A friend of mine who is the publisher of a very successful news site has a joke: In the future the Internet will consist entirely of Sarah Palin slide shows. Anyone who's ever had occasion to look at traffic statistics for a news website understands what he's saying. Few things draw in readers and garner clicks more reliably than articles (or, even better, pictures) of Sarah Palin. We can't look away. We can't stop talking about her even when we desperately want to. The very fact that we've been blogging about her all week attests to that.

My first experience of this Sarah Palin effect came during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. As a progressive opinion journalist who routinely reports on conservatives, you come to develop a kind of practiced disassociative state when behind enemy lines. You'd never be able to gain any understanding whatsoever if you spent all your time arguing with and hectoring people at evangelical colleges or anti-immigration rallies, so it's both psychologically and professionally necessary to put yourself in a state of mind where you simply listen.

On the night Palin gave her big debut national speech, I sat through the speeches that preceded hers in that same slightly removed state. Then Palin came to the stage. The crowd grew more and more raucous, and the room began to feel like a Roman Colosseum. When Palin went after the "reporters and commentators" in the "Washington elite" for having disparaged and condescended to her, the crowd erupted and began pointing and jeering at Tom Brokaw, sitting in the NBC booth. I watched all this still, I thought, with equanimity.

About a third of the way through the speech, when she delivered her infamous potshot at community organizers--

"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities"--

I suddenly felt like the room was 100 degrees. Realizing my face was burning with heat, I went to touch my cheeks, which felt feverish. I couldn't for the life of me understand what was going on, and was about to get up for a breath of fresh air or water until it hit me: I was furious.

My father is a community organizer and spent years toiling in some of the poorest neighborhoods in New York, doing the painstaking, unglamorous work of attempting to build power among people who were routinely getting screwed over. And Sarah Palin had just spit in his face.

Despite my best efforts, she had gotten to me.

What I was experiencing was a strange kind of dislocation: Palin had managed to bypass one part of my brain and reach down deep into another. There are two kinds of politics: There's politics of the prefrontal cerebral cortex, the politics of analysis and facts and discussion, and there's politics of the limbic system, the sub-rational, emotional, ancient part of the brain that controls the bodily responses like the blood flushing my cheeks in that seat in the Xcel Energy Center.

As degraded as our politics may be, it's impossible for me to imagine a politician as purely limbic as Sarah Palin ever managing to ascend to the White House. But democratic politics in a heterogeneous society like ours is inevitably tribal, and millions of Americans view her as their vessel and their chief. The political potency of someone who can provoke that kind of visceral reaction shouldn't be underestimated.

Chris Hayes, along with Jane Hamsher, Amanda Marcotte and Michael Tomasky, speculate more on Palin's political future and a 2012 run for the Presidency in the closing forum of "Going Rouge: An American Nightmare," from OR Books. Comments and discussion are welcome though: After all we've seen this week, what is she up to? Is she running in 2012, or just trying to cash in?

I like Oprah Winfrey. She gets people to buy--if not actually read--books like Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. She oozes the right amount of sympathy for people who have been mauled by chimpanzees and incest survivors and recovering drug addicts like Mackenzie Phillips. She's perfected the technique of humanizing celebrities and wringing heart-wrenching stories out of victims - it's good TV.

But that's exactly why Oprah did a terrible disservice to the public in today's interview with Sarah Palin, who is no victim and no ordinary celebrity. She's a politician who has carefully crafted a bogus narrative of victimization at the hands of McCain aides, the Washington elite and the mainstream media. And now with Going Rogue, she's trying to cement that story, neutralizing McCain staffers who say otherwise (see Sam Stein and Geoffrey Dunn's reporting at the Huffington Post), and stay relevant enough to make a bid for president in 2012, while continuing to flex her Facebook-Twitter muscles to torpedo Obama's agenda.

For most of the show, Oprah pitched Palin softballs and missed opportunity after opportunity to inject some reality into the conversation. Oprah asked Palin to talk at length about how the McCain campaign dealt with the news of Bristol's pregnancy. According to Palin, the McCain team painted a picture of happy grandparents instead of the more complicated mixture of disappointment and surprise that Palin and her husband actually felt. That might be true but somewhere along the line of questioning, shouldn't Oprah have mentioned Palin's support for abstinence-only sex education? What about when Palin claimed that Bristol - who was in the audience and is a Teen Abstinence Ambassador for the Candie's Foundation--was on a mission to educate American youth about the consequences of "unprotected sex"? Just what kind of "protected sex" does abstinence-only education teach?

