“Rick Scott’s Epic Blunder”: Directly Insulting The Very People Whose Support He Needs
The dust-up over Charlie Crist’s portable fan at the Florida gubernatorial debate has degenerated into a war of words over which side violated the pre-negotiated rules. The truth of who plugged in what device, and on whose authority, may forever remain lost in the murk of Sunshine State politics.
But the issue here is not who is right and who is wrong. The issue is that Governor Rick Scott, by not taking the stage for seven minutes, lost the battle. And he did it in a way that is spectacularly tone-deaf. Non-participation in a debate requires solid justification, especially once the candidates are already on-site and waiting to take part, as was the case in Florida. Whatever the particulars of Crist and his Vornado Air Circulator, the annoyance did not merit the Defcon One response that Scott and his handlers accorded it. In making the event about his own petulance, Scott created a blunder that enters the annals of what not to do in a campaign debate.
Debates are frequently won and lost on the little things. Rick Perry’s “oops” moment. Mitt Romney’s $10,000 bet. Obama’s “You’re likable enough, Hillary” line. George H.W. Bush glancing at his watch. Richard Nixon’s flop sweat. Al Gore advancing inappropriately on George W. Bush and Rick Lazio invading Hillary Clinton’s space to demand that she sign a pledge. The list goes on.
Such mishaps tend to fall into three predictable categories: cosmetic problems (Nixon), strategic miscalculations (Gore, Lazio), and inadvertently self-inflicted wounds (Perry, Romney, Obama, Bush and the watch). Obviously, no candidate ever sets out to damage himself, but in the live arena of a debate, mistakes are easy to make and difficult to undo.
Rick Scott ought to have known that showing up late could only be perceived as an insult to the audience — not just those in the hall but the extended viewing audience as well. Politicians too often fail to take into account the popularity of debates among voters, and the proprietary feeling viewers bring to these programs. Debaters who show disrespect for the institution — say, by refusing to step onstage — are directly insulting the very people whose support they need.
By granting Charlie Crist several minute of valuable airtime alone on the debate set, Scott essentially handed his opponent a huge gift of free advertising. As a number of commentators have pointed out, Scott passed up a golden opportunity to upstage his rival, to use Crist’s vanity against him. Instead, Crist got to grandstand, Scott came off as pissy, and Florida politics — once again — looked nuts.
The high drama of that opening few minutes worked against Scott on a number of levels. Although the moderator backed up the Scott campaign’s point about a rules violation, he also directly attributed Scott’s absence to the fan, planting the issue front and center in the public spotlight. The catcalls of the live audience lent an air of anti-Scott sentiment to the proceedings before the debate had even started. And a cutaway shot of the fan in question, whirring innocently behind Charlie Crist’s lectern, further reinforced the absurdity of Scott’s overreaction.
The key thing about debates, and the reason politicians dread them, is that they are live. Which is to say, the participants get no do-overs. That Governor Scott could not anticipate the damaging effect of seven minutes of dead airtime speaks ill of his judgment. When the candidates reconvene for the final debate on October 21, Rick Scott had better be on time.
By: Alan Schroeder, Professor of Journalism, Northeastern University; The Huffington Post Blog, October 17, 2014
“Callous, Dumb Policy”: Scott Walker’s Minimum Wage Argument Is Even Dumber Than You Think
The minimum wage is causing a bit of campaign drama, notably in Wisconsin, as John Nichols reports. Republican Governor Scott Walker, running neck and neck against Democrat Mary Burke, inflamed the debate this week when he rejected complaints that the state’s $7.25 an hour wage floor was too low. “I don’t think it serves a purpose,” Walker said of the labor standard.
One of the most bizarre points in the Walker administration’s argument for why $7.25 is a living wage (it’s not) is that some low-wage workers supplement their earnings with public assistance. It’s true that even many full-time employees in Wisconsin and elsewhere rely on government aid—because their wages are too low. Walker, meanwhile, is no supporter of social programs. If he had his way, there would be an even smaller safety net for workers to fall back on.
