Looking to secure a veneer of bipartisanship for their health care plans, Democrats have reached into the grave, exhuming the alleged endorsement of Richard Nixon. They claim that the health care legislation he proposed in 1971 and 1974 is a model for their own proposals today.
For instance, the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan wrote last month that President Obama’s plan “remains more moderate than those once proposed by Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.” A St. Louis Post Dispatch editorial at the end of January makes the same point, saying that the Obama plan relies more on free market mechanisms than Nixon’s proposal.
“Missing Richard Nixon” blared the headline atop an August 2009 Paul Krugman column in the New York Times. His pen pines for the good old days under Nixon: “As many people have pointed out, Nixon’s proposal for health care reform looks a lot like Democratic proposals today. . . . So what happened to the days when a Republican president could sound so nonideological, and offer such a reasonable proposal?” In fact, positive comparisons between the Democrats’ plans and those of Nixon were made even before Obama took office!
Thus far, no one has made reference to President Nixon’s staunch opposition to President Bill Clinton’s health care proposal in the early 1990s. In his tenth and final book Beyond Peace, which may have reflected a stronger commitment to limited government than at other points in his public life, Nixon issued a stinging critique of the Clinton plan. He began, “The 1994 debate over health care will be a crucial testing ground for our faith in freedom, which, if it means anything, must mean free markets and free choice.” Certainly, we face the same test today.
He continued, “The Clinton plan, all 1,342 impenetrable pages of it, is less a prescription for better health care than a blueprint for the takeover by the federal government of one seventh of our nation’s economy. If enacted, it would represent the ultimate revenge of the 1960s generation. The plan epitomizes the discredited notion that taking action against a problem requires introducing a massive network of new compulsions, bureaucracies, and government controls.” Elsewhere in the essay, he wrote, “For a thousand years, whenever price controls have been tried, they have failed.” Particularly when we speak of the public option and the House bill, we could say all the same things, only today it would mean nationalizing one sixth, not one seventh, of our nation’s economy.
President Nixon not only argued against the bureaucratic statism inherent in the Clinton plan – he also articulated a patient-centered vision similar to the one delivered by Sen. Tom Coburn and Rep. Paul Ryan in recent days. “Any sensible reform of the nation’s health care system must start with the patient, not with the government. The most powerful force inflating health care costs has been a system of insurance that removes the patient’s own incentive to shop for value.” In other words, Nixon today would be much more likely to support health savings accounts than a public option. He also called for tort reform, a great emphasis on wellness and preventative care, and greater competition among insurance providers, all key elements of Republican alternatives.
Nixon sought to repudiate the suggestion, floating then as well, that his plans from the 1970s inspired the Democrats plan at present. Rebutting those who implied his support for the Clinton scheme from his time in office, Nixon wrote, “I most emphatically did not, and would not, endorse a wholesale federal takeover of the nation’s health care system.” Those equating the Obama plan with the Nixon plan are missing the fundamental difference between the two, something Nixon himself noted in his opposition to the 1994 plan: “Employers would have been required to help pay only for their own employees, not for all the indigent in the entire community.” He concluded that the Clinton plan “focuses less on improving health care delivery than it does on centralizing health care control. Our program was about health. The Clinton program gives every indication of being about power.” Could we not deliver the same indictment today against the Obama plan?
President Nixon spent his entire life fighting against the central planning and nationalized industries of the Soviets. Though not all his domestic policies reflected the same distrust of centralized bureaucracies, Republicans should not allow liberals to claim Nixon’s imprimatur on their health care scheme.
Daniel R. Suhr is an attorney in Washington, D.C., and a Washington Fellow of the National Review Institute.
Recently I wrote about the editorial chaos erupting at the Washington Times, the daily that has provided a conservative viewpoint in the nation’s capital for twenty-seven years. Earlier this month came the news that within the next few months the paper will undergo radical changes. At least 40% of the staff will depart and the paper will switch to primarily free circulation, apparently planning to compete to some degree with Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz’s conservative giveaway daily the Washington Examiner. The price for paid subscriptions will increase substantially as the Times de-emphasizes that part of its distribution. Local and entertainment news will be diminished, as the paper focuses on covering national and international stories, and providing conservative op-eds. Greater “synergy” will be developed with the Times’s new talk-radio show and with its website.
When these changes were announced, Editor & Publisher, the magazine which has been the bible of the newspaper business for over a century, put up an informative article on its website, and normally I would link to this. But I’m linking to the Los Angeles Times’sarticle on the subject instead because yesterday brought the news that E&P, after years of chronicling one newspaper closing after another, will itself end publication effective immediately, since its corporate parent, Nielsen (the TV-ratings company), was not able to find a buyer. This puts E&P’s staff of ten out of work, including the magazine’s editor, Greg Mitchell, who made his name with two books on California elections of years past: The Campaign Of The Century (about Upton Sinclair’s 1934 run for governor) and Tricky Dick And The Pink Lady (describing RN’s contest with Helen Gahagan Douglas for the Senate).
With the departure of E&P, Jim Romanesko’s Medianews site sponsored by the Poynter Institute becomes the leading clearinghouse for news on journalistic happenings. Since it’s in cyberspace, it looks set to stay – at least for a while.
