This article by Kim Strassel in the Wall Street Journal highlights a little-discussed problem with Obama's re-election campaign: it is depending on Virginia and North Carolina to remain blue to overcome a loss in one of the three states Obama won (Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania).
In a previous post, I had stitched together an electoral college map that would give Barack Obama a win even with the loss of North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio and Florida. The Democrats are holding their convention in North Carolina, which they're hoping will help keep that state voting for Barack.
Obama's Virginia Defeat
Democrats were trounced in Tuesday's state legislature election, despite the president's heavy investment of time in the state.
Of all the noise of this week's state election results, what mattered most for Election 2012 came out of Virginia. It was the sound of the air leaking out of the Plouffe plan.
That would be David Plouffe, President Obama's former campaign manager and current senior strategist, who is focused today on how to cobble together 270 electoral votes for re-election. That's proving tough, what with the economy hurting Mr. Obama in states like Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania that he won in 2008. The White House's response has been to pin its hopes on a more roundabout path to electoral victory, one based on the Southern and Western states Mr. Obama also claimed in 2008.
States like Virginia. Mr. Obama was the first Democrat to win Virginia since 1964; he beat John McCain by seven percentage points; and he did so on the strength of his appeal to Northern Virginia's many white-collar independents. Along with victories in North Carolina, Colorado and Nevada, the Obama Old Dominion win in 2008 inspired a flurry of stories about how Democrats had forever altered the political map.
So the White House is pouring resources into what Tim Kaine, the state's former Democratic governor, now pridefully refers to as Democrats' "New Dominion." The Obama campaign has held some 1,600 events in the state in the last half-year alone. Only last month Mr. Obama hopped a three-day bus trip through Virginia and North Carolina. Obama officials keep flocking to the state, and Tuesday's election was to offer the first indication of how these efforts are succeeding.
Let's just say the New Dominion is looking an awful lot like the Old Dominion. If anything, more so.
Virginia Republicans added seven new seats to their majority in the House of Delegates, giving them two-thirds of that chamber's votes—the party's largest margin in history. The GOP also took over the Virginia Senate in results that were especially notable, given that Virginia Democrats this spring crafted an aggressive redistricting plan that had only one aim: providing a firewall against a Republican takeover of that chamber. Even that extreme gerrymander didn't work.
Every Republican incumbent—52 in the House, 15 in the Senate—won. The state GOP is looking at unified control over government for only the second time since the Civil War. This is after winning all three top statewide offices—including the election of Gov. Bob McDonnell—in 2009, and picking off three U.S. House Democrats in last year's midterms.
Topline figures aside, what ought to really concern the White House was the nature of the campaign, and the breakout of Tuesday's election data. Mr. Obama may have big plans for Virginia, but the question is increasingly: him and what army?
Elected state Democrats—who form the backbone of grass-roots movements—couldn't distance themselves far enough from Mr. Obama in this race. Most refused to mention the president, to defend his policies, or to appear with him. The more Republicans sought to nationalize the Virginia campaign, the more Democrats stressed local issues.
State House Minority Leader Ward Armstrong felt compelled to run an ad protesting that it was a "stretch" for his GOP opponent to "compare me to Barack Obama." After all, he was "pro-life, pro-gun and I always put Virginia first." (Mr. Armstrong lost on Tuesday.)
Virginia Democrats were happy to identify with one top official: Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell, who is providing a lesson in the benefits of smart GOP governance in battleground states. Criticized as being too socially conservative for Virginia when he was elected in 2009, Mr. McDonnell has won over voters by focusing on the economy and jobs. His approval ratings are in the 60s, and he helped raise some $5 million for local candidates. He's popular enough that Democrats took to including pictures of him in their campaign literature, and bragging that they'd worked with him.
Mr. McDonnell has been particularly adept at connecting with the independent, white-collar voters Mr. Obama used to win Virginia in 2008. That crowd lives in North Virginia's booming exurb counties of Prince William and Loudoun, and presidential races hinge on their votes. Mr. Obama's 2008 victory in Virginia rested on his significant wins in both Loudoun (8%) and Prince Williams (16%).
