Howard Kurtz has gone to a "Best of the Media" approach on an Blog basis.
The Hitler Analogy
Monday, Jan 05, 2004; 3:20 PM
The first ad begins with pictures of Adolf Hitler making speeches amid English subtitles ("We have taken new measures to protect our homeland") until a picture of President Bush appears. "Sound familiar?" it says.
The second ad combines pictures of Hitler with Nazi tanks advancing before showing Bush: "What were war crimes in 1945 is foreign policy in 2003," it says.
The video appeared on the Web site of MoveOn.org, whose sister unit, MoveOn Voter Fund, is conducting a nationwide contest for an anti-Bush television ad on which it plans to spend a considerable sum. The liberal organization has received more than 1,500 submissions and selected 15 finalists in an online poll of its members. The two with Hitler are not among the finalists, which can be seen on the Web site.
The final choice will be made by a panel of celebrity judges that includes James Carville, filmmaker Michael Moore and actress Janeane Garofalo.
MoveOn spokesman Trevor FitzGibbon said today that the Hitler spots "slipped through" and would not have been posted "had it been caught." But Eli Pariser, campaign director of the MoveOn Voter Fund, said that "anyone in the public could submit an ad. We didn't want to censor. If it didn't have big legal problems, we were going to let it through and let our members vote on it." The Hitler ads "lost miserably," he said.
The organization's guidelines call for "really creative ads that will engage and enlighten viewers and help them understand the truth about George Bush. . . . We're not going to post anything that would be inappropriate for television."
Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Wiesenthal Center, said that "to compare Hitler to an American president is not only ludicrous, but defames the Holocaust."
All the ads that didn't make the finals, including the Hitler spots, have been removed from the Web site. But the Republican National Committee has posted the Nazi-themed spots on its own site, along with a blast from its chairman, Ed Gillespie.
"This is the worst and most vile form of political hate speech," Gillespie said, adding: "Such ads are anything but appropriate for television, and MoveOn.org should apologize for posting the ads, as the Simon Wiesenthal Center today asked them to." Gillespie plans to mount an attack in television appearances today.
But Pariser said: "Except for a few hundred people, no one would have seen it if the GOP hadn't picked it up and put it on their Web site."
Dean Survives Gang-Tackling
Monday, Jan 05, 2004; 11:44 AM
THIS JUST IN: Do the wire reports that Bill Bradley is about to endorse Howard Dean mean much?
Probably not as much as the Gore endorsement, since Bradley has kind of dropped out of sight since losing the 2000 primaries and didn't do all that well when he ran. But it can hardly hurt the "outsider" Dean that both of the Democratic candidates last time around have now lined up behind his campaign.
The rough consensus of today's debate coverage is that Howard Dean emerged pretty much unscathed, despite having been "repeatedly pummeled," as the New York Times puts it.
One sidelight: When asked to name a mistake in their career, wasn't it kind of a cop-out for most of the candidates to cite incidents far, far in the past (Joe Lieberman as Connecticut attorney general, Dennis Kucinich as mayor of Cleveland)? Dean, at least, apologized to Edwards for something he said in this campaign. The question would have elicited more revealing answers if it had been limited to the last year.
"During a portion of the debate that allowed candidates to question one another," says the Los Angeles Times, "Dean subtly counterpunched by asking his rivals to pledge to support whoever wins the nomination. The other six candidates on the stage all raised their hands. . . .
"Four of the other candidates aimed their questions, usually in barbed language, at Dean.
" 'They . . . used their questions to attack us, and we used our question to pull the party together,' said Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager. 'They continue to make us the focus of the campaign -- any time we're the focus, we do better.'
"The debate also demonstrated the leftward pull of the Democratic race. Most of the candidates tumbled over one another to express skepticism about free trade and the school accountability provisions in the Bush-backed education reform act that all of the Democratic contenders who serve in Congress voted for."
The Boston Globe goes with the ganging-up theme: "Dean had steeled himself for such a firing squad after days of increasingly harsh attacks on both his record as governor and his blunt remarks on issues ranging from Osama bin Laden to the Democratic establishment.