This month has seen a number of shakeups in the world of Washington newspapers, which in recent years have been feeling the pinch caused by falling circulation, dwindling advertising revenues, and repeated staff cutbacks.
On November 16, the weekly Washington Blade, America’s oldest newspaper aimed at a gay audience, went out of business a month after celebrating its fortieth anniversary, when its parent company, Window Media of Atlanta, abruptly went into Chapter 7 bankruptcy. No warning was given to the staff of 21, which learned of the paper’s demise when a Window Media employee phoned them to say the parent company’s offices had had its locks changed.
But, undaunted, the Blade staff got to work on putting out a new paper as soon as they’d moved their belongings out of their old offices, and the following Friday saw the first issue of DC Agenda. But the new paper faces the same questions its predecessor did about losing advertisers to the internet, and wooing readers from the generation accustomed to getting its news through a keyboard and screen.
This week, the Washington Post took another step toward ceding its status as a national newspaper to the New York Times. The paper announced that it was shutting down its remaining out-of-town bureaus in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, and bringing the reporters posted there to DC. The plan is to send reporters outside Washington only when major news stories occur. But one has to wonder if anyone pointed out some simple facts to Marcus Brauchli, the Post’s executive editor. Suppose “the big one” really hits Los Angeles. Just how long would it take to get reporters into a city devastated by an earthquake? Would it not make more sense to keep one or two reporters in the city, so that they could begin reporting within the regular news cycle? 9/11 also comes to mind; in the days after the tragedy, it was extremely difficult for anyone to enter Manhattan.
Finally, there’s the turmoil at the Washington Times, the daily founded by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and operated (reportedly at losses exceeding $50 million a year) since 1982. Since Sunday, the paper has not published its usual comic strips and crossword. But that’s the least of its problems. Early this month, the paper’s president, Tom McDevitt, was fired; its executive editor, John F. Solomon (formerly of the Washington Post) quit; and in mid-November Richard Miniter, the Times’s editorial page editor, told Howard Kurtz of the Post that he had been fired from the paper (though it still lists him in its staff box) and that he was suing his former employer for discrimination, saying that he was coerced into attending one of Rev. Moon’s famous mass wedding ceremonies as a spectator.
A week ago, Joseph Farah’s World News Daily site (which has a number of contributors formerly associated with the Times) reported that more staff cuts are imminent and that the print version of the newspaper could vanish within sixty days, to be replaced (a la the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) by an online-only entity. It would be an unhappy fate for a newspaper which, though rarely reaching a circulation of 100,000 in a metropolitan area with several million potential readers, still managed to score with solid national-security reporting, mostly thanks to Bill Gertz, who might have received a Pulitzer had he worked for any other newspaper on that beat. (Not to mention its often-outstanding sports coverage and its excellent book reviews, especially in the days when its literary section was run by the late Colin Walters.)
It’s hard to know what’s going to happen next in the print world, but I’m hoping that there’s still some time to go before the days when my fingers are smudged with newsprint will be as bygone as the times they were smeared with the ink of a typewriter ribbon.
Between 1969 and 1974, when there was nothing especially urgent to report, newspapers used to routinely publish articles about ten-year-old Little Leaguers or 95-year-old nursing home residents or 38-year-old insurance salesmen named Richard Nixon, which would describe how these otherwise ordinary Americans coped with having the same name as the President – the jokes they would hear, the raised eyebrows when they would fill out a form or sign a hotel register (back in the days when hotels had registers), etcetera.
Articles like these are frequent whenever a new President takes office. Or were frequent, that is, for it seems fairly likely that the forty-fourth President is the only person in this country named Barack Obama. (A situation with which I can sympathize, as I appear to be the only person on Earth with my name, although there are Robert Nedelkovs in Canada and Australia.)
And so it is that the New York Times website has taken to running posts about people around the country named for President Obama’s forty-two predecessors. (Remember that Grover Cleveland was the twenty-second and twenty-fourth President.) The site has already posted about an African-American in New York named George Washington, and a fellow named Calvin Coolidge who is a distant relative of the thirtieth Chief Executive. (As, indeed, is the case with just about everyone named Coolidge in the country, including the popular actress Martha Coolidge, whose usual onscreen roles are about as far removed from the persona of Silent Cal as can be imagined.)
The other day, the site posted about Richard Nixon, for decades a firefighter in Atlantic City, New Jersey, who now lives in retirement not far away in Brigantine. There’s nothing especially out of the ordinary in the post – as I said, it’s much the same as the articles that used to appear four decades ago. But it does show that in this age when we hear so much about the decline of print, online journalism does follow the traditions of its predecessor in various small ways.
During a recent visit to the Nixon Library, I had a discussion with several people about the potential for a podcast, something designed to highlight the events at the library, as well as the larger work of the Nixon Foundation.
We determined to use the recent visit of Sonny West and his talk about the day Elvis came to see President Nixon in the Oval Office for the premier production of the podcast.
This podcast is being registered with I-Tunes and will be available through them by the end of today. This, of course, makes the podcast portable. It can be downloaded to I-Pods and other such devices. In the meantime, here is a link to the first episode of what we hope will be a regular feature.
