“CPAC’s Peddlers Of Resentment”: Calls For Fresh Ideas Followed By The Same Stale Shtick
Upon arriving Thursday at CPAC, the first thing said to me, squealed by a cheerful young conservative activist, was an admonition to “go upstairs, because Dick Morris is about to speak!” The following day, I could listen to the musings of Donald Trump (I skipped this, as did almost every other attendee). And Saturday, to end on a rousing and inspirational note, a speech by Sarah Palin. While Trump has the Apprentice on NBC, Morris and Palin have recently been fired from Fox News.
As I wrote on Friday, the ossified ideas offered by the former Fox heads were loudly challenged by Sen. Rand Paul’s insurgent movement of socially-tolerant Republicans. While the old guard complained about being unfairly treated by the press corps, Paul excited the crowd with a heavy dose of libertarian ideas slickly packaged for a conservative audience. CPAC organizers kept out New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and the gay activist group GOProud; perhaps they should have been paying more attention to Paul and the party’s libertarian wing.
On Saturday, Palin was dismissing as a liberal media slander the idea that conservatives were locked in an internecine ideological battle. The conference was full of reporters, she complained, “here to write their annual ‘conservatives in crisis’ story.” She doesn’t believe that the Republican Party is rudderless and beset by infighting—in a state of crisis—but there she was, the not-even-one-term governor turned reality television star, excoriating Republican consultant Karl Rove from the stage, along with the rest of those faux conservative quislings and quitters. From the big name speeches to the small panels discussions, there was virtually no mention of the Bush presidency (though conservative fossil Phyllis Schlafly managed an attack on George W. and George H.W. Bush from the dais). But there is most certainly not a crisis within the conservative movement.
“Fresh ideas,” one young Republican told me, “we need fresh ideas.” Yes, well. The conference would effectively close with the rather stale Palin, whose folksy incoherence always manages to always fill the seats, and a Breitbart.com-sponsored panel at which those who has been “uninvited” by CPAC (meaning not that they were barred, but that they weren’t invited to speak this year) could complain about the horrible mistreatment they’d endured at the hands of the conference organizers .Among that group was semi-pro conspiracy theorist and blogger Pamela Geller, who’d earlier charged that the annual conservative gathering had been “corrupted” and “compromised by Muslim Brotherhood activists.”
Palin’s speech was standard fare in comparison. There was the star of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” mocking the “reality television” world of Washington DC. Reading off of a TelePrompTer, she asked the president to “step away” from his TelePrompTer and “do your job.” And then she hoisted a 7-11 “Big Gulp” — evidently unaware that the drink would have been the one exception to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stupid regulation of big sugary drinks (thankfully halted at the last minute by a local judge).
Palin’s speeches are routinely described by her foes in the “lamestream media” (possibly the most irritating political neologism of the past decade) as “entertaining” and “crowd-pleasing”—descriptors that conservatives deploy too, and which the reader should always translate as “hopelessly devoid of ideas.” The “aw-shucks” tone, surplus of words ending with an apostrophe (the “amen, sista’’’ she offered to Margaret Thatcher, for instance), heavy reliance on one-liners that would make Shecky Greene cringe, and endless references to gun racks, dog sleds, and moose were all intended as a reminder just in case you forgot that she was from, to use her own, tired phrase, “real America.”
It’s transparent shtick, but for reasons this fake American fails to understand, the audience loves it.
And that’s always the takeaway from CPAC: it’s an event for activists (not intellectuals) who manage the rote recitation of keywords and fulsome references to conservative heroes. Sure, there were some interesting “breakout sessions” that transcended the rah-rah stump speech, but the stimulating ones I attended were sparsely attended.
This isn’t a conservative problem so much as it’s a problem with American politics. After Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster, even those pundits who disagreed with the Kentucky senator expressed relief that real ideas were being substantively debated on the senate floor. It’s a perennial suggestion that Washington needs something approximating Prime Minister’s Questions, in which Britain’s parliamentarians pepper their leader with questions and insults. Palin might be a hypocrite on this point, but American politics does indeed all too often resemble a reality show. (In comparison, the United Kingdom’s defense minister, William Hague, wrote a critically-acclaimed biography of Pitt the Younger, while Tory star and London mayor Boris Johnson is a newspaper columnist, former editor of The Spectator, and author of a novel and a work of history).
Like many CPAC attendees, Palin believes that the party doesn’t need new ideas, because those ideas—immigration reform and gay marriage, for instance—would supposedly betray conservative principles. Keep losing elections, but lose with dignity.
