“The Vain And The Desperate”: The Caress Of The Spotlight Redeems The Indignities Of The Process
In case you missed it, our nation’s officeholders, current and former, have been working overtime to make us proud.
Ted Cruz threw a histrionic hissy fit in front of Arab Christians. Sarah Palin went to a birthday party where her family reportedly got into a brawl. Mark Sanford emitted a self-pitying aria of romantic angst. Debbie Wasserman Schultz compared some Republicans to wife beaters.
Somewhere in there, I sank into a newly deep funk about the kinds of people drawn to politics these days.
Then I burrowed into Matt Bai’s new book and I hit rock bottom.
It’s called “All the Truth Is Out,” it will be published later this month and it’s about Gary Hart. Remember him: the presidential contender who rode a boat named Monkey Business into a media whirlpool? You should, as the book, which is excerpted in The Times Magazine this weekend, makes clear.
And the reason isn’t so much the scandal that swallowed him or his particular exit from the political arena. It’s the warning that his story sounded — about a new brutality on the campaign trail, about uncharted frontiers of media invasiveness and about the way both would wind up culling the herd, not in favor of the strongest candidates but in favor of those so driven or vacuous that the caress of the spotlight redeems the indignities of the process.
Has running for public office become less attractive than ever? Does it frighten off potential leaders who might benefit us and clear a path for aspirants with less to offer?
Bai’s book suggests as much, and he points a finger at political journalism, which, he writes, is “now concerned almost entirely with exposing lies and unearthing character flaws, sexual or not.”
“Hart’s downfall,” Bai continues, “was the thing that tipped the scales completely, the catalyst that made it O.K. — even necessary — for all aspiring political reporters to cast themselves as amateur P.I.s and psychotherapists. If post-Hart political journalism had a motto, it would have been: We know you’re a fraud somehow. Our job is to prove it.”
“All the Truth Is Out” has fascinating tidbits, in particular about friendships that bloomed between Hart and Mikhail Gorbachev and Hart and Bill Clinton, his descendant in the annals of sexual scandal.
It also has a few belly laughs — painful ones. Bai writes that when the media was consumed by Hart’s sex life, Johnny Carson joked that “the nomination would fall into Hart’s lap — if there was any room left there. On the highly rated sitcom ‘Golden Girls,’ one of the little old ladies commented of another character, ‘She’s Gary Hart’s campaign manager. It doesn’t pay much, but you don’t have to get out of bed to do it.’ ”
Those jokes serve a point: Hart was reduced to a single trait, and everything else he had to say was muffled by it. And the same questionable fate befell many politicians after him, as privacy perished and the media’s insistence on a certain sort of juicy narrative intensified.
“It’s just getting worse,” Stuart Stevens, the veteran Republican strategist who spearheaded Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, told me. “It’s the most grueling process imaginable.”
As CNN’s Peter Hamby noted in a study he wrote during a fellowship at Harvard last year, the accelerated news cycle of the social-media age demands meaningless scoops, trumpets dubious gaffes and turns the reporters trailing a candidate into “one giant, tweeting blob.”
That blob suffocates its quarry, often at the prodding of his or her rivals, who supply opposition research (or “oppo”) that strays from serious byways down silly cul-de-sacs. This was captured in a story about the Senate elections that was splashed across the top of the Politico website Friday afternoon.
The headline blared, “GOTCHA! How oppo took over the midterms.” And the story began, “Why would anyone want to talk about immigration, terrorism, gun control or the national debt, when there’s Alison Lundergan Grimes’ bus, John Walsh’s thesis, Bruce Braley’s chickens and Pat Roberts’ recliner? Gotcha stories — ranging from those tangentially related to issues of the day to the completely ephemeral and even absurd — have been front and center in an abnormally large number of top races this year.”
Everything’s a teapot, primed for a tempest. Although Joe Biden has a famously spastic tongue and there’s no reason to believe he is anti-Semitic, he makes an indecorous reference to “Shylocks” and the outrage machinery cranks into gear. The content-ravenous blogosphere lights up.
But the hysteria of the present media climate isn’t the only problem or turnoff. There’s the extended duration of a political race. There’s the ceaseless fund-raising, the burden of which was spelled out in an internal memo that leaked from Michelle Nunn’s Senate campaign in Georgia. It decreed that drumming up money should consume 80 percent of her time in the first quarter of 2014, declining to 70 percent in the third.
The memo identified Jews as a “tremendous financial opportunity,” so long as Nunn struck the right position on Israel, still to be finessed. Ah, the heartfelt conviction that animates today’s candidate!
Writing about the memo in The Times Magazine, Mark Leibovich said that his main takeaway was “that a political campaign today is a soul-killing pursuit.” He presumes a soul to take.
