Meet Adam Nagourney, new voice of the Democratic Establishment. Certainly in Adam Nagourney's own self-understanding, as it would seem. Having firmed up the Times' commitment to John Kerry yesterday, today Nagourney issues A1 marching orders to the laggards ("Southern States Are Set to Shake Democratic Race"):

The voting [in Tennessee] and in Virginia could help to shake out the race, Democrats said. The chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party, Randall A. Button, said Monday that General Clark, who is from neighboring Arkansas, and Mr. Edwards, who is from neighboring North Carolina, should quit if they could not beat Mr. Kerry on their home turf, an outcome some polls released Monday suggested.

"They are both Southerners that have a message that resonates with Southerners," Mr. Button said. If they lose, he said, "it's gotten down to this: Let's move ahead to our objective, and our objective is unseating George W. Bush."

A senior national Democratic Party official made the same argument, saying that General Clark and Mr. Edwards would have difficulty raising money to push on should they lose to Mr. Kerry in the South. "The voters will have spoken: Let's get on with it," this official said.

A case in which reporting the thing is equivalent to requiring it. Typically and tellingly, Nagourney slips in the moralizing language when he addresses the possibility that his advice won't be heeded: "Mr. Edwards and his aides rejected admonitions [emphasis mine] from some Democrats that he step aside if he loses."

Imagine the perversity! Sen. Edwards, don't you realize you've been admonished? You don't want Nagourney putting you on report, do you?

posted by michael  5:21:51 PM  
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Scales, falling ... It appears that A1 has finally noticed that there were some shenanigans going on in the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife as a CIA agent ("Top Bush Aide Is Questioned in C.I.A. Leak"):

President Bush's press secretary and a former White House press aide testified on Friday to a federal grand jury investigating who improperly disclosed the identity of a C.I.A. officer, the press secretary and a lawyer for the aide said on Monday.

The appearances of the press secretary, Scott McClellan, and the press aide, Adam Levine, reflected what lawyers in the case said was the quickening pace of a criminal inquiry in which a special prosecutor is examining conversations between journalists and the White House.

As Josh Marshall notes, "it's sort of astonishing that this story has still received so relatively little attention given that ... mutliple White House appointees have been told they are 'subjects' of a criminal inquiry." Or it would be astonishing, except that the wall of silence thrown up jointly by the Times and the WaPo on this has discouraged most other mainstream news organizations from mounting an aggressive pursuit on their own initiative. But hey, better late to the party than never arrived, yes?

Meanwhile, look what turns up today on A17 ("Democrats Suggest Inquiry Points to Wider Spying by G.O.P."):

Senate Democrats who were briefed Monday about an investigation into how Democratic strategy memorandums dealing with judicial nominations ended up in the hands of Republican staff members said they now believed the problem was far more extensive than previously thought.

Some of the internal memorandums appear to have been used to prepare one or more of President Bush's appeals court nominees to answer specific questions from Democratic senators during their Judiciary Committee hearings, Democrats said Monday.

Funny. Is the Neil A. Lewis who wrote today's article the same Neil A. Lewis who told us, not three weeks ago, that the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms was about to end his investigation, and strongly implied that he could barely stifle a yawn from the triviality of the whole thing? Nothing said today in correction of the earlier piece, of course, which in my reading was positioned (cf. above, re: wall of silence) to shut the lid on an aggressive Boston Globe article on the investigation that had appeared a day earlier. In January, Lewis quoted Republican staffer Manuel Miranda (quoted him generously and without rebuttal), who's emerging as the fall guy for this thing, assuring us that "There was no systematic surveillance, no hacking, no stealing and no violation of any Senate rules." Today's report notes that William Pickle, the Senate investigator, "said the breach in security was the result of a person 'hacking' [love the scare quotes there], or working to gain entry into the Democrats' files."

Neil Lewis apparently has some sort of memory impairment, otherwise he'd certainly have realized that between January and now he'd caught Mr. Miranda in a bald lie—instead of just quoting the man's latest round of evasions. After all, that's the kind of thing reporters are generally keen on discovering, isn't it? Glad I could be here to lend him a hand.

posted by michael  4:08:46 PM  
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