A couple of provisos: First, the theme music is from “VICTORY AT SEA” at the recommendation of Sandy Quinn. He told me how much Mr. Nixon enjoyed it – so it was an obvious choice. Second, some of the audio during Sonny’s remarks is a little difficult to hear and I suspect he pulled a Fran Tarkenton and scrambled out of the pocket, straying from the microphone, at times. These technical difficulties will be addressed and corrected for future events and podcasts.
But even with a few “glitches” – this podcast will be, I think, a welcome edition to the wonderful media expressions of the Nixon Foundation.
It is my privilege to host and produce this and I look forward to working on new editions about once a month – so, stay tuned! My special thanks to Philip Bassham, on my staff in Fairfax, for his vital help with this project.
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The scandalous videos depicting ACORN (Association of Community Organizers For Reform Now) employees recently revealed by young undercover journalists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles hardly struck a cord with the left wing media.
In fact, they unabashedly ignored it. But such is the fractured political landscape of our times. Or possibly the past 40 years.
Just to recap, O’Keefe, 25, acting as a pimp and Giles, 20, as a prostitute solicited ACORN offices for advice on running a brothel — involving among other things the smuggling of children — and tax evasion. O’Keefe said he wanted to use the money to fund a political campaign, the ACORN employees depicted, willingly — and often enthusiastically — offered their services.
Conservative new media ace and Drudge friend, Andrew Breitbart, used his star power to promote the videos, coinciding with the launch of his biggovernment.com, a sequel to his hugely successful Big Hollywood blog.
Fox News, and its conservative commentators Glen Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity used their large audiences to magnify the scope of the story prompting Republicans in the House and the Senate to slip amendments into bills that would defund the embattled grassroots organization.
Byron York of The Washington Examiner put the rapid turn of events this way:
It was an absolutely mind-blowing turn of events, a total collapse of longtime Democratic support for ACORN. Republicans had worked for years to reduce ACORN’s influence, with little success. Now, in the span of a few days, the GOP scored major victories.
At this point, just as in the Van Jones case, the left wing media shifted gears and — rather than investigate the issue further — questioned the partisan motives of the persons who uncovered the story.
O’Keefe insists that he and Giles’s work was done independently and rejects liberal suggestions that the videos were bankrolled by conservative organizations. He does, however, acknowledge receiving help and advice from a conservative columnist and Web entrepreneur.
The North Star’s Don Calabrese imagines how rival newspapers may have reacted to the reporting of two certain Washington Post journalists in the early Seventies. That is, if they did the impossible:
Post Reporters Deny Using Questionable Tactics to Entrap Nixon
The proposition seemed outlandish. Two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, would accept information from a secret source who would only be known as “Deep Throat.” This information would be so damaging to president of the United States, it would unleash a scandal that would shake the foundations of the nation’s government to its core.
Woodward and Bernstein deny being beholden to left-wing interests, but admit taking advice in their reporting from left-wing editor Ben Bradlee. They insist that no left-wing organization bankrolled their reporting efforts.
Of course it wouldn’t have been reported this way.
Obama is their man.
RN wasn’t.
Greg Gutfeld, a writer and host of Fox News comedy hour Red Eye, takes the unscrupulous to task for this selective method of whistle-blowing:
A little over a year ago, when Rick Perlstein published his mammoth study of “the American berserk” – the original subtitle of Nixonland – in the years between 1965 and 1972, he concluded his 748-page saga of heated hardhats and howling hippies (or was it the other way around?) by arguing that the culture and political wars of the late Sixties and early Seventies had not only not died, but had never really gone away.
Perlstein maintained that the 37th President’s legacy to the nation was “a notion that there are two kinds of Americans: one kind viewing themselves as “people of faith,” patriots, “nonshouters,” and viewing the other kind – “liberals,” “cosmopolitans,” “intellectuals” – as “un-Americans, anti-Christians, amoralists, aliens [Perlstein's emphasis].”
The book’s final paragraphs read:
Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not.
How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.
When Nixonland appeared, several reviewers criticized that penultimate statement, and said that Perlstein clearly was mistaken to think that the passions of that time still ran as strong.
But that was last year, and now that many of this month’s “town halls” about the proposed health-care legislation across the country have featured very heated rhetoric, not only at the meetings themselves, but among the crowds assembled outside the venues, Perlstein has written an op-ed for the Washington Post that makes it clear that he considers himself vindicated in his argument.
Now, anyone following the town hall meetings closely knows that many speakers at them have been as fervent about single-payer care and the proposed legislation’s failure to incorporate it, though not as visible in TV sound bites as the ones who have been waving pocket copies of the Constitution and arguing against the bill’s big-government tendencies.
But the leftist voices at the meetings count for nothing where Perlstein is concerned. What he sees is nothing less than the return of the right-wing fervor that swept through parts of America during the Kennedy years. And the op-ed’s title, though probably the work of a dependably liberal Post staffer, sums up its attitude toward the liberatarian and conservative voices at these gatherings: “In America, Crazy Is A Pre-Existing Condition.”
