My "Think Again" column is called “Jews Are Still Liberal” and it’s here.

I’ve got a piece in the Times Arts and Leisure section on Joseph Alsop called “A Newsmaker in Every Sense of the Word” and it’s here.

In other Alterman-related news, The Daily Beast had nice things to say about The Cause, here, and forbes.com published an interesting response to the Springsteen excerpt published in The Nation here.

Bill Moyers also put up a clip from our interview, which will run this weekend, here.

And should you wish to listen to my talk with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate, that’s here.

If you want to say hello and you live near either LA or DC.

Los Angeles 
Los Angeles Times Book Festival, April 21, 4:30 PM
Panel: The Boys on the Bus: Covering Decision 2012.

Washington, DC.
Politics & Prose 5015 Connecticut Avenue in Washington, April 25 at 7:00 
The Center for American Progress, 1333 H Street, lunch served at 11:30, panel with John Halpin and Michael Kazin at noon. 

(I’ll also be at the NOLA Jazz fest this weekend for Bruce’s second appearance there, in case there’s some place you think I absolutely need to go…)

Reed is away this week, so I will entertain you with this excerpt from The Cause, which I originally pulled for Mike Allen, who did so much to make Kabuki Democracy a success, but has apparently become less enamored with my work as he chose not to post any of the below, nor mention the book’s publication, alas. Thanks for reading…

$32.95 but only $19.76 from Amazon right now, 576 pages.

The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama
After clinching the Democratic nomination in June 2008, Barack Obama had stood before an excited group of supporters in St. Paul, Minnesota, and declared:

“We will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”

But if ever a president was to prove Mario Cuomo’s adage that candidates “campaign in poetry” but “govern in prose,” it was Barack Obama. As Marshall Ganz, a community organizer and academic who helped play a large role in the campaign, explains, “‘Transformational’ leadership engages followers in the risky and often exhilarating work of changing the world, work that often changes the activists themselves. Its sources are shared values that become wellsprings of the courage, creativity and hope needed to open new pathways to success. ‘Transactional’ leadership, on the other hand, is about horse-trading, operating within the routine, and it is practiced to maintain, rather than change, the status quo.” Obama, Gans conceded, “entered office wrapped in a mantle of moral leadership” but ceded it without a struggle. He never recovered from abandoning the bully pulpit of moral argument and public education and embracing the politics of compromise over those of advocacy.

Barack Obama, as Jesse Jackson might have put it, was a deal maker, not a world shaker. His rhetoric, together with his legislative strategy, was always oriented toward inclusiveness, consensus building, and preemptive offers of compromise.

Whatever political calculation may have lain behind it—and countless supporters found it baffling—Obama’s approach failed to take into account some fundamental changes that American politics had undergone during the Bush years, most particularly the radicalization of the Republican Party. Republicans circa 2009 were no longer interested in bipartisan solutions to America’s problems. Then-Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told The National Journal, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”  Senator Jim DeMint famously promised health care reform could be used to “break” Obama from day one. “We’re the party of ‘Hell, no!’ ” cried Sarah Palin to a crowd of cheering southern Republicans in April 2010.

By the time of Obama’s election, the moderate wing in the Republican Party had been purged virtually out of existence, and in its place was a faction dominated, according to the moderately conservative commentator, Fareed Zakaria, by “Conservatives [who] now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America’s present or past.”

The result, as New Republic editor John Judis described it, was a party that had “transformed [itself] from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. . . . If there is an earlier American precedent for today’s Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to, and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery.” In the fall of 2011, Mike Lofgren, recently retired after twenty-eight years as a congressional staffer, serving sixteen of these as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees, went so far as to describe the party for which he had labored so long as “becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy than an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of twentieth century Europe.”  Democrats, meanwhile, were divided between what one pundit called their “sitting pretty faction” and “the more fragile ‘scaredy cat’ faction that could be carried off by even the gentlest of anti-incumbent breezes.” The latter voted more often like Republicans than with their president.

Asked what he wished for in 2011 during the 2010 holiday season, Obama reportedly replied, “All I want for Christmas is an opposition I can negotiate with.” He never got one. As a longtime student and frequent defender of Congress—the American Enterprise Institute’s Norman Ornstein—observed in an article he titled “Worst. Congress. Ever.”:

Republicans, having been thrashed at all levels in 2008, did not respond to the voters’ rebuke by cooperating with the majority or trying to find common ground. Instead, repeating a tactic employed with great political success by Republicans in 1993 and 1994 against a newly elected President Bill Clinton, they immediately united fiercely and unremittingly against all the Obama and Democratic congressional initiatives. In the Senate they used delay tactics—the filibuster and the hold—in an unprecedented fashion, to block a large number of Obama administration nominees for executive branch positions and draw out debate to clog the legislative process and make an already messy business even messier.

Republicans refused to agree to approve appointments to the federal bench, even to crucial government posts, many of which remained vacant for Obama’s entire term. Following the passage of the financial reform bill creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they intimidated the president into not even nominating the Democrats’ most popular choice, Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren, and then proceeded to refuse to schedule hearings on Obama’s alternative choice, former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray, after Obama caved in.

Republican willingness to threaten to filibuster just about every Democratic initiative successfully frustrated liberal priority after liberal priority. The labor movement’s key issue, passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, received only tepid administration or congressional support. Nothing was done to reform America’s broken (and deeply exploitative) immigration policies. (The pace of deportations actually increased during Obama’s presidency by roughly 20 percent above that of an equivalent period during the Bush administration’s tenure.) Reproductive rights for women were actually narrowed. Money grew more powerful both in politics and in society, as campaign finance laws were weakened and the Bush-era tax cuts extended, worsening the previous era’s explosion in inequality, despite the unpopularity with the public of both of these policies. These were all clear breaks from past practices. Journalist Michael Tomasky compared eight key priorities of presidents Bush and Obama in the autumn of 2011 and found, on average, 41.1 percent of Democrats tended to support Bush’s legislation, while the corresponding number for Republicans under Obama was just 5.75 percent.

