Press Release

The (Digital) Marketing of the President

The sophisticated on-line techniques used by the Obama campaign are broadly outlined in this July 2008 piece (since the details are closely held by the campaign's brain-trust):

The campaign is collecting some of the most helpful data on its own. For example, aides can track what time you open e-mails from them, and if you show a consistent pattern, they'll start sending them at around that time of day. "The marginal benefit of sending some people an email at 2 o'clock vs. 3 o'clock vs. 4 o'clock might not make sense [at first]," said Michael Bassik, a Democratic consultant with MSHC Partners, the firm that did John Kerry's online advertising in 2004. "But once you start getting an e-mail list that's 3 million, 4 million, or 10 million people, increasing the returns for a fundraising e-mail by 5 or 10 percent means additional returns of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars."

If you're one of the 1 million people who have a login on Obama's social networking site, they know how often and when you visit, and they can use that to gauge how committed you are to the campaign. A few months ago, the campaign sent out a three-page survey asking people about their voting habits, how often they go to church, which groups and issues they identify with and whether they've given money to political candidates in the past. The point of all of the online gadgetry is to get people to show up for offline events. "We've tried to orient the tools less as a social network and more as a mobilization network," said Joe Rospars, Obama's online director. "We're creating opportunities for people to get out there and do things -- the campaign is election-outcome oriented."

Digital Reach

From brandrepublic.com:

The success of Barack Obama's election campaign has been in part credited to a 21st-century digital media strategy driven by David Axelrod, the newly elected president's chief strategist.

Axelrod oversaw an electoral campaign that successfully enlisted hard to reach parts of the US electorate such as young voters, African-American and Latino voters, and first time voters, through an all encompassing digital campaign, which placed a heavy emphasis on social media through websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Axelrod and Obama's high-profile campaign manager David Plouffe, who made appearances in many of Obama's YouTube videos such as the one below, used text messages, the internet and a network of 1.5m volunteers, to overpower John McCain's Republicans in a series of battleground states.

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Plouffe attempts to connect “personally” with voters, while also delivering a controlled message to them about the campaign’s new Keating Five documentary and inviting supporters to participate in their get-out-the-vote strategy.

The Malaise of a Medium

Locally, we have an example of the impending closing of two small daily newspapers and a collection of weekly newspapers, as reported here and here, as a collection of legislators are exploring ways to possibly save them with state intervention. These papers have suffered through their owners' profit aspirations at the expense of their editorial products (massive staff cuts). The parent company's stock price closed below $.01 per share on Friday.

In the Comments to the second linked article is the gem from Jim:

The newspaper is going the way of the horse and buggy. The internet is the new place for news. However, the impending doom of these newspapers is happening much faster due to the poor quality of these publications. There simply was not enough local coverage. Not enough quality unbiased reporting. The critical factor in keeping these newspapers open longer is creating a strong link to the internet. The Journal Register Co. has failed miserably over the years at this...If the JRC was smart, they would invest (heavily) in their web presence, retain their local reporters, and focus their ad sales on internet sales.

In light of evolving on-line reader preferences and the declining economics of traditional newspaper publishing, on-line citizen journalism, similar to the Westport, CT paper referenced in the Poynter article is a great example to what 21st century community journalism should aspire.

Bobby Jindal 2012

Counterpoint

Here is the response from WTMJ to Dan Shelley's article Secrets of Talk Radio:

We are surprised and saddened that a former employee, who worked with us for ten years, would choose to attack our talk shows hosts and company in this manner. Neither the station nor our hosts were offered a chance to comment on the claims made by the author. Newsradio 620 WTMJ stands by Charlie Sykes and Jeff Wagner and will continue to give their listeners the opportunity to share and participate in the best local talk programming in Milwaukee.

In great detail, here is Charlie Sykes response on the station's website. He concludes his defense as follows:

And here is where Dan exposes his hand: he obviously did not actually listen to what I said on my show. He did not hear what listeners of my radio show and viewers of my television show saw and heard.

In fact this issue that Shelley chose to highlight as an example of all that wrong with talk radio is actually is an example of just what Shelley says does NOT happen on conservative talk.

That’s what I call irony.

Every day we come to work looking not to enrage our audience, but to engage them. We do this by presenting a different (conservative) perspective on the news of the day. We try to inform them by searching out interesting and compelling stories and points of view. Our listeners don't come to us to decide WHAT to think... they can make up their own minds; what they want is for us to help make them think in different ways by having intelligent conversations with our listeners (and occasional guests).

People tune in because they know that there is more than the point of view spoon fed them from the mainstream elite media. They tune in to hear issues they care about addressed; they tune in to hear common sense; and to realize they don't have to simply accept the liberal line. That is the power of talk radio and its appeal. It is obviously a power that liberal elites regard with fear and loathing. And, apparently, it is a voice they are willing to use the power of government to silence.

