The Bigger the Lies…

“It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida…In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003.”

A new study by the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism counts up the staggering number of falsehoods made by the Bush administration in the lead-up to Iraq. “The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period…Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq’s links to al-Qaida, the study found. That was second only to Powell’s 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaida.” (Via Dangerous Meta.)

The Sun Also Spins.

“For Simon, this dispute basically comes down to the complexity of urban problems. As he sees it, the ‘Philly model,’ imported to the Sun by Carroll and Marimow [re: Klebanow and Whiting], ignored the decades of economic, racial, political, and social disconnects underlying that complexity. When it spurred reform, it was reform that could not match the intransigence of the underlying patterns. The reporting itself was formidable, Simon says, but to him, homelessness, addiction, and violence aren’t the central problems. ‘Those are all the symptoms of the problem,’ he says. ‘You can carve off a symptom and talk about how bad drugs are, and you can blame the police department for fucking up the drug war, but that’s kind of like coming up to a house hit by a hurricane and making a lot of voluminous notes about the fact that some roof tiles are off.’“

As The Wire 53 premieres on On Demand, some links on the journalistic controversies driving show creator David Simon’s animus this season. The CJR offered a long and interesting overview of the Simon v. Marimow/Carroll feud, and its partial roots in differing conceptions of urban journalism. An old 2000 City Paper piece suggests who Simon may have in mind in cub reporter Scott Templeton. And Simon himself recently discussed his old newsroom for Esquire, and got involved with Mark Bowden and Matt Yglesias over at The Atlantic. (Most links here via THND.)

Clinton’s Racial Provokatsiia.

“We seem to be at the point where there are now two credible possibilities. One is that the Clinton campaign is intentionally pursuing a strategy of using surrogates to hit Obama with racially-charged language or with charges that while not directly tied to race nonetheless play to stereotypes about black men. The other possibility is that the Clinton campaign is extraordinarily unlucky and continually finds its surrogates stumbling on to racially-charged or denigrating language when discussing Obama.” TPM‘s Josh Marshall ponders the last week in politics, while going on to defend Clinton’s “fairy tale” remark as untinged by race. (I would agree — I found it dismaying for other reasons, which I’ve explained twice, and which The Nation‘s David Corn also finds reprehensible — the Rovian swift-boating of Senator Obama’s stance on the Iraq war.)

Another commenter at TPM aptly characterized what the Clintons have been doing here (the “rope-a-dope” strategy I outlined in the comments the other day.): “I think that the Clintons’ anti-Obama strategy is more subtle than commentators are realizing. It is in the nature of a ‘provokatsiia’, as the Russians say…Such comments are a provocation, waving a red cloak in front of the Obama people. When they respond angrily with charges of racism, suddenly they look like Jesse Jackson redux…just the kind of angry, militant black folks who scare white people…The whole point was to get the Obama people to respond angrily, which they did. Clintons win.” And we all get dirty.

Update: “Is it possible that accusing Obama and his campaign of playing the race card might create doubt in the minds of the moderate, independent white voters who now seem so enamored of the young, black senator? Might that be the idea?” The Post‘s Eugene Robinson sees a similar strategy at work.

Update 2: As does Margaret Carlson: “While it isn’t clear from whose sleeve the card was pulled, it is likely it wasn’t from the person with the most to lose. If Hillary Clinton’s campaign had taken only one shot at Obama, it might have been blown off as a mistake. But four shots constitutes a pattern.”

Update 3: As does the New York Times: “By the time the campaigns got to New Hampshire, the Clinton team was panicking…It was clearly her side that first stoked the race and gender issue.“

The Comeback “Kid.”

Hrm.

Well, that was unexpected…I must say, if nothing else, “false hopes” had a really good night. But, hey, I guess I should’ve known better. As The Wire continually reminds us, despite all evidence to the contrary, maybe a new day is never dawning. (You know, I should really develop some new interests. Maybe it’s time to become a gardening blog or something.)

Anyway, looking at the numbers, it looks like the difference voters in New Hampshire were women, who returned to Clinton’s corner in droves (47% to 34%), and older voters, who’ve been there all along (65 and over: 48% to 32%, 50-64: 39% to 30%, 40-49: 44% to 33%.) Well, at least the kids are alright. (18-24: 60%-22%, for Obama.)