Seriously, who’s attracted to this ordeal? Some people with only the best intentions and motivations, yes. But also plenty like Sanford, whose 2,346-word Facebook post about his postmarital woes signaled a Newt-caliber neediness. Or like Wasserman Schultz, an intemperate warrior who, if Politico’s profile of her last week got it right, is consumed by self-centered ambition. Or like Cruz, with his lust for attention, even if it’s negative.
Or like Palin. She’s clearly on Bai’s mind when he writes that the “post-Hart climate” of estrangement between politicians and the press — and of shallow campaign pageantry — made it easier for candidates with little policy expertise or insight into governance, because no one expected any candidate to say anything too detailed or deep.
“A politician could duck any real intellectual scrutiny simply by deriding the evident triviality of the media,” Bai writes.
It’s odd and funny that the conservative writer Charles Krauthammer sought to vilify President Obama last week by calling him, of all things, a narcissist. When this came up on “The View” and narcissism was explained to Rosie O’Donnell as “a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of self and their own importance and a deep need for admiration,” she replied, “That’s every celebrity I know, including me.”
It’s a lot of politicians, too. The process guarantees it.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 20, 2014
“Something Out Of Nothing”: Obama’s ‘No Strategy’ Moment Is A Non-Story
It’s all so predictable. As expected, media pundits are having a field day dissecting President Barack Obama’s statement yesterday that, when it comes to dealing with the Islamic State (the militant group also known as ISIS), “we don’t have a strategy yet.” That sentence came in response to a journalist’s question regarding whether Obama needed Congress’ approval to go into Syria militarily, and came after an extended analysis by Obama regarding the Islamic State and the situation in Iraq and Syria.
As I suggested in this previous post prior to Obama’s press conference, the president’s caution regarding how to deal with the Islamic State is warranted, given the fluid nature of the situation in Iraq and Syria, and because there remains a great deal of uncertainty among his foreign policy experts regarding the extent to which the Islamic State presents a security threat to U.S. national interests.
For most Americans who saw Obama’s press conference in full, his candid statement explaining why his administration has not yet settled on a military strategy for dealing with the militants is likely to hardly raise an eyebrow. But for media pundits determined to extract a digestible sound byte or headline from Obama’s rather nuanced and lengthy discourse, the specific statement regarding the lack of a strategy was manna from heaven. Not surprisingly, the twitterverse exploded in consternation that the president would make such an admission, and many news outlets used Obama’s statement to lead their press conference coverage. As a result, Obama administration spokesman Josh Earnest went on the news shows to clarify that by lack of strategy, the president referred specifically to military tactics for dealing with the Islamic State, and that he in fact did have a plan for addressing broader regional concerns.
Earnest’s explanation notwithstanding, pundits were quick to assess the damage Obama’s statement would have on a) his political standing, b) the nation’s foreign policy, c) the Democrats’ chances in the upcoming midterms and d) all three. The most common media theme was that Obama’s statement reinforces the impression conveyed by recent polls that Obama is not tough enough when it comes to foreign policy, and that – as Hillary Clinton implicitly suggested in her recent Atlantic interview – Obama’s foreign policy approach lacks any underlying guiding principles. And, not least, it allowed the pundits to recycle all the previous stories about the damage done by presidential gaffes.
Here’s the problem with these instant analyses. They are wrong. Obama’s statement, by itself, will almost surely have no substantive impact on either his political standing or the effectiveness of his foreign policy. Nor will it change the outcome of the 2014 midterms. This despite the best efforts by pundits to fit this statement into a larger media narrative that will surely dominate the next few news cycles.
How do I know this? Consider some other celebrated gaffes that are even now being recycled in light of Obama’s latest statement. For example, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake likens the “we don’t have a strategy yet” to Mitt Romney infamous 47 percent statement during the 2012 presidential campaign, in which the Republican presidential candidate claimed that “47 percent of the people ….are dependent on government” and thus would never vote for him. Blake writes, “As with all gaffes, the worst ones are the ones that confirm people’s pre-existing suspicions or fit into an easy narrative. That’s why ‘47 percent’ stung Mitt Romney so much, and it’s why ‘don’t have a strategy’ hurts Obama today.”
The problem with Blake’s analogy, however, is that despite wide-spread media coverage of Romney’s 47 percent statement, including pundits’ claims that he had essentially killed his chances to win the election, it actually had almost no impact on the outcome of the presidential race, a finding documented by political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck in their careful study of the 2012 presidential race. They conclude that, “In terms of the most important decision – who to vote for – there was no consistent evidence that much had changed” as a result of the video. Indeed, they argue that whatever its immediate impact, the video’s effect largely dissipated by the time of the first presidential debate a few weeks later and that it had no lingering influence on Romney’s support. They conclude, “Whatever the explanation, it was striking that this video, a supposed bombshell, detonated with so little apparent force in the minds of voters.”