Sykes, quite methodically, puts forth arguments to attempt to refute all of Shelley's claims. Somewhere between the two of them is the truth, though Sykes seems to have presented a sanitized version of events that just might not wash with anyone except a conservative talk-show host and his minions.

Zogby Won't Poll Again

As a result of backlash to John Ziegler's controversial documentary, Zogby has refused to conduct a McCain voter poll:

“I am happy to do a poll of both Obama voters and McCain voters, with questions that I formulated and sponsored either by an objective third party or by someone on the left, in tandem with a John Ziegler on the right — but poll questions that have my signature,” Zogby said.

“I believe there was value in the poll we did,” Zogby added. “I also believe it was not our finest hour. This slipped through the cracks. It came out critical only of Obama voters.”

Ziegler responded: "I am shocked by John's statement that he would do another poll but not an exact duplication. What is the point of that? Not their finest hour? This a was great poll. This didn't fall through any 'cracks,' they just got scared. ... The point of the poll was for my documentary on the media's impact on voter knowledge."

Nate Silver had both the Politico story and this one from The Wall Street Journal.

Not everyone sees the world through John Ziegler's lens.

Thank You Sarah Palin

(See this The Caucus entry and/or kevindayhoff.blogspot.com for a news release about this PAC and upcoming media release.)

The production looks like a parody, but apparently it is sincere.

Opinion & Commentary as Entertainment

To be fair (and balanced?), there is an "entertainment quotient" that is important to the success of news programming that leans left (Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show immediately come to mind). In conservative quarters, they are certainly disparaged as much as the left ridicules the right (see David Frum's last appearance on Rachel Maddow).

Rush Limbaugh, embracing his critics in Media Week (August 2003), said

"I combine two elements: irreverent humor and serious discussion of issues," Limbaugh, who doesn't know when he'll stop told Media Week. "People tune in for both. But the key is having credibility. This has led to critics saying I am just an entertainer. I'm proud to be an entertainer. This is showbiz. At the same time, I believe everything I say."

Olbermann often refers to him as a comedian.

And from the Ziegler Atlantic article:

John Ziegler is not a journalist—he is an entertainer. Or maybe it's better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved.

Does Bill O'Reilly routinely feature Dennis Miller on his show for two reasons, one obvious and the other subtle? The first, to add to the entertainment quotient of The O'Reilly Factor (if you still find Dennis Miller entertaining), and the second, to distinguish and defend O'Reilly as a serious newsman: I am the authority - he is the comedian.

John Ziegler Revealed

Last week’s Nate Silver-John Ziegler exchange was well-timed for our purposes, as Nate’s linking to the nearly 14,000-word, exceptionally-annotated 2005 Atlantic article provided further insight into “what’s under the hood” of conservative talk radio (automotive-only metaphor intended). The end of this passage provides a succinct characterization of conservative talk radio’s audience:

Who exactly listens to political talk radio? Arbitron Inc. and some of its satellites can help measure how many are listening for how long and when, and they provide some rough age data and demographic specs. A lot of the rest is guesswork, and Program Directors don't like to talk about it.

From outside, though, one of the best clues to how a radio station understands its audience is spots. Which commercials it runs, and when, indicate how the station is pitching its listeners' tastes and receptivities to sponsors.

For instance, one has only to listen to Coast to Coast With George Noory's ads for gold as a hedge against hyperinflation, special emergency radios you can hand-crank in case of extended power failure, miracle weight-loss formulas, online dating services, etc., to understand that KFI and the syndicator regard this show's audience as basically frightened, credulous, and desperate.

Conservative talk shows seem to focus on issues, narratives and rants that assuage the fears of their listeners, who tend to tune-in either because they are frustrated or highly-susceptible to manipulation. For those who fall into the “credulous” camp, it must be the “willing suspension of disbelief” that allows otherwise thoughtful, rational people to believe the hyper-hyperbole that is the daily grist for this audio mill. The car-crash quality of much of the debate is simply too compelling to look (listen) away.

Ziegler’s misanthropic flashes invariably drew him to repeatedly work for “evil, evil” people or companies - apparently they were drawn to one another again and again. His is an unsympathetic character both in and out of work in an unsympathetic, though highly-successful, media platform.

Nate Silver: Did Talk Radio Kill Conservatism?

The latest posting by Nate addresses the trouble with John Ziegler, a former talk-radio personality, as the launching pad for his hypothesis that talk-radio helped derail conservatism. He quotes from an April 2005 article in The Atlantic, where the author describes what makes talk-radio tick:

Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential—a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you're saying—which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you're speaking.) Plus, ideally, what you're saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself—your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you're discussing.

