Eric Alterman | The Nation

My new “Think Again” column is called “Is America Getting More Conservative?” and it's here.

Richard Thompson live, in person and on bluray:
I saw Richard Thompson do one of three “all request” shows at City Winery. It was a particularly engaging affair. Thompson sort of did the requests that had been deposited in a bowl beforehand, and sort of didn’t depending on whether he felt like it. Some of them he did even though they were pretty silly, including McCartney’s “Blackbird” and Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.” He was playing solo and not all the sightlines were great, but it’s ok, because Thompson is not so pretty to look at, and the sound was crisp and clear particularly on his guitar. The song selection turned out to be pretty excellent too. There’s a new Eagle Rock Entertainment's release both on DVD and bluray of Thompson’s band called “Live At Celtic Connections.” It’s got twenty songs on it and comes in at nearly two and a half hours. The sound on bluray is killer. The song selection leans heavily on Dream Attic, his last album, which was recorded live, and the second set does the catalogue back to 1972, and is, I suppose, a matter of taste. You get “Wall of Death” and “Tear Stained Letter” but I could have used “The Dimming of the Day” in either place but nobody asked me. The bonus features include two extra songs filmed at the 2011 Cambridge Folk Festival: "Uninhabited Man" and "Johnny's Far Away."

Now here’s Reed:

Poll Dancing
by Reed Richardson
The American press has long been infatuated with the allure of campaign polls, and understandably so. Thanks to their headline-ready horserace numbers, reams of topline data to be further parsed and charted, and the public’s natural curiosity in predictions about the future, polls satisfy almost every journalistic need an editor or producer might have on a slow news day. (And let’s not overlook the increasingly salient fact that, unless your news organization commissioned the poll, reporting such a story requires minimal resources.) But this symbiotic relationship has a downside too; one that is growing more insidious with every election and, if left unchecked, could start to erode the very foundations of our Constitution. 

Ironically, the rise of modern public opinion polling can be traced back to perhaps the worst media-polling blunder in our nation’s electoral history. On the eve of the 1936 presidential vote, the magazine The Literary Digest—just as it had for the five previous elections—released its public opinion poll of the race. Gleaned from an amazing 2.4 million reader responses, the magazine confidently predicted Kansas Republican Alf Landon would sweep incumbent Democrat Franklin Roosevelt out of the White House, winning 55 percent of the popular vote and 370 electoral votes. The election, to put it mildly, didn’t pan out this way—Roosevelt’s nationwide landslide (he even won Kansas) left Landon with a measly eight electoral votes.

It’s easy to look back now and laugh at The Literary Digest’s woeful prediction as mere hackneyed guesswork. (The poll’s inherent flaws are rooted in relying upon voluntary responses from a non-randomized pool of middle and upper-class voters.) But it’s important to realize that, at the time, the Digest’s presidential poll was considered cutting-edge and had proven itself extremely accurate, having correctly chosen the presidential victor since 1916 and predicted to within one percentage point the final popular vote tally in the 1932 election. 

The public furor over the incident redounded to the benefit of one George Gallup. His new, more scientific polling methods had led him to the conclusion—months before the actual vote—that Roosevelt would win in a walk. And this thinking would forever change the way polls approached both the public and public figures.

That is to say, it also changed the way the public and public figures approached polls. A mere five years after that landmark 1936 presidential prediction, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was already sounding very much like a modern-day politician, lamenting the “the temperamental atmosphere of the Gallup poll, always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature.” For decades this mindset remained entrenched in both the media and political ruling classes. The madding crowd’s fickle and often fair-weather opinion, in other words, need not be heeded in between Election Days.

Though polling remained rather limited even during the Watergate era— the vaunted CBS News/New York Times poll was only conducted four times a year in 1977—it nonetheless fit in with the media’s evolution toward a more aggressive, bottom-up approach to news coverage. Perhaps not coincidentally, the rise of Bill Clinton during the 1992 presidential campaign first prompted Gallup to commit to the idea of ongoing tracking polls. By the time of Clinton’s impeachment six years later, the growing online newshole coupled with the public’s striking disconnect with the pundit class’s disapproval of Clinton pushed some pollsters into weekly tracking. And by the time the 2000 presidential election rolled around, daily pulse-taking during the final campaign stretch made its debut, albeit with extremely volatile results.

In the aftermath of that election, some in the media became increasingly suspect of polling’s journalistic news value as well as their sheer volume, as this American Journalism Review essay from early 2001 attests.

[Marvin Kalb, executive director of the Washington office of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy], says the increasing use of tracking polls ‘represents less than the best of contemporary journalism—putting it most charitably.’

[…]

[A] count of polls available in the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research database shows about 130 taken in the two months preceding the 2000 election. In the two months before the 1980 election, there were about 20.

Once again, in hindsight, these complaints look prescient, if rather quaint in terms of scale. Four years later, ABC’s daily presidential tracking poll upped the ante again. Then, in 2008, prompted by the heavyweight Democratic primary contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton, Gallup started its daily political tracking poll in March. By the time that November arrived, no fewer than seven different national tracking polls were in the field.

But even that pales in comparison to this election cycle, which has become one of endless, ongoing polling. Forget the old adage that polls are mere snapshots. Their now unceasing frequency allows the media to weave together a day-by-day, if not hour-by-hour, moving narrative of the race. Indeed, in just the past two months, one can count nearly 90 different national poll releases on the GOP primary campaign (roughly two-thirds of these come from Gallup’s daily tracker) and more than six dozen state-specific polls in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida. And this total leaves out the dozens of other poll releases on President Obama’s job approval (tracked daily by Rasmussen Reports) and his head-to-head matchups with the various GOP primary candidates. 

