October 01, 2008

10/1: Palin Vs. The Press

As the political world eagerly awaits tomorrow night's VP debate, Sarah Palin is once again commanding most of the blogosphere's attention. Liberal bloggers are buzzing about the latest excerpt from Katie Couric's interview with Palin, in which Palin is unable to name a single newspaper that she reads regularly. Lefty bloggers are blasting Palin for being "dramatically uninformed" and are (once again) comparing her to George W. Bush, who famously admitted that he "rarely" reads newspaper articles.

Meanwhile, conservative bloggers are accusing the VP debate moderator -- PBS' Gwen Ifill -- of being biased in favor of Barack Obama. They're arguing that Ifill has "a financial stake in the election of Barack Obama" because her upcoming book, "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama," is slated for publication on Jan. 20, 2009. Michelle Malkin complains: "[Ifill]'s so far in the tank for the Democratic presidential candidate, her oxygen delivery line is running out." It's clear that righty bloggers will protest mightily if Ifill appears to ask tougher questions of Palin than she does of Joe Biden.

PALIN: Sarah Strikes Out Again

Liberal bloggers are buzzing about the following exchange between Palin and Couric:

COURIC: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this -- to stay informed and to understand the world?
PALIN: I've read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media --
COURIC: But what ones specifically? I'm curious.
PALIN: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.
COURIC: Can you name any of them?
PALIN: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news. Alaska isn't a foreign country, where it's kind of suggested, 'Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?' Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America."

• The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates: "Oh my god. [...] Katie just asked her what newspapers and magazines and books she's read. I bullshit you not. She couldn't name a single one -- not one."
• AMERICAblog's John Aravosis: "I mean, seriously, she couldn't name her local town paper, the big paper from Anchorage (the Anchorage Daily News), she never goes online and reads AP or Reuters? Never read Newsweek or TIME? I mean, seriously, why is she incapable of giving patently obvious answers to patently easy questions?"
• Salon's Glenn Greenwald: "In order to learn the source of her political knowledge, Katie Couric asked her three times what specific newspapers she read prior to being selected as Vice President, and Palin -- after trying to answer a couple times with her trademark rambling incoherence ('all of 'em, any of 'em that have been in front of me all these years...a vast variety') -- abruptly decided that the question was an elitist, condescending East Coast media assault on Alaska and chided Couric accordingly, without answering. How could you mock that other than by repeating it verbatim?"
• Firedoglake's emptywheel: "What's stunning about this clip is not that she can't name a single newspaper she reads (not even the Anchorage Daily News, from which she hired a key staffer). It's that her immediate retreat to claiming she got her news from many, unnamed, sources so closely resembles something Bush once said in an interview. [...] And we know how well that worked out."
• digby: "It's not that [Palin] is a stupid person. Maybe she is, but you can't tell that on the basis of a couple of interviews. But she is dramatically uninformed about current events, history, and even Republican politics. [...] Jon Stewart said the other night after one of her bizarre non answers: 'Did she win a contest?' I think she did. She won the Hockey Mom contest and got the right to run on the national ticket with John McCain. She was the prototype Republican for the next generation -- someone who knows absolutely nothing about politics at all. I guess they must have figured that Bush's failure was due to the fact that he knew too much."
• TPM's David Kurtz: "These Palin interviews just get harder and harder to watch."

Ezra Klein: "You have to appreciate the bind the McCain campaign has put Palin in. By launching an overwhelming attack against 'media elite,' they effectively walled off leading publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Palin couldn't name them, because to legitimize them would undercut the campaign's rhetoric from recent weeks. At the same time, the fear is that she's really just a parochial, small town mayor and small state governor who's unready for the national stage. She can't name the Anchorage Daily Post or whatever and risk someone reporting that her primary information source doesn't even have a foreign bureau. And meanwhile, she's not actually so fluent in the ideas and information infrastructure that she'd think to name a safe elite choice like 'The Economist' or wrest some generational cred by pointing towards a news aggregator. Instead, we get 'all of them.' Bravo."

PALIN II: She Must Be A Speed Reader...

