a manageable climate.
McCain's energy money makes no sense. He tries to differentiate his position with the President, then authors the same policies. He has a lukewarm cap and trade proposal (polluters under his plan get free permits, rather than Obama's 100% auction which is used to fund alternative energy and relieve the burden of higher energy prices on low-income Americans), but doesn't really understand what it means.
Al Gore to endorse Barack Obama. Now. After all the primaries are over and Obama is the presumptive nominee.
It's his right to wait, of course, and he's less a leader of the party as an outside statesman. At the very least, I'm glad he's not using the even-handed "both candidates are committed to fighting global warming" rhetoric he was using about McCain and Obama just a month or so ago. Hopefully it'll get Obama a news cycle bump and maybe a few dollars. Here's the endorsement.
A few hours from now I will step on stage in Detroit, Michigan to announce my support for Senator Barack Obama. From now through Election Day, I intend to do whatever I can to make sure he is elected President of the United States.
Over the next four years, we are going to face many difficult challenges -- including bringing our troops home from Iraq, fixing our economy, and solving the climate crisis. Barack Obama is clearly the candidate best able to solve these problems and bring change to America.
This moment and this election are too important to let pass without taking action.
That's why I am asking you to join me in showing your support by making a contribution to this campaign today:
https://donate.barackobama.com/gore
Over the past 18 months, Barack Obama has united a movement. He knows change does not come from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or Capitol Hill. It begins when people stand up and take action.
With the help of millions of supporters like you, Barack Obama will bring the change we so desperately need in order to solve our country's most pressing problems.
If you've already contributed to this campaign, I ask that you consider making another contribution right now. If you haven't, please take the next step and own a piece of this campaign today:
https://donate.barackobama.com/gore
On the issues that matter most, Barack Obama is clearly the right choice to lead our nation.
We have a lot of work to do in the next few months to elect Barack Obama president, and it begins by making a contribution to this campaign today.
As you may know, I'm actually spending the weekend out in New York City for a wedding and am largely off the grid, but I did want to mention one thing before HBO unveiled its cinematic account of the Bush-Gore Florida follies Recount tonight, which is getting excellent reviews.
In my day job, I'm a freelancer in the LA area, and this past week I spent some time in a new office that I hadn't been to in some time. Immediately, I noticed something new gracing the wall; the front page of the Los Angeles Times from the day after the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore and Gore's concession from the race. I don't know how it got there or who put it up, but I'm glad they did, for as an artifact of the state of the world from the eye of the media at the close of the election, it's pretty fascinating.
The subhead from the top headline reads "President-Elect Calls For Reconciliation After Gore Concedes Defeat in Longest Contest in a Century." There was an analysis from Times Washington Bureau Chief Doyle McManus titled "Bush's Vow To Unite Encounters a Great Divide," and the beginning of the story (only the front page was on the wall) talked about how Bush campaigned as a "uniter, not a divider," and how this would now be tested by those angry Democrats, who Bush planned to reconcile with in order to calm the waters. Here's a sample:
Bush sought to send a message of soothing bipartisan conciliation in his first statement as President-elect.
"I am optimistic we can change the tone in Washington, D.C.," Bush said. "I believe things happen for a reason, and I hope the long wait of the last five weeks will heighten a desire to move beyond the bitterness and partisanship of the recent past."
Bush actually invoked Lincoln in that speech, saying that "Our nation must rise above a house divided," and how he was elected to serve one nation and not one party.
There was an analysis by Josh Getlin about how the nation was ripped asunder by this recount battle and scars were still showing and how wonderful it was that the "national shouting match was ending."
And there was an vaguely sourced story about how Gore's lawyers wanted to keep fighting after the Supreme Court decision (they apparently found some glimmers of hope in the opinion), but Gore finally called it to an end after exploring all avenues.
So the prevailing opinion on one of the country's more respected newspapers on this day was, basically, that George Bush was this conciliatory figure, Al Gore was scheming right up until the very last second and even after to overturn the election, and the public was just glad it was all over and now America can get on with the business of healing and bipartisanship.
Let that marinate in your mind, and bathe it in the knowledge of what actually took place over the past eight years.
