Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 818
April 1, 2016
Uh-oh: Where does all the white rage go when Donald Trump loses?
For all Donald Trump’s dark pronouncements about immigrants and Muslims and the sporadic fistfights at his rallies, the Republican front runner has so far channeled the rage and fear felt by his constituents into an election campaign. Violence is never far from the surface at a Trump rally, and as has happened with sickening regularity in recent weeks, it occasionally breaks through in wild sucker punches and outright beatings of protesters, but the goal of the Trump campaign could not be more conventionally political: to propel its candidate to the Republican Party nomination, and from there, to the presidency. But what happens when his campaign fails, as it almost certainly will? Trump is openly at war with his own party, and even if that badly splintered organization magically unites behind him after the convention, there simply are not enough angry white people in America to elect him president. Where will all that anger, which has been slowly building among America’s white working class for half a century, go once it is left without a viable political outlet? In the months since Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has shifted from amusing diversion to cold political reality, the narrative favored by America’s political and media elite has been one of chickens coming home to roost. The Republican Party, the story goes, having for too long cynically played upon the ignorance and fears of its white lower-middle class base to gain the votes to pass ever more lavish tax breaks for its wealthy donor class, has had its electorate stolen by a clownish billionaire willing to say in plain English what Republican leaders have for decades been communicating to their constituents only in whispers and dog whistles. This narrative is true, of course, but in the telling, the focus invariably falls on Trump, who is portrayed as a shameless but politically astute demagogue in the mold of Louisiana’s Huey Long or Alabama’s George Wallace, able to sniff out deep wounds in the body politic others have missed and transform them into votes. But this is absurd. For all his bluster, Trump is at best a mediocre politician. He has no core political philosophy, he rambles at the podium, and quails at even the mildest questioning from the press. Half the time, he doesn’t even seem that interested in the office he’s running for. The night he won the Florida primary, knocking the home-state Senator Marco Rubio out of the race and cementing his position as his party’s front runner, Trump spent much of his prime-time televised speech touting his eponymous line of steaks and wines. Trump is the P.T. Barnum of 21st century American politics, a gifted impresario able to spot a sucker a mile off, but he isn’t the phenomenon we should be watching this spring. His constituency is. Lower-middle class white voters from the Rust Belt and South have fallen under the sway of Republican leaders for more than half a century now. In some cases, those Republicans were brilliant politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Just as often, though, white working class voters pulled the lever for empty suits like Mitt Romney and George W. Bush. What changed, then, in 2016? It wasn’t the Republican Party’s strategy or the quality of the candidates it put forward. Jeb Bush, with his jaunty exclamation point and famous last name, was a more substantive version of his twice-elected younger brother, and Ted Cruz has the sweaty, aggrievement-fueled intensity of a young Richard Nixon. In any other election cycle, one of them, most likely Jeb Bush, would be honing his acceptance speech by now. That didn’t happen this year because lower-middle class white Americans are hurting as they never have before. No group, after all, has been hit harder by globalization than the white working class in the Rust Belt and South. Drug addiction, long considered an “urban” (read: African American) scourge, is spreading through white society, especially in rural areas and former industrial hubs. A recent study by a pair of Princeton researchers found that, alone among all cohorts of Americans, the death rate for white middle-class people has been rising, thanks to spikes in alcoholism, drug overdose, and suicide. It’s easy to argue that working-class white Americans have no one to blame for their predicament but themselves. For generations, white people were favored in virtually every area of American life. Then, thanks in part to liberal legislation and court rulings, America became more color-blind and meritocratic, while at the same time free-trade agreements helped push factories overseas, hollowing out whole towns. The wiser children of factory workers got an education and joined the information economy. Those who stuck it out in the industrial heartland hoping the mid-century American gravy train would return instead got left behind. This, obviously, is not how Trump’s white working-class constituency sees it. They blame 1960s-era legislation and court rulings for promoting the interests of minorities and immigrants over their own, just as they blame the free-trade policies of both parties for sending their jobs offshore. Their economic power waning and their social status under threat, they lash out at the minorities and immigrants themselves, fearful that these once lower-caste workers are fast climbing past them on the ladder of American society. Ultimately, though, whether one views Trump’s supporters as victims of American progress or as a bunch of overprivileged bigots matters less than the undeniable facts that they exist and there a lot of them and they are stuck. Having lost faith in the traditional Republican Party, they have pinned their hopes on Donald Trump, but even if Trump could deliver the jobs and self-respect they seek – a doubtful proposition, to say the least – they lack the numbers to make him president. So, then what? All that highly combustible anger and fear we’re seeing on the nightly news and in shaky YouTube videos shot at Trump rallies – where will it go once Trump is gone? We may already be getting a chilling preview of a possible post-Trump future in the spasms of seemingly random gun violence such as those at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Neither of these alleged shooters has been brought to trial and there is much we do not know, but what is clear that we are in the midst of an unprecedented epidemic of mass shootings, a disturbing number of which seem to be carried out recently by emotionally troubled white men harboring right-wing views. For a generation, gun advocates have defended the right to bear arms as a check against tyranny, and for just as long liberals have dismissed this as a melodramatic talking point. But what if we take them at their word, and accept that it is possible we are witnessing the opening phase of a still-inchoate violent uprising by a broad class of Americans, who, ignored politically, bypassed economically, and dismissed socially, are beginning take matters into their own hands? What if, in other words, Donald Trump isn’t an aberration created by the miscalculations of a party elite, but the political expression of a much deeper, and more dangerous, frustration among a very large, well-armed segment of our population? What if Trump isn’t a proto-Mussolini, but rather a regrettably short finger in the dike holding back a flood of white violence and anger this country hasn’t seen since the long economic boom of the 1950s and ’60s helped put an end to the Jim Crow era? One way or another, we’re going to find out soon. Trump made headlines when he suggested his supporters would riot if he were denied the nomination despite his lead in the delegate count. Even if we are spared that spectacle, the Trump era will almost certainly come to an end by November. And then we will be left with the naked fact of his followers, too few in number to affect meaningful change on their own, too numerous for the rest of us to ignore, too angry to sit still for long.For all Donald Trump’s dark pronouncements about immigrants and Muslims and the sporadic fistfights at his rallies, the Republican front runner has so far channeled the rage and fear felt by his constituents into an election campaign. Violence is never far from the surface at a Trump rally, and as has happened with sickening regularity in recent weeks, it occasionally breaks through in wild sucker punches and outright beatings of protesters, but the goal of the Trump campaign could not be more conventionally political: to propel its candidate to the Republican Party nomination, and from there, to the presidency. But what happens when his campaign fails, as it almost certainly will? Trump is openly at war with his own party, and even if that badly splintered organization magically unites behind him after the convention, there simply are not enough angry white people in America to elect him president. Where will all that anger, which has been slowly building among America’s white working class for half a century, go once it is left without a viable political outlet? In the months since Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has shifted from amusing diversion to cold political reality, the narrative favored by America’s political and media elite has been one of chickens coming home to roost. The Republican Party, the story goes, having for too long cynically played upon the ignorance and fears of its white lower-middle class base to gain the votes to pass ever more lavish tax breaks for its wealthy donor class, has had its electorate stolen by a clownish billionaire willing to say in plain English what Republican leaders have for decades been communicating to their constituents only in whispers and dog whistles. This narrative is true, of course, but in the telling, the focus invariably falls on Trump, who is portrayed as a shameless but politically astute demagogue in the mold of Louisiana’s Huey Long or Alabama’s George Wallace, able to sniff out deep wounds in the body politic others have missed and transform them into votes. But this is absurd. For all his bluster, Trump is at best a mediocre politician. He has no core political philosophy, he rambles at the podium, and quails at even the mildest questioning from the press. Half the time, he doesn’t even seem that interested in the office he’s running for. The night he won the Florida primary, knocking the home-state Senator Marco Rubio out of the race and cementing his position as his party’s front runner, Trump spent much of his prime-time televised speech touting his eponymous line of steaks and wines. Trump is the P.T. Barnum of 21st century American politics, a gifted impresario able to spot a sucker a mile off, but he isn’t the phenomenon we should be watching this spring. His constituency is. Lower-middle class white voters from the Rust Belt and South have fallen under the sway of Republican leaders for more than half a century now. In some cases, those Republicans were brilliant politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Just as often, though, white working class voters pulled the lever for empty suits like Mitt Romney and George W. Bush. What changed, then, in 2016? It wasn’t the Republican Party’s strategy or the quality of the candidates it put forward. Jeb Bush, with his jaunty exclamation point and famous last name, was a more substantive version of his twice-elected younger brother, and Ted Cruz has the sweaty, aggrievement-fueled intensity of a young Richard Nixon. In any other election cycle, one of them, most likely Jeb Bush, would be honing his acceptance speech by now. That didn’t happen this year because lower-middle class white Americans are hurting as they never have before. No group, after all, has been hit harder by globalization than the white working class in the Rust Belt and South. Drug addiction, long considered an “urban” (read: African American) scourge, is spreading through white society, especially in rural areas and former industrial hubs. A recent study by a pair of Princeton researchers found that, alone among all cohorts of Americans, the death rate for white middle-class people has been rising, thanks to spikes in alcoholism, drug overdose, and suicide. It’s easy to argue that working-class white Americans have no one to blame for their predicament but themselves. For generations, white people were favored in virtually every area of American life. Then, thanks in part to liberal legislation and court rulings, America became more color-blind and meritocratic, while at the same time free-trade agreements helped push factories overseas, hollowing out whole towns. The wiser children of factory workers got an education and joined the information economy. Those who stuck it out in the industrial heartland hoping the mid-century American gravy train would return instead got left behind. This, obviously, is not how Trump’s white working-class constituency sees it. They blame 1960s-era legislation and court rulings for promoting the interests of minorities and immigrants over their own, just as they blame the free-trade policies of both parties for sending their jobs offshore. Their economic power waning and their social status under threat, they lash out at the minorities and immigrants themselves, fearful that these once lower-caste workers are fast climbing past them on the ladder of American society. Ultimately, though, whether one views Trump’s supporters as victims of American progress or as a bunch of overprivileged bigots matters less than the undeniable facts that they exist and there a lot of them and they are stuck. Having lost faith in the traditional Republican Party, they have pinned their hopes on Donald Trump, but even if Trump could deliver the jobs and self-respect they seek – a doubtful proposition, to say the least – they lack the numbers to make him president. So, then what? All that highly combustible anger and fear we’re seeing on the nightly news and in shaky YouTube videos shot at Trump rallies – where will it go once Trump is gone? We may already be getting a chilling preview of a possible post-Trump future in the spasms of seemingly random gun violence such as those at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Neither of these alleged shooters has been brought to trial and there is much we do not know, but what is clear that we are in the midst of an unprecedented epidemic of mass shootings, a disturbing number of which seem to be carried out recently by emotionally troubled white men harboring right-wing views. For a generation, gun advocates have defended the right to bear arms as a check against tyranny, and for just as long liberals have dismissed this as a melodramatic talking point. But what if we take them at their word, and accept that it is possible we are witnessing the opening phase of a still-inchoate violent uprising by a broad class of Americans, who, ignored politically, bypassed economically, and dismissed socially, are beginning take matters into their own hands? What if, in other words, Donald Trump isn’t an aberration created by the miscalculations of a party elite, but the political expression of a much deeper, and more dangerous, frustration among a very large, well-armed segment of our population? What if Trump isn’t a proto-Mussolini, but rather a regrettably short finger in the dike holding back a flood of white violence and anger this country hasn’t seen since the long economic boom of the 1950s and ’60s helped put an end to the Jim Crow era? One way or another, we’re going to find out soon. Trump made headlines when he suggested his supporters would riot if he were denied the nomination despite his lead in the delegate count. Even if we are spared that spectacle, the Trump era will almost certainly come to an end by November. And then we will be left with the naked fact of his followers, too few in number to affect meaningful change on their own, too numerous for the rest of us to ignore, too angry to sit still for long.