That all makes a certain amount of sense, I guess. Women more readily see Clinton as a candidate of change by her very nature, and, as I wrote at great length about over the weekend, many older voters seem to buy what she’s selling regardless: another eight years of cautious, obfuscating, Grand Theft Auto-blaming and very “experienced” incrementalism.

To be honest, on its face, New Hampshire going Clinton doesn’t bother me all that much. It’s an older, whiter state, and for all its vaunted independence, it’s usually just contrarian for its own sake, like bad Slate columns and Armond White. Once Clinton became the underdog after Iowa, it was a natural pick-up for her.

What does concern me, tho’, is the bizarre polling problem we saw tonight. Some polls are occasionally wrong, sure, but every poll — not one poll, every poll — had Obama up between five and twelve points this morning. Ok, well, there were a lot of undecided voters, and clearly most of ’em broke for Clinton. So be it. More disconcerting, however, exit polls — taken after the votes were made, mind you — also had Obama up by five. So, how did we finish down two at the end of the night (with the polls still getting the GOP race exactly right?) How did every poll miss out on that seven point swing, a swing based on post-voting data? I suppose it’s still an open question, but the elephant in the room is the Bradley Effect, and, I gotta say, I’m pretty disgusted right now with my fellow white people. Vote for who you want to vote for, but don’t lie about it before or after the fact. If someone has a better explanation about the disparity in exit polls, I’m all ears. Update: Pollster has a good overview of the various prevailing current theories.

As for what explains Clinton’s victory, I must confess: even given what I said above, I’m at a bit of a loss. This is mainly because I thought the polls reflected, you know, the actual standings. The only real possible game-changer lately, other than just a collective New Hampshire uprising against media expectations (which is stupid – it was their poll answers creating and driving those expectations), was the “Diner Sob”, as Slate is billing it, the other day. Apparently, a sizable majority of New Hampshire’s older/women voters looked in to Clinton’s heart at that moment, and liked what they saw. Iron Eyes Cody for President! I dunno…admittedly, I’m feeling rather Menckenesque at the moment. Still, I’m reminded of Bernie Birnbaum, John Turturro’s character in Miller’s Crossing: “What were you gonna do if you caught me? I’d just squirt a few and then you’d let me go again.“

Bleah. A no-good, lousy night, to be sure. Unless you’re John McCain — for him, the news is great on both sides of the ledger. If the current paradigm wins, so do Republicans. Now, I have no real inclination to vote Republican, but the fact remains: When it comes to campaign finance reform —the change issue — McCain has far, far better creds than Clinton.

Still, it’s not over yet, and adversity builds character, right? We’ve split the first two games, and now attention moves to Nevada and my home state of South Carolina. Neither are necessarily unfavorable terrain for Obama, so if he can weather the post-New Hampshire bounce over the next week, we’re still good to go. But it’s definitely harder now, no doubt. Florence, come to our aid! (For old times’ sake, if nothing else.)

By the way, New Hampshire? Eff you, you tired, gaseous windbag of an “independent” state. Robert Frost, Alan Shepard, and Christa McAuliffe notwithstanding, you haven’t contributed anything to the polity since Daniel Webster. From now on, I’m hiking in Vermont.

Clintons, Fatigued.

Well, suffice to say, the past 24 hours have not been the Clintons’ finest hour. At this point, you’ve probably seen Hillary’s lip-quivering moment yesterday. I was going just to leave it well enough alone — partly because things seem to be breaking Obama’s way at the moment, so why pile on, and partly because I’d prefer to write the post-mortems post-mortem (I mean, let’s not count our chickens in NH just yet, although turnout looks historic.) But then I witnessed the wholly depressing sight of an exhausted Bill Clinton completely going off the rails this morning. If you missed it, he ranted about the press coverage and called Obama’s surge “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” I found this exasperating, and so, some quick thoughts.