Nate goes on to distinguish between stimulation and persuasion, suggesting that somewhere along the way, conservative talk-radio became mostly sizzle, with little steak.

Chuck Hagel Tells It Like It Is

I've been a fan of Chuck Hagel for a long time. He has impressed me as a no-nonsense, straight-talking, earnest politician who has been the real "maverick" of the Senate. He was featured in the November 3 New Yorker:

Even after McCain became the presumptive nominee, in March, Hagel, asked repeatedly on the Sunday-morning talk shows whether he was going to endorse him, remained noncommittal.

In Washington, the men’s friendship was well known, and unsurprising. Both were hard-driving, politically conservative, hot-tempered, and humorous. They had served in Vietnam and were known as independent thinkers, averse to Party orthodoxy. And although they could be self-deprecating, they had a penchant for righteousness that did not endear them to many colleagues. McCain had campaigned in Nebraska for Hagel in 1996, during Hagel’s first Senate race, which he won in an upset against Ben Nelson, the former Nebraska governor (and current Democratic senator). A photograph in Hagel’s office shows him newly elected, with the five other senators who were Vietnam veterans: McCain, Bob Kerrey, Chuck Robb, John Kerry, and Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm in the war. Cleland, seated in a wheelchair, has made a joke, which they all seem to be enjoying. But Hagel and McCain didn’t become close until, about a year and a half later, McCain read a story about Hagel and the Nebraska gubernatorial race in Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper. As the article recounted, Jon Christensen, the onetime front-runner in the 1998 Republican primary, had attacked his opponent with a harsh negative mailer in the final days before the election. Hagel and other Party officials in Nebraska, who had said that they would remain neutral, scolded Christensen and declared that his tactics “embarrassed Nebraska.” Christensen lost by a large margin. The story quoted Hagel as saying, “The most dangerous element of our political future in this country is candidates who debase and degrade the political process by straight-out lies and misleading spots on television. It’s a cancer to our system.” Hagel told me that McCain came to his office to talk to him about the article and said, “You know, I’m really proud of you for doing that. Not many people would have done it.”

Hagel never did endorse McCain, nor did he endorse Obama, though his wife did. Hagel is reportedly under consideration for a cabinet post in the Obama Administration, either as Secretary of Defense or Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Yesterday, Hagel had criticism for Rush Limbaugh and the cacophony he and his right-wing zealots relentlessly spread. Addressing a group at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies:

"We are educated by the great entertainers like Rush Limbaugh," said Hagel, sarcastically referencing the talk radio host who once called him "Senator Betrayus." "You know, I wish Rush Limbaugh and others like that would run for office. They have so much to contribute and so much leadership and they have an answer for everything. And they would be elected overwhelmingly," he offered. "[The truth is] they try to rip everyone down and make fools of everybody but they don't have any answers.

...the American people don't like what is going on... they want us to start doing what leaders are expected to do, address the problems, find some consensus to governing. Get along. There will be disagreements, sure... but in the end we can't hold ourselves captives to this raw, partisan, political paralysis."

Chuck Hagel rides the real Straight-Talk Express.

Nate Silver is the Gift That Keeps On Giving

My interest in this story began this morning when I read Nate's latest post on fivethirtyeight.com. I began thinking about it and looked through a book that I read this past summer titled Just How Stupid Are We? since John Ziegler's premise is two-fold:

Obama supporters were poorly-informed about Obama because the liberal media did not do their job (this implicitly suggests the conservative media didn't either since it is impossible not to surf through a right-wing zealot at some point during the day) and that they are generally not very bright.

A lack of basic knowledge about our government is pervasive (on both sides of the aisle), and Shenkman contends the problem starts in our schools, not in the media....but I digress.

Ziegler, from the cabal of conservative talk radio, is out to discredit the election of Obama with of his web site and documentary, and is attempting to give his "research" credibility by having a Zogby poll back it up. Nate Silver has called him on it, citing the effort as "push polling." Both the clip from the documentary and the Fox interview are worth watching. If you don't have disdain for Ziegler after reading and viewing, the story gets better.

Zogby issued a statement today defending their polling, and Ziegler agreed to be interviewed by Nate Silver, issuing an F-Bomb himself. The interview is worth reading (maybe twice) as Ziegler proves to be as arrogant as both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity (he would probably be flattered).

NS: Would you consider yourself well-informed
JZ: I’d consider myself extremely well-informed.

NS: Who are the two senators from South Dakota
JZ: Thune and, uh, Johnson.

NS: Very good. South Carolina?
JZ: Go f--- (sic) yourself. I'm done with this interview if you're going to ask me stupid questions like that. Obviously I know who Lindsay Graham is.

Enough said.

Digging for the News

As a follow-up to our discussion last evening, here's a web-based news team in San Diego doing original reporting that is being followed by traditional news organizations:

As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.

Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.

Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias' take on this, along with some interesting comments.

FiveThirtyEight on the Media

Nate Silver's most recent post comments on

...the arbitrary and largely ineffectual nature of the fact-checking process employed by the mainstream media.

...the blogosphere serves as the fact-checkers that the mainstream media is too negligent to employ.

He asserts that emerging new media institutions do a much better job of vetting stories than the established MSM.

The Transition

Committed to a smooth transition of power, the White House Transition Project is a vast resource of information; under the Plum Book link is the following lament:

Every four years and after an election the government publishes a compendium of positions the new President will need to fill. The 2008 Plum Book has arrived on that schedule. WHTP makes it available by download (pdf): download here.

Unfortunately, now is too late. After extensive experience with presidential transitions, the WHTP has consistently recommended that the Plum Books come out prior to the national conventions so that the campaign transition planners can begin developing strategies for how to blend their policy agenda and their personnel agenda.

Interestingly, Barack Obama came under criticism this past summer for moving forward with the same type of planning that previous presidential candidates had embarked upon, and the criticism was not challenged by the media (the links below each video will take you to research by Media Matters on the presidential transitions from Jimmy Carter through George W. Bush):





In addition to change.gov, the Obama transition has a wikipedia entry.

Change.gov

Barackobama.com has evolved into change.gov, hosting an impressive amount of information about the transition process, including news releases, appointments, an employment application (while many U.S. employers are laying people off, the federal government is hiring) and two pages to allow citizens to share their "American Moment" or vision for America.

For the first time, the weekly Democratic radio address that dovetails with the weekly Saturday President's radio address, has also been captured in video format, delivered by the President-Elect, to be broadcast via the transition website and on YouTube.

The campaign that embraced the internet, using its resources to communicate, attract and engage supporters and to perform the most successful fund-raising effort on the planet, is now the incoming administration that is committed to communicate and engage as a cutting-edge, 21st century trail-blazing organization.

A Synopsis of Transitions of Power 1980-2000

Here are four capsules of the most recent transitions from A History of Presidential Transitions:

1980-81
Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan took the animosity they had shown each other on the campaign trail in 1980 into the Oval Office when they met during the transition period. President Carter had run TV advertisements claiming Reagan was not to be trusted with the nuclear button. Reagan had accused Carter of driving America into depression. The conversation at the White House between the two men began badly, and deteriorated from there. President Carter began by talking about national security matters. President-elect Reagan however, sat impassively, saying nothing and taking no notes. An annoyed Carter told Reagan, "The day begins early. A CIA officer briefs you at 7am." Reagan, responding only has he could, "Well, he's sure going to have to wait a long while for me."

President-elect Reagan's slights towards Carter were mirrored by the attitude of First Lady to Be Nancy Reagan towards First Lady Rosalyn Carter. During their meeting at the White House, Mrs. Reagan gave a "subtle hint" that the Carters should get out early so she could start decorating.

1988-89
John Tower, the author of the Iran-Contra investigative report, had his nomination as President-elect George H.W. Bush's defense secretary voted down 53-47 by the Senate. Among the criticisms were his ties to defense contractors and his pro-choice stance on abortion. But Tower was likely targeted for retribution by some Democrats, angered over the 1988 General Election campaign that had used negative tactics against Michael Dukakis. The issue that garnered the most newspaper space was his reputed drinking and womanizing. Tower became the first cabinet nominee to be rejected in more than 30 years. Wyoming Congressman and former Gerald Ford Chief of Staff Dick Cheney, considered a moderate pragmatist, was confirmed unanimously 10 days later.

1992-93
The 1992-93 transition is generally remembered as chaotic, unfocused and undisciplined. Clinton said in his autobiography that, "I spent so much time on the cabinet that I hardly spent any time on the White House staff." The cabinet position that caused the most time spent, not to mention public embarrassment, was the Attorney General position. President-elect Clinton's first and second choices for the position, Zoë Baird and Kimba Woods respectively, blew up due to similar reports that each had employed illegal aliens for domestic work. Clinton, determined to nominate a woman for the position, settled on Florida State Attorney Janet Reno who was sworn in on March 12, 1993.

2000-01
George W. Bush ran for the Presidency in 2000 on a campaign in part to restore "honour and dignity" to the Oval office, a reference to President Clinton's indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky in that room. His own transition meeting occurred in December 2000 shortly after the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore, awarded him the General Election win and the Presidency. When President-elect Bush met Clinton in the White House the encounter had great potential for disaster, though it never materialized. Presidents Clinton and Bush went on to talk privately for an hour and dine without incident over curried squash soup and fillet mignon.