6 times Hillary Clinton lost her cool
The Democratic frontrunner's recent lash out toward an environmental activist is the latest in a list of times she lost her cool.
Cracks in the GOP wall: The Republicans’ hardline Supreme Court obstruction is crumbling
The trick to making blanket obstructionism work as a political tool is to make it a team effort. The Republicans in Congress understand this well – their strategy for the Obama administration from day one was to oppose everything and enforce unanimity among their members. They understood that any Republican defections would feed political ammunition to the Democrats and the White House, who would claim bipartisan backing for their initiatives and paint the Republicans in opposition as unreasonable. For a while, that strategy worked: the president’s biggest legislative items were passed without any Republican backing, and Republicans ran hard against those laws to make gains in Congress. The key to it all was putting up a united front. That’s what Senate Republicans tried to accomplish when news broke that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had passed away. Their immediate reaction was to clamp down hard: no hearings, no meetings, not even a mote of consideration for any nominee President Obama would put forward. They came up with a number of reasons justifying this position, but they’re all bullshit – the real reason is that they’re holding out hope that a Republican president will restore the court’s conservative majority next year. But the key to making this obstructionist strategy have at least some political viability was unanimity of opposition. Well, say goodbye to that plan. The wall of obstruction put up by GOP leaders is showing a number of cracks as Senate Republicans – from blue and red states alike – defy their leadership and actually show minimum levels of professional courtesy to President Obama’s nominee, judge Merrick Garland. Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois (who happens to be facing a tough reelection fight) has already met with Garland and is actively pushing his colleagues to hold hearings and “man up and cast a vote.” Garland has more meetings lined up with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas. According to NBC News, one-quarter of Republican senators have expressed openness to at least meeting with Obama’s nominee. None of this means that Garland is any closer to actually having hearings or receiving a vote, but the fact that so many Republicans are deviating from the official line is bad news for the GOP politically. Republican leaders have invested a good deal of time building up a case for why Garland’s nomination doesn’t even merit cursory attention, and it’s being ripped down by their own colleagues. Orrin Hatch insists that Republicans are doing their jobs by blocking Garland, while Jerry Moran says they’re actually abdicating their responsibilities. Chuck Grassley insists Republicans are standing on principle by pushing hearings off until after the election, while Mark Kirk says they’re actually being cowards. The obstructionist plan was never popular to begin with, and internal fractures like these make it supremely difficult to convince anyone that Republicans are on the right side of this issue. The Democrats, meanwhile, have successfully gotten Garland’s foot in the door, so now they have an opening to push things even further: If meetings are okay, why not hearings? And every Republican senator Garland meets with is another opportunity for the White House to pit Republicans against one another. The Senate GOP leadership wanted nothing more than to make this nomination process a referendum on Obama, but now they have to explain why their own colleagues are wrong for meeting with Garland. This was always the big danger in adopting of posture of maximalist obstruction. That position was difficult to defend to begin with, but defections within their ranks make it next to impossible. The Republican leadership very likely understood all of this before going down this path, but they figured that the political difficulties would be worth it if they could keep that Supreme Court seat open for the next Republican president. But hopes for electing a Republican in November don’t look especially great, while the political price of obstruction seems to be growing steeper.The trick to making blanket obstructionism work as a political tool is to make it a team effort. The Republicans in Congress understand this well – their strategy for the Obama administration from day one was to oppose everything and enforce unanimity among their members. They understood that any Republican defections would feed political ammunition to the Democrats and the White House, who would claim bipartisan backing for their initiatives and paint the Republicans in opposition as unreasonable. For a while, that strategy worked: the president’s biggest legislative items were passed without any Republican backing, and Republicans ran hard against those laws to make gains in Congress. The key to it all was putting up a united front. That’s what Senate Republicans tried to accomplish when news broke that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had passed away. Their immediate reaction was to clamp down hard: no hearings, no meetings, not even a mote of consideration for any nominee President Obama would put forward. They came up with a number of reasons justifying this position, but they’re all bullshit – the real reason is that they’re holding out hope that a Republican president will restore the court’s conservative majority next year. But the key to making this obstructionist strategy have at least some political viability was unanimity of opposition. Well, say goodbye to that plan. The wall of obstruction put up by GOP leaders is showing a number of cracks as Senate Republicans – from blue and red states alike – defy their leadership and actually show minimum levels of professional courtesy to President Obama’s nominee, judge Merrick Garland. Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois (who happens to be facing a tough reelection fight) has already met with Garland and is actively pushing his colleagues to hold hearings and “man up and cast a vote.” Garland has more meetings lined up with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas. According to NBC News, one-quarter of Republican senators have expressed openness to at least meeting with Obama’s nominee. None of this means that Garland is any closer to actually having hearings or receiving a vote, but the fact that so many Republicans are deviating from the official line is bad news for the GOP politically. Republican leaders have invested a good deal of time building up a case for why Garland’s nomination doesn’t even merit cursory attention, and it’s being ripped down by their own colleagues. Orrin Hatch insists that Republicans are doing their jobs by blocking Garland, while Jerry Moran says they’re actually abdicating their responsibilities. Chuck Grassley insists Republicans are standing on principle by pushing hearings off until after the election, while Mark Kirk says they’re actually being cowards. The obstructionist plan was never popular to begin with, and internal fractures like these make it supremely difficult to convince anyone that Republicans are on the right side of this issue. The Democrats, meanwhile, have successfully gotten Garland’s foot in the door, so now they have an opening to push things even further: If meetings are okay, why not hearings? And every Republican senator Garland meets with is another opportunity for the White House to pit Republicans against one another. The Senate GOP leadership wanted nothing more than to make this nomination process a referendum on Obama, but now they have to explain why their own colleagues are wrong for meeting with Garland. This was always the big danger in adopting of posture of maximalist obstruction. That position was difficult to defend to begin with, but defections within their ranks make it next to impossible. The Republican leadership very likely understood all of this before going down this path, but they figured that the political difficulties would be worth it if they could keep that Supreme Court seat open for the next Republican president. But hopes for electing a Republican in November don’t look especially great, while the political price of obstruction seems to be growing steeper.
Hillary can’t ignore Bernie: Democrats must embrace his economic populism or face the consequences
Anybody paying attention to the 2016 Democratic presidential campaign knows Bernie Sanders is on a roll. Hillary Clinton is doing everything she can to ignore him in her speeches. Her campaign is saying maybe they won’t debate before New York's primary. But they keep sending email blasts saying how much more his grassroots supporters are donating than hers. Sanders is leading Clinton by four points in the latest poll in the next big state, Wisconsin, which votes next Tuesday. Should he win, as even the New York Times was predicting earlier this week, then the race moves next to a series of delegate-rich mid-Atlantic states voting in late April: New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania. (Rhode Island also votes on April 26.) Most mainstream analysts are focusing on the delegate math, saying Sanders has to win at least 56 percent of the pledged delegates from all remaining states. They’re saying that math favors Clinton, because she does better among wealthier Democrats and more racially diverse states, and that’s who will be voting on April 19 (New York) and a week later along the eastern seaboard. Indeed, those states are among those at the top of the national chart for highest household incomes, from just over $70,000 in Maryland to over just $50,000 in Pennsylvania in 2015. These states’ residents also tend to have the most disposable income, and people whose income brackets tend to invest their savings in stock market mutual funds. These political projections and economic trends pose a fundamental question that is not being raised in most analyses: Will this region’s middle- and upper-middle-class Democrats respond to Sanders’ message that big steps need to be taken to offset class-based inequalities, starting with addressing economic injustices by making Wall Street pay higher taxes? Or will they reject him because they are financially doing better than the nation as a whole? In other words, are Democrats who have figured out how to make more money willing to shake up the status quo? It is one thing for Sanders to rail against the super-rich or target the wealthiest Americans for higher taxes. For example, his proposal to boost Social Security benefits by forcing people making more than $250,000 a year to pay income taxes for the program like those now making under $118,500—the current income tax cap funding the system—starts by targeting the wealthiest 1.5 percent of Americans. (If he proposed just lifting the current income tax cap, that would affect the top 6.3 percent of taxpayers.) You can expect Sanders will not change his rhetoric that much, as that has been his hallmark. Reporters who have traveled with him have noticed that he only slightly modulates his topics as the audience changes, such as talking more about criminal justice reform when speaking to African Americans in the South. But whether Sanders' anti-establishment remedies will be rejected by Democrats who have more invested in the establishment— whether they are little more than continuing what Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson proposed decades ago—is a question where the answer will echo far beyond the Democrats’ 2016 nominating process. Progressives can hope that the Democratic Party is changing; that after years of seeing it cater to pro-corporate centrists and the agendas of wealthier donors it is shifting back to Main Street. But in states along the Acela corridor, where Amtrak runs its fast trains between Washington and Boston, we will soon see if the resistance to systemic change is not just confined to the wealthiest Americans. Will these Democrats be willing to see their mutual funds pay a tiny transaction tax if it is used for making public colleges and universities tuition-free, and lowering college loan interest rates? Will they be willing to pay more taxes if it means creating the national health-care program Sanders says will cost them $500 more a year yet cut annual coverage costs by thousands? States with wealthier Democrats should have little to fear from a Sanders presidency. But as wealthier individuals are arguably more invested in the status quo, we’ll soon see whether eastern Democrats will embrace Sanders—and a broader progressive agenda.
