Media Criticism

I have to admire the enthusiasm of political activists in the Democratic Party as we approach the 2008 election. The appearance of choice in the Democratic primaries as well as an impending end to eight miserable years under George W. Bush has brought out activists from the wood work. I am undecided on my state’s primary (Wisconsin votes on February 19th) though I will likely throw my vote to John Edwards. The reason why I would go with Edwards even as his campaign is running third in every state is that I need to look at myself in the mirror after the 19th.

Barack Obama’s campaign is extraordinary not because he is an African-American; it is remarkable due to the excitement he has drawn in vague platitudes. I like Barack Obama as an interview subject because he seems to get that typical politicians look wooden in different environments. My problem is that I cannot possibly vote for someone who speaks about hope, change and a new day without much detail. I am going to head off angry emails from Obama supporters by stating that I have read his platform. I am still not convinced that hope can get the job done in changing the structure of power.

Hillary Clinton falls into the DLC-run section of the Democratic Party that I dislike immensely. The two-party system necessitates that each party represent a distinct portion of the political spectrum in its platform. I have a feeling that if Clinton and her Senate cohorts got a hold of a majority of delegate they would eliminate progressive reforms in favor of triangulated policies to appease both sides without pleasing anyone.

I won’t go too far into why I am voting for Edwards except to say that I would rather vote for a losing candidate with the right ideas instead of a winning candidate with faulty ideas and lofty language. A recent story in The Nation highlights the exceptional growth of the Democratic grassroots since Howard Dean became head of the DNC. I think that the Democratic Party needs to appeal to these grassroots which cross into the moderate and liberal portions of the political spectrum.

My greatest hope for this election is that we will see a brokered convention where John Edwards has a few hundred delegates to parlay into a more progressive platform. This hope turns into fear when I realize that all of this will be done in a backroom instead of the convention floor because no one has seen this type of convention in decades. Democratic delegates need to realize that once the first ballot fails to confirm a candidate they can float to other candidates as they please. It is time for the grassroots to use this unique opportunity to assert a return of progressivism to America.

I gave some free (and unsolicited) advice to the Romney campaign yesterday that I thought could be helpful in upcoming weeks. I thought I would help a struggling Democratic campaign to maintain a balanced approach to the 2008 presidential election. The campaign by former Senator John Edwards has languished since a close second place finish in Iowa where he spent the last four years building a following. Edwards has to challenge the party establishment in order to excited frustrated rank-and-file members as well as independents.

It sounds antithetical to challenge the party that will provide the nomination Edwards needs to win the presidency. The DLC has made it clear that Edwards is out of the race and talking heads place Edwards in a spot slightly ahead of Dennis Kucinich. John Kerry gave Edwards the snub in favor of Barack Obama which should set Obama in the same establishment camp as Clinton. Edwards needs to point out the directed process of the Democratic primary process while acting as the only true agent of change.

Voters aren’t tiring of the change message which Edwards is dishing out in his campaign speeches. The only problem Edwards faces is the budget crunch from running a national campaign. Edwards will have to settle for second or third in many of the states running up to the February 5th primaries. If Edwards can win a few states in the West on February 5th and finish in a respectable position elsewhere, he has some momentum to stay in the race beyond Super Tuesday.

How will he win these states on February 5th, you ask? He needs to speak out against the hidden Republicanism of the DLC, continue to pound at non-topics on the campaign trail like poverty and demonstrate that his detailed agenda is right for America after the Bush Administration’s failures. A critical eye on the DLC, the Democratic Party establishment and elements of conservatism in the party can go a long way toward cultivating the simmering frustration among Democratic voters. Edwards’ message should be that his election to the presidency would only change the fundamental arrangement of the Democratic Party but the relationship between the executive and Congress.

Barack Obama and John Edwards have engaged in a debate through proxies, press releases and speeches in front of dozens at events in Iowa over 527 advertising. Edwards’ former campaign manager works for a 527 organization that supports union interests and plans on spending hundreds of thousands on advertising for Edwards in Iowa. Obama is claiming that Edwards’ weak attempt at stopping the advertising on his behalf seems to be a weakness in leadership. Edwards has countered that he does not officially support the messages of the 527 ads on his behalf.

