Jeff Smith: Stupidest Column of the Cycle?

Possibly the stupidest/most illogical political column of the cycle to date: Joe Manchin supports Obama: [Charleston Daily Mail]

The RP’s Weekly Web Gems: The Politics of Media

The Politics of Media

More than 40 million tuned in to NBC’s coverage of the Olympics Opening Ceremony on Friday, making it the most watched ever for the network. [LA Times]

CNN’s President, Jim Walton, announced he will step down at the end of the year. He said the network needs “new thinking.” [The Wall Street Journal]

Viacom will publicly oppose the Defense of Marriage Act. The company is joining a group of entities that is filing a court brief expressing opposition. [TVBlog]

The New York Times Company saw circulation revenue surpass advertising revenue over the first half of 2012. [New York Magazine]

NBC’s Today and ABC’s Good Morning America are now too close to call in ratings races. Today had been the perpetual leader for years. [NYT]

 

Artur Davis: Obama – The Master of Negative Arts

Count me in the camp that is not yet wringing hands about Mitt Romney’s prospects in the fall, largely because this script is so familiar. The narrative of impending doom (or blown opportunity) plays out every four years when Washington’s pundit class is forced indoors because of the heat.  In the summer of 2008, the conventional wisdom among Democratic seers was that Barack Obama had hit a glass ceiling due to his disconnect with the white working class and that the campaign had drifted into a vague, impressionistic state. In 2000, the same chattering class pronounced Al Gore a weak, wooden nominee who had wasted the spring and early summer and was in danger of being run off the court by the Bush machine.

It’s not that the summer never matters: John Kerry’s offhanded remark that he had supported the Iraq invasion before he was against it was a precious kind of self-inflicted injury that happened during the summer lull.  But for the most part, the fluctuations in campaign performance and the free media squalls of the convention run-up are over-borne by larger electoral forces. The fatigue with the Bush years and John McCain’s inability to separate himself from that record trumped Obama’s lull; the fundamentally even dynamic of the 2000 contest, a race between two broadly popular, non-polarizing figures in a largely contented electorate, was too fixed to be shaken by momentary plot twists. And the list could go on: for every defining moment in June or July, like Kerry’s gaffe, the list of half-time perceptions that proved flat wrong is far larger and more telling.

The fact is that this race is frozen, and polling as recent as today suggests that Romney’s tax returns and the new surface wounds around his private equity days (must the producers of the Batman installment opening this week have chosen as its evildoer a menace named “Bane”, rhymes with “Bain”?) have not changed the race much, if at all. (William Galston, the most perceptive Obamian at the New Republic, agrees).

But Republicans would still be wise to understand the exchange of blows in July as revealing of a pathway that could pry open the deadlock if Camp Romney is not careful.

Specifically, the Obama team, which seems at any given moment overwhelmed or bored with the domestic side of governance, has a way of wearing down its opponents with a disciplined, untroubled capacity at gut-fighting. The already forgotten takeaway of 2007-08 was the extent to which the Obama/Hillary Clinton match turned on two reinforcing strategic narratives. The first was the Obama campaign’s ability to disrupt the flow of the Clinton effort by literally driving them to distraction: the early burst of slime about Bill Clinton’s social life: the jabs at Hillary’s ties to lobbyists; the shots at the 42nd president’s historical legacy; the put-down that Hillary was riding her husband’s coattails; the heavy-handed insinuations that the Clintons had a racial complex that was seeping out into view all looked unbecoming the days they were launched, but they did the damage they were meant to do, by knocking the Clintons off their game and into a defensive crouch.

Second, the Clinton campaign matched Obama’s ruthlessness with its own hesitance about returning fire with the same kind of aggression. It is entirely understandable that the Clintonites pulled their punches on Jeremiah Wright in a party where racial ethnic politics is so primal, far less defensible that they shrunk from leveling sustained fire at Obama’s gamey pattern of avoiding controversial votes in the Illinois legislature, or his links to a notorious influence peddler in Chicago, or even more inexplicable, that it never exposed blue collars and rural Democrats in Indiana and North Carolina to Obama’s far-left leaning record in the trenches of Illinois politics (including a lone wolf vote to reduce imprisonment for sex offenders).