Of course, this is the rhetorical angle that Bush used outwardly during the recount battle, that the counting was over with and now is the time to "bind up the nation's wounds" and move forward. What's a little shocking is how quickly and directly the major media figures came to the same conclusion. The seeds of how the media treated the Bush Administration over the bulk of his first term are all here, particularly the amplification of the main message coming from Ari Fleischer on any given day. And this was all done for our benefit, in the spirit of ending bitterness and changing tone and overcoming the rancorous partisanship. A time for healing.
Except we all know where that partisanship flowed from. And how it continued from the moment Bush II entered office. I don't know if this is explored in "Recount," but it should be in the background of any story which recreates that time period.
Now, I think the fundamentals are still very positive for a Democratic victory in November, and probably a significant one. Just like how Barack Obama never really topped 45% in Pennsylvania in any poll, and that was where he ended up, John McCain has similarly not topped 45% in any poll, and that appears to be close to his ceiling.
However, Democrats have a lot of opportunities for self-inflicted wounds (outside of intra-party warfare that goes all the way to the convention), and in general they should stay away from those pitfalls. Let me enumerate:
• Apparently both Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton are pushing a bogus piece of science that suggests that autism is related to vaccinations. That not only is wrong, it has the potential to create a serious public health problem. Vaccinations save lives. They need to stop this silliness and not use their podium and their power to spout bad science. It's disheartening to those who believe science will make a comeback with a new President.
• Al Gore needs to move beyond praising legislators just for paying lip service to the fight against global warming. That's something you could afford to do 2 or 3 years ago. The consensus is further along now, and so is the sense of urgency. John McCain's climate proposals are woefully insufficient, the product of bad "bipartisanship" which posits that the midpoint of any two perspectives must be the best policy, when actually it would be a handout to corporate polluters and a walk away from solving the problem. Gore needs to do more than just pat people on the head, but advocate strongly in the policy arena.
• While Charles Gibson asked a B.S. question about capital gains taxes that relied on an artifact to make its point (it's a long story, but basically people hold back selling stock when they find out there would be a cut in the tax rate on capital gains, leading to a SHORT-TERM increase in revenue that doesn't sustain over the life of the cut), both Democrats kind of agreed with him because they don't think Americans can handle the truth about taxes.
This gets to a generalized problem in Democratic tax talk, which is that they're very unwilling to talk about taxes in terms of value. There are lots of government services which are actually a good deal for middle income families and should be sold as something that Americans would be wise to invest in. But rather than making a positive case around awesome stuff we're going to get, Democrats talk about taxes in complete isolation from the things that taxes buy, and begin with the premise that they're so odious and painful that they should only be levied on folks too rich to notice.
That is the gospel's truth, and reframing the tax argument as the dues you pay for civil society is so urgently needed or else we'll always wind up back here.
• I'd have to see the numbers, but Paul Krugman is arguing that Obama's comment about bitter voters turning to social issues to base their choices when economic issues should drive things may be true (I think black voters may get included in Larry Bartels' sample and skew it). There's an affluent, aspirational, exurban community that is much more motivated by social issues because they have the luxury to do so. However, those are the voters feeling most squeezed by the housing crisis, so we can actually put this to the test in November.
It is remarkable that only a right-winger like Will seems upset about the Fed giving taxpayers' money to the very richest people in the country with no strings attached. This makes the battles over programs like the State Children's Health Insurance Program look like silly charades. If the government can cough up uncounted billions for the country's richest people when they get themselves in trouble due to their own stupidity, with no questions asked, isn't absurd that we must have a huge fight over getting $7 billion a year to extend health insurance to kids?
• Finally, whoever said this is not paying enough attention:
There is much speculation that the Democrats will run Mr. Lieberman out of their caucus (he now sits with Democrats and votes with them on most issues not related to the war) if they widen their margin in the Senate after the November elections. But Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate Democratic leader, has pledged that he would not disown Mr. Lieberman under those circumstances and said he considered him a good friend.
A member of the Senate Democratic leadership, who insisted on not being identified, said: “The bloggers want us to get rid of him. It ain’t happening.” He added: “We need every vote. He’s with us on everything but the war.”
That's not true, actually. He's been dead weight on the Government Affairs committee, and on an array of national security issues he votes with Republicans. And he's endorsed the opposing candidate for President, which is really the last straw and grounds for dismissal. It's disqualifying.
Democrats broadly need to get better on all of these things. It's still a long road.