Yes, all the objections raised to the mammoth scope of the bill, and to the possibility that it marks the start of a path which will see Americans turn over as large a percentage of their income to the state as was the case in Sweden at the height of its cradle-to-grave system – or perhaps more – yes, all the worries raised by hard-working citizens, in Perlstein’s opinion, are on a par with the fears of almost 50 years ago that fluoride in drinking water would brainwash children into being Communists, or whatever members of the John Birch Society were supposed to have believed in those days.
(I have to admit that sometimes fluoride does worry me a bit. The other night I was gargling with that new Listerine “Whitening Formula,” or whatever it’s called, in which the active ingredient is sodium fluoride. On the back of the bottle I noticed an instruction not to drink or eat anything for 30 minutes after using it. If the idea is to keep fluoride out of my system, then why would it be in my drinking water? But then again, my dentist tells me there’s been an upsurge in cavities because kids don’t drink as much tap water as they once did. End of digression.)
In the op-ed, Perlstein states:
Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror — powerful elites — find reason to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically fair-minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism: something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing different values down their throats.
Why, of course, “crazy-making panic” is endemic only to conservative Americans, otherwise defined, in the world of the Post, as those people who still insist on regarding Sarah Palin as a political force even after her daughter’s former fiance has started dating Kathy Griffin. Those thousands upon thousands (or maybe millions upon millions) of words, many of them still online, which fretted about Guantanamo in the Bush years presaging internment camps for the young and disaffected in the United States? That was legitimate political discourse, nothing irrational about it.
(As is, presumably, the post at a left-leaning site I read the other day that compared the present political situation in America to that of Germany in about 1930. Anyone for Obama as the new Heinrich Bruening?)
Although, as I write, it will be several more hours before Perlstein’s piece appears in the antiquated ink-on-paper format, it has already stirred up several dozen responses from across the political spectrum. Matt Yglesias has one of the most thoughtful posts about it on the Left. He focuses on these remarks of Perlstein’s:
You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to “debunk” claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president’s program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn’t adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of “conservative claims” to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as “extremist” — out of bounds.
As opposed to the “in-bounds” rhetoric of the SDS and Black Panthers, which got substantial on-air attention. But let’s look at today’s situation. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when President Obama held his town hall meeting about health care this week, William Kostric, a self-described “free stater,” was spotted in the crowd by an MSNBC crew with a sign reading “Time To Water The Tree” (it referred to a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson, which concludes “with the blood of patriots and tyrants”) – and a gun strapped to his leg, which he had a permit to carry.
It turned out that Kostric had not simply brought the weapon to provide a headache to Secret Service personnel who had to worry about any individuals who might not be carrying weapons simply to “make a statement.” He meant for the gun to attract media attention and stir curiosity about what he wanted – which turned out to be, presumably like all the “crazies” Perlstein describes, to get on TV.
And which program finally extended an invitation to appear? Was it Glenn Beck’s show, or Sean Hannity’s, or The O’Reilly Factor, or any of the other shows which, as every schoolperson in Santa Monica or Marin County knows, are diabolically constructed by “elites” to inflame the heartland? No, it was Hardball with Chris Matthews, a show which is not usually viewed as a hotbed for “crazies.”. I assume that Kostric chose Hardball because MSNBC was the channel that gave him visibility. (He also appeared on Alex Jones’s radio talk show, a venue more along the lines of his personal views, but certainly not the creation of any media “elite.” Indeed, Michael Savage, singled out as a rabble-rouser by Perlstein, has not had Kostric appear on his program.)
Perlstein doesn’t seem to realize that most of those who are concerned about the drawbacks of the health-care bill are voicing heartfelt and rational objections. They know that every citizen of the country already is shouldering a share of the national debt equivalent to nearly a fifth of a million dollars and they hope that there’s some way to keep it from going to a quarter of a million. They were not happy with the idea of a President doing his best Lyndon Johnson imitation and insisting that Congress pass over a thousand pages of slapped-together taxes and regulations before the end of last month, before it became clear that would not happen. (And compared to the versions of the health-care bill now in the works, even the most hastily drafted bills of LBJ’s Great Society look like they were penned by James Madison or George Mason.)
But that doesn’t matter to Perlstein; for him, “the tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America’s flora.” However, he’s not going unchallenged about this. One of the more impressive retorts so far has come from Stephen Bainbridge, a professor at UCLA’s law school. The professor sums up the op-ed as follows: “we lefties are rational, nice, kind people who are puzzled by conservative crazies. We’ve got no crazies on our side, of course. Just nice rational people like me.” Then Bainbridge lists some “rational” responses to perceived threats from the Right by left-wing organizations, starting with the Weathermen.
Bainbridge’s post got this prompt response from Perlstein, who says: “I hate the Weathermen. Read my book. So does everyone I know on the left.”
Well, it may be that everyone Rick knows on the Left deplores what the Weathermen, as a whole, became, or some of its actions. But individual former members of the Weathermen, whether or not they still think they were justified in what they did, certainly are not hated by many of his colleagues – indeed, quite the opposite, as Bill Ayers’s recent well-attended book tour demonstrates.
And, before I forget: does Perlstein mention Richard Nixon in his article? Yes, he does, classing RN as one of the “vultures” who exploited the fears sprouting from the “tree of crazy” – and, somehow, managed, by doing so, to secure a 49-state victory in 1972.