Right now, we sit in what amounts to the Siberian wasteland of the GOP campaign calendar—the last debate was fully three weeks ago and the next primary isn’t for another 11 days. As such, this steady barrage of polls offers the media a convenient lifeline, a ready-made way to fill the ever voracious maw of airtime, blogs, and Twitter feeds. In effect, these polls—whether they be of the national, state, or head-to-head vs. Obama variety—represent hundreds of little proxy elections, each one judged to be worthy of being breathlessly reported, Tweeted, and analyzed for larger meaning.

Therein lies the danger, however. What might otherwise just be statistical noise in one poll now gets picked up and amplified by the campaign trail press corps and the punditocracy. Unwilling to be late to the zeitgeist, the establishment media finds itself all too eager to interpret the latest blip up or down in the polls as the sign of some larger, deeper shift in the populace’s political thinking, whether it’s real or not.

But by broadcasting and highlighting these supposed swings in opinion, the press runs the risk of distorting the very perceptions of the public they're purported to be objectively measuring—akin to the “observer effect” in physics. With each new poll and its subsequent coverage, the media begins to create something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby a politician deemed as “surging” (see Santorum, Rick) receives more positive press coverage and, in turn, becomes more attractive to the public, all the while someone whose momentum is seen as slowing (see Romney, Mitt) gets more critical and dismissive coverage, which can then further sour the public on his candidacy.

By ratcheting up the frequency of these polls and the coverage devoted to them, the press fosters a volatile discourse that is more prone to radical shifts in public opinion. Certainly that looks to be the phenomenon affecting the GOP presidential primary, as the right-hand side of this RealClear Politics chart of the last year’s polling attests. Even the candidates are wise to this newly heightened climate, as Newt Gingrich on Wednesday referred to the “Space Mountain” nature of this primary campaign’s many wild poll swings.

Of course, the tenacity, if not the consistency, with which Republican primary voters can’t yet abide giving Mitt Romney their party’s presidential nomination can’t be wholly blamed on polls and the media. His political baggage can apparently make almost anyone appear to be an attractive alternative to conservatives, no matter how unappealing they are to the rest of the country. Still, Romney’s current campaign struggles are rooted in the failure of his underlying “electability” argument, which relies upon a similar, poll-based intellectual foundation—this notion that what most people think or agree on is always the best course of action.

Writ large, this policy-by-what’s-most-popular approach is precisely the tyranny of the majority that the Founders hedged against when writing the Constitution and, more specifically, the Bill of Rights. All too often, however, the media has become susceptible to this argument when it applies to fundamental issues that shouldn’t be decided by the whims of majoritarian rule. And to me, it’s what makes the ‘most people agree’ defense of Obama’s just and honorable federal contraceptive mandate just as wobbly as those arguments that justify his troubling Gitmo policy and predilection for legally unaccountable drone strikes.

Just where this slippery slope can lead our country will be on full display in my home state of New Jersey this coming week. When the state Assembly joins the state Senate in passing a gay marriage bill, my not-so-esteemed governor Chris Christie will undoubtedly veto it, as promised. And by way of excusing this behavior, he will once again fall back to the notion that the state should settle the issue through a referendum and, as political cover, he will cite a few opinion polls, which show a slim majority favor the bill.

In our democracy, however, minority rights are never something to be granted or denied by popular vote. Sadly, my own hometown newspaper’s editorial page disagrees. It believes that those few positive public opinion polls that Christie not-so-innocently cites should convince the Democrats in the state legislature to drop their “mistrust” of the “will of the people.” (What could go wrong? Just ask the people of California.) But when our media invests too much stock in polls and public opinion as the best way to guide our politics, it’s perhaps not surprising that we end up hearing tendentiously anti-democratic arguments like this: “Theoretically, rights should be afforded equally. But pragmatically, history is the struggle for securing rights against political opponents.”

Indeed, our nation did have to fight a war of the latter, but history tells us that what compelled the Founders to revolt in the first place was their unshakable belief in the former. Indeed, we’ve fought too long and too hard aspiring to those theoretical ideals to now fall victim to the notion that 51% of us always know what is best for our country or its citizens. It’s a lesson the press would do well to remember, especially since its poll numbers don’t look too good right now.

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

The Mail:
Ken Waltzer

East Lansing

Seems to me that a single case -- the popular response to Sheldon Adelson and Newt Gingrich -- proves little about the ostensible disappearance of antisemitism in the United States, and other singular cases -- like the widespread entrance into mainstream language of the idea of a secret Jewish power manipulating American foreign policy -- suggest something quite different. Yes, the response to Wall Street malfeasance creating the recession suggests the same thing your article suggests -- antisemitism wasn't and isn't the frame, antisemitism is down and declining; and yet isolationist strains and neo-realist complaints, from Ron Paul to Mearsheimer and Walt, have little problem renewing classic antisemitic themes....

The reality is thicker, considerably more complex, than you purport it to be.  There is declining antisemitism and there is also increasing antisemitism. Both exist together.  The really challenging issue is to sort this out and explain it.

Eric replies:
I’m not sure I disagree with any of the above, except in the particulars.  The phenomenon is certainly there. Its significance is the question and I think that is deeply overr-ated. Anyway, It’s hard to do justice to such nuance in a nine-hundred something word column. I thought the phenomenon about which I wrote was worth pointing out, and was something I had not seen anywhere else.

Michael Green 

Las Vegas
Dr. A., now you've done it.  In Las Vegas, our best columnist is John L. Smith of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and when he wrote a book telling what Adelson has done and been accused of, and Adelson sued him for libel and drove him into bankruptcy.  So, expect a call.  We have some law firms out here that have benefited greatly from Adelson always suing people.

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

My new Think Again column is called "When Books Disappear" and it's here.

