For what it's worth, A1 coverage of every Presidential Moment since I started this blog in January has followed an inflexible formula: news coverage paired front-and-center with at least one news analysis piece. (The twin-pack, which I wrote about earlier this month.) It's evidently considered the proper compliment the Paper of Record pays to the Executive and to its own importance in the scheme of things. Dubya's Army War College speech last night, which certainly qualifies as a Presidential Moment, does get its analysis today: but the Times goes inside with it, on the jump (A12 in my edition) from Liz Bumiller's straight-news report. I'm not going to get all Kremlinological on this—but you can't help but notice when a chink suddenly appears in the wall.

In an email, the Cunctator, a Kos diarist, asks that I highlight

the difference between the NYT "news analysis" of the Prezzie's speech and the WaPo's analysis...it takes Richard Stevenson many paragraphs of desultory meandering into horse-race campaign coverage to get to the nut, which Wright & Allen get to after a direct, sharp introduction: "After promising 'concrete steps,' the White House basically repackaged stalled U.S. policy as a five-step plan."

Stevenson's version? "If the five-point approach he set out covered all the bases on paper, it still risked appearing detached from the violence and chaos that has threatened to engulf Iraq and extract a heavy political price from Mr. Bush and his fellow Republicans at home."

I think that's as good and as cogent as any highlighting I'd manage to do, so I hope the Cunctator doesn't mind my letting him stand in for me. Past that—honestly, I just can't bring myself to care, about whatever feckless lies and evasions Bush promulgated last night, about the predictable, toadying "seriousness" with which the Times reports the occasion. As Barbara Bush once said, why should I waste my beautiful mind? Some days it's all just a little too much.

posted by michael  3:34:34 PM  
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Abby Goodnough knows it's not about race. Except, of course, when it suits her. Goodnough's A1 article yesterday on the Florida voting system and the state's little problem with disenfranchisement ("Reassurance for Florida Voters Made Wary by Chaos of 2000," headline truncated for the online story) is the latest in what's turning into a nauseating series (my post on Goodnough's earlier story, a heartwarming look at Jeb and the felons, is here). Here's the nut-graf lead—see if you can tell what Goodnough's oh-so-earnest-and-sincere manner is repressing:

The party had barely begun when Shirley Green Knight arrived with her optical-scan voting machine, lugging it out of a pickup truck and stationing it between the D.J. and the food tent. The sight was no longer strange to the people of Gadsden County, where Ms. Knight, the elections supervisor since 2001, attends most communal gatherings with the machine and a gently pleading message: Your vote will count this time, so please, please come out.

Gadsden County, a quiet stretch of tomato fields and piney woodlands hard against the Georgia border, had the highest rate of disqualified ballots in Florida in 2000: 12 percent of those cast in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Almost 2,000 county residents voted in vain that year, and cynicism still courses through the heavily Democratic county of 45,000, as regular as summer rain.

"All my life I have never seen the TV stations declare a winner, then change their minds," said Greg Johnson, a fourth grade teacher in Quincy who still wonders if his ballot landed in the scrap heap. "The Supreme Court decided that election, not us. I like politics, but people in power can get away with stuff and I'm just not sure this time."

As Election Day 2004 draws near in a battleground state whose 27 electoral votes could prove crucial to the victor once again, a movement is rising in poor black communities to register and to educate, reassure and entreat. A top goal is to change the mindset of people like Mr. Johnson, who still harbor deep suspicions about everything from the accuracy of voting equipment to how polling places are chosen and what role Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, will play in Florida's outcome.

OK, I couldn't resist dropping in a hint. That's right: the Florida voters who are the subject of this story, voters who were intimidated away or otherwise barred from the polls in 2000, whose votes are disproportionately lost through spoilage, are African-American. You might expect that to be a primary datum for an article about the efforts of Florida blacks to avoid being disenfranchised in 2004, but from her lead Goodnough seems intent on eliding it.

