There's a simple way to shape political coverage on Oval Office qualifications

Reporting on and analyzing the skill sets of the two presidential candidates and the two vice-presidential candidates wouldn’t be that hard. First, we’d need journalism to work as smart as politics.

The President ought to be as smart as the cabinet.
Now that’s a proposition The Press could use to focus election year coverage.
No more teen mother angst or fighter pilot claim to superiority or community organizing theory or Delaware do-righteousness.
The person who appoints the heads of our governmental departments should be on a par with them.
Besides selecting the best and the brightest, the Chief Executive then has to monitor and manage and motivate them.
Oh, the President doesn’t have to out-lawyer the Attorney General. But a feel for the Constitution and the rule of law would be nice.
Contrary to GOP candidate John McCain’s emphasis, there’s more to the presidency that serving as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces.
So it’s not necessary to hold a driver’s license for an aircraft carrier or a permit to carry a howitzer or a flight plan for a stealth bomber.
Sufficient unto the day is the sure and certain knowledge that it’s the duty of every soldier to kill the enemy. The how can be left up to the Secretary of Defense.
What the president needs is the judgment to know when to unleash those dogs of war.
And it’s pretty important to have the analytical ability to maintain our tradition of civilian control of the military.
The Secretary of Agriculture may know a lot about crops and markets. But to carry on a conversation about farmers, the President needs to grasp the nuances. For instance we don’t have food stamps merely to feed the poor. The program is foremost an Ag subsidy program.
The Treasury is not a place we keep money. It’s the control room for keeping the dollar sound despite our debtor nation status.
Interior is not about raping the land but extracting its resources soundly.
Education isn’t about enforcing ideology but planting our seed corn for the smart nation we must be to compete in the world.
Commerce isn’t all census and weights and measures – not when we’re killing off our fisheries and can’t get trade policy to work right.
Labor is about fair pay for fair work instead of this seesaw between the rights of unions vs. the prerogatives of corporations.
And what does the President need to know about the State Department to monitor that Secretary?
This: State is the sum of all the other Departments, because we make our way in the world by projecting our good name with justice, intelligence, respect for full bellies and sound minds, caution against bullies and confidence in a Yankee sensibility about trade and money.
Barack Obama has a good idea about appointing a technology chief for the government. There’s a better claim for making that a Cabinet job compared with Veteran Affairs, which could be folded into the Pentagon.
How alienating toward the future and futurists – every person on the Internet – when McCain patronizingly said he doesn't do computers. His implication was we who appreciate the digital world are eccentric.
Technology actually is a way of making science work for us…of causing the future to happen now…of compensating America in the global prosperity race where others enjoy advantages over us.
That sort of thinking and a keenly organized mind would make the President an equal with any Cabinet.
Reporting on and analyzing the skill sets of the two presidential candidates and the two vice-presidential candidates wouldn’t be that hard.
First, we’d need journalism to work as smart as politics.
It’s always intelligent to elevate the national conversation and to focus.

Political platforms and weather shelters are OK but we need foreign affairs coverage too

It’s like taking Gov. Sarah Palin at her word that she is Alaska’s Snow White gift to the nation instead of really being as politically pure as the driven slush upon revelation by reporter scrutiny.

The Press should be more like the Pentagon. Russia shows why.
World peace depends just as much on understanding international conflict as shooting the globe up.
Military planners classically prepare to wage two American wars at once with enough assets left to meet a third emergency.
It’s the attention span as much as anything. But our Information Industry can’t meet the same standard.
Well, come to think of it, neither can the admirals and generals. But they at least try in theory.
Media are concentrating on politics. ’Tis the season.
With some effort they also are monitoring the machine gun-like rat-a-tat of ferocious storms strafing from the weather-Atlantic air war.
Yet for a long time journalism has lost sight of the shooting war that never quits giving hell between Israel and the Palestinian people.
Lebanon lies abandoned between bombings.
Iraq may be a success story. But we haven’t looked at it with the critical consideration of what happens to a corner crime scene when the beat cop moves on.
Iran was the subject of much Press speculation about our possible invasion. Too little real reporting is going on now that our government hasn’t pulled that trigger.
Military Intelligence – that cliché of an oxymoron – lacks analysts who can speak Farsi. Media lack sufficient folks who even know adequately the difference between the Persian culture of Iran vs. the Arab rest of the Middle East.
Food, fuel and water shortages portend more resource wars, especially in Africa.
North Korea seems to have backslid – as the preacher would say – on nuclear disarmament. But just try to find a coherent news story explaining independently the American role.
The news consumer is thrown on too much dependence of our own self-serving government for explanations of worldviews, especially in the gaze toward Russia.
That’s the same Administration reinventing the Cold War.
Missiles in Poland, NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, patronizing attitudes toward Russian self-esteem – all got fashioned into a new containment policy.
But the bear doesn’t want to go into that cage. It even got restive, invading Georgian territory that leans toward Moscow anyway.
Now we have Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, and his oddly subordinate president of Russia, looking at the real prize, The Ukraine.
The new czars can cut off gas and oil to Europe on whim as a strategic weapon. That potential is akin to terrorists or rogue states shutting down the flow of Middle Eastern oil through the Straits of Hormuz – a crippling but real potential.
President Bush has made bear trainer threats he can’t enforce, because he has our diplomatic and economic and military assets stretched too thin.
Vice President Cheney castigated Russia from a Tbilisi pulpit on an aid trip as though he were a two-bit Ronald Reagan saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, bring down that wall.”
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cut her academic teeth on the Cold War. She quaintly denounced the Russian moves as unacceptable in the 21st Century. Yet it’s her Administration’s leadership that fails to move out of the Reagan era into realistic foreign affairs of this time.
Without intense, systematic, independent reporting and analysis on front page and prime time, those government pronouncements stand unchallenged by the benefits of journalism.
It’s like taking Gov. Sarah Palin at her word that she is Alaska’s Snow White gift to the nation instead of really being as politically pure as the driven slush upon revelation by reporter scrutiny.
Or it’s like depending on the National Weather service as the sole source of hurricane coverage instead of the animated maps, on-scene reports and progress updates by the energized Media.
American foreign affairs deteriorate badly and rapidly while The Media deploy their assets to other stories. The winning presidential candidate is going to have a greater problem than the drain of jobs, housing and affordable fuel.
We’re in for shock about world affairs.
And all because self-imposed cutbacks of resources and interest prevent The Media from providing the independent information democracy needs as much as it needs political platforms and weather shelters.