Other liberal bloggers are taking Palin's words literally and are mocking her for claiming that she reads "all" newspapers:

• Mark Kleiman: "When Katie Couric asked Sarah Palin what newspapers she reads, Palin replied 'all of them.' Impressive, no? Just one question, though: one at a time, or all at once?"
• Daily Kos' georgia10: "She reads all of them. Not just all of them, but any of them that have been in front of her 'over all these years.' And strangely enough, not one of those many, many newspapers ever mentioned the Bush Doctrine."
• Obsidian Wings' hilzoy: "That's a lot of newspapers! Did you know that there are 38 newspapers in Alaska alone? And Florida: one hundred and forty! I don't even want to think about how many there are in New York or California. Even Wyoming has twenty one. [...] I guess all that stuff about Putin rearing his ugly head and entering Alaskan airspace must have been part of the McCain campaign's clever expectations management game. I, for one, will never underestimate Sarah Palin again."
• Think Progress' Matthew Yglesias: "Bizarre. I mostly read The New York Times and secondarily The Washington Post as well as individual articles that I find being recommended by others, with The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, USA Today, and The Guardian coming up frequently. But there are an awful lot of newspapers and even though reading stuff is a big part of my job I certainly don't read 'um, all of them.'"

PALIN III: Gwen's In The Tank!

Conservative bloggers are accusing the moderator of Thursday night's VP debate -- PBS' Gwen Ifill -- of being biased in favor of Obama. Michelle Malkin got the ball rolling when she wrote a column arguing that Ifill is not an impartial moderator because her upcoming book is titled, "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama":

"Tomorrow, PBS anchor Gwen Ifill will serve as moderator for the first and only vice-presidential debate. But there is nothing 'moderate' about where Ifill stands on Barack Obama. She's so far in the tank for the Democratic presidential candidate, her oxygen delivery line is running out."

Other righty bloggers are following Malkin's lead and are accusing Ifill of being an impartial moderator:

• Gateway Pundit: "Unreal! Pro-Obama partisan Gwen Ifill will moderate [the] Palin-Biden debate."
• Hot Air's Ed Morrissey: "If Obama loses, how will [Ifill's] book sell? Not nearly as well as if Obama wins, and everyone knows that. Moderators should not have a financial stake in the election. That should be exceedingly obvious, and is to most people outside of the mainstream media and the Commission. Her pending book publication should alone disqualify her to moderate any of the debates this cycle. If Ifill had any sense of journalistic ethics, she would have turned them down herself. Of course, the [Commission on Presidential Debates] could make this a habit. Let's have Brent Bozell and Glenn Beck moderate the final two presidential debates. After all, that fits perfectly in the new Ifill tradition."
• Townhall's Matt Lewis: "Michelle Malkin's column today is worth reading. Essentially, she points out that Gwen Ifil -- who will moderate tomorrow night's debate -- is in the tank for Obama. There is no doubt that if the moderator had any pro-McCain bias in her background, the media would be screaming bloody murder..."
• RedState's Moe Lane: "Michelle Malkin and I don't actually agree on all that much, but we do agree on this: it is perhaps not the most objective thing in the world to have as one's VP debate moderator a woman who has written a book entitled 'Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama'. Particularly when it's scheduled to come out on 01/20/2009. [...] Note that neither Ms. Malkin nor I am suggesting that Ms. Ifill stop moderating the debate; merely that she let the viewing public know right from the start that it's in Ms. Ifill's long-term financial interest that Senator Obama win the Presidency. They call it 'transparency:' it's quite the coming thing. The media should try it sometime."
• Townhall's Amanda Carpenter: "The most important thing about Malkin's column is that it notes Gwen Ifill, who will be moderating Thursday's VP debate, has written, what's being marketed as, a pro-Obama book. [...] It will be released on January 20, 2009 -- Inauguration Day. Ifill must certainly be hoping for an Obama win to help her book sales."
• NRO's Jim Geraghty: "It's a little late to replace Gwen Ifill as moderator of the vice-presidential debate, and McCain partisans might prefer to have a moderator with a glaring conflict-of-interest to provide a handy objection to any question Palin deems out of bounds. 'Gwen, that sounds like the kind of question one would ask if one had a financial stake in the election of Barack Obama -- like a book about him coming out early next year or something.' But as if we needed any further evidence of a jaw-dropping double standard, we have to contemplate the sheer impossibility that someone who wrote a positive biography of McCain being chosen to moderate a debate."
• NRO's Jonah Goldberg: "Gwen Ifill is moderating the debate tomorrow night even though she has a pro Obama book coming out. [...] But when a conservative judicial nominee is reported to have eaten at a questionable taco stand in the 1970s, the press worries somberly about whether such a conflict of interest makes it possible to be impartial."

MCCAIN: Losing His Cool?

