Category Elections

In the spring a young man’s fancy also turns to baseball and cars; politics is getting in the way

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

Yep, another great day: sunny skies and highs in the low 80s in southeast Texas, got a ticket for my first game of the new baseball season tonight, made some good progress with a new swing thought out on the driving range yesterday, and I’m about a week away from trading in a serviceable but boxy and uninspiring VW for a very low mileage Honda two-seater—just the kind I’ve always loved and used to drive—while lowering my costs in the process!  With Rick Santorum’s exit from the GOP presidential primary, I’m hoping we can all enjoy a period of relative campaign quiet, too, but here’s something to roll around in your head before Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, and the permanent political class, use up all the oxygen.

It has looked like, from the vantage point of today, that come November we voters would face a choice between the radicalism that defines today’s Republican Party or another four years of divided government and damn little constructive effort on crucial economic issues.  Even the most moderate-seeming Republican candidate, Romney, was disavowing anything in own past that smelled of reasonableness and compromise, to appeal to the extremists who make up most of the GOP primary voters.  But the need for that should be over now, absent a mind-boggling resurgence from Newt Gingrich or Ron Paul or a last gasp charge to the convention from Sarah Palin or someone of that ilk to rally the “true conservatives.”

But even as Romney starts to redefine himself to appeal to the less ideological among us, Republicans will have a quite a slog in front of them if they wish to broaden their appeal beyond those who’ve already drunk the Kool-Aid.  Former White House speechwriter and senior policy adviser Michael Gerson says it’s not just a matter of trying to counter the Democrats’ “war on women” meme: “The GOP’s main problem is not the contraceptive issue; it is the perception that it has become too ideological on many issues.”

Women and independent voters have seen a party enthusiastically confirming its most damaging stereotypes. The composite Republican candidate—reflecting the party’s ideological mean—has been harsh on immigration, confrontational on social issues, simplistic in condemning government and silent on the struggles of the poor. How many women would find this profile appealing on eHarmony?

This is the hidden curse of the Republican congressional triumph of 2010. Republican activists came to believe that purity is all that is necessary for victory. But a presidential candidate, it turns out, requires a broader ideological attraction than your average tea party House freshman.

From an academic standpoint it will be interesting to see if and how Romney and the more traditional Republican elements work to sand the scary edges off of their primary campaign messages, to widen their appeal and entice the plurality of American voters who don’t ritualistically identify with the Republican or Democratic parties; those are the people who will decide this election.  (The Obama campaign isn’t going to make it easy, already working to reinforce Romney’s “severe” conservatism and other primary campaign highlights.)  Gerson argues that “Mainly, women and independents want some reassurance that Republicans give a damn about someone other than Republican primary voters. It is not a high bar. But Romney needs to start somewhere…”.  I’ll check back in after Memorial Day to see how he’s doing.

Crazy conservatives shoot themselves in the foot, then reload

Pat Ryan 2 Comments

The radical right of the Republican Party keeps drifting farther and farther away from the reality where most of us exist.  The good part is they’re getting less and less likely to remain a national political force, since as they get more and more extreme in their views they’re pushing more and more moderates away while their own supporters, angry old white people, are dying off.  The overreaction to every imagined slight against The Way Things Should Be and The Way Things Used To Be has become comical, and an easy target for Jon Stewart and others.

The Daily Show took note of last week’s hissy fit in a hatbox over mandating health insurance coverage for contraception services and the requirement that employers offer such coverage, even some religion-affiliated employers, and was delighted to report that the conservative message machine didn’t miss a chance—again—to bulldoze blithely over that line that separates rational argument from hysterical exaggeration.  Click the pic, and enjoy.

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This one guy says the evil super PACs are SAVING democracy, others are less charitable

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I’m not sure if he’s right or not, but he makes an interesting argument.  Dave Weigel is an excellent political reporter who’s spent a lot of time chronicling the conservative movement.  Today at Slate he makes the provocative argument—it was to me, anyway—that the political action committees fostered by the U. S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decisionare a good thing, that they have been a force to strengthen democracy and have made this year’s Republican presidential contest fairer.

Huh?  No, no, no, wait a minute: Citizens United is an evil thing, a twisted interpretation of dictionary English by the conservative members of the court so that now the godless, faceless corporations are considered “persons” for the purposes of political participation, and they can secretly donate as much of their giant piles of money as they like to PACs and buy elections and marginalize the little guy like me (I was going to say you and me, but I really shouldn’t presume to speak for you, should I?)…it’s already happened starting in Iowa this year, right?  I mean, that’s what we’ve all been told, right?

