MSNBC Hardball Host Chris Matthews dealt with President George Bush’s charge that Senator Barack Obama would appease terrorists on his show and obliterated Los Angeles conservative radio talk show host Kevin James who was on the show to give the Barack-is-an-appeaser side of it.
James’ problem: he had no idea what actual appeasement is. Note how he tries to get around the issue by talking loud and changing the subject. The problem: even though he takes a lot of heat from some partisans (particularly Democratic progressives), Chris Matthews was an excellent reporter and op-ed column writer (he had an excellent record for political prognostication) before he got on the air.
It’s a classic case of radio talk show host polemics and volume versus a reporter who’s trying to get a substantive answer from an interview subject and insisting that his follow up question be answered. You can see Matthews’ combination of amazement, absolute dismay and seeming contempt for James’ (a) attempts not to answer the question and (b) ignorance about the question he asked him even thought he is “dittoing” President Bush. (Listen closely as Matthews makes his own historical error in a side comment about the Cole…but he’s not the one charging a candidate with something based on inaccuracies).
This is a classic and is Matthews as professional reporter at his best (be sure to cover the eyes and ears of small children):
I have a theory about West Virginia, the state with the “Wild and Wonderful” slogan and the first bearer of good tidings for Hillary Clinton since her accountant told her it was okay to lend herself another few million bucks in her quest to defy gravity.
West Virginians aren’t irredeemably racist as some commentators portray them, they just don’t like any politician who is not a white male, and despite her lopsided 41-point victory there yesterday Clinton is no Mountain Mama, merely their version of sloppy seconds.
After all, 30 percent of West Virginia Democrats voted for George bush in 2004 over that girlie man John Kerry.
Furthermore, those all-important undeclared superdelegates are not going to be moved by the results of a primary election that hasn’t mattered since 1960 when JFK beat HHH, and whose voters personify the concept of a backwater state.
West Virginia ranks toward the bottom in household income and other quality-of-life indicators among all states, and apparently in viewing positively the coming of the first serious black candidate for president, as well. How else to interpret this staggering fact: Two in 10 people leaving polling places in the Mountain State unapologetically said that race was a factor in who they voted for, which I would translate to mean that it was a factor for a substantial majority of voters who would never utter such a thing to a network exit poller.
And although he had dropped out of the race 15 weeks ago, a white guy by the name of Edwards got 7 percent of the vote. Dunno. Maybe it was his haircut, but white guys did really well in the Republican primary, too.
This suggests a couple of things:
* Obama’s race will be a huge factor in the fall and the big question is whether people who will not vote for the nominee simply because of his skin color and/or because they falsely believe he is a Muslim can be offset by new Democratic voters who don’t give a fig about race, already registered blacks, more affluent white voters and Independents.
My own view is that they can, and American is an election cycle or two away from race, gender and sexual preference not being determining factors in the success of a national candidate.
* Despite Clinton’s belated apologies for her campaign’s seeming obssession with race (as in belabor Obama’s vulnerability because of his blackness 19 times and then apologize the 20th), expect to hear more such talk in the run-up to the primary next week.
That is in the state of Kentucky, which is a lot closer to West Virginia than Oregon in more than distance and will be another “symbolic” victory for Clinton.
This is not to say that people who are disinclined to vote for a black are her Great White Hope, because there is no hope for her with Obama holding a big lead in popular votes, pledged delegate votes, opinion-poll positives, contributions and endorsements, and is currently picking off uncommitted delegates by a 4-1 margin. (As it was, Clinton’s 12 delegate gain in West Virginia has been more than offset by superdelegates migrating to Obama.)
Besides which, the mainstream punditocracy has dutifully fallen in line behind NBC News blowhard Tim Russert, who in a moment being compared to Walter Cronkite telling LBJ that the Vietnam war could not be won, declared after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries last week that “We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be, and no one is going to dispute it.”
Me too, and the version of this story at my own blog was bumped by two that are far more important — a development in the Pat Tillman case and the latest setbacks for the Bush torture regime.
Well, maybe not everybody has gotten the message. Just ask folks in the Wild and Wonderful State.