"As they have from the beginning, Dean campaign advisers tried to turn the criticism to their advantage, portraying their candidate as a straight-talking outsider and arguing that the bickering would weaken the Democratic nominee against President Bush in November."
The New York Times finds a non-Dean subplot:
"The debate also highlighted an emerging subplot here: the fight for No. 2 -- or, in the tradition of Iowa caucuses, with their wide field and first position on the calendar, No. 3.
"Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, a low-voltage presence in past debates, repeatedly took on Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri. The two clashed in particular over the depth of their opposition to free trade treaties, an issue that Mr. Gephardt has made a centerpiece of his appeal in a state where there is strong opposition among Democrats to pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement."
Slate's William Saletan serves up some highlights and lowlights:
"Worst question. Moderator Paul Anger to Kucinich: 'Given your personal decision not to consume animal products, how can you assure livestock producers you will be an advocate for them as president?' (Hypothetical follow-up to Lieberman: 'Given your personal decision not to accept Jesus as your savior, how can you assure Christians you will be an advocate for them as president?')
"Second-best question. Panelist Michele Norris to Lieberman. 'Why does the nation spend 10 times as much on people of your generation than on your grandchildren?'
"Best question. Norris to Dean: 'A hallmark of your campaign has been the pledge to repeal the Bush tax cuts across the board. Does this include tax cuts that are intended to provide some measure of relief for the middle class -- the child tax credit or the lifting of the marriage penalty? And specifically, what kind of tax relief are you proposing for middle-class and working-class families?'
"Second most shameless pander. Gephardt: '[Dean] kind of runs against all of us in Washington and says that we haven't done anything. I guess I've got a question for him: Is he saying that [Iowa Sen.] Tom Harkin has never done anything good?'
"Most shameless pander. Gephardt: 'A state like Iowa is already under-compensated for Medicare. I have a bill with [Iowa Rep.] Leonard Boswell, who is here today, to try to correct that problem.'"
Gephardt takes both first and second place!
The New Republic's Ryan Lizza goes negative on the moderator, Des Moines Register Editor Paul Anger:
"Both Newsweek and Time have Dean on their covers this week with skeptical stories inside, solidifying the conventional wisdom that Dean is suddenly vulnerable if only one of his opponents could capitalize on it. But they can't. After throwing everything they've got at him for two hours, Dean once again exits the stage unruffled.
"One reason for Dean's Teflon performance is moderator Paul Anger, who seems committed to cutting off any interactions that might actually create news or conflict. Again and again he stifles exchanges that are on the cusp of turning interesting with a sharp 'thank you.' When John Kerry finally seems to be breaking through with an attack on Dean's flip-flops, Anger shuts it down. 'Senator, we're going to have to move on,' he says, before admonishing the candidates to 'play nice' in the next round. The animals in the press room seethe. 'What a turkey,' says one."
Embedded Journalism
Monday, Jan 05, 2004; 9:00 AM
We're back in business this morning, and there's a lot of ground to cover. I'll have some thoughts on Sunday's Iowa debate (such as, what genius decided to put it on during the NFL playoffs rather than at night?). But first I want to lead things off with my print column on the tireless young men and women who have been Velcroed to the candidates:
Marc Ambinder says he spent so many hours with Howard Dean that he knew a month in advance that the candidate would pass up federal funding and raise the campaign cash himself.
"You build enough trust with the candidate and his staff that they begin to act normally around you, even though you're a member of the press," the ABC News producer says.
Ambinder, 25, was until recently one of the campaign "embeds," a term appropriated by MSNBC to describe the boys-who-never-get-off-the-bus approach to campaign reporting. It is a costly endeavor that yields considerable benefits for the news organizations willing to pay the freight, but also contains its share of frustrating wheel-spinning. And the constant presence of notebooks and cameras means that many candidates are constantly on guard, their every move recorded, every offhand comment a potential gaffe.
