NYT Public Editor Clark Hoyt offers his own sage judgment on the McCain Innuendo. The money quote:

The pity of it is that, without the sex, The Times was on to a good story. McCain, who was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 for exercising “poor judgment” by intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a corrupt savings and loan executive, recast himself as a crusader against special interests and the corrupting influence of money in politics. Yet he has continued to maintain complex relationships with lobbyists like Iseman, at whose request he wrote to the Federal Communications Commission to urge a speed-up on a decision affecting one of her clients.

Give this man a newspaper to edit.

No, that wasn't it. The actual Times headline was, of course, "For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk." With that most vapid of introductions (so bland that my eyes glazed over on first inspection), the editors tried to muffle the dynamite that they'd awkwardly stuffed into the nth reedit of their half-exploding bombshell about--well, what was it about? (1) Intimations of an Iseman affair, or the "appearance" of an affair, that his aides tried to scotch? (2) McCain's entanglements with lobbyists who cared a good deal about what he did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee? Uncertain which way to turn, having not much of a story about (1) and (on the strength of the evidence they published) no smoking gun about (2), they squared the potato and ran with the hodgepodge. If they had worked the lobbying story (which has since been advanced by Michael Isikoff in Newsweek, they could have produced something revelatory about how intimately powerful senators collaborate with lobbyists. With this, they could have held McCain to account for career-long "For McCain, Special Interests Hard to Disentangle From" would have been a more sensible headline. But "Poses Its Own Risk"?! Too fidgety by half, the Times is now reeling (again).

First they got knocked around, undeservedly, as "liberal media." Then they sprayed Teflon on George W. Bush and escorted Judy Miller into the annals of journalistic ignominy. Now they juggle McCain like a hot potato. Like tightrope walkers who think too long about every step, they plunge. This is a staggering denouement, but not a surprising one, for The Newspaper that Fears Its Own Shadow.

While we wind down this year’s nominating season, and with it, the possibility of our nation’s first woman president, the New York Times reported today on President Bush’s visit to another first and only, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. She is the much beloved leader of a country whose current situation makes any economic issues in America look like minor tribulations. Surviving over a decade of bloodshed, rape, destruction and terror that impoverished this nation, Johnson Sirleaf, who is also called Mama Ellen, was overwhelmingly elected to rebirth a country that has little running water or power, an 80% unemployment rate, and a life expectancy of 42 years.

Though its civil war may have come to a close, Liberia still faces the dubious challenge of restoring human security: clean water, safe streets, access to jobs and energy, healthcare and education. The concept of human security was first proposed by Dr. Jessica T. Matthews, in an article for Foreign Affairs in 1997. She pointed out that the security of an individual does not necessarily derive from the security of the nation, and that threats to human security often lead to physical instability and conflict. Though these threats are more apparent in weak states than strong states, the conflicts that turn into war are less about state verses state and more about internal crises that pit tribe against tribe, region against region. Kenya’s recent debacle is the latest manifestation of human insecurity.

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For many years (and sometimes now), many people treated my optimism about the long-term strength of the labor movement as somewhat delusional, but having been in and around it now for twenty years -- okay, that number makes me feel old -- what's been clear to me is that watching the overall membership numbers year to year was not representative of the long-term planning that would payoff only over time.

It helped that I spent the 1990s in California where some of that innovation was most dramatic in the labor movement-- and the results have been a massive revival of union strength in that state. 200,000 union members were added in California alone last year. And this is based on a labor vision that had ten-year horizons for organizing, a level of long-term investment that few American institutions have been willing to make. One piece of evidence-- a coming showdown in California between the health care unions and the industry that was literally ten years in the making:

For the first time, nearly 200 contracts are set to expire in the same year, giving [United Healthcare Workers] extraordinary strength at the bargaining table...The plans for this campaign began 10 years ago, with union leaders lining up contract dates to maximize their power as healthcare workers.

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Someone needs to tell Susan Jacoby about hyperlinks.