There’s been much back and forth about the genuineness of Hillary’s Muskie moment, whether it was a contrived campaign stunt to humanize her or a brief twinge of Clinton’s very real frustration leaking through. (If forced to draw a conclusion, and at the risk of being called an orc, I’d say it was a bit of both. Some Clinton supporters argue that she got emotional solely because she was just that moved by the problems facing America…Strange, then, that this sort of thing didn’t happen until after Iowa.) At any rate, the fact that we even have to wonder whether or not her emotion was authentic suggests the problem her candidacy faces from now herein: The Senator is not a new face. For better or for worse, the nation has formed a definite view of Hillary Clinton over the past two decades, and it’s hard to imagine that impression changing in the few weeks between now and February 5. If Clinton loses tonight in New Hampshire, the only possible way she can get back into the race in so short a time – barring a monumental Obama flub — is by going scorched-earth negative, which will redound badly for her, for Obama, and for all Democrats this cycle. She’ll either still lose, and have lost ugly, or she’ll have won a Pyrrhic victory that’s turned off crucial swing voters. I mean, the GOP candidates are lousy, but they’re not that lousy.

Which brings us to President Clinton. Of course he’ll be supporting his wife’s candidacy ’til the heavens fall, and of course he believes his wife is the best, most qualified candidate. That’s fine, no problems there. Still, I’d kinda hoped that America’s “first black president” might avoid taking serious potshots himself at the man who could very well be America’s first black president, if only because their appeal as “change” candidates in 1992 and 2008 bear some similarities. Alas, this morning’s remarks put an end to that “false hope.” (I’d do a point-for-point rebuttal of President Clinton’s unbecoming lunges, but Salon‘s Tim Grieve already pushed back against the “free ride from the press” line and has pointed out the half-quotes and spin propelling the rest of his arguments, and Senator Obama, also looking dog-tired, responded well to Clinton’s scattershot attack here.) Obviously, fatigue is a huge factor right now, and both Clintons must be feeling anger, frustration, and even a certain amount of denial about how nightmarishly things are shaking out for them. But, that doesn’t excuse the flailing for negativity here.

Of course, whatever happens tonight, the Clintons continuing negative seems a pretty good bet. And their central line of attack thus far seems to be that America doesn’t know what Obama stands for — he’s just a vague bromide-spouting Hope machine. Well, forgive the flippancy here — I’m having my own New Hampshire fatigue moment, and I find this argument tremendously irritating — but some scientists got together a few years back and created this thing called the “Internet.” (Or Internets, if you prefer — You may have heard about it. Al Gore was involved.) Anyway, on this Internet, there are things called websites, and on Barack Obama’s website, he has pages devoted to issues, where you can look up what he thinks and plans to do — from Day One, even — about education, the economy, health care, homeland security, you name it. So, if you feel like Obama is some unknowable cipher just because he usually chooses not to speak in the soul-deadening rhetoric of statistics and position papers, check it out. It’s really quite useful, this information superhighway thing…I wonder if it’s possible to make any money off it.

Barack Obama and the Generation Gap.

(Obama silhouette pic via a friend/colleague at Peasants Under Glass, where we talked about some of the following in the comments.)

Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? Let’s go back a few days to Friday, just after Iowa, at the 100 Club Dinner in Milford, NH: “What you need to understand about the dinner and the venue is this: it was supposed to be a Clinton room.” The Clinton advance people had secured the best tables at the front, so all the formidable Granite State luminaries who’ve backed Hillary could show their strength, and show the Iowa upstart how things work in “independent” New Hampshire. Meanwhile, the Obama voters had been shunted to the back of the room, far away from the podium, the cameras, and the action. All well and good…except it didn’t work out that way. The legions of Obama voters surged to the front just before his speech and, by most accounts, blew the Clinton operation out of the room. “‘I’m really worried about him,’ said [Beverly] Hollingworth, a member of the state’s Executive Council and a former state senator, as she headed for the door. ‘Other people have been working their whole life for change, and have made good progress. This is just rhetoric.‘” And you know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mrs. Hollingworth?

Fast forward to this morning, where George Stephanopoulos held his usual This Week roundtable at the site of last night’s Manchester debate: Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, George Will, and Donna Brazile. For his part, Will seems to be among the “national greatness,” “Morning in America” civic conservatives — such as Peggy Noonan and particularly Andrew Sullivan — who’ve responded to Obama’s candidacy, and see elements of their beloved Reagan in his crossover appeal. (No doubt anti-Hillary schadenfreude is playing a considerable part too.) Brazile, who worked the comment desks at CNN on Iowa night, had already said her piece last Thursday, and didn’t add much this Sunday morning.