And I appear to be in the news: (From the NY Daily News, at a luncheon for The Giants on Wednesday):

While the luncheon brought out a bipartisan crowd, there was a little Republican-Democrat friction when the Nation columnist Eric Alterman approached Bill O’Reilly to thank him for apologizing on-air in 2004 for calling Alterman a “Fidel Castro confidant.” (On a later show, O’Reilly sarcastically claimed he was “foolin’ around.”) Alterman says “O’Reilly responded by twice saying, “Get away from me,” and eventually summoning a handler to intervene. O’Reilly told us there was “no run-in,” but Alterman said, “I’m beginning to think that maybe he wasn’t all that sorry.”

And while this was not in the news, this really did happen Wednesday night:

There was a reception in Soho for Steve VZ's new Netflix series. I had a close friend in town, who happened to have been my volunteer intern for the Bruce book, but is now a macher in the TV biz and he took me out to dinner. Since it was his business to develop such shows, he did not want to “work” and so we did not make the screening but as I thought it would be interesting to see who was at the party, I said let's eat down there.

So we did and when we were done, we walked by the hotel and the screening wasn't over, so I asked the girl at the door if I could see the list of who had come to it so I could decide whether to wait the ten minutes until the reception started. I couldn't believe it when I saw the name “Bruce Springsteen” with a check next to it. 

So we went downstairs and Steve was waiting for it to end and we waited with him and then everyone came out and Bruce and Steve took photos with Tony Bennett (and David Chase and other Soprano types) and then I waited and introduced myself  and thanked him for the lyric permissions I had gotten from him for my new book, (of which I’m pretty sure he had no idea) and he said "Hey, thanks for all your terrific writing in The Nation all these years" (or something like that) and then we talked for about 10-12 minutes, about lots of stuff, including our daughter’s respective tastes in music—I told him she was much bigger on Kanye and Jay Z than on him--and happily, I refrained from gushing but did find a way to congratulate him on being the only goy who had made it into my kid's Bat Mitzvah service.

It was the second time I've met him but the first time we spoke and it couldn't have gone better. I broke off the conversation after telling him I didn't want to talk to him too long lest he say something that might screw up my relationship to the music. He liked that too, I think. 

That’s all. Great guy, Bruce…. He’s playing the Apollo for Sirius Radio on March 9 if anyone has tickets and wants to take me. If not maybe you should buy the book.

Alter-reviews:
Jaimo’s Jasssz Band and Joe Henry:
I also saw two shows this week. The first was the new Jaimoe's Jasssz Band at the Gramercy Theater and it was a lot of fun. Did you know that Jaimoe toured with Otis Redding before he became the original drummer for the Allman Brothers Band. We’ll be seeing them a couple of times in March, but in the meantime, this Jasssz Band is a really fine blues band with a heavy jazz flavor. To be honest, it is dominated by the great Junior Mack, who is lead singer, songwriter and a great lead guitarist. The song selection was first rate, leaning on the same stuff that’s on their new album, “Renaissance Man” and including especially "Melissa," "Rainy Night In Georgia" and "Leaving Trunk.” It is, by my count, the fifth fine band to come out of the current Allman lineup and further makes my case that they are the single most virtuosic group of musicians playing anything, anywhere right now, (especially if you include Greg’s amazing voice). Read about the Jaimo record here.

Then Tuesday night I went to City Winery to catch a show by Joe Henry (with Marc Ribot joining on guitar). The entire show, or at least Joe’s part was dedicated to Joe ‘s new record, Reverie, an all acoustic album recorded in Joe’s basement with sounds like birds chirping through the windows to the ticking and stuff like that. It’s intelligent, moving and challenging in equal measure, as all Henry’s music is, but it’s also ironic since he is best known as a producer for people ranging from (my buddy) Ornette Coleman, Elvis Costello, Ani DiFranco, the forthcoming Bonnie Raitt cd and his close relation and occasional meal-ticket, Madonna. Ribot is all over the record and Tom Waits does a turn too. What’s not to like? More about Joe here.

Now here’s Reed:

Mitt Romney’s Sorry Foreign Policy
by Reed Richardson
That Mitt Romney, the current GOP presidential frontrunner, called his thinly veiled 2010 campaign treatise “No Apology” should come as no surprise. Though it was no doubt written before Obama’s first year in office had yet to conclude, the book and its title—which not so subtly draws upon a stubborn conservative myth about this President’s foreign policy—perfectly captures the rabidly reflexive nature of the modern Republican Party.Of course, with the economy still struggling to dig its way out of a massive hole and unemployment and jobs foremost on voter’s minds, the Republican primaries have spent little time debating foreign policy. (Some debates have skipped the topic altogether.) In many ways, though, what effort they do expend on foreign policy is ripped right from the same Obama-can’t-do-anything-right playbook. And Mitt Romney is, by no means, an exception, as his latest stump speech now includes a throwaway line that the president’s foreign policy amounts to little more than “pretty please.”

But the real conundrum facing Romney and the other GOP pretenders to the throne isn’t that Obama’s foreign policy has some notable successes. Or that the current administration’s actions, whether withdrawing from Iraq or fighting terrorism and scaling down the war in Afghanistan enjoy popular support from the public. It’s that their campaign trail criticisms have, as their foundation, little actual policy differences behind them.

Case in point, the killing of Osama Bin Laden. It should come as no surprise that the latest version of Candidate Romney offers up to Obama faint praise for taking out the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. While he did offer begrudging approval last May—he couldn’t bring himself to mention Obama’s name—this past December Romney was blithely telling MSNBC: “I think other presidents and other candidates like myself would do exactly the same thing.” Setting aside the often-overlooked fact that Obama had to lay the groundwork for that moment two years earlier, by restarting a covert program aimed at finding Bin Laden that George W. Bush had abandoned, it’s worth pointing out that the 2008 release of Candidate Romney was singing a different tune. For, back then, when Obama was pledging to unilaterally enter Pakistan to kill Bin Laden if such a chance arose—which it did and he did—it was Romney who was all about asking for permission: “I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours… I don’t think those kinds of comments help in this effort to draw more friends to our effort.”