But it’s also that Palin isn’t in the ideas business. She is, as loudly reaffirmed in her CPAC speech, a peddler of resentment, and a worldview of conservative victimology obsessively focused on the media gatekeepers and corrupt political consultants they see distorting a political message that, if not interfered with by liberal ideologues, would be embraced by most all Americans. It’s a common theme at CPAC: it’s not our ideas, it’s how the media distorts our ideas. Circling the conference center was a truck sponsored by the Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, displaying the message that the “liberal media” was “censoring the news.”
Perhaps Palin is correct that events like CPAC get a tough time from the media, but spending some time in the company of right-leaning journalists one realizes that CPAC skepticism is a bipartisan thing. Indeed, there were few conservative journalists or intellectuals—excepting the ideological insurgents of the Breitbart crew and assorted right-wing blogs—I spoke to that held the conference (or, in some cases, its attendees) in high esteem. As one conservative journalist told me, the conference had successfully transformed from “a conservative freak show into a general freak show.”
After three days at CPAC, one could have almost forgotten that the previous decade of Republican politics ever happened, when the party prepared for a permanent majority and a long war against Islamic extremism, circled the wagons in defense of George W. Bush, and believed complaints about civil liberties were deployed as a cudgel to undermine the president. If CPAC is an indicator of the state of conservatism—and I’m not entirely convinced that it’s much more than a poorly executed media event—then expect this civil war to be long and bloody.
By: Michael Moynihan, The Daily Beast, March 17, 2013
“Every Game Is A Shutout”: How Much Of A Market Is There On The Right For Real Reporting?
Four years ago, Tucker Carlson went before the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and told them that instead of creating more media forums to talk to each other about what a bunch of jerks liberals are, they ought to nurture outlets that actually report news, with a commitment to accuracy. For his trouble he was booed vigorously, and I guess he learned his lesson about what conservatives are interested in, because instead of creating a newsgathering organization he created the Daily Caller. I’m sure it’s doing quite well with it’s target audience, and I couldn’t help but think about Carlson upon seeing that Erick Erickson, proprietor of RedState.com and CNN talking mouth, issued a plea to conservatives to come work for him and actually do journalism. First though, he identified the problem:
I think conservative media is failing to advance ideas and stories. Certainly part of that is because the general media has an ideological bias against conservatives, which makes it harder for the media to take our views seriously. But many conservatives are, instead of working doubly hard to overcome that bias, just yelling louder about the same things. The echo in the chamber has gotten so loud it is not well understood outside the echo chamber in the mainstream press and in the public. It translates only as anger and noise, neither of which are conducive to the art of persuasion.
You think? It’s a bit of a surprise to see this coming from Erickson, who in the past has had, shall we say, a taste for bombast and insults (he called David Souter a “goat-fucking child molester” and Michelle Obama a “Marxist harpy”; see here for more). But hey, people change. I completely understand how somebody can spend some time playing the role of shouting partisan, then decide it really isn’t accomplishing much and there might be a better way of accomplishing your ideological goals. Erickson went on:
Educating conservatives is a critical component of our mission. We have never viewed RedState as a site engaged in reporting, but as a site engaged in activism. Though occasionally we do break news, it has not been central to our existence. But, an honest accounting of facts and news is important and mission critical. Consequently, I would like to hire some reporters who can help educate conservative activists — who will not be focused on the outrage du jour, but focused on the daily grind of Washington and how the sausage being ground out in Washington will affect the conservative movement and the nation. Over time, I would like to expand this to covering governmental sausage making in the states too.
Good for him, I suppose, though I’ll admit I’m skeptical. There are certainly conservative reporters out there—heck, there are even some real reporters at Fox News—but the question is just how much of an audience there is for what they produce. The problem isn’t just that the really successful conservatives are bloviators like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, it’s that the entire movement seems content to treat their constituents like they’re a bunch of idiots who want only to nod their heads and mutter about how Barack Obama is a socialist and liberals are evil.
Consider the recent case of Jeff Sessions’ GAO report. The Alabama Republican senator asked the GAO to give him a report on how much Obamacare would add to the deficit if all the spending stayed in, but all the ways to pay for the bill, from cost savings from innovation, to reduced payments to providers, to tax increases, were taken out. The GAO has to respond to these kinds of requests, so it did. And then Sessions went in front of the cameras proclaiming that the GAO says Obamacare will increase the deficit by eleventy bazillion dollars, and one conservative news organization after another (here‘s an example) picked it up, saying, “See! See! See!” As Steve Benen said, the whole exercise was “roughly the equivalent of the Boston Celtics’ coach asking someone on his staff, ‘Figure out what our record would be if our opponents’ points didn’t count.’ Then, soon after, the coach called a press conference to declare, ‘Good news everyone! We’re undefeated! And every game was a shutout!'”