Marisa Buchanan, an MSNBC producer traveling with Wesley Clark, was there after his first campaign manager quit and new advisers started showing up. "I was introducing staff members to one another," says Buchanan, 24.
Becky Diamond, covering John Kerry for MSNBC, says she understands "what makes him tick" and that "camera crews that come in and out just can't compete with the access I have." Sometimes this produces small but intriguing moments, such as when Diamond, 34, taped the senator playing guitar on his campaign bus. "MSNBC loved it and ran it quite a bit," she says.
ABC's Deborah Apton was with Clark in a Florida synagogue when, in response to an audience question, he began naming potential members of his Cabinet. "I was pretty much the only one who had it," says Apton, 25. "I end up in places where the national press wouldn't."
Not that campaign officials always hang out a welcome sign, as ABC's Beth Loyd discovered while following Al Sharpton. "They tried to limit my access as much as they could," says Loyd, 25. "They wanted to control it. Sometimes it was hard to get people to return my phone calls," and Sharpton "didn't want someone around him all the time."
Another frustration: "It's hard when you don't have a cable network to get things out," Loyd says. ABC's producers spend their time filing for radio, the overnight newscast and the online digest The Note, as well as booking guests and briefing the network's anchors before interviews.
Mark Halperin, ABC's political director, who had the same producer's job with the 1992 Clinton campaign, says the sources developed are invaluable. Besides, he says, "there's no greater way to understand the mood of America than to see which lines in the stump speech work."
ABC stirred controversy last month by scaling back its round-the-clock coverage of Sharpton, Dennis Kucinich and Carol Moseley Braun, with Kucinich complaining about "the media trying to pick candidates." As Halperin notes, though, ABC has still covered these lower-tier contenders more thoroughly than most news organizations.
CBS has six reporters shadowing the major candidates -- some more embedded than others -- who shoot footage and file for radio and the Web. Eric Salzman, for example, got some on-the-plane video that was used in a "CBS Evening News" piece on Dean's reaction to the capture of Saddam Hussein. Salzman also has written some anecdote-filled online pieces about Dean's evolution as a candidate, such as his improvement in television interviews and how he switched to shirts with bigger collars to cover his sizable neck.
In one sense, the embedding process -- the name was lifted from the Pentagon program under which journalists lived with the troops during the Iraq war -- is nothing new. The New York Times has a reporter on every major candidate. When the field dwindles to two or three, some newspapers, magazines and networks routinely assign reporters to follow them -- though many prefer a "zone defense" approach of switching off to avoid havinga correspondent get too close to one campaign and lose perspective.
What's unusual is for reporters to trail nine candidates for months before the voting begins. And in a high-tech era, they can quickly post their video online or feed it to their network.
Some campaigns are happy to play. Dean recently granted exclusive interviews to ABC's Reena Singh and, separately, MSNBC's Felix Schein, who elicited some revealing comments from Dean: "I am somewhat of a street fighter. If someone punches me I am apt to chase them down and I need to be restrained by the people who know better and have been in the game longer than I have." And: "I usually wake up at 4 in the morning and think about politics for three hours."
The tricky part is the tradeoffs that come with constant access. Ambinder wasn't able to break the story of Dean's decision to reject public financing because the information was provided off the record.
"It's a difficult balancing act," he says. "You want to be able to communicate what you know to people, but you have to respect their confidences. Obviously when you spend 24/7 with people, you become friendly with them."
One thing the road warriors have in common is that the grueling hours take a toll. "I don't even have time to call my friend who just had a baby," Diamond says. "If I call my boyfriend, it's in front of 10 people in a press van." On the other hand, she says, "you're on the front lines of the battle for the presidency."
You can link to the embed sites we're talking about at ABC, CBS and MSNBC.
Bloomberg Backs Off
Some Bloomberg News staffers are upset that Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler killed an accurate story about a lawsuit against Deutsche Bank after a complaint by the former executive who was the suit's target.
The electronic story Dec. 5 about Deutsche Bank, a major customer for Bloomberg financial terminals, was purged, and a corrected version sent out that deleted the names of the former executive and the female plaintiff who says she was fired for complaining about sexual harassment and discrimination.