In last Sunday's Washington Post, she techno-moralized that the rise of video (which according to her includes "every form of digital media") has led to the fall of "print culture" and Americans' inability to read books and poems and locate things on maps. Her sociology is, as Peter Suderman points out, imperfect at best.  The trends are not as uniform as she suggests, and she takes liberties with the studies she cites, assigning causality where it's not at all clear it exists and making personal logical jumps ("[it]seems to me") where even that falls short.  But what's worse, she seems to have missed the biggest media story of the last decade.  It's a story you probably have a pretty good grasp of if you're here: the rise of the networked public sphere.

Jacoby's basic misunderstanding comes from her unwillingness to treat the internet and television as two distinct media phenomena.

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The number of reader blogs continues to grow at an incredible speed, and the quality of their content is remarkable. We've got quite a few to recommend today, so I won't waste any time.

Reader DryHeat gives us a helpful summary of the recent gamesmanship concerning telecom immunity. I think this piece does a nice job of showing how the magnitude of what the administration is not saying seems to grow greater as their public pronouncements become more and more tortured.

Following Castro's long-awaited resignation this week, reader The Cynic Press takes on the "stupidity" of the U.S.'s current Cuba policy and cautions us not to pass up this opportunity to fundamentally re-think our relations with the island.

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There’s been a lot of discussion these past few days about Senator Clinton in response to my Table for One posts. Of course, in the current political climate, it makes sense to reference her historic bid for the presidency when discussing women’s political leadership. But it’s also important not to conflate her candidacy with broader concepts regarding the political pipeline and the “first and only” phenomenon. What I am most concerned with, when it comes down to it, is the bigger picture: the monumental task of transforming our system of government into the representational democracy it really should be.

The desire for that kind of change is precisely what’s driven record numbers of voters turn out for their Presidential primaries year. The formula is simple, and it's the key to how you get new people invested in democracy: offer people candidates who are not only politically savvy and experienced, but who also actually look like them, and voters will begin to feel there is place for them in our political system. In both Senators Obama and Clinton, many voters see viable candidates who, for the first time, are accessible and familiar - a closer reflection of the voters themselves. That's the beauty of representational democracy -- people feel that their interests are truly being spoken for - and hence become more likely to be involved in the political process.

But one or two people alone can not make change in this nation.

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Well, I know everyone’s attention is elsewhere today, but I thought this might be a good time to go into my mailbag and answer some of my readers’ pressing questions about discussions of race in our mainstream media. Those of you who remember my old blog will surely recall that I sometimes adopted the persona “Mister Answer Man,” in which I offered, as a free public service, a kind of online guide to the perplexed. You’ve got questions – he’s got answers! That’s chief among the reasons his name is Mister Answer Man, you know.

Without further ado, then, let's go to two questions from yesterday’s inbox:

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This is adapted from a piece at Progressive States today--

In one more example of lax federal agencies being empowered to block tougher state protection of consumers, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that states are barred from protecting consumers from faulty medical devices, such as breast implants, if the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has already approved those devices.

These means that a federal agency like the FDA, politicized by a right-wing President and dominated by industry-funded advisors, can unilaterally override laws in all fifty states that hold companies liable for harm to consumers.  This, despite the fact that, as the New York Times described:

The Institute of Medicine, the Government Accountability Office and the FDA's own science board have all issued reports concluding that poor management and scientific inadequacies have made the agency incapable of protecting the country against unsafe drugs, medical devices and food.

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A brief break from the sex, lobbyists and politics for a reality a little less entertaining.

On Skid Row is a documentary about the homelessness epidemic in Los Angeles from Good Magazine. It's a little tough to watch, so warning. This is the first part of five.

This is an open thread to speculate about both the facts and fallout of the McCain/Iseman story. What actually happened here? Why did the NYT publish the story like this? Does this mean the GOP race isn't actually over? How does it affect the Dems? And the big question: did Mike Huckabee know?

Share your idle speculation here.

One of the best things to come out of this election season is how gender has re-entered the public arena and political debate. In previous election years, women have been relegated to the background. But in 2008, issues of gender and power are very much in the forefront. Since readers brought so many comments, I am taking today as an opportunity to respond and expand upon some of my arguments.