Some have criticized this effort by Al Gore to raise awareness on the need to seriously alter our climate policies, on the grounds that it's a big media campaign and that Republicans are involved, blurring the lines on the issue. As for the type of campaign, it's apparently got a online organizing and alternative-media component as well. And I do think that progressives need to use the marketing tools we've seen conservatives use over the years. People still get most of their news and information from television, after all. And as for the partisan issues, I say that if you can bring Republicans around to the right side of an issue, go ahead and do it; Al Gore is not likely to compromise on the issue, he's staking out his ground and demanding everyone comes to him. Plus, I agree that in this case, it's both sides who are being timid:
"This climate crisis is so interwoven with habits and patterns that are so entrenched, the elected officials in both parties are going to be timid about enacting the bold changes that are needed until there is a change in the public's sense of urgency in addressing this crisis," Gore said. "I've tried everything else I know to try. The way to solve this crisis is to change the way the public thinks about it."
Reorganizing the way we live and finding a new energy infrastructure is a big step for any politician to take. The people must lead.
(That's not to say that there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans on this issue, John McCain has an abysmal environmental record punctuated with attempts to blur the issue, and he shouldn't be allowed to get away with that.)
Anyone who says they know what's going to happen on Super Tuesday tomorrow is lying. It's just not reliable to go by this wave of polls that is coming out; primary polls this cycle have been notoriously off by several points. Charlie Cook did an extremely close reading by Congressional district, and the conventional wisdom is that Clinton and Obama will not be separated by more than 100 delegates. That's why Obama's camp is setting the bar right at that number. As long as they don't crater, and as long as they're close or even in the delegate lead, the juiciest rumor is that the white knight will ride in.
Today I’m going to say it aloud: former Vice President Al Gore is rooting for Obama for president and the question is not if, but when, he says it aloud.
Ironically, the political gossiper over at The American Spectator known as The Prowler has better surveillance tools at hand than the wonks at TPM’s Election Central, The Atlantic or The New Republic who have been trying to swat down this idea without having a clue themselves as to what the Nobel Prize winner really thinks. But the time draws near when they’ll all go, “Doh!” [...]
Remember that there were good reasons for the Obama campaign to hold back Kerry’s endorsement until after the New Hampshire primary. First, it would have raised expectations even higher for New Hampshire since Kerry had won it in ‘04 and hails from the neighboring state. Second, waiting turned out to be a master-stroke, opening the floodgates for the bigfoot endorsements by others (McCaskill, Napolitano, Sebelius, Nelson of Nebraska and of course a parade of Kennedys); Kerry started the stampede heading into South Carolina and Tsunami Tuesday.
There would be two drawbacks to rolling Gore out now. One, is that Obama is up against a rival camp that loves the play the “politics of pile on” (its words) card, also known as the victim card. It worked in New Hampshire and at this point the Obama camp doesn’t want to give Clinton an opening to portray its candidate as ganged up on by the boys. The Tsunami Tuesday cycle is Kennedy’s, with sizeable ensemble performances by McCaskill, Sebelius and Napolitano (as in this Wall Street Journal Op-Ed today) and it’s working. But once the dust settles from Tuesday, more shots in the arm will be needed, especially prior to the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4. That would be better timing for a Gore endorsement.
The second reason is Tennessee. It’s one of the Tsunami Tuesday states where Clinton enjoys a commanding lead (up by 14.5 percent in the Pollster.com average, and by 13 in the RealClearPolitics average). For Gore to come out now, only to be perceived (again) as not being able to carry his own state, would erase the benefit of his support after Tsunami Tuesday.
Al Giordano has been pretty right about things in this cycle.
I don't know if a Gore endorsement would be game, set and match, but it would significantly close the circle, and presumably start up another rush of residual endorsements to Obama. I would imagine it could be huge in the Wisconsin primary on February 19, if not on Super Tuesday II on March 4, when Texas and Ohio go to the polls. By the way, I think this will end right there. The candidates will have two weeks to compete in those two big states, and I feel like the momentum will lead to a definitive winner. And the loser will face tremendous pressure from the inside to drop out for the good of the party. And they will. So fear not this spectre of a brokered convention and a nasty primary that drags on for months. Especially with Al Gore potentially in Obama's corner.
UPDATE: Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson tepidly endorse my March theory, although they also add that it could go to Pennsylvania on April 22 or even the convention. I think April is a possibility (and a month of camping out in my birthplace of PA would be very interesting), but March is more likely as a knockout punch.
