The frightening decline in journalism ethics

Courtesy of strokesofcandor.com.

I shuddered the other day when I learned that NBC was hiring the unctuous David Axelrod as a senior political analyst. My misgivings were confirmed when I read the Washington Post's column just now addressing the same issue:

Ignatius writes:

Reading NBC News’s announcement Tuesday that it was hiring David Axelrod, a top adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, as a “senior political analyst,” I had a sinking feeling in my stomach: No wonder the American public increasingly mistrusts the news media. We are obliterating the line between the political players and the people who are supposed to act as commentators and referees.

NBC boasted in its news release about how “for nearly three decades Axelrod guided successful campaigns at every level on the ballot.” Once upon a time, that would have been a disqualification for a news organization. But now, NBC brags that Axelrod “will contribute frequently across all broadcasts and platforms.” And he won’t just be a “senior political analyst” for MSNBC, the broadcaster’s more ideological affiliate, but also for the NBC mothership.

Just a week ago, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow introduced Robert Gibbs, the former Obama White House spokesman and campaign operative, as a new contributor. Politico reported that Gibbs would also appear on NBC News.

This trend is hardly new. It’s commonplace these days for television news operations to hire former political advisers or campaign operatives as analysts. Fox has a stable of them, including former George W. Bush aides Karl Rove and Dana Perino, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and, until recently, that modern-day Edward R. Murrow, Sarah Palin. ABC News’s budding superstar is George Stephanopoulos, who has adapted so well to journalism that people forget he was once a top White House aide to President Bill Clinton.

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Why did Americans allow Axelrod, Plouffe, and Daley to take over the country?

David Plouffe: "All hail the Messiah!"

Early in the Obama Administration, an upcoming Sunday sermon in my liberal church fellowship was titled, “The Obama Era.” Seriously. My God, I thought, they’ve anointed him pharaoh. I stayed home that morning.

The Obama Era emerged from the messianic campaign messages of David Axelrod and David Plouffe who, with the aid of Bill Daley, are apparently still trying to get all of us peasants to bow down to the One.

I don’t recall how Michael Tomansky responded to the Obama presidential campaign. He may or may not be one of the disillusioned who were once swept up in the glory days of 2008. Today, he’s in touch with reality in this post at the Daily Beast titled, “The Obama Team is Blowing it”:

We were told, as I recall, that Barack Obama had to seek a debt deal with the Republicans to please independent voters. Well, the independent voters are speaking, and they don’t appear to be especially appeased. There’s a new Gallup poll just out showing that independent voters hate the deal. Their views on it are far more similar to the GOP’s than to the Democratic Party’s.  Combine these data with the president’s approval numbers, which are swiftly heading south, and we have little choice but to conclude that this brilliant stratagem backfired. Isn’t it time for someone to say: this new White House political team is worse than the previous one?

First let me run you through the numbers. Americans disapprove of the deal by 46 to 39 percent. Democrats support it 58-28. Republicans oppose it 26-64. Independents oppose it 33-50. A second question asked of respondents: Was the deal a step forward or backward or neither with respect to “addressing the federal debt situation?” Democrats lined up 30-14-50. Republicans, 15-28-52. Independents, 16-25-50. Finally, independents also align more closely with Republicans on the question of whether the deal will have a good or bad effect on the economy.  Whereas 29 percent of Democrats think the effect will be good, just 12 percent of independents and 8 percent of Republicans believe that.

Let’s see, what else? The immigration speech from May? What, you don’t even remember it? If it was at least partly intended as a sop to Latino voters before the campaign really revs up, it seems to have left them largely unmoved—Obama is below 50 percent with Latinos in some surveys. OK, how about the more recent Midwestern jobs swing? Probably did no damage, but certainly did no good. The Vineyard vacation? I don’t begrudge the man a little R and R, and maybe it’s a small thing, but that destination—a bad symbol, Martha’s Vineyard. He might as well have gone to California wine country. Last I checked, there are golf courses aplenty to be found in North Carolina, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Colorado.

When David Axelrod left to go to the campaign office in Chicago, and Rahm Emanuel left to become mayor, the spin was that David Plouffe and Bill Daley, their respective replacements, would, if nothing else, bring fresh and unwearied perspectives to these admittedly grueling and thankless jobs. But they appear to have given Obama bad advice at nearly every turn. Plouffe, from what I can see, just looks to be in over his head in this job. He was a whiz at organizing a campaign field network. But this is a different game.