What Richard Hofstadter had written of the extremely business-friendly Democrat Grover Cleveland turned out to be eerily true of Obama as well:

“With his stern ideas of purity, efficiency, and service, he was a taxpayer’s dream, the ideal bourgeois statesman for his time: out of heartfelt conviction he gave to the interests what many a lesser politician would have sold for a price.”

The president showed little willingness to use the powers of his office to counter the hardball tactics that were strangling his agenda, such as making recess appointments when Congress was out of session or issuing executive orders to ensure that his will was done regardless of Republican filibusters or delaying efforts. Instead he simply curtailed his appointments and left many key positions unfilled. The old joke about the liberal who showed up for a gunfight with a library book was no longer so funny.

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

My new "Think Again" column is called "John Bolton and the Problem with On-the-One Hand Objectivity." Read it.

By way of introduction to Reed’s post, I was up at Yale last week to give a talk to Jewish students there and it happened to be the day when the International Relations program through which I got my master’s there was celebrating its reception of Henry Kissinger’s papers, which I assume must have been inspired either by a great deal of money or by Henry’s desire to poke Harvard in the eye. John Lewis Gaddis (who appeared deeply unhappy to see me) talked about how great Henry was and then Henry moderated a panel on China with Robert Rubin, Jonathan Spence (its only China expert) William Burns, deputy secretary of state; Michael Mullen, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What was said during conference was off the record, it was repeatedly announced, but the let the record show that the words “democracy” and “human rights” were not spoken a single time until I was invited to ask a question from the audience. I see this as legitimate to mention because 

a) I am not reporting on anything that was actually said at the conference;

b) When I did raise the question, asking Kissinger to comment on his own record in this regard and to speak freely since we were off the record, he responded that he would be happy to respond “on the record” and then said what he has always said on the topic.

But the actual reason I am bringing this up was because I had a nice talk with Mike Mullen at the reception and we talked about the “other one percent”; those Americans with family members in the military and the disjunction between their lives and the rest of us. I brought up the sign I had seen at Springsteen in Philly the night before. “Please play Thundercrack for my dad in Iraq.” He brought up Rachel Maddow, and had some quite complementary things to say about her work.

That’s all. Here’s Reed. Happy Passover and Easter and two Bruce Garden shows. Let’s, um, go Mets. 

A Military Policy Adrift
by Reed Richardson
On June 1, 1784, General Henry Knox commanded a mere 700 men, the remainder of the Continental Army that had finally wrested America’s independence from the vast British Empire less than a year before. Congress took one look at this paltry force and decided that its size was completely unacceptable. Indeed, for them, it was much too large. So the next day, Congress summarily disbanded the army, leaving this new nation with only 80 privates as the sum total of its active-duty force. (Their lone duty was to guard the weapons stores at Fort Pitt and West Point.)

This adversarial attitude toward a large peacetime military was no mere afterthought. It was born out of the early colonial citizens’ deep-seated displeasure of bearing the costs and burdens of the large British garrisons that had been stationed among them. After ridding themselves of the British yoke, the Framers’ visceral distaste for any future empire building on the part of the United States manifested itself in the Constitution, where the military was clearly placed under civilian control and war-making powers were specifically vested with the Congress. This new American take on liberalism had little interest for the dangerous instruments of imperialism, and as Thomas Jefferson wrote during the early Constitutional debates: “Such an instrument is a standing army.”

That this historical context—as well as this Jefferson quote—shows up early on in “Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power” (Crown publishing, $25), is your first cue that that Rachel Maddow’s new book is no mere talking-points polemic tossed off to build brand synergy with her on-air MSNBC persona. Instead, as befits someone with a doctorate in politics from Oxford, “Drift” is a considered, if sometimes smirking, exploration of an oft-ignored political predicament now confronting our democracy. When it comes to building up our ability to wage war, it seems America just can’t stop itself anymore.

This wasn’t the case until recently, Maddow points out. For most of our nation’s history, our warfighting capability relied heavily upon the occasional call-up—and, once hostilities ended, rapid demobilization—of citizen-soldiers. Though commonly traced back to the Revolutionary War’s Minutemen, the most notable of these reluctant warrior archetypes dates back more than 2,500 years, to the Roman farmer Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus, the story goes, famously accepted the role of Roman dictator for six months to lead a successful defense of the city against foreign invaders. Then, sixteen days after achieving victory, Cincinnatus voluntarily resigned his powerful position and went back to happily tending his farm.

It was this great disruption that war inflicted upon the lives of Cincinnatus and the Roman Republic’s polity that informed the Framers’ thinking when crafting their new nation’s laws. They, too, wanted the choice to go to war to have such a momentous political and societal impact that it would necessarily be a rare one for their new nation. In their minds, America should either be at war or at peace, either stand an army or go without—mixing and matching these scenarios were just not acceptable options. 

But as Maddow asserts in “Drift,” the built-in constitutional governors that men like Jefferson and Madison intended to act as a brake on our nation’s engine of war-making have broken down. These days, “we the people” rarely enjoy a real policy debate before a president (of either party) decides to engage our military in yet another mission of dubious value to the “national interest.” Indeed, the book’s core argument can be boiled down to this passage:

Rational political actors, acting rationally to achieve rational (if sometimes dumb) political goals, have attacked and undermined our constitutional inheritance from men like Madison. For the most part, though, they’ve not done it to fundamentally alter the country’s course but just to get around understandably frustrating impediments to their political goals. The ropes we had used to lash down presidential war-making capacity, bindings that by design made it hard for an American president to use military force without the nation’s full and considered buy-in, have been hacked at with very little appreciation about why they were put there in the first place.