May 13th, 2008 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
Wait, wait, don’t clobber me for asking this low in vitamins, high in refined sugar question. I’m not qoing to answer it. I question the question… the repeater-rifle question stuck on automatic: “Should Hillary quit?”
Hear me out…
There are several poignant “election times” topics for national discussion that have been mostly ignored. They oughtn’t be. For instance:
How much of the MSM, by their pronouncements about what any candidate ought or ought not do, (such as quit running) seems to be attempting to influence and create behavior in a candidate, rather than reporting on a candidate’s behavior?
This one too: Whether or how powerful media TV and radio show hosts, who daily perseverate on ‘Should Hillary Clinton quit?’ (sometimes with bald exhortations rather than as inquiry) come close –perhaps unwittingly– to subverting the spirit of the election process…
An election process in the USA seems to guarantee that citizens are allowed to place their votes in a nomination contest without having themselves, or the candidates, be unduly pressured to quit by any outside power or force.
In a democracy we are told that our votes count, that voting is the rich marrow of the bones our country is founded on. It seems sensible that each person in America who so chooses, wants to be able to have their one say-so in this nomination contest.
I think, from the people I listen to, just average people who work for a company or who own their own businesses, the voters don’t want their chance to vote in the primary pre-empted by a media surge that contains overt and covert calls for a candidate to quit.
What I hear in my corners of the world is that ‘the people’ don’t want the contest to be shut down by media influence, nor by endless fair-weather polls quoting, nor by pollsters’ choices of what to/ whom to test and what not to test, what to keep in, what to leave out.
I think a majority of people just want what they have been promised, what they have prepared for, given their time to already for many months now. They want their right to cast a vote in the election primary not to be interfered with.
Instead, what continues to seem odd, is the MSM in much of television and radio in particular, but also in many old mainline newspapers, seeming telling/ shouting out what a candidate running for high office ought do to quit…
Some in media remind me of a part of the old ballpark where habitually squatted a group we used to call ‘the loser bruisers.’ These were guys who’d never played the game, drank plenty of spirits, but enjoyed dispiriting the players on the field by shouting out insults… the theme of each being predictable: Go home, You’re no good.
But, the ‘loser bruisers’ forgot that for the game to be fair–and to make a winner really ‘a strong winner’ by having met the challenge, not just ‘a weak winner’ by default– the game had to be played out in a certain form… despite those who thought otherwise.
Exhorting a candidate to drop out, too, appears to be tromping on the form. I think the idea is that we are in a democracy, where as impatient as some of those in the MSM are pressured to rush onto the next big OJ thing… the people, ‘we the people,’ want their say. Everything in its own time. Without shortcuts.
Imagine for a moment, another nation, one that has lived under a dictatorship, but which suddenly was enabled to have their first democratic election. Imagine such a nation where the people are straining toward a new day after years of having been battered about. Imagine there are two or more candidates giving speeches, rallies, visiting parts of the country that no person from high office has EVER been bothered to visit before.
Then imagine a big portion of the big and moneyed media of that nation—rather than the people who have not yet voted—imagine the well-established media of that country, much of it old guard, begins pushing that one candidate or another ought disappear before the contest is done, before all the people can vote on which one they most want….
We’ve all had our days when we’ve absolutely exploded and few saw it. Let’s face it: Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa probably had them.
It stands to reason that Fox’s top rated talk show host Bill O’Reilly would have had one or two himself. And some years ago, before he was on Fox News, a camera captured one of them.
This classic bit capturing a celebrity in his off camera….and off color (WARNING: Adult language)… (frustrated) role has been posted on You Tube, but it has reportedly now been yankked. Read the rest of this entry »
This was quite a week — and not just because of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. It was a week when there were two TV moments when you could seemingly watch and hear the Democratic party starting to split.
First, brace yourself for Clinton supporter and strategist Paul Begala clashing with uncommitted superdelegate and former Al Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile. In her devastating recent Wall Street Journal column on Hillary Clinton titled Damsel of Distress, Peggy Noonan wrote of this piece of video:
The Democratic Party can’t celebrate the triumph of Barack Obama because the Democratic Party is busy having a breakdown. You could call it a breakdown over the issues of race and gender, but its real source is simply Hillary Clinton. Whose entire campaign at this point is about exploiting race and gender.