But those venerable dinosaurs of the Beltway punditariat, Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson, were virtually beside themselves that the Insider candidate seemed to be going down in flames, and soon proved themselves absurdly in the tank for Clinton. Cokie sneered at the constancy of Obama’s youth appeal: “Young people, as much as we’d like to see them active in politics, are notorious for not showing up when you need them.” She then went on to parrot Clinton’s most recent talking points. (Consider “It’s a lot of talk, when the reality is, change will happen,” or “She embodies change just by being the first woman who might be elected president.”)

Donaldson, meanwhile, got bogged down in a wish-fulfillment metaphor about the old champ wearing down the young hotshot (i.e. The Hustler, with Obama as Fast Eddie and Clinton as Minnesota Fats) and huffed and puffed with aggrieved authority, “I agree with Bill Richardson, experience is not a leper!…She’s the only one who brought up the economy, did you notice? Anyone could’ve said look, we may go into a recession here, there’s hard times. Only Senator Clinton — with her experience, if you will — managed to bring it up!” (You heard it here first, folks. Obama is too inexperienced to have considered the possibility of a recession.) “We’re always looking for the non-candidate, the non-politician, and we’d think that’d be great, Donaldson intoned. “But, George, when you have a toothache, most of the people here go to the dentist that’s drilled teeth for a long time, I think that’s where the country could turn out.” (Note here that it’s Edwards, not Obama, running the standard outsider-against-the-Washington-ramparts campaign that Donaldson is decrying.)

Now, on one hand, who cares what Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts think? Not only are they so completely invested in the Beltway power structure that it’s in their very marrow, but they’ve been living the sheltered life of the television Green Room for decades now. (So, it seems, has ABC’s Charlie Gibson, who showed last night during the Manchester debate that he thinks a two-academic family makes $200,000 a year. Uh, Charlie, try $3,000 a class.) As I know from considerable personal experience, the higher echelons in Washington invariably turn up their noses at candidates with outside-the-Beltway appeal, and tend to view them as interlopers worthy of ridicule (or, if they catch a spark, vitriol. At its most extreme, this is how you get Senator Clinton angrily exclaiming in 2000 that killing Ralph Nader “might not be a bad idea.”) In short, Sam and Cokie, like countless other members of the Washington media machine, see themselves as bastions of the Beltway order, keepers of the flame, and they don’t like any provincial outsiders upsetting the established status quo. All the more reason why Obama is causing them great consternation: “You’ve been with the professors and they all like your looks. With great lawyers, you have discussed lepers and crooks. You’ve been through all of F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s books. You’re very well-read, it’s well known. But, something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is…“

On the other hand, if we peel away their affronted Beltway dismay about Obama’s upstart candidacy, Sam, Cokie, and Mrs. Holllingworth’s views speak to arguably the biggest open question about the Illinois Senator’s broad-based appeal, and the one demographic factor that most threatens his winning New Hampshire, and the nomination: the generation gap. Pulling up the Iowa numbers again: “Among all caucus-goers under age 45, a smashing 50 percent supported Obama, compared with just 17 percent for Edwards and 16 percent for Clinton. Among those under 30, Obama went even higher, to 57 percent. Among seniors, by contrast — nearly a quarter of participants — it was Clinton 45 percent, Edwards 22, Obama 18.” Obama pulled young voters out in droves in Iowa, and I think he shows every indication that he can do it again in New Hampshire and beyond. Still, as Cokie snarkily reminded us, older voters are consistent voters. And, allowing that individuals mostly defy easy groupings and follow the dictates of their conscience, the Boomers as a generation are clearly not sold on Obama just yet. So, what’s going on here?

Part of it, I think, was explained by Andrew Sullivan a few months ago in the Atlantic Monthly: “Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America — finally — past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us…If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.” Senator Obama has since furthered this line of argument himself, telling Newsweek‘s Joe Klein that he aims to move past “the dorm fights of the ’60s.” To younger voters, the culture wars that raged from the sixties to the nineties just don’t resonate. They seem like ancient history. To older voters, who lived through the experience and witnessed time and time again how low today’s GOP will sink in their pursuit of power, this past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.

This is why, Sullivan continued in the Monthly, Clinton’s methodical (some might say calculating) persona and incrementalist approach doesn’t seem to rankle older voters nearly as much as it does those under 45. “[S]he has internalized what most Democrats of her generation have internalized: They suspect that the majority is not with them, and so some quotient of discretion, fear, or plain deception is required if they are to advance their objectives. And so the less-adept ones seem deceptive, and the more-practiced ones, like Clinton, exhibit the plastic-ness and inauthenticity that still plague her candidacy. She’s hiding her true feelings. We know it, she knows we know it, and there is no way out of it.” To many older liberals and progressives, who’ve experienced one dismal setback after another since the heydays of the New Frontier and Great Society, the Clintonian brand of cautious pragmatism often seems the only viable approach to moving the country forward. Put simply, you get burned enough times, you stop using the stove. This time, irony isn’t the shackles of youth, but of their parents.

The sheer fact of Clinton and Obama’s presidential candidacies, I think, also plays a part in the wide generation gap. The great liberal and progressive victory of the Boomers, one that merits them the moniker “greatest generation” just as readily as fighting WWII does their parents, is the sweeping and (for the most part) successful cultural transformation of race and gender in American life. This is not to say that racism and sexism don’t continue to fester in America, both individually and institutionally — Of course they do, and they’re all the harder to root out for having gone underground. But, thanks to the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, younger people tend to view race, gender, and other issues of identity as much more fluid concepts than most Boomers do. While many older voters still possess vividly etched memories of separate drinking fountains, grotesque sexism in the workplace, and fire hoses trained on children, Generations X, Y, and Z grew up sharing a multiracial consumer culture of MTV, The Cosby Show, hip-hop, Tiger Woods, Eminem, etc. Similarly, I think it’s safe to say that people under 50 are much more likely to have had a female boss at one point or another. (Counting ’em up, I’ve worked under more women than men, and I doubt I’m in a slim minority on that point.)

Put simply, and while being careful not to overstate the case, categories like race and sex just don’t seem as defining to the youth of today. Boomers fashioned this new world through blood, sweat, tears, and sacrifice, but — like Moses at the Promised Land — they can’t enter it as readily as their children and grandchildren. This is part of the reason, I think, why, anecdotally speaking, older columnists seemed so much more taken aback by Obama’s victory in lily-white Iowa. This also partly explains why Clinton seems to enjoy the strong support of older women. They remember a considerably lower and less permeable glass ceiling — and the considerable struggle it required to break it — while many younger women seem to more readily presume (as I do) that sex isn’t really a barrier to the presidency anymore.

Now, the response to an older Clinton voter to all of these arguments thus far might be something along the lines of “Just you wait…We know better than you, sonny. Obama may seem like a rock star, but we can see there’s no substance to him.” But, it doesn’t do any dishonor to older voters to suggest in return that maybe this is the moment to forsake a lifetime of dashed hopes and bet on the possibility that the time for a new, expanded progressive coalition has finally come. This is not an easy thing to do. As accomplished and dedicated a reformer as Jane Addams, part of a progressive generation for which I have great empathy, couldn’t bring herself to vote for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, and she was not alone.

Still, there’s something strikingly dismaying about watching Clinton and other members of her generation dismiss Obama’s message as merely “false hope” (a particularly vicious phrasing) and empty rhetoric. This is the same generation who recoiled from the tested, experienced establishment candidate in 1960, despite his considerable national security credentials, and flocked to the young, hopeful standard of Camelot. This is the same generation who, buoyed by the words of Dr. King, swelled the ranks of the civil rights movement, and who — disgusted by the continuance of a badly thought-out war overseas — was inspired by the moving oratory and surprising crossover appeal of Robert Kennedy.

Those leaders were all tragically taken from us, of course, two of them forty years ago this spring and summer. It’s maddening to think of how the past four decades might’ve played out had we the opportunity of their continuing leadership and inspiration. And it’s been a long time, far too long, since we’ve seen anyone on the left who can be mentioned in the same breath as those fallen leaders without hyperbole. But, look at those Iowa numbers again. Maybe, just maybe, that wheel has finally come full circle. Maybe, Senator Barack Hussein Obama is the real deal. Maybe he’s the candidate who can transcend the sad political paradigm we’ve been operating under since 1980 and bring about that long overdue progressive realignment. We’ve only seen one caucus, of course, but the game moves fast in 2008, and all the indicators seem to suggest he’s got “it.” If you’re not going to stake a chance on him now, what, then, are you waiting for?

I started this entry with a Bob Dylan song. I’ll end with another, one I listened to on Friday for the 1,000th time and “heard” like it’s the first time. (It sounds completely different when unburdened for a few moments by the ironic punchline of the years after 1968.) If it seems like GitM has become all-Obama, all-the-time since last Thursday, well, there’s a good reason for it. Right now, I truly believe we’re standing at a crossroads moment, one that could all too easily become evanescent, another missed opportunity in a political lifetime that doesn’t offer many of them. But if, on Tuesday, New Hampshire nurtures the spark set in Iowa last week, and Nevada and South Carolina kindle the blaze, we could be looking at a full-fledged progressive wildfire across the nation come SuperduperTuesday. So, to the older voters — and to any voters — who, for whatever reason, may be harboring doubts about Barack Obama, give him another look. We’re at the first hinge of 2008, and what we do in the next few days and weeks will echo profoundly throughout the next several years of our governance. The old road is rapidly agin’, y’all. So please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand, for the times, they could be a-changin’.

Mythical Maverick in Theoretical Hot Water.

“I do find the timing of this whole issue very interesting. And we’re not going to stand for what happened to us in 2000. We’re getting close to the primary.” Matt Drudge’s recent attempts to foist a December Surprise into the Democratic primaries seems to have whiffed. Will he draw more blood in the GOP? John McCain decides to respond forcefully to an unpublished Times story — held up by editor Bill Keller and leaked to Drudge — involving some sort of unspecified lobbyist malfeasance. Hmmm. I’m torn on this. Since the NYT story hasn’t actually gone live, there may well be nothing to it. As such, this looks a bit like the Choose Your Own Scandal shenanigans that Clinton operatives attempted to unleash on Obama last month. But, then again, the NYT powers-that-be were idiotic enough to hold the NSA wiretap story through the 2004 election, so maybe their judgment about what constitutes newsworthiness around voting time should be in question.

Madchester for McCain.

“We don’t agree with him on every issue. We disagree with him strongly on campaign finance reform. What is most compelling about McCain, however, is that his record, his character, and his courage show him to be the most trustworthy, competent, and conservative of all those seeking the nomination.” In a boon to his flailing presidential hopes, which now rest squarely on a superlative showing in New Hampshire, the right-leaning Manchester Union-Leader endorses John McCain. (IMHO, of course, for all the wrong reasons.) “McCain is pro-life. Always has been.” Uh, yeah.

Kinsley Selection.

“My candidate, at least at the moment, is Obama. When I hear him discussing some issue, I hear intelligence and reflection and almost a joy in thinking it through…That willingness, even eagerness, to figure things out seems to me more valuable than any amount of experience in allowing issues to wash over you as they do our incumbent president.” In an article on the value of various types of experience (spurred by this recent exchange), Slate founder and Crossfire alum Michael Kinsley comes out for Obama.

Ready for his Close-Up.

“But political success on television is not, unfortunately, limited only to those who deserve it. It is a medium which lends itself to manipulation, exploitation and gimmicks. It can be abused by demagogs, by appeals to emotion and prejudice and ignorance. Political campaigns can be actually taken over by the ‘public relations’ experts, who tell the candidate not only how to use TV but what to say, what to stand for and what ‘kind of person’ to be. Political shows, like quiz shows, can be fixed-and sometimes are.”

By way of Ted at The Late Adopter, Senator John F. Kennedy ruminates on how television has changed politics in 1959, and much of it reads as presciently as Eisenhower’s farewell address fourteen months later. “The other great problem TV presents for politics is the item of financial cost. It is no small item…If all candidates and parties are to have equal access to this essential and decisive campaign medium, without becoming deeply obligated to the big financial contributors from the worlds of business, labor or other major lobbies, then the time has come when a solution must be found to this problem of TV costs.” Yeah, I’d like to say we were working on that.