With a little help from 47,168,710 “crazies.” Count ‘em.
Unfortunately there is no video or transcript available yet, but Chris Matthews on his nationally syndicated weekend show that bears his name, asked his panel which former President would be judged more favorably come the year 2050: RN or President Bill Clinton?
With the exception of CNBC’s Trish Regan, who offered the quite brief answer of “Clinton,” The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker, Time Magazine’s Rick Stengel, and New YorkMagazine’s John Heilemann all voted for RN.
For Parker RN’s 1972 trip to China said it all, for Stengel it was his dexterous management of the larger Cold War, and for Heilemann it was because of his “huge” domestic agenda: the EPA, OSHA, and an impeccable record on civil rights.
I will keep a look out for video when it becomes available.
(Update: 8/9/2009, 10:08 pst)
The video from today’s Chris Matthews Show is here.
On July 29 of last year Vanity Fair’s website put up a portrait of President George W. Bush by that eminent visual satirist Drew Friedman. In it, the President was made up to look like that latterday icon of villainy, the late Heath Ledger in his Oscar-winning role as the Joker in The Dark Knight.
At the time, the picture merited comment from less than a dozen bloggers, several dozen more comments at the magazine’s site, and that was it. It was one of many visual lampoons of an unpopular President, and as such, was worth a chuckle or two from those who viewed it, and then forgotten.
But in recent weeks a similar image of another Chief Executive has provoked a different reaction. As early as April, posters and stickers began showing up on the walls of buildings here and there in Los Angeles – and, more recently, in other American cities. The image portrayed on them is that of President Obama, his face made up in the especially ominous shade of clown white used by Ledger in The Dark Knight, with a ghoulish red smear around his mouth a la the Joker. Beneath the picture, one word in lower-case letters: “socialism.”
This poster, of course, brings to mind the celebrated “HOPE” images produced by artist Shepard Fairey (in turn, based on an Associated Press photo) which helped Obama reach the Oval Office last year. And Fairey himself, fresh from an assignment producing another semi-iconic Obama portrait for Rolling Stone’s cover, was quick to inform the Los Angeles Times that although he didn’t think that the President was a Socialist, he personally thought the creater of the “socialism” poster (who remains unknown, as of this writing) had a right to his or her opinion. (As it happens, the earliest online image depicting Obama and captioned by “Socialist,” in the spring of 2008, was a direct steal of the Fairey/AP image.)
But others are not quite as sanguine. Rich Lieberman of the San Francisco Chroniclecontends that the “socialism” image is “creepy, unfunny, and sinister” and “a piece of garbage” to boot. At the Washington Post, Philip Kennicott devoted an article to pondering what boundary of taste the image had crossed. Both Lieberman and Kennicott have duly noted that Obama’s predecessor had been portrayed in the same fashion. But they both argue that to give the current officeholder such treatment has something wrong about it – perhaps, if not quite racist (Lieberman remarks that the anonymous artist is “probably white,” but is clearly unwilling to affirm that he or she isn’t), then using “urban” imagery in a discriminatory fashion (as Kennicott maintains in a somewhat tortured argument, both in his article and in a lengthy online discussion at the Post’s site).
The latter discussion is rather interesting, not least because one of the commenters remarks that the poster, especially since it originates from LA, may well be meant as a parody of anti-Obama sentiment instead of the real thing. This spurs Kennicott to mention Andy Warhol. But, surprisingly, neither he nor anyone else in the discussion notes that the poster (as opposed to the image it features, of which more in a moment) may well have been inspired by one that Warhol made.
That would beVote McGovern,a silkscreen created by the famed Pop artist in 1972 as a limited-edition production, proceeds to be donated to Sen. George McGovern’s campaign for the White House. In it, the face of President Nixon was recolored (in a ghoulish green) and retouched to make him look like Dracula. McGovern supporters (and Warhol collectors) bought up the entire run of the series. The next year, Warhol was audited by the Internal Revenue Service. He always expressed uncertainty about whether this event was related to his silkscreen (though he often was audited during the next three presidencies, nonetheless) but the audit did have one fortunate consequence for students of twentieth-century American history: it made Warhol decide to make an hour-long tape every day, in which, as well as itemizing his personal and business expenses, he gossiped in uninhibited fashion about his wealthy, famous, and just plain bizarre friends and acquaintances. And thus, in 1989, two years after the artist’s death, the American reading public was treated to The Andy Warhol Diaries.
But the use of an altered photograph of a politician did not start with Warhol. Back in early 1963, Richard Hamilton, the British pioneer of Pop Art, was a ban-the-bomb activist, unhappy because Hugh Gaitskell, the head of the UK Labor Party, did not support unilateral nuclear disarmament. So Hamilton put a Phantom-of-the-Opera mask on a photo on the MP and titled it Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland, though it’s not certain whether this was the inspiration for Warhol a decade later. And, of course, caricaturists as far back as James Gillray in George III’s time have done brutal pictures of political leaders; this is the tradition to which Friedman’s Bush-as-Joker belongs.