Where did we start to lose our way, to think that our nation could prosecute a war and that most Americans wouldn’t really notice (or care)? The book traces the roots of this phenomenon back to President Lyndon Johnson’s fateful decision—against the advice of his Defense Secretary and Joint Chiefs of Staff—not to call up the National Guard and Reserves to fight in Vietnam. This strategy, Maddow eloquently explains, effectively cleaved the interests of the American people from that of the military for the first time. And the psychic wound to the nation that resulted, one could argue, has never fully healed.

Still, it’s not that lessons weren’t learned there. From the ugly injustice of granting exceptional exemptions to people of a certain social station (included among them a future Speaker of the House, Vice President, and two Presidents) and instead forcing mostly poor draftees to fight this war, the modern, all-volunteer professional military arose. And at the policymaking level, post-Vietnam strategizing arrived at the Total Force Policy—also known as the Abrams Doctrine—which restructured the military to make it much more difficult to avoid fully involving the Reserves and, by proxy, the American people, in the next war.

Almost as quickly as these fixes were put in place, however, they began to unravel. And the reason why, Maddow successfully argues, can be answered in two words: Ronald Reagan.

In fact, if this book has anything approaching a single antagonist, our 40^th president undoubtedly fills the bill. First appearing on page 29, Ronald Reagan spends the next 100 or so pages under Maddow’s unblinking gaze, as she lays out a devastating indictment of his zeal for demagoguing foreign policy issues, trampling upon our Constitution, flaunting due process, and the violating international laws of war on everything from the Panama Canal treaty to Iran-Contra.

To understand Reagan’s first real taste of acting first and thinking later when using our military, Maddow expends an entire chapter detailing the bungled debacle that was our 1983 invasion of Grenada. Despite its macho, Hollywoodesque codename, Operation Urgent Fury actually played out more like Operation Fuzzy Urges thanks to paranoid and poorly-thought-out planning on the part of the White House. Maddow weaves together the invasion’s numerous intelligence failures, misguided operational assumptions, and unnecessarily risky gambits to paint a vastly different picture than the one portrayed to the public by a fawning press corps. (I vividly remember my first encounter with this disconnect a decade after the fact, when my Airborne school instructor, a former Ranger who was shot in the back by friendly fire amidst the chaos that reigned during the jump into Pt. Salines airfield, succinctly summed up the operation using one military acronym—FUBAR.) 

Sadly, “Drift” makes no mention of one of the most important legacies of the botched Grenada invasion—the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols reforms. Ostensibly passed to lessen the often petty inter-service rivalries of the military, these reforms streamlined the Pentagon’s operational command structure but also had the unintended effect of strengthening our military leadership’s hand vis-à-vis its civilian overseers. This phenomenon has, no doubt, only exacerbated the Pentagon’s ability to get almost whatever it wants from Congress and the president. 

This growing power imbalance, whereby military leaders enjoy a bully pulpit that equals or exceeds their funders and commander-in-chief has set a dangerous precedent. For example, while then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell was basking in high Q ratings and rumors of becoming a possible presidential contender, his savvy political maneuverings against intervention in Haiti and Bosnia as well as implementation of gays into the armed forces received a much less rosy reception among those who study civil-military affairs. In 1993, a Journal of Military History article boldly claimed that no general since McClellan “has ever resisted civilian proposals as consistently, systematically, and as successfully as General Powell.” A year later, military historian Richard Kohn concurred in a National Interest essay—with the not-so-subtle headline “Out of Control”—that included these notable observations:

The U.S. military is now more alienated from its civilian leadership than at any time in American history, and more vocal about it.

[…]

At the Army's elite Command and General Staff College, a respected Congressman was ‘jeered’ by the class when he ‘repeatedly lectured officers’ about Congress's role and powers—and was greeted by ‘catcalls’ at the mention of the President.

Bringing the growing political influence of our military leaders to heel has hardly been a priority of the intervening Congresses or administrations. But this idea that American military power has, at least in part, become unmoored from civilian oversight because that’s precisely how it wants it doesn’t really get any attention in Maddow’s book, unfortunately. For the most part, she treats the military as impartial, dutiful actors under the willing thumb of an executive branch calling all the shots. (The lone exception being her brief fisking of the canonization of David Petraeus and his impossibly costly counterinsurgency doctrine.)

This is one of two primary (albeit minor) disappointments with “Drift.” While its sweep of history is vast, it is, by the very nature of its 252 pages (and small pages at that), somewhat shallow in places. Perhaps this is due to her deliberate authorial pace—in the opening sentence of her acknowledgements she says: “I’m the slowest writer on earth.” 

Still, I can’t help but think about the book that might have been, the longer one that dug deeper into the military’s own active role in drifting toward our current state of almost perpetual war. Or the chapter on how the media has continually enabled this drift through, by turns, incurious reporting, relentless cheerleading, and an almost wholesale organizational retreat from foreign coverage. In addition, one would think that a more comprehensive book would lend itself to more insightful and satisfying policy remedies than the ones she concludes with. To wit: “If we are going to use drones to vaporize people in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia, the Air Force should operate these drones, and pull the trigger. And we should know about it.” Or, you know, maybe we should stop doing this altogether, since no matter what part of the U.S. government does it, it’s arguably still illegal, immoral, and counter-productive in the long run.