Anybody paying attention to the 2016 Democratic presidential campaign knows Bernie Sanders is on a roll. Hillary Clinton is doing everything she can to ignore him in her speeches. Her campaign is saying maybe they won’t debate before New York's primary. But they keep sending email blasts saying how much more his grassroots supporters are donating than hers. Sanders is leading Clinton by four points in the latest poll in the next big state, Wisconsin, which votes next Tuesday. Should he win, as even the New York Times was predicting earlier this week, then the race moves next to a series of delegate-rich mid-Atlantic states voting in late April: New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania. (Rhode Island also votes on April 26.) Most mainstream analysts are focusing on the delegate math, saying Sanders has to win at least 56 percent of the pledged delegates from all remaining states. They’re saying that math favors Clinton, because she does better among wealthier Democrats and more racially diverse states, and that’s who will be voting on April 19 (New York) and a week later along the eastern seaboard. Indeed, those states are among those at the top of the national chart for highest household incomes, from just over $70,000 in Maryland to over just $50,000 in Pennsylvania in 2015. These states’ residents also tend to have the most disposable income, and people whose income brackets tend to invest their savings in stock market mutual funds. These political projections and economic trends pose a fundamental question that is not being raised in most analyses: Will this region’s middle- and upper-middle-class Democrats respond to Sanders’ message that big steps need to be taken to offset class-based inequalities, starting with addressing economic injustices by making Wall Street pay higher taxes? Or will they reject him because they are financially doing better than the nation as a whole? In other words, are Democrats who have figured out how to make more money willing to shake up the status quo? It is one thing for Sanders to rail against the super-rich or target the wealthiest Americans for higher taxes. For example, his proposal to boost Social Security benefits by forcing people making more than $250,000 a year to pay income taxes for the program like those now making under $118,500—the current income tax cap funding the system—starts by targeting the wealthiest 1.5 percent of Americans. (If he proposed just lifting the current income tax cap, that would affect the top 6.3 percent of taxpayers.) You can expect Sanders will not change his rhetoric that much, as that has been his hallmark. Reporters who have traveled with him have noticed that he only slightly modulates his topics as the audience changes, such as talking more about criminal justice reform when speaking to African Americans in the South. But whether Sanders' anti-establishment remedies will be rejected by Democrats who have more invested in the establishment— whether they are little more than continuing what Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson proposed decades ago—is a question where the answer will echo far beyond the Democrats’ 2016 nominating process. Progressives can hope that the Democratic Party is changing; that after years of seeing it cater to pro-corporate centrists and the agendas of wealthier donors it is shifting back to Main Street. But in states along the Acela corridor, where Amtrak runs its fast trains between Washington and Boston, we will soon see if the resistance to systemic change is not just confined to the wealthiest Americans. Will these Democrats be willing to see their mutual funds pay a tiny transaction tax if it is used for making public colleges and universities tuition-free, and lowering college loan interest rates? Will they be willing to pay more taxes if it means creating the national health-care program Sanders says will cost them $500 more a year yet cut annual coverage costs by thousands? States with wealthier Democrats should have little to fear from a Sanders presidency. But as wealthier individuals are arguably more invested in the status quo, we’ll soon see whether eastern Democrats will embrace Sanders—and a broader progressive agenda.
March 31, 2016
5 reasons why Hillary Clinton’s first New York ad missed the mark
Hillary Clinton has released her first New York ad in anticipation of the April 19 primary. The 30-second spot features a diverse array of people, presumably New Yorkers, as Clinton narrates: New York. 20 million people strong. No, we don’t all look the same. We don’t all sound the same either. But when we pull together we do the biggest things in the world. So when some say we can solve America’s problems by building walls, banning people based on their religion and turning against each other, well, this is New York, and we know better.While the ad is as stylish as a Benetton commercial, it is problematic for several reasons. 1. Bernie Sanders, her main competition, isn’t the focus. The ad hones in on Donald Trump’s bigotry and violent rallies. But New York is a closed primary state and hasn’t voted for a Republican candidate in a presidential election in over 30 years. 2. Trump had a small hand in the rebuilding of the Twin Towers. As a first-term senator, Clinton was instrumental in securing $21 billion in funding for the World Trade Center site's redevelopment after 9/11. On the other hand, Donald Trump “became the most prominent backer of a plan to rebuild Manhattan's World Trade Center,” reported Business Insider. Donald Trump’s initial plan, to rebuild the towers exactly the same but with stronger material, was largely nixed, with the exception of the 9/11 Memorial. Still, for an attack ad on Trump, a positive framing of any real estate ventures he was involved in is pretty counter-productive. 3. Clinton’s 9/11 experiences that could win voters are brushed over. As a first-term New York senator, Hillary Clinton investigated the health issues faced by 9/11 first responders who thanked her for the passage of the health care legislation during a 2004 ceremony. Instead of featuring footage of events like this, the only shot of Hillary in the ad shows her meeting bodega customers. 4. Clinton’s lauded New York endorsements don’t receive the slightest mention. Hillary Clinton has been endorsed by New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo, who believes wholeheartedly that “Clinton, ‘an experienced progressive,’ would win in the election against Donald Trump.” 5. Clinton was New York’s first female senator. For a campaign that has largely revolved around a female presidency being a benchmark of equality, this detail should have been included in her first New York ad. Watch Hillary Clinton's first New York ad:
Hillary Clinton has released her first New York ad in anticipation of the April 19 primary. The 30-second spot features a diverse array of people, presumably New Yorkers, as Clinton narrates: New York. 20 million people strong. No, we don’t all look the same. We don’t all sound the same either. But when we pull together we do the biggest things in the world. So when some say we can solve America’s problems by building walls, banning people based on their religion and turning against each other, well, this is New York, and we know better.While the ad is as stylish as a Benetton commercial, it is problematic for several reasons. 1. Bernie Sanders, her main competition, isn’t the focus. The ad hones in on Donald Trump’s bigotry and violent rallies. But New York is a closed primary state and hasn’t voted for a Republican candidate in a presidential election in over 30 years. 2. Trump had a small hand in the rebuilding of the Twin Towers. As a first-term senator, Clinton was instrumental in securing $21 billion in funding for the World Trade Center site's redevelopment after 9/11. On the other hand, Donald Trump “became the most prominent backer of a plan to rebuild Manhattan's World Trade Center,” reported Business Insider. Donald Trump’s initial plan, to rebuild the towers exactly the same but with stronger material, was largely nixed, with the exception of the 9/11 Memorial. Still, for an attack ad on Trump, a positive framing of any real estate ventures he was involved in is pretty counter-productive. 3. Clinton’s 9/11 experiences that could win voters are brushed over. As a first-term New York senator, Hillary Clinton investigated the health issues faced by 9/11 first responders who thanked her for the passage of the health care legislation during a 2004 ceremony. Instead of featuring footage of events like this, the only shot of Hillary in the ad shows her meeting bodega customers. 4. Clinton’s lauded New York endorsements don’t receive the slightest mention. Hillary Clinton has been endorsed by New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo, who believes wholeheartedly that “Clinton, ‘an experienced progressive,’ would win in the election against Donald Trump.” 5. Clinton was New York’s first female senator. For a campaign that has largely revolved around a female presidency being a benchmark of equality, this detail should have been included in her first New York ad. Watch Hillary Clinton's first New York ad:
Hillary Clinton has released her first New York ad in anticipation of the April 19 primary. The 30-second spot features a diverse array of people, presumably New Yorkers, as Clinton narrates: New York. 20 million people strong. No, we don’t all look the same. We don’t all sound the same either. But when we pull together we do the biggest things in the world. So when some say we can solve America’s problems by building walls, banning people based on their religion and turning against each other, well, this is New York, and we know better.While the ad is as stylish as a Benetton commercial, it is problematic for several reasons. 1. Bernie Sanders, her main competition, isn’t the focus. The ad hones in on Donald Trump’s bigotry and violent rallies. But New York is a closed primary state and hasn’t voted for a Republican candidate in a presidential election in over 30 years. 2. Trump had a small hand in the rebuilding of the Twin Towers. As a first-term senator, Clinton was instrumental in securing $21 billion in funding for the World Trade Center site's redevelopment after 9/11. On the other hand, Donald Trump “became the most prominent backer of a plan to rebuild Manhattan's World Trade Center,” reported Business Insider. Donald Trump’s initial plan, to rebuild the towers exactly the same but with stronger material, was largely nixed, with the exception of the 9/11 Memorial. Still, for an attack ad on Trump, a positive framing of any real estate ventures he was involved in is pretty counter-productive. 3. Clinton’s 9/11 experiences that could win voters are brushed over. As a first-term New York senator, Hillary Clinton investigated the health issues faced by 9/11 first responders who thanked her for the passage of the health care legislation during a 2004 ceremony. Instead of featuring footage of events like this, the only shot of Hillary in the ad shows her meeting bodega customers. 4. Clinton’s lauded New York endorsements don’t receive the slightest mention. Hillary Clinton has been endorsed by New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo, who believes wholeheartedly that “Clinton, ‘an experienced progressive,’ would win in the election against Donald Trump.” 5. Clinton was New York’s first female senator. For a campaign that has largely revolved around a female presidency being a benchmark of equality, this detail should have been included in her first New York ad. Watch Hillary Clinton's first New York ad:
How baseball got so lame: The national pastime is so white and so dreary — and is still a money machine
