Politics of space. (Space as in, space on the front page, not the "mission to Mars" kind.) As an antidote to David "Kerry is the new Gore" Halbfinger's latest atrocity, you may want to take a look at the piece that sits immediately below it on A1: "How Industry Won the Battle of Pollution Control at E.P.A.," by Christopher Drew and Richard A. Oppel, Jr. This is a long, well researched, scrupulous article detailing the "two-year fight inside the Bush administration for dominance between environmental protection and energy production on clean air policy." Wonkish as that makes the piece sound, Drew and Oppel build a revealing, heavily documented case that a cabal of utility companies, major Republican contributors and employers of highly connected Republican lobbyists (Haley Barbour, David Racicot), was given license by the Bush (or should I say the Cheney) administration to essentially gut enforcement of the Clean Air Act:

One of the most important decisions [early in his administration] was Mr. Bush's reversal of a campaign promise to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that many scientists say contributes to global warming. The administration also has proposed looser standards for emissions of mercury — a highly toxic pollutant — than President Bill Clinton had sought. The most protracted fight concerned the administration's decision to issue new rules that substantially reduced the requirements for utilities to build pollution controls when modernizing their plants. The final policy shift may ultimately help the coal-plant operators shed the lawsuits.

The struggle within the administration, in skirmishes between Cabinet officers and volleys of memorandums, showed how the White House has transformed domestic policy through regulatory revision, rather than more contentious congressional debate.

I can't say this piece comes to me as news, nor will it, really, to anybody that's been paying attention to what's happened at EPA. Still, the care with which the piece is written and the level of inside detail is impressive.

It's that care, and the dispassionate tone of the article, that make it so damning. (It doesn't hurt, either, that the Times features a very large graphic on the jump page detailing the political contributions and emissions records of the six companies making up the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a utility industry lobbying arm.) And it's clear that the Times editors understand it to be damning, because that's why Halbfinger's nonsense is given pride of place on the front page, above the fold, above the EPA story. It's a prophylactic, as always: our real reporting is going to piss 'em off at the White House, so by all means let's give Karl Rove something to show we're going to play nice on the side he really cares about, the campaign side. Message: The national political desk can be relied on to fling whatever monkey crap the GOPpo boys want to drop in its hand.

posted by michael  6:02:50 PM  
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My name is Michael and I'm a Cardinals fan, in spite of my being happily transplanted to Chicago, not to mention living three blocks from Wrigley Field. (It's eRobin's example at Fact-esque today that encourages me to out myself.) And I'm down with making Opening Day a national holiday, a suggestion Kos mentions. Though I can't help wondering whether the holiday wouldn't, if implemented, mark the official demise of baseball as the actual national pastime—the way that giving jazz a Lincoln Center showcase officially marked its disappearance as a genuinely popular music.

And you know what? Screw the Cubs and Red Sox fans—it's been a long damn twenty-two years since the last time the Cards won a World Series.

posted by michael  1:18:11 PM  
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Full Gore. Second Saturday in a row that A1 has made me do a spit take with my morning coffee.* Today it's David Halbfinger's turn to bow and scrape before the Presence, aka Ed Gillespie of the RNC ("Kerry's Shifts: Nuanced Ideas or Flip-Flops?"). "Throughout his campaign," Halbfinger types, "Mr. Kerry has shown a knack for espousing both sides of divisive issues."

Now with the general-election campaign under way, President Bush and Republicans are already attacking Mr. Kerry for precisely this characteristic. In California this week, the president said Mr. Kerry had "been in Washington long enough to take both sides on just about every issue." And on Friday the Republican National Committee e-mailed to reporters an Internet boxing game called "Kerry vs. Kerry" designed, the committee said, to highlight the senator's "multiple positions on multiple issues."

The e-mail included a list of Mr. Kerry's stances on 30 issues, including many of the examples that were researched in preparation for this article.

Halbfinger's stance today exactly matches Todd Purdum's last Saturday: if the Republicans make an attack, we'll print it. More specifically, we'll take their oppo research, add a little "objectivity," warm it up and serve it under a byline. Does it matter if the attack is true? Does it matter if the "issue" raised in the attack is serious, has any bearing on what policies the attackee will pursue or how we can expect him to bear himself in office? Not remotely. In a press culture where the only thing legitimately of interest in political campaigns is the campaigning itself—where politics is a tactical exercise pure and simple—then when one fighter throws a punch at the other it's news, self-evidently and self-justifyingly.

[It's pretty sad that Halbfinger finds stupid campaign geegaws like a Web-based Kerry "boxing game" charming enough to write about. Bet that one's a triumph of the Flash animator's art. The real travesty, though, is in the second graf of the quote. I was already working on it! Halbfinger protests. Apparently it's a professional point of pride with him that he didn't need any orders to come down from Conservative Command Central—he was all set to do the RNC's oppo work for it without further prompting.]

Just so we're clear: the public record of any Presidential candidate deserves thorough, impartial scrutiny. I expect the Times to subject John Kerry's long career to such scrutiny, to analyze the history of his approach to his public responsibilities, to expose if need be any self-dealing, any avoidance or compromise of those responsibilities. What I don't expect is hagiography, of the sort the Times has been happy to produce when the issue was plumping Kerry as the Establishment choice against Dean; nor do I expect the sort of mindless, contextless, GOP-mandated gotcha! games that Halbfinger descends to today:

When Senator John Kerry was speaking to Jewish leaders a few days ago, he said Israel's construction of a barrier between it and Palestinian territories was a legitimate act of self-defense. But in October, he told an Arab-American group that it was "provocative and counterproductive" and a "barrier to peace."

Is Halbfinger exposing an actual contradiction here? (Seems to me you could make both the reported statements without causing any serious mind-bending to occur, but then I'm not a Professional Political Analyst.) Should we expect a President Kerry to deal incoherently or incompetently or dishonestly with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (as if that would differ from the approach of the current administration)? To channel Bob Somerby, I don't know, and neither do you. Halbfinger has no interest in asking, much less answering, those questions: he's nakedly playing the GOP hack here. Halbfinger leads his article with Kerry apparently two-facing Jews and Arabs because he knows his audience: Jews, after all, are a significant portion of the Times' readership (not to mention its ownership) and Halbfinger's going to pump up the emotional volume for them. If there's a scummier way to punch an article like this I can't think of it—I guess Halbfinger can't either, or he'd have used it.

There are a couple of points of rhetorical art in Halbfinger's piece that I think I want to highlight, but I'll save that for a later post. Right now I'm still too pissed off to be properly analytic. Let me just point out, before I leave off, that the headline is a perfect distillation of the article's tactics. Notice how "Kerry's Shifts" are offered as simple, acknowledged fact, about which there's nothing to do except determine what that fact implies. And given the family relationship between "nuanced" and the "complex" meme (the subject of last week's lesson), this is pretty much all the interpretive space Halbfinger holds open: "John Kerry: Shifty or Untrustworthy?" Really—at what point does A1 go all the way and adopt "We Report, You Decide" as its new motto?

*Free plug for Chicago's own Intelligentsia Roasters. Best. Coffee. Ever.

posted by michael  12:51:12 PM  
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