Winkler says the original report "doesn't meet the Bloomberg standard for a story" because it lacked context and any sense of "why do we care about this." He also says the legal reporter failed to consult with the staffers who cover banking.
"Anybody can go to court," Winkler says. "Anybody can file papers." He wrote in an internal memo that Bloomberg shouldn't be "the mouthpiece for litigants." Asked why Bloomberg doesn't simply do some follow-up reporting, he says the case isn't important enough.
As for suggestions that he caved to pressure, Winkler says: "We have lost business from Deutsche Bank and a lot of firms for stuff we have written."
Fox Flap
"Attorney General John Ashcroft Stepping Down Over CIA Leak Probe," said the Fox News headline during "Dayside" on Tuesday.
Only Ashcroft wasn't quitting. Anchor Mike Jerrick got it right, citing sources as saying Ashcroft was stepping down "in" the probe of the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA employment. A network spokesman blames "mistakes by overzealous producers."
Vice President John Moody was not pleased. "Despite a mistaken graphic put up during the 'Dayside' show," he said in an internal memo, Ashcroft "is not resigning or stepping down. . . . There's a difference which most native English-speakers would understand."
Moving on to the Des Moines Register debate, my sense is that it didn't move the ball very much. Lieberman, Gephardt, Kerry and Kucinich all went after Dean, who seemed to counterpunch well. His worst moment was when he unintentionally drew laughter by saying: "I am going to balance the budget, and I'm going to do it in the sixth or seventh year of my administration..."
The cable pundits agreed. Dean "dominated the debate" as the central focus, said Fox's Chris Wallace. "It's hard to see how Howard Dean was particularly hurt by what happened here today," said CNN's Jeff Greenfield. The attacks made Dean "look like a martyr," the Register's David Yepsen told Fox.
And on MSNBC, we heard from . . . Drew Carey. The network blew off the debate and ran a taped celebrity bio.
There's too little debate fact-checking at this stage of the campaign, so let me take a whack. Dick Gephardt was mistaken when he said the Bush administration "tried to put more arsenic in the water." The administration didn't "put" anything in the water, but held up a rule-tightening adopted at the close of the Clinton administration, keeping allowable arsenic at the same level of Clinton's eight-year term (before eventually adopting the lower standard.)
John Kerry was wrong when he told Dean, "you said the president had prior warning about September 11th." Dean took the strange step of repeating an unsubstantiated theory to that effect, but did point out that he didn't believe it.
I'll post some of the debate coverage later today.
By the way, one of the great bumps the winner of the New Hampshire primary is supposed to get is cover stories in Time and Newsweek. But Dean gets the cover treatment today, for the second time in both magazines. (This campaign really is speeded up!).
"No one since Jimmy Carter has risen to front-runnerhood in quite the way Dean has: as a largely invisible outsider catapulted to a commanding position without so much as a nod from the Beltway political kingmakers," says Newsweek. "Dean's blunt, combative persona -- and his opposition to George W. Bush's war in Iraq -- allowed him to rocket to the top via the Internet. But, on the center stage of traditional politics, he's a controversial figure, launching attacks but airily refusing (especially now that he's ahead in the polls) to answer charges of his rivals; given to fights for their own sake, not-so-subtle adjustments of positions, sloppy statements and seemingly self-inflicted wounds.
"Thus far, the resulting dust-ups haven't hurt him. In fact, they may have done the opposite, inspiring team spirit among Deanies and branding him vividly as the kind of anti-establishment, hell-for-leather, shin-kicker who grass-roots Democrats want to lead them into mortal combat against the presidential imperium."
In case you missed it over the holidays, Dean tried to neutralize the religion issue--some are calling it pandering--in a pre-Christmas sit-down with the Boston Globe:
"Presidential contender Howard Dean, who has said little about religion while campaigning except to emphasize the separation of church and state, described himself in an interview with the Globe as a committed believer in Jesus Christ and said he expects to increasingly include references to Jesus and God in his speeches as he stumps in the South.