Goodnough's reporting exists in a sunny world from which race has disappeared—as an explanatory category, anyway. The facts of black disenfranchisement are unavoidable, and a different, more skeptical writer might have put them together to depict a system at least open to the charge of being biased against the state's poor, rural, and minority voters. But Goodnough sees no evil: certainly, she doesn't see structure or intent. For her, disenfranchisement in Florida isn't systematic, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened. She scatters the relevant information as widely and disjointedly as possible throughout the article, and never reports any of it, anything that might lead the unwary reader into thinking there's a race issue lurking, without presenting an immediate rebuttal. (Official dismissals are always final in Goodnough's world, and always offered in good faith.) Abby's suffering from a bad case of controversius interruptus, the premature closing of subjects of contention.

Despite the lingering suspicion among blacks, intentional disenfranchisement was never proved, and blatant voter intimidation now seems to have been far more limited than first reported. In Gadsden County, as in Palm Beach and Duval, the root problem was a confusing, badly designed ballot ...

Republicans, who are also courting black voters in some parts of Florida, say the Democrats and their supporters are recklessly rekindling bad feelings that were based on mostly false allegations. They say rumors of black voter intimidation in 2000 remain grossly exaggerated: a Florida Highway Patrol investigation of an unauthorized police checkpoint near a precinct in a black neighborhood outside Tallahassee, for example, found no evidence that it delayed or prevented blacks from voting ...

The real problems in 2000, people like [Palm Beach's Black Republic Caucus chairman Andre] Cadogan say—and several investigations have echoed—were faulty equipment and voter error, issues that elected officials and advocacy groups have been addressing, with varying energy and success, ever since ...

Many [black voters] also deeply distrust Florida's process of removing felons, who lose their voting rights when convicted, from the rolls. Each county gets lists of potential felons from a central database, and is supposed to determine whether the information is accurate. But in 2000, the counties mistakenly purged an unknown number of legitimate voters from the rolls because of faulty data.

In Goodnough's world, everything is about feelings. Even when she acknowledges the Miami Herald/USA Today investigation that found "that 83 of the 100 precincts with the largest numbers of discarded ballots were majority black," where does she go from that? Certainly not to to a consideration of causes:

Anger, shame and fear roiled those precincts afterward, fueled by reports of police roadblocks near black polling places, poll workers turning black voters away and the mysterious disappearance of registered black voters from the rolls. As the extent of Gadsden's problem was discovered, television cameras descended, conspiracy theories brewed, and Gadsden County became an object of national ridicule that haunts it still.

The sentimental narrative of Goodnough's framing device—the patient, long-suffering (and not incidentall female) elections supervisor, who at the end of the piece we see wearily laying down her burden for a while, her "gentle pleading," the suspicious Mr. Johnson and his need for reassurance—functions to short-circuit any possibility of analysis. The only story that Goodnough can see is a story of people irrationally mistrustful, whose "fears of disenfranchisement" have to be "quelled," who believe "rumors," "myths that have circulated since 2000," who (in the manner of simple rural folk) exhibit "suspicion about the new [voting] machinery," for which the proper and only remedy is "education" and "entreaty."

Which is where race does structure her piece, in a kind of return of the repressed. Underlying the article is the hoariest tropology of racial paternalism: Those black people are just a bit too emotional, aren't they? Too easily stirred up ("inflamed" and "distracted," in the words of Black Republican Andre Cadogan), too ready to believe in myths. You have to explain complicated things to them patiently and repeatedly, just like doughty and ironically named Ms. White (who's all but made to exclaim "Lawsy!" before she "eases herself off duty" at the end of the article). [Check out her ealier piece on Jeb Bush if you want to see an even more literalized version of Goodnough's paternalism.]

Is Goodnough herself a racist? Almost certainly not. She's just a consensus-mongering sentimentalist, too stupid to recognize when her pet sentimental tropes happen to bear the racist taint.

Update: Just noted a prior post about Goodnough's article at the excellent Body and Soul, which I'm glad to see is back after Jeanne's leave of absence.

posted by michael  11:13:21 AM  
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