Despite the media fixation, this will almost certainly be the case with Obama’s latest “gaffe” as well. The reason is that voters are not blank slates whose opinions toward politicians and policies are largely determined by the latest media meme of the day, no matter how pervasive the coverage. Instead, history suggests that voters’ assessment of Obama’s handling of foreign policy will be driven much more by their perceptions of events, including the Islamic State’s progress in Syria and Iraq, as mediated through voters’ own ideological predispositions, than they will by pundits’ single-minded focus on one sentence in a presidential press conference. Nor will it overshadow the more fundamental factors – the state of the economy, incumbency status and the typical seat loss experienced by the president’s party – that primarily determine midterm election outcomes.
Nonetheless, the fact that Obama’s statement will matter little to most of the public won’t stop pundits from endlessly replaying and analyzing it for the next few news cycles in the fervent, albeit misguided, belief that it may turn out to be the equivalent of “‘read my lips’ signature of a failed presidency”. That is, unless another non-story comes along in the next few days to push this one from the headlines.
By: Mathew Dickinson, Professor, Middlebury College; Thomas Jefferson Street Blog, U. S. News and World Report, August 29, 2014
“Stop Complaining About Obama’s Golfing”: It’s Not About Optics, It’s About Doing Your Job
Of course, Obama is hardly the first president to vacation – President John Adams took an amazing eight months off in one year in office, and President John F. Kennedy went away almost every single weekend of his presidency. And Obama’s not the first president to get criticized for it either. President Ronald Reagan, who was on vacation for more than 300 days of his presidency, took an incredible amount of heat for not coming rushing back to the White House after the death of two Marines in Lebanon, an attack that would lead to the 1984 bombing of the Marine barracks there. But he blew off the criticism and even campaigned for two days before returning to Washington.
We don’t let our son watch the news anymore. Growing up with parents who are big consumers of news, my boy—at the ripe old age of three—already knows something is amiss if Diane Sawyer is taking a night off. If David Muir is at the anchor desk he has been known to ask, “Is Diane sick?” (We haven’t started explaining the more permanent transition going on at ABC just yet because we don’t know how he will take it.)
But between Ferguson, ISIS, Gaza, Ukraine, Ebola and every other tragic news story happening, there are too many questions that newscasts raise now that a three-year old shouldn’t have to wonder about. Too many sad faces on the screen, and it’s too soon to explain why.
Being president of the United States means engaging on all of those issues every day, often multiple times – whether you’re on vacation or you’re not. And regardless of the location, this president – like every occupant of the Oval Office before him – is making decisions based on the welfare of the nation, far ahead of what his vacation schedule is.
Something unspeakable happened to James Foley, and his grieving family lives with the tragedy created by the ruthless monsters who took him from them. I can’t say how I’d react if someone took my son from me in the same way. No one can know who hasn’t gone through such a horrible thing. But I can guess. My guess is that I’d want the entire world to stop. That I’d want a moment of silence that never ended. I would want people to stop laughing and businesses to close. I have no judgment for the impulse of any American who feels any hint of that sadness at Foley’s loss.
But I have little patience, and our country has little need for, the people who play politics with his life. One mindless commentator tweeted that people who share my view support golfing while Americans are being beheaded. The New York Times wrote that the president was “seemingly able to put the savagery out of his mind,” as he went on to continue his vacation with his family and his friends after addressing the incredible tragedy.
I’m not sure why the New York Times thinks it can read minds, but knowing this president, I know one thing with great clarity: The savagery of those who attack Americans is never far from his mind. This notion that he can detach is mostly wrong. For the man who gave the green light to take out Osama bin Laden and is often first to hear the reports of American servicemen and women who die in missions that he ordered, the savagery of this world is not far from the forefront of his mind at every moment of the day.
I don’t remember, but I assume that I was one of the many Democrats who gleefully took shots at President George W. Bush for the time he spent at Crawford—and if so I regret it. Presidents are better for having time out of Washington, even better for time away with their families.
Whether you’re a partisan or a cynical reporter who has been making the same critique about presidential vacations for decades, I assume you probably agree that human beings function better when they get a little time away. I wouldn’t want my surgeon to be some woman who hasn’t had a break in 4 years. I wouldn’t want to share the road with a truck driver who hasn’t had enough sleep. It doesn’t matter what your occupation is; you will do your job better if you recharge your batteries. And even though the president is never really on vacation, giving him at least a little downtime is good for all of us.
In the end, it’s not about the optics. It’s about doing your job. And if the president is doing his – which he is – we should all be able to appreciate the fact that he is taking the opportunity to be a dad, a husband and even a leader of the free world who can clear his head on the golf course.
