Palin’s Bailin’

Posted on July 4, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Alaska governor Sarah Palin is the Manny Ramirez of American politics. For one thing, she’s living in a world of her own. For another, she sure seems like she’s on drugs.

Her Fourth of July Eve bolt from the blue (transcript here, via the New York Times) featured more doublespeak than a Bill Clinton deposition.

Campaign Outsider’s favorite soundbites from her statement (with translations):

So that Alaska will progress, I will not seek re-election as governor. And so as I thought about this announcement, that I wouldn’t run for re-election and what that means for Alaska, I thought about, well, how much fun some governors have as lame ducks. They maybe travel around their state, travel to other states, maybe take their overseas international trade missions. So many politicians do that. And then I thought, that’s what wrong. Many just accept that lame duck status and they hit the road, they draw a paycheck, they kind of milk it, and I’m not going to put Alaskans through that.

(Yes, it’s all about Alaska. No, I’m not going to be like normal politicians and live off your dime. I’m going to be like other politicians and live off campaign contributors’ dime.)

Life is too short to compromise time and resources and though it may be tempting and more comfortable to just kind of keep your head down and plod along and appease those who are demanding, hey, just sit down and shut up. But that’s a worthless, easy path out. That’s a quitter’s way out. And I think a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just kind of hunker down and go with the flow. We’re fishermen and we know that only dead fish go with the flow.

(Listen up here: I am a lame duck. Not a dead fish.)

Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law that I championed became their weapon of choice over the past nine months. I’ve been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations, such as holding a fish in a photograph or wearing a jacket with a logo on it and answering reporters’ questions. Every one of these, though, all 15 of the ethics complaints have been dismissed. We have won, but it hasn’t been cheap. The state has wasted thousands of hours of your time and shelled out some two million of your dollars to respond to opposition research and that’s money that’s not going to fund teachers, or troopers or safer roads.

And this political absurdity, the politics of personal destruction, Todd and I, we’re looking at more than half a million dollars in legal bills just in order to set the record straight. And what about the people who offer up these silly accusations? It doesn’t cost them a dime. So they’re not going to stop draining the public resources, spending other people’s money in this game. They won’t stop.

(I can’t afford to defend in court all the questionable things I’ve done as governor. Plus, First Dude Todd is tired of working to pay oily lawyers to defend us. You betcha.)

Let me go back quickly to a comfortable analogy for me — sports, basketball. And I use it because you are naïve if you don’t see a full-court press from the national level picking away right now. A good point guard, here’s what she does. She drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her head up because she needs to keep her eye on the basket. And she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win. And that is what I’m doing — keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities — you remember they include energy independence and smaller government and national security and freedom! And I know when it’s time to pass the ball for victory.

(Okay, now even I have no idea what I’m saying.)

Campaigner Outsider Pop Quiz:

Sarah Palin dropped this bomb on a Friday before a holiday weekend (traditionally a time to bury bad news) because:

a) Sarah Palin is actually very shy

b) There’s a real spitstorm about to come down on Sarah Palin’s head

c) Sarah Palin is totally unhinged

Whichever, check out Gail Collins’ always deft take.

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Palin by Comparison

Posted on July 3, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Top Ten Reasons Sarah Palin Has Gotta Hate Todd Purdum’s Vanity Fair Piece About Her:

10. ” [She] often seems proud of what she does not know.”

9.  “No political principle or personal relationship is more sacred than her own ambition.”

8. “Palin’s [gubernatorial] victory . . .  was one of the flukiest successes in modern American politics.”

7. “The [Alaska] Frontiersman accused Palin of confusing her election with a ‘coronation.'”

6. “Several [Palin associates] told [Purdum], independent of one another, that they had consulted the definition of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ . . . and thought it fit her perfectly.”

5. “The surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game . . . gave her family a singular status in the rogues’ gallery of political relatives.”

4. “Some top [McCain] aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing post-partum depression?”

3. “Palin’s deep ignorance about most aspects of foreign and domestic policy provided her with a powerful political reason not to submit to interviews.”

2. “[If McCain] had won the presidency, the vice-presidency would be in the hands of a woman who lacked the knowledge, the preparation, the aptitude, and the temperament for the job.”