Here’s the first place an outsider could see the tensions that have taken hold: on CNN Tuesday night, in the famous Brazile-Begala smackdown. Paul Begala wore the smile of the 1990s, the one in which there is no connection between the shape of the mouth and what the mouth says. All is mask. Donna Brazile was having none of it.
Next, there was Clinton backer (and occasional Huffington Post contributor) Lanny Davis, who felt he was treated shabbily by a CNN panel that he felt was stacked with people who favored Obama (you’ll see Brazile again). Details about his side of the behind-the-scenes story are HERE.
But you could again hear the riiiiiiiiiip. Watch this TPM montage and judge for yourself:
My take on it? I think Noonan’s piece, which contains some original reporting, sounds right on the dime.
She explains a lot of what is going on, and what is NOT going on and why. What seems clear from this is that the same attitude George Bush has shown in trying to impose his will on the legislative and executive branches, is what the Clinton campaign is now showing in its attitude towards the Democratic party and its long range goals — not just of winning an election but of burnishing its Big Tent, keeping that Big Tent stable, and opening it up, so more more people can pour in.
Davis? He tried making his case and clearly felt outnumbered.
And Begala? He talked about inclusion at the end, but his words meshed with the controversy later in the week centering on Clinton’s comments about her getting more white votes.
Begala was old-school divide and rule politics delivered with a pasted-on smile.
April 29th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Past political campaigns have had their share of people associated with candidates who are placed on the defensive — but seldom has one in any year had one as proactively insistent on keeping himself alive and injected into an excruciatingly close race as the political albatross now dangling around Democratic Senator Barack Obama named Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Aside from the eager nodding of heads and the unspoken “Keep it up!” you can almost feel coming from the campaign of rival Democratic Presidential wannabe Senator Hillary Clinton, conservative Republicans are ecstatic. Jonah Goldberg, writing in The Los Angeles Times:
God bless the Rev. Jeremiah Wright!
After Barack Obama gave his big race speech in mid-March, many critics noted that the Illinois senator had thrown his own grandmother under the bus to defend his controversial pastor. Well, Wright proved over the last few days that he would not be outdone. He not only threw Obama under the bus, he chucked much of the liberal and mainstream media under there with him. If this keeps up, to paraphrase Roy Scheider in “Jaws,” he’s gonna need a bigger bus.
For six weeks, Obama’s biggest supporters have diligently argued that to so much as mention Wright is in effect racist. When Hillary Rodham Clinton said that Wright wouldn’t have been her pastor, Andrew Sullivan gasped on his Atlantic blog that this was “a new low” in the election. When Lanny J. Davis, Clinton’s consummate spinner, defended her on CNN by describing what Wright actually said, CNN’s Anderson Cooper lambasted Davis for daring to even repeat Wright’s comments. Newsweek’s Joe Klein chimed in, “You’re spreading the poison right now.”
What Wright has done the past few days by (over)exposure is to leave himself in the eyes of many indefensible in terms of the center — and converted himself into an unrelenting albatross also chained to a 1,000 lb. anchor dangling around Obama’s neck:
Obama and his defenders have repeatedly insisted that the bits from Wright’s sermons that got wide circulation last month had been taken “out of context.” His infamous sound bites were grounded in concrete theological or factual foundations, they claim. He was quoting other people. He’s done good things. Nothing to see here, folks.
And so God bless Wright because he’s left all of these folks holding a giant, steaming bag of … well, let’s just call it a bag of “context.”
His positions and the context of his remarks, some could argue, are still explainable, but the problem is that those making that argument right now veer into a nuanced area of nuance — the kind of argument that usually does not work in elections where candidates oversimplify, generalize and try to link up their opponents with broad-brush imagery of stances, events or individuals that will be seen unfavorably by key chunks of an attention-span-challenged electorate.
All this comes at a time when Obama’s campaign is reportedly battening down the hatches for what is expected to be a brutal campaign lasting well into the summer, the New York Times reports:
Mr. Obama’s aides said that they remained confident he would win the nomination. “We feel very good about the position that we are in,” said David Axelrod, his chief strategist. “But we have gotten to the position we are in by taking every week and every contest seriously.”