I chose to center this week’s Table for One on the topic of the “first and only,” because it is an important (but not often discussed) reality that numbers matter. We like to think of ourselves as a fair country, beyond the prejudices of yesteryear, where individuals who work hard will be judged on their merits alone. But in truth, until there are enough diverse females in authority so that a chosen few are not expected to speak for an entire race or gender , those few will continue to carry the burden for all. When more women are running for the presidency, say three or four just like the men, the conversation about gender will be replaced by conversations about each woman’s agenda. With one woman, stereotypes abound; often, that “only” woman either has to prove she is “man enough” for the job or find a way to be “tough enough” without losing her appeal as a woman. It’s almost impossible. That isn’t to say that the particular policy concerns about Hillary Clinton or about President Clinton that readers have expressed would disappear, but the issues around gender would be far less pronounced if two other women governors or senators were in the race. If those gender issues are ones you aren’t seeing, let’s take a quick look at how the media are treating this particular one and only.

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Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig is considering a bid for Rep. Tom Lantos' California House seat. He's made one of his trademark powerpoints to layout his thinking (after the break).

Lessig achieved iconic status in online communities for founding Creative Commons and going to war with the entertainment industry as the legal leader of the free culture movement. He's kind of a Thurgood Marshall for the Napster/YouTube set. His congressional run is an extension of his latest effort to reinvent himself as an anti-corruption crusader (see his "alpha" powerpoint for that here).

As a young techie, I have more than my fair share of admiration for the man. Even so, I'm skeptical.

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Based on inflation data released this morning, a combination of slower wage growth and faster price growth has led to falling real hourly and weekly earnings for most workers.

The Figure shows the yearly change in real earnings for the approximately 80% of the workforce that are non-managers in services or blue-collar factory workers. After handily beating inflation last year, wage growth began to slow as the economy lost speed in the last quarter of 2007. A year ago, annual hourly wage growth before inflation was 4.3%; this year—Jan07-Jan08—it was 3.7%.

Inflation, conversely, driven up by higher energy prices, is growing about twice as fast as was the case one year ago.

This combination has led to the dramatic shift in the buying power of workers’ paychecks. A year ago, real hourly and weekly earnings grew on a yearly basis by over 2%; this January, they are both down by about 1%. Note also that over the past two months, due to the decline in average weekly hours—a function of the weakening job market—real weekly earnings are falling more quickly than hourly earnings.

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Glad to report that my experiment in the arcane art form of sculpting less than 150 words into the NYT--a sort of haiku equivalent--met with some success this morning:

To the Editor:

In order to impugn “the quality of thought of the Democrats’ academic and media supporters,” none of whom he names or quotes, William Kristol drafts George Orwell, who wrote in 1942 that “a permanent and pensioned opposition” suffers a deterioration in “the quality of its thought.”

By Mr. Kristol’s reasoning, the belligerent right that was out of power from 1932 into the 1970s should have been terminally shriveled by the time it came to power with Ronald Reagan in 1981. Perhaps its long exile explains the ruinous fatuousness of such manifestoes as the declaration on Sept. 20, 2001, that failure to invade Iraq “will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism” — a declaration by William Kristol and fellow conservatives.

Todd Gitlin
New York, Feb. 18, 2008

The writer, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, is the author of several books about politics.

Haven't you always suspected that neo-conservatives and other wild-eyed hawks are getting restless waiting for the next terror attack on Americans so they can get us into another war or two.

I have. I don't think they want Americans dead. No way. But I do think they feel that losing a few more now will save more later by enabling us to kill more "Islamofascists". It's a crazy mindset but quite real.

And there it is in today's New York Times. Reuel Marc Gerecht, one of the original neoconservatives now an AEI fellow, writes a piece arguing that it's time for neocons like himself to wake up and start laying the groundwork for a US attack on Iran.

His idea is clever, in a crazy way. He advocates engaging with Iran so that when engagement fails, we can attack.

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I just want to add two thoughts to Reed Hundt’s post below.