Then there's the segment when Palin discussed at length the empathy she felt for women who have unintended or unwanted pregnancies. The "easy" way out is how Palin characterized abortion, casting her choice as heroic and making it seem as if she regarded abortion, personally, as the wrong option. But what Oprah failed to point out is that Palin wants women to have no choice at all - not even in cases of rape or incest.

When Oprah finally asked Palin about why she left the governor's office so abruptly, Palin suggested it was because journalists and opposition researchers from the Obama campaign had come up to Alaska, filed FOIAs (oh snap!) and started ethics investigations - making her an ineffective governor. But the ethics investigation into Troopergate began before Palin was nominated and not by Obama opposition researchers but by the Alaska state legislature. Palin made herself an ineffective governor by abusing her office - as the Branchflower report found--before she was even on the national radar. Notice also the conflation of journalists with political operatives. That's what Palin is now calling fact-checking of her book by AP reporters--"opposition research."

The entire effect of the show was to cast Sarah Palin as an ordinary American woman who has been thrust unwillingly into the political and media machine. Poor Palin--in her universe Katie "the Perky One" Couric badgers her incessantly with questions like--what's your policy on abortion or what magazines or newspapers do you read? And then there's McCain strategist Steve Schmidt who bullied and manipulated her into doing things she didn't want to do--like run for vice-president. In Palin's eyes - Schmidt's a marauding chimp. But just who does Oprah take us for - chumps?

Over the next few days, my co-editor Betsy Reed and I will be reading and responding to Going Rogue, as will contributors from our book Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, An American Nightmare, which is available only at www.orbooks.com.

Thanks for the great discussion.

Will, I think you crystallized the problem with our public/media response to Columbine: Many of us shoehorned this tragedy into our existing agendas or preconceptions, consciously or not. We made it fit a model that explained something we needed explained, or accelarated the need for a solution to an existing problem.

By doing so, we whizzed right by the real drivers. What about teen depression? What about our criminally-poor understanding of psychopathy: what causes it, how to ID it, and how to treat it when we discover it? Psychopathy and depression were not the only factors in Columbine, but they were major factors, which have gone ignored.

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The most difficult work a journalist can take on is an emotional autopsy of a tragedy. The breadth of the Columbine horror and its damage on the psyches of a community and nation makes this a torturous assignment. But the emotional truths, in many ways, are just as important to expose as the reality of the horror inside the building and the failures of police; in fact, they elevate our understanding of those horrific details.

The fact that Dave was willing to spend years plumbing the minds and souls of the victims, survivors and killers is a tribute to his emotional stamina and courage. You don't follow in the footsteps of principal Frank DeAngelis where he spots a speck of blood from his best friend on the school room floor, or imagine yourself over and over under the table with student Cassie Bernall without carrying away a lot of pain. You don't immerse yourself in the diary of a killer without testing the limits of your empathy - not to mention inviting criticism from the public for the mere effort.

These are hard exercises, exercises most journalists don't dare undertake.

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The story of Columbine seems so familiar as it's become part of our national consciousness. One word, and we all nod our heads. Ah, yes, Columbine. And we think we know it. Yet revisiting it through your deft, sensitive and insightful narrative brought tears to my eyes, especially in the chapters where you describe the hours during which the violence unfolded. It's the simplicity in which you tell this story, and your restraint from gore and hyperbole, that's so haunting and so moving. I'd like you to talk about how you were able show us the innocence of these young victims whose lives so suddenly end in a place they least expect it, who draw their last breaths in utter surprise, thinking some sort of prank was in progress, unable to comprehend the horrors which they faced. Dave, I think you have shown tremendous respect for the victims and never let us forget that this is their story, as well as Eric and Dylan's.

So, I'll bypass the discussion of examining why this happened, which you so brilliantly addressed, and pose the question about your choices in re-creating that horrific day at Columbine High School, beginning with Chapter 11, "Female Down," which takes us inside the school virtually shot for shot.

Dave, how did you decide to structure this narrative in terms of describing not just what happened, but how you would portray the victims in a way that was both sensitive and real? Too many crime narratives seem overwrought and hackneyed. You were able to take us there, make it real and make us feel something profound.

I spent a week in Littleton, Colorado, in August 2000, trying to understand what had happened. I was doing a piece with a co-writer for a website, and a Littleton City Council member gave us a guided tour of the area. (He wouldn't take us to the school, so we dropped by on our own later and were on the receiving end of countless, and justified, scowls from students.) He took great pains to explain that Columbine was not, in fact, within Littleton city limits; the school just used the city in its mailing address, and journalists used it in their datelines. "Shame, people will always associate it with us," he said. "Just a misunderstanding, really."