Walker isn’t the only candidate digging in his heels against efforts to raise the minimum wage while simultaneously bashing public aid. This isn’t just callous—it’s also dumb policy. There are lots of reasons to raise the minimum wage, like the fact that it will boost the economy and that 80 percent of Americans support it. But one reason in particular should get conservatives’ attention: it will help people get off government aid programs and save the government money.
How many people? About 1.7 million, according to a brief released Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute, which examined the implications for public-assistance enrollment of raising the federal wage floor to $10.10 an hour.
Nearly half of all recipients of government aid work full time, but because lawmakers have let the minimum wage stay low while the cost of living rises, many workers can’t get by on their earnings. The result is that roughly half of all workers making hourly wages below $10.10 rely on public assistance directly or via a member of their family, according to EPI. And about half of all the funds for the six main types of government support—food stamps; the Earned Income Tax Credit; the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program; Supplemental Nutrition for Women, Infants, and Children; the Section 8 Housing Choice voucher program; and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families—go to people working for less than $10.10 an hour.
Those programs were designed to provide temporary support to people who were down on their luck, noted David Cooper, an economic analyst at EPI and the brief’s author, on a call with reporters. “They were not intended to act as long-term subsidies to employers so businesses could get away with paying poverty-level wages,” he said. As it stands now, the government is essentially giving a $45 billion handout every year to companies that pay less than $10.10 in order to patch the gap between what they pay their employees and what those workers need to survive.
It’s important to note that raising the wage floor wouldn’t justify cuts to the safety net. Even $10.10 is below a living wage in many cities, and there are still an awful lot of people without full-time work. “Given the extraordinarily high rates of poverty and child poverty that persist in the wake of the Great Recession, there is every reason to think that current levels of spending on these programs are woefully inadequate to truly combat poverty and lift living standards for program participants,” Cooper wrote.
But raising wages would free up money that could be used to benefit those who aren’t directly affected by the increase. Cooper estimates that lifting the wage floor to $10.10 would save the government at least $7.6 billion annually—money that could be used to strengthen and expand safety net programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit or be invested in infrastructure projects that create jobs.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, October 16, 2014
“You Don’t Need A Hazmat Suit”: Want To Help Combat Ebola? Get A Flu Shot
On Friday morning, the Obama administration announced that it was appointing Ron Klain, the former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden, to become the Ebola “Czar” to oversee all efforts to combat the disease. This isn’t much of a surprise. After all, the president told reporters Thursday night that he would consider making such a move. But there is another, much more subtle message, hidden in this move: Get a flu shot.
When he spoke to reporters Thursday, Obama expressed complete satisfaction with his current team overseeing the Ebola response: Thomas Frieden, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of the Health and Human Services, Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice. But each of those four have other duties as well. Monaco and Rice are both heavily involved in coordinating the airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.
For Frieden and Burwell, their attention will soon be partially diverted to flu season. “We’re going into flu season, which means, by the way, that people should be looking to get their flu shots,” Obama said. “We know that every year tens of thousands of people potentially die of the flu, and a hundred-thousand or more may be actually going to the emergency room and hospitalized because of the flu. So that’s something that Tom [Frieden] also is responsible for.”
As I noted Friday morning, there is no reason to fear Ebola. You don’t need to wear a hazmat suit when you travel. But if you are feeling helpless and want to do something to help combat the disease, get a flu shot. The symptoms for the flu—fever, nausea, vomiting—are very similar to those of Ebola. That means the more people who get the flu this year, the more people are going to panic about potential cases of Ebola, cases that the vast, vast majority of the time will prove false. Reducing the number of people who get the flu will help quell that panic.
And, by the way, the flu killed 50,643 Americans in 2012. That’s another very good reason to get a flu shot.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, October 17, 2014
“Deception Carries No Meaningful Risk”: Mega-Blitz Of Ad Spending Makes It Easier For Candidates To Lie
Today the New York Times reports that Republicans are benefiting from a money surge that could give them a boost in all those tight Senate races, and the article probably brought a smile to many Republican faces. The truth is that it’s probably too late for money in these amounts to change much of anything either way.