Good luck hearing someone from the traditional media confront Romney on this raging hypocrisy, however, because this notion among conservatives that the whole Bin Laden raid was some kind of happy coincidence is now slowly but surely being embedded into the Beltway media’s consciousness. For example, it’s no coincidence that, as part of her criticism of Obama’s recent State of the Union address, Washington Post columnist and Romney consigliere Jennifer Rubin had the gall to write: “After an easy applause line for killing Osama bin Laden, Obama then plunged into his economic defense.”

See what she did there? When I first read that sentence, I immediately had flashbacks to this old Saturday Night Live bit, and wondered if Rubin hadn’t initially practiced the above sentence by mumbling the words “applause line for” under her breath. By the time Romney debates Obama next fall, others in the media might be going so far as to suggest that Bin Laden somehow accidentally left his address on Leon Panetta’s voicemail and then willingly threw himself in front of Seal Team Six’s gunfire, all in an effort to avoid his later, inevitable assassination under a new Romney administration.

Indeed, on issue after issue, Romney’s shameless proclivity for trying to have his foreign policy cake and eat it too manifests itself time and again.

-He blasts Obama’s full withdrawal from Iraq as “sheer ineptitude” yet calls it “fortunate” the troops are now home and conveniently lacks the courage of his convictions to send them back if he were to become President.

-He repeatedly criticizes White House policy toward Iran while calling for “crippling sanctions,” kind of like the policies Obama and our European allies put in place this past week, which just so happened to have spurred Ahmadinejad back to thenegotiating table and which went unmentioned by the Romney campaign.

-He bemoaned that Obama was “leading from behind” and “following the French into Libya.” Yet when the regime of longtime dictator Qaddhafi finally crumbled under the dual pressures of a committed ground rebellion and a U.S./European air coalition, the Romney campaign’s first instinct was to bash the president and absolve him of any credit.

-Romney willingly joins in the GOP chorus in an attempt to out-butch Obama and position him as soft on terror. In fact, this administration has decimated Al Qaeda, thanks in part to a ramped-up policy of CIA drone strikes that—far from being “judicious” or asking “pretty please”—routinely tramples upon the sovereignty of foreign nations and has resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties.

-He dismisses as “hiding from reality” Obama’s 2013 Pentagon budget, which, absent a war in Iraq and with a dwindling role in Afghanistan, would trim 100,000 active-duty personnel from the military. Seemingly out of little more than spite, Romney instead calls for an increase of 100,000 personnel instead.

-In his campaign literature and debate rhetoric, Romney often dismisses Obama’s foreign policy decisions as predicated on an idea that “America is in decline.” But the president very publicly believes and espouses the reverse to be true.

-And just this week, he labels as “misguided” and “naïve” the Obama administration’s new deadline for exiting the wildly unpopular war in Afghanistan, yet when Obama’s predecessor proposed a similar timeline for leaving Iraq, Romney contorted himself into supporting timetables based on caveat that the White House and Iraqis keep it a secret from the public.

As one might expect of this generation’s political Zelig, a list of Mitt Romney’s hypocritical foreign policy positions runs much longer than the few I have documented above. Now, I would love for Romney to have to fully answer for any one of his aforementioned bouts of shameless anti-Obama grandstanding. But I’d settle for the press just laying bare his campaign’s single greatest foreign policy paradox—that his primary critique of Obama’s domestic policy and prescription for reinvigorating our nation’s economy both rest upon on a fundamental misreading of the state of the world. 

Romney continually pillories Obama in his stump speech by saying: “I want you to remember when our White House reflected the best of who we are, not the worst of what Europe has become.” Europe, in this case, being Romney’s not so subtle stand-in for notions like “elite” and “foreigner,” both of which bring with them well-known responses among a public that has endured years of Birther conspiracies and numerous storylines about the president’s so-called arrogance.

What’s most striking, however, is that, once again, Romney has it completely, utterly backwards. It’s his own misguided economic package that takes the “worst of what Europe has become” and tries to apply it here. His plan for massive tax cuts for the rich and deep cuts to the federal budget would not only balloon the deficit and shred the social safety net, it would embrace the exact kind of austerity measures that have sent European economies tumbling back into recession.

Obama’s stimulative economic policies, though tepid, have at least enabled the country to reverse course and fashion together an unmistakable, though weak, recovery. For a Romney administration to come in next year and impose even more draconian spending cuts would be to risk plunging our still vulnerable nation back into fiscal crisis. That Romney would so misread the lessons of the rest of the world in order to advance a political agenda that only benefits the 1 percent speaks to how far the modern Republican Party has sunk. That he would undertake such reckless policies, both here and abroad, unapologetically, doesn’t make them any less perilous. In the end, it will be the American people who will be sorry.  

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

The Mail:
Ben Willis

Queens

Dear Alterman,
 
Over the years I have had my issues with some of your opinions (most notably Ralph Nader, and your unwavering support for the Democratic party), but now I understand why you write the things you do. Mozart over Beethoven?!?!?!? Are you serious? Mozart was a lyrical genius. Every musical idea he wrote was melody and no doubt his appeal is universal, yet his compositions never reached the transcendence of those by Ludwig van Beethoven. I challenge you to compare any of Mozart's works for string quartets or chamber ensembles with Beethoven's late quartets. Ops. 127, 130, 131, 132, 135 and the glorious Grosse Fuge revolutionized music and can be heard not only as romantic works but as precursors to the modern age where the sound of the notes/chords themselves are as important as to how those musical ideas fit within the hierarchy of the key or the rigidity of phrase forms that mark Mozart's oeuvre. There is also the slight issue of the position of Beethoven's symphonies within the pantheon of great repertoire of the "classical" music. Not even Mozart's "Jupiter" can compare with any one of LVB's more well known symphonies such as; the "Eroica" (3rd), the iconic 5th, the Pastoral (6th), the Tanze (7th), and the glorious Ninth. (Not to mention the underrated 8th and the almost unknown Missa Solemnis which is considered Beethoven's Tenth). Ok, Mozart has his operas and Beethoven only has one. Mozart has his twenty-something piano concerts. But Beethoven's five are outstanding and the sonatas for Hammerklavier are light years ahead of anything Mozart wrote for the soloist.
  I thank you for the review of the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra. Some of my friends, including Claudia, were there playing that night. I also know Scott Ligon of NRBQ from way back in his Peoria days. I'm glad you're covering these events. But please save the missive about Mozart over Beethoven for some other forum.