And the #1 reason Sarah Palin has gotta hate Todd Purdum’s Vanity Fair piece about her:

“She was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice presidency.”

Then again, at least Purdum didn’t call her a “slutty flight attendant.”

As juicy as the Vanity Fair piece is, even juicier is the GOP dustup it’s spawned, as Politico reports.

Main event: Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol vs. McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt.

Kristol accuses Schmidt of “trashing Palin’s mental state” with the post-partum depression speculation. Schmidt says the allegation is “categorically untrue” and “rises to the level of a slander.”

The Politico piece also includes a lot of back-and-forth about who anonymously whacked Palin as a “whack job” and a “diva” in the press, which led Schmidt to launch a “leak hunt in the campaign’s internal e-mail system,” which led another McCain adviser (and friend of Kristol) to accuse Schmidt of “acting in a manner of Iranian secret police.”

Remember McCain’s “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” moment? This is his “Shame shame shame, shame shame McCain” moment. Because in the end, he’s the one who picked Palin.

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The First on Our Block

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Plowing through the Sarah Palin takedown in Vanity Fair (more later), but wanted to issue this Consumer Alert:

The Missus and I agree that Boston Globe movie critic Ty Burr got it just right in his review of Public Enemies. (“Public Enemies has powerful stars, problematic script.”)

Great clothes, though, and absolutely trend-setting eye/sunglasses.

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This Week’s Old Media/New Media Donnybrook

Posted on July 1, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

These days the newspaper business is like an endless self-help seminar, with chinstrokers tossing around theoretical therapies while journalists cast about for a life preserver.

The latest in the latter category is Connie Schultz’s column in Sunday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer (via Romnesko) calling for 24-hour copyright protection of newspaper reports. The problem, Schultz writes, is that Internet sites like Daily Beast and Newser are “free riding” on expensive-to-gather newspaper content.

[P]arasitic aggregators reprint or rewrite newspaper stories, making the originator redundant and drawing ad revenue away from newspapers at rates the publishers can’t match. The inevitable consequence: diminished revenue and staff cuts.

For a solution, Schultz turns to the brothers Marburger – David and Daniel – a First Amendment lawyer and an economics professor, respectively. Their recommendation is this:

[A] change in federal law that would allow originators of news to exploit the commercial value of their product. Ideally, news originators’ stories would be available only on their Web sites for the first 24 hours.

This is a certified Bad Idea for one simple reason: You pretty much never want to invite the federal government into your house. As Chris Brown follows Rhianna, the feds will eventually stretch out in your living room and ask for a beer and a sandwich.

Firing back from the new-media side of the Imaginot Line, Buzz Machine mechanic Jeff Jarvis  – perhaps upset by the “parasitic aggregator” thing – started by focusing on Schultz herself.

First note well that Schultz is married to U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown as she calls on her newspapers and employer (my former employer, Advance Publications) and fellow columnists to influence Congress to remake copyright. She should be registered as a lobbyist. No joke.

Actually, is to laugh. But more substantively, after several derogatory comments about David Marburger, Jarvis added this:

Schultz and the Marbergers [sic] complain about what they call the “free-riding” of aggregators, et al. But they simply don’t understand the economics of the internet. It’s the newspapers that are free-riding, getting the benefit of links.

Seems to me the relationship is symbiotic, but what do I know? Anyway, Schultz promptly responded to Jarvis in the comments section:

I have no beef with Google News, for example, which posts a headline and a link to the original story. My objection is to aggregators who post such significant rewrites or summaries that readers to their sites lose any interest in going to the original stories. Nor am I arguing that the copyright exists in perpetuity. I suggested a 24-hour window – and this is up for debate, of course – to allow the originators of the coverage to exploit the full commercial value of their product. Hardly a dangerous proposition.

Whereupon Jarvis responded with his own comment:

You do not deal with the substance of my argument at all. News when it is news is fact and fact in discussion is not subject to the protection you seek to bring to it. Links to newspapers’ news benefit the newspapers.

Over all, I tend to agree with Jarvis – although for different reasons – that the Marburger/Schultz approach is counterproductive. But at the risk of being flame-broiled by the Buzz Machine machine, I gotta ask: Why does Jeff Jarvis feel the need to be so relentlessly unpleasant when he does his new-media boogaloo?