My point is, this is not how serious people who respect their constituents act. But Sessions knew that conservative media outlets would run with his ridiculousness, and they in turn knew that their audiences would eat it up. In the end, the whole thing did nothing but make conservatives a little dumber on the issue of health care. And you know what? They don’t care. Oh sure, there are some conservatives who are embarrassed by that kind of thing, but they’re the quiet ones, and they’re outnumbered.
And that’s what Erick Erickson will be confronting if he really wants to hire real reporters to do real reporting: there just aren’t enough people on his side who want it.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 28, 2013
“Stop Indulging Him”: Bob Woodward Demands Law-Ignoring, Mind-Controlling Presidential Leadership
Bob Woodward rocked Washington this weekend with an editorial that hammered President Obama for inventing “the sequester” and then being rude enough to ask that Congress not make us have the sequester. Woodward went on “Morning Joe” this morning, and he continued his brutal assault:
“Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying ‘Oh, by the way, I can’t do this because of some budget document?’” Woodward said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“Or George W. Bush saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to invade Iraq because I can’t get the aircraft carriers I need’ or even Bill Clinton saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to attack Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters,’ as he did when Clinton was president because of some budget document?” Woodward added. “Under the Constitution, the president is commander-in-chief and employs the force. And so we now have the president going out because of this piece of paper and this agreement, I can’t do what I need to do to protect the country. That’s a kind of madness that I haven’t seen in a long time.”
Speaking of kinds of madness, Woodward’s actual position here is insane. As Dave Weigel points out, “some budget document” is a law, passed by Congress and signed by the president. Woodward is saying, why won’t the president just ignore the law, because he is the commander in chief, and laws should not apply to him. That is a really interesting perspective, from a man who is famous for his reporting on the extralegal activities of a guy who is considered a very bad president!
Also, that George W. Bush analogy is amazing. It would have been a good thing for him to invade and occupy Iraq without congressional approval? Say what you will about George W. Bush, at least he was really, really devoted to invading Iraq. (And yes the Reagan line, lol.)
There is nothing less important about “the sequester” than the question of whose idea it originally was. So, naturally, that is the question that much of the political press is obsessed with, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Republicans have been making the slightly incoherent argument that a) the sequester, which is a bad thing, is entirely Obama’s fault, b) Obama is exaggerating how bad the sequester will be, and c) the sequester, which is Obama’s fault, is preferable to not having the sequester. Woodward has lately been fixated on Obama’s responsibility for the idea of the sequester, but at this point, the important question is who will be responsible if it actually happens. On that question, Woodward, and others, have taken the position that it will be Obama’s fault because he has failed to “show leadership.” But laws come from Congress. The president signs or vetoes them. Republicans in the House are unwilling and unable to repeal the law Congress passed creating the sequester. All Obama can do is ask them to pass such a law, and to make the case to the public that they should pass such a law. And Obama has been doing those things, a lot.
Woodward’s most recent Obama book also took the position that presidents “should work their will … on important matters of national business,” though how one’s will should be worked on a congressional opposition party led by a weak leader and unwilling even to negotiate with the president is never really explained. As Jonathan Chait points out, “use mind control to get your way” is an incredibly popular argument among centrist establishment political reporters and analysts. It is a convenient way of taking a debate where most people agree that one side has a reasonable position and the other side an unreasonable position and making it still something you can blame “both sides” for. Sure, the Republicans are both hapless and fanatical, but the president should make them not be.
Bob Woodward’s name is synonymous with Quality Journalism, mostly because of one really good movie. The movie, based on a book that is riddled with exaggeration and misdirection, permanently established Woodward as the best shoe-leather reporter in politics, though his modern reporting style does not put too much of a strain on his Ferragamo loafers: He simply talks to powerful people in his kitchen and then “re-creates” events based on what they tell him. Powerful people talk to Woodward because of his reputation, and because talking to Woodward is the best way to ensure that they come across well in his best-selling books. They talk because they figure if they don’t give him a self-serving account of events, someone else will give him a version that makes them look bad. My dream is a Washington where no one talks to Woodward, but until that happens people will continue to pay attention to his biennial book-promoting cable news blitzes and occasional appearances in the pages of the newspaper that continued to pay him a salary — despite his withholding most of his original reporting from that newspaper — until quite recently.