I grew up as a fan of the San Francisco Giants, which meant something very different then than it does now. In the 21st century, the Giants are an enormously rich and successful franchise whose fancy waterfront stadium and affluent, tech-economy fan base serve as a perfect illustration of the way baseball has been transformed — not to say gentrified, a loaded term that fits all too perfectly in this context. To say it wasn’t always that way is an understatement. None of this took place in a vacuum, to be sure: San Francisco was a frayed and downtrodden city for much of the 1970s and ‘80s and its baseball team reflected that. The Giants were perennial also-rans who struggled to draw fans to the wind-blown desolation of Candlestick Park, a concrete monstrosity that the city fathers had perversely located on an isolated peninsula in the city’s southeastern corner. We were repeated told that the team would be sold and moved to some more hospitable city: Toronto or Tampa or Las Vegas or damn near anywhere else. Only the Giants’ road games were on TV (announced by the legendarily laconic Lon Simmons), and not too many of those. Seeing a game in person either involved navigating strangled traffic and tundra-like parking lots or a slow public-transit journey involving at least one transfer. I can remember going to a game against the Houston Astros with my friend Chris from down the street. We took a bus and then a train and then another bus. Whatever the tickets cost — the price that sticks in my head is $2.75 — I guess our allowances could handle it. We plotted the journey out with our parents, but we went on our own. (Maybe our dads understood what a dire experience it was likely to be.) We were 12 years old. Was baseball in better shape, as a business or an industry or an entertainment product, when Chris and I could go to a game without adult chaperones, without buying tickets from StubHub weeks ahead of time, and without much advance planning? Or when, a few years later, I literally snuck into a World Series game at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore? (You gave a local kid a few bucks, and he showed you the hole he had cut through the cyclone fence.) Clearly not, and when culture-vulture types like me come along to proclaim that baseball is dying, its boosters have all kinds of impressive numbers at their disposal. But baseball was in a vastly different cultural position in those years, one that is difficult or impossible to quantify. Chris and I and that kid with the wire-cutters in Baltimore came along toward the end of a long period in American history when baseball served as a kind of male-coded cultural glue (although it certainly entrapped some women and girls) that transcended race, religion, socioeconomic status and geography. We felt ourselves connected, with no sense of detachment and no quotation marks, to the mythic lore and overwrought symbolism of baseball. I probably knew, at that age, the anecdote recounted in the new baseball-boosting documentary “Fastball,” about how Walter Johnson, later a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Washington Senators, was discovered playing semi-pro ball in the Snake River Valley of rural Idaho. I doubt anyone plays semi-pro baseball in the Snake River Valley today (except on the Xbox), and if anyone does they definitely don’t include the next Walter Johnson. Were we kidding ourselves, at the time, about the enduring cultural power of baseball, which was visibly fading in places like the frigid, empty bleachers of Candlestick Park? Is my backward glance at that era now tinged or occluded by middle-aged masculine nostalgia? Yes and yes. But certain things are not illusory, starting with the fact that what happened to baseball has more to do with the social segmentation, niche marketing and cultural commodification that characterize 21st-century America than with baseball itself. Baseball has been reinvented, whether deliberately or accidentally, as an immensely successful niche sport whose audience is overwhelmingly white, suburban, affluent and middle-aged or older. It has pretty much become the Republican Party of professional sports. I mean that as a metaphor: In cities like Boston and San Francisco, baseball’s core demographic in the squaresville top tenth of the Caucasian population no doubt includes plenty of liberals (although I’m going to crawl out on a limb and say that they skew toward Clinton rather than Sanders). If this transformation doesn’t pose an economic and demographic problem at the moment, and apparently will not do so into the medium term, it’s hard to imagine that it’s sustainable indefinitely. No, baseball isn’t dying, as ardent defenders like Maury Brown of Forbes constantly remind us. Whatever happened to the sport formerly known as America’s national pastime, “death” does not describe it. Major League Baseball was a $9.5 billion business in 2015, and has experienced at least a dozen years of steady revenue growth, right through the big financial crash of 2008. Some baseball insiders predict that MLB’s revenues will soon surpass those of the concussion-plagued National Football League, long the Goliath of American spectator sports. (The NFL grossed about $12 billion last year.) Although baseball’s owners have made various attempts to contain player salaries over the years, with all that money flowing in they really haven’t needed to. At least 10 of the sport’s big-name stars will earn $25 million or more apiece in the 2016 season, which opens this weekend, led by Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw at $32 million. (Perhaps half the players on that list are being egregiously overpaid for past accomplishments, but that’s how it goes.) Even unsuccessful teams keep signing cable-TV deals involving remarkably large numbers. The Arizona Diamondbacks are feuding with local authorities over their decaying home stadium; they haven’t made the playoffs for five years and have played in the World Series only once, in 2001. Yet for reasons someone other than me will have to explain, Fox Sports Arizona just agreed to pay $1.5 billion to carry D-backs games for the next six years, replacing an old contract at one-sixth the price. But there are lies, damned lies and statistics, as Mark Twain famously observed (wrongly attributing the quote to Benjamin Disraeli), and baseball’s obsessive relationship to statistics is one aspect of its cultural problem. No, I’m not being an old-line fan complaining about the rise of “sabermetric” measurements of player value, such as “on-base plus slugging” (OPS) or “wins above replacement” (WAR). Or at least not exactly. Those newfangled stats have sometimes led baseball fans and general managers hilariously astray, as with the brief mania for “three true outcome” players, meaning hitters who strike out, walk or hit home runs, but rarely do anything else. But they emerged more or less organically from the nerdy, monastic nature of baseball fandom as it encountered the Information Age, and they successfully quantified some of the sport’s esoteric mysteries, including the fact that a .290 hitter is sometimes superior to a .310 hitter and that certain old-school stats, like runs batted in (RBIs) or a pitcher’s wins and losses, are almost meaningless. If the numbers tell us that baseball isn’t dead or dying, they cannot quite explain how and why it has so thoroughly driven away younger fans, working-class fans and nonwhite fans over the last three decades. Baseball is now largely a sport played by exurban white Americans and young men from the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean nations, with a smattering of imported Asian players. African-American participation in baseball is at or near an all-time low, a change that is glaringly obvious to those of us who grew up when most of the game’s best hitters were black Americans, from Willie Mays to Willie Stargell to Reggie Jackson to the steroid-tainted home run king, Barry Bonds. The 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates, who beat the Orioles in that World Series game where I snuck through the fence, featured eight black or Latino players among their starting nine. Some baseball purists do blame the influence of sabermetrics for baseball's altered and diminished cultural status, or blame the various innovations designed to modernize the sport or broaden its appeal. I don't much like interleague play or video replay myself, or even the designated hitter (introduced when I was a small child). But at worst those things are symptoms of a deeper and broader ailment, not causes. As I have suggested, the real meaning of the question “What happened to baseball?” is probably “What happened to America?” In an era of increasing political division and economic inequality, the naïve and sentimental democratic dream that baseball once appeared to represent has become unworkable and even embarrassing. If my friend Chris and I were 11 years old today, we might watch Giants games on our dads’ big-screen TVs once in a while. (Most likely while wearing our Stephen Curry or Lionel Messi replica jerseys.) But would we feel anything more than bafflement, impatience and contempt for the fatuous middle-aged notion that baseball somehow expressed the American soul — or that America had a soul?
TV’s tokenism tension: “Rush Hour,” “Lopez” and the tricky balancing act of diversifying aging networks
It does not seem obvious that the 1998 film “Rush Hour” would be adapted into a 2016 television procedural on CBS. “Rush Hour,” the film, is a profane buddy comedy starring Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan as an unlikely pair of law enforcers brought together by an abduction that crosses international lines. Tucker brought an element of Eddie Murphy’s “Beverly Hills Cop” to his performance as Carter, performing—perhaps over-performing—the role of a wisecracking, street-smart black man in Los Angeles. Chan, meanwhile, served up his usual action-hero charm as Lee, the Chinese agent flown in from the other side of the world—stumbling through his English in a way he would never stumble through a fight scene. In the original film, both characters are playing up their own ethnic identities to contrast them against the other, for whatever laughs they can muster; at times, this highlights the enormous bridge between the stereotypes for both races, and at times, it plays uncomfortably into the existing norms. To this easily amused viewer who is neither black nor Chinese, “Rush Hour” is a very funny, a surprisingly cosmopolitan buddy comedy about globalization (?!) filled with banter about, for no reason at all, Edwin Starr’s “War.” It stars two leads of color and a Latina sidekick, a bunch of its dialogue is Chinese, and the main bad guy is basically the embodiment of The Man—a tall white guy in a suit played with dry sincerity by the extremely overqualified Tom Wilkinson. For every instance that Carter calls Lee “Mr. Rice-A-Roni” or refers to his “sweet and sour chicken ass,” there’s also a strange moment of clarity. “This is the LAPD,” he says at one point. “We're the most hated cops in all the free world. My own mama's ashamed of me.” “Rush Hour” became a franchise that took the cops to Hong Kong, Paris, and Las Vegas; CBS’ “Rush Hour” aims to take its formula and convert it into a long-running comedy-procedural. The cast is different and the timeline has started over, meaning that it is, technically, a reboot, if we can go so far as to call the “Rush Hour” part of an extended cinematic universe. The bones of the show are identical to the film—the pilot, which aired last night, recreates some of the scenes of the film and even some of the fight scenes, including the semi-famous gun-stealing move that Lee teaches Carter. And TV show “Rush Hour” engages with the same politically charged subtext that the film engages head-on; more than being just about two very different people working the same case, the story showcases the kind of resentment, discrimination, and distrust that can foment between two different minority groups in America. This is a theme throughout black cinema, from Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing” to the controversy over Chris Rock’s jokes at the Oscars; in the "Rush Hour" film, director Brett Ratner (who is not black, but has close ties to the black creative community) is toying with a cultural discourse that is both superficially slapstick and deeply rooted, and pivoting that towards black theatergoers who would then buoy the films to crossover success. Which is why what is really confusing about the “Rush Hour” update is not that it exists; it’s that it is on the oldest and whitest broadcast network in America. CBS, a network with a median age of 56.1, is desperately trying to make inroads into a younger audience, given that the primary advertising demographic in America spans the ages 18-49. And though this analysis from the Awl is two seasons old, it puts CBS’ recent attempts to diversify its lineup in context. “Rush Hour”’s Carter and Lee (Justin Hires and Jon Foo, in the reboot) are as of yesterday the only cast on CBS’ current lineup to be headed by leads of color; “Scorpion”’s mixed-race lead Elyes Gabel