As if to tease all of us who have seen him mature into the nation's leading liberal, Al Gore has now sensibly come out in favor of same-sex marriage.
"Gay men and women ought to have the same rights as heterosexual men and women -- to make contracts, to have hospital visiting rights, to join together in marriage, and I don't understand why it is considered by some people to be a threat to heterosexual marriage," he says on the video, which appears on his Current TV network. "Shouldn't we be promoting the kind of faithfulness and loyalty to ones partner regardless of sexual orientation?"
Gore is allowed to do this, of course, because he's no longer in the political arena, and because of the weird constraints of political life that force you away from tough but sensible decisions. In a time with such a leadership deficit from the Democrats in the Congress, you almost get the sense that
I seriously don't know what the hell's up with Barack. On policy matters the two most significant issues he's drawn contrast with his rivals is by attacking Social Security and mandated health care from the right. He accused Edwards of being somehow less-holier-than-he by becoming a trial lawyer (that's a bad thing now, apparently; getting paid to fight corporate America and help people isn't noble anymore) and bringing in "outside money," which basically shows a creeping contempt for labor unions.
Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign manager has spent the final days of the Iowa campaign railing against “big interests” that have poured a “flood of Washington money” into the state in “underhanded” efforts to support his rivals.
But more than three-quarters of that money has come from a pillar of the Democratic Party: labor unions.
And top union officials who support Obama’s rivals are in turn accusing the Illinois Democrat, who once sought their endorsements, of trying to damage labor’s political role.
“I’m taken aback that somebody like Obama would think that Oprah Winfrey has a greater right to participate in the political process than the 4 million people I represent,” Edward J. McElroy, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which has spent $799,619 on New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s behalf, said, referring to the television host’s high-profile support for Obama. “It’s sour grapes. It sounds just like the charges the Republicans make.”
And now he's claiming that Al Gore and John Kerry alienated the country? Dude, conservative attacks on John Kerry and Al Gore led to alienating the country. And if you think your unique special-ness makes you somehow immune, keep dreaming. I think the Republican attack machine can come up with a way to turn a lot of people against the first black Presidential nominee in American history. That's not a reason to not select Obama; the reason, actually, is his attempting to win the Democratic nomination by attacking the Democratic Party.
And somehow, Dennis Kucinich sanctions this, asking his 8 supporters in Iowa to vote for Obama as a second choice. Kucinich has much less support this time around, so this is of dubious importance. But it's clear that whenever somebody tries to run on Kucinich's turf, as a true progressive, he gets indignant and goes in the other direction.
There are rebuttals to this peppered about the blogosphere, but come on. Obama is running against progressive ideas and believes he can make change through the power of his personality. I'd rather not risk it.
If Edwards wins in Iowa by running left and pissing people off, that'll be a good thing for the world. By contrast, while there's a lot I like about Barack Obama, if he wins Iowa it won't have been by running hard on the things I like best about him.
I think Obama's foreign policy team, his open government proposals, and his oratory talent augur strongly in his favor. His instinct to stick a knife in the back of progressives does not. Gimme John Edwards.
UPDATE: And according to the most respected poll in Iowa, Obama's taken the lead, so what the hell do I know.
It Depends On What Your Definition of "Together" Is
Yesterday, the Boston Phoenix investigated this claim from Mitt Romney that his father "walked together with Martin Luther King" in favor of civil rights. Turns out he, um, didn't. Here's the Romney campaign's explanation:
A spokesperson for Mitt Romney now tells the Boston Phoenix that George W. Romney and Martin Luther King Jr. marched together in June, 1963 -- although possibly not on the same day or in the same city.
Romney, according to one piece of written source material provided by the campaign, made a “surprise” appearance at a small march in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in late June -- several days after King led a much larger march in Detroit. Romney spokesperson Eric Fehrnstrom suggests that these two were part of the same “series” of events, co-sponsored by King and the NAACP, and is thus consistent with Romney’s claim that “I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.”
“The record is convincing and clear – George Romney marched with Martin Luther King and other civil rights demonstrators,” Fehrnstrom wrote in an email.
Yes, it's perfectly clear: George Romney knew how to walk, Martin Luther King walked in the state of Michigan once: that means they were best friends!