Yet Tuesday's results showed the extent to which that support has reversed. Loudoun in particular proved an unmitigated rout for Democrats. Republicans won or held three of four of the county's Senate seats. It swept all seven of the county's House seats. It won all nine slots on the county's Board of Supervisors, and pretty much every other county office. In Prince William, the story was much the same. This is what happens when a recent Quinnipiac poll shows Mr. Obama's approval rating among Virginia independents at 29%.
Democrats are now arguing that turnout (about 30%) was too low to prove anything, but then again, the particularly low Democratic turnout suggests that, on top of everything else, the White House really does face an enthusiasm gap. It's still got time to try to remedy that problem, and some other Virginia fundamentals. But going by Tuesday's results, Mr. Plouffe might need to start considering Electoral Plan C.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Even the Washington Post is concerned about public pension plans
This article gives a cursory overview of how bad the problem is.
A graphical look at our close-encounter with YU55
An excerpt from this article:
Since a humble start at a single telescope in the 1980s, NASA’s $5 million-per-year asteroid-tracking program has matured to the point where the agency said in September that it has detected more than 90 percent of “planet killer” asteroids, those bigger than one kilometer in diameter. None will hit Earth in the foreseeable future, the agency has said.
Source: SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration
Since a humble start at a single telescope in the 1980s, NASA’s $5 million-per-year asteroid-tracking program has matured to the point where the agency said in September that it has detected more than 90 percent of “planet killer” asteroids, those bigger than one kilometer in diameter. None will hit Earth in the foreseeable future, the agency has said.
Source: SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration
How the Left dismisses the Reagan Revolution
This article in Forbes by Brian Domitrovic details how historians (and other Liberals) tend to nitpick the outliers of aspects of Reagan's presidency, while ignoring the reduction of unemployment, inflation, and "malaise" while at the same time standing up to their beloved Soviet Union, which crumbled officially in 1989. In the early 80's this was not a foregone conclusion. Reagan came into office in January of 1981 with high unemployment, an economy in recession, and a high "misery index." He left with America on the upswing.
In 2007, writing in the wake of a slew of books that had just come out on the end of the Cold War, historian and author Steven F. Hayward noted the following: “With these works, the literature on Reagan’s foreign policy is more or less complete—until additional classified documents are released or new Soviet sources are revealed. By contrast, the story of Reagan’s domestic policy remains clouded and obscure, in part because we are still wrestling with many of the same issues today—tax cuts, trade and budget deficits, globalization, affirmative action, and the rest of the culture war.”
Not much has changed. We are still waiting for our massive academic establishment to produce histories of Reagan’s domestic policy – particularly his economic policy – commensurate with its significance. What I wrote in 2009 in my own book on the history of supply-side economics, Econoclasts, is applicable today: “There does not appear to be one scholarly book or article, in the discipline of history, on the topic of supply-side economics that has called on and analyzed the relevant complement of primary sources. Not one.”
So what is passing for scholarly opinion on Reaganomics these days? Comments such as this, which appeared two weeks ago in the New York Times, care of Rutgers history professor James Livingston: “The architects of the Reagan revolution tried to reverse…trends as a cure for the stagflation of the 1970s, but couldn’t.”
Here is an implication that the Reagan Revolution did not solve stagflation. It is notwithstanding these facts: as Reagan’s reforms got put into practice in the 1980s, unemployment fell from 11% to 5%, inflation went down from 14% to 2%, growth boomed at 4.3% per year, and stocks tripled.
Livingston identified himself to Times readers “as an economic historian who has been studying American capitalism for 35 years.” And he went on to contend that “private investment isn’t even necessary to promote growth.”
Livingston’s weird and misleading Times column, called “It’s Consumer Spending, Stupid,” is reflective of a deeper problem. It’s the problem of to what lengths our top historians will go to misrepresent if not ignore the Reagan Revolution – in particular its manifest successes.