Liberal bloggers are buzzing about McCain's contentious interview with the Des Moines Register:

• The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "The videos of the discussion between McCain and the editors are worth watching, because the transcripts alone don't convey just how angry and sarcastic McCain became when challenged. I wouldn't go so far as to say McCain completely lost his cool, but we did get a glimpse of Angry McCain, and his temper led to some odd responses."
• AMERICAblog's Joe Sudbay: "This is the real John McCain. He looks like he's ready to blow his top. This guy does not have the temperament to lead America."
• MyDD's Todd Beeton: "We've often heard about John McCain's famed temperament and even he himself is quite fond of telling us he's never won 'Miss Congeniality' in the Senate, but I guess I sort of never really expected him to put this quality on full display for us all to see. Between McCain's debate performance on Friday and his utterly uncharming turn here in front of the editorial board of The Des Moines Register, it's becoming clear that he doesn't expect to win any popularity contest in the presidential race either. [...] So if he's in no mood for mea culpas and has no intention of charming his way to the White House, does that mean we might be in for the next iteration of John McCain: unhinged, with nothing left to lose? The Politico is reporting that nervous Republicans are urging him to go nuclear on Obama. From what we've seen of McCain lately, is there any evidence at all that he'd shirk from doing just that?"

$700 BILLION BAILOUT: Seize The Moment, Dems!

Liberal bloggers are urging Dem lawmakers to scrap the failed bailout bill, create a progressive alternative, and pass it on a party-line vote:

• Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas: "The leadership can tinker around the edges of the current plan or try to pass the exact same one after twisting some arms. But this is a shit bill, and, anything designed to appease one end of the House 'no' votes will cost them support on the other end. It's the 'problem' with having this bill opposed not by a single group, but by two ideologically incompatible ones. Public sentiment remains against this bailout, but the public wants something to be done to address the current crisis. [...] So it's time to craft a progressive solution to this problem and ditch the GOP. We have the majorities. Show some leadership. Pass a bailout plan with Democratic support, and then dare Bush to veto it. If things are as dire as he claims, he won't have much of a choice."
• Daily Kos' Devilstower: "The temptation now is going to be to coddle the poor right. Give them some minor tweak in the bill to salve their fragile egos and gain the dozen votes that are needed to pass yesterday's bill. Don't. Don't do it, damn it. Things have changed since yesterday. The wind is blowing from the other direction now, and if you give the Republicans one thing -- if you even give them another chance at yesterday's bill -- it'll be the biggest mistake the Democratic Party has made since it signed on to George Bush's endless war. Not only that, you'll have passed over the best opportunity in this whole sorry mess. Instead, take the bill in hand and mark up big changes. [...] Don't just pass the bill, own it. Pass it on a party line vote if that's what it takes to get it across the Hill and on the desks of the Senate. Let the Republicans chose whether they'll filibuster or veto."
• Firedoglake's Ian Welsh: "The 7 Step Program for Democratic Generational Control of Congress: (1) Scrap the Paulson bill. (2) Start from scratch and write a good bill that is a main street bailout. (3) Take it to a vote, let the Republicans kill it or veto it. (4) Run an election on 'this is how we will handle the crisis: in a way that takes care of ordinary people.' (5) Reap the electoral benefits. (6) Follow Through. (7) Control Congress for a Generation."
• MyDD's Jerome Armstrong: "Markos and Digby are right on, in my assessment: take the Paulson crap-burger off the table and start over. Yes, of course that makes sense, and it's only because the Republicans didn't deliver their votes that we even can think about this option. [...] Lets see this attitude start right now in Congress, in bucking the bill for something better. And that should start with running on the plan, and not passing it before the election."

Mother Jones' Kevin Drum, on the other hand, believes that Congress must act now: "The current panic is hardly unwarranted. Our real problem is in the credit markets, and the credit markets are blinking fire engine red right now. Overnight bank lending rates have skyrocketed. Municipal bond markets have cratered. The two biggest providers of short-term credit to restaurant franchises, GE Capital and Bank of America, have exited the market. Rates on overnight commercial paper are up two points. This stuff doesn't hit you or me in the pocketbook immediately, but it does eventually as spending drops, companies can't get financing, and jobs get cut. You wouldn't ignore a speeding truck just because it was still a few hundred yards away, and you shouldn't ignore this either. So sure: we should all hope that after the election we can pass legislation that attacks the roots of the financial crisis. This includes financial market regulatory reforms, macroeconomic stimulus, and broad relief measures. [...] But right now, we have what we have, and complaining about it is like refusing to turn a fire hose on a burning building because you're afraid the water is flouridated. It's time to pass the bill."

On the right side of the blogosphere, RedState's Leon H. Wolf agrees with Drum: "I suspect that most people don't fully understand the dynamics of what is happening here. Imagine that downtown Manhattan is ground zero for the financial equivalent of a nuclear blast (it is). A lot of people throughout the country seem to feel that since they're outside the area where sand is going to be turned into glass, they are safe from what's going to happen. Nothing could be further from the truth. [...] The bottom line is that the consequences of the 'no bailout' plan all add up to Depression with a capital, 20-point font 'D'. It will furthermore almost inevitably result in the government being on the hook for a lot more than $700B in risky assets. We are looking, at this point, at trillions and trillions of dollars in potential losses across the economic system."