Granted, faulting a book for what it doesn’t have in it can be an exercise in intellectual misdirection. And Maddow deserves credit for avoiding that same trap herself. “Drift” offers up a readily accessible tone to its readers and lets Maddow’s sarcastic wit artfully color the sometimes absurd nature of the subject matter. Yes, these punch lines, at times, resemble either the worst of a Borscht Belt comic from 50 years ago or the vacuous ruminations of a bored teenager, but they’re easily overlooked if they’re not your cup of tea.

Her methodology for sourcing facts and citing them, on the other hand, is a bit harder to brush aside. With nary a footnote, the book settles for breezy, conversational-style endnotes that “are not intended to be comprehensive.” As a result, when a striking fact appears—“In the past decade, the US Army has lost more soldiers to suicide than to enemy fire in Afghanistan”—the end notes provide no way to easily check this or even learn more about why. (Unsurprisingly, the Army’s latest report shows that more deployments closely correlate with more suicides.)

To be clear, I’m not impugning the book’s veracity. Maddow’s writing style, though cheeky and light-hearted at points, nonetheless conveys a mastery of the subject at hand. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in her discussion of the massive privatization of our nation’s warfighting capabilities, which she spends the last third of the book unpacking. (As it happens, the National Magazine Award finalists were announced this past week. Among those listed in the Public Interest category was Sarah Stillman, whose powerful New Yorker exposé from last summer, “The Invisible Army,” detailed yet another part of the private contractor archipelago where fraud, abuse, and exploitation are brazenly conducted in our country’s name and thanks to our tax dollars.)

To illustrate the frightening degree to which our military is now beholden to these third-party warfighters she cites example after example, but it was a recent quote from the current Director of National Intelligence that sent shivers up my spine: “If all the contractors failed to come to work tomorrow, the intelligence community would stop.”

This is where we are now, as a country. Maddow’s book makes for a compelling argument to change directions.

In the end, calling her book ‘Creep’ might have been a more obvious choice for Maddow, as ‘mission creep’ has long been the favorite phrase to describe a military plan gone astray. But I prefer her choice of ‘Drift.’ That’s because besides describing the broader unmooring of American military power, drift also has a very narrow military definition that brings with it a powerful symbolism. When firing at a target that can’t be directly viewed, artillery units must account for types of drift—spin, wind resistance, the rotation of the earth—in their plotting lest they miss badly and hit something else. And as the size of the projectile grows ever larger, the potential drift that can push a round off-target increases as well—almost to the point where it’s hard to tell what you’re really aiming at anymore.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com.

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

My new "Think Again" column is called "The End of Newspapers and the Decline of Democracy."

Alter-reviews:
Though I was shocked to see it at first, I supposed it should have come as no surprise to me that Judith Miller is at least as discerning a theater critic as she is when it comes to weapons of mass destruction and Bush administration lies, deception and folly. Her pan of Mike Nichols’ revival of Death of a Salesman, starring Philip Seymour Hoffmann, is one of the most wrong-headed pieces of prose I’ve read since her parroting of Dick Cheney’s nonsense about yellowcake uranium, though to be fair, few people are likely to die as a result. More optimistically, few people are likely to do anything at all as a result, given the deservedly unreserved raves the production received in New York and The New Yorker. I vaguely recall seeing both the George C. Scott and Dustin Hoffman versions of the play and while it was too long ago for me to make any sensible comparison, I can hardly remember being so riveted (often painfully so) by any performance anywhere as watching this magnificent play. Much of it is cliché today, but here is where the cliché was invented and, seen in context, these clichés take on added power for the truths they reveal about life in a capitalist country and what it does to men. I actually left the theater speechless and since I saw it just before opening night, I sent a few emails out to friends suggesting that they buy the tickets before the reviews came out; even friends who lived out of town. Hoffman’s performance is one for the ages, but the rest of the cast has the right combination of explosiveness and tenderness you’d want in this play. I’ve been writing about Arthur Miller for my next book, but I’ve never “felt” the power of what made his reputation live so long and travel so far and wide until I saw Nichols’ Salesman. 

And while we’re on the subject of Miller, my friends at the Library of America have just released volume II of his collected works. Not many people sit down and read plays but Miller’s later works are useful exceptions to this rule. Not many people ended up seeing Miller’s works after the big four (All My Sons, Salesman, The Crucible and View from the Bridge) and now’s your chance to see what you missed. Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1964-1982 (Library of America)

I also want to mention the terrific and completely crazy evening I spent at 92Y for the Friars’ Club celebration of Jerry Lewis’ 86^th birthday. What an amazing guy. I have never seen anyone so needy and so mean (often at the same time) to his audience. But you can’t, nor should you wish to deny his genius. So thanks to the folks at the Y for that. (The evening began with Richard Belzer crooning, “Barechu es adoni homoverah.”) Read all about it, here. Oh and last night, I saw Nathan Englander and Joshua Foer discuss their new New American Haggadah, published by Little Brown. I am an enormous fan of Englander’s and strongly recommend the audio version of his new short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. I’m looking forward to using the Haggadah.

Now here’s Reed:

Citizens United Blowback: How the GOP’s Super PAC addiction is helping Obama’s reelection chances 
by Reed Richardson
Give someone enough rope and they’ll hang themselves, goes the old saying, and the 2012 election may prove that the same is true when it comes to money in politics. Indeed, the easy-money political climate ushered in by the Citizens United case two years ago just may turn out to be the undoing of the Republican Party’s chances against Obama this November.

This is not to say, however, that because there exists a potential silver lining to the Supreme Court’s radical decision, liberals should find anything to cheer about it. Make no mistake, Citizens United undermined our democracy and, as a large majority of the public agrees, the inequality it unleashed on our political system should not stand.