Still, they said they were no longer as hopeful as they once were that the contest could be resolved before June 3, the day of the last primaries. As a result, they were girding for six weeks of attacks by Mrs. Clinton and potential election defeats that could raise further questions among superdelegates — the elected Democrats and party leaders who will ultimately determine the nominee — about Mr. Obama’s strength as a general election candidate.
And Wright’s double-whammy of appearances came at a time of introspection and private disappointment:
In discussions with donors and supporters last week, Mr. Obama’s advisers played down the loss in Pennsylvania, noting that both sides had expected Mrs. Clinton to win there.
Still, the message belied private frustration and disappointment that Mr. Obama shared with a few associates and advisers, particularly over the hardening narrative that he could not appeal to working-class voters, and a personal frustration for comments he made about some small-town voters being “bitter” at their economic conditions. (Mrs. Clinton seized on those remarks, which have shadowed his campaign.)
“Everyone’s got a real calmness about where we are,” said David Plouffe, who is Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, “but a real sense of urgency that we have eight contests coming up in pretty rapid succession.”
But now it’s clear from the amount of space Wright has gotten on blogs, on serious cable talk shows, on screaming head cable and radio talk shows and in the opinion columns:
Wright is proactively making it tough for Obama to right his campaign.
Will he have to make a statement to distance himself even more from him? And what if Wright’s love affair with national media coverage continues? In essence, Wright himself has been putting the muscle, meat and flesh on the skeletal stereotypical imagery critics have tried to sculpt about Obama. And he won’t stay out of the spotlight to let the issue defuse itself.
Candidates’ associates have seldom totally sank a national political campaign.
But perhaps we are about to see an example of what happens when an association does.
Critics in the media — quite a few of whom unabashedly favor Obama — have been out in force this week, pointing fingers and getting red-faced over ABC’s treatment of their favorite in the most debate. Yes, that shoe always pinches when it’s on the other foot, I’ve noticed.
At The Politico, John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei wrote:
The shower of indignation on Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos over the last few days is the clearest evidence yet that the Clintonites are fundamentally correct in their complaint that she has been flying throughout this campaign into a headwind of media favoritism for Obama….. (The Politico)
The article further acknowledges, “Many journalists are not merely observers but participants in the Obama phenomenon.” (The Politico) [Egalia: “Politico says Obama has a secret weapon….the media. Duh. Duh. Duh. That’s a secret if you’re deaf, dumb, and blind.”] But it’s not exactly a new trend; the media also — according to me — did its little part, all to get George W. Bush elected.
April 18th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Fuses are exceedingly short among cable talking heads as well. Did MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough walk off the set — or did he merely choose not to participate any more in an on-the-air discussion with progressive talk’s rising radio and cable star Rachel Maddow? Details and the video are HERE.
Even if Scarborough did walk off, it’s unlikely to hurt his standing with his network. Scarborough is a unique and authentic talent. He’s a former pol and former professional Republican talking head who broke out of the pack due to his independent viewpoints and the fact he comes across so well on television. Maddow is also a major talent: not all radio types do well on television and she comes across as an assertive and thoughtful progressive who represents her side exceedingly well.
But look at this event as a sample of what’s going on this election year. Tempers are frayed on all sides and discussion often deteriorates into shouting and anger. Scarborough’s point was he won’t do screamfest talk shows a la Crossfire and Maddow’s point was that he was interrupting her while she was giving her take on events. You decide..
Expect this motif to get much worse after the Democrats choose a candidate. Right now (as can be seen in the blogosphere) there is a three way split between people who support Republican Senator John McCain, and Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. McCain is an increasingly strong candidate — someone who appeals to independents, Democrats and is now successfully shoring up the GOP’s longtime winning coalition.
If trends continue, by August GOPers will realize they have an authentic chance to win a once-seemingly-unwinnable Presidential election and Democrats will realize once a candidate is picked that they could well blow winning a once-seemingly-easy Presidential election. If you think tempers are frayed now…and given how America’s political culture increasingly sparks anger and confrontation…fasten your seat belts.
April 17th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
This Guest Voice is by video and web producer Joe Windish, who wrote a well received column earlier this week. He takes another look at the dynamics between politics and cable political and comedy talk shows.
