Category: Current Affairs

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He Didn’t Inhale Enough

I noticed yesterday that one of the New York Times blogs, The Caucus, had an item on how a gaggle of right-wingers is promising to do a “documentary” that will expose the dark side of Barack Obama. ‘Bout time! Here’s a guy who for years has been leaving a trail of unpleasant secrets. He has even written books full of assertions that people can fact check to find out what a self-aggrandizer he is.

The Times itself begins the process of exposing the mendacity with a 1,751-word story this morning–“Old Friends Say Drugs Played Bit Part in Obama’s Young Life“– that investigates his claims that he used drugs as a youth. That’s right: Obama says he used drugs and has suggested both in writing and on the campaign trail that his occasional pot smoking, drinking and cocaine sniffing was troubling and unwise.

But the Times is blowing the lid off those claims. The story says that “more than three dozen interviews” with “friends, classmates and mentors” from his high school and college years find that Obama is remembered as “grounded, motivated, and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.”

What could account for the discrepancy the Times seems intent on manufacturing? Ready? Here it is:

“[It] [could suggest he was so private about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.

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Super Tuesday Footnote

The morning of election day, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a piece by columnist C.W. Nevius recounting a story from Barack Obama’s 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate. The piece was titled “Obama snub still rankles Newsom,” it says that Obama refused to have his pictured taken with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom because of the controversy swirling around Newsom’s decision to allow gay marriages in the city. Nevius quotes no less an authority than Willie Brown, the former mayor and maybe the state’s last true political kingmaker, as saying Obama told him directly that “would really not like to have his picture taken with Gavin.” Brown doesn’t give a date, but says the incident took place before an Obama fund-raiser he arranged at the Waterfront restaurant. Nevius doesn’t provide offer a date, either, beyond saying the snub happened four years ago. He gives no indication whether the incident has been reported before.

This may be a footnote in most parts of the country, but in San Francisco and perhaps in Southern California, too, the story could be damaging. The gay community in the state is very politically active and at least since the first Clinton candidacy has been a major source of support for Democrats. There are aspects to the story that make you wonder, if you’ve been in the Bay Area for awhile, whether there’s anything to it. It’s not impossible imagine Brown blowing smoke to help a candidate he favors, but I don’t see that he’s on record as supporting either Obama or Clinton. And among the story’s odd qualities is that it took four years to surface and that none of the principals speak to it. A senior Obama campaign activist who happens to be gay is quoted as saying there’s nothing to it, but the story treats the episode as fact. I heard this story discussed among some news types the day after it ran and heard anecdotally that some gay voters switched from Obama to Clinton after reading Nevius’s piece. Who would blame them? Here’s a guy who enjoys solid support from and friendly relations with gay voters in his own state who is portrayed as acting as some kind of weasel when he’s out of town.

So: where did the story come from, is it true, and can you tell anything meaningful without talking to the people involved?

Well, it would be great to have Newsom and Obama on the record, naming names. But that’s beyond my poor powers this time of night (or maybe any time). Without the principals, I think the key evidence about what happened is missing. But it’s possible to track the story back to 2004.

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Semper Berkeley

It’s national news: The Berkeley City Council voted last week to invite the U.S. Marine Corps recruiting office to leave our town. The council put the Corps on notice that if it failed to move on, it should know that its status here is one of an “uninvited and unwelcome intruder.” And last, our elected representatives expressed support for “antiwar groups residents and organizations such as Code Pink that may volunteer to impede, passively or actively, by nonviolent means, the work of any military recruiting office located in the city of Berkeley.”

Of course, things haven’t stopped there. The right-wingers are exercised, and a group of them, a clutch of Southern senators, has taken the probably predictable step of introducing a bill (the Semper Fi Act) to strip Berkeley of $2 million or so of federal earmarks approved in the last session of Congress. In its press release, the group points out that it’s trying to kill $975,000 for a project at the University of California, Berkeley, despite the fact the university had nothing to do with the City Council action besides happening to exist inside the same town limits.

The release also delights in announcing it would withdraw $243,000 set aside for “gourmet organic school lunches.” Oh, that stings, but the senators don’t know the difference between “nutritious” and “gourmet,” or believe that it means the same thng. What they’re actually referring to is a very successful and long-running project that turned an acre of weed-choked asphalt at a local middle school into a thriving organic garden. The kids at the school raise food; they learn how to prepare it, too. My guess is that the money might have been going to a project the school district has had a hard time funding: a new kitchen and cafeteria associated with the garden project. In any case, the Berkeley school district didn’t have a say in the City Council’s action, either.

And now: how about that City Council. The vote they took was intended to make a statement against the Iraq war. Why a statement was needed five years into the war and more than a year after the Marines arrived I don’t yet understand. But there it is.

I haven’t been writing about the war much lately, but I think about it every day, and the wastefulness of it on every level never fails to anger me. Beyond that, I’m more and more distressed to live in a country that has turned the military and the idea of military service into a superpatriotic cult. There’s a reason the nation was created without a large standing army and made do without one, except in the most dire emergencies, for the first 150 years after the Constitution was adopted. Beyond the mere fact of our huge armed establishment, the blind civic celebration of the military above and beyond every other institution in society is a danger to the democracy its supposed to protect.

I probably agree with most members of the City Council on the war. I have no problem with people protesting Iraq, or with people protesting the protesters, either. But I think the Marines are more than an agent of the war; in a very real way, they represent a viewpoint and are part of the debate in our society over both the war and the role of the military in society. They’re also a means by which members of the society might express their opinion of these issues; there are many thoughtful people in the ranks who are talking insightfully about the experience of war and the role of American military power in the world. Because I see the Marines, both the institution and the members, that way–as a participant in the marketplace of ideas–I think it’s misguided to try to shut them down here; to try to shut them down as a matter of public policy is simply wrong.

To do that, to shut up your opponent to score a point in an argument, betrays the ideal of free speech, one that need not and ought not rely on force or censorship. To give in to the temptation to muzzle an opinion invites intolerance from your opponent. And round and round we go.

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About Last Night

One lesson learned from Super Tuesday — one covered exclusively here, not at your CNN or your fancy East Coast paper or smart, edgy blog — is that I suck as a prognosticator. Not that I was trying to do much of that, but I was carried away oh so momentarily by a belief that an exit poll or two could lead me to some sort of interesting insight. I found it’s not true, though if you ever find yourself waiting for election returns, there are worse ways of spending your time than reading an exit poll.

Another more generally expressed lesson is that the people have spoken. I’ll just add my voice to say that Idaho, North Dakota, Kansas et cetera aside, for a Democrat to win a national election you need to win those big states where Hillary Clinton was finishing first, mostly. Just saying.

And finally: Last night I was volleying emails with my friend Pete as we watched election returns online. Perusing the count in my own county, Alameda, I checked on a whim what was happening in the Libertarian primary. With about a third of the votes counted, “Write-In” was leading a field of about a dozen identified candidates, with 67 votes. I conveyed the news to Pete, who wrote back:

“Or as Wolf Blitzer would put it: In the Libertarian contest, a highly contested contest, that contest in Alameda County, ‘Write In’ — ‘Write In’ — is leading a field of a dozen candidates. That race in Alameda County among Libertarians. 67 votes for the Libertarian candidate leading there, ‘Write In,’ besting a field of a dozen candidates right now, with a third of the precints reporting, that result right now in Alameda County among Libertarians. We’ll be watching that contest very closely throughout the night, this historic night, the biggest primary election day, now well into the night, in American history.”

I checked this morning. Write-In prevailed.

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Illinois

Comparing home state performances, it looks like Obama’s support among exit poll respondents was 68.3 percent. Clinton didn’t crack 30 percent (29.8). All sorts of ways you can spin that, but one that Obama’s folks will seize on — and rightfully so — is that he actually ran a fairly respectable race in Clinton’s home state compared to her performance in his.

And oh, yeah: Illinois is Clinton’s home state, too (born and raised there, if you’re keeping score at home).

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Exit Polls

A little experiment: Reading the primary exit polls (as reported at CNN.com, but used by other networks as well, I believe) and seeing how they track against the results. As of this writing — 9:15 ET/6:15 PT — they’ve accurately forecast how the networks would call the races in two places where it looks sort of close, Delaware (Obama) and Massachusetts (Clinton). In two other states, New Jersey and Missouri, the exit polls shows a dead heat. In any case, here’s a series of messages I sent out to my friend Pete and brother John over the last 45 minutes as I went through a few of the exit polls:

New Jersey

For what it’s worth … not much, perhaps, but we’ll see … the broadcasters’ exit poll (the one that CNN, MSNBC and perhaps others are using) gave Clinton 48.96 percent and Obama 48.64 percent (the poll doesn’t report that number; I’m extrapolating from the male/female vote percentage). I’d say that’s the very definition of “too close to call” (though of course since the Democrats aren’t running a winner-take-all contest, all this tells you is that there’s likely to be a very close division of the available delegates.

Missouri

Running the male/female exit poll numbers the same way I did for New Jersey, Missouri is another close one with Clinton holding a narrow edge: Clinton, 46.95, Obama, 45.45. Edwards took most of the rest; and there’s a category called “uncommitted” that 6 percent of the men voted in. …

Massachusetts

Clinton: 50.7

Obama: 45.88

Delaware

Obama: 48.69

Clinton: 47.26

Delaware

Biden drew 10 percent of the men’s votes in Delaware.

One pattern that’s consistent state to state: women consistently make up more than half of Democratic voters; men consistently make up more than half of Republican voters. Clinton is winning among the women in every state I’ve looked at, and Obama is winning among the men.

Connecticut

Obama: 49.51

Clinton: 45.08

New York

Well, I note that the networks seem to have called Massachusetts based on the five-point spread, Clinton over Obama, so maybe there’s something to this. Here are the numbers for New York:

Clinton: 56.54

Obama: 40.2

Is that a landslide? Not sure. If Obama winds up with 40 percent in New York and manages to get a chunk of the state’s delegates, that’s a good showing for him.

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Anchor Magnetism

Dennis Richmond is retiring after more than three decades on KTVU. Which makes me ponder the longevity of anchors, at least in the big markets. I haven’t lived in Chicago for more than 30 years, and I still seem to recognize some of the people reading the news. Same here in the Bay Area. The mystery is, the one thing about local news shows everywhere is the low esteem in which they’re held–at least among the cognoscenti in other media. So what accounts for the staying power of the same faces year after year after year?

The obvious part of the answer is that despite how shallow, superficial, hollow or misinformed a particular show or anchor is, the programs and personnel obviously develop a loyal following in all those anonymous TV-watching households. With my occasional serious journalistic pretensions and the occasional serious pretensions of my blog, I’ve been bemused to discover that the one subject over the past couple of years that draws readers day in and day out have been items dealing with Leslie Griffith, the former KTVU late-night co-anchor. I’ve noticed that plenty of visitors also arrive on my site after Googling Julie Haener and Sara Sidner and Gasia Mikaelian, Griffith’s successors. Part of the audience is obviously guys who really like hearing about traffic accidents and shootings and the Bush White House from good-looking gals. Period.

There’s got to be more to it than that, though. I think it comes down to the phenomenon of consumer habit. People like what they like, and just as most of us prefer a certain kind of car, a certain kind of breakfast cereal and a certain kind of toothpaste, most tend to stick with a favorite newscast. I think that group is the biggest group, and is very durable (even now, I can tell you which newscasts we watched when I was growing up in Chicago and why). But stations don’t go on hunches; they pay big money to figure out what the audience is doing and why; they pay top dollar to keep their brands intact by keeping a likeable lineup on the air.

The question I have is whether the phenomenon of the anchor who serves for generations, the way Dennis Richmond has, is passing or past already. We have different and many would insist better ways of getting the news now than watching someone in a studio someplace read a sliver of a complex story told better elsewhere. I guess it comes back to the habit: How much longer will we need that comforting daily presence coming to us over the air. When you look at it that way, the answer is maybe forever.

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Bobby Fischer

I don’t play chess. Heck, I don’t really understand chess. Still: Bobby Fischer. What a wonderful, strange, tangled, disturbing story. The New York Times obit is a gem, weaving back and forth between the story of the prodigy and overpowering force on one side and the tale of the anti-Semitic whack job on the other. You can’t blame them for not knowing exactly how to play it; the protagonist would take volumes to unravel if you wanted to fight your way through to something like the truth of him. Worth reading if you have a little time: a 1985 Sports Illustrated piece by a writer who went on an obsessive years-long hunt for Fischer. In a sort of wistful denouement, he finds his man.

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Exit Poll: Undeclared Candidate

CNN on Tuesday night published results of its Democratic exit polling in New Hampshire. In addition to posing the standard demographic questions–showing younger voters tended to vote for Obama, older ones for Clinton, for instance–the pollsters asked the following: If Bill Clinton had been running, who would you have voted for–him or your candidate? (It’s the fourth question listed; the results table doesn’t give the exact wording.)

Overall, the response seems to have been that people would have stuck with their candidates by a large majority: 61 percent said they’d vote for that candidate, 37 percent said they’d vote for Bill Clinton. Of those who said they’d stick with their candidate, 47 percent voted for Obama yesterday and 27 percent chose Hillary Clinton. Of those who said they’d vote for Bill Clinton instead, 58 percent voted for Hillary Clinton yesterday and 24 percent voted for Obama.

In other words, a majority of Hillary Clinton voters in this New Hampshire sample–note all the qualifications there–would vote for her husband instead if given the chance.

How big a majority? That’s a little hard to quantify exactly, since I’m not sure how percentages were rounded up or down and I can’t find a place right now to pose questions to CNN, but let’s try: The reported sample population is 1,955. Assuming every member of the group answered this question, 1,193 people said they’d vote for their candidate instead of Bill Clinton; 723 said they’d vote for Bill over whoever they voted for yesterday; and 39 apparently didn’t answer.

Among the 1,193 voters in the “I like my candidate better than Bill” group, 27 percent, or 322, voted for Hillary Clinton; among the 723 people in the “I like Bill better than whoever” group, 58 percent, or 419, voted for Hillary Clinton. (For comparison: 561 Obama voters said they’d stick with him, 173 said they’d vote for Bill instead.)

If I’ve got those numbers right — and if is the operative word here — 56.5 percent of the Hillary Clinton group said they’d vote for Bill Clinton if he was on the ballot. I find that shocking. Maybe the result is meaningless, a quirk. But maybe it shows that Hillary Clinton’s voters, to some extent, view her as a surrogate for the ex-president (and saying that, I’m shocked again: It flies in the face of one of her main appeals, which is, as Gloria Steinem reminded us yesterday, that she’s a history-making woman). It may also show that the former president is still a powerful draw for Democrats

In any case, I’d love to see the results if the same question were posed in the primaries to come. Go read the poll yourself and tell me whether I’ve got it right.

[Later: MSNBC, which published the same poll, focused on this finding last night. They report the full question as, “If Bill Clinton were eligible to run for a third term and had been on the ballot today, who would you have voted for?”]

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New Hampshire

With all the attention on the putative front-runners in both parties, the Main Stream Media (MSM) short-shrifted some of the candidates further down the New Hampshire results list. As usual. Who, for instance, bothered to cover the vote in the hotly disputed Kucinich-Thompson beauty contest? Who even thought of analyzing what the outcome could mean to the country?

No one.

Don’t go scrambling for your Daily Cyberbugle, I’ve got the numbers right here:

Kucinich: 3,845

Thompson: 2,808.

That’s with 96 percent of precincts reporting, but I think it’s safe for Kucinich to cut loose and douse his Secret Service detail with biodynamic sparkling apple juice. He won. He took down big, sleepy Fred. Kicked his behind, really, winning 57.2 percent of the votes cast in the race.*

One might be tempted to scoff and say, “Well, Mr. Pundit, they didn’t really run against each other — they’re in different parties for heaven’s sake.”

That point must be conceded, and I’m pondering what it means. For now, I just want to bask in Kucinich’s victory. And Thompson’s defeat, which isn’t the same thing.

*The Kucinich-Thompson race.

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