Something New
URL:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/nation/columns/kurtzhoward/
In yet another sign of my tireless dedication to the reading public -- and because I thought it might be fun -- we're going to try something different here at Media Notes Incorporated.
I'll be posting occasional updates as media and political developments warrant, or when I am suitably inspired, or just sitting around with nothing better to do.
You'll still get your daily dose in the morning (though the time may vary a bit), and then we'll stack some new material on top of that (which you can whiz by if it doesn't grab you). All in an effort to keep up with the relentless 24/7 cycle. And if it doesn't work, we reserve the right to bag the idea. So I'll be interested in your feedback.
- Howard Kurtz
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• Media Backtalk (Live Online, 12/22/03)
• Media Backtalk (Live Online, 12/15/03)
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Kurtz in The Post
• Media Notes appears in The Washington Post each Monday.
• Caught on Video: How the Story Played Out (The Washington Post, 12/15/03)
• For N.H. Publisher, a Tailor-Made Candidate (The Washington Post, 12/8/03)
• Tongue in Cheek, Hip On Camera (The Washington Post, 12/1/03)
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Clark for Veep?
Monday, Dec 22, 2003; 4:44 PM
The general is still helping flog this story.
He just told CNN's Judy Woodruff that Howard Dean "made the offer" last September. "It was certainly dangled out there and discussed."
Dean says no way. In fact, his campaign chief, Joe Trippi, told me that Dean was angry about Clark claiming he'd been invited to join the ticket.
When pressed, though, Clark sounded a Clintonian note: "It depends on how you define 'offer.' "
I don't quite see what Clark gets out of this, since he's running for the top job. The notion that Dean thinks he's hot stuff? Seems that voters who might be attracted to Clark as a military-hero alternative to Dean wouldn't especially care whether the man from Vermont thinks Clark would make a nice No. 2.
Of course, if Dean wins the nomination, he could still pick Clark. Dean himself says he has a hole in his resume when it comes to national security, and a former general could certainly help plug that.
But Dean has another hole -- he's an outsider candidate with no Washington experience. So (if he makes it that far) he may want to consider someone with some Beltway experience, rather than someone who's never been in politics. Not to mention someone from a part of the country that Dean has a better chance of winning than the South, where he faces a real uphill climb.
If they continue to squabble, Clark may just find himself off the list. And if Clark wins the nomination, Dean probably shouldn't expect to get the running-mate nod.
Looking for the Anti-Dean
Monday, Dec 22, 2003; 1:02 PM
Is a Wes Clark boomlet about to echo across the land? First Joe Klein and Ron Brownstein give the retired general a second look, and now The Washington Post's Dan Balz sees some possibilities for Clark as well:
"Although he has corrected many of the mistakes of those early days, he is just one of five candidates now competing to become [Howard] Dean's principal challenger -- albeit it one many Democrats believe is best positioned to emerge from the pack. . . .
"Clark's candidacy, however, remains a concept in search of a constituency. Dean already has solidified his hold on the antiwar activists within the party and so Clark aims his appeal to those voters who, regardless of their view of the war, worry that Dean would take the party down to a big defeat against Bush."
Or is it Dick Gephardt who is well-positioned to become the anti-Dean? Lee Bandy, the veteran political scribe at South Carolina's The State, sounds this upbeat note:
"Rep. Richard Gephardt, once dismissed as old news, is increasingly being seen as a sleeper in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.
"It's not far-fetched. Take a look at the primary calendar. If the stars line up right for him, he could well be on his way to the party's nomination by mid-March.
"First up is Iowa, where the 62-year-old Missouri congressman has a strong organization. Caucus balloting starts Jan. 19. Polls show Gephardt and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean locked in a virtual tie. Gephardt needs to win Iowa.
"Next comes New Hampshire, which votes in the nation's first primary Jan 27. Dean enjoys a huge lead over the rest of the field. Gephardt is in sixth place.
"Enter South Carolina, site of the first Southern primary Feb. 3. This will be the make-or-break state for most of the nine candidates. Gephardt is in a virtual tie for first place. Nearly half of the vote will be African-American. Gephardt has the endorsement of U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, the state's dominant black politician, and the backing of the state's black mayors."
What's happening here is that journalists are trying to dope out the next turn in the presidential race. Indeed, they're hoping there will be another turn in the presidential race, since all those Dean's-running-away-with-it stories are getting a bit old. There's starting to be a hunger for a Credible Alternative so reporters can get what they want for Christmas: a two-man race. At the moment, no other candidate is getting the kind of proctologic exam about their past and current positions that the media inflict on candidates they believe might win the nomination.
The extra scrutiny may be unfair to Dean, on one level, but it also certifies him as the only Democratic contender worth the investment of journalistic manpower.