Last year, Livingston released a book, The World Turned Inside Out, about trends in intellectual history and culture over the closing decades of the twentieth century. It began with a chapter ruminating on the history of supply-side economics.
This chapter deployed a now-classic strategy of big-name historians’ (Princeton’s Sean Wilentz and Daniel Rodgers use it too) when dealing with the Reagan Revolution: focus on its outliers. Livingston expended pages canvassing the career of George Gilder, 1981 bestseller Wealth and Poverty author, as the meat of his presentation on supply-side economics. Lots of points were scored in portraying supply-side economics as oddball, in that Gilder’s previous work was a full-throated dismissal of feminism.
At last Livingston made a list of supply-siders, and tellingly the name of Robert A. Mundell, the 1999 Nobel laureate and intellectual lodestar of supply-side economics, was not given.
Not only is this the same unconscionable omission that Rodgers made in hisAge of Fracture earlier this year, it made tenuous Livingston’s specific claims: “[The supply-siders’] argument never made any sense…but the arithmetic was beside the point.” Mundell was the greatest practitioner of economic geometry of his era, and the equations behind the graphs that first outlined the supply-side solution in the 1960s were gone over in the official Nobel Prize discussions of Mundell’s work.
You don’t make this kind of mistake if you commit to reading sources. But did Livingston read sources to compose his history of supply-side economics? The signs are not good. In the Introduction, Livingston avowed that “This book takes supply-side economics and South Park equally seriously.”
Invariably this does not mean applying rigorous historiographical discovery to the phenomenon of South Park (the profane cartoon on television), but rather to apply South Park-like heedlessness to the phenomenon of supply-side economics. Thanks a lot, James Livingston.
The failure to take sources seriously inevitably leads to major factual errors. For example, The World Turned Inside Out has it that “marginal tax rates on corporate and individual incomes were cut substantially (by half) in 1981.” In fact, corporate rates were not cut at all, and personal rates went down a phased-in 23%. A passing acquaintance with the iconic Reagan tax law, the Economic Recovery and Tax Act of 1981, would have corrected this doozy.
From time to time I visit the Ronald Reagan archives in California, where I learn that there’s little interest among visiting researchers in the tax cut files of the Reagan presidency, even though these files have been open and available since 1994. Rather, there is capacious interest in things like Central America policy, even as Nicaragua has reverted to its natural status as a global footnote. It’s funny what responsibilities you can’t count on our huge historical establishment to fulfill.
Blame it on Brokaw
Jonah Goldberg's take on Tom Brokaw and the mainstream (old) media.
Another article on how the double standards of the mainstream media is making them more and more irrelevant, with less viewership and readership as time progreses.
Another article on how the double standards of the mainstream media is making them more and more irrelevant, with less viewership and readership as time progreses.
Blame It On Brokaw
By Jonah GoldbergYou know who I blame for the terrible tone in American politics? Tom Brokaw.
No, not the man himself, but what he represents.
Since Dan Rather famously beclowned himself, Brokaw stands as the last of the respected “voice of God” news anchors (CBS News executive Don Hewitt’s phrase). These were the oracles who simply declared what was news and what wasn’t. Walter Cronkite, the prize of the breed, used to end his newscasts, “And that’s the way it is” — as if he were speaking not just with journalistic but also epistemological and ontological authority.
You can still find this sort of hubris on the masthead of the New York Times, which proclaims “All the news that’s fit to print” — a claim that would be subjected to truth-in-labeling laws were it not for the First Amendment.
Brokaw, an honorable and industrious man, is now playing the role of elder statesman while touting his new book, The Time of Our Lives. In it, he writes: “Slashing rhetoric and outrageous characterizations have long been part of the American national political dialogue . . . but modern means of communications are now so pervasive and penetrating they might as well be part of the air we breathe, and therefore they require tempered remarks from all sides. Otherwise, the air just becomes more and more toxic until it is suffocating.”