Perhaps because of that, Jarvis suffers in some circles from the rap that he revels in the misfortune of old-media types just because they haven’t drunk his flavor of Kool-Aid.

Jarvis is right about a lot of things, although his confidence that new media can replace the in-depth and investigative content of old media like newspapers is, I think, wildly optimistic.

Regardless, this much is true: Schadenfreude is bad luck in any language. And in any medium.

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Is the Times Guilty of Wiki-pediment?

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

The soon-to-be-a-major-motion-picture saga of New York Times reporter David Rohde – who was kidnapped, along with his translator,  by the Taliban last November and  escaped, along with his translator, last Saturday – has raised some Big J journalism questions about the effort by the Times to keep the kidnapping out of the news.

As the Times itself just reported, its executives persuaded numerous mainstream media outlets to quash any coverage of the kidnapping. More problematic, Times execs also got Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales to  have the online encyclopedia delete any references to the kidnapping, so that the captors could not “get online and assess who he was and what he’d done and what his value to them might be.”

All worthy efforts, but journalistically sound?

Phoenix media critic Adam Reilly has some thoughtful comments on his blog, writing that

[W]hile Wikipedia did constrain the freedom of some of its users, it didn’t violate their freedom of speech. The individuals who wanted to get word of Rohde’s kidnapping out could have contacted countless news outlets, for example; or nabbed a relevant blogspot account to publicize Rohde’s situation and Wikipedia’s response; or simply stood on the streetcorner handing out leaflets that did the same.

That led to this response from a commenter:

I’d be more understanding if it wasn’t for the NYT double-standard. When it comes to releasing information about our secret program to track terrorists finances, they have no qualms about publishing that info, in essence working against America’s safety. So what happens when terrorism hits home with them? Surprise, it’s “hush-hush” to the point of deleting public information again or again. I’m glad the reporter is OK, but I’ll never trust the NYT, and now wikipedia.

Which led to this response from Adam Reilly:

When the Times reports something like the warrantless wiretapping story, they’re operating on the assuption that the threat to privacy is a massive public ill that outweighs any potential safety threat stemming from their coverage. Whether you buy that argument or not, it’s possible to make it.

One other aspect that many Times critics overlook: the paper held off on publishing the warrantless wiretapping story for a full year because the Bush administration convinced Times executives that the story’s potential to jeopardize public safety outweighed the public’s right to know what the federal government was up to.

The Times might want a mulligan on that call. But I bet they sleep just fine now that David Rohde is back in the fold.

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Gay Old Times at the New York Times

Posted on June 29, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

At least twice in the past month the New York Times has published stories with the basic theme, The American Public Is Way Out in Front of Politicians on Gay Rights.

At the end of May there was Matt Bai’s piece in the Times Magazine asking the musical question, “How did Washington miss the generational shift toward gay marriage?”  Bai also made this observation:

On gay rights, localities and courts have dragged national politicians toward what would seem to be an inevitable social reckoning.

Fast forward to yesterday’s Times front page, which featured a piece headlined, “Political Shifts on Gay Rights Are Lagging Behind Culture.”

Nut graf:

The conflicting signals from the White House about its commitment to gay issues reflect a broader paradox: even as cultural acceptance of homosexuality increases across the country, the politics of gay rights remains full of crosscurrents.

The “cultural acceptance of homosexuality” might be eluding the political world, but it increasingly includes the advertising arena. Coincidentally or not,  yesterday’s Times also ran a “special advertising feature” headlined “Stonewall 40 Years Later.”

And what did we find imbedded in a cursory essay – read, advertorial – about the landmark 1969 insurgency against a New York City police raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar?  Go figure – laudatory references to the special advertising feature’s sponsors, each of which also ran a traditional ad in the two-page spread.

To wit:

ABC Carpet & Home (“All employees, regardless of race or sexual preference, are treated equally”)

The Visionaire condominium (“has attracted gay owners who want a building that is both luxurious and state-of-the-art in terms of being ‘green'”)

Olivia Cruises and Resorts (“The safe space for women created by 1970s music festivals [has] found a new venue”)

and

The Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention Convention & Visitor Bureau (“Fort Lauderdale has over 30 gay-owned guesthouses and over 150 gay-owned businesses”)

Moral of the story: The politics of gay rights might be business as usual, but business, in the end, is just business.