Matthews, Clinton & Colbert: Retributive Jusice In The Modern Mediascape
by Joe Windish
Stephen Colbert ends his Philadelphia run tonight with a guest appearance by Hillary Clinton. There’s nothing saying that appearance will be an interview and it’s too bad, too, after last night’s debate.
The story-line this morning is her relentless pounding of Obama on Rev. Wright and the Weather Underground and the like, as he uses tea and cookies as a means to diffuse such issues rather than attack. He refused even to pile on when given the opportunity with her Bosnia gaffe and (unlike Andrew) I admire him all the more for it.
The bigger debate take away, of course, is her “Yes! Yes! Yes!” belief that Obama could win the presidency.
All of this is the stuff of a great Colbert interview!
A Clinton on the Colbert set the day after a debate that some saycould have been scripted for her by a sycophant press caught up in all of the non-issues of the day is all of the license Colbert needs to go for comedy of epic Correspondents Association Dinner proportions.
I’ll be watching closely tonight.
Colbert’s performance has been fine in Philadelphia, still he’s yet to really soar. Maybe it’s the road, or the size of the theater (nine times that of his NY home), but I have to wonder if he wasn’t thrown off his stride that very first night interviewing Philadelphia native Chris Matthews…
STEPHEN COLBERT: Your show’s called Hardball.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Right.
STEPHEN COLBERT: Well I think I have a harder ball than you and let me tell you why.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Hah!!!
STEPHEN COLBERT: Because Barack Obama did an hour with you, how hard could your ball be? He won’t come on my show. I clearly swing a harder ball.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let me put you another case… you’ve got Hillary Clinton coming on, right?
STEPHEN COLBERT: Uh… [pregnant pause]… There’s a possibility of that Chris… We like to surprise people with certain guests.
April 14th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Today Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert kicks off his Pennsylvania coverage with a guest: MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. But is this symbolic for Campaign 2008 and journalism’s future? What’s the most effective way to deliver news to people on the Internet and to appeal to younger American voters? Video and web producer Joe Windish. offers this compelling original interview on the decline of traditional news an across-the-generations political information delivery system and the ascent of vehicles such as Comedy Central’s news-based comedy shows:
Stephen Colbert: A Media Maestro Plays Philly
by Joe Windish
The New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story this weekend was The Aria of Chris Matthews. Released to the web last Tuesday, bloggers had been baffled by it all week. Even Mark Leibovich, who wrote the story, noted that “three network officials asked me why I was writing about Matthews and not [Keith] Olbermann.”
The gist of the piece was that Matthews is an anachronism likely to be downsized when his $5 million a year contract is up next year. MSNBC’s now betting on Olbermann and David Gregory. Why the paper of record deemed it necessary to devote 8,000 words to that observation, I’ll never know.
Meanwhile, the whole way these guys are playing the cable news game seems a little passé to me. The big questions today are: how are we going to profitably port news over to the Internet, and how are we going to make it appealing to a younger demographic? Indications are that by either of these measures the leader in the cable news game right now is in not to be found at NBC, CNN, or FOX.
The hands-down champ is Comedy Central, whose Daily Show and Colbert Report have been playing by the fast and loose rules of comedy to beat journalism at the news game as far back as Indecision 2000. Since then Jon Stewart’s won two Peabody Awards for his election coverage, and he was joined just last week by Stephen Colbert when The Colbert Report won a Peabody of its own.
Today Stephen Colbert and his 80 staffers kick off a week of Colbert Report coverage of the Pennsylvania Primary from the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia. As it happens, Chris Matthews, a Philadelphia native, is slated to be Stephen’s first guest.
JW: You’ve referred to comedy as The Fifth Estate. Can you explain?
BT: I started calling comedy the 5th Estate to keep the 4th Estate of journalism in check several years ago… I think this whole notion of comedy as the Fifth Estate really, in many ways, is more important in these new shows that are actually doing parodies of news shows because it’s the idea that the Fourth Estate is keeping those first three in check. The idea of what’s going on in Colbert and The Daily Show and even some of what Saturday Night Live and shows like that, is that it’s not only dealing with the political issues but it is dealing with the way in which the mainstream news operations are covering the issues.