There’s much wisdom here. But blaming the new media environment for what ails us is an awfully convenient alibi. It suggests that the old media, of which Brokaw was a master of the universe, played no part in losing the trust of so many Americans.
For starters, when the mainstream media complains about the national “tone,” it almost invariably means the tone to their right. After the tragic Gabrielle Giffords shooting, the mainstream media reported, and liberal pundits raced to insist, that Republican rhetoric — particularly, a pictogram on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page — inspired the suspect. The evidence disproving all of that is voluminous; the record of apologies and retractions from those who reported it is comparatively scant.
At the same time, Democratic rhetoric has grown ever more extreme. Vice President Joe Biden said pro-tea-party Republicans in Congress acted “like terrorists.” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has said Republicans want to “end life as we know it.”
More recently, Biden has insisted that the GOP’s refusal to pass the White House’s jobs bill would cause a surge in rapes, sexual assaults, and other crimes across the country. Perhaps he’s right, because the legislation has failed (at the hands of Democrats and Republicans alike), and such offenses at Occupy Wall Street protests have risen (that’s why they’ve built a women-only tent at Zuccotti Park). But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from watching the nightly news.
When tea partiers angrily shouted down their congressmen at some town halls around the country, then-speaker of the House Pelosi and then-majority leader Steny Hoyer wrote in an op-ed article in USA Today that such behavior is “simply un-American.” The mainstream media, which during the George W. Bush years often imagined and certainly trumpeted alleged GOP assaults on the patriotism of Democrats, yawned in response.
Meanwhile, violence, extreme rhetoric and wanton lawlessness have been prevalent in the Occupy Wall Street movement, but the coverage remains largely positive. And any politician who suggests these protests are “simply un-American” risks getting worse than a yawn from the media. The Today show even ran a segment on how the protests offered “civics lessons” for children.
All too often it seems as if the supposedly evenhanded media cherry-picks positive examples from the left and negative ones from the right. And even when they do cover ideologically inconvenient news, the passion and hysteria are nearly always reserved for the threat from the right.
Brokaw and his heirs don’t understand that such double standards breed precisely the rhetoric they find so toxic. Because the new media Brokaw laments allows conservatives to see how much important news the old media didn’t deem fit to print, they learn not to trust or respect those who wag their fingers rightward about civility — or anything else.
No, not the man himself, but what he represents.
Since Dan Rather famously beclowned himself, Brokaw stands as the last of the respected “voice of God” news anchors (CBS News executive Don Hewitt’s phrase). These were the oracles who simply declared what was news and what wasn’t. Walter Cronkite, the prize of the breed, used to end his newscasts, “And that’s the way it is” — as if he were speaking not just with journalistic but also epistemological and ontological authority.
You can still find this sort of hubris on the masthead of the New York Times, which proclaims “All the news that’s fit to print” — a claim that would be subjected to truth-in-labeling laws were it not for the First Amendment.
Brokaw, an honorable and industrious man, is now playing the role of elder statesman while touting his new book, The Time of Our Lives. In it, he writes: “Slashing rhetoric and outrageous characterizations have long been part of the American national political dialogue . . . but modern means of communications are now so pervasive and penetrating they might as well be part of the air we breathe, and therefore they require tempered remarks from all sides. Otherwise, the air just becomes more and more toxic until it is suffocating.”
There’s much wisdom here. But blaming the new media environment for what ails us is an awfully convenient alibi. It suggests that the old media, of which Brokaw was a master of the universe, played no part in losing the trust of so many Americans.
For starters, when the mainstream media complains about the national “tone,” it almost invariably means the tone to their right. After the tragic Gabrielle Giffords shooting, the mainstream media reported, and liberal pundits raced to insist, that Republican rhetoric — particularly, a pictogram on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page — inspired the suspect. The evidence disproving all of that is voluminous; the record of apologies and retractions from those who reported it is comparatively scant.
At the same time, Democratic rhetoric has grown ever more extreme. Vice President Joe Biden said pro-tea-party Republicans in Congress acted “like terrorists.” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has said Republicans want to “end life as we know it.”