President Bush took office in January 2001, and he aimed to make a clean break from all things Clinton. However, the acrimony stemming from the 2000 Florida recount and the Supreme Court decision apparently carried over to the staffers. Reports of office vandalism and thievery made their way into the press soon after the Bush team moved in. A 215-page Government Accounting Office report released a year later, found between $13,000 and $14,000 worth of damage, including missing doorknobs and "W" keys from nearly 60 computer keyboards occurred. A Clinton spokesmen acknowledged that there may have been pranks done in jest, but attributed the majority of the damage to normal wear and tear. In the end both sides claimed vindication, but the bitterness was a symbol of the entire 2000 election.

"Reflection"

With credit to Courtney for her magazine cover posting earlier today, I was impressed with this metaphor-rich front cover of the most recent issue of The New Yorker.

John McCain on The Tonight Show

The Boogie Man

As the Republican Party is now in a period of serious introspection, they are most-likely taking a look back as they look ahead to the mid-term elections and 2012. PBS aired an interesting biographical piece last night on the man that shaped national Republican campaigns over the past twenty-four years: Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story.

Atwater, the architect of the election of George H.W. Bush, had his hand in Ronald Reagan's re-election, the media spin of Reagan's Iran-Contra Affair, was a mentor to Karl Rove dating back to their college days and helped lay the foundation for George W. Bush's ascent to the White House. He became famous for planting false stories and spinning the press.

Atwater was the man behind two negative ads (below, the first damaging, the second devastating) in the Bush-Dukakis 1988 race. Atwater anticipated in the late 1980's that Bill Clinton would challenge Bush in the 1992 race; he hand-picked an opponent to challenge Clinton in the Arkansas gubernatorial race to begin "dirtying him up" before '92. The filmmaker contends that had Atwater been healthy, he would have run a campaign that would have resulted in a Bush victory over Clinton.

In 1989, Lee Atwater was a political rock star. After masterminding George H.W. Bush’s presidential victory over Michael Dukakis, the colorful, blues guitar-playing Atwater was relishing his new role as chairman of the Republican National Committee as he redefined the role of the political operative.

Two years later, the political strategist would be dead from a brain tumor at the age of 41, cast aside by the Washington power players he’d helped create, and wracked with remorse for the tactics he'd employed in his political ascent...producer Stefan Forbes reveals new information about the meteoric rise and tragic demise of a man both admired and reviled for the controversial, sometimes racially-charged political tactics that helped elect George H.W. Bush president and inspired protégés such as Karl Rove. Through a wealth of compelling, never-before-seen footage and photos as well as interviews with boyhood friends, elite Republican strategists and political adversaries, the documentary examines Atwater’s impact on the way modern political campaigns are waged.

“[Lee Atwater] mattered in American politics,” Newsweek political writer Howard Fineman says, “because of the man he got elected, because of the party he shaped. He was very important not only to George H.W.’s victory, but to his son’s victory.”

Boogie Man traces Atwater’s political rise from his early days masterminding political victories in South Carolina. Among his triumphs was a fiercely contested battle for Chairman of the College Republicans between Karl Rove and Robert Edgeworth. Atwater lost, but mounted an appeal of Edgeworth’s victory which was ultimately decided by then Republican National Committee chairman George H.W. Bush, who gave the election to Rove.

“That was a pretty early lesson for Karl Rove from Lee,” says Joe Conason, a journalist for The Nation and Salon.com, “that you could play the hardest of hardball and get away with it.”

Boogie Man recounts how fellow South Carolinian Sen. Strom Thurmond took an interest in Atwater, tutoring him in the use of highly emotional wedge issues such as abortion and crime that would help Republicans win over disaffected working class voters to a largely pro-business agenda. Says Atwater intimate Tucker Eskew, “resentment became the future of the Republican party.”

In the documentary, viewers hear from numerous journalists and politicians who say Atwater’s use of scurrilous rumors, push polls and other dirty tricks propelled him onto the national scene, where he became assistant to Ed Rollins, campaign manager for Ronald Reagan’s 1984 election.

“A lot of people told me he wouldn’t be loyal to me, told me not to pick him,” Rollins says. “I admired his work ethic.”

Not long after, Rollins says, Atwater arranged what turned out to be an ambush media interview in which Rollins was accused of running a dirty-tricks campaign against the Democratic vice presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro.

“Lee had put a spear in my back,” Rollins says. “… It was just a two-year effort to destroy me. He wanted to run Bush’s [presidential] campaign.”

Boogie Man takes viewers behind the scenes of the contentious 1988 campaign, remembered for its infamous “Willie Horton” ad, which portrayed Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis as soft on crime and easy on rapists and murderers. Among the film’s revelations is Republican operative Roger Stone’s account that while he was running the Bush campaign, Atwater said he had secretly arranged financing for the Horton ad. “[Atwater] locked the office door,” says Stone, “and he popped the famous Willie Horton spot onto a television. He said, ’I got a couple boys who are going to put up a couple million dollars for this independent.’ And I said, ‘That’s a huge mistake.’”