But Weigel argues that the super PACs have had a leveling effect: the big money from super PACs is all that’s kept Mitt Romney from outspending his opponents into submission, and essentially buying the GOP nomination.  And despite the concerns about the secretive nature of the super PACs, he notes that we seem to know more about the biggest of the big donors to super PACs than we do about the people making direct donations to the individual candidates’ campaigns. He writes, “The big fear about campaign money is that it corrupts the candidates who have to beg for it.”

But that worry applies better to the shadowy bundler than it does to the megabucks super PAC donor. Corruption can’t grow in the sunlight. The people giving big to super PACs are famous. I didn’t fully understand how famous until I tagged along with [Newt] Gingrich at a speech to Aloma Baptist Church in Florida, when a parishioner asked him to explain why he was taking dirty money from the gambling industry. Gingrich explained that he and [Sheldon] Adelson had a simpatico, guns-a-blazin’ view on Israel. Is it corruption if the candidate tells you what he’ll do for the donor?

(snip)

We know more about those guys than we know about the bundlers, who’ve been passing money under the table for years. So which of those systems is worse for our democracy?

I know what’s good for our democracy: satire and ridicule, and in the case of Citizens United it’s been coming most effectively from Stephen Colbert.  The Comedy Central comedian started his own super PAC and has been using it to expose the ridiculous reality resulting from the court’s ruling.

The line between entertainment and the court blurred even further late last month when Colbert had former Justice John Paul Stevens on his show to discuss his dissent in Citizens United. When a 91-year-old former justice is patiently explaining to a comedian that corporations are not people, it’s clear that everything about the majority opinion has been reduced to a punch line.

The court fights aren’t over, and perhaps the coolest one is in Montana where the state supreme court has told the one in Washington to pound sand.  The court voted 5-2 to uphold the constitutionality of Montana’s ban on corporate campaign contributions, finding justification for the ban that Citizens United does not consider.  Beyond that, Justice James Nelson unloaded: “Corporations are not persons.  Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people—human beings—to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creatures of government.”   And that from one of the two dissenters in the ruling!

More fundamentally, the majority and one dissenter seem to understand perfectly how much the American people resent being lied to about the burning need for courts to step in to protect the oppressed voices of powerless corporate interests. As Judge Nelson wrote in dissent, “the notion that corporations are disadvantaged in the political realm is unbelievable. Indeed, it has astounded most Americans. The truth is that corporations wield enormous power in Congress and in state legislatures. It is hard to tell where government ends and corporate America begins: the transition is seamless and overlapping.”

ESPN: The Worldwide Sellout

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

A blind man can see that the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports is no giant of journalism, but the hype-pool of Super Bowl week is no excuse for the eyewash ESPN put out yesterday masquerading as an Earth-moving event of epic proportion.  It was pathetic; it was sad; and it goes to the heart of my belief that many in the news media compromise their integrity every day in covering sports stories, giving control over what they ask and what they publish to the players and the teams.

Loads of reporters have wanted to interview Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning, whose great career came to an unexpected (and perhaps only temporary) stop when he missed this entire season recovering from neck surgeries.  They’ve especially wanted to talk to him since (1) his contract is expiring and everyone wonders if he’ll come back to play with the Colts, or if the team will drop him to save money and use the first pick in the upcoming draft to secure his successor, (2) the Super Bowl is being played in Indianapolis on Sunday, (3) Manning’s brother Eli, the quarterback of the New York Football Giants, is playing in this year’s big game, and (4) anything new to report on would be a blessing.

They’ve all wanted the Big Get, but Peyton Manning has declined the offers, which is his right, until yesterday, when he agreed to an interview with ESPN’s Trey Wingo.  But you and me, the great unwashed American tee wee viewer, we had to be sharp to notice that the interview was arranged through the good offices of Gatorade, which granted ESPN access to its spokesman Manning so he could talk about a Gatorade promotional event.  As such, Gatorade leveraged its position to turn a “news” interview with a hard-to-get person at a time when he’s even more in the news than normal into a commercial for Gatorade (Manning was interviewed with Gatorade bottles lined up behind him, for crying out loud!); as a business with a product to promote, that’s Gatorade’s right.