More recently, Biden has insisted that the GOP’s refusal to pass the White House’s jobs bill would cause a surge in rapes, sexual assaults, and other crimes across the country. Perhaps he’s right, because the legislation has failed (at the hands of Democrats and Republicans alike), and such offenses at Occupy Wall Street protests have risen (that’s why they’ve built a women-only tent at Zuccotti Park). But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from watching the nightly news.
When tea partiers angrily shouted down their congressmen at some town halls around the country, then-speaker of the House Pelosi and then-majority leader Steny Hoyer wrote in an op-ed article in USA Today that such behavior is “simply un-American.” The mainstream media, which during the George W. Bush years often imagined and certainly trumpeted alleged GOP assaults on the patriotism of Democrats, yawned in response.
Meanwhile, violence, extreme rhetoric and wanton lawlessness have been prevalent in the Occupy Wall Street movement, but the coverage remains largely positive. And any politician who suggests these protests are “simply un-American” risks getting worse than a yawn from the media. The Today show even ran a segment on how the protests offered “civics lessons” for children.
All too often it seems as if the supposedly evenhanded media cherry-picks positive examples from the left and negative ones from the right. And even when they do cover ideologically inconvenient news, the passion and hysteria are nearly always reserved for the threat from the right.
Brokaw and his heirs don’t understand that such double standards breed precisely the rhetoric they find so toxic. Because the new media Brokaw laments allows conservatives to see how much important news the old media didn’t deem fit to print, they learn not to trust or respect those who wag their fingers rightward about civility — or anything else.
Herman Cain and the Media
I like Herman Cain. I've liked him before he was the front-runner in the Republican primary. I thought he would be a good candidate to field against Barack Obama. I still feel he would be a good candidate for the presidency, but in 2016 or 2020, not 2012. Frankly, I think Herman thinks this time around is a good way to get his message out, build some electoral 'cred, and expose any skeletons in the closet. And there are certainly skeletons.
But his chief of staff, Mark Block, has done Herman, and the Republican party, a disservice with the way this campaign is being run. This is amateur hour. It has to be textbook for how NOT to run a campaign. The only reason why Cain is neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney is because of Herman, period. Certainly not because of any credible advice from his advisors.
The main litmus test I use to judge a person is the quality of people they surround themselves with. Have they hung out with people who accomplished great things themselves? Do they hang with others who are "yes" men or those who bring vibrant life experiences to play and can (and do) challenge the person when they say stupid things? The world is not black and white, but has pastels and shades of every color. The fact that people can tune in to opinions that validate their world view means there's a rich set of material out there that has to be debunked, challenged, or accepted at face value and wrestled with (the fact that Liberals are more prone to do this than Conservatives is an issue I'll discuss in another post, but it's why they can't articulate a coherent Conservative issue to logically refute). I see Herman has surrounded himself with a win-at-all-costs-damn-the-principles characters, and this disappoints me. Not that Barack has surrounded himself with stellar advisors of high quality (even ones that had some life experienced have been relegated to radicals who've come through academia, rather than the crucible of the private sector, where ideas are put to the test every hour of every day).
So I felt this article begins to scratch at the surface of some of my complaints against the Cain campaign. Liberal or Conservative, I think it raises some truth that one can walk away with, namely the double-standard of the media, and the lack of standards being applied by Herman's team.
But his chief of staff, Mark Block, has done Herman, and the Republican party, a disservice with the way this campaign is being run. This is amateur hour. It has to be textbook for how NOT to run a campaign. The only reason why Cain is neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney is because of Herman, period. Certainly not because of any credible advice from his advisors.