Let’s take, for example, the classic example of what Jon Stewart did in the lead up to the war, when he was really examining that issue in a way that a lot of reporters were not for fear of being called unpatriotic and all the rest of it. The whole Dixie Chicks phenomenon. I think there Jon Stewart was a lone voice crying in the wilderness that this was the stuff that ought to be covered. And he was really making fun of – with evidence, showed the clip and that kind of thing – of how this was being inadequately covered by the traditional journalist operation. So there, I think, what Jon Stewart was doing was a really important message about the lead up to the war, but about the way it was being inadequately covered.
JW: What’s your take on Colbert’s Peabody?
BT: Certainly the Peabody is another feather in the cap of respectability that Comedy Central’s hour-long block in late night television has been garnering. That Peabody just goes on the mantelpiece right next to the invitation to speak at the Washington Correspondents Association Dinner, and all kinds of other things that have just been being heaped upon these shows. So, the Peabody is another example of how these late night comedy shows that Comedy Central are doing are really being taken very seriously by a whole range of people… Now we should remember that it also says something about the Peabody Awards. The Peabody Awards are one of my favorite of the awards given because they really don’t operate on the traditional criteria of what we think would be good. Let’s remember that Colbert got a Peabody I believe at the same time that Project Runway got a Peabody. Project Runway is not the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth estate! However, it’s a really good show and I think it deserved its Peabody as did Colbert, but for different reasons. When you think of when Comedy Central first started, and when you think of a lot of the other shows that are on Comedy Central, and you think of how Colbert does that whole act when he dances across the stage when he’s about to interview someone, it’s really pleasing to think that this is now the Peabody Award winning Stephen Colbert!
JW: Colbert is a really tough interview. There’s not a lot of fluff on his show. He brings on hugely complex topics and seems to help his interviewees make their point. And the arc of the show through a season is almost like a college course, he is educating his audience. I come away blown away sometimes. It seems like to me a very high-brow news show. Bring me back to earth Bob. Read the rest of this entry »
During the March 31 edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist repeatedly mocked Sen. Barack Obama’s bowling performance — which Scarborough called “dainty” — at a March 29 campaign stop at Pleasant Valley Lanes in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Deriding Obama’s score, he said: “You know Willie, the thing is, Americans want their president, if it’s a man, to be a real man.” Scarborough added, “You get 150, you’re a man, or a good woman,” to which Geist replied, “Out of my president, I want a 150, at least.”
Later in the show, after NBC political analyst Harold Ford Jr. said that Obama’s bowling showed a “humble” and “human” side to him, Scarborough replied, “A very human side? A prissy side.”
Right, because bowling is the true test not just of a president but of a man.
(And because all-American guys like Scarborough (Chris Matthews is another one) want a president on whom they can have a full-out man-crush.)
Note the language here. Obama was “dainty” and “prissy,” and certainly not “a man.” In other words, he was feminine. More to the point, he was gay. This is the language of the right, the “denigration of the female” (as my friend LindaBeth put it in a brilliant post a couple of months ago on the use of the word “pussy”).
The right uses it to denigrate its political opponents, and they are using it, and will continue to use it, against Obama. The race card will be played, too — and, make no mistake about it, appeals to racism still work — but race as a political weapon is problematic and can only be used covertly, directed at specific audiences under the radar of the mainstream media. Sexism is another matter, especially sexism tinged with homophobia, which is what Scarborough’s comments were all about. (Note that scoring a 150 makes you either a man or a good woman. This is how sexists like Scarborough view women, with utter condescension: a good woman is just an average man.) Read the rest of this entry »
You know, an Obama campaign co-chair recently compared Bill Clinton to Joe McCarthy—-a truly dire insult from the point of view of anyone old enough to remember what McCarthy was and did. And the insult was generated not because of anything Clinton said or did but because of something McPeak assumed he meant or might have meant or could be construed to have meant, despite the fact that he didn’t in fact say what McPeak said he said. The reaction of the Hillary-demonizing media and punditocracy to McPeak’s response to a meaning he had to wring out of Bill Clinton’s words? "…………………."