After Atwater was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1990, some of his closest friends say that Atwater was terrified he was going to hell and embarked on a desperate search for redemption. “Lee really was confronting some very troubling facts,” says Eskew, “that in winning he had hurt people. Fear had been part of his toolkit. That fear came back on him.” But producer Stefan Forbes notes that his reporting reveals a more nuanced story than media accounts of Atwater’s remorseful apologies for his tactics. “Lee apologized directly to some of the people he’d hurt,” says Forbes, “but never criticized the GOP, or even disavowed negative campaigning. And his vision of politics as war would continue to affect a new generation of GOP politicians and operatives.”

Atwater aide Tucker Eskew, who went on to run George W. Bush’s war room in the 2000 campaign, says Atwater knew how to control media narratives. “Now it’s kind of rote in politics, but Lee was saying early: perception is reality. He was ahead of his time.”

“Atwater had a genius for the sticky issue—simple enough, scary enough that the media could latch onto it,” Conason says. “…[George] W. learned that the only thing that really matters is who wins.”

While some argue that Atwater’s political successes resulted solely from dirty tricks and a win-at-any-cost mentality, former colleagues say that view is an oversimplification. They explain in Boogie Man how Atwater’s keen attention to the concerns of middle-class Americans helped him identify issues to which his Democratic opponents were often tone deaf.

“It’s so much easier to blame dirty tricks than it is to acknowledge hard work,” says Tucker Eskew. “Did he give his opponents ammunition to criticize him for negative tactics? Yes. Does that obscure the fact that he outfoxed them at nearly every turn? Not to those of us watching closely.”

Former colleague and conservative commentator Mary Matalin agrees. “They had to kill the messenger because they couldn’t kill the message,” she says of Atwater's critics. “They had to turn him into the boogie man--Satan incarnate.”

“Lee Atwater made himself a figure of demonology to psych out his opponents and anesthetize people to his tactics,” says Howard Fineman. “And the sad part, some people would say, the justified part, was that the role that he made for himself literally ended up imprisoning him.”

The Elephant in the Room

Reverend Wright made the list in a Washington Post piece on Saturday, titled A Few Obama Thank-Yous:

In Liberty Baptist church, my childhood place of worship, I heard it preached: "Sometimes a stumbling block can be a steppingstone in disguise."

Wright, Obama's former pastor, may have fulfilled that wise saying. Without Wright's fiery and controversial sermons, short segments of which were repeatedly aired in the media, Obama would not have delivered his "A More Perfect Union" speech in Philadelphia.

The whole affair allowed Obama to address head-on the elephant in the room -- race. Obama did it with candor and a sensitivity that reflected an insightful understanding of this American dilemma. It was a rare and reassuring performance by a presidential hopeful.

Excerpted from the speech:

I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

There is something transcendent about Barack Obama, not limited to the issue of race. He provides the promise of being able to rise above partisan politics and has persuaded tens of millions of Americans to believe in his vision for America. While I recognize the historic quality of his election, this race was not about about race because he never allowed it to be. Instead, he proved himself to be the most qualified of the two dozen or so candidates that emerged over the past two years to engage on all of the issues we face. At the conclusion of that journey, he himself fulfilled the promise of an American dream.

The Eye on Obama's Team

At the 4:40 mark, the question of race in the campaign comes up, and then specificially as it related to Reverend Wright:

"There were just so many people, reporters, pundits, everybody, who said that, 'You're not gonna be able to elect a black man president of the United States. It's just not gonna happen right now.' Obviously, that had to be part of your equation in planning this campaign," Kroft remarked.

"No, honestly you had to take a leap of faith in the beginning that the people we get by race. And I think the number of meetings we had about race was zero," Plouffe told Kroft.

"Zero. We had to believe in the beginning that he would be a strong enough candidate that people of every background and race would be for him."

"The only time we got involved in a discussion of race was when people asked us about it. It was a fascination of the news media," Axelrod added.

“But you must have had some meetings on it during the Jeremiah Wright affair,” Kroft probed.

Axelrod said the Jeremiah Wright affair was probably a pivotal moment in the whole campaign. "You know, pandemonium erupted in the political community. And there was this sense that we were in crisis."

The video taped rantings of Obama's former pastor brought the issue that the Obama campaign had long sought to avoid center stage, and took them all by surprise.

"And I think we'd all acknowledged that we should've been aware of some of these tapes were available. We didn't review all of the tapes of Jeremiah Wright as we should have," Axelrod said. "And as a result we were kind of caught flat-footed on some of these tapes. But you know we should have recognized that once that happened, that race is such a fascination of the political community that it would take off as it did. And it did."