Wasn't it Ronald Reagan who so famously said, 'There you go again'?

You can tell when Republicans enter campaign mode.
They make war on The Media.
And they polarize the nation.
The national conversation ought to be about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…about the economy, including our oil dependency…and about making us all reverse our feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction.
The rapid response solution is to move assets from Iraq to Afghanistan…stimulate markets for alternative energy…and elect a peace and prosperity government.
But this is a democracy. So let’s talk.
It’s just that it’s hard to talk sensibly when Republicans get on their high horse.
I’d like to be bipartisan with this criticism. But the Karl Rove playbook does put the GOP in a class of its own.
So the national chitchat turned to one teen’s pregnancy, a governor’s tabloid family story and whether it’s okay to talk about an official of either gender taking the kids to High Office.
Simple questions from The Press on behalf of The Voter to understand better Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska brought down the wrath of the RNC.
Turns out the running mate choice by Sen. John McCain is perfectly capable of fighting for herself.
Her line about lipstick as the only difference between a pit-bull and a hockey mom will go down in the books.
But look what’s not among the serious talking points – our two wars, our greasy economy and the national confidence. Gov. Palin’s personal chutzpa isn’t enough to carry the needed political conversation.
And why did the minions of presidential nominee McCain get bellicose with the Press as a shield against a perfectly natural curiosity about his unusual choice of Gov. Palin?
Because the tactic works.
Network anchors and some other natterers were making nice, singing praises, backing off – after her acceptance speech.
So here we go again, polarized and under threat of a McCain permanent media war instead of doing journalism.

* * *

Any City Hall reporter knows a country club lunch and golf game with the mayor compromises credibility.

Network anchors celebrated a pleasurable birthday over French cuisine in a Manhattan restaurant with John McCain some time back and generally enjoyed the Media Elites' cozy relationship with the senator who would be president.

Jim Rutenberg captured the coziness when he reported in the NYT how dismayed the journalists were by McCain's media attack at the Republicans' convention.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/us/politics/04media.html?ex=1378267200&en=96c863317b4350bb&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

So it was dismaying to to the rest of us to hear Tom Brokaw – NBC-TV's senior pontificator – lavish praise on the presidential nominee's performance moments after McCain's acceptance speech.

Club and tee time can't be far off.

* * *

The Times is getting the political story right.

And sometimes a chart tells it all. One on the front page the day after the GOP convention compared the number of times certain terms were used per 25,000 words there and in the Democratic convention.

Democrats uttered "change" 89 times compared to 33 for Republicans; they said "economy" 32 times vs. the GOP 14; "taxes" was heard 26 times in Denver compared with 46 times in St. Paul; and "reform tripped off Democratic tongues 6 times as opposed to 25 times from Republican mouths.

* * *

Sen. McCain vows to end "partisan rancor."

Well, maybe not.

He wants to reach the moderates that way.

Yet the hard core of his own party lives for Karl Rovian invective.

The running mate being called "Sarah Barricuda" and Rush Limbaugh will do a lot of standing in and mouthing off for the candidate.

But he's inevitably going to have to energize his base on his own.

Post-election, should McCain win, we'll have greater political division and soreness between his White House and an increasingly Democratic Congress.

End rancor? That's a campaign promise for The Press to monitor.

They serve popcorn in the movies. . .So, what would they serve in the Oval Office?

The movie Juno delights across generational lines: A family copes humorously but seriously when an unwed teen goes through with pregnancy.
Hollywood follows. It doesn’t lead. The film reflects changing social attitudes.
Now life imitates art, imitating life.
The daughter of the Republican pick for vice president is 17 and preggers. She plans to marry the young father but hasn’t yet.
Media and politics alike can leave that script alone.
Fairer game is the selection process Sen. John McCain uses for big decisions such as choosing his running mate – Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the teenager’s mom.
The governor enjoys an ultra short but messy resume with the pending investigation of an official firing wrapped around a lurid family problem, her sister’s divorce.
The more limited question is how well the would-be President McCain researched Gov. Palin’s background: Did he simply fall for a fellow political contrarian?
The larger issue is how the man makes all his decisions: Would he be such a dice-thrower in the Oval office?
His autobiography is the self-portrait of a devil-may-care jetfighter pilot, flying on the edge and taking chances without too much attention to rules.
The most dramatic moment of his long, legendary life struck like a surface-to-air missile over Hanoi – literally. His radar and his training both said, “Get outta there,” when a North Vietnam rocket locked onto his aircraft.
McCain gambled he could still drop his payload. He lost, spending the next five years in tortuous captivity.
The story bears a sacred stamp. No one can criticize the split-second decision nor the sacrifice made for flag and country.
But in the longer view of the man, what recurs again and again as a maverick, counter-to-convention thought process does merit scrutiny by The Media as the designated stand-in for The Voter.
Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin live the lives of a Hollywood script.
Now The Press must help us decide if we want to elect a credible president and vice president. Or do we want to spend the next four years inside someone else’s movie.

Our convention-al media

PEOPLE ALWAYS ASK the editor how many work in the newsroom.
Oh, about half, goes the old joke.
The Columbia Journalism Review’s Justin Peters wrote a cute send-up on the 15,000 reporters at the Democratic National Convention.
Most are wearing bad suits.
A thousand are drunk, which Peters says is as it should be.
Many don’t have credentials, can’t find the credentialing office, are complaining about lack of floor passes and are smugly criticizing others in the media who have no business crowding the place up.
Those are right.
But an exception not mentioned in CJR is Asa Eslocker with his ABC-TV camera crew. Denver police arrested Asa – roughly, it sounded like – and used language not too delicate for the reporter’s ears but not likely to be heard from the DNC podium.
Cops said the network crew was blocking a hotel’s private sidewalk.
ABC said the journalists were looking into corporate lobbyists and wealthy fat cats at the convention.
Oh, what a lovely reason to get busted. Waytago, Asa.

- - -

MANY OF THE convention-going journalists are doing it for funsies, no doubt.
Bloggers had an extraordinary welcome.
But professional news organizations can spend $50,000 a reporter and up covering presidential campaigns. Convention town hotels and bars and restaurants and whatever else can be hidden on expense vouchers eat up a bunch.
So why do it, asks U.S. News & World Report.
Its Whispers column quotes Mark Potts, a media blogger at RecoveringJournalist.com, suggesting the media instead do community journalism – my phrase, not his.
Let Associated Press and the big syndicated news operations blow their dough, says Potts. And spend the money instead on covering city hall or local schools and the like.
Well, I’d spend the money on the presidential campaigns. But I suggest the “community” approach, because that implies relationship journalism.
Make the candidates’ health care platforms a local story. Explain what the two hot wars are doing to the home front. Tell the local economy story in Obama and McCain terms the hometown crowd can feel.
All we need to know about the conventions – except for the odd story an Asa Eslocker might get arrested for – can be seen on the television tube as it happens.
Relating politics to the local media audience — priceless, as the commercial says.

- - -

MARK SALTER wrote books with his and boss’s John McCain’s name on them.
Now he’s writing the senator’s acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination.
His muse is Peggy Noonan, the hit speechwriter of the George H. W. Bush presidential years, according to Newsweek.
The McCain candidacy is derivative. It’s based on the ongoing war in Iraq, the tax policies of the current president Bush and the trickle down economy from as far back as Ronald Reagan’s days but as dried up for Americans as Death Valley
Two of Salter’s books with McCain – Hard Call and Faith of My Fathers – are workmanlike, readable prose. But they are not dream-inspired like the two published works of Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic opponent.
The Republican writing team will need more than the Noonan mojo and the campaign leftovers of past Republican years.

- - -

THIS IS A credentialing society.
We don’t seek education for its own sake. We earn degrees and diplomas to get our ticket punched for entering the middle class mainstream.
The odd result is bored, tired, ennui toward life instead of the genuine liberal arts and sciences joy of discovery about the universe and all that’s in it.
It’s the same with journalists who seek the political convention credential and then sit on it.
They have a nasty habit of reporting in the “here we go again” fashion slouch.
But the unfolding DNC show in Denver – and with any luck the RNC convention to follow – don’t live down to the conventional view of blah-boring.
The aroma of American renewal is in the air.
And any journalist who can’t smell those roses had just as well join the drunks spotted by the CJR observer at the convention.

Who's in control of the political story?

Media are so embarrassingly easy to manipulate.
Barrack Obama did it just by saying he would announce his veep pick by text message.
He immediately set up anticipation – the key ingredient in sex and politics.
The chase ensued.
An somewhat important announcement took on even greater weight, simply because reporters fell for the old “hard to get” act.
When some outlets – notably CNN – ferreted out the name of Joe Biden in the first hours of Sunday morning, the rooster crowing sounded like sexual conquest.
Why should Sen. Obama care? His campaign collected all those text message addresses and got a little hype over the VP process as a bonus.
Sen. John McCain lost his title of maverick when he got plain old grumpy instead of being the fun old curmudgeon. But his campaign can still draw media attention away from the opposition just by having something cute to say.
So the new Obama press kit tool, according to media columnist David Carr in The New York Times, is to go over the heads of reporters. The Web gives the Democratic campaign direct access, filtering out the press.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/business/media/25carr.html?ex=1377316800&en=6c2039e448c46775&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
There’s an easy remedy: Reporters could start reporting the substance of the electorate’s concerns. That would be jobs, inflation, world peace – you know, everything that gets passed over while political types dance around the fringes of campaign process, rumor and twitter.
Then Obama and McCain both would have to meet the press on the media’s home field advantage.
The press would reclaim its truer role in politics.
And the public wouldn’t see the media at their most embarrassing.

What media mean by Olympian glory and what that says about war and politics

Russia picked a fitting time for her little national aggression against Georgia – the Olympics.
What two better examples of nationalism run amok can you name than war and The Games?
When the media do their hype of combat to increase patriotic audiences, we call it “yellow journalism.”
Track and field and swim frenzy by reporters and editors and producers deserves as much scorn.
USA Today started the patriotic frenzy with banner headline worry over the “gold mining” on opening day.
CNN closed The Games two weeks later by fretting the USA merely had a higher overall medal count. China won more gold.
No less a legendary sports writer than Grantland Rice reminded us The Great Scorer will come not to write who won or lost but how we played the game.
Nowadays we are derided if we merely admire the lithe, smooth bodies of dedicated athletes doing their best in the global glare to make their athletic mark, any mark.
Nope. Gotta bring home the gold. Or don’t bother
Dorothy Rabinowitz, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist in The Wall Street Journal, condemned those of us mesmerized by the Olympics for their own value and not for “the national interest.”
She labeled as “Olympics-babble” the view that humanity has a higher standing than nationalism.
That WSJ scold especially chided actor Morgan Freeman for his warmly human Visa ad. Freeman called on us to root for athletes – not for the flag on their backs but “simply because they are human and we are human and that when they succeed, we succeed.”
Only the prophet Isaiah said it better when he pronounced we will study war no more.
The value of the Olympics is to glorify youth in peace instead of deadly conflict. Sports jingoism by the press cheapens The Games into a way to bide time until a real war comes along.
Armed conflict will come soon enough, as Russia proved. One reason is nationalism in the media.
Would I prefer a lack of patriotism? No. I’d prefer real national pride that doesn’t have to prove itself as Russia felt pushed to do in the Caucasus or as USA Today and CNN and Dorothy Rabinowitz measured for us by medals slung around Americans necks.
Now we’re leaving China for the national conventions in our domestic politics, another free fire zone. Politicians and some members of the press in that arena play on our patriotic fear at election time.
Unworthy anxiety forms the real basis for nationalism, not healthy self assurance.
Sen. Barack Obama – the Democrats’ great hope – recognizes our cultural weakness in his autobiographical Dreams from My Father: “Nationalism provided that history, an unambiguous morality tale that was easily communicated and easily grasped.”
We don’t have to think when we operate out of national fervor, only feel. We let the animal out of ourselves.
I’d prefer the media call us to live life gloriously, not revel in human failing by an enemy either at war or at The Games.

Do read John McCain and Barack Obama for citizenship, for journalism, for uplift

Hard Call, The Art of Great Decisions
By John McCain with Mark Salter
Twelve, 2007, 457 pp., $15.99

Faith of My Fathers
By John McCain with Mark Salter
HarperCollins, 1999, 349 pp., $14.95

Dreams from My Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance
By Barack Obama
Three Rivers Press, 2004, 457 pp., $14.95

The Audacity of Hope, Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
By Barack Obama
Three Rivers Press, 2006, 375 pp., $14.95

Every citizen-journalist has a duty to add our presidential candidates to his or her knowledge base.
I feel hopeful. We’ll preserve values, if we elect either man. Read their stories. You’ll agree.
Notice I didn’t say John McCain and Barack Obama share world views. The Democratic National Convention will nominate Sen. Obama this week for his principles. Then Republicans will see that bet and raise it with Sen. McCain’s ideals.
We’ll have a choice, a real choice, not the usual poker game. Their writings make it so clear.
Obama is the change candidate because his journey is founded on family generations where the future – only the future – always looks brighter. So his Dreams has substance. Dreams must, because life depends upon them. He really can understand this current national crossroads of economy and opportunity and progress after race and after class and after mean political conflict.
The Democrat is what he says, the child of always striving, sometimes failing, constant hopefulness.
The Republican is true to his forefathers too. They are Celtic warriors in every American conflict since Scottish immigration. McCain looks backward to their history for his strength.
We must ask if the warrior can govern. Hard Call does not make him out the decision maker you would expect.
The classy Barron’s columnist Alan Abelson flatly calls McCain’s campaign inept. The New York Times details his habit of adopting the last opinion he hears, of agreeing to staff decisions only to abandon them without warning and of undercutting his own spokeswoman in public.
Imagine such executive disorder in the White House and shutter.
McCain admits he’s hard pressed to explain his method. Call actually is an anthology of Horatio Alger heroes – of interest but not as forecast of a presidency.
The ghostwritten selection runs to the conventional white male usually with military or even a naval connection. The senator can’t escape the ghosts of his admiral father and grandfather and his own hellish Navy aviator life as a POW torture victim in North Vietnam.
McCain claims to live for the present. But two pages later in Faith he concedes, “My public profile is inextricably linked to my POW experiences.”
So is yearning for principled death, for projection of military power abroad, for a VFW worldview.
We have this soldier of Sparta, the Greek citystate forever associated with perpetual war footing. We have the philosophical Barack Obama, suited for Socratic dialogue.
Both suffer from absentee fathers. Both lead aimless youths. Both recover well. Both taste betrayal.
Sen. McCain fights an inept government’s misguided war. But he can’t learn from it, perpetually choosing combat as Option One, the old warrior genes kicking in.
Sen. Obama’s DNA points him forward in Hope. His Chicago pastor who suggests the concept turns on him. Eyes on the prize: The Democrat keeps, “…the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict…
“It was that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family’s story to the larger American story.”
Two families…two storytellers…two candidates for America.

The Hometowners: Obama and McCain

When you’re hot, you’re hot.
And when you’re not, you’re not.
– Jerry Reed

No one wants to repeat Al Gore’s non-election. He lost Tennessee, his home state.
So GOP nominee-to-be John McCain feels the need to campaign a bit more in Arizona, even though he represents it in the U.S. Senate.
Things slip. People who know you best may not view you as presidential timber. And the minority vote prefers the opponent.
That African American, Native American, Latin American and Asian American electorate counts.
Journalists from those groups saw Democratic nominee-to-be Barack Obama up close and personal at Unity, the combined journalism conference for all four minority groups.
They saw him in “Chicago, Chicago, (his) hometown,” which is generously endowed with admirers of the Illinois senator.
Hot item at the conference was the Chicago-based Ebony cover of Obama as “One of the 25 Coolest Brothers of All Time.”
He made the list with music mogul Jay-Z, R&B great Marvin Gaye and “the original heartthrob, Billy Dee,” swooned Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell.
Obama fever soared until an editorial in that paper had to remind readers that campaigns are the news, not just the hometown candidate.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism found the Democrat featured in 78 percent of political stories, according to the paper’s observation. McCain mentions came in at only 51 percent.
An oped piece by Jewel Woods, a “gender analyst” for the Renaissance Male Project, claimed even guys have a crush on Obama. It’s his “white collar masculinity.”
Still another columnist compared the candidate’s foreign policy team with The 300. That would be Sparta’s hero-defenders against Persia in the cult movie featuring Bowflex-product, muscle rippling warriors admired by gamer boys.
What’s the fun of Chicago, if you can’t go over the top?
The attention drove Sen. McCain to mock the press.
But cool as the breeze off Lake Michigan, “Obama sizes up Mideast stage” in a Chicago Tribune headline.
A quote by Trib columnist John Kass called McCain “grumpy.”
Editorial Board member Steve Chapman called the man “confused on Iraq.”
And Trib syndicated writer Jonah Goldberg called his pro-surge strategy on the war a loser as the defining issue of his campaign.
Don’t mess with the hometown candidate in other words.
A couple of days’ look at Chicago papers conjures the Jerry Reed lyric when it comes to Sen. Obama: My luck was so good I could do no wrong.

Media generations: MTV and the AARP crowds can set government right again

MTV may save the republic
Ladies Home Journal and the Crown Forum book How to Raise an American and even The AARP Magazine will help.
’Bout time someone did something. Really. It’s all about time or at least age. The issue is how to motivate the youth vote, and those media are onto something.
The big news is Viacom’s countercultural music broadcaster announcing it will now take political ads.
It’s for the money of course. When Sen. Barrack Obama passed up public funding of his Democratic presidential campaign, he put a monster ad budget in play with a youth orientation.
But an ad is information, too, not just a commercial. If campaign advertising weren't suddenly cool, MTV wouldn’t break its 27-year ban against marketing candidates.
This is watershed stuff. Potentially, anyway.
Just a few years ago David T. Z. Mindich wrote Tuned Out, explaining why Americans under 40 don’t follow the news. He said political process alienated the young who found it immoral, unresponsive to the people and irrelevant along with the news media that covered politics.
Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam broke that ground with his landmark study of civic disengagement.
And journalist E. J. Dionne, Jr., decried the exchange between politicians and the governed as “unintelligent” in his book, Why Americans Hate Politics.
For the smart set, the young set, the MTV set to tune back in as both the Iowa caucuses and the Obama millennials indicate is big for the future of self-government.
A letter to Reader's Digest calls this "The Facebook Election." But ultimately, the writer said, two things will have to happen:

• These young activists will have to run for office;
• And leadership in both major parties will have to step aside to "let younger, more open minds take over."

Too soon to say if the information industry and especially newspapers will reverse their own downward spiral related to civic malaise.
Mindich anticipated some rise from the ashes, because “despite their disengagement with news, young people are as thoughtful and passionate and self-reflective as they have ever been, ready to interact with news if we just provide the right conditions for them to do so.”
One condition could be for parents and grandparents to be civic-minded and to model participatory government for the generations to come of voting age.
Myrna Blyth, former editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, started Take Your Kids 2 Vote, promoting the idea of adults taking their children into polling places with them. She remembered it when she was a kid.
She and cofounder Chriss Winston researched Election Day involvement and wrote How to Raise an American.
Naturally http://www.takeyourkids2vote.org/ is their Web site. Emphasis is on recollection and narrative.
“Sharing your memories of voting makes kids realize their family is part of the American experience,” Blyth said to writer Nick Kolakowski of AARP http://www.aarpmagazine.org/.
And that’s cool too. For the self-described “World’s Largest Circulation Magazine” to publicize civic lessons across the generations really does link MTV’s ad policy news with shoring up the Republic’s future.
Rap that tune.

Stars Fell on Barack Obama

I will go to Korea, Ike said. He campaigned during an unpopular Asian war.
And America elected Dwight David Eisenhower as president.
I will go to Iraq, Barack Obama said, campaigning during the latest unpopular war.
Now the star system in American journalism is burning, burning bright to light up the Democrat’s presidential campaign.
If the candidate doesn’t make a major foreign policy goof, the media celestials will brightly backlight his election profile. They’re going too.
You get the impression of a royal progress by an oriental potentate. Newspaper poobahs and magazine satraps and TV sultanas will climb aboard decorated dromedaries to form the entourage. The U.S. military will assist the Secret Service in Janissary duty.
Headliners from national newspapers and magazines are going.
So are all three network news anchors – Charles Gibson of ABC, Katie Couric of CBS and Brian Williams of NBC. They’ll be doing primetime interviews with the candidate.
Clang the cymbals. Blow the trumpets. Beat the tabla. The cavalcade comes.
Obama couldn’t buy this kind of publicity.
Neither could Republican opponent John McCain. Coverage of his international trips fit into the routine category.
The old hat McCain is getting the “also running” treatment stingingly felt by Hillary Rodham Clinton in her party nomination campaign against Obama.
“He’s the new guy, though,” rationalize media executives to Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times. The reporter documents the ongoing imbalance of TV coverage in favor of Obama. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/us/politics/17anchors.html?ex=1374033600&en=00fc706cfaedd8e9&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
My own political reporting for The Courier-Journal years ago had to measure up – literally – to the standards of the Louisville managing editor, a stickler for fairness and ethics. He used a yardstick to make sure every candidate got exactly the same number of column inches.
The M.E. also said you have to rise above your ethics sometimes. So he would excuse a lack of balanced coverage for news reasons.
Barack Obama traveling to get his foreign policy ticket punched does not excuse blatant unfairness.
Neither does the “new guy” argument after a long “rock star” campaign by the now familiar candidate.
Nor does the Ike analogy. This isn’t history. It’s politics. And the star system.
Media celebrities recognize a fellow luminary when they see one in politics. So they give chase like Magi going to Bethlehem.
Stardom is an addiction constantly to be fed. Journalism egos are not too big but too little, too insecure, too threatened not to conform with the pack. They can’t stand the idea of being left behind when the court travels abroad.
And network newscasts look enviously at ratings by cable outlets for political coverage. So on caravan they will go.
They’ll need a little music.
Here’s my parody on a Mitchell Parish, Frank Perkins lyric familiar to Alabama:

We lived our little drama, we kissed in a field of white.
And stars fell upon Obama last night.
I can’t forget the glamour, your eyes held a tender light.
And stars fell upon Obama last night.

I never planned in my imagination, a situation so heavenly
A fairy land that no one else could enter
And in the center, just you and me, dear
My heart beat like a hammer, my arms wound around you tight
And stars fell upon Obama last night.

Bed sheets, bazookas: New Yorker, the hen

Eustace Tilley blew this one.
If you know that name, you probably “got” the Barack-o-drama cover of The New Yorker.
Satire is a double meaning the reader is in on. Or else it’s a scam.
If the shock of the image allows a viewer to take it seriously, the artistic or literary trick becomes a mere antic, a ruse, a hustle.
The questioned cover shows Mr. and Mrs. Obama as flag burning terrorists in the Oval Office. “Politics of fear,” is the satiric target by cartoonist Barry Blitt.
Trouble is, polls show some Americans believe – wrongly, but believe anyway – the lies connecting Islam, Osama bin Laden and the possible First Couple.
Those of us who don’t believe are nervous that we live in a society where some do harbor or even foster those untruths. So we’re not too keen for the cover either.
We prefer an information campaign.
The New Yorker tried the humor of disinformation and laid an egg.
Hey, Eustace is a buddy of mine, fictional though he is. I delight in seeing the signature dandy on the front of the magazine. He’s the logo. He’s the sophistication. He’s a pretty good clothes horse, often depicted by TNY satirically with props.
Editor David Remnick can sly up the magazine’s symbol, can satirize public figures, can make fun of our social foibles.
Surely he can do a take-off on the Democrat with a funny name and a funny past and a serious chance of becoming president.
Well, yes. If he can answer one question: Does the cover communicate?
Not to Eustace’s standard is the answer.
Remnick knows how hard irony is to wield as a means of conversation. And he must know he goofed. Because he’s trying to explain the joke. That’s proof positive the joke fell as flat as a magazine cover.
It’s as lame as New York Times editor Bill Keller trying to explain the paper meant to say Republican presidential candidate John McCain showed poor judgment about ethics, not that he had an affair necessarily.
Manhattan is an island. Those editors need to swim to shore more often.
For The Times to link sex and a politician was to run a public DNA test on his bed sheets.
For The New Yorker to attack ignorance with sophistication was to bring a pen knife to a bazooka fight.

Sen. Gramm’s Ph.D. economy goof while 'helping out' Sen. McCain proves public, press, politicians need a common language

Let’s drop the word “economics” in favor of “quality of life.”
Public, politicians and media might get it right then.
Sen. John McCain’s Republican quest to be president is but the latest to foul up. He did it through a stand-in, former Sen. Phil Gramm.
We’re but a “nation of whiners,” said that Ph.D. in economics. Gramm claimed we’re only in a “mental recession.”
Insert funny comment here: Maybe it’s the professor who has the receding mind…he taught at Texas A&M, so maybe this is an aggie joke gone bad…or as Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic presidential camp commented, “America already has one Dr. Phil.”
We don’t need a shrink to know we can’t buy or sell houses, afford fuel and food, meet the hidden tax of rising college tuition, find a job in some cases or get a raise in others.
John McCain still thinks trickle down works, corporations will save us out of the goodness of their hearts and oil policy means greasing the palms of petro execs yet again.
He’s a goose egg on money matters. So he uses Gramm to tell him what to think. But no one told Gramm how to speak.
To be fair we lack a common language about finances. An egghead looks at the numbers, the institutions, the science of capitalism and sees the engine running right along.
The people see only the result and feel the engine running them down.
Reporters don’t translate between the two opposites, which is why God invented journalism – so media would communicate.
When the Gramm-McCain gaffe broke, that’s all the story was. Media treated it as yet another misstep in the political pasture full of language cow patties.
In journalism we call this a daily process story, because it lacks context.
An enterprising reporter covering Gramm-McCain could have, might have, should have included news of the whole day: \

• The federal government is stepping up to support the two mortgage holders that account for half the nation’s mortgages, which add up to $12 trillion.
• Banks are in the tank.
• Gas isn’t, because of costs, which won’t quit with President Bush drawing a military bead on Iran.
• Food expense is tied to fuel.
• Goalposts for retirement keep moving because of all of above.

We’re not whining, Dr. Gramm. We’re living life and enjoying it less. We’re also reading the papers.
We’re just not reading the right story. It would put two and two together, linking screwy political views, the public’s disconnect from brainy economists and daily living.
No more petty political items. No more campaign gotchas. No more disconnects.
Media need to change the language: It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the quality of life.
Then we would no longer be a nation joined asunder by so many misunderstandings about the meaning of money.
That’s one thing we all have in common, money, but commonly not enough.

Live wires promote the living truth

I know, let’s open all the microphones all the time.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson is merely the latest public figure to speak ugly into a hot mic he apparently thought was dead.
He apologized to Barack Obama for calling the Democratic presidential hopeful out of his name. (That’s a wonderful country idiom for, “Momma, Jesse said something vulgar”).
Here're a couple of points.
First, it’s nuts to say anything in a broadcast studio you don’t want picked up.
Really, don’t say anything anywhere you don’t want the world to hear these days.
Which leads to the possibility Jackson actually wanted to be heard. But that’s too cynical and spy-vs.-spy to contemplate. Let’s don’t go there.
Instead think about a world where everybody gets everything out in the open naturally.
This flap won’t go anywhere. Because Obama quickly accepted a quick apology. And it wasn’t big enough to label “Jessegate.”
But the remark inside a Fox Broadcasting studio focused on the candidate’s stand that African American fathers should be fathers. That means at home and attentive to children as Obama’s dad was not.
Jackson called that “talking down to black people.”
Really interesting is his published statement of apology.
The old line Civil Rights leader said he wanted black males’ personal moral responsibility to be matched by the country’s collective responsibility for public policy.
Oh, really? H-m-m-m-m, say those folks who have moved beyond that view.
Government ought to correct itself for “the lack of good choices” that often led to their black dads’ irresponsibility, according to the Jackson statement.
Suddenly we understand Obama better for Jackson’s gaffe and follow-up.
The younger leader believes in personal responsibility. The older leader still labors under the entitlement mindset that government is to blame and needs to make up for it.
Barack Obama couldn’t pay for that kind of left-handed endorsement.
And public understanding is the better for climbing the continental divide between two views.
The unintended free flow of ideas all resulted from a single hot mic.
Open all the microphones!

Karl Rove, Wes Clark and "swiftboating"

I was skeptical from the minute I heard Wesley Clark dissed John McCain’s service record.
Sure enough. Another case of media quoting out of context.
These political days, you have to stay in skeptic mode 24-7.
The columnist Paul Krugman wants to blame Karl Rove, the man who surgically removed the civil tongue from the body politic.
It’s tempting. The Roveblitz career started with screwing up Alabama politics, especially in the state judiciary. Then the smear, innuendo and truth twists gave us an All America era that will require two more eras for un-spinning.
You can’t resume civility with the speed of a swiftboat.
Krugman lays out the connection between that dirty political operation of four years ago and how the McCain GOP presidential camp used the Wes Clark interview for a fake scandal. It’s a good column on the dirty dealing. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/opinion/04krugman.html?ex=1372910400&en=0e1bedcbb66a5840&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
But these tricks wouldn’t work if the hair trigger media didn’t rush to Web or air or print with the latest phony tittle-tattle. The emphasis is on gotcha and quicky.
The Rovian world is brought to you by its sponsor, shoddy journalism.
Those of us who teach the old fashioned brand of balanced reporting sometimes worry whether jobs will await our graduating students. Actually we ought to figure out a way to get practicing journalists back into our schools for refresher courses.
What General Clark, the hero of Kosovo as NATO commander and the West Point valedictorian and the Rhodes Scholar and the wounded Silver Star soldier of valor in Vietnam, actually said of John McCain’s also heroic military service was that it didn’t necessarily prepare him for the presidency.
McCain believes the totality of his lifetime in public service, including time in Navy jets and as a Hanoi POW, does prepare him. And that’s what the voters will decide in the contest against the Democrat, Barrack Obama. Since Obama didn’t serve at all in the military, the better comparison may be over judgment rather than uniform.
Quick trigger journalists and the pols who load their guns want to impact the outcome. It is the judgment of the Republicans and of McCain to use those rapid fire techniques.
The best way in the old school of press and politics would be to squeeze off a round of truth after checking the safety for facts rather than to fire from the hip with a jerk of the finger at the first glimpse of a target.
Context is everything. Clark was talking about strategic foreign policy thinking vs. Top Gun fingers on a joy stick.
I read one of his books, Waging Modern War. Impressive, thoughtful, prophetic. He also wrote Winning Modern Wars.
I interviewed Clark on the speaking tour he took in 2000 to position himself for a Democratic presidential run, which he has tried without success.
He’s an engaging, bright, even brilliant person who takes care with words and actions. Clark modeled the mantle of intelligent military statesman most people now view wrapped around the also talented frame of General David H. Petraeus, our best bet for getting out of Iraq with at least a small amount of honor.
So if one of those guys isn’t qualified to talk about strategic qualifications as better preparation than tactical assignment, no one is.
Now the sad thing is reporters will always throw the non-incident incident about Clark and McCain into “background” like a repeating rifle. That will be a pity if it costs future American public service the mind and talent of this strategic thinker, Wesley Clark.
Bad journalism is the gift that never quits giving.

Keep Tim’s name at work

Tim Russert deserves a living memorial from journalism.
The testament should endure much longer and more meaningfully than the on-air shrine of NBC’s coverage about his passing.
Despite the network’s backlashing critics, no one honestly can be surprised by the broadcasters’ excess on behalf of their Washington bureau chief and moderator of the best political talk show.
Instead of, “If it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Press,” the slogan could be, “If it’s NBC, here’s another tribute to Tim.”
There’s a simple reason for the immoderation about the moderator. NBC did it because it could. And his many friends and colleagues did it, because they wanted to.
So let the longest running wake on television play itself out. By general agreement the Russert name is too good for his colleagues to wear out.
I know I don’t let the first day of the week pass without watching Meet the Press. I also watch ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos for contrast. And I finish the Sunday papers-on-the-air with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer who claims the best political team in the business.
Maybe the cable crew does deserve ranking in the group category.
Tim Russert was the tops in singles for good reasons: He asked questions. He asked them well. He asked them only after research.
Perhaps that’s not a lost art in journalism.
But the nation blundered into the Iraq War behind our unquestioning press corps. The Bush-Cheney cat got the tongue of White House reporters on all sorts of policies that will take long years to reverse. And community print and broadcast media lack the chutzpah of the blogosphere when seeking the bottom of local, state and regional issues that matter.
I’ve witnessed reporters read a press release and pose an inquiry on the text so the utility, business, police or public official could ever so politely parrot the official statement back for camera or steno pad.
Fear of appearing rude, contrary or uninformed intrudes: Don’t stand out in the crowd.
Well, Tim Russert must have cared about country, about the civic conversation and about the future more than he cared about smooth talk. He wasn’t abrasive as ABC’s Sam Donaldson in his heyday or as rantingly partisan as the skulk from the Fox hole or as blandly scattershot as Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour on PBS or as politically poetic as Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation.
He was the studious case detective armed with the facts and merely asking the politician to account for the record so different from the latest statement. He had the tape or the film clip or the transcript as back-up.
Tim Russert was the master of the question.
So we should honor him by putting his name into the professional language.
From now on a question shall be called a “Tim.”
And the act of questioning with factual support shall be called “Doing a Russert.”
It’s a fitting memorial.