The main litmus test I use to judge a person is the quality of people they surround themselves with. Have they hung out with people who accomplished great things themselves? Do they hang with others who are "yes" men or those who bring vibrant life experiences to play and can (and do) challenge the person when they say stupid things? The world is not black and white, but has pastels and shades of every color. The fact that people can tune in to opinions that validate their world view means there's a rich set of material out there that has to be debunked, challenged, or accepted at face value and wrestled with (the fact that Liberals are more prone to do this than Conservatives is an issue I'll discuss in another post, but it's why they can't articulate a coherent Conservative issue to logically refute). I see Herman has surrounded himself with a win-at-all-costs-damn-the-principles characters, and this disappoints me. Not that Barack has surrounded himself with stellar advisors of high quality (even ones that had some life experienced have been relegated to radicals who've come through academia, rather than the crucible of the private sector, where ideas are put to the test every hour of every day).
So I felt this article begins to scratch at the surface of some of my complaints against the Cain campaign. Liberal or Conservative, I think it raises some truth that one can walk away with, namely the double-standard of the media, and the lack of standards being applied by Herman's team.
By Carl M. Cannon - November 9, 2011
Herman Cain has met the enemy and he is us. The media, that is.
Not his libido. Not his lack of impulse control. Not his changing stories. Not his flaky campaign manager. Not the “Mad Men” environment of the restaurant business, or the evolving standards of male-female behavior -- not even the sometimes ephemeral standards of sexual harassment.
No, his problems stem from the First Amendment. He’s the victim, not the growing roster of women who have accused him of boorish behavior. Anonymous sources! Hidden agendas! Sensationalism in the Fourth Estate! Yes, that’s the true scandal here. That’s his story, anyway, and he’s sticking to it. So is his lawyer.
“Herman Cain finds himself on trial in the court of public opinion . . . where there are no rules except those made up by the media,” Lin Wood, Cain’s high-dollar defense lawyer, groused on Tuesday.
“Don’t even go there,” Cain scolded a reporter who tried to ask him about the accusations a day earlier.
“Can I ask my question?” the surprised reporter asked.
“No!” Cain replied, before adding, bafflingly: “Where’s my chief of staff? Please send him the journalistic code of ethics.”
Say what? It’s hard to know what Cain had in mind, just as it’s hard to fathom what campaign manager Mark Block was doing when he breathlessly told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he had “confirmed” that the son of one of Cain’s alleged victims worked for Politico, the news outlet that broke the original story.
Except that the journalist in question, Josh Kraushaar, is not related to Karen Kraushaar, the former National Restaurant Association employee who brought sexual harassment claims against Cain and was given a cash settlement for her troubles. Nor does Josh Kraushaar work for Politico. He works for Hotline, a rival news outlet owned by Atlantic Media. Josh did work briefly at Politico, but that was 16 months ago -- before anyone had ever heard of Herman Cain.
Let’s return to that “journalism code of ethics” crack of Cain’s for a minute, though. I’m going to pull rank on him here.
Herman Cain made his reputation working for Burger King and Godfather’s Pizza. I like hamburgers as much as the next man (Big Macs more than Whoppers), and I ordered a carryout pizza for my kids the night of Cain’s latest press conference. And although I worked in a pizza parlor and a burger joint in high school, I don’t presume to know as much about the fast-food business as Cain. And he damn sure doesn’t know as much as I do about journalism.
I was born and raised in the news business. My father was -- and is -- a highly respected reporter and presidential biographer. I have a college degree in journalism, and have worked for 35 years as a reporter and editor, and covered every presidential campaign since 1984. I’ve worked on newspapers, magazines, and online organizations, including this one. I’ve written books, done investigative reporting, won several of the prestigious journalism awards, lectured at colleges, been a writing coach, and done in-depth media criticism.
I have delved more deeply into the ethical obligations of journalists than anyone running for president in 2012. Although not a conservative myself, I’ve long been troubled by the pervasive liberal slant of political reporting in the mainstream media. I’ve written about this problem -- and named names -- and strained friendships over it. I was disgusted by the one-sided political coverage in 2008, particularly concerning Sarah Palin, and said so in print.
And yet, my view is that Herman Cain and his conservative defenders couldn’t be more wrong about the
duty of the press corps.