Perhaps the most well known symbol of this glaring inequality is the Super PAC. By allowing a few wealthy individuals and corporations to funnel unlimited amounts of cash into our political system, these so-called independent entities can unfairly skew our national discourse and buoy candidates that enjoy little public support. And since this is the first full election cycle where they’ve been in place (only a few existed by the 2010 midterms), it’s instructive to see how their presence has impacted the Republican primary process.

Here’s what might come as a surprise: the first, full-fledged presidential primary campaign of the Super PAC era has been accompanied by a big drop in overall spending. Of course, the increased number of primary debates and cable-TV platforms—and all that free media exposure they provided—no doubt contributed to this decline in spending. But I’d submit that the rise of Super PACs have as well.

Fundraising is one of the toughest tasks for any political candidate. So, encountering a new political environment, one where a campaign’s stalking horse PAC can quickly and easily bring in millions of dollars from just a few generous benefactors, can make the hard work of cobbling together thousands of small-dollar donors seem like a wasted effort. In fact, Super PAC spending now represents a sizable chunk of the Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich campaigns’ advocacy efforts, as this Open Secrets report shows. (In Gingrich’s extreme case, Super PAC expenditures on his behalf have dwarfed official spending, and through February, nearly half of this outside money came from a single individual, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.) So, though there's been less money spent, what has been spent is even more concentrated among donors that are rich and powerful.

To be sure, one could argue that the Republican field’s depressed level of official fundraising is also a function of an unenthusiastic primary electorate. (And substantially lower primary turnout than four years ago would go a long way in making that case.) But there’s something else at work here and, again, I believe it’s an unintended consequence of the rise of Super PACs in our politics.

What little rules there are regarding Super PACs involve the prohibition of any ‘coordination’ between these groups and a candidate’s official campaign.  As a result, all those everyday, nuts-and-bolts aspects of a campaign—location scouting, event staging, staff transportation, phone banking, GOTV efforts—become de facto forbidden activities for Super PACs. The most notable campaign expenditure that’s left, something that can be easily scheduled ahead of time simply by looking at the calendar, is obvious: campaign advertising. And so it’s no shock to learn that the Republican Super PACs have spent most of their money on just that. (And of that campaign ad spending, a majority has been spent on tearing down the primary opposition, as this Slate interactive guide shows.)

Rather than treat the millions of dollars of Super PAC-funded TV advertising as but one tool in their campaign toolbox, however, it’s becoming clear that the Republican candidates are instead relying upon it as a crutch, an inexpensive proxy for actually building out a campaign. As Nate Silver of the New York Times’ Five Thirty Eight blog noted last month:

The ‘super PACs,’ however, have spent almost all of their money on television advertising — much of it negative — leaving candidates without the robust organizational infrastructures that the Democrats built in 2008 or Mr. Bush did in 2000. Although Mr. Romney’s ‘ground game’ is strong compared with that of his rivals, it is fairly weak by historical standards, with his campaign generally establishing just one field office in each major state, according to his campaign Web site.

How weak are we talking, historically? Well, Romney’s single field office in New Hampshire this year compares to the 16 opened by Hillary Clinton four years ago when she won that state’s Democratic primary. (Obama and John Edwards had 16 and 19 offices there, respectively.) As the 2012 primary calendar has progressed, Romney’s shortchanging of infrastructure has only grown, as his campaign has become increasingly reliant on an electoral strategy of ‘carpet bombing’ each state with negative ads to eke out a narrow victory, only to then abandon it just as quickly. This excellent National Journal article from earlier this month, worth reading in its entirety, peels back the lid on all this ephemeral spending to demonstrate just how little Romney and the Republican Party are getting for their money and how well positioned Obama is in comparison.

[T]he Republican primary so far has largely resembled a traveling road show. Candidates hurriedly establish a presence in the state next to vote before packing up and moving to the following one, leaving the Obama campaign with the run of the place. Obama has eight campaign offices in Iowa, eight in New Hampshire, three in Nevada, and 12 in Florida. The campaign also has six sites in Wisconsin, a state the Republican candidates have thought little about because it doesn’t hold its primary until April 3.        

[…]

Romney’s failure to organize on the ground level at this stage of the election cycle is partly a function of the circumstances of the 2012 campaign, which has unfolded in strikingly different ways from the 2008 Democratic primary.

It’s not just the easy money that’s undermining Romney’s chances to win a general election against Obama, it’s also the relatively weak campaign opposition that he’s only barely beating.

Case in point, Newt Gingrich, who spent much of last summer on a five-star, vanity book promotion tour thinly disguised as a presidential run. (Who can forget his July pledge to fly commercial after his debt-ridden campaign divulged it had spent $500,000 ferrying him on private jets owned by the metaphorically prescient Moby Dick Airways?) His fortunes only improved once the GOP primary’s Ring Cycle of debates got into full swing later that fall and by December he (briefly) claimed the mantle of frontrunner largely because of his performances therein. But as far as campaign infrastructure goes, Gingrich’s belated rise in the polls left him woefully unprepared to do battle in Iowa, leaving him all that more vulnerable to the negative ad blitz Romney’s Super PAC unleashed on him in the days before the caucuses.

Still, Gingrich’s brief flirtation with running a serious presidential campaign, even after his South Carolina primary victory in late January, didn’t last long. His evanescent political success began a precipitous downfall at around the same time—naturally—that the televised debates ended. Now, he’s back to spending money as fast as he can just to keep alive a self-serving twilight campaign (and, according to his February FEC filing, shelling out $75,000 to fly Moby Dick Airways again). Indeed, at this point, he’s all but hustling donors for vacation money—a Politico reporter covering the Gingrich campaign this week noted its lack of outreach to, well, not just registered voters, but humans: “A lifelong animal lover, the former speaker has been scheduling more time at zoos.”

