"There is a certain vicious amorality about the Mark Zuckerberg-ian philosophy that all transparency is always and everywhere a good thing, particularly when it’s uttered by the guy who’s busily monetizing your radical transparency. And the way most journalists 'expose' secrets as a professional practice — to the extent that they do — is just as narrowly selfish: because they publicize privacy only when there is profit to be made in doing so, they keep their eyes on the valuable muck they are raking, and learn to pledge their future professional existence on a continuing and steady flow of it. In muck they trust.

"According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will 'carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,' a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary."

The “interactive budget” feature at the New York Times was kind of interesting. I played around with several scenarios. The thing that surprised me is how easy it is to close the gap simply by returning most taxation to mid-Clinton Administration levels, particularly on people making more than $250,000 a year plus taking away some really huge weapons expenditures. But of course in the dark days of the 1990s, rich people were fleeing the United States in huge numbers, leaving our country a smoldering ruin of middle-classness, so let’s not relieve that nightmare. I’m sure Very Serious People will be along any minute now to tell us why it’s naive to think that this approach to revenue and expenditure could ever be implemented, given that the 21st Century is so very different than the 1990s.

What does linguistics have to offer to the understanding of "public language," and vice-versa? What is the public, anyway? How does public language adapt to its material & social settings? What's the effect of new media on the language of public discourse?

This essay forum strives to build an integrative discussion for what is a fragmented interdisciplinary field of study on the public sphere. It is meant to accompany a mapping project we are calling the Public Sphere Guide and is co-sponsored by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. The forum provides a platform for discussions around current or emerging projects in this area and serves as a gateway to ongoing conversations around sub-themes that have resulted in other stand-alone forums or blogs at the SSRC.

As we continue, Mr. Koch becomes increasingly animated. He discusses another seminal work in his collection, F.A. Harper’s 1957 “Why Wages Rise.” The book demonstrates “that wages rise not because of unions or government action, but because of marginal productivity gains–people get more money when they produce more value for other people.” Then he confides, “I was so thrilled by this revelation that I had what Maslow called a ‘peak experience.’” [WSJ]

An interesting idea that bares no relation to the facts.

This will inspire some creative flailing by the free market ideologues whose positions at my university are directly funded by Koch’s institutions. “You should measure total compensation, not just wages!” Fair enough:

Even after the Heritage Foundation jukes the stats with their patented Implicit Price Deflator, there’s still a gap (along with a humorous typo in the title — more wishful thinking?).

That gap between productivity and compensation is what’s known as “profit,” or, in some quarters, “exploitation.”

And let’s not forget that “total compensation” includes employer-covered health care, whose costs have risen astronomically in the past ten years. The current health care bill will not stem this trend.

Meanwhile, Koch has had a peak experience of another sort.

Tagged: capitalism, graphiti, the ruling class

Chief Justice-nominee Roberts, in his opening statement at his confirmation hearings in September, 2005:"Judges and justices are servants of the law, not
the other way around. Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the
rules; they apply them."The role of an umpire and a judge is critical.
They make sure everybody plays by the rules."But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a
ball game to see the umpire."Judges have to have the humility to recognize
that they operate within a system of precedent, shaped by other judges
equally striving to live up to the judicial oath."Chief Justice Roberts last September, questioning Solicitor General Elena Kagan, during oral arguments in the Citizens United v Federal Election Commission corporate-funding case whose decision was announced yesterday (as reported by Stuart Taylor here):" 'When corporations use other people's money to electioneer,' as Kagan
explained, 'that is a harm not just to the shareholders themselves but a
sort of a broader harm to the public,' because it distorts the
political process to inject large sums of individuals' money in support
of candidates whom they may well oppose.
"Roberts sharply challenged this line of argument. 'Isn't it
extraordinarily paternalistic,' he asked, 'for the government to take
the position that shareholders are too stupid to keep track of what
their corporations are doing and can't sell their shares or object in
the corporate context if they don't like it? ... ' "We the government have
to protect you naive shareholders." '
"Kagan responded that 'in a world in which most people own stock
through mutual funds [and] through retirement plans ... , they have no
choice. I think it's very difficult for individual shareholders to be
able to monitor what each company they own assets in is doing.' "
Of course Kagan's response is the practical and real-world one. Virtually all such "wealth" as my wife and I hold, apart from our house, is in low-cost indexed mutual retirement funds. I literally have no idea which specific companies I might have bigger or smaller positions in. By the prevailing wisdom of the day, I'm behaving rationally for a non-expert prudent investor. By Roberts' standard, I am "too stupid to keep track" of what every one of these companies is doing and shifting my positions day by day in response. Or maybe just too lazy. And even if Kagan were wrong -- and, she is right -- is it not breathtaking for one appointed Justice, on his own, to decide that he does not like the balance that elected legislators decided on many decades ago, and that many waves of his judicial predecessors have declined to tamper with? On the merits, Roberts' approach is like the idiot-savant faith in flawless markets that we all recall from Introductory Ec class. The cliched joke about this outlook concerns the economist's refusal to pick up a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk: After all, if really were a $20 bill, someone would already have picked it up. But the merits of his argument aren't the point. It's the disjuncture between the person who presented himself with "humility" at the confirmation hearings and the man happy to legislate from the bench.The head of the nation's judicial branch was purposefully deceptive during his "umpire" testimony. Or he had no idea what his words meant. Or he has had a complete change of philosophy and temperament while in his mid-50s. Those are the logical possibilities. None of them is too encouraging about the basic soundness of our governing institutions.

A friend of mine once asked me why I so disliked the use of George Lakoff’s concepts of “frames” by political operatives, after reading me complain here about those ideas several times. After all, my friend argued, there’s some truth to the idea, political outcomes are in fact decided by the rhetorical and conceptual shorthand that comes to dominate public discourse: say, in the difference between considering something warfare versus seeing it as law enforcement, or in terms like anti-abortion, pro-life, pro-choice.

Yes, there’s some empirical truth to the concept, that how we commonly speak about political and social problems leads to the privileging of certain kinds of actions. The problem with how political elites use Lakoff, however, is that they assume that the association between a frame and the real embedded knowledge of people about their world is arbitrary and infinitely mobile, that all you have to do is find the right key to unlock hearts and minds. It’s a way of thinking that had a much more sophisticated double or echo in Stuart Hall’s meditations about Gramscian thought back in the Thatcher era. Hall was upbraiding his colleagues on the left for thinking that their major challenge was to mobilize the appropriate social formations, that Thatcher’s public rhetoric had no relationship to her political power. Instead, he argued, they needed to take that rhetoric very seriously, because it was an important source of her political success. That was an important point, but Hall didn’t quite take it far enough, in that he never fully thought through why Thatcherite ideas were popular even among social groups that the British left hoped to mobilize.

What I’ve written about here before is what happens when political organizers and experts of all ideological predispositions believe that they’re engaged in “rehanging frames” is that they fall quickly into a self-destructive elitism, a cack-handed vanguardism. They come to believe that they somehow have an x-ray vision understanding of the rhetorical landscape which the general public does not have, they separate the world into knowing magicians and dumbfounded marks. Even when a political elite has a pretty good ear for how things play in Peoria, once an aspirant frame-mover sets himself outside of the lived world of various publics, it’s only a matter of time before they misfire completely in word or deed. It’s the domestic equivalent of expecting Iraqis to throw flowers at occupying troops.

I mention this discussion because of a Glenn Greenwald column about some writing by Cass Sunstein, in which he calls for a consensus-politics liberal-leaning version of COINTELPRO, more or less. Rather than restate Greenwald at length, just go read his critique. Read it because for one, the bone-headedness of the position paper by Sunstein that Greenwald discusses is breath-taking. Forget the obvious and legitimate slippery-slope arguments for a moment. Purely in terms of the argument of the paper, it’s impossible to conceive of a “solution” more guaranteed to actually aggravate or even just create the problem that it defines.

If it was just a dumb argument, that would be one thing. But it’s not: I think it’s emblematic of what has happened to the political elite on both sides of the aisle. Whatever happens in elections, most of them feel like they can’t lose. Certain prizes change hands, sure, but the circuit of their power and influence remains largely unbroken. They know that even if a candidate comes into office seemingly riding a wave of insurgent sentiment, they’re going to have to fill out the ranks of government with experts of one ideology or another. Where else are you going to go? And if you try seriously to reach outside the usual suspects, the usual suspects are going to find ways to fuck with your authority. Because if there’s one thing the policy and bureaucratic establishment (right and left) is good at, it’s sandbagging and subverting policy directions they don’t like or don’t endorse.

Sunstein’s paper exemplifies what I was writing about last week, about the inauthenticity of political and social life at the moment. As I said then, it’s not just Sunstein’s problem. Far too much public conversation is driven by a similar conceit, a belief that you can move obstacles to your favored goals by pushing constantly at them with half-truths and manipulations. But Sunstein in this essay is a poster child for just how deep in the tank much of the Beltway elite has gone–and how they’re dragging any hope of meaningful social change down into the pit with them.

In a review of Elena Gorokhova’s memoir of childhood in the Soviet Union, there’s a quote of her youthful realization about Communism:

“The rules are simple…They lie to us, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.”

Here in the gathering twilight of 21st Century America, the situation is hardly much different, with one exception: we seem to want the lies, we compete to outdo the power elite with our own tall tales, we luxuriate in the drowning filth of our fabulistic excesses.

Frank Rich made the case a few weeks ago that Tiger Woods was the emblematic man of our moment not because of his sexual escapades but because of the total disconnect between the popularity of the iconography of his squeaky-clean professionalism and his actual life.

Rich suggests that there is a growing consensus on both left and right that virtually no public figure’s iconography is trustworthy, and that basing your political and social choices on those narratives is a fool’s errand.

That, I have to admit, seems true enough. I can remember thinking that John Edwards seemed like a decent enough candidate in his first run for the Presidency, but I can’t even begin to remember why I thought that: some vague impression of his electability, a few catch-phrases here and there that mimicked positions I could charitably imagine having a resemblance to what I’d like to see happen, and yes, some sense that he seemed like a capable, decent leader. In retrospect, obvious bullshit, all of it. I can remember telling a few friends in 2000 that Bush seemed to have some interest in governing towards the middle, because of a few little rhetorical flourishes, and I thought that again when he gestured in that direction right after 9/11. Again, bullshit.

I gave money to Joe Sestak in his race for Congress here in my district, and while virtually anybody was an improvement over the previous incumbent, Sestak’s actual voting record wasn’t anything like what I’d heard him talking about doing when I went to a fund-raiser and his lack of interest in setting up a real constituent-relations operation was palpable. We were just a way station on the road to something else, just a little resume-builder.

I didn’t buy the same bill of goods in voting for Obama, so I’m not as intensely disappointed by him as those that did. That said, he doesn’t even seem to be governing up to my more modest expectations, settling for “not aggressively bad like the last guys”.

If I’m setting out to buy a dishwasher or a video game, I feel pretty good that crowdsourcing is going to help me find a decent product, that the flow of information online will give me a peek at the actual experiences of users. I feel like I’m pretty experienced at spotting obvious shills, in part because they typically describe products or services in phony language or improbably complimentary terms. I get burned now and again, but not very often.

Politicians and public life, not so much, none of it, because almost all of us are engaged in one way or another in adorning the lies and tale tales of the political elite, in pushing a line or selling a product.

Just about every blogger I read and respect, and I include myself, has a politics that is an a la carte assemblage of positions and favored projects strung together loosely by attitude and affect. Most of the people I like are too smart and wary to be active, aggressive shills for any particular candidate, but there’s still a lot of qualified nods for some leaders and lip-curling disdain for others, based largely on whether they’re telling the lies that we like or the lies that we hate, whether they match up at some moment with some random item on our personal checklists of things-we-like. As Rich suggests, even people that like to imagine themselves as tough-minded independents and skeptics tend to invest in politics the way that audiences invest in the narrative of a contestant on Top Chef or The Amazing Race.

And then beyond that conversation is a vast domain of other readers and writers busy spinning and confabulating in a far less guarded way, a heaving ocean of shillery.

We lie to us, we know we’re lying, we know we know we’re lying, but we keep on lying anyway, and we keep on pretending to believe ourselves.

And yet there are also these moments where real understanding seems possible, where online discourse breaks through to expose our mutual authenticities, where YouTube shows us moments of genuine political life, where a real person is suddenly there speaking about hard choices. Times where the bedrock on which beliefs and politics really rests upon is exposed. I don’t think all my political desires, all my personal checklist, is just a collection of advertising slogans, and I don’t even think that’s true of many of the people I most disdain. Some of what I believe is a product of my self-interest, as it is for all of us, and some of it is a product of what I honestly know about the world and about what makes for best practices at this moment in human history.

For our own velvet revolution, for at least a possibility of moving the ball forward past this stagnant, curdled moment in American life, I think what we’ll all have to do is take the risk of authenticity, to develop a grown-up taste for the rough edges and honest imperfections of lives as they are lived. In our politicians, in our public figures, in ourselves. To stop carrying water for liars or telling simplified fabulisms because we think that will serve some end that we deem necessary. To drop our deflector shields. Living and speaking within a world of acknowledged ambiguity, uncertainty, and imperfection is an end in and of itself.

Otherwise, 21st Century American life is going to amount to just us, the online comments threads, and those wonderful people out there in the dark…a long slow fading as we dreamily revisit over and over again our old glories, waiting endlessly for our close-up.

I just watched President Obama’s Cairo speech.   It’s not a very pretty piece of writing, but it has an impeccable quality.  I’d equate it with a Henry James novel or a shaker chair – all is all plan, intention, and the shrewd distribution of energies.  I’d love to learn more about the process that went into crafting it, as the prose shows evidence of long contemplation and final polish.

That said, remember that this speech is really not for Americans: beware of any analysis of this oration that is not based on how it sounds in Arabic, Persian or Urdu.  For instance, I feel certain that the reason that the speech uses the term “extremist” instead of “terrorist” has something to do with translation, not ideology.  Of course, virtually none of the opinions that we read in the West will be based on foreign language versions, so the meaning of the speech has been reduced to a parlor game.

But it’s a smashing good parlor game, and one with implications.  In fact, the interpretation of Obama’s speech proves one thing: politics thrives on treating speech in a dishonest way, because commentators keep asking burning questions about words, yet they paradoxically refuse to pursue answers, even when there exists obvious ways to find these answers.

Consider, for instance, this response to Obama’s speech, an exchange between Liz Cheney and James Zogby on CNN the other day:

CHENEY:  What I thought was new and particularly troubling was the juxtaposition. You know, when he talked about the Holocaust and horror of the Holocaust, but then in the very next paragraph, when he was done with the Holocaust, he said, on the other hand — and seems to equate the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust, the murder, the slaughter of six million Jews to the situation in which Palestinians live today.

And I think that — that, you know, goes way too far. And I know he was trying to sound even-handed, but I think that begins to be very much appalling, frankly, to a lot of folks and walking away — putting some distance in the relationship with Israel.

ZOGBY: Clearly not and not intended as such. He was playing out the historical narratives of both peoples. This is why Jewish people suffer. This is why they’re afraid. This is why they have a feeling that they are insecure. This is why Palestinians have suffered. This is why.

Okay, this is little more than a dog-and-pony show.  But let’s pretend for the sake of argument that the purpose of this exchange is to understand what the President really means, what he thinks about the world and intends to make of it.

With this in mind, consider what Cheney is suggesting: for her, the idiom “on the other hand” is a connective phrase that contains a fully-developed intellectual proposition – when people use this phrase, she suggests, they promulgate the idea that the preceding subject and the succeeding subject are equivalent in a moral sense.

So let’s imagine that I said: “AIDS is sad; on the other hand, dysentery is sad.”  According to Cheney’s reasoning, by employing the phrase “on the other hand” I have consciously proposed that AIDS and dysentery are equally deserving of lament, as if sadness is to be justly meted out in equal portion to sufferers of each disease, and this notion may be questionable by campaigners who specialize in HIV prevention or water treatment initiatives.  You could say that I have “elevated” dysentery to the status of AIDS, or vice versa, and then get all huffy about it, if we follow Cheney’s way of looking at things.

This turf battle would not exist if I instead said something like “AIDS is sad; also, dysentery is sad,” or – even better – if I discussed AIDS and dysentery in two separate speeches on separate occasions.  That formula would presumably not imply any provocative moral equivalence.  Now that’s what Zogby is saying.  For him, the phrase “on the other hand”  is merely a signal that tells listeners “okay, that’s one story; now I’m moving on to another story.”  This reading imputes little meaning to the connecting phrase – Zogby thinks that the phrase is just a marker, not a miniature argument – and so he has the benefit of simplicity.

But which reading is correct?  If an ordinary person really cared to know what Obama really meant, how could he or she find an answer?

One way you could do so would be to look to your own usage.  Personally, when I use the term “on the other hand” I seldom intend it to convey moral equivalences.  Rather, I tend to use it when I am deliberating an issue that has more than one legitimate perspective and I want to give each one equal airtime, but not necessarily equal gravity.  My usage is closer to Zogby’s model than it is to Cheney’s.  Of course, I am not infallible, and it is possible that many people use this term in a different way.  But if Cheney wants to prove her point, she would need to examine her own recorded usages of this phrase, to ensure that they conform to the interpretation that she is imputing to the President.

Another way to answer the question would be to look to the whole of the speech.  I don’t have the time to really do  justice to such an exercise, but let’s look at the highlighted paragraphs anyway:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive …

If Cheney is correct, then the sheer fact of mutual mention implies equivalence.  It matters not if one persecution is “enslaving” and “unprecedented,” while another is “humiliating” and “intolerable,” so long as the descriptions of these two situations abut one another in a sequence.  Meanwhile, Zogby is focusing on the last phrase.  His view is that Obama set out to summarize and dignify two peoples, not to engage in some historical argument that measures and compares the sums of collective suffering.  In his reading, one would imagine that the last part is the “core message” of the passage, rather than some connecting idiom in the middle of it.

There is a third way to find out the truth: by contextualizing these readings in the larger corpus of Obama’s statements and acts.  Remember that our goal is to know Obama’s meaning, what he intends to convey with words, because this gives us a window onto his plans.  If that’s the case, then it would be smart to look at a pattern in how his use of the term “on the other hand” correlates with policy proposals.  Sounds like a job for a grad student …

Of course the question does not even end there.  Ultimately, this dispute of interpretation isn’t about a speech, but about character.  Is Obama’s penchant for even-handedness bona fide, or is it merely a gesture to ingratiate himself to both sides in a dispute before he disappoints one of them?  To answer this question both Cheney and Zogby would have to present a case.  For instance, Cheney might show an instance in which Obama proposed to balance two opposing points of view, but really only helped one side to the unmitigated detriment of the other; conversely, Zogby might go through Obama’s speeches and look for other moments in which he summarizes positions of opponents without overtly aiming at moral judgments of either position.

Whew.  Okay, let’s back up and look at the larger implications of all this: my point is that there are many avenues available to find the truth, if we really wanted arguments that are illuminating.  But why on earth would we want that?  To do so would not make for very good television.  The purpose of these disputes is not to find meaning in words but to ascribe meaning to words, which is why this debate throws open a number of questions that are perfectly answerable by obvious research – which never takes place and therefore provides no answers.

That’s what’s so dishonest about this kind of political debate.  It asks questions that we could answer fairly easily, but it refuses to do so, because it is more exciting to perpetuate uncertainty than to expunge it.  By now everybody knows that the facts don’t really matter; what’s amazing is that we create great opportunities for the facts to matter and then immediately give up at the moment that the facts begin to show promise.

If American anger remains corralled on the Internet, into e-mail messages to Congress and in sporadic small-group protests, it is unlikely that the Obama administration will do much to assuage the anger of taxpayers.

The award for "Most destructive effect on public discourse by a single person" for the 2000s, so far, goes to Dick "no doubt" Cheney.  ("Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Cheney, speech to national VFW Convention, August 26, 2002. Of course, this is a career-achievement award, not limited to this one event.) My nominee for the winner in the 1990s would be Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey. At various stages in her career she has been a banker, a Republican politician, and a staffer at conservative think tanks, but she entered the public stage in the mid-1990s in the guise of a dispassionate, independent researcher who considered it her duty to inform the American public about the dire threats it faced. Come to think of it, that is more or less the guise Cheney took in warning about the threat from Iraq.In McCaughey's case, the equivalent of weapons of mass destruction was the original Clinton Health Reform plan. In 1994 she wrote a cover story in the New Republic "revealing" a number of hidden dangers in the Clinton plan that less careful analysts had somehow missed. Unfortunately for McCaughey, most of what she wrote was false. Unfortunately for the Clintons, most of what she claimed was echoed uncritically and became part of the conventional wisdom of why the bill couldn't pass. After the jump, a passage from my 1995 Atlantic article "A Triumph of Misinformation" about McCaughey's article and its effects. More on this topic in my 1996 book Breaking the News -- and especially about why sloppy press coverage did as much to thwart health-care reform under the Clintons as it did to bring on the Iraq war under Cheney and Bush. Why bring this up now? Because McCaughey has sprung up again to "reveal" another hidden danger in another Democratic administration's plans. Buried inside the new stimulus bill, she has discovered, are new big-brother tactics similar to those she warned against years ago. In a recent Bloomberg.com opinion column she wrote:One new bureaucracy, the
National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective....Hospitals and doctors that are not "meaningful users" of the new system will face penalties.  "Meaningful user" isn't
defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who
will be empowered to impose "more stringent measures of
meaningful use over time" (511, 518, 540-541)  For what is wrong with her "analysis" this time, check out this
in The Washington Monthly, which also has a chronology of how
the (right wing) press -- led by Fox, Limbaugh, and Drudge -- is again
picking up flatly disprovable lies. (Eg, the "new" bureaucracy she
warns about already exists, and was established under GW Bush.)
Seriously, every one of McCaughey's statements about public policy from
this day forward should be subjected to the "Oh yes, and how did it
turn out last time?" test. We are in OJ territory here. Stop this new
claim before it gets real traction.___From "A Triumph of Misinformation":Much of the problem for the plan seemed, at least in Washington, to come not even from mandatory alliances but from an article by Elizabeth McCaughey, then of the Manhattan Institute, published in The New Republic last February. The article's working premise was that McCaughey, with no ax to grind and no preconceptions about health care, sat down for a careful reading of the whole Clinton bill. Appalled at the hidden provisions she found, she felt it her duty to warn people about what the bill might mean. The title of her article was "No Exit," and the message was that Bill and Hillary Clinton had proposed a system that would lock people in to government-run care. "The law will prevent you from going outside the system to buy basic health coverage you think is better," McCaughey wrote in the first paragraph. "The doctor can be paid only by the plan, not by you."

George Will immediately picked up this warning, writing in Newsweek that "it would be illegal for doctors to accept money directly from patients, and there would be 15-year jail terms for people driven to bribery for care they feel they need but the government does not deem 'necessary.'" The "doctors in jail" concept soon turned up on talk shows and was echoed for the rest of the year.

These claims, McCaughey's and Will's, were simply false. McCaughey's pose of impartiality was undermined by her campaign as the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of New York soon after her article was published. I was less impressed with her scholarly precision after I compared her article with the text of the Clinton bill. Her shocked claim that coverage would be available only for "necessary" and "appropriate" treatment suggested that she had not looked at any of today's insurance policies. In claiming that the bill would make it impossible to go outside the health plan or pay doctors on one's own, she had apparently skipped past practically the first provision of the bill (Sec. 1003), which said, "Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting the following: (1) An individual from purchasing any health care services."

It didn't matter. The White House issued a point-by-point rebuttal, which The New Republic did not run. Instead it published a long piece by McCaughey attacking the White House statement. The idea of health policemen stuck.

While watching our 43rd president's final press conference two days ago, I noted in real time, here and here, that I felt the first flickers of empathy for a man whose effect on America and the world I have relentlessly deplored. (Try this, for a sample, a  story the Atlantic had the guts to put on its cover just before the 2004 election that I'm still proud of.)I got a fair amount of "how dare you feel sorry for this guy?" response -- but also one note that conveyed a reaction I wish I had captured at the time. In fairness, this came in two days after the press conference, and I was writing in the wee hours in Beijing with a Yanjing beer in hand while Bush was on the air. Still, I thought it impressive. It is from David Carr, not the NYT writer of that name, from North Carolina:I too thought the final Bush press conference was a remarkable performance; if an actor were to memorize and replicate it, it would seem like something out of Eugene O'Neill, staged in a barroom, and we might feel pity.  The inept man without words realizes that he cannot say what he must say: an admission of failures across the board, a realization that his pipe dreams were deadly, an understanding that his nation and the world now hold him in low esteem and wish him gone.  And not to be able to say these things is to remain their captive forever.  But there is no expiation for Mr. Bush, and that is the objective tragedy. How can he live without awareness?  He also must see how much Barack Obama is his opposite, how much he is admired and welcomed to the office, so unlike the stolen Bush arrival in 2000.  It's a remarkable achievement for Mr. Bush:  every moment of his presidency is touched with a shame that cannot be bathed away.  I think he will disappear; I cannot see any post-presidential role he could fulfill without the full recollection of that shame.

Outsiders who follow Chinese events have known for years about Roland Soong's EastSouthWestNorth site*, which draws from Chinese-language and English-language sources for reports and analysis.I've just seen this post, from a few days ago, which strikes me as something that people who don't normally follow Chinese events should know about. It's the text of a speech Soong prepared for last weekend's annual Chinese Bloggers conference (but did not deliver, for family-emergency reasons). In it, he discusses the differences the Internet has, and has not, made in the Chinese government's ability to control information and maintain power within China. This is a subject easily misunderstood in the United States, where people tend to assume either that the cleansing power of the Internet will ultimately make government efforts at info-control pointless, or, on the contrary, that the bottling-up effectiveness of the Great Firewall will protect the government from the power of an informed citizenry.  (My own Atlantic article on the subject here.)Soong elegantly illustrates why such categorical assumptions miss the complexity of what's going on. The whole speech is worth reading, but the passage below is especially important for Americans. First he describes the way info would flow when bloggers and net connections first became significant in China, around 2003:1. A bad thing happens somewhere in China (such as police brutality, government malfeasance, a forced eviction, a coal mine disaster, etc).2. The local government suppresses all information.3. All media reports are censored.  (But if it wasn't reported in traditional media, there are other alternatives now on the Internet.)4. The victims begin a petitioning process up the hierarchy in order to seek justice.  The road is long and hard, and nothing ever comes out of it.5. The Internet forums/blogs rushed to report on the case.  But within approximately 48 hours, all traces of information are erased by order of the authorities.  (Thus, one of the excitements of my blogging activity was to find and translate that information within this time window.)6. Western media catch wind of the incident, and follow through.  This creates an international scandal.7. Senior Chinese officials take notice, and corrective actions are taken.Then he describes what has changed in the past five years, in this 2008 update:1.
A bad thing happens somewhere in China (such as police brutality,
government malfeasance, a forced eviction, a coal mine disaster, etc).2. The local government suppresses all information.3. All media reports are censored.4.
The victims begin a petitioning process up the hierarchy in order to
seek justice.  The road is long and hard and nothing ever results.5. The Internet forums/blogs rushed to report on the case. 6a.
Within 48 hours, all traces of negative (i.e. against the authorities)
information are erased by order of the authorities, or else by
self-censorship at the portals/forums/blog service providers.6b.
Positive (i.e. on behalf of the authorities) information appear from
Internet commentators who are paid by the authorities for their efforts5. Western media catch wind of the incident, and follow through with an international incident.7.  But there are just too many portals/forums/blogs that important information will eventually seep through.8. Senior Chinese officials take notice, and corrective actions are taken.He lists various reasons for the change, and then comes down to the one he considers most important:You
will note the role of western media has been eliminated from the
process model...  If once upon a time western media
coverage, which affects the opinion of western politicians and
citizens, mattered to the Chinese people, this is no longer the case.In
the political realm, the Chinese people no longer have to believe in
the rhetoric of freedom, liberty, democracy, sovereignty and human
rights.  The war in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prison, the Guantanamo camp,
hurricane Katrina and other misconduct took care of all that.  Why
would the Chinese people be interested in what American president
George W. Bush have to preach to them about freedom, liberty,
democracy, sovereignty and human rights?  When the western media invoke
those terms, the reaction from the Chinese people is: "Look within
yourselves and fix your own problems first!"In the economic
realm, the financial tsunami of 2008 took care of any credibility in
the Washington consensus.  In its place was an as-yet-undefined Beijing
consensus which has less specifics than the general idea of
self-determination.  Why would the Chinese people be interested in what
Alan Greenspan and Henry Paulson have to tell them about how to run
their economy when they have failure on their hands?There is more in the same vein. Sobering but significant reading.______* The name of Soong's site refers to the way directions are given in Chinese. By this system, Seattle would be in the "Westnorth" corner of the United States, and Atlanta in the "Eastsouth."

Twice in the last six months we've had the spectacle of a candidate clinging to a provably false personal narrative. Each tale was meant to show something admirable and significant about the candidate's character. But in each case the press had the goods to show that the tale was too tall to be believed.One, of course, was Hillary Clinton's "hail of bullets" account of her arrival at the airport in Bosnia.The other is Sarah Palin's "thanks but no thanks" claim to have opposed funding for the "bridge to nowhere."In Senator Clinton's case, the more often she repeated the story, the more relentlessly the press said the story was not true. All parts of the press did this: right, left, middle. They didn't say that there was a "controversy" about her story. They said it was false. And eventually she bowed to the inevitable and stopped telling the story any more.In Governor Palin's case, the more often she has repeated the story, the more abashed the press has seemed about pointing out its falsity. The accurate version would be more like: "I said 'Yes, please!' until the Congress said 'Sorry, no.'" As best I can tell (from my distance in China), the right-wing press has played no part in this truth-squadding. The mainstream press has seemed to treat it as a "controversy" rather than a falsehood. And there is no evidence of Palin hesitating to use the story again and again.There can't be any difference in gender or race bias in treatment of these two cases: they both both involve successful, married white female politicians. There is no essential difference in the falseness of their claims, though there was a greater comic potential in the film footage of Sen. Clinton's "harrowing" arrival. The major remaining difference is that one case involves a Democrat (though the more conservative of the primary-campaign finalists) and one a Republican.So here are the controlled-experiment questions:1) At any point will the right-wing press join the effort to hold Palin accountable for her false claim, as all of the press held Clinton responsible?2)  If Palin keeps making the claim, will press critics redouble their debunking, as they did with Clinton, or taper off for fear of seeming biased or boring?3) At any point will Palin herself -- or, far more significant, McCain -- acknowledge that there are such things as fact and fantasy, and stop making a demonstrably false claim?I pose it as a set of questions rather than an assumed conclusion. For now.

John McCain is a long-time acquaintance of mine that goes way back to our time together at the U.S. Naval Academy and as Prisoners of War in Vietnam. He is a man I respect and admire in some ways. But there are a number of reasons why I will not vote for him for President of the United States.

Instead of speaking softly and wielding a big stick, as Teddy Roosevelt recommended, the American policeman has been loudly lecturing the rest of the world while waving an increasingly unimpressive baton.

Preliminary impeachment hearings begin this coming Friday, July 25th. Congressman Kucinich has an online petition here. And a video of the hearing is expected to be posted here.

Things we can all do to make sure that this preliminary hearing turns into something more substantial:

Contact every member of the Judiciary and insist that they attend the hearing! The hearing is on a Friday and they usually don’t work on Fridays.  Faxing is absolutely worth a try. If you wish to email them in one fell swoop, do so here.

To leave a comment on voicemail, the Democrats’ House Judiciary Office is 202-225-3951 and the Republicans’ is 202-225-6504.  Remember that NINE House Republicans voted to send Kucinich’s latest impeachment proposal, H.Res.1345 — which stated that Bush had lied to Congress to get authorization for his invasion of Iraq — to the Judiciary Committee: Brady (TX), Gilchrest (MD), Walter Jones (NC), Manzullo (IL), Tim Murphy (PA), Ron Paul (TX), Reichert (WA), Christopher Shays (CT), and Mike Turner (OH)

Call your Representative (Congressional Switchboard: 1-800-828-0498) and urge him/her to call for formal hearings in the Judiciary (preferably to begin prior to the commencement of the August recess 2 weeks after July 25.  Ask him/her to sign Kucinich’s resolutions to impeach Bush (H.Res.1258 and H.Res.1345).  Thus far, Wexler (FL-19), Woolsey (CA-6), Barbara Lee (CA-9), Hinchey (NY-22), Baldwin (WI-02), Farr (CA-17), and Towns (NY-10) have co-sponsored H.Res.1258 and Wexler (FL-19) and Barbara Lee (CA-9) have co-sponsored H.Res.1345.

Send an “official” email to your Representative via Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s impeachment petition.

Contact the mainstream media and insist that they report on the impeachment issue and cover the July 25th hearing.  Write a letter to your local newspaper.  Email and/or call national media outlets.  A list of various media outlets can be found here.

Spread the word.

Good night, and good luck.

Related:July 30, 2008 -- Impeachment Petition Deadline Midnight TonightJuly 16, 2008 -- Nine Republicans Vote for Impeachment Hearings, Ten AbstainJune 14, 2008 -- Kucinich explains why he is pushing for impeachment.June 12, 2008 -- Call to impeach BushAugust 10, 2008 -- Some Evidence for Nancy Pelosi

When I saw the title of an article in today's New York Times, The ’60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire, I thought, "Sweet! Professors are retiring! Finally! Jobs all around for me and my PhD-seeking buddies!"If the charts accompanying the article are to be believed, there are a ton of crotchety profs out there, greying by the second, inching closer everyday to retirement:The article's key argument is that the turnover is "changing the face of academia." Not only is academia's face much younger and less wrinkly, it is also, supposedly, more politically moderate:Now, I like charts as much as the next gal, and these are certainly very attractive ones. I have to note, however, that they're also a bit misleading. Apparently, the political spectrum of academia today consists of only three categories: liberal, moderate, and conservative. Like many of the hot young profs in the "under-35" category, I don't consider myself a "liberal." But this certainly doesn't make me a moderate. Ew!I suspect these charts would look very different if their categories were expanded to include a larger array of political sentiment. With a bit more sleuthing, the author of the article might have found that a great many young profs in the humanities and social sciences devote their studies to the critique of liberalism, that they do so largely from non-liberal leftist positions, and that their political commitments are complex, not lacking. Why not write an article about that? Is there some kind of law against truly interesting, thoughtful articles written for popular audiences about the academy?I'd continue my critique, but thankfully, Mark from Kyoto already did so in the article's comments section.  I'm including the whole comment here because it's worth the read:Interesting enough. But one thing goes for the most part undiscussed in this article (and inadequately registered in its accompanying graphics): It is possible to speak of an "aging" faculty (especially in the humanities) only if by "faculty" we mean "full-time tenured or tenurable faculty." If by faculty we mean instead "the men and women who actually run classrooms" the case is altogether different: the "faculty" in this latter sense is by no means "aging" or "graying," nor is it "moderating" in politics (so far as I can tell). A few people interviewed, here, hint at this (e.g., by speaking of the way "market forces" are changing American academia). But Ms. Cohen might have addressed the matter more directly. I suspect that any changes in sensibility, tone, or posture among college/university teachers--insofar as these changes are measurable--is due as much to the gradual phasing out of the tenure system in favor of contingent labor as it is to retirement of professors who came of age in the 1960s & 1970s. It isn't that "liberal professors" are "retiring." The salient point is that tenure itself is being retired--with the result that, in many cases, the men and women who actually run our classrooms are not even listed in traditional "faculty" directories. There are plenty of activist-teachers on campus (for the most part left-leaning). You just don't find them available for interview in offices, because as often as not they have none. Just keep an eye peeled, as you walk around the university, for men and women pulling carry-on luggage of the sort you see in airports. I started noticing this about ten years ago when I worked at a university in Michigan: Education on the fly; education with low (or no) overhead; open-air (or coffee-shop) office hours; and students who have no idea what a "faculty" is.

What struck me at this conference was how certain words seemed to pass through “automated moral preprocessing”, which would allow filing complicated and ambiguous concepts quickly into neatly labeled boxes.

As mentioned earlier, family concerns (my father) have trumped other concerns for quite a while. Among various consequences, and in the cosmic sense a trivial one, is the list of items building up that I am looking for a chance to weigh in on -- should that chance coincide with my being near an internet connection.

Future items range from U.S. policy toward the Beijing Olympics, to Windows Vista and Mac and Google news, to frog-related and air taxi-related developments, to other themes. Concerning a potential US boycott of part or all of the Olympics, I'm looking for the chance to explain why Jimmy Carter, GW Bush, and WJ Clinton are right on this issue, and John McCain, Barack Obama, and HR Clinton are wrong. Off-hand I can't think of any other controversial issue in which you can place Bush and Carter on the same side.

And some day I will at least look at the couple thousand emails now backed up in the system. Sorry if one of them is yours.

I want to use this moment at the computer to address the unspeakable ABC bear-baiting debate last night. I haven't read what anyone has said about this -- except for Tom Shales of the Washington Post. He said that what Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos did last night was "shoddy and despicable." I completely agree and add only these grace notes:

--- From the often-harrumphing Gibson, this is no big surprise. But from Stephanopoulos??? Who earlier in his career was a message/press/legislative man for Dick Gephardt and of course played a more visible version of that role during Bill Clinton's rise - what the hell is this????

I like and respect Stephanopoulos, and part of what I respect about him is the way he usually conducts his TV interviews. But I also remember dealing with him back in the early Clinton days, he in his role as campaign guy and me in my role as reporter. He understands thoroughly and in his bones what is wrong with the kind of mindless, substance-free gotcha questioning he and Gibson wasted their time on last night. I know he understands it because I've heard him shame journalists who were applying the same tactics to Bill Clinton back in the day. What was he thinking? What kind of pressure had been applied to him?

--- After the jump, a passage from my 1996 Atlantic article "Why Americans Hate the Media," itself excerpted from my book Breaking the News, which bears on exactly this kind of mindless "what about the flag pin?" haranguing. To summarize what this passage says: Political reporters think they are being "tough" when they take a borderline-impolite (or worse) tone and try to trap people in some provable if ultimately-meaningless contradiction. But while members of the electorate often find these gaffes diverting in a pro-wrestling sense, whenever they have their own chance to ask "tough" questions they ask the candidates about things that will affect the voters' lives. These are generally questions of war, peace, economics, etc. Again, George S. lived through the phenomenon the excerpt below describes, though he was on the other side. That he would now be in gotcha mode is depressing, to put it mildly.

--- Whatever else happens the next time we choose a president, there has got to be a better way to see candidates operate under pressure than the grotesque system that has metastasized during this electoral cycle. It makes candidates into mere props for bullying anchormen-narcissists. It does no one except the anchormen any good. I mentioned earlier the oddity of Jimmy Carter and GW Bush finding common cause about China policy. Maybe the RNC and the DNC can join hands in freeing political debate from the destructive grip of the networks. And if they can't do that, maybe we should just go all the way and have the candidates compete eating pails full of maggots on Fear Factor. That's the logical extension of where we're headed.

Article except after the jump. Then, again off line for a while.
________

From Breaking the News (1996):

After the 1992 campaign the contrast between questions from citizens and those from reporters was widely discussed in journalism reviews and postmortems on campaign coverage. Reporters acknowledged that they should try harder to ask questions about things their readers and viewers seemed to care about—that is, questions about the differences that political choices would make in people's lives.

In January of last year there was a chance to see how well the lesson had sunk in. In the days just before and after Bill Clinton delivered his State of the Union address to the new Republican-controlled Congress, he answered questions in a wide variety of forums in order to explain his plans.

On January 31, a week after the speech, the President flew to Boston and took questions from a group of teenagers. Their questions concerned the effects of legislation or government programs on their communities or schools. These were the questions (paraphrased in some cases):

* "We need stronger laws to punish those people who are caught selling guns to our youth. Basically, what can you do about that?"

* "I notice that often it's the media that is responsible for the negative portrayal of young people in our society." What can political leaders do to persuade the media that there is good news about youth?

* Apprenticeship programs and other ways to provide job training have been valuable for students not going to college. Can the Administration promote more of these programs?

* Programs designed to keep teenagers away from drugs and gangs often emphasize sports and seem geared mainly to boys. How can such programs be made more attractive to teenage girls?

* What is it like at Oxford? (This was from a student who was completing a new alternative-school curriculum in the Boston public schools, and who had been accepted at Oxford.)

* "We need more police officers who are trained to deal with all the other different cultures in our cities." What can the government do about that?

* "In Boston, Northeastern University has created a model of scholarships and other supports to help inner-city kids get to and stay in college. . . . As President, can you urge colleges across the country to do what Northeastern has done?"

Earlier in the month the President's performance had been assessed by the three network-news anchors: Peter Jennings, of ABC; Dan Rather, of CBS; and Tom Brokaw, of NBC. There was no overlap whatsoever between the questions the students asked and those raised by the anchors. None of the questions from these news professionals concerned the impact of legislation or politics on people's lives. Nearly all concerned the struggle for individual advancement among candidates.

Peter Jennings, who met with Clinton as the Gingrich-Dole Congress was getting under way, asked whether Clinton had been eclipsed as a political leader by the Republicans. Dan Rather did interviews through January with prominent politicians—Senators Edward Kennedy, Phil Gramm, and Bob Dole—building up to a profile of Clinton two days after the State of the Union address. Every question he asked was about popularity or political tactics. He asked Phil Gramm to guess whether Newt Gingrich would enter the race (no) and whether Bill Clinton would be renominated by his party (yes). He asked Bob Dole what kind of mood the President seemed to be in, and whether Dole and Gingrich were, in effect, the new bosses of Washington. When Edward Kennedy began giving his views about the balanced-budget amendment, Rather steered him back on course: "Senator, you know I'd talk about these things the rest of the afternoon, but let's move quickly to politics. Do you expect Bill Clinton to be the Democratic nominee for re-election in 1996?"

The CBS Evening News profile of Clinton, which was narrated by Rather and was presented as part of the series Eye on America, contained no mention of Clinton's economic policy, his tax or budget plans, his failed attempt to pass a health-care proposal, his successful attempt to ratify NAFTA, his efforts to "reinvent government," or any substantive aspect of his proposals or plans in office. Its subject was exclusively Clinton's handling of his office—his "difficulty making decisions," his "waffling" at crucial moments. If Rather or his colleagues had any interest in the content of Clinton's speech as opposed to its political effect, neither the questions they asked nor the reports they aired revealed such a concern.

Tom Brokaw's questions were more substantive, but even he concentrated mainly on politics of the moment. How did the President feel about a poll showing that 61 percent of the public felt that he had no "strong convictions" and could be "easily swayed"? What did Bill Clinton think about Newt Gingrich? "Do you think he plays fair?" How did he like it that people kept shooting at the White House?

When ordinary citizens have a chance to pose questions to political leaders, they rarely ask about the game of politics. They want to know how the reality of politics will affect them—through taxes, programs, scholarship funds, wars. Journalists justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are the public's representatives, asking the questions their fellow citizens would ask if they had the privilege of meeting with Presidents and senators. In fact they ask questions that only their fellow political professionals care about. And they often do so—as at the typical White House news conference—with a discourtesy and rancor that represent the public's views much less than they reflect the modern journalist's belief that being independent boils down to acting hostile.

ABC News is getting roundly criticized about the way it produced the Obama-Clinton debates yesterday. It’s was so bad, there are over 12,000 comments on the ABC News site related to the debate. A sample:

I am disgusted with ABC, Stephanopoulos and Gibson. The “Debate” was nothing more than tabloid journalism. It was a disgrace. There were two hours to ask questions that would showcase the candidates’ policies and approaches to some of “THE” toughest challenges this country has ever faced and you chose to spend most of the time on nonsense. From snipers to Jeremiah Wright to lapel pins. Do you think that’s what we care about? ABC, Stephanopoulos and Gibson you owe Americans a profound apology for this wasted opportunity and their sensationalism of non issues.

This appears to be more than typical “astroturfing.” These are folks who actually took the time to write angry grafs like the above, rather than simply pressing a “vote” button.
Perhaps more to the point was this from Will Bunch from the Philly Daily News:

With your performance tonight — your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters — you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.

Touche.

I supported Bill Clinton when he was in office, and I have liked and admired him before and since. I knew that he did some unsavory things -- OK, let's set aside the obvious, and think back to his approval of the execution of the (mentally-damaged) convicted murderer Ricky Ray Rector during the heat of the campaign in 1992. I thought, and think: this is the price leaders pay. The question is whether, on balance, the leader is a force for public good, and I thought he clearly was.

This standard of comparison sticks in my mind during Hillary Clinton's campaign. And I'm not even talking about Bill Clinton's flurry of public involvement around the time of the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries. Rather I'm thinking: she has done things I don't remember him doing, or that he was smooth enough to do without my noticing it.

As mentioned earlier, I don't recall Bill Clinton knee-capping his Democratic opponents in the 1992 campaign by saying that the Republican opponent, incumbent President George H.W. Bush, was better qualified for office than they were. This of course was Hillary Clinton's charge against Obama a week or so ago.

And I do not recall Bill Clinton saying anything as flatly insulting to the intelligence as Hillary Clinton's statement about the Michigan primary during her interview yesterday with Steve Inskeep on NPR's Morning Edition.

Flatly false from Bill Clinton? Sure: "I did not have..." But flatly insulting to the intelligence, in the fashion of an old press briefing by Scott McClellan when defending Scooter Libby or Alberto Gonzales? No. And that is what Hillary Clinton did yesterday -- to the plain incredulity of the normally calm-sounding Inskeep, who kept asking things like, "But how could the primary have been 'fair' if Barack Obama's name was not on the ballot?"

Listen to the clip to hear for yourself, if you haven't already done so -- but it came down to a "how stupid does she think we are?' argument that it was Obama's own fault that he obeyed the party's rules (as other candidates did) and took his name off the unauthorized Michigan ballot. "We all had a choice as to whether or not to participate," she told Inskeep. "Most people took their names off the ballot, but I didn’t. And that was a wise decision, because Michigan is key to our electoral victory in the fall."

My point is not really the merits of this argument. It is the Clinton-v-Clinton contrast. Am I right in remembering that in his prime, Bill Clinton didn't -- or didn't have to -- do things quite this bluntly and ham-handedly? Are we seeing a demonstration during the campaign of a talent gap in basic political skill between the two members of the household? One reason not to think so is that Bill Clinton is presumably involved in these very strategies, which seem so much clumsier than he was in 1992. Another is that he himself has struck same of the same off-notes this year.

Perhaps it's just Golden Age-ism that makes me think that the old Bill Clinton could always spin the story and make us like it. Perhaps the objective circumstances are different now. But perhaps there is a real and important prose-versus-poetry difference within their household, whose results we're seeing now.

Whatever the reason: I've been away from The Internets for several days, and to emerge and hear Inskeep's clip was startling indeed.

The "plagiarism" flap over Barack Obama is bogus and overstated. It makes me think worse about whoever is pushing this complaint, rather than about Obama himself.

Conceivably Obama would have been wiser to introduce his recent discourse on the role of "hope" by saying, "As my friend the governor of Massachusetts has often pointed out...." But please: A candidate on the stump utters tens of thousands of words every single day. Few of those can be "original" in any deep sense. For many of the words, even the most brilliant candidate relies on help from people whose job is to think of newer and better ways to make the campaign's point.* We should be suspicious of candidates who don't seek this kind of help; it suggests that they are naive about the tradeoffs, triage, and delegation necessary to run a campaign well, let alone an Administration.

The classic campaign stump speech, in its low-rent version, is a memorized mish-mash of things the candidate has already said. In its high-rent version, it's an improvised and steadily evolving mish-mash of things the candidate has already said -- but slightly retuned with each delivery, to reflect the news and the location and the latest charge and countercharge. It's also slightly altered or enriched with each delivery, to include the latest anecdote or aphorism or snappy phrase or moving line that the candidate, or someone around him, has come across that might help push the campaign's main theme. Unless a candidate is a total robot, giving the very same speech time after time, he or she is inevitably grabbing whatever idea, illustration, or phrase is at hand. Again, not to do this is to suggest that a presidential candidate is not quite ready for the job.

Moreover, on the specific Patrick/Obama point at issue: it's not as if no one had thought of this argument (about hope and inspiration), or these examples -- FDR, JFK, MLK Jr -- before Deval Patrick uttered them. Speechwriters could hardly exist without this theme or these illustrations!

Talk about American resolve in the dark days, and you're going to talk about Lincoln and FDR -- plus George Washington at Valley Forge, if you have a little more time to fill. Talk about American national ambition, and you're going to talk about the westward movement across the frontier and the Apollo Project's race to the moon. Talk about American opportunity, and you're going to talk about the GI Bill. Talk about American resolve and determination, and you're going to talk about Pearl Harbor and the fall of the Soviet regime. Talk about the power of ideas, and... [take the home speechwriter-aptitude test! Fill in this blank. One possible answer explained here.]

The list goes on and leads to this: Talk about hope and inspiration, and you are going to use the examples both Patrick and Obama used -- and that I, as just one political speechwriter among legions, have used many times.

A plagiarism charge stings when it underscores the idea that the plagiarist is trying to mask some deficiency: The D student looks over the A student's shoulder to copy during a test. Does any sane person actually think that Barack Obama is deficient in expressing himself? His first book was a "real" book, of a quality most "real" writers would be proud to have matched. (The second one was more of a campaign book, and less in his own voice.) To the extent this flurry is designed to introduce subliminal concerns -- and, let's face it, concerns tied to racial stereotypes -- that Obama is not quite deserving intellectually, a flim-flam man, it really is contemptible.

I respect and admire Joe Biden, but his "similar" case in 1988 was completely different, and actually bad. On the stump he was telling someone else's personal story -- as it happened, Neil Kinnock's -- as if it were his own. That is not the kind of detail you just swap into and out of a stump speech to make it more powerful. Indeed, the mystery is how anyone could actually utter words -- "My daddy was a coal miner," "there I was, at Valley Forge" -- knowing them not to be true. And -- mentioning again that I respect and admire Biden -- the incident wounded him because in fact he had been a weak student in college and law school. Not, say, the president of the Harvard Law Review.

And it's different when people whose job is writing -- people who know very well that the exact phrasing of ideas is each writer's brand and property, and who have plenty of time, in private, to check and perfect the phrases on which they will be judged -- copy others' work. I'm a hawk on punishing them. But to think that this is anything like a candidate's constant search for ways to explain his message, in real time, is unrealistic and wrong. As someone has already said, in an interview or post somewhere whose insight I'm stealing, It's fine for the Hillary Clinton campaign to adopt "Fired up! Ready to go!" as its new motto, and it's fine for Barack Obama to use this way of explaining the importance of hope.

______
*(Disclosure -- or, if you choose, standing to speak: I was a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter during his general-election campaign in 1976 and then for two years in the White House.)

In my kind of journalism, I don't think I have any business "endorsing" candidates. I have strong and unconcealed views about certain issues -- that it was a gigantic and foreseeable mistake to have invaded Iraq (let alone to have done it so badly), that it would be just about as wrong to attack Iran, that we need to be more rather than less open to immigrant talent, that the economic growth of the last decade has been dangerously and shamelessly unbalanced, that we don't need to be terrified of China but that we have to take it seriously, etc.

While certain preferences for parties and candidates naturally flow from those views, actual "endorsement" is for organizations or public figures who feel their backing might sway others. Here instead is an account of what I would be thinking if I were voting in the Democratic primary in my original home state of California tomorrow:

- On domestic and economic and environmental policy, it’s a wash. The Clinton and Obama positions are similar to each other and different from any Republican's. Some people think there is a huge difference in their health-care proposals. Having seen administrations come and go, I am absolutely certain that the difference between Clinton's and Obama's stated objectives in 2008 matters much, much less than what either of them will be able to get through the Congress in 2009 and afterward. Thus: an important distinction in domestic policy is which candidate will bring in a larger bloc in Congress to work with.

- On foreign policy, Clinton and Obama actually do differ, and I agree with him more than with her. He (like Al Gore) was against invading Iraq before it happened; she was for it. He (like Jim Webb) opposed the infamous Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which at the time was undeniably an attempt to legitimize military action against Iran; she voted for it. (Obama, to his discredit, failed to show up to cast his No vote, but his position was not in doubt.) He has criticized the current flat-earth idiotic US policy toward Cuba; she has defended it (as Fareed Zakaria has pointed out in a strong recent essay). I understand the argument that Sen. Clinton has to take these positions to maintain her "credibility" and appearance of strength. To me that matters less than that she keeps voting in what I consider the wrong way. Thus: the positions and “mindsets” differ, and and I like his better.

- On style and governing philosophy, she is for incremental policies and incremental politics -- "experience" and "competence" – based on the underlying belief that Republican obstructionism makes nothing else possible. Not even for a dreamer like Obama. He obviously is trying for something more -- as Bill Clinton was in 1992, when I preferred him to an incomparably more experienced and time-tested President.

- On straight electability, just unknowable. Given that everyone in the country already knows her and a large minority say they don't like her, a narrow victory seems the most that is within Hillary Clinton's grasp. People can argue that Obama would be capable of much more -- or, on the contrary, even less, and that not even a narrow win would be possible once the smear machine got through with him. There is simply no way to be sure now, when it's time to vote. Thus: also a wash.

- On diversity and opportunity, a breakthrough either way. But on a deeper level of “diversity,” we have the prospect of returning a husband-and-wife team – Bill Clinton’s emergence has made this unignorable -- already in the White House for eight years, versus fresh blood.

Any vote for anybody is a gamble. Who imagined that the George Bush of 2000, with his “compassionate conservatism” and critiques of “nation building,” would become the man we’ve known in office? We have no idea what surprises will confront a President Obama, or Hillary Clinton, or Romney, or McCain, or how they might respond. We have to place bets -- roll the dice, if you will -- based on what we do know, which for me is the elements above.

It involved Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, on the power of words in presidential leadership.

Each made his or her respective point clearly, calmly, and appealingly. This was not an ambush or a gotcha or a gaffe or an unintentionally revealing quicksilver exchange. It was the expression of thought-through and well expressed views. And on the merits I think it left the Clinton camp at a terrible disadvantage.

Clinton, after pointing out that Obama voted for an energy bill that was full of the special-interest tax breaks he now criticizes in speeches:So you know, words are not actions.
And as beautifully presented and passionately felt as they are, they are not action. You know, what we've got to do is translate talk into action and feeling into reality. I have a long record of doing that, of taking on the very interests that you have just rightly excoriated because of the overdue influence that they have in our government. And you know, probably nobody up here has been the subject of more incoming fire from the Republicans and the special interests, so I think I know exactly what I'm walking into and I am prepared to take them on.

Then, after an appeal by John Edwards to the Teddy Roosevelt tradition of head-on trust-busting, this response from Obama:Look, I think it's easier to be cynical and just say, "You know what, it can't be done because Washington's designed to resist change." But in fact there have been periods of time in our history where a president inspired the American people to do better, and I think we're in one of those moments right now. I think the American people are hungry for something different and can be mobilized around big changes -- not incremental changes, not small changes....
[T]he truth is actually words do inspire. Words do help people get involved. Words do help members of Congress get into power so that they can be part of a coalition to deliver health care reform, to deliver a bold energy policy. Don't discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens. And if they are disaffected and cynical and fearful and told that it can't be done, then it doesn't. I'm running for president because I want to tell them, yes, we can. And that's why I think they're responding in such large numbers.

Of course each of them was right. Each expressed part of the job of a president, or any leader. Words and deeds. Talk and action. Poetry and prose. Presidents obviously do best when they can do both.

But only Obama captured what is unique about a president's role. A President's actions matter -- Lyndon Johnson with his legislation, Richard Nixon with his opening to China -- but lots of other people can help shape policies. A President's words often matter more, and only he -- or she -- can express them. Grant led the Union Army, but Abraham Lincoln, in addition to selecting Grant, wrote and delivered his inaugural and Gettysburg addresses. Long before Franklin Roosevelt actually did anything about the Great Depression, his first inaugural address ("the only thing we have to fear...") was important in itself. The same was true of Winston Churchill just after he succeeded Neville Chamberlain. It would be years before the Nazi advance would be contained, but Churchill's words and bearing were indispensable to Britain's recovery.

Certainly Hillary Clinton knows this. And she knows the political record of poetry-vs-prose matchups in the past. Kennedy vs. Nixon. Carter vs. Ford (yes, Carter was a man of healing-America poetry in those days). Reagan vs. Mondale. And of course the first Candidate Clinton against his Democratic rival Paul Tsongas and then against the first President Bush. She is playing the hand she holds, but it's worse than the other hand.

One extra thought on this point, from Jimmy Carter himself. This is the way he described the words-vs-action tension in the major speech that laid out his human rights policy, the commencement address at Notre Dame in 1977. I am partial to this formulation, because I was involved in putting it together. But I think it, like Obama's comment, is closer to what Americans expect of their president than what Hillary Clinton has been left with, the "let me handle the details" appeal. Especially what they'll expect of the next president:

We live in a world that is imperfect and which will always be imperfect--a world that is complex and confused and which will always be complex and confused.I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We have no illusion that changes will come easily or soon.
But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words and of the ideas that words embody. In our own history, that power has ranged from Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream."

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