Cain wants to be president of the United States. He’s never held elective office before, has displayed only cursory knowledge of domestic politics and international affairs, has passed others’ words off as his own, and has made several dubious statements about sensitive public issues. These have ranged from suggesting a fence between Mexico and the United States be electrified to asserting that he wouldn’t put a Muslim in his Cabinet. When these statements received critical news coverage, Cain responded: He claimed he was joking about wanting to electrocute illegal immigrants, and issued an abject apology to Muslims.
That’s how self-government works. These candidates say what they’d do as president (“9-9-9”), and we examine their ideas. That’s as it must be. The presidency of the United States is a temporary job but the person who holds it possesses more power than any single person on this planet. So Americans want to know the character and temperament of the individual they are putting into office.
Is the candidate sufficiently worldly? Is he (or she) tough enough, smart enough, empathetic enough? Do their policies make any sense? Will they keep us out of war? Will they help the poor? Do they know anything about the economy? Can we envision their family in the White House? Is the candidate a bully?
These are the questions voters turn over in their minds. Any reporter who doesn’t think sexual harassment is a legitimate area of inquiry ought to turn in his press pass to a younger, hungrier reporter and become a food critic or travel writer. Examining how Herman Cain treated the women at the restaurant association is exactly the role of the press.
Most conservatives know this, but they have issues with the media. I had an exchange of emails about Cain with a movement conservative from my home state of California. His name is Mark Meckler, and he’s co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. He’s uncompromisingly conservative, but a principled guy; and I wondered what he thought about a candidate accused of serial groping.
Mark didn’t speak directly to the Cain allegations. Instead, he compared the feeding frenzy on the Cain story to the almost defiant refusal of the mainstream media to report on the John Edwards sex scandal until after Edwards was no longer a 2008 Democratic candidate. Mark called it an “obvious double standard,” concluding his message with this thought: “The history of journalism of this era will be one of blatant bias and an amazing lack of responsibility and professionalism.”
Those words ought to bother my journalistic brethren more than they do: The double standard is not imaginary, and has helped sustain the career of Rush Limbaugh and his imitators who this week were noisily defending Herman Cain and attacking his accusers and the mainstream media.
But blind partisanship is a distorting instinct, whichever side is doing it, and leads its practitioners to some strange rhetorical places. “Sexual harassment is a political tool of the left to get rid of people, or to score money gains, whatever is most desired,” Rush said last week.
Limbaugh knows better, but it’s the kind of thing that pops out of one’s mouth when partisan points are the goal instead of non-partisan elucidation. Was the press too hard on Sarah Palin and too easy on Joe Biden? Absolutely. Did it take a powder on John Edwards? Yes, but I would suggest that the fate of former Rep. Anthony Weiner, a very liberal Democrat, is a more recent and relevant example.
I don’t remember conservative commentators agonizing over the nuances of journalistic ethics in the Weiner case. Acting on a tip (which came in the form of a “retweet” on the social networking site Twitter) of a lewd picture posted via Rep. Weiner’s Twitter account, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart republished a screenshot of the picture (which had since been deleted) in a post raising questions about the Congressman’s claim that his Facebook account had been hacked.* When it soon became clear that Weiner was misbehaving, and lying about it, the mainstream media basically hectored this guy into telling the truth, which he ultimately did — at the cost of his career in Congress.
We don’t have photographic evidence documenting any wrongdoing on the part of Herman Cain, and aren’t likely to find it. We do have the testimonials of an increasing number of women, however. It’s the media’s job to examine these stories carefully, and also to search for other possible victims and witnesses. I’m not nominating Politico for a Pulitzer Prize just yet, but I will suggest that Joseph Pulitzer himself would have approved of the publication’s exposé on Cain.
“There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy,” Pulitzer once told his assistant Alleyne Ireland. “Get these things out in the open, describe them, attack them, ridicule them in the press, and sooner or later public opinion will sweep them away.”
That’s our job.
(*This story was updated to clarify the circumstances surrounding the Weiner case.)
Monday, November 7, 2011
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