As disorganized and dishonest as Gingrich’s campaign is, though, Rick Santorum’s may be even more so. Just three weeks ago, The New Republic characterized his campaign thusly: “By any conventional measure, there is no Santorum campaign beyond his allied Super PAC and the bare infrastructure that makes his TV ads. Otherwise, it’s just the candidate winging it.” Since then, Santorum has, at least, opened a national campaign office, but his campaign remains so bereft of paid staff that he heavily recruits volunteers to phone bank from their personal homes (as does Romney). Sure he’s scored primary victories in Iowa, thanks to a dogged retail politics strategy that can’t be repeated, and in the South, where his culture war message resonates with evangelicals, but none of this is translatable into any kind of follow-on, general election strategy.

That leaves Mitt, still facing off against two tomato cans for opponents (and one can of corn in Ron Paul). After Romney’s victory in Illinois Tuesday, his Super PAC showed little signs of letting up on its mission, as it reloaded for TV aerial bombardments in Louisiana, Maryland, and Wisconsin. But leaning on his Super PAC so heavily has finally begun to take its toll, apparently, as last month Romney’s own neglected campaign coffers spent money faster than it took it in. Still, even this renewed emphasis on the part of Romney may suffer from a sort of Super PAC hangover effect, since big donors have been courted much more consistently than grassroots supporters throughout his campaign, as the National Journal story details: 

Romney’s small-donor fundraising is weak not only in comparison with his Republican rivals and Obama but also by historical standards, said [Campaign Finance Institute] President Michael Malbin.

 ‘It’s not the only metric for measuring grassroots strength, but it tells you what kind of campaign they are running,’ he said. ‘Governor Romney’s campaign is mostly funded by people who write large checks. He’s not mobilizing the base as he competes for the nomination, though on the day he becomes the presumptive nominee, the entire situation will change.’ 

Count me somewhat skeptical about that last assertion. Romney’s wins have primarily come in spite of, not because of, the support of the party’s most conservative—read passionate—supporters. But even if Republicans of all stripes do enthusiastically rally round Romney by this summer, his campaign’s strategy of favoring Super PACs over the grassroots will leave it months behind the president in terms of building out a crucial ground game in closely fought states like Ohio, Virginia, and Florida. Plus, the remaining primary calendar does Romney no favors, forcing him to mostly fight over negligible turf, as only six of the final 24 contests (Wisconsin, Missouri, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Indiana, and New Mexico) are in what were considered swing states in 2008.

This all redounds to Obama’s favor come November, as well as our democracy’s. Because as important as November’s vote will be with regard to major issues like the economy, health care, reproductive rights, and the social safety net, Obama’s reelection could also prove to be the spark that eventually reverses one of the most corrosive distortions of our political discourse.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com. 

The Mail
Stephen Judge
Mr. Alterman,
I thoroughly enjoyed your article on the state of newspaper media organizations in the United States. Sadly, as most are so enamored with "digital media", few people know that it is traditional media that does essentially all the reporting on issues.  However, I would counsel you to take heart at a bit of information that the financial media seems not to recognize.  If you burrow, or even scratch a bit at the financial statements at the New York Times Company, you will see that the New York Times Paper has actually been growing revenue for 2 quarters now, year over year.  All of this growth has come from "circulation" (i.e. paywall) and has outpaced the rate of decline in advertising.  Therefore, even though the larger NYT holding company is shrinking, the NYT paper is growing again after many years.  That paper is essentially saved.  As paywalls get put up in Boston and the International Herald Tribune, I think we will see revenue growth at the larger holding company within a year, maybe two.  As for the wonderful NYT, take heart!! 

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

My new "Think Again" column is called “Labor and the 'Civil Right' to Organize.” 

Tuesday night I went to an extremely well produced benefit for the Blues Foundation in Memphis designed to celebrate (just one year late) the centennial birthday of the (literally) legendary Robert Johnson. Assembled by the actor Joe Morton, the house band was insanely great. Keb Mo, Colin Linden and James Blood Ulmer on guitar; Sugar Blue on harmonica; Willie Weeks on bass; and Steve Jordan on drums. And the lineup: Sam Moore, Taj Mahal, Todd Rundgren, Elvis Costello, Chuck D., Bettye Lavette, Macy Gray, Sarah Dash, the Roots, the Dough Rollers, Shameika Copeland, Living Colour and Geoffrey Wright.

The peformances were, inevitably, hit or miss. Rundgren was a treat. Sam Moore did a quiet, haunting “Sweet Home Chicago.” Elvis sang “From Four Till Late” also rather quietly explaining, “They don’t allow hellhounds on our trail in England..They worst we get is bloodhounds.” The real revelation of the show, however were the songs played by Keb Mo, who, grown up and gray, gives the impression of carrying Johnson’s ghost inside him. His solo versions “Crossroads Blues” and “Love in Vain” were show highlights sent shivers down my old bones. Show was kinda long, but not at all haphazard, and held together, as I said earlier, by the amazing house band. Give some money to the Blues Foundation here. 

For the high-minded amongst us, I recommend a recent release by Acorn’s documentary line Athena, of IN THEIR OWN WORDS, a series which features interviews and short readings by Sigmund Freud, George Orwell, Ian Fleming, Evelyn Waugh, among many others, and the only surviving voice recording of Virginia Woolf. It’s never been aired in the U.S., and it’s worth your time. Acorn is also now responsible, somehow for the future of FOYLE’S WAR, which is one my household prized discoveries of the past few years. And you can start at the beginning while they are making new ones.