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Youthful Obama supporters from 08 “walking around like cattle hit with a stun gun”

Barack Obama Speaks to 75,000 at Portland Oregon Rally, May 19, 2008

 

Newsweek’s Michael Tomasky asks, “How can the president rev up and mobilize his demoralized liberal base?” That would be those folks who supported candidate Obama in 08 from the ranks of “African-Americans, educated white liberals, Latinos, young people, and union members.”

Um, Mr. Tomasky, some of us educated white liberals took a pass on Obama in the 08 primary and voted for Hillary Clinton – for a sampling, click here.

Anyway, Tomasky provides a couple of interesting insights and nuggets of information in his analysis of the hurdles Obama faces in campaign 2012, which, as we are repeatedly hearing, isn’t likely to be a rerun of the media-driven, euphoric stampede the last time around.

Instead, well, Tomasky is suggesting that the Obama camp use fear to get out the vote. Wonder how many of those supporters reeling as if they’ve been hit with a stun gun are going to buy that?  Here’s the scoop:

It was a rare confessional moment for Barack Obama. At a Miami fundraiser in mid-June, the president acknowledged that it’s “not as cool” as it was in 2008 to support him. It isn’t just a matter of fewer hip posters and viral videos. It’s a matter of votes. Rekindling the enthusiasm of African-Americans, educated white liberals, Latinos, young people, and union members—the Democratic Party’s most loyal and progressive members—will be a huge challenge. After all, you can only elect the first African-American president once, and the past two and a half years have deeply disappointed many liberals. “I know a lot of the kids who worked hard in 2008,” says Hodding Carter III, adviser to the last one-term Democratic president (Jimmy Carter) and now a professor at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. “They walk around like cattle who’ve been hit with stun guns between their eyes. This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”

Obama and his people have heard this sort of thing so often that they no longer bother to take umbrage. When I asked chief Obama reelection guru David Axelrod about this sense of disillusionment, he patiently ticked off a list of accomplishments: health-care reform, repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” financial regulatory reform, the drawdown from Iraq, student-loan reform. “Did we keep faith with the things that the president said he would do when he ran?” asks Axelrod. “There is a long list of things he said he’d do that we in fact did.”

It’s a solid inventory. But it’s countered by the undeniable reality that the country hasn’t noticeably moved in a more liberal direction (quite the opposite), and by the widely held perception among progressives that Obama will never wage fierce battle on behalf of liberal ideals. When I interviewed Justin Ruben, the executive director of MoveOn.org, whose 5 million members (many in swing states) must be revved up and mobilized if the president is to be reelected, he gave me four or five variants of the line “People need to feel like the president and the Democrats are really going to fight for their side.”

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President Obama, An Unlikely Protégé of the Late Liberal Lion of the Senate

Glenn Thrush at Politico reports on the Axelrod and Edwards embrace at last night’s memorial for Ted Kennedy. I’m reminded that Axelrod is the guru who convinced Americans that a political candidate’s compelling personal narrative was more critical to his or her success than relevant qualifications backed with a substantive resume.

Who can forget Edwards standing tall in his jeans at a campaign site, talking to the folks about his life as the son of a mill worker and his impassioned pledge to resolve the rift between the ‘two Americas’ – the rich and the poor? In case you didn’t know, that was all Axelrod stuff.

Axelrod was also instrumental in the successful campaign of Deval Patrick for governor of Massachusetts and would later lift some of the rhetoric from Patrick’s speeches to pad presidential candidate Obama’s rousing orations. As Hillary Clinton pointed out in a subsequent debate: “That’s not change you can believe in, that’s Xeroxing.”

As we soon discovered, though, Obama was Axelrod’s golden boy with a personal narrative so powerful it even caused the likes of Chris Wallace and David Brooks to fall into a swoon from which they’re only now beginning to awaken. Not to mention the fact that the Kennedy clan saw a flicker of hope for reviving Camelot by passing the torch to the young senator whose sole claim to superior judgment was a speech he gave as an Illinois legislator opposing the Iraq war.

(Have I mentioned that I signed a petition at my church opposing the invasion of Iraq? Odd - I've never once thought that action qualified me to be president of the United States.)