But one thing that Lieberman and Kennicott evidently did not know when they wrote about the “socialism” poster was that its unidentified maker derived (or stole, if you want to put it that way) the Obama-as-Joker picture from a Flickr image posted last January, not by a tattooed neo-Nazi from the Rockies or some other likely candidate, but by Firas Khateeb, a twenty-year-old Palestinian-American engineering student (and Muslim) in Chicago who Photoshopped a 2008 Time cover of the then-candidate.
Khateeb’s picture did not have the word “socialism” and, contrary to a couple of earlier blogposts which state that he created the image to express his disappointment that Obama was joking about pursuing a leftward agenda, he now states on Flickr that the altered Time cover (and presumably the “socialism” poster) does not express his political views in any way. Apparently he just thought it would be a bit of a goof to make the President up to look like Heath Ledger. But that jeux d’esprit has stirred up quite a fuss, not least because, in a rather direct way, it speaks for the disquiet so many Americans feel when their President announces schemes as vast, vague, and downright nebulous as rescuing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by creating a gigantic “bad bank.”
Therefore, the chances seem good that we’ll be seeing more “viral” images like the Joker-in-Chief one emerging, no matter what the pundits think.
This is too late to matter, but I do want to note this peculiar passage in Mark Leibovich’s piece on California’s governance that ran in the New York Times last weekend:
As I waited for Schwarzenegger in the lobby of the governor’s office, I studied the official portraits of former governors, including those of Ronald Reagan, Earl Warren and Jerry Brown (boldly colored and cartoonish and considered so bizarre at the time it was painted that the Legislature initially refused to hang it). Suddenly I heard Schwarzenegger’s unmistakable voice booming joyously as he led an entourage from his office.
The problem here, as anyone who’s been to the California State Capitol knows, is that those portraits are several stories above “the lobby of the governor’s office” — and several hundred feet to the west. If you’re looking at the portraits, you’re not in “the lobby of the governor’s office,” nor even close to it, and you sure aren’t going to hear anything from the Governor’s office — not even “Schwarzenegger’s unmistakable voice booming joyously.” Why would Leibovich include this obviously falsifiable and false detail? It’s a sloppy embellishment that illuminates no point he makes. It does, though, diminish them all.
The rest of the piece is a long exposition by someone writing a book report on California, and it contains the analytic errors one might expect from that exercise: Dianne Feinstein’s “presence” does not actually “hover over the Democratic field”; Tom Campbell does not matter overmuch; et cetera. It’s not the analytic flaws one holds against the author, though, but the falsehoods.
Youtube is setting up a kind of journalism school of the internet, featuring clips in which various eminences of the Fourth Estate attempt to explain their profession in the space of five or six minutes. The project is being undertaken with the cooperation of many of America’s surviving dailies, and the “faculty” includes many names not widely known outside their particular cities except by their peers in the profession.
But some of the names that have been recruited for the project so far are known from coast to coast, and beyond: Arianna Huffington, Tavis Smiley, Katie Couric….and Pulitzer-winning Bob Woodward. Woodward’s clip is chock-full of old photos of himself, Carl Bernstein and Ben Bradlee striking the poses familiar to all students of the cinema of the late Alan J. Pakula). Over these images, the reporter’s voiceover describes how he got started breaking local stories, until the day he and his partner Carl came across a “metro” subject that, well, jes’ grew.
It all makes one wonder when the Youtube academy will include a clip in which Bernstein offers his sage reminiscences about the art of ordering Brandy Alexanders at just the right moment when investigating a sizzling story in mixed company, back in the days when the art of journalism involved far more than poking around with a computer.
One event that received comparatively little coverage during the tumultuous events (here and abroad) of the last week was Rupert Murdoch’s sale of the journal of opinion, the Weekly Standard, to the Clarity Media Group, owned by Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz.
The Standard, edited from its inception by William Kristol and Fred Barnes, was launched in 1995 with expectations far exceeding those of the usual periodical of its type. The Republicans had captured both houses of Congress the year before. Rush Limbaugh’s audience numbers were large and still growing. But the existing conservative opinion magazines, in those days, seemed to have trouble taking advantage of the resurgence of the Right. National Review was in a somewhat fallow period. Human Events was on the borderline between moribund and fallow. And the American Spectator was approaching the chaotic period during which it nearly vanished.
So it seemed that, with financial backing from the Murdoch communications empire, the Standard would have little trouble becoming the country’s leading conservative journal. And, in its first three or four years, things looked quite promising. Within a fairly short time the magazine’s circulation moved into the high five digits. From the start, the stable Kristol and Barnes assembled included a number of young but very bright and able journalists – Andrew Ferguson, Christopher Caldwell, and Matt Labash foremost among them – and soon added more writers along those lines, including Tucker Carlson. Meanwhile, Joseph Bottum (later succeeded by Philip Terzian) supervised a Books and Arts section which, thanks to contributors like P.J. O’Rourke and Christopher Hitchens, soon proved itself the best among opinion journals in the country, whether liberal or conservative.