I'm not sure what I was expecting; it seemed such unimaginable evil. I expected, while driving into the city, for the skies to part, for a plume of smoke to be permanently ensconced above the city. But it wasn't like that at all. It was just any other city, like any other place, like any other school.

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Thanks for joining in Frank and Hugh. There's a lot to talk about.

Hugh, We definitely blew it on Columbine by trying to assign blame too quickly. In retrospect, it seems amazing that we (the media) thought we could have it all figured out--why it happened, who the killers were, what was driving them--in the first day or two. But we did, and we reported it, and it stuck. The data we needed to make those assessments didn't come for months and years. (It was about seven years before we finally got the killers' journals--the most important element of all.)

I'm putting a post together outlining the major myths of Columbine, which will address more of that shortly.

Frank, I am so glad to have your perspective here. I hope it adds to some understanding of what these tragedies can be like for the people going through them. Those anecdotes are all too familiar. People in/around the school began referring to the "Columbine Curse" for at least a few years afterward. The grief seemed to cascade, and under that umbrella of gloom it was hard to separate out random misfortune.

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When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people in Columbine, Colorado, the American psyche received the sort of blunt trauma that psychologists love to learn from. Except: nobody was looking. The focus, instead, was on the parents that failed the two boys, or the bullies that fomented their rage, or the music that inspired them, or the gun industry that enabled them, or the support networks that were underfunded and unobservant.

In COLUMBINE, Dave Cullen explores each of these themes, but the true genius of the work is in its overall coverage of that damaged psyche by delving into our reaction, as witnesses, to this event. There are two human traits highlighted by the book that go largely unnoticed, possibly because they are so pervasive, but more probably because of what they conclude.

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To walk through Columbine High School today is to be struck by the apparent normality of it all. Students greet each other between classes. A teacher jokes with a group of girls and boys in the hall. Band members tote instruments to practice. It's almost as if the shootings of April 20, 1999, had never happened.

But the cheerful ordinariness that prevails on the surface masks a painful paradox: Though the school and the community are gradually returning to normal, they will never, on one level, be "normal" in people's minds again. The name "Columbine" will always signal more than the name of a high school. And those who lived through the killing cannot deny to themselves that their lives have been forever changed, reorganized around tragedy and loss.

That was written in the summer of the year 2000, during my regular visits to Littleton. I was welcomed by the principal and other Columbine administrators because we met earlier at a conference convened by the FBI, came to know and trust each other as we discussed the motives and methods of American school shooters, and as we struggled to find ways to help those responsible for restoring confidence to survivors of such harrowing tragedies.

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Why did they do it? That's the first question most people ask me about Columbine, so let's plunge right in. Why did two boys walk into their high school one morning and start shooting people in the head?

There's a problem. One big reason we got ten years of bogus answers is a question designed to lead us astray. They. Why did they do it? Even before we shooting was over, we were already repeating that. We fused Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold into a single entity. They are indistinguishable to most of the public: two lonely outcasts from the Trench Coat Mafia, of one mind in revenge against the jocks. Almost none of that is true. Dylan was lonely, the rest is nonsense. Eric and Dylan had dramatically different personalities and motives. We can understand Columbine, but only once we look at it from the killers' points of view. That's an unnerving proposition, because it sounds perilously close to sympathizing, justifying or forgiving. Those judgments are up to you. But we're in no position to even consider them, until we explore the murders from inside two radically different heads. Why did Eric do it? Why did Dylan do it?

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This week at Cafe, Dave Cullen joins us for a discussion of his book Columbine, a story ten years in the making that explores the April 1999 school shooting and its aftermath.

From Dave's first post:

...what first got me hooked on covering this: what happens to a community shattered by an event of this magnitude. I was particularly unnerved by the kids in Clement Park the morning after. How would they recover from this? Who would lead them to emotional safety? And what bozos would stand in their way?

Join us for this important discussion.

As I read Andrea's post yesterday, I was struck by the timing. Just hours before, President Obama delivered a speech to students in which he exhorted them to ask questions, get help, work hard, and most of all, find success against odds. I listened to the speech and thought it was pretty good. If I had been a school kid, I think I would have been impressed. It's not every day that the President gives a speech just for kids.

So a few weeks ago when I heard about the coming speech, I didn't think much of it. The next day, however, I was surprised to see how some people across the country were angry about the speech - they felt that it was wrong for the President to speak to kids about staying in school. They were concerned that kids would be unduly influenced by the President's address. That to me seemed outrageous. I can understand not liking a President. Heck, I just lived through 8 years of that. But to say you don't want your kid to listen to a speech because you're concerned that they'll be unduly influenced by it? That's not saying much for your kid. In fact, it's not saying much for any of us. Are we really so concerned that a President's speech to school kids about staying in school could have a negative impact on our kids that we'll TAKE THEM OUT OF SCHOOL? Really?