In 2010 he said a Hillary Clinton-Joe Biden switch was “on the table,” although it was not. He suffered no professional consequences for saying made-up nonsense. Bob Woodward has lost it, let’s all stop indulging him.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, February 27, 2013
“Ending The Permanent Crisis”: These Problems Are Really Republican Problems
This has to stop.
Ever since they took control of the House of Representatives in 2011, Republicans have made journeys to the fiscal brink as commonplace as summertime visits to the beach or the ballpark. The country has been put through a series of destructive showdowns over budget issues we once resolved through the normal give-and-take of negotiations.
The old formula held that when government was divided between the parties, the contending sides should try to “meet in the middle.” But the current Republican leadership doesn’t know the meaning of the word “middle,” so intimidated by the tea party has it become.
Here is a way out of permanent crisis: President Obama should demand the repeal of all artificial deadlines and tell both houses of Congress that he won’t make further proposals until each actually passes a replacement to the sequester — not a gimmick or something that looks like an alternative, but the real thing.
With everyone on the record, normal discussions could begin, and Washington would no longer look like the set of a horror movie in which a new catastrophe lurks around every corner.
The solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy, so let both houses hold votes on all the potential remedies — on Obama’s own proposal, on packages put forward by Democrats Chris Van Hollen in the House and Patty Murray in the Senate, and on anything the Republicans care to proffer, including the sequester itself.
Let the House Republican majority show that it can come up with a substantial alternative or, failing that, allow a plan to pass with a mix of Republican and Democratic votes.
In the Senate, ditch the unconstitutional abuse of the filibuster and let a plan pass by simple-majority vote. Misuse of the filibuster is a central cause of Washington’s contorted policymaking. Let’s end the permanent budget crisis by governing ourselves though the majorities that every sane democracy uses.
The air of establishment Washington is filled with talk that Obama must “lead.” But Obama cannot force the House Republican majority to act if it doesn’t want to. He is (fortunately) not a dictator.
What Obama can do is expose the cause of this madness, which is the dysfunction of the Republican Party.
Journalists don’t like saying this because it sounds partisan. But the truth is the truth, whether it sounds partisan or not.
And a staunch conservative has succinctly explained why this problem really is a Republican problem. In an admirably candid interview Monday with Ezra Klein on MSNBC, Ben Domenech, a conservative blogger, said the new tea party Republicans in the House don’t want their leadership to sit down with Obama to talk because “they have their doubts about the ability of Republicans to negotiate any better situation.”
Read that carefully: We are in this mess because Republicans don’t trust their leaders to bargain. Domenech added that many conservatives “don’t buy this distinction between smart cuts and dumb cuts,” a distinction that is not “all that critical.” This is astonishing: Government is bad, so all cuts are more or less the same. And you wonder why we have a crisis?
House Speaker John Boehner keeps saying that the House has twice voted for ways to replace the sequester. What he doesn’t say is that those votes were held in the last Congress, so the bills are dead. If they are so good, why doesn’t the speaker bring them up again and pass them now? The answer is almost certainly that he doesn’t have the votes. If I’m wrong, Boehner can prove it by calling the question. I’m not worried.
One proposal Republicans are floating would give Obama more flexibility to administer the sequester. Thus, a party that says it can’t trust Obama enough to negotiate with him would trust him so much as to grant him exceptional power.
The contradiction is so glaring that Republicans are split on the idea, and it’s foolish anyway. As a senior administration official suggested, it’s like being told that two of your fingers will be cut off but you could choose which fingers. How is it a “concession” to ask Obama to organize the cuts he says would be a disaster?
The nation is exhausted with fake crises that voters thought they ended with their verdict in the last election. Those responsible for the Washington horror show should be held accountable. And only one party is using shutdowns, cliffs and debt ceilings as routine political weapons.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 27, 2013
“Plainly And Demonstrably Wrong”: Bob Woodward’s Unfortunate And Inexplicable Errors
In the world of media giants, the Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward has reached a legendary status with few rivals. If there’s a journalistic award to be won, Woodward has received it, including multiple Pulitzers. His Watergate coverage 40 years ago is, quite literally, the stuff of legend.
But even reporting icons sometimes make mistakes, some of them rather inexplicable.
Over the weekend, there was quite a kerfuffle when Woodward, to the delight of far-right bloggers, jumped into the debate over this week’s sequestration cuts, challenging some of the White House’s key assertions. For one thing, Woodward insists the sequester was President Obama’s idea. For another, Woodward wants the public to believe Obama is “moving the goal posts” by expecting Democrats and Republicans to reach a compromise including both spending cuts and revenue from closed tax loopholes. As far as the Washington Post reporter in concerned, sequestration cuts were supposed to be replaced entirely with different spending cuts, just as GOP policymakers demand.