Now, when Al Gore made statements that were clumsy, they were taken completely out of context and put into the worst possible light to make him appear like a "serial exaggerator." Yet here we have Romney, and really not just him on the Republican side, lying over and over again, changing their stories, endlessly parsing their own statements.
So will we seem the same media narrative placed on them?
No, it's not that it doesn't exist, it's the systematic suppression of evidence from our government over the last seven years that the planet is warming up.
For the past 16 months, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been investigating allegations of political interference with government climate change science under the Bush Administration [...] The evidence before the Committee leads to one inescapable conclusion: the Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming.
In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute developed an internal “Communications Action Plan” that stated: “Victory will be achieved when … average citizens ‘understand’ uncertainties in climate science … [and] recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” The Bush Administration has acted as if the oil industry’s communications plan were its mission statement. White House officials and political appointees in the agencies censored congressional testimony on the causes and impacts of global warming, controlled media access to government climate scientists, and edited federal scientific reports to inject unwarranted uncertainty into discussions of climate change and to minimize the threat to the environment and the economy.
The White House would block media requests to speak with climate change scientists on their payroll. They would rewrite reports to tone down the language in them. They would edit testimony to Congress from leading scientists. They did everything you can think of to mitigate any public awareness of climate change, and any groundswell for federal action. The overriding concern was that the Administration knew they were vulnerable if actual science was the parameter of the debate. So they sought to undermine the science. The full report is here.
Let's not pretend that the Administration is acting alone here. There's a great bonanza of conservative noise machine pushback on climate change, all funded by think tanks like the American Petroleum Institute. There seems to be a story like this every other week.
On 8 November many who would deny that human activity has anything to do with global warming were agog at news of a paper entitled "Carbon dioxide production by benthic bacteria: the death of manmade global warming theory?" by Daniel A. Klein of the Department of Climatology, University of Arizona and colleagues (Journal of Geoclimatic Studies, vol 23, p 273). It was just what they wanted to hear [...]
According to bloggers, a well-known UK social anthropologist sent out an alert about the paper to a climate-sceptic email list - and withdrew it an hour or two later. Why? Because neither the authors nor their institutions nor the journal exist. A teensy clue might have been found in the inclusion of equations that are not only nonsensical but irreproducible here, due to their imaginative use of Thai and Serbian Cyrillic characters - alongside suspiciously perfect graphs. Then there was a list of other papers in the alleged journal - including, wonderfully, "Submarine lightning strikes in the Hadean Zone: an unacknowledged cause of fish mortality?"
But clearly, this is playing out most starkly on the federal level, where the resistance to doing anything to solve the climate crisis has spilled over to Bali and the UN conference aimed at hammering out a new international agreement. The chief climate negotiator has rejected any specific targets for emission reductions and refused to signal anything but a willingness to continue talking. They simply want to run out the clock, as they have on so many policies. But on this one, there simply isn't that kind of time.
We have a few leaders on this issue fighting for science and sanity. John Kerry was in Bali on Monday delivering strong remarks. Ed Markey, the chief Democrat on this issue in the House, gave an address using an avatar in Second Life. And there's also Al Gore. On the same day that Henry Waxman's Oversight Committee released their report about White House suppression of the problem, Gore was accepting his prize from the Nobel committee, delivering one of the more powerful speeches on the subject you'll ever see, appealing to the moral fiber of those charged with making these decisions.
In the last few months, it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter. Major cities in North and South America, Asia and Australia are nearly out of water due to massive droughts and melting glaciers. Desperate farmers are losing their livelihoods. Peoples in the frozen Arctic and on low-lying Pacific islands are planning evacuations of places they have long called home. Unprecedented wildfires have forced a half-million people from their homes in one country and caused a national emergency that almost brought down the government in another.
Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself. Now, we and the earth's climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: "Mutually assured destruction."
As the American poet Robert Frost wrote, "Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice." Either, he notes, "would suffice."
But neither need be our fate. It is time to make peace with the planet.
We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war. These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words at the 11th hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge.
The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, "One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door."
The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: "What were you thinking; why didn't you act?"
Or they will ask instead: "How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?"
We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource. So let us renew it, and say together: "We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act."
Gore is due in Bali tomorrow, and he is heartened by a people-powered movement to commit to real change. Unfortunately, people can't do it alone; they need leaders willing to listen, and set the emissions targets needed to mitigate the worst effects.
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