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The Clintons will attack Obama in harsh, personal terms for two main reasons: they hope to attract attention from the media, which they need to overcome Obama's advantages in paid ads, free media coverage (like the extraordinary coverage of his extraordinary Houston speech last night), and field organization, and they want to instill doubts about Obama in the voters in Ohio and Texas who threaten to follow the pattern of the last ten votes, where in the last few days across all demographic groups there has been a decisive change of mind among the Clinton-leaners to move to the Obama side.

The attention-seeking will work. The free media, especially the cable shows, will report the Clintons' charges. The allegations may be straight from the Rove playbook -- illogical, self-contradictory, twisted, trivial. But whatever they are, they will be reported. In a sense, it is the news that Mrs. Clinton and her sharp-tongued surrogates want to make and so they deserve the coverage.

But

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As TPMCafe's reader blogging section continues to grow, we're able to bring you a diverse selection of some of the extraordinary writing that goes on away from the glitz and the glare of the Cafe front-page. So, without further ado, here are today's recommended reader blogs:

The parent of a marine describes in detail some the ways in which the men and women of the armed forces are bribed and otherwise manipulated into reenlistment. Unpleasant, but necessary, reading.

Member FlyOnTheWall takes a comprehensive look at the mathematics of the Democratic nomination race and asks, What Adds Up to Legitimacy?

Criticism of Bill Kristol is always appreciated, as far as I'm concerned, and member Eddie-george doesn't disappoint in his takedown of Kristol's reading of Rudyard Kipling.

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As they wend their way through the Midwest, candidates Obama and Clinton are laying out a detailed and useful policy architecture for addressing one of our central economic challenges: the gap between overall growth and the living standards of working families.

Predictably, they’ve taken no end of flack from the ideological maintainers of the status quo, those backwards looking critics who label someone an “economic populist,” as if the offender’s agenda is just this side of communism.

But let’s take a clear-eyed look at their arguments. Step one is defining “economic populism” in today’s context.

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Later in the day, I plan to grade the various public statements from leading American politicians about US-Cuba relations in the wake of Fidel Castro's statement that he will not return to Cuba's presidency after February 24th.

But one criteria I will use is whether they evince any humility at all about the fact that America's many decades old embargo failed to alter the political path of the Cuban government.

I will grade on the basis of whether these politicians are seeing and responding to reality or blinded by a perversion of ideology and the calculation that they think will help them with the vote in Miami but which undermines US national interests.

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In last week’s New York Times op-ed, “When Women Rule,” Nicholas Kristof referenced a telling case study of Indian women who (by law) form one-third of village council positions. The study found that women ran the villages better than men, but that they were often judged as having done a worst job than their male counterparts – at least when they were the first women on the job. In fact, the study found that by the time the second round of women leaders were elected, they were rated on par with men.

The lesson learned, yet again: first women are inherently judged under a harsher set of standards and face elevated scrutiny than their male peers. But through their service, these trailblazers inevitably shift cultural perceptions of women as leaders.

We’re seeing this now in the race for the presidency, particularly in the male-dominated field of national security.

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If it was ever truly sincere about promoting democracy, the Bush administration has clearly abandoned that policy at this point. In Iraq, the administration has backed an incompetent, quasi-democratic regime that was imposed at gunpoint. In the Palestinian elections, it didn't like the results, and has joined Israel in refusing to even speak to Hamas. In Lebanon, the presence of elected members of the Hezbollah party in the government was used by Bush policymakers to justify giving the green light to Israel's use of U.S.-supplied weaponry to dismantle large parts of the country's infrastructure and inflict large-scale civilian casualties. Not exactly "democracy promotion."

And in Pakistan, where opposition parties have overwhelmed the ruling party of Pervez Musharraf in this week's elections, this step forward for democracy came despite Bush policies, not because of them. When Musharraf imposed emergency rule and jailed opposition figures ranging from the head of the Supreme Court to leading players in the parties of Benazir Bhutto to Nawaz Sharif, the Bush administration made critical noises, but took no action. Calls to suspend military aid were ignored, and State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher described Musharraf as "indispensable" to U.S. interests in the region, as reiterated in an article in today's New York Times.

