I have a big day going on and will link to McJoan and Greg Sargent for commentary on Obama and the FISA bill rather than write commentary myself. We’re all disappointed.
Republicans, of course, have an entirely different view on FISA, because they want an America in which security is paramount. I bet I know where they’ve been looking for inspiration.
I have a hard time imagining the current flap over how Barack Obama has “destroyed” public financing of elections will actually get much traction from voters. Obama supporters are OK with it. McCain supporters will feign outrage, even though they never liked public financing. Everyone else will flip channels, so to speak.
And today, while editorialists are denouncing Obama, few seem to have noticed what Josh Marshall is pointing out:
I mentioned earlier today that it was quite a thing to see John McCain denouncing Barack Obama for breaking his word on public financing when McCain himself is at this moment breaking the law in continuing to spend over the spending limits he promised to abide by through the primary season in exchange for public financing. (By the FEC’s rules, we’re still in the primary phase of the election and will be until the conventions.)
I want to return to this subject though because this is not hyperbole or some throw away line. He’s really doing it. McCain opting into public financing, accepted the spending limits and then profited from that opt-in by securing a campaign saving loan. And then he used some clever, but not clever enough lawyering, to opt back out. And the person charged with saying what flies and what doesn’t — the Republican head of the FEC — said he’s not allowed to do that. He can’t opt out unilaterally unless the FEC says he can.
Here’s a video from last February in which Josh explains McCain’s, um, maneuverings:
I’m a little confused about why Obama’s decision is causing such a stir.
To be sure, Obama reversed course. He said he intended to stay within the system, and then he didn’t, so if his detractors want to shout, “Flip-flop!†it’s a reasonable enough charge. But if policy reversals are a politician’s biggest crime, John McCain might as well drop out of the race now.
Ultimately, Obama is a pragmatist. He wants to play by the rules — Obama isn’t violating any laws or doing anything unethical here — and maximize his chances of success. In this case, that means raising lots of money from his supporters. And this is scandalous … why?
Sidoti said Obama “chose winning over his word.†It reminded me of an extemporaneous speech Obama delivered to his staff in Chicago shortly after securing the nomination. He explained that the nation is counting on him and his team to win. “We don’t have a choice,†Obama said. The stakes are too high, and the responsibilities are too great. In this context, if that means withdrawing from a flawed campaign-finance system, so be it.
Two other points. First, it’s curious that Obama’s perfectly legal and ethical decision is sparking complaints, but McCain’s arguably illegal decision to “spend over the spending limits he promised to abide by through the primary season in exchange for public financing†is hardly generating any news at all. Obama is opting out of a system he never entered; McCain is playing fast and loose with election law. For some reason, the AP is writing caustic admonishments about the prior, not the latter.
We all know what the “some reason” is, and what’s going on out of our sight. Corporate interests and the deep pocket/true believer types running rightie media infrastructure are flogging Obama’s campaign finance decision and doing whatever they can to blow it up into a major scandal to hurt Obama. They’re calling/writing/emailing/faxing every columnist and editorialist and news manager in America to be sure they “get” the rightie view of things. And then the rightie view is reflected in news coverage, whereas what we might call an “objective” view is frozen out.
The AP in particular is bought and paid for. Let’s not even pretend otherwise.
David Brooks repeats the propaganda — I mean, it’s David Brooks, so you know he will toe the line even as he pretends to be sorrowful about it all — but he also says,
This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.
“Machiavellian” is hyperbole, IMO, but on the whole I believe this is correct. During the Endless Primary, people kept portraying Hillary Clinton as a scrappy fighter, and don’t we want somebody who will fight for us like that? But while Clinton was exhausting herself in public histrionics and losing, Obama was finessing the delegate game and winning.
It’s called fighting smart, not hard.
Brooks continues,
All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades.
Exactly. But then Brooks says,
Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.
Brooks has to put a rightie spin on things; it’s his purpose in life. But Barack isn’t renouncing “politics.” He’s renouncing the sick political culture that has been strangling elections and government these past few decades. The same culture, I might add, that Brooks and his ilk thrive in like mold in a petri dish.
I’m no scientist, but I believe this is huge.
Sorry I’ve been scarce. I had to focus on the other site for a while.
Glenn Greenwald is the go-to guy on matters of telecom immunity and wiretapping. I’ve got no explanation for the House Dems’ behavior other than they must all be corrupt up to their eyeballs.
Here’s the latest on the Associated Press v. Bloggers smackdown you may have read about elsewhere. The AP has announced an “Excerpt for Web Use” policy that requires payment of fees based on the number of words used. For example, one would owe the AP $12.50 for excerpting as few as five words. Yes, m’loves, that’s 5, as in the number of fingers most people have on one hand. See this article in BetaNews for more details.
Cernig at Newshoggers reports that the AP used 154 words from the rightie blog
Kos says he’s going to excerpt wantonly from the Associated Press all he pleases, nyah nyah nyah.
Lots of blogs are calling for boycotts of AP content. Not me. I’m going to keep using it. I will copy and paste as many words as I feel necessary to make my points and that I feel are within bounds of copyright law (and remember, I’ve got a JD and specialized in media law, so I know the rules pretty well). And I will keep doing so if I get an AP takedown notice (which I will make a big public show of ignoring). And then, either the AP — an organization famous for taking its members work without credit — will either back down and shut the hell up, or we’ll have a judge resolve the easiest question of law in the history of copyright jurisprudence.
The AP doesn’t get to negotiate copyright law. But now, perhaps, they’ll threaten someone who can afford to fight back, instead of cowardly going after small bloggers.
Having worked in print media for years, I can tell you that “fair use” often is one big gray area. I have encountered publishers who wanted a permissions fee for use of one sentence from a magazine or newspaper article to be republished in print. But on the web, if the brief excerpt is fully attributed and linked back to the original article, this is both driving traffic directly to the original article and also making the article more visible to search engines, which is a benefit to the publisher if its ad revenues depend on traffic.
I sometimes find entire blog posts of mine pasted on other blogs, and this annoys the hell out of me even if it’s linked. If the entire article is there, why would anyone feel a need to click on the link back to me? But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about brief excerpts. The AP is nuts.
Update: Scholars & Rogues is taking the side of the AP. I just left the following comment there:
Having worked in print media for years, I can tell you that “fair use†often is one big gray area. I have encountered publishers who wanted a permissions fee for use of one sentence from a magazine or newspaper article to be republished in print.
But on the web, if the brief excerpt is fully attributed and linked back to the original article, this is both driving traffic directly to the original article and also making the article more visible to search engines, which is a benefit to the publisher if its ad revenues depend on traffic.
I sometimes find entire blog posts of mine pasted on other blogs, and this annoys the hell out of me even if it’s linked. If the entire article is there, why would anyone feel a need to click on the link back to me? But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about brief excerpts. Now the AP wants to charge bloggers for use of as few as five words. That’s insane.
I write for the New York Times Company’s About.com site, which is a big commercial site, and I can tell you we live and die by traffic. Search engine optimization and traffic driving is the be-all and end-all of that business. If someone excerpts some of my writing with a link, this drives traffic back to my work on About.com and also helps move my writing up to the top of google searches, driving more traffic. Ultimately this makes About.com more money and it makes me more money, which makes me happy.
The New York Times encourages us to sniff out people re-publishing entire articles, and the NYT lawyers will issue takedown orders if such an article is found. But excerpts with links? We like people to publish excerpts with links.
There is indeed a crisis in news reporting now, because newspapers are losing revenue and cutting back on reporters and news bureaus. News gathering costs money, and bloggers do make free use of the work done by news-gatherers.
However, the issue ultimately is one of business models. The old print media business models don’t apply to the Web. How will news gatherers and media make profits in the future? The way things are falling out now suggests traffic and SEO are huge assets that web sites must cultivate to survive.
There’s a good discussion at Jack and Jill about who might replace Tim Russert on Meet the Press. I endorse the Christian Progressive Liberal’s opinions on this matter.
I predict NBC will have rotating hosts until they settle on someone. The other most likely possibility, IMO, is that Tom Brokaw would take the MtP hosting job.
As much as I love Keith Olbermann, and as much as I would so start watching MtP again if he were hosting, I just can’t see NBC going with him as MtP host.
Michael Finnegan writes for the Los Angeles Times that women voters overwhelmingly prefer Obama to McCain.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found a wide gap last week: Women favored Obama over McCain, 52% to 33%.
The survey also found that voters who cast ballots for Clinton in the Democratic primaries preferred Obama over McCain, 61% to 19%.
Over the weekend, Frank Rich argued that the groundswell of female Clinton supporters moving to McCain was mostly a myth, based on anecdotes not supported by data.
How huge is a 13- to 19-percentage-point lead? John Kerry won women by only 3 points, Al Gore by 11.
The real question is how Mr. McCain and his press enablers could seriously assert that he will pick up disaffected female voters in the aftermath of the brutal Obama-Clinton nomination battle. Even among Democrats, Mr. Obama lost only the oldest female voters to Mrs. Clinton.
But as we know from our Groundhog Days of 2008, a fictional campaign narrative, once set in the concrete of Beltway bloviation, must be recited incessantly, especially on cable television, no matter what facts stand in the way. Only an earthquake — the Iowa results, for instance — could shatter such previously immutable story lines as the Clinton campaign’s invincibility and the innate hostility of white voters to a black candidate.