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Andrea's book, The Death of Why, could not come out at a more appropriate time. It's premise has unfortunately become a truism - in the American Idiocracy, we have stopped asking even the simplest questions, much less the tough ones like "why."

Instead of offering up examples that prove Andrea's thesis, let's just take a moment and ask a meta question - why the death of why? In other words, why have we stopped asking questions in a democracy that gives citizens the historically rare chance to inquire?

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"Don't be afraid to ask questions." That's what the President of the United States told the schoolchildren of America. Sounds good. But is our public school system one in which students are encouraged to ask questions? In such an answer-obsessed culture -- and, in particular, school system -- do we actually value inquiry?

I wrote "The Death of Why" last year. You can probably get a sense from the title that I have a point of view. As an activist for social and economic justice, or perhaps despite this fact, I have increasingly come to believe that there is no hope for an enduring progressive agenda for this country unless we raise a population prepared to question. Most of the debates we encounter today, from health care to retirement security to the appropriate role of government in our lives, will not be solved tomorrow for forever. No matter how good we are. So the question that increasingly obsesses me is -- are we raising a population that is prepared to inquire?

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Hope you all enjoyed the holiday - we're ready to get back to business! This week at Cafe, Andrea Batista Schlesinger joins us for a discussion of her book The Death Of Why? The Decline Of Questioning And The Future Of Democracy.

Batista Schlesinger was executive director of the Drum Major Institute For Public Policy, a nonprofit progressive organization, for seven years before taking a leave of absence this February to work as a policy adviser for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's re-election campaign.

Joining the discussion are Dan Gross, senior editor at Newsweek and Slate columnist; Deborah Meier, Senior Scholar at New York University and author of In Schools We Trust and The Power Of Their Ideas; Kyrsten Sinema, Democratic state representative in Arizona and author of Unite and Conquer; and David Sirota, journalist and author of Hostile Takeover and The Uprising.

Since Congress began considering healthcare reform, conservatives and their industry allies -so-called opponents of healthcare reform- have embarked on a shameless misinformation campaign about the consequences and implications of expanding access to affordable coverage. Here, debunked, are three of the right wing's most widely circulated myths about reform.

Myth 1: Healthcare reform will limit patient choice and lead to socialized medicine. The Republican alternative to President Obama's health reform efforts-the Patients' Choice act-states, "The Federal government would run a health care system-or a public plan option-with the compassion of the IRS, the efficiency of the post office, and the incompetence of Katrina." The Cato Institute has published a brief asking "does Barack Obama Support Socialized Medicine" before suggesting that "reasonable people can disagree over whether obama's health plan would be good or bad. But to suggest that it is not a step toward socialized medicine is absurd." (Patients' Choice Act Summary, May 20, 2009; Cato Institute, October 7, 2008)

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Howard Dean writes that when it comes to health care "The real issue is: Should we give Americans under the age of sixty-five the same choice we give Americans over sixty-five?"

This is without a doubt an important issue, but I think progressives do ourselves a disserve when we proclaim it "the" "real" issue as if all other aspects of the health reform debate are somehow trivial or fake. Consider the basic problem of the self-employed person looking to buy insurance on the individual market. Well, if he tries to buy insurance the insurer will naturally wonder why he wants it. Is he sick? Absent the sort of large risk-pool provided by a large employer, nobody wants to sell insurance to anyone who wants to buy it. Consequently, nobody can buy any decent insurance on the individual market and everyone's ability to get health care winds up inextricably tied-up with their job. The solution is regulation -- make companies stop discriminating against people who may need health care. But this creates a new problem -- if insurers charge everyone the same flat average premium, the pool of people who actually buy insurance will be disproprortionately weighted to those (older people, women, those who are already sick) with higher-than-average costs. Consequently, insurers would go out of business and nobody would have insurance.

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While employers are guaranteed the right to purchase health insurance, the great majority of states -- which govern the individual insurance marketplace -- do not extend the same protection to Americans who buy individual insurance politics. In most states, "insurers can refuse to sell individuals policies based on their health, recreational activities, occupations, credit histories, and a variety of other factors" -- and state governments do little to stop them. As a recent Families USA report observed, "[States] are doing very little to provide basic protections for health care consumers and many are turned down from coverage or are charged unaffordable premiums or have their health claims wrongfully denied."

Insurance companies earn enormous returns for their chairmen and shareholders, becoming successful by insuring only healthy people while rescinding coverage once a person becomes ill.