Now that Musharraf is for all practical purposes about to be dispensed with, the Bush administration needs to take a new approach.

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Howard Dean and Ned Lamont are the iconic Netroots candidates of the 2004 and 2006 cycles. They were Boomers who, despite little personal experience with or connection to internet politics prior to their campaigns, were able to ride a wave of support from organizers, fundraisers and bloggers to more serious challenges than anyone could have expected. But their campaigns may just have been a testing grounds for what we're now seeing: Netroots candidates.

These are not candidates simply supported by online communities and activists as Dean and Lamont were, they're folks of the Netroots whose rhetoric comes directly from it and who, again unlike Dean and Lamont, are obviously personally experienced with it.

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We understand that the Clintons want to raise Obama's negatives. They have been doing it for weeks now, most pointedly in encouraging surrogates like Billy Shaheen and, famously, Bill Clinton to inject racial stereotypes into the voters' calculus.

But what is the point of attacking Obama for not debating his rival in Wisconsin or for giving good speeches or for swapping metaphors with Duval Patrick?

If we have to have still more debates, we are going to have a hard time keeping the electorate awake for the rest of this campaign. The voting is entrancing; the speeches are awesome; the crowds are stunning; the debates are the least interesting or illuminating aspect of the whole campaign. I understand that if the Clintons are short on money, they would want debates to substitute for the advertisements they can't buy. But buying ad time to complain about the lack of debates is passing strange.

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Last week, the Economic Policy Institute released an important analysis of Jacob Hacker’s Health Care for America (HCFA) plan by the respected health economics team at the Lewin Group. As you can read in the EPI press release, Lewin found that HCFA would cover everyone in America, while saving the US economy over a trillion dollars over the next decade. And the efficiencies achievable primarily through Hackers public health insurance plan would save enough money that, after modest premiums from employers and individuals, the new system would cost the US government only $50 billion more than what we are paying now for a system that leaves millions uninsured or badly insured.

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Over the course of this election to date, I have read with interest the speculation by many, most recently Maureen Dowd, that the intense scrutiny Hillary Clinton has faced in her candidacy for the democratic nomination may have less to do with her gender than it has to do with some flaw in her personality—her “Clintonianism” as some have put it, or as a result of her being “this woman,” in Dowd’s phrasing.

It’s a clever and disarming argument—except that there’s clear evidence that Clinton’s gender does mean that she is dissected in ways that are unique among the candidates – from the pitch of her voice and the cut of her blouse to the state of her marriage and her general “likeability.” But we don’t just have to look at Hillary Clinton’s candidacy to see what the impact of being the “one and only” woman running for a position of power might be; let’s think back to not that long ago, when a very different woman ran for president. Remember Elizabeth Dole?

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There are a lot of hare-brained schemes around town to bailout the banks and other financial institutions that are reeling under the burden of hundreds of billions of dollars of bad mortgage debt. Many push these schemes as plan to help homeowners.

Let's be clear, giving hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the banks is a government handout to the banks. It is like welfare, except the checks are much bigger, and they are going to the banks' top executives and shareholders, not poor single mothers.

The government can keep the financial system functioning as the big banks go under without writing huge welfare checks to the super-rich. We just nationalize failing banks as Gordon Brown did with the Northern Rock bank in the United Kingdom. We replace the top management with competent people and then sell the bank back to the private sector as soon as its books are back in order. It's fun, simple, easy, and cheap. And, if we want to help low income people who are losing their homes, we offer them the own to rent option.

Happy Presidents Day!

All this week we'll be joined by Marie Wilson, the author of Closing the Leadership Gap and President and Founder of the White House Project. Wilson will be here to offer thoughts on women in politics, and more broadly the obstacles to making our representative government actually representative of the diversity of the country.

Issues of gender and race have clearly been at the center of the current Presidential race, so we thought it would be an apt time to bring in an expert on gender and presidential politics. Wilson isn't here to advocate for either candidate, but hopefully she'll be able to help us better understand the historic and often challenging race we've been watching for the past year.