Eric replies:
Dear Ben, 
I’m sorry. I should have pointed out that I’m a complete philistine when it comes to such things. I’m sure you’re right (and I’m not being sarcastic) but to be fair to me, I mentioned only as way of mentioning the Shaw/Shakespeare thing.

Asher Fried
NY, NY
Reed: I don’t think Obama is so naïve. I think he’s decided that he’ll be Mr. Conciliatory Compromiser and let the GOP look like the hardliners.  He really doesn’t believe he’ll achieve his goals by compromise; it’s just a posture that suits him. When he states he is for certain goals: public option, or the government’s right to negotiate drug prices or re-importation of drugs, he is telegraphing what he is willing to cave in on. He never expected to achieve those goals so he’d rather look like he is compromising by giving up items he deems important [knowing they were unachievable because of the GOP hardliners] to get agreement on anything.  Thus when the GOP threatened the government shut down, Obama caved on renewing the high-end Bush tax cuts, but he did get things he wanted.

It’s a tactic; it works to the extent that the President can get some things accomplished. The problem is that after a while unless he is willing to draw an absolute line in the sand somewhere the GOP push back will eventually get him nothing.

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

My new Think Again column is called  “The Tea Party: Struggling for Political Relevance” and it’s here.

The tsoris that forced me to write last week’s Forward column continues in lots of places, most of them foolish. What I found craziest about the Josh Block/Ben Smith accusations was the notion that there is any relationship whatever between alleged anti-Semitism and the desire to resist a potentially disastrous attack on Iran. Block was quite explicit about his desire to shut down all debate about Iran’s nuclear program with his McCarthyite accusations, even though nobody really knows, including the IAEA and the US Director of Central Intelligence.  But that’s not my point: My point is that both nations are going to be competing for the “Best Foreign Film” Oscar this year, Israel with the truly excellent Footnote, and Iran with the truly great A Separation. And the latter is going to win, despite the fact that Hollywood is approximately a billion times more Jewish than it is Iranian. So Josh Block and his friends might wish to start planning to call all of Hollywood anti-Semitic in preparation.

Now here’s Reed:


The 27 Percenters
by Reed Richardson
Much has been made in the past few months—and rightly so—about how our nation’s political system all too often operates merely as a lever that the 1 percent use to control the other 99. But what’s just as important to understand is that there’s another minority cohort out there exerting an out-sized influence on our democracy. And though this subset of our citizenry can be reliably counted on to be either spectacularly misinformed or willfully ignorant on any particular issue, their opinions are nonetheless being allowed to shift the center of gravity of our country’s discourse. 

Now the notion that some number of Americans will always fail to exercise any intellectual capacity beyond that of a sea cucumber when it comes to politics is admittedly not a new one. “Some of the people,” as Abraham Lincoln famously noted more than 150 years ago, can be fooled “all of the time.” But it wasn’t until six years ago, in an insightful post by blogger John Rogers, that someone finally put an exact figure to this phenomenon. During a discussion of, coincidentally, Barack Obama’s campaign for the U.S. Senate the year before, Rogers notes that Obama’s opponent, the self-immolating, out-of-state, unstable candidate Alan Keyes, was still able to attract 27 percent of the electorate:

They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.

Of course, picking a rather random data point and bestowing upon it such broad political significance sounds very much like the kind of irrational, conspiratorial behavior that Rogers himself is trying to quantify. Except that, like a bad penny, this 27 percent figure stubbornly shows up in our recent political discourse again and again. 

- Remember the level at which President Bush’s free-falling job approval ratings finally had their hard landing in the summer of 2008 and roughly remained through Obama’s election?

- Or how about the number of people who, fully a year into Obama’s presidency, still thought ACORN stole the election for him, despite a victory margin of more than 9.5 million votes?

- Halfway into Obama’s term, that same percentage of people remained stubbornly in the thrall of the “Birther” crowd.

- On the eve of the 2010 midterm elections, there was the number cropping up in a poll that asked registered voters if political quitter and intellectual paperweight Sarah Palin was “qualified” to be president.

- Last month, it was the ratio of Americans who characterized themselves as supporters of the Tea Party.

- Earlier this week, it was the percentage of respondents saying Obama has accomplished “little or nothing” during his term so far.

- And just this past Wednesday, guess how many Americans thought Republicans in Congress were genuinely trying to “work with Obama”, despite countless examples of legislative brinksmanship to the contrary?

Now, it’s not fair to say that all these surveys and polls are capturing the same set of people time after time. But while the demographic composition of all the 27 percenters listed above no doubt varies from issue to issue, the thinking that informs those arguments is very much the same.

Are these people really ‘crazy’ as Rogers asserts? Probably not. But his broader, rhetorical point is made—they are likely to be ‘dead-enders’ and ‘true believers,’ people who simply have no capacity to endure cognitive dissonance or curiosity in learning basic facts. The implication being that if you peel away the rational pulp of our body politic, the one quarter or so that’s left represents the hard, unthinking pit of the American psyche.