$700 BILLION BAILOUT II: Obama Pisses Off The Netroots (Again)

Several leading netroots bloggers are criticizing Obama for aggressively advocating passage of the bailout bill during his speech in Reno yesterday:

• Open Left's Matt Stoller: "Obama is demanding 'no vote' Democrats and Republicans 'step up to the plate and do what's right for this country.' Congratulations, all of us have just been called unpatriotic by Barack Obama for objecting to the bailout."
• Armstrong: "If this $700B to $1 Trillion farce gets passed, it's the end of a progressive platform to govern with the next few cycles. [...Why is Obama] abandoning his self-proclaimed skepticism of Bush here, why? Can anyone say with a straight face that his argument for why Democrats should go along with Bush and back this bill that he's presented is sound? I don't even see an argument. All that he's offered is a bit of fear mixed in with post-partisan and some language changes to go along with a few platitudes. Yea, he's better than McCain, but that doesn't make his b******* smell any better."
• Welsh: "I don't really know what to say about Obama anymore. It boggles the mind that the Paulson bill, a Republican bill, has somehow turned around and become the Obama bill, pushed by Democrats. It is fantastically unpopular and for good reason, since it is a bailout for the richest people in the world, not just America, and does almost nothing for the ordinary people who are expected to pay for it. Obama can't lose this election to John McCain. McCain has turned himself into a punch line. But a lot of the house members whose arms Obama is twisting are likely to pay the price for him. Likewise in 2010 Obama is setting himself up for huge reverses in Congress, then in 2012 he will become a one term president. The smart move at this point would be to put up a good bill that helps Main Street, let the Republicans defeat it if they chose and then fight the election on it. Why not? If Obama can twist arms for the Paulson bill, why not for a good bill?"
• Firedoglake's Eli: "If Senator Obama somehow gets this plan passed (probably by watering down or eliminating its redeeming qualities), then President Obama will have his hands tied from the day he takes office. No money for middle class tax cuts, healthcare reform, alternative energy, infrastructure repair, or anything else that costs money. The Republicans will wave the flag of Fiscal Responsibility, the Blue Dogs will happily join them, and nothing constructive will get done. Obama will be left holding Dubya's bag, and he'll be ridiculed as a 'do-nothing' president who talked big about Change and couldn't deliver it. All because he had to give the Worst President Ever $700 billion of our money to fix the economy like he fixed Iraq."

Again, Drum disagrees with his fellow liberal bloggers and praises Obama's speech on the bailout: "That's what [Obama] should be saying. Is it politically risky to take a more active role in congressional negotiations -- and with it, possibly more responsibility for an unpopular bailout? Maybe slightly. But if you want to be president of the United States, that's what you need to do. And you need to do it for real, not just for the cameras."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The Paulson Crisis

Yglesias:

"One issue that I don't think has been adequately explored yet is the extent to which our current predicament is attributable to Hank Paulson's mismanagement of the situation ten days ago. After underreacting to problems at Lehman Brothers and bringing us close to brink, Paulson abruptly reversed months of (false) reassurance that everything was fine and decided that dramatic action was needed. The smart thing to do would have been to privately alert key congressional leaders that he thought the ad hoc approach wasn't sustainable and they and their staffs should expect to spend the weekend in sequestered talks with him and [Fed Chairman] Ben Bernanke to work something out. They could have announced to the public that bipartisan discussions were underway to think out a comprehensive approach to problems in the financial system. I bet something could have been worked out.

Instead, Paulson unilaterally unveiled a plan that, in its initial form, was completely unacceptable to legislative leaders in either party. And then, in a misguided effort to ramrod a bad bill through congress, he did the equivalent of strapping a bomb to the entire US economy by dramatically announcing that the entire banking system was on the verge of imminent failure.

Naturally, this had the effect of taking whatever real problems were growing and making them much more severe by creating a sense of panic. It did not, however, have the effect of transforming an unacceptable plan into an acceptable one. So congressional leaders wound up needing to meet privately and negotiate with Paulson anyway. Which is what he should have done in the first place. But in the interim, justified criticism of Paulson's initial plan helped poison opinion against the (better) bill that eventually emerged. Had Paulson proceeded in a more reasonable manner from the get-go, I think it's very possible that we wouldn't be in this situation."

LEST WE FORGET: Great Moments In Unintentional Irony

From Overheard in the Office:

Interviewer: How do you feel about ambiguity?
Interviewee: Can you be more specific?

Posted by Ian Faerstein at October 1, 2008 12:41 PM