But this is significant, because it highlights how current campaigns are now getting hit by such a massive blizzard of spending and advertising that for candidates, accountability has become all but impossible and deception carries no meaningful risk.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
All told, in seven races for which both Democrats and Republicans provided complete fund-raising totals by Wednesday evening — Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan and North Carolina — Republicans held more cash in six of them, with a net advantage of about $7 million. At the same time, Democrats had booked more advertising from Sept. 29 through Election Day in at least five of those races, with the biggest advantages in North Carolina and Iowa, according to a Republican tracking media purchases.
In Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia and Iowa, Republican contenders posted their best fund-raising quarter of the year. In Iowa, the Republican candidate, Joni Ernst, who narrowly leads in polling, raised $6 million, more than double the amount taken in by her Democratic opponent, Representative Bruce Braley, and reported three times as much in cash on hand than Mr. Braley. Representative Tom Cotton of Arkansas reported raising $3.8 million, far more than the Democratic incumbent, Senator Mark Pryor, who took in $2.2 million. In Colorado, Representative Cory Gardner raised $4.5 million and reported $1.4 million more in cash on hand than Senator Mark Udall, the Democratic incumbent.
If you don’t live in one of these states it may be hard to appreciate the incredible volume of political ads television viewers have already endured in recent months. A count from the Wesleyan Media Project of television ads shows that in just one week, some 14,000 ads were aired in North Carolina, 13,000 in Iowa, 11,000 in Kentucky, and so on. Buying a few hundred more ads in one of these states is like walking up to people who have been standing in the middle of a monsoon and firing a squirt gun at them.
Meanwhile, the total spending so far in these races is enormous, as these data from the Center for Responsive Politics show:
By the time the race is over, the spending in, for example, North Carolina will probably total at least $75 million. Is another million or two going to be transformative? Probably not.
The important thing here is that all of this spending makes real accountability a lot harder. The candidates know that any forum where they might actually be held accountable will inevitably be drowned out by all the ads. For instance, in a debate yesterday Cory Gardner had to endure a grilling by a couple of obviously exasperated reporters over the fact that Gardner keeps denying that the “Personhood” bill he sponsored in Congress actually does what it says it does. He bobbed and weaved, and the footage looks really bad. But is Gardner particularly worried? I doubt it. He’s up by a couple of points in the polls, and how many people actually watched that debate? He has thousands of opportunities to get his message out his way.
Nor, I suspect, is Mitch McConnell worried that he’ll pay a price for trying to fool people in Kentucky into thinking that you can repeal the Affordable Care Act “root and branch,” but they’ll still get to keep Kynect, the hugely successful ACA exchange. Voters don’t understand the distinction, and the media aren’t helping them get it. In the post-Citizens United world, there’s little to fear, so long as you and your allies have the money.
That isn’t to say that the media couldn’t impose some accountability if they truly wanted to. But it would take an agreement that a particular issue is important enough to warrant intense, repeated attention. And that, apparently, is something they only do for things that have little or no substantive importance, like whether a candidate will say who she voted for.
Thirty years ago, George H.W. Bush’s press secretary Peter Teeley was asked by a reporter about a lie Bush had told during his debate with Geraldine Ferraro. “You can say anything you want during a debate, and 80 million people hear it,” he said. And if reporters then correct the falsehood? “So what?” Teeley responded. “‘Maybe 200 people read it or 2,000 or 20,000.”
The principle today is the same, but the information environment has changed. Candidates are no more afraid of accountability than they were, but now it’s because they’re drowning voters in advertising. And they can still say anything they want.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 16, 2014
“Creating Winners And Losers”: Are The Beltway Media Helping Mitch McConnell Stay In Power?
The Beltway media are at it again, creating winners and losers long before Election Day. Yesterday I wrote that Alison Lundergan Grimes beat Mitch McConnell in Kentucky’s one and only Senate debate, and if you watched the debate, you might agree.
But if you had only followed the media coverage, you might well believe that Grimes is a goner, that her refusal to say whether she voted for Obama was of such import that it rightly overshadowed all other issues the candidates fought over—minimum wage, jobs, climate change, student loans, healthcare—and that her demurral was far more worthy of coverage than McConnell’ s actual lies and deceptions about the healthcare of 500,000 Kentuckians.