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Ah, August - allegedly the slowest news month of the year, according to general wisdom among the media and political junkies. Not so this year, despite Congress being on recess and Obama now on vacation. The battle for health care reform has never been hotter, with one side worried about death panels and socialism, the other fighting for the public option, and everyone in between commenting on the funding and breadth of proposed programs. See TPMDC for blow-by-blow coverage of the debate.

That said, we have a rather special and timely book club this week, with former DNC head, Vermont governor, and presidential candidate Dr. Howard Dean joining TPMCafe for a discussion of what real health care reform means. He'll be joined by an expert panel of strong voices on reform to talk about his book, Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform: How We Can Achieve Affordable Medical Care for Every American and Make Our Jobs Safer. It's a discussion not to be missed - join us.

This post won't be about indie rock! But I do want to pick up on a bigger point made by Amanda in her post on that subject. She writes:

[I]t's hard to tell in the melee what's going to matter. If I was around in 1960, I'd probably dismiss the whole finding that radio listeners and TV viewers of the presidential debate had different takes on who won. That strikes me immediately as a fluffy distraction story. In truth, it became a profound statement about the direction of our politics, sometimes given more profundity than it deserves. No one would have guessed in 1963 that the Beach Boys would be the single biggest influence on indie rock in 2009, either. At a certain point, we have to do our best and worry less about how much we can control the outcomes.

I absolutely agree about our relative inability to control, or even to predict, which stories from our current era will rate as important in history's judgment. But I think we can also agree that even to attempt thinking along those lines will immediately rule out whole swaths of our current news discourse. If you even try to ask the question about your news -- will we care about this in three months, let alone a year, or ten? -- then your sense of "what's going on" will become considerably different.

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If, as Amanda Marcotte suggests, the Internet is like the Beach Boys in 1963, then I guess we have a few more years of inspired genius before the psychosis, death, and exploitation set in. Then again, everything goes faster on the Net, so maybe we're already in the psychosis, death, and exploitation phase.

Like Amanda, I think that Bill Wasik, in his book, glosses over the fact that one of the foundational characteristics (and joys) of popular music has always been its ephemerality, the way new bands buzz in and out of consciousness like beautiful bees. As Stephen Malkmus observed in 1994 (well before MySpace):

Music scene is crazy
Bands start up each and every day
I saw another one just the other day
A special new band

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Amanda wants me not to be so sad about the state of indie-rock culture. We've always had one-hit wonders, after all; and besides, we can't guess history's judgment, so why get stressed about my sense that nothing lasts?

It's true that pop music has always had its overnight sensations. But they've almost always been manufactured by radio, or by big record labels, or by the interplay between the two. What got me thinking about indie rock, as I began to report my book, was the observation that this now Web-centric music scene, left in the hands of the fans themselves (together with some very low-budget semi-pro outfits, like indie labels and Pitchfork), was actually creating overnight sensations more quickly than the corporate music machine does. As I pointed out in my post on the "media mind," when you give amateurs the tools to compete with big media, they act, in many respects, like big media!

Beyond that, though, having formed my musical tastes (and political consciousness) during the 1990s, I find there to be something depressing about the ecstatic surf from new band to new band, from track to track, from style to style, that serves as the predominant mode of indie-rock fandom today.

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Over at one of my favorite blogs, The Awl, Choire Sicha picks up on our book club discussion and the idea of the nanostory. But, he asks, wouldn't it be easier just to call nanostories by their old-fashioned name: propaganda?

[I]n reality, the nanostory is never apolitical.

It's not just that big stories about important things are difficult to understand. It's that groups of people, with varying agendas, do not want you to understand the actual story.

That the Internet is easily excitable and people are restless is true; but what really matters is that the process of moving this micronews is easy now and can be done by any lobbyist, any Astroturfer, any cable stealth shock-jock. .... The most important thing about the "nanostory" is that it is always presented through manipulation. It is packaged. What [Wasik] calls meme warfare actually is warfare, and we don't have to look much further than OBAMA'S SENIOR CITIZEN DEATH PANELS to see that.

And if you're confused as to why OBAMA'S FINAL SOLUTION DEATH PANELS FOR YOUR GRANDMA are so captivating to the imagination of America--well, a nanostory is merely a successfully-launched propaganda wave.

I agree entirely with that first sentence: nanostories are never apolitical. The reason any nanostory takes off is that a group of people -- or even competing groups of people -- seize on it, with the belief that it confirms some larger point about the world.

But I don't think it's correct to say that all nanostories are propaganda. Nanostories are just inflammatory bits of narrative. Sometimes they're turned into propaganda, with greater or lesser success. But often they're spread most avidly by the very people whose interests they serve least. For example: progressives!

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