Clinton’s strategists were neither inexperienced nor immobilized: their error was in their conviction that Obama’s manifest greeness and the haziness of his public profile were destined to defeat him. It’s hard not to hear some echoes of that mis-placed confidence in Republican circles now, when the case is made that Obama’s economic record is so weak that voters are bound to reject it.  It’s equally hard to miss that Republican frustration this cycle at Obama’s resilience sounds, verse for verse, like the post-mortems in Clintonland around a candidate who seemed so overmatched the first nine months of the race.

Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: Obama – The Master of Negative Arts

Michael Steele: What’s So Bad About Super PAC-Men?

News that deep-pocketed Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson gave a whopping $10 million to a pro-Mitt Romney political action committee makes it the largest advertising buy since the Republican candidate became the putative challenger to President Barack Obama. Certainly, such generosity contributed to the Romney campaign-Republican National Committee-Victory Fund troika’s massive $106 million haul last month.

But it is the donations to the “super PACs” that have whipped Democrats into a frenzy and spurred the news media to turn their spotlight on the growing role and influence of these PACs and the individuals who fund their activities.

Such big donations lead some politicians and pundits to paint super PAC donors as nefarious agents corrupting the political process. The political left has especially been critical of the role that these organizations and their donors play since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010.

Specifically, the high court ruled that “the Government may not suppress political speech based on the speaker’s corporate identity.” In other words, PACs that did not make contributions to candidates, parties or other PACs could accept unlimited contributions from individuals, unions and corporations (both for-profit and not-for-profit) for the purpose of making independent expenditures for “express advocacy or electioneering communications purposes.” Citizens United essentially ensured that corporations would have the right to free speech, just as the unions were enjoying.

The Supreme Court gave little credence to the government’s argument that the First Amendment does not cover corporations because they are not “persons.” Corporations are, after all, the court would note, just “associations of people,” and the First Amendment should protect their right to petition the government.

That being said, most donations to super PACs have come not from corporations but from the wealthy individuals who run them. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the top 100 individual super PAC donors in 2011-12 made up just 3.7 percent of contributors but accounted for more than 80 percent of the total money raised.

Given that labor-union political activities and money favoring Democrats had previously been dominant in federal campaigns, it is interesting to hear the screams of indignation now that Republican-leaning corporate moguls are stepping up their political and financial support.

Of course, super PACs are being criticized specifically for engaging in heavily negative campaign advertising. Yet, like them or not, such attack ads often work to drive up the negatives of opponents. Ironically, despite calls for less negative campaigning by the presidential candidates as well as their respective super PACs, research early in the 2012 campaign indicated that most voters found negative advertising informative and that candidates benefited from negative advertising sponsored by PACs.

The Citizens United case and its aftermath, however, have nothing to do with the fact that the campaign-finance-reform law passed by Congress and from which the Citizens United case was born woefully neglected to include an effective donor-reporting mechanism that could have been an adequate check on the mega-donations made to such PACs. Simply put: Congress should have written full disclosure into the law.

By January 2010, though, at least 38 states and the federal government had come around to requiring disclosure for all or some independent expenditures or election communications — stipulations intended to deter potentially corrupting donations. Yet, despite these laws, many voters go to the polls not knowing who funded those political commercials running incessantly for the past three weeks. In fact, in federal elections, PACs have the option of filing reports on a monthly or quarterly basis, which often means that funds are collected and spent long before the legal filing disclosure is required.

Read the rest of…
Michael Steele: What’s So Bad About Super PAC-Men?

The RP’s Weekly Web Gems: The Politics of Media

News Corp. patriarch Rupert Murdoch resigned from several boards controlling newspapers his company owns, including The Sun, The Times, and The Sunday Times. Growing speculation surrounds the future of his newspaper group. [Telegraph]

Partnership with NBCUniversal makes Twitter the official online “narrator” of the Olympics. [WSJ]

ABC’s Brian Ross caused a stir after he incorrectly linked James Holmes, the Aurora, Colo. shooting suspect, with the Colorado Tea Party Patriots. [Politico]

Larry King is back… but on the Web. The famous former CNN interviewer is hosting ‘Larry King Now’ on Hulu. [LA Times]

PBS President Paula Kerger is disappointed lawmakers are seeking to cut funding for the broadcasting giant. [AP]

NBC’s Bob Costas still tells it like it is. The sportscaster is preparing for Olympic coverage that will feature him prominently. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Jeff Smith: The Sterilization of Politics

Here’s the backstory behind the sterilization of politics, the pseudo-neutering of political journalism. [New York Times]

Peter Beinart Disappoints Again

A few months ago, I reviewed Peter Beinart’s trashy, error-filled hit-job on the State of Israel, The Crisis of Zionism.