I doubt that Barack Obama or any other presidential candidate is above reproach when it comes to 527 advertising. I also think that Edwards could have preempted these criticisms with a phone call to his former campaign manager as soon as the news got out. Neither side has a right to complain, however, as every candidate (save people like Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul) seems to support the system that allows 527 ads to exist. No candidate who supports maintaining the status quo and keeping competitive ideas down through complex legislation should complain that 527 ads are fair to one candidate.

The frustrating part of the debate over 527 ads is that they work. I know voters will say that they are sick of politicians bickering but they are influenced by these ads in the same way that they are influenced by consumer advertising. 527 organizations are led by people connected to presidential and Congressional candidates in some substantial way which means that they are familiar with the lexicon of negativity needed to run a successful advertisement. While the Internet allows everyone to see an ad designed for Iowa and New Hampshire, there is an impermanence to these 527 ads that is perfect for candidates in the 21st century. The volume of advertisements on the Web means that a 527 ad criticizing Hillary Clinton will be supplanted within a day by a counterattack with an equal measure of vitriol.

I hate speaking about 527 ads because they are symbolic of fundamental problems with corporate influence, media and American politics in one fell swoop. A campaign advertising law that closed 527 rules permanently and forced candidates to apply their name to all TV, print, radio and Internet ads would ensure transparency in our political process. The 527 issue gets down to the fundamental question of money as free speech but candidates should preempt every 527 ad to meet the free speech standard and save their behinds.

I announced my endorsement of Senator John Edwards a few posts back but I want to speak today about Governor Bill Richardson. Richardson is the type of candidate that looks fantastic on paper, a shoo-in for the nomination: former energy secretary, governor of a “purple� state, experience in foreign policy and a platform that is purely Democratic. As Mother Jones reports today, the problem with Richardson’s campaign is that politics is not simply about ideas.

I admit that when I hear Richardson speak in debates, I cringe at the wonkiness of his language. I love his perspectives on the environment, education and college loans. I also like the idea of someone from the West giving a presidential bid a chance. The problem is that Governor Richardson is an ideas candidate not a candidate that evokes happiness, anger and bile at the opposition party in each of his speeches. Richardson is deeply ensconced in Democratic politics and his connections to Bill Clinton and other moderates do not help him in an election where Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd and Joe Biden are fighting for votes.

His campaign cannot define itself as an outsider campaign (Edwards, Kucinich), a reform campaign within reason (Obama) or a desire to use new ideas bandied about in Beltway meeting rooms (Biden, Dodd). Governor Richardson projects an idea instead of a charismatic template that voters can apply to other candidates. I would never instruct someone as experienced in politics as Bill Richardson to try to be more charismatic; Bob Dole tried to be more charismatic in 1996 and he got creamed. I would say that Richardson needs to be aggressive in using new media and highlighting the fact that voters can get a Hillary Clinton-plus platform without the baggage.

While the Democrats and Republicans focus their attention on Iowa and New Hampshire, both national parties are contending with issues of scheduling. The Democratic Party seems to be victimizing itself at every turn by adhering to the ridiculous legal mandates within Iowa and New Hampshire state law dictating their place in the primary process. DNC Chairman Howard Dean and others have indicated that Florida and other states will not have any delegates at the national convention next summer if they hold their primary ahead of the party’s schedule. Candidates are signing pledges not to campaign in Florida, Michigan and other states in order to provide legitimacy to their primary efforts.

Howard Dean may think that he is establishing discipline but the DNC and the RNC aren’t legal bodies. Political parties are organizational tools established at the will of the people to help define (or divide, depending on your perspective) political thought. If states want to pass laws that move their primaries to Christmas, the Democrats need to recognize the legal reality. I am not a fan of Iowa and New Hampshire acting as the initial political determinants for the presidential campaign but their legislatures are autonomous from the ideas of political parties.

The Democrats will suffer greatly if they persist with the policy of keeping delegates of violating states out of the convention. Democratic activists feel that 2008 is a slam dunk but the party has screwed up in the past (just look at the 2004 convention when they played patty cake with President Bush). An article in Salon today points out the frustration of activists in Florida which may lead them to sit out the presidential primaries or choose a Republican candidate in November 2008. Dean’s image as the grassroots hero, cultivated in 2004 and in his 50 state campaign of 2006, is greatly damaged by his bureaucratic overreaching.

We have too many problems in America to allow the national party committees to derail the political process. Future problems with Iran, Social Security, health care and dozens of other issues mean that the Democrats and Republicans need to allow the primary process to happen organically. If voters dislike the process, they can speak with their state legislators and vote out legislators that support an acceleration of state primaries in the next election. The DNC and RNC need to begin planning their conventions and laminating passes and allow politics to play out amongst the states.

As a writer for CensorSpace, I came out quickly to endorse former Senator John Edwards in his bid for the Democratic nomination in 2008. This endorsement means very little and I don’t think that the blogosphere, whether liberal or conservative, makes nearly the difference that it thinks it does on politics. I feel it necessary to disclose this fact as I have vacillated on the available candidates in both parties in previous posts on Media Critiques.

I am coming out today to endorse wholeheartedly the candidacy of John Edwards for the Democratic nomination. There are many reasons I have chosen Edwards over other candidates not the least of which is that Edwards is an underdog with a detailed populist program facing the two-headed monster of Hillary and Barack. John Edwards has been releasing specific policies since the beginning of his campaign including a national health care plan and plan to deal with poverty that include ways to pay for these programs. His most recent policy has put my support over the top for Edwards over my next choice, “someone else� followed by “third party.�

Mr. Edwards is now railing against drug advertisements that help drive up the price of pharmaceuticals in the United States. You know those commercials for penis medication and sleeping pills? They cost money in prime time and that money goes back to the public in the form of higher retail prices. One of the former senator’s first acts as president would be to promote a two year moratorium on consumer advertising for new drugs. He would also provide the FDA the power to stop advertisements that are misleading or based on questionable evidence. It is no wonder that Edwards has a devoted, if small, following in states like Iowa and South Carolina.

I have been advocating in various publications for the regulation of drug advertisements since my days as an ultra-liberal graduate student in Wisconsin. Drug companies complain about the high price of research but they don’t seem to mind putting money into lobbying, advertising and hectoring doctors to peddle their drugs. Mr. Edwards has come out for things that I believe in like investment in education, health insurance and a sound foreign policy in recent months. The smear machine within the Republican Party, the Democratic Leadership Conference and the media has focused on expensive haircuts. It is time to get past media obfuscation to find the truth.

This will be the last time I write about Mr. Edwards in this blog until the primaries unless there is an incredibly compelling reason to do so. I will not be a shill for Edwards (beyond this entry, at least) nor will I attack other candidates on his behalf. I simply want to say that corporate media can be reformed for the better with John Edwards in the Oval Office. If that is a sentiment that is incorrect, then I will no doubt look back upon this post in upcoming months to cringe at my narrow mindedness. For now, it is time for change in the way drug companies, lobbyists and major political parties do business.

The Des Moines Register published a poll on Sunday that showed Senator Hillary Clinton gaining a lead on previous Iowa favorite John Edwards and the “it� candidate, Senator Barack Obama. The Clinton campaign and the mainstream media have pushed this recent success by Clinton as a sign that she is emerging as the most viable candidate for the Democrats. My question about this poll and other polls is whether they are a product or a generator of media hype. In other words, does the Des Moines Register poll result from Clinton’s hype in the national press or will the poll generate greater press for Clinton and feed conspiracy theories among independents?

I look back to the Iowa Republican Party’s straw poll as an example of how starved for news the mainstream media is these days. The poll was bought by Mitt Romney and not attended by Giuliani, McCain and Fred Thompson. The hype around Romney’s success and the dark horse success of Governor Mike Huckabee were grasped onto by major newspapers and TV networks after months of exhausting rhetoric. The answer to my original question based on the Iowa straw poll and subsequent straw polls in other states is that the poll is reflective of media attention rather than grassroots support.

Clinton and Romney share a similar problem in a general election. Both candidates would try to point out flip-flopping and political opportunism while failing to address their own flip-flopping and opportunism in the past. The Iowa caucuses are still three months away and there are too many independents in states like Iowa and New Hampshire to claim that Senator Clinton has struck a blow against her opponents. I implore the national press and the voters of early primary states to consider their choices carefully and avoid these polls like the plague.

The people who read this blog are probably sick of me talking about the Democratic debates, the 2008 election and other aspects of politics that are fueled entirely by the media. I even get sick of these diatribes but I think I have given myself the unintentional mission of ending the long primary process once and for all, one blog at a time. To fuel this fire, the awful trio of the Huffington Post, Yahoo! and Slate are putting on a unique debate and a “mashup� tool that allows people to put individual answers together into their own package. Here is a little bit more detail on the debate from the New York Times:

Here’s how it works: Charlie Rose is hooking up by satellite individually from his studio in New York with each of the eight Democratic candidates, who are scattered across the country. He’ll question them each for 12 minutes on three topics _ Iraq, health care and education. There will also be a “wild card� question.

According to all three sponsors, these answers will be available on Friday through each website. The “mashup� tool will also be available to help political and technological nerds the opportunity to get involved in yet another debate.

Marc Lampkin makes a good point in his latest post on the Huffington Post, a liberal blogging website headed by Arianna Huffington. Lampkin discusses the use of the “mashup� tool as a way for people to hear what they want to hear from each candidate. Yahoo!, Slate and the Huffington Post should know better. This is already what the mainstream media does to candidates particularly the minor candidates who only make it on the news when they make a gaffe or do something silly.

If the Internet-using public is indeed tired with politics as usual and poor media coverage for their candidate, they should not resort to the “mashup� tool. Instead, they should search for unabridged audio, video and written transcripts of their speeches to hear what they are saying around the country. Lampkin’s final point is that we will hear more of the same which makes a “mashup� of what Obama, Clinton or even Kucinich or Gravel useless. Let’s stop pretending like high-tech gadgets and tools are really going to improve the process until we are actually ready to change the process in Washington D.C.

The underlying theme of any presidential primary debate depends on who is hosting the candidates. Forums held by the AFL-CIO will probably not deal with the environment while the Logo Network debate probably won’t get too far into the Iraq War. I understand that the good graces of the host make a focused debate a necessity in order to get the best questions from the panel. The Democratic debate held on September 9th on Spanish-language channel Univision may be drawing too fine a line in pleasing constituents with debates that few people watch.

I think that Hispanic voters who are interested in the debates have probably watched the endless hours of debates already conducted across the country. The political correctness that is rife within the Democratic Party was obvious when Senator Dodd and Governor Richardson (who is HISPANIC!) tried to speak Spanish to the chagrin of hosts. Every candidate was required to speak English which was then translated into Spanish for the viewing audience. The difficulty of listening to candidates of any party lay out their talking points for an hour and a half is made more significant when it is filtered several times over.

All of these points lead to one conclusion: the primary season is not too long, just the list of debates. While I have an interest in what candidates have to say on gay marriage or the environment, I don’t want to hear 90 minutes on the topic. I have not decided who I will vote for in my primary and I definitely have not thought about the general election yet. Like most voters, I will make a decision as I approach the ballot box. These debates are focused too much on a particular issue based on questions from single-minded forum moderators and offer nothing that a look at each candidate’s website won’t yield. If the Democrats and Republicans insist on holding similar debates in future election seasons, here are a few suggestions:

1) Let local news stations host the debates, not issue-oriented groups.
2) Space these debates out so that you have no more than one every month.
3) Stay away from the YouTube debate…please!

Today, presidential candidate John Edwards began a tour highlighting the poverty problem in our country. He spoke to Good Morning America about his ideas, and he also spoke in New Orleans about the current administration’s failure after the Hurricane Katrina disaster. He claims that the current administration is ignoring the plight of the poor and seeks change.

I saw two articles on the subject, one a local publication and one national.

The specifics of these two articles reflect differences in mentalities. The local article focuses on Edwards’ speech in the region and his views regarding Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina. This, of course, is not surprising from a southern newspaper.

However, as evidenced by the ABC News article, simple coverage of one campaign stop hardly helps define Edwards as a candidate. In fact, ABC points out a striking irony in Edwards’ position on poverty: “[C]an a wealthy candidate live among the privileged and really care about poverty?”

Edwards seems to respond to this question in three ways. One, he simply accepts criticism for obscene spending. In response to a recent question about his infamous $400 haircut, he admits the mistake and offers no defense. Two, his rags-to-riches story gives his anti-poverty campaign more legitimacy. Edwards certainly was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. As the first of his family to go to college, Edwards is self-made. Now, he’s going to try to give back. Three, he is looking to pay for his universal health care campaign by eliminating Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. He most certainly falls into this income bracket, and his taxes would increase as a result of this measure.

National coverage gives a much clearer view of the Edwards campaign, and it even seeks to question Edwards’ ability to deliver on his promise. Local coverage, on the other hand, answers the questions plaguing those in the area: will Edwards offer a better answer to poverty and disaster than Bush did?

The campaign continues.

John Edwards, Presidential Campaign