In our country’s defense, this ratio of is likely the same all around the world. What’s unique and unfortunate about our situation, however, is that, increasingly, one of our two political parties has decided it is in their and our nation’s best interests to tailor public policies around this irrational, unyielding worldview. Crackpots and conspiracy theorists get to enjoy the same freedoms as the rest of us, but that doesn’t mean they should be afforded the responsibility of crafting legislation and reshaping the whole of society in their image.

Nevertheless, that is exactly the strategy the modern Republican Party is engaging in. What other conclusion can one draw when, for every example from above, there’s a corresponding effort from within the highest ranks of the GOP to embrace it and enact it?

- Re ACORN: The Republicans openly kill the organization in 2010 through intense Congressional bullying, despite no proof of actual voter fraud.

- Re Birthers: Republican lawmakers in more than a dozen states and the U.S. Congress introduce birth certificate-verification legislation since Obama’s inauguration.

- Re Palin: Despite a large majority of the public doubting her fitness as a politician, GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich announces this week that she would play a ‘major role’ in his administration.

- Re Tea Party: Republican lawmakers kowtow to its extreme ideology in this past summer’s debt ceiling fight, pushing the economy to the brink of disaster.

- Re “little or nothing” accomplished: The Republican presidential candidates manipulate this displeasure with Obama among primary voters by counter-intuitively feeding them an apocalyptic taleof a tyrannical second term.

- Re “work with Obama”: The Republican Senate Minority Leader publicly states that making Obama a one-term president is “my single most important political goal along with every active Republican in the country.”

These are but a few of the most notable examples of ‘27-percenter’ thinking driving Republican policy, of course. The ongoing Republican presidential primary can provide almost daily examples of this same phenomenon. And while catering to one’s hardcore political base is part and parcel of a primary campaign, the remaining candidates, including frontrunner Mitt Romney, show little appetite for tacking back to the center policy-wise once the general election begins in earnest later in the spring.

Indeed, just as the Republican-dominated 112^thCongress demonstrated yesterday and nearly every other day it has been in session, the extreme goals and detached-from-reality ideals of those hardcore constituents now dominate the party’s orthodoxy. Compromise is simply no longer a part of the current Republican Party’s lexicon because the GOP has thoroughly abandoned its moderate base.

All too often, however, the press and the punditocracy don’t recognize the reality of the GOP’s recent rightward lurch. Consequently, they increasingly accept as reasonable the party’s embrace of the ‘27 percenters,’ which unwittingly pushes the nation rightward as well. But this slow drifting into reactionary seas presents a perilous dilemma for our democracy, because it only further emboldens the entrenched powers that enforce one set of rules for the rich and another for the rest of us. In other words, in this political calculation, taking 27 percent away from the 99 leaves only the 1 percent in charge.  

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 “Conservatives Prefer Reagan Fantasies to Reality (And So Did Reagan)” and it’s here.

I did a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review called “The Girl Who Loved Journalists” about the Stieg Larsson trilogy, which I very much enjoyed, and that’s here.

I did an interview with a German newspaper on the future of media and it’s called “Blood on the Newsroom Floor: The video” here.

And for the Daily Beast, I wrote up “What Liberals Want From Iowa's Caucuses” here, which you can still read, if you want to, but it’s ok if you don’t.

My friends Steve Earle and Allison Moorer are doing a five-week residence at City Winery (with friends) and the Wall Street Journal was nice enough to say “he's part of a lineage of country songwriters who, like Townes Van Zandt and Johnny Cash, never could toe the line.” I went to the Winery twice in the past couple weeks. Most recently I caught up with Little Feat, whom I’d not seen since the passing of Lowell George back in 1979. Now led by Paul Barrére and Billy Payne, they’ve reformed and play Dead-like, well actually, Furthur-like shows (sans drummer Richie Hayward who died of penumonia in 2010), including some of the same songs, like “The Weight” and “Long Black Veil,” which makes them, like the Allmans, a roots/blues/jazz/traditional Americana outfit. Larry Campbell sat in on fiddle the night I saw them and nobody was sorry to be there. They played three sold out nights.

A week or so earlier, I was quite happy to be there for one of the four sold out nights by the Fab Faux, who are pretty much a guaranteed good time as well as musically ambitious without being pretentious. It’s a long way from seeing McCartney at Yankee Stadium and this is mostly a good thing. The songs are played more inventively and the stage patter is less annoying. Of course there are no voices like Paul’s or George’s or John’s, but it’s a pretty damn good cure for a bad mood. You can watch them play “Hey Bulldog,” something I’m pretty sure the Beatles would not be playing if they were all alive and together today, here.

In between those two shows, I caught the first night Gov’t Mule’s two night annual trip to the Beacon for New Year’s Eve. I was not there the night they played “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” which strikes me as a truly inspired choice. But I did see them open with a Parliament/Funkadelic song with the horrible title of “Maggot Brain,” which was pretty crazy, and it segued into Pink Floyd’s “One Of These Days” and “Fearless.” Funnily enough, they were joined by the Fab Faux guitarist Jimmy Vivino and did a really sweet “Working Class Hero,” which the great and deeply underrated Mr. Haynes has recently convinced the mighty Allman Brothers Band to play as well. Next, Los Lobos guitarist David Hidalgo, who was also in town for a City Winery gig, came on for from “Smokestack Lightning” into “John The Revelator.” Both guitarists stuck around for the encores of “Politician” and “Dear Mr. Fantasy” into “For What It’s Worth.” Again, this music is, like Duke Ellington, “beyond category,” a bastardized, mongrelized American invention shared by the Dead, the Allman Brothers, late Miles, Hot Tuna, Little Feat, David Bromberg, and the spinnoff bands of each of these. It deserves to be celebrated, but not so much that the celebration detracts from the unpretentiousness of the music. The Mule site is here. Get Warren’s album if you don’t already have it.