Sure it was almost too silly to dignify with a response, but it was an interesting illustration of how there is really nothing too bad or too absurd for people in Obama’s camp to say about the Clintons—or for those with a large media platform to say. Cf. Andrew Sullivan’s allegations that Hillary’s proposal that Obama run on a joint ticket as Vice President of the United States and therefore as the logical successor to the presidency amounted to an instance ‘white entitlement.’ Again with the accusations or implications of racism!–another dire insult as and routinely lightly and absurdly flung at the Clintons as though racism weren’t a grave offense against God, humanity, and common decency.
Barack Obama has had to confront his twin albatrosses, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the decidedly secular Tony Rezko. In his rounds of the cable news shows last night, Obama was articulate, as always, but for the first time, glib bordering on shifty.
On Countdown with a deferential Keith Olbermann, he distanced himself from Wright’s racist rants but asked voters to believe that, in 17 years of churchgoing, he did not hear any of the venom or he would have condemned it.
Even more tenuous was Obama’s attempt to paint Wright as a spiritual leader caught up in the anger of his generation at racial injustice, a pissed-off Martin Luther King, if you will. That won’t wash with those who remember how King stressed rejection of such attitudes at a time when Black Power advocates were promoting them. Senator, Wright is no Martin Luther King. Not even close.
In his attempt to “disgorge” Rezko, along with his campaign contributions, Obama stressed that he has not been accused of any wrongdoing or connected to any of the issues involved in the current federal corruption trial, but his opponents won’t be deterred from harping on their long, close association, including the buying of the Obamas’ Chicago home.
Obama’s most fervent admirers will be tempted to pass off these iffy relationships as part of a misguided search for substitute fathers by a man who lost his own at an early age, and there may be truth in that. But Obama is now attempting to become the national father figure, and just asking him to show better judgment than George W. Bush would be setting the bar very low.
March 9th, 2008 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
Set your recorder, or watch in person: Joe Gandelman, our Editor in Chief of The Moderate Voice, will be on television at approximately 6:30 PM EST today, Sunday March 9, 2008.
That’s 6:30 PM Eastern Time
5:30 PM Central Time
4:30 PM Mountain Standard Time
3:30 PM Pacific Time
CNN is doing a segment called Blog Buzz, and they’ve selected a blogger on the right, on the left, and in the center… which is where Joe will be as he is formally an Independent, like Dr. E and a few others here at TMV are also.
The CNN segment will last about 4 or 5 minutes. Joe makes no bones about being fed up with negative campaigning and has done posts on that — and that’s said to be one of CNN’s main topics for this evening.
If someone knows how to make a video of Joe on CNN (old tech, old school person please apply), please let us know, and we will post it at TMV.
During the debate last night, it was obvious that the moderators were focused (almost obsessively) on getting their questions answered.
All by itself, that made the entire event much different from previous debates, and at the general level, they should be commended for it. It’s been frustrating in the extreme to hear candidates wander off on tangents, and never get called back to the initial point. Furthermore, I felt that the debate format, and most of the questions (yes, even the silly ones), were an improvement over prior events.
There was, however, an exchange that bothered me — not because the question itself was asked, but because the moderator evidently didn’t understand the answer. In a debate, I see that as a real problem:
[Russert]: On Sunday, the headline in your hometown paper, Chicago Tribune: “Louis Farrakhan Backs Obama for President at Nation of Islam Convention in Chicago.” Do you accept the support of Louis Farrakhan?
SEN. OBAMA: You know, I have been very clear in my denunciation of Minister Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic comments. I think that they are unacceptable and reprehensible. I did not solicit this support. He expressed pride in an African-American who seems to be bringing the country together. I obviously can’t censor him, but it is not support that I sought. And we’re not doing anything, I assure you, formally or informally with Minister Farrakhan.
Russert was not satisfied, and came back around with four more questions on the subject — and in the process, he started dropping some of the more heinous Farrakhan comments into the record. That was, in my opinion, both unnecessary and inflammatory.
In the context of a debate, though, there’s an argument to be made for Russert’s tenacity with the original question. Staying on topic and requiring direct answers is A Good Thing. Unfortunately, he absolutely would not let go of his question without hearing a response keyed to the word he’d fixed in his mind: “accept”, or its antonym, “reject”.