is playing a white man, and “Hawaii 5-0”’s relatively diverse cast is led by Scott Caan and Alex O’Loughlin playing Danno and Steve. So while “Rush Hour”’s premiere on CBS is an exciting one, it also raises some interesting questions. Is this a show designed to get (young) viewers of color to CBS, or is this a show designed to package (young) people of color to CBS? The answer, probably, is both. Watching the “Rush Hour” pilot is an exercise in watching the show walk the tightrope of trying to move in opposite directions simultaneously, and though that isn’t necessarily bad, it is not particularly funny, either. Stereotypes about Chinese people, delivered from a stereotypical black character, to an audience that is accustomed to seeing largely white characters (and is, in all likelihood, largely white themselves)? It walks a line between tokenism and representation, traversing a path that I have previously called the “just one guy” phenomenon. In this case—especially because the show is going through the motions of the film’s plot points—the pilot is hardly memorable at all, a pale facsimile of a thing that might have been funny, once. It is very early to guess what the rest of “Rush Hour” is going to be like, but as it proceeds, the show is right now a kind of test case for CBS. What exactly happens when you lob a show that combines stereotype with representation into a lineup that has not seen anything like it before? What, exactly, will viewers take away? These are questions that are relevant to another network: TV Land. The network best known for airing reruns of classic sitcoms like “The Andy Griffith Show” targets the 25-54 demographic, meaning that like CBS, it skews older. It’s much more racially diverse, though; the cable platform only started producing scripted programming in 2010, and introduced a black family with its “Hot In Cleveland” spinoff “The Soul Man,” led by Cedric The Entertainer, in 2012. Tonight, it’s premiering “Lopez,” the latest effort by Mexican-American comedian George Lopez, who has been at the helm of any number of shows bearing his name, all with a different attempt at landing mainstream humor. There was “George Lopez,” in 2002 on ABC, a middlebrow family sitcom that ran for six seasons; “Lopez Tonight,” a late-night talk show on TBS that ran from 2009-2011, and “Saint George,” a raunchier attempt at bro-comedy that aired for 10 episodes on FX in 2014. Lopez is a trenchant, funny stand-up comedian, but translating his humor to television—even to edgy cable television—proved a difficult task. “George Lopez” offered the appeal of a regular boring middle American sitcom, except with a Latino family; “Saint George” offered no appeal whatsoever. And interestingly, that’s a lot of what “Lopez” is about. The show is very much in the style of “Louie,” Louis C.K.’s single-cam dramedy that revolutionized prestige television comedy. (I read the replication as more homage than theft, but your mileage may vary.) In it, Lopez plays himself, a successful Latino comedian trying to figure out what comes next after divorcing his wife who gave him a kidney and recovering from the shame of passing out drunk on the floor of a casino in 2014. And because he’s playing himself, “Lopez” and Lopez discuss the industry with intriguing frankness, whether that is in the form of George’s irritating agents and social media experts or his run-ins with the Star Tours van making rounds past his house. I find “Lopez” the most enjoyable form of George Lopez, and partly that’s because it’s so seemingly authentic. The intimacy of single-cam draws out his whole self, not just a punch-line-delivering persona for the camera. Lopez is a self-denigrating, optimistic guy, one who is acutely aware of how the audience his success is based off of isn’t quite enough of a fanbase to pay the bills. In the show, he limps through the multiple spheres of the marginal performer turned success story—total nobody for some, revered celeb for others, mere dad to his daughter and upstart new money to his neighbors. His relationships with other Latinos are especially interesting; as I’ve written before, the demographic is the least well-represented on television, and in some ways, Lopez’s occasional neuroses are the result of knowing he’s one of the few guys like him who made it. It is true that George Lopez, both in “Lopez” and in real life, can barely get through five minutes without commenting on his own race or the general position of Latinos in society. But it’s also true that it’s hard to blame him. Older, wiser, and slightly more self-aware Lopez is dropping into a TV Land lineup that is transitioning from targeting Baby Boomers to targeting Gen-Xers, following the aging population. Niche and nimble little TV Land is a far cry from multi-faceted, multi-tiered CBS, and though their audiences might overlap, their programming doesn’t, really. But where “Rush Hour” is a test balloon, “Lopez” feels like a weary withdrawal from the attempt to reconcile the upsides of mass appeal with the frustrating downsides of apparently necessary tokenism. Which is to say, it was funny. Certainly funnier than “Rush Hour,” and generally an appealing little comedy, able to juggle things like identity and success and privilege and a general terror of aging with some nimble skill in a way that felt actually fresh. Mainstream appeal might be necessary to keep the bills paid, but it is the easiest way possible to kill a joke.
Robbie Fulks on how not to be “a guy in his 50s singing about sex or good times or even the opposite, about married contentedness”
There was a time when Robbie Fulks came off as, well, brash. At the height of empty-hat country music in the ’90s, Fulks was writing subversive throwbacks to Buck Owens, like “She Took a Lot of Pills (And Died),” “God Isn’t Real” and “Fuck This Town,” his love letter to the Nashville country music establishment. A few years later, he was taking pleasure in publicly needling Ryan Adams, and a few years after that, he played against type with the 2010 release “Happy: Robbie Fulks Plays the Music of Michael Jackson,” which was, in fact, a genuine tribute to the pop star, who had died in 2009. More recently, Fulks has toned down his satiric streak and put the emphasis on his considerable musical chops. “When I was younger, I was more interested in slashing and burning and making an impression,” Fulks says. “I feel like now it’s more appropriate for me not to strive to make an impression and just be the thing that I am and people can look at it, or not look at it.” He pared back to mostly acoustic instruments and a pronounced bluegrass flavor on his stark 2013 album “Gone Away Backward,” culled from a 50-song collection he posted online in 2010. His new album “Upland Stories” follows a similar understated path with a dozen earthy new songs recorded with Steve Albini and featuring bassist Todd Phillips, violinists Jenny Scheinman and Shad Cobb, guitarist Robbie Gjersoe, drummer Alex Hall, multi-instrumentalist Fats Kaplin and keyboardist Wayne Horvitz. Ever the contrarian, Fulks doesn’t attribute his new material to musical influences so much as literary inspirations. Along with James Agee and “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” his seminal Depression-era exploration of poverty in the South, Fulks cites the writers Flannery O’Conner, Anton Chekhov and the Spanish novelist Javier Marias. It often makes for a more somber sensibility, though Fulks’ wry sense of humor remains fully intact on “Aunt Peg’s New Old Man.” The Chicago singer talked with Salon about the challenges of distilling works of literature into song ideas, the growing social consciousness in his music and why, despite his libertarian leanings, he plans to cast a vote for the status quo in November. Writers like Chekhov and Javier Marias aren’t part of the standard alt-country canon. How did they work their way into your songs? I sort of hesitate to go too far with that in music, because I feel like avoiding being seen as pretentious: “Please don’t consider me a musician but a poet,” which I find disagreeable. But once I started doing it a little bit, and then doing it more, it seemed to make more sense. It’s kind of an unexplored area. It’s an area where it’s easy to fail, but if you can pull it off, then you’re really in a high place in the Empyrean, if you know what I mean. Paul Simon has done it well, and four other people, or whatever. So it’s a high goal to aim for. But for me, it also makes sense with my age, because when you’re 52 and you’ve done 10 or 12 records, then you’ve kind of exhausted the personal angles to some extent, and I don’t want to hear a guy in his 50s singing about sex or good times or even the opposite, about married contentedness. And all the subjects like that that are sort of natural to middle-aged guys are kind of conflict-free and so to me, it makes sense to go into this other area that I really love and that is a big part of my life and take ideas and characters and storylines and let myself be guided or inspired by that. Where there particular works that inspired you? I have a couple Chekhov favorites, but there’s one called “Peasants,” where a sick guy from Moscow goes to the country to return to his people and is entirely unsuccessful and eventually dies. The story has a depressing arc, but along the way it also takes a few surprising turns into describing the community, and into the religiosity of the community, and some ancillary characters pop up and then go away. It’s that story that comes to bear on my song “Never Come Home,” which is transplanted to Tennessee. And Javiar Marias I just came to in the last two years or whenever Edward St. Alban wrote about him in The New York Times. I thought I’d better look into that guy. Like one of my friends said of NRBQ when he saw them for the first time, he said, “I didn’t realize you were allowed to do that.” And I think for me, writing like that has the same effect, that you can willfully break established traditional connections, you can play with punctuation, with chapter breaks, you can make huge dramatic plot episodes take a sentence and long winding digressions inside somebody’s head take 20 pages. You can do anything, so to me, his style is liberating. How does that sort of thing translate into your music, where you’re working in a much more concise form? The implication of that question points to where efforts to infuse music with literature often go down. And quite frequently when I’m working on these things in the first or second draft, I can just see that it’s gotten too obscure, too long, too dense, too full of 75-cent words, and so often the editing takes that same direction of either throwing away or trying to make it something simpler than it’s straining to be, something that’s maybe striving less after significance. So I guess the answer is that it frequently fails. With “Alabama at Night” and “Never Come Home,” the scenarios are the inspiration, but as you say, you don’t have the room to elaborate. And some of the actual phrases from Agee were purloined for “Alabama at Night.” He used “scoured clay” and I lifted that, and I can’t remember off-hand which other phrases. There’s two or three phrases in there. So I feel free to do that. I don’t know why. I might get sued or something. I think Bob Dylan makes you feel free to do that, he seems to lift a lot. You say that a writer your age has generally exhausted personal angles, but there do seem to be autobiographical elements in these songs. That seems to me to be a biological, well, imperative is too strong a word, but I feel this increased interest and inner push toward remembering things from a long time ago. I came across this quotation from Arthur Schopenhauer, who said the first 40 years of your life are text, and the last 30 are commentary. So I definitely felt the little leap over that divide at some point over the past couple years, where the distant past started to become very interesting compared to anything that was presently developing. I think a lot of it is that things go away. When I visit the places where old things happened to me, where I was growing up, the land is there, but not as you remember it. And the people by and large aren’t there, or if they are, they look like they’re rotting away, and actual events may as well never have happened, because they exist only in this sort of mindscape, which is also biological and temporary, apparently. I guess the temporariness of it, and the evanescence