Dean's foreign policy views are being increasingly dismissed on the right, as this slam by the Weekly Standard's David Tell makes clear:
"You can drag a man to the foreign-policy center with a big, subtle, ghostwritten speech. But you can't make him think from the center if he really doesn't want to. And let's face it: Howard Dean really doesn't want to. That 'capture of Saddam has not made America safer' remark earned him three days of stinging criticism from his presidential-primary rivals and from an increasingly skeptical press corps.
"Whereupon Dean apparently decided that he'd made a mistake even attempting to reposition himself as a national-security moderate. Not only is America no safer for the capture of Saddam, he growled at a subsequent press conference in New Hampshire, but 'we are no safer today than the day the planes struck the World Trade Center'; the defenestration of the Taliban from Kabul counts for nothing.
" 'I think the Democratic party has to offer a clear alternative to the American people,' says the new, new Howard Dean. The 'Washington Politics-as-Usual Club' -- not just the Republicans, but also all those 'Washington Democrats' who 'fell meekly into line' over Bush's ghastly foreign war -- must be swept aside.
"As we say, we don't understand how a frontrunning, major-party presidential candidate could have come to think like this. The most interesting theory we've heard -- and it's only a theory; no one can know for sure -- is that sometime in the 1990s, French intelligence agents snuck into Dean's bedroom in Burlington and brainwashed the poor man."
In case you've had too much eggnog, this is a play on Dean's floating the unsupported theory that Bush might have had advance warning about 9/11.
"But even if true, that still wouldn't explain the corollary mystery: How could it be that the very 'Washington Democrats' who so recently 'fell meekly into line' over war with Iraq are now just as meekly acquiescing in the institutional conquest of their party by a presidential candidate who openly derides them for it -- and who openly repudiates, in the process, foreign policy views to which the vast majority of them remain personally and politically committed?"
The American Spectator also takes its whacks at Dean's apparent snubbing of Clinton:
"Former Vermont Gov. Howie Dean annoys a lot of people. Many of them Democrats. But no one is more annoyed at him than the would-be leader of the party, Bill Clinton.
"First, Dean swoops in and sucks up to Clinton's failed protégé Al Gore, without really trying to cozy up to the big guy. Then the two new soul mates announce Gore's endorsement blocks from Clinton's Harlem offices (which, by the way, was Gore's idea). Now Dean is using the Clinton economic program as his latest doom and gloom target in stump speeches around the country, and Clinton isn't happy about it.
"Dean has been telling just about any audience listening to him that Clinton's claim that the era of big government is over was in essence a betrayal of basic Democratic values. That Clinton got into bed with Republicans to cut back government, and in turn hurt poor families who needed more of what Dean think government should be giving them. In classic Dean fashion, he riles up his crowds with those kinds of ideas, then turns around and tells the press that his remarks aren't intended as shots across Clinton's bow, even though Dean has told campaign staffers that Gore, for one, told him that those remarks about the Clinton Gore economy were spot on target, and confirmed Gore's belief that Dean was the straight talker the party needed. . . .
"According to a Dean staffer in Iowa, Clinton has sent Dean a message through intermediaries to stop using him as a political scratching post on the campaign trail."
And President Bush's insistence to Diane Sawyer that he has no need to read newspapers continues to draw throat-clearing disapproval from, well, newspaper people. USA Today's Peter Johnson takes a look:
"CBS White House correspondent Mark Knoller says getting the news from his wife or aides seems to work for Bush. 'We very rarely catch him unaware of something in the way that we used to catch Ronald Reagan. He is a very well-informed president.'
"And a deliberate one. Questioned at a news conference recently about a critical New York Times editorial on Vice President Cheney, Bush dismissed that influential editorial page, saying he never read it. And at last week's ceremonies honoring the Wright brothers' first flight, Bush took a dig at the Times, noting that it opined after the first flight that people were not destined to fly. 'He enjoyed that a lot,' Knoller says. The Times had no comment.
"Bush may in part be playing to people who have distrusted the media ever since the Watergate days, when Vice President Spiro Agnew railed against 'nattering nabobs of negativity.' . . .
"Says Playboy editor James Kaminsky: 'It's appalling to think that the man who runs the country somehow finds time for a long gym workout each day but can't muster up the intellectual curiosity to peruse the newspaper. Is it laziness, arrogance or a willful combination of the two?' "
The World According to Trippi
Monday, Dec 22, 2003; 9:10 AM
An interview with Howard Dean's campaign manager is a long, multi-layered, multi-faceted thing that cannot be fully distilled in a single news story.
Having recently spent some time with Joe Trippi in New Hampshire and Vermont, I find that I still have a pretty full notebook. So here's a bit more of his worldview.