But it only works when ESPN agrees to the charade.  Check out the interview, parts 1 and 2.  I give Wingo credit for repeatedly trying to get Manning to talk about his injury, his unfortunate public disagreement with his team’s owner, and his contract situation, all things that Manning didn’timage want to discuss—all the reasons why he hadn’t been talking to anyone lately.  As for Manning—and this is particularly true in part 2—I give him credit for not straying from his intended topics.  But for a guy who is so good on camera in so many commercials and interviews, and when he hosted “Saturday Night Live,” I thought he looked uneasy throughout, as if he were seated on something not flat or soft.  When you think about it, that isn’t surprising for a guy who agreed to be interviewed but knew he wasn’t going to be responsive to most of the questions.  I’m not the only one he thought that the very camera-friendly Manning looked uncomfortable in this “interview.”

I’m not saying you can’t do an interview arranged by a press agent or a corporate sponsor, but if you put yourself out to the public as an independent journalistic voice then you don’t roll over (insert inappropriate sexual metaphor here, if desired) and let the flaks have their way with you.  This interview wasn’t live to air—ESPN had the time, and every right, to edit it as they saw fit before airing it, or not to air the damn thing at all if they determined that it wasn’t newsworthy.  What they aired was an embarrassment…or should be.

And then I think about Newt Gingrich, and the traction he’s getting complaining about presumptuous reporters asking uncomfortable questions during campaign debates.  (Jack Shafer takes him to task for pouting and blaming journalists.)  Gingrich is smart enough to know that asking hard questions is what reporters are supposed to do, and also smart enough to know that a lot of people will find him brave for “standing up to” the hated left wing liberal news media.

Remember, most people don’t see any substantive difference between the reporters covering the candidates for president and the reporters covering high school football.  When those people see that “the media” is willing to surrender control of the content of an interview and allow a pro football quarterback to hawk a promotion put on by his sports drink company but conspicuously refuse to answer any question of substance, we shouldn’t be surprised when they think it’s inappropriate “gotcha” journalism for reporters to ask a pointed question of a candidate for president.  And we sure as hell shouldn’t be surprised when the candidate exploits those feelings for his own benefit.

Thank you, Worldwide Leader, for your contribution to journalism education—the bad example.

Why politics has become so damn annoying

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I used to be completely enamored of politics.  I was interested in the government issues that were discussed, and intrigued by how professional politicians figured out how to win support from their colleagues and the voters, and proud to see how the system was used to pass laws meant to support the rights and freedoms upon which our country was established.  But the system has moved away from me over the years.

For me America’s politics has become more and more grating as it’s become less about political issues and more about Christian fundamentalism.  I learned about government and politics in a time and a place where government and politics were not seen as a means to enforce some any religious orthodoxy through law; since the law said everyone had freedom to practice their faith, or not to practice one at all, it didn’t occur to me that religions had anything to worry about.

The veil started lifting from my eyes in the 1980 election campaign.  I was a recent college graduate and news reporter trying to comprehend the strident religious rhetoric from the Rev. Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority: wasn’t it out-of-place for this preacher to be mixing religion and politics?  In time I came to understand that a group interest based on religious belief was as valid as any other group interest in an election, but I was never comfortable with the sub rosa assurances from Falwell and his colleagues that their political position came with a Holy Imprimatur (“I’m God, and I approve this message.”)

Today, I see that a goodly portion of the people whom we politely refer to as social conservatives would more accurately characterized as Christian extremists who would like nothing more than to live in a semi-fundamentalist Christian theocracy, despite their declared love for the United States Constitution which expressly forbids that.  Granted, they have shown some, uh, flexibility in insisting they support the original intent of the document throughout, but cherry-picking those passages that support their position on an issue while ignoring all those which don’t.  But I give them credit: they played within the system, they played by the rules, and they’ve all but taken over the Republican Party.

Today I found this thoughtful video editorial at The Daily Beast: Michelle Goldberg gives some props to the religious right while gently scolding the pouters on the left who say they’ve given up on President Obama and electoral politics because they haven’t gotten everything they wanted since he was elected. 

Maybe it was the Reagan Revolution; maybe it was the Goldwater Generation; but conservatives have made the very vivid point that persistence pays off–there are elements at home today in the GOP’s ever-narrowing tent that neither Reagan nor Goldwater would have ever thought would be accommodated.  It’s an object lesson that the Republican fiscal conservatives, and the moderate-progressive-liberal-independent plurality of American citizens, need to take to heart.