of it, become kind of morbidly fascinating. How has the intersection of literature and songwriting changed the way you edit yourself? I’m not sure that I can remember how much I edited when I was 18 or 20. I would assume less. For me now, probably most – I don’t know, 50 or 60 percent of the editing – is just throwing away. So I’ll start a verse, get through a verse and chorus, it will seem kind of promising and then I’ll wail away at it for a week and find that it’s going nowhere and not interesting me anymore and pitch it. That’s more efficient than what I used to do. I tended to finish everything in the old days, and probably performed most of it at some point. So I just try to recognize earlier now when it’s going awry, or when it’s not achieving that magic, try to apply that high bar to it, and when it’s not producing sparks, just walk away from it, rather than try to refashion it. Given all the songs you used to finish, is there a huge backlog of tunes? Oh, sure, yeah. Really, it’s like 90 percent of what I write gets thrown away, and I don’t think that’s so unusual for writers. But I have noticed, looking back over the old records — I feel like I’m getting better at it, but I might not be, because the songs that still excite me to play now, there’s a couple from each record, and the trend line doesn’t go up as I get older. So I’m more conscious now when I do a record of really trying to look at it more skeptically and more severely so I don’t end up including a lot of stuff. Every time I make a record, I think, oh, these 12, these are the ones, and I’ve done as great a job as I can, and I’m proud of it. And then within five years, you look at it and say, ‘Oh, no, it was just those two that were really worthy,’ and that’s happened almost every record. It’s not a very inspiring procedure when you look at it from the long view. Does your opinion change about which two are the worthy ones? No, I just rediscover more that I don’t like. What accounts for the increasing social consciousness of your songs? A couple things over the last couple years have sort of provoked thought for me, and some of it’s been of the nature of people just saying random things that are memorable. One guy said in a bar, “Well, I went back to my hometown in Michigan, and how can these places go on if they don’t make anything? They used to make thing in my hometown, and now nobody knows how to make things anymore.” And I thought, well that’s a really good point. How do they? That immediately connected with what I see when I travel around, either playing in towns or just traveling through them, that they have service there for people passing through, and that’s where all the jobs seem to lie. And then they have closed factories. So I think that thread in modern politics, too, whether it’s Sanders or Trump or Pat Buchanan or whomever, that sort of economic patriotism in modern politics, I think that’s not exactly a will-o’-the-wisp or bogeyman kind of idea of less-educated people. I think that’s a reality in a lot of America, and I think the recession, at least as far as my observations traveling around, after 2008, it got worse. It seems like a natural subject for somebody writing anything right now in America to dwell on. And the connection with the Depression is a little bit provocative maybe, because things were so hard: horses dying in the streets, kids dying at age 4 and so on, the things that Agee witnessed. But that kind of thing is still happening, too. My sister-in-law works at a public school where she sees people who are too poor to have shoes on their feet in the wintertime, literally, which seems like a comic and antiquated form of poverty in America. I mean comic like I mean, so long ago that it doesn’t even seem plausible, that scenario, but that’s happening. It seems worth of comment, you know. To put it mildly. You were known for a libertarian streak in the past. How much has that changed over the years? That has changed. I still think that the libertarian philosophy is hopeful, and positive, and apart from practical politics, I think it’s a great philosophy, that the fewer controls on behavior the better, until the behavior impedes somebody else’s freedoms. But it gets harder to see how that can be positively turned into practical policy before addressing more important questions of do we go to war or do we not go to war, how do we set the top marginal tax rate or how do we reform the tax code or how do we help suffering people in our country or what do we do about the border. I’m not sure that the “let everybody do whatever they want” philosophy either has answers to those questions or might answer in the wrong direction. So I hate to say it, but currently I’m just not excited about any candidate. I really don’t like any of them. It’s a very strange year. How closely are you following it? Are you a political junkie? I thought I was, but then my oldest child really, really is informed as far as reading The New York Times and Real Clear Politics every day and watching “PBS Newshour” every night, so thanks to him, I stay more informed than I otherwise would be. Libertarianism seems like it requires more personal responsibility than most people are willing to take on. Yeah. It doesn’t require it, but it has a hopeful expectation of an educated, thoughtful population to some degree, or the society just devolves into reality-TV chaos. I feel I’m going to disappoint any of your readers who are interested in a musician’s thoughts on politics, unless you put me next to Drake or something. [Laughs] For not liking any of the candidates, do you think you’ll vote? I’ve voted Republican in the past, and I wanted to cast a vote against Trump in the primary, but on the other hand, my son was thinking of voting for him to hasten the destruction of the party. That’s an interesting strategic point of view, too. I anticipate voting for Hillary Clinton in November. I don’t mind voting for status quo, and she’s the status-quo candidate and the Democrats are now the center-right party. That doesn’t particularly bother me, except for the Wall Street connections. I’m pretty much convinced by what’s happened over the past 10 years that the Washington-Wall Street connection needs reform. The “Inside Job” documentary was very revealing. It doesn’t take all that much money to seduce some intellectually sophisticated people. That’s kind of disappointing. It is, but I guess it’s human nature. There’s probably a price at which I’d hang up the phone and start shilling for Trump. Maybe not $1 million, but $50 million. Yeah, don’t do it for cheap. Right. [Laughs]. Wow.There was a time when Robbie Fulks came off as, well, brash. At the height of empty-hat country music in the ’90s, Fulks was writing subversive throwbacks to Buck Owens, like “She Took a Lot of Pills (And Died),” “God Isn’t Real” and “Fuck This Town,” his love letter to the Nashville country music establishment. A few years later, he was taking pleasure in publicly needling Ryan Adams, and a few years after that, he played against type with the 2010 release “Happy: Robbie Fulks Plays the Music of Michael Jackson,” which was, in fact, a genuine tribute to the pop star, who had died in 2009. More recently, Fulks has toned down his satiric streak and put the emphasis on his considerable musical chops. “When I was younger, I was more interested in slashing and burning and making an impression,” Fulks says. “I feel like now it’s more appropriate for me not to strive to make an impression and just be the thing that I am and people can look at it, or not look at it.” He pared back to mostly acoustic instruments and a pronounced bluegrass flavor on his stark 2013 album “Gone Away Backward,” culled from a 50-song collection he posted online in 2010. His new album “Upland Stories” follows a similar understated path with a dozen earthy new songs recorded with Steve Albini and featuring bassist Todd Phillips, violinists Jenny Scheinman and Shad Cobb, guitarist Robbie Gjersoe, drummer Alex Hall, multi-instrumentalist Fats Kaplin and keyboardist Wayne Horvitz. Ever the contrarian, Fulks doesn’t attribute his new material to musical influences so much as literary inspirations. Along with James Agee and “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” his seminal Depression-era exploration of poverty in the South, Fulks cites the writers Flannery O’Conner, Anton Chekhov and the Spanish novelist Javier Marias. It often makes for a more somber sensibility, though Fulks’ wry sense of humor remains fully intact on “Aunt Peg’s New Old Man.” The Chicago singer talked with Salon about the challenges of distilling works of literature into song ideas, the growing social consciousness in his music and why, despite his libertarian leanings, he plans to cast a vote for the status quo in November. Writers like Chekhov and Javier Marias aren’t part of the standard alt-country canon. How did they work their way into your songs? I sort of hesitate to go too far with that in music, because I feel like avoiding being seen as pretentious: “Please don’t consider me a musician but a poet,” which I find disagreeable. But once I started doing it a little bit, and then doing it more, it seemed to make more sense. It’s kind of an unexplored area. It’s an area where it’s easy to fail, but if you can pull it off, then you’re really in a high place in the Empyrean, if you know what I mean. Paul Simon has done it well, and four other people, or whatever. So it’s a high goal to aim for. But for me, it also makes sense with my age, because when you’re 52 and you’ve done 10 or 12 records, then you’ve kind of exhausted the personal angles to some extent, and I don’t want to hear a guy in his 50s singing about sex or good times or even the opposite, about married contentedness. And all the subjects like that that are sort of natural to middle-aged guys are kind of conflict-free and so to me, it makes sense to go into this other area that I really love and that is a big part of my life and take ideas and characters and storylines and let myself be guided or inspired by that. Where there particular works that inspired you? I have a couple Chekhov favorites, but there’s one called “Peasants,” where a sick guy from Moscow goes to the country to return to his people and is entirely unsuccessful and eventually dies. The story has a depressing arc, but along the way it also takes a few surprising turns into describing the community, and into the religiosity of the community, and some ancillary characters pop up and then go away. It’s that story that comes to bear on my song “Never Come Home,” which is transplanted to Tennessee. And Javiar Marias I just came to in the last two years or whenever Edward St. Alban wrote about him in The New York Times. I thought I’d better look into that guy. Like one of my friends said of NRBQ when he saw them for the first time, he said, “I didn’t realize you were allowed to do that.” And I think for me, writing like that has the same effect, that you can willfully break established traditional connections, you can play with punctuation, with chapter breaks, you can make huge dramatic plot episodes take a sentence and long winding digressions inside somebody’s head take 20 pages. You can do anything, so to me, his style is liberating. How does that sort of thing translate into your music, where you’re working in a much more concise form? The implication of that question points to where efforts to infuse music with literature often go down. And quite frequently when I’m working on these things in the first or second draft, I can just see that it’s gotten too obscure, too long, too dense, too full of 75-cent words, and so often the editing takes that same direction of either throwing away or trying to make it something simpler than it’s straining to be, something that’s maybe striving less after significance. So I guess the answer is that it frequently fails. With “Alabama at Night” and “Never Come Home,” the scenarios are the inspiration, but as you say, you don’t have the room to elaborate. And some of the actual phrases from Agee were purloined for “Alabama at Night.” He used “scoured clay” and I lifted that, and I can’t remember off-hand which other phrases. There’s two or three phrases in there. So I feel free to do that. I don’t know why. I might get sued or something. I think Bob Dylan makes you feel free to do that, he seems to lift a lot. You say that a writer your age has generally exhausted personal angles, but