Bad publicity actually helps Dean, Trippi believes, referring to the flaps over the Confederate flag and not serving in the military. Most people, he says, aren't paying much attention to politics right now, so "they just get some noise that there's something going on about this guy Howard Dean." Then, if Dean gives a speech that's carried by cable, folks might tune in. "Controversy gets you an audience, and the audience loves him," Trippi says.
In most campaigns, Dean the outsider would be "the guy in the weeds" while "all the focus for the entire year is on the Washington consensus front-runner dude." But this year is different, since Dean is both the insurgent and the front-runner, and Trippi believes the other campaigns don't quite know how to react.
Trippi complains that he can't get Dean to do things for political reasons, that the doctor takes a clinical approach to issues and his staff can only make headway with factual arguments. This sounds totally self-serving, I know--what campaign chief wouldn't want to portray his boss as a man of principle?--but it's interesting that Trippi believes this.
For example, he says, Dean would benefit politically by releasing his Vermont records and defusing the attacks of his opponents. But Trippi says he can't persuade the candidate because Dean is worried about the precedent for confidential advice to future governors.
"No one's gotten this," Trippi says. Dean "is hard-wired differently than these other guys." If a voter told Dean she had lost her job, says Trippi, Bill Clinton would throw an arm around her, but Dean would ask a series of questions: Where did you work? Why were you laid off?
As Trippi sees it, Dean's is a jujitsu campaign in which attacks only make it stronger. When the conservative Club for Growth spent $100,000 on an ad depicting Dean as the tax-raising reincarnation of Walter Mondale, the Dean camp "put up the bat"--meaning, made an online fundraising appeal with a baseball-bat graphic that filled up as money came in. Dean supporters contributed $360,000, of which $100,000 went for a counterattack ad.
"We put up an ad saying you're lying and thank you very much for helping us raise a quarter-million dollars over what you did," Trippi says. "Make my day." This, Trippi believes, is one reason that rival candidates aren't running negative ads against Dean--at least so far--and are trying to peddle anti-Dean themes to the press. (All campaigns do that, of course, including Dean's.)
Trippi and company have an almost mythic faith in the Web community they have helped assemble. "Our opposition research comes not from one guy looking at Lexis-Nexis, but from 20,000 people out there scrounging the Internet for quotes," he says. One found a quote from Stephen Moore, head of the Club for Growth, having once said that Dean was a Democrat he could work with. When Dean got in trouble for saying that America wouldn't always have the strongest military, another Web fan found a similar quote from Clinton, which the campaign promptly put out.
But Trippi scoffs at the popular stereotype: "The weird rap on us is that we're an Internet campaign and that's all it is." He boasts that Iowa and New Hampshire supporters have written tens of thousands of letters to others in support of Dean. "I can't remember the last time I've received a hand-written letter," he says.
Trippi, who has worked for Mondale, Dick Gephardt and Gary Hart, declares that "we've got to be the least spinning campaign in history." That, of course, may be more spin, but it's worked pretty well so far.
Dean responds to a Washington Post editorial slamming his foreign policy positions with an op-ed piece charging that the editorial "repeatedly misstates my views."
The Philadelphia Inquirer's Dick Polman says Dean is splitting the party:
"Dean's critics now acknowledge that he's the clear favorite for the nomination; he has captured the liberal activists who vote heavily in the early primaries, and the primary calendar is so compressed that the stop-Dean forces may not have time to slow his momentum, or even figure out which of his rivals would be the best alternative.
"Besides, nonpartisan analyst Stuart Rothenberg said, 'the idea that the Democrats will nominate anyone who supported Bush's war is sheer lunacy.'
"But, Dean's critics ask, will the general public elect someone with no foreign policy experience who opposed that war - especially if Hussein's capture spurs further improvements on the ground? For Dean, the potential problem is that the mood among Democratic diehards - on Iraq and national security - is markedly more liberal than the general mood.
"By a 2-1 margin, likely Iowa Democratic voters believed earlier this month that going to war in Iraq was the wrong decision; by contrast, a new, post-capture survey reports that, by a 2-1 margin, Americans in general believe that going to war was the right decision.
"The disconnect runs deeper. Dean has attacked Bush's new preemption doctrine...But, as a national poll reported just prior to Hussein's capture, 63 percent of Americans say they support Bush's preemption doctrine."
The New Republic's anti-Dean blogger, Jonathan Chait, joins the argument over whether Deanism repudiates Clintonism:
"The prevalent view of Dean is that he's actually a moderate who's running as a left-liberal. Two recent stories both arrive at this conclusion. In Slate, Will Saletan writes:
"'Dean is doing the same thing. When he claims to stand for a "new era" different from Clinton's, he isn't really ditching Clinton's agenda. He's just bashing Clinton so that his audience--liberals, angry Democrats, and disgusted nonvoters--won't think of his agenda as Clintonism.'