This morning, the blogosphere’s all abuzz about the Farrakhan exchange — and while there are people who understood the meanings of these words, I’m shocked at how many people apparently don’t.
So here, in the interests of edification, is “denounce“:
1. speak out against;
2. to accuse or condemn or openly or formally or brand as disgraceful
1 a: to refuse to accept, consider, submit to, take for some purpose, or use
Obama answered the question much more forcefully than was required… and although Hillary Clinton followed Russert into this pit, she had a valid reason for doing so. She, unlike the moderators, had a stake in the debate. Russert’s foolishness gave her an opening, and she understandably tried to take it.
Tim Russert has no such excuse, and his refusal inability to process the information exposed him as either illiterate on these basic vocabulary words, or as a cheap hack trying to score points in his own right.
I’m here in the media filing center. The Ohio Democratic Party top dogs have given an overview that I didn’t really hear because I was busy figuring out where I am, uploading photos and saying hello to other press. There is supposedly going to be over 500 press here.
In Ohio, it’s 3:30pm EST. I will be blogging through until about 7:30 or so, when I have to go into the audience - I won a ticket to the debate through a lottery, as well as was awarded credentials. MANY bloggers are here and it’s great. I’ve got some video and will be posting that too.
Here are some photos, after the flip. Have questions about what it’s like and what’s happening here? Leave them in the comments and I’ll try let you know! Read the rest of this entry »
And no one is even trying anymore to show them the boundaries. It all ends up being about who is more objectively offensive and who should apologize to whom. When the issue is: they’re all wrong in their fast and loose use of language. Absolutely wrong. These folks are supposed to be our best journalists who get these hours to themselves because of their skill and ability. Instead, they get out there and work to get attention, pure and simple. Sometimes they have to say they are sorry, sometimes they don’t. But what are we really showing everyone about who we are, by what we like and tolerate?
Feh.
For background, Media Matters is a good place to start for the latest kerfuffle. For the record, of course Bill O’Reilly should not be talking about holding off on lynching parties for Michelle Obama. What a completely ridiculous choice of words. There must be 1000 other words, at a minimum, that he could have used to make the same statement.
Larry C. Johnson of No Quarter has been arguing for quite some time that Obama is insufficiently vetted to withstand attacks from the right. In a recent piece in The Huffington Post, he discusses the basis of his concerns. And while I don’t agree by any means with all Johnson’s conclusions about Obama’s candidacy or Obama himself, the warnings he has sounded and the red flags he has indicated have most certainly given me pause. In fact, it would be fair to say that Johnson’s writings were some of the first to raise serious doubt in my mind about whether Obama is the best candidate for the times (though I continue to hope he will prove to be the presidential candidate of the future).
But, unlike the attacks on Dukakis, Cleland, and Kerry, the ammunition that Obama has provided to his political foes is significant and deadly. [Huffpost; links in original]
In light of what we know about GOP tactics, Johnson (like me) is bemused by Obamacrats’ willingness to take him at face value and resistance to questioning (or even allowing anyone else to question) his past and past connections.
The e-mails, phone calls - robo and live, invites and blogs are buzzing through every inch of available space, cyber and otherwise, in Ohio right now. In the last two hours alone I’ve received information about Barack Obama’s efforts to reach out to the Jewish community in Northeast Ohio, I was called by a live (as opposed to recorded) Hillary Clinton supporter about attending a rally tomorrow at a local high school and I’m gathering information for a fellow blogger coming into Cincinnati soon, from California, who may drop in on some campaign events.
And there’s still 19 days before Ohio’s primary on March 4.
For those who are curious, the NBC debate - the one that seemed to be in jeopardy because of MSNBC’s David Shuster “pimped out” comment regarding Chelsea Clinton’s activities on behalf of her mother’s campaign - will occur. Tickets are being issued by lottery to Cleveland State University students only, but students, faculty and staff can volunteer. Hardball will be broadcasting all day from an adjacent location with a different sign-up for tickets process, and information on press credentials has yet to be released.
Here are on the ground reports by Ohioans about the campaign events so far:
For a population that was convinced as recently as the first week of January that Ohio wouldn’t make a difference, we are mostly very glad that we didn’t kowtow and change our primary date.