And meanwhile, the Allmans are coming back to the Beacon for ten shows and Furthur for eight, both in March. You know where to find me

Now here’s Reed:

Why the Iowa Caucuses Are Bad for Journalism
by Reed Richardson
Let me say this up front. I was born and bred in a state that neighbors Iowa (Go Unicameral!), so I take no small amount of oblique umbrage at anyone who dismisses the voters there through snide, corn-shucking, country-bumpkin, tent-revival stereotypes. This is intellectual laziness at its worst and any broad-brush presumptions about how “all Iowans think this” or “all Iowans do that” shouldn’t be tolerated. (Sorry, Meredith Wilson.)

That said, I don’t buy this stubborn notion that voters in Iowa and a few other arbitrarily chosen states are somehow especially worthy of one-of-a-kind quadrennial access to presidential candidates and concomitant amount of media saturation that comes with them. This is, to paraphrase one of Wilson’s most famous lyrics, “Trouble with a capital T.”

True, these routine candidate pilgrimages to Iowa and New Hampshire allow for retail politics at their most elemental. But, by the same token, this hidebound early-primary rota enables candidates who would prefer to overlook or downright ignore the actual crises facing the country as a whole and instead focus their undue attention on more provincial concerns. As far as democratic processes go, the current presidential primary system is inherently flawed and, as we saw these past few weeks, ripe for outside manipulation. But there’s one other strike against it that is rarely mentioned, it’s bad for journalism as well.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for healthy doses of old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting and hearing the real-life stories of Iowans can provide invaluable context. But all too often what goes on in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses involves the media merely trading one journalistic cocoon for another. Saturating just a few critical locations with reporting assets is a necessary evil when trying to, say, cover an imminent war in a foreign land that has little concern for freedom of the press. But when the high concentration of journalists populating the Des Moines Marriott Downtown brings to mind Baghdad’s Al-Rashid Hotel just before the kickoff of Desert Storm 21 years ago, one has to wonder if news consumers aren’t being served up a product that is similarly narrow and subject to pack journalism groupthink.

Even when not congregating cheek by jowl in the Des Moines Marriott’s bar, which turns into something like the media equivalent of a Great Rift Valley watering hole during the African dry season, there’s a strong possibility of treading the same, well-worn journalistic ground. For a snapshot of how this plays out along the Iowa caucus campaign trail, check out this surreal experience documented by a reporter from The American Prospect this past Monday:

In Marshalltown the previous night, I watched as The Washington Post's Jason Horowitz rushed to intercept The Atlantic's Molly Ball as she turned her tape recorder on a voter he had already selected for a profile. After a Mitt Romney event Thursday in Mason City, a reporter friend and I noted that we had both previously interviewed Beth, a high-school teacher from Clear Lake. We watched as yet another writer thrust a notepad forward to document how she was a committed Santorum voter while remaining intrigued by Romney.

These episodes might be laughable if it they weren’t easily trumped by even more ridiculous examples. And in some respects, this really isn’t surprising, since, based on Tuesday night’s vote count, there ended up being only 80 or so actual caucus voters for every member of the media in Iowa in recent weeks. (For the New Hampshire primary next Tuesday the voter-to-journalist ratio will only be roughly double that.) And during many small town campaign stops, this already low ratio shrinks down to the point where inverts, and the media actually outnumber everyone else.

The stilted nature of these moments, when candidates make small talk with a few Iowans primarily to be seen by the media making small talk with a few Iowans rather than to have actual conversations, fool few with regard to their authenticity. Iowans, are genuinely knowledgeable and quite able to ask insightful questions, but all too often both candidates and journalists essentially treat them as props or proxies. Constrained within the norms of this traveling Kabuki show, the media can easily fall into the trap of playing along, needing as it does a constant stream of pixels and video content.

Jay Rosen, over at his PressThink blog, makes several astute observations regarding this contrived aspect of the Iowa caucuses. Particularly how the media now plays a critical role in not merely covering the caucuses but in perpetuating and validating their importance in our political infrastructure:

The Iowa Caucuses are presented as a news event, a mini-election with an informational outcome, a winner. But what they really are is a ritual, the gathering of a professional tribe, which affirms itself and its place in our political system by staging this thing every four years…Yeah, [the press] created this thing but we bring it to you as if it would happen without us. (emphasis original)

Even more problematic, the press increasingly focuses on a disconnected, meta-analysis of its own caucus coverage (or lack thereof), spinning untold stories, video packages, blog posts, and Tweets out of the gossamer of what others in the media are (or aren’t) saying. It creates an endless feedback loop, one that obsesses over who’s up and who’s down according to the conventional wisdom (manufactured again, mostly by the media) and emphasizes expectations over actual results.

Reuters media critic Jack Shafer sees in the political press’ preoccupation with score-keepingmany similarities to sports reporting. And because the Iowa caucuses enjoy much of the same, year-long buildup as the Super Bowl, it’s telling that the respective press corps tend to cover acandidate’s campaign trail visit and the big game’s annual Media Day—both manufactured events of dubious news value—in much the same manner. And though Shafer is drawing a different analogy here, he arrives at much the same conclusion about the Iowa caucuses’ true value as Rosen:

The reason we hear so much about the caucus is because it matters a lot to the press corps, which should—but doesn’t—downplay the event into something less meaningful than a coin toss.

At least the Super Bowl changes locations every year, whereas our presidential campaigns are stuck in the same old rut. The media’s willingness to revisit Iowa and New Hampshire again and again is understandable, however. In much the same way that sports has become fascinated with statistics, the temptation of all that election data going back for decades is almost too much for political reporters to gainsay. That returning to Iowa again and again also makes the historical parallels that much easier to draw doesn’t hurt. That these comparisons rarely hold up under scrutiny doesn’t matter.