Eight months in and the former peace candidate who gave the eulogy today at Ted Kennedy’s memorial mass has adopted most of the national security policies of George W. Bush, while our military lingers in Iraq and we pour more and more troops and treasure into the nine-year war in Afghanistan.

As Obama continues to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, it becomes increasingly difficult to see him as a protégé of Ted Kennedy who was known as the liberal lion of the U.S. Senate.

“Is mybarackobama now the new name for the Democratic Party?”

The above is a mailing from former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe inviting Obama supporters to gather this weekend for "Change is Coming Events." (originally posted at Heidi Li's Potpourri.)

I’ve said it before: The Onion video showing bereft Obama supporters with nothing to do after their idol was elected president is more an accurate portrayal of reality than satire.

Not to worry.

Political Intelligence (Boston Globe) reports:

“One of the big questions following Barack Obama's victory last month was how engaged his supporters would continue to be once the initial euphoria wore off. If this weekend is any indication, they're showing no signs of letting up.

‘“Obama supporters will gather at more than 4,200 ‘Change is Coming’ events this weekend to discuss where to take the movement from here, according to his campaign. That's nearly three times the number of events that Obama aides had been expecting. More than 200 meetings are scheduled for tonight, with thousands more tomorrow and Sunday.

‘“Obama's website quotes Jan Biederman from Cleveland: ‘The goals of our get-together will be multi-fold, not the least of which will be to keep the grass-roots momentum going ... I plan to facilitate a discussion on what we can do locally to help bring about the change we all want, and not just wait for Washington.”’

This is more evidence the Obama Administration intends to follow the misguided path of its predecessor. During his eight years in office, George W. Bush never learned the difference between campaigning and governing; Dubya positioned Karl Rove, his chief campaign strategist, in a nearby office in the White House. Likewise, Obama is taking his top campaign strategist, David Axelrod, to Washington with him.

But the Obama “movement” is going a step or two further than Bush. A few days ago Heidi Li Feldman posted a mailing from the Obama team inviting supporters to participate in the above “Change is Coming” House Meetings. Feldman, a Georgetown University law professor, wrote:

‘“What IS this? It reads like some sort of tent-revival/teeny-bopper/new-age infotainment ad. Why is mybarackobama now the the new name for the Democratic Party? Is Obama for America officially operating with 2012 in mind, as I have suggested previously, hence we are receiving messages from David Plouffe in his capacity as ‘Campaign Manager, Obama for America?’

“In the United States of America, political parties do not have Constitutional status. They are not to be conflated with the government, which, in contrast to parliamentary systems, is not in the possession of the prevailing party. And neither the head of any political party nor the President of the United States is to be conflated with government either - that would be a totalitarian regime.

“President-elect Obama must come to realize that these messages coming from his campaign manager, using the resources of the debt-ridden DNC, are unbecoming to say the least. As a Democrat, they make me cringe. I have no problem with patriotism; I have no problem with politicians building their base. But as a Democrat and a democrat, I shy away from messages that sound cultish or invoke the style of Sunday morning TV preachers to ‘encourage’ everybody to ‘plan the next steps for this movement.’ What movement? Mr. Obama: you are the President now. Your job is not to lead a movement, if it ever was. Your job is to lead the country, the entire country, not just those who supported you or voted you. You are the chief executive officer of the United States of America. Form your cabinet, staff the executive branch, and lead the country. In the meantime, please note, it is, again to say the least, unseemly to have your Campaign Manager sending messages with a graphic that makes no mention of the United States but just continues to refer to ‘CHANGE’ and displays your personal symbol. We need a president, not a guru.

“Compare the above with Reverend Moon's organizational materials to catch the similarities in style, if not content. Examples here.”

Feldman is right, of course; we do need a president, not a guru, but it’s a guru, we’ve got. In these perilous times, we are about to inaugurate the most inexperienced president-elect in contemporary history. In the meantime, we are asked to support the “movement” that swept Obama into office on vague promises of hope and change.

Pardon me if I remain a bit skeptical.

Corruption in the Land of Lincoln: Obama’s Reformist Image Tarnished

From left: Rod Blagojevich, Barack Obama and Richard M. Daley. Photo credits: John Gress/Reuters

Google the name of any major operative from the Obama campaign now serving on his transition team with the phrase, “Daley machine politics in Chicago,” and you’ll see that Obama’s carefully crafted reformist image was already tainted by the city he calls home before the indictment this week of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. I can name three members of Obama’s inner circle right off the top of my head who have long-time Daley connections: Michele Obama, Valerie Jarrett, and David Axelrod.