"That was a terrible weekend," Dunn remembered. "The excerpts were endlessly looped on television."

“Yeah, and the only one who was calm was Obama,” Axelrod added. The candidate called his aides and told them he wanted them to clear some time on his schedule.

"And he said, 'You know what? I'm gonna make a speech about race and talk about Jeremiah Wright and the perspective of the larger issue.' And he said, 'And either people will accept it or I won't be president of the United States. But at least I'll have said what I think needs to be said,'" Axelrod remembered.

Gibbs said there wasn't a discussion.

"If there had been a discussion, we've often joked, probably most of the people in the campaign would've advised against it," Dunn added.

"The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past," Obama said in his March 2008 speech on race.

"You know, it was a moment of real leadership. I think when he gave that race speech in Philadelphia, people saw a president," Plouffe said.

Media Reflection

While the historic event of November 4, 2008 may not have heralded the post-racial era, most of the campaigning that preceded Election Day was conducted in the post-Imus era. Humor and banter based upon racial insults and negative stereotypes was exposed for what it was, racism, and it was no longer to be condoned. Media companies were challenged to present a more balanced cast of on-air talent and points of view.

All in the Family creator Norman Lear, in an April 2007 posting, offered this hope:

This could be an historic, watershed moment if American leaders in every field, in every business, were to see the opportunity as well as the responsibility to use this incident as a teaching moment, an opportunity to hold up a mirror to Americans everywhere and show them the truth of racism in our culture. And then exercise their right to clean up the areas in which they have control -- and rid them of the demeaning and the dehumanizing hostility toward race and gender.

MSNBC, the most culpable as they had been the television broadcast home of the Imus show, now regularly includes numerous African-American journalists and politicians in their coverage and analysis, including Eugene Robinson, Jonathan Capehart and Perry Bacon of the Washington Post, Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune, former Congressman Harold Ford, Jr., Independent Women’s Voice President Michelle Bernard and Republican strategist Ron Christie.

A step in the right direction.

GOP 2.0

John McCain's Chief Strategist Steve Schmidt provides some insight into what went wrong with the McCain campaign and what the Republican Party needs to do:

Well, I would say this. When you look at the campaign, one of the results of this campaign is the reality that public financing is dead. And the Obama campaign changed the scale of American politics by their fundraising operation, and their use of technology. Each party develops techniques, usually when they’re out of power, for the purpose of gaining power on the next election—need being the mother of all inventions. You saw Republicans pioneer direct mail in an earlier age. You saw, you know, the use of television advertising pioneered in an earlier age. You saw microtargeting—you know, the overlaying of consumer and consumer data against the voter file, earlier in the decade, to much effect. There’s been a profound leap forward in technology and from a community organizing perspective by the Obama campaign in this election. The Democratic Party is a generation ahead technologically. And the Republican Party is going to have to be competitive to catch up in a world where viral information is just as important as what might be in the network news.

GOP Looks to the Future

A beta site has been launched by a "Coalition" of Republicans:

2008 made one thing clear: if allowed to go unchecked, the Democrats' structural advantages, including their use of the Internet, their more than 2-to-1 advantage with young voters, their discovery of a better grassroots model -- will be as big a threat to the future of the GOP as the toxic political environment we have faced the last few years.

Obama tapped the Internet successfully because he made it about "you" and "us" not "me" and "I." You were invited in. You were a key part of his campaign/movement. Your help was truly appreciated. Republican candidates need to grow more comfortable talking in these terms and focus less on being inaccessible objects of hero worship (the "me/I" strategy).

Because of the Internet, "us" becomes a force more powerful than any in politics. The ability to donate or volunteer instantaneously online gives the millions of "us" more leverage than even the most connected group of insiders. Only "us" will be powerful enough to fund the first $1 billion Presidential candidate. By embracing the Politics of Us, the Republican Party can rediscover its roots as the party of individual liberty and build a truly modern political army.

Imitation is often considered the highest form of flattery.

Signed. Sealed. Delivered.

MSNBC just did the right thing after announcing the western states for Obama, and went silent, letting the celebration of the sea of people in Grant Park and Times Square be the proverbial thousand words.

AP just reported that John McCain called Barack Obama to concede.

We have all just been witness to history.

9:00 PM Update

I am multi-tasking between MSNBC, the Fox News (yes, Fox News) live stream and updates from fivethirtyeight.com. The group on Fox has called Ohio for Obama and are resigned to the fact that while Obama hasn't reahed 270, McCain has no path to victory. Their focus, right now, is 'where does the Republican party go from here?' Frank Luntz: "The challenge for the GOP is to transcend partisanship." - that would have been good advice for McCain 6 months ago.

I Didn't Vote For Obama Today

I hope this posting on Talking Points Memo touches you the way it touched me.

What a beautiful day!