The flip side to these successes was the fact that the Standard did not turn a profit. This was only to be expected; the very nature of America’s journals of opinion precludes their being able to attract many advertisers, who usually prefer magazines to be nonpartisan in nature, so it is a rare year when any of them emerge from the red for even a moment. Nonetheless, thanks to Murdoch’s deep pockets it looked, during the 1990s, that the Standard might soon achieve preeminence in its field.
But during the last decade this has not been the case. There are a number of factors involved. First, the competitors managed to get out of their ruts. National Review experienced a renaissance after Rich Lowry became editor in 1997, and in the last six or seven years that magazine has established a very impressive presence online. This in turn has helped to keep its presence in print viable; its current circulation of 155,000 is almost double that of the Standard (which, according to Wikipedia, is now about 83,000).
The American Spectator, since 2003, has been undergoing a gradual but definite resurgence, with a lively website. Its circulation of about 50,000 is well below its heyday of 1991-1992 but a considerable improvement from its low point around 2001. Even Human Events, thanks to its regular contributions from Ann Coulter, has held its own.
By contrast, the Standard was rather slow to establish a comprehensive presence on the Web, and suffered for this. Its other drawback has been its ideological viewpoint. From the very beginning the magazine’s editorial stance skewed more toward neoconservatism than was the case with the competition. This was to the Standard’s advantage during the heyday of the neocons during the first term of George W. Bush. But in the last three years, with the conservative movement gradually shifting to more traditional channels (as exemplified by the return of Newt Gingrich to prominence, for example), the Standard has been left behind.
Last fall, it looked as if the rise of Gov. Sarah Palin to prominence might change this; Kristol and Barnes had been the leaders in bringing her to notice in Washington. But since the election, the Standard’s profile seems to have become less and less pronounced.
And although Rupert Murdoch’s support for the magazine never wavered, as Richard Morgan reports in thedeal.com, his wife Wendi Deng is said to have been vocal in her dislike of the weekly. This seems to have been a major factor in Murdoch’s decision to sell.
Philip Anschutz is an industrialist who’s made his mark in recent years by branching into various parts of the media; one recent success was the film version of The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. His forays into the world of ink-on-paper have not been as successful. He owns two giveaway dailies named the Examiner (in San Francisco and Washington) but the plans he had a few years ago to expand the Examiner brand to print newspapers in several dozen cities was replaced by a concentration on local websites. Nonetheless, he definitely has the wherewithal to keep the Standard going. (In this respect the magazine is rather luckier than The American Conservative, which almost went under last month before being reconstituted as a monthly.) And a spokesman for Clarity Media has stated that there are no changes planned for the Standard’s staff or editorial position. Since the Examiner does have a substantial online presence (which is still in development), it will be interesting to see if the Standard begins to increase its visibility in this area.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department contacted the social networking service Twitter over the weekend to urge it to delay a planned upgrade that could have cut daytime service to Iranians, a U.S. official said on Tuesday.
“We highlighted to them that this was an important form of communication,” said the official of the conversation the department had with Twitter at the time of the disputed Iranian election. He declined further details.
I guess we all just have different ways of expressing ourselves.
Jay Nordlinger at National Reviewwrites that Maureen Dowd — who pens weekly at the grey lady — left out a convenient fact about former President Jimmy Carter when justifying her argument that former Vice President Cheney’s criticisms are tantamount to what the right calls treason:
She begins with the story about how ex-president Carter wrote to members of the U.N. Security Council, as Bush 41 was trying to assemble a coalition against Saddam Hussein. Carter wanted them to resist the administration’s efforts. I thought Corner readers might like to know an interesting detail about this — a detail not included in the Dowd column.
Carter did not inform the administration that he was writing these governments, urging them to resist the American president. The administration learned about it when Canada’s prime minister, Brian Mulroney, called the secretary of defense — Dick Cheney.
Michael Grunwald’s Time cover story declares that “Republicans have the desperate aura of an endangered species,” and asks (one assumes rhetorically), “are the Republicans going extinct?” If you wonder what Grunwald’s answer is, think back to the last time a major newsmagazine ran a piece to express its optimism for the GOP. The author’s basic thesis is succinctly expressed in this passage:
The party’s ideas — about economic issues, social issues and just about everything else — are not popular ideas. They are extremely conservative ideas tarred by association with the extremely unpopular George W. Bush, who helped downsize the party to its extremely conservative base. A hard-right agenda of slashing taxes for the investor class, protecting marriage from gays, blocking universal health insurance and extolling the glories of waterboarding produces terrific ratings for Rush Limbaugh, but it’s not a majority agenda.
This isn’t reporting: it’s editorializing. That’s not a bad thing if backed up with data, but Grunwald offers none. Instead, he delivers a lengthy exposition of the Democratic storyline that Conservatism Killed the Republican Party. It’s appealing to those who dislike conservatives and Republicans, and it’s false.
Grunwald is right that the Republican Party is deeply troubled, of course, but to posit this as a function of its conservatism demands several things, among them: that the Republicans governed as conservatives when last in power; that the Republicans were defeated in recent election cycles due to conservatism; and that the electorate at large displays a desire for Republicans to abandon conservatism.