Last March, Ben Joravsky wrote in the Washington Independent: “Obama settled in Chicago a couple of years after {Mayor Harold} Washington died and this is the political universe he knows. His wife, Michelle Obama, used to work for the Daley administration. His campaign strategist, David Axelrod, ran some of Daley’s campaigns. Many of Obama’s closest advisers, like Valerie B. Jarrett, are Daley appointees and insiders — it would be hard to find big players in Chicago who aren’t. And last year, Obama mustered his oratorical powers to endorse Daley with a speech so reverential it made some of the senator’s fans cringe in embarrassment.”

Obama’s ties to the old politics of Chicago were never fully vetted by the media who continue to be under his spell. So it’s in the category of better late than never that Time Magazine’s Massimo Calabresi actually raises an eyebrow over the latest revelation of corruption in the Land of Lincoln.

Calabresi writes:

“On more than one occasion during his stunning press conference Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald bluntly said he has found no evidence of wrongdoing by President-elect Barack Obama in the tangled, tawdry scheme that Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich allegedly cooked up to sell Obama's now vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. But for politicians it's never good news when a top-notch prosecutor has to go out of his way to distance you from a front-page scandal. And indeed, there are enough connections between the worlds of Blagojevich and Obama that the whole thing has the potential to grow beyond a colorful Chicago tale of corruption to entangle members of the Presidential transition team, to test Obama's carefully cultivated reformist image and to distract the President-elect just as he is preparing to take office.”

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The Well-Oiled Obama Machine Gets Some Advice from Concerned Critics

For months, Obama’s netroots supporters gleefully compared their man’s well-oiled political machine, blatantly ginned up by the Daily Kos and the Huffington Post, to the messily run Clinton campaign during the Democratic primary. The netroots, composed of mostly youthful white males, not as yet distracted by the necessity to earn a living, aggressively argued that Obama’s calm (no drama), secretive (never a leak to the press), tightly run campaign proved the One was qualified to be president of the United States.

Since the Palin effect first broke a couple of weeks ago and McCain seized the lead from Obama, pundits and former campaign advisors for the first time have criticized the Obama team led by his honor, David Axelrod.

For example, the NY Post’s Kirsten Powers in a piece titled, How Obama Blew It: Pays Price in Polls for Bungled Attacks on Sarah, writes:

“YESTERDAY'S Gallup poll had John McCain ahead of Barack Obama by an astonishing 10 points among likely voters. A Washington Post poll had that lead at only two points, but clearly showed a McCain surge - especially among women. This wasn't what Democrats were expecting when they left Denver - yet they have nobody to blame but themselves.

“Obama's toughest challenge has always been to connect with working-class swing voters. So attacking the poster child for small-town values, Sarah Palin, was a bad strategy.

“No, Obama didn't engage in the mass sneering at Palin - but he did fall into the trap of disrespecting her. When McCain chose her, the Obama campaign's first response was to ridicule the size of her town. Then the candidate himself began referring to her as a ‘former mayor’ when she is in fact a sitting governor.

“When she retaliated (justifiably) by mocking his stint as an organizer, the Obama camp was clearly rattled. Obama himself actually began arguing about the importance of community organizing. His supporters amplified this cry - claiming Palin's attack was a racist slur and passing around e-mails titled ‘Jesus was a community organizer, Pontius Pilate was a governor.’

“Meanwhile, the rest of the country was probably wondering what being a community organizer has to do with being president.

“Lured by the McCain camp, Obama supporters engaged in an argument about who had more overall experience - the top of the Democratic ticket or the bottom of the GOP ticket. This diminished Obama.

“Meanwhile, the media lit up in all their cultural-elite splendor.”

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Axelrod: Dollar Remark Referred to Race

Photo credits: ABCNews photo illustration



Mark Mooney reports at ABC News today, Aug. 1, 2008, that David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, has conceded Obama was referring to race in his comment the other day when he said Republicans were trying to scare voters by suggesting Obama "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."

Interesting that several leading online news sources reporting on this latest incident agree with my earlier post that Obama’s attempt to use the race card in the general election is just a replay of his campaign’s repeated efforts to smear the Clintons as racists during the Democratic primary.