The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vols. 1–3. Edited by Melvyn. P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. 1999 pp.
Far be it from your humble author to even attempt to do justice to this approximately two thousand page collection of essays by some of the most distinguished diplomatic historians alive. What I find most interesting in thumbing through them is the manner in which what historians agree to be true is often at odds with what our political culture insists must be true. The historiography of the Cold War has gone through many phases from orthodoxy to revisionism to post-revisionism (which some call “orthodoxy with footnotes”) and from being an entirely US-Soviet focused field to one that has engaged historians from many nations who write about Europe and what used to be called “the periphery” as if it were part of a shifting center. Of course these authors take advantage of methods of inquiry that were never dreamed of in the respective imaginations of previous generations of historians and remain controversial to many today.   

Volume I (Origins) examines the origins, causes and early years of the Cold War while Volume II (Crises and Détente) examines the developments that made the Cold War into a long-lasting international system during the 1960s and 1970s. Volume II examines the developments that made the Cold War a long-lasting international system during the 1960s and 1970s. And Volume III tries to ask the question of why did it end, why did it end the way it did, and who was responsible?

Some of the most interesting articles I read were those that might be considered furthest afield from traditional lines of inquiry, such as the one on the intellectual history of the Cold War by Jan-Werner Müller, on science and technology by David Reynolds, the world economy by Giovanni Arrighi and others on topics like migration and consumerism by Matthew Connelly and Emily Rosenberg respectively.

Perusing Volume 3, the articles that made the greatest impression on me, given my own interests, so far, were Archie Brown’s essay on "The Gorbachev Revolution" and Matthew Evangelista on the role of transnational organizations. Together (and with others included here) they easily refute the triumphalist narrative that dominates almost all political discussion of the Cold War in the United States as well as the almost religious mythology that has been purposely propagandized by adhererents to the cult of Ronald Reagan.

Gorbachev, Brown argues, instituted a "conceptual revolution as well as systemic change" in great power foreign policy, rejecting entirely the "common simplification" which credits Reagan’s arms build up for this. And Evangelista demonstrates the key role that transnational organizations played in communicating the bases of some of these ideas between East and West, during times when little communication appeared possible. The two arguments complement one another as Brown also emphasizes the role of "informal transnational influences," in creating the “new thinking” that eventually overthrew the regime. Here is the Amazon page for Volume 3. (I’ll have more to say about some of these issues in my Nation column next week.)

Now here’s Reed on a topic dear to all of our hearts, particularly this week of all weeks, followed by a guest review of Netflix “Lilyhammer” by the Renaissance Record Executive, Danny Goldberg.:

Do You Hear What I Hear?
by Reed Richardson
For those in need of a dose of unintentional, yet laugh-out-loud hilarity this week, I offer up Politico’s take on the conservative’s field guide to the Bruce Springsteen catalog.

Published this past Monday, just one day before Bruce’s new album dropped, as the kids say, this piece of shameless journalistic linkbait joins a small pantheon of other laughable examples of this genre. (Yes, that is Tammy Wynette’s classic country ballad “Stand by Your Man” inexplicably listed among the top 50 conservative rock songs.) In this latest version, we once again find right-wingers straining to gain any kind of ideological purchase from which they can plant their flag on a popular artist’s work, and falling mightily on their faces in doing so.

To wit, who knew that Bruce’s music oeuvre is all about emphasizing Randian philosophy and avoiding the dole? Or so says some conservative blogger/comedian named Evan Sayet: 

"But his lyrics, over and over again, mention some of the fundamentals of conservatism—that though life is horrible, it’s not horrible enough for you to need a handout. When he talks about interpersonal relationships, or the responsibilities we have, one on one … he almost—unconscious to himself—has a conservative message."

Talk about taking the ‘fun’ out of fundamentals. And as far as intellectual loopholes go, one could drive a whole lot of Pink Cadillacs through that wonderfully obtuse “almost—unconscious to himself” phrasing. What’s more, I guess I totally misinterpreted Bruce’s total bummer of an underlying message all these years—life in America sucks, but not as bad as it would if those suffering had to further endure something like, say, free, government-subsidized health care. 

One Mike Brownfield, who works at the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation (from whence Obama’s gravest threat to individual liberty ever known also originated), shows his capacity for conservative projection with a similarly wonkish take on what is perhaps Springsteen’s best-known song:

"When I listen to ‘Born to Run,’ I’m hearing about a man who is struggling to find happiness, not a song about someone who is trying to find happiness and wants the government to step in."

It’s most assuredly also not a song about trying to find happiness amid the joyous invisible hand of capitalism, but I digress. I suppose we now know why Brownfield thinks the lyrics don’t go: ‘’Cause baby, I’m just a scared and lonely [free] rider.’ Because, dammit, that that kind of individual-mandate thinking is just a trapdoor for the federal government’s tyrannical abuse of the Commerce Clause. 

To find out how academia might treat such a stupid musical premise, Politico readers also get to hear from a professor at Columbia Muhlenberg College, who teaches a course on TV, Media, and Culture Springsteen, meaning that, as someone once told Alvy Singer, “his insights have a great deal of validity:”

"[Springsteen] references flags; he references Jesus; he references God. His approach to lyrics, from a political sense, often uses conservative-tinged words that might resonate with voters who are by no means liberal."

Please to be stopping with the shallow, non-contextual, throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks analysis, Mr. Borick, it’s sounds ridiculous. And it makes one long for Bruce to step in Marshall McLuhan-style… But to be fair, Borick does reappear later in the article and sort of backs into the truth about conservative ideology in talking about the themes from the first single of Bruce’s new album, “We Take Care of Our Own.”

"‘This is very much a message that you hear echoed by conservatives—responsibility for one’s self and immediate family,’ said Borick."

Hard to argue with that last statement, I admit. I mean, just look at current Republican presidential frontwalker Mitt Romney. If anyone has any questions about which constituencies he does or doesn’t favor, his hardcore base of wealthy voters, mega-rich Super PAC funders, and self-enriching policy proposals should erase any doubt. Maybe Springsteen really is subtly making common cause with a fellow supply-sider here? 

Maybe not. Even the Politico author can’t miss the song’s accusatory allusions to the Bush administration and its inexcusable response to Hurricane Katrina. “[N]ot your typical conservative fare,” the article concedes, in an understatement akin to saying Katrina was not your typical rainstorm. 

Of course, Springsteeen is not your typical musician either. He’s a master storyteller. Someone who’s spent his entire career expertly evoking the experiences of everyday Americans. And while his music has the power to inspire or affect everyone differently based on their own individual interpretation, one can’t ignore as mere coincidence that during Springsteen’s four-decade career his songs have slowly taken on a harder, more complex, and even desperate tone. That’s because life has too, for far too many Americans.

So, one might ask, how do conservatives deconflict their passion for Springsteen’s music and its clear embrace of a competing narrative about the increasing inequality in our country? The answer, we find, is as simple as it is symbolic about the broader, disconnected state of conservative political thought right now: 

"‘I’m going to embrace it as it fits with my way of thinking’ […] Sayet said, admitting that while there is an alternative explanation for ["We Take Care of Our Own"], he’s going to listen to it the way he wants to hear it."

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com. 

Lilyhammer
By Danny Goldberg
Although the American advertising for “Lilyhammer” seeks to exploit Steve Van Zandt’s previous role as Silvio Dante, the aesthetic of the series is more evocative of “Portlandia” than “The Sopranos.”

The publicity around “Lilyhammer” has focused largely on the novelty of the internet service Netflix being an originator of programming in the United States rather than a secondary source, the series was originally produced for Norwegian television and the delight of it is how quirkily Scandenavian the series is. The majority of the dialogue is in Norwegian with English subtitles although the protagonist, a New York gangster named Frank Tagliano played by Steve Van Zandt speaks in English. His character is depicted as being able to understand enough Norwegian to get by.

The premise is a pretty simple “fish out of water” gimmick. Tagliano’s life is threatened by a new crime boss so he rats him out to he government in return for being put in a version of the witness protection program. He chooses Lillehammer, Norway because he’d liked Winter Olympics broadcasts he seen years earlier. Why the spelling of the name of the series differs from that of the city is never revealed.

Tagliano’s new Norwegian name is Giovanni Henrikson and the series created and written by Anne Bjørnstad and Eilif Skodvin, (Van Zandt shares writing and production credits) revolves a lot around gently lampooning assorted politically correct Norwegian cultural and governmental practices. The natives seem to envy the ability of a fantasy mobster to get things done. 

There are times when the series is a little disquieting for admirers of Scandenavian socialism. I kept hoping that Van Zandt’s character would learn to internalize some Scandinavian communitarian impulses but there isn’t much of that. As with the experience of empathizing Tony Soprano, I felt a little weird at times rooting for an amoral thug but since “Henrickson” is a benign Norwegian’s notion of such a thug he has enough of a heart of gold to make him a protagonist one can root for with relatively little guilt. The one character he kills is a sociopathic violent monster who kidnaps his girlfriend’s young son. 

The plot is nothing special but the glimpses of Norwegian culture are far more quirky and entertaining than what can be found in the films based on the Stieg Larsson novels.

The revelation is that Van Zandt can actually act. His character in the Sopranos was so wooden it was never clear whether it was the performer or the producer who was responsible. Van Zandt has a wide range that includes epathy, nuance, romance and a much more subtle with than Silvio Dante ever let him show.

Marian Saastad Ottesen as a (possibly) single mother who becomes his romantic interest has an understated glamour charm and that will likely translate well into a global career. “Lilyhammer” neither attempts nor achieves the gravitas of “The Sopranos” or other classic American cable series of recent years. But it’s funny and smart and unique and demonstrates beyond doubt that Van Zandt’s improbably career has many interesting chapters ahead.

And as someone who prefers to watch TV series, one episode after the other, I appreciate that Netflix released all eight episodes at the same time. 

The mail:
Dr. Howard Brooks
Philadelphia, PA
Eric Alterman writes, “If a Jew-hater somewhere, inspired perhaps by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, sought to invent an individual who symbolizes all the anti-Semitic clichés…” He goes on to characterize Sheldon Adelson as Fagin the Jew to Gingrich’s Oliver Twist. Then he goes on (sorrowfully) to announce the death of that prejudice. “The bugaboo of anti-Semitic accusation is almost nowhere to be found." Oh it’s here alright. But we have internalized it. The author of this screed himself takes up the old, time-honored tropes. He tries to discredit Adelson by listing some "allegations" ("bribery", "prostitution", "organized crime"....). His contributions to Gingrich's Super Pac are stigmatized as a "perversion" of democracy rather than an exercise of democratic free speech. Surely, the Supreme Court would support this exercise of Free Speech even if, like the author, it disagreed with its point of view. That's the point of this Right, isn't it? Oh, and Adelson funds an (Israeli) newspaper to express his point of view? Yo “The Nation”, you got a problem with that? The author also reports Adelson's agreement with Gingrich's domestic policy as "barely concealed racist hatemongering". A bit over the top, no? He then characterizes a pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear weapons facilities as "yet another potentially disastrous pre-emptive attack". More “endless Israeli aggression"? Is he conveniently forgetting Ozrick in Iraq and the North Korean reactor in Syria destroyed by Israel? Not the same sized task, to be sure, but successful with little blowback. The author concludes "given the near-complete disappearance of this wholly respectable American prejudice"... Don't worry Alterman, Anti-Semitism is alive and well here on “the Left”, and when convenient on “the Right” as well. 

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.