And if Grimes’s non-answer wasn’t a pretend disaster enough for the media to hyperventilate over, they got more confirmation later yesterday when the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee announced it wasn’t going to spend more to run ads in Kentucky. Well, surely that showed that Big Dems agreed with Big Media that Grimes was out. Money speaks. She’s over. Or so it seems.
But the media have it wrong. First, on the debate: Columbia Journalism Review did a large round-up of the political media responses to Monday’s debate and found that the coverage was “imbalanced” and that it “calls into question the national media’s role in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.”
Democratic candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes made national headlines during the debate for again declining to share how she voted in previous presidential elections. At the same time, however, the Washington press corps barely covered a claim by incumbent Sen. Mitch McConnell that Obamacare, unpopular in Kentucky, could be repealed without dismantling Kynect, the popular statewide healthcare exchange funded through the law. McConnell’s argument is not only factually questionable, at best, but also seems to be of much more potential consequence to the state’s voters. Monday’s debate was the only televised face-off scheduled before the November election, and the imbalanced coverage calls into question the national media’s role in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.
Grimes’ non-answer received headline treatment on web stories at CBS, NBC ABC, and CNN. The Washington Post devoted an entire piece to the refusal, which led the Associated Press’ story , and Politico and National Journal both listed it as their top takeaway of the debate. Such stories either omitted McConnell’s claim or played it down relative to Grimes’ comment. FoxNews.com mentioned only the latter, meanwhile, and The Wall Street Journal left McConnell’s statement as its story’s kicker, unchallenged.
It’s not as if the media was hearing Mitch’s lie for the first time and simply lacked the time to study up on it. It had all been reported on before:
Liberalmedia and a few national outlets, such as the AP, challenged the five-term senator’s claim back [in May]. Indeed, an Obamacare repeal would have huge consequences for the Bluegrass State, as an estimated half-million residents have signed up for health coverage through its Kynect exchange. A Washington Post Fact Checker column soon after concluded, “the history of individual state exchanges shows it is not credible for McConnell to suggest that the state exchange would survive without the broad health-care system constructed by the Affordable Care Act, such as an individual mandate and subsidies to buy insurance.”
Given the availability of such reporting, not to mention McConnell’s hazy logic in a race in which Obamacare has been a central theme, it’s unclear why the national media didn’t pounce on his answer Monday. What’s more, local coverage of the debate suggests that Grimes’ voting history—a sign of her allegiance to President Barack Obama—is merely one of many concerns or Kentucky voters.
It is true that the DSCC stopped running ads in Kentucky in order to redirect funds to other state races. But the Democratic Senate campaign arm is still funding Grimes’s get-out-the-vote drive, and is “monitoring the race for future investments,” according to a DSCC official. In any case, Grimes is very well-funded herself, having just announced a record breaking nearly $5 million haul for the third quarter.
But the national media were quick to jump to the most melodramatic conclusion. As Daily Kos pointed out:
Today a rumor was spread throughout national media by irresponsible nationally-known media (Chris Cillizza, Jon Heilemann, Mark Halpirin, MSNBC, CNN) that “Democrats have abandoned Grimes”.
Heilemann and Halperin agreed on their program that “Her campaign is dead”.
This rumor was based upon the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) not having pre-purchased ad buys in KY market for last 3 weeks of campaign. The DSCC has been very active in the Kentucky market, with great ads playing. The DSCC acknowledged this was true, but that they were open to purchases if necessary.
Guy Cecil, the Executive Director of Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, posted at about 8:00pm eastern Tuesday night 10/14, on Twitter:
Guy Cecil @guycecil 3h 3 hours ago
Just signed a $300,000 wire for the KY Get Out The Vote operation for @AlisonForKY. That’s an interesting view of “pulling out of the race”
And for all this, you’d never know that as of Wednesday afternoon, Alison Grimes is only three points behind Mitch McConnell in the RealClearPolitics average.
By: Leslie Savin, The Nation, October 15, 2014
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