By: Bill Burton, Executive Vice President at Global Strategy Group; Politico, August 25, 2014
“Non-Journalistic Instincts”: Joe Scarborough, Mike Allen Form Journalistic Axis of Evil
One of the more fascinating sidelights of the crisis in Ferguson is the way it has revealed the complacent, obedient, and fundamentally non-journalistic instincts of certain leading centrist establishmentarian journalists. The precipitating event was the arrest of Wesley Lowery, a young Washington Post reporter who was illegally ordered to leave a McDonalds near the demonstrations and, correctly, refused, leading to his arrest.
This angered Joe Scarborough. And by “angered,” we should be clear, we mean angered at the presumption of Lowery for refusing. The avuncular host of Morning Joe instructed him, “Next time a police officer tells you that you’ve got to move along because you’ve got riots outside, well, you probably should move along.” (Because nothing says “journalism” like following orders from authorities, however questionable, self-interested, or illegal they may be.) Scarborough attributed Lowery’s refusal not to any commitment to continue doing his job but to his desire to “get on TV and have people talk about me the next day,” because the desire to get on television in any way possible is the only motivation that makes sense to Joe Scarborough.
Lowery replied sharply. Riding to Scarborough’s side today, forming a kind of journalistic Axis of Evil, is Mike Allen. In Allen’s world, which is defined by overlapping and possibly coterminous circles of sources, friends, and paid advertisers, the sort of effrontery displayed by Lowery first toward the police and then toward an esteemed television commentator was thoroughly intolerable. Sniffs Allen, in today’s Playbook:
YA CAN’T MAKE IT UP – Wesley Lowrey, 23-year-old Congress/politics reporter for the WashPost, responding on CNN to suggestions that he should have obeyed police amid a riot: “[L]et me be clear about this: I have LITTLE PATIENCE for talking heads.”
FYI, his name is spelled Lowery, and his age is 24. But if Lowery wants more favorable coverage from Allen, maybe he should think about sponsoring some ads in Playbook.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencier, New York Magazine, August 15, 2014
“The Trouble With Optics”: Talking About Image When We Should Be Talking About Substance
I’ve been writing about politics for a long time, and it’s a tribute to the dynamism of our glorious democracy that every time I think that things couldn’t get any stupider, I’m proven wrong yet again. While we face a genuine humanitarian and policy crisis on our southern border, with thousands of children making their way across hundreds of miles to wind up in the arms of the Border Patrol, the news media allowed Republicans to turn the focus to the deeply important question of whether or not President Obama would travel there to mount a photo op. Seriously.
Then because it wasn’t removed enough from reality already, people in the media are now talking about whether Barack Obama does photo ops and how often, because if he rejected a photo op on this particular issue but has photo-opped before, then I guess he’s a hypocrite and therefore…um…therefore something.
I’m not saying that “optics” are, per se, a bad thing to discuss. I certainly agree with Kevin Drum that as a general matter, “how something will look to other people” is often worth contemplating; After all, that’s a good portion of what politicians and those who work for them spend time thinking about. And I write about it plenty myself. The problem comes when we’re dealing with times when choices are being made and events with consequences are occurring (unlike an election campaign, which is purely an exercise in persuasion), and some people—in this case, both politicians and reporters—act as though the optics of a situation are the only thing that matters. It’s particularly crazy when there’s a genuine crisis happening and we’re trying to arrive at a solution.
Another problem is that when we talk about “optics,” we do it so poorly, in particular by ascribing all kinds of power to rhetoric and images that they don’t actually possess. People are still convinced that the president can give a single speech and utterly transform the dynamic of a political situation (he can’t), and that a particular image isn’t just a useful encapsulation of events that occurred, but the thing that caused events to occur the way they did.
So for instance, in trying to argue that Obama should go stage a photo op at the border, many people have pointed to that picture of George W. Bush looking out the window of Air Force One at the devastation of New Orleans, to argue that a photo can have significant negative consequences on a presidency. But not only do they have the Katrina comparison exactly backwards (as I argued over at the Post yesterday, the problem there was that Bush wasn’t doing anything, while the problem now is that Barack Obama wants to do some things but Republicans in Congress don’t want to do anything), they don’t seem to understand why people found the picture of Bush resonant and memorable. It was because for many people it accurately captured his government’s failure (Bush was soaring above the ground, too removed to understand the human suffering going on below). But people weren’t persuaded to believe that by the picture, they were persuaded to believe that by the actual events that occurred; the picture just became a symbol of it. Let’s not forget that thousands of people died in Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath (estimates vary from 1,400 to 3,500). Bush would have suffered in the public esteem whether he had pictures taken of him or not. Reality was the problem, not the optics.
And that’s what will matter in this case too. Either the administration will succeed in dealing with this problem (with or without Congress’ help), or it will just get worse. And no picture is going to change that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 10, 2014
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