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Anonymess

Posted on June 28, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Confidential sources are the Achilles heel of print media.

Part of the reason the general public doesn’t trust/believe/respect newspapers, for instance, is that the general public thinks it’s too easy for them to just make stuff up. See Jayson Blair et. al. for further details.

So newspaper editors have taken pains lately to specify just why they’ve granted anonymity to the sources they cite.

Here’s a typical disclaimer:

These people were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak.

Duh.

But this quote from a New York Times piece about Michael Jackson takes the cake:

‘It’s all a mess,’ said one executive involved in Mr. Jackson’s financial affairs who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of respect for the entertainer’s family.

Puh-leeze. Saying nothing is respect for the entertainer’s family. Anything else is bushwa.

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Times Report Lacks MySpice

Posted on June 28, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Social networking giant MySpace is hardly going Friendster, but it does have its problems.

Facebook is currently kicking its boot-up, reportedly drawing more monthly visitors than MySpace, which also is experiencing losses in page views and revenues.

So what looked like a steal for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. – which outbid Viacom for MySpace in 2005 for a lunch-money $580 million, propped up by $300 million annually in guaranteed Google adbucks for five years – is now a millstone.

Enter Viacom honcho Sumner Redstone, the bridesmaid in in the MySpace bake-off. Redstone “could get a second chance” to own MySpace, according to a New York Times piece this week.  The Times story also said this about Redstone’s second-place finish four years ago:

The Viacom chairman acknowledged firing the chief executive, Tom Freston, for failing to purchase MySpace when he figured he could have had it for $500 million. Losing out to Mr. Murdoch was a ‘humiliating experience,’ Mr. Redstone told [PBS host] Charlie Rose in a 2006 interview.

Here’s the thing: According to a piece by Lloyd Grove in the Daily Beast,

[I]t was Redstone and Viacom board member (now CEO) Philippe Dauman, not Freston, who shut down the bidding for MySpace – this, according to numerous accounts, including the definitive book on the subject, Julia Angwin’s Stealing MySpace.

So, if Grove is to be believed (and he seems pretty solid), the Times bought a pig in a poke (that is, a pig in a bag) from Redstone. As did Charlie Rose.

Not exactly a “humiliating experience” for the Times and Rose, but not exactly a Hallmark moment either.

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Sanford an Easy Mark

Posted on June 27, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

I tend to agree with Slate’s John Dickerson’s piece on So. Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, which features this fabulous lede:

Mark Sanford is no longer missing, but he’s obviously lost.

I also agree with Lee Siegel’s Daily Beast post, in which he’s outraged that the liberal privacy crowd has been AWOL about the leaked emails between Sanford and his Argentine paramour, and that the anti-Patriot Act set hasn’t been howling about it.

The emails have been boffo boxoffice for So. Carolina’s The State, which has attracted almost two million hits in the past several days.

When I actually read the emails, though, it was just sad – two people caught in a position only a chiropractor could straighten out, expressing emotions that were more raw than a sushi buffet.

There’s a Peeping Tom facet to this affair that’s thoroughly unsettling. I’m done peeping.

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Hello and Welcome

Posted on June 26, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Despite Dr. Johnson’s excellent advice (see above right), I hereby claim my humble space in the blogosphere.

(Big shoutout to blogger extraordinaire Dan Kennedy, whose helpful ministrations got me to the starting line.)

Up until now, my blogging experience has been limited to the receiving end, which is to say I’ve been flame-broiled in the flogosphere on numerous and memorable occasions. But finally I’m ready to start dishing it out (well, dishing, anyway).

Of course, I have no idea what I’ll fill this space with, but I know I have exactly zero to say about the demise of Michael Jackson, whose story would be sad if it weren’t so sordid. Ditto for the kneejerk (accent all too often on jerk) coverage by the news and entertainment media.

But I will try my best to post at least once a day, and to write something interesting and different.

There – have I set the bar low enough?

Think so.

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