These propositions are arguable at best. Republican governance in 2001-2007 may have been rhetorically conservative — as this former Administration speechwriter remembers well — but it was not particularly conservative in its policies. This was especially apparent in the fiscal sphere, as Grunwald notes, quoting a Concord Coalition official on the party’s “atrocious record” on the federal budget. The Republican defeats in 2006 and 2008 were not exactly indictments of conservatism either: there wasn’t a national Congressional campaign on the GOP side to speak of, and John McCain was no conservative standard-bearer, even with the accompaniment of Sarah Palin. As I discussed here and at TAPped, Republican conservatives actually preferred a very different ticket in ‘08, and that campaign can hardly be considered a reflection of, or on, their agenda.
Finally, there is little data suggesting that the electorate at large thinks the Republican Party is too conservative. This November 20th, 2008, Gallup poll — taken when partisan feeling was at its height, and Republican fortunes had suffered a decisive blow — demonstrates this well enough. In addition to losing the Presidency, GOP negatives were at a record high of 61%. And yet, when asked what ideological direction the Republicans would take, some curious data emerged: 37% wanted more conservatism, 37% percent wanted less, and 20% wanted the status quo. Put differently, Gallup found that Americans at large had no meaningful problems with the ideological content of the Republican Party.
Why, then, is the Republican brand so tarnished? Had Grunwald allowed data, rather than supposition and anecdote, to drive his reporting, he would have focused narrowly upon the actual causes of Republican decline, which have everything to do with pragmatic outcomes, and little to do with ideological content. Going through old Gallup data again, it’s noteworthy that (as noted here) Republican political fortunes displayed their first sustained downward movement around the end of 2005 — that is, after the twin blows of public disenchantment with the Iraq War, and Hurricane Katrina. The theory-driven proclamations of left-wing commentators and politicos aside, these were failures of competence and honesty, rather than ideology per se. This — not its ideas — is the root of Republican decline.
The good news is that the ideas remain viable, even if the party that advances them does not. Grunwald writes that the Republicans are “starting to look like the Federalists of the early 19th century: an embittered, over-the-top, out-of-touch regional party en route to extinction, doubling down on dogma the electorate has already rejected.” This is bad history: even as the Federalists went extinct, they were absorbed into the broader Democratic-Republicans, and then the National Republicans — and their principles disseminated throughout the American political system of the first half of the 19th century. The Americans of the late Federalist era did not reject its “dogma”: they rejected its aesthetic of pro-British, pro-urban, pro-mercantile, and pro-finance policy. Once the Federalists were gone, their policy program, stripped of its specific class and individual associations, was almost wholly enacted in successive Administrations.
If that’s the historical path the Republican Party now trudges down — and I don’t believe it is — then conservatives, far from despairing, may take heart.
Rep. Brad Miller is chairing ill-attended hearings on oversight of the $787 billion stimulus. Reports The Washington Times:
“These hearings are titled ‘follow the money’ after the character in the movie – and the book – ‘All the President’s Men,’ ” Mr. Miller said. “The Deep Throat character, he told [reporters Carl] Bernstein and [Bob] Woodward to trace the money back to find out where the corruption began.
“We hope this will not end up as anything as sordid as that was,” he joked.
Mark Felt, the real Deep Throat, never said “Follow the money.” In 1997, Daniel Schorr wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times about his search for the phrase’s origin. When he could not find it in book version of All the President’s Men, he spoke to William Goldman, who wrote the script of the movie version. “I can’t believe I made it up,” said Goldman. “I was in constant contact with [Bob] Woodward while writing the screenplay. I guess he made it up.” Woodward thought that Goldman had made it up. Whoever wrote the line, concluded Schorr, “it was an invention.”
Bill O’Reilly is being subjected to severe interrogation techniques (it’s up to him to say if it’s actually torture) for saying that Richard Nixon never met with Mao Zedong, which, of course, he did, in February 1972. Here’s the lashing by the “Economist.”
As the President prepares for his prime time press conference tonight, the Obama missing mojo meme continues to grow apace. The media is in hog heaven — spreading by analyzing the Frankenstein’s monster of its own making.
Though many wonder if President Obama risks “over-exposure” after a week long barrage of high profile interviews, his high approval rates suggest instead the White House has found the correct strategy.
First Read thinks Obama aides “probably believe that had the president NOT done this six-day media blitz, he would have been more singed on AIG than he was. But he was out there talking all week about it and wasn’t hunkered down at the White House. Look back at this last week and realize this will be a lesson the Obama White House learns.”
Wonkette remains unconvinced. And, in its own snarky way, applies some home truths to the situation.
Hey all you elite cocktail-sipping Georgetown dandies gumming your cucumber sandwiches at tea time: Barack Obama is NOT overexposing himself with the daily live-teevee appearances and “town halls” and Jay Leno guest spots. In fact, this is how you make Americans love you, in this country. You just show up on every teevee show, laughing weirdly, dancing, saying vaguely untrue things, smiling, etc., and then your approval ratings just go up, up, up.
Michael Grunwald’s Time cover story declares that “Republicans have the desperate aura of an endangered species,” and asks (one assumes rhetorically), “are the Republicans going extinct?” If you wonder what Grunwald’s answer is, think back to the last time a major newsmagazine ran a piece to express its optimism for the GOP. The author’s basic thesis is succinctly expressed in this passage:
