MEDIA NOTES - Howard Kurtz
The Lieberman-Clark War
Washington Post
How tough is the competition for a "solid" or "impressive" or "better than expected" finish in New Hampshire?
Joe Lieberman and Wes Clark are increasingly taking aim at each other.
Not in their TV ads--the senator's are about his proposals to help the middle class, and the retired general talks about his background--but the sniping is now hard to miss. With both men skipping Iowa, New Hampshire is the battleground, and with Clark rising in the polls, Joltin' Joe has to find a way to hold his ground.
Thus it was that I just got an attack e-mail from the Lieberman camp with the headline: "We Admit It. We Screwed Up.
"Wes Clark Has Taken 7 Different Positions on the War, Not 6."
Here's the electronic slam: "This morning on Good Morning America, Host Charlie Gibson told Wes Clark that 'Joe Lieberman [is] saying Wes Clark had six different positions on the war.'"
They must have been whooping it up in Lieberman's New Hampshire apartment over that one.
"Clark responded, 'Well, has he ever named the six different positions, Charlie? I meant that's just -- that's old-style politics. You can go back to my record. I've even been on your show - while I couldn't when I was on CNN. But, I was consistently against this since the guys from the pentagon told me two weeks after 9/11 we were attacking Iraq. It didn't make any sense to me. And I have been very, very consistent on this. This was a war we didn't have to fight. It was an elective war. I have said it at almost every opportunity.'
"We admit it. We goofed. As it turns out, Wes Clark hasn't taken 6 different positions on the war. He's taken SEVEN DIFFERENT POSITIONS on the Iraq war, including three different stances in two days."
Various Clark quotes are detailed.
Meanwhile, remember John Kerry? The former front-runner who kept sinking in New Hampshire until the press basically decided he was toast?
The latest Reuters/MSNBC tracking poll in Iowa has Dean at 24 percent, Kerry tied with Gephardt at 21 and the Des Moines Register-approved John Edwards at 15.
"The real story is John Kerry," pollster John Zogby just said on MSNBC. "He is cutting into Dean among Democrats, he is cutting into Gephardt among union workers. We could see John Kerry in the lead tonight."
Or not. These nightly tracking polls are famously volatile, and Zogby acknowledged that the margin of error is 4.5 percent. Which means this breathless chatter about a candidate moving up by a couple of points could just as easily mask a situation where there's no real change or that candidate is moving down a couple of points. Margin of error: The fine print that takes much of the fun out of political handicapping.
Josh Marshall is taking note: "Several days ago one very high-level Iowa Democrat (one who hasn't endorsed anyone) told folks that he thought that if the caucuses were held then (late last week) that Kerry would probably beat Gephardt and possibly even win the whole thing.
"I don't think anyone has any really solid clue what's happening. But it does give you a sense of the fluidity of the race -- and not just the Dean-Gephardt contest we've all been focusing on."
Could the press be blowing it again? Stay tuned.
Trippi: 'We're Not Going to Take It'
Wednesday, Jan 14, 2004; 8:41 AM
When Roger Simon was interviewing Howard Dean last spring, the U.S. News & World Report correspondent responded to the candidate's grumbling about the media by saying: "You ain't seen nothing yet."
He was right. In the final days before the Iowa caucuses, the doctor finds himself at the center of a media maelstrom in which his every gaffe, misstep and shortcoming are being amplified and analyzed -- leaving Dean complaining Monday that "the established press" has "attacked us for months."
A negative media assault "comes with the territory," Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi said yesterday, "but so does us saying we're not going to take it, and standing up and fighting back. The coverage doesn't get what this campaign is about, the way it's dramatically changed politics."
Asked about a continuing spate of stories depicting Dean as an "angry" candidate, Trippi said: "We maintain it's not about anger, but if the other campaigns say that, you guys go along with it. A lot of Americans are angry about what Bush has done to the country."
Many journalists see the Dean landscape differently. "He's saying a lot of things that are questionable," Time columnist Joe Klein said from Iowa, such as floating a theory, without endorsing it, that President Bush had advance warning of Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. "This is the kind of scrutiny a front-runner always gets . . . especially when a guy comes out of nowhere."
Said Simon, who is also traveling the state, "Most reporters would much rather err on the side of too much scrutiny."
Visual images from the trail show Dean on the defensive. On Friday, he walked briskly down a corridor as a press pack shouted questions about NBC's disclosure of a four-year-old Canadian talk show tape in which the then-Vermont governor dismissed the Iowa caucuses as dominated by special interests. The same day, Trippi noted, the state's front pages blared news of 12 Iowa soldiers wounded in a mortar attack in Iraq.
"That's the day the press decides it's going to ask Howard Dean about a statement he made about whether he liked the caucuses or not," Trippi said. "If that's what the press decides America should be talking about, it seemed not to make much sense to us."
Eric Boehlert, writing for Salon.com, says Dean is being Gored -- that is, harassed by the same press corps that obsessed on Al Gore's supposed exaggerations, inventing the Internet and so on. "Suddenly, as with Gore in 2000, it seems Dean is battling not only his Democratic opponents and Republican Party officials, he's also wrestling members of the media's chattering class who view him with growing unease and even contempt," Boehlert writes.
He singles out The Washington Post for using such words as "abrasive," "flinty," "cranky," "arrogant," "disrespectful," "yelling," "hollering," "fiery," "red-faced," "hothead," "testy," "short-fused," "angry," "worked up" and "fired up" in two Dean features last year. And he says the editorial and op-ed pages, "which double as the house organ of the D.C. establishment," have "taken the lead role in deriding the surging outsider."
Fred Hiatt, The Post's editorial page editor, said that accusing his pages of fronting for the Beltway establishment is a form of name-calling that sidesteps the substance of the critique.
"The issues we've raised have to do with his positions not only on Iraq but on trade and Medicare and places we feel his positions have changed during the campaign," he said. "There are legitimate questions about experience and what kind of experience is optimum for a president in a time of war." When Dean objected to an editorial that called his foreign policy views "beyond the mainstream," Hiatt said, he quickly ran a rebuttal piece in which Dean accused The Post of misrepresenting his views.
Larry Sabato, who runs the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, allowed that the avalanche of Dean coverage "is unfair, in that he's getting far more scrutiny than the others, particularly Wesley Clark, who's had more gaffes than Dean." But, said Sabato, "it's part of our hazing ritual for presidents. If they can't survive poking and prodding and rudeness from the press, how are they going to survive the pressures of the most powerful office on earth?"
Indeed, leading White House wannabes have long been subjected to months of media grilling. Bill Clinton was pummeled over Gennifer Flowers, averting the draft and not inhaling marijuana. George W. Bush was depicted as a dim bulb and interrogated on whether he had used drugs during his "young and irresponsible" days. John McCain, who beat Bush in New Hampshire, was portrayed as a tantrum-thrower with psychic scars from his POW years.
Now Dean has been pelted with stories questioning his failure to release his gubernatorial records; controversial comments about Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden; skiing after flunking a draft physical; his temperament; his hesitance to discuss religion; his all-white Vermont cabinet, why his wife doesn't campaign for him, and whether, all things considered, he is headed for a McGovern-like landslide defeat.
Political operatives say Dean's recent travails follow a year in which the press eagerly chronicled his transformation from asterisk to anointed.
"He didn't get to be the front-runner without tremendous help from the media," said Democratic consultant Jenny Backus. "The media can be your best friend or worst enemy at the drop of a dime. A strong campaign knows how to weather these cycles."
Republican strategist Mike Murphy, who battled media frenzies for both McCain and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said that "when Dean complains about the media, it's a powerful way to motivate his base and raise money." Murphy described the media mind-set this way: "We need a race and we're tired of Dean, so let's give him the scrub."
Perhaps the motivation is even simpler. Said Simon, "No reporter in Iowa wants to write that Dean is going to sweep it and get a call from his editor: 'What are you doing there? If this thing is already won, do we really need you spending $200 a day in expenses?'" |