The problem with these artificially created narratives is, of course, that many in the electorate buy into them. For example, “everyone knows” that Republicans are better on national security than Democrats. History says otherwise, but no one argues with The Narrative. Thus old propaganda perpetually re-seeds itself.
So, there probably are some Clinton-supporting women out there who have switched to McCain, in part because they’ve inferred from media that’s what they’re supposed to do. That’s why it’s so important to get the fact about McCain out to the public and not allow right-wing “swift boat” games to overwrite the facts.
For example, Michael Finnegan writes that many people don’t realize McCain opposes reproductive rights.
In the days since Clinton abandoned the race and endorsed him, the political arm of Planned Parenthood and other women’s groups have rallied behind Obama and joined forces to attack McCain. Among other things, they have highlighted McCain’s opposition to abortion rights. The Republican’s moderate image, they say, has misled many women into thinking he supports abortion rights.
“It’s astonishing the extent to which that’s just assumed about him,” said Hesla.
The argument that Obama must choose Clinton as a running mate or risk losing women voters has been rebutted by reality. What about those white working-class voters Clinton managed to win over in the waning days of her compaign? Thomas Schaller argues that having Clinton on the ticket would not help Obama win “swing” states.
With the notable exception of Arkansas and its six electoral votes, what state would Hillary deliver that Obama is not already going to win? Forget all this talk about the parts of the Democratic coalition to which she appeals. If he cannot pull together the elements of that coalition himself he’s going to lose anyway in swing states, whether those are states that he won in the primary, like Colorado or Virginia, or states that he lost, like Ohio, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. Conversely, if Obama can reassemble the two halves of the Democratic coalition, he’s going to win the swing states and the election, despite the intraparty tensions that arose during the primary. (The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll seems to indicate he’s already made substantial progress.)
His fate in swing states does not hinge on having a polarizing figure like Hillary Clinton as his running mate. Whatever advantage she offers him in bringing in skeptical Democrats will be offset by losses among Clinton-fatigued independents and soft Republicans. Many despise her, and if they’re looking for an excuse to vote against Obama, picking Clinton as his running mate will provide it.
Then there are those three states where Hillary Clinton has personal ties. There’s no scenario in which Obama loses Illinois and New York and wins 270 electoral votes. Her help in two of the three states is moot. As for Arkansas, political scientist Jay Barth, an Arkansas native who teaches at Hendrix College in Conway, says the level of skepticism toward Obama is so high locally that an Obama-Clinton ticket might not take the state’s six electoral votes anyway. Put simply, Hillary Clinton is not this year’s version of Lyndon Johnson in 1960.
I’ve thought the Hillary as Working-Class Heroine phenomenon would likely be short-lived, anyway. In all her years in public life she had never been remarkably popular among white working-class voters. She managed to whip up some enthusiasm in that demographic through a well-targeted media campaign combined with the fact that her opponent is, um, black. I don’t see her owning those voters enough that she could deliver them in November, especially since the top of the ticket is still, um, black. Some of that innate hostility of white voters to a black candidate is not a myth.
Along with Schaller’s argument, Salon published a piece by Ed Kilgore arguing that Clinton should be Obama’s running mate. (Ed Kilgore is one of those “Democratic strategists” that many of us feel are more of a drag on party strategy than an asset, but he makes a good living.)
First, Kilgore argues that a “unity ticket” would bring the two feuding halves of the party together. Matt Yglesias demolished the “unity ticket” argument last May, and if anything the recent polls show us the two feuding halves are coming together quite nicely, thank you, without the “unity ticket.”
Kilgore also makes a lame “well, who else you gonna call?” argument. There are a wealth of veep possibilities, I say. They all have their minuses to go with the pluses, but then, so does Senator Clinton.
Greg Anrig writes at Washington Monthly that conservatives are abandoning the cause of school vouchers. Eighteen years have gone by since Milwaukee began its voucher program, and many other programs have been in effect for nearly that long. And finally some school voucher cheerleaders are admitting the programs neither helped low-achieving students nor improved public schools through “competition.”
Even more critical for the Right, school vouchers simply didn’t pan out as an effective political weapon to use against “liberals.” In particular, lots of those middle-class, small-town white folks the Right thinks they own did not want some gubmint program messing with the local public schools. In many of those towns the public schools (and the schools’ varsity sports programs) are the hub of the community. If you’re from a small middle-America town, as I am, you probably know what I’m talking about. Interesting that right-wing political leaders didn’t figure that out themselves.
Anrig also points out that whenever there’s been a statewide referendum on school vouchers, the voucher programs lost. And they usually lost big.
Now if we can just kneecap No Child Left Behind, maybe we can start focusing on real solutions to the problem of poor public schools.
On the other hand, Steve Benen says Florida Republicans didn’t get the memo and are still trying to sneak in a voucher system via deceptive constitutional amendment initiatives.