there do seem to be autobiographical elements in these songs. That seems to me to be a biological, well, imperative is too strong a word, but I feel this increased interest and inner push toward remembering things from a long time ago. I came across this quotation from Arthur Schopenhauer, who said the first 40 years of your life are text, and the last 30 are commentary. So I definitely felt the little leap over that divide at some point over the past couple years, where the distant past started to become very interesting compared to anything that was presently developing. I think a lot of it is that things go away. When I visit the places where old things happened to me, where I was growing up, the land is there, but not as you remember it. And the people by and large aren’t there, or if they are, they look like they’re rotting away, and actual events may as well never have happened, because they exist only in this sort of mindscape, which is also biological and temporary, apparently. I guess the temporariness of it, and the evanescence of it, become kind of morbidly fascinating. How has the intersection of literature and songwriting changed the way you edit yourself? I’m not sure that I can remember how much I edited when I was 18 or 20. I would assume less. For me now, probably most – I don’t know, 50 or 60 percent of the editing – is just throwing away. So I’ll start a verse, get through a verse and chorus, it will seem kind of promising and then I’ll wail away at it for a week and find that it’s going nowhere and not interesting me anymore and pitch it. That’s more efficient than what I used to do. I tended to finish everything in the old days, and probably performed most of it at some point. So I just try to recognize earlier now when it’s going awry, or when it’s not achieving that magic, try to apply that high bar to it, and when it’s not producing sparks, just walk away from it, rather than try to refashion it. Given all the songs you used to finish, is there a huge backlog of tunes? Oh, sure, yeah. Really, it’s like 90 percent of what I write gets thrown away, and I don’t think that’s so unusual for writers. But I have noticed, looking back over the old records — I feel like I’m getting better at it, but I might not be, because the songs that still excite me to play now, there’s a couple from each record, and the trend line doesn’t go up as I get older. So I’m more conscious now when I do a record of really trying to look at it more skeptically and more severely so I don’t end up including a lot of stuff. Every time I make a record, I think, oh, these 12, these are the ones, and I’ve done as great a job as I can, and I’m proud of it. And then within five years, you look at it and say, ‘Oh, no, it was just those two that were really worthy,’ and that’s happened almost every record. It’s not a very inspiring procedure when you look at it from the long view. Does your opinion change about which two are the worthy ones? No, I just rediscover more that I don’t like. What accounts for the increasing social consciousness of your songs? A couple things over the last couple years have sort of provoked thought for me, and some of it’s been of the nature of people just saying random things that are memorable. One guy said in a bar, “Well, I went back to my hometown in Michigan, and how can these places go on if they don’t make anything? They used to make thing in my hometown, and now nobody knows how to make things anymore.” And I thought, well that’s a really good point. How do they? That immediately connected with what I see when I travel around, either playing in towns or just traveling through them, that they have service there for people passing through, and that’s where all the jobs seem to lie. And then they have closed factories. So I think that thread in modern politics, too, whether it’s Sanders or Trump or Pat Buchanan or whomever, that sort of economic patriotism in modern politics, I think that’s not exactly a will-o’-the-wisp or bogeyman kind of idea of less-educated people. I think that’s a reality in a lot of America, and I think the recession, at least as far as my observations traveling around, after 2008, it got worse. It seems like a natural subject for somebody writing anything right now in America to dwell on. And the connection with the Depression is a little bit provocative maybe, because things were so hard: horses dying in the streets, kids dying at age 4 and so on, the things that Agee witnessed. But that kind of thing is still happening, too. My sister-in-law works at a public school where she sees people who are too poor to have shoes on their feet in the wintertime, literally, which seems like a comic and antiquated form of poverty in America. I mean comic like I mean, so long ago that it doesn’t even seem plausible, that scenario, but that’s happening. It seems worth of comment, you know. To put it mildly. You were known for a libertarian streak in the past. How much has that changed over the years? That has changed. I still think that the libertarian philosophy is hopeful, and positive, and apart from practical politics, I think it’s a great philosophy, that the fewer controls on behavior the better, until the behavior impedes somebody else’s freedoms. But it gets harder to see how that can be positively turned into practical policy before addressing more important questions of do we go to war or do we not go to war, how do we set the top marginal tax rate or how do we reform the tax code or how do we help suffering people in our country or what do we do about the border. I’m not sure that the “let everybody do whatever they want” philosophy either has answers to those questions or might answer in the wrong direction. So I hate to say it, but currently I’m just not excited about any candidate. I really don’t like any of them. It’s a very strange year. How closely are you following it? Are you a political junkie? I thought I was, but then my oldest child really, really is informed as far as reading The New York Times and Real Clear Politics every day and watching “PBS Newshour” every night, so thanks to him, I stay more informed than I otherwise would be. Libertarianism seems like it requires more personal responsibility than most people are willing to take on. Yeah. It doesn’t require it, but it has a hopeful expectation of an educated, thoughtful population to some degree, or the society just devolves into reality-TV chaos. I feel I’m going to disappoint any of your readers who are interested in a musician’s thoughts on politics, unless you put me next to Drake or something. [Laughs] For not liking any of the candidates, do you think you’ll vote? I’ve voted Republican in the past, and I wanted to cast a vote against Trump in the primary, but on the other hand, my son was thinking of voting for him to hasten the destruction of the party. That’s an interesting strategic point of view, too. I anticipate voting for Hillary Clinton in November. I don’t mind voting for status quo, and she’s the status-quo candidate and the Democrats are now the center-right party. That doesn’t particularly bother me, except for the Wall Street connections. I’m pretty much convinced by what’s happened over the past 10 years that the Washington-Wall Street connection needs reform. The “Inside Job” documentary was very revealing. It doesn’t take all that much money to seduce some intellectually sophisticated people. That’s kind of disappointing. It is, but I guess it’s human nature. There’s probably a price at which I’d hang up the phone and start shilling for Trump. Maybe not $1 million, but $50 million. Yeah, don’t do it for cheap. Right. [Laughs]. Wow.
WATCH: Clinton goes off on Greenpeace activist: “I am so sick” of people bringing up my fossil fuel money
Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton went off on an environmental activist on Thursday, after being asked about the large sums of fossil fuel-linked cash she has received. At a Clinton rally on the State University of New York at Purchase campus, Eva Resnick-Day, an activist with the environmental justice group Greenpeace, asked Clinton, "Will you act on your word to reject fossil fuel money in the future in your campaign?" Clinton quickly lost her patience. Her smile promptly morphed into a scowl and she yelled at the environmental activist, "I do not have — I have money from people who work for fossil fuel companies." "I am so sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me," Clinton shouted, pointing angrily at Resnick-Day. This incident comes mere days after a top official in the Clinton campaign insisted Hillary would not debate fellow presidential candidate Bernie Sanders unless he changes his "tone." Environmental justice group Greenpeace uploaded video of Clinton's irate response to its YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC4Pv... Greenpeace has detailed Clinton's many connections to the fossil fuel industry, arguing her campaign and the Super PAC supporting her have received more than $4.5 million from those who work in it. Although the activist from the environmental group asked if the former secretary of state will "reject fossil fuel money" overall, Clinton implied she has not received any, instead making a misleading distinction between the corporations themselves and individuals tied to them. It is true that Clinton's campaign has not gotten money directly from fossil fuel corporations, or any other companies, as this would violate election law. Rather, many of the people raising money for Clinton's campaign work for large oil and natural gas corporations. "Nearly all of the lobbyists bundling contributions for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign have at one time or another worked for the fossil fuel industry," Mother Jones revealed in a July exposé. She has received enormous help, Mother Jones reported, from "Democratic Party lobbyists who have worked against regulations to curb climate change, advocated for offshore drilling, or sought government approval for natural gas exports." Environmental news website Grist has also shown how Clinton rakes in money from fossil fuel interests. The outlet notes that her campaign does not receive money directly from fossil fuel companies; rather, she "is getting a lot of money from fossil fuel executives and lobbyists acting as bundlers (fundraisers who collect donations) who represent fossil fuel companies." Among the prominent contributors to Clinton's campaign are lobbyists for Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP America, America's Natural Gas Alliance and more. Clinton's campaign also has links to the Keystone XL pipeline, a project of the corporation TransCanada that has faced a series of delays since it was commissioned in 2010. Environmental scientists like former NASA official James Hansen have warned it would mean "game over for the climate," and activists have protested it for years. In June 2015, Clinton's campaign announced that it had hired a former major TransCanada lobbyist as a consultant.
As secretary of state, Clinton also pushed for the pipeline. In 2010, she said her department was "inclined" to sign off on the project. During her tenure as head of the State Department, Clinton also advocated strongly on behalf of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, or TPP, which environmental and labor groups warn would be disastrous for the climate and local economy. Although the deal is 6,000 pages long and addresses a variety of obscure issues, it does not mention the phrase "climate change" once. Despite openly supporting them for years, after pressure from the Sanders campaign, Clinton now claims she opposes both the Keystone XL pipeline and TPP. Clinton has also received millions of dollars in speaking fees from Wall Street banks and corporations. In fact, in just 12 of such speeches, Clinton made approximately $3 million, more than most Americans will earn in their lifetimes. She has been asked numerous times to release transcripts of her paid speeches, but refuses to do so. An investigation by the Wall Street Journal furthermore revealed that Bill Clinton's speaking fees grew rapidly when his wife served as secretary of state. Fellow presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has refused to take contributions from fossil fuel corporations. In July 2015, The Nation magazine created a pledge calling on presidential candidates to reject money from fossil fuel corporations. Clinton did not endorse it.
The Washington Post’s revealing blunder: Their screwup over the FBI’s Hillary probe is a great example of why Americans hate the press
I don't think there's ever been a period in my lifetime during which a sizable plurality of Americans didn't look upon the mainstream media with a mix of disdain and distrust, but the 2016 election has taken it to another level. There's Donald Trump's campaign, obviously, which has placed hatred of elite media — not just as an institution, but very much as a group of "disgusting" individuals — front and center like no other presidential campaign (at least since Richard Nixon's in 1968). But he's hardly alone. In fact, with the possible exception of Gov. John Kasich, every candidate still in the race is known for having an either frosty or downright hostile relationship with the press. Hillary Clinton's loathing for the media is central to her political identity; Sen. Ted Cruz routinely uses the press as a punching bag in order to avoid tough questions; and rare is the occasion when Sen. Bernie Sanders turns down the chance to slam "corporate media," which he sees as structurally biased — at best. We may be a profoundly heterogeneous and divided nation, in other words, but we do all agree that the media sucks. (Few people, by the way, hate media more than those who are themselves journalists.) Why is the media almost universally despised? That question is way, way too big for a blog post to handle. People — smart people — have devoted their careers trying to answer just that. So if you want a more holistic analysis, I'd recommend you acquaint yourself with the work of NYU's Jay Rosen. Eric Alterman's "What Liberal Media?" also still holds up. But if you want a case in point, look no further than this correction from the Washington Post:
From 147 to "fewer than 50" — that's quite a drop! But if a subsequent report from NBC is correct, the Post is still selling itself short. The real number isn't 147, and it isn't fewer than 50. It is, NBC reports, twelve:
From 147 to "fewer than 50" — that's quite a drop! But if a subsequent report from NBC is correct, the Post is still selling itself short. The real number isn't 147, and it isn't fewer than 50. It is, NBC reports, twelve:
From 147 to "fewer than 50" — that's quite a drop! But if a subsequent report from NBC is correct, the Post is still selling itself short. The real number isn't 147, and it isn't fewer than 50. It is, NBC reports, twelve:
From 147 to "fewer than 50" — that's quite a drop! But if a subsequent report from NBC is correct, the Post is still selling itself short. The real number isn't 147, and it isn't fewer than 50. It is, NBC reports, twelve: Sources close to the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton's email are knocking down suggestions that 147 federal agents are working on the case, a figure first reported — and now revised — by the Washington Post, citing a lawmaker. The Post updated the figure on Tuesday, stating that while the "FBI will not provide an exact figure," there are "fewer than 50" FBI personnel involved in the case. But a former federal law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the Clinton investigation tells MSNBC an estimate anywhere near 50 agents is also off base.That's not all the Post screwed up, either (though it's more than enough already). According to NBC, the Post's number wasn't just way off — it was, to those in law enforcement who'd know, "completely improbable." Again, from NBC:
A former FBI official, also speaking anonymously, says many in the law enforcement community view the large estimates of people assigned to the case as completely improbable. "147 was such a ridiculous number," said the source, adding that 50 also sounded unrealistic for this kind of inquiry. "You need an act of terrorism to get 50 agents working on something," said the former FBI official.How the hell did such shoddy journalism ever make it into The Washington Post, you ask? I don't know; that's something for the Post's ombudsman to find out. But I can tell you how I — and many others — suspect it went down. The key phrase, turning back to the Post's correction, is this: "...according to a lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James B. Comey." That "lawmaker," almost certainly, was a Republican. And if past is prologue, it was a Republican involved with the so-called Benghazi committee, the oh-so-serious investigative entity that House Republicans established in order to destroy Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign get to the bottom of the 2012 attack. It would not be the first time that a politician leaked knowingly false information just for the sake of giving its target a few days of bad press. Yet that, right there, is the problem: This was utterly predictable. It's something that happens all the time. And any journalist with an ounce of common sense is always on guard, careful not to become a useful idiot for someone engaged in political machinations. Getting played like this is, to put it lightly, amateurish. But man-oh-man, did the Post's initial report get a lot of attention. You gotta figure it earned the Post's website a whole lot of clicks. That's often the case with these "too good to check" stories. Meanwhile, the Post can just slap a correction at the bottom of the piece and continue along with its business. And who knows what juicy leak Republican politicians might send its way next? I don't think there's ever been a period in my lifetime during which a sizable plurality of Americans didn't look upon the mainstream media with a mix of disdain and distrust, but the 2016 election has taken it to another level. There's Donald Trump's campaign, obviously, which has placed hatred of elite media — not just as an institution, but very much as a group of "disgusting" individuals — front and center like no other presidential campaign (at least since Richard Nixon's in 1968). But he's hardly alone. In fact, with the possible exception of Gov. John Kasich, every candidate still in the race is known for having an either frosty or downright hostile relationship with the press. Hillary Clinton's loathing for the media is central to her political identity; Sen. Ted Cruz routinely uses the press as a punching bag in order to avoid tough questions; and rare is the occasion when Sen. Bernie Sanders turns down the chance to slam "corporate media," which he sees as structurally biased — at best. We may be a profoundly heterogeneous and divided nation, in other words, but we do all agree that the media sucks. (Few people, by the way, hate media more than those who are themselves journalists.) Why is the media almost universally despised? That question is way, way too big for a blog post to handle. People — smart people — have devoted their careers trying to answer just that. So if you want a more holistic analysis, I'd recommend you acquaint yourself with the work of NYU's Jay Rosen. Eric Alterman's "What Liberal Media?" also still holds up. But if you want a case in point, look no further than this correction from the Washington Post:
From 147 to "fewer than 50" — that's quite a drop! But if a subsequent report from NBC is correct, the Post is still selling itself short. The real number isn't 147, and it isn't fewer than 50. It is, NBC reports, twelve: Sources close to the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton's email are knocking down suggestions that 147 federal agents are working on the case, a figure first reported — and now revised — by the Washington Post, citing a lawmaker. The Post updated the figure on Tuesday, stating that while the "FBI will not provide an exact figure," there are "fewer than 50" FBI personnel involved in the case. But a former federal law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the Clinton investigation tells MSNBC an estimate anywhere near 50 agents is also off base.That's not all the Post screwed up, either (though it's more than enough already). According to NBC, the Post's number wasn't just way off — it was, to those in law enforcement who'd know, "completely improbable." Again, from NBC:
A former FBI official, also speaking anonymously, says many in the law enforcement community view the large estimates of people assigned to the case as completely improbable. "147 was such a ridiculous number," said the source, adding that 50 also sounded unrealistic for this kind of inquiry. "You need an act of terrorism to get 50 agents working on something," said the former FBI official.How the hell did such shoddy journalism ever make it into The Washington Post, you ask? I don't know; that's something for the Post's ombudsman to find out. But I can tell you how I — and many others — suspect it went down. The key phrase, turning back to the Post's correction, is this: "...according to a lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James B. Comey." That "lawmaker," almost certainly, was a Republican. And if past is prologue, it was a Republican involved with the so-called Benghazi committee, the oh-so-serious investigative entity that House Republicans established in order to destroy Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign get to the bottom of the 2012 attack. It would not be the first time that a politician leaked knowingly false information just for the sake of giving its target a few days of bad press. Yet that, right there, is the problem: This was utterly predictable. It's something that happens all the time. And any journalist with an ounce of common sense is always on guard, careful not to become a useful idiot for someone engaged in political machinations. Getting played like this is, to put it lightly, amateurish. But man-oh-man, did the Post's initial report get a lot of attention. You gotta figure it earned the Post's website a whole lot of clicks. That's often the case with these "too good to check" stories. Meanwhile, the Post can just slap a correction at the bottom of the piece and continue along with its business. And who knows what juicy leak Republican politicians might send its way next? I don't think there's ever been a period in my lifetime during which a sizable plurality of Americans didn't look upon the mainstream media with a mix of disdain and distrust, but the 2016 election has taken it to another level. There's Donald Trump's campaign, obviously, which has placed hatred of elite media — not just as an institution, but very much as a group of "disgusting" individuals — front and center like no other presidential campaign (at least since Richard Nixon's in 1968). But he's hardly alone. In fact, with the possible exception of Gov. John Kasich, every candidate still in the race is known for having an either frosty or downright hostile relationship with the press. Hillary Clinton's loathing for the media is central to her political identity; Sen. Ted Cruz routinely uses the press as a punching bag in order to avoid tough questions; and rare is the occasion when Sen. Bernie Sanders turns down the chance to slam "corporate media," which he sees as structurally biased — at best. We may be a profoundly heterogeneous and divided nation, in other words, but we do all agree that the media sucks. (Few people, by the way, hate media more than those who are themselves journalists.) Why is the media almost universally despised? That question is way, way too big for a blog post to handle. People — smart people — have devoted their careers trying to answer just that. So if you want a more holistic analysis, I'd recommend you acquaint yourself with the work of NYU's Jay Rosen. Eric Alterman's "What Liberal Media?" also still holds up. But if you want a case in point, look no further than this correction from the Washington Post:
From 147 to "fewer than 50" — that's quite a drop! But if a subsequent report from NBC is correct, the Post is still selling itself short. The real number isn't 147, and it isn't fewer than 50. It is, NBC reports, twelve: Sources close to the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton's email are knocking down suggestions that 147 federal agents are working on the case, a figure first reported — and now revised — by the Washington Post, citing a lawmaker. The Post updated the figure on Tuesday, stating that while the "FBI will not provide an exact figure," there are "fewer than 50" FBI personnel involved in the case. But a former federal law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the Clinton investigation tells MSNBC an estimate anywhere near 50 agents is also off base.That's not all the Post screwed up, either (though it's more than enough already). According to NBC, the Post's number wasn't just way off — it was, to those in law enforcement who'd know, "completely improbable." Again, from NBC:
A former FBI official, also speaking anonymously, says many in the law enforcement community view the large estimates of people assigned to the case as completely improbable. "147 was such a ridiculous number," said the source, adding that 50 also sounded unrealistic for this kind of inquiry. "You need an act of terrorism to get 50 agents working on something," said the former FBI official.How the hell did such shoddy journalism ever make it into The Washington Post, you ask? I don't know; that's something for the Post's ombudsman to find out. But I can tell you how I — and many others — suspect it went down. The key phrase, turning back to the Post's correction, is this: "...according to a lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James B. Comey." That "lawmaker," almost certainly, was a Republican. And if past is prologue, it was a Republican involved with the so-called Benghazi committee, the oh-so-serious investigative entity that House Republicans established in order to destroy Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign get to the bottom of the 2012 attack. It would not be the first time that a politician leaked knowingly false information just for the sake of giving its target a few days of bad press. Yet that, right there, is the problem: This was utterly predictable. It's something that happens all the time. And any journalist with an ounce of common sense is always on guard, careful not to become a useful idiot for someone engaged in political machinations. Getting played like this is, to put it lightly, amateurish. But man-oh-man, did the Post's initial report get a lot of attention. You gotta figure it earned the Post's website a whole lot of clicks. That's often the case with these "too good to check" stories. Meanwhile, the Post can just slap a correction at the bottom of the piece and continue along with its business. And who knows what juicy leak Republican politicians might send its way next?