Let’s take these one at a time. The first point, which Republicans and reporters find needlessly fascinating, is quickly becoming farcical. Tim Noah argued that the White House came up with the sequestration policy “in roughly the same sense that it was Charles Lindbergh’s bad idea eight decades ago to fork over the equivalent in today’s dollars of $840,000 to a German-born carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann…. The sequester was a ransom payment.” Noam Scheiber added that saying the sequester was Obama’s idea is “like saying it was your idea to give your wallet to a mugger when he said, ‘Your money or your life.'”
Republicans were threatening to crash the economy on purpose and Obama was scrambling to satisfy their demands before GOP lawmakers pulled the trigger and shot the hostage (which is to say, shot us). The sequester then became part of the plan that Republicans proceeded to vote for and brag about, before they came up with the “this is all Obama’s fault” talking point in the hopes of winning a bizarre public-relations fight.
After Republicans created a crisis, both sides created the sequester, and both sides now consider it dangerous. The point that matters, even if Very Serious People in Washington are reluctant to acknowledge it, is that only one side is prepared to compromise to resolve the problem.
Which leads us to Woodward’s second, and more dramatic, error.
For the Washington Post legend, Obama is “moving the goal posts,” since everyone realized in the summer of 2011 that the sequestration cuts were supposed to be replaced with a different set of cuts — and no new revenue. It’s unfair, Woodward argues, for the White House to suddenly expect a balanced compromise when that was never part of the original plan.
Woodward is plainly, demonstrably wrong. It’s not a matter of opinion and it’s not an answer found in a fuzzy gray area in which both sides have a credible claim.
When the Budget Control Act became law to end the Republicans’ debt-ceiling crisis in 2011, a “super-committee” was created to find an alternative to the sequester. Was the committee’s mandate to find a cuts-only policy? Of course not — even Republicans accepted the fact that some revenue would be part of a solution. President Obama, when signing the BCA, explicitly said, “You can’t close the deficit with just spending cuts…. It also means reforming our tax code so that the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations pay their fair share.'”
Brian Beutler added that Woodward “is just dead wrong.”
Obama and Democrats have always insisted that a balanced mix of spending cuts and higher taxes replace sequestration. It’s true that John Boehner wouldn’t agree to include new taxes in the enforcement mechanism itself, and thus that the enforcement mechanism he and Obama settled upon — sequestration — is composed exclusively of spending cuts. But the entire purpose of an enforcement mechanism is to make sure that the enforcement mechanism is never triggered. The key question is what action it was designed to compel. And on that score, the Budget Control Act is unambiguous.
First: “Unless a joint committee bill achieving an amount greater than $1,200,000,000,000 in deficit reduction as provided in section 401(b)(3)(B)(i)(II) of the Budget Control Act of 2011 is enacted by January 15, 2012, the discretionary spending limits listed in section 251(c) shall be revised, and discretionary appropriations and direct spending shall be reduced.”
Key words: “deficit reduction.” Not “spending cuts.” If Republicans wanted to make sure sequestration would be replaced with spending cuts only, that would have been the place to make a stand. Some of them certainly tried. But that’s not what ultimately won the day. Instead, the law tasked the Super Committee with replacing sequestration with a different deficit reduction bill — tax increases or no.
At a certain level, Woodward, despite having written extensively on the subject, seems somewhat confused about the specific details. In his op-ed, he wrote, “The final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester….So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts.”
But that simply doesn’t make any sense. The sequester didn’t include revenue, so it’s unfair to expect the sequester alternative to have revenue? Why is that, exactly?
What’s especially troubling is that Woodward’s own book is at odds with the argument he presented in the new op-ed.
But wait, it gets worse. Woodward, who for whatever reason doesn’t seem to care for the president, made an unfortunate mistake and got caught. And if Woodward acknowledged his missteps and corrected them, it would have been easy to simply move on. Even journalistic legends make mistakes.
But in this case, after learning of the criticism, Woodward emailed Politico‘s Mike Allen with a defense that made matters worse, flubbing several key, basic details, suggesting he’s even more confused about the debate than was evident from his mistaken op-ed.
Republicans seem thrilled with Woodward’s errors because they reinforce the story they’re eager to tell. But relying on mistakes to bolster a bad argument only makes Woodward and Republicans look worse.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 25, 2013
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