Vote Early. Vote Often.

An homage in Simsbury to the politics of another era.

Caveat Emptor

Here are two recent headlines that followed Bill Clinton’s appearance Wednesday night with Barack Obama:

Bill Clinton heaps praise on Obama as calm manager

Bill Clinton: Obama Got Lots of Help on Economic Crisis Response

The first, from a Reuters blog posting, went on to say:

Campaigning with Obama on Wednesday, Clinton not only gave the Illinois senator his support, he heaped praise on him, describing him as a calm manager who had responded deftly to the financial crisis and sought advice from the best experts.

He talked to his advisers. He talked to my economic advisers, Clinton said, listing experts such as investor Warren Buffett and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker whom Obama consulted.

The second, from foxnews.com, also contained the sub-head:

Bill Clinton says at a rally that Barack Obama called a round of advisers during the height of the economic crisis and said, "tell me what ... to do."

…to hear Bill Clinton tell it, the Democratic nominee didn't quite have a handle on the situation himself.

Was Clinton providing a strong endorsement of Obama or a warning to America that the Democratic candidate was unsure of himself? A review of the clip below (from the 8:25 mark on) supports the Reuters reporting.



Fox went on to report, more accurately in the body of their story:

I haven't cleared this with him and he may even be mad at me for saying this so close to the election, but I know what else he said to his economic advisers (during the crisis), Clinton told the crowd at a Wednesday night rally with Obama in Florida.

"He said, 'Tell me what the right thing to do is. What's the right thing for America? Don't tell me what's popular. You tell me what's right -- I'll figure out how to sell it.'"

Clinton said when the crisis broke, Obama called his own advisers as well as those of the former two-term president, Hillary Clinton, Warren Buffet and others.

"He called those people. You know why? Because he knew it was complicated and before he said anything he wanted to understand," Clinton said. "That's what a president does in a crisis."

A reader moving quickly through the Fox site, however, might have read the headline and sub-head and have been left with the impression that Obama was not ready to tackle the economic crisis.

Ironically, a semi-literal definition of the “fox watching the hen house” may be found in Fox News’ belief that they are the only objective news source in America.

To hear the network's bigwigs tell it, it's not Fox that's being biased when it puts conservative fare on heavy rotation. It's the "liberal media" that are biased when they fail to do so. Fox's entire editorial philosophy revolves around the idea that the mainstream media have a liberal bias that Fox is obligated to rectify.

As revealed in the State of the News Media 2008 report:

Most Americans believe the news media are politically biased… Audiences are moving toward information on demand, to media platforms and outlets that can tell them what they want to know when they want to know it.

If the media is inherently biased, and people overwhelmingly understand that the media is biased, should we be concerned? Phil Grffin, president of MSNBC, was quoted in Saturday's NYT:

All of our material is based on fact — our guys work really hard on it, and the point-of-view shows make their conclusions, Mr. Griffin said. In this modern era, you’ve got a variety of places that look at the day’s events. Some you respect more than others, others you recognize as having a point of view, some you see as factual in a different way, and it all blends together into how you make your decision for what’s going on.

The burden is a little more on the individual.

This is the caveat emptor perspective: (1) With an understanding of the bias each media brings to their presentation, it is up to each of us as consumers of the news to decide which product we want (2) The free market of news gathering, distillation and reporting should over time correct whatever imbalances exist. If a media outlet creates a “bad product” their market share will suffer; it is the demand for each of the products that gives them their shelf-life.

With this in mind, beyond giving each of us what we want, media bias in Presidential election reporting has the potential to sway low-information voters who by their indifference may not recognize propaganda and rhetoric for what it is; implicit is the following disclaimer -

WARNING: What you are reading/seeing/hearing may not be accurate, may be misrepresenting the facts or may be entirely untrue. We report. You decide.

Google Metrics

Nate Silver has observed a difference in Google search traffic over the past month or so between Obama and McCain. The Obama search volume (both across the U.S. and in the ten states you can link to) consistently exceeds the McCain volume in the final days before the election.

With approximately 30% of the votes being cast prior to Election Day, who are the undecided voters who might still be looking for information on the candidates? A recent Pew Research Survey Report indicates that:

A week before the election, nearly one-in ten voters (8%) remain undecided in their choice for president and there is little to suggest that these voters will move strongly to one candidate or the other on election day.

Undecided voters do clearly distinguish themselves from supporters of both McCain and Obama in their lower levels of participation and interest in this election, and partisan politics in general. A majority (51%) of undecideds do not identify with either the Republican or Democratic parties and fewer than half (48%) report having voted in the primaries this year; by contrast, 63% of both Obama and McCain supporters say they voted in a primary.

Despite their lower level of interest, the Undecideds in the poll sample are registered voters, suggesting at the very least their intention to vote.