This was much in evidence this past Tuesday night. As CNN’s John King constantly toggled back and forth between the 2008 and 2012 county-by-county results on his “Magic Wall”—with the help of a telestrator, naturally. Watching it for awhile I got the same distinct sense of can’t-help-ourselves statistical gorging that often accompanies sports broadcasts. That Romney eked out a victory, but didn’t do any better than he did four years ago was treated as big deal by much of the media—a “devastating blow” according to one hyperventilating Fox News columnist. And Santorum’s close second has already earned him plenty of credulous coverage and talk of ‘momentum.’ And what feeds these tenuous memes? Assumptions within the media that the voters’ calculus hasn’t changed much because their location hasn’t either.

The reality of what happened or, more accurately, didn’t happen in Iowa Tuesday night is both less and more complicated than this, however. First off, for all the allegedly dramatic twists and turns along the way to Tuesday night, the best funded, most disciplined GOP presidential campaign still claimed victory, albeit a narrow one. The frontrunner remains the frontrunner—especially, it’s worth nothing, among those willing to put money on it. On the other hand, Romney’s closest opponents—Santorum and Paul—continue to lack either the finances and personnel or a broad enough ideological base within the party to mount a serious, long-term campaign. And hyping inherently flawed candidates as legitimate contenders based on one or two unique electoral contests only weakens the press’s standing in the long run.

Foregone conclusions rarely sell newspapers and attract eyeballs, though. Making the results in Iowa matter matters most to the media, even if history demonstrates the state has a decidedly mixed record in predicting the eventual nominee. So, moving the first test of our presidential nomination process out from between Sioux City and Davenport and into a wider rotation of states would do more than just encourage debate on a larger set of issues. It would also force our political press to work outside of its comfort zone and help to avoid the trap of the media having a vested interest in promoting an event it is covering.

In other words, we really did give Iowa a try, to paraphrase "The Music Man" one last time. But now it’s time for our democracy and our media to try somewhere else.

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

The mail:
Diane Lake
Rockford
Mr Alterman,
I missed the link to write you so I wrote the editor. In case you don't see that I will tell you directly. I feel real reason for Politifact naming Lie of the Year over observing Ryan's bill as ending Medicare is not due to rightwing pressure.

Everyone saw the 'journalists' swoon like pre teen girls over the bill and Ryan himself. Ryan, to them, was almost at Chris Christie status in their eyes. A hero and an awesome guy. They deride the president for his intellect and sneer professor about him. Not a real guy. But, they insist that Ryan is a true intellect and in this case, being smart (as they see it) is okay.

Jouralists got laughed at and made fun of for their collective swoon and insistence that Ryan was an intellectual over the kill Medicare bill. They refused to accept that the bill was an ode to Ayn Rand. That Ryan was not brave and smart and true but, an Ayn Rand zombie and his bills are odes to her cult of crazy.

Politifact is, afterall, written by Journalists. The pressure was from fellow journalists who want to save Ryan's reputation. To discredit the left, as they always are doing. They needed ammo to use as the reason to discredit the left and to save Ryan as a hero and so brave.

Robert Humphries
Estero, FL
Iraq lessons
Thank you for reminding us of some of the reasons we went to war in Iraq.

Two items I would add to the discussion:

1) Bush pushed the war path during an election time so Democrats had to fall into a 'patriotic' mode or be crushed by the shameless chicken-hawk Republicans.
2) The press LOVED the war idea since it would mean great TV and print media viewership. I suggest you research the "Bloom Mobile" that ABC or NBC, I believe, built to cover the war first hand, utilizing the genius of the Pentagon's embed program.

Keep hitting the war motif that the U.S. seems to love—Vietnam should have been recent enough to have given us second thoughts about going into Iraq. Senator Byrd gave a great speech just before the war on many of the points you are making.

David Drasin
West Lafayette IN
You do the best job I know on the press, so I send you these items! Thanks for your work and Happy 2012.

I thought I would paste the letter I sent to the NY Times public editor yesterday concerning their reporting on the push in Indiana for a `right to work' law. But then a friend sent me a quote from Martin Luther King relevant to this. So I paste this first:

This is cut and pasted from the AFT page of MLK's statements on labor and unions here:

"In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as 'right to work.' It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. It is supported by Southern segregationists who are trying to keep us from achieving our civil rights and our right of equal job opportunity. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote."
—Speaking on right-to-work laws in 1961

*****

Now here is my email to the public editor:

I live in Indiana, so was delighted (at first) to see that you had a major article today on Indiana (front page of Business section) on the issue of the Indiana legislature considering passing a right-to-work law.

This is an important issue that is arising throughout the country, and having prominent space devoted to the topic in fact seems of national importance.

Unfortunately, the reporter only interviewed people whose opinions were not only predictable, but managed to avoid giving information that might help a Times reader come to an evaluation of the merits of the issue. Just because the Republican speaker calls having the possibility of a union shop `the last barrier to job creation in Indiana' or asserting [with no documentation] that `those charged with bringing new jobs to Indiana have given us very specific evidence that at least a third to a half of businesses looking for where to move take Indiana off the table because we’re not a right-to-work state' does not mean he is telling the truth (see, for example, the misinformation during the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003!). And the article stops on quoting such comments.

In fact, one Indiana newspaper (and, as far as I know only one) decided to do some reporting on this matter--and to be fair, they did find one example (although even there the executive was never asked point-blank whether they would definitely build in Indiana once this bill were passed).

On the other hand, it is no surprise that the AFL-CIO leader would say that this bill would have a harmful effect.

By now the Times should know better than to accept or disseminate predictable quotations and consider that a news article. Upon reading the article, I felt I had learned nothing new.

P. S. The article recalls that one of governor Daniels' first actions on assuming his office was to eliminate collective bargaining for state employees (which is indirectly related to the right-to-work issue). I would have been interested in being given information on how this has affected state employees, especially whether there were any willing to criticize the governor's actions and give their names.

But that was not there either.

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