"Dean, 55, who practices Congregationalism but does not often attend church and whose wife and children are Jewish, explained the move as a desire to share his beliefs with audiences willing to listen. His comments came as a rival, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, chastised other Democrats for forgetting 'that faith was central to our founding and remains central to our national purpose.'
"The move is striking for a man who has steadfastly kept his personal life out of the campaign, rarely offering biographical information, much less his religious beliefs. But in the Globe interview, Dean said that Jesus was an important influence in his life and that he would probably share with some voters the model Jesus has served for him.
"'Christ was someone who sought out people who were disenfranchised, people who were left behind,' Dean said. 'He fought against self-righteousness of people who had everything . . . He was a person who set an extraordinary example that has lasted 2000 years, which is pretty inspiring when you think about it.'''
Jonathan Chait, the New Republic's anti-Dean blogger, isn't buying:
"First, much of the damage--in the form of Dean comments that seem hostile to religion--has already been done. Bush already has enough material he needs for flyers and radio commercials making the case that Dean disrespects religious people. Second, it's pretty obvious that religiosity is not natural for Dean. His attempts to project himself that way may therefore come across as forced and awkward, like Michael Dukakis in a tank."
What have the big papers been saying about Dean? The Temper Issue is bubbling up, courtesy of the New York Times:
"That Howard Dean has always had a temper is beyond dispute. He mentioned it himself in an essay he wrote for his high school yearbook. And stories abound from his days as governor of his snapping at Statehouse reporters or blowing up at political opponents...
"Now, as the Iowa caucuses approach and he shoulders the relentless scrutiny that comes with being the candidate in the lead, Dr. Dean's opponents in the Democratic field are jumping on every wayward off-the-cuff remark, trying to make his temperament an issue. They are questioning whether he has the judgment to be president, and trying to feed the impression that he is a man with lots of anger, an attribute that repels many voters."
The Washington Post sees a ray of hope for Clark:
"The strategies range from Rep. Richard A. Gephardt's one-state last stand in Iowa to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's rapid-fire attacks on Dean to retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark's national campaign on electability. All of them depend on Dean stumbling during the Jan. 19 Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary the following week...
"Clark, who entered the race in September, is perhaps best positioned to challenge Dean for two key reasons: his fundraising prowess and military résumé, strategists for several campaigns said."
American Prospect's Michael Tomasky hammers Smokin' Joe:
"Some of the criticisms of Dean have crossed the line. Joe Lieberman in particular has behaved appallingly. No Democratic candidate should ever say that Democrat X can't win in November, as Lieberman has said and/or hinted repeatedly of Dean. Suppose Dean becomes the nominee. How does Lieberman endorse him? The answer is that either he doesn't, which would be an act of apostasy that should get him thrown out of the party, or he does, but in such a way as to be completely meaningless. In any event, he has already made it as clear as spring water to his supporters, such as they exist, that if Dean's the nominee, they might as well sit it out.
"But for whatever reason, St. Joe enjoys the protective immunity of the pundit class, so he'll never be reproached for his behavior in the way that he deserves...
"So Lieberman -- and, to a lesser extent, Dick Gephardt and John Kerry -- are playing dirty pool...Dean, however, has handled this mess poorly from his end as well. For him to say, as he did the other day, that his support is "not transferable anymore" to another candidate brings him almost down to Lieberman's gutter level. And he should not have chided McAuliffe publicly; that's the sort of thing you say quietly over the cell phone, not loudly through the press.
"I'm on record as writing that the Deanophobic Washington establishment ought to give some thought to trying to understand the Dean phenomenon instead of reflexively rejecting it, and should start thinking about making its peace with Dean, who after all stands a strong chance of being the nominee. I stand by those assertions. But traffic on these political streets flows two ways: It's also incumbent upon Dean to give the Washington Democratic establishment some reasons to believe in him and in his electability."
One thing's for sure: Dean is dominating the political conversation just about everywhere. |