As more and more Zionists have piled on, it seems as if Beinart is seeking the aid and comfort of some of Israel’s — and Judaism’s — worst enemies.  This week, the Atlantic exposed Beinart’s new relationship with the uber-controversial, anti-Zionist Web site, Mondoweiss:

Yesterday, Peter Beinart’s pluralistic blog, Open Zion, published a post by Alex Kane, a staff writer for a website called Mondoweiss.It’s impossible to peer into the hearts and minds of the people who edit the site, but Mondoweiss often gives the appearance of an anti-Semitic enterprise. Site founder and editor Phil Weiss, a former writer for the American Conservative when Pat Buchanan was editor, wrote this past May, “I can justly be accused of being a conspiracy theorist because I believe in the Israel lobby theory … certainly my theory has an explanation of the rise and influence of the neocons. They don’t have a class interest but an ideological-religious one.”

An April 2011 article on the site strongly implied that Mossad agents were involved in the murder of Italian activist Vittorio Arrigonni, an assertion for which there’s no factual evidence. In 2011, contributor Max Ajl argued against “left-wing” condemnation of the Itamar massacre, in which attackers killed five members of a settler family, including a three-month old baby. In 2009, Jack Ross, who has contributed to the white nationalist, Holocaust-denying journal The Barnes Reviewargued on Mondoweiss that “it was not the appeasement, but the internationalist hubris and bellicosity of Chamberlain which started World War II.” In other words, lay off the Nazis.

“Iran has never officially denied the Holocaust,” Mondowess claimed in April of this year. This statement might be technically true, but it is functionally false. It also reflects a troublingly dismissive attitude towards Holocaust denial on the part of high-ranking Iranian officials.

One winner of Mondoweiss’ recent “New Yorker parody contest” was a bizarre entry in which former Israeli Prime Minister has a teary reunion with the ghost of his long-lost father: Adolf Hitler.

Philip Weiss has found evidence of Jewish influence and Jewish perfidy in everything from NPR to the names of the buildings at Harvard University to an innocuous statement by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. Weiss has argued that the “Jewish presence in the Establishment” imposes its own single-minded, communalistic interests upon the whole of American and British society. “Don’t you see,” he wrote in a post also suggesting “Zionists” were to blame for the outbreak of the Iraq war, “the vociferousness and effectiveness of the Israel lobby make this conflict Our Conflict!” Ironically, Weiss also believes that Zionism entails Jewish self-hatred.

Is Alex Kane, the Mondoweiss writer whose post was featured on Newsweek’s Open Zion, responsible for all this? Of course not. But he is a Mondoweiss staff reporter. Publicly, he does not challenge the site’s lunacy. And Open Zion, in carrying a byline from Mondoweiss, incorporates not just Kane but the Mondoweiss reputation and all of its sordid baggage into its larger conversation.

 Click here to read the full article.

Jeff Smith: Obama’s Sharpest-Tongued Advocate

Nice piece by Alex Burns of Politico on the emergence of Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley as President Obama’s “sharpest-tongued, most enthusiastic…advocate” [Politico]

Rick Reilly on Paterno

ESPN’s legendary columnist wrote an important column on Joe Paterno, the man he profiled for the Sports Illustrated‘s Sportsman of the Year issue in 1986.  SPOILER ALERT: It’s devastating. [ESPN]

The RP on Kentucky Newsmakers

This weekend, the RP appeared on WKYT’s Kentucky Newsmakers, the oldest and most respected TV news interview program in the Commonwealth, hosted by The RP’s friend, local broadcasting legend Bill Bryant.

Enjoy their discussion (in two segments below) about poker, politics and a whole lot more:

PART ONE:

WKYT 27 NEWSFIRST

PART TWO:


Click here for link
to part two.

The Recovering Politician Bookstore

     

The RP on The Daily Show