"And here in TNR, my colleague Ryan Lizza observes:
"'As has been the case throughout his campaign, Dean has reversed the usual political calculus, offering relatively moderate proposals while positioning himself as outside the mainstream Democratic establishment.'
"As a matter of substance, I'm honestly unsure whether this assessment will turn out to be true. (I'll get into that question later.) But if this is true, as a matter of politics, isn't this about the worst strategy imaginable? The trick is to get elected on an aggressive policy platform that comes across as centrist. That's what Bush did, smuggling a far-right agenda into the White House under the guise of a "compassionate conservative." Is Dean's strategy is to run as a standard-bearer of the left wing of the Democratic Party while actually planning to govern as a moderate? If so, this transcends 'risky' and borders on the criminally insane."
Not to put too fine a point on it.
In classic Net fashion, the Dean-o-phone blog has already spawned a Chait-o-phobe blog:
"An interesting new anti-Dean meme (I heard a variation of this on Rush...) he is trying to be the anti-Clinton. Interesting because that is the exact opposite of what Dean has actually said. (I am paraphrasing, but the actual quotes are easy to find)
"'My first job as President would be to send Clinton over to the Middle East, since he was the most effective negotiator'
"'My question to the American people is this: would you be willing to pay the taxes of the Clinton years for the prosperity of the Clinton years? I suspect that the answer will be yes' "Saletan, Chait et al suffer from the same hubris: It is so because we say it is so. They trot out the theme: Dean is 'bashing' Clinton."
In the Los Angeles Times, Ron Brownstein sees Wes Clark movin' on up--maybe:
"In several recent polls, Clark has moved into third place in New Hampshire, site of the critical first primary next month, with some surveys showing him within striking distance of Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts for second. "Clark has reorganized his staff, quickly built an impressive fundraising base and focused his message on his most distinctive asset -- his experience as a military leader in an election when national security could loom larger than in any presidential race since 1980...
"With Clark's money and potential appeal in moderate Southern and Western states that highlight the primary calendar in February, some Democrats believe he may be the best-positioned to emerge as the alternative if front-runner Howard Dean stumbles...
"Yet Clark remains uneven as a candidate; he is often compelling but sometimes unsteady on the details of domestic policy."
Is there an obscenity contest in the Democratic primaries? First Kerry uses the F-word, now Clark uses the S-word, according to this AP report:
"Moments after praising his opponents in the Democratic presidential race as worthy running mates, Wesley Clark said, in no uncertain terms, how he would respond if they or anyone else criticized his patriotism or military record. 'I'll beat the [expletive deleted] out of them,' Clark told a questioner as he walked through the crowd after a town hall meeting yesterday. 'I hope that's not on television,' he added.
"It was, live, on C-Span."
Continuing its practice of using much harsher rhetoric in statements than the candidate employs on the stump, this e-mail went out:
"CLARK CAMPAIGN BEATS THE SPIT OUT OF TOM 'CHICKEN-HAWK' DELAY
"Clark Campaign Strategist Reid Cherlin responded to Tom 'Chicken-hawk' Delay's latest cowardly comments, "The closest to real combat that Tom 'Chicken-Hawk' Delay has ever come was when he got himself a student deferment from Vietnam and instead suited up in his exterminator outfit and defended the people of Texas against invading cockroaches, marauding red ants and hostile moths."
Sounds more like Chris Lehane than Wesley Clark.
Today's print column is loaded with good stuff--including the emergence of AOL as a player in the '04 campaign and the lowdown on who's leaving The Washington Post.
The NYT's new public editor, Dan Okrent, made an impressive debut yesterday. Equally impressive, in light of the paper's long history of ignoring its critics, was his response to InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds, who complained the Times had blown off an anti-Saddam protest in Iraq:
"Hey, just got this email from Daniel Okrent:
"'I've been in touch with the Times's Baghdad bureau and the paper's foreign desk, who attribute the failure to cover the story in detail (a three-column picture did appear in the paper) to two things: The organizers of the demonstration failed to alert the Times in advance. And, more crucially, the responsible parties at the Times dropped the ball. As you might imagine, life can be difficult and work terribly complicated for journalists in a war zone. Still, the story should have received more thorough coverage.'"
Speaking of Iraq, the Beeb is at it again, according to London's Sun:
"Barmy BBC bosses have banned reporters from calling tyrant Saddam Hussein a former dictator.Instead, staff must refer to the barbaric mass murderer as 'the deposed former President' . . . "The astonishing edict was seized on by MPs last night as more proof of a Left-wing bias inside the BBC against the Iraqi war. Labour MP Kevan Jones, of the Commons Defence Select Committee, said: 'This shows the crass naivety of the BBC. Such political correctness will be deeply hurtful to many of our servicemen serving in Iraq.'"
I'll be off